Read Online Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nancy Mitford
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Montdore and Lady Patricia, was always exactly the same, whatever the company.
At tea time the village policeman reappeared with his bicycle, having wiped the eye of all the grand detectives who had come from London in their shiny cars. He produced a perfect jumble-sale heap of objects which had been discarded by the burglars under a haystack and nearly all the little treasures were retrieved, with high cries of joy, by their owners. As the only things which now remained missing were jewels of considerable value, and as these were felt to be the business of the Insurance Companies, the party continued in a much more cheerful atmosphere. There was, however, a distinctly noticeable current of anti-French feeling. The Norahs and Nellies would have had a pretty poor reception if any of them had turned up just then, and Boy, if it was possible for him to have enough of a Duchess, must have been having enough of this one, since all but he fled from the machine-gun fire of questions, and he was obliged to spend the next two days practically alone with her.
I WAS HANGING about, as one does at house parties, waiting for the next meal; it was not yet quite time to dress for dinner on Sunday evening. One of the pleasures of staying at Hampton was that the huge Louis XV map table in the middle of the Long Gallery was always covered with every imaginable weekly newspaper neatly laid out in rows and rearranged two or three times a day by a footman whose sole occupation this appeared to be.
I seldom saw the
Tatler
and
Sketch
, as my aunts would have thought it a perfectly unwarranted extravagance to subscribe tosuch papers, and I was greedily gulping down back numbers when Lady Montdore called to me from a sofa where, ever since tea, she had been deep in talk with Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett. I had been throwing an occasional glance in their direction, wondering what it could all be about and wishing I could be a fly on the wall to hear them, thinking also that it would hardly be possible for two women to look more different. Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, her bony little silken legs crossed and uncovered to above the knee, perched rather than sat on the edge of the sofa. She wore a plain beige kasha dress, which must certainly have been made in Paris, and certainly designed for the Anglo-Saxon market, and smoked cigarette after cigarette with a great play of long thin white fingers, flashing with rings and painted nails. She did not keep still for one moment, though she was talking with great earnestness and concentration.
Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immovable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through. Smartness, even if she had sought after it, would hardly be attainable by her in a world where it was personified by the other and had become almost as much a question of build, of quick and nervous movement as of actual clothes. Her hair was shingled, but it was grey and fluffy, by no means a smooth cap, her eyebrows grew at will, and when she remembered to use lipstick and powder they were any colour and slapped on anyhow, so that her face, compared with that of Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett was as a hayfield is to a lawn, her whole head looking twice as large as the polished little head beside her. All the same she was not disagreeable to look at. There was a healthiness and liveliness about her face which lent it a certain attraction. Of course she seemed to me, then, very old. She was, in fact, about fifty-eight.
“Come over here, Fanny.”
I was almost too much surprised to be alarmed by this summons and hurried over, wondering what it could all be about.
“Sit there,” she said, pointing to a needlework chair, “and talk to us. Are you in love?”
I felt myself becoming scarlet in the face. How could they have guessed my secret? Of course I had been in love for two days now, ever since my morning walk with the Duc de Sauveterre. Passionately, but, as
At tea time the village policeman reappeared with his bicycle, having wiped the eye of all the grand detectives who had come from London in their shiny cars. He produced a perfect jumble-sale heap of objects which had been discarded by the burglars under a haystack and nearly all the little treasures were retrieved, with high cries of joy, by their owners. As the only things which now remained missing were jewels of considerable value, and as these were felt to be the business of the Insurance Companies, the party continued in a much more cheerful atmosphere. There was, however, a distinctly noticeable current of anti-French feeling. The Norahs and Nellies would have had a pretty poor reception if any of them had turned up just then, and Boy, if it was possible for him to have enough of a Duchess, must have been having enough of this one, since all but he fled from the machine-gun fire of questions, and he was obliged to spend the next two days practically alone with her.
I WAS HANGING about, as one does at house parties, waiting for the next meal; it was not yet quite time to dress for dinner on Sunday evening. One of the pleasures of staying at Hampton was that the huge Louis XV map table in the middle of the Long Gallery was always covered with every imaginable weekly newspaper neatly laid out in rows and rearranged two or three times a day by a footman whose sole occupation this appeared to be.
I seldom saw the
Tatler
and
Sketch
, as my aunts would have thought it a perfectly unwarranted extravagance to subscribe tosuch papers, and I was greedily gulping down back numbers when Lady Montdore called to me from a sofa where, ever since tea, she had been deep in talk with Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett. I had been throwing an occasional glance in their direction, wondering what it could all be about and wishing I could be a fly on the wall to hear them, thinking also that it would hardly be possible for two women to look more different. Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, her bony little silken legs crossed and uncovered to above the knee, perched rather than sat on the edge of the sofa. She wore a plain beige kasha dress, which must certainly have been made in Paris, and certainly designed for the Anglo-Saxon market, and smoked cigarette after cigarette with a great play of long thin white fingers, flashing with rings and painted nails. She did not keep still for one moment, though she was talking with great earnestness and concentration.
Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immovable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through. Smartness, even if she had sought after it, would hardly be attainable by her in a world where it was personified by the other and had become almost as much a question of build, of quick and nervous movement as of actual clothes. Her hair was shingled, but it was grey and fluffy, by no means a smooth cap, her eyebrows grew at will, and when she remembered to use lipstick and powder they were any colour and slapped on anyhow, so that her face, compared with that of Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett was as a hayfield is to a lawn, her whole head looking twice as large as the polished little head beside her. All the same she was not disagreeable to look at. There was a healthiness and liveliness about her face which lent it a certain attraction. Of course she seemed to me, then, very old. She was, in fact, about fifty-eight.
“Come over here, Fanny.”
I was almost too much surprised to be alarmed by this summons and hurried over, wondering what it could all be about.
“Sit there,” she said, pointing to a needlework chair, “and talk to us. Are you in love?”
I felt myself becoming scarlet in the face. How could they have guessed my secret? Of course I had been in love for two days now, ever since my morning walk with the Duc de Sauveterre. Passionately, but, as
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