3 Great Historical Novels (99 page)

Her Ladyship looked askance at her daughter. The girl had abandoned her customary unconventional yet tasteful garments for a motley gathering together of clothes which looked as if they had been chosen by a child. A pair of striped black and white pantaloons, like a clown’s, a white smocked shirt like a baby’s, and a man’s waistcoat beaded with the kind of glitter a magpie would steal.

She seemed to be in fancy dress, and, her mother thought, looked almost insane. ‘You look very peculiar, Rosina,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should call a doctor.’

‘It is not I, but you who are behaving oddly, Mama. You cannot uninvite a Prince. It will cause comment. And you have seen fit to fetch that poor waif upstairs and try to train her up as a lady’s maid. She is irremediably incompetent. These garments are Lily’s choice: they are what she picked out for me. I wear them only to prove a point. She has put a silk shirt of mine in with the laundry wash, and allows
you
to go around looking like a madwoman in a soiled wrap and with your hair undone. Grace would never have permitted such a thing. Please bring Grace back. Mother, I need her. You neglect me. And all your concern goes to perfect strangers, and American ones at that. Why? Because you want their money? It is disgraceful.’

Lady Isobel, who had been feeling much better now she had made the decision to spend Christmas in Hampshire, so that she could order her life again, feared she might well be flung back into despair and confusion by her daughter’s nagging.

‘My early return to the country has nothing to do with the Prince,’ she said, ‘though I daresay he is much to blame in all this. I don’t mean to remain a day longer than I have to under this roof. Your grandfather was right. I should not have married your father. He was only an Honourable when I met him, and a second son at that. I never expected to have to live like this.’

‘Be reasonable, Mama,’ said Rosina. ‘Father only did what men do,’ and she launched into a tirade, which amounted to a validation of her decision not to marry, and made her mother regret that she had trusted Rosina with the cause of her distress. All Rosina could do, Isobel said, was think about herself. It was almost as if other people had no reality.

Rosina repeated that she saw no point in trusting her feelings to someone who was bound to hurt them with the passage of time. She did not intend to be a wife.

‘A wife grows old, so the husband looks elsewhere,’ she said. ‘A wife is obliged to have children, and likely as not dies horribly in childbirth, and is told as she dies she has done her duty to her husband. No, if one can afford not to, no woman should marry. It is a form of slavery. In return for a wedding gown and a declaration of love, a woman offers her sexual and domestic services in exchange for her keep for the rest of her life. Obliged to do things she doesn’t want to, like inviting the heir to the throne to dinner.’

‘Mr Shaw again,’ said her mother. ‘You’d have never turned up for the Prince’s dinner in any case. You’d have found a meeting to go to, one that seemed more important to you than any service you could possibly offer me, your mother.’

‘The Prince finds my
décolletage
irresistible,’ said Rosina. ‘He likes to stare at it, finger it, and if I am sat next to him, to brush his hand against it as he manages to lower his hand to my knee and give it a good pinch.’

‘But Rosina,’ said her mother, ‘when have you ever even met the prince? All talk of him but few see him.’

‘On occasion, Mama,’ said Rosina, ‘he is to be found at the d’Asti salon. He likes to keep up with the thinkers and artists of the day, the ones you so studiously avoid. Where but there is he to meet so many actresses?’

‘This is fantasy, my poor Rosina,’ said her mother.

‘If only it were, Mama. Combine a good
décolletage
with a good intellect and a good pinch and our Prince turns into a slavering idiot. His pleasure is in finding a woman who thinks, and then depriving her of the capacity to do so. He squeezes it out of her. He is very big and very heavy, but also very good at what he does. Flora reports that Father is also very good at what he does, which I am sure you know, and why you are in such a state now. You must be more like the Princess, Mama, and be nice to your husband’s mistresses.’

Isobel stared open-mouthed at her daughter.

‘You are astonished, Mother, that the Prince should like me in this way. You think I’m so plain no man will look at me. Of course, he seldom gets to see me standing up. When I am seated I suppose my height is not so noticeable. When I am seated my bosom is at eye level. I expect that is what he likes.’

‘My dear, you are perfectly capable of attracting any man you want, if only you would not stoop, and stand tall and look them in the eye, and not scowl and thrust your chin out at the same time. It is a bad habit. I had no idea that this went on. My poor girl!’

‘You think I am mad,’ said Rosina, sniffling a little. Isobel was always nervous of sympathizing with her daughter. At the first ‘you poor little thing’ Rosina would burst into tears. Perhaps she was at fault in the way she had reared her daughter? Been hard when she could have been soft, unkind when she should have been kind? Told her daughter how pretty she was instead of pointing out her faults?

‘My dear, you are a lovely girl,’ Isobel said, ‘and have a noticeably graceful body,’ and even as she said it saw Rosina’s face relax and the scowl disappear. Really, was it so easy? But Rosina had not finished with her mother yet.

‘Why do you think the Prince keeps Father so close? The Prince is after me. Father is not so great a wit, though I daresay good enough for a drunken evening on the tiles when the Prince is short of a friend brave enough to go gambling with him. I inherited my mind not from Papa, thank God, but from you and my grandfather Silas. Inasmuch as I am responsible for his death, and I know it suits people to say so, I am truly sorry I killed him, if I did, and of course I did not mean to. I think you should stay quietly here until you feel better and give your dinner as planned. I will come and face the Prince out, and if he fingers my bosom, simper like all the other young women round your table hoping for his favours.’

Isobel thought her daughter had lost all touch with reality. Why would the Prince be bothered with a girl like Rosina? She was no beauty. It was true that the girl had a quick mind and was well-informed, which the Prince seemed to appreciate in a woman. Rosina’s was a nicely shaped bosom which many admired; that could not be denied. But to attribute her father’s friendship with the Prince to herself – that way madness lay. Rosina was unhinged. Her father Robert’s abominable behaviour – which somehow the girl must have come to know
– had triggered off some kind of manic episode. And on top of everything else what had the girl said?
‘I think you should stay quietly here until you feel better?’
How dare she offer her mother advice! The mother she had cruelly orphaned, and ought to honour the more. Rage mounted.

‘I wish you had never been born,’
Isobel almost said to her daughter, but managed to stop herself. There was no escape from duty. Once one was a wife and mother one’s own personal life was at an end. To give in to rage and sorrow was to weaken the props that kept the entire structure of family and household going. She had a vision of the Modder Kloof mine, awash with murky water, ironwork eaten through by rust, the wooden props already rotting and failing, and saw it as a metaphor for her own life. If she was not careful everything would fall in upon itself.

‘Oh please go away,’ she said and Rosina did.

Rosina gave a little skip and a jump as she went to her room. She felt happy. She had made all that up about the Prince, and her mother had believed her, and even told her she had a graceful body. She had been waiting years for her mother to say she was pretty. Now she could be. She was not ugly and plain and impossibly tall. She was, come to think of it, just the kind of intelligent girl the Prince did seem to favour. Lily Langtry was no dullard. Princess Alexandra was tall and everyone loved and admired her. She, Rosina, should stand up straight and be more like the Princess, and not spend her time stooping and looking at her toes and trying to be little and small. She must practise not scowling.

She took off her silly clothes in front of the mirror and tried standing tall, and liked the way her small breasts seemed to perk up, and the nipples stand out. Of course the Prince admired them; everyone did.

It was chilly in the room, in spite of the fire. Her limbs were long and thin and shapely, much longer than Minnie’s. If she relaxed her brow, her mother was right; her chin seemed to sink back and be no more protuberant than anyone else’s. She might try changing to clothes that fitted more tightly and didn’t hide her shape in flowing velvets and velours; she would think less about comfort and more about the impression she
was making on others. Next time she was at a meeting she would stand up and speak her mind. She had seen advertisements for classes in public speaking for women and she would investigate them. She wouldn’t just think about the possibility: she would actually do it.

She went to her wardrobe and looked through her clothes. Why had she felt it so impossible to choose her own, but that she must instead rely on someone else to do it? Perhaps because thus she had been making Grace responsible for her very looks? It was an absurd way to behave. She would be proud and daring – continue to be as she had at the d’Astis’ salon, in the blue dress and the rakish hat with the leopard-skin band. Boldly she picked out the narrowest skirt she owned, in a plain blue wool, and a white shirt with no frills, and buckled it tightly round her waist. She found her leopard-skin hat, looked at herself in the mirror, and lo, it was what she had made, like God, and like God she saw that what she had made was good.

Rosina wondered how Arthur had got on with the American heiress and hoped the stupid girl had sent him packing in disgust. She said ‘stupid’ advisedly. Only someone really stupid would dismiss so tragic and profound a work as
The War of the World
s
as ‘diverting’. If, in pursuit of the title she craved, Minnie had managed to ‘forgive’ Arthur, she, Rosina, could always tell Arthur that his future wife was illegitimate, a bastard, conceived out of wedlock. That would soon put paid to his knavish tricks. Even Arthur would not let the house of Hedleigh fall so low, and the Earldom go to the son of a bastard wife.

Pappagallo squawked and flew across the room and landed on her shoulder, startling her. Its wings had grown; they needed clipping. It was unfair to keep this pretty creature
trapped in a stuffy room. Its nature was to fly free. She went over to the window and flung it open. The bird launched itself on the instant into space. Immediately she was anxious. How would it survive? Where would it find the fruit and nuts it needed? Winter was coming. It might freeze to death. Perhaps parrots had enemies who flew about the skies? Hawks? Buzzards? It occurred to her that she knew so much about everything yet so little about the real world. The parrot fluttered and faltered but made it back to the windowsill and then jumped back upon her shoulder. They were both saved.

She remembered she had called in at Vine Street Police Station and regretted it. But it would probably be all right. Just another mad woman, stumbling in from the fog, making a mean complaint. Getting others into trouble. They would probably forget it.

Her Ladyship decided rage and loathing must have a stop. That she simply did not have the strength to see a move to the country through without Robert’s help and support. Cancelling the royal dinner would be far more tiresome than giving it. And, of course, Freddie would crow and make mischief and spread gossip.

Lily was nowhere to be found, so Isobel saw to her toilette herself, taking her time. She could see that it was hopeless to try to punish Robert. He simply would not understand what he had done, how he had turned her whole married life into a lie, how cruelly and suddenly destroyed the illusion of the love between them for which she had thanked God on her knees, and thought herself so blessed, that singular good fortune, that ‘specialness’ from which she had for thirty years construed her very existence, and borne her children too. She had been a fool, and had to face it. Hers was not the only body Robert had enjoyed, or could enjoy. But that was what it was like for women. One man all your life, the purpose of sex procreation, forget pleasure. Men were allowed more liberty, the force of their animal instincts forgiven by Church and State and increasingly, society. She must acknowledge that, once fired up, men could not help themselves.

Fredericka even permitted male guests declared the guilty party in a divorce case to sit at her dinner table. Times were
changing, a new century nearly here. Next time Robert came knocking at her door she would do her duty, try to forget that these limbs had once entwined with another woman than herself, allow him to penetrate her as he had another, and show no disgust.

She had no choice but to face reality, forgive Robert, bring her daughter to her senses and her son back to face his responsibilities. The royal dinner would go ahead. But she would not invite Mrs Baum. She would not humiliate herself that far.

Even as she decided this, Mr Neville came in with a letter. It was a reply from Mr Abbot at Pickford’s. They had replied with exemplary speed. When she opened it she realized why. The firm thanked her for her instructions but could not oblige until they had been paid the amount owing for the last five moves over four years. Their account totalling one hundred and thirty pounds had been presented five times but they had so far received no response. As soon as the matter was settled, of course they would be only too happy to oblige his Lordship and family.

She kept her face unmoved for Mr Neville’s benefit, but her blood ran cold. This was unheard of. People like her did not receive letters like this. It was outrageous.

‘Will that be all, ma’am?’ She thought there was a new tone in his voice, one she did not quite understand. She glanced as if casually at the envelope. It was hard to tell, because the back of the envelope was torn, but the paper along the seal did look a little damp, wrinkled and stretched. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the envelope had been steamed open, the contents read, and it then resealed. But no one on her staff would surely do anything so petty and dishonourable.

‘Will you ask Cook to come and see me?’ she asked. ‘I think we will have an extra course after all on the seventeenth. We
could have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding before the sorbet. The Prince is very fond of it, I hear.’

When Mr Neville had gone she tried to get hold of Robert at the House and failed. She telephoned Mr Baum instead and asked him to call on her. Then she went to Robert’s study and started opening and collating all the unopened envelopes, so many of them brown, that she could find.