Great Historical Novels (123 page)

Besides she needed a motoring hat, which meant a big scarf tied over the hat and under the chin, and Liberty’s, though she had never been to the store, was known to have the best fabrics in London. Tana lawn, named after Lake Tana in Ethiopia, was the finest, softest cotton available anywhere.

Arthur was to drive her down to Hampshire in the Arnold Jehu steam car. She both looked forward to the journey and dreaded it. She had inspected the automobile in Arthur’s garage, and it was certainly a graceful thing, and with its two large headlights like two bright eyes, had an almost human quality. She could understand his affection for it, though she feared it would be worse than a bony nag to sit upon for any length of
time, while the large wheels rumbled on their thin white tyres, and the engine puffed and boiled behind them. A bolting horse seemed a lesser danger. But Arthur loved it, so she would learn to.

Arthur had said, ‘She’s fine going uphill, but used to be a little heavy going down: so now I’ve put in condenser in and fitted a different flash boiler which should really improve matters. She’ll manage the Devil’s Punchbowl now with no trouble. I’ll just make sure that by the time we’re on the top of the hill we’re low on water to reduce weight. She’ll still pick up a good head of speed but you won’t mind that. I’ve seen you on horseback. We’ll be grand.’

She loved him so she did not even demur. She must try not to tell Arthur she loved him. Nothing frightened men more than a declaration of true love; Tessa had told her so, and her friends lamented that it was true. Yet she had told Stanton Turlock she loved him, and it had not put him off, rather it had spurred him on. But then he was an artist and perhaps she hadn’t really loved him. The initial sexual excitement which had carried her away and led her to ‘give up all for love of a genius’, a deed which she now regarded with embarrassment and horror, had faded quickly, even as Stanton’s had, to be replaced by his low moods and bad temper. His professions of undying love had stopped; next thing he shrank from her touch. Then he had been seized by the Devil’s own energy, ceaseless sex had replaced the hurtful indifference, and he’d start shouting, waving an old sabre, and threatening to slash the works of his rivals, convinced that Minnie was in league with them. ‘I warned you,’ Tessa had told her. ‘These artists are just plain pesky.’

‘Pesky ain’t the word for it,’ Billy had said. ‘He’s loco. A pig with a demon inside, trampling pearls. Go off and find yourself some better breeding material. And don’t come back until you have.’

At least Arthur was not crazy. Madcap, but not gloomy, hurtful crazy.

Liberty’s, a little shop off the sweep of Regent Street, was even smaller than she expected, but inside was all beauty. Everything seemed to glow. Fabrics hung gracefully, delicate flimsy furniture – little pieces placed here and there, suitable for the smaller town houses of London, Rosina explained, not like the ponderous family pieces she herself had been brought up with. Strange dull copper and brass pieces from Asia and Arabia whose use you couldn’t even imagine, fabrics designed by William Morris himself, smocked dresses in smoky velvets which showed rather a lot of leg but had high, cluttered necklines, the kind of thing Rosina herself favoured. It was all enchanting, and had a special smell rather like the incense they used at mass, which she supposed was designed to drug you in some way, so you didn’t notice how high the prices were. And they certainly were.

Yet it all seemed to Minnie slightly decadent, on its way out, a shrine to the past, an altar to the gods of greenery-yallery as the old century died. She had a sudden pang for the wide open spaces, the prairie and the lakes and the sweep of sky above, and the lowing of cattle as they were herded and the crack of the cowboy’s whip, and the coyote’s yelp and her father’s kindly, if brutish, common sense. He funded an Art Institute but left the art to his wife, who valiantly aspired to discrimination but could never quite get there.

Minnie did not want to be the child of some effete English painter, though she accepted that she might well be. She wanted to be Billy’s daughter. Surely a child belonged to whoever brought her up? She had no wish to seek out her natural father. Supposing it occurred to her mother to leave her husband and take up with Eyre Crowe? She was quite capable of it. If she,
Minnie, had run off with Stanton Turlock, a rather inferior painter, might not her mother run off with a better one?

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Rosina.

Not on your Nellie, thought Minnie. She longed to tell someone, but it was for her mother to tell, not for her. Her mother had already been indiscreet. The news of her illegitimacy would probably be with the Dilbernes already. But they were like her father, interested in breeding and the inheritance of characteristics, and would probably prefer the blood of an English gentleman to run through the Dilberne veins, to that of a crude Irish peasant whose only merit was that he had managed to grow rich.

‘You’re very silent. Mama says your mother is the opposite.’

Tact was clearly not Rosina’s strong point, but at least she was honest and straightforward. Minnie decided she liked her.

‘She is very noisy but she has a good heart, and I love her very much,’ said Minnie. ‘I may be noisy too, but I’m struck dumb by the beauty of this store. Also by the prices.’

‘I am surprised that you are troubled by the cost,’ said Rosina. ‘I thought the whole point of you is that you are rich.’ She is so like Stanton, thought Minnie. She can’t help but speak the truth as it occurs to her.

‘I am rich enough,’ said Minnie, ‘but I’m just remembering that the workers who make these things probably get paid indecently little.’ She guessed this was an opinion which would endear her to Rosina, and found that she had read the girl rightly. Rosina beamed and in the gentle light of the shop, looked almost lovely. If only she could learn to stand proudly upright and not stoop, and look others in the eye, she could be almost a beauty.

Minnie went in search of a Tana lawn scarf and found a very pleasant one, all peacock tails, in (the label troubled to say,
and the store seemed very proud of it, whatever it was) Mr Arthur Silver’s recent Hera design, all greens and blues, colours that everyone knew ‘never went together’. She hoped it would prove popular but feared it wouldn’t. It would do well enough to tie under her chin. And Hera was the Greek goddess of love and marriage so Minnie made up her mind almost at once. It would bring good luck.

Rosina suggested they had tea and cakes in the little restaurant, where they sat upon little spindly chairs designed by Charles Voysey, who had just designed H.G. Wells’ house.

‘I do so admire Mr Wells,’ said Minnie. ‘So young and so clever.’

‘But he squeaks when he speaks,’ complained Rosina, and pointed out that H.G. had been present at the d’Asti party and expressed surprise that Minnie had not been introduced.

‘You mean the little man with the crowd of women around him? The one who upset Henry James by calling him a hippopotamus? Well, I suppose we must forgive him. He did write
The War of the Worlds
, after all. Such a diverting novel.’

‘Diverting?’ enquired Rosina. ‘Hardly. Alarming, I should say. Wells points out that just as we overwhelm the poor Africans with our weapons and our scientific inventions, the same thing could very well happen to us.’ Minnie observed that it was a great pleasure to find herself in a place where books were discussed and not just what a good hog could fetch in a competitive market. That too went down well with Rosina. They would be friends. Rosina’s brow ceased to crease in such an alarming way. She was looking positively pretty. They ordered saffron tea. Rosina said it was good for the eyesight and for the complexion. It was made from crocuses which grew in Persia.

The Earl Makes a Mistake

3.30 P.M. TUESDAY, 28TH NOVEMBER 1899

Even as Minnie raised the cup of saffron tea to her lips and smelled its strange odour of damp pencils, so her Ladyship raised a cup of more familiar China tea to her lips in the House of Lords; she admired the view of the Thames, flowing slightly murkily, it was true, but certainly no longer stinking, as it had when she had visited London as a child. The London sewers had been finished and the city had much benefitted from the network, though it turned out that smell itself was not the culprit, but a polluted water supply. The Earl had invited his wife to listen to the third reading of some proposed legislation she might find interesting, since her charity At Homes were in support of St Joseph League for the Mother and Child. The Bill was to oblige all practising midwives to be licensed by the General Medical Council. The debate was fierce – male obstetricians arguing that women should not be seen as professionals – even though the death rate from puerperal fever was rising and much of it due to simple lack of hygiene on the part of untrained midwives.

Private member’s bill after private member’s bill had been flung out, though after the pattern of these things, it would eventually become law. Not probably this year. Isobel had been delighted to come along. You never knew whom you might meet, and it was quite an event to meet her husband
where he worked. He had slipped out of his own meeting with a sleeping Salisbury and various more alert and younger members of the War Office, to join his wife for a cup of tea. The cups were too delicate for their own good, small and too thin, with a pretty flowered pattern. Rather, his Lordship felt, like his wife herself, sitting like some delicate tea rose in this very solid stone male maze.

It seemed she had not been paying much attention to the debate. She had been brooding.

‘This Flora of Arthur’s,’ she said, ‘how do you come to know so much about her? That she has aspirations to being a courtesan, and dresses very agreeably, and you can recognize her at Pagani’s? This common harlot?’

‘Oh, that’s all over,’ he said, without thinking, ‘a long time ago.’

She gave a little scream, and jumped to her feet, and stood, her arms across her chest, like some wronged stage heroine, her eyes wide and horrified. Fortunately the restaurant was almost empty. No wonder men went to such lengths to keep women out of male establishments. Women, even the best of them, made scenes.

‘But what’s the matter? I thought you knew.’ Even as he said it, he feared his life with her would never be quite the same. Some things, once said, cannot be unsaid.

‘Knew what?’ Her voice was high and unnatural. What had he done? Had he done something so bad? Nothing worse than what most men of his age and class did. He’d kept a mistress, not for long, only months, some five years ago. He had not liked the secrecy involved, and had quickly brought the affair to an end. He loved his wife. Flora had been enchanting but it was dangerous. He could not expose Isobel to scandal. Come to think of it, he had given the girl up for
Isobel’s sake. He was to be congratulated, not chided. Perhaps it should not have happened in the first place, but marriage is long and sometimes relief is needed, however briefly. Women don’t seem to realize this – how important it is and yet how little it means.

Flora had made a great fuss when he left her, he remembered, and claimed her heart was broken. Fortunately her tears just hardened his heart against her; she lost all remaining attraction for him when he was obliged to watch her weeping, her eyes so red, swollen and ugly, and her mouth so loose and out of control. She managed to seize the bank notes he held out to her, he had noticed.

He had not abandoned the girl: indeed, he had asked Reginald to organize his successor. Robert had not been pleased to discover the rogue had fixed the girl up with his own son, but there was nothing he could do about it, except be relieved that as these girls go she was healthy, clean and not too hysterical. There was no need to let Arthur know his own father was his predecessor in the girl’s bed. The boy was fond of his mother. He’d assumed Arthur would quickly grow out of any attachment to the girl. But apparently he had not. The consequences of little choices you made which you assumed would just fade away and disappear could come swirling back through time to get you.

‘It’s all over, long ago,’ he said to Isobel. ‘It meant nothing.’

But her face was hardening into a mask of hostility and dislike. He shivered to see it. That was the last thing he should have said. When it came to women, as with politics, denial was the safest path.

‘You can have your dinner party for the Prince,’ she said. ‘You can spend my money and your children’s money on horses and cards, and whoring with your fat friend, whom
even his own mother despises, but I choose my own guest list. Mrs Baum will only enter this house over my dead body.’

‘But haven’t the invitations gone off?’

‘I held hers back, on seeing the postal district. I hadn’t yet made up my mind. Now I have. I am my father’s daughter.’

A thick yellow fog was beginning to curl up the river. It seemed a bad omen.

Robert could see that it might take time to win her round and he had none to spare. Affairs of State called. He kissed her politely goodbye, or would have, had she not jerked her cheek away from him; so he advised her to go home quickly to get out of the fog and made for the Cabinet Office, where the war meeting was under way and there were no women.

In the Cabinet Office

4.30 P.M. TUESDAY, 28TH NOVEMBER 1899

The latest dispatches were being discussed. The news was mixed. The Queen had received one from Lord Methuen after the Battle of Modder River to the effect that it had been the bloodiest of the century; the Boers had shelled from trenches with dreadful success before being charged by the British. Losses had been heavy. Nevertheless it was a victory; the Boers had been driven back. More detailed messages arrived. It seemed that a force of over seven thousand crack troops, including the Guards Brigade, armed with bolt-action rifles and supported by field artillery and four guns of the Naval Brigade, with further reinforcements arriving by the railway, had been surprised and pinned down by a larger force of Boers. The latter had been cunningly concealed and well dug in, armed with Mausers, several field guns and a Maxim ‘pom-pom’ apparently borrowed from the Orange Free State. It had taken ten hours to drive the enemy back just a couple of miles to Magersfontein. Some claimed the British had lost nearly five hundred men, the Boers only eighty.