The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Read online

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  Two years and two weeks later Albert Gates stood on a cross-Channel steamer, watching with some depression the cliffs of Dover, which looked more than ever, he thought, like Turner’s picture of them. The day was calm but mildly wet, it having, of course, begun to rain on that corner of a foreign field which is for ever England – the Calais railway station. Albert, having a susceptible stomach, was thankful for the calm while resentful of the rain, which seemed a little unnecessary in July. He stood alone and quite still, unlike the other passengers, most of whom were running to and fro collecting their various possessions, asking where they could change money and congratulating each other on the excellence of the crossing. Every mirror was besieged by women powdering their noses, an action which apparently never fails to put fresh courage and energy into females of the human species. A few scattered little groups of French people had already assumed the lonely and defiant aspect of foreigners in a strange land. Paris seemed a great distance away.

  Albert remembered how once, as a child, returning from some holiday abroad, he had begun at this juncture to cry very bitterly. He remembered vividly the feelings of black rage which surged up in him when his mother, realizing in a dim way that those tears were not wholly to be accounted for by seasickness, tiredness, or even the near approach of another term at school, began to recite a dreary poem whose opening lines were:

  ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead

  Who never to himself hath said,

  “This is my own, my native land? …”’

  She did not realize that there are people, and Albert among them, to whom their native land is less of a home than almost any other.

  He thought of the journey from Calais to Paris. That, to him, was the real homecoming. Paris, the centre of art, literature and all culture! The two years that he had just spent there were the happiest of his whole life, and now the prospect of revisiting England, even for a short time, filled him with a sort of nervous misery. Before those two years Albert had never known real contentment. Eton and Oxford had meant for him a continual warfare against authority, which to one of his highly-strung temperament was enervating in the extreme.

  He had certainly some consolation in the shape of several devoted friends; but, although he was not consciously aware of it, these very friendships made too great a demand upon his nervous energy.

  What he needed at that stage of his development was regular, hard and congenial work, and this he had found in Paris.

  So happy had he been there that it is doubtful whether he would ever have exchanged, even for a few days, the only place where he had known complete well-being for a city which had always seemed to him cold and unsympathetic, but for two circumstances. One was that Walter and Sally had written even more persuasively than usual to beg that he would stay with them in their London flat. He had not seen them since that evening when they dined with him at the Ritz, and Walter was the one person whom he had genuinely missed and found irreplaceable.

  The other circumstance – the one that really decided him – was that he had recently shown his pictures to a London art dealer of his acquaintance, who had immediately offered to give him an exhibition the following autumn. As this was a man of some influence in the London world of art, owning the particularly pleasant Chelsea Galleries where the exhibition would be held, Albert felt that here was an opportunity not to be missed. He arranged therefore to bring over his pictures immediately, intending to store them and look about for a studio where he himself could stay until the exhibition should be over, late in October. Paris was becoming hot and stuffy and he felt that a change of air would do him good. Also, he was really very much excited at the prospect of seeing Walter again.

  Presently the ship approached the quay, and sailors began adjusting a gangway at the very spot where Albert stood. Inconsequently he remembered the landing of the Normans – how William the Conqueror, springing first from the boat, seized in his hands a sod of English soil. It would be hard to do that nowadays. Impossible even to be the first to land, he thought, as he was brushed from the gangway by a woman of determined features laden with hand luggage which she used as a weapon.

  In the train he found himself sharing a carriage with two idiotic girls who were coming home from a term at some finishing school in Paris. They were rather obviously showing off on his account. After talking at some length of their clandestine affairs with two French officers, which appeared to consist solely in passing notes to them when visiting the Louvre on Thursday afternoons, but which they evidently regarded as the height of eroticism, they broached the subject of Art. It appeared that once a week they had spent two hours at some atelier drawing the death mask of Beethoven, the Venus of Milo and other better known casts in smudgy charcoal. These depressing efforts were now produced from a portfolio and pinned on to the opposite seat which was unoccupied. Albert learnt from their chatter that when a drawing was finished by a pupil at the atelier, ‘Madame’ would come round and add ‘Quelques petits accents bien à leur place’; in other words, the finishing touch. The pupil would then fix it and put it carefully away in a portfolio.

  Presently one of the girls said:

  ‘I think I must go on with my art, I might make quite a lot of money. You know, Julia once made two pounds by painting lampshades for her mother’s dining-room, and I’m quite as good as she is.’

  The other one remarked that she thought Art was marvellous.

  They then began to play vulgar jazz tunes on a portable gramophone, a noise which Albert found more supportable than their chatter.

  As the train drew near London he felt homesick and wretched. He longed to be back in his studio in Paris surrounded by his own pictures. It was a curious and rather squalid little abode, but he had been happy there and had grown attached to it. His neighbours had all been poor and friendly, and in spite of having seen practically none of his English friends and few French people of his own class for two years, he had not for a moment felt lonely.

  Now he began to wish that he had never left it; the pouring rain outside the carriage and the young artists opposite him had plunged him into a state of the deepest gloom. The idea of seeing Walter again began to terrify him. Walter! How could one tell what changes a year of matrimony may not have wrought. Considering these things, Albert fell asleep in his corner.

  When the train stopped at Victoria he got out drowsily, but was only half-awake until suddenly thrown into a most refreshing rage by the confiscation, from his registered luggage, of a copy of Ulysses which Walter had particularly asked him to procure.

  ‘Sir!’ he cried violently to the uninterested official, ‘I am Albert Gates, an artist and seriously-minded person. I regard that work as literature of the highest order, not as pornography, and am bringing it to London for the enlightened perusal of my friend Monteath, one of your most notable, if unrecognized poets. Does this unutterable country, then, deny its citizens, not only the bodily comforts of decent food and cheap drink, but also the consolations of intellect?’

  At this point, observing that his audience consisted of everybody on the platform except the one individual to whom he addressed himself, he followed his porter to a taxi and was soon on his way to Walter’s flat in Fitzroy Square.

  Driving up Grosvenor Place he was struck, as people so often are when returning from an absence abroad, by the fundamental conservatism of London. Everything looked exactly the same as it had looked the very day that he left, two years before. The streets were wet and shiny, as they had been then; the rain fell in the same heart-rending drizzle, as though it had never for a moment stopped doing so, and never would again. The same Rolls-Royces contained hard-faced fashionable women in apparently the identical printed chiffon dresses and picture-hats of two years before, fashionable, but never chic.

  He thought how typical it is of Englishwomen that they should always elect to dress in printed materials. A passion for f
ussy detail without any feeling for line or shape.

  ‘And those picture-hats which have been worn year after year, ever since the time of Gainsborough and which inevitably destroy all smartness, they seem still to be blossoming upon all heads, in this repulsive town. If ever I marry, God send it may be a woman of taste.’

  Albert disliked women, his views on the sex coinciding with those of Weininger – he regarded them as stupid and unprincipled; but certain ones that he had met in Paris made up for this by a sort of worldly wisdom which amused him, and a talent for clothes, food and maquillage which commanded his real and ungrudging admiration.

  These and other reflections continued to occupy his mind, until, looking out of the window, he saw that the taxi had already arrived in Charlotte Street. He was now seized with the miserable feeling of nervousness which always assails certain people when they are about to arrive at a strange house, even though it should belong to a dear friend of whose welcome they are inwardly assured. He began to torture himself with doubts. Suppose Walter had not received the telegram announcing the day of his arrival, and they were spending a week-end in the country? Or, worse than that – for he could easily go to an hotel if it were necessary – suppose they had really not wanted him at all, or had put off some visit on his account, or – but at this moment the taxi stopped abruptly opposite a green front door which was almost immediately opened by Walter. At the sight of his friend’s welcoming face, Albert’s doubts vanished completely.

  ‘My dear!’ cried Walter, ‘my dear boy, my darling Albert. How we have been looking forward to this! Oh, how nice to see you again after all these years! Quickly! quickly – a cocktail. You must be dying for one. And here’s Sally, who’s been spending the whole day arranging flowers in your bedroom.’

  ‘I do hope you won’t die of discomfort here,’ said Sally. ‘Did Walter prepare you in the least bit for what you’re going to suffer? There are no servants, my dear, except an idiot boy. You know, the sort that murders butlers in the evening papers, but he’s quite sweet really, and as we haven’t a butler we think it’s fairly safe. Cocktail for you?’

  The room into which Walter and Sally led the way was so lovely that Albert, who had half expected the usual green horror with sham eighteenth-century flower pictures, was thrown into a state of almost exaggerated rapture. For a London drawing-room it was a particularly good shape, with large windows and cheerful outlook. The walls were covered with silver tissue a little tarnished; the curtains and chair covers were of white satin, which the grime of London was rapidly turning a lovely pearl colour; the floor and ceiling were painted a dull pink. Two huge vases of white wax flowers stood one each side of the fireplace; over the mantelpiece hung a Victorian mirror, framed in large white shells and red plush. Albert, as he walked about this exquisite room, praising and admiring, felt blissfully happy; the depression which had been gathering force ever since he left his studio that morning now left him for good.

  He had always experienced in Walter’s company a feeling of absolute ease and lack of strain. He now found, rather to his surprise, that the presence of Sally did nothing to impair their relationship; she gave him no sensation either of intruding or of being intruded upon. Walter and Sally together seemed almost like one person, and Albert realized at once how wrong he had been to oppose their union.

  ‘How I should like,’ he said, looking at her lovely face, ‘to paint a portrait of Sally.’

  ‘Well, why not? She’d love to sit for you, I know, and we’ve got a room with a perfectly good north light at the back of the house. Albert, do.’

  ‘My dear, impossible. I can’t work in London, you know. People think it an affectation, but I assure you that it is no such thing. I might even go so far as to say that I’m incapable of working in this country at all; a question, I suppose, of nerves.’

  ‘How like Walter,’ said Sally laughing. ‘Poor angel, he’s quite incapable of working in London, too. He gave up his last job after exactly three days.’

  ‘Shut up, darling. You know quite well who it was that begged and implored me to leave, now don’t you? Sally’s father,’ explained Walter, ‘got me a job in a bank. I can’t tell you what I suffered for three whole days. It was like a P. G. Wodehouse novel, only not funny at all, or perhaps I’ve no sense of humour. To begin with, I had to get up at eight every morning. One had much better be dead, you know. Then, my dear, the expense! I can’t tell you what it cost me in taxis alone, not to mention the suit I had to buy – a most lugubrious black affair. There was no time to get back here for luncheon, and I couldn’t go all day without seeing Sally, so we went to a restaurant which was recommended to us called “Simkins”, too putting off. Sally was given some perfectly raw meat with blood instead of gravy, and naturally she nearly fainted, and she had to have brandy before I could get her out of the place. By then we were so upset that we felt we must go to the Ritz in order to be soothed, which meant more taxis. In the end we reckoned that those three days had cost me every penny of thirty pounds, so I gave it up. I can’t afford that sort of thing, you know.’

  ‘Poor Father,’ said Sally, ‘he’s very much worried about Walter. He has a sort of notion in his head that every man ought to have some regular work to do, preferably soldiering. He doesn’t seem to understand about cultivating leisure at all, and he regards writing poetry as a most doubtful, if not immoral occupation.

  ‘And he isn’t as bad as your uncle Craigdalloch, who actually said in my hearing of some young man, “Ah, yes, he failed for the Army, and was chucked out of the City, so they sent him to the Slade.” Just think how pleased Tonks must have been to have him!’

  Walter then asked Albert how long he intended to stay.

  ‘Can you keep me till the end of next week?’

  ‘My dear, don’t be so childish. Now that we have at last persuaded you to come, you must stay quite a month if you won’t be bored. I know London in August is very unfashionable, but it would cheer us up a lot to have you, and besides, think what a boon you would be to the gossip writers!’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sally, ‘poor old Peter seems to be at the end of his tether already. His page the last few days has been full of nothing but scraps of general knowledge which one assimilates quite unconsciously. I call it cheating … I mean, when I want to read about wild ducks sitting on their eggs at the edge of a railway line I can buy a book of natural history; but I do like gossip to be gossip, don’t you? This paragraph about the ducks was headed, “Observed by Jasper Spengal.” Well, I was quite excited; you know what a talent Jasper has for observing things he’s not meant to, and then it was only the beastly old duck after all. Well, I mean … if he’s come down to that sort of thing already, it will be the habits of earthworms by August, I should think.’

  ‘So you want me to stay and have my habits noted instead?’ Albert felt all his resolution slipping away. After all, it was nice to see his old friends again. It occurred to him now that he had been very lonely in Paris.

  ‘But you’ll be leaving London yourselves?’

  ‘Not until the end of August, anyhow, then we may go to the Lido for a little.’

  Walter looked rather defiantly, like a naughty child, at Sally as he said this, and she pretended not to hear. She knew quite well, and had said so already more than once, that, terribly in debt as they were, this idea of going to the Lido was quite out of the question. Sally spent much of her life trying to put a brake on Walter’s wild extravagances and they had more than once been on the verge of a quarrel over the Lido question.

  The Monteaths led a precarious existence. They had married in the face of much opposition from both their families, especially Sally’s, who looked upon Walter as a rather disreputable, if attractive, person and an undesirable son-in-law. However, as soon as they realized that Sally was quite determined to marry him whatever happened, they had softened to the extent of settling five hundred pounds a year on her. More they could not
afford. Walter had about the same, which had been left him some years previously by an uncle; they struggled along as best they could on a joint income of one thousand a year. This they supplemented from time to time by writing articles for the weekly papers and by the very occasional sale of one of Walter’s rather less obscure poems.

  All might have been well except for his incurable extravagance. In many ways they were extremely economical. Unlike the type of young married couple who think it essential to have a house in the vicinity of Belgrave Square and a footman, they preferred to live in a tiny flat with no servants except an old woman and a boy, both of whom came in daily. Sally did most of the cooking and all the marketing herself and rather enjoyed it.

  On the other hand, Walter seemed to have a talent for making money disappear. Whenever he was on the point of committing an extravagance of any kind he would excuse himself by explaining: ‘Well, you see, darling, it’s so much cheaper in the end.’ It was his slogan. Sally soon learnt, to her surprise and dismay, that ‘it’s cheaper in the end’ to go to the most expensive tailor, travel first class, stay at the best hotels, and to take taxis everywhere. When asked why it was cheaper, Walter would say airily: ‘Oh, good for our credit, you know!’ or ‘So much better for one’s clothes,’ or, sulkily: ‘Well, it is, that’s all, everybody knows it is.’

  He also insisted that Sally should be perfectly turned out, and would never hear of her economizing on her dresses. The result was that during one year of married life they had spent exactly double their income, and Sally had been obliged to sell nearly all her jewellery in order to pay even a few of the bills that were pouring in, so that the idea of going to the Lido, or indeed of doing anything but stay quietly in London was, as she pointed out, quite ridiculous.

  Walter, incapable always of seeing that lack of money would be a sufficient reason for giving up something that might amuse him, was inclined to be sulky about this; but Sally was not particularly worried. She generally had her own way in the end.