3 Great Historical Novels (87 page)

‘Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ Mr Eddie had said in the lobby to the under-manager, gazing after Minnie’s retreating back when she arrived back from her walk in the Park with Arthur. She’d been wearing an uncorseted red velvet gown from Liberty which followed the lines of her body, an unusual sight in a smart hotel like Brown’s. More such dresses were to be seen in the Ritz, which catered for a younger crowd. ‘Someone ought to warn that poor young man.’

To the outside world, Mr Eddie, red-faced and smiling and getting on for fifty, seemed the soul of good nature but was in truth a weary and resentful man, sending guests off as he did to shows he would never see, restaurants where he would never eat, delivering hot water bottles in the middle of the night to chilly maiden ladies, and expensive lady
bed-companions
for men who travelled alone. He passed on information about guests, mostly for money but occasionally on moral grounds. Mr Eddie had not yet had word from Grace to the effect that the O’Brien girl was to have her reputation protected.

Mr Eddie often thought how sensible it would be if only the chilly maidens and the rampant men could get together, but that was not how the world worked. Also, it would be very hard on his pocket. A hot water bottle went on the bill at two
shillings with usually a sixpenny tip for him: a lady companion of really high quality could cost as much as twenty-five pounds for a short visit, fifty pounds for the night, and a fiver for him. Once he had been given a tenner, but the lady in question was indeed a lady, and did it for fun, not because it was her vulgar profession.

He liked Grace, whom he saw when she was about her Ladyship’s various errands, delivering letters, presenting her card, welcoming her guests, collecting packages from abroad. They could share their discontent with so many of the inequitable ways of the modern world – the class system, the oppression of the proletariat and so on. He thought that one day he might ask her to marry him, though perhaps he was too old to change his ways. They could join their nest eggs together, buy a little house, and start their own household. But then they might start complaining about each other, instead of she about the other servants, or he the hotel guests. Best to leave things as they were. Occasionally he could persuade her to join him on the sofa in his office for the odd half-hour. She would take no money from him: she said she saw these sessions as fair exchange: it was not only men who had desires which must be satisfied. She was a strange one, too clever for him, but always welcome on his sofa.

When Grace called by, breathless, with a message for him to the effect that Minnie O’Brien’s reputation was to be protected, he agreed to spread the news that she was pure as the driven snow, a virgin, but an enemy had spread rumours about her in Chicago, later discovered to be wholly untrue. These things were easily done. Grace was grateful and showed her gratitude in the usual way.

Arthur had been well satisfied with his conversation with Minnie in the Park. They were two of a kind. She did not whinny and moan and flutter fans as girls were inclined to do when meeting a well set-up and eligible young man. She liked him well enough, as most girls did. She was probably fertile. With the Irish blood came many children. She was no prude, and almost eager when he kissed her. What a stroke of good luck. He had told his mother something would turn up and it had. They would marry, his tailor’s bill would be paid, his parents would be pleased, and he would be able to pay Flora’s rent without worrying whether his funds would suddenly dry up. The wretch Baum would be put in his place, his father freed from financial pressure. A pity about the Meat Company but it was not too high a price to pay to save the family’s face and fortune. He and Minnie would make their home in London, somewhere better than Belgrave Square, with more mews garaging.

The kiss had been interesting. He’d meant it just as a bit of acting but it had set off a spark between them before he had even touched her lips. Recalling it put him in mind of Flora. He would go and visit her, become part of her, drown in her. It was how a man relaxed. He was entitled. Sex set off a kind of creative energy in him; vaguely to do with the tightening of screws, the
driving of pistons, the grinding of cog wheels; when it was finished with, new ideas were left in the detritus of experience. Get rid of the feminine and the masculine was set free to act.

He had not of course mentioned Flora’s existence to Minnie. It really did not concern her now, and even after the marriage, if all went well, it still would not. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ applied to other men’s wives, not bad girls off the peg. That surely was what Moses meant, when he handed down the Commandments; sex with slave girls did not count as adultery for Abraham in the Bible, and Flora was to all intents and purposes a slave girl. One woman all your life, otherwise burn in hell? It just did not make sense.

Nevertheless Arthur instructed Reginald to drop him off on the corner of Half Moon Place instead of at Flora’s door. He was glad he had. There was a growler there already, its light off, and the driver waiting, trying to read a newspaper in the gloom of the gas lamp. Why? Flora had strict instructions to keep herself available from six to eight every evening: no visitors. Worse, monstrously worse, the yellow silk curtains of her bedroom on the top floor were closed and he could see the silhouette of a man and a woman. The man he had no doubt was Redbreast, and the girl was Flora, her hair down around her shoulders. They were not doing anything alarming, just standing talking, but that made him angrier still. What had they got to talk about? Yet Redbreast leaned towards her as if she fully engaged his attention.

‘Little hussy,’ said Reginald, sympathetically. ‘Pretty little place this too, compared with many round here. Must cost a pretty penny. I hope you’re not the one paying the rent if you’re sharing. The police can get you for that these days. You’d be keeping a disorderly house. I blame Mr Gladstone. Shifty old bugger.’

‘I am well aware of the law, Reginald,’ said Arthur stiffly, though this was the first he’d heard of it. It was not the kind of conversation one enjoyed having with a servant, no matter how useful and worldly wise that servant was. It was Reginald who had found him Flora in the first place, pointed out that the Half Moon Street flat was to rent.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Reginald. ‘It’s just you have to be careful with the better girls like Flora, and your Flora’s one of those. They promise things but you can’t trust them out of your sight. Do you have a key?’

‘I do, of course.’

‘Then why don’t you just go in, sir. Two can play at sharing.’

Arthur felt quite shocked when he worked out what Reginald was suggesting.

Though had not Flora suggested something more unusual than the missionary sex they had so far indulged in? If he paid for it? Knew how it worked? Well, he was already paying.

‘I imagine the other gentleman is Mr Anthony Robin of the Foreign Office, sir. I recognize the growler.’

Arthur was hesitant. There was so much he knew he did not know. He had read
My Secret Life
at Oxford, but it was so long and densely written, grubby and vaguely disgusting, it quite put him off sex for a time. You had to work out the positions to make any sense of what was going on and there seemed no point. There had been Grace the housemaid when he was fourteen but she was hardly experimental, and Flora had never so far offered anything fancy. He felt both aggrieved and excited.

‘If you ask me, she deserves what she gets,’ said Reginald, so Arthur let himself in the front door, and ran up the narrow stairs he had paid for and found Redbreast standing by the bed he, Arthur, had paid for, and Flora whom he, Arthur, had paid
for, naked upon it, wriggling on her white mink wrap, rosy legs stretched wide apart with wanton lack of modesty, and a length of pink silk between his rival’s hands. It seemed he was about to tie one of her wrists to the brass bedstead. He had removed his jacket, but was otherwise fully clothed. His waistcoat was a sober-patterned damask.

Arthur was glad he had been to a proper school, as had Redbreast. Gentlemen knew how to deal with any social situation they happened to find themselves in, and how to surmount embarrassment. One kept one’s cool and made a joke.

‘I think this is my property, Redbreast,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is some misunderstanding here?’

‘Oh my dear good man!’ said Robin. ‘If it isn’t Dillybutt! Of all people!’ Arthur winced at the use of his nickname. He hadn’t heard it for a good ten years.

‘Don’t tell me this lass has been misbehaving? Flora, have you?’ Redbreast bent over her, the end of his old school tie tickling her breasts, so she wriggled and giggled the more.

‘He promised to marry me and he let me down,’ said Flora. ‘I owe him nuffink.’ She usually managed a proper ‘nothing’, but in what could only be a surfeit of guilt her pronunciation had reverted to its original.

She tried to slip off the bed but Redbreast caught her wrist and tied the silk scarf or whatever it was to the shiny brass rail so tightly she fell back on it, gave a little cry of alarm and quickly put her legs together.

‘You promised, Dillybutt? Had you been drinking?’

‘Indeed I had,’ said Arthur. ‘I would hardly have asked her sober. But since I pay well over the odds for exclusivity, old fellow, I can’t quite work out what you’re doing in my house?’

‘Then you are not entitled, Flora,’ said Redbreast, ‘and must
keep your side of the bargain. I too have paid over the odds.’ Redbreast tied her other wrist to the bed, and though she tried now to keep them together, parted her legs forcibly.

‘See to her ankles,’ said Redbreast, speaking with the authority of a fag master, so Arthur felt he had no choice but to obey. He found what he thought must be the white silk belt Flora had been wearing at Pagani’s and used it to grab the left ankle and tie it to the bedpost – she tried to kick out at him, but he got the leg caught soon enough – and used Redbreast’s now discarded old school tie, black silk with blue diagonals, to secure the other ankle.

Flora did not seem too aggrieved by the process. She kept talking and imploring for mercy and occasionally giggling. ‘A silent woman is above rubies,’ said Redbreast. ‘Be quiet.’ And, surprisingly, she was – if briefly.

Life was very curious, thought Arthur. There was Minnie, with her discreet body, her quick mind, her formality, with whom one could have one kind of intimacy and this one, a plump rosy shape full of exits and entrances, which offered quite another.

The matter was settled amicably enough and to both their advantage. Redbreast had first happened upon Flora weeping in the park, claiming to be an unfortunate virgin abducted from school by the man she claimed had now ‘let her down’. She needed funds to sue for breach of promise: then she took him home, explaining that the expensive flat had been borrowed from an actress friend until she had raised the necessary money. It wasn’t as if she was a whore. She wasn’t used goods, she claimed, on the contrary, she was good as new.

‘She has quite a way with words,’ Redbreast said. ‘That almost put me off. One doesn’t want to think of a brain working too hard behind that pretty face.’

Redbreast had agreed to pay Flora’s rent, and ten pounds the hour on top of that. She brushed up well, he’d even taken her to Pagani’s, and risked meeting anyone he knew. You’d never know from the look of her what kind of girl she was.

Neither of them wanted to lose her. They would simply share her, as she had tried to share them. She had started it. They agreed Redbreast would pay half the rent, from now on. Arthur would continue with the keep. Arthur must have the lion’s share, for was he not paying more? Granted, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, but it was still 70/30 in Arthur’s favour. Things Arthur had thought not possible, Redbreast assured him, were.

‘Oh no, no, please,’ Flora moaned as Redbreast delineated exactly where and how they would attend to her. Arthur remembered the word from
My Secret Life
: ‘doodles’, faintly ridiculous, were always going stiff, stiffer, failing, growing stiff again – as his was doing now – a source of anxiety as well as satisfaction, rubbing here, rubbing there, explosions and squirtings of juices and so on, mucky stuff, ridiculous and disgusting. But looking at Flora, he began to see the charm of it. Something, whatever it was, had to
happen
. Redbreast had his clothes off. His ‘doodle’ was magnificent, surprising for so lank and academic-looking a man. Flora seemed to regard it with admiration, even fear, but then so she had honoured Arthur’s ‘doodle’ when first she saw it. Mind you, Arthur’s was not bad, better than almost anyone in his House at Eton for his height.

While Flora cried for mercy and regularly moaned ‘Ow, it hurts, have mercy, sirs, please don’t,’ and so on, and even managed a tear or two, she continued to offer herself, he noticed, by no means averse to sharing any of her attributes to amplify her pleasure. Really, these women were corrupt; they
made beasts of men: he would only marry a virgin and make sure she knew nothing and never got to find out anything.

Why did one do this, he wondered, why was one driven to these slippery, mucky endeavours: the instinctive jerking and pumping, in and out, in and out, as if seeking out some vital centre that was so frustratingly elusive, and when you found it, ceased to be of any importance at all? It was an appetite like hunger, he supposed, that had to be satisfied if you were to live, and the same sort of unreasonable drive, just that this could only be honoured when it was employed to keep the race alive. Unlike food, which had dignity, elevated you, honoured you – a good
tournedos
, a delicate
soufflé Curaçao
– desire was designed to humiliate you by making you as low as the filthiest rutting beast; it made Flora mock the squealing of the sow as she was serviced, he and Robin mimic the stupid grunting of the boar as it did its business; yellow satin, pink gauze, white mink, scarlet damask, but still underlying it the sour black mud of the pigsty.

And why was he so glad to see that Redbreast’s doodle, though stouter than his own, if not necessarily longer when fully extended, did not have such excellent staying power? Why did that make him want to crow like some cock? It was beyond all sense.

When the pair left, some three hours later, Reginald and Redbreast’s driver were not only still patiently waiting, but, Arthur was sorry to see, in conversation; no doubt comparing the habits of their masters and betters. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Boys would be boys, everyone knew.

Reginald was unnecessarily inquisitive and asked Arthur ‘How it had gone’, and Arthur said he thought the girl had learned her lesson – though in truth when he left he had the distinct impression Flora was laughing at him, and when he told her he and Mr Robin would be coming round for her
attentions together every Saturday afternoon to get what they had paid for, and separately whenever they felt inclined, she seemed not too vexed at all. Girls were difficult to impress.

‘I’ve known some of these girls take on six or seven at a time,’ said Reginald, ‘and not turn a hair. You say she was out with Mr Robin last night?’

‘They turned up at Pagani’s.’

‘Did she, sir!’ said Reginald.

‘She can’t possibly have known I’d be there,’ said Arthur.

‘Very few secrets in this town,’ said Reginald. ‘I reckon Grace and Mr Eddie have something going on. What’s the betting your little friend was wearing a white mink stole? If she was, it’s the one the girls pass round. Nothing like a jealous man to part with cash. She knew you’d turn up. How much more did she get out of you tonight?’

Arthur deliberately failed to answer. She’d got ten pounds more because he’d felt bad. He’d been a mug, that was the truth of it. Now he saw himself, not Flora, as the one who had been used and abused. Reginald, seeing the set of Arthur’s jaw, prudently fell silent.

Arthur took a hot bath when he got home, and spent a long time in it. His father had recently installed copper pipes for running hot water and Arthur was glad of it. Otherwise Mrs Neville would have made a fuss having to fetch hot water from the kitchen while the staff was doing dinner, and been curious. He was not proud of what had happened. He wished it had not. But he looked forward to the next time he saw Flora, with or without Redbreast, and also of course to riding with Minnie O’Brien on Rotten Row. But he had the Arnold Jehu to see to first. He had missed dinner but Cook might find him some bread and cheese and then he might spend a little time in the garages with his real darling.