Valhalla, p.17
Valhalla, page 17
‘Perhaps we should all be getting back to Florence,’ says Mr Thaddy. ‘Things would be different there. Not to mention a hell of a lot more fun. Do you remember, May Flower, that evening in Lady Orford’s salon?’
‘Which evening was that?’
‘The four card players. The wife, the husband, the lover and indeed the previous husband from whom she’d been divorced. Playing whist together, without a care. And the next morning, they’d all be in Santo Spirito, confessing trivialities, but never even thinking to mention the mortal sins which had led them to that card table.’
‘And without hypocrisy too,’ says Madame Bricka. ‘That is the English disease. I applaud you Mr Thaddy, and your charming fiancée, for refusing to cower before it. And for facing the price you are paying.’
‘I think our princess was a bit shocked that night,’ says Mr Thaddy.
‘Probably.’ May smiles. ‘I had little knowledge of such things then.’
Harry Thaddeus Jones touches Madame Bricka’s arm and lowers his voice, as if to share some shocking secret.
‘May and I made a little agreement, one day long ago in Italy,’ he says. ‘She declared she wanted to see the world beyond those horizons which she knew. I told her that she’d have to get down on the grubby earth with the rest of us.’
‘And did she?’
‘She tried right enough,’ he sighs. ‘Bless her, she tried very hard. She just wasn’t able to stand there long enough.’
‘Well I did my best to keep her there,’ says Madame Bricka, ‘if only between the pages of books. It was better than nothing.’
They both turn to contemplate her now, as if she is a promising pupil who has not lived up to expectations.
He excuses himself for a moment. Too many cups of tea, he pleads. How do you women hold it in? A question May doubts has been asked before in the Red Drawing Room.
‘You would like Eva,’ says Madame Bricka once they are alone. ‘I’m sure you would.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘Oh yes, I took tea with them in Fortnums last week. A most interesting woman. No Queen of The Nile, but very cultured. She draws and paints and plays the piano. One gets a sense of great inner strength.’
‘She’s certainly going to need that,’ says May. ‘I’d so like to meet her, but a divorced woman with a former husband now living…’
‘Well Fortnums is only a ten-minute walk. Perhaps if you wore a large hat with a veil. Perhaps if you just happened to be shopping and bumped into us...’
Madame Bricka is gazing at her again, head cocked to one side.
‘Actually Princesse, it strikes me now. She is rather like you.’
Mr Thaddy returns, only to take his leave. A sitting with a duchess who shall be nameless. A terrifying harpy who must not be kept waiting. May and Madame Bricka play a guessing game. Which duchess?
‘I have it!’ cries Bricka. ‘The Duchess of Teck.’
May releases that vulgar laugh. What a while it is, she realises, since the last time she laughed so easily. The dogs on the rug wake up, bark and then doze off again. Suddenly, Georgie is in the doorway. He had gone to open a boys’ club in Twickenham, but is back earlier than expected.
‘Goodness, what a row,’ he says.
It is the pricking of a balloon.
‘Georgie, you know dear Bricka of course. And this is Harry Thaddeus Jones, our friend from Italy. I’m sure you recall that he came to our wedding and caught my bridal bouquet.’
‘Ah yes,’ says Georgie, without the faintest flicker of recognition.
‘He painted that picture of me too. The one in my little room in Norfolk.’
‘Ah yes. That picture.’
Silence falls in the Red Drawing Room. One of the dogs breaks wind again. Mr Thaddy clears his throat.
‘Forgive me, May Flower, but I really must go. The harpy awaits.’
‘What was that you called my wife, Mr Jones?’ asks Georgie, not looking at him, but at some far corner of the ceiling.
‘We all had daft nicknames back in Florence sir, when we were so much younger.’ He smiles. ‘I was Mr Thaddy and my pupil was May Flower.’
‘We’re not in Florence now, Mr Jones. We’re all older and times have changed. My wife is now the Duchess of York, so I must ask you to address her in a manner appropriate to her rank.’
‘Oh Georgie, we’re such old chums, I really think…’
‘That is my word on the subject,’ says Georgie. ‘Good afternoon to you.’
He turns to leave, then stops.
‘May, you should rest now,’ he says. ‘We have important guests this evening.’
‘I have important guests now, Georgie,’ she replies.
As her husband turns his back on them, he calls over his shoulder.
‘Rest now, May. And I think that tonight your dark green gown would be appropriate.’
Harry Thaddeus Jones lifts her hand to his lips. She wants to escape his gaze but cannot avert her eyes.
‘Oh May Flower,’ he whispers.
*
In her dark green gown, she sits at her dressing table. The dress was one of the mistakes in her trousseau. It does not become her. The bodice is cut very high and does not show her figure to best advantage. Odd, she thinks, how Georgie’s appreciation of her fine breasts does not extend to letting her display them to others. Odder still that he, scion of the quarterdeck, has begun to take an interest in ladies’ fashions and to propose what she should or should not wear.
The bedroom door is thrown open. Her maid and her lady-in-waiting are dismissed.
‘What the hell were you thinking of earlier?’ he asks. ‘You cannot ever receive that man in this house.’
‘I can’t go to his wedding. I accept that,’ she replies. ‘But he is my friend and he’ll always remain so.’
‘You excuse his behaviour and, far worse, that of the woman he is to marry? I’m told she has three young girls by the husband she has deserted. Children she is abandoning for your so-called friend. Did you know that?’
‘Yes, I do know that and it must be a terrible thing for her. But yes, I do excuse their behaviour. More than that, I applaud their bravery.’
‘In God’s name, why?
‘Because they have fallen in love, Georgie.’
‘Fallen in love?’ he repeats. ‘What about their duty?’
‘To what?’
His mouth opens and closes, trying to reach deep down into himself for the damn words. She feels a shameful prick of pleasure in observing the struggle. Georgie throws his hands up in the air and paces round the room, coming to rest by the mantelpiece to glare into the flames.
‘Duty to… um… to the way things are. The way things must be.’
‘Bricka tells me that the woman’s first husband was most unkind to her.’
‘Unkind? What the hell does that mean? Did he not buy her enough hats or take her to dine at Romano’s? Is that enough reason to walk out on the man who had given her a roof and the protection of his name? Not to mention breaking the vows she made before God?’
In his sudden flash of fluency, Georgie seems unable to stop. ‘And as for Bricka, that damn creature. She’s the one who fills your head with silly books and stupid notions. She’s here far too much. I’ve a good mind to ban her from this house too.’
‘Then I will simply go to see her at White Lodge or in some other place.’
‘You will go where I permit you! You are answerable in everything to me!’
Georgie’s hand sweeps across the mantelpiece. A Dresden shepherdess, a small ormolu clock and a framed photograph of Aunt Queen fly through the air and crash to pieces on the marbled hearth.
He sags into a chair, his breath coming in gasps. May stays stock still at her dressing table. They both stare down at the carnage. The fire in the grate crackles and spits.
‘So Georgie, it is the woman’s duty to stay with the man who abuses her? Even when the prospect of happiness elsewhere is suddenly before her?’
‘Yes!’ he replies. ‘If we fail in our duty we fail in our purpose. In this family above all others. I have told you before. We must be different. We must be better. Otherwise, there’s no bloody point to us.’
‘So has your own father arranged some sort of exemption with God?’
He glares at her in fury. For a moment she wonders if he will rise and strike her, but the moment passes.
May Teck crosses to the fireplace and kneels down to pick up the myriad pieces of china and glass. He crouches beside her and helps to gather the fragments.
‘And if we do our duty without love, how do we cope with that, Georgie?’ she says quietly. ‘How does our spirit cope with that?’
A nervous knock comes to the door. Her lady-in-waiting appears. The first guests are beginning to arrive. Mr and Mrs Gladstone are already in the hall.
‘Good God, we’re late,’ he says. ‘Do you hear that, May? You have made me late. The shame of it.’
He dumps the broken pieces into her hands and hurries from the room.
At dinner, she is placed next to the Grand Old Man. It is not easy. He is eighty-two but energy comes off him like an aura, though he sits as still as a mountain and says very little. Aunt Queen cannot bear Gladstone, complaining that he talks to her as if addressing a public meeting. Mr Merrypebble, she calls him in secret, though merriment is singularly absent from his attributes. Yet May Teck admires what she reads of him. It is even reported that he goes at night into the worst of the slums, into Whitechapel where those poor women were butchered, to try to save such fallen souls and, with God’s help, guide them to a better way. How she would love to talk to him of this, but he would surely find her observations banal. No doubt he finds this evening tortuously dull too. I was stuck beside that shy girl, she imagines him telling Mrs Merrypebble in the carriage home.
Instead she tries Ireland. It is only weeks since his latest efforts to let that unhappy island rule itself were so crushingly defeated. She reminds him that, at the time of Eddy’s passing, it was being mooted that the young prince should go there as Viceroy, to give parties, shake hands and pour regal oil on troubled waters. How nervous dear Eddy had been, she tells him, but how excited they had both felt at the prospect. The chance of a real purpose to both their lives.
The Grand Old Man shrugs his shoulders.
‘I fear it would have been no more than a sticking-plaster,’ he sighs into his soup. ‘Ireland is a gaping wound that needs a lot more than that.’
Then, as if thinking he may have been discourteous, he allows a social smile to crack the granite face.
‘But you, my dear young lady, would have been a veritable ornament to Dublin Castle,’ he says. ‘Yes indeed. The only word for it. An ornament.’
XXII
Autumn, 1893
‘This egg isn’t right,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with my egg?’
They all glance at the egg, as if the problem must be visible. May’s father puts on his glasses for a closer look.
‘It’s too runny,’ says Georgie. ‘You can’t tell me this egg has been boiled for five and a half minutes. It can’t possibly be more than four. Perhaps not even that.’
‘Bad enough in a hotel,’ says May’s father, ‘but in one’s own home…’
The butler is sent for. What’s wrong with the kitchen? What sort of galley are they running down there? The man is required to gaze deep into the yolk.
‘I’m so sorry, sir. The kitchen is a little tardy this morning. There has been a small upset in the night.’
‘What sort of upset?’
‘Perhaps I might speak to you privately, sir, once you’ve finished breakfast?’
‘Nonsense. Tell me now.’
‘It’s one of the maids, sir. She was taken ill in the small hours. A doctor had to be sent for.’
‘What’s wrong with the girl?’ asks Georgie; his interest cooling as quickly as his tea.
‘It’s rather delicate, sir,’ the man replies, his cheeks flushing. ‘I hesitate to…’
‘Spit it out, man.’
‘She has given birth, sir.’
‘Given birth? To a child?’
‘Indeed sir. A male child. Five pounds and three ounces, the doctor says.’
‘I’m quite uninterested in its weight,’ snaps Georgie. ‘Why were we not told of this situation?’
‘It seems the girl herself was not aware of her condition until a very short time before the delivery. The doctor says it is very rare, but not unheard of.’
‘How singular.’
‘Who is it?’ asks May.
‘It’s young Pilgrim, Ma’am.’
May dabs the corner of her mouth with her napkin and rises from her chair.
‘I must go to her.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ says Georgie.
‘It’s my duty to care for the welfare of our servants. That’s what you always taught me and the boys, isn’t it Papa?
Her father removes his glasses and returns them to his inner pocket, as if this might prevent him from envisaging any sort of scandal.
‘Well yes Pussycat, but…’
‘But?’
‘But this girl has brought shame on my house,’ says Georgie. ‘What would you like us to do? Take in gifts for the baby?’
‘Who is the father?’ asks Mary Adelaide of the butler.
‘The girl refuses to say, Ma’am,’ the butler replies. ‘In fact, she claims she doesn’t know.’
‘An immaculate conception then?’ says Georgie.
‘I’m going up to her,’ says May again.
‘But May dear, Georgie doesn’t wish it,’ says the Duke.
There is silence in the dining room, broken only by the swishing of May’s tea-gown as she sweeps from the room.
Mary Adelaide holds up the empty toast rack to the butler.
‘A few more slices, I think,’ she says. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice, Georgie? And of course another egg.’
‘Five and a half minutes exactly this time,’ says Georgie. ‘Not a second more or less.’
The butler bows and withdraws, more upset by the crisis of the egg than by anything happening in a distant garret.
On an October morning in the glum little villa, it is cold in the attics where the servants sleep. If the rooms downstairs are small enough, these are hardly more than glorified cupboards, squashed beneath the eaves and inside the turrets. But in the space Pilgrim shares with another servant a fire has been permitted in the meagre grate. The girl lies on an iron bedstead beneath sheets so crisp and white it is obvious that their predecessors, grubby witnesses to the night, have been spirited away to the laundry. The usual ruddy cheeks of the Fens are quite gone; Pilgrim’s face is pale as the bed linen. Yet, strangely, May sees a beauty in her that was not there yesterday. Beside the bed, a baby is swaddled in a basket.
The girl tries to rise but falls back onto the pillows, her eyes filling with tears.
‘I’m right sorry, Ma’am.’
‘Did you really not know you were… in this condition?’ May asks.
‘No, Ma’am. No, I swear it. I would’ve told you, Ma’am,’ she replies. ‘The doctor says it was tucked right up under my ribs, so it didn’t show.’
‘But how did it happen? Who…?’
‘I don’t know, Ma’am,’ the girl bleats. ‘I mean I’m not rightly sure.’
May sits down on a spindly chair beside the bed. She cannot think what to say or do. But that day when she needed it, it had been Pilgrim’s arm which had comforted her and now she returns the gesture.
Suddenly, Mary Adelaide bustles into the tiny room, out of breath from the climb. Hardly glancing at the figure in the bed, she goes straight to the basket.
‘Oh look how tiny he is,’ she says. ‘But what a handsome lad. Almost as handsome as my own three darling boys. Oh my dear, you must be so proud.’
The Duchess lifts the child from its crib. It is crying a little.
‘This little thing wants his mother,’ she declares and places the bundle in the girl’s arms. ‘That’s the only place he needs to be.’
Mary Adelaide smiles down on them.
‘Pretty as a picture,’ she says.
And something changes in the attic. All sadness flies out through the tiny window and dissolves in the morning mists. Shock and shame, pain and bewilderment all vanish from the girl’s pale face. Now she smiles too and some colour comes. She kisses the bundle on the forehead and wraps her arms tighter around him.
May Teck wonders what it would feel like to perform that simple, extraordinary act. She is frightened because she does not know the answer. It is an answer she wants to find. Because, unlike the maid in the iron bedstead, May Teck has no doubt whatsoever that she herself is carrying a child.
*
The Bard is right. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. It is a day destined to ruffle the flat fields of Norfolk. No sooner has May Teck descended from the attics, then the telegram arrives from Georgie’s mother.
Bertie has had a terrible fall. Coming alone down the spiral stairs at Waddesdon, Georgie’s father slipped and bounced all the way to the foot like a child’s ball. They found him lying there, groaning with pain, his leg twisted every which way. Not even the thickness of Baron de Rothschild’s carpets saved him from injury, the seriousness of which is not yet clear. Despite the agony, Bertie insisted on being taken back to London, where the best doctors are. Some local quack would hardly suffice.
‘That awful house,’ Alix says. ‘It is cursed.’
Alix hates Waddesdon because she never goes there. Nor would she really be wanted. The mock chateau high above the Aylesbury vale is one of the places where Bertie frolics with his other family; those nursery people, the brittle women and entitled men. Here they wallow in the unrivalled splendours which surround them; the gorgeous fruits of the labours of the Rothschilds, the bankers of Frankfurt who now grease the wheels of half Europe. Yet none of it can protect them from a slip on a stair or a kneecap that breaks. Even such men are not gods after all.
