Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘I do not owe him a thing,’ Leonora replies with irritation.

Ever since she left Ireland at the age of eighteen, Maurie Moorhead had lived life as a vertiginous round of entertainment. Games of croquet (ugh, how Leonora loathed them); hunting in red jackets on red horses with red foxhounds after a red fox; charity sales; bridge parties; massages booked with Madame Pomeroy at Piccadilly Circus; hair salons; beauty treatments; fittings for the latest garments at top couture houses: the fact that Maurie creates the latest fashion without ever being in fashion is just part of her charm. According to Leonora, their mother-and-daughter partnership unfailingly arrives either early or late to every occasion.

‘The catwalks displaying the latest in French haute couture,’ says Maurie, ‘they are the starting point of fashion worldwide.’

‘Just like at the horse races?’ asks Leonora, enchanted by the insane creativity of Schiaparelli in the Place Vendôme.

‘Let’s go to Lanvin, we can call in at Poiret, even if we end up in Au Printemps.’

Maurie is disappointed at being unable to find coffee-coloured satin knickers. She is also obsessed with procuring leather buttons for a tweed bag she has, and none of the ones she finds are quite to her taste.

‘We might as well be in London,’ she tells Leonora, ‘and I could find the same ones in Regent Street and at half the price…’

‘One doesn’t come to Paris to purchase buttons.’

‘So what do we come here for?’

‘To buy a Van Gogh.’

Maurie selects a sailor’s cap which suits her very poorly. Leonora is amused to discover a nightclub on the Rue de Boissy d’Anglas called The Ox on the Roof and asks the maître d’ there — who looks like he could well be a member of the French Academy — where the place got its name. He replies: ‘In honour of Jean Cocteau, who comes here from time to time. I think tonight may in fact be his night.’

Maurie flatly refuses to go to any cabaret until she has found her satin knickers.

‘No — let’s instead go for tea at Rumpelmayer.’

While Maurie takes her nap, Leonora goes to the Café de Flore without her purse. In France, it’s so easy to drink a glass — or two — and pay up an hour — or two — later. By then her mother will have woken up. She orders a cocoa.

‘There is no cocoa,’ answers the waiter. ‘Café au lait, herb tea, black tea, hot chocolate, wine, beer if you will, but no cocoa.’

‘ Thé, alors .’

At the next table is a young man who won’t stop staring at her.

‘I assume you are English, since you have ordered tea. I have been to London, and found the Thames very pretty. Then I stayed on in Southampton, which was very green.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be green. The green of Ireland is of a shade that makes it look as if there were a fire under the ground beneath it.’

Thus an hour went by and the young man, Paul Aspel, requested that she join him for dinner, Leonora suddenly comes to her senses.

‘I need to go and collect my mother. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Back at the hotel, Maurie warns her daughter not to talk to strangers. ‘It is badly looked upon for a young woman to sit down alone in a café.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you attract far too much attention, and it appears you are looking for clients.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean, Mama. The nuns never told me about any of this.’

In her turn, Maurie weaves a web of restrictions and abstinence around her daughter, which causes Leonora to look daggers at her. Maurie intends to drown her in an ocean of rules. It is unthinkable to infringe them because her Carrington parents have educated her to exalt their name, their ancestry, their good reputation and the family glory.

‘Mama, living according to the rules of others is an illness.’

‘You are a part of Society, your heritage …’

‘Everything you’re saying is nonsense. All these taboos … to me the only taboo I recognise is using face powder.’

‘No, Leonora. They are nothing more than counsels for you to live in harmony with your own nature, with your own family history, and with the grandeur of your home nation. You are your nation. You are Great Britain.’

‘I am Leonora, not the British Empire.’

‘Don’t dismiss your forebears: you are your ancestors, too.

Oscar Wilde is in your neurons, he is the reason you are as you are — rebellious, unattainable, and — just like him — you don’t measure the consequences of your actions.’

Leonora alleges, as she did before in Crookhey, that none of this heraldry has the least effect on her; on the contrary, instead of inflating the importance of her past, she minimises it with her impish smile. ‘My mother is a snob,’ she mutters under her breath. In many families, the zeal for a glorious past is irresistible, rooted in human nature as it is, to such an extent that hotel owners, car salesmen, perfume and tobacco sellers all seek to acquire a heraldic shield or a family coat of arms for their business, their brandy or their wine.

‘Receiving the benefits of merchandise you have not made yourself does not appear to me aristocratic. That reduces it to the level of a trade.’ They also discuss the question of good taste, because Maurie is forever striving to divide things into matters of good or poor taste.

‘All that is entirely relative,’ avers Leonora. ‘What you like might repel me and vice versa.’

‘No, Leonora, you have been educated in good taste, and if you overlook this first principle, you cut yourself off from your class.’

The maitre d’hôtel murmurs the year and vintage of every wine into the ear of each guest as he pours from the bottle. When he utters ‘ Grand vin de Château Latour 1905 ’ Leonora is in no doubt that she is tasting something extraordinary, something old and wise while at the same time so fresh and cheerful that it could have been made yesterday. She sips it as if it were Communion wine.

‘It is their wine that renders the French a race apart,’ she informs Maurie, ‘they owe their genius to this wine.’

Within a month, she has learnt to recognise and return a corked wine, one whose colour looks deadened and whose taste is wooden, as against another bouchonné , whose cork has rotted to powder.

‘I would like to be as rich and sparkling and free as a Veuve Cliquot or Pol Roger.’

‘You have your own lineage in Lancashire.’

‘I am not going to shackle myself to that place, or shrivel to a corpse like Mary Edgeworth. I don’t want to become asphyxiated by skeletons; I am my own mother and my own father. I am a one-off phenomenon.’

Maurie turns her head aside so that Leonora can’t see her tears welling up. Leonora is her mortification: a strange creature who has emerged from the fold where her brothers still peaceably graze.

They arrive at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz in the midst of a February snowstorm. Maurie takes it as a personal insult that snow should fall on the eve of spring, and is convinced that the world is turning off its orbit.

‘It’s obvious why Biarritz is empty. Next year we shall go to Torquay. Not only is it cheaper, but the climate is better there, too.’

Skiing in St. Moritz, summering in Eden Roc are fixed items in their annual agenda; moving around from place to place in a Bentley or a Rolls Royce is a part of their everyday life.

As soon as they arrive in Monte Carlo, Maurie shuts herself away in the casino.

‘Is this your spiritual retreat?’ enquires Leonora.

Ever greedy, Maurie always wishes to dine punctually, and the next day she delights in the memory of what she has eaten, whereas Leonora never remembers.