‘My dear Conrad –’
‘Or if you jib at that you can press unborn chickens on to your face before going out.’
‘Thank you very much if by you, you mean me. I get one Polish egg a week on my ration.’
‘Remarkable what your cook manages to do with that one Polish egg, I must say. Hens must lay enormous eggs in Poland, or are they ostriches? But to go back to your friends, none of them looks a day more than forty. I can’t think why you’re not pleased, you’re supposed to love the French so much.’
‘I think it’s frightfully annoying, after all they’ve been through. Now I want to hear a great deal about other things. What is the exact situation at present.’
‘Situation?’
Sir Conrad had come back in a very uppish mood, she thought, like a child after a treat.
‘The political situation, of course. What does Blondin say, for instance?’
‘My dear Meg, I didn’t see Blondin, or any of them. I was entirely given over to pleasure and fun. But you know what the silly fool says as well as I do, since I am well aware that, like me, you see all the French papers.’
Mrs O’Donovan sighed. She did wish her English political friends could be a little more serious about the terrible state of the world. Sir Conrad, she thought, might well take a leaf out of the book of that important, well-informed Mr Hector Dexter whom she had met the day before at a dinner party, and who had told her some interesting, if rather lowering, facts about present-day French mentality.
Sir Conrad was not unconscious of these critical thoughts, he knew Mrs O’Donovan too well for that, but he was still a little drunk with all the pleasure and fun he had been having, so he went carelessly on,
‘I want you to help me give a big, amusing dinner for Madame Rocher des Innouïs next month if she comes, as I hope she will, to stay at the French Embassy.’
‘Régine Rocher,’ said Mrs O’Donovan, faintly, ‘don’t tell me she’s got the liver of a newly run-over young man.’
‘I should think she’s got everything she can lay her hands on. Anyhow she’s remarkably pretty for what Charles-Edouard says is her age. He says she spends £8,000 a year on clothes, and the result, I’m obliged to tell you, is top-hole.’
‘Simply ridiculous, I should imagine.’
Mrs O’Donovan, who was generally the driest of blankets, was proving such a wet one on this occasion that Sir Conrad took himself off to the House. Here he had a sensational success with all his traveller’s tales about Bogomoletz and embryo chickens, not to mention detailed descriptions, unfit for the ears of a lady, of the goings-on chez Countess Arraczi.
13
‘Our visit to London,’ said Hector Dexter, ‘was an integral success. I went to learn about the present or peace-time conditions there and to sense the present or peace-time mood of you Britishers, and I think that I fully achieved both these aims.’
The Dexters and Hughie Palgrave were dining with Grace. Charles-Edouard had told her earlier in the week that he was obliged to dine alone with Madame de la Ferté to talk family business.
‘My uncle is so old now, he really makes no sense at all, and Jean is no use to her either. Nobody knows whether he is a case of arrested development or premature senile decay; she is having him injected for both, and the only result so far has been a poisoned arm. Why don’t you ask some friends here to keep you company?’
Grace jumped at the idea of having the Dexters without Charles-Edouard. Although he never said they bored him, and indeed professed to admire Carolyn, whom he always referred to as la belle Lesbienne, she could somehow never bring herself to suggest inviting them again when he was there. As for Hughie, there would clearly be an awkwardness if he were to meet Charles-Edouard. She herself saw him quite often at the Dexters, and once a certain embarrassment between them was over they had become good friends again. They had never been much more than that, never passionate lovers.
‘It’s not the first time you’ve seen London, is it?’ Grace said.
‘No, Grace, it is not. I was in London during World War II and I will not pause now to say what I felt then about the effort which every class of you Britishers was putting forward at that time because what I felt then is expressed in my well-known and best-selling book Global Vortex. This time I found a very different atmosphere, much more relaxed and therefore much more difficult to sense, harder to describe.’
‘Whom did you see?’
‘We saw a very representative cross-section of your British life. We were in London and had a good time there, many very pleasant lunch parties and dinner parties and cocktail parties being given for us. We spent some nights with Carolyn’s relatives in the North and had a good time there and some nights with some other relatives of Carolyn’s near Oxford and had a good time there too.’
‘So now what was your general impression, Heck?’
Hughie revered Hector, who seemed to him quite the cleverest man he had ever met. His own ambition was to go into politics as soon as he could get a seat to contest, and he liked picking Hector’s brains on international subjects, or rather, allowing Hector’s brains to flow over him in a glowing lava of thought.
‘I must be honest with you, Hughie, my impression is not quite satisfactory.’
‘Oh dear, that’s bad. In what way?’
‘An impression, I am sorry to say, of a great deal of misplaced levity.’
‘Levity? I never see much levity at home; nothing much to levitate about, I shouldn’t have said.’
‘I must explain a little further. My government expects and gets, reports from me on the political equilibrium, stability, and soundness of the various countries
