‘Funny,’ I said, ‘that she should be quite so narrow-mindedly English when you think that she spent five years in India.’
‘Oh, my dear child, the butler was grander and the weather was hotter but otherwise there wouldn’t be much to choose between Hampton and Viceroy’s House. If anything, Viceroy’s House was the less cosmopolitan of the two, I should say, and certainly it was no preparation for Sicilian housekeeping. No, she simply loathes it, so there is the poor fellow, shut up month after month with a cross little girl he has known from a baby. Not much cop, you must admit.’
‘I thought,’ said Cedric, ‘that he was so fond of dukes? Sicily is full of heavenly dukes, you know.’
‘Fairly heavenly, and they’re nearly always away. Anyhow, he doesn’t count them the same as French or English dukes.’
‘Well, that’s nonsense, nobody could be grander than Pincio. But if he doesn’t count them (I do see some of the others are a bit unreal) and if he’s got to live abroad, I can’t imagine why he doesn’t choose Paris. Plenty of proper dukes there – fifty to be exact – Souppes told me so once, you know how they can only talk about each other, in that trade.’
‘My dear Cedric, they are very poor – they can’t afford to live in England, let alone Paris. That’s why they are still in Sicily, if it wasn’t for that they’d come home now like a shot. Boy lost money in the crash last autumn, and he told me that if he hadn’t got a very good let for Silkin they would really be almost penniless. Oh, dear, and when you think how rich Polly would have been –’
‘No cruel looks at One,’ said Cedric. ‘Fair’s fair, you know.’
‘Anyway, it’s a shocking business and only shows where dear old sex can land a person. I never saw anybody so pleased as Boy was when I appeared – like a dog let off a lead. Wanted to hear every single thing that’s been going on – you could just see how lonely and bored he feels, poor chap.’
But I was thinking of Polly. If Boy was bored and lonely she was not likely to be very happy either. The success or failure of all human relationships lies in the atmosphere each person is aware of creating for the other, what atmosphere could a disillusioned Polly feel that she was creating for a bored and lonely Boy? Her charm, apart from her beauty, and husbands, we know, get accustomed to the beauty of their wives so that it ceases to strike them at the heart, her charm used to derive from the sphinx-like quality which came from her secret dream of Boy; in the early days of that dream coming true, at Alconleigh, happiness had made her irresistible. But I quite saw that with the riddle solved, and if the happiness were dissolved, Polly, without her own little daily round of Madame Rita, Debenhams and the hairdresser to occupy her, and too low in vitality to invent new interests for herself, might easily sink into sulky dumps. She was not at all likely to find consolation in Sicilian folk-lore, I knew, and probably not, not yet, anyhow, in Sicilian noblemen.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said. ‘If Boy isn’t happy I don’t suppose Polly can be either. Oh, poor Polly.’
‘Poor Polly – m’m – but at least it was her idea,’ said Davey, ‘my heart bleeds for poor Boy. Well, he can’t say I didn’t warn him, over and over again.’
‘What about a baby?’ I asked, ‘any signs?’
‘None that I could see, but after all, how long have they been married? Eighteen months? Sonia was eighteen years before she had Polly.’
‘Oh, goodness!’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t imagine the Lecturer, in eighteen years’ time, will be able –’
I was stopped by a well-known hurt look on Davey’s face.
‘Perhaps that is what makes them sad,’ I ended, rather lamely.
‘Possibly. Anyhow, I can’t say that I formed a happy impression.’
At this point Cedric was called to the telephone, and Davey said to me in a lowered voice,
‘Entirely between you and me, Fanny, and this is not to go any further, I think Polly is having trouble with Boy.’
‘Oh, dear,’ I said, ‘kitchen-maids?’
‘No,’ said Davey, ‘not kitchen-maids.’
‘Don’t tell me!’ I said, horrified.
Cedric came back and said that Lady Montdore had been caught red-handed having elevenses in the Devonshire tea-rooms and had been given the sack. She told him that the motor would call for him on its way, so that she would have a companion for the drive home.
‘There now,’ he said gloomily. ‘I shan’t have my little visit to you after all, and I had so been looking forward to it.’
It struck me that Cedric had arranged the orange cure less with a view to getting rid of kilos than to getting rid of Lady Montdore for a week or two. Life with her must have been wearing work, even to Cedric, with his unflagging spirits and abounding energy and he may well have felt that he had earned a short rest after nearly a year of it.
6
Cedric
