The New Countess (18 page)
Authors: Fay Weldon
Minnie thought of Connor and Edgar and wept some more. What was to be their fate? She had visited them twice at Belgrave Square. She had been allowed to see them for half an hour, in Nanny’s and Isobel’s presence. They had behaved towards her as when they were brought down for tea: looked at her curiously and showed her their toys and drawings with muted enthusiasm. Nanny had glared; Isobel had been amiable and sweet.
‘Do visit again next Sunday, Minnie,’ she had said. ‘Just for the half-hour, so as not to disturb them. And come home when you feel ready.’ And that was all. No reproaches, no questions. When she left and stumbled down the wide stone steps – the butler let her out as if she was a total stranger – Minnie had been the one to cry. The children had seemed unconcerned. Perhaps they thought Isobel was their mother.
‘I did warn you before you got married,’ said Rosina now, ‘and I got into enough trouble with that. Arthur was furious. But you took no notice. Cried “love” like any simple dairy maid and went ahead.’
‘Arthur loved me.’
‘Really? We all thought it was for the money. He and Anthony shared a girl between them. They kept her in a flat in Half Moon Street. My brother nearly got Anthony in trouble with the law. Anthony’s not the forgiving and forgetting kind. Don’t trust him.’
‘Anthony? Anthony Robin? Our Anthony?’ She’d stopped crying. Her nursery might have been heated but she’d been brought up in the stockyards and had her father’s blood.
‘Our Anthony. Don’t worry about it. He likes you, and you’re good at pasting up. Just face it, Minnie. You’re a married woman and a mother and you’re soft. You’re helpless. Go home to Arthur. Get over it.’
Minnie thought of her wood-carving knife. She would like to stick it into someone. Whether Arthur or Rosina or Anthony or the girl with the wet hair or her mother-in-law she was not sure, any one of them would do. Rosina was right: she was too soft. She’d thought somewhere in her head that Arthur would come after her, and kneel before her, and ask her forgiveness and she would grant it and they would be happy ever after. But he had not.
Diana came out to join them, pretty and girlish and nice. She put her arms round handsome, leathery Rosina and kissed her ear. Rosina turned her face and kissed Diana’s mouth. They were like a man and a woman together.
‘It’s too smoky out here,’ Rosina said, ‘and the wind’s getting up. We’ll eat inside.’
And she took no further notice of Minnie and went indoors. Diana followed. Minnie was left outside to gather up the cooked steaks onto a serving dish and follow them in. Her fingers were greasy. She could see the advantage of living with servants. She felt abandoned, shut out. She’d thought she was Rosina’s best friend but now Diana seemed to actually own her, by virtue of some other happenstance she didn’t quite understand. It was all very puzzling, and none of it very nice, just somehow upsetting. She couldn’t stay here for ever. She would have to steal the children. If only her mother would write.
In the meanwhile Arthur was beginning to miss Minnie. In three weeks his mood had changed from anger to a vague feeling that perhaps he was in some way to blame, and that he might need to rectify the situation by looking her out.
By the time Arthur had composed himself after Miss Braintree’s rather startling visit, had rearranged some vital papers and walked back up to the house, he had begun to feel quite angry with Minnie. The Gatehouse surely was his private place, the equivalent of any gentleman’s den, and a wife did not enter unannounced. The privacy of both man and wife in a marriage was important. More, it was most un-English of Minnie – he could think of no truer way of putting it – to have reacted as she did, as though he, her husband, had something to hide, which he most certainly did not. Miss Evelyn Braintree had behaved in a deliberately provocative way, but he had not succumbed to her charms. On the contrary. He deserved consideration for this, not Minnie’s frankly rather shop-girlish and immediate show of suspicion. His mother, in a similar situation, would have raised her eyebrows disdainfully and that would have been enough.
But Minnie had uttered a squeal and rushed back into the Jehu and Reginald had driven off, leaving Miss Braintree to walk to the station. And why, come to that, had Reginald taken Minnie down to the Gatehouse in the first place, knowing a young lady was visiting? It had been wrong-headed in the extreme, even delinquent. Had Reginald not been so good with the Jehu, understanding her inside out, this would have been a firing offence. As it was, Arthur put up with a lot. Reginald was a servant and one expected no better. But Minnie was meant to be a lady. This was the trouble, of course. She was just not. You could take the girl out of Chicago but you could not take Chicago out of the girl. His mother had done her best but it was not working.
Minnie’s mother, from what small acquaintance he had of her, would no doubt in similar circumstances have launched herself like some banshee at her unfortunate husband. He supposed he should be grateful that Minnie had simply squealed and run off. Well, he would talk her round, and she would apologize. But when he’d got back to the Court Minnie was nowhere to be seen. It seemed his mother had sent her off to Belgrave Square.
‘Minnie was upset,’ his mother was saying. ‘She seemed to me to be in a state of shock. I thought she would go straight to Belgrave Square but she has chosen to take refuge with Rosina, who has lodgings, I hear, somewhere near St Paul’s. At least it is perfectly respectable and she is safe. Arthur, you are too bad. What can you have been doing to upset her so? Everything seemed perfectly normal when we left the Gatehouse. What happened?’
He was a grown man, not a child. He did not want to be spoken to in this way.
‘Nothing happened,’ he said crossly. ‘Minnie is being idiotic. More to the point’ – and he spoke before he could stop himself – ‘what were you and Mr Strachan doing together?’
Isobel looked at her son with incredulity, raised her elegant eyebrows and walked out of the room, flowered pink-and-white silk skirt swishing. She made a fine, haughty exit, he thought. She did grandeur well, unlike his wife.
He went up to the nursery where Nanny Margaret was putting the little ones to bed. He asked her what had happened, why wasn’t Minnie with her? Minnie was usually to be found in the nursery at bath time.
‘Lady Minnie has gone. She would have taken the children, Master Arthur, but I stopped her,’ said Nanny.
‘Gone? Gone where?’ he asked.
‘To her fancy man, of course,’ said Nanny. Arthur dismissed the very idea as ludicrous. Nannies normally thought badly of mothers, everyone knew, but this was going too far. The old woman must be in her eighties: too old for the job. But Isobel thought the world of her. And just because Nanny would have died in defence of her charges, as Isobel kept saying, and he had no doubt she would have, that did not mean she was a reliable, let alone truthful witness. He remembered an incident in which he and Rosina as children had walked with Nanny into a field where, unknown to them, an untethered bull had been left to graze. When it loped towards them as though to charge, Nanny had stood in its way and pummelled its head and shouted and the beast, rather surprisingly had given up, shaken its poor battered head and limped away. By which time the children had jumped the hedge. The tale had lost nothing in its telling.
But that did not mean Nanny was a dependable witness, just a rather stupid one. The sooner Edgar and Connor passed out of her care – why had Minnie insisted on this stupid Irish name? It would haunt the poor boy all his life – and into a school where the teachers were at least minimally intelligent, the better. That the thought of a ‘fancy man’ could even enter Nanny’s head was what was so shocking. He blamed his mother for having led him into wedlock with a girl she well knew had a bad reputation. Minnie had a past – there was no denying it. She had once, in bed, even called him ‘Stanton’. He had pretended he did not notice, but he had, and it had rather put him off her. One had hoped for a virgin for a wife.
Really he had no time for this absurdity. How could Minnie expect him to love her when she showed so little trust in him, suspected him of impropriety when there was none? Running off, leaving the children; what sort of mother was she turning out to be? He felt very angry – wasting good emotion on a wife when he had the Jehu III to think about? He had come second in the Isle of Man race, and it was not good enough. He had to get the vehicle-weight down somehow.
He kissed the children good-night, and it seemed to him they shuddered at his bristly moustache. The sooner they were away from the care of overwrought women the better. Until Minnie saw sense and came back his nights would be lonely. It was too bad. But he would not go after her: to do so would be an admission of guilt. And he was guilty of nothing.
The political parties had split over tariff reform; it was generally assumed that the Liberals would win the coming election; the King’s relationship with his nephew the Kaiser worsened; in Russia the Emperor brought in his Duma, thus planting the seeds of further revolution. Forget the bolting of Minnie, all was tumult and change at home and abroad. A degree of governmental control over the level of gold production was beginning to seem inevitable and the row over the employment of Chinese miners in South Africa began to be a factor in the prospects of the Dilberne mine at Modder Kloof. Even the Earl had a brief spasm of worry as to his finances.
‘My dear,’ he said to Isobel, ‘perhaps you have done enough to make a palace out of Dilberne Court; one must bear the expense in mind,’ and to Arthur, ‘Dear boy, one must hope the development of the Jehu III begins to see some kind of financial return,’ but was met with such looks of pained bewilderment from both of them that he gave up any hope of economies, and wrote to Mr Baum for advice. Mr Baum came back with the observation that when times were hard it was always better to spend rather than save. ‘Spend, spend, spend, while you can,’ he wrote. ‘By which I mean investing, not wasting.’
So his Lordship put in a bid for the house next door in Belgrave Square, now up for sale, so that Isobel could extend her empire sideways, and another £5,000 into the development of Jehu IV, and his family were satisfied. He sent Rosina £250 as a gesture, towards the publication of her book. Whatever Isobel thought, the family name would not be damaged by a dissertation on the habits of aborigines. Social progress depended upon knowledge: there was no such thing as too much information – another of Mr Baum’s precepts. He and Mrs Baum wrote in a most friendly fashion from the Mount of Olives, where they were busily making the desert bloom. Mrs Baum had started her own Handel choral society, apparently involving Mr Balfour, by post, in the endeavour.
Rosina deserved to have her name shine; she was an intelligent girl and it was not her fault she was born a woman; his Lordship did suggest, however, at a brief meeting with his daughter at the House of Lords, that she did not let her mother know about the £250. She would regard it as disloyalty. He wanted to make it up to Isobel. He felt bad about his visits to The Cardinal’s Hat, now a weekly occurrence. He promised himself he would cease after Christmas; it was a silly way for a grown man to behave. Carmen, as much a man as a woman, was a most sweet and exotic creature, but one could hardly believe her declarations of love, and one was exposed to blackmail. Digby had already asked for an increase in salary, and got it. Mind you, Digby was an excellent valet. His Lordship had taken his advice over the matter of the sponge-bag trousers, and Carmen had much admired them, saying in her delightful accent what a fine figure of a man he was, now looking like a man of forty not sixty. Isobel’s taste in all things sartorial was always excellent.
Her Ladyship’s changes to the Court were, thank Heaven, beginning to wind down. The loss of the heavy mahogany picture rails had been the last of the major changes. The old family portraits had been relegated to the staircases, and been replaced with a selection of French racing scenes by Edgar Degas, which she was convinced would please the King, if not Mrs Keppel, whose taste was not modern but lent itself to chinoiserie and chandeliers. Everything was finally to her Ladyship’s taste. She was now busying herself with matters of security, which involved no end of locks, keys and the occasional man-trap in the grounds, which Strachan had recommended, but to which his Lordship had quickly put an end.
‘One thing to trap a rabbit, or hare,’ his Lordship observed, ‘but a whole man seems excessive. No, and no spring guns either, Inspector Strachan.’
Strachan had sighed heavily, as was his rather annoying habit, but abandoned the idea. He seemed to have become one of the household, half adviser, half staff, putting Robert rather in mind of the Old Queen’s Munshi, the Indian servant. But Strachan gave Isobel peace of mind: a man about the house, young and strong, and with Minnie away and Arthur spending so many nights at the Gatehouse, and he himself so often away at Belgrave Square, that was no bad thing. Neville the butler was the kind to become a gibbering mouse when faced with a night-time intruder; Isobel’s designers and decorators would retreat under their bedclothes at the slightest alarm, the male staff would wait for instruction, and the females run around squawking like hens in a henhouse when the fox got in. Some farm workers might be just as likely to side with the intruder as with the gentry, times being what they were. Reginald was the only one strong and sensible enough to square up to danger. But he was as likely to be at Belgrave Square as at the Court. If Isobel felt the need to have the Inspector around, so be it. Arthur of course couldn’t stand him, just as Bertie had hated the Indian waiter: failing himself in his filial duties, the son hated to think of another as taking his place.
Security apart, his Lordship decided, the improvement in Isobel’s mood was probably because in Minnie’s absence she now had full control of the grandchildren, those two fine little fellows.