The Last Houseparty (7 page)

“I say,” he said. “That's my fault. I'm terribly sorry. I managed things wrong. Sally g-g-got a bit too friendly, and …”

“Oh, she's a terrible flirt, aren't you, darling?” said Mrs Dubigny. “You mustn't worry, Vincent. It's something that happens at this age. I expect I was just the same.”

But as she caressed Sally's back she glanced at Vincent with a frown of warning and mouthed, inaudibly but clearly, “She misses her father.”

“Of c-c-course,” said Vincent.

The doors to right and left of the clock face opened with their premonitory groan.

“Do look, darling,” said Mrs Dubigny. “It's going to strike. And honestly you're getting too heavy for me to carry for ever and ever.”

She lowered Sally to the ground and turned her firmly to face the world. Sally glanced only briefly towards the clock, then stared at Vincent. She had stopped crying. Despite the tear-streaks her expression was now unreadable.

“You've got a dirty face,” she said.

“Sally! Manners!” cooed Mrs Dubigny. “But I'm afraid it's true, Vincent. What on earth have you been up to? Oh, hush … it's starting!”

With its usual judder of effort the clock began its show. A calf slid out, then a milkmaid and a second calf. Then came Summer, buxom and beflowered, followed by the second milkmaid and her beasts. The bells jangled their intricate tune and the figures danced in the sunlight until Time emerged to break up their round and shoo them through the further door. A white pigeon wavered down to perch below the clock.

“Have you noticed how lovely the second milkmaid is?” said Mrs Dubigny. “Isn't it funny how that sort of thing happens? I don't suppose the man who painted them did it on purpose—I mean I expect he thought he was making them all as beautiful as he knew how, but his brush slipped or something and he made that one perfect by accident.”

“I hadn't noticed,” said Vincent. “I'll look next time.”

“God must be a bit like that, don't you think? Doing his best, I mean, but really needing a fluke to get anyone as beautiful as Zena? The rest of us are the best he can actually do on purpose. Now, Sally, I want you to make friends with Mr Masham and then we'll go and find Nanny.”

“I want to stay with you.”

“I can't, darling. Didn't you hear his lordship? I've got to find Mr Masham and bring him to his lordship's study, and bring my pad, too, to write a letter. Have you any notion what that's all about, Vincent—he seemed in the most fearful bate?”

“He wants you to write a letter sacking McGrigor.”

“Oh lor! But that'll be the end of the world, won't it?”

2

We are fortunate in having a contemporary account of what it felt like to be a guest at a Zena week-end “do”. In the summer of 1936 Harold Nicolson had written to V. Sackville-West about precisely that experience:

“My own dearest,

“For once I can say with sincerity that I wish you had been here—I think even you would have enjoyed yourself, scrum and all. And that despite the garden being a perfect waste of all the opportunities one could wish for by way of natural vistas, nooks, surprises and changes of level. Considering how you and I have laboured to achieve our effects in the near-flat wilderness of Sissinghurst, what could we not have accomplished here? Snailwood is interested in nothing but roses, and has laid out bed after bed, pruned to their gawkiest—though I admit that in season the blooms do look splendid inside the house, arranged in great vases by the hundred. This is Snailwood's only achievement—he does it all with his own hands.
A propos
, one rather delicious detail: do you remember my showing you a photograph of the John portrait of Zena? It was in last year's Summer Exhibition and now hangs here, strident but striking, portraying Zena with a sheaf of blossoms. It turns out that she has never arranged a twig in all her life. The whole thing is, like so much of modern art, (or so it seems to me) nothing more or less than a great tease.

“Eighteen to luncheon on Saturday—fairly political, with most of what people are beginning to call ‘the Snailwood gang', though Charles Archer is in America. I had been hoping to try and make up a coldness which arose mainly from my getting in a huff about what he wrote when I left the New Party. Foolish of me. I am a lightweight and there's no reason why Charles should not say so, but still I did mind. In addition there is an exceedingly cultured American banker called Hoffman who had read my Murrow book and told me a couple of things about M. I am glad not to have known at the time of writing; his exceedingly half-cultured wife, the type of American woman who helps one understand why their divorce rate is what it is; Ducky Boone and Lady F.; Snailwood's sister Ivy Masham, quite as appalling in the English fashion as Mrs Hoffman in the American; an impressively intelligent young publisher called Harry Quintain who won my heart at once by being able to quote three or four lines of
Out with a Gun
. Admittedly he might have mugged them up (flattering, in a different way, if he did) but how was he to know that of all your poems that is my favourite? He is Snailwood's nephew, favoured by Zena, I am told, to inherit; but there is another nephew, Ivy Masham's son, of whom I know nothing other than that he is a soldier with a stammer. It is said that Snailwood leans more to him. Quintain appears to me just such a young man as I might have been had I not joined the Diplomatic Service. He is looking for an opening in politics, and—finances permitting—will attempt to contest a seat in 1940. His politics are not mine, but would mine be if I were his age, now? The pull of what you might call intelligent Mosleyism—and having been so involved in M's tragic career I can truly assert that that was not always a contradiction in terms, but may well turn out to have been the great missed turning of the 'thirties … Why am I writing you all this? It does not interest you in the least, except in so far as it interests me. You would have loathed the Saturday luncheon. But I should have liked you to meet Quintain. I will tell you about Zena.

“She is an impossible creature, capricious, self-regarding, ridiculous, but quite clever enough to perceive that these vices can be presented as delightful foibles if well managed. That is her art—management. Of herself, of others. If she has never arranged a flower, she has been greatly successful with bunches of people. She is not your Nancy Astor type of hostess, bossy and incompetent (I remember an afternoon at Cliveden when five of us were forced to go boating in the rain in a skiff that would safely carry no more than three). Instead of bouncing about, stopping people doing things that they are enjoying and forcing them to do things they do not enjoy, Zena lies on piles of cushions, looking—but that is not her main secret—extremely beautiful. Her guests are attracted to her by natural force; and then somehow, without being bossed, they find themselves doing precisely what suits them. You, my darling, would not have needed to express a preference for dogs and privacy to find yourself walking alone with an affable young borzoi.

“I must not give the impression that Zena spends her whole day as an odalisque. It is simply her process of getting things started. After that she rushes about, taking part, teasing, coaxing, aware apparently of the exact moment when some process is about to diverge into tedium and … do I mean interposing herself? Yes, that is just what I mean. Imagine one of those old movies we used to take the boys to—do you remember?—the heroine bound to the railway line—the express approaching—the cowboy spurring to the rescue? Tedium is that express, Zena that heroine, and every man jack among her guests that cowboy. Where Nancy would get out her megaphone and order the express (vainly, in my experience) to go elsewhere, Zena contrives that it is we who, to all appearances by sheer luck, divert it. It is a pleasure to have realised this and study how she works. If only she would not fool around with politics. And I would guess that inside the family her machinations may not always achieve happy results.

“Let me tell you about Saturday night. Zena, typically, refers to the whole week-end as a ‘do' and to the big party on Saturday evening as a ‘superduperdo'. I grumbled to you in my last letter about having to find my trivial decorations because Zena had contrived to attract some princeling to her table. It all seemed drearily
démodé
, more appropriate to one of my father's ambassadorial unfestivities before the War. And when I stole into the office of Zena's secretary to crib the list of guests (for as you know I am not above doing the sort of preliminary mugging-up of which I accused young Quintain) my heart dropped to my boots. I foresaw an evening of no mere tedium, but of inexpressible embarrassment. It appeared a quite impossible ‘mix', some fifty people, not one of whom had ideas or interests in common with more than three or four of the others.

“And yet it all ‘went'. The formality, the decorations, the tiaras, the bows and curtseys to the princeling, somehow these were converted from trappings of outworn formality into—I don't know—fancy dress, I suppose. It is Zena's combination of gusto and irony that achieves this. The gusto may verge on hysteria, the irony become self-parody, but a balance is found. It is as if inwardly we all were saying that because we are unashamedly ‘modern' we can amuse ourselves by cavorting in this antique mode. And then the ‘mix'. Of course like does not necessarily mean like. Have we not two millennia of Christian thought to prove that no arrangement is so certain to induce sullenness than to place side by side the advocates of two heresies different in their own minds but indistinguishable in those of others? One sees this among the Communists also. Stalin will shake the hand of Rockefeller while his agents are hounding Trotsky round the world. This truth does not normally operate in the social sphere, but it does when Zena wills. Fifty or so incompatibles, we sat down to an eight-course dinner, and everybody as far as I could see ‘got on'.

“I sat between … but I mustn't forget to tell you about Zena's dress. It was designed for her by Schiaparelli, who if she did not excel herself I think can be said to have exceeded herself. Enormous puffy sleeves, each containing more material than the whole of the rest of the frock; the back completely bared, as if for the attentions of a tattooist …”

And so forth. It is fair to say that Mr Nicolson seems to have struck a good week. By no means all of Zena's guests were so captivated.

3

“The fellow had become impossible,” Lord Snailwood told the area surrounding him. As most of the Saturday luncheon guests were within that area, other conversation had become subdued. Lord Snailwood, having dictated and signed the letter dismissing McGrigor, seemed unable to let the matter rest. It was as though King Edward III had met the burghers haltered and trussed for hanging beneath the walls of Calais, had proclaimed to all in earshot his determination to show no mercy, but then because of some error in timing had been forced to reiterate his indignation for an hour on end until Queen Philippa should put in an appearance and melt his steely resolution. Sadly, the residents and regular visitors to Snailwood showed little wish to beg for McGrigor's reprieve, many past discomforts, major and minor, having been attributable to the fact that Lord Snailwood would let no one else service cars, repair overflowing cisterns, conjure with the central heating, or tamper with anything that could be classed as machinery anywhere on the estate.

“The war, of course,” said Lord Snailwood. “He's still got pieces of shrapnel under his skull. Accounts for his temper. Used to be a first-class man in the old days. Came to my uncle to help with the railway. Walked over from Swindon, he'll tell you, and was going to walk back if he didn't get the job. Nothing to McGrigor those days. Walked down from Inverness to Swindon in the first place, but found he couldn't take the racket in the boiler sheds. Been on the estate ever since, not counting the war years. He'll keep his cottage, of course, and draw his pension, but I wish I knew what had gone wrong with the fellow. Used to be such a first-class man. Do a repair, and it would be stronger than before it broke—last for years. And damned ingenious too. Told you about the rat trap in the generation room?”

Suddenly the Earl's voice ceased to be a grumble, took on an enthusiasm only otherwise heard when he spoke of his roses, as he repeated the many times told account of how McGrigor had used a large rat trap, triggered by a five-shilling alarm clock, to switch off all the lights in Snailwood every night at 10.05 sharp, so that the private generator could recharge the accumulators overnight. Though he did not say so, it was clear to his listeners that part of the charm of this device was the emphatic signal it gave to house guests and visitors that it was time to go to bed, or to take their leave. The gadget had ceased to be needed with the installation of mains electricity in 1931 but remained the prime evidence for McGrigor's ingenuity partly because it was simple enough for the Earl himself to grasp its principles, and partly because it had continued to function for years on end, unlike so many of McGrigor's later contrivances, whose very complexity and waywardness had involved them in ceaseless breakdowns and at the same time ensured that only McGrigor was able to understand their foibles. Lord Snailwood appeared to see no discrepancy between his present outrage at McGrigor's failure to maintain the Daimler and his own past fervour in defence of his employee's devices. The story about the rat trap concluded with a pause for emphasis, into which Sir Charles Archer moved with more firmness than tact.

“I tell you what, Snailwood,” he said. “We're all in your position …”

“What the devil do you mean, in my position? You've rooms in Albany. Nothing to go wrong there. I'd like to see how you'd make out if you had to depend on McGrigor to maintain the lifts.”

“Oh, yes, superficially some of us are pretty comfortable, but I was talking about the country as a whole. Has it ever struck you that one of the ways in which we differ from the other civilised nations is that we had our Industrial Revolution two or three generations earlier than they did? The result is that we are now much further along that road. For a long time now the whole machinery of Britain has been wearing out, becoming less and less efficient, repairing itself with solutions that are little more than ingenious patchwork and last for shorter and shorter spans because of the decrepitude of the fabric at large.”