Authors: Fay Weldon
The New Countess (12 page)
His Lordship asked her what she had been doing with her life and Minnie said she had had a letter from her mother. Her mother had suggested she go home to Chicago for the Christmas month. Tessa missed her grandchildren.
‘A letter from your mother!’ cried Isobel. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How is the dear old soul?’
‘She is very well, said Minnie, ‘and very busy. She is setting up an international arts and crafts exhibition at the Institute.’ ‘Dear old soul’ did not seem to Minnie to be an adequate description of her mother, who though she was buxom and lacked sophistication in both life and dress, was amazingly good-natured and energetic. She rather suspected, judging from an indiscreet word or two in the letter, that Tessa had taken up with a young arts and crafts jeweller whose work was central to the exhibition.
She also thought it better not to say that Tessa had mentioned Grace. ‘Grace sends her regards to her Ladyship,’ was what Tessa had actually written. ‘She and I mean to start a little art gallery and fabric shop in North Avenue. Grace turns out to have quite a business mind.’ Grace had been Lily’s predecessor as lady’s maid.
‘It’s not sensible to take the little ones to God’s Own Country, Minnie, and you know it, especially not to Chicago in Winter. They’d freeze to death. It’s remarkably cold and windy, I believe, isn’t it, Robert? You were once there for the World Fair.’
‘I was there in May,’ said his Lordship, ‘and it was pleasantly warm. Warm and windy enough,’ he added, ‘for the stench of the stockyards to get to us. But they do say it’s jolly cold in Winter.’
‘I could go on my own, leave the children. Mother isn’t too well, she has a bad leg or she’d come over to me.’ Lies, lies. What was she saying? She had been pushed back into childhood.
‘Chicago for Christmas is out of the question, anyway,’ said the Countess. ‘Robert’s youngest brother Alfred is coming over from Bombay to see his children and to be with the family. Did not Arthur tell you?’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Minnie. Arthur hadn’t. ‘How silly of me. My brain is all to pieces, these days.’
‘It’s motherhood,’ said Isobel cheerfully. ‘Besides, the King is coming just before Christmas for the shooting. You are wife to a Viscount. You need to be beside your husband at such a time.’
The Earl grunted. ‘Meanwhile the gamekeeper’s worrying about his chicks and my son’s bloody motors. Nasty, noisy, smelly things. Can’t understand why the boy doesn’t stick to horses.’
‘The King will understand,’ said Isobel. ‘He so loves his Daimler.’
‘Yes, but will the chicks understand?’ and Robert laughed heartily at his own joke and took some more strawberry ice cream.
That afternoon Minnie lay on her bed in the green room and cried a little, which in itself was consoling. She would have gone up to the nursery floor but the children were having their afternoon nap and Nanny would be guarding them like a dragon, breathing fire on anyone who came near. It was very hot and very quiet. She would have gone down to the servants’ hall for some gossip and conversation – she was sure it was livelier than any she got upstairs – but that was not the way one behaved. So she cried, brooded and half slept instead.
The builders were no longer in the room above, but dust motes from their labours the day before drifted down through the sunbeams. She thought there was a presence in the room, almost tangible, someone lurking in the brightness of the corner, a woman in a pale dress. She did not want to get up to see properly; simply closed her eyes to save the effort. She remembered that the servants said the green room was haunted. Servants were always saying that kind of thing; it gave them a good excuse not to carry coals or fetch water. The presence was not frightening. There just seemed to be some kind of pause in the continuum of things.
But she was glad when there was a tap on the door and Lily came in with a pile of under-things fresh up from the laundry. She was a sweet and friendly girl and a favourite with Isobel, being quite a skilled little dressmaker; Minnie thought she made a pretty figure today, her fair hair looped under her frilly cap, her figure lissom in its maid’s black dress – perhaps rather too tight a one. If she was in charge of her own house, she would think twice before employing a girl so pretty, and what’s more so quick and clever.
‘Is this room supposed to be haunted?’ asked Minnie.
‘Oh yes, ma’am,’ said Lily cheerfully. ‘Some kitchen maid hanged herself in here in 1723, put in the family way by the fourth Earl. But don’t you worry about it. I’ve never noticed a thing, and you and Lord Arthur will be back in the West Wing in no time. Besides, it’s not likely. What would a kitchen maid be doing up here? Now if it was the parlourmaid—’
‘I thought you had Sunday afternoons off,’ said Minnie, breaking off the anecdote, though she longed for more. If you gave staff an inch they took an ell, as Arthur would explain.
‘You have to get the laundry out of the way by Monday when everything starts again,’ said Lily, ‘time off or not. You sound just like Miss Rosina, always tut-tutting about conditions of work while finding extra stuff for us to do, like her parrot. You’re different. In fact, you’re quite a favourite in the servants’ hall.’
‘I don’t think I need to know that, Lily,’ said Minnie, carefully. This was certainly too familiar. On the other hand, times were desperate.
‘I don’t see why not, Miss,’ said Lily, pertly. ‘I always tell her Ladyship things. She likes to know what goes on. I’m her trusted spy. I’m good friends with Mrs Keppel’s lady’s maid.’
‘Tell me about Lady Rosina then,’ said Minnie.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Where is she? Has she gone back to Australia?’
‘No, Miss. She’s staying with friends of the family at No. 3 Fleet Street and publishing a rude book. Lady Isobel’s brought in the lawyers to try and stop her. That’s why everyone’s acting so peculiar.’ She hesitated. ‘She gives me all her cast-offs.’
‘Someone gave me three pairs of silk stockings which proved far too small for me,’ said Minnie. ‘Great big, galumphing American girl that I am. They’re French with cherub lace inserts. Would they be of any use to you, Lily?’
‘Thank you very much, m’Lady. They certainly would.’
‘You can find them at the bottom of one of my stocking drawers.’
They were still neatly folded in tissue paper and a delicate oyster colour. Lily stroked the smooth, pale silk fondly. Minnie watched them go with some sorrow. They fitted well enough and she had looked forward to wearing them. But as Sir Francis Bacon said, knowledge was power, and she was sadly in lack of power and must do what she could to rectify the shortcoming. And perhaps God had taken notice and sent her Lily.
‘What goes on at No. 3 Fleet Street?’ asked Minnie.
‘I couldn’t say, m’Lady, though there was some talk about drink and drugs and goings-on. But that’s probably just wishful thinking. Everyone loves a scandal. Same as they likes a ghost. What else is there to think about, stuck away at the ends of the Earth? What does galumphing mean?’
‘Half-way between a horse galloping and a horse snorting, I guess.’
‘If I may say, m’Lady, I think you’re very elegant and gracious and not at all the galumphing kind. That’s more Lady Rosina’s style. She’s a great disappointment to her Ladyship. Thank you for the stockings. They do say a Mr Anthony Robin and his sister Diana live at No. 3. He’s in the book world, so I daresay our Miss Rosina has gone to live with them. Good riddance to a bad lot is what all the servants say, and thank God we don’t have the parrot pooing to put up with any more.’
‘That will be all, Lily,’ said Minnie. But she had what she wanted.
The Gatehouse had been designed by James Wyatt in 1797 for a previous Earl.
It was a vast and imposing – if rather less than graceful – stone arch which bridged the entrance to the long oak drive that led to Dilberne Court, substantial enough to serve as home to the gatekeeper but not much more. There was a door on the inner side of both piers leading to a windowed room, and a staircase up to a long room within the arch itself, long enough for a coach and four and a couple of out-riders to pass underneath. Old Tommy’s duties had been to answer the bell and open and close the iron gates that linked the piers, deter unwelcome strangers, report unwanted predators, and keep the drives swept and the high beech hedges in good order.
During one of her sporadic attempts to persuade Arthur to live apart from his parents, Minnie had been down with him to inspect the Gatehouse. Arthur could see no need for change. The West Wing was very comfortable and convenient for his work: the children were happy and settled. His mother’s enthusiasm for what her designer referred to as ‘refurbishment’ could not go on for ever – presumably when the royal shooting weekend had come and gone and Mrs Keppel been suitably impressed the hammerings and crashings and falling plaster would be a thing of the past. Minnie, Arthur concluded, was just a little homesick and suffering from one of the fits of restlessness which afflicted women every few weeks: what she really wanted, his father assured him, was another baby. He must see to it. Indeed, he meant to see to it, he just fell asleep so easily.
Fortunately, even Minnie had realized upon inspection that the Gatehouse was scarcely suitable for any family, certainly not for one with servants. He knew what Minnie was up to – his mother had told him she had been asking about the Dower House. But she would soon forget and settle down when she had another baby.
‘A gatehouse is such a peculiar building,’ she’d said. ‘An arch with rooms which does nothing but tell you how grand and important it is. This country is so full of the
unnecessary
.’
He did not like it when Minnie separated herself out from him by talking about ‘this country’ but he overlooked it. He loved her.
‘It would be very useful to me as an office,’ he’d said, and indeed, he realized, it would: just a few hundred yards from the workshops – now a cluster of six – at Isobel’s insistence hidden from the drive by a curtain of trees.
He would at last have somewhere to put all the papers and blueprints, which as it was, flew about the oily floors and got neglected at best, and rendered unreadable at worst: an office where he could receive business associates properly dressed and with washed hands, where the telephone would be on the desk and not lost beneath a pile of metal on the floor. He would have a properly trained secretary to separate orders from invoices, probably even a female one. Plain, of course; he was a married man and a father and loved his wife, and had a business to run, and no time to waste for the emotional involvements which so preoccupied his friends, even the married ones, let alone energy for the sexual indulgences which made fools of them all.
‘I thought perhaps you could have an office in London,’ said Isobel. ‘Surely you could run the business from there?’
‘London is a place for gentlemen, not business men,’ he said. ‘And anyway it is too distracting.’
He meant it, too. He remembered Flora, the girl he had kept in Mayfair before he turned sensible and married Minnie, and what a fool Flora had managed to make of him. Sex was like a good meal, something you wanted most when you couldn’t have it. But now he had Minnie. All the same he could see propinquity could be dangerous; female secretaries could be risky, they were said to be quick, adaptable and competent, but also had the reputation of making themselves most agreeable at first, but then turning out to be predatory blackmailers. Like Flora, of the ample bosom, pretty eyes, and soft, silky, entwining limbs.
Well, once bitten, twice shy. He would hire a Sussex girl, respectable and plain, even a married one, caught in the gap between marriage and motherhood. To have female staff was the mark of a forward-looking, modern, effective business, not afraid of risk taking.
Things moved fast after the decision had been made. Tommy was moved out, in spite of his grumblings about age, infirmity and so forth, to live with his nephew in one of the estate cottages, where he would doubtless be more comfortable. Traffic was now so heavy in and out of the Court it was tiresome to have to keep opening and shutting gates. Horses had quite liked stopping for a rest, but the motor traffic of today preferred to just carry on through.
Isobel had builders moved from the big house, and the Gatehouse was plumbed and wired in no time, the ground-floor room on the right pier was set up as a reception area, the one on the left pier as a little private room for Arthur. It was eccentric but it worked. The long upper room at the top was the office, complete with office desks and neat loud-speakers for quick communication between rooms, filing cabinets, two Hermes typewriters – the secretary might need an assistant – and high-backed office chairs.
Minnie was happy enough to help Arthur buy furniture for the reception and office areas. Indeed, they’d had a very happy outing to Liberty’s, to buy some small, light, elegant pieces – William Morris, especially designed for small-scale living – and Minnie had chosen a carved Mackmurdo panel in pale elm to nail up over the office door – tree trunks and a recumbent female figure with a breast exposed; which he himself would not have dared put up, but he could see its charms. Minnie was no prude. But when over dinner with the family a couple of days later he asked Minnie to buy a bed for his private room, she burst into tears.
‘But what’s the matter?’ he asked, taken aback.
‘I know men,’ she wailed, and ran from the room so the Earl and Countess raised their eyebrows. Arthur was horrified by ‘scenes’. He felt rather insulted. He trusted Minnie, surely she trusted him. It was a pity, he sometimes thought, he had married a girl with a past, who did indeed ‘know men’.
He asked his mother later what the matter with Minnie was, and she said,
‘She’s American and sometimes it shows. She’s homesick and broods rather a lot. Don’t worry about it. I’ve found a dear little shop in Brighton – it’s called Brewers – where I’m getting my wallpaper and paints and they have a little range of bamboo beds – I’ll bring one back.’