The New Countess (3 page)

‘She will be company for Minnie,’ said Isobel. ‘I have no doubt Rosina will say she must stay in Belgrave Square, not be stuck away at Dilberne Court, but for once she must do as she’s told. It would be plainly foolish to have her living round the corner from the House. The last thing we want is her turning up in the middle of a debate waving flags and complaining that Chinese coolies are oppressed. She is quite capable of it.’

Robert agreed that would be unfortunate but added rather sadly, ‘Most people can be relied upon to tailor their beliefs to suit their interests, just not Rosina. Funnily enough, I rather admire her for it. Now, shall we just go off to the races and leave Minnie to meet the
Ortona.
’

Isobel felt suddenly cheerful: whatever had taken place before, her only daughter was coming home from over the seas after a three-year absence and she was glad. If a divorce had to be faced, so be it. An unfortunate marriage was better than no marriage at all: it could be seen as the way of the world rather than the fault of a neglectful mother. Now Adela had gone Rosina’s arrival was even something of a blessing. Arthur was so very much caught up with his business and his automobiles that Minnie must often feel alone. Perhaps Isobel should have gone with Minnie to Tilbury – but Robert needed her and one’s duty was surely more to one’s husband than one’s children. There were lots of children but only one spouse. And a day at the races was not so dreadful a fate.

Isobel chose a nautical theme for her day in Newmarket – a jaunty sailor-suit skirt and blouse in matching navy
moiré
, with a square white lace bib that fell over the head back and front – a wide white leather belt with an anchor buckle, and a cheerful little straw boater with an ostrich feather which one wore on the side of one’s head – Lily her lady’s maid fixed the hat with an extra-long turquoise and diamond hat pin which quite lifted the severity of the outfit. One did not want to look like some business woman on her way to an office, which was always the danger these days. She and Lily toyed with the idea of adding a bunch of velvet cherries to the brim, in honour of Cherry Lass, the season’s favourite, but decided against it. It would have amused Robert, but seemed dishonourable – she really could not tell one racehorse from another, nor did she care.

Newmarket scarcely offered the sartorial splendour one found at Ascot, but then they came across His Majesty walking amongst the crowds. Isobel thought Bertie was looking remarkably jovial and very much the man of the people, if not quite so flamboyant as once he had been – rather thinner, and his chest less gleaming with medals than it had been in the past. Indeed, he and Lord Rosebery, who walked beside him, could have been just another couple of portly gentlemen of means and status strolling by. As for Rosebery, he was looking decidedly less dissolute than usual, some remnant of his former good looks firming his jaw and brightening his eye.

‘It’s because his Cicero won the Derby at Ascot,’ said Robert. Isobel refrained from remarking that racing men seemed to be as invigorated by ‘winning a race’ as if they themselves had run the course and not left it to the horse.

A mixed group of familiar faces, hats gleaming and beards wagging, followed close behind: Isobel recognized young Ponsonby the King’s private secretary, and his pretty wife Victoria Lily, walking next to Sidney Greville, the Queen’s secretary, his notebook as ever clasped to his bosom. But no Queen. Instead Mrs Keppel the King’s mistress walked with the little cluster of grandees. Alice Keppel was on Rosebery’s arm rather than the King’s: so much presumably being owed to tact. Rather unnecessarily, Isobel thought, since a few years earlier Alice Keppel had been on show at the Coronation with all the other royal mistresses – in what the Queen had referred to a little bitterly as ‘The Loose Box’.

Keppel was looking most attractive, light and bright and cool in a pale-blue and white fine cotton plaid, its leg-of-mutton sleeves in voile, and a flat straw skimmer which might have been a man’s hat, other than for its broad satin ribbon and bow. Isobel at once felt far too hot and stuffy in her navy
moiré
, and that she was wearing quite the wrong outfit. But as Robert and she moved closer, Isobel could see what looked like goose bumps on the arms beneath the voile sleeves – there was quite a chilly easterly wind for such a bright summer’s day – and a small bunch of velvet cherries on the bow of her skimmer, and felt no, if anyone had chosen unwisely it was Alice. Alice was over thirty and only young girls could get away with cotton plaid, voile sleeves, and cheap red velvet cherries.

When His Majesty greeted Robert and Isobel it was with enthusiasm, but requiring of their sympathy. Had he not had remarkably little luck at the races lately? Was not Rosebery the man of the moment, what with his third Derby winner at Ascot, and everyone so admiring the Party of the Decade, the great staff celebration at Durbans down the road – five thousand people and beer and cakes for everyone?

‘It is my great misfortune,’ lamented the King, ‘that no one these days allows me to be lavish. What is permitted to Archibald Rosebery, a mere former leader of the House, is not allowed to a monarch. My partying is sadly restrained. If I served beer the Temperance League would be at my throat. If I served cake they’d remember Marie Antoinette. There’d be questions in the House. Keir Hardie would thunder at my extravagance. It seems we must all be socialists now. More, Dilberne, you find me a prisoner. I must not go about alone any more. I am protected. There are policemen everywhere.’

It was true that a discreet scattering of tall young men, none of whom Isobel recognized, surrounded and mixed with the royal party. They were well set up, but though they dressed like gentlemen they did not carry themselves like gentlemen. They were too watchful, too quick and easy in their movements: Bertie’s security party, of course – Robert had talked of them.

‘The King doesn’t want them,’ he’d said. ‘Bertie is blind to danger, quite unlike the Kaiser, who jumps at the squeak of a mouse and has protectors everywhere. But then the Kaiser isn’t loved by all, and Bertie is – or so he profoundly imagines. When Balfour suggests that perhaps he is not, the King takes offence. But Balfour’s insisted and won.’

Isobel now saw at first hand how this victory seemed to have rankled the King.

‘Balfour instructs Akers-Douglas, who instructs the Metropolitan Police,’ the King thundered to all and sundry, and Mrs Keppel stroked his arm to calm him, ‘who instruct Inspector Strachan here, who tells me where I can and cannot go for fear of anarchists and communards. Isn’t that so, Strachan?’ He addressed the most senior of his protectors.

‘Indeed, Your Majesty,’ said Inspector Strachan who looked rather like a bright-eyed eagle, spoke in educated tones but had very big boots and a paper collar, and whose social origins were hard to determine. Certainly not gentry, Isobel thought, nor professional, but not quite working-man either. But well enough versed in the ways of the courtier, it seemed. There was certainly something sensible and reassuring about him.

‘Danger tends to come from foreigners, Sir, from anarchists and nihilists, not from your own people – who would gladly die to keep you safe,’ he was saying. ‘But since ease of travel now fills our prisons with aliens, a threefold burgeoning in the last five years, it is only reasonable to take precautions.’

‘Against foreigners and madmen,’ said the King, ‘may the Good Lord, and brave Strachan, protect us,’ and for a moment the little group was sombre.

But then someone in the crowd recognized the King and a shout went up, ‘
Bertie! Bertie!
’ At a slight nod from the Inspector, the tall young men moved to form a defensive circle around the royal party, but when there was the sound of applause and someone even struck up with ‘God Save the King’, a slight move of Strachan’s head and they melted away again. It was tactfully, and quite elegantly, done, thought Isobel, and she would have liked to have complimented Inspector Strachan, but circumstances did not allow it. Mrs Keppel was complaining to her of a chilly wind.

‘You are so wise to be wearing that charming
moiré
, I am hopelessly exposed in cotton. The weather is not what it was: one cannot expect to be warm any more just because it is high Summer.’

Alice Keppel spoke casually and easily as one equal to another and Isobel, while making some normal response or other about the sudden inclemency of the day, was somewhat taken aback. They had been introduced once or twice before, it was true: Alice Keppel was charm itself, known to be an accomplished hostess and accepted in Society – if at its more rackety end; known to be the King’s official mistress, and though both her own husband and Queen Alexandra accepted the situation, Isobel thought – well, what
did
she think? That there should be some extra deference paid to her own virtue, to her position as a proper wife, a respectable woman, one superior in rank? No, not quite that, but perhaps one did expect some hesitancy, some deference, in Mrs Keppel’s approach? Well, there was not. The world changed as the weather changed and one must accept it.

At the remark upon the weather Robert had started to take off his own black cashmere coat to place it round Mrs Keppel’s elegant shoulders, but Frederick Ponsonby got in first with his camel jacket. It was the turn of Ponsonby’s wife, Victoria Lily, to look put out. Without female influence, Isobel decided, the world would simply descend into a swamp of untrammelled male passion in all respects – war without honour, rank without duty, and passion without love.

Mrs Keppel was now rich beyond belief, according to Robert, the King having given her some rubber shares which under Eric Baum’s financial management had done inordinately well. Isobel was in no position to think ill of her for that, for the Dilberne family had themselves profited well enough under Baum’s guidance; now Baum and his wife had gone to live in Palestine; Robert still wrote to him, Isobel knew, when he needed guidance on financial matters.

Now the King’s grievances reverted to an earlier tack, as His Majesty again deplored his current lack of success when it came to racing. He had, he claimed, got the Navy and even his nephew the Kaiser under control, but his stable was suffering. He had not had a winner for years, though he hoped that Cyllene, son of Bona Vista out of Arcadia, the stallion he had just hired from Rosebery, would in time produce a foal worth bringing on. Cyllene had, after all, sired the winning Cicero, much to everyone’s surprise.

‘It may have surprised others,’ said Rosebery. ‘It didn’t surprise me. Blood will out.’

‘I certainly like to think I am very much my father’s son,’ said Bertie, ‘though the Good Prince was never one for the nags. But he was almost daily in pursuit of game. I too look forward to the closing in of the summer days and a gleam of a winter sun on a raised gun barrel. Nothing like the whir of startled wings to stir the spirits.’

The King could become quite poetic when it came to killing birds. Isobel could not help but remember something her friend the Countess d’Asti had once said. ‘When an English gentleman grows too old for sex, his romantic impulses find their outlet in the mud and cold of the shooting party.’ These days the remark came to her mind more and more often. She tried not to think of His Majesty in mid-congress with Alice Keppel. It was hard not to: he was so old and fat, Alice so elegant. The embarrassment about mistresses was that one always imagined them at it: when it came to wives the imagination veered discreetly away. Love-making within marriage was confined to the procreation of children, or was meant to be.

The King turned to Robert, and to Isobel’s alarm asked him if the shooting at Dilberne looked promising for the Autumn. She assumed Robert would make some prudent excuse, but he was rash enough to say the shooting would be marvellous: he anticipated a really good season. The weather had been mild through the Spring and the pheasant chicks were plentiful. One of the gamekeepers had reported thirty eggs in one nest now they’d started clipping wings. The keepers were forsaking their old traditional ways and taking a scientific approach to breeding, and it was, Robert assured him, really paying off. Only the grey partridge had had a bad year, he told the King: too many predators around in the early Spring when the chicks were small: the sparrowhawks had been a particular bugbear.

‘Then I’d like to visit you in mid-December,’ the King said, ‘the weekend after the big birthday shoot at Sandringham.’ Greville took out his notebook; Ponsonby searched for his. The King turned to Isobel. ‘Would we be welcome, Lady Dilberne?’

‘But of course,’ said Isobel, faintly, ‘we will be honoured.’

‘Not too big a party,’ said the King. ‘Just de Grey and possibly the Oliff-Coopers, Leicester perhaps – a really fine shot but I usually end up with a better bag – and a few other friends. How does the idea suit you, Alice? Bring George with you if necessary.’

Alice murmured that she too looked forward to it. Isobel did not.
George?
– thought Isobel. ‘George’ could only be George Keppel, Alice’s husband. It was a nightmare. Less than six months to make Dilberne Court fit for a king. And worse, fit to survive the eagle eye of the King’s mistress. The place had been left to itself for years. Lighting and plumbing were antiquated and primitive; the domestic staff were mostly untrained in London ways, and accustomed to taking advantage. She could just about cope with the annual day-long meet of the hunt at Dilberne, but the prospect of a royal shooting weekend, probably dragging on for a week, was worrying.

The more she thought about it the more terrifying it became. The London house was more modern, and set up for entertaining, but Dilberne Court like so many ancient houses was a warren of back staircases and rooms that led one out of the other without corridors, so offering no proper privacy. It needed an imaginative architect to bring it up to rationality – unnecessary staircases could be turned into water closets: some rooms split into two, others turned into one. A lot of people these days were heating their nurseries, though Nanny of course objected: ‘Fumes and vapours bring the agues, not God’s good fresh air.’ Attics and basements were prone to damp. The old yellowed bed linen needed throwing out and replacing: the camphorwood and cedar chests which had done so well for blankets needed to be replaced with proper storage cupboards. The place was oppressive. Family portraits looked down upon the present and disapproved. But once you began to rectify that sort of thing there was no end to it: one needed help.