Habits of the House (3 page)

The only reason he had transferred most of his, and Isobel’s, wealth – and indeed what was left of the children’s nest eggs – into the gold mine in Natal was that the seam was nearer the surface and a great deal quicker and easier to bring the ore to the surface than the diamonds in which so many of his landed friends and colleagues had invested. He hoped, rather against hope, that the news Baum brought was not to
do with yet more trouble from the wretched Dutch Boers. The Modder Kloof mine was a few score miles to the south of Ladysmith, but so great was the British military superiority in arms and numbers the place had seemed safe enough. More, the Boer treatment of the natives was so appalling that loyalty from workers could surely be expected in the many British enterprises springing up in the area, providing employment, wealth and culture to a benighted land. Mind you, he supposed, that was probably the same assumption made by the Romans until they found the Iceni under Boadicea sacking Colchester and Londinium in 60
AD
. What, after so much we have done for them – roads, rule of law, wealth, trading opportunities – still yet they can hate us?

An Early Breakfast

8.15 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

Grace, in her attempts to bring the family down to breakfast an hour too soon, approached Arthur first. He stretched a long lithe arm from the bed and tried to grab her ankle – but that she knew was merely from habit. When he had been fourteen and she, at eighteen an agreeable, pretty and willing young thing, his enthusiasm had been greater. Now she could pull away easily enough; he remained, she thought, essentially a child, while she had used the last dozen years to grow in dignity and pride. Then she would have engaged in an unseemly tussle, giggling the while, but the passage of the years somehow dried up the capacity to giggle. The more one knew of the world, the less frivolous existence seemed. She could only assume Arthur still knew very little of the world. Men took longer to grow up than girls, and the upper classes were slower than the lower. He could afford to stay an innocent.

All she had to say was, ‘Stop that, Master Arthur,’ and he did. She thought there was probably some hope for him yet. By the time he took over the title he might become as good a man as his father.

‘Breakfast, with Pater? Why? Is there another tailor’s bill in the post?’ he asked her now.

‘Worse than that. That solicitor is here,’ she said. ‘Mr Baum.’

Arthur groaned and got out of bed. He was naked and beautiful, his skin a kind of golden brown wherever hair grew. Grace shielded her eyes from his parts. She knew them well from of old, of course – and she couldn’t help noticing now that they had grown even more impressive as he grew to full maturity – all the same she felt he might do her the courtesy of some small gesture to protect his privacy. The one thing which might lead her to take the jump, leave the safety of service and join the work force – she had savings which would enable her to take a course as a lady typewriter, and there were good hostels where working girls could live respectably and cheaply – was the sheer indignity of being treated as no different from a pet cat or dog, as another species altogether, so that their betters could perform their own animal functions – have sex, excrete, urinate, give birth, get drunk, vomit, quite freely in their presence. If the servants were young and pretty sexual favours could be expected from them, and no extra pay given, as if their bodies as well as their souls were owned. And though her experiences with young Arthur still loomed large in her mind, she suspected that he had hardly given the matter any thought at all in the last ten years.

‘But why at this hour?’ asked Arthur.

‘I have no idea,’ said Grace. ‘I saw him from the window. He looked like a bird of bad omen. He had a yellow vest, like Miss Rosina’s parrot.’

Miss Rosina kept a yellow-vested Senegalese parrot in her rooms, to the great annoyance of the servants. This bird was allowed to fly free from its cage, and scattered the floors with bits of fruit and vegetable matter and shat at will. The servants then had to do the cleaning up. Rosina had trained the bird to squawk ‘
Votes for Women
’ at any man who approached. Grace
thought it was quite funny but down in the servants’ hall Mr Neville took it amiss.

‘All this fuss,’ he said. ‘Women! They’ll only vote the same as their fathers and husbands, so what’s the point? Waste of bloody time.’

Grace Wakes Rosina

8.25 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

Grace went next to wake Rosina. She was a light and nervous sleeper, and never quite seemed to stop thinking, even when her eyes were closed. Her sleeping eyelids trembled. You could almost see the thoughts crossing to and fro just beneath them. Grace tapped on the little, white, long-fingered hand with her rather large and work-worn one. Rosina sat upright in bed, instantly. Like her brother she slept naked, but from principle rather than general carelessness. She was a member of the Rational Dress Association. She had little white breasts and pink nipples, which she made no attempt to cover up on Grace’s account. She liked to sleep with the windows open at night, which was all very well in the countryside, but, as everyone knew, the night air of the city was poisonous.

It was a great waste for such a graceful body to be unmarried, Grace always thought, but it was not her place to be Rosina’s friend. When Rosina turned eighteen she had declined the opportunity to have her own lady’s maid, saying she was perfectly able to wash, brush and dress herself, thank you. All the same, she was not above borrowing Grace from her mother from time to time and requiring Grace to mend, wash, iron and even accompany her to rowdy public meetings, should she prefer not to go to them alone. Thus she added to
Grace’s workload but not her income, matters the gentry seldom thought about while pursuing their lofty principles.

Now Rosina got out of bed and looked around for her wrap. She was all long, pale, smooth limbs and slender body, centred by a copious reddish blonde bush of curly hair between her legs. She was as tall as her father, who was well over six foot, and shorter than her brother by an inch. Her jaw was too strong and her brow too prominent for real beauty. Her tongue was harsh – she spoke her mind and spoke the truth, careless of the feelings of others. She had refused to do the Season as girls of her class were required to do.

‘I am not a prize cow at a market,’ she had said at the time, ‘to be stared at and valued. I am not a slave girl at an auction to be bought for my body after due inspection. That is all the Season really is, that and an opportunity for the mothers to show off their jewels. I will not be part of it!’

Lady Isobel had remonstrated and then given it up. She had once remarked to Grace that God had blessed her with a handsome, cheerful and obliging son, then tried her with an unbiddable daughter. She must be thankful for what she had. Perhaps one day some brave man would come along and take Rosina off her hands and tame her.

Grace thought there was something not quite right with the connections in Lady Rosina’s brain. Most girls could bend their will to the demands of society, whether they were the gentry or in service. She herself found it difficult. She recognized the problem in herself – she was too clever for her own good, too ready to take offence for her own comfort. Why did she object to the way Lady Rosina now let her wrap slip to the floor? Why did she find the girl’s lack of self-consciousnesses offensive, get so upset if others felt free to behave as they wanted to, not as custom suggested? Yet she
did. She had, she supposed, been marked by her own strict upbringing. Some reactions had been engraved into her being, and no matter how her mind argued with them, they had become part of her. She wondered if anyone would ever find a way to unpick these habits of thought and supposed not.

She picked up the wrap and handed it to Rosina, and felt a surge of relief as, in the interests of warmth rather than decency, she covered herself up. But Grace worried that she would never manage to find herself a husband. The girl did not have the right instincts. Arthur had no shortage of girls who saw him as an ideal partner, though none so far had seemed to particularly interest him. Rosina went to public meetings and took notes, but scuttled in and out, and didn’t stop to make acquaintances, as other girls would. For all her brave front she was nervous in crowds, and did not speak in public. She tried once and complained her voice rose an octave so she squeaked and the men around her shuffled and laughed in embarrassment and impatience until she stopped. So she did not try it again.

‘I don’t want breakfast,’ she said now to Grace. ‘I’m not hungry. I’d be content with a glass of water and some of Pappagallo’s nuts. What’s going on?’ Pappagallo was her parrot, who lived on a diet of sunflower seeds and pine nuts, hardly food for humans. Though Rosina was capable of arguing otherwise. She was a member of the Theosophical Society.

‘Mine not to reason why,’ said Grace, as she went through Rosina’s wardrobe and laid out suitable morning apparel, choosing the least eccentric articles of clothing she could find. ‘But Mr Baum is here. You are required to be there.’

‘I don’t see why I should,’ said Rosina. ‘Horrid little man.’

Rosina was also a member of the Costume Society, the Aesthetic Society, and the Rational Dress Association, so few
of her clothes were conventional or did anything for her figure. She liked to go corset-less but hated sessions with the dressmaker, so was reduced to visiting stores and buying ready-made clothes, which tended to hang in folds around her bust, and grip her around her waist. Some of the new Liberty Style fashions fitted her, but tended to be draped in a flowing Grecian way or were quaintly old-fashioned and simply not suitable for breakfast. Grace in the end picked out a pair of brown velvet pantaloons and a frilly-collared floral silk shirt, and laid them out.

‘Pantaloons! Very daring for you, Grace,’ said Rosina, but she put them on.

‘Ours but to do and die,’ Grace murmured.

‘Oh, Tennyson,’ said Rosina.
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade
. You are very knowledgeable, Grace, in spite of being so backward in many ways. I suspect you know more poetry than I do, had a better education at your Ragged School than I ever did at Miss Broughton’s Academy for Young Ladies. Father sent Arthur to Eton, but I was only a girl so Miss Broughton’s and a spell at a finishing school was good enough for me.’

‘There’s misfortune and misfortune in life, I daresay,’ Grace said calmly. She had been destined for service from the beginning: a foundling, taken in by Dr Barnardo, and sent to a good Ragged School where because she was clever, she was kept until she was sixteen. She was not taught shorthand or typing, her Headmaster believing that the skills were dangerous to society – the presence of unmarried girls in the office would lead to the collapse of family life – what married man could resist the temptation? She had no savings or family to support her, so her choice was a career in service, where if you were diligent, honest and pleasant, you could rise from
kitchen maid to housekeeper, or factory work, which meant you could end up somewhere like the match works, where your skin turned yellow and your jaw got eaten away from the phosphorous, and you never got your full wages if you so much as dropped a match on the factory floor. Service was certainly preferable; the Dilbernes were good employers and kept a good table. All the same she found it hard to sympathize with Miss Rosina’s troubles. Grace went to the master bedroom to attend to her Ladyship.

Her Ladyship’s Troubled Morning

8.45 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

As it was, even without the annoying arrival of Mr Baum, Isobel anticipated a busy day. There were eighteen to dinner and Rosina had upset her seating plans, deciding the company was not interesting, and had found a meeting she
had
to go to at a new ladies’ club in Bayswater, this one in support of the movement for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Pleas from her mother merely hardened Rosina’s resolve. Isobel sometimes complained to her husband that Rosina had stuck at the age of sixteen, when girls were at their most wilful and argumentative. Isobel would rely on Grace to help her with the seating and the place names. Grace had her finger on the pulse of society, on the many-tongued gossip which travelled from lady’s maid to lady’s maid, concierge to concierge, footman to footman all around London: only butlers could be relied upon to be discreet. In any case that was the common perception.

At least the Prince of Wales had not been invited, as Robert sometimes threatened. Then the seating would become a nightmare, though Grace could be relied upon to know who would be welcome sitting next to the Prince, and who had best be kept at the further end of the table. And, after a great deal of fuss and bother, news might come in any case that he was unable to attend after all. In the same way as Rosina was so
good at finding meetings that simply had to be attended or her very life would collapse, so the Prince would find his mother the Queen had summonsed him, or affairs of State had arisen that needed his attention. Or perhaps he would decide suddenly that his wife demanded him by her side. Not that this courteous and well-mannered woman caused her husband any trouble unless she felt his reputation was in danger.

It was not the expense of royal dinners that worried Isobel – though the Prince was a hearty eater – but extra agency staff would have to be brought in, usually undertrained and prone to spill food and chip plates in return for outrageous wages. Robert worried about large sums of money but not the small, assuming that the normal workings of a large household came to him by right and were therefore free of charge. Isobel had been brought up by a mother from the North, who would say things like ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ and ‘look after the pence and the pounds will look after themselves’, and her daughter knew it to be true. ‘Come round to dinner,’ his Lordship was quite capable of saying to the Prince, but instead of the pleasure and pride that a normal dinner party would avail, the inclusion of royalty brought only anxiety and tension. She reflected that the way Robert dealt with problems was first to invite them and then deny them. When Grace called her she was already fully awake. After his Lordship’s earlier attention she felt languid and relaxed and her bed more comfortable than usual.