The New Countess (16 page)

Indiscretion

30th September 1905, The Servants’ Hall

Cook served an early tea. His Lordship was coming down for the rest of the weekend, so there would be an extra course of roast beef for dinner. He liked to eat as soon as he got in. Cook would have to fire up the stove and that took time. New gas ovens had been installed by the Southampton Gas, Light and Coke Company, and were well able to deal with a fancy eight-course dinner for thirty, but Cook did not trust them with a classic beef roast. The old iron range had been kept on, so she would use that. Beef needed a really fierce oven if it was to be properly sealed: the new namby-pamby steel ovens with their thermometers were all well and good, but nothing beat the back of the hand and experience. A good roast was burned on the outside with the fat well shrivelled up, brown on the inner layers and pinker and moister the further in you got.

Digby had telephoned to say his Lordship would be down by train as soon as he was free at the House. Lily had left the phone giggling.

‘He told his Lordship about The Cardinal’s Hat,’ she told the assembled staff. ‘Digby reckons he’ll be going this afternoon. He’s fed up with her Ladyship. I’m not surprised.’

‘That’s enough of that,’ said Mr Neville.

‘What with Mr Strachan and all,’ said Lily.

‘And even less of that,’ said Mrs Neville. ‘I daresay they’ll be keeping to their separate rooms.’

‘I should hope so,’ said Lily. ‘I was going in with her cup of tea this morning, but she came out and told me not to bother. I reckon she had the Inspector in there.’

‘God will curse you for telling such wicked lies,’ said Elsie.

‘So I took it to Lady Minnie instead and she was in a right state. All Master Arthur does is leave her alone. I reckon she’d be better off running away. She doesn’t fit in and never will. And she knows it.’

‘She made such a pretty bride,’ said Elsie. ‘She loves him. And those dear little children. They’re just going through a bad patch, the way married couples do.’

‘Not that you’d know much about that,’ said Lily.

‘You’re just in a bad mood,’ said Elsie, ‘because you’re having to go up to London to talk to Agnes, just as his Lordship is coming down here. I know you.’

‘You’re the one who ought to wash their mouth out with soap and water,’ said Lily, ‘if you’re implying what I think you’re implying.’

Reginald came in from the Jehu and trumped them both. He helped himself to ham on the bone. He had missed his lunch.

‘You’ll never guess who turned up at the Gatehouse for Lord Arthur today,’ said Reginald. ‘Bold as brass and still overflowing, if you get my meaning. Putting herself forward as a gentleman. Fat chance. Miss Flora of Half Moon Street, not looking a day older.’

‘Not that one? Not that Flora?’ asked Mr Neville. ‘The one he shared?’

‘Well, I’m not quite certain,’ admitted Reginald, ‘but she’s a dead ringer. I left them there together. And her Ladyship walked back to the house with Mr Strachan.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Cook. ‘What’s the matter with everyone? One thing after another.’

‘Royal visits are always unlucky,’ said Mrs Neville. ‘Everything was going so well until that was announced.’

‘Never wise to throw out old furniture,’ said Mr Neville. ‘In my experience where things go, people follow after.’

Arthur Resists Temptation

30th September 1905, The Gatehouse

After Reginald had left in the Jehu, the lady journalist stepped inside the Gatehouse. She looked round appreciatively, and sat down in one of the Liberty chairs.

‘Ah, Mackmurdo,’ she said. She was evidently knowledgeable and cultured, and refrained from crossing her legs. She might even be a lady. She was wearing a nice crisp white shirt tucked firmly into a broad belt, so that her bosom appeared to advantage. It was quite plump. Women with tiny waists often had an unfortunately small bosom. She had no wedding ring, yet came unescorted. It was difficult these days to judge class or status. When she spoke it was with an educated, even refined voice, and quite melodious. Flora had tended to screech when excited. Miss Braintree would never screech. He put Flora from his mind.

Miss Braintree seemed quite pleased with what she saw.

‘A strange place for an office, Lord Hedleigh, but most attractive and I daresay perfectly functional. It is so pleasant to get out of London for the day. The city has become so grimy and crowded.’

She spoke as if they were friends, when they were not. It was a very female strategy, thus to claim acquaintance when there was none. They were unchaperoned. He wondered if he should ask her to leave and send a male replacement but decided against it. Miss Braintree had the power of the press behind her and it was important that the Jehu Automobile Company was not represented in the
Mirror
as old-fashioned and stuffy. She took out the notebook journalists carried with them these days for their strange squiggles. Her fingers were long and neatly clipped. He imagined where the fingers would travel if they were in bed together and banished the thought as best he could. Perhaps he should ring up the house and get Minnie to come down at once and bring him back to his senses? But then he remembered how Minnie hated coming down to the Gatehouse, and he failed to lift the telephone. He would simply face the new world: Miss Braintree would listen and he would talk.

Miss Braintree warned him they had little more than an hour together and then she was catching the quarter-past-one train back to the station the better to meet her deadline. She had, she said, taken the liberty of asking his driver to call back for her at one o’clock. Careful not to be misconstrued, he refrained from saying a lot could be achieved in an hour.

‘I thought lady journalists only wrote about fashion and how to look after babies,’ he said, and if there was a hint of derision in his voice he did not care. Women who aped men must expect to be treated like a man.

‘Many of them do,’ she said, ‘but I don’t. I write about the beauty of automobiles.’

If only he could hear Minnie say such a thing. Miss Braintree asked him for his views on Herbert Austin’s new plant at Longbridge and his plan to mass-produce a new automobile, the Phaeton, to be on sale as early as next Spring. Was it feasible? Was it true?

‘It sounds such a wonderful machine,’ she enthused. ‘A 30-horsepower, high-class, touring model, with magneto and coil ignition and a four-speed gear box, all for a mere £650.’

‘I would be happier to talk about the colour of my shirt,’ said Arthur, ‘or whether I sing lullabies to my children, but automobiles? These are serious matters, Miss Braintree. It is a woman’s place to sit in them and look pretty, not to understand them.’

‘Then please be serious,’ said Miss Braintree. ‘I have a job to do, and not much time to do it in. It seems to me that young Mr Austin is a long way ahead of you in the race.’

‘There is no race, only competition amongst enthusiasts,’ he said. ‘Let me give you some figures.’

Miss Braintree was doing her best to provoke him. He must play for time. Life was moving too fast. His mother and Mr Strachan? It was an absurdity even to imagine it. But now this: equally unbelievable that respectable women should behave in this way. Don’t think about it. He needed Minnie.

He pretended to be looking up files: moved papers around. Women were so tricky. They smiled and smiled and then they traduced you. Flora had the same talent: she had so easily bamboozled him into paying her rent on the assumption that he, Arthur, would be her sole visitor, only to find he was sharing her with another – who was it? – one’s memories for these things was so vague. A bird of some kind? Of course, Anthony Robin; Redbreast, whose fag he had been at Eton. Some nonsense about the law and the technicalities of who paid the rent for what – the solicitor had sorted all that out. But he suddenly had a terrible vision of Miss Braintree, not Flora, velvet-handcuffed, naked and smiling up at him from the bed. The bamboo bed. These were not the visions meant to assail a man trying to run an engineering business in a competitive world. Where was Minnie? Keeping the company of her children, no doubt, neglecting her husband, scorning the love of his life: the automobile. Also, suddenly, gratifyingly, he recalled Redbreast’s member: it was distinctly smaller than his own. He found himself laughing. He had soon got the better of Robin Redbreast.

Miss Braintree was looking at him strangely. He pulled himself together.

‘Mr Austin rather overstates his claim,’ said Arthur, summoning up the special smile that he knew well enough made women melt and envy Minnie. ‘We have all heard of the Phaeton; Austin has a very good publicity team, perhaps even better than the one in charge of his engineering. But the Phaeton’s horsepower will only be twenty-five or thirty at best. The Jehu’s full four and three-quarter-inch bore and a five and a quarter-inch stroke yields a good thirty to thirty-five.’

‘But the Phaeton’s out next Spring and so cheap! And that adorable dark red! Our information is that the Jehu won’t be coming out until Christmas of next year at £800 and no mention of colour. Have you not been rather trounced in the race by young Mr Herbert Austin?’

‘Christmas always comes sooner than one thinks,’ said Arthur and Evelyn wrote it down in her strange squiggles and underlined it.

‘That makes a good headline,’ she said.

‘Also,’ said Arthur, ‘Mr Austin is not so very young. He has at least five years advantage over me.’ He was rather beginning to enjoy this. Most journalists were either seedy, if they came from the yellow press, or unbearably pompous if they came from
The
Times
.

‘But he’s a farmer’s son,’ said Miss Braintree, ‘and went to a grammar school and you’re a Viscount and went to Eton. Has he not done rather well?’

‘Of course he has,’ said Arthur, adding, ‘but then I am a magnanimous fellow, you know.’

She asked him how to spell magnanimous and he told her.

‘I trained at Pitman’s Secretarial College,’ she said. ‘I can do a hundred words a minute shorthand,’ she said, ‘and I can type at sixty. But long words hold one up so. It’s lovely and cool in here but so hot outside.’ Miss Braintree dabbed at her brow with a little lace handkerchief and opened a button of her shirt. Now he could see the swell of the breasts. He wondered if the nipples were pink or brown – pink, he suspected. Minnie’s tended towards brown.

‘I am looking for a secretary,’ he said, before he could help himself. ‘Perhaps you know someone who would suit?’

Some plain girl, he thought, someone with bad teeth, no figure and a hairy chin, or else Heaven help me! I am a married man and have no time for frivolity. At the same time he was still a man.

‘From the state of your papers you certainly need one,’ she said. ‘You need someone with knowledge of automobiles,’ she said. ‘And if you want a girl they will be thin on the ground and want paying at least as much as a man. And if they have an aptitude for publicity, so necessary in the modern age, they will want even more.’

‘I can pay well,’ he said faintly. The bamboo bed came into his mind for no apparent reason, just a few feet away, the solid smooth thick yellow-brown legs, the curly swirls at the head of the ornate bedstead: rather like Miss Braintree’s curls. He shivered.

‘Personally, I would be happy to work for you,’ she said, tossing the curls. It was so hot some of them clung damply to her skin; others rioted and glittered around her skull. ‘I so want to get out of London and write a novel. I need part-time employment. I’d work for you five hours a day: the rest of the time would be my own. The accommodation here would suit me very well – just right for one person. We’d get on, I imagine.’

‘Yes, I do imagine, Miss Braintree,’ he said, ‘but I think it would be wiser not. Cheaper and more sensible to have an ordinary male secretary.’

‘Ah, cold feet already?’ she said, with another careless toss of those curls. ‘And you so go-ahead! Anthony Robin said you were a stick-in-the-mud at heart and he was right. A pity. Let me know if you change your mind.’

‘Anthony Robin?’ Arthur was startled. ‘What can you possibly know about Anthony Robin?’

‘I take the odd glass of wine at El Vino’s with him,’ said Miss Braintree, coolly. ‘He works in Fleet Street. He edits
The Modern Idler
. He seems very interested in your progress and not very fond of you. I wonder what you did to annoy him. He and I used to be thick as thieves, of course.’

Thick as thieves?
Did that mean what he thought it meant? Quite extraordinary. And was the past never done? This was proving a most disconcerting day, one way and another. The sooner she was out of the place the better. But she hadn’t finished.

‘Nowadays of course he’s as thick as thieves with your sister Rosina, but I can only imagine it’s a meeting of souls, not bodies. She’s one of his contributors, and these days I rather think he prefers the company of men, and now I come to think of it probably always did. And Rosina’s written this startling book about Australia, hasn’t she. I believe there’s quite a split in your family. Your mother threw her out of the house. I won’t write about that. I could, of course, but I won’t. I’m much too nice. Are you sure you don’t want to employ me?’

His mother had been right.
The Times
was one thing: the gutter press quite another.

‘Quite sure, Miss Braintree,’ he said, ‘though I am sure it would be a delightful experience. As for the rest, the Dilberne view is Wellington’s
publish and be damned
.’

‘It is certainly your sister’s, my Lord,’ she said, with a certain sardonic tone in her voice, as if the form of address was worth more mockery than respect: people split into two camps, he’d noticed: those who paid too little respect, and those – by far the greater number – who fawned.

She prepared to go. She asked him outright where the bathroom was and he told her. Most women of his acquaintance would have died rather than admit to so basic a need. But she showed no signs of mortification. Her backside stuck to her dress as she went upstairs. The fabric was thin. There was a cry of alarm from the bathroom, and she rushed out onto the landing. Her hair was dripping wet and her shirt was drenched. That too stuck to her body.