Valhalla, p.23
Valhalla, page 23
May changes the angle of her parasol so her face is in the shadows.
‘I really must lie down now,’ says Aunt Queen. ‘Heavens, when the children were young, I used to run from this terrace all the way down to the very edge of the sea. Run! Can you credit it? How awful to be old. I do so pray it doesn’t last much longer.’
A lady-in-waiting, clucking like a mother hen, hurries out to take charge. Before disappearing into the cool gloom of the corridor, Aunt Queen turns with a smile.
‘You’re quite right my dear. We women are always the stronger, aren’t we? How much it would please me if one day it could be written in the books, “Once Victoria sat on the ivory throne of Travancore and after her came May.” Not consort but regnant. Oh well, tant pis.’
It is the greatest compliment May will ever hear in this life and she knows it. In the years to come, no other arrangement of words in a sentence, no speech of welcome, no panegyric in a newspaper, on the wireless or in a cinema newsreel will ever be its equal.
As the afternoon sun beats down on the palazzo on the island, May Teck makes her deepest curtsey to the small black figure in the doorway. When she raises her eyes again, the figure has gone and all she can hear is the song of the starlings among the towers.
*
While Aunt Queen dozes, May Teck goes to the dressing room she has been allocated and opens the wardrobes. For the rest of her days, she need never open a wardrobe again. Someone else will always do it for her, but that is not the point. Wardrobes are the repositories for things which it is possible to rearrange in a certain way, a way conducive to greater order and thus to peace of mind. The gowns, the cloaks, the hats, the shoes, the stockings, the nightdresses, even the undergarments all offer the prospect of an increase in serenity.
In London or in Norfolk, the sheer number of items means the rearrangement can easily consume one whole day or even two. Now, on the island for less than a week, the quantity is diminished but the principle holds true. On throwing open the wardrobe which shelters her evening gowns, she sees an immediate opportunity. Why on earth, she wonders, has her dresser here not noticed it? The gowns, currently hung in an aimless row, could so easily be grouped in a spectrum; ranging from whites, creams and silvers via pastels like lemon or blue and the middling shades of moss green and gold, right through to that one indispensable black dress in case some inconsiderate relative decides to die without warning. Or might it be better if the silks were placed together, then the satins, the organzas, the velvets and so forth? It is a quandary.
She bites her nails as she considers it. Such a dreadful habit. Something children do; something she herself never did before, yet now does. Of course she could try both options for the wardrobe and discover which brings the greater ease. And so she does just that. It swallows two whole hours as the afternoon sun begins to weaken and a kindly breeze skitters in from the sea, rustling the long net curtains that frame the open windows.
In her own houses, it is the same with her jewellery, her little objets d’art and, above all, her books. Not merely to arrange them perfectly, but to catalogue them also. How reassuring it is to write down in indisputable black and white exactly what one possesses. Not out of vulgar pride and certainly not of avarice, merely the quiet satisfaction of a well-ordered existence in a world half mad. She has done it since she was a little girl, when the corridors of White Lodge echoed to the tantrums of her father and the chatter of her mother.
‘Why on earth do you do all that?’ Georgie once asked when he discovered her making a list of which hats she has already worn at which country house weekend.
‘For the same reason you collect stamps, Georgie dear,’ she replied.
‘Nonsense. That’s a completely different thing. That’s a serious occupation.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Good God, I hope you’re not going a bit batty like your Papa.’
She had mustered so much fury in her eyes that, when she turned them on him, he had stared down at the carpet and shuffled his feet.
‘Sorry Miss May. Out of order.’
Now, she closes the wardrobe doors as softly as she can, as if shutting away a secret between herself and the satinwood which nobody else must know. At the little click as the two doors meet, May Teck gives a gentle sigh. She could sleep now, she thinks.
Suddenly, from outside, the shouts of children knife into her solitude. It can only be Liko, bringing his brood back up from the Swiss Cottage. Hiding behind the net curtain, she looks out over the terraces. The older boy is throwing a ball for a dog, the girl clutches Liko’s hand while the younger boy is enthroned on his father’s shoulders, ruffling the brilliantined hair. How easy they look together, she thinks. How easy everything seems to be for Henry of Battenberg. It is not likely, she reflects, that he has ever felt the urge to rearrange the shirts and suits in his closet or to count the number of his cufflinks.
This morning she had woken in a flush of panic. She wondered if she could say she was unwell. It would not have been a complete falsehood for she had been sick yet again, damn it. As she lay there, she could not decide which thing she feared the most: facing Liko across the breakfast table, looking ashen and far from the goddess she had portrayed the previous night, or simply facing Liko at all. In the end it hadn’t mattered because, when she went down, he had breakfasted already and gone out to play tennis.
‘How strange,’ said Cousin Willy, buttering his toast. ‘Our precious Liko isn’t usually an early riser. I sometimes wonder if he is really a German. What can ail him?’
Now, as Liko and the children pass beneath her window, May Teck too has a question. She would like to shout it out into the drowsy evening air and hear it echo around the terraces, but instead she just whispers it softly into the folds of the net curtain.
‘Why have we not spoken today? Are you avoiding me? When will I see you again?’
XXX
Summer, 1895
Liko is smoking in the sunshine, his feet resting on the seat of an old rocking-horse. He has taken off his jacket and his collar, loosened his cravat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. It is a strange apparition; he is usually so dapper. When he sees her coming across the lawns, he does not stand up; odd too, for he is the most courteous of men. If she needed any signal that something had changed between them, she need look no further. He gives her no more than a lazy smile; a shyness in it which was not there before.
‘Ah, Gloriana. Come and have a cucumber sandwich.’
Once again, Liko had not been at breakfast. Tennis again, it seemed. Nor at lunch. Aunt Queen complained that he had gone into Cowes to attend to some problem with his silly boat. It had never occurred to her that wood, canvas and rope could ever become her rival for his attentions. Later still, she moaned that he had now vanished to play with the children in the Swiss Cottage. Always gadding about, Aunt Queen said.
May summons the little prince’s nurse, declaring that they will take a turn with the perambulator around the gardens. And why should she not find herself at the little wooden chalet? Here, for three generations now, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Aunt Queen have played in miniature at being the ordinary people they can never be. For the first and last time, they will scrub saucepans, sweep floors, make beds, bake cakes and brew tea. What fun ordinariness can be, they think, for a little while at least.
‘Are you sure I’m not intruding?’ May replies now to the offer of the cucumber sandwich.
Liko gives up his chair to her and himself straddles the rocking-horse. Aunt Queen is right. He does look a little like Eddy, even though the face is broader with higher cheekbones, its planes as smooth as skiing slopes. It is a beautiful face, made more so by the first tiny lines etched around the dark eyes. Above all, it is an open face. Nothing is dissembled on the features of Henry of Battenberg: joy, sadness, the frustration of his existence, the love for his children are writ large for anyone to see.
He coos over the little prince, scooping him up from the perambulator and bouncing him on his knee. The boy delivers the same gurgling smile given to Harry Thaddeus Jones on the day of the sketching. Again, May marvels how it is elicited so easily if one has the trick of it.
Georgie’s son and heir is toddling by now. Liko tells May’s nurse to take him into the kitchen to watch the tea being prepared by his own children. At the arrival of the little prince, a great shriek comes from inside the tiny house. The Battenberg siblings adore him, smothering him with kisses, licking him like a lollipop. May throws her hands over her ears.
‘Dear God, the racket. Doesn’t it bother you?’ she asks.
‘Of course not.’ He smiles. ‘Why, does it trouble you?’
‘I’m not certain that I understand the mind of a child.’
‘But you were a child yourself. Don’t you remember?
‘I’m not sure that I do,’ she replies. ‘I remember being young of course, but not exactly being a child, whatever that means exactly. I don’t believe I was given the time. I had to grow up rather fast, you see.’
‘Then start being a child from now on,’ he says. ‘Do silly things. Annoy people. Stick your tongue out at Mr Gladstone. Take your shoes off and run barefoot through the cornfields. Show us your ankles.’
‘I rather think it’s a bit late for all that. Such things are no longer allowed to me.’
Liko watches her through the smoke of his cigarette.
‘Well that’s a shame. Harry Thaddeus Jones told me you’ve got very pretty ankles.’
‘What?’
‘Oh I heard all about May Teck long before I ever met you,’ he grins. ‘Ten years ago, more perhaps. He often talked of you then, scandalous old roué that he now is.’
‘He spoke of me? To you?’
‘When I still lived at our home in Heiligenberg, Jones was touring the small courts of Germany looking for commissions to build his reputation. Sadly we didn’t have the money to pay him, so he didn’t stay long.’
‘But he spoke of me?’
‘Oh yes,’ replies Liko. ‘The splendid young princess he had left behind in Florence. I do believe he was a little in love with you. His precious May Flower.’
‘It’s a long time ago,’ she mutters. ‘What else did he tell you?’
‘That you were a girl of possibilities.’
‘As what?’
‘As a woman I should think,’ he replies. ‘Though to be honest, since I first met you, I could never quite see what he meant. But I did last night. And so does everyone else now. You should hear how catty Toria is being about you today. She knows you have something she and her stupid sisters will never have.’
She blushes now and asks for a cigarette.
‘Why do you blush?’ he asks. ‘Don’t be modest. In those who have nothing to be modest about, it might be regarded as an affectation.’
‘Oh shut up, Liko dear and give me the damn cigarette.’
When he comes up close to light the match, she cannot look him in the eye. Her hand is trembling a little. For a moment, no more, he grasps it to steady the cigarette. If he wonders why the hand trembles, he does not ask.
He returns to the rocking-horse. Of course it is too small for him and his legs are spread wide across the seat. They are strong, broad legs and the position seems slightly indecent. She feels she should avert her eyes but she cannot. As the tumult from the kitchen continues, he asks her to tell him about her time in Italy. Though he is German, he was born and raised in Milan and knows Florence well.
So the conversation moves to safer ground: the view of the city from Bellosguardo, the frescoes of Santa Croce and Santo Spirito, the baldacchino in the Duomo. She has never imagined Liko any more of an aesthete than Georgie, but now she finds he has opinions on Titian, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto. Not the cool, academic opinions of Mr Thaddy, but opinions none the less; simplistic, inchoate but full of vigour and even spirituality. Liko has been to the monastery of La Certosa, climbed the tower of Castello Vincigliata and wandered the halls of the Uffizi and the Palazzo Pitti. He has even been to Lady Orford’s weekly salon and joined her in smoking a cigar.
May tells him of the great flower Corso in the Cascine when the young bucks threw their blossoms into her carriage till she and her mother were half submerged in petals and stems.
‘They shouted that they would die of love for me,’ she smiles. ‘Can you imagine it?’
‘Oh yes,’ says Liko.
Now it is her turn to hide behind a cloud of smoke.
Most of all though, she tells him of the Villa I Cedri. Of the garden unlike any other, the sound of the Arno crashing over the weir, the ruined mill on the opposite bank. The scent of the jasmine and the bougainvillea.
‘The light and the warmth,’ she says. ‘If I close my eyes and think hard, I can still feel the glow of it on my skin. I seemed to have such freedom there. Or at least as much as the likes of you and me would be permitted. Did you feel that too?’
‘Another world,’ he replies. ‘One with its corsets undone. England is such a tight little country, don’t you think?’
They look at each other across three feet of grass. On the breeze, May catches the smell of the sea. And in Henry of Battenberg’s dark eyes, usually so full of laughter and mischief, she sees, for a moment, a glimpse of misery.
She tells him too of the night of her seventeenth birthday, when her Mama and Papa gave a party and she danced among the fireflies.
‘How different you are when you speak of these things,’ Liko says.
‘And Mr Thaddy presented me my portrait that night. He wasn’t paid a penny for it; he’d asked if he might paint me. I think that’s why I treasure it so much.’
‘I’d like to see it. Where is it now?’
‘In my room in Norfolk.’
‘Your room? You only have the one?’
‘Only one I can call my own,’ she says. ‘I keep it there because Georgie doesn’t like it. He says it’s not me.’
‘I’m even keener to see it now.’
‘Mr Thaddy said I would grow into something called a maitresse femme. Do you know the phrase?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I’ve never been quite sure what it meant. I used to imagine it was slightly indelicate.’
‘It simply means you’re a strong woman.’
She takes a long slow draw on her cigarette.
‘And am I?’
‘If you’d asked me before you played Gloriana, I would have said you were quite the opposite. But now I know how wrong that was. Perhaps the role you’ve really been acting was that of the obedient little wife.’
The nurse comes out of the Swiss Cottage, the little prince stumbling beside her. The boy pulls towards Liko, his baby arms outstretched. Liko catches him just before he falls, lifting him high into the air, the sun circling the child’s golden hair like a halo. For the first time, May sees her son as an object of beauty, as worthy of attention as an image of the Christ Child. But it is the vision of a moment. When Liko brings him back down to earth, the illusion is gone.
The little Battenbergs shout from the doorway that tea is all laid out on the kitchen table and they must come right this very minute. With his Walter Raleigh flourish, Liko picks up his jacket and spreads it on the grass before her.
‘Idiot,’ she says. As the word leaves her mouth, it strikes her how she could never use it to her husband. It is quite inconceivable. But then Georgie is a god; at least one in waiting.
‘Tell me one thing before we go in,’ says Liko. ‘How many May Tecks are there?’
‘How many?’
‘Well, there’s dull Georgie’s spouse who walks behind him and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. There’s the Gloriana of the other evening. And there’s the girl who dances among fireflies in an Italian garden. I should like to know which one is real.’
‘Why?’
From inside the Swiss Cottage comes the crash of breaking crockery, shouts and screams. But May Teck scarcely hears it. She is waiting for an answer.
‘Because I need to decide which one to fall in love with.’
Without another word, he goes rushing in through the doorway and out of her sight.
‘What have you done now, you dreadful little devils?’ he shouts. ‘I’ll swing for the lot of you, I really will.’
When finally she ventures into the tiny kitchen, spills have been mopped up and tears dried. The Battenberg brood are feeding the cake they have baked to their pet, the little prince. At the tiny table with the red-and-white chequered tablecloth she must squash herself in next to Liko. It is impossible to ignore his thigh resting against hers. At first, the pressure is light but, as the squealing rages on and tea is slurped, she feels it increase. One of his children remarks on how hot she looks. Is the lady going to faint? She asks the question of herself. How absurd. A leg is no more than flesh and muscle, tendon and bone. In the carriage, Georgie’s leg brushes hers all the time. She scarcely notices that; certainly feels nothing. So why is this so different? Why is she so overwhelmingly aware of her own flesh and how it is responding now? Because there is no doubt that it is. And when he must stand up to separate two squabblers, the glimpse she gets of his lower body before he quickly hides it with a napkin is enough to tell her she really should get out of here at once.
Yet, as May Teck walks back across the lawns to the house, she remembers, as she often does, the cruel words of her uncle. That she would never inspire a passion in anyone. Well damn him. She stops for a minute and sits on the side of the fountain basin and listens to the gentle gurgling of the water. Half closing her eyes and turning her face to the sky, she feels again the sunlight of a Florentine garden.
XXXI
Summer, 1895
Until forty-eight hours ago, it would have lit up her day and carried her through a whole week at least. It would have been read again and again, trawled for meaning like some ancient piece of papyrus, before being folded and stored away with the others. Now though, she almost tosses it into the darkness of a drawer as if it hardly matters.
