Long Live the King (30 page)

‘I know what I want,’ she said. ‘I want to go home. Next year in Jerusalem, all that.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘A dusty, dangerous land.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘It’s my land, it’s where I belong, where my children belong. It’s not enough for me to make The Bishops Avenue bloom again, though that would be hard enough. I want to build a new land, of peace and plenty and justice, where all are equal and all are free.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and taxes will be high. You are such a socialist! You will be very uncomfortable: so will the children.’

‘They will grow up to be real people,’ she said. ‘Tall and handsome and strong.’

‘If they grow up,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. They are safe here.’

‘That’s not enough,’ she said. ‘Being safe. I want you to sell these plots of land. They are in the wrong place. I want you to buy one on Mount Zion.’

He thought for a little.

‘No, not Mount Zion. Inside the old city walls is safer and better. More expensive, mind you. I don’t think I could bear communal living.’

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘Inside the city walls.’

‘No more diamonds,’ he said, ‘no more maidservants, just basic next year in Jerusalem. It will be hard work. You will have to take off your wig.’

‘I’d take it off now,’ she said. ‘Except I’d look such a sight.’

They walked back hand in hand. Jane remarked upon how happy they looked and they told her their plans. She asked if she could come too? She had given in her notice because she was so bored, everything was so dull, the local boys so weedy and pimply. If she could have time off to go to classes, could she take her notice back? She loved Reuben and Ruth, but she wanted to make the desert bloom, too, the way the Ladies for Zion had been saying. She wanted to be included in the family. They loved each other; she’d seen that. The way Naomi had bandaged Eric’s hand. In her house everyone shouted at each other. Perhaps she could convert?

They hardly knew what to say, other than, ‘It’s not simple.’

A Struggle with Belief

Frederick Bligh Bond of the Society for Psychical Research was right; the séance offered was a most interesting and fascinating demonstration of the continuation of life and death. It was of course humbug, and fairly obviously fraudulent. His Lordship did not understand why Arthur Balfour, a perfectly intelligent man, went on wasting his time and intelligence on charlatans. It was one thing to engage in a dinner debate about the decline of religion and the rise of superstition – whether, as Shakespeare said, ‘the instruments of darkness tell us truths’ was always good for a debate – but to ask your friends to sit through twenty minutes of a woman in a darkened room having fits and talking to spirits was quite another.

But Consuelo seemed excited by the prospect – she was interested in the esoteric arts, as so many of the very wealthy were. They looked for alternatives to the hell they feared they deserved. The likes of Balfour, on the other hand, comparatively impoverished, while perfectly sure that he deserved heaven, perhaps hoped to control death in the same way as he controlled life. The death of friends and family simply offended him.

His Lordship hoped that the others, a bibulous crowd, would turn up soon; their cabs seemed to have been delayed. Being seen alone with Consuelo was not altogether wise, and yet she so often managed it. Perhaps she had little men running after her, peering into windows, overhearing her conversations, recording her every move? Did she want to persuade Sunny to divorce her, and was providing him with evidence against her, to spare him the trouble of finding it himself? He would not put it past her. The others turned up, to his relief, including Sunny himself, and all moved into the row reserved for them, and the show began.

Princess Ida turned out not to be not some puddingy housewife but an extremely pretty young girl with a refined face and an educated tongue – very different from the ordinary run of lady mediums, who tended to look as if the spirits coursing through from the other side had drained them of looks, style, and intelligence. There was a kind of slackness and coarseness of personality which kept company with those who dealt too closely with the occult. But Princess Ida, who wore a childish dress – too tight, in faded red velvet – and had an ethereal air. When they adjourned for drinks he heard Gilbert Chesterton’s brother Cecil compare her to a Botticelli angel but Edgar Jepson, the gathering being of its nature refractory, retorted: ‘More like one of Alphonse Mucha’s Moët et Chandon White Star Line advertisements.’

At least Princess Ida didn’t foam or twitch when she went into a trance, just drifted off into a kind of angelic, blissful state in which you could believe that her real home was heaven, whose comings and goings it was her task to report. When she spoke in tongues they were melodic rather than guttural. Raps both startled and amused, and seemed to have a sense of humour, tapping out the sound of
The Death March
or
Lillibulero
at wholly inappropriate moments, accompanied by an accordion that played by itself. Only when a lost and wandering soul that was transmitted through the planchette identified itself as being that of May Lyttleton, and talked of searching high and low for her engagement ring, credibility lessened. It just seemed too obvious. Everyone knew how Arthur Balfour had pined all his life for May, and had thrown their engagement ring into the coffin with her body. ‘May’ faded back into wherever she had come from and the session came to an end. Then something happened that shook even his cynical Lordship.

A sparrow had flown in through the open window into the hall and had been flying about happily above the audience’s head – there must have been a good eighty people present – and chirruping away, before deciding it wanted to leave but, finding no way out, flew into a panic and hurled itself between one wall and another before dashing head first with a thump and a cracking of glass against the tall window behind Princess Ida’s table – George had just opened the curtains to let in the light and demonstrate the absence of any fraudulent appliances. The bird fell instantly to the ground: it was obvious it was dead. Princess Ida got up from her chair, cradled the little limp creature in her hands and stroked its feathers for a little. Then she said quite loud and clear, and slightly crossly, ‘Do wake up!’ Whereupon the sparrow did just that, opening its eyes, struggling to its feet, and within moments opening its wings and flying off unerringly through the window by which it had come in. Heads turned to watch it as it went. It seemed so cheerful, so normal.

Silence fell.

‘It was stunned,’ said a voice from the audience, ‘that was all.’ The voice came from the rationalist camp. The audience had divided itself roughly into two, the idealists on the left, the rationalists on the right, choosing the propinquity of the like-minded, as, his Lordship had noticed, people will usually do if left to their own devices.

‘No,’ said another. ‘It cracked that great window. That bird could not ordinarily have survived.’ That came from the don’t-knows.

‘It had a heart attack?’ said someone else irrelevantly.

‘It’s a miracle,’ piped up Consuelo, from the front row where the grandees sat – so it carried more weight than perhaps it should have. ‘First it was dead: then it was alive. We watched a miracle.’

‘It was a trick,’ grumbled the rationalists. ‘Imbeciles!’ His Lordship, agreeing, decided that chicanery could indeed be the only answer.

The grandees left the I Don’t Knowers to their noisy debate, and gathered round Balfour in his antechamber. He seemed not to be much concerned with the incident of the bird. May had come back from the other side and spoken to him. He was distressed, happy and overwhelmed all at the same time. He seemed to feel the need to explain. ‘We were indeed engaged,’ he was saying. ‘It was her voice, the dearest girl, I would know it anywhere. I had the ring, ready to give her, before the illness overcame her. I put it in the coffin. It was the least I could do.’

‘I know the story, Arthur,’ said Consuelo, with surprising acerbity. ‘But knowing you, I don’t suppose you got round to actually asking the poor girl. Ever the bachelor!’

Balfour ignored her. The Society for Psychical Researchers were agreeing that Princess Ida had a well-developed mediumistic talent, and that they would ask her to participate in their next controlled experiment. She was indeed very pretty.

His Lordship slipped away and took a cab back to Belgrave Square and Isobel. Whatever game Consuelo was playing it was dangerous. He would steer well clear of her in future. One had to be very careful of pretty faces. Look at the S.P.R.: faced with an obvious piece of trickery (though how it had been achieved, he had no idea) a pretty face reduced them all to idiocy.

A Night at the Savoy

Rosina was in the lobby of the hotel, engaging with the reservation clerk, suggesting that perhaps the reason she had been given an inferior room was because she was a woman, when Frank Overshaw, flustered and distraught, came in through the swing doors of the lobby.

Seeing Rosina at the desk, he crossed over to her saying, ‘Oh, your Ladyship, Rosina, I am so pleased to have found you! I thought we’d missed each other!’

To which Rosina replied crossly, to the reservation clerk as much as anyone, ‘I am Lady nobody, I am reserved under the name of Miss Rosina Hedleigh,’ and gestured Frank to wait on one of the armchairs under the great central chandelier. The clerk seemed to believe Frank, since instead of arguing, as he had been inclined – there was nothing wrong with the room, other than that the maid had neglected to turn down the sheet and pull the curtains to on her late-night round – saw fit to upgrade her to one of the superior rooms: one argued with Misses, but not with Ladies.

By the time the room was sorted out Frank had quite recovered his composure. He took her to the bar, and though the bartender looked surprised he consented to serve them Manhattans. Rosina watched while the bartender had a surreptitious word with the concierge who had a word with the desk, who looked over to where they sat and nodded a discreet approval. She was not a lady of the night.

‘I missed the train,’ he said. ‘I was wrangling with the Bishop. Mrs Kennion had become hysterical. I regret nothing except causing trouble to my Aunt, who has been so good to me.’

‘I thought you had changed your mind. I sat there at the dinner table next to an empty seat and told myself he is just another deceiver, a man who likes to lead women on with false hopes only to dash them at the last moment. They delight in it. There are men like that.’

‘Not Australians,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the bloody time.’

‘Hush, Frank,’ she said. ‘That’s a word for the Australian bush, not the Savoy.’

‘Then the sooner we have you out there the better,’ he said, ‘so you can say it too. My bloody oath!’

He said the purser of the
Cuzco
was happy with the change of name on the tickets but would be pleased to have a glance at the marriage lines, if only to keep the owners happy. Serious efforts were being made to keep undesirables out of Australia. ‘I told him I was marrying a Lady of the Realm and he soon shut up.’

The problem, and why he had missed the train, was that the Bishop refused to give Rosina away, a girl he hardly knew, or permit the Canon to marry them. The Bishop found it outrageous. A man could not simply replace one girl with another in order to suit a shipping company’s timetable.

‘I can see it is unusual,’ said Rosina, ‘but it is certainly practical.’

‘And there is the question of the banns,’ said Frank. ‘I had forgotten about those.’

‘Then we will get married in a Registry Office, not a church,’ she said. But he balked at this: he wanted to be married to a girl in a white veil.

Both said they loved each other, agreed they were made for each other and had probably met in another life. Then they had another Manhattan; and then another Manhattan. He said he’d had a wonderful dream in which poor Adela appeared in the guise of Eostre the Saxon Goddess of Spring, with flowing robes and flowers in her hair. She gave him and Rosina her blessing and wished them well. Adela’s fate had been to die in the fire: a mistake had been made, now corrected. Rosina had been the one intended for Frank Overshaw. Karma had been served: all should be happy.

Rosina thought perhaps the dream was a little self-serving, but belief was so much easier than doubt. She had finished the index: the book was at the publishers: she wanted very much to go to Australia and look after the aboriginals, and teach them mining. Her own family had a mining background. There was a new study called ethnography: she had been to a few lectures: it was all about the origins of different cultures: she would do some studies.

She could see that Western Australia was the back of beyond, and probably very uncomfortable. But Frank was a decent man, and she did not see that Theosophy was any stranger than anything else anyone believed in. The acquaintance was certainly very short; but they had got on very well in the Bishop’s Palace: embraced sufficiently in the library to understand it would be pleasant to embrace more, gone on to exchange increasingly fond and intimate letters – he had enclosed some sketches of her, which had not been at all lacking in imagination – and she had been so upset when he had not turned up at the I.D.K. dinner she could almost say truthfully she loved him.

She would miss the Coronation but she could put up with that. She would miss Minnie but Minnie would soon be having a baby. Her brother Arthur cared only for engines, her mother cared only for clothes, her father only for politics and, if tonight was anything to go by, girls young enough to be his daughter.

She did not want to stand by to see Isobel’s distress when her father’s secret came out, as secrets always did. She only hoped the scandal would not be public. It was the kind that could rock nations, if the girl in question was who Rosina thought it was. She would rather go to Australia.

She assumed her parents would give her some kind of allowance. Frank said he had more than enough wealth for both of them, but it was always advisable for a woman to have at least some money of her own.