Читать книгу Gone With the Windsors - Laurie Graham - Страница 119

Trent Park is a dream. Acres of parkland, lakes, tree-lined avenues, and dozens of dusky servants who glide around silently and appear the very moment they’re needed. His sister, Sybil, attended, minus husband who was away at a tennis tournament. She looks haughty, very straight-backed, with iron-gray hair and rather hooded eyes, but she’s really very agreeable.

“Violet’s sister!” she said. “Of course! How very naughty of Violet not to have brought you to tea.”

The other guests were Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, a Polish piano player called Rubinstein plus wife, a Sassoon cousin from Paris, and two Italian airmen, with whom one could only gesticulate and offer the occasional “olé.”

We had oysters, flown up from Kent, and roast Guinea fowl dressed with home-grown oranges. In Hertfordshire! Then a blue cheese made on Sibyl’s estate in Norfolk and a plum pudding carried flaming and aloft by a six-foot Ethiopian in silk livery. Everything was perfect.

Lightfoot said, “Now will you please set the record straight. Maybell doesn’t believe you have stags with gilded antlers.”

Philip said, “Oh but I do, and if only it weren’t such a gray day, you’d see for yourself. I’ve trained them to note the position of the sun and waggle their heads accordingly. Syb believes animals should be left au naturel, but my stags are all trrragedians manqué. They’d have been deeply unhappy left naked on a moor.”

I’m sure he’s right. And I may not have seen the stags this time, but I did see his black swans. Very chic! I asked him how they were kept still long enough to dye their feathers, but he refused to say.

He loved his mallard doorstop and intends to place it at the entrance to his dressing room. Lightfoot took him a bottle of something made from roasted melon seeds.