The New Countess (17 page)

‘But I turned on the bath tap and water came out of the shower,’ she complained. ‘Now look!’ He went upstairs, pushing past her, and found a towel and handed it to her. One did not want to be written about as ungentlemanly.

He heard the Jehu clattering down the drive to collect her. He was glad that she was going but the clatter was something of a worry. The exhaust valve regulator might need more attention. And as the vehicle drew up there was a series of explosions, which made Miss Braintree giggle rather indelicately as she stood on the stair beside him. The sudden expansion of hot gases under high pressure made the unfortunate noise – suggesting that the silencer holes were still ragged and needed yet more smoothing. Anything which impeded the passage of escaping gases from an engine must be avoided, be that engine organic or inorganic. Back to the workshops.

The door opened and Minnie came in.

‘Darling,’ she cried. ‘Little Connor took five steps on his own today. On his feet at last! Five whole steps. I thought you’d like to know.’ Her voice drained away.

Arthur could see that the sight of Miss Braintree on the stair in her wet, all-but-transparent shirt, rubbing her curls with the towel Arthur handed her, might give Minnie the wrong impression. But surely not so great a one as to justify what his wife did next – which was to run off, get back into the Jehu and tell Reginald to drive her back to the house, leaving poor Miss Braintree to walk to the station.

‘Oh dear, dear me,’ she said, as she left, still giggling. ‘That was most unfortunate. I can see I’ll never be the secretary now.’

She could take nothing seriously. He claimed pressure of work and did not offer to accompany her. He locked up, mindful of Inspector Strachan’s warnings, and went on up to the house to explain matters to Minnie.

Minnie Runs

30th September 1905, Dilberne Court

Minnie ran. She pushed through the great door, not waiting for anyone to let her in, and ran. She ran through the great hall where a team of embroiderers were restoring the wall tapestries, through the ante-room with its newly restored gold-leaf ceiling, and through the chandelier room with its glittering glass, where Mr Neville directed Elsie how to lovingly wash and polish each hanging prism and globe so as to be fit for a King – as if she didn’t know. Minnie ran down a corridor which never got the sun, but builders were knocking in a new window, and another painted in three different colours to see which one was best; she ran up the steep back stairs which Isobel couldn’t do much to but paint, and the fumes still lingered, into the East Wing where Mrs Keppel and her husband George were to sleep, and into her own and Arthur’s quarters.

She ran away from her life and into her future. She ran blindly, all else blotted out by a vision sealed into her mind and she knew she would never get rid of: the sight of Arthur on the stairs handing a towel to a near-naked girl whose hair hung loose around her shoulders. It was as if she had always had it in her mind: there was a certain relief in being able to see it so sharp and clear at last. Abandonment, loss. She flung herself upon the bed and opened her mouth as if to howl.

But her feet were hurting, so she pushed off her little laced boots without bothering to undo the laces, using force – the right foot dealing with the left, the left the right – on to the floor where Isobel had taken away the old worn rug she loved and replaced it with a brassy one from Heal’s which didn’t suit the room one bit.

This was why Arthur wanted the Gatehouse. To frolic with a female secretary, some snippet of a girl: no, not some snippet, some blowsy trollop with creamy shoulders. Reginald had said to her as she crouched in the Jehu on the way back to the Court.

‘Don’t take on so, my Lady. It doesn’t last long, with Master Arthur.’

Was that meant to be comfort? That it was a meaningless habit. And how dare he speak to her like that? He was a servant.

Now she was on her feet. She meant to escape, get away from this accursed place. Lily pushed the door open.

‘Mr Neville told me to come up to see if you were all right, Miss?’

‘I am leaving this house,’ she said. ‘Fetch me a suitcase.’

‘How big a one, your Ladyship?’

Minnie said sharply, ‘One I can carry myself, girl,’ and Lily went off to fetch it, and no doubt to report back to Isobel first. She flung the things she needed on the bed. What did one want? A couple of skirts and dresses, some under-things, a toothbrush, soap and a towel. She wanted nothing that belonged to here. She wanted her life before Arthur back. She found her little drawstring purse – so pretty, antelope suede with a silver clasp, a present from Arthur when once they had loved each other (she would not cry, she would not) and in it two pound notes, three shillings, a sixpenny piece and two farthings. She found her cheque book, so long unused, at the bottom of a drawer where she kept her lace stockings and took it out. No. 3 Fleet Street. She was running to Rosina, of course, where else? One needed comfortable shoes if one was to run.

When Lily came back she did not wait for proper packing; one had to run or one began to think. If she gave herself a moment the sight came back, pulsing in and out of definition. Arthur stood upon the stair, looking up at the girl as she looked down. Longing, such longing. Her heart would break. She grabbed a coat, any coat; one needed a coat to keep out the cold. She was shivering. Her lips were salt; she’d been weeping, was weeping, and didn’t know it. She ran; she ran from love and loss and the habit of endurance, she ran from the vision of Arthur and the girl upon the stair, she ran through rooms and down corridors and up stairs and past staring decorators and plumbers and servants and found herself at the nursery door. She pushed it open and Edgar and Connor were standing stiff and uncomfortable and ready to be brought down for tea. She held out her arms for them.

‘You’re coming with me,’ she said. ‘Nanny, get them ready.’

But they shrank from her and little Connor opened his mouth and started to wail. She realized she had frightened them; that she must look strange. Nanny put her arms round them and stood as if guarding them against an enemy.

‘You leave these poor wee mites alone,’ said Nanny. ‘You wicked woman.’

Minnie looked towards Molly at the back of the room. Wasn’t there an ally here? But Molly just shook her head. No hope.

‘Go now,’ said Isobel’s voice behind her. She turned, and there was her mother-in-law, her face oddly soft. ‘I know how terrible it is,’ she said. ‘Go now, come back when you can. I’ll look after them.’

Edgar stuck out his little jaw as his father did when she had annoyed him, and little Connor hid his face in Nanny’s skirts and Minnie brushed past Isobel and ran and ran from them all. Lily was beside her and Reginald driving – Isobel said the train was not advisable – with a picture of Arthur on the stair with the girl seemingly engraved into the very glass of the Jehu windows – she would never travel in a Jehu again – all the way to No. 3 Fleet Street where the door was opened by Rosina and Rosina let her in.

Reginald and Lily went off, presumably to Belgrave Square, where Minnie had been expected to go, but, just like Rosina, had not.

Part 2

What Happened Next

…in Minnie’s Life

Minnie marvelled at how quickly things could change. Three weeks after her flight from Dilberne Court, she stood in her stockinged feet in front of an easel and pasted up next month’s edition of the
The Modern Idler.

‘I could spend my life doing this, and be happy,’ she thought.

‘Pasting-up’ was a simple matter of working out in your mind’s eye what the page would look like; making what was important bigger and what was less important smaller, cutting up typewritten columns into pieces and pasting them down with Mendine glue onto the large page sheets, getting the matching wood blocks in place, fitting it all together so it was aesthetically pleasing, and taking the finished sheets and a couple of white five-pound notes down to the
Daily Mirror
(where Anthony had a friend) and the typesetters could do 2,000 copies of
The Modern Idler
on good-quality paper in two hours using an old-fashioned flatbed. Minnie could do in three days what it took everyone else five. She just had a talent, rare in women she’d been told back at art school in Chicago, for spatial arrangement. The others waved scissors around and panicked and scattered the floor with bits of screwed-up paper and blobs of glue, and took days when Minnie took hours.

‘You’re a genius,’ Anthony Robin said. It was a long time since anyone had said that to her. She thought she was probably in love with him. His face was all planes and angles.

They’d put her to work straight away, ‘to stop her brooding’. She slept on the sofa the first night and after that she had a little back room of her own. She could see down to the Inner Temple church and gardens and even got a glimpse between rooftops of the river. They’d been astonisinghly nice to her. Rosina had moved out of the spare room to make room for her when she’d turned up in the middle of the night, and now Rosina shared with Diana and said it was okay by her if it stayed like that.

People came and went all the time at No. 3: artists and writers. Conversation was lively, food came when people were hungry, not when mealtimes dictated. Rabbit pie was a favourite and the Fleet Street butcher sold blocks of pastry to go on it. Diana did the cooking when she was not cleaning up after everyone, and now Minnie could help her keep up with the secretarial work. She worked and she was welcome.

Every now and then Anthony would emerge from his room and wander around, and if she was pasting up would stroke her head a little and turn her chin towards him and look into her eyes as if he saw her soul there, and then wander off.

Rosina slept in late and would then go round to Longman’s in Paternoster Row to prepare her book for the printers: Minnie had begun engraving a couple of wood blocks for the illustrations: a group of thin, naked natives dancing round a fire – none of them seemed to have washed their hair, so the engraving of their tangled locks was fiddly and difficult. Minnie had not tried her hand at engraving before. Perhaps it was her true vocation. It was rather nice wielding a knife rather than a paintbrush. It made one feel more in control of one’s life. Or perhaps she just wanted to kill? Only she wasn’t like that, was she – or perhaps she was? She didn’t know who she was, and didn’t care. Here and now was good enough. Every night was a party of one kind or another, though she didn’t use the same potions that seemed so to entrance the others.

So long as she didn’t think of the children all was well. But when she did a terrible longing and anxiety seized her.

‘It isn’t rational,’ Rosina assured her. ‘Just because you feel anxious it doesn’t mean there is anything to be anxious about. It’s instinct working, it isn’t
you
. They are perfectly safe where they are, more than safe. The only thing they’re likely to die of is boredom.’

Minnie said she was desperate to take them home to Chicago and bring them up there and Rosina just laughed. They might let her take Connor out of the country as he was only a second son, but they’d never let her have Edgar the little heir.

‘But a son belongs to the mother until he’s seven; I thought that was the law.’

‘Not if he’s a peer of the land,’ said Rosina. ‘No English judge would allow it. How these old men close ranks against women! You’d have a better deal in the land of the aboriginal. Mind you, they just share the children there, hand them out amongst one another as if they were anyone’s. You hardly have a name of your own. You’re just someone’s mother, or sister, or daughter.’

‘Not so different from me,’ said Minnie. ‘I have no existence of my own. I am a future Viscount’s mother, a Viscount’s wife and an Earl’s daughter-in-law. A long time since I was little Minnie O’Brien.’

It was a warm autumnal day. They were outside in the little overgrown garden. Rosina had rigged up an old fire grate on two stacks of bricks and had lit a charcoal fire under it. She had been down to the butcher and bought a pile of red rump steaks, and was preparing to cook them, using long hand-held tongs to flip them over. Minnie thought she had never smelt anything so delicious. She hadn’t been able to eat for weeks, she had been too upset; but now suddenly she was hungry and restless, she wanted something and she wasn’t sure what. She wanted her children, but this was something different. She wanted Arthur: her body craved him, he was the architect of all her woes and yet she craved him. If he walked into the garden and said he was sorry and he loved her she would fall into his arms.

‘You’ll go back to him,’ said Rosina, who seemed able to read minds. ‘Women do. How will you live? Where? What on? If you leave home you have no rights. You can be divorced for desertion. I’ll bet my brother has all your money tied up.’

Minnie had gone to the bank to take out money and found she had none. The bank also told her that though she owned shares in the Jehu Automobile Company, she had signed papers to the effect that she could not sell them. She had written to her mother asking her for funds and was waiting for a reply. She shivered: a cold wind eddied off the river. Rosina didn’t seem to notice it.

‘Arthur has done something unforgivable.’

‘But Arthur can do as he likes,’ said Rosina. ‘Just as the King does as he likes. The Queen forgives the King, so you had better forgive Arthur. Sex means very little to men. Except they have to have it or they go mad. My poor husband was like that: he had to have sex, and got it, and still he went mad. It was not so dreadful a thing for me when he died. The aboriginals are just the same, except the women behave like the men. It’s all in my book. It will make a great stir.’

‘But I hurt so, Rosina. I don’t understand it.’

Smoke and the smell of burning meat drifted towards them and Minnie began to cough, and then to cough and cry at the same time.

‘Don’t distress yourself so,’ said Rosina, not unkindly. ‘You are so soft, Minnie. It comes from being brought up in a heated nursery and never being beaten. We blue-blooded English toughen our young.’