Love in a Cold Climate (30 page)

“Oh, dear,” I said. “If Boy isn’t happy I don’t suppose Polly can be, either. Oh, poor Polly.”

“Poor Polly—m’m—but at least it was her idea,” said Davey. “My heart bleeds for poor Boy. Well, he can’t say I didn’t warn him, over and over again.”

“What about a baby?” I asked. “Any signs?”

“None that I could see, but, after all, how long have they been married? Eighteen months? Sonia was eighteen years before she had Polly.”

“Oh, goodness!” I said. “I shouldn’t imagine the Lecturer, in eighteen years time, will be able …”

I was stopped by a well-known hurt look on Davey’s face.

“Perhaps that is what makes them sad,” I ended rather lamely.

“Possibly. Anyhow I can’t say that I formed a happy impression.”

At this point Cedric was called to the telephone, and Davey said to me in a lowered voice, “Entirely between you and me, Fanny, and this is not to go any further, I think Polly is having trouble with Boy.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, “kitchen maids?”

“No,” said Davey, “not kitchen maids.”

“Don’t tell me!” I said, horrified.

Cedric came back and said that Lady Montdore had been caught red-handed having elevenses in the Devonshire tea-rooms and had been given the sack. She told him that the motor would call for him on its way, so that she would have a companion for the drive home.

“There now,” he said gloomily. “I shan’t have my little visit to you, after all, and I had so been looking forward to it.”

It struck me that Cedric had arranged the orange cure less with a view to getting rid of kilos than to getting rid of Lady Montdore for a week or two. Life with her must be wearing work, even to Cedric, with his unflagging spirits and abounding energy, and he may well have felt that he had earned a short holiday after nearly a year of it.

C
EDRIC HAMPTON AND
Norma Cozens met at last, but though the meeting took place in my garden it was none of my arranging—a pure chance. I was sitting, one afternoon of Indian summer, on my lawn, where the baby was crawling about stark naked and so brown that he looked like a little Topsy, when Cedric’s golden head appeared over the fence, accompanied by another head, that of a thin and ancient horse.

“I’m coming to explain,” he said, “but I won’t bring my friend. I’ll attach him to your fence, darling. He’s so sad and good, he won’t do any harm, I promise.”

A moment later he joined me in the garden. I put the baby back in its pram and was turning to Cedric to ask what this was all about, when Norma came up the lane which passes my garden, on her afternoon trudge with her dogs. Now the Boreley family consider that they have a special mandate, bestowed from on high, to deal with everything that regards the horse. They feel it to be their duty, no less than their right, and therefore the moment she saw Cedric’s friend, sad and good, standing by my fence, Norma unhesitatingly came into the garden to see what she could do about it. I introduced Cedric to her.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said, her eye upon the famous piping of the seams, brown to-day upon a green linen coat, vaguely Tyrolean in aspect, “but there’s a very old mare, Fanny, tied up to your fence. Do you know anything about it? Whom does she belong to?”

“Don’t, dear Mrs. Cozens, tell me that the first horse I have ever owned is a female!” said Cedric, with a glittering (brush) smile.

“The animal is a mare,” said Norma, “and if she is yours I must tell you that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for keeping her in that dreadful condition.”

“Oh, but I only began keeping her ten minutes ago. My intention is to build her up. I hope that when you see her again, in a few months time, you simply won’t know her.”

“Do you mean to say that you bought that creature? She ought to go straight away to the kennels.”

“The kennels? But why? She’s not a dog!”

“The knacker, the horse butcher,” said Norma impatiently, “she must be put down immediately, or I shall ring up the R.S.P.C.A.”

“Oh, please don’t do that. I’m not being cruel to her, I’m being kind. That horrid man I bought her from, he was being beastly, he was taking her to the knacker. My plan was to save her from him. I couldn’t bear to see the expression on her poor face.”

“Well, but what are you going to do with her, my dear boy?”

“I thought—set her free.”

“Set her free? She’s not a bird, you know, you can’t go setting horses free like that—not in England anyway.”

“Yes, I can. Not in Oxford, perhaps, but where I live there is a
vieux parc, solitaire et glacé
, and it is my intention to set her free there, to have happy days away from knackers. Isn’t knacker a hateful word, Mrs. Cozens?”

“The grazing at Hampton is let,” said Norma. It was the kind of detail the Boreleys could be counted on to tell you.

Cedric, however, took no notice and went on, “She was being driven down the street in a van with her head sticking out at the
back, and I could see at once that she was longing for some nice person to get her out of the fix she was in, so I stopped the van and bought her. You could see how relieved she felt.”

“How much?”

“Well, I offered the man forty pounds. It was all I had on me, so he let me have her for that.”

“Forty pounds!” cried Norma, aghast. “Why, you could get a hunter for less than forty pounds.”

“But, my dearest Mrs. Cozens, I don’t want a hunter. It’s the last thing. I’d be far too frightened. Besides, look at the time you have to get up—I heard them the other morning in the woods, half-past six. Well, you know, I’m afraid it’s ‘up before seven
dead
before eleven’ with
one
. No, I just wanted this special old clipper-clopper. She’s not the horse to make claims on a chap. She won’t want to be ridden all the time, as a younger horse might, and there she’ll be, if I feel like having a few words with her occasionally. But the great question now, which I came to tease practical Fanny with, is how to get her home?”

“And if you go buying up all the horses that are fit for the kennels, however do you imagine hounds are going to be fed?” said Norma, in great exasperation. She was related to several Masters of fox-hounds and her sister had a pack of beagles, so no doubt she was acquainted with all their problems.

“I shan’t buy up all the horses,” said Cedric, soothingly, “only this one, which I took a liking for. Now, dear Mrs. Cozens, do stop being angry and just tell me how I can get her home, because I know you can help if you want to and I simply can’t get over the luck of meeting you here at the very moment when I needed you so badly.”

Norma began to weaken, as people so very often did with Cedric. It was extraordinary how fast he could worm his way through a thick crust of prejudice, and, just as in the case of Lady Montdore, the people who hated him the most were generally those who had seen him from afar but never met him. But whereas Lady Montdore had “all this” to help in her conquest of disapproval, Cedric
relied upon his charm, his good looks and his deep inborn knowledge of human, and especially female, nature.

“Please,” he said, his eyes upon her, blinking a little.

I could see that he had done the trick, Norma was considering.

“Well,” she said at last, “there are two ways of doing it. I can lend you a saddle and you can ride her over. I’m not sure she’s up to it, but you could see …”

“No, Mrs. Cozens, no. I have some literary sense—Fauntleroy on his pony, gallant little figure, the wind in his golden curls, all right, and if my uncle had had the sense to get me over from Canada when I was younger we should have seen that very thing, I’ve no doubt. But the gloomy old Don on Rosinante is quite another matter, and I can’t face it.”

“Which gloomy old don?” asked Norma with interest. “But it makes no odds, she’d never get there. Twenty miles, now I come to think of it—and I expect she’s as lame as a cat.”

She went to the fence and peered over.

“Those hocks …! You know, it honestly would be kinder—oh, very well, very well. If nothing I can say will make you understand that the animal would be far happier dead, you’ll have to get the horse box. Shall I ring up Stubby now, on Fanny’s telephone and see if he can come round at once?”

“No! You wouldn’t do that for me? Oh, dearest Mrs. Cozens I can only say—angel! What a miracle that I met you!”

“Lie down,” she said, to the Borders, and went indoors.

“Sexually unsatisfied, poor her,” said Cedric, when she had gone.

“Really, Cedric, what nonsense! She’s got four children.”

“I can’t help it. Look at all those wrinkles. She could try patting in muscle oil, of course, and I shall suggest it as soon as I get to know her a little better, but I’m afraid the trouble is more deep-seated. Of course, I feel certain the Professor must be a secret queer—nobody but a queer would ever marry Norma, to begin with.”

“Why? She’s not at all boyish.”

“No, dearest, it isn’t that; but there is a certain type of Norma-ish
lady which appeals to queers, don’t ask me why, but so it is. Now, supposing I arranged for her to come over every Tuesday and share a facial with Sonia, what do you think? The competition would be good for both of them, and it would cheer Sonia up to see a woman so much younger, so much more deeply haggard.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Norma always says she can’t stick Lady Montdore.”

“Does she know her? Of course, I doubt if anything short of a nice lift would fix Mrs. Cozens, but we could teach her ‘brush’ and a little charm to help the Waynflete Prof to do his work a bit better, or, failing that, and I fear it’s rather a desperate hope, some nice Woodley might come to the rescue. No, darling, not
one,”
he added, in response to a meaning look from me. “The cuticles are too desperately anaphrodisiac.”

“I thought you never wanted to see her because she reminded you of Nova Scotia?”

“Yes, I thought she would, but she is too English. She fascinates me for that reason; you know how very, very pro-English I am becoming. The cuticles are rather Nova Scotian, but her soul is the soul of Oxfordshire and I shall cultivate her after this like mad.”

Some half an hour later, as Cedric went off, sitting by the driver of the horse box, Norma, panting a little from her efforts with the mare, who had stubbornly refused at first to get into it, said, “You know, that boy has some good in him, after all. What a shame he couldn’t have gone to a decent public school instead of being brought up in those shocking colonies.”

To my amazement, and great secret annoyance, Cedric and Norma now became extremely friendly, and he went to see her, when he was in Oxford, quite as often as he did me.

“Whatever do you talk about?” I said to him crossly.

“Oh, we have cosy little chats about this and that. I love Englishwomen; they are so restful.”

“Well, I’m fairly fond of old Norma, but I simply can’t imagine what you see in her, Cedric.”

“I suppose I see whatever you see,” he replied carelessly.

After a bit, he persuaded her to give a dinner party, to which he promised to bring Lady Montdore. Lord Montdore never went out now, and was sinking happily into old age. His wife being provided with a companion for every hour of the day, he was not only allowed but encouraged to have a good long nap in the afternoon, and he generally either had his dinner in bed or shuffled off there immediately after dinner. The advent of Cedric must have proved a blessing to him in more ways than one. People very soon got into the habit of asking Cedric with Lady Montdore instead of her husband, and it must be said that he was much better company. They were going out more now than when Cedric first arrived, the panic caused by the financial crisis was subsiding and people had begun to entertain again. Lady Montdore was too fond of society to keep away from it for long, and Cedric, firmly established at Hampton, weighed down with many large expensive gifts, could surely now be shown to her friends without danger of losing him.

In spite of the fact that she was by way of being unable to stick Lady Montdore, Norma got into a perfect state over this dinner party, dropping in on me at all hours to discuss the menu and the fellow guests, and finally imploring me to come on the morning of the day to make a pudding for her. I said that I would do so on one condition: she must buy a quart of cream. She wriggled like an eel not to have to do this, but I was quite firm. Then she said would the top of the milk do? No, I said, it must be thick rich unadulterated cream. I said I would bring it with me and let her know how much I had paid for it, and she reluctantly agreed. Although she was, I knew, very wealthy, she never spent a penny more than she could help on her house, her table or her clothes (except her riding clothes, for she was always beautifully turned out in the hunting field and I am sure her horses lived on an equine substitute for cream). So I went round, and, having provided myself with the suitable ingredients, I made her a crème Chantilly. As I got back to my own house the telephone bell was pealing away. Cedric.

“I thought I’d better warn you, my darling, that we are chucking poor Norma to-night.”