A Dance To The Music Of Time Part 1

ANTHONY POWELL.

AT LADY MOLLY'S.

A NOVEL.

A Dance to the Music of Time.

HEINEMANN : LONDON.

1.

WE had known General Conyers immemorially not because my father had ever served under him but through some long-forgotten connexion with my mother's parents, to one or other of whom he may even have been distantly related. In any case, he was on record as having frequented their house in an era so remote and legendary that, if commission was no longer by purchase, regiments of the line were still designated by a number instead of the name of a county. In spite of belonging to this dim, archaic period, traces of which were sometimes revealed in his dress and speech-he was, for example, one of the last to my knowledge to speak of the Household Cavalry as 'the Plungers'-his place in family myth was established not only as a soldier with interests beyond his profession, but even as a man of the world always 'abreast of the times'. This taste for being in the fas.h.i.+on and giving his opinion on every subject was held against him by some people, notably Uncle Giles, no friend of up-to-date thought, and on principle suspicious of worldly success, however mild.

'Aylmer Conyers had a flair for getting on,' he used to say, 'No harm in that, I suppose. Somebody has got to give the orders. Personally I never cared for the limelight. Plenty of others to push themselves forward. Inclined to think a good deal of himself, Conyers was. Fine figure of a man, people used to say, a bit too fond of dressing himself up to the nines. Not entirely friendless in high places either. Quite the contrary. Peacetime or war, Conyers always knew the right people.'

I had once inquired about the General's campaigns.

'Afghanistan, Burma-as a subaltern. I've heard him talk big about Zululand. In the Soudan for a bit when the Khalifa was making trouble there. Went in for jobs abroad. Supposed to have saved the life of some native ruler in a local rumpus. Armed the palace eunuchs with rook rifles. Fellow gave him a jewelled scimitar-semi-precious stones, of course.'

'I've seen the scimitar. I never knew the story.'

Ignoring interruptions, Uncle Giles began to explain how South Africa, grave of so much military reputation, had been by Aylmer Conyers turned to good account. Having himself, as a result of his own indiscretions, retired from the army shortly before outbreak of war in the Transvaal, and possessing in addition those 'pro-Boer' sentiments appropriate to 'a bit of a radical', my uncle spoke always with severity, no doubt largely justified, of the manner in which the operations of the campaign had been conducted.

'After French moved over the Modder River, the whole Cavalry Division was ordered to charge. Unheard of thing. Like a gymkhana.'

'Yes?'

For a minute or two he lost the thread, contemplating the dusty squadrons wheeling from column into line across the veldt, or more probably a.s.sailed by memories of his own, less dramatic, if more bitter.

'What happened?'

'What?'

'What happened when they charged?'

'Cronje made an error of judgment for once. Only sent out detachments. Went through to Kimberley, more by luck than looking to.'

'But what about General Conyers?'

'Got himself into the charge somehow. Hadn't any business with the cavalry brigades. Put up some excuse. Then, day or two later, went back to where he ought to have been in the first place. Made himself most officious among the transport wagons. Line of march was like Hyde Park at the height of the Season, so a fellow who was in the advance told me-carriages end to end in Albert Gate-and Conyers running about cursing and swearing as if he owned the place.'

'Didn't Lord Roberts say something about his staff work?'

'Bobs?'

'Yes.'

'Who said that, your father?'

'I think so.'

Uncle Giles shook his head.

'Bobs may have said something. Wouldn't be the first time a general got hold of the wrong end of the stick. They say Conyers used to chase the women a bit, too. Some people thought he was going to propose to your Great-aunt Harriet.'

Other memories, on the whole more reliable, gainsay any such surmise regarding this last matter. In fact, Conyers remained a bachelor until he was approaching fifty. He was by then a brigadier-general, expected to go much further, when-to the surprise of his friends-he married a woman nearly twenty years younger than himself; sending in his papers about eighteen months later. Perhaps he was tired of waiting for the war with Germany he had so often prophesied, in which, had it come sooner, he would certainly have been offered high command. Possibly his wife did not enjoy following the drum, even as a general's lady. She is unlikely to have had much taste for army life. The General, for his own part, may have felt at last tired of military routine. Like many soldiers of ability he possessed his eccentric side. Although no great performer, he had always loved playing the 'cello, and on retirement occupied much of his time with music; also experimenting with a favourite theory that poodles, owing to their keen natural intelligence, could profitably be trained as gun dogs. He began to live rather a social life, too, and was appointed a member of the Body Guard; the role in which, from early a.s.sociation of ideas, I always think of him.

'Funny that a fellow should want to be a kind of court flunkey,' Uncle Giles used to say. 'Can't imagine myself rigged out in a lot of scarlet and gold, hanging about royal palaces and herding in and out a crowd of young ladies in ostrich feathers. Did it to please his wife, I suppose.'

Mrs. Conyers, it is true, might have played some indirect part in this appointment. Eldest daughter of King Edward VII's friend, Lord Vowchurch, she had pa.s.sed her thirtieth birthday at the time of marriage. Endless stories, not always edifying, are-or used to be-told of her father, one of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery. His most enduring memorial (to be found, with other notabilities of the 'seventies, hanging in the damp, deserted billiard-room at Thrubworth) is Spy's caricature in the Vanity Fair series, depicting this high-spirited peer in frock-coat and top hat, both grey: the bad temper for which he was as notorious at home as for his sparkle in Society, neatly suggested under the side whiskers by the lines of the mouth. In later years Lord Vowchurch grew quieter, particularly after a rather serious accident as a pioneer in the early days of motoring. This mishap left him with a limp and injuries which seem to have stimulated that habitual banter, rarely good-natured, for which he had often been in trouble with King Edward, when Prince of Wales; and, equally often, forgiven. His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.

My parents never saw much of the General and his wife. They knew them about as well as they knew the Walpole-Wilsons; though the Conyers relations.h.i.+p, with its foundations laid in a distant, fabled past, if never more intimate, was in some way deeper and more satisfying.

Like all marriages, the Conyers union presented elements of mystery. It was widely a.s.sumed that the General had remained a bachelor so long through conviction that a career is best made alone. He may have believed (like de Gaulle, whom he lived to see leading the Free French) in a celibate corps of officers dedicated like priests to their military calling. He wrote something of the sort in the United Service Magazine. This theory rested upon no objection to the opposite s.e.x as such. On the contrary, as a young officer in India and elsewhere he was judged, as Uncle Giles had indicated, to have enjoyed a considerable degree of quiet womanising. Some thought that ambition of rather a different sort-a feeling that he had never fully experienced some of the good things of life-had finally persuaded him to marry and retire. A few of the incurably romantic even supposed him simply to have 'fallen in love' for the first time on the brink of fifty.

General and Mrs. Conyers seemed to 'get on' as well, if not better, than many married couples of a similar sort united at an earlier age. They moved, on the whole, in a circle connected, it might be said unpretentiously (because nothing could have been less 'smart', for example in Chips Lovell's use of the term, than the Conyers menage) with the Court: families like the Budds and Udneys. In the limited but intense-and at times ornamental-preoccupations of these professional courtiers, the General seems to have found an adequate alternative to a life of command.

They had an only daughter called Charlotte, a rather colourless girl, who married a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. I used sometimes to have tea with her when we were both children.

In 1916, towards Christmas, at a time when Mrs. Conyers was a.s.sembling 'comforts' for troops overseas (still at this period in more amateur hands than the organisation that employed Uncle Giles after America came into the war) I was taken-pa.s.sing through London on the way home from school-to her flat near Sloane Square. My mother paid the call either to add some knitted contribution to the pile of socks, scarves and Balaclava helmets lying about on chairs and sofas, or to help in some matter of their distribution. In the corner of the room in which all these bundles were stacked stood the 'cello in a case. Beside it, I at once noticed a large photograph of the General, carrying a halberd and wearing the plumed helmet, swallow-tailed coat and heavy gold epaulettes of a Gentleman-at-Arms. That is why I always think of him as a statuesque figure at levees and court b.a.l.l.s, rather than the man of action he must for the greater part of his life have been. Retired from the army too long for any re-employment of the first importance, he had acquired soon after the outbreak of war some job, far from momentous, though respectably graded in the rank of major-general.

We had finished tea, and I was being shown the jewelled scimitar to which Uncle Giles had referred, which was kept for some reason in the London flat instead of the small house in Hamps.h.i.+re where the poodles were trained. This display was made by Mrs. Conyers as some amends for the fact that Charlotte was in the country; although no apology was necessary as it seemed to me more amusing without her. I was admiring the velvet-covered scabbard, wondering whether to draw the steel from its sheath would be permissible, when the maid showed someone into the room. This new arrival was a young woman wearing V.A.D. uniform, who strode in like a grenadier. She turned out to be Mildred Blaides, youngest sister to Mrs. Conyers.

Difference of age between the two of them must have been at least that of Mrs. Conyers and her husband. This Miss Blaides, indeed, represented her parents' final, unsuccessful effort to achieve an heir, before Lord Vowchurch's motor accident and total resignation to the t.i.tle pa.s.sing to a cousin. She was tall, with a long nose, no more handsome than her sister, but in my eyes infinitely more das.h.i.+ng than Mrs. Conyers. Her face was lively, not unlike the mask of a fox. Almost immediately she took from her pocket an ornamental cigarette-case made of some lacquer-like substance and lit a cigarette. Such an act, especially in one so young, was still in those days a sign of conscious female emanc.i.p.ation. I suppose she was then about twenty.

'Mildred is at Dogdene now,' explained Mrs. Conyers, 'You know the Sleafords offered their house as an officers' hospital when the war broke out. They themselves live in the east wing. There are huts all over the park too.'

'It's absolute h.e.l.l having all those blighters in huts,' said Miss Blaides. 'Some of the tommies got tight the other night and pushed one of the stone urns off the Italian bridge into the lake. It was too bad of them. They are a putrid unit anyway. All the officers wear "gorblimeys".'

'What on earth are those, Mildred?' asked Mrs. Conyers, nervously.

I think she feared, after asking the question, that they might be something unsuitable to mention in front of a small boy, because she raised her hand as if to prevent the exposure of any too fearful revelation.

'Oh, those floppy army caps,' said Miss Blaides, carelessly. 'They take the stiffening out, you know. Of course they have to do that when they are up at the Front, to prevent bits of wire getting blown into their cocoanuts, but they might try and look properly turned out when they are over here.'

She puffed away at her cigarette.

'I really must check all these gaspers,' she said, flicking ash on to the carpet. 'By now it's got up to about thirty a day. It just won't do. By the way, Molly Sleaford wants to come and see you, Bertha. Something about the distribution of "comforts". I told her to look you up on Wednesday, when she is next going to be in London.'

For some reason this announcement threw Mrs. Conyers into a state of great discomposure.

'But I can't possibly see Lady Sleaford on Wednesday,' she said, 'I've got three committee meetings on that day and Aylmer wants me to have five Serbian officers to tea. Besides, dear, Lady Sleaford is Red Cross, like you-and you remember how I am rather wedded, through Lady Bridgnorth, to St. John's. You see I really hardly know Lady Sleaford, who always keeps very much to herself, and I don't want to seem disloyal to Mary Bridgnorth. I-'

Her sister cut her short.

'Oh, I say, what a bally nuisance,' she remarked. 'I quite forgot about beastly old St. John's. They are always cropping up, aren't they? I really think they do more than the Germans to hold up winning the war.'

After voicing this alarming conjecture, she paced up and down the room, emitting from each nostril a long eddy of smoke like the trail of a s.h.i.+p briskly cutting the horizon. Throughout the room I was increasingly aware of the hardening of disapproval, just perceptible at first even on the immediate arrival of Miss Blaides: now not by any means to be denied. In fact a sense of positive disquiet swept through the small drawing-room so powerfully that mute condemnation seemed to rise in a thick cloud above the 'comforts', until its disturbing odour reached the ceiling and hung about the whole flat in vexed, compelling waves. This disapproval was on the part not only of Mrs. Conyers, but also-I felt sure-of my mother as well, who now began to make preparations to leave.

'A blinking bore,' said Miss Blaides, casting away her cigarette-end into the grate, where it lay smouldering on the tiles. 'That's what it is. So I suppose I shall have to tell Molly it's a wash-out. Give me another cup of tea, Bertha. I mustn't stay too long. I've got plans to scramble into some glad rags and beetle off to a show tonight.'

After that, we said good-bye; on my own part with deep regret. Later, when we were in the train, my mother said: 'I think it a pity for a girl like Miss Blaides to put on such a lot of make-up and talk so much slang. I was rather interested to see her, though. I had heard so much about her from different people.'

I did not mention the fact in reply, but, to tell the truth, Miss Blaides had seemed to me a figure of decided romance, combining with her nursing capacity of a young Florence Nightingale, something far more exciting and perhaps also a shade sinister. Nor did I realise at that time the implications contained in the phrase to 'hear a lot about' someone of Miss Blaides's age and kind. However, the episode as a whole-the Conyers' flat, the General's photograph, the jewelled scimitar, the 'comforts' stacked round the room, Miss Blaides in her V.A.D. uniform-all made a vivid impression on my mind; although, naturally enough, these things became soon stored away, apparently forgotten, in the distant background of memory. Only subsequent events revived them in strong colours.

That afternoon was also the first time I ever heard Dogdene mentioned. Later, of course, I knew it as the name of a 'great house' about which people talked. It came into volumes of memoirs like those of Lady Amesbury, which I read (with some disappointment) at an early age after hearing some grown-up person describe the book as 'scurrilous'. I also knew Constable's picture in the National Gallery, which shows the mansion itself lying away in the middle distance, a faery place set among giant trees, beyond the misty water-meadows of the foreground in which the impastoed cattle browse: quite unlike any imaginable military hospital. I knew this picture well before learning that the house was Dogdene. By then the place was no longer consciously a.s.sociated in my mind with Miss Blaides. I was aware only vaguely that the owners were called Sleaford.

Then one day, years and years later, a chance reference to Dogdene made me think again of Miss Blaides in her original incarnation as a V.A.D., a status become, as it were, concealed and forgotten, like relics of an early civilisation covered by an ever-increasing pile of later architectural accretion. This was in spite of the fact that the name of Mildred Blaides would sometimes crop up in conversation after the occasional meetings between my parents and General or Mrs. Conyers. When she figured in such talk I always pictured a person somehow different from the girl chattering war-time slang on that winter afternoon. In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency. Work, sometimes organised at artificially high pressure, would alternate with stretches of time in which a chaotic nothingness reigned: periods when, surrounded by the inanities and misconceptions of the film world, a book conceived in terms of comparative reality would to some extent alleviate despair.

During one of these interims of leisure, reading a volume of his Diary, I found Pepys had visited Dogdene. A note explained that his patron, Lord Sandwich, was connected by marriage with the then Countess of Sleaford: the marquisate dating only from the coronation of William IV.

'So about noon we came to Dogdene, and I was fain to see the house, and that part newly builded whereof Dr. Wren did formerly hold converse with me, telling me here was one of the first mansion houses of England contrived as a n.o.bleman's seat rather than a keep moated for warfare. My Lord Sleaford is yet in town, where 'tis said he doth pay court to my Lady Castlemaine, at which the King is not a little displeased, 'tho 'twas thought she had long since lost her place. The Housekeeper was mighty civil, and showed us the Great Hall and stately Galleries, and the picture by P. Veronese that my Lord's grandfather did bring with him out of Italy, a most rare and n.o.ble thing. Then to the Gardens and Green Houses, where I did marvel to see the quickening of the Sensitive Plant. And so to the Still Room, where a great black maid offered a brave gla.s.s of metheglin, and I did have some merry talk with her begging her to show me a painted closet whereof the Housekeeper had spoken, yet had we not seen. Thither the bold wench took me readily enough, where I did kiss her twice or thrice and toyed wantonly with her. I perceive that she would not have denied me que je voudray, yet was I afeared and time was lacking. At which afterwards I was troubled, lest she should speak of what I had done, and her fellows make game of me when we were gone on our road.'

Everyone knows the manner in which some specific name will recur several times in quick succession from different quarters; part of that inexplicable magic throughout life that makes us suddenly think of someone before turning a street corner and meeting him, or her, face to face. In the same way, you may be struck, reading a book, by some obscure pa.s.sage or lines of verse, quoted again, quite unexpectedly, twenty-four hours later. It so happens that soon after I read Pepys's account of Dogdene, I found myself teamed up as a fellow script-writer with Chips Lovell. The question arose of some country house to appear in a scenario.

'Do you mean a place like Dogdene?' I asked.

'That sort of thing,' said Lovell.

He went on to explain, not without some justifiable satisfaction, that his mother, the current Lord Sleaford's sister, had been brought up there.

I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films. To be 'an author' was, of course, a recognised path of approach to this means of livelihood; so much so, indeed, at that period, that to serve a term as a script-writer was almost a routine stage in literary life. On the other hand, Lovell's arrival in the Studio had been more devious. His chief stock in trade, after an excellent personal appearance and plenty of cheek, was expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations. Much more interested in daily journalism than in writing scenarios, he coveted employment on the gossip column of a newspaper. I knew Sheldon slightly, one of the editorial staff of the evening paper at which Lovell aimed, and had promised to arrange, if possible, a meeting between them.

Lovell delighted in talking about his relations. His parents had eloped on account of family opposition to their marriage. There had not been enough money. The elder Lovell, who was what Uncle Giles used to call 'not entirely friendless in high places', was a painter. His insipid, Barbizonish little landscapes, not wholly devoid of merit, never sold beyond his own circle of friends. The elopement was in due course forgiven, but the younger Lovell was determined that no such gra.s.s should grow under his own feet. He was going to get on in life, he said, and in a few years make a 'good marriage'. Meanwhile, he was looking round, enjoying himself as much as business permitted. Since there were few enough jobs going about for young men at that time, his energies, which were considerable, had brought him temporarily into the film business; for which every one, including himself, agreed he had no particular vocation. Something better would turn up. The mystery remained how, in the first place, he had been accepted into an overcrowded profession. Our colleague, Feingold, hinted that the American bosses of the company dreamed of some intoxicating social advantage to be reaped by themselves, personally, through employing an eligible young man of that sort. Feingold may have been right; on the other hand, he was not wholly free from a strain of Jewish romanticism. Certainly it would have been hard to think of any fantasy too extraordinary for the thoughts of these higher executives to indulge.

One night, not long after we had talked of Dogdene, I had, together with Lovell, Feingold and Hegarty, unwillingly remained later than usual at the Studio in an effort to complete one of those 'treatments' of a film story, the tedium of which is known only to those who have experienced their concoction. On that particular evening, Feingold, in his mauve suit and crimson tie, was suffering from an unaccustomed bout of depression. He had graduated fairly recently from the cutting-room, at first full of enthusiasm for this new aspect of his craft. The pink skin of his plump, round face had begun to sag, making pockets around his bluish chin, as he lay back in a chair with an enormous pile of foolscap scribblings in front of him. He looked like a highly-coloured poster designed to excite compa.s.sion for the sufferings of his race. Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life-burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony-and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty years before, the ba.n.a.lity of which had persuaded some director that it would 'make a picture.' This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

Lovell and I used to alternate in which of us brought a car (both vehicles of modest appearance) to the Studio. That night it was Lovell's turn to give me a lift. We said good night to Feingold, who was moving Hegarty off to the pub at the end of the road. Lovell had paid twelve pounds ten for his machine; he started it up, though not without effort. I climbed in beside him. We drove towards London through the mist, blue-grey pockets of cloud drifting up ominously from the river.

'Shall we dine together?'

'All right. Let it be somewhere cheap.'

'Of that I am strongly in favour,' said Lovell. 'Do you know a place called Foppa's?'

'Yes-but don't let's go there.'

Although things had been 'over' with Jean for some time by then, Foppa's was still for some reason too reminiscent of her to be altogether comfortable; and I was firmly of the opinion that even the smallest trace of nostalgia for the immediate past was better avoided. A bracing future was required, rather than vain regrets. I congratulated myself on being able to consider the matter in such brisk terms. Lovell and I settled on some restaurant, and returned to the question whether Sheldon would be able to arrange for the job to be offered at just the right moment: the moment when Lovell's contract with the film company terminated, not before, nor too long after.

'I'm going to look in on an aunt of mine after making a meal,' Lovell said, tired at last of discussing his own prospects, 'Why not come too? There are always people there. At worst, it's a free drink. If some lovely girls are in evidence, we can dance to the gramophone.'

'What makes you think there will be lovely girls?'

'You may find anything at Aunt Molly's-even lovely girls. Are you coming?'

'I'd like to very much.'

'It's in South Kensington, I'm afraid.'

'Never mind. Tell me about your aunt.'

'She is called Molly Jeavons. She used to be called Molly Sleaford, you know."

'I didn't know.'

Confident that Lovell would enjoy giving further information, I questioned him. He had that deep appreciation of family relations.h.i.+ps and their ramifications that is a gift of its own, like being musical, or having an instinct for the value of horses or jewels. In Lovell's own case, he made good practical use of this grasp, although such a talent not uncommonly falls to individuals more than usually free from any desire for personal advancement: while equally often lacking in persons rightly regarded by the world as sn.o.bbish. Lovell, almost as interested in everyone else's family as his own, could describe how the most various people were in fact quite closely related.

'When my first Sleaford uncle died,' said Lovell, 'his widow, Molly, married a fellow called Jeavons. Not a bad chap at all, though of rather unglamorous background. He couldn't be described as particularly bright either, in spite of playing quite a good game of snooker. No live wire, in fact. Molly, on the other hand, is full of go.'

'What about her?'

'She was an Ardgla.s.s.'

'Any relation of Bijou Ardgla.s.s?'

'Sister-in-law, before Jumbo Ardgla.s.s divorced Bijou-who was his second wife, of course. Do you know her-probably slept with her? Most of one's friends have.'

'I've only seen her about the place. No other privileges.'

'Of course, you wouldn't be rich enough for Bijou,' said Lovell, not unkindly. 'But, as I was saying, Bijou got through what remained of the Ardgla.s.s money, which wasn't much, and left Jumbo, who'd really had enough himself by that time. Since then, she has been keeping company with a whole string of people-Prince Theodoric-G.o.d knows who. However, I believe she still comes to see Molly. Molly is like that. She will put up with anyone.'

'But why do you call him your "first" Sleaford uncle?'

'Because he died, and I still have an uncle of that name-the present one is Geoffrey-the first, John. Uncle Geoffrey was too poor to marry until he succeeded. He could only just rub along in one of the cheaper cavalry regiments. There were two other brothers between him and the t.i.tle. One was killed in the war, and the other knocked down by a bus.'

'They don't seem much good at staying alive.'

'The thing about the Sleafords,' said Lovell, 'is that they've always been absolutely mad on primogeniture. That's all very well in a way, but they've been so b.l.o.o.d.y mean to their widows and younger children that they are going to die out. They are a splendid example of upper-cla.s.s stinginess. Geoffrey got married at once, as people do when they come into a peerage, however dim. Of course, in this case-with Dogdene thrown in-it was something worth having. Unfortunately they've never managed to knock up an heir.'

Lovell went on to describe his 'first Sleaford uncle', who seems to have been a chilly, serious-minded, competent peer, a great organiser of charitable inst.i.tutions, who would have done well for himself in any walk of life. For a time he had been taken up with politics and held office under Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.

'He resigned at the time of the Marconi scandal,' said Lovell. 'He hadn't been making anything on the side himself, but he thought some of his Liberal colleagues had been a bit too liberal in the ethics of their own financial dealings. He was a selfish old man, but had what is called an exaggerated sense of honour.'

'I think I've seen Isbister's portrait of him.'

'Wearing the robes of the Garter. He took himself pretty seriously. Molly married him from the ballroom. She was only eighteen. Never seen a man before.'

'When did he die?'

'Spanish 'flu in 1919,' said Lovell. 'Molly first met Jeavons when Dogdene was a military hospital in the war. He was rather badly wounded, you know. The extraordinary thing was they didn't start a love affair or anything. If Uncle John hadn't died, she would still be-in the words of an Edwardian song my father hums whenever her name is mentioned-"Molly the Marchioness."'

'Where did she re-meet her second husband?'