“Alors, racontez!” the Colonel said, and spun her beneath his arm.
Nancy had to duck, of course. The man was frightfully short.
“Racontez! Racontez!”
She laughed, thinking of all the times the Colonel made this demand. Racontez! Tell me!
“Allô—allô,” he’d say across some crackling line. “Were you asleep?”
He might be in Paris, or Algiers, or another place he could not name. Weeks or months would pass and then the phone would ring in London and set Nancy Mitford’s world straight again.
“Alors, racontez! Tell me everything!”
And she did.
The Colonel found Nancy’s stories comical, outrageous, unlike anything he’d ever known, his delight beginning first and foremost with the six Mitford girls, and their secret society. Nancy also had a brother, but he hardly counted at all.
“C’est pas vrai!” the Colonel would cry with each new tale. “That cannot be true!”
“It all happened,” Nancy told him. “Every word. What do you expect with a Nazi, a Communist, and several Fascists in one family tree?”
“C’est incroyable!”
But her sisters and the Hon Society were the past, and this gilded Parisian hotel room was the present, likewise Nancy’s beloved Colonel, currently reaching into the bucket of champagne. How had she gotten to this place? It was the impossible dream…
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