The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

who had eaten nothing since one o’clock, was hungry and rather cross; he felt exhausted by so much vitality and secretly annoyed that Walter, whom he regarded as the most brilliant of his friends, should be about to ruin his career by entering upon the state of matrimony. He thought that he could already perceive the signs of a disintegrating intellect as they sat at dinner discussing where they should go afterwards. Every nightclub in London was suggested, only to be turned down with:
‘Not there again – I couldn’t bear it!’
By the time they had finished their coffee Sally said that it was too early yet to go on anywhere, and that she, personally, was tired out and wanted to go home. So, to Albert’s relief, they departed once more, in a taxi.
The next morning Albert left for Paris. It had come to him during the night that he wished to be a great abstract painter.

2
Two years and two weeks later Albert Gates stood on a cross-Channel steamer, watching with some depression the cliffs of Dover, which looked more than ever, he thought, like Turner’s picture of them. The day was calm but mildly wet, it having, of course, begun to rain on that corner of a foreign field which is for ever England – the Calais railway station. Albert, having a susceptible stomach, was thankful for the calm while resentful of the rain, which seemed a little unnecessary in July. He stood alone and quite still, unlike the other passengers, most of whom were running to and fro collecting their various possessions, asking where they could change money and congratulating each other on the excellence of the crossing. Every mirror was besieged by women powdering their noses, an action which apparently never fails to put fresh courage and energy into females of the human species. A few scattered little groups of French people had already assumed the lonely and defiant aspect of foreigners in a strange land. Paris seemed a great distance away.
Albert remembered how once, as a child, returning from some holiday abroad, he had begun at this juncture to cry very bitterly. He remembered vividly the feelings of black rage which surged up in him when his mother, realizing in a dim way that those tears were not wholly to be accounted for by seasickness, tiredness, or even the near approach of another term at school, began to recite a dreary poem whose opening lines were:
‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
“This is my own, my native land? …”’
She did not realize that there are people, and Albert among them, to whom their native land is less of a home than almost any other.
He thought of the journey from Calais to Paris. That, to him, was the real homecoming. Paris, the centre of art, literature and all culture! The two years that he had just spent there were the happiest of his whole life, and now the prospect of revisiting England, even for a short time, filled him with a sort of nervous misery. Before those two years Albert had never known real contentment. Eton and Oxford had meant for him a continual warfare against authority, which to one of his highly-strung temperament was enervating in the extreme.
He had certainly some consolation in the shape of several devoted friends; but, although he was not consciously aware of it, these very friendships made too great a demand upon his nervous energy.
What he needed at that stage of his development was regular, hard and congenial work, and this he had found in Paris.
So happy had he been there that it is doubtful whether he would ever have exchanged, even for a few days, the only place where he had known complete well-being for a city which had always seemed to him cold and unsympathetic, but for two circumstances. One was that Walter and Sally had written even more persuasively than usual to beg that he would stay with them in their London flat. He had not seen them since that evening when they dined with him at the Ritz, and Walter was the one person whom he had genuinely missed and found irreplaceable.
The other circumstance – the one that really decided him – was that he had recently shown his pictures to a London art dealer of his acquaintance, who had immediately offered to give him an exhibition the following autumn. As this was a man of some influence in the London world of art, owning the particularly pleasant Chelsea Galleries where the exhibition would be held, Albert felt that here was an opportunity not to be missed. He arranged therefore to bring over his pictures immediately, intending to store them and look about for a studio where he himself could stay until the exhibition should be over, late in October. Paris was becoming hot and stuffy and he felt that a change of air would do him good. Also, he was really very much excited at the prospect of seeing Walter again.
Presently the ship approached the quay, and sailors began adjusting a gangway at the very spot where Albert stood. Inconsequently he remembered the landing of the Normans – how William the Conqueror, springing first from the boat, seized in his hands a sod of English soil. It would be hard to do that nowadays. Impossible even to be the first to land, he thought, as he was brushed from the gangway by a woman of determined features laden with hand luggage which she used as a weapon.
In the train he found himself sharing a carriage with two idiotic girls who were coming home from a term at some finishing school in Paris. They were rather obviously showing off on his account. After talking at some length of their clandestine affairs with two French officers, which appeared to consist solely in passing notes to them when visiting the Louvre on Thursday afternoons, but which they evidently regarded