The New Countess (6 page)

His Lordship, like so many of the great and famous, was not above temptation – the brave deserved the fair – though Lily, in Reginald’s opinion, was not sufficiently fair to attract other than the very temporary attention of the brave. She was wasting her time. She should stick to the man she knew, himself, and show more loyalty.

Lady Dilberne Confronts her Daughter

28th June 1905, Belgrave Square

‘I really don’t understand you, Rosina,’ said Isobel. She paced up and down the morning room. The sun was bright and high and the day was warm. She herself was dressed in a kimono, finding herself at a loss as to what she should wear for the morning. It was such a temptation to do without stays and corsets – and even the new elastic suspender belts could grip one uncomfortably – that she had succumbed, it being midsummer and Lily not being there to insist on a proper formality, Rosina having turned up unannounced, two days late, parrot on her shoulder, at scarcely nine o’clock in the morning. Lily had been sent down to Dilberne Court to warn Mr Neville of Rosina’s arrival and make sure the girl had a respectable wardrobe. Rosina, Isobel had decided, was to have her old rooms in the East Wing, but they’d been unoccupied for a good six months since Adela left, so drawers and wardrobes would have to be brushed out, aired and dusted, polish applied, spider webs got rid of – they lived in procreative bliss in four-hundred-year-old buildings – and the place made generally cheerful. Better that Rosina had not turned up at all just now, with the King’s visit to prepare for, and so much to be done, but better to have her safely ensconced in Dilberne Court than causing embarrassment in London.

And here was her daughter Rosina in person, strangely attired in split skirts, bare ankles showing, with one small string bag hung over her shoulders which apparently contained all her worldly possessions.

‘I don’t understand you either, Mama,’ said Rosina. ‘But that doesn’t mean we can’t get on together. I am sorry if I didn’t come straight back home to meet you as I expected, and it was sweet of Minnie to come all the way to meet me, but Anthony had set up a meeting with my publisher in Paternoster Row on Friday, and he and Diana are just round the corner from there in Fleet Street, and really all I wanted to do was go to bed and sleep. You know what these sea voyages are. I plead exhaustion.’

‘Publisher?’ asked Isobel faintly. ‘And who are Anthony and Diana? Do I know them?’

‘Anthony and Diana Robin. They are perfectly well bred. You even know their father,’ said Rosina. ‘You went to his funeral. Lord Ashenwold. Diana is my friend; Anthony is her brother.’

The name Anthony Robin rang some kind of bell but Isobel could not place it. She put in many obligatory appearances at the funerals of grandees she scarcely knew, looking suitably grave and solemn.

‘At least they sound respectable,’ said Isobel. ‘But Fleet Street? What a strange place to live.’

‘It’s very suitable,’ explained Rosina. ‘Anthony is the editor of a literary magazine called
The Modern Idler
.’

‘I’ve not heard of it,’ said Isobel, thus dismissing it as being of no consequence. ‘But I don’t understand. Do you see yourself as a writer now? From what Minnie tells me, you have returned to us a widow but quite a large landowner.’

‘I married a man whom everyone spoke ill of but whom I loved,’ said Rosina, briskly. ‘He was bitten by a brown snake and died of the bite, rather quickly and horribly, which was most distressing to me and everyone on the station. But that was eighteen months ago, and as for being a widow, I do not define myself in terms of my marital status. No sensible woman does. I inherited the station, all forty thousand acres of it, and with the advent of a passable road from Geraldton to Perth land prices have soared, as has that of the wheat which we produce. If I wanted to sell I could, and even as it is I shall never need a penny from you and Pater, Mama, for the rest of my life.’

‘And do you then plan to sell?’ asked Isobel. ‘A pity you didn’t see fit to give us more information or more warning as to your return. Let alone your departure from these shores.’ Isobel spoke a little acidly. She could not help herself. Her daughter’s sudden marriage had given rise to a good deal of gossip. Rosina was known to have spent a night with her suitor in the Savoy before even announcing her engagement. Word had got round. Society turned out not as forward thinking as many had supposed. Isobel had been cut dead once or twice. These things got forgotten but Isobel had spent a disagreeable year. Since the Prince of Wales had become King, free love had become unfashionable. Mrs Keppel was still seen out and about with His Majesty, but no longer took his arm in public. And now she, Isobel, was expected to receive Mrs Keppel, and Rosina wore no wedding ring. Scandal could be so easily revived.

Pappagallo the parrot, seeming to feel tension in the air, stirred on Rosina’s shoulder, cleared its throat rather horribly, and then spoke. ‘Too right, mate. Too right,’ it squawked, fluttered to adjust its position, and left a grey splash on the white Aubusson rug Isobel had recently chosen with Minnie at Maples. Isobel kept her composure, though she rang at once for Mary the parlourmaid. If it was quickly removed it would do less damage.

‘I am in two minds about selling,’ said Rosina, when order was restored. Mother and daughter waited in vain for Robert to return for lunch, as he had sent a message to say he would. Rosina rather remarkably asked the kitchen to send up steak and a fried egg for lunch ‘to remind her of home’. Isobel picked at a cheese omelette when finally they gave up waiting for Robert and lunch was served.

‘I find outback life quite appealing, if rather hot and full of quite dangerous creepy-crawlies,’ she told her mother, ‘but it is quite fun telling other people what to do, sending them here and there to do as one decides. It is almost like being a man.’

‘I thought Australia was all desert,’ said Isobel, who was trying to absorb what she felt was too much information, too unambiguously passed on, and still keep her equanimity. It was evidently Rosina, but a Rosina who had become quite the foreigner in her absence; even her vowels had a drawling quality, no longer clipped and authoritative, and her sentences, though well-constructed, rose in pitch at their end as though to cheer rather than command the listener. But yet she was speaking with Robert’s eloquence.

If only Rosina had been born a boy how much better off everyone would have been. Rosina as, say, Roland Earl of Dilberne would have quite enjoyed managing the estate. As it was, it was becoming clear that Arthur’s heart was not in the land. All his energy and emotion was spent on the development of smelly, noisy, expensive engines for the road, when it would have been better spent on new ways of farming, the breeding of dairy cattle, or even the development of an automobile plough, which was now much talked of. She had been very glad when he married Minnie and ceased being an idle young man and ‘found his interest’, but the interest now seemed to dominate his life. He had none of his father’s knack of easy approach. Which Rosina seemed to have developed in good measure, seeming to have no reticence at all. Steak and fried egg! One had these children, and one was never free of concern, both for them, and about them. It was too bad.

Rosina explained that though most of Australia was desert-like, hot, dry and for the most part unpopulated, it was so vast anything could happen. There were pockets of great fertility wherever there was water. She herself farmed wheat and lupins, very productively, on a farm called Wandanooka in the Nyoobgah tribal areas.

Oh yes. My daughter in Nyoobgah. Where, your Ladyship? Oh, you must know. Her Wandanooka estate! Everyone knows the delights of Wandanooka! My little grandchildren Nyoob and Gah simply love it there.

Isobel
felt she was on the brink of hysteria
.
Rosina sat with her legs plonked apart as if she were Long John Silver, a man with a parrot perched on his shoulder, digesting steak and fried egg. Her daughter, quite unchaperoned, a widow, said she was developing a dairy farm and a ‘training school for the black fellas’, where she was ‘teaching basic literacy and good farming practice’. The aboriginals were apparently nomadic within their tribal areas, but when there was a purpose to it they would settle in one place.

‘If it’s so very pleasant, why have you left?’ Isobel asked.

‘I’ve finished the book. Seebohm Rowntree has read it and thought well of it and wrote to Longman’s the publishers to recommend it. I took it round to them yesterday. If the book’s a success I daresay I will stay in London and be a literary person: if I find I am wasting my time I will go back to Wandanooka.’

‘How nice, dear,’ she said. ‘Is what you’re writing a novel? I hope it is nothing to embarrass your father.’

‘It is about the marital customs of the aboriginals. Well, hardly marital; let’s say sexual. We in Europe have a lot to learn. A man can have up to ten wives and treat his child as his wife but must never speak to his mother-in-law. I compare it with the equally irrational practices of Sussex villagers. Do you know about bundling, Mama? It is very commonplace in Sussex.’

‘I do not,’ said Isobel grimly. ‘Write what you will, but please, not under the family name Hedleigh. Have some mercy on your father, please.’

‘Father doesn’t notice anything I do,’ said Rosina, ‘I hadn’t seen him for over three years and he couldn’t be bothered to welcome me home. It was nice of Minnie to come.’

‘He would have come if he could,’ said Isobel, ‘and so would I. The Russian business has flared up again. Odessa is in revolt: the Foreign Office has to give an opinion and your father is needed to help form it. He has become quite a force in politics in your absence. You should be very proud of him.’

‘Father was always extremely good at being elsewhere when required,’ said Rosina. ‘The gambling den or the bookmaker or the company of some Duchess always tempted him away. How you put up with it for so long I cannot imagine. At least my aboriginals can see what’s going on under their funny flat noses.’

Isobel wished her daughter well, but just not in this room now. Enough was enough. She suffered a spasm of rage. She felt it rise in her loins, tauten her stomach, tighten her chest, constrict her throat and heard it burst from her mouth in a low, hard pitch, as if she was spitting out a lump of coal.

‘Go back where you came from!’ Once it was out Isobel felt better. There had been some blockage, she realized, now released, caused by decades of never saying what she wanted to say.

‘But of course, my dear,’ she added quickly, moderating what had been so intemperately said, and even managing a little light laugh, ‘this is exactly where you do come from.

This is your home.’

In turn Rosina’s hostility seemed to ebb away, like molten iron cooling as it drained from a cauldron. Her legs closed, her shoulders drooped, her chin dropped, her mouth worked; she sobbed – great gulping sobs – and tears ran down her poor sunburned cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

She wept loudly and unreservedly, like a servant, and Mary quickly packed up her brush and basin of soapy water and disappeared from the room. At least, thought Isobel, my servants, unlike my children, know how to behave.

‘I’m sorry, Mama, I am,’ Rosina wailed. ‘I don’t mean to be horrid. I’ve had such a terrible time, Frank dying so awfully and only me and him for hundreds of miles. You’ve no idea. He was a really good man but he had very strange habits. He’d have never left me up the duff the way he did it, for all he tried. He just wouldn’t listen. Do you understand?’ Isobel, gently reared, didn’t. ‘And it was a terrible voyage back; I travelled steerage. I don’t see just because I’m so rich I should be more comfortable than anyone else, but people kept vomiting all over me and when finally I got off the bloody boat I took one look at Reginald and Minnie and couldn’t face coming back here. I knew you’d be cross. I try so hard to be brave and not to care about anything but then I just go to pieces like this. Mama, I’m just so tired and upset.’

Isobel allowed herself to be embraced but remained stiff.

‘Oh please, I’ve said I’m sorry. Please.’

Isobel allowed herself to soften a little. Rosina hugged her tighter and snivelled and gulped and quietened.

‘But this book of yours simply won’t do, Rosina. You know that.’

It was Rosina’s turn to stiffen.

‘I
am
the book, Mama. I can hardly not publish it. It’s the truth, that’s all. We have to be able to face the truth.’

‘I don’t see the virtue of rubbing people’s noses in what is distasteful. And truth is no good at all for the populace, as your father well knows. They don’t have the wit to make sense of it. The whole art of government lies in the distortion of facts in the interests of the nation as a whole. You’re simply overtired and need a good rest in the country, some food other than steak and eggs, and to keep out of the sun. You must go down to Dilberne.’

‘Very well, Mama.’

‘And now you must go to your old room – I have had it opened up for you, and you must lie down and have a little sleep and recover your composure. And then you can go home and be with Minnie.’

Rosina went, meekly, and Isobel was much relieved.

Ah, Minnie, thought Rosina, as she composed herself to sleep in the room where she had spent so much of her childhood. (Pappagallo flew without questioning to his old perch. Parrots had very good memories.) Of all her family she was perhaps fondest of Minnie; it had been good to see her, even if briefly, on the dockside at Tilbury. It was just the crushing weight of what lay behind her, the complexity, the formality, the implicit reproaches, that had made her take to her heels and flee. But the previous evening, when they had been well into the absinthe, there had been a rather strange scene, which made her wonder if she had fled from a frying pan into a fire. Anthony had remarked that Minnie seemed to be a very sweet and pretty girl, and no doubt a kind mother, but unawakened. She was the kind of girl to whom you would be doing a kindness by teaching her a thing or two before sending her back to her husband.