3 Great Historical Novels (92 page)

She asked Arthur what his pater did in the Lords. Arthur said he was not sure, but he had of late become exercised about Ladysmith where a gold mine in which he had interests had been flooded. Apparently there was a war going on in South Africa, which Minnie knew nothing about. Arthur enlightened her. But then there was a war going on between America and the Spanish in the Philippines which Arthur knew nothing about, so Minnie enlightened him on that.

‘I don’t think girls should bother themselves about wars and politics,’ he said. He seemed put out that she should know something he didn’t. Had not her mother warned her – better she’d stayed quiet or just talked about fashion plates and diamonds?

Minnie could bear the sense of formality no longer. She reined in her horse, dismounted, unstrapped the saddle with accustomed hands and tossed it to the ground, where it sank and all but disappeared into drifts of old leaves. She leapt back on the horse, and sitting astride, kicked in her heels and galloped off all the way to the Serpentine Road. It was most unladylike, and caused quite a stir amongst the onlookers. One or two riders had found energy and space to break into canter, but a full gallop had seemed impossible. Arthur found himself quite stirred at the sight; wild girl on a wild horse. By the time she returned it was raining and the fabric of her riding jacket clung closely to her figure and showed it to advantage. Half the size of Flora’s, true, but more elegantly shaped.

‘I never was a quitter,’ said Tessa to Grace. ‘A little rain ain’t goin’ to scare me off.’

No matter how adroitly Grace held the umbrella Tessa’s head bobbed about so that its spokes threatened to catch the feathers of her new hat. It was a very beautiful hat,
wide-brimmed
in a deep brown felt, an orange velvet band round the crown and a green bird of paradise curling around it, rather spoiled by the freckly and plump double-chinned face beneath, it would have looked better on the finer-featured daughter. Grace’s own black bonnet was getting drenched and would need re-blocking when they got back to the hotel. It had a fetching simplicity, and quite suited her: she had had a few admiring glances herself from young male passers-by.

Grace felt quite skittish. She had stopped by Mr Eddie’s office for half an hour early that morning, and had quite enjoyed it. There being nothing to gain from the encounter – she was for once not after lists for Lady Isobel or the Countess d’Asti, who had daughters to marry off – Grace felt less
whore-like
and more like a decent woman, and able to laugh quite genuinely at Mr Eddie’s jokes. Ah, the uses of leisure!

Now she and Tessa were ‘doing the shops’, as Tessa put it, up and down Bond Street, charging through the grand emporia in a determined and exhaustive way. Reginald, on loan from her
Ladyship, was following them in the cabriolet, to receive the plunder when the stores brought out their packages and samples. Grace would have been perfectly willing to lug them round the corner to Brown’s herself, but Mrs O’Brien would have none of that. She insisted on treating Grace as her equal and Grace found it extremely bothersome, to use Tessa’s own word.

Grace privately thought Tessa must be a little mad. The more she saw of her the more it was clear that the English aristocracy would be better off without any influx of bog-Irish blood. Mrs O’Brien’s feet swelled with the heat, and she took insufficient care to conceal them when she lifted her skirt hem away from the mud and horse droppings. Or else she forgot to lift them at all. When they got back to the hotel Grace would have a fine time brushing the hems to make them fit to be worn. When the Countess returned from an excursion there was seldom any brushing to be done. Her Ladyship was fastidious, Mrs O’Brien was simply not.

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Grace. ‘Quidder?’

‘I guess that means you don’t understand what I’m saying, and want me to say it again, though why you ask my pardon for it I’m sure I don’t know. I wish you’d all just speak the King’s English and we’d get on better. A quitter is someone who gives up too easily.’

Grace murmured something to the effect that she hoped Mrs O’Brien had remembered about the d’Asti salon the next day.

‘Lawks a mussy,’ Tessa said. ‘I forgot all about it.’

‘Her Ladyship very kindly obtained an invitation for you,’ said Grace, ‘and it would be quite impolite for you not to be there. I fear it will be a rather mixed group of guests. I hear the Prince of Wales may deign to call by, though I’d have thought it was a little louche even for his tastes.’

‘All I ever hear is the Prince of Wales here and the Prince of Wales there,’ complained Tessa. ‘Back home they call him Dirty Bertie.’

‘If I might make so bold as to mention it,’ said Grace, irked at this description of the Prince by an outsider, ‘“Lawks a mussy” is not an expression in common usage in Society.’

‘You mean it’s servants’ speech?’

‘Scullery maids, perhaps. Not parlour maids.’

‘I heard it at the music hall over here,’ said Tessa, ‘and I’ll use it when I goldarned choose. It’s short for “Lord have mercy” and I sure do hope he will. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Miss Prim and Proper.’

Grace lapsed into silence, until Tessa took it into her head to poke her in her ribs, and say,

‘I forgive you, thousands wouldn’t. So you can darn well forgive me.’

Grace actually managed a smile, and said Mrs O’Brien would need to decide on a tea gown; she would lay out a selection for her to choose from in the morning, and no, it was not the kind of occasion one needed to wear a tiara.

‘One does not wear tiaras in the daytime,’ Grace explained.

‘Not even in the presence of royalty?’ Tessa sounded disappointed.

‘No,’ said Grace firmly. ‘One might go as far as an unobtrusive silver band for the head, I dare say, flat, and very much filigreed, with a diamond or two inset. Asprey’s have some very pretty ones, just in from the Orient.’

Grace had an understanding with Asprey’s, the Bond Street jewellers, as indeed did Mr Eddie: a small financial consideration for every customer they introduced.

‘Minnie could wear something like that,’ said Tessa.

‘Unmarried women only wear diamonds if they are
inherited,’ said Grace, alarmed. ‘Otherwise people will think the worst.’

‘Let them think what they like,’ said Tessa, going stomping off in the direction of Asprey’s, followed by Grace with the umbrella. Mrs O’Brien’s energy was phenomenal. No doubt she ate a good deal of meat, considering her husband’s business. Grace imagined, and certainly hoped, that the young people’s Rotten Row outing had been rained off; forget the girl’s fortune, the O’Brien name could only sully that of the Hedleighs. No amount of money, surely, was worth that!

But it was the timepieces in the window of Asprey’s that now attracted Tessa’s attention. She seemed bent on buying one of their jewel-encrusted gold pocket watches and chains for Billy, to replace the plain but useful railway watch he swore by, but then changed her mind, turned on her heel and hailed Reginald.

‘Thank the heavens above,’ murmured Grace to Reginald, ‘she’s seen sense. We’re going to go back to the hotel. She’ll need a mustard bath for those feet. Her ankles are like balloons.’

But Mrs O’Brien had not seen sense. On the contrary. She demanded they be taken to the Royal Academy in Burlington House at Piccadilly. She and Grace were to go in; Reginald was to wait.

‘It’ll be closed, ma’am,’ protested Grace. Sadly, it was not.

Tessa presented herself to the Curator, who had been about to go home, and who seemed shocked by the sudden presence of this large noisy woman from Chicago with a spectacular hat who insisted that she must be taken to see a painting by a friend of hers, Eyre Crowe.

The curator knew Crowe as a quiet, rather reclusive man with whom he occasionally dined informally at his studio in
Charlotte Street. They moved in the same artistic circles. In the Curator’s opinion Crowe was in, as it were, the First Eleven of painters, but his work was popular with the public, who much appreciated a large canvas when it told a story. Mr Crowe was unmarried, was looked after by a very homely housekeeper, and had certainly never made mention of any ‘friend’ of the kind who now presented herself. The Curator could see that, take away the florid colour, the stout waist, the plump cheeks and the over-elaborate hat, Mrs O’Brien would once have been a startlingly attractive woman of the fleshy kind. She wasn’t demanding to meet Eyre Crowe, merely to look at a painting of his. But why? It was possible she was an art lover, but it seemed unlikely.

‘The Academy is just closing for the day, madam,’ he said. ‘My assistant will be pleased to welcome you tomorrow. I, alas, will be in Brighton.’

‘You won’t get rid of me as easily as all that,’ she said, ‘not Tessa O’Brien from Chicago. I’ve surely come a long way for this. Thought I would, thought I wouldn’t, plumped in the end for hold-your-nose-and-jump. I was looking at these timepieces, and I thought life’s short and Billy O’Brien won’t mind. It’s only a blamed picture!
The Dinner Hour, Wigan
, please, mister, and I won’t keep you too long.’

Tessa O’Brien? O’Brien? Where had he heard and marvelled at that name on official paper? Of course, one of the founders of the Art Institute of Chicago, that rather vulgar symptom of America’s compulsion to establish some kind of cultural background for itself: and full of fakes, he had heard. This was what was thrown up, the crude ostentation of the new as it faced the artistic emptiness of its past. The curator considered that he had perhaps misjudged the circumstance. This was not what he had at first feared. Stockyard O’Brien’s wife could
indeed be more interested in the painting than the painter. Mr Crowe might yet be saved from the monstrous hat with the green and yellow bird of paradise curled around the crown, little pink beak poking out from amongst its poor dead feathers. The painting could suffer its attendance unaffected.

Then the thirtyish person who accompanied Mrs O’Brien, and seemed an altogether different and more demure type, wearing a pretty plain black bonnet under which wet hair showed interjected, ‘Madam is from the United States of America, sir.’

To which Mrs O’Brien said, ‘Lord save us, Grace! He knows that. This nice gentleman is delighted to take us where we want to go.’

Which, indeed, he did. Mrs O’Brien, he could see, was not accustomed to impediment to her will. Though the younger woman, who turned out to be her servant and companion, chafed and fretted about the need to get back to the hotel and ‘get on’.

They made their way up the great staircase with its broad flat steps, then to the top floor of what started out as Lord Burlington’s town palace, where some of the silk that had lined the walls for a couple of hundred years or so was now faded and even split in places, Mrs O’Brien remarked:

‘But why do you dear English like everything so darned old and faded? Everything about my Institute that can be is new. And every bit as big as yours, and I guess bigger. That silk needs replacing.’

Grace winced. The curator said nothing, until they passed James Whistler’s portrait of Eyre Crowe, which the Curator found a rather murky piece of work, almost ghostly, as if poor Crowe’s very existence was in doubt. The curator preferred sharper lines and more convincing colours, and had spent
many years fighting against hanging Mr Whistler’s work at all: there was a meretricious quality to the work he had disliked. Whistler remained un-English, intrinsically foreign: he had spent too much time in Paris, let alone other places abroad no one had ever heard of, picking up a louche amorality.

It was against his better judgement that the Curator drew Mrs O’Brien’s attention to the painting as they passed, and the noisiness of her response exceeded his fears – it echoed through the vaulted ceilings and drew a caretaker who was waiting to switch off the lights to see what was going on.

‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ Mrs O’Brien cried. ‘I didn’t know about this one. And by Mr Whistler too. Eyre’s right up in the world! Grace, would you say there was a little of Minnie in those eyes? Just look at the eyebrows – look at the shape of them!’

Then she clutched the younger woman’s arm and said, ‘Golly, what have I said! I didn’t say a word. You didn’t hear a thing, Grace,’ but she neither seemed unduly upset, nor came back to the subject. She was too determined to get to see
The Dinner Hour, Wigan
. Her little plump feet went faster and faster up the stairs, the imposing Whistler portrait of Crowe left behind. The curator sighed, forbearing to point out that the Eyre Crowe in the portrait was a different Eyre Crowe, the diplomat, not the painter. People saw what they wanted to see.

But why
The Dinner Hour
,
Wigan
anyway? Was this not a very curious request? It was an unattractive subject, as various critics had remarked: a group of young women, Lancashire mill girls, gathered together eating in the street. But Eyre was always attracted by misfortune for a subject, a painter moved by moral as well as artistic principle, which was why the Academy, quite reasonably, housed so many of his works, in spite of the critics.

Mrs O’Brien plonked herself down in front of the painting and stared.

‘A masterpiece,’ she said. ‘No doubt about it. Sure as eggs is eggs. It’s as my friend Eleanor said. She saw it when she was over last fall. And she’s right: that’s me.’ And she pointed to one of the tall figures in the foreground, a tall blonde girl with ample bosom, in a white cotton dress and her hair in a net, basket in hand, bending to the left with her girl companion, as though about to fall, but resting on a stone bench. There could be a certain lack of care in Crowe’s paintings: he was often better at brickwork than the human figure. It was quite possible, the Curator could see, that Crowe had done a portrait of the young Mrs O’Brien, working perhaps from a photograph.

‘He remembered me,’ she said, simply. ‘He didn’t forget.’ The curator suddenly liked her. He admired her tenacity, the immediacy of her folly. She was not to blame for her nationality, her breeding, or her lack of it. If it wasn’t for the energy of people like Stockyard Billy and his good wife, America would never find any culture. For all one knew, the flow of art across the Atlantic might eventually be in the other direction. It could certainly make up in size for what it lacked in sensibility.

‘All nicely cleaned up,’ observed Tessa. ‘In my experience working girls are a lot muckier than that. But then he always was a romantic, was Mr Crowe. I reckon we Yanks are a good deal better than you folk at keeping our feet on the ground.’

Mrs O’Brien was certainly not stupid, he thought. He was quite coming round to her. He liked a woman who could take in a painting at a glance and not feel obliged to stand for ever and admire. Perhaps he would encounter her again. She was turning to go when she hesitated, and then asked if he could kindly give her an address for Eyre.

It seemed to the Curator that colour drained from the maid’s face. Or perhaps it was just the caretaker, turning off lights other than the ones immediately near them, anxious to leave and get home to his tea, as who was not?

‘Dear lady, I could not formally divulge such information about an Academician without consulting him first,’ said the Curator, and beamed at her in a way that he hoped was disarming.

He wondered whether he should tell Eyre of this sudden visitation or not, deciding on balance against it. The woman could dispense patronage, but Eyre guarded his privacy, and the woman was at best a lionizer. And he himself wanted no sudden disruption to the quiet dinners
á deux
at the Charlotte Street studio. She might never leave his friend alone.