Free Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford Page B

house would have tolerated for long those active little creatures. Lady Bobbin was the type of woman best described by that single adjective so explicit of its own dreary meaning, ‘plain’. As a girl she had been the greatest heiress of her time and even then nobody could find a happier epithet with which to describe her looks than ‘handsome’, and that to the loudly expressed mystification of those of her fellow débutantes whose faces were their fortunes. At forty-five she was tall and thin but heavy of movement, her fuzzy hair uncut, her muddy skin unaided by any condiment, and with a voice like the worst sort of loud-speaker, imitating and aggressive and perpetually at work. She was without any kind of grace, either mental or physical.
    At twenty-four she had married Sir Hudson Bobbin, a weak but rather charming character. To those who knew her it was a perpetual mystery, not indeed that she had married at all, as, but for the packages of tea, it must have been; but that having married she should have produced children of such charm and beauty as were possessed by her son Roderick and her daughter Philadelphia. She herself, if she had ever considered their undoubted attractiveness, would have felt it to be profoundly unimportant. (Actually, in her eyes, Roderick was merely a tiresome little schoolboy and Philadelphia a pert and disagreeable girl.) She knew that every woman has in life two main duties, to marry well and to produce a son and heir; having achieved both it was of no consequence to herwhether or not the marriage was a happy one or the heir a young man of looks and distinction. Except for one terrible period, when between the sinking of Sir Hudson in the Lusitania and the birth of Roderick, she had been submitted to the suspense of not knowing whether the child would indeed prove to be of the required male sex, she had never known much disquietude on the score of her family life. Her daughter, beyond the initial disappointment caused by her sex, had never interested her at all, her one wish in that direction being that Philadelphia should marry as quickly and as advantageously as possible. The only thing which afforded her a real and lasting satisfaction was her pack of foxhounds. These meant to her what husband, children or artistic expression may mean to other women; they were her vanity and her delight. A hard day’s hunting was to her the most exquisite of joys, and when this happiness was rendered temporarily impossible by frost, flood, or, as at present, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the district, her bitterness of spirit would be beyond all bounds; she would be as one mourning the untimely loss of a beloved, shut up within herself and inaccessible to sympathy.
    Philadelphia Bobbin balanced a few pieces of rather dreary holly on the frame of her great grandmother’s portrait by W. Etty.
    ‘And now,’ she said, getting down from the chair on which she had been standing, and viewing without satisfaction the results of her handiwork, ‘I suppose I had better go and meet this hellish tutor. God, how I do hate Christmas.’
    ‘Don’t speak like that, Philadelphia,’ said Lady Bobbin sharply, looking up from her perusal of the
Morning Post
, a perusal which at present was a daily torture to her since it consisted entirely in reading about the good runs of other packs of hounds which, more fortunate than hers, were not haunted by the grim spectre of foot and mouth disease. ‘May I ask what else you want to be doing at this particular moment? The truth is you never do a hand’s turn for anybody except yourself – self,self, self with you, all day long. You ought to be very grateful to have a motor car of your own instead of making all this fuss when you are asked, occasionally, to do some little errand for me with it. Another time I will hire a car when Fred is away. I would much sooner do that than have all these complaints. And if you’re going to be in such a disgustingly bad