Valhalla, p.3
Valhalla, page 3
‘Hush Papa. Do cheer up or you’ll make yourself ill again,’ she replies.
‘Well this is a kind of funeral, isn’t it Pussycat?’
Oh dear. His mood is drooping like his moustache. She has to keep a constant vigil on him now. Good days and bad days, sunshine and storms. Only sixteen years old, May Teck has already appointed herself as her father’s keeper. Nobody else seemed to want the position, least of all her mother.
It is a nippy evening for early autumn and they are swaddled tight in their travelling capes. But the family of the Duke of Teck need not fear the spectre of an English winter. They will be far distant, feeling the chill in quite a different way.
On the platform at Victoria Station, a small knot of people is gathered. The casual passers-by, hurrying in search of their compartment, would assume them all to be together, but in truth they are two tribes, the vanquished and the victors. In the first group are her mother and father, her three brothers, the necessary servants and of course herself. In the second, her mother’s family; her uncle, her aunt and, in absentia, the great Aunt Queen herself, whose authority hovers over everyone and the need for whose approbation runs through all their lives like the very blood in their veins. It is all of them who have tried May’s mother for her spendthrift ways, judged her shockingly guilty and sentenced her to an indefinite period of detention in a hopefully inexpensive corner of the Continent. The two tribes stand slightly apart, pain and embarrassment hanging in the air like the silvery steam from the hissing engine.
In this strange tableau, the Duchess of Teck takes centre-stage as she always does. Those casual observers, however flustered and late for the train, would easily identify the leading lady. Even if they have no idea who she is, they would recognise at once that she is someone. The figure of Mary Adelaide draws every eye, though it is not merely a matter of bulk. Somehow, the air around her quakes as she sucks it in, as if it doubts it can possibly sustain such a spirit, such a force of nature.
Yet the Duchess is no actress. The ability to dissemble is not among her many gifts. As a rule, her face shows exactly what she is feeling; the words that gush out of her express exactly what she thinks. But this evening, for once, on the dank station platform, she is giving a performance worthy of Bernhardt or even Mrs Langtry. Her judges have come expecting tears and protestations, a scene of penny-dreadful melodrama. Might Mary Adelaide have to be literally bundled onto the train like a sack of mail, the doors slammed and locked behind her? But they need not have worried. She gives orders to the porters as if she is merely going to Eastbourne for a fortnight. She refuses to let her family see that they have trampled on her heart.
The stationmaster, dressed in his best, bows low and tells her it is time to board. She stretches out a lilac-gloved hand for him to kiss with the same grace she would extend to a bishop or the emissary of some foreign potentate.
‘Oh my good man, a thousand thanks for your kind attendance. And how spick and span you keep your most impressive railway station.’
It is an absurd remark; they are entombed in a blackened cathedral of soot, sweat and pigeon shit. But when the man stands up straight again, his eyes are shining. He will never forget the kissing of the lilac glove. Gorged on her love of life, the Duchess has the blessed knack of reaching out to everyone without effort or condescension. It is why the people love her. God bless Fat Mary, they say. She’s a game old girl and no mistake. Always got a smile and a wave for us. Not like her gloomy cousin in Windsor, with her widow’s weeds and a face like a slapped arse. You could almost imagine having a beer with her down the pub, though she might not fit in the snug.
And yet she never lowers herself, never lets anyone forget she is a royal princess, granddaughter of poor mad George no less. The only time she ever diminished herself, in the eyes of some at least, was in her marriage. It came late in life, when the family had almost given up hope and a permanent place on the shelf was being made ready for her. But Mary Adelaide’s road to the altar was long and strewn with withered bouquets.
‘I don’t believe I wish to embark on such a vast undertaking,’ one potential candidate had said with a smirk, before fleeing back to his Schloss above the Rhine.
So when a minor German princeling was finally sniffed out, hunted down and indicated a willingness, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Franz Teck was good-natured and notably handsome. In the uniform of the Austrian Hussars, he had fluttered hearts of both sexes across the ballrooms of Europe. In Vienna, he had waltzed with the Empress Elisabeth herself. He had even shown valour in battle. What more could any maiden have desired? Unfortunately, as the vulgar expression goes, the paragon was also flat stony broke. Worse yet, his royal blood was forever tainted by the morganatic marriage of his lovesick father to an unsuitable woman. But who cared about all that? At last, somebody was game for taking Mary Adelaide off the shelf and off their hands. The Lord be praised.
They came to care soon enough. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the small drawbacks of the handsome Hussar swiftly loomed larger than was at first apparent. However much her closest relations originally smiled on the alliance, her husband’s shadowed blood made his wife a little less royal than before. The huge family of Aunt Queen functioned as an infinitely long dinner-table; everyone precisely seated according to rank. From now on, Mary Adelaide would always be below the salt.
But it was Franz Teck’s stony broke-ness that would eventually lead them to the boat train at Victoria Station. The new Duchess no more understood money than she understood Swahili. Faced with running her own establishment, she was utterly lost. What a shame she rarely read a book; the advice of Mr Micawber might have been invaluable: never spend a farthing more than you possess. But the necessary funds had always come from somewhere, had they not? It really was too bad to be troubled by such common considerations. And was she not economising all the time? Saving string from parcels and writing on both sides of the notepaper?
‘What more can I do?’ she had bleated in answer to her brother and sister’s constant pleas to, as it were, tighten her belt. ‘Must I be reduced to just one carriage?’
But even Mary Adelaide was troubled by the sight that greeted her one morning as she glanced out of her bedroom window at White Lodge. How pretty the deer looked as always, moving with that delicate precision through the green-gold swathe of the park. Then she noticed other brown-clad creatures, weaving their way among the antlers and heading straight in her direction. A more terrifying species entirely. Oh my God. It was a deputation no less and when it reached the doors of White Lodge, a letter to the Duke and Duchess of Teck was, respectfully but very firmly, presented by the shopkeepers of Richmond, Kingston and Sheen. Eighteen thousand pounds was collectively owed to them and if payment was not made at once, the debtors would go to court and sue for the removal of the sofas on which the Tecks sat, the beds in which they slept, the shirts on their backs and the bonnets on their heads.
As soon as the deputation had withdrawn, a panicked telegram was sent and within the hour, Mary Adelaide’s brother, head of their branch of the family, came hurtling across the greensward in his pony trap, face like a bursting tomato, riding crop thwacking against his thigh. Within a minute, the walls of White Lodge were scarce able to contain him.
‘Eighteen thousand pounds! Good grief Mary Adelaide, how have you managed that? Are you feeding your scullery maids on grouse and foie gras?’
Uncle George was commander-in-chief of the British Army. In forty years of military service, there had never been an insubordinate soldier he could not whip into line, but his damn spendthrift sister had always been quite beyond him. A defeat he much resented and was now determined to reverse.
‘Well this is it, you know,’ he shouted. ‘This is your Balaclava, Mary Adelaide. The family will take no more. You’ve refused to change your ways and now you expose us to public shame. Something must be done, once and for all.’
May listened outside in the hall, hidden among the palms in the shadow of the staircase. She had long since discovered that the adoption of such tactics was the only way to know what was happening in this crazy house.
‘Not all the sheep in Surrey are white,’ Uncle George ranted on. ‘There are two very black ones sitting in this room who’ve had their hooves clamped tightly over their ears for far too long. Well now, at last, they must listen.’
Uncle George came charging out of the drawing room. He flung the door wide so it ricocheted against the wall. On the threshold, he turned and threw one last grenade back into enemy lines.
‘I am now going directly to Her Majesty. She will decide what must be done.’
He stopped when he spotted his niece among the foliage.
‘Tell me, young May,’ he snapped, ‘which one of your parents do you take after? For your sake, I hope to God it is neither.’
Through the open door of the drawing room, she saw her father with his head in his hands. Her mother sat with her palms pressed together, as if in prayer, her bosom heaving like the sails of a galleon in a following wind. For May Teck, it was the moment which must come to everyone sooner or later; when one’s mother and father, those gods of childhood, first wobble dangerously on their pedestals, revealed for what they truly are. All too human, all too frail, all too childlike in themselves.
So Aunt Queen deliberated, then passed sentence. Their beloved home, occupied only by her grace and favour, was to be shut up. Most of the servants were paid off, some of who May had known since the nursery. A public auction was held of the best furniture and pictures; a disgrace from which the Duchess fled in her carriage till the horror was over, sitting by the river and sobbing all day long. Dust sheets were draped over what remained. The same fate, May thought, was befalling the landscape of her childhood: the rolling, rumpled carpet of the park, the distant view of St Paul’s from King Henry’s Mound, fishing with her brothers in Pen Ponds, the topiary pyramids beneath her window, the creaky old swing. All of it was to be suddenly, shockingly, snatched away. For how long, young May did not know.
Now, on the station platform, the Duchess turns to her brother and sister, those chief justices of her downfall, and embraces them warmly.
‘Rush home now, my dears. You mustn’t delay your dinner on our account. We shall all be perfectly fine.’
Oddly, it is her sister who begins to cry, perhaps realising at last what is being lost to her.
‘Tsh tsh, my angel. No cause for tears,’ says the Duchess. ‘What a grand adventure we embark upon.’
May shivers inside her travelling cape. She wants to go home. She wants to sleep tonight in her dear little bedroom, in her own little bed. Then she remembers that, apart from a watchman or two, her home no longer exists. It is shrouded, shuttered, silent.
Of course, she says nothing about how she feels. She certainly doesn’t make a fuss. Already she loathes and detests fuss. Sometimes she thinks she is drowning in the fuss all around her, clinging for dear life to her own good sense as a whirlpool of inconsequence tries to pull her under. No, fuss is not her way, though even if it had been, nobody would have paid much attention. It is her mother and father whose wishes and needs create the climate of her life, in fair or foul weather. Trying to compete, to make herself heard above the tumult, would be a waste of time. Besides, it is her brothers who will carry the name of Teck into the future. A girl hardly signifies. She learned that long ago.
When the boat train lurches away from the platform, all waving and blowing of kisses done, her mother sighs and sits right down on top of her. The girth of the Duchess means that looking round to see what might be behind her is no easy business and one which she often abandons altogether.
‘Goodness chick, how did you get there? Heavens, do I not have enough to cope with today?’
The train roars towards Dover with indecent haste as if it can hardly wait to be rid of them. Mary Adelaide dozes off, exhausted by the effort of her performance. The Duke too sits with his eyes closed. Yet the fingers drumming on his knee tell his daughter he is far from resting, but trying to calm himself, to stop his poor nerves getting the better of him as they so often do, when he explodes at those he loves for no reason at all. She reaches out and encloses the drumming fingers with her own.
‘Who are we now, May?’ he whispers, without opening his eyes. ‘Where do we fit in?’
Poor Papa. He has never fitted in at the level to which he believes himself entitled. That tainted blood means he can never reign over the small Germanic state which should have been his birthright. In his dreams, in his very heart and soul, he will always be King Franz of Württemberg. But instead of being a king in his own little country, he has become something of a joke in somebody else’s; Fat Mary’s downtrodden husband, walking a few paces behind her, diminished in her bustling shadow, passing the time with trivialities. Scarcely a man at all. Marriage to an English princess did not exactly bring him the entrée he imagined. Nor indeed the small fortune for which he had hoped; a misunderstanding, a concealment even, for which he resents Uncle George to this day.
‘I could have married some North Country heiress you know,’ May heard him shout at Uncle George on the day of the crisis, ‘and lived in clover for the rest of my days.’
But he didn’t. And all of it preys on his mind and his nerves. So often in his dreams, he is still dancing with the Empress Elisabeth round and round the ballrooms of Vienna. She is slim as a reed and light as thistledown, pearls threaded through the chestnut hair that cascades down her back. And then he wakes and sees Mary Adelaide snoring gently beside him.
Now on the boat train May, the only one who understands him, strokes his hand and murmurs soft words of consolation.
When the ship pulls away from the harbour, she goes out onto the upper deck alone. It is dark now, the moon almost full. The great white cliffs, faded to a ghostly grey, tower above the sea like a long high bastion shutting her out. Her father’s words lurch in her head. Where do they fit in now? And who is May Teck? A shy girl, not very pretty, who hardly speaks unless she is spoken to. Consigned to the shadows, she has learned to be comfortable there. Increasingly though, she wonders how it might feel to step into some sort of light.
The sea is disgruntled tonight. She watches as the swell rises, falls and spumes behind the ship. She dislikes the sea as she dislikes the wind and always will; its unpredictability and disorder. She has already learned to hate disorder in anything. Has it not now brought them to this pretty pass?
Below her on the poop deck, by the swinging light of the navigation lamps, May sees a lone figure walking towards the stern. Her mother still clutches the bouquet of white roses presented by an official in the port. Despite her size, she is famously light and graceful on her feet and now she performs a little pas de deux with the heaving sea. As the deck tilts this way and that, never putting a foot wrong, never overbalancing, she reaches the railing. For a while, she stands looking at the last lights of England as they pull back from her and mingle with the stars. Then, one by one, Mary Adelaide casts the roses out over the waves. For a split second, each bloom catches the moonlight as it arcs through the air till it falls from grace and is lost in the heartless wake. High above, May has the urge to shout ‘bravo’. Despite everything, she loves her mother.
IV
Autumn/Winter, 1883
‘I think, chick,’ her mother whispers to May so that the menfolk cannot hear, ‘you and I might have to purchase thinner knickers. I fear we may roast in the ones we’re wearing now.’
All the way down through France and Switzerland, the Duchess keeps up her performance. How lucky they are to be heading to warmer climes as the nights grow longer.
‘It will be sunshine for the Tecks from now on,’ she declares, embracing the metaphor, as the train bursts from the mouth of the St Gothard tunnel. ‘I know it. I just know it. Francis dear, do look at this beautiful scenery.’
Still May’s father sits with his eyes closed, fingers drumming on his knee.
To be sure, the landscape is glorious as they travel further south, sitting out on the open balcony of their compartment. Chestnut, mulberry and walnut trees; villages scattered carelessly like corn seed across the valleys; peasant farms of sun-baked stone; tiny churches perched on lonely hillocks. But to May Teck, however beautiful, it is alien. How she longs for the view from her bedroom out over the park, where she knows every time-blasted oak, every copse of wildflowers, every herd of fallow deer. Now she is uprooted from the soil of her memory and cast into the four winds.
Nor does Florence, their destination, turn out to be quite the shimmering Camelot that the Duchess has advertised so effusively all the way from Calais. They arrive on a cool, drizzly evening. On the frantic platform, porters shout in a language May does not understand. How dirty and uncouth they look and, when she is jostled, she can smell their garlic breath. She has never been jostled before. Is this, she wonders, what happens to those of little consequence? Is she now to be jostled forever?
But the English consul has come to meet them and May clings to his shadow as he guides them through the maelstrom of the station out into the night. Yet the silence that envelops them now is almost more discomfiting. Their carriage is soon swallowed up in a skein of dark streets lined with ancient palazzos grim as fortresses, their vast doors firmly closed, their windows barred and shuttered. It is as if a plague has struck. There is no sign of life at all, except when another carriage tries to pass in the narrow lanes and a fracas erupts between the coachmen; yelling in a way no English coachman would ever do, certainly not with ladies on board.
‘What is the man saying?’ says the Duchess to the English consul who is escorting them to the private hotel where they are to lodge at first.
‘Well, your Highness…’ he replies, suddenly engrossed in his cufflinks.
