The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

Nanny had spent them dreaming of Hyde Park and what fun it would be, now she had a baby once more, taking him there. But when at last, on their return from Paris, she had achieved this objective, the dream, as dreams so often do, had turned to ashes. The Park, she found, had lost its old character. Not only had the railings disappeared, the beautiful fleur-de-lis railings which used to surround it, the stout stumps of Rotten Row, the elegant Regency railings of the flower beds, and the railings on which children loved to walk a tight-rope at the edges of the paths, but so, to a very great extent, had the nannies. Increasing numbers of little boys, it seemed, while they had a multiplicity of mummies and daddies, had no nannies at all. They were no longer wheeled about in prams, morning and afternoon, as a matter of course, but when they needed fresh air they were hung out of windows in meat safes. As soon as they could toddle they toddled off to nursery schools, where they were taught to sing little songs, given a great deal of milk to drink, and kept strictly out of the way of their harassed parents. So Park society was not what it had been. There was no wide range of choice, as in the past, and the few nannies who were left clung together, a sad little bunch, like the survivors in an autumnal poultry yard, most of whose fellows had already gone to the pot. Nanny had few friends among them and pronounced them to be, on the whole, a very inferior type of person. But at Bunbury she had congenial gossips, the old housekeeper, the groom’s wife, Mrs Atkin the butler’s wife, and Mrs Black, to whom she was able to boast and brag about her year in France until they stretched their eyes. Anybody who knew how terribly she had complained during the whole of her sojourn there, or who could have heard her comments to Nanny Dexter on every aspect of French civilization, would have been amazed by the attitude she now assumed over the clanking cups of tea with her cronies.

‘Say what you choose, France is a wonderful country – oh it is wonderful. Take the shops, dear, they groan with food, just like pre-war. I only wish you could see the meat, great carcasses for anybody to buy – the offal brimming over on to the pavement – animals like elephants. They could have suet every day if they knew how to make a nice suet pudding. But there is one drawback, nobody there can cook. They’ve got all the materials in the world but they cannot serve up a decent meal – funny, isn’t it? It’s the one thing I’m glad to be back for, you never saw such unsuitable food for a child – well I ended with a spirit lamp in the nursery, cooking for ourselves. There now – I wish you could have seen our nursery, a huge great room looking out over the garden, with a real English fireplace. Then I wish you could have seen the château, it is different from Bunbury – oh it is. Abroad, and no mistake. Like a castle in a book, at the top of a mountain, you quite expect to see knights in armour coming up on their horses. And warm! Well, imagine the worst heat wave you ever knew in your life, the summer of 1911 for instance, and double that. No, I didn’t mind a bit, it simply didn’t affect me, though the poor mite got rather peaky. You don’t know what heat can be, in this country.’

Sir Conrad gave Sigi a little gun, and with it a great talking to on the handling of guns in general and the manners of a sportsman in particular.

‘And just remember this,’ he said in conclusion, ‘never never let your gun pointed be at anyone. That it may unloaded be matters not a rap to me! And Black is going to keep it for you in the gun-room; he’ll teach you to clean it and so on, and you may only use it when you are with him.’

So Sigi never left Black’s side all the long summer days, trotting happily about the woods and pooping off at magpies and other vermin.

‘There’s something I do regret,’ he remarked to his mother. ‘I would like to show my gun to Canari. It’s small, but you could kill a man with it if you got the vital spot. Now Canari isn’t a silly little baby mollycoddle, like dear little Foster Dexter, or dear little Georgie in the Park. Canari is a maquisard, a brave, a dragon, and he would never sack me out of his bande again if I had this gun. They’re terribly short of equipment in Canari’s maquis, it’s a shame.’

Grace could hardly bear to think of lovely Bellandargues shut up and empty all the summer and that, for the first time in living memory, the big salon would no longer be the scene of a conversation piece like that which was discovered when Charles-Edouard had first held open the door for her to walk in, and repeated thereafter every day of her visit; Madame Rocher at the piano, M. de la Bourlie at his canvas, and Madame de Valhubert deep in earnest talk with M. le Curé.

She had an uneasy feeling of guilt, exactly as if it were all her own fault and not that of Charles-Edouard.

Also she longed very much for the heat and light of Provence. They had come home to a typical English summer. Rain poured all day on to the high trees out of the low clouds, clouds which lifted and parted towards nightfall so that a pallid ray of north-western sunshine illumined the soaking landscape, a pallid ray of hope for the morrow.

‘It’s lovely now – we must go out. Don’t you think the weather may have turned at last?’

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