Habits of the House (16 page)

‘I know,’ said Minnie. ‘I think we will get on very well. Wilde talks about the wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down the streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows. The current climate of London can only be entirely due to this particular school of art.’

‘Don’t be deceived, Minnie. May I call you Minnie, not Miss O’Brien? You don’t seem at all like a Miss O’Brien. I must warn you I am primarily an engines man. I only know about Wilde because Rosina made me come to a talk at the Slade where they were discussing a book called
Imitations of Art
. I yawned all the way through to make her angry, which she was.’

‘But
Imitations of Art
was part of my course at the Institute too,’ she said. She knew now was the moment to mention Stanton Turlock, but she did not. Time enough later.

‘Obviously we were meant for each other,’ he said. It was a pity that his voice still had its slightly facetious note. ‘Here, let me try to kiss you, and you will pull away and I will look most upset, and so we will continue until it is time to declare our most practical and convenient troth.’

He bent to kiss her – her head came up to his shoulder – but she did not pull away. For his part he did not object or look upset but kissed her on the lips. His lips felt soft in the middle but quite hard and firm round the edges. Stanton Turlock’s lips had been the other way round. She preferred Arthur’s, which quite startled her. She had thought she would never fancy another man again. Not that Stanton had done much kissing or wooing. He proceeded straight to the point but with such conviction it had been impossible to resist. A gentle suitor would make a change.

‘I quite look forward to marrying you,’ she said. Were they joking, were they not?

‘We might even fall in love,’ he said. ‘That would be most convenient. I do not deny that it would be better if you were one of us, obviously, but the ones of us available at the end of the season are quite unbearable to look at, and mostly rather poor. All the rich ones have been snapped up.’

‘My father sent me to Europe to buy a husband and a title,’ said Minnie, ‘and he will pay generously. We get on very well, on the whole. His settlement will certainly be more than enough to pay off all your family debts. My mother can persuade my father to do anything. He worships the ground she walks upon. She wants grandchildren and would love them to have titles. They mean a lot in America. This is the
kind of talk that is usually left to lawyers but shall we simply get on with it ourselves?’

‘We already are,’ he said, ‘I appreciate it.’ So since she was declaring her assets, she added that she also had a few hundred thousand dollars in a bank account in London, it suiting her father’s tax arrangements to have her keep it there. ‘I could always “borrow” from that if I had to, though I would rather not.’

She also suggested that since she was the only child, the sole heir to the O’Brien Meat Company, to have her as his wife would open up lines of credit for anyone who had the great name Dilberne – enough to buy new harvesting machinery to put their acres back into profit again, not to mention purchasing any number of steam cars, or electric, or even cars with internal combustion engines. She hoped that would compensate for the vulgar absurdity of the nature of her father’s business.

He did not deny any of that, but merely remarked, ‘There is no future in the combustion engine, unless we can figure out some better way of compressing the fuel–air mixture it requires. Even if it can be done, water is free and all around us: petroleum has to be refined and is expensive and there must be an end to digging it out of the earth.’

Then he observed that his mother might find having the O’Brien Meat Company in the family something to hide rather than celebrate, but he did not think his father would be anything other than heartily relieved.

‘My father is very good at acquiring and spending money, just very bad at paying it back. I must admit I take after him. You will be quite horrified to hear about my tailor’s bills.’

Then he took her hands in his – he had traces of black engine oil beneath his nails, just as Stanton always had green oil paint – and said that even if her father refused them a
penny he might very well still marry her. Better an entertaining life than a dull one. ‘Don’t you agree?’

Minnie had found herself blushing. At the beginning she had been vastly entertained by Stanton; in the end unkind people had forced her to look at the truth. He was a liar, a cheat and a betrayer, even a male nymphomaniac, and, according to her mother’s doctor, suffered from a manic-depressive psychosis. Until he became violent she hadn’t even noticed. She thought it better not to bring the subject up with Arthur. Young men could be very high-minded. They liked their wives to be virgins, and she liked Arthur.

‘Oh yes, yes,’ she said fervently. ‘I have to confess that my real name is Melinda, but nobody calls me that.’

‘I like it,’ he said.

‘Now, Mama,’ Minnie said to her mother over the next morning’s breakfast. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you all this and you are to keep it to yourself. People can be very strange. Tell no one yet that Arthur and I have already reached an agreement. Look how upset you were yesterday, for no real reason at all, other than that we were being practical, when it would have been nice if we were being romantic.’

Tessa said she wasn’t one for keeping secrets; they seemed to speak themselves when she was around, but she could see the sense of it. She would keep mum. She asked how they had parted yesterday and Minnie said that Arthur had delivered her in a cab back to the hotel, and they had been careful to give the concierge, Mr Eddie, the impression that as a romance this was in its very early, merely friendly stage. She had offered Arthur a limp hand and he had touched it with his lips, through her gloves, in the most formal way.

‘And did he suggest you meet up again?’ asked Minnie’s mother.

‘We are to go riding together in Hyde Park in a week or so,’ said Minnie, ‘but he has to do some work on his automobile first.’

‘Typical male,’ said her mother. ‘But I suppose that’s better than nothing.’

A Matter of Reputation

5.15 p.m. Saturday, 4th November 1899

‘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 is Moved to Visit Flora

5.30 p.m. Saturday, 4th November 1899

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.