In the end, for a Malcolm Lowry fan, it was the perfect way for a Mexican honeymoon to come to a halt. We ran out of money. Quentin, who is good at that sort of thing, made several phone calls. The iguana watched us. Perhaps he was even jealous of the telephone.
At last, after, it seemed, more than a dozen abortive telephone calls conducted in Spanish, Quentin got through to someone who said that they were the secretary to the British Consul. Naturally grave and courteous, Quentin enquired whether he might speak to the Consul.
It was the middle of the afternoon.
The reply came from the secretary, that no, Quentin might not speak to the Consul, since the Consul was taking his rest.
It was irresistible not to hope that the Consul was sleeping it off.
In the event, we flew home, happy in the almost certain knowledge that Oliver would be joining us at some point fairly soon. Over the next nine months I doubled in size. This is not a figure of speech. Quentin was gallant about having married someone of ten stone who very shortly became someone of eighteen.
After Oliver’s first Christmas in the hands of his doting but unpractised parents, help arrived in the octogenarian form of Nanny Ramsay. She was the real thing. Her best friend was also a nanny and had, like our nanny, been nanny to three generations of the same family. When they telephoned each other for a chat, they addressed one another as Nanny, as though it was their given name. I do not know Nanny Ramsay’s Christian name. She smoked one cigarette each evening, out of the window, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle and one hand on her narrow hip. The very old-fashioned sort of nannies used to come in two shapes, fat or thin. She was a thin nanny. She wore a white overall, a belt, a hairnet. Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party at the time and Nanny said of him, ‘Poor Michael Foot, I can’t imagine who his nanny might have been. Look at his hair.’
Nanny was a Scot from Crieff and had retired aged seventy-five. She came out of retirement to do some babies, as favours. She liked to weigh the baby before and after each feed, in proper scales such as a grocer might use, with weights going right down to an eighth of an ounce. Nanny made me keep a notebook to see how Oliver was getting on. It was quite clear that he was thriving. In the scales, he looked much like a person who is always going to hang over the end of things.
There had been but one tricky moment in the haze of delight that surrounded the arrival of Oliver, which was when Quentin’s aunt Camilla visited just before the birth. I had stencilled the cornice of the baby’s room with mermaids and Aunt Mickey, as the family called her, was perfectly content with that. My instinct told me, though we never actually knew from a scan, that the baby would be a boy, and I had purchased what I thought of as a very sensible selection of blue clothes for his arrival, jumpers, jeans, a blanket.
Aunt Mickey instinctively took over the matter of babywear for an impending heir. She took me to the White House, now long gone, where she ordered quires of monogrammed poplin handkerchiefs for the small face to rest upon. Dozens of long white nightgowns with no more than the faintest touch of forget-me-not on the smocking, drifts of shawl made in the Shetland Isles, Egyptian cotton sheets with the discreetest of ‘W’s in the corner, were all were amassed for this most weighty of arrivals. Any other equipment we acquired at the also long-gone Simple Garments of Sloane Street, where it was simply impossible to buy anything synthetic or with animals on it, or anything at all that looked as though it had been confected after 1953. Quentin’s Aunt Philippa Chelsea sent silk bibs. She was the family beauty, lushly voiced, clever, small. She had worked on Jocelyn Stevens’s Queen magazine.
Thank goodness for Aunt Mickey. She had set me on the path of rectitude. And so it was that Oliver and then Clementine were dressed as the kind of children who wore tweed coats with velvet collars and strapped sandals and short pure cotton socks. It is only fair at this stage to say that Clementine complained about this from the age of twelve to the age of twenty-three. She would say, ‘Mummy made me wear smock-dresses and strappy sandals till I was twenty.’ For a long time another line of Clem’s has been that she doesn’t want daughters though this has, by a recent miracle, been lifted during my blindness. The last time we touched on the matter of how she would dress her female children, she said, ‘I’m keeping them in smock-dresses and Mary Janes until they’re thirty!’
Aunt Mickey had worked at Bletchley Park, was widowed young, and lost both her older son and only grandson. For the weeks before my marriage to her nephew, she mothered me at St James’s Palace where the family lived when they were in London. It was at lunch on one of these pre-nuptial days that I learned that one must not cut the nose off a piece of Brie; to do so is called ‘nosing’, as in, ‘My dear, you’ve nosed the Brie’. It was at Aunt Mickey’s table during this astounding week that I looked into the bluest eyes I have ever seen up close, those of Clementine Beit.
Of course she was a Mitford. I fear blue eyes. I like them and I fear them. They freeze the mongrel in me that expects to be whipped.
I must here say something of Aunt Mickey’s brother, Quentin’s father Nol (Oliver) Lymington, my father-in-law. Nol had badly wanted to be a doctor but it was not felt that this was suitable to his station. He was a sweet man, with beautiful legs that he has passed to his son and grandsons. He was frail after a bout of TB and a long stay in Midhurst TB hospital. I am not sure that he received many visitors there, though I know that Mickey was a champion sister to him. He had a wide selection of talents. Towards the end of his shockingly short life, he apprenticed himself to Bill Poon, of Poon’s Chinese restaurant in Soho. Bill Poon was said to be descended from the man who invented the stock cube. Nol came away with a magnificent certificate from Bill Poon, certifying in cursive black ink that ‘Viscount Lee-Min-Tong’ had completed, with distinction, his cookery course. And so he had.
At this point Nol was living with us and I was pregnant: so were many of my friends who lived near us in Hampshire. Nol cut no corners and found every last elephant’s-ear fungus in the stores he haunted in Soho and gave us girls weekly lessons of such detail and panache.
After Chinese food, there was a lull; maybe it was in this lull that he produced my yellow retriever pup Guisachan, dropping her on to my bed as I slept after giving birth to Clementine. The next phase was altogether more esoteric and demanding; Nol became an apprentice chocolatier. He joined the University of the South Bank and learned a tremendous amount about the temperatures at which chocolate is shiny, less shiny, not shiny at all, completely screwed up and so on. He purchased a white overall and he worked in beautiful white gloves. There was nothing he could not do and boxes of chocolates so complex and so pretty that it was impossible to imagine eating them started to appear at family occasions. Nol was the most patient enrober, glosser, crystalliser, ganache-maker and praline-crackist. At this stage in his life he had not yet separated from his third wife. They lived in a house of airy elegance with a parrot named Albert, who had plucked off all the feathers save those on his head, so that Quentin would say he looked oven-ready, and three wire-haired dachshunds named Charlotte, Anne and Emily. The minute precision required by chocolate technology was a challenge to domestic and marital life and it was perhaps a manifestation of their internal schisms when forty-five gallons of enzyme for making soft centres turned up in a drum on the doorstep. Each chocolate requires but one drop.