‘Oh bother, yes – it was a National Day we had to go to.’
‘It didn’t matter. I was rather tired you know, really.’
After dinner he said it was bedtime and he’d better say good-bye. ‘We have an early start – I shan’t come and disturb you in the morning, Fanny – I know you’ve never been much use before seven and I want to be off at half-past five. Many thanks. Payne and I have enjoyed ourselves.’
‘Come again,’ I said.
All three boys were invited to stay at Boisdormant. Before they left I screwed up my courage to have a long-postponed talk with Fabrice. This was a moment I had always dreaded, when I must tell him who his father was. He knew that my cousin Linda was his mother and presumably thought that her husband, Christian Talbot, whose surname he bore, was his father. He had never seen Christian or exhibited any interest whatever in him and since he had asked no questions I had not raised the subject. I found it, for some reason, deeply embarrassing to do so.
‘Fabrice, darling, you’re sixteen now –’
‘Definitely.’
‘Which is really grown-up. In fact you have taken charge of your own life; you’re not a child any more. So I suppose I can talk frankly to you –’
‘If this is a pi-jaw hadn’t I better fetch Charlie?’
‘No, it isn’t. One doesn’t pi-jaw with one’s fellow grown-ups. I simply want to talk about your parents. Now I’ve always told you that my darling cousin Linda was your mother.’
‘Definitely. And my father was the son of this old woman we are going to stay with.’
‘Yes, but how did you know?’
‘Mum, you are a scream! Of course I’ve known since I was nine – from the very first moment I saw Sigi at Easterfields. He had heard the nannies telling each other when he was meant to be asleep.’
I suppose my feelings on hearing this must have been the same as those of a mother who finds that her girl has been conversant with the facts of life since childhood. Thankful, really, not to have to enter into difficult explanations, I felt slightly aggrieved to think that Fabrice had kept such important knowledge from me all these years and not best pleased at the way in which he had found it out.
‘Everything’s always arranged by Sigi,’ I said, crossly. ‘Never mind. So, darling, be very nice to your grandmother, won’t you?’
‘Then she might adopt me and leave me a lot of money?’
‘Oh dear! How cold-blooded you are –’
But I knew that at sixteen people put on a cold-blooded air partly because they are terrified of betraying sentiments which might embarrass them. Fabrice would be incapable now of saying that Alfred and I were his heart’s father and mother; that would come much later, if at all.
He went on, ‘Sigi thinks we might make a syndicate for getting what we can out of her. She can take the place of Yanky in our lives.’
‘Good luck to you!’ I said. ‘I expect that Duchess is capable of looking after herself – just like Yanky. You boys aren’t quite as clever as you think you are –’
‘Don’t be ghoulish, Mum.’
They stayed a week at Boisdormant and came back in tearing spirits, having greatly enjoyed themselves. Oudineau had taken them out shooting every day and Jacques Oudineau, who kept a little aeroplane at a nearby aero-club, had allowed them to flop out of it in parachutes to their hearts’ content. In the evenings they had listened with real, not simulated, interest to the Duchess’s endless tales of her family and the history of Boisdormant. They were taking notes of episodes suitable to be incorporated in the Son et Lumiére and other attractions for tourists which they planned to produce there the following summer. Jacques Oudineau would see to the technical details, Sigi was to be publicity agent in Paris while our boys, collaborating with Basil and Grandad, would supply an endless stream of Britons. Beautiful Boisdormant was clearly destined to wake up one day and find itself the French Woburn. As these activities were not likely to get the boys into much trouble and could easily be combined with their lessons, I could only feel thankful at the turn their lives had taken. Jacques Oudineau, young and dynamic, seemed to have gained a far more complete ascendancy over them in one week than Alfred and I during their whole lives; they could only talk of him. He had decreed that they must now work very hard and pass all the exams with which the modern child is plagued; then he would take them into his business and they would be happy ever after. As for the Duchess, according to Valhubert she found that Fabrice more than came up to her expectations. As soon as she saw Uncle Matthew, she said, she realized that the family was bien. Fabrice himself then won her heart by looking like her late son and exhibiting perfect manners. Her will, it seemed, had already been altered in his favour.
24
After Christmas, Philip was posted to Moscow. It seemed to me that everybody had either gone or was going there. M. Bouche-Bontemps, in a fur hat, was conferring with Mr K. at the Kremlin; the French papers were full of lines and sidelines on Russia, no photograph without its onion dome. On Boxing Day, David and Dawn had their baby in a snowstorm between Omsk and Tomsk, causing the maximum amount of trouble to Alfred’s colleague in Moscow; telegrams flew back and forth. They were illegally on Soviet territory; it was not easy to get permission for them to stay there until David should be out of danger. (The other two had
