3 Great Historical Novels (82 page)

His mother’s dinner party having come and gone without untoward incident, and quickly faded into history as dinner parties do, and since there had been no further mention of marriage from his parents, and the very best caviar had been served at dinner, Arthur supposed that one way and another the financial crisis had melted away. His elders had been panicking. Probably his father had been lucky at the Cheltenham races, or Mr Baum had changed his tune. At any rate, being of an optimistic turn of mind, Arthur decided he could well afford another visit to Flora. He paid for her flat by bank draft, but whenever he turned up to make free with her services it was a given that he eased her way with some pocket money.

She served him a delicious light lunch of French cheese, grapes and fresh white rolls, served with a Rhône wine, and made him comfortable in other ways; and when he was lying back on the bed satisfied and happy, watching her replace her garments one by one, almost as fascinating a sight as watching her remove them, just more relaxed, she said to him,

‘I have been thinking it over and realize I love you very much. I agree to your proposal of marriage.’

‘My what?’ asked Arthur. He had forgotten all about it. ‘Oh, that. No, no, that’s water under the bridge, my dear. It isn’t
necessary any more. Everything is settled now. They were all just panicking. Things will go on as before.’

She looked at him sadly with quivering lip and tears gathering in the large blue eyes.

‘You told me you loved me. You promised to marry me. You can’t just change your mind. I will sue you for breach of promise. You have broken my heart and what’s more there is the financial loss. I told Jim I was going to marry you and I sent him away.’

‘Jim?’

Jim, it seemed, was a very nice rich gentleman Flora had met while walking her little dog in the park and Jim had offered to set her up in a little house in Maida Vale, much superior to the lodgings she currently had in Mayfair but she had said no, because she was going to marry into the Hedleigh family and her children would be lords and ladies. Now came this terrible denial, shock and disappointment.

Arthur’s good cheer faded. He could not bear to lose Flora. He was not born yesterday: Jim was probably an invention. The ‘breach of promise’ threat was an absurdity. No one would take a whore’s word against his own. On the other hand, and this was the really outrageous part, he realised Flora was perfectly capable of deceiving him with another man: assuring him too that he was ‘the only one’ while using the very bed he, Arthur, had paid for. Or more than one, as had happened to his friend Ernest Dowson the poet. Dowson’s sweet all but pre-pubertal Cynara turned out to have a whole flock of admirers.

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion
. Yes, but what about Cynara? What had she been up to?

You couldn’t blame the girls: they had to make a living: fidelity was something a man had to expect to pay very highly
for. Ernest Dowson had ended up marrying Cynara, and a very good wife she was proving, though hardly one who could move in any society other than the
demi-monde
. But Ernest was a poet. Arthur was a gentleman. Different rules applied.

He should not care, but the thought of Flora with another man made Arthur feel ill.

Arthur fell upon his knees and begged Flora to stay with him, to be faithful to him, to ignore offers from other men. He offered to increase her remuneration. He might even have to sell the Arnold Jehu to be able to afford it. That a man should consider selling a car to keep a mistress happy was not in the ordinary run of things. This must surely impress her. Perhaps he did indeed love her.

Sobbing and plaintive, but already cheering up, Flora accepted his offer of three pounds a month more than the twenty pounds she already received, plus a rental of five shillings a week.

‘I love you so,’ she said. ‘I want no one but you, and I never have.’ She put her milk-white arms around him and dragged him back into bed. The sheets were exquisitely clean, exquisitely embroidered. Her little dog sat on its red velvet cushion and looked on: the canary in the gilded cage sang its joy in their passion. It was worth it.

Arthur’s allowance was three hundred pounds a month. He owed his tailor Mr Skinner of Conduit Street one thousand, eight hundred and fifty pounds. His father refused to pay off the debt, which Arthur thought unnecessarily mean. The Earl, Arthur had observed, could spend just as much on a night’s gambling with the Prince, and though his father persuaded himself that the losses and gains evened out, Arthur doubted that this was the case. A gentleman’s tailoring requirements were not trifling: he required not just a dress
suit, a morning and an evening suit, but appropriate clothing for bicycling, riding, hunting, golf, and motor sport: white kid gloves were needed for evening wear and after one wear would have to be replaced. More, several copies of each garment would have to be made, since in the end brushing failed to remove dust, dirt and grease, and fashionable fabrics did not stand up to much washing, no matter how careful the laundress. Wardrobe life was short and garments went out of fashion. His Lordship had declined to provide Arthur with a personal valet, and Arthur got by, but it was a false economy.

The Viscount, as Grace had observed, kept his dressing room manageable by the simple device of handing over any garment which displeased him to Reginald and telling him to find a home for it. Over at the Austrian Embassy, she had noticed, staff often appeared on their days off in Master Arthur’s cast-offs.

So what really was another three pounds a month for poor Flora, whose hopes Arthur had so cruelly and thoughtlessly dashed? The qualities one looked for in a wife were very different from those of the girls one had fun with: nevertheless all deserved to be treated kindly and generously. God would provide if his father wouldn’t.

Arthur assumed, as did his mother, that his father did not keep a mistress. Like her he took it for granted that though his father so often accompanied the Prince to the smart gambling houses of London, he did not go on to the brothels the latter liked to frequent as night turned to dawn. The Prince, a disappointment to his mother the Queen, was a man of prodigious fleshly appetites. The Queen had arranged her son’s early marriage to Princess Alexandra both in the interest of affairs of State, and in the hope of quenching these appetites and so avoiding scandal. The plan had worked for a time. The
unwritten understanding was that the prime duty of a royal couple was to provide heirs for the succession. After two males had been born to the virgin bride – one spare, in case of illness or accident – what royalty did with their lives thereafter was at their discretion. Alexandra had six children in quick succession, but apparently stayed in love with her husband: at least no scandal had been attached to her. The Prince, however, very soon took advantage of the fact that fidelity was not required of him. He and Alexandra simply did not ‘get on’, as everyone knew, whereas the Dilberne marriage was surely a love match. Different and more exacting behaviour was expected from the Earl and his wife, especially by their children. Good husbands were not expected to keep their wives company of an evening, but must treat them with respect and not expose them to humiliation or shame. Gambling dens were one thing, brothels quite another. That was left to Royalty, who actually had little need for them, other than to indulge in the more extraordinary of tastes.

‘If you make it five pounds a month more,’ said Flora now to Arthur, ‘I can think of even more interesting things we could do which you might quite appreciate, which a lot of other girls don’t like but I do.’

‘Oh please,’ he said. ‘Please. Tell me. Show me.’

On the Friday, Robert found himself, to his surprise, lunching at the House of Lords with not only the Prime Minister himself but the Unionist Leader of the House, Arthur Balfour, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and the President of the Board Of Trade, Charles Ritchie. Balfour had actually beckoned the Earl over as he entered the Peer’s Dining Room, and had a chair fetched for him. Everyone moved up in a most welcoming way.

Robert wondered why. His interest in politics was fitful; he had no great influence in the land, other than that perhaps his friendship with the Prince of Wales, the Queen’s son, might be seen as potentially useful to some. He attended the House of Lords because he liked the calm of the library and the company of civilized men. Because there were no women around, it was a place free of troublesome emotion. A man could say what he pleased, not what it pleased a woman for him to say. There would, perhaps, be some friendly
antler-locking
, but little bitterness.

Robert had no great ambition to improve society. Experience had proved that intervention in any social plan merely ended up with shifting the boundaries of good and bad
around. What advantaged some could only ever be to the detriment of others. Give workers a bath and they would keep coal in it. Raise taxes and the wealthy would save money by dismissing their servants. Mostly he kept his opinions to himself, voted for Salisbury, and left it at that. But he was no fool, and well aware that this sudden elevation to the grace of the grand panjandrums’ table meant they wanted something from him. Which, considering his financial plight, could only be to the good.

In the first reading of the Exportation of Arms Bill that morning, a bill which ‘sought to prohibit the export of certain classes of military equipment when it was necessary to prevent such equipment being used against British or allied citizens or military forces’, Robert, though by birth and inclination a natural Tory, had voted with the Liberal Unionists against the Bill. It had been passed by only three votes, not surprisingly because as a bill it had been hasty and ill-conceived, as Mr Baum had happened to point out during the course of breakfast, and had alarmed mining interests. Smokeless coal and its by-products could easily be converted into military equipment, and gold was often used in trade between nations, even when they were in a formal state of war. Mr Baum, for one, would certainly not want this badly constructed legislation to go through in its present state, nor would many of his friends whose prosperity depended upon the free international passage of trade. A vague patriotism must be weighed against loyalty to friends and national advantage against national pride.

As he had listened to the discussion of the Bill with Mr Baum’s strictures in his ears, Robert had decided that for once the Liberal Unionists were in the right: the Bill should not pass. In joining the ‘Noes’ he had become a floating voter, and as a
floating voter he must be wooed and won, which was why he now enjoyed the company of anyone who was anyone in the beleaguered Conservative party. The beef was excellent: the Yorkshire pudding light and golden, the gravy excellent, better than any Cook achieved. But she was something of a French cook. Not of the old-fashioned English variety. There was no fancy French cooking in the Lords. He liked it this way.

Conversation was at first light and cheerful: no pressure was put upon him, no reproach on his batting for the wrong side. He hoped they’d get round to suggesting some form of preference, an actual paid job in the administration – hardly a Secretaryship, that required unusual intelligence, let alone a President, which suggested unusual probity: but a junior Ministry, even if only of Fisheries – the trout fishing at Dilberne Court being famous – would claim a good salary, and a good salary at the moment would be more than useful. He wondered briefly how much he had realised that voting ‘no’ would be to his financial advantage and quickly dismissed this from his thoughts. He was a bumbling fellow up from the shires, no sort of wily politician.

He had listened to Baum’s voice, that was all, and responded to it, as was his duty. Baum’s was the voice of an experienced man of commerce. Robert wished he and his family had been more civil to the man. It was the behaviour of a rich man who thought himself unassailable. Now suddenly he was a poor man. It behoved him to change his ways.

‘The war was inevitable,’ observed Salisbury over apple pie and clotted cream, ‘though most regrettable. The behaviour of the Boers gave us no choice. We have to protect our colonial citizens from their bullying and the natives from their cruelty. One could not countenance a Dutch South Africa with, what? German naval ships using its ports? The Boer would bring
back slavery if they could, too. Yet jingoism, as one sees it in the press, is most distasteful. But one hardly wants to arm the enemy, does one, Robert? The inference taken from your vote this morning might be that you do.’ Ah, finally, thought Robert, over cheese, to the point.

‘Nor does one want to impoverish the nation, sir,’ he said.

‘In what way impoverish?’ asked Ritchie of the Board of Trade. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘To quote a character in
Major Barbara,
’ said Robert (by great good fortune Isobel had persuaded him to take her to the Shaw play at the Savoy, and he had woken from sleep to hear a few memorable lines),
‘“the worst of crimes is poverty”,
and what leads to poverty is damage to our great manufacturing industries through government interference. The Bill is both contrary to mining interests and too vaguely drafted to be safe.’

‘Well well,’ said Salisbury. ‘Quite understand your position, Dilberne, but perhaps you should avoid the theatre in future. If Mr Shaw has his way we will all end up Whigs!’ Robert relaxed. He’d got away with it. ‘We must get to know you better, Dilberne. You’re a good fellow, well liked, with quite an influence in high places.’

High places? The PM, Robert supposed, could only mean the Queen. But that was folly. He had met the old lady three times, true, but being a friend of the Prince was the opposite of a recommendation. The old lady thought her eldest son quite unfit for the throne, and was so confused by her daily dose of sedatives from the quacks that however he behaved she was not likely to change her mind in a hurry. Where the Prince had influence was round the gossipy dinner tables of London’s high society, and surely Salisbury in his gravity, could not take what went on there seriously?

‘I hope you trust in our Party’s capacity to steer the great ship of State into smoother waters than we have lately encountered,’ went on Salisbury. It seemed as much a plea as a statement.

‘I do indeed, sir,’ Robert replied, with the formality which seemed suddenly to be required of him, ‘given the accumulated sagacity gathered at this table, I could not do otherwise.’ But he found he had crossed his fingers as his Irish nanny had taught him to, when obliged to tell a lie. Had Balfour caught the action and frowned? Robert uncrossed his fingers casually.

‘Good,’ said Salisbury. ‘Good man. Stay with us.’ His beard was whitening fast – along with the Queen he grew old – but his authority was undiminished.

‘No harm done,’ said Balfour. ‘This time. The Bill goes to second reading.’

But his tone was very much that of the schoolmasterly ‘Just don’t let it happen again.’

Robert felt, as they left the dining room smiling, that he had passed whatever test it was and that he might get something even higher and better paid than Fisheries. He certainly hoped so.