These things have worried me all my life; as I despise myself for not having the strength of character to do more than give an occasional pound to the R.S.P.C.A., I try to put them out of my mind.
‘Come and have your dinner, dearest.’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said, when the butler put a plate of consommé before her, ‘nothing made of meat – I won’t prey on them – never again.’
Alfred said, ‘But if nobody ate meat the whole race of cows and sheep and pigs would become extinct. They have happy little lives you know and death is never agreeable, it won’t be for us, either. It’s the price we all have to pay.’
‘Yes, but not torture. That’s too much. Fanny, do promise you’ll never have cruel food here.’
‘What is cruel food?’
‘For instance, lobsters and Irish horses and foie gras. A Frenchman on board told me what they do to sweet geese for pâté de foie gras.’
‘Very wrong and stupid of him.’
‘He told to make me care less about the bullocks.’
‘This journey has been a nightmare. Now you must forget it.’
‘But if people always forget these things they go on and on. All right, I suppose I’m boring you.’
‘You’re not boring us,’ said Alfred, looking at her with love, ‘but we don’t like to see you so upset.’
‘But you understand why, don’t you? There we were, all travelling together – I used to go and chat to them, they looked so sad and good, poor little creatures – then I come to this lovely house and you, while they –’ she was eating the remains of a cheese soufflé now, evidently very hungry. ‘The captain of the Esmeralda,’ she said, with her mouth full, ‘was a most unpleasant person. He was ghastly to the bullocks and he offered to – you know – to hug me. But the sweet Frenchman who was there got me off.’
‘Weren’t there any women on board?’
‘Only me.’
‘And this Frenchman – he didn’t want to hug you himself?’
‘M. Cruas? He might have liked to but he didn’t offer. He is kind. So is the station-master. When we got on shore and I looked for my ticket, quelle horrible surprise – there it wasn’t. M. Cruas is poor, you know, so he couldn’t buy me one, he could only carry my luggage to save porters. So the station-master lent. Can we pay him back at once, Sir Alfred – oh you are kind, may I really? Alfred? He knows about us because Lady Leone never has a ticket, or any money, or a passport – just a basket he says. Sacrée Lady Leone. Why sacred I wonder?’
‘It only means that blooming Lady Leone,’ said Alfred, in his falsetto. ‘How’s your French, Northey?’
‘Very nice. M. Cruas is a teacher, so he taught me.’
‘Did you not learn it at school?’ An embarrassed, pouting wriggle was the answer to this. ‘You went to school, I suppose?’
‘I went. Only I didn’t stay.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was too dread.’
‘You’ll have to learn quickly you know or you won’t be any good to Fanny.’
‘Yes. I’ve thought of that. So M. Cruas will come here and go on with the lessons.’
Alfred said to me afterwards, ‘Your cousin Louisa is a fool. Imagine letting that child go alone on a cattle boat and sending her to a school where she was so unhappy she had to leave. I’ve no patience with such people. The poor little thing seems to have been utterly mismanaged.’
Implacable where his own contemporaries were concerned, Alfred had infinite indulgence for the young; in fact I sometimes thought he was too much on their side – hoodwinked by them. It was plain to see that Northey would twist him round her little finger.
Presently Philip came in. Perhaps he felt sorry for us, all alone as he thought, dwelling on that horrid party. When he saw Northey, he said, ‘Don’t tell me, I’m going to guess. I suppose this must be the wonderfully efficient young lady who is going to make life easier for all of us? Northey, in fact. How d’you do? How was the cattle boat?’
Alfred and I began talking simultaneously to change the subject. Northey made a sad little noise like a kitten but went on eating; the food, and the sight of Philip (that, perhaps most of all, she was gazing at him as if she had never seen a young man before) seemed to be taking the edge off her sorrow.
‘This is Philip,’ I said, ‘he is busy, he mustn’t be put upon, but in real emergency you’ll find that he will come to the rescue.’
‘Each for each is what we teach,’ said Northey, looking at him from under her eyelashes. Oh bother, I thought, silly old love, again. Why does he have to be in it already, with Grace? Like all happily married people I am inclined to make matches; Philip and Northey seemed, on the face of it, such an ideal couple.
‘What would a real emergency be?’ she asked him.
‘Let me think. Well, if you invited the Tournons to the same dinner party as les faux Tournons, that would be a pretty kettle of fish.’
‘Please explain.’
‘There is a couple here called M. et Madame de Tournon – social butterflies, pretty, delightful, perfectly useless. They are the real Tournons. Then there are M. et Madame Tournon. He is a deputy, a brilliant young man who specializes in finance, hard-working, ambitious, a parliamentary under-secretary. His wife is a prominent physicist. In spite of the fact that he is almost bound to become Prime Minister, while she may well end up with the Nobel prize, they are known to the whole of Paris as the false Tournons. Now if you had the two couples here together, protocol would demand that the false Tournons, elected by the people, should take
