Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
PENGUIN BOOKS
Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford (1904–73) was born in London, the eldest child of the second Baron Redesdale. Her childhood in a large, remote country house with her five sisters and one brother is recounted in the early chapters of The Pursuit of Love (1945), which, according to the author, is largely autobiographical. Apart from being taught to ride and speak French, Nancy Mitford always claimed she never received a proper education. She started writing before her marriage in 1932 in order ‘to relieve the boredom of the intervals between the recreations established by the social conventions of her world’ and had written four novels, including Wigs on the Green (1935), before the success of The Pursuit of Love in 1945. After the war she moved to Paris where she lived for the rest of her life. She followed The Pursuit of Love with Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). She also wrote four works of biography: Madame de Pompadour, first published to great acclaim in 1954, Voltaire in Love, The Sun King and Frederick the Great. As well as being a novelist and a biographer she also translated Madame de Lafayette’s classic novel La Princesse de Clèves into English, and edited Noblesse Oblige, a collection of essays concerned with the behaviour of the English aristocracy and the idea of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. Nancy Mitford was awarded the CBE in 1972.
Alan Cumming is an actor, director, producer and writer. He has adapted several plays for the Royal National Theatre and starred as the Pope in his own adaptation of Jean Genet’s Elle in New York. With Jennifer Jason Leigh he wrote and directed the film The Anniversary Party, which premiered at Cannes and won a National Board of Review award and two Independent Spirit nominations. He has written introductions and contributions for books on a range of subjects including Andy Warhol, nude photography and the AIDS crisis, and for publications such as Newsweek, BlackBook, Interview, Marie Claire, Contents, OUT Traveler, the Independent and House and Garden. His novel Tommy’s Tale was published by Penguin in 2003.
Love in a Cold Climate
NANCY MITFORD
Introduction by Alan Cumming
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1949
Published in Penguin Books 1954
Reissued with a new introduction in this edition 2010
Copyright © the Estate of Nancy Mitford, 1949
Introduction copyright © Alan Cumming, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196474-4
To LORD BERNERS
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Introduction
Reading this book is – as that ‘awful effeminate pansy’ Cedric says on the very last page – like ‘having our lovely cake and eating it too’. Just like a delicious cake, it melts in the mouth, but it also can make one a little queasy.
Turning her attentions from the goings-on at Alconleigh in Mitford’s previous novel The Pursuit of Love, our heroine Fanny concentrates now on her friend Polly, newly returned from India with her parents Lord and Lady Montdore. Polly’s curiosity as to whether the mores of young lovers are the same in the inclement weather of the south of England as they had been in her former home gives the book its title. Polly is a beauty but, at least in her mother’s eyes, unruly and stubborn, as she cannot seem to be married off. Fanny, even with all her social disadvantages – an absent father and a mother whose proclivity for travelling around the world having inappropriate and brief affairs has earned her the moniker ‘the Bolter’ – manages to get engaged before Polly. But when Polly finally does get her man, she sends seismic shock-waves across the Home Counties and the ensuing schism between her and her parents allows a distant relative from Nova Scotia named Cedric to enter stage right with a flourish. And oh boy, what a flourish!
Mitford, in the guise of the plucky Fanny, manages to stand outside the rarefied world of the English upper classes while never actually leaving the inner circle for a single second. Like a mummy bird feeding her young, she drops entertaining little nuggets of gossip, eccentricity and wife-swapping into our open and willing beaks.
I sometimes think of the world of Posh in the same way as I think of the world of religion: its inhabitants are often fascinating, hilarious, and in every corner of the globe, but when push comes to shove they will close ranks and cast you out when they realize you are not really one of them. That’s how both groups have survived and prospered for so long: they look after their own, and they don’t change. Here I feel I must confess that being Scottish and working class I have a genetic chip on my shoulder concerning the English upper classes. Actually, no, don’t think of it as a chip, more a super-sized proletariat-flavoured chip supper that rests as heavily on my shoulder as one of Lady Montdore’s jewels after Cedric’s makeover.
However, even my easily risen hackles are smoothed by the brilliance of the observational wit on offer here. This book is fun. And fascinating. It’s set at a time of great change and, as we all know, change of any kind is hard, but seemingly even more so, for the upper classes. Here, for example, the introduction of central heating to a draughty, freezing-cold country house is lamented by Fanny thus: ‘the age of luxury was ended and that of comfort had begun’. And if that weren’t bad enough, there is a Labour majority government that must be contended with! (Sorry, I’m at it again.)
Foreigners, of course, are seen as obsessed with food and sex, and there’s an enlightening description of a burglar slinking through the bedrooms at a weekend party being mistaken for an aristocratic Fren
ch lothario come to service the willing English ladies (and, more tellingly, being directed to their wives by the sleepy, libidinally challenged husbands).
Fanny is a fascinating character, for as odd and exasperating as she may seem to her social peers (she marries an Oxford don for goodness’ sake!), to us utterances like ‘Aunt Emily never allowed me to take her maid on visits as she said it would spoil me in case later on I should marry a poor man and have to do without one’ plant her firmly back among them. But this is the enchantment of Mitford’s writing: throwing open the door of the zoo and letting us watch the animals. Here is the prospect of Fanny marrying for love [that Lady Montdore offers]: ‘Remember that love cannot last, it never does… One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle. Then at meal times, sitting with all the unimportant people for ever and ever. And no motor. Not a very nice prospect, you know.’
It’s amazing that Fanny, and Nancy Mitford, are able to make spending time with these people not just a nice prospect, but actually a delicious one that leaves us gagging for another slice.
Alan Cumming
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
I AM obliged to begin this story with a brief account of the Hampton family, because it is necessary to emphasize the fact once and for all that the Hamptons were very grand as well as very rich. A glance at Burke or at Debrett would be quite enough to make this clear, but these large volumes are not always available, while the books on the subject by Lord Montdore’s brother-in-law, Boy Dougdale, are all out of print. His great talent for snobbishness and small talent for literature have produced three detailed studies of his wife’s forebears, but they can only be read now by asking a bookseller to get them at second hand. (The bookseller will put an advertisement in his trade paper The Clique, ‘H. Dougdale, any by’. He will be snowed under with copies at about a shilling each, and will then proudly inform his customer that he has ‘managed to find what you want’, implying hours of careful search on barrows, dirt cheap, at 305 the three.) Georgiana Lady Montdore and Her Circle, The Magnificent Montdores and Old Chronicles of Hampton, I have them beside me as I write, and see that the opening paragraph of the first is:
‘Two ladies, one dark, one fair, both young and lovely, were driving briskly towards the little village of Kensington on a fine May morning. They were Georgiana, Countess of Montdore and her great friend Walburga, Duchess of Pad-dington, and they made a delightfully animated picture as they discussed the burning question of the hour – should one, or should one not, subscribe to a parting present for poor, dear Princess Lieven?’
This book is dedicated, by gracious permission, to Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess Peter of Russia, and has eight full-page illustrations.
It must be said that when this terrible trilogy first came out it had quite a vogue with the lending library public.
‘The family of Hampton is ancient in the West of England, indeed Fuller, in his Worthies, mentions it as being of stupendous antiquity.’
Burke makes it out just a shade more ancient than does Debrett, but both plunge back into the mists of medieval times, from which they drag forth ancestors with P. G. Wodehouse names, Ugs and Berts and Threds, and Walter Scott fates. ‘His Lordship was attainted – beheaded – convicted – proscribed – exiled – dragged from prison by a furious mob – slain at the Battle of Crécy – went down in the White Ship – perished during the third crusade – killed in a duel.’ There were very few natural deaths to record in the early misty days. Both Burke and Debrett linger with obvious enjoyment over so genuine an object as this family, unspoilt by the ambiguities of female line and deed poll. Nor could any of those horrid books which came out in the nineteenth century, devoted to research and aiming to denigrate the nobility, make the object seem less genuine. Tall, golden-haired barons, born in wedlock and all looking very much alike, succeeded each other at Hampton, on lands which had never been bought or sold, until, in 1770, the Lord Hampton of the day brought back, from a visit to Versailles, a French bride, a Mademoiselle de Montdore. Their son had brown eyes, a dark skin and presumably, for it is powdered in all the pictures of him, black hair. This blackness did not persist in the family; he married a golden-haired heiress from Derbyshire and the Hamptons reverted to their blue and gold looks, for which they are famous to this day. The son of the Frenchwoman was rather clever and very worldly; he dabbled in politics and wrote a book of aphorisms. A great and life-long friendship with the Regent procured him, among other favours, an earldom. His mother’s family having all perished during the Terror in France, he took her name as his title. Enormously rich, he spent enormously; he had a taste for French objects of art and acquired, during the years which followed the Revolution, a splendid collection of such things, including many pieces from the royal establishments, and others which had been looted out of the Hôtel de Montdore in the Rue de Varenne. To make a suitable setting for this collection he then proceeded to pull down, at Hampton, the large plain house that Adam had built for his grandfather, and to drag over to England stone by stone (as modern American millionaires are supposed to do) a Gothic French château. This he assembled round a splendid tower of his own designing, covered the walls of the rooms with French panelling and silks, and set it in a formal landscape which he also designed and planted himself. It was all very grand and very mad, and in the between-wars period of which I write, very much out of fashion. ‘I suppose it is beautiful,’ people used to say, ‘but frankly I don’t admire it.’
This Lord Montdore also built Montdore House in Park Lane and a castle on a crag in Aberdeenshire. He was really much the most interesting and original character the family ever produced, but no member of it deviated from a tradition of authority. A solid, worthy, powerful Hampton can be found on every page of English history, his influence enormous in the West of England and his counsels not unheeded in London.
The tradition was carried on by the father of my friend Polly Hampton. If an Englishman could be descended from the gods it would be he, so much the very type of English nobleman that those who believed in aristocratic government would always begin by pointing to him as a justification of their argument. It was generally felt, indeed, that if there were more people like him the country would not be in its present mess, even Socialists conceding his excellence, which they could afford to do since there was only one of him and he was getting on. A scholar, a Christian, a gentleman, finest shot in the British Isles, best-looking Viceroy we ever sent to India, a popular landlord, a pillar of the Conservative party, a wonderful old man, in short, who nothing common ever did or mean. My cousin Linda and I, two irreverent little girls whose opinion makes no odds, used to think that he was a wonderful old fraud, and it seemed to us that in that house it was Lady Montdore who really counted. Now Lady Montdore was for ever doing common things and mean and she was intensely unpopular, quite as much disliked as her husband was loved, so that anything he might do that was considered not quite worthy of him, or which did not quite fit in with his reputation, was immediately laid at her door. ‘Of course she made him do it.’ On the other hand I have often wondered whether without her to bully him and push him forward and plot and intrigue for him and ‘make him do it’, whether in fact, without the help of those very attributes which caused her to be so much disliked, her thick skin and ambition and boundless driving energy, he would ever have done anything at all noteworthy in the world.
This is not a popular theory. I am told that by the time I really knew him, after they got back from India, he was already old and tired out and had given up the struggle, and that, when he was in his prime, he had not only controlled the destinies of men but also the vulgarities of his wife. I wonder. There was an ineffectiveness about Lord Montdore which had nothing to do with age; he was certainly beautiful to look at, but it was an empty beauty like that of a woman who has no sex appea
l, he looked wonderful and old, but it seemed to me that, in spite of the fact that he still went regularly to the House of Lords, attended the Privy Council, sat on many committees, and often appeared in the Birthday Honours, he might just as well have been made of wonderful old cardboard.
Lady Montdore, however, was flesh and blood all right. She was born a Miss Perrotte, the handsome daughter of a country squire of small means and no particular note, so that her marriage to Lord Montdore was a far better one than she could reasonably have been expected to make. As time went on, when her worldly greed and snobbishness, her terrible relentless rudeness, had become proverbial, and formed the subject of many a legendary tale, people were inclined to suppose that her origins must have been low or transatlantic, but, in fact, she was perfectly well-born and had been decently brought up, what used to be called ‘a lady’; so that there were no mitigating circumstances, and she ought to have known better.
No doubt her rampant vulgarity must have become more evident and less controlled with the years. In any case her husband never seemed aware of it, and the marriage was a success. Lady Montdore soon embarked him upon a public career, the fruits of which he was able to enjoy without much hard work since she made it her business to see that he was surrounded by a horde of efficient underlings, and though he pretended to despise the social life which gave meaning to her existence, he put up with it very gracefully, exercising a natural talent for agreeable conversation and accepting as his due the fact that people thought him wonderful.
‘Isn’t Lord Montdore wonderful? Sonia, of course, is past a joke, but he is so brilliant, such a dear, I do love him.’
People liked to pretend that it was solely on his account that they ever went to the house at all, but this was great nonsense because the lively quality, the fun of Lady Montdore’s parties had nothing whatever to do with him, and, hateful as she may have been in many ways, she excelled as a hostess.
