Gone With the Windsors. Laurie Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ boot boy has gone by bicycle down to Aboyne with a wire to Fishbone and Strong. I’ve instructed them to find a good tenant for Sweet Air. Flora is happy. She’s been dancing up and down the Long Gallery, singing, “Aunt Bayba’s staying forever!”

      Penelope seems very pleased, too. She says there’s a house that may be coming up across from them in Cadogan Square. I don’t know. I’ll have to see if it’s my kind of neighborhood.

      The Anstruther-Brodies have arrived, which signals the start of the shooting party.

      The quarry is a small bird called grice.

      12th August 1932

      The guns went out early, Ailsa Anstruther-Brodie among them. It was all too obvious at dinner last night that Melhuish is very smitten. He kept gushing about her being a first-rate shot, and bounding across the room to light her cigarette. It all seems to sail over Violet’s head.

      Everything now revolves around the shooting, even luncheon, so one has the choice of piling into motors and joining the guns, or going hungry. Even Viscount Minskip has been forced to reschedule his daily battle. Two long tables had been taken up to the moor and set with china and flatware kept especially for these occasions. Shooting lunches, they’re called. The whole thing must be an enormous strain on Violet’s struggling staff, and it would be altogether simpler if sandwiches were sent up in a shooting brake and the rest of us were left in peace, but no. Ladies, children, and Minskip at one table; men, loaders, beaters, and Ailsa Anstruther-Brodie at the other. Stag pie and salad and a cake decorated with flaked almonds, which Rory calls Toenail Cake.

      Jane Habberley is now sucking up to me, asking my advice about watercolor painting—feeling pangs of guilt about my tango record, I hope.

      13th August 1932

      I now know everything there is to know about shooting parties. The guns come in at five and talk of nothing but the day’s bag. More than sixty birds were taken today, which means we shall be eating them till kingdom come, but at least it will make a change from fish. The guns also dash away after one whiskey, help themselves to all the hot water, then commandeer the conversation at dinner. Weather prospects, heather bugs, gamekeepers droller than Beatrice Lillie, dogs smarter than Alfred Einstein.

      Next year, I shall summer with my own kind of people. The raspberries here are delicious, however.

      Weather close and thundery. Poor Ena Spain is suffering. She perspires even on a cold day. Her age, I suppose. She’ll be moving on to Balmoral on Tuesday, to visit with Their Majesties. George Lightfoot says Balmoral is like Drumcanna with extra tartan. “Home from home,” Ena calls it. She’s been there just about every summer of her life.

      She said, “Well, no one ever dared question it. Grandmama loved Balmoral, and wherever she went we followed. She never let Mama out of her sight. Even visited her on her honeymoon! But Mama doesn’t come anymore. She had her fill of it, and she doesn’t care for travel. She prefers to stay put.”

      Ena’s mother is Princess Baby, still going strong, with an apartment at Kensington Palace and a house on the Isle of Wight.

      Violet said, “And is she still beavering away at her diaries?”

      Ena said, “She is. Almost finished, I think.”

      I told her I keep a diary.

      “Well,” she said, “these aren’t Mama’s own diaries. They’re Grandmama’s.”

      Princess Baby is apparently going through Queen Victoria’s diaries, taking out anything that might cause offense and rewriting them in fresh notebooks. It’s called editing.

      I said, “No one had better change my diaries after I’m gone. I’ll be very cross.”

      Violet said, “Maybell, rest assured, nobody will be interested in your diary.”

      14th August 1932

      Rain beating against the windows all night, heavy snoring from Anstruther-Brodie, who is in the room below mine, and then, just as I’d dropped off to sleep, doors banging as the early birds went down to breakfast. When the party breaks up on Tuesday, I may try the room Jane Habberley’s been occupying. She claims she sleeps like the dead when she’s at Drumcanna, and I believe I can live with wall-to-wall tartan—for a few nights, at any rate.

      An extraordinary question from Penelope. Have I managed to enjoy a little romance while I’ve been here? Romance!

      I said, “I already told you what I think of Tommy Minskip.”

      “Well, not Minskip, obviously,” she said. “But Habberley perhaps, or Lightfoot? You seem quite ‘in’ with him.”

      Well, Ralph Habberley has bad breath, not to mention a wife. George Lightfoot is certainly the best of the bunch, but a little too young for me. He never brushes his hair and he will sit sideways, swinging his long, gangling legs over the arm of the chair. If I were in a hurry to find a beau, which I am not, I’d be looking for a man with a little silver at his temples.

      I said, “No. I haven’t had a romance. Have you?”

      “No,” she said. “I put it down to the quality of the shooting. Last year they were coming in with very small bags, and I found Anstruther-Brodie quite in the mood for an adventure. But this year, not a nibble. Maybe I’ll make a play for Lightfoot this evening, if you’re sure I won’t be trespassing.”

      How desperate and how dangerous. A person could so easily fall and break their neck, tiptoeing up and down those turret stairs in a state of ardor.

      16th August 1932

      Penelope winked at me over the kedgeree, signaling she made a conquest last night.

      She said, “Maybell, why don’t I stay and keep you company when Violet and Melhuish go to Birkhall? Fergus won’t mind going on to Glendochrie without me.”

      I thanked her but pointed out that everyone else is moving on today. Including George Lightfoot. More winks. Then a lot of giggling in the morning room while she had me guess who she’s seduced. Not Lightfoot, because he played billiards all evening and didn’t tango with her once. Not Anstruther-Brodie, because that would be like reading yesterday’s newspaper. And not Ralph Habberley, because he’s a drip and the last man on earth. So who? Angus.

      I said, “Who is Angus?”

      “Shh,” she said. “One of the housemaids is his sister. He’s the underghillie. Isn’t it a lark?”

      An underghillie! That’s nothing more than a junior fishing assistant. It would be like having an assignation with a boot boy.

      She says she found him in the rod room.

      Ena Spain, George Lightfoot, the Anstruther-Brodies, and Doopie, whom the Majesties appear to dote on, just left for Balmoral. The Blythes and the Habberleys are meant to be going south to Perthshire to another shooting party, but a major row blew up between Penelope and Fergus as to whether she should remain here instead. I’m afraid she got no support from me.

      She СКАЧАТЬ