Valhalla, p.21
Valhalla, page 21
When he looks at her, she feels as if every memory they have ever shared is right there at the front of his mind, intact and unforgotten. Every stroll along the banks of the Arno, every carriage ride in the Cascine, every moment when his easel was turned towards her, his brush held in mid-air as he stared into who she was at the sweet age of seventeen.
‘Well now, May Flower,’ he says, ‘and how is motherhood?’
How can she answer in a way he would be pleased to hear?
‘It has been achieved,’ she replies.
‘Achieved?’ says Mr Thaddy. ‘Sure, I never heard it put like that before. But look then, here comes your achievement.’
The nurse is on the threshold with the child. Mr Thaddy snatches him from her arms and lifts him high in the air. He lets the tiny fingers explore his beard. The little prince beams and chortles and coos. The infant is more animated than his mother has yet seen him. In truth though, she has only really looked at him when he is asleep in his cradle. As soon as he starts the hellish crying, she abandons him to the nurse. The black cloud that oppresses her has still not entirely shifted. The breeze has not yet come to blow it clean away.
‘Enough of this,’ says Harry Thaddeus Jones. ‘I’m here to work, am I not?’
‘May dear, I’ve asked Mr Thaddy to execute some sketches of you and the darling child,’ says her mother. ‘Just simple drawings for my bedroom. Only for me and Papa, not to be seen by anyone else. Please say you will do that for your old Mama.’
‘Of course Mama. If that is what you want. But I’m hardly dressed for a sitting…’
‘Ah, you’re fine as you are,’ he says. ‘In fact, you’re overdressed as usual these days, but we can be doing something about that.’
Harry Thaddeus Jones looks at her with that old, unsettling gaze. He tells her to remove her jacket. Leg-of-mutton sleeves, he declares, are an obscene deformity of the female shape, like something from a freak show at the Piccadilly Hall.
‘The earrings too please and that brooch at your throat. And undo the first two buttons of your blouse. You’ve got a good neck, May Flower, you always did. Let’s see it.’
‘Careful monsieur,’ says Madame Bricka, ‘or you will make my Princesse look like a Gaiety Girl.’
‘That would be quite impossible, even if I painted her stark naked,’ he replies.
‘Oh Mr Thaddy!’ says the Duchess. ‘You’re such a naughty boy.’
‘Now ladies, away with you, be gone.’
He places May on the chaise holding the infant. She is asked to look down at her son, nothing more. What could be simpler? Madonna and Child.
Mr Thaddy sits at a distance on a wicker chair, pad across his knees, charcoal in his hand. He will do some rough sketches today, he says, and progress them in his studio. But it is to be a turbulent sitting. The little prince cries, refusing to lie still and be cherubic. He wriggles around inside his wrappings and makes fists to punch the air. When she tries to calm him, it only agitates him more.
Harry Thaddeus Jones crosses the room and lifts the boy from her grasp. In seconds, the child stops yelling and a beatific smile cools his angry cheeks. Again he gurgles and coos. If only Georgie could do that, May thinks. She has never once seen him pick up his son since the day after the birth. Not once. If only she could do it too. There must be a trick to it. Some magic. Some alchemy. How she longs to know what it might be.
‘Now young sir, return to your mother and be good,’ says Mr Thaddy, crouching down to return the bundle to her arms. ‘Your Mama loves you, don’t you Mama?’
He does not, as she expects, retreat to his wicker chair, but stays crouched beside her. She realises that he is waiting for an answer or even just for a look that says it instead. It is only when he gets neither that he goes back to his perch.
The little prince quietens a little, though he is still querulous. She tries to find the way to hold him, the words to murmur, which will earn her the smile he gives so gladly to Mr Thaddy. When she sneaks a glance at the artist, the bushy brows are furrowed, the lips pursed. It is not an expression she is used to seeing on that cheerful, open face. At his feet lie two or three screwed-up balls of paper. How she hated it when he called her ‘Mama’. How she must have dwindled in his eyes. A mother, nothing more.
After a while, he declares that will be enough for today and soon after takes his leave. It is ten years now since the garden of the Villa I Cedri and the summer night when the fireflies danced the polka.
*
She hears the first rumble when she is dressing to go out. In an instant her heart begins to race. Within minutes, the rain is pounding the windows and the storm slams against the turrets of the old palace of St James’s. Damn it. The evening will be ghastly enough without this. They must travel all the way to Greenwich too. At the Royal Naval College, there is to be a charity dinner for impoverished seamen left high and dry by the passage of time. A cause close to Georgie’s heart. For once, he does not mind being dragged away from the coverts. Already, he is brushing up tales from his long-ago voyages with Eddy. In the splendour of the Painted Hall, he will show them his trick of tapping the biscuit to check for weevils. How they will all laugh. May will sit and smile and say nothing.
A knock comes to her door. The child is very distressed, her lady-in-waiting says. He is frightened by the storm. His nurse is sick with influenza and he needs a familiar face. Might his mother come? Even for a few minutes?
In the nursery, the little prince writhes in his cot, yelling to high heaven. Her lady scoops him up and plunks him gratefully into May’s arms. He stares up at his mother, the tiny eyes wide open. With each crack of thunder, they grow wider still. Cradling him, she sees her own terror reflected in those eyes. Suddenly the gulf is bridged and the connection made; both to the child in her arms and to the child long lost inside May Teck. She murmurs to him the soothing words she always gives to herself. It will not hurt you. It will soon go away. It is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The little prince turns his head into her breast, pushing his body against her own. He has never done that before.
The door of the nursery opens. Georgie is bedecked in his admiral’s uniform, his hair smeared flat with brilliantine, even his beard neatly combed.
‘What are you doing in here?’ he says. ‘We must go at once. This weather may make us late.’
‘The boy is distressed by the storm,’ she replies. ‘His nurse is not here. I think perhaps I should stay with him.’
‘Stay with him? Don’t be ridiculous. This lady can do that. Why should you?’
‘I’m his mother.’
‘You are my wife. Come at once.’
Outside the windows, the eye of the storm settles over the old palace. There is a crack so loud it is as if the earth is splintering. May passes the bundle in the shawl back to her lady. The child starts to scream once more, reaching out his arms towards his mother. He has never done that before either. She looks from the son to the husband and back again.
‘With or without you, the carriage leaves in five minutes,’ says Georgie, turning on his heel. ‘Choose.’
May stands in the middle of the nursery floor. She is shaking now. Still she looks to and fro between the open doorway and the screaming child. Then she puts her hands over her ears and runs from the room. All along the corridor, she can hear the cries of her son. As the horses head out into the raging night, she can hear them still.
In the shadows of the carriage, her hand rests lightly on her breast where the head of the little prince had nestled. At last, she reflects, her yearning had been fulfilled. Someone had lain there to find comfort. She had never imagined it might be a child.
Yet now, with every turn of the carriage wheels, she moves further away from him. Why has she done such a thing, she asks herself? But she well knows the answer. She had to choose and she has chosen. There will not be, there can never be, a turning back.
*
In a week or two, a telegram is received at White Lodge.
‘Oh dear,’ Mary Adelaide says to her husband. ‘Mr Thaddy must suspend work on the sketches of May and the child. He is called urgently to Paris to oversee an exhibition of his paintings. What a disappointment.’
But a parallel message is sent by Harry Thaddeus Jones. This time in a letter marked ‘personal and private’. Unlike most missives May receives, prim, proper and considered, the words here, scrawled in huge letters, explode like shrapnel across the paper.
I’m sorry May Flower, but I have failed. I just can’t make it work. I’m not finding you now. You have gone from me.
XXVIII
Summer, 1895
As the train pulls her across the fields towards the coast, she sits alone in her compartment, her head resting against the windowpane. When it slows to pass through a station, she pulls back into the shadows. They must not see her like this, not even for a fraction of a second.
She cannot believe it is happening again, then asks herself why it should not? He is on top of her every night, except those on which the slaughter of a thousand birds has overtired him. How she prays for those nights, though she mourns the poor creatures that must be sacrificed to give her some respite. So instead of sleeping unmolested, she lies awake seeing the tiny corpses scattered across the fields and coverts, splashes of feathery red on muddy green, eyes wide open, staring up at the sky in disbelief that they could have fallen so far, so fast.
On the morning when she first retched into the basin, she went down on her knees and prayed to her God that it was no more than a bad boiled egg or a piece of shot left in a partridge. But why would He listen to her? Did she not vow before Him on her wedding day to obey her husband and to worship him with her body? Yet how can she worship when she feels nothing but distaste? With every coupling, she finds him less appealing: the skin coarser, the beard less sanitary, the breath less sweet, the acrid odour of his manhood as it slides inside her ever more revolting. And, when it is over, no terms of endearment will be uttered, the back will be turned and she will be left alone in the darkness.
But on the next morning, she was fine. She blessed that boiled egg. On the third day though, her head was in the basin once more. In an instant, she made a decision. She would tell nobody. Until, like the last time, she can hardly function for the vomiting or until the swollen belly is declaration enough, she will maintain her privacy. She will keep the ravenous eyes, the prying questions, at bay. She will give them nothing to see.
Now, from the window of the train, she catches a first glimpse of the coast; the sea a silvery fingernail beyond the yellowing landscape of yet another glorious summer. Georgie has gone to the island ahead of her. They will all be waiting. The clans are gathered for the yachting; Osborne will be bursting. Ten minutes from now, she will be at the port and then aboard the vessel. Please God, let the sea be calm. In another hour, she will reach the harbour at Cowes. On Trinity Pier, the bunting will flap in the breeze. The brass band will play. Georgie will be there to meet her and the little prince. He will stride up the gangway to awkwardly kiss her cheek and pat the child on the head. She knows how he hates doing such things in public, considers it indecorous but a necessary duty. To the townsfolk, cheering and waving their little flags, they must demonstrate happiness and harmony and show that all is well among their betters. Whatever might be amiss in the lives of ordinary folk, such reassurance will surely be of great comfort.
She keeps the notes in her handbag. She takes them everywhere with her now, clings to them. Tiny life rafts of paper and ink. They do not come often, the notes. Perhaps once every couple of months. In response to something she has done that pleases him, or at least has not displeased him. Still she cannot fathom the notes. Does he even write them himself or requisition them from some secretary of a romantic disposition? The latter possibility makes no sense. He would never be able to handle the embarrassment of making the request. But how else to reconcile the man of the notes and the man in the almost silent dining room or the almost silent bedroom in which the terms of endearment are not uttered? Whatever the truth of it, she still clings to these tiny life rafts. Still, May Teck wants to love.
Her lady-in-waiting comes into the compartment, bearing a quivering bowl of warm water laced with lavender, a flannel and a little towel. May dabs her cheeks and forehead, the back of her neck. The lady brushes down her gown to remove any dust or crinkling from the journey and helps her on with an enormous summer hat. May is slowly circled to make sure nothing is out of place. Between the railway platform and the gangway of the boat, she will be visible for less than five minutes but nothing less than perfection will do.
‘You look splendid, Ma’am,’ the woman says. ‘Quite splendid.’
And it is true. May studies the reflection wobbling on the mirrored wall. She has lived now for twenty-seven summers and whatever might assail her spirit, it does not show on her person. Not for a moment has she ever considered herself a beauty, but she sees now how handsome she has grown. Her skin is flawless, her figure full and fine. This, she thinks, is my prime. The best I am ever going to look, the most fecund my body will ever be. Is this why I am impregnated so easily? Is this the reason the ends of my nerves feel flayed and stripped bare? Is this the time when I am to be most alive, but also when I feel that I am being slowly walled up? Because, despite the furore in her womb, it seems like nothing is truly happening to her. Nothing at all, at least not of any purpose she can bring herself to value.
‘You will do great things,’ Aunt Queen had said, that day beside Eddy’s tomb.
It was clear the old lady did not mean the incubation of a screaming infant, so where are these great things? Essentially, she has no occupation. Neither for that matter has Georgie. He shoots and fishes and collects his damn stamps. Like his father, he waits in the queue for a purpose, even if it is one that terrifies him. Together, he and May traipse from palace to castle to country house to the glum little villa in Norfolk and back again. They change their four walls with the seasons but nothing of note goes on inside any of them, so the journeys are essentially pointless. At every destination, they find the same tribe, the same view of the world and of their place in it. Their presence is much sought, their good opinion treasured, their every word hung onto, but the order is never challenged nor shaken up. It is a life in aspic. She struggles against la petitesse de la vie only to sink further into it.
The train snakes its way into the station. She can see the mayor and his lady on the platform, but at least it should be quick. At least there will be no grim, tongue-tied lunch to sit through. She checks her reflection again. The vast hat is in place and so is the expression beneath it. Nothing will be discerned. Nothing will be seen. May Teck takes a long slow breath and draws herself back into the sanctuary of her shell.
*
‘Oh come on, May. You can do it. I know you can.’
‘No Liko, really. I couldn’t possibly.’
‘You always say you love the theatre.’
‘But strictly from the box, not from the stage.’
‘But you don’t have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Heavens girl, you don’t even have to move.’
‘I’ll still make a spectacle of myself. And in front of Aunt Queen and everyone else too.’
‘If you refuse,’ he replies, leaning right into her face, ‘I shall ask Georgie’s permission to put you over my knee and spank you.’
It is the way he says it. May blushes. She knows quite well she is going to agree. Few ladies find it possible to deny Henry of Battenberg anything. He is, and only the soppiest adjective will do, quite adorable. Liko, as he is called, is wonderfully handsome, kind-hearted and the most outrageous charmer. Opinions are divided over whether or not he might also be something of a cad but, even if he were, he would be instantly forgiven.
And besides. Everyone is sorry for Liko. What a life he leads. When the German princeling asked to marry Georgie’s youngest aunt, her mother only agreed on the strict condition that he and his bride would live with her. Dear dumpy Beatrice was quite indispensable to Aunt Queen, at her beck and call from the dawn chorus till the rising of the moon. For ten years now, Liko has known no home but those of his mother-in-law. He has no whim, no wish, no earthly desire that can take precedence over hers. At the age of thirty-seven, his life is as aimless as a puppy-dog with nothing to do but chase its tail.
‘Poor Liko,’ mutter the men of the family in the billiard room after dinner. ‘They’ve cut his knackers off. Those are his own balls he’s whacking round the table.’
The women of the family, at least those on whom Henry of Battenberg’s eyes have alighted for more than a moment, doubt that this is entirely true. What a shame, they think to themselves, that such a man should be wasted on Beatrice. A good enough soul but, dear God, how enervating she is. An antidote to romance. A bromide against all passion.
But it is no more true to say that Liko’s life is wasted than that his cojones have been chopped off. For Liko is a bringer of joy, not just to dumpy Beatrice but also to Aunt Queen herself. There is no heart which Liko wins as entirely as hers. For the first time since the terrible events of 1861, there is fun and laughter within her walls. The marriage she at first resisted, fearing it would lose her a daughter, has gained her a son who brings the sunlight back to her life. Even the patter of tiny feet, when Liko’s children arrive in quick succession, has been not just tolerated but embraced far more gladly than was ever the case with her own offspring. Tiny hands tug at the black bombazine skirts, demanding to sit on her lap. Tiny voices scream and shout and giggle. The clouds lift from the towers of the great bastion above the Thames, from the little castle on the Dee and from this mansion on the island in the Solent.
