Read Long Live the King Online
Authors: Fay Weldon
‘Oh dear me, no,’ said Robert, ‘she seldom visits Sunny in his office. She meets with the Queen at Marlborough House should they both be in London. No, I saw her snipping a tape at some slum clearance ceremony for the London County Council. If it is Consuelo’s duty to glitter, she glitters. She is a very remarkable woman.’
‘I daresay,’ said Isobel, perhaps a little shortly.
‘But so are you,’ said Robert, rather hastily, ‘in your own way.’
They were breakfasting in Belgrave Square.
Isobel was wearing a pale yellow tea-gown in silk shantung, made by Fortuny, vastly expensive, being embroidered round the neck with a host of tiny silvery shells gathered in the South Seas. The gown was barely corseted, and, showing the natural flow of her body as it did, was not quite suitable for breakfast. But others maintained it suited her very well and Robert appreciated it. Not, Isobel hoped, that Robert had ever seen Consuelo in a tea-gown. Isobel had a delicacy of beauty which Consuelo could not aspire to. Isobel was a delicate English rose, Consuelo had the strong features of a woman with Cuban blood. She had detected in herself of late a tendency to buy clothes on the grounds that they would not suit Consuelo, rather than that they suited her. What was the matter with her? There was something standing between her and common sense: something like a black cloud of fog, which drifted in and out of her brain. In the meantime it was a very pretty tea-gown. She was being very careful not to drop food on it.
Most of the staff were still down at Dilberne Court but Isobel found she quite enjoyed this state of affairs. The sense of not being overlooked, not being endlessly talked about downstairs, every movement noticed, watched and dissected, was quite liberating. It was like being a child again, in the house in Old Conduit Street where she grew up amongst artists, writers, theatre people, the happy, clever, illegitimate daughter of an actress mother, but frequently visited by her father Silas Batey, the coal magnate from the North. She was wealthy now, and grand, the scandal of her birth long forgotten, almost even by herself, but perhaps she was no happier now. It might be that to have had an unhappy childhood was good fortune; life was likely to get better. To be a happy child was to want to re-create that childhood all your life. She had been to see John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
at the Surrey Theatre when she was fifteen and watched her mother play Polly Peachum.
‘Oh Polly, you might have toyed and kissed,
Been wooed at length and never won.’
‘But he so pleased me and he so teased me,
What I did, you must have done.’
That was the night she realized that Silas Batey the occasional visitor was her father, that Polly, the bad girl, had done it with Silas, otherwise she, Isobel, would not exist. The tune kept running through her head, oddly comforting. Robert, the second son of an earl, had come along and pleased and teased and then, surprisingly for one of his class and kind, had married her. And she’d had Arthur, who had pleased and teased Minnie, who, like Polly, had been pleased and teased before, by an artist called Stanton. Well, it was a small sin: when it came to it Isobel was pleased the girl had some life in her.
But she, Isobel, would have to see about the missing invitations. There could be no forgetting them, and letting what happened just happen. Too late now simply to confess all to Robert. He was well aware of her early resistance to the Baums’ inclusion in their family life – bad enough to have him as a lawyer and financial adviser; though he had certainly done well enough in that latter capacity. Even so she certainly did not want the pair sitting next to the Dilberne party listening to Parry’s anthem, in full view of every lord and lady in the land. It gave them quite unholy status. But Robert wanted it for reasons of his own and so he would see to it that it happened. He would not forget. Like the King, Robert might appear cheerful but he was always watchful. He had begat a son who took after him. If Arthur appeared lightweight, it was the better to mask a steely determination. Robert applied his to politics, Arthur to his engines, but it was the same kind of energy. How else had he won Minnie, how else persuaded his poor mother, and indeed his father, that it was reasonable to turn acres and acres of Dilberne’s green and pleasant land into a race track for noisy, smelly, oily engines to career around?
But she must telephone Mrs Neville and ask her to search for an envelope missing from her writing case: she would say it was unlikely but possible it had got amongst Miss Minnie’s things when she travelled down to the country. She picked up the receiver. The call would have to go through Mrs Flower, who ran the telephone exchange at the back of the village store, and no doubt listened in. Then she remembered that she had asked Reginald to post the letter, and worse than that, asked him to retrieve it. He would remember posting the letter, and say so – she could of course offer him money to stay quiet – but that way absurdity lay. Better keep things simple; an unsuccessful search of Belgrave Square would have to do. Then – yes, a stroke of genius – she would suggest to Robert that she have an apologetic lunch with Consuelo to ask for a replacement of the missing invitations. And the lunch would cure her, Isobel, of the madness of her suspicions.
Or if it did not, well, at least she would know where she stood. She hoped she had not been naïve in believing the invitations had gone up in flames. It certainly seemed unlikely that anyone would follow them up. She thought about the red velvet dress that had gone to the niece in the same post. Poor little girl! She had wished her well then and still did. Why had she found herself so absurdly sensitive about having a ‘Your Grace’ at her table? Because she was just back from Sandringham and was humiliated by being a mere Your Ladyship amongst so many Your Royal Highnesses, and that only by marriage? Probably. It was absurd. But Robert had certainly not wanted the girl included in the family, and had made it very clear. Adela would have to manage on her own.
It was in the middle of January that Adela found herself waking in the big four-poster double bed in a pool of blood. Not a big pool, but enough to terrify her. It was coming from ‘down there’: her stomach was aching in great clenching pains: she was wounded; God was punishing her for burning the Rectory down, for failing to grieve for her parents. She was bleeding to death, and deserved to.
‘Ivy, Ivy,’ she called in her head but there was no Ivy. ‘Mama!’ she called aloud but of course that was useless. There was no Mama. So she rang the bell and a maid came. Adela asked for Mrs Kennion and presently she came bustling in, threw back the bedclothes, looked and laughed, saying it was perfectly normal; it happened to women every four weeks; it meant she was a woman now, not a girl, and must behave like one. The body was getting rid of all the rubbish it accumulated every time it didn’t make the baby God was waiting for her to have.
‘Every month?’ asked Adela, aghast. ‘How long for, every month?’
‘A week,’ said Mrs Kennion. ‘But less if you’re lucky. Once you’re married you’ll be glad to see it, it means you’re not having a baby.’
‘But I’m going to be a nun,’ said Adela. ‘I’m not going to get married. Does it still come?’
‘Of course.’
‘That isn’t fair. Does it have a name?’
‘It’s called the curse,’ said Mrs Kennion. ‘God’s curse on womankind for tempting Adam. Although personally, Adela, I have always thought Adam should have known better than to accept the apple in the first place. Cheer up; it’s not the end of the world. It’s more like the beginning.’
Enough girls in trouble had passed through the House of Mercy Mrs Kennion ran back in Adelaide to convince her that of the twin evils of ignorance and promiscuity, ignorance was the lesser. The menarche had been a shock to the girl, unprepared as she was. But then few gently brought up girls ever were prepared, and rightly so: too much information about the facts of life could only encourage sexual activity in the curious and energetic young, leading to disgrace, ruination and some poor little baby with no place in the world. A shock at the menarche was a small price to pay. She herself was a mother of sons, not daughters, and felt quite privileged to have witnessed Adela’s transition from childhood to womanhood. It happened only once and it was important that a girl be amongst friends when it did. She was happy to have been there to help.
Jenny the housekeeper came to change the sheets and clean Adela up. Mrs Kennion left to get back to her busy life, no doubt to see about the sunbursts on the Bishop’s coronation robes, which had been central to the conversation at the dinner table for the last few days.
‘This is how we do it,’ said Jenny, producing the oldest, thinnest sheet she could find in the linen press. She cut the hem with scissors in strategic places, ripped the sheet with her hands into some twelve oblongs, and made a neat pad of fabric out of each one. She used three stretches of hem, one long, to go round her waist, and two short, to fall down back and front, to contrive a belt, and handed her two sturdy safety pins with which the pads were to be attached. This was the business of womanhood.
‘They are called rags,’ Jenny said. ‘Always keep them in a private drawer, wash them unobserved, dry them in secret, re-use them or you won’t have a sheet left in the house. Never let a man know they exist. Don’t hang them on the line for the neighbours to see. It is a great shame to be seen with a stain on your skirts, so always check before you leave your room. Don’t complain to anyone about the pains, not if there’s a man about who can overhear. It’s a woman’s secret. It goes on until you’re fifty. I’m sorry you don’t have a mother to tell you this. Poor wee waif.’
‘But how do I know when it’s going to happen?’ asked Adela.
‘You have a few days’ notice,’ said Jenny. ‘When you find yourself quarrelling with everyone and you can’t sew a straight seam, and you hate the man you ought to love, why then you know it’s on its way.’ It seemed a kind of incantation, worse than the wound and the blood, the real curse.
Such dreadful pains in her middle overcame Adela that she took to her bed for the day, and huddled up with a stone hot-water bottle, telling the maid who brought her lunch (haricot soup and broiled steak) that she had a headache. She wanted to tell Ivy what had happened but where was Ivy? Adela wept. She was alone in the world. Where were her aunts and uncles, where were her grandparents? She wanted the Countess who had sent her a Christmas parcel to come and snatch her away. She might be wicked, might deserve the fate of Lot’s wife and be turned into a pillar of salt, but at least she was kind: the little row of reindeers kept coming to her mind as comfort. Presently the pains abated. She consoled herself with the idea that she was to be a nun, and from now on she would have sisters and mothers aplenty. Since the female condition was what it turned out to be, it was as well to live one’s life out in a convent. No wonder nuns chose to wear black skirts and keep themselves to themselves. Anything else was hypocrisy. Love was hypocrisy: purity was hypocrisy: women were kept away from altars for good reason, and only men were allowed near. The world belonged to man, and always would. Women were too near the animal, too much of the body, not enough of the soul. Real women were not the romantic ethereal creatures that Burne-Jones painted or
The Blue Fairy Book
described. Women were Creatures of the Bloody Rags, and that was that. Her parents were right. She was unclean. But only three months to go and she would be with the Little Sisters of Bethany, away from this life of indolence and luxury, this palace posing as a bishop’s home. She did not want to go to hell.
By now the soup was cold and the steak was not the kind that melted in the mouth, though the onions and carrots were good: she ate up and mopped up the gravy with bread and felt almost happy again.
Ivy’s kindness to Adela over the years had not gone unnoticed in Yatbury. Her absence from her proper bed on the night of the fire was somehow overlooked and she was awarded £200 from the parish funds to rehouse herself and replace her belongings. This may have had something to do with a fondness for Ivy’s mother Doreen on the part of the Parish Council clerk. He visited Doreen weekly, being a widowed man. Ivy’s return to her maternal home after the fire was proving a little awkward.
Ivy’s gentleman friend George, Adela’s rescuer, lost no time in using Ivy’s funds to set up in business in Bath. He had finished with his exams and was looking for employment as a science teacher, while spending some useful hours working as a lab assistant at the college. He thought he could profitably use such spare time as he had trying his hand at the afterlife business. Ivy agreed to come in with him: she had been out of a job since the fire. It seemed something of a laugh. People were gullible, but seemed comforted by the idea that the dead lived on and could be contacted. It was no great crime to make money out of them. George, along with his tutors and a handful of students in the new Department of Paranormal Studies, had come to the conclusion that a few genuine and talented mediums did occur amongst the many fakes, just as a few great artists would always turn up amongst the many who daubed away. And as some artists specialized in miniatures, some in still lifes, some in landscapes or portraits, so some of those with a special talent for the paranormal would find themselves specializing in telepathy, or teleportation, or had the gift of prophecy or communication with those passed over.
‘I don’t understand a word of it,’ Ivy said.
‘You don’t have to,’ said George. ‘Just stand back, trust me, and wait for the money to roll in.’
She did trust him. Since the funeral, since he’d become a local hero, since he’d struck Adela’s young man to the ground – a lolloping colonial with glasses – he seemed to have grown in energy and determination.