Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online Page A

she said, to a handsome man called Hubert Lace, who was an old darling, but fearfully jealous, selfish, greedy, and mean. These unpleasant words were not named, but served up with a frothing sauce of sugary chatter. As the old darling was also slightly half-witted he could naturally have no sympathy for Anne-Marie’s artistic leanings, and she was therefore obliged to wrap herself up in her garden, her children, and the consolations of the intellect. Noel assumed from the fact that her name, as she told him, was Anne-Marie, from the slightly foreign accent and curious idiom in which she spoke, and from her general appearance, that she was not altogether English. He was wrong, however.
    For the first twenty years of her life she had lived in a country vicarage and been called Bella Drage. Being an imaginative and enterprising girl she had persuaded her father to send her to Paris for a course of singing lessons. He scraped together enough money for her to have six months there, after which she came back Anne-Marie by name and Anne-Marie by nature. Shortly after this metamorphosis had occurred she met Hubert Lace, who was enslaved at the Hunt Ball by her flowing dress, Edwardian coiffure and sudden, if inaccurate, excursions into the Frenchlanguage. He laid heart and fortune at her feet. Bella Drage was shrewd enough to realize that she was unlikely to do better for herself, not sufficiently shrewd to foresee an unexpected vein of obstinacy in the Major which was to make him perfectly firm in his refusal to live anywhere but at Comberry. She now knew that her ambition of entertaining smart Bohemians in London could never be realized while she was still married to him. It was one of her favourite day-dreams to envisage the death of Hubert, gored perhaps by a Jersey bull or chawed up by one of those middle-white pigs, who, their energies having been directed by a fad of the Major’s towards fields of cabbages rather than the more customary trough, were apt to behave at times with a fearful madness of demeanour. After the funeral and a decent period of mourning, an interesting young widow would then take London by storm. The idea of divorce never occurred to her as an alternative to the demise of poor Hubert. Early up-bringing in the parsonage had not been without its influence upon her and Mrs Lace was at heart a respectable little person.
    None of these truths made themselves apparent to Noel. He beheld, as he was meant to behold, a vivid vital creature living in unsuitable surroundings, a humming bird in a rusty cage, a gardenia in a miry bog, a Mariana of the Moated Grange. Eugenia faded into unreality, Miss Smith and Miss Jones might never have been born for all he cared. Jasper could now retire into his proper place as a penniless sycophant, Noel had at last gone one better than him, and found by his own unaided efforts a pearl among women.
    They talked and talked over the cowslip wine and Noel began to realize that his pearl was as cultivated as she was beautiful. She was a student of obscure Restoration poetry and early French ballads, so she told him, knew Proust by heart (expressing a pained surprise when he owned that he had only read
Swann’s Way
, and that in English), also D. H. Lawrence, Strindberg, Ibsen, which last two she preferred to read in French.
    In painting, her taste, it appeared, was catholic. Primitives, Dutch and Italian Renaissance, the English School, French impressionists,Surréalistes, all was grist that came to her mill; in music her exquisite sensibilities were apparent. She only cared for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. Wagner was to her a mere ugly noise, Chopin a sentimental tinkle. She told him that she was born out of her proper time, she could only have been contented in the eighteenth century – this boisterous age, these machine-made nineteen-thirties said nothing to her, she found herself bored, bewildered, and unhappy.
    Noel was enchanted. Never before, he thought, had he met a beautiful