The preparations for the actual wedding were full of difficulty. In the first place, Porstock knew nobody in England, and had forgotten to ask anyone to be his best man. When the omission was discovered, he quite cheerfully suggested his mechanic, and actually asked him: he was, however, a Catholic, and “wasn’t sure but the priests would read him out from the altar” if he consented, a possibility of which he seemed to live in permanent dread. However, a great friend of our family, Frank Hopgood (the College of Heralds did take him back) consented to act on a rather slight acquaintance, which had sufficed to convince him that Porstock was “one of the very.” Then there was the question of where Porstock should stay on the night before the ceremony, since he could not stay with us—this tradition was one which my mother would not hear of departing from, although Mrs. Rowlands proved to her conclusively that it was a survival of marriage by capture. In the end, he stayed with the Combes, and I am afraid disappointed Lady Combe a good deal: she had expected him to be full of nervousness, and even tried, as far as her nature would permit, to rally him archly on his approaching happiness, but found him iron-nerved as usual. She said, for instance, that she supposed he would want to look his best for to-morrow (I fancy it must have been a bedtime hint), to which he replied that looking your best was nervous work while you were in the kissing and cuddling stage, but he wasn’t going to get rattled any about the aisle-walk. Altogether I am afraid he did not win golden opinions at The Pines. But after all, as he said, the point was to “get the parson busy,” and he had no patience with details. My mother insisted on “giving me away,” a pretty old custom which was even then falling into disuse.

Then there was the question of the form of service. Mrs. Rowlands’ Book of Modern Prayer was turned down at once, curiously by Juliet: she declared that she would inevitably get the staggers if I were asked “Wilt thou respect him and show all reasonable deference to him, love, humour, and tolerate him, in sickness (other than permanent insanity) and in health?”: nor was it with much less apprehension that she looked forward to my replying that I would “take him to my wedded husband, in accordance with the terms of the marriage settlement, till death, permanent insanity, cruelty, infidelity, or incompatibility of temperament us did part.” Finally we fell back on “The Revised Book of Common Prayer” (highly recommended by all the Bishops), which contented itself with altering “obey and serve” to “respect and co-operate with him,” and adding to the final words “so long as ye both shall live” the proviso “until the King shall take other order.” When it was explained to Porstock (after the ceremony) that this curious phrase allowed for the possibility of a divorce, he replied that the King would have to set his alarum clock at three any morning he wanted to take that kind of order—which was understood to indicate his unwillingness that His Majesty should move in the matter at all.

One or two of my friends, all of the older generation, kept up the old practice of giving wedding presents in kind—Lady Combe, for example, gave me a new form of “sluggard’s delight” (Porstock did not go to bed till two the night he stayed with them), which automatically boiled an egg every half-hour, and Lady Lushcombe some beautiful table silver with my maiden initials engraved upon it, explaining that it was “just as well to be prepared for all emergencies, my dear.” But cheques were already the usual form, and I was able to publish the fact that I had received cheques amounting to £2,600 13s. 4d. in honour of the occasion. The stupid and invidious habit of itemizing the list of cheques had not then grown up.

Of the ceremony itself I am but an indifferent witness; for, curiously enough, I felt very nervous and fidgety all the morning, and as I went up the church found myself actually turning faint; Juliet restored me to myself by whispering that it was a relic of marriage by capture. I am not going to describe my wedding-dress, for young ladies of forty years on to ridicule and call dowdy. Porstock’s wedding-suit, which had been specially made for him in Paris, was (as a silly compliment to myself) of a curious opalescent material which I have never seen before or since. The service was on the whole a simple one, out of respect for the village choir and for Mrs. Rowlands’ organ-playing: besides “O perfect Love,” which was of course by that time an official part of the service,[[6]] we only had “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden” and Kipling’s Recessional. But, since we were rather long in the vestry doing the signatures, Mrs. Rowlands got tired of playing the Wedding March, and we finally left the church to an extemporization of her own, distantly based on alternate recollections of “The Star-spangled Banner” and “The Marseillaise.”

The breakfast afterwards was a very simple affair, as was usual in those days; the menu did not go over the page, and I doubt if the whole meal lasted more than three hours. There were, of course, the usual interminable speeches, in the course of which Sir Richard produced a very long metaphor about deep-sea fishing, under the mistaken impression that opals came out of oysters, and Porstock distinguished himself by declaring, before an astonished audience, that if they heard of anyone prospecting for the big noise in brides, they had better send them round to him right away. It was all very thrilling and very touching, and Mr. Hodges saying “God bless you!” moved me, I am afraid, to tears. But there was only one real moment in the day, and that was when Porstock got his hand on the lever, and the autumn glories of Hertfordshire leapt away from underneath.

CHAPTER IX
LONDON SOCIETY AND ITS FOLLIES

Society is the “head” on the tankard of civilization; if you did not want it, you should not have poured so fast.—Henricourt: Kleptomania, Bk. IV, Part II, ch. 37.

We spent our honeymoon in Algiers. The time passed all too quickly, since the office was unable to spare me for more than a month. Print shall not profane these sacred memories. It is enough for my readers to know that early in the next year, 1945, I gave up the active part which I had hitherto taken in the management of the business, and became something of a sleeping partner. We took a house in Chiswick, which had the advantage of being a central as well as a fashionable quarter. We bought Greylands, and added to it a little, taking great care, however, not to spoil the character of the house—our needs, indeed, were comparatively simple. Two covered courts, a ferro-concrete drome, and a new smoking-room for my women guests proved, in the end, to be all that was necessary. It was at Greylands that my two sons were born, Francis James, the second and last Lord Porstock, in 1946, and Gervase Linthorpe, who never lived to succeed him, in 1947. But I have, perhaps, spent too much space already in purely domestic chronicles; my readers will be expecting by now some account of the world of London as it was forty years ago. Did I say “the world” of London? Only a very tiny bit of it, I am afraid; for we all live in small worlds, and perhaps in some ways there is none smaller than that which is called “Society.” Yet, for a later generation, it is easy to understand why Society, in this sense, should be of particular interest. For, after all, it is the leisured and the more elaborately differentiated class who reflect most faithfully the fads and the follies of their time.

The fads and the follies! I remember bluff old Lord Billericay, when we were having one of those terrifying smart conversations at Edith St. Briavel’s, being called upon to contribute his definition of what one meant by Society; to which the only answer he would give was, “I have no respect for a Society which doesn’t see that Tommy Lieberts is a fool.” And yet, when I look back at the salons of those days, and think how the beauty that thronged them has faded, and the wit and inspiration that then seemed so novel has become flat and insipid, and the serious questions which we discussed have either been platitudinously answered by now or have ceased to be questions at all, I sometimes think the only thing that lives about us is our follies. For these are only the pastime of a moment, and, passing with the moment, they escape by their very briefness of duration the desecrating hand of time. I suppose we were foolish. Manners, language, and even thought had become artificial, as the result of a long spell of European peace and prosperity: I suppose it is always so until a war comes to waken us up to a sense of realities. Let me try and remember, then, some of the charming fools I knew.

The people with parlour tricks! Perhaps the most extraordinary of these was Algy Fearon, whose sole accomplishment was to giggle. When he was young, it was treated as a disease; by inoculation when the inoculation craze was in vogue, till his poor little system (he was only eight at the time) was running all over with cachinnococci, as I think they called them—but nothing would stop Algy laughing. Then he went to a mind-cure man, who I believe tickled him unmercifully in the hope that he would have enough of it that way—but nothing would stop Algy laughing. Finally he made a virtue of necessity, and took his degree at Oxford without being sent down more than twice, and came up to London to go into business. To his intense surprise, he became the lion of the hour. Hostesses scrambled for him, and almost got to the point of writing on their cards “to hear Mr. Fearon laugh.” About half-way through dinner, he would break down with no warning whatever, and roll from side to side in agonies of merriment—and every one else had to join in. You couldn’t help yourself. He went out to South Africa afterwards, but I never heard that he was cured.