Charles-Edouard, she knew, had gone to Venice this year. He had taken a palazzo on the Grand Canal and was entertaining many Paris friends, among others Madame Rocher, the Novembre de la Fertés, and Albertine Marel-Desboulles. This had been a great blow to poor Hughie. He had cherished a hope all the summer that Albertine might have gone with him for a motor tour in Sweden. But as soon as the Venetian party offered itself, with Charles-Edouard and all her friends, the motor tour became, for various good reasons, impossible. Furthermore she discouraged Hughie from following her to Venice, saying vaguely that she would be taken up with the film festival. So he often came now to spend a day or two at Bunbury. He was trying to stand for Parliament, but had had no luck so far with the Selection Committees, partly of course, he said, because he was so stupid, and partly because he had no wife. He longed more than ever to be married to Albertine, even though he felt sure that in that case it would be her they would want as candidate and not him. He could just imagine the kind of speech she would make, bringing her point of view, inspired, sensible, and well expressed, to bear on all the problems under discussion.
‘I, the soul of the French bourgeoisie, my solid legs planted on the solid earth, I Albertine Labé, descended from generations of timber merchants, who have always given good measure for good money, I have the gift of seeing things clearly and truthfully as they are. I cannot pretend. I feel the truth, I feel it here in my heart and here in my bowels as well as knowing it here in my brain. It is a power, this seeing and feeling and knowing truth, and it has been bred in me by my ancestors the merchants.’
‘And I tell you, I, Albertine Labé, bourgeoise, that it is this power of truthfulness and of knowing truth which is needed if we are to rebuild your England, rebuild my France, and rebuild our Europe.’
Just the stuff for the Selection Committees, he thought. There was another line of talk which ran, ‘I who loathe the bourgeoisie, I who would rather burn charcoal in the woods than buy or sell anything whatever it might be, I who would rather freeze to death out of doors in the cruel winter of my native Lorraine than sit over a warm fire in a back shop, I, Albertine Labé de Lespay, aristocrat, child of knight and warrior, whose ancestors never touched money or even carried it on their persons because they thought it the dirtiest of dirt, I tell you that I know the truth, I know it here and here and here, and it is this truth, this virtue, this hatred of gold that is needed if we are to rebuild etc. etc.’
The second statement, actually, had more foundation in fact, since Albertine did not possess one drop of bourgeois blood, and her ancestors, a line of powerful princes, had only been timber merchants to the extent of owning vast forests in Lorraine. But the trend of the modern world had not escaped her notice, and the timber merchants were ever increasingly brought into play. Hughie was much too much dazzled by her to notice any discrepancy; both these statements had, at different times, bowled him over, as he assumed that they would bowl over the Selection Committees. He was unable to imagine anybody, even an English Conservative, standing up against the charm and brilliance of this extraordinary woman. With her by his side, to inspire and teach him, it seemed that no goal in the world would be unobtainable.
‘Of course I’m glad to think of her in Venice,’ he said, not gladly though, to Grace, as they sat over the little drawing-room fire, summer rain fiercely beating on the windows. ‘She loves Italy so much, she needs the beauty. Then there is the important work she does there, with the films.’
‘What work? She’s frightfully rich, she doesn’t need to work.’
‘She doesn’t need to, she does it for her country, for France. She is a moving power in the French film industry with her taste and knowledge and influence. No film is ever made there without first being submitted to her, you know. She has an infallible instinct. Yes, I love to think of her in Venice, but I do wish she would write to me. She won’t, of course. “What is writing?” she said once. “Just a scratch of metal upon paper.” Well, look at it that way and what is it?’
Grace, whose heart was also in Venice, and who would also have welcomed a scratch of metal upon paper, or even upon a postcard, sympathized with Hughie, but did not quite enjoy his interminable eulogies of Albertine, who seemed to her one of the many causes of her own wretchedness. She wondered if he was aware that Charles-Edouard went to tea with her every day, but was too polite and tactful to mention it.
‘Don’t you think young people nowadays manage their lives much worse than we used to?’ Sir Conrad said to Mrs O’Donovan, who had come down for a little country air. ‘Surely you and I would have been more competent than either of those two in the same circumstances, and less gloomy? I’m
