‘And in India too, it happened several times, Polly only had to fancy a young man for him to vanish mysteriously.’ They spoke as if Lady Montdore were an enchantress in a fairy tale.
‘She was jealous, you know, of her being supposed to be such a beauty (never could see it myself, don’t admire that flatfish look).’
‘You’d think she’d want to get her off all the quicker.’
‘You can’t tell how jealousy is going to take people.’
‘But I’ve always heard that Dougdale was Lady Montdore’s own lover.’
‘Of course he was, and that’s exactly why she never imagined there could be anything between him and Polly. Serve her jolly well right, she ought to have let the poor girl marry all those others when she wanted to.’
‘What a sly little thing though, under the very noses of her mother and her aunt like that.’
‘I don’t expect there’s much to choose between them. The one I’m sorry for is poor old Lord Montdore, he’s such a wonderful old man and she’s led him the most awful dance you know for years, ever since they married. Daddy says she utterly ruined his career, and if it hadn’t been for her he could have been Prime Minister or anything.’
‘Well, but he was Viceroy,’ I said, putting in my oar at last. I felt thoroughly on Lady Montdore’s side against these hideous people.
‘Yes he was, and everybody knows she nearly lost us India – I believe the harm she did there was something terrible. Daddy has a great friend, an Indian judge, you should hear his stories! Her rudeness –!’
‘Of course, lots of people say Polly isn’t Lord Montdore’s child at all. King Edward, I’ve heard.’
‘It doesn’t seem to make much difference now whose child she is, because he’s cut her out of his will and some American gets it all.’
‘Australian, I heard. Imagine an Australian at Hampton, sad when you come to think of it.’
‘And the whole thing is that old woman’s fault, the old tart. That’s all she is when you come to think of it, needn’t give herself such airs.’
I suddenly became very furious. I was well aware of Lady Montdore’s faults, I knew that she was deplorable in many ways, but it seemed to me wrong of people who had never even met her and knew nothing at first hand, to speak of her like this. I had a feeling that they did so out of an obscure jealousy, and that she only had to take any of these women up and bestow a flicker of her charm upon them for them to become her grovelling toadies.
‘I hear she made a ghastly scene at the wedding,’ said the don’s wife whose Daddy knew an Indian judge. ‘Screamed and yelled and had hysterics.’
‘She didn’t,’ I said.
‘Why, how do you know?’
‘Because I was there.’
They looked at me curiously and rather angrily, as though I ought to have spoken up sooner, and changed the subject to the eternal ones of children’s illnesses and servants’ misdeeds.
I hoped that at my next dinner party I should be meeting the noble, thoughtful, intellectual women of my Oxford dream, if indeed, they existed.
After this Norma Cozens took a fancy to me for some reason, and used to drop into my house on her way to or from the huge walks she went for every day with the Border terriers. I think she was the crossest person I ever met, nothing was ever right for her, and her conversation, which consisted of lectures, advice, and criticism, was punctuated with furious sighs, but she was not a bad old thing, good-natured at heart, and often did me little kindnesses. I came to like her in the end the best of all the dons’ wives; she was at least natural and unpretentious and brought her children up in an ordinary way. Those I found impossible to get on with were the arty-crafty ones with modern ideas, and ghastly children who had never been thwarted or cleaned up by the hand of a nanny. Norma was a type with which I was more familiar, an ordinary country hunting woman, incongruous, perhaps, in academic circles, but with no nonsense and certainly no nastiness about her. Anyhow, there she was, self-constituted part of my new life, and accepted by me as such without question.
2
A more difficult and exacting relationship was the one which now developed between me and Lady Montdore. She haunted my house, coming at much odder and more inconvenient times than Norma (who was very conventional in such ways), and proceeded to turn me into a lady-in-waiting. It was quite easy; nobody has ever sapped my will-power as she did, and like Lord Montdore, but unlike Polly, I was quite completely under her thumb. Even Alfred lifted his eyes for a moment from pastoral theology and saw what was going on. He said he could not understand my attitude, and that it made him impatient.
‘You don’t really like her, you’re always complaining about her, why not say you are out when she comes?’
Why not, indeed? The fact was that I had never got over the physical feeling of terror which Lady Montdore had inspired in me from childhood, and though with my reason I knew now what she was, and did not care for what I knew, though the idol was down from its pedestal, the bull-fighter back in his ready-made suit, and she was revealed as nothing more or less than a selfish old woman, still I remained in awe of her. When Alfred told me to pretend to be out when she came I knew that this would be impossible for me.
‘Oh, no, darling, I don’t think I could do that.’
He shrugged his shoulders and said no
