Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (15 page)
But although each season of the year had its own merrie little
rite it was at Christmas time that Lady Bobbin and her disciples in the neighbourhood really came into their own, the activities which she promoted during the rest of the year merely paving the way for an orgy of merrieness at Yule. Her first step in this direction was annually to summon at least thirty of the vast clan of Bobbin relations to spend the feast beneath their ancestral roof, and of these nearly twenty would, as a rule, find it convenient to obey. The remainder, even if their absence in Araby or Fair Kashmir rendered it palpably unlikely that they should accept, were always sent their invitation just the same. This was called Decent Family Feeling. Having gathered together all those of her late husband’s relations who were available to come (her own had mostly died young from the rigours of tea planting in the Torrid Zone) she would then proceed to arrange for them to have a jolly Christmas. In this she was greatly helped by her brother-in-law, Lord Leamington Spa, who was also a fervent Merrie Englander, although, poor man, having been banished by poverty from his country estates and obliged to live all the year round in Eaton Square, he had but little scope for his activities in this direction. Those who should have been Lady Bobbin’s prop and mainstay at such a time, her own children, regarded the whole thing with a sort of mirthful disgust very injurious to her feelings. Nothing, however, could deter her from her purpose, and every year at Compton Bobbin the German and the Sussex customs were made to play their appointed parts. Thus the Christmas Tree, Christmas stockings and other activities of Santa Claus, and the exchange through the post of endless cards and calendars (German); the mistletoe and holly decorations, the turkeys, the boar’s head, and a succession of carol singers and mummers (Sussex Roman Catholic); and the unlimited opportunity to over-eat on every sort of unwholesome food washed down with honest beer, which forms the groundwork for both schools of thought, combined to provide the ingredients of Lady Bobbin’s Christmas Pudding.
On Christmas Eve, therefore, various members of the vast Bobbin family began to arrive from every corner of the British Isles. The seven sisters of the late Sir Hudson, who, be it remembered, had all married well, of course brought with them their husbands and children, and in many cases their dogs. It was noticeable that those who had married the least well came first, by train, while, as the day wore on, richer and ever richer motor cars, bedecked with larger and ever larger coronets, made stately progress down the drive; until the St. Neots Rolls-Royce made its strawberry-leaved appearance, marking the end of this procession, just before dinner time.
Bobby, who for some while had been hovering round the front door, greeted this vehicle with bloodcurdling screams of delight, and rushed forward to assist from it his favourite aunt, the Duchess of St. Neots and her daughter, his favourite cousin, Miss Héloïse Potts. (The duchess had been married five times, and had now settled down once more with her girlhood’s husband, the Duke of St. Neots, Miss Potts being the offspring of an intermediate venture with an American millionaire.)
To Paul the day was like an endless nightmare. Wherever he went he met some new, and for the most part, unsympathetic face, upon which the mutual embarrassment would become intense. Lady Bobbin, unversed in social graces, forbore to make any introductions, and Bobby spent most of the day sulking in his bedroom. His mother had instructed him to stay at home to greet his guests, the greater number of whom, however, he was pleased to consider quite unworthy of any notice.
Unluckily for himself, Paul happened to be the first down to breakfast, when, entering the dining-room with a prodigious yawn, he discovered six hungry Mackintoshes just off the midnight express from Perth. They reminded him of nothing so much as a Scotch family he had once seen on the music halls,
sandwiched between some performing seals and a thin woman who gave imitations of (to him) unknown actors and actresses. The children, a son of about seventeen and three hideous girls of between ten and fourteen years old, all wore tartan woollen stockings and long tartan kilts. Lady Mackintosh was dressed in one, and Sir Alexander’s reddish whiskers fell into the porridge which he ate – Paul could scarcely believe his eyes – standing up. Paul ventured a few polite remarks, inquired about their journey and observed that the weather was beautifully open, a cliché which he had learnt from Lady Bobbin, but as a family they appeared to be incapable of sustaining conversation, and he soon relapsed into that silence which they so evidently preferred. Presently Lady Bobbin came in from her early morning ride, and he was able to leave them to her hospitable ministrations.
Next to arrive were some more distant relations of Bobby’s; Captain Chadlington, M.P., his wife Lady Brenda, their children Christopher Robin and Wendy, and a pack of ugly liver and white spaniels. They were being warmly congratulated by the rest of the party on Captain Chadlington’s recent election to Parliament. Paul, having listened during lunch to some of his conversation, felt that it would be impossible to extend the congratulations to his electors; their choice of a representative seemed strangely unfortunate. He was evidently a young man of almost brutish stupidity, and Paul, who had hardly ever met any Conservative Members of Parliament before, was astounded to think that such a person could be tolerated for a moment at the seat of government. To hear him talking about Bolshevik Russia was a revelation to Paul, who took it for granted that Communism was now universally regarded as a high, though possibly a boring, ideal. Lady Bobbin’s attitude towards it was just comprehensible, as she had evidently been out of touch with the world for years; but anybody who, being perforce in daily contact with persons of a certain intelligence, could still
hold the views held by Captain Chadlington, must surely be a monster of denseness and stupidity.
Lord and Lady Leamington Spa came with their son, Squibby Almanack, whose appearance on the scene threw Paul into a fever of guilty terror since they had been at school together. He explained the situation to Bobby, who led his cousin into the schoolroom and told him the circumstances of Paul’s presence in the house, upon which Squibby shook his fat sides, laughed a Wagnerian guffaw, and betook himself to the piano where he sat alone, picking out harmonious chords until it was time to dress for dinner.
Squibby Almanack was a person who belonged so exclusively to one small circle of very intimate friends that any divorce, however temporary, from that circle left him in a most pitiable condition of aimlessness and boredom. In London he was never seen anywhere unless accompanied by ‘Biggy’ Lennox and ‘Bunch’ Tarradale, the three of them forming, so to speak, a kind of modern édition de luxe of
Les Trois Mousquetaires
. Of this fraternity that insouciant beguiler of womanhood, Maydew Morris, provided a picturesque if only occasional fourth, a sort of d’Artagnan, who, although of very different character to the others, was drawn to them by that passion for German music which was the dominant note in all their lives. In spite of the fact that Squibby, Biggy and Bunch sought no adventures save those of the questing spirit, while the adventures of Maydew were the talk of London, they being men of words while he was in all things a man of deeds; in spite of many dissimilarities of nature, the four of them got on well together, and there were very few classical concerts and no performances of German opera at which they could not be seen sitting side by side, deep in perusal of the score. They were further made remarkable by an extraordinary physical resemblance to each other. All four were on the large side, blond and with pink and white complexions, all, with the exception of the hirsute
Maydew, slightly bald and quite lacking in eyebrows. They walked with the same peculiar gait, swinging rather prominent buttocks in the manner of hockey-playing schoolgirls, and all sat listening to music (which, provided, of course, that it came from the Fatherland, was the beginning and end of their existence) with the same air of rigid concentration.
Nearly always they sat alone, dispensing with female company. Sometimes, however, by mutual consent, each would appear followed by some pretty débutante; these, with gestures of exaggerated courtesy, would be motioned into the intervening seats, presented with programmes, and then be completely ignored. Many unlucky girls were forced to subdue their very natural distaste for highbrow music for hours on end in order that they might sit in this delicious proximity to their heroes, listening with awe to the Olympian breathing and even, if lucky, occasionally brushing a heroic hand. In the case of Maydew things sometimes went further during the dark moments of The Ring, but the other three were most consistently platonic in their friendships, and were rapidly becoming the despair of match-making mammas. Things were indeed beginning to reach such a pitch that the more ambitious mothers of sub-débutantes were obliged to abandon Paris as an educational centre and dispatch their daughters instead to Munich, where they could be trained to endure classical music silently and, in certain cases, even intelligently. For Squibby, Biggy, Bunch and Maydew were all highly eligible young men. After one of these ‘mixed’ evenings each would sternly criticize the girls produced by the others. Should one of them have yawned, or even sighed a little, her immediate expulsion from her admirer’s visiting list would be demanded, while too frequent crossing and uncrossing of legs would be made a cause for bitter complaint. Poor Bunch, always less fortunate in his choice than the others, because more easily beguiled by a pretty face, produced two inveterate leg crossers on consecutive nights during the Wagner season and was very severely spoken to by Biggy, who, seated on
the other side of these ladies, had suffered in consequence sundry kicks and knocks, and complained that his attention had been quite abstracted from the stage during several moving moments. It is true that the climax of horror was reached by a girl friend of Maydew who, during the Rhinegold, was heard to ask in a piercing whisper what the heaps of firewood were for, what the story was all about anyway, and whether there wouldn’t soon be an interval; but then a certain licence was always allowed to Maydew in matters of the heart.
When the performance was concluded the girls, if any, were obliged to stifle their cravings for food, drinks and the gay sights of the town, and were hurried away in one or two unromantically full taxis to their respective homes. (May-dew’s girl, however, always lived in a different part of London from the others and had to be taken home alone.)
After this, Squibby, Biggy and Bunch would foregather in Biggy’s flat, where they drank strong beer and talked of music and philosophy, and where, much later if at all, they might be joined by a complacent Maydew.
These friends were so seldom separated that Christmas time, when from a sense of duty Squibby, Biggy and Bunch would rejoin their noble families, seemed to them the most inhuman of feasts. How, secretly, did they envy the unregenerate Maydew, who had departed with a Balham beauty to Berlin in order to improve his German. Squibby in particular, dreaded all the year round the Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin. This year, however, things might be more amusing; he had been fond of Paul at Eton, Bobby was now a grownup person instead of a child, Michael Lewes, too, might prove to be pleasantly reformed. With less than his usual depression, he picked out some obscure motif from Siegfried.
The presence at Compton Bobbin of these people and others too numerous and boring to mention had the effect for the time
being of throwing Philadelphia, Paul and Michael very much into each other’s company. All three of them had a profound distaste for noise, crowds and organized pleasure, and they now spent most of their time hiding from the rest of the party. They went for long rides together every morning, Paul mounted, at his own urgent request, on an ancient cob which had long ago been turned out to enjoy a peaceful old age in the orchard, and which he found more to his liking than the aristocratic Boadicea. After dinner they would retire by mutual consent to the schoolroom and thus avoid the games of sardines, kick-the-bucket, and murders with which the others whiled away their evenings.
Bobby was now seldom to be seen; he spent most of his time giggling in corners with Miss Héloïse Potts, a pretty black-eyed little creature of seventeen who substituted parrot-like shrieks and screams of laughter for the more usual amenities of conversation, with apparently, since she was always surrounded by crowds of admiring young men, the greatest possible success. Even Squibby would often leave his beloved piano in order to enjoy her company, while at meal times her end of the table was eagerly sought after by all the men of the party, young and old, except for Paul and Michael. They, understanding neither her attraction nor her language (when she spoke at all she usually inserted the sound ‘egi’ after the consonants of her words, thus rendering her meaning far from clear to those unversed in this practice) would make their way with unhurried footsteps to the vacant places near Philadelphia. Indeed, everywhere else the conversation was too highly specialized to be very enjoyable. Héloïse, Bobby and their followers ended every sentence with ‘egat thegi Regitz’, which meant to the initiated ‘at the Ritz’; Captain and Lady Brenda Chadlington, whose recent election to Parliament, actual and vicarious, had rather mounted to their heads, could speak of nothing but the P.M., S.B., L.G., the F.O., the L.C.C., the I.L.P., and their fellow M.P.s; the Mackintoshes fell
upon their food in a famished silence, relieved, but very rarely, by remarks on the grouse disease; Lady Bobbin spoke to those about her of horses, hounds, and such obscure eventualities as going to ground, eating bedding, pecking while taking off, and being thoroughly well wormed; while Squibby, although quite intelligent, was apt to be a little wearisome with his musical talk or else a little exasperating with his theories on conditioned reflexes and other philosophical data.
Only Philadelphia, having no interests, talked no shop, but merely sat looking beautiful, calm and amiable, while Paul and Michael exchanged across her their cultured confidences, referring politely every now and then to her judgment. They both considered that although totally uneducated she was very far from being stupid, while the fact that what few books she had ever read had been written before the present century began gave to her mind and outlook a peculiar old-fashioned quality which Paul, at least, after the specious and metallic up-to-dateness of Marcella, found extremely restful.
