Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (20 page)

‘Grand. He’s going to ask a question about it in the House.’

‘I think we should be going on out,’ said Amabelle, ‘although a more unpleasant idea in this weather I can hardly imagine, myself! Just listen to the wind, howling down the chimney – ugh! Come on, Sally, my poor darling, I can lend you a fur coat and a nice big hankie, and we might tie hotwater bottles next to
our tummies, don’t you think? Very nice and pregnant we shall look, too.’ She led the weeping Sally from the room.

‘You’ll be blind, you know, Walter, old boy, if I may say so,’ remarked Paul, who had been watching Walter fill his glass with unusual abandon.

‘Yes, I mean to be,’ said Walter. ‘I’m terrified,’ he added confidentially as Major Stanworth left the room, ‘never been so frightened in my life. But nothing hurts nearly so much if you’re drunk, does it? I once saw a drunk man fall thirty feet, on to a stone pavement, too; he wasn’t hurt a bit. Come on, then; are we all ready for the pretty spectacle of my demise? Cheer up, Sally, think of the Roman matrons, darling. Besides, you’re quite attractive enough to get some more husbands, though, of course, I doubt you finding anything quite up to my form again. Have we got lots of cherry brandy in the car?’

The point-to-point course lay on the exposed and wind-swept side of a hill and the cold which assailed Amabelle’s party on their arrival at this scene of action was beyond what would be thought possible by anyone not accustomed to the pleasures of rural England in winter. Walter, by now fairly drunk, got out of the car and strode about in his overcoat, accompanied by Major Stanworth, Paul and Bobby. He went down to look at the water jump, had a talk to Major Stanworth’s groom, and generally behaved in what he imagined to be a professional manner. Amabelle and Sally huddled up together for warmth in the Rolls-Royce, clasping innumerable hot-water bottles, and refusing to move out of it until Walter’s race should begin. This was third on the programme. After the first race, at which there were many accidents, poor Sally was even further depressed by seeing the motor ambulance leave the course with its groaning load. A reserve of pride in her nature, however, prevented her from making any more scenes, and it was with a comparatively cheerful face that she went off to the paddock when the
time came for Walter to mount. Amabelle still declared that nothing would drag her from the car, so Paul took Sally under his protection. He pointed out Captain Chadlington, whose ordinarily red face was now mauve from cold and harmonized unpleasingly with his racing colours of black, cerise cap and old-gold sleeves. Lady Brenda, in expensive tweeds and holding a brown leather shooting stick, was talking to friends nearby; it seemed to Sally that she was viewing her husband’s approaching peril with unnatural calm.

‘You can go into the paddock, if you like, Sally,’ said Bobby, who was accompanied by a pretty little Jewess with thin leg’s and a spotted scarf.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t dare,’ shivered Sally, ‘your mother looks too forbidding today, doesn’t she? Besides, Lady Prague is in there.’

At last the terrible moment came and the crowd round the paddock drew back to make a path for the horses, who jogged off with much tossing of heads and jingling of harness towards the start. They were soon lost to sight over the brow of the hill, and Walter was last seen leading the field at an uncontrolled gallop and fishing madly in the air for a stirrup with his left foot.

‘Now,’ said Paul, taking Sally’s arm in a fatherly manner, ‘where would you like to go? Shall we watch the race from the winning post or would you rather be at one of the jumps?’

‘Where is he most likely to be killed?’ asked Sally, her teeth chattering. She was by now in a state of utter resignation, regarding herself as a widow already; she felt, however, that she would like to be at hand to close Walter’s eyes and hear his dying words, if any.

‘Sally, dear, please don’t be so absurd. Walter rode in several grinds at Oxford. I remember it quite well,’ lied Paul, ‘and he never had a scratch. I promise faithfully that he’ll be all right – do stop worrying. Let’s go to the last jump of all, shall we? Giles Stanworth says we can see most of the course and the finish from there.’

‘Just as you like,’ said Sally in a dull voice. She was wondering vaguely which of her male acquaintances she could bear to marry in the event of Walter’s death.

Presently there was a murmur all over the race course, somebody in the crowd said ‘They’re off,’ and a distant thunder of hoofs could be heard.

‘There,’ said Paul triumphantly, ‘what did I tell you? They’re all over the first jump. Walter’s among the first three; can you see? Would you like these glasses?’

‘No thanks,’ said Sally. ‘I never can see anything but sky through them.’

‘I believe Walter’s bound to win, you know; all over the second jump and he’s still leading. Isn’t it grand. Cheer up, Sally, it’ll soon be over. Now they go round the hill and we shan’t see them for a minute or two.’

A voice in the crowd behind was heard to say confidentially: ‘Here, photographer – I’m Sir Roderick Bobbin and that’s my cousin, Lady Brenda Chadlington, in the beige hat. If you take our photographs you’ll get promotion, I should think.’ And a moment later, ‘Oh, look, Brenda darling, we’ve been photographed! No, of course I won’t tell him our names if you’d rather not.’

‘Here they come,’ said Paul excitedly. ‘Walter’s still leading; aren’t you thrilled, darling? Over the water jump, only one more now – over that – here they come – come on, Walter – come on, old boy – ’

The horses thundered towards them, Walter leading easily. They approached the last fence, rose to it, Walter for some reason lost his balance and fell heavily to earth. Six horses in rapid succession jumped into the small of his back and passed on.

‘You see,’ said Walter that evening, as they settled down to bridge, ‘the great advantage of getting blind before point-to-points. Sober I should certainly have been killed, as it is my left knee is a little sore but otherwise I feel grand.’

‘The only thing is,’ said Amabelle, ‘that if you’d been a shade less drunk you might easily have won the race, instead of losing my five shillings in that careless way.’

‘I should like to say that it’s hardly the fault of anyone here if I’m not a widow tonight,’ remarked Sally coldly. Major Stanworth, who had come, as he generally did now, to spend the evening at Mulberrie Farm, looked rather uncomfortable at this remark, which he took, and with reason, to be directed at himself.

It seemed to Philadelphia Bobbin that there was too much going on in her life all at once, she had scarcely the time to assimilate one new impression before being faced by another, even stranger and more dazzlingly improbable than the last. She felt a smouldering resentment against fate, which had crowded three weeks of her ordinarily uneventful existence with so many and such varying excitements. How much more satisfactory if they could have been spread out over the months and years of boredom which she had hitherto been obliged to endure at Compton Bobbin. As things were, it was in the course of three short weeks that she had fallen in love, received a proposal of marriage, been precipitated into the strange and dazzling society of Amabelle, and made friends violently and passionately – ‘best friends’, the kind of relationship that girls of her age have usually outgrown – with Sally Monteath.

Any single one of these events would normally have kept her happy and given her food for thought over a period of months; crammed all together like this she was unable to treat them as realities, but behaved rather as though the whole thing were a play in a dream, and she the chief actress.

Philadelphia was twenty-one. She had hitherto led the flat, uninspiring life of many such girls, ‘educated’ by a governess (Lady Bobbin, for some reason about which she herself was none too clear, disapproved of girls’ schools), sent with the same governess to Paris and Florence for six months, and then ‘brought out’ in London. Her mother took a house for her first season in
Eaton Place and escorted Philadelphia to dances nearly every night in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate or occasionally Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. Also she gave a dance for Philadelphia, for which, the Eaton Place house being too small, she hired a large and dirty mansion in Belgrave Square.

All these dances were as one dance, absolutely and completely identical. Philadelphia, self-conscious and unhappy in her printed chiffon, her pink taffeta or her white and diamanté georgette, her hair too much crimped, her nose too much powdered and her stays much too tight (her beautiful rounded body being a constant source of worry to her) would follow Lady Bobbin, or some other chaperone on duty for the evening, up stairs already crowded to their utmost capacity into the noisy, hot and overwhelming ballroom. It then became her business to make herself agreeable to the young men who danced with her, because it was essential that when she met them in similar circumstances the next night and the night after they should be willing to repeat the experience. She soon realized that to sit in that silence for which alone she felt inclined until it was time to go back to the ballroom was merely to lay up for herself a future of wall-flowerdom, which fate she thought on the whole even more embarrassing and unamusing than that of attempting, usually in vain, to interest the nonentities in whose company she found herself. It was a fate, however, from which she did not entirely escape, despite all her efforts. She had no success in London, her beauty, as produced by Lady Bobbin, never appeared to its best advantage, and in any case was not such as would appeal to the heirs of Cadogan Place, while they were unallured by those long and indifferent silences, that complete absence of small talk which Paul and Michael were later to find so intriguing. Much, indeed, as she hated sitting, an obvious failure, by the wall with her mother, or a girl friend in like case, she was very little happier when perched on the back stairs or at
the supper table with some strange man. Dancing she enjoyed; she was a beautiful dancer.

If her evenings were on the whole rather depressing, her days were made positively hideous by the girls’ luncheon parties to which her mother forced her to go. ‘You must get to know some nice girls; besides, as we are in London, I want you to do everything you are asked to. We need never come up again.’ Nearly every day, therefore, at one-thirty p.m., she would find herself in printed crêpe de chine, standing, finger pressed to bell marked ‘Visitors’, before some house in Pont Street, Chesham Place, Cadogan Gardens, Queen’s Gate, Hyde Park Gardens or Sussex Square. She would be ushered into an empty L-shaped drawing-room decorated in the pre-pickled-wood-and-maps period, but brought slightly up-to-date by the presence of a waste-paper receptacle with an olde print stuck on to its plain green surface, a couple of Lalique ornaments and a pleated paper lampshade.

‘I will tell Miss Joan (or Lady Felicity) that you are here, miss.’ For Philadelphia, owing to early training, was one of those unfortunate people always fated to arrive a little before anybody else.

Presently Lady Joan (or Miss Felicity) would appear, and several pretty, fluffy girls in printed crêpe de chine and they would all go downstairs to a meal consisting of egg rissole with tomato sauce, cutlets with paper frills round the bone, hard round peas and new potatoes, followed by a pinkish jelly served in glasses with a tiny blob of cream on the top of each portion.

The conversation would run on the following lines:

‘Which dance are you going to first tonight?’

‘I think the Campbell-Parkers’, because Archie said he’d meet me there, so I’ve booked up five and six with him. Besides, Lady Millicent Freke-Williams’ is sure to be fearfully crowded at first.’

‘I hear she’s got thirty dinner parties for it.’

‘I know. But I expect it will be fun later on. Which are you going to?’

‘Well, I’m dining at the Freke-Williams’ so I shall have to go there first, I suppose. Did you have fun last night? I was dying to get asked.’

‘Yes, it was marvellous, but, my dear, the most awful thing happened. You see, Teddy asked me for number four and I said yes, and then Claud came up and said could he have number three or four because he had to go. Well, three was Johnny, and I never cut him; so I said “yes, four. But meet me downstairs by the buffet, or else I shall be caught by Teddy.” So I went to the buffet at the beginning of number four and waited for ages and Claud never came and Angela said she had just seen him leave with Rosemary, so then I dashed upstairs but Teddy had started dancing with Leila, so then, my dear, I had to pick up that awful little Jamie Trent-Pomeroy. I felt so ashamed at being seen with him. But wasn’t it awful of Claud – ’

Philadelphia, meanwhile, would sit in a stony silence, bored and boring, and when she had gone Lady Joan or Miss Felicity would say to her girl friends, ‘Isn’t she too awful. Mummy made me ask her.’

Philadelphia’s one London season was from every point of view a failure, and it had never, to her great relief, been repeated. Lady Bobbin was far too much wrapped up in all her country pursuits to leave them more than once for the sake of a daughter who neither appreciated nor repaid such sacrifice. She felt that she had done all that duty demanded by the child, and could now rest on her laurels.

Philadelphia herself never had the slightest wish to repeat that particular experience, but all the same she was profoundly unhappy at Compton Bobbin. She was without occupation or interest, the days dragged by each more boring than the last, and she was beginning to think that perhaps she was never to find those people who she felt sure must exist in the world and who would prove more congenial to her than those she had met as a débutante. She longed passionately for
even one friend who would not think her plain, stupid and tongue-tied.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, if she was dazed and incredulous on finding herself hailed as a beauty by Amabelle, admitted to the confidences of Sally, treated as an intellectual equal by Paul and asked in marriage by Michael, all of whom were people she felt to be not only far more intelligent and interesting than any she had met, but more thrilling even than those imaginary beings whom, in day dreams, she had longed to have as her friends.