‘Darling! What a sigh!’
‘Yes, well I can’t say this is the sort of wedding I’d hoped for.’
‘I know. It’s a shame, but there you are. The war.’
‘A foreigner.’
‘But such a blissful one. Oh dear, oh dear, this hat. What is wrong with it d’you think?’
‘Very nice indeed, I expect, but then I always liked Mr Hugh.’
‘Hughie is bliss too, of course, but he went off.’
‘He went to fight for King and Country, dear.’
‘Well, Charles-Edouard is going to fight for President and Country. I don’t see much difference except that he is marrying me first. Oh darling, this hat. It’s not quite right, is it?’
‘Never mind, dear, nobody’s going to look at you.’
‘On my wedding day?’
But when Charles-Edouard met them at the registry office he looked at her and said, ‘This hat is terrible, perhaps you’d better take it off.’
Grace did so with some relief, shook out her pretty golden hair, and gave the hat to Nanny, who, since it was made of flowers, looked rather like a small, cross, elderly bridesmaid clasping a bouquet.
They went for their honeymoon to Sir Conrad’s house, Bunbury Park, in Wiltshire, and were very happy. When, during the lonely years which followed, Grace tried to recall those ten short days, the picture that always came to her mind was of Charles-Edouard moving furniture. The central block of the house having been requisitioned by soldiers, he and Grace occupied three rooms in one of the wings, and Charles-Edouard now set himself the task of filling these rooms with objects of art. He seemed not to feel the piercing cold of the unheated hall, with its dome and marble floor, where most of the furniture had been put away, but bustled about in semi-darkness, lifting dust sheets, scrambling under pyramids of tables and chairs, opening cupboards and peering into packing cases, like a squirrel in search of nuts. From time to time, with a satisfied grunt, he would pounce upon some object and scurry off with it. If he could not move it alone he made the soldiers help him. It took eight of them to lug the marble bust of an Austrian archduke up the stairs into Grace’s bedroom. Nanny and the housekeeper clearly thought Charles-Edouard was out of his head, and exchanged very meaning looks and sniffs while the archduke was making his painful progress. One of Marie Antoinette’s brothers, bewigged and bemedalled, the Fleece upon his elaborately folded stock, he now entirely dominated the room with his calm, stupid, German face.
‘He looks dull,’ said Grace.
‘But so beautiful. You look too much at the subject – can’t you see that it’s a wonderful piece of sculpture?’
‘Come for a walk, Charles-Edouard, the woods are heavenly today.’
It was early spring, very fine and dry. The big beeches, not yet in leaf, stood naked on their copper carpet, while the other trees had petticoats of pale green. The birds were already tuning up an orchestra as if preparing to accompany those two stars of summer, the cuckoo and the nightingale, as soon as they should make their bow. It seemed a pity to spend such days creeping about under dust sheets.
‘Nature I hate,’ said Charles-Edouard, as he went on with his self-appointed task. So she walked in the sunny woods alone, until she discovered that if she could propose an eighteenth-century mausoleum, Siamese dairy, wishing well, hermit’s grotto or cottage orné as the object for a walk, he would accompany her. He strode along at an enormous speed, often breaking into a run, seizing her hand and dragging her with him. ‘Il neige des plumes de tourterelles’, he sang.
Her father’s park abounded in follies, quite enough to last out their visit. What did they talk about all day? She never could remember. Charles-Edouard sang his little songs, made his little jokes, and told her a great deal about the objects he found under the dust sheets, so that names like Carlin, Cressent, Thomire, Reisener and Gouthière always thereafter reminded her of their honeymoon. Her room became transformed from a rather dull country house bedroom into a corner of the Wallace Collection. But he hardly talked about himself at all, or his family, or life in Paris, or what they would do after the war. A fortnight from their wedding day he left England and went back to Cairo.
Grace soon realized that she was expecting a child. When the air raids began Sir Conrad sent her to live at Bunbury, and here, in a bedroom full of works of art collected by his father, Sigismond de Valhubert opened his eyes upon the calm, stupid face of an Austrian archduke.
3
‘He is a little black boy – oh, he is black. I never expected you to have a baby with such eyes, it doesn’t seem natural or right.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘I think one gets tired of always gazing into these blue eyes. I like this better.’
‘Such a funny sort of name, too,’ Nanny went on, ‘not like anything. If he’d had been called after his father he could have been Charlie, or Eddy, but Sigi –! Well, I don’t care to say it in the street, makes people look round.’
‘But you’re so seldom in streets, darling.’
‘Salisbury. People stop and look at him as it is.’
‘That’s because he’s such a love. Anyway, I think he’s a blessing.’
And so of course did Nanny, though she would have thought him an even more blessed blessing had he resembled his mother more and his father less.
Grace stayed on at Bunbury. She had not meant to, she had meant to go back to London and the A.R.P. as soon as Sigi was weaned, but somehow, in the end, she stayed on. She fell into various country jobs, ran a small holding, and looked after the baby as much as Nanny allowed. Sir Conrad went down to see her at week-ends, and sometimes she spent a few days with him in London. So the years of the war went
