‘Yes,’ she said, ‘badly advised, poor man [pip-pip-pip] I fear. I saw Freddy Barbarossa last night (they are being so brave about it, by the way, quite stoical. Yes, at Claridges) and he told me …’ here a flood of Daily Express news and views. ‘But Montdore and I are very much worried about our own special Infanta – yes, a close friend of ours – oh, Prime Minister, if you could hear anything I should be so more than grateful. Will you really? You know, there is a whole chapter on Madrid in the Grand Duchess’s book, it makes it very topical, rather splendid for her. Yes, a near relation. She describes the view [pip-pip-pip] from the Royal Palace – yes, very bleak, I’ve been there, wonderful sunsets though, I know, poor woman. Oh, she hated them at first, she had special opera glasses with black spots for the cruel moments.
‘Have you heard where they are going? Yes, Barbara Barbarossa told me that too, but I wonder they don’t come here. You ought to try and persuade them. Yes, I see. Well, we’ll talk about all that, meanwhile, dear Prime Minister, I won’t keep you any longer [pip-pip-pip] but we’ll see you on the tenth. So do I. I’ll send your secretary a reminder, of course. Good-bye.’
She turned to me, beaming, and said, ‘I have the most wonderful effect on that man, you know, it’s quite touching how he dotes on me. I really think I could do anything with him, anything at all.’
She never spoke of Polly. At first I supposed that the reason why she liked to see so much of me was that I was associated in her mind with Polly, and that sooner or later she would unburden herself to me, or even try and use me as go-between in a reconciliation. I soon realized, however, that Polly and Boy were dead to her; she had no further use for them since Boy could never be her lover again and Polly could never now, it seemed, do her credit in the eyes of the world; she simply dismissed them from her thoughts. Her visits to me were partly the outcome of loneliness and partly due to the fact that I was a convenient half-way house between London and Hampton and that she could use me as restaurant, cloakroom, and telephone booth when in Oxford.
She was horribly lonely, you could see that. She filled Hampton every week-end with important people, with smart people, even just with people, but, although so great is the English predilection for country life, she generally managed to get these visits extended from Friday to Tuesday, even so she was left with two empty days in the middle of the week. She went less and less to London. She had always preferred Hampton, where she reigned alone, to London, where she faced a certain degree of competition, and life there without Polly to entertain for and without Boy to help her plot the social game had evidently become meaningless and dull.
3
It was no doubt the dullness of her life which now deflected her thoughts towards Cedric Hampton, Lord Montdore’s heir. They still knew nothing about him beyond the mere fact of his existence, which had hitherto been regarded as extremely superfluous since but for him the whole of ‘all this’, including Hampton, would have gone to Polly, and, although the other things she had been going to inherit were worth more money, it was Hampton they all loved so much. I have never made out his exact relationship to Lord Montdore, but I know that when Linda and I used to ‘look him up’ to see if he was the right age for us to marry it always took ages to find him, breathing heavily over the peerage, pointing, and going back and back.
… having had issue,
Henry, b. 1875, who m. Dora, dau. of Stanley Honks Esq. of Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and d. 1913 leaving issue, Cedric, heir pres., b. 1907.
Just the right age, but what of Nova Scotia? An atlas, hastily consulted, showed it to be horribly marine. ‘A transatlantic Isle of Wight’ as Linda put it. ‘No thanks.’ Sea breezes, in so far as they are good for the complexion, were regarded by us as a means and not an end, for at that time it was our idea to live in capital cities and go to the Opera alight with diamonds, ‘Who is that lovely woman?’ and Nova Scotia was clearly not a suitable venue for such doings. It never seemed to occur to us that Cedric could perhaps have been transplanted from his native heath to Paris, London, or Rome. Colonial we thought, ignorantly. It ruled him out. I believe Lady Montdore knew very little more about him than we did. She had never felt interest or curiosity towards those unsuitable people in Canada, they were one of the unpleasant things of life and she preferred to ignore them. Now, however, left alone with an ‘all this’ which would one day, and one day fairly soon by the look of Lord Montdore, be Cedric’s, she thought and spoke of him continually, and presently had the idea that it would amuse her to see him.
Of course, no sooner had she conceived this idea than she wanted him to be there the very
