‘At Oopers I ordered a new Rolls-Royce, of cane-work – you see the chic of that. From time to time, when I get a little tired, for all this shopping does tire me rather, I go to the Cadena Café and order a café crême and sit very happily watching your English beauties. They are a refreshment to the eye. I notice how sensible they are, they scorn the demi-toilette, and quite right too, there is nothing worse. They come out with no make-up, hardly having combed their hair even, to do their shopping. Then, of course, they go home and arrange themselves properly. Now I admire that. All or nothing, how I agree.
‘So I had no time for luncheon as you can imagine, but who cares when you can have a bun and a cup of tea? The afternoon I spent in fittings!’
‘Fittings?’ Mrs O’Donovan and Lady Clarissa were stunned by this recital.
‘Junior Miss, my dear. All my little dresses for the plage. Don’t ask me what Dior will say when he hears of Junior Miss. I’d rather not think. No thank you, no wine – when I am in England I drink nothing but whisky.’
Mr Clarkely, more interested in French politics than English elegance, began asking a few questions about the Third Force, saying that he had made friends, through his Committee, with many of the Ministers, but Madame Rocher merely cried,
‘Don’t talk to me of these dreadful people – they think of nothing, day and night, but their stomachs and their mistresses.’
‘Really?’ said Mr Clarkely. ‘Are you sure?’ It had not been his impression at all.
‘On what do you suppose they squander their salaries – those huge augmentations for which they are always and forever voting?’ (Madame Rocher would have complained very much if she had found herself compelled to dress on the amount annually earned by a French Minister.) ‘Stomachs, dear sir, and mistresses. The vast sums that dreadful Dexter gives them for tanks and aeroplanes, what d’you suppose happens to them? My nephew, a commandant, tells me there are no tanks and no aeroplanes and hardly even a pop-gun. Why? Because, my dear sir, these sums are spent on the stomachs and the mistresses of your friends.’
Mr Clarkely was very much surprised. ‘Surely not so and so,’ he said, mentioning a certain prominent Minister noted for his dyspeptic austerity of life and devotion to work.
‘All – all! Don’t mention their names or I shall have an attack! All, I tell you, all! They take the best houses to live in, they have fleets of motors, they spend the day eating and drinking and all night the relays of mistresses are shown up the escalier de service. It has ever been so, but let me tell you that the scandals of Wilson and Panama, of the death of Félix Fauré even, are nothing, but nothing, to what goes on today. Give us back our King, my dear sir, and then speak to me of politics,’ she said, rather as if her King were kept a prisoner in the Tower of London. ‘More whisky, Vénérable, I pray.’
Mrs O’Donovan whispered to Mr Clarkely, ‘It’s no use asking that sort of Frenchwoman about politics – ask me. I know a great deal more than she does.’
But Mr Clarkely went to tea once a week at St Leonard’s Terrace and had been told what Mrs O’Donovan knew already. He had hoped for something more direct from the horse’s mouth.
‘Is she really so royalist?’ he turned to Grace. Madame Rocher was telling Sir Conrad her summer plans and begging him to go with her to Deauville, Venice, and Monte Carlo.
‘Like all the Faubourg,’ said Grace, ‘she has a photograph of the King on her piano, but I don’t think she’d raise a finger to get him back. My husband says the French hate all forms of authority quite equally.’
After dinner Madame Rocher took Sir Conrad aside, saying, ‘And tell me, mon cher Vénérable, how goes the Grand Orient? You know,’ she said, breathing a scented whisper (not Yardley’s) into his ear, ‘that I have designs on one of your adherents?’
‘I am most glad to hear it,’ he replied, delightfully drowning in the great billows of sex that emanated from her in spite of her seventy-odd years. ‘Come in here a minute and we will discuss ways and means together.’
12
Madame Rocher’s journey turned out not to have been really necessary. The night of Sir Conrad’s dinner party Sigismond was very sick and feverish; in the morning the doctor came, and said he must have his appendix out at once. He was taken by ambulance to a nursing home to be prepared for the operation, deeply interested in the whole affair.
‘Shall I die? And go to the Père La Chaise? And see l’Empereur, like in Le Rêve? Well, I forgive Nanny for everything. Can I see the knife? I shall have a scar now, like Canari! oh good! When are you going to do it?’
‘Not until tomorrow morning,’ said the nurse, ‘and don’t get so excited.’
‘Better give him something to keep him quiet,’ said the doctor, after which Sigi became intensely drowsy. Grace sat with
