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

really or was listening to his terribly adequate French. Lady Montdore gave her a dissatisfied look from time to time, but she noticed nothing. Her thoughts were evidently far away from her mother’s dinner table, and after awhileher neighbours gave up the struggle of getting yes and no out of her, and, in chorus with mine, began to shout back chat at the lady called Veronica.
    This Veronica was small and thin and sparkling. Her bright gold hair lay on her head like a cap, perfectly smooth, with a few flat curls above her forehead. She had a high bony nose, rather protruding pale-blue eyes and not much chin. She looked decadent, I thought, my drunkenness putting that clever grown-up word into my mind no doubt, but all the same it was no good denying that she was very, very pretty and that her clothes, her jewels, her make-up and her whole appearance were the perfection of smartness. She was evidently considered to be a great wit and as soon as the party began to warm up after a chilly start it revolved entirely round her. She bandied repartee with the various Rorys and Rolys, the other women of her age-group merely giggling away at the jokes but taking no active part in them, as though they realized it would be useless to try and steal any of her limelight, while the even older people at the two ends of the table kept up a steady flow of grave talk, occasionally throwing an indulgent glance at Veronica.
    Now that I had become brave, I asked one of my neighbours to tell me her name, but he was so much surprised at my not knowing it that he quite forgot to answer my question.
    “Veronica?” he said, stupefied. “But surely you know Veronica?”
    It was as though I had never heard of Vesuvius. Afterwards I discovered that her name was Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett, and it seemed strange to me that Lady Montdore, whom I had so often been told was a snob, should have only a Mrs., not even an Hon. Mrs., to stay and treat her almost with deference. This shows how innocent, socially, I must have been in those days, since every schoolboy (every Etonian, that is) knew all about Mrs. Chaddesley Corbett. She was to the other smart women of her day as the star is to the chorus, and had invented a type of looks, as well as a way of talking, walking and behaving, which was slavishly copied by the fashionable set in England for at least ten years. No doubt the reasonwhy I had never heard her name before was that she was such miles, in smartness, above the bread-and-butter world of my acquaintance.
    It was terribly late when at last Lady Montdore got up to leave the table. My aunts never allowed such long sitting in the dining room because of the washing up and keeping the servants from going to bed, but that sort of thing simply was not considered at Hampton, nor did Lady Montdore turn to her husband, as Aunt Sadie always did, with an imploring look and a “Not too long, darling,” as she went, leaving the men to their port, their brandy, their cigars and their traditional dirty stories which could hardly be any dirtier, it seemed to me, than Veronica’s conversation had become during the last half hour or so.
    Back in the Long Gallery some of the women went upstairs to “powder their noses.” Lady Montdore was scornful.
    “I go in the morning,” she said, “and that is that. I don’t have to be let out like a dog at intervals.”
    If Lady Montdore had really hoped that Sauveterre would exercise his charm on Polly, she was in for a disappointment. As soon as the men came out of the dining room, where they had remained for quite an hour (“This English habit,” I heard him say, “is terrible”), he was surrounded by Veronica and her chorus and never given a chance to speak to anybody else. They all seemed to be old friends of his, called him Fabrice and had a thousand questions to ask about mutual acquaintances in Paris, fashionable foreign ladies with such unfashionable English names as Norah, Cora, Jennie, Daisy, May and