Great Historical Novels (127 page)

‘I am not a bitch,’ she said, and ordered some sole and then when it arrived complained that the lemon was dry and had no juice in it and demanded another. She lacked the
savoir
faire
of his mother, who would have thought it beneath her to complain about a dry lemon. In her own household, of course, yes, standards had to be kept up at all costs, but outside it, no. His mother had been of comparatively humble, though wealthy, stock, on her father’s side, but knew how to behave. This girl tried, but couldn’t quite.
Not a bitch
. He’d never heard a girl say the word like that. She had the instincts of an
Irish peasant, a background in the Chicago stockyards. All the same, with her hair falling lavishly about her face as it lost the last of its dampness, she was very attractive. He would not have been sorry to marry her.

He wished she had not made it impossible. Flora could have faded somehow into the background, but Minnie had to bring it up. He would have it out with Rosina when he got back. Confounded Rosina could be a terrible mischief-maker. Because she was not happy she wished everyone else to be unhappy.

‘For a bitch not to breed true,’ Minnie said, ‘she needs to have had pups. I’ve had no children.’

‘People try to argue that on this side of the Atlantic too,’ Arthur said, ‘but it is not the case. With mares and bitches, all they have to do is get out once and they’re never the same again.’

‘The hog that a sow happens to get out with first,’ she said, ‘makes no difference whatsoever to the litter she produces when properly mated. How can it? I am a child of the stockyards. We breed scientifically. You English are just romantics.’

And she, talking like this, was most certainly not a romantic. Minnie of the stockyards! He could hear his friends laughing.

‘There is no reason we cannot remain friends,’ he said. ‘In fact I hope we do.’

He knew she liked him. He could tell from the way she inclined her body towards him. She would be easy. A girl who does it with one man will do it with another. Girls quickly get a taste for sin, learn to compare one man with another, enter the realm of the animal where Flora dwelt, comparing ‘doodles’ one to another, and go on looking for perfection until the end of their days, never satisfied. 

‘I’ve asked them to light a fire in the bedroom upstairs,’ he said. ‘It’s very pleasant up there. Shall we go up for a nightcap?’

She didn’t jump to her feet and scream or stab him with the knife with which she was cutting her cheese, though the expression on her face suggested she might – but just stiffened and enquired coldly,

‘Are you out of your mind?’

And then, in a gesture worthy of the Chicago stockyards, she slapped his face.

Arthur went out to see that the Jehu was safely tucked away for the night, and when he went back inside she was nowhere to be seen.

Rosina Challenges Her Mother

11 A.M. SUNDAY, 3RD DECEMBER 1899

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 Sets Pappagallo Free

11.30 P.M. SUNDAY, 3RD DECEMBER 1899

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 Worlds
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.