So we planned for our sons, hoping to undo the harm they had done themselves. It never occurred to us that they would refuse to cooperate. We were soon to learn our mistake.
We let the rest of November go by; then I sent them a telegram, reply paid, asking them to dine with me at the Ritz the following day. They were kind enough to accept the invitation quite promptly. Alfred said this showed they were starving and should easily be caught, like animals in the snow.
‘The gilt will be off the gingerbread by now – they’ll have begun to see what it’s like to be alone in London with no money. It was far better not to go at once.’
On St Andrew’s Day I arrived at the Ritz. When I had unpacked and had a bath I was still about half an hour too early for our appointment; there was nothing else to do so I went downstairs, sat on one of those little sofas below the alcove, where I have perched at intervals all my life, and ordered a glass of sherry. Never possessing a London house of my own I have always found the Ritz useful when up for the day or a couple of nights; a place where one could meet people, leave parcels, write letters, or run into out of the rain. It now remains one of the few London interiors which have never changed a scrap; the lace antimacassars are still attached to the armchairs with giant hairpins; the fountain tinkles as it has for fifty years; there is the same sound of confident footfall on thick carpet and the same delicious smell of rich women and promising food. As in the Paris Ritz the management has been clever enough not to touch the decoration designed by M. Meuwes, the excellent architect employed by M. Ritz. I have been told that the late Lady Colefax once refused a commission to redecorate the ground floor, saying that it would be wrong to alter any of it.
I sipped my sherry and reflected on the enormous length of human life and the curious turns it takes, a train of thought always set off by a place with which I have been familiar at irregular intervals for many years. Some people, I know, feel aggrieved at the shortness of life; I, on the contrary, am amazed at how long it seems to go on. The longer the better. Paris had cured me of my middle-aged blight exactly as I had hoped it would; if I was sometimes worried there I never felt depressed, bored, and useless, as at Oxford. I managed the work far better than I had expected to. I had neither kissed the President nor extinguished the Eternal Flame nor indeed, as far as I knew, committed any major gaffe. As I am not shy, and most of the people I met were engaged in responsible, therefore interesting, work I found no difficulty in conversing with them. Philip had provided me with one or two useful gambits. (‘I suppose you are very tired, M. le Ministre’ would unloose floodgates.)
Alfred was an undoubted success with the French, whatever Mockbar might say. He was more like their idea of an Englishman, slow, serious, rather taciturn, than the brilliant Sir Louis, who had been too much inclined to floor them on their own ground. Such worries as I had all came from the children; Alfred’s were more serious. He was obliged to press the European Army upon the French although personally convinced by now of its unacceptability. The Îles Minquiers, too, were still giving him a lot of uncongenial work. However, Mr Gravely seemed quite satisfied with the way these things were shaping. The Americans had assured him that the European Army was almost in the bag. He thought he had himself persuaded M. Bouche-Bontemps to give up the Minquiers and that it was only, now, a matter of time before they became British Isles.
Two men coming out of the alcove and passing my sofa roused me from these thoughts. ‘When I got to the factory,’ one of them said, ‘they told me that seven of the girls were knocked up – well, pregnant in fact. It’s the new German machine.’
‘You don’t surprise me at all,’ said his friend, ‘these new German machines are the devil.’
I have overheard many a casual remark in my life; none has ever puzzled me more. As I pondered over it I saw three figures ambling towards me from the Arlington Street entrance. They were dressed as Teddy boys, but there was no mistaking the species. With their slouching, insouciant gait, dead-fish hands depending from, rather than forming part of, long loose-jointed arms, slightly open mouths and appearance of shivering as if their clothes, rather too small in every dimension, had no warmth in them, they would have been immediately recognizable, however disguised, on the mountains of the Moon, as Etonians. Here were the chrysalises of the elegant, urbane Englishmen I so much longed for my sons to be; this was the look which, since I was familiar with it from early youth, I found so right, and which I had missed from the tough premature manliness of the other two boys. Charlie and Fabrice had changed their clothes but not yet their personalities; what a relief!
18
‘We didn’t think we were late?’
‘You’re not. I was early.’
‘Pretty dress, Mum. We’ve brought you some flowers.’
‘Oh, you are nice. Thanks so much – roses!’ (But this was rather sinister. Roses are expensive on St Andrew’s Day; they must still have got some
