They tiffed about it in front of me in a way which was not only new in my experience, but out of character for both of them—my father being the last man to act the parsimonious host, and my mother not normally caring what wines were drunk.
* * * *
I didn’t see Brad again till the party. If my mother saw him she didn’t tell me, not that it would have been a secret, but somehow we didn’t talk about Brad much, and perhaps for that reason we talked a great deal about Hugo Framm. My mother was no respecter of celebrities, and we shared the same sense of humor, ribald and vagrant and often rather rude. Between us we built up a huge joke about Professor Framm that made us both afraid we might laugh indecently when the man actually took shape before our eyes. We first said he would be fat and pompous, with a thick German accent and a mustache that would get in the way of the soup; then we changed the picture because it seemed too much the conventional Punch-cartoon-type of German professor; we finally decided on a tall thin man more like Sherlock Holmes, with the most exquisite manner and an Oxford accent. He would kiss my mother’s hand and look up at her at the same time, which made her say she wouldn’t shoot till she saw the whites of his eyes. I said he’d probably engage in some scientific argument and shoot somebody else, or at least demand a duel on Hampstead Heath. “Now that’s enough,” she laughed. “We’ll never dare to meet him if we keep on….” We didn’t bother to ask my father what the man was really like, and I suppose I could have found a photograph of him somewhere if I’d wanted.
It snowed a little the day of the party, just a white film over roofs and lawns; the traffic soon scoured it from the streets. There were about twenty people, and I wondered how Brad would like that, or if he cared any more. He had suggested only a very few of the names. But my mother, or else experience, had certainly done something to him socially; he was still shy, but not awkwardly so, rather now as if he didn’t care whether he were shy or not. On the whole it was a dull crowd, far too many people who were only distinguished enough to be unsure whether others knew they were distinguished at all. The man next to me had explored some buried cities in Honduras, and my other neighbor was shortsighted and thought I was Lady Muriel Spencer, whom he had been talking to over cocktails. Brad was between my mother and the real Muriel; Framm was opposite him between my mother and Baroness Regensburg, who threw a little German at him occasionally. But there was no need; he spoke good English, though with an accent; while as for his appearance, it was nowhere near either my mother’s foolery or mine; and that, perhaps, introduces him best, for he was the kind of man it would have been hard to imagine in advance. I had certainly never met anyone who so obviously looked important; you would have stared at him anywhere, if only on account of his large frame and massive, wide-browed head. In age he might have been anything between forty and sixty; the bushy hair was iron-gray, the eyes were blue and keen, the lips sensitive and also sensual. He gave an impression of physical and mental vigor that dominated without effort, and therefore without offense; and his voice had a matching quality that lured the listener from whomever else he was listening to, yet it wasn’t loud—there were times when you wondered how you had managed to hear it. I think I was not the only person at that dinner party who was fascinated, but I wished there had been something in him to catch my mother’s eye about and smile.
Looking back on that first and only time I ever met Hugo Framm it is tempting to overload the diagnosis; but I do recollect, during dinner, wondering what faults a man like that would have, and deciding they must include vanity (since he had clearly so much to be vain about), and a kind of arrogance, since the continual experience of other people’s admiration would give him either that or shyness, and he certainly wasn’t shy. Yet these were deductions, not observations; and I cannot say that at any time he was either boastful or overbearing. Whether he was talking to my mother, or to the Baroness, or to Brad, or to the whole table, there was a constant radiation of what, for want of any other word, must be called charm; and in the end it was the constancy of this that seemed to me its only possible drawback. If only one could have caught a glimpse of something beneath the charm; one knew it was there, so there was no taint of superficiality, but one was teased, after a time, by the withholding.
After dinner we sat in the drawing room in changing groups. It was not the sort of party for music, but there was a billiard room across the hall where card tables were set up. A bridge four detached themselves from the main party; they weren’t missed and I wasn’t aware of it when they returned. It must have been an unsatisfactory game. My father kept moving from group to group, the considerate host, and during one of these movements he found a chance to whisper in my ear that Brad had decided to accept Framm’s offer.
“You mean he’s only just decided? I thought it was all settled weeks ago.”
“Well, no. Apparently he wasn’t sure till they talked just now.”
“I didn’t see them talking much.”
“It was after you left the table. They had quite a private chat. Framm has to go back to Vienna tomorrow night and if Brad can make arrangements in time they’ll go together.”
“Tomorrow night?” That came as a shock.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that quick work?”
“He won’t have much to pack—Brad, I mean. Lives in furnished rooms, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know—I’ve never been there.”
“Well, your mother must have—or else he once told me.”
“Father, do you really think it’s the best thing he can do to go with Professor Framm?”
“Why, don’t you like Framm?”
“I think he’s very charming, but it does seem rather sudden if Brad only made up his mind tonight and he leaves tomorrow. I hope it’s the right thing.”
“It’s a great chance—if he uses it. Of course if he doesn’t use his chances, nothing at all will do him much good…. We shall miss him when he’s gone—your mother will, I know…. By the way, where is she?”
“In the billiard room, I think. There’s some bridge going on.”
But later I noticed that the bridge players were back in the drawing room, and I also couldn’t see Brad anywhere. I was sure people had begun to notice my mother’s absence and I ran upstairs to see if she were feeling ill, but there was no trace of her. I could see my father a little preoccupied behind his façade of suavity, and every now and then Hugo Framm’s voice would somehow make a silence and then quietly fill it. About eleven o’clock John served more champagne and I hoped this was not a sign that the party would continue late, for I was beginning to feel a tension in the atmosphere—or perhaps it was only in my own mind. About a quarter past eleven my mother walked into the room with flushed cheeks and clenched hands. Few actually saw her, but she seemed to look for an audience from the doorway before speaking out as if to gain one. “I hope you’ll forgive me for being terribly discourteous, but I’ve been at the radio—we’ve got one that picks up New York—it’s the only way you can get the latest about the Simpson case over here….”
It was a few days before the story broke officially in England, though the American tabloids and radio were agog with it, and London’s informed society was already gossiping. There had been talk of it at the dinner table, and nobody seemed unwilling to discuss it again. While this was going on I saw Brad enter the room behind her. He edged into the crowd and stood by the bookshelves in an alcove, listening in a detached way and not taking sides in the argument, though I knew he was pro-Simpson. So was my mother—and never more emphatically, or perhaps I should say more naïvely, than then. Others differed and there was a lively exchange of views. Suddenly, amidst the chatter, I heard Framm’s voice again and saw him towering above my mother with his large expansive smile, the charm turned on full.
“I entirely agree with you, Mrs. Waring. There is no reason at all why your King should not marry whomever he wishes. There are many precedents for such marriages. Your Queen Mary’s own grandmother was a mere Hungarian