The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(109)

Freed from poetry and modern music, from Sibley Swan, Walter Nazing and Hugo Solstis, Fleur was finding time for her son – the eleventh baronet. He represented for her the reality of things. Michael might have posthumous theories, and Labour predatory hopes, but for her the year 1944 would see the eleventh baronet come of age. That Kit should inherit an England worth living in was of more intrinsic importance than anything they proposed in the Commons and were unable to perform. All those houses they were going to build, for instance – very proper, but a little unnecessary if Kit still had Lippinghall Manor and South Square, Westminster, to dwell in. Not that Fleur voiced such cynical convictions, or admitted them even to herself. She did orthodox lip-service to the great god Progress.

The Peace of the World, Hygiene, Trade, and the End of Unemployment, preoccupied all, irrespective of Party, and Fleur was in the fashion; but instinct, rather than Michael and Sir James Foggart, told her that the time-honoured motto: ‘Eat your cake and have it’, which underlay the platforms of all Parties, was not ‘too frightfully’ sound. So long as Kit had cake, it was no good bothering too deeply about the rest; though, of course, one must seem to. Fluttering about her ‘salon’ – this to that person, and that to the other, and to all so pretty, she charmed by her grace, her common sense, her pliancy. Not infrequently she attended at the House, and sat, not listening too much to the speeches, yet picking up, as it were, by a sort of seventh sense (if women in Society all had six, surely Fleur had seven) what was necessary to the conduct of that ‘salon’ – the rise and fall of the Governmental barometer, the catchwords and clichés of policy; and, more valuable, impressions of personality, of the residuary man within the Member. She watched Michael’s career, with the fostering eye of a godmother who has given her godchild a blue morocco prayer-book, in the hope that some day he may remember its existence. Although a sedulous attendant at the House all through the spring and summer, Michael had not yet opened his mouth, and so far she had approved of his silence, while nurturing his desire to know his own mind by listening to his wanderings in Foggartism. If it were indeed the only permanent cure for Unemployment, as he said, she too was a Foggartist; common sense assuring her that the only real danger to Kit’s future lay in that national malady. Eliminate Unemployment, and nobody would have time to make a fuss. But her criticisms were often pertinent:

‘My dear boy, does a country ever sacrifice the present for the sake of the future?’ or: ‘Do you really think country life is better than town life?’ or: ‘Can you imagine sending Kit out of England at fourteen to some God-forsaken end of the world?’ or: ‘Do you suppose the towns will have it?’ And they roused Michael to such persistence and fluency that she felt he would really catch on in time – like old Sir Giles Snoreham, whom they would soon be making a peer, because he had always worn low-crowned hats and advocated a return to hansom cabs. Hats, buttonholes, an eye-glass – she turned over in her mind all such little realities as help a political career.

‘Plain glass doesn’t harm the sight; and it really has a focusing value, Michael.’

‘My child, it’s never done my Dad a bit of good; I doubt if it’s sold three copies of any of his books. No! If I get on, it’ll be by talking.’

But still she encouraged him to keep his mouth shut.

‘It’s no good starting wrong, Michael. These Labour people aren’t going to last out the year.’

‘Why not?’

‘Their heads are swelling, and their tempers going. They’re only on sufferance; people on sufferance have got to be pleasant or they won’t be suffered. When they go out, the Tories will get in again and probably last. You’ll have several years to be eccentric in, and by the time they’re out again, you’ll have your licence. Just go on working the human touch in your constituency; I’m sure it’s a mistake to forget you’ve got constituents.’

Michael spent most week-ends that summer working the human touch in mid-Bucks; and Fleur spent most week-ends with the eleventh baronet at her father’s house near Maple-durham.

Since wiping the dust of the city off his feet, after that affair of Elderson and the P.P.R.S., Soames had become almost too countrified for a Forsyte. He had bought the meadows on the far side of the river and several Jersey cows. Not that he was going in for farming or nonsense of that sort, but it gave him an interest to punt himself over and see them milked. He had put up a good deal of glass, too, and was laying down melons. The English melon was superior to any other, and every year’s connexion with a French wife made him more and more inclined to eat what he grew himself. After Michael was returned for Parliament, Fleur had sent him Sir James Foggart’s book, ‘The Parlous State of England’. When it came, he said to Annette: