‘Oh, my dear boy, I don’t know about this mask. What would Griffith say?’
‘If Griffith is your maid she won’t notice a thing, they never do. We shall notice, though, your great new beauty. Those cruel lines!’
They were absorbed in each other and themselves, and when Lord Montdore came in from the dining-room they did not even notice. He sat for a while in his usual attitude, the fingers of both hands pressed together, looking into the fire, and very soon crept off to bed. In the months which had passed since Polly’s marriage he had turned into an old man, he was smaller, his clothes hung sadly on him, his voice quavered and complained. Before he went he gave the little book of poems to Cedric, who took it with a charming show of appreciation and looked at it until Lord Montdore was out of sight, when he quickly turned back to the jewels.
I was pregnant at this time and began to feel sleepy very soon after dinner. I had a look at the picture papers and then followed Lord Montdore’s example.
‘Good night,’ I said, making for the door. They hardly bothered to answer. They were now standing each in front of a looking-glass, a lamp at their feet, happily gazing at their own images.
‘Do you think it is better like that?’ one would say.
‘Much better,’ the other would reply, without looking.
From time to time they exchanged a jewel (‘Give me the rubies, dear boy.’ ‘May I have the emeralds if you’ve finished with them?’) and he was now wearing the pink tiara; jewels lay all around them, tumbled on to the chairs and tables, even on the floor.
‘I have a confession to make to you, Cedric,’ she said, as I was leaving the room. ‘I really rather like amethysts.’
‘Oh, but I love amethysts,’ he replied, ‘so long as they are nice large dark stones set in diamonds. They suit One so well.’
The next morning when I went to Lady Montdore’s room to say good-bye I found Cedric, in a pale mauve silk dressing-gown, sitting on her bed. They were both rubbing cream into their faces out of a large pink pot. It smelt delicious, and certainly belonged to him.
‘And after that,’ he was saying, ‘until the end of her life (she only died just the other day), she wore a thick black veil.’
‘And what did he do?’
‘He left cards on all Paris, on which he had written “mille regrets”.’
4
From the moment that the Montdores first set eyes on Cedric there was no more question of his having come to Hampton for a fortnight; he was obviously there for good and all. They both took him to their hearts and loved him, almost at once, better than they had loved Polly for years, ever since she was a small child; the tremendous vacuum created by her departure was happily filled again, and filled by somebody who was able to give more than Polly had ever given in the way of companionship. Cedric could talk intelligently to Lord Montdore about the objects of art at Hampton. He knew an enormous amount about such things, though in the ordinary sense of the word he was uneducated, ill-read, incapable of the simplest calculation, and curiously ignorant of many quite elementary subjects. He was one of those people who take in the world through eye and ear; his intellect was probably worth very little, but his love of beauty was genuine. The librarian at Hampton was astounded at his bibliographical knowledge. It seemed, for instance, that he could tell at a glance whom a book had been bound for and by whom, and he said that Cedric knew much more than he did himself about eighteenth-century French editions. Lord Montdore had seldom seen his own cherished belongings so intelligently appreciated, and it was a great pleasure to him to spend hours with Cedric going over them. He had doted on Polly; she had been the apple of his eye in theory, but in practice she had never been in any respect a companion to him.
As for Lady Montdore, she became transformed with happiness during the months that followed, transformed, too, in other ways, Cedric taking her appearance in hand with extraordinary results. Just as Boy (it was the hold he had over her) had filled her days with society and painting, Cedric filled them with the pursuit of her own beauty, and to such an egotist this was a more satisfactory hobby. Facial operations, slimming cures, exercises, massage, diet, make-up, new clothes, jewels reset, a blue rinse for her grey hair, pink bows and diamond daisies in the blue curls; it kept her very busy. I saw her less and less, but each time I did she looked more unnaturally modish. Her movements, formerly so ponderous, became smart, spry, and bird-like; she never sat now with her two legs planted on the ground, but threw one over the other, legs which, daily massaged and steamed, gradually lost their flesh and became little more than bone. Her face was lifted, plucked and trimmed, and looked as tidy as Mrs Chaddesley Corbett’s, and she learnt to flash a smile brilliant as Cedric’s own.
‘I make her say “brush” before she comes into a room,’ he told me. ‘It’s a thing I got out of an old book on deportment and it fixes at once this very gay smile on one’s face. Somebody ought to tell Lord Alconleigh about it.’
Since she had never hitherto made the smallest effort to appear younger than she was, but had remained fundamentally Edwardian-looking, as though conscious of her own superiority to the little smart ephemeral
