Habits of the House (6 page)

‘One assumed,’ said their father, after a little thought, ‘that the area was well defended. We should have bought arms in from Krupps and Mauser when we could. I told them. Lee-Metford bullets are too soft: they stop no one. As well hit the enemy with bags of flour. Armstrong-Whitworth would have done better and we could have re-armed sooner. But one saw an advantage in buying arms from British sources only. Free
trade when it comes to arms, is well known to have most malign consequences.’

‘Old Willie Armstrong is hardly concerned with consequences other than for himself,’ said his wife. ‘He supplied both sides in the American Civil War.’

‘Mere rumour,’ said her husband. ‘And that was a different time, a different world. I think we are beyond such niceties. Let trade follow the flag.’

Another silence.

‘A pity you did not at least consult me,’ said Isobel. ‘Working with servants as I do, I understand the concept of sabotage. How dinners get spoiled and mines get flooded, when least expected. But men work from theory and women from experience. I daresay that is the case.’

It was the only word of reproach on the matter her children heard her utter.

‘And I take it that what remained of my, and the children’s trust funds is lost as well? All that was left of my father’s wealth?’

‘The Prince has money in the syndicate as well,’ was all her husband said.

‘Had,’ said his wife; and then brightly: ‘So. We are ruined. What is to be done?’

His Lordship turned to Arthur and said, ‘You are the son and heir. You answer your mother. What is to be done?’

Arthur, taken aback at so direct an approach, said that if his father sold off the Mews and got rid of the horses, he could start a garage specialising in steam cars. He would make a fortune. Isobel explained that the Mews were leased not owned, there was no question of money from a sale. Arthur shrugged this off, with the replacement suggestion of selling off some more of the farms. His father said the
automobile would never replace the horse. Rosina, though not asked for her opinion, said steam engines might amuse schoolboys, but were always frightening horses. She personally, she added, was going to train as a doctor and support herself. She wanted no part of the old world. Ignorance, illness and poverty were the source of all human ills. Abolish these and humanity would be reborn. So perhaps, on second thoughts, not a doctor but a reformer. She would start with the condition of many of the farm cottages on the Dilberne estate. They were damp, run down, crowded and unsanitary. Tuberculosis and any number of fevers were rife. It was a disgrace. She would build a model village and people would come from far and wide to see and admire, and the profits could be ploughed back into the estate.

The Earl protested and said he had spent unconscionable sums improving the land over the last five years. If the tenants could stir themselves out of their idleness and torpor to pay their rents on time they might find themselves better off. Rosina said that torpor was largely caused by poor nutrition and if the political classes could stir themselves to abolish free trade the poor might at least be able to afford something to eat. Robert pointed out to Rosina that the problem was holding on to Dilberne Court and the estate at all. Arthur said he would be sorry to see the old place go – tradition and all that – but he personally had no appetite for rural living, any more than his mother had. Robert looked pained that three centuries of hard work, dedication and
noblesse oblige
might be dismissed as ‘tradition and all that’, and Arthur felt suitably chastened but at a loss to offer any further solution.

Rosina said, with a rare show of self-interest rather than principle, that perhaps they had been foolish in not showing themselves more civil to Mr Baum, who presumably held their
future in his hands. ‘If Pater has gambled our patrimony away, and got himself in debt to this moneylender – the least he should have done was to be agreeable to him. Moreover, Mother, I do not think you should refer to Mr Baum as an appalling little man, even in his absence. He does not know how to behave, it is true, but very many perfectly worthwhile people do not. He is only making a living, as people must.’

‘Rosina,’ said her mother, ‘the sooner you get married and stop telling other people how to behave the better.’

‘I don’t see at all why one would be a consequence of the other,’ said Rosina. Still Isobel kept her temper. Arthur thought how important it must be to marry someone of equable temperament. He wondered if it was possible to ensure that his future wife gave birth only to sons, but he supposed it was not.

‘Rosina is right,’ said her father, who often took a more kindly view of his daughter than did the mother, or indeed the brother. ‘It might have been wiser for all of us to have shown more civility to Mr Baum. Arthur, you should not have been witty at his expense.’

‘Sorry and all that, Pater,’ said Arthur, ‘but sometimes the tongue outruns the mind. I really must be off. I’ll leave you to sort this out. I’m needed in the garage. I don’t trust William with the boiler of the Jehu. The man’s a good mechanic but does not quite understand the power of steam.’

‘I would prefer that you stayed, Arthur,’ said his father. ‘You are to inherit the title, the trust fund is empty and you are perfectly old enough to give the matter some attention. The future of the steam car is neither here nor there. It is an absurd contraption, and dangerous as well. As for you, Rosina, you yourself scarcely acknowledged Mr Baum’s presence.’

‘All I did was ignore him,’ said Rosina snappily, ‘I didn’t
make fun of him. So all of a sudden I am the one expected to be nice to someone Mama dismisses as a dreadful little man. I’m glad there is a Mrs Baum, or next thing you would be asking me to marry him.’

Both parents looked at her speculatively. Isobel said, ‘Well, my dear, it is a great luxury for a girl not to marry, one you may not be able to afford. The younger she marries the better her prospects in the world. With every year her charms wane. So I suggest you get on with it, for you have no dowry other than your looks to offer.’

‘Plainly spoken, Mother,’ said Rosina, bitterly. ‘I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you. Let me just say that I am surprised that so much of the family fortunes was trusted to a hole in the ground.’

‘Mines can be drained,’ said Isobel. ‘We must see this as a setback, not a disaster.’

‘What, drained, with hostile forces in the area?’ asked her husband. ‘After a mere two weeks wooden pit props rot under water. Iron fixtures corrode and rust. The Boers resent all mining, whether gold or diamond, in what they fancifully see as their territory.’

‘I think I should have been consulted,’ said Rosina. ‘You mentioned investing in South Africa, Pater, but no one said anything about
mining
. The conditions down the mines are shameful. It is no better than slave labour. Workers
die
.’

‘Rosina, please do try not be so disagreeable,’ said her mother. ‘It is hardly surprising if your father keeps some things to himself.’

‘A gold mine?’ It was Arthur’s turn. ‘We have interests in a gold mine? Why? Diamonds I can understand, you can use them in machines to cut other things with, but gold? It’s so soft. What can you make out of it, other than ladies’ jewellery 
and spare teeth? If there was money to spare, it should have gone into automobiles.’

‘Paper money will lose its value,’ said their father. ‘It is an invention, an abstraction, numbers on a piece of paper, a concept. Gold is real; it is not smoke and mirrors: you can see it and touch it. It is in scarce supply in the world and so can be used as a base from which to value other things. Gold is a wonder.’

‘You are such a romantic, dear Robert,’ said their mother. ‘You see only the glister, you forget about rotting pit props, strikes and sabotage. As for you children, when you gave your father power of attorney it was so that you, Rosina, could devote your valuable time and energy to improving the world, and you, Arthur, to the workings of the steam automobile as opposed to the petrol engine. You chose to do so and are in no position to complain.’

Arthur put some honey on his bread and ate it and said nothing more.

‘I am glad the mine is flooded,’ said Rosina. ‘It spares me from belonging to a slave-owning family.’

His Lordship said Rosina was at liberty to leave the room, there was too much chattering which precluded necessary thought. ‘I really cannot put up with any more annoyance than I have already had today.’

‘So Arthur is to stay and I am to go?’ enquired Rosina. ‘Yet I am the elder? The laws of primogeniture reach everywhere!’

So Rosina flounced out of the room and went to find Grace, whom she asked to help her compose letters to such medical schools as accepted women as students. She did not intend to marry anyone. Marriage was slavery, a woman offering domestic and sexual services in return for her keep, George Bernard Shaw had said so.

‘Yes,’ said Grace, ‘that’s as may be, and we all know him to be a very clever man, though some think if he were not a vegetarian he would speak more sense. But marry the right person and at least you can afford to get someone else to do the domestic servicing. The sexual servicing, in my opinion, can be quite enjoyable.’

‘Ugh!’ said Rosina.

Back in the breakfast room Robert suggested to Isobel that it might be wise to invite Mrs Baum to an At Home or whatever it was the ladies did to be hospitable. His wife should remember that times were changing and that these days those who were once powerless now had power. Isobel raised her elegant eyebrows and refrained from remarking that it was in male nature to look for their own faults in those most near and dear to them.

Robert had kept his composure remarkably well so far, for which she was proud of him, but she knew by the twitching of the vein above his left eyebrow that at any moment he might start shouting at either herself or more likely Arthur, who sat sulking at being prevented from going to rescue his new steam car from destruction by an over-pressured boiler; or he might start banging the furniture or the doors, simply to ease his tension.

‘I quite agree. Mrs Baum is pretty and noisy,’ said Isobel, ‘although she wears too much jewellery in the morning. I daresay she has a good heart, and I wish her no ill. But it would be an unkindness to her to set her down in real society. They would tear her to bits.’

‘Even so,’ said Robert, and his voice was rising in scale. ‘If Baum forecloses on my debt to him, we will have very little but the clothes we stand up in.’

‘I hardly think it will come to that,’ said Isobel. ‘Or that Baum will actually foreclose. We have friends in high places. And Mrs Baum will have an invitation from me by tomorrow’s post. Though only to one of the less important “At Homes”.’

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Robert, and the vein in his forehead ceased throbbing. ‘Perhaps the Prince could be persuaded to buy his racehorse back.’

‘My dear,’ said his wife, ‘I don’t advise any approach to him at the moment. To them that hath shall be given. Not to him that hath not. Are you listening, Arthur, or still sulking?’

‘I am listening if that’s what you prefer, Mother,’ said Arthur. He was a handsome and charming lad: even when sulking he could not hide the agreeable curve of his lips, or the brightness of his smile, when he chose to use it. ‘Anyway they say the Prince is up to his ears as well, and since the Queen won’t finance him because of the latest scandal – he being too closely associated with Agnes Keyser for Her Majesty’s comfort – he has gone to his friend Cassel for money. Which is why the fellow has scrounged a KCB.’

‘Arthur, that is a foul calumny,’ said his father, his vein throbbing again. ‘The Prince is not to be bought.’

‘It is only what the servants say, Pater,’ said his son. ‘I am not saying it is true.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said his wife. ‘Arthur is only reporting back what is widely held to be the case. I would advise against spreading the news of our financial difficulties abroad. See them as merely temporary, and they will be. Poverty is seen to be as catching as the smallpox, and people flee from it.’

‘What about my tailor and his beastly letters?’ asked Arthur

‘Carry on spending,’ said his mother, ‘as if nothing were amiss. Carry on running up bills. Defy the sorry rogue to go to court, and he will not. On no account offer him part-payment,
or he will take it into his head to demand the lot.
“Let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.”’
She spoke with vehemence, as one who knew.

There had been times when the lawyers of her father’s legal wife had prevented money reaching them, and little Isobel and her actress mother had gone hungry.

‘I only hope you are right, my dear,’ said the Earl. ‘I hope you have not learned too much from me. Heaven knows how I have got us into this mess.’

How the Earl Got Them into This Mess

11.40 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

His wife knew well enough. Robert loved to take a risk: he loved to gamble. He was wily, but trusted too much. His impulse was to keep up with whoever was around to keep up with and keeping up with the Prince of Wales was no easy matter. So far as she knew his Lordship did not accompany HRH to the brothels of London but kept to the gaming clubs, though they were alarming enough: the most charming and attractive girls of loose morals gathered there in the hope of a little excitement and if they were lucky a protector. But she trusted him – he seemed too fond of getting back to his wife to succumb to any folly. Also, her Ladyship was well aware how hard it was to be anonymous in current London society. Servants carried news from household to household, hotel to hotel, stable to stable.

Just as well, Isobel thought, that her beloved father Silas was not alive to crow over Robert’s present predicament. Silas had warned her against the marriage.

‘Marry that young man,’ he said, ‘and you’ll end up poor.’

Thirty years later and Isobel could see that it might be true. The upper classes were up against it as never before. It could only be in desperation, Isobel thought, that Robert now surrounded himself with unsuitable advisors. Silas, who had started life as a coal miner and ended life as a coal baron, had foretold it. Land as a source of income was finished.