Valhalla, p.20
Valhalla, page 20
Now, in her old bedroom, she folds the letter and returns it to its hiding place. She pulls the bell. Pilgrim comes. She asks for tea to be brought to her here. And if there might be a slice of Madeira cake? Just the one slice, mind.
‘Are you all right Ma’am?’ the girl asks as she lays down the tray.
‘Just a little tired,’ May answers. ‘And my back hurts. But of course you know all about that.’
‘Looking back, Ma’am, yes, though at the time I didn’t know what the problem was, if you remember. You’ll be fine, I’m sure you will. It’s not that bad.’
‘And are you all right, Pilgrim? Living in this house now?’
‘Oh yes Ma’am. The Duchess is very kind to me. She is a sainted lady, Ma’am. I can’t thank you both enough for giving me a home.’
The girl has been here for six months now, far away from the scene of her disgrace, sheltering under the forgiving heart of Mary Adelaide. The Duke had grumbled about impropriety, till the Duchess reminded him that he too lived under this roof by the grace and favour of her family, so he would do better to be silent.
‘Remember though, you must be very careful while my husband is here,’ May orders her. ‘He must not see you, Pilgrim. He really must not or we’ll all be in terrible trouble.’
‘I’ll bury myself away below stairs, Ma’am. Like a tiny dormouse I’ll be.’
Pilgrim pulls back the moss-green quilt and plumps up the pillow.
‘Why don’t you take a little rest now, Ma’am? Just for half an hour. Do you a power of good.’
Pilgrim unlaces May’s shoes and helps her to stretch out on the little bed. She pulls the blind half down against the sun and creeps away.
May longs to doze but sleep will not come. Anyway, after the tea, her bladder won’t last long. Instead she lies listening to the sounds from the woodland drifting in on the summer air. A timeless reminder of when, through the rose-hued prism of childhood, everything seemed simpler. How she longs for simplicity again.
I adore you sweet May, I can’t say more than that.
In his written words, he is Dr Jekyll. In his spoken words, and sometimes in his deeds, Mr Hyde. Where, she asks herself, is the map for this journey? What is she to think? Or to do? Who would have imagined that she, the good and sensible girl, would ever come to this?
The child gives her another sharp kick. It seems to be having a petulant day. Aunt Queen extols the blessed chloroform. Please, May Teck asks of God, can I have some now, right this very minute? Not for my body, but for my spirit. All is chaos and disorder. Chaos and disorder.
XXVI
Summer, 1894
The indignity will stay livid in her memory. Her pretty ankles in mid-air, her legs wide apart. Her most private place open like a gaping wound for all to see. The blood, the fluids, the odours. The sweat running down her face; her mother dabbing it away. Madame Bricka squeezing her hand.
‘Get this out of me!’ she shouts more than once.
Even through the pain, she remembers too the flush of embarrassment on her mother’s face because the doctor and nurse can hear. Even in this moment of blood, sweat and tears, she is not permitted to be herself. Some level of decorum must be preserved.
‘You said I wouldn’t need the chloroform,’ she wails to her mother. ‘You lied to me!’
‘Easy now, chick, it will soon be over.’
As the worst of it approaches, Madame Bricka, though still clasping her hand, turns her head away, but not before May glimpses the horror on her friend’s face. So, she thinks, this looks as bad as it feels. Sweet Jesus, she swears to herself, I will never ever go through this again. Never. Except of course she knows that she will; that it will not really be her choice.
When the moment comes, late in the summer evening, she cannot tell where her own scream ends and that of the child begins. When the waves of pain start to recede, they bring it to her. Its tiny cheeks are red and puffy; its skin clammy. It is Georgie’s to the life. And it is a son. A little prince. The Duchess, weeping, holds out the swaddled bundle, but May cannot summon the energy to take it. She can only lift a fingertip to brush its cheek before exhaustion overcomes her and she turns her face to the wall. Vaguely, as if from some distant star, she is conscious of a hairy hand patting her own and of a quarterdeck voice telling her she is a good girl.
But there is no rest yet for the other denizens of White Lodge. Through the short midsummer night, telegrams crackle out; west to Windsor, east to Norfolk, north and south to the throne rooms of Europe. In the vast baroque palaces of St Petersburg and in tiny medieval castles perched high above the Thuringian forests, the noble citizens of the Almanach de Gotha start their day with the joyful news. Then, like a flock of homing pigeons a thousand strong, telegrams fly back to Richmond Park, borne down with messages, each vying to be the most poetic or portentous expression of congratulation. No adjective is left unturned, especially those of the most revolting sentimentality. Nobody doubts that this child will one day affect the world in the way of the great Alexander, El Cid, Charlemagne or indeed all three rolled into one.
As May Teck sleeps on into the morning, a marquee is erected just beyond the garden walls. On the first day alone, fifteen hundred come to inscribe their names in a book, in the sure expectation that the infant will preserve it to his dying day. A squad of constables is on duty to keep enthusiasm under control and to make sure no loyal zealot, emboldened by beer, tries to scale the palings around the house. When she finally drifts back towards consciousness, she can hear the muted buzz of all the voices. At least, thank God, she cannot see the eyes.
In the days to come, she turns the birth chamber into another womb. It is easy to persuade the doctors that Georgie must continue to sleep in another room for a while longer. She tolerates the windows being half open to allay the heat, but orders the blinds half closed. She does not even glance at the mountain of telegrams waiting for her to read. She takes some tea, but does not want food; the obsession with Madeira cake gone as if by magic. Besides, the thought of pushing out a stool with her aching muscles is too awful to contemplate.
When anyone other than the nurse comes into the room, she pretends to be asleep. She senses her mother and Madame Bricka standing over her; she knows them both by their scent, but does not open her eyes.
‘Poor May,’ whispers Mary Adelaide to Madame Bricka. ‘She’s had a worse time than I expected.’
When they leave, the nurse, no fool, dares a reprimand.
‘You’d be wise to sit up and take some soup, Ma’am,’ she says. ‘A slice of toast even. Your muscles will ease up faster if you move them a little.’
But it is three days before she begins to eat. On the third day, she is helped up and into a chair. The nurse washes her gently from a pitcher of warm water laced with lavender. It soothes and calms her, but still she wants no intruders. Georgie of course barges in, but he is answered in monosyllables.
‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ he asks. ‘When Eddy and I were in Asia, we saw women back working in the fields five minutes after giving birth. You can’t even manage a smile.’
‘I’m tired,’ she says.
‘Well buck up, there’s a good girl. Grandmama is coming tomorrow to see the boy. The Russian cousins too. Then my mother and the girls the day after. You really must be up to receive them, even if it’s just in a tea-gown.’
She hadn’t much cared for the Russians the last time they had met. Nicky the Tsarevitch is an amiable nonentity and Alicky, his betrothed, is a strange, sullen creature, taut as piano wire. She is sure they look down on her blood; Alicky especially, who has a way of excluding her from conversation as if May were somehow beneath her notice. Anyway she will see not them and that’s that. Her mother can take the infant in for inspection. They can all poke and prod the child as much as they like; they will not be allowed to do the same to her. Poor May, how are you? Poor May, was it frightful? Yes it damn well was. The doctors can make up some excuse. She will stay in bed, in the room with the half-drawn blinds.
Now, as the nurse brings in the child, the woman makes to hand him to his father, but Georgie steps back in alarm.
‘The boy only cries, sir.’ The nurse smiles. ‘He doesn’t yet have teeth to bite you.’
He looks down at the bundle in his arms. Perhaps, May observes, he thinks the child expects him to make small talk. He has the same strained expression he adopts when he must speak to some official or local worthy but cannot think of a single sentence. She has no clue about what he thinks or feels about being the father of a son. Maybe he will send another note to let her know.
‘Excellent,’ he finally mutters as he hands the child back. ‘Yes, excellent. Well done everyone.’
*
The next day, the carriages from Windsor come crunching over the gravel to the ecstasy of those still queuing to sign the book. Behind the half-drawn blinds, May hears the cheering. She is still trembling from the almighty row of the morning, when Georgie finally understood that she would not come to the drawing room. It was the worst of their rows yet. An eyes-flashing, teeth-baring, fist-pounding row. She had never been called a selfish cunt before. Worse still, the disorder still rampant inside her provoked a strange reaction. For the first time in weeks, she laughed. The laugh he hated so much. And she could not stop. The door to the bedroom slammed so hard that it bounced open again and ricocheted off the wall.
When the carriages have departed and the crowds gone home, May gets up. She raises the blinds and sits smoking by the open window, dressed only in her robe. The park is quiet now, no sound beyond the evening birdsong. For the first time in days, a light breeze carries in the arid scent of parched grass and woodland, softened by the whiff of honeysuckle climbing up the wall. From here, she can look across the forecourt towards the white sitting room in the opposite wing. She pictures Madame Bricka at the big desk, wading through the telegrams that must be answered and cursing the God in whom Bricka does not believe. The space between the wings is no more than thirty yards, but to May it seems like a universe. From the white sitting room and from all that it means to her, she is now exiled forever.
To May’s astonishment, Madame Bricka adores the child. The expected disinterest, derision even, is nowhere to be seen.
‘Oh do let me hold him again,’ she begs, whenever the nurse brings him in.
In amazement, May watches how Bricka’s sharp corners are planed away under the inquisitive glance of the mewling, puking thing in the shawl of Honiton lace. Like all the others, she has questions too. But Bricka’s questions have a different tinge to them. She searches May’s face with a look that May has never seen before. It is a look of desolation.
‘Does it feel quite wonderful? That he is yours?’ she whispers. ‘Does it?’
May cannot produce an answer, at least not the one that the woman wants. Instead she simply shrugs.
‘Oh, it must feel quite, quite wonderful,’ Madame Bricka says again, as the child stretches his rosebud mouth into a yawn.
May feels a sudden fury flood through her. Bricka’s words feel almost like betrayal. A betrayal of all the hours in the white sitting room, of the thinking world, of the possibility of escaping from la petitesse de la vie.
May wishes the nurse would not bring the child to her so often, though she knows quite well what the woman is doing. May has seen too many litters of puppies and kittens not to understand what is happening to her and yet be unable to resist it. She prays the oppression will lift from her like some huge and seemingly immovable cloud which suddenly slides away on an unexpected blessed breeze. But it does not.
On the fifth morning, a note is brought to her, roughly written, without an envelope. It comes from below stairs. Pilgrim asks most humbly if she might be allowed to see the baby. Just for a minute. Perhaps when the nurse is taking her tea in the kitchen. She will be quiet as a mouse and disturb nobody, certainly not the little man himself. Since Georgie has fled to town once more, permission is given. It is yet another hot day. In the afternoon, May is dozing again on top of her bed when something wakes her. At first she thinks it is the child bleating yet again, but it is a softer sound, muffled and constricted as if it is in hiding. When May opens the door to the nursery, Pilgrim is sitting by the cradle, rocking the little prince in her arms. The girl holds him tightly to her breast as she weeps.
‘Oh Pilgrim,’ says May.
‘I’m right sorry, Ma’am. Truly. But I still miss him. My own boy. Only two weeks of life, Ma’am. Two weeks, no more. And his little grave is so far away from me now, Ma’am.’
At last, May does not think of herself. An idea comes to her.
‘Would it help you if we moved him from Norfolk? To somewhere nearby where you might go and be with him?’
‘Disturb him at his rest? Would God forgive us?’
‘Such things are not unheard of. The Almighty is a loving God, at least sometimes. You have suffered enough, surely. I don’t think He will begrudge you that.’
‘Oh Ma’am.’
‘Then we will arrange it. I will speak to my mother and the arrangements will be made.’
The little prince wakes and reaches up to the girl’s face. With his fingertips he traces the tear running down her cheek.
May Teck feels her legs go from under her. She stumbles into a chair and dissolves into some other creature. Like an anaesthetic wearing off, the numbing melancholy of the past five days gives way to searing pain. A pain far worse than the most agonising spasms of the birth itself. Pilgrim rushes to her, the child still in her arms.
‘Ma’am, Ma’am, heavens what ails you? Look here’s your lovely lad. Take comfort in him for whatever it might be.’
But May cannot answer. She stares emptily in front of her, at some hazy, unseen corner of the room.
‘Let’s get you back into bed, Ma’am,’ says the girl. ‘You’ll feel safer there.’
The sheets, having been thrown back, are cooler now. Pilgrim pulls them over her and plumps the pillows. The girl brings the child to her, laying him on the bed against his mother. At once he begins to cry. May looks at him with a detachment that, observing it in herself, chills her heart. It is as if she is both deaf and dumb, as if he is nothing to do with her at all.
‘All right, Ma’am, all right. I’ll take him back to his cradle. You just rest now. Rest now, Ma’am.’
For a while May dozes, then wakens to hear the child again. A sharp piercing wail, like a needle being pushed between her eyes. Why does he do that? What suffering has he yet experienced in this life? Why can’t the damn nurse do something to stop it? May pulls the pillow over her ears to blot it out. She curls up into a ball. For the next few days, despite the soft entreaties of her mother and the harsh bafflement of her husband, she will not uncurl. All she wants is to stay inside the womb.
XXVII
Summer, 1894
After May hides for a few days inside the shadowed room, the Duchess takes control in that way of hers in which, like a tidal wave, she sweeps all before her. Even Georgie is flattened. A mother knows better than a husband, she tells him. Childbirth affects some women more than others and their dear, sweet, gentle May is simply one of these. She needs a holiday, a change of scene and that is that.
The little prince is not yet six weeks old when the Duchess and her daughter take the boat train and embark for Switzerland. From a grand hotel in St Moritz, they venture out for short walks along the lake and long drives into the mountains. In the evenings they attend some amateur concert, dine in the villas of the beau monde or just go to bed early. And her Mama is right. Dragged from the womb, May breathes in pure, clear air and begins to take some notice of the world again. She lolls in a little boat under a sky-blue parasol and is rowed to and fro across unruffled waters. She sits for ages in a silent corner of the hotel garden, watching the eagles soar around the mountain peaks, wheeling and banking on the thermals. For a few weeks, May Teck has freedom. She had begun to forget the taste and smell of it. How heady it is. How indispensable, surely, to any sort of life worth living.
But the fragile restoration is over too soon. When the boat train is swallowed up by the sooty glass canopies of Victoria Station and the air is once more clogged with filth, it feels as if she has never seen the eagles soar nor felt the balmy breeze off the lake. The old palace of St James is as sunless as ever. Georgie asks almost nothing about her little holiday, does not bother to enquire if it has done her good. The child looks up at her from his cradle and yells anew. Dear Lord, she thinks, it is even louder than before.
*
It is her mother’s idea. It is, so to speak, a surprise package. May and the child are summoned from St James’s to White Lodge with the promise of a fine tea and a very special treat. No, the Duchess telegraphs, she will not provide the slightest clue in advance or that would spoil the fun. And it might be better if this aspect of the visit is not mentioned to dear Georgie.
The surprise is spread out across a chaise in the conservatory.
He is, she notices, even stouter than before. But even if the buttons on his fancy waistcoat are under greater strain these days and the beard does not quite hide a supplementary chin, the rascal has not lost his charm. On either side of Harry Thaddeus Jones, the Duchess and Madame Bricka hang on his every word. Nor does the scandale of his private life seem to have impinged on his professional success. In certain quarters, among the free thinkers and such like, it may even be an added attraction. In any case, the Irish eyes still smile and that is all that matters.
How pleased she is to see him and she does not hide it. When he leaps up and bends to kiss her hand, her heart still quickens as it always did. How she would love to throw her arms around him. Such a simple thing to wish for, but how completely impossible. But at least, she thinks, the desire to do it may mean she is not dead yet.
