After one of these clandestine outings they were drinking hot chocolate with blobs of cream in her pretty, warm little boudoir at the rue de Varenne. The mixture of camaraderie and sex in Juliette’s approach to Sigi made her almost irresistible and the little boy was fascinated by her, though rather sleepy now from the cold afternoon air. Presently she said, ‘We do have a good time together, eh, Sigismond?’
‘Oh we do!’
‘You’d like it to go on for ever, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes please, I would.’
‘For ever and ever. It easily could, you know. I could become your maman and live in the same house – would you like that?’
‘Mm,’ he said, his nose in the chocolate.
‘Then you could drive my motor every day, not only sometimes, like now. We’d do all sorts of other lovely things, specially in the summer.’
‘Could we have a speed-boat on the river?’
‘Yes, that would be great fun.’
‘And a glider perhaps.’
‘Surely.’
‘And I very much long for a piebald rat.’
‘Well –’ she said with a slight shudder, ‘why not?’
‘And what else?’
‘Let’s see what would be nice. Perhaps – little brothers and sisters?’
Sigi took his nose out of the chocolate and gave her a very sharp and wide-awake look. He finished the cup, put it down on the table and said, ‘I think it’s time to go home.’
Juliette realized at once that she had made a blunder, though she did not know quite how fatal it was going to be to her ambitions, and nor could she know that her words would be underlined that very evening by the two nannies.
‘That Madam November,’ Sigi overheard, from his bed, ‘is a perfect menace. She gets hold of the child, and the things they do – thoroughly unsuitable – dress shows, and awful sorts of films, and he says (not that I quite believe it, mind you, but you never know) that she lets him drive her car. Anyway she fills his little head with rubbish and spoils him, oh she does spoil him. If you ask my opinion it’s the Marquee she’s after and that’s the way she’s setting about it, and quite likely it would be all for the best if she got him. Because then little Master Grown-up would be back in the nursery for good, sure as eggs is eggs, no more high jinks, and the young person occupied with her own children likely as not.
‘That child’s getting ruined between the lot of them, and I don’t mind who knows it. I can’t do a thing with him any more.’
‘Yes well,’ said Nanny Dexter, ‘none of it’s any surprise to me.’
‘Papa,’ said Sigi next morning.
‘Hullo! You’re early today.’
‘Yes I’ve got something very important I want to talk about.’
‘Well?’
‘You know how you’re wrapped up in Madame Novembre?’
‘So you always tell me.’
‘Were you thinking of marrying her?’
‘Why, Sigismond?’
‘Because she’s not at all the type of person I would like to have as my maman – not at all.’
‘Nothing,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘could be further from my thoughts.’
But this was not perfectly true. The idea of marriage with Juliette had been occupying his mind of late, chiefly because, as he said to one of his men friends, it was so dreadfully tiresome always going to bed in the afternoon. However if Sigi felt like that about it the question would arise no more.
6
Albertine played upon the little boy’s social sense, already very much developed.
‘I have three invitations for you, darling, two parties and luncheon at the Ritz.’
‘You know, Madame Marel, I’m very tired of parties. Always that silly old conjurer, he’s getting on my nerves with his doves and rabbits. Can’t I go to a ball?’
‘You want to go to a ball now, do you? But for several reasons that is impossible. Firstly, how would you dress? Secondly, you are too small for dancing with grown-up people, and thirdly, as it is not the custom for boys of your age to go to balls you’d find that you would not enjoy yourself at it. You must wait for balls until you are older.’
Sigi’s mouth went down at the corners and he looked very glum. He was not accustomed, now, to being refused things.
‘What can we do?’ Albertine said to Charles-Edouard when he had gone home. ‘The poor little boy looked so sad. I must think this over.’
She thought it over, and presently had an idea of genius. She would give a ball for Sigi, a fancy-dress ball, ‘Famous parents with their famous children’, which would be the most sensational of the season. Her first intention was that parents with their children only would be allowed, no famous child admitted without a famous parent, and, far more testing, no famous parent without his or her own famous child. But this rule led to such shrieks down the telephone from Albertine’s many bachelor friends that she was finally obliged to relax it in favour of uncles and aunts. Further she would not budge; nobody, she said, would be allowed in without either their own child or their own nephew or niece.
Never before had children been at such a premium. A great deal of sharing out took place in families. ‘If I have Stanislas and you take Oriane that still leaves little Christophe to go with Jean’; fleets of aeroplanes were chartered to bring over nephews and nieces for the many bachelors from Chile, Bolivia, and the Argentine who live in France, while legal adoptions were hurried through at a rate never previously known in the department of the Seine. The Tournons, and others who, like them, had had several children in order to avoid taxation, now sent to the country for them, and these little strangers suddenly found themselves the very be-all and end-all of their parents’ existence.
As was to be expected, the Tournons were positively dramatic in their approach to the ball; indeed one night, shortly before it was to take place, Madame de Tournon woke up screaming from a nightmare in which her
