The Pursuit of Love (12 page)

‘In the first place he’s a relation, and in the second place he’s a clergyman, so shut up.’

It had become a classical saying with the Radletts.

So the Kroesigs were duly invited. They accepted, and the date was fixed. Aunt Sadie then got into a panic, and summoned Aunt Emily and Davey. (I was staying at ‘Alconleigh anyhow, for a few weeks’ hunting.) Louisa was feeding her second baby in Scotland, but hoped to come south for the wedding later on.

The arrival at Alconleigh of the four Kroesigs was not auspicious. As the car which had met them at the station was heard humming up the drive, every single light in the whole house fused – Davey had brought a new ultra-violet lamp with him, which had done the trick. The guests had to be led into the hall in pitch darkness, while Logan fumbled about in the pantry for a candle, and Uncle Matthew rushed off to the fuse box. Lady Kroesig and Aunt Sadie chatted politely about this and that, Linda and Tony giggled in the corner, and Sir Leicester hit his gouty foot on the edge of a refectory table, while the voice of an invisible Davey could be heard, apologizing in a high wail, from the top of the staircase. It was really very embarrassing.

At last the lights went up, and the Kroesigs were revealed. Sir Leicester was a tall fair man with grey hair, whose undeniable good looks were marred by a sort of silliness in his
face; his wife and daughter were two dumpy little fluffy females. Tony evidently took after his father, and Marjorie after her mother. Aunt Sadie, thrown out of her stride by the sudden transformation of what had been mere voices in the dark into flesh and blood, and feeling herself unable to produce more topics of conversation, hurried them upstairs to rest, and dress for dinner. It was always considered at Alconleigh that the journey from London was an experience involving great exhaustion, and people were supposed to be in need of rest after it.

‘What is this lamp?’ Uncle Matthew asked Davey, who was still saying how sorry he was, still clad in the exiguous dressing-gown which he had put on for his sun-bath.

‘Well, you know how one can never digest anything in the winter months.’

‘I can, damn you,’ said Uncle Matthew. This, addressed to Davey, could be interpreted as a term of endearment.

‘You think you can, but you can’t really. Now this lamp pours its rays into the system, your glands begin to work, and your food does you good again.’

‘Well don’t pour any more rays until we have had the voltage altered. When the house is full of bloody Huns one wants to be able to see what the hell they’re up to.’

For dinner, Linda wore a white chintz dress with an enormous skirt, and a black lace scarf. She looked entirely ravishing, and it was obvious that Sir Leicester was much taken with her appearance – Lady Kroesig and Miss Marjorie, in bits of georgette and lace, seemed not to notice it. Marjorie was an intensely dreary girl, a few years older than Tony, who had failed so far to marry, and seemed to have no biological reason for existing.

‘Have you read
Brothers
?’ Lady Kroesig asked Uncle Matthew, conversationally, as they settled down to their soup.

‘What’s that?’

‘The new Ursula Langdok –
Brothers
– it’s about two brothers. You ought to read it.’

‘My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is
White Fang
. It’s so frightfully good I’ve
never bothered to read another. But Davey here reads books – you’ve read
Brothers
, Davey, I bet.’

‘Indeed, I have not,’ said Davey, petulantly.

‘I’ll lend it to you,’ said Lady Kroesig, ‘I have it with me, and I finished it in the train.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ said Davey, ‘read in trains, ever. It’s madly wearing to the optic nerve centres, it imposes a most fearful strain. May I see the menu, please? I must explain that I’m on a new diet, one meal white, one meal red. It’s doing me so much good. Oh, dear, what a pity. Sadie – oh, she’s not listening – Logan, could I ask for an egg, very lightly boiled, you know. This is my white meal, and we are having saddle of mutton I see.’

‘Well, Davey, have your red meal now and your white meal for breakfast,’ said Uncle Matthew. ‘I’ve opened some Mouton Rothschild, and I know how much you like that – I opened it specially for you.’

‘Oh, it is too bad,’ said Davey, ‘because I happen to know that there are kippers for breakfast, and I do so love them. What a ghastly decision. No! it must be an egg now, with a little hock. I could never forgo the kippers, so delicious, so digestible, but, above all, so full of proteins.’

‘Kippers,’ said Bob, ‘are brown.’

‘Brown counts as red. Surely you can see that.’

But when a chocolate cream, in generous supply, but never quite enough when the boys were at home, came round, it was seen to count as white. The Radletts often had cause to observe that you could never entirely rely upon Davey to refuse food, however unwholesome, if it was really delicious.

Aunt Sadie was making heavy weather with Sir Leicester. He was full of boring herbaceous enthusiasms, and took it for granted that she was too.

‘What a lot you London people always know about gardens,’ she said. ‘You must talk to Davey, he is a great gardener.’

‘I am not really a London person,’ said Sir Leicester, reproachfully. ‘I work in London, but my home is in Surrey.’

‘I count that,’ Aunt Sadie said, gently but firmly, ‘as the same.’

The evening seemed endless. The Kroesigs obviously longed for bridge, and did not seem to care so much for racing demon when it was offered as a substitute. Sir Leicester said he had had a tiring week, and really should go to bed early.

‘Don’t know how you chaps can stand it,’ said Uncle Matthew, sympathetically. ‘I was saying to the bank manager at Merlinford only yesterday, it must be the hell of a life fussing about with other blokes’ money all day, indoors.’

Linda went to ring up Lord Merlin, who had just returned from abroad. Tony followed her, they were gone a long time, and came back looking flushed and rather self-conscious.

The next morning, as we were hanging about in the hall waiting for the kippers, which had already announced themselves with a heavenly smell, two breakfast trays were seen going upstairs, for Sir Leicester and Lady Kroesig.

‘No, really, that beats everything, dammit,’ said Uncle Matthew, ‘I never heard of a
man
having breakfast in bed before.’ And he looked wistfully at his entrenching tool.

He was slightly mollified, however, when they came downstairs, just before eleven, all ready to go to church. Uncle Matthew was a great pillar of the church, read the lessons, chose the hymns, and took round the bag, and he liked his household to attend. Alas, the Kroesigs turned out to be blasted idolaters, as was proved when they turned sharply to the east during the creed. In short, they were of the company of those who could do no right, and sighs of relief echoed through the house when they decided to catch an evening train back to London.

*

‘Tony is Bottom to Linda, isn’t he?’ I said, sadly.

Davey and I were walking through Hen’s Grove the next day. Davey always knew what you meant, it was one of the nice things about him.

‘Bottom,’ he said sadly. He adored Linda.

‘And nothing will wake her up?’

‘Not before it’s too late, I fear. Poor Linda, she has an intensely romantic character, which is fatal for a woman.
Fortunately for them, and for all of us, most women are madly
terre à terre
, otherwise the world could hardly carry on.’

*

Lord Merlin was braver than the rest of us, and said right out what he thought. Linda went over to see him and asked him.

‘Are you pleased about my engagement?’ to which he replied:

‘No, of course not. Why are you doing it?’

‘I’m in love,’ said Linda proudly.

‘What makes you think so?’

‘One doesn’t think, one knows,’ she said.

‘Fiddlesticks.’

‘Oh, you evidently don’t understand about love, so what’s the use of talking to you.’

Lord Merlin got very cross, and said that neither did immature little girls understand about love.

‘Love,’ he said, ‘is for grown-up people, as you will discover one day. You will also discover that it has nothing to do with marriage. I’m all in favour of you marrying soon, in a year or two, but for God’s sake, and all of our sakes, don’t go and marry a bore like Tony Kroesig.’

‘If he’s such a bore, why did you ask him to stay?’

‘I didn’t ask him. Baby brought him, because Cecil had ’flu and couldn’t come. Besides, I can’t guess you’ll go and marry every stopgap I have in my house.’

‘You ought to be more careful. Anyhow, I can’t think why you say Tony’s a bore, he knows everything.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly it, he does. And what about Sir Leicester? And have you seen Lady Kroesig?’

But the Kroesig family was illuminated for Linda by the great glow of perfection which shone around Tony, and she would hear nothing against them. She parted rather coldly from Lord Merlin, came home, and abused him roundly. As for him, he waited to see what Sir Leicester was giving her for a wedding present. It was a pigskin dressing-case with dark tortoiseshell fittings and her initials on them in gold. Lord Merlin sent her a morocco one double the size, fitted blonde tortoiseshell, and instead of initials,
LINDA
in diamonds.

He had embarked upon an elaborate series of Kroesig teases of which this was to be the first.

The arrangements for the wedding did not go smoothly. There was trouble without end over settlements. Uncle Matthew, whose estate provided a certain sum of money for younger children, to be allocated by him as he thought best, very naturally did not wish to settle anything on Linda, at the expense of the others, in view of the fact that she was marrying the son of a millionaire. Sir Leicester, however, refused to settle a penny unless Uncle Matthew did – he had no great wish to make a settlement in any case, saying that it was against the policy of his family to tie up capital sums. In the end, by sheer persistence, Uncle Matthew got a beggarly amount for Linda. The whole thing worried and upset him very much, and confirmed him, if need be, in his hatred of the Teutonic race.

Tony and his parents wanted a London wedding, Uncle Matthew said he had never heard of anything so common and vulgar in his life. Women were married from their homes; he thought fashionable weddings the height of degradation, and refused to lead one of his daughters up the aisle of St Margaret’s through a crowd of gaping strangers. The Kroesigs explained to Linda that, if she had a country wedding, she would only get half the amount of wedding presents, and also that the important, influential people, who would be of use, later, to Tony, would never come down to Gloucestershire in the depth of winter. All these arguments were lost on Linda. Since the days when she was planning to marry the Prince of Wales she had had a mental picture of what her wedding would be like, that is, as much like a wedding in a pantomime as possible, in a large church, with crowds both outside and in, with photographers, arum lilies, tulle, bridesmaids, and an enormous choir singing her favourite tune, ‘The Lost Chord’. So she sided with the Kroesigs against poor Uncle Matthew, and, when fate tipped the scales in their favour by putting out of action the heating in Alconleigh church, Aunt Sadie took a London house, and the wedding was duly celebrated with every circumstance of publicized vulgarity at St Margaret’s.

What with one thing and another, by the time Linda was
married, her parents and her parents-in-law were no longer on speaking terms. Uncle Matthew cried without restraint all through the ceremony; Sir Leicester seemed to be beyond tears.

I
THINK
Linda’s marriage was a failure almost from the beginning, but I really never knew much about it. Nobody did. She had married in the face of a good deal of opposition; the opposition proved to have been entirely well founded, and, Linda being what she was, maintained, for as long as possible, a perfect shop-front.

They were married in February, had a hunting honeymoon from a house they took at Melton, and settled down for good in Bryanston Square after Easter. Tony then started work in his father’s old bank, and prepared to step into a safe Conservative seat in the House of Commons, an ambition which was very soon realized.

Closer acquaintance with their new in-laws did not make either the Radlett or the Kroesig families change their minds about each other. The Kroesigs thought Linda eccentric, affected, and extravagant. Worst of all, she was supposed not to be useful to Tony in his career. The Radletts considered that Tony was a first-class bore. He had a habit of choosing a subject, and then droning round and round it like an inaccurate bomb-aimer round his target, ever unable to hit; he knew vast quantities of utterly dreary facts, of which he did not hesitate to inform his companions, at great length and in great detail, whether they appeared to be interested or not. He was infinitely serious, he no longer laughed at Linda’s jokes, and the high spirits which, when she first knew him, he had seemed to possess, must have been due to youth, drink, and good health. Now that he was grown up and married he put all three resolutely behind him, spending his days in the bank house and his evenings at Westminster, never having any fun or breathing
fresh air: his true self emerged, and he was revealed as a pompous, money-grubbing ass, more like his father every day.