Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online Page A

see what was coming next; when plates were given round after the pudding she touched hers and I heard her say approvingly to herself,
“Encore une assiette chaude, très-très bien.”
She was loving her food.
    I was loving mine, too, especially now that the protective colouring was in perfect order again, and indeed continued to work for the rest of the evening with hardly another breakdown. I thought what a pity it was that Davey could not be here for one of his overeating days. He always complained that Aunt Emily never really provided him with enough different dishes on these occasions to give his metabolism a proper shock.
    “I don’t believe you understand the least bit what I need,” he would say, crossly for him. “I’ve got to be giddy, exhausted from overeating, if it’s to do me any good. That feeling you have after a meal in a Paris restaurant is what we’ve got to aim at, when you’re too full to do anything but lie on your bed like a cobra, for hours and hours, too full even to sleep. Now there must be a great many different courses to coax my appetite—second helpings don’t count; I must have them anyway, a great many different courses of really rich food, Emily dear. Naturally, if you’d rather, I’ll give up the cure, but it seems a pity, just when it’s doing me so much good. If it’s the house books you’re thinking of, you must remember there are my starvation days. You never seem to take them into account at all.”
    But Aunt Emily said the starvation days made absolutely no difference to the house books and that he might call it starvation but anybody else would call it four square meals.
    Some two dozen metabolisms round this table were getting a jolly good jolt, I thought, as the meal went on and on. Soup, fish, pheasant, beefsteak, asparagus, pudding, savoury, fruit. Hampton food, Aunt Sadie used to call it, and indeed it had a character of its own which can best be described by saying that it was like mountainsof the very most delicious imaginable nursery food, plain and wholesome, made of the best materials, each thing tasting strongly of itself. But, like everything else at Hampton, it was exaggerated. Just as Lady Montdore was a little bit too much like a Countess, Lord Montdore too much like an elder statesman, the servants too perfect and too deferential, the beds too soft and the linen too fine, the motor cars too new and too shiny and everything too much in apple-pie order, so the very peaches there were too peach-like. I used to think, when I was a child, that all this excellence made Hampton seem unreal compared with the only other houses I knew, Alconleigh and Aunt Emily’s little house. It was like a noble establishment in a book or a play, not like somebody’s home, and in the same way the Montdores, and even Polly, never quite seemed to be real flesh-and-blood people.
    By the time I was embarked on a too peach-like peach, I had lost all sense of fear, if not of decorum, and was lolling about as I would not have dared to at the beginning of dinner, boldly looking to right and to left. It was not the wine. I had only had one glass of claret and all my other glasses were full (the butler having paid no attention to my shakes of the head) and untouched. It was the food; I was reeling drunk on food. I saw just what Davey meant about a cobra, everything was stretched to its capacity and I really felt as if I had swallowed a goat. I knew that my face was scarlet, and looking round I saw that so were all the other faces, except Polly’s.
    Polly, between just such a pair as Rory and Roly, had not made the least effort to be agreeable to them, though they had taken a good deal more trouble with her than my neighbours had with me. Nor was she enjoying her food. She picked at it with a fork, leaving most of it on her plate, and seemed to be completely in the clouds, her blank stare shining, like the ray from a blue lamp, in the direction of Boy, but not as though she saw him