‘She’ll be down in exactly a quarter of an hour,’ said Valhubert. ‘Grace thinks she can’t bear to begin painting her face until she actually sees us arriving for fear we should have an accident on the road and then all the powder and paint and eye black would be wasted. She and Oudineau are hard at it now. He’s her lady’s maid as well as butler, caretaker, wood-man, chauffeur, gardener and gamekeeper. Nobody has ever been so much à tout faire. The exquisite luncheon we are about to eat (you’ll see how it’s worth the journey for that alone) will have been fished, shot and grown by Oudineau and cooked by his son. This Jacques has an enormous situation in Paris, but he is obliged to drive down here and do the cooking when my aunt has guests. I must say it only happens once in a blue moon.’
‘Is he a chef, in Paris?’
‘By no means! He directs an enormous electrical concern – Jacques Oudineau will produce all the atomic plant of the future. He’s immensely powerful and very attractive, one meets him dining out everywhere – that’s his Mercedes, parked by the kitchen garden.’
‘What a charming room this is!’
‘Yes – there’s nothing so pretty as a château-fort – redecorated in the eighteenth century. This panelling is by Pineau. Look at those heaps of illustrated papers – they go back fifty years and more. One day Grace and I were waiting for her to come down and we began looking at them (I am particularly fond of Matania – orgies – galley-slaves – jousting and so on). Literally showers of banknotes came tumbling out of them, all obsolete. Yes, she’s a miser in the true sense of the word.’
Presently our hostess appeared looking, I thought, exactly the same as she had some twenty-seven years ago, at Hampton. She had then been in her fifties; she was now in her eighties; she had seemed old then and not a day older now. She must once have been pretty, with little turned-up nose and black eyes, but almost before middle age, probably, she had become stout; there was something porcine in her look. It was hard to imagine that she could have given birth to the irresistible Fabrice. Almost on her heels, Oudineau reappeared and in a voice of thunder announced, ‘’chesse est servie.’
We lunched, in a narrow room with windows on both sides, off Sèvres plates which must literally have been worth their weight in gold. ‘They belonged to Bauffremont – you know them very well, my dear Charles-Edouard. I never allow Jacques Oudineau to wash them up; he is quite a good cook, but a most unreliable boy in other ways.’
The luncheon was indeed worth the journey. We began with brochet. Why is brochet so good and pike so nasty, since the dictionary affirms that they are one and the same? Then partridges, followed by thick juicy French cutlets quite unlike the penny on the end of a brittle bone which is the English butcher’s presentation of that piece of meat. They were burnt on the outside, inside almost raw. Boiled eggs suddenly appeared, with fingers of buttered toast, in case anybody should still be famished. Then a whole brie on bed of straw; then chocolate profiteroles. I was beginning to get used to such meals, but they always made me feel rather drunk and stupid for an hour or two afterwards.
When she tasted the salad, Madame de Sauveterre said ‘Vinegar!’
‘Jacques is in despair, Madame la Duchesse, he forgot to bring a lemon.’
‘It’s inadmissible. This boy always forgets something. Last time it was the truffles. He has no head. Thank goodness I haven’t got shares in his concern.’
‘Thank goodness I have,’ said Valhubert, ‘since they double every year.’
The Duchess asked a hundred questions about the Embassy, specially wanting to know what had become of all the English people she had known there in the past.
‘Et cette adorable Ava – et la belle Peggy – et ce vieux type si agréable du Service, Sir Charles?’
When she saw how little I could tell her about any of them she put me down for what I am, provincial. Valhubert, however, knew all the answers. He told her that she had met me already, at Hampton, after which she got on to Lady Montdore and her circle. Here I did better.
‘Yes, she died before the war, of heart failure while having an operation in Switzerland.’
I did not add that it was an operation for leg-lifting which Cedric, the present Lord Montdore, had persuaded her to undergo against a great deal of medical advice. He said that he utterly refused to be seen with her at the Lido again until it had been done. Her heart, worn out by dieting and excessive social life, had stopped under the anaesthetic. As this happened at a very convenient moment for him, the whole affair seemed fishy and many people openly said that he had murdered her. Soon afterwards the war broke out and he fled to America. ‘Darling, you can’t really imagine one going over the top?’
Indeed it was an unlikely conception. However, having killed Lady Montdore and failed to kill Germans, he was badly received in England when he returned there after the war. He had very soon gone back and settled in his native continent.
‘The present Montdore? Yes, he lives in the West Indies. I miss him very much. Polly? She is happy, has thousands of children and has completely lost her looks.’
‘Fabrice always said she would. And Lady Montdore’s lover – ce vieux raseur – I forget his name?’
‘Boy Dougdale? He has become one of our foremost biographers.’
‘Now tell me about yourself, charmante Ambassadrice. I hear you have two boys at school with that little monster of Charles-Edouard’s? I don’t know much about young people as I never see any, but one hears such tales –’
‘Does one?’ said Charles-Edouard, amused. ‘What sort of tales penetrate to Boisdormant,
