‘I thought I’d better warn you my darling that we are chucking poor Norma tonight.’
‘Cedric, you simply can’t, I never heard anything so awful, she has bought cream!’
He gave an unkind laugh and said,
‘So much the better for those weedy tots I see creeping about her house.’
‘But why should you chuck, are you ill?’
‘Not the least bit ill, thank you, love. The thing is that Merlin wants us to go over there for dinner, he has got fresh foie gras, and a fascinating Marquesa with eyelashes two inches long, he measured. Do you see how One can’t resist it?’
‘One must resist it,’ I said, frantically. ‘You simply cannot chuck poor Norma now, you’ll never know the trouble she’s taken. Besides, do think of us, you miserable boy, we can’t chuck, only think of the dismal evening we shall have without you.’
‘I know, poor you, won’t it be lugubrious?’
‘Cedric, all I can say is you are a sewer.’
‘Yes, darling, mea culpa. But it’s not so much that I want to chuck as that I absolutely know I shall. I don’t even intend to, I fully intend not to, it is that something in my body will make me. When I’ve rung off from speaking to you, I know that my hand will creep back to the receiver again of its own accord, and I shall hear my voice, but quite against my will, mind you, asking for Norma’s number, and then I shall be really horrified to hear it breaking this dreadful news to Norma. So much worse, now I know about the cream, too. But there it is. But what I rang you up to say is, don’t forget you are on One’s side – no disloyalty Fanny, please, I absolutely count, dear, on you not to egg Norma on to be furious. Because so long as you don’t do that you’ll find she won’t mind a bit, not a bit. So, solidarity between working girls, and I’ll promise to come over tomorrow and tell about the eyelashes.’
Oddly enough, Cedric was right and Norma was not in the least put out. His excuse, and he had told the truth, merely adding a touch of embroidery by saying that Lady Montdore had been at school with the Marquesa, was considered quite a reasonable one, since dinner with Lord Merlin was recognized at Oxford as being the very pinnacle of human happiness. Norma rang me up to say that her dinner party was postponed, in the voice of a society hostess who postpones dinner parties every day of the week. Then, lapsing into more normal Oxford parlance, she said,
‘It’s a bore about the cream, because they are coming on Wednesday now, and it will never keep in this weather. Can you come back and make another pudding on Wednesday morning, Fanny? All right, and I’ll pay you for both lots together, if that suits you. Everybody is free and I think the flowers may last over, so see you then, Fanny.’
But on Wednesday, Cedric was in bed with a high temperature, and on Thursday he was rushed to London by ambulance and operated upon for peritonitis, lying between life and death for several days, and in the end it was quite two months before the dinner party could take place.
At last, however, the date was fixed again, another pudding was made, and, at Norma’s suggestion, I invited my Uncle Davey to come and stay for it, to pair off with her beagling sister. Norma looked down on dons quite as much as Lady Montdore did, and as for undergraduates, although of course she must have known that such things existed, since they provided her husband and mine with a livelihood, she certainly never thought of them as human beings and possible diners-out.
It would never formerly have occurred to me that ‘touching’, a word often on Lady Montdore’s lips (it was very much of her day), could come to have any relation to herself, but on the occasion of Norma’s dinner, the first time I had seen Lady Montdore with Cedric since his illness, there was really something touching about her attitude towards him. It was touching to see this hitherto redoubtable and ponderous personage, thin, now, as a rake, in her little-girl dress of dark tulle over pink taffeta, with her little-girl head of pale blue curls, dark blue ribbons and a swarm of diamond bees, as she listened through her own conversation to whatever Cedric might be saying, as she squinted out of the corner of her eye to see if he was happy and amused, perhaps even just to be quite sure that he was actually there, in the flesh; touching to see with what reluctance she left the dining-room after dinner; touching to watch her as she sat with the rest of us in the drawing-room waiting for the men to return, silent, or speaking at random, her eyes fixed upon the door like a spaniel waiting for its master. Love with her had blossomed late and strangely, but there could be no doubt that it had now blossomed, and that this thorny old plant had very much altered in character to accord with the tender flowers and spring-time verdure which now so unexpectedly adorned it. During the whole of the evening there was only one respect in which she behaved as she would have done in her pre-Cedric days. She
