Habits of the House (22 page)

Arthur’s mount was a very elegant, nervy racehorse with a Russian name which his father didn’t know he had borrowed. Arthur’s father had been at the House of Lords deciding the fate of the nation, so apparently had not been around to ask. Otherwise of course Arthur would have sought permission.

It was decidedly a cut above all the other mounts on the Row this afternoon, they ranging from the scraggy and starving to the fat and waddling, it not apparently being ‘the season’.

‘Pater’s been at the House a great deal this season.’

Pater
. The upper classes all knew Latin as much as English, especially the men. And ‘season’ was a word that came up a lot.

‘What season?’ asked Minnie. ‘I thought that was for the debutantes, when they are presented to the Queen. The one I just missed. There was a lovely sketch in the
Graphic
. So much flowing white silk, so many diamonds. It was one of the reasons I wanted to come, even though they said all the most marriageable bachelors had been snapped up.’

‘The shooting season, silly,’ said Arthur, and pointed out that most of the guns were currently in the country shooting
birds, and most of the smart people were out of town. By rights he too should be in Hampshire at this time of year, but he had more than enough to occupy him in town at the moment. What was occupying him, she wondered? It was not as if he seemed to ‘do’ anything. In America men had jobs. They thought it was normal to work and earn. Here it seemed enough to be ‘a gentleman’.

But Minnie hoped he was referring to her, and the suspicion that he wasn’t caused a sudden unexpected pain in her heart, which unsettled her. If she was to marry this young man, she had thought yesterday, it would be simply as a sort of refined trade – coldly: his title and way of life in return for her money – the idea that she might suffer emotionally, as she had when she parted with Stanton the artist quite frightened her. But it was rather too late to worry. She
wanted
to marry him, stranger in a strange land though she realized she was.

She was being foolish, no doubt about it. She had stayed awake all the precious night in a romantic haze, dreaming about living in a stately home with the Earl of Dilberne, one day to be the Countess, and in the dream coolness had ended up as passionate love. The detail of their lovemaking, visualized when half asleep, was much like the lovemaking she had engaged in with Stanton Turlock. Indeed, in her half sleep he and Arthur merged into one. She’d sat up in bed, wide awake and shocked at herself.

She could see her mother’s point: if girls remained virgins their judgement would stay unclouded as to whom, and when they should marry. Of course it was a serious decision. Your husband decided your social milieu, your income and your friends, not to mention your children, so you had better get it right. No use envisaging divorce. To get divorced in the States you could at least claim mental cruelty: not here. Here if you
weren’t a good wife in the eyes of the law not even his adultery would get you out of it – and here if you left him he kept the children. Perhaps she would never ever be able to see things clearly again.

If just wondering what he did when he was not with her caused her pain she was a pretty contemptible case. If thinking about him made her think of Stanton naked in bed with her, her cause was lost. In her dream there were all kinds of things a man and woman could get to do with each other, if only you found a man prepared to experiment. But how, if you did not sleep with him in advance would you know what it was like? The cult of virginity was a nonsense. Again, she shocked herself. This young man with the floppy hair and the top hat could not possibly be, as it were, approached before marriage. ‘Bad girl, bad girl,’ she found herself saying to herself under her breath, in much the same way as she said to her little dog back home, ‘Good boy, good boy’. If so many people in Chicago saw her as a bad girl and she didn’t much care, it suggested they were right. That was what she was. Not that ‘badness’ was anything which necessarily barred you from joining the English aristocracy so far as Minnie could see.

All the same they wouldn’t want their noses rubbed in it. She hoped gossip from Chicago didn’t follow her. Her father had paid enough to try and ensure it didn’t. Yet Grace seemed in her attitude to know something: did ‘bad-girl-ness’ show in the face? Could it so?

Minnie was seated side-saddle, in her skirts, in obedience to Grace and on a rather placid, slow beast with too thin a neck, and going at a gentle trot. Arthur bobbed up and down beside her on Agripin, a handsome bay. He told her all about the horse’s ancestry and that his father had won him from the Prince of Wales in a wager, as if she should be impressed.
Minnie was used to riding a Morgan, and bareback if necessary. It was not so great a skill. If you could stay on an unbroken ranch horse for half a minute you could do pretty much anything on a horse. Here on Rotten Row she and Arthur rode sedately together. Conversation remained a little stiff. Dull, dull, dull.

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.

Grace and Tessa go Shopping

2.30 p.m. Saturday, 18th November 1899

‘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.’