Habits of the House (15 page)

Billy O’Brien had Turlock, never reckoned wholly sane, it transpired, beaten up and locked away in a lunatic asylum, and Minnie was obliged to return home. She was ashamed, chastened and stunned by the extremity and rapidity of dramatic events, but told herself she had recovered from Stanton’s betrayal quickly enough. It was the idea of Stanton Turlock she loved, not Stanton himself. Fortunately she had not fallen pregnant. But her reputation was lost amongst the decent families of Chicago, and her beloved father even forbade her to go on painting.

She’d come home to Prairie Avenue with a sex-inspired Monet-style flower-subject canvas tucked under her arm and Billy had just torn it to bits in front of her eyes. That had offended and upset her more than losing her lover and her ‘reputation’, for both of which she discovered she cared very little.

‘I’m a practical man,’ Billy had said. ‘I don’t blame you. You take after your mother. A girl on heat’s no different than a sow on heat. She takes it where she finds it. Just stop this art shenanigan. I don’t mind it in a gallery but it has no place in a decent Catholic home. Your mother wants grandchildren, and no one in this town is going to marry you. You’d best go abroad and buy yourself some toff who doesn’t know your history. Your mother would like an outing. And a title in the family is good for business.’

Tessa was indeed happy enough to go on a European tour, to stay just around the corner from the Royal Academy where so many of Eyre’s paintings were exhibited. There could be no harm in just looking, in reminding herself of the past, when she had been the kind of buxom blonde girl painters liked around, as bed companion, model, cook and laundress, preferably all at once. She had heard that he was still unmarried, there was no Mrs Crowe. There would be nothing untoward in her visit, no risking her own marriage; so many and so much depended upon it, Billy himself, her standing at the Art Institute of Chicago, charities all over the land, and there could be no upsetting any of it all.

But still it would be interesting to see
The Dinner Hour, Wigan
, of which she had seen a copy, painted in 1874 when Eyre had returned to England, and see whether the girl in the foreground was as like her in the original as it had been in the reproduction. She’d worked in the packing factories in Chicago when first she met Billy – well, that was not quite accurate. She’d met him in the burlesque theatre where she worked of an evening. He liked to watch but couldn’t do. It didn’t stop him loving her or she him. He’d had a nasty accident in the yards when he was a lad and would never have children. All his energies went into making money. But he was always good for a cuddle and had even let her know that if she wanted his friend Murphy to sire a child, he would look the other way on one occasion and one occasion only. The occasion had arrived and in the same week, as it happened, had an impulsive encounter at the rather drunken opening of the Art Institute of Chicago with Mr Eyre. Minnie had arrived, and if the baby didn’t look in the least like Murphy, Billy wasn’t to know a thing like that.

Life never turned out the way you expected it. One way and another, it was quite a marvel Minnie had turned out as steady
as she had, and with any luck another marvel was in store for the bog-Irish O’Briens when the girl ended up as Lady Minnie Dilberne, society beauty, in quaint old England.

‘Besides, I don’t think they let commoners marry in Westminster Abbey,’ Minnie said.

‘You wouldn’t be a “commoner”, you’d be a viscountess.’

‘Only on the way out, not on the way in.’

‘But you’ve been thinking about it?’

‘Oh sure,’ said Minnie, casually, as if it was nothing to anyone.

‘So you like him? Really like him?’

‘Ma, I scarcely know him. We spent one hour in the Victoria and Albert museum. Which is so impressive – do you know the Queen herself, whom no one ever sees, actually came to the opening? It is all very glorious. I am so in love with England. As for its native sons… I daresay one is much like another, and this one is good-looking and pleasant enough. Though all he can talk about is the number of birds he’s killed, and steam automobiles, and what a disgrace it is that electricity is taking over from steam – or maybe he thinks that’s a good thing, I don’t remember; I didn’t listen all the time. But then Pa can talk about nothing but hogs, sows, cattle and refrigeration cars, and you and he get on happily enough. One has to take men with a pinch of salt.’

‘But I haven’t got a brain, Minnie, and you have. You will be easily bored.’ She looked at her daughter with sudden alarm. ‘It’s all very well dressing up and playing at Lords and Ladies, but you’d be such a long way from home. Supposing you were lonely.’

One thing to persuade a daughter to marry when you think she will not, quite another when you think she is likely to do it. She said as much to Minnie. Minnie should think long and
hard about the man she married. Some women, these days, even chose to stay spinsters rather than put up with a man.

‘But I thought you wanted grandchildren, Mama. And Papa is right, I blotted my book so badly no one I’d accept would accept me, for all my money. Even if I had stayed a good girl, there’d always have been too many like me on the market, and it is a market: Papa certainly thinks so. All my friends had declarations of love before they were twenty and I never had a single one.’

‘You will say these clever things that put men off.’

‘No, it is worse than that. I am perfectly good-looking but there is something about me just not very attractive to men, and I must face it. I don’t know why, it’s just like that.’

‘I do. You look at men as if you judge them.’

‘But I do judge them. What can they expect? They are not gods; they are just male human beings. How can I pretend otherwise? Stanton was the only one who ever said he loved me, and he was mad. Or so Father says, not to mention a whole team of alienists. What am I to make of that? No, I will do without love and marry suitably and please everyone. This young man seems totally suitable.’

Tessa sat down heavily. She burst into tears at the shock of it all, indeed she howled, so noisily that the chamber maid knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right. Minnie assured her everything was, and sent her away. She went over to her mother and embraced her.

‘You just cannot be upset, Ma. This was what you wanted. You tell me time is running out for me and I am not likely to do any better. Arthur and I talked it over as we walked round the Serpentine. He was so bored in the museum I took pity on him and we agreed to go for a walk. The young Austrians stayed behind, they are so accustomed to being stiff and
formal the museum seemed a garden of earthly delights to them. Arthur and I spoke freely. I like that about him. He says what he thinks. Few men do: if they did most women would run from the room screaming.’

Tessa gaped at her daughter. Minnie in England seemed a different person than the one she knew at home. The one in the USA was withdrawn, discrete and diffident, and had indeed attracted few beaux – partly because her father suspected every young man who came along to be a fortune-hunter and drove them all away – and partly because if her father didn’t do that, she did, wilfully or no. How Stanton, who it transpired had already spent months in a lunatic asylum suffering from an ailment called manic-depression – had succeeded where many had failed, Tessa could not imagine. This English Minnie had gone to the museum wearing an uncorseted gown which showed her ankles above her little buttoned boots, and if you looked at her from behind you could see the actual movement of her hips as she walked. It was very daring, and so very much in advance of anything that was done at home.

‘In suiting others we suit ourselves,’ said her daughter now, more blithely. ‘Arthur’s parents want him to marry someone rich, and I turn up. My parents want me married and settled down before I do something else dreadful, and he turns up. We are obviously made for each other. Fate has decreed it. He is taking me to Rotten Row on Saturday but the style of horse riding over here is very different – he warned me. He’s quite a jolly man, really.’

Tessa smiled, and looked her daughter up and down. She saw everything that she had made, and, behold, it was very good.

‘Whadd’ya know, Melinda,’ she said. ‘Well – whadd’ya know!’

A Proposal at Second Sight

1 p.m. Saturday, 4th November 1899

The outing had been more than diverting. Minnie hadn’t felt so cheerful since the blow of discovering Stanton’s deception, and the depths of it. The man who defied convention, who despised marriage as a bourgeois fantasy, was already married, had two children, and a history of insanity. She had vowed never to trust a man again, let alone love one. But now, on the banks of the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park – how she loved London! – Arthur had wound a twig around her wedding finger and said, ‘There, we are officially engaged.’ Then they had pecked each other on the cheek.

‘Are you serious?’ she had asked.

‘I am completely serious,’ he said. ‘It is time I got married. One has to look after the succession, you know. My mother has decided you will do, not least because you are a wealthy woman and know how to behave. Your family has decided I will do because I am a viscount, eventually to be an earl, not as good as a duke but certainly better than a baron. You will not interfere with my steam cars: I will not interfere with your little artistic sketches. Once we have achieved two sons, one for the title and one spare in case of illness and accident, we will both be free to go our own ways.’

‘I must have time to think about this,’ she said.
‘You disappoint me. You seemed a woman of quick decision.’

‘Oh very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it. One could go further and fare worse.’

The expression on his face did not alter. He just blinked a little.

‘We will wait three months before we announce the engagement,’ he then said, ‘for the sake of Society’s reaction, and for the sake of the household, which would otherwise have hysterics. We must show some sign of developing passion between us. The servants like a show of true love. It makes the crops grow, according to a Scottish wiseacre called Frazer, as reported by my sister Rosina, who is very learned and goes to lots of lectures. Rosina is anxious that I get married to save her the necessity, though you may not be quite what she has in mind. The harvest has been poor lately and though I doubt that our marriage will put an end to the depredations of Free Trade, it will cheer the estate workers no end.’

‘I can see that is important,’ she said. ‘My father maintains that happy hogs are profitable hogs.’

‘So over the next months I will pretend to woo you, and you will pretend to be doubtful about accepting me. Then you will capitulate, and we will declare our true love. We will tell no one, except possibly my sister Rosina, who you have not yet met, and loves a secret. She is very tall and more like a man than a woman. I hope she doesn’t put you off. She is very advanced, and I advise you to disapprove of her views in front of my parents, especially my mother, though I have no idea whether you’ll disapprove of them or not.’

‘You are putting a great deal of trust in me,’ said Minnie. ‘My mother is very good-natured and loves to buy clothes and tease my father, but she doesn’t take formalities very seriously.
I imagine I will have to take many things very seriously if I am to be an adequate Lady of the Manor at Dilberne Court.’

‘I will drive you down there soon so you can inspect it. We may have to take a chaperone. Perhaps we could find someone quieter than your mother? Though I have nothing against her; she seems a very jolly woman.’

‘She is,’ said Minnie, ‘and as for a chaperone, please realize I am an American. In the new world, young women manage very well without being watched all the time.’

‘I can see it would be more fun without one, though I am not sure that I approve. But there will be staff waiting for us at the other end. The place is Jacobean with all kinds of pompous bits added on through the centuries, but still really quite pretty, even quaint in a large kind of way – there are forty-five bedrooms – but not very comfortable. In becoming a viscountess you will sacrifice a great deal of comfort, and will have to live with a great many dreary family portraits. It will be hard work.’

If indeed Arthur did as he said, and drove her down to Dilberne Court, Minnie would know that he was serious. As it was she could not be completely sure. His voice had a slightly jeering quality, as if he were mocking her. American men spoke from the heart when they spoke to women. English men spoke as if through some emotional filter made of flannel: it was hard to know what they were really about.

‘I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,
’ she quoted,
‘but the doctrine of the strenuous life.
Theodore Roosevelt said that earlier this year. I met him at a reception after he spoke in Chicago. It was a wonderful speech, about the feminization of America. My father said it might be true in New York but it couldn’t be said of Chicago.’

‘Was he wearing yellow gloves?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Minnie said, confused.

‘We were guests at his wedding in St George’s Hanover Square ten years or so ago. He was wearing yellow gloves. It was such a foggy day it was just as well. Mr Roosevelt’s gloves were about all you could see in the church at all. I thought perhaps it was what all Americans wore to their weddings. But maybe it was just a safety measure because of the fog.’

‘Oh you are dreadfully sharp,’ she said, ‘and cynical, and not at all what I’d thought Englishmen to be, but I like that. And so – we have friends in common in the person of Teddie Roosevelt.’

‘And we have not had a single fog since you came to the country,’ said Arthur. ‘You must bring good cheer. I hope you paint bright cheerful scenes?’

‘Landscapes, mostly,’ she said. ‘Wide plains and large skies. I daresay I will have to bring them down to English haystack level – your galleries are full of such paintings – when I become a proper English lady.’

‘So long as you are not an impressionist,’ he said, ‘or you will make our fogs worse. In Oscar Wilde’s estimation, it is art that created them in the first place, in particular the works of impressionist painters.’