‘Personality –’ I said. ‘I don’t know. The thing about Polly is her beauty.’
‘Describe it.’
‘Oh, Cedric, I’ve described it to you hundreds of times.’ It rather amused me to do so, though, because I knew that it teased him.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘as I’ve often told you before, she is so beautiful that it’s difficult to pay much attention to what she is saying, or to make out what she’s really like as a person, because all you want to do is just gaze and gaze.’
Cedric looked sulky, as he always did when I talked like this.
‘More beautiful than One?’ he said.
‘Very much like you, Cedric.’
‘So you say, but I don’t find that you gaze and gaze at One, on the contrary, you listen intently, with your eye out of the window.’
‘She is very much like you, but all the same,’ I said firmly, ‘she must be more beautiful because there is that thing about the gazing.’
This was perfectly true, and not only said to annoy poor Cedric and make him jealous. He was like Polly, and very good-looking, but not an irresistible magnet to the eye as she was.
‘I know exactly why,’ he said, ‘it’s my beard, all that horrible shaving. I shall send to New York this very day for some wax – you can’t conceive the agony it is, but if it will make you gaze, Fanny, it will be worth it.’
‘Don’t bother to do that,’ I said. ‘It’s not the shaving. You do look like Polly but you are not as beautiful. Lady Patricia also looked like her, but it wasn’t the same thing. It’s something extra that Polly has, which I can’t explain, I can only tell you that it is so.’
‘What extra can she possibly have except beardlessness?’
‘Lady Patricia was quite beardless.’
‘You are horrid. Never mind, I shall try it, and you’ll see. People used to gaze before my beard grew, like mad, even in Nova Scotia. You are so fortunate not to be a beauty, Fanny, you’ll never know the agony of losing your looks.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘And as talking about pretty Polly makes us both so disagreeable let’s get on to the subject of Boy.’
‘Ah now, nobody could say that Boy was pretty. No gazing there. Boy is old and grizzled and hideous.’
‘Now Fanny, that’s not true, dear. Descriptions of people are only interesting if they happen to be true, you know. I’ve seen many photographs of Boy, Sonia’s books are full of them, from Boy playing Diabolo, Boy in puttees for the war, to Boy with his bearer Boosee. After India I think she lost her Brownie, in the move perhaps, because “Pages from Our Indian Diary” seems to be the last book, but that was only three years ago and Boy was still ravishing then, the kind of looks I adore, stocky and with deep attractive furrows all over his face – dependable.’
‘Dependable!’
‘Why do you hate him so much, Fanny?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, he gives me the creeps. He’s such a snob, for one thing.’
‘I like that,’ said Cedric. ‘I am one myself.’
‘Such a snob that living people aren’t enough for him, he has to get to know the dead, as well – the titled dead of course, I mean. He dives about in their Memoirs so that he can talk about his dear Duchesse de Dino, or “as Lady Bessborough so truly says”. He can reel off pedigrees, he always knows just how everybody was related, royal families and things I mean. Then he writes books about all these people, and after that anybody would think they were his own personal property. Ugh!’
‘Exactly as I had supposed,’ said Cedric, ‘a handsome, cultivated man, the sort of person I like the best. Gifted, too. His embroidery, really wonderful, and the dozens of toiles by him in the squash court are worthy of the Douanier himself, landscapes with gorillas. Original and bold.’
‘Gorillas! Lord and Lady Montdore, and anybody else who would pose.’
‘Well, it is original and bold to depict my aunt and uncle as gorillas, I wouldn’t dare. I think Polly is a very lucky girl.’
‘The Boreleys think you will end by marrying Polly, Cedric.’ Norma had propounded this thrilling theory to me the day before. They thought that it would be a death blow to Lady Montdore, and longed for it to happen.
‘Very silly of them, dear, I should have thought they only had to look at One to see how unlikely that is. What else do the Boreleys say about me?’
‘Cedric, do come and meet Norma one day – I simply long to see you together.’
‘I think not, dear, thank you.’
‘But why? You’re always asking what she says and she’s always asking what you say, you’d much better ask each other and do without the middleman.’
‘The thing is, I believe she would remind me of Nova Scotia, and when that happens my spirits go down, down, past grande pluie to tempête. The house-carpenter at Hampton reminds me, don’t ask me why but he does, and I have to rudely look away every time I meet him. I believe that’s why Paris suits me so well, there’s not a shade of Nova Scotia there, and perhaps it’s also why I put up with the Baron all those years. The Baron could have come from many a land of spices, but from Nova Scotia he could not have come. Whereas Boreleys abound there. But though I don’t want to meet them I always like hearing about them, so do go on with what they think about One.’
‘Well, so then Norma was full of you just now, when I met her out shopping, because it seems you travelled down from London with her brother Jock yesterday, and now he can literally think of nothing else.’
‘Oh, how exciting. How did he know it was me?’
‘Lots of ways. The goggles, the piping, your name on your luggage. There is nothing anonymous about you, Cedric.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘So according to Norma he was in a
