Long Live the King (26 page)

The bitch. Isobel went back home, at least with the invitations, and resolved to get them into the post to the Baums that very day, and to hand the remaining card to Rosina. What had she been thinking of, trying to disown her own daughter? The black fog again, now happily dispersed. Tomorrow she planned to go all the way to Wells to meet with Adela and discuss the wedding, acknowledge her too as one of the family, and see what could be done to help.

There was uproar in Belgrave Square as the cab dropped her off. Three large covered brakes were parked outside No. 17, apparently too wide for the mews entrance, so that a mass of indoor servants and their possessions were being disgorged into the street. All could have been managed more easily in four broughams. Reginald’s fault. She would have upbraided him but needed to ask him to drop the invitations for the Baums into the post before she forgot. What an intolerable fuss, she thought, about seating for three at a King’s Coronation.

Mrs Baum Waits

It was a beautiful Spring and Mrs Baum’s garden in Golders Green, two years in the making, was showing the benefits of the attention lavished upon it. The daffodils had made a wonderful display and the gardeners were tying back their green spikes to make way for a dozen budding shrubs. Jonathan Reuben and Barbara Ruth were enrolled at the prestigious City of London School on the Embankment, though the promised Hampstead Tube line had still not materialized. It was a day school, so heaven knew how she would get them there, but she would manage. It was unfortunate that Jane, who although a
shiksa
girl had been so good as a nursemaid and general help about the house, and whom she had come to treat almost as a friend, had given in her notice so suddenly and for no apparent reason. It would be hard to replace her. But the building plots on the road were being quickly taken up and quite a little community, like the Baums fleeing from London’s East End, was growing up fast around them. A little row of shops including a Kosher butcher was now within walking distance. She could not be the scientist she had hoped to be, but perhaps her daughter would.

Eric had bought her a very splendid Bösendorfer grand piano and she had set up a little choral society in her front room, and a Saturday
shul
for the children. Eric had given in to her demands to call the children by their middle names, respectively Ruth and Reuben. He was, thank God, now in no danger of apostasy but proud of his religion, being now so well established in society, and indeed a director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. There was little point now in assimilation. And had not Lord Robert asked them to sit with his family in the Abbey at the Coronation? It was a great honour.

She thought perhaps she had contributed to his acceptance into high society. A year or so back she had been invited by Lady Isobel to a charity dinner at which the Prince of Wales had engaged her in conversation, since when many doors had opened. She had encountered Mr Arthur Balfour, a friend of Lord Robert’s, at the inauguration of the Royal London Voice Choir and talked at length with him about Ebenezer Prout’s sterling work re-orchestrating Handel’s
Messiah
. It had been a most exhilarating conversation – though Eric had looked blank and not known what was going on. Well, let him get on with the money – what he was good at, she would get on with culture. Mr Balfour, everyone said, was going to be the next Prime Minister and would do much to promote the arts. She sincerely hoped so. Not since Disraeli had the country been governed by anyone remotely cultured. Now she waited for the invitations to come dropping through the letterbox. His Lordship’s business interests were so intertwined with Eric’s she had no doubt they would.

Naomi had started a small local branch of the Zionist Federation in her front room. They met monthly: it was for women and many came, their husbands for once not objecting to their absence, such was the cause. The ladies would read and discuss Theodor Herzl’s work and someone had embroidered ‘If you will it, it is no fairy tale’ on a banner and pinned it up above Naomi’s splendid Adam fireplace. All present looked forward to the creation of a new and perfect society, a land of peace and plenty, where ethics would prevail over greed, where Jews of all nations could live without fear or persecution. The most determinedly religious stayed away: furious in their belief that Zion must wait until the second coming. But these were a gentle lot. Tonight they were going to discuss the dreadful plight of Jews in Roumania, and someone was bringing forward the idea of Uganda instead of Palestine as the new homeland. Naomi did not think it would be well received: Israel was not a geographical but an historical and spiritual concept. Nevertheless she would let the idea go forward. All discussion was good.

Naomi was in her bedroom dressing for the occasion, and thinking she needed fewer guests or a bigger drawing room – the orthodox ladies seemed to wear more voluminous skirts than the ones who turned up for choir practice. She would wear something pretty but modest and perhaps, to liven things up, the pretty diamond and gold bracelet Eric had bought her last December. She had almost refused it at the time: still perhaps a little over-sensitive when it came to observing proper ritual. One should not succumb to the lure of a pagan festival like Christmas, she had told herself: she had already had a more than satisfactory Hanukah gift in the form of a very similar bracelet in twenty-three-carat gold, only without the diamonds, but it was so pretty she had over-ruled her scruples, and fastening the clasp now, was glad that she had done so. Eric, back from work, came bounding up the stairs to her room, and she could stretch out her pretty wrist for him to admire, and kiss.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘Both good news! One, I have bought us a building site in The Bishops Avenue, the new road that joins the Heath to Finchley. The Church is selling off plots large enough for palaces, and that’s what we shall build!’

But apparently it was not good news. Naomi snatched back her wrist before he could kiss it. In the silence Eric could hear Jane moving about downstairs in the drawing room, setting up for this evening’s meeting, wavy hair flowing free. When she was working overtime she refused to wear a cap. Naomi, as ever, wore a black wig: he had never insisted on it, let alone pointed out the inconsistencies of her rituals: it was her doing. Eric hoped it was not his doing that Jane had handed in her notice – she was so pleasant to watch moving around that he could not help doing so – and a chaste kiss or two could hardly have come amiss: she was almost one of the family – but perhaps it was just as well she was going, for whatever reason. It could be hard not to covet one’s handmaid, and perhaps even excusable, thinking of Hagar and Abraham, but he loved Naomi dearly. It was just she seemed to find enthusiasm so difficult. The Bishops Avenue was a huge step up.

‘But Eric,’ she was saying, ‘we have only just got settled here. And anyway, why should we want to live on ground, as you boast, named after Christian bishops? We are Jews. And the daffodils have been so lovely: the lawn is finally grass not mud: I have made friends: I have a good butcher. What about my choir – what about my Ladies for Zion – they don’t want to have to traipse across all London – I’ll lose everything I’ve taken the trouble to build up. We will stay where we are.’

He felt his temper rising. He did so much for just a kind word from her, and so seldom received it.

‘For heaven’s sake, Naomi,’ he said coldly: he could be unkind if she could – ‘The Bishops Avenue is only around the corner, and “here” is going to be next to impossible when the Crematorium goes up practically next door; you have campaigned against it often enough. I will not have my children growing up in the shadow of its chimney, for the sake of some daffodils and the Ladies for Zion. We are a good Jewish family: we live where I say we live. I work hard for what we have: I give you everything, everything – today I hurried home with these – at least pretend to be grateful!’

‘These’ were two invitations to the Coronation in a blank envelope sealed with a crescent moon and two suns. Reginald had dropped it off by hand – Eric Baum suspected because her Ladyship could not bear to write out a North London postal address. Well, a Bishops Avenue address would be harder to despise. They were very large plots and very expensive; the Church evidently preferred to sell to its own. Others had bought for less. He had run for the bus to get the invitations home to her quickly; two causes for exultation. Now this. She did not even open the envelope but looked at it with distaste and dropped it to the ground.

‘A good Jewish family?’ she enquired, her voice hard and raw, so different from when she spoke to the children. ‘So you say. But one in which the husband does not care to observe the laws of purity?’

It seldom happened, but it had. The ritual bath took a long time coming. He was a vigorous man.

‘You deny Mitzvah,’ he could not help retorting. ‘You deny me unreasonably. You are rebellious. I could divorce you.’

‘Oh divorce me,’ she said, ‘please do. Why has Jane handed in her notice, I ask myself?’

‘Any stick to beat me with,’ he said, lamely. She had been like this when her mother died. He could not endure it.

‘I do everything for you,’ he said again, and it was true. She was why he lived and worked and breathed. ‘I give you everything.’ He was beside himself.

She did not look down and concede as a good wife would, but moved the safety clasp of the bracelet and at the same time flicked her wrist so the bracelet flew off and into the heart of the fire.

‘So much for your everything!’ she said. He bent down, picked up the envelope, straightened, took his time to tear envelope and contents in half – thick, stiff and not easy – and flung them into the fire after the bracelet.

‘There goes your Coronation,’ he said.

Panic and Confusion

‘But this is absurd,’ Rosina said to her mother. ‘Why can’t we go by railway like anyone else?’

‘
Because to get to Wells you have to change trains twice and you know what these small lines are like,’ said her mother.

‘Or by automobile? Please, Mama!’

‘Nasty oily things,’ said Isobel. ‘Always breaking down.’

Rosina thought her mother was behaving very erratically. One moment she felt herself to be the object of what almost amounted to dislike: the next of an admiration that was almost too uncritical. Isobel would flush as if embarrassed when there was nothing whatsoever to be embarrassed about, or seem to grow hot when the wind was cold and throw off as much clothing as she decently could. Now she had got it into her head that she needed to turn up at the Bishop’s Palace in a coach and four: it was, she said, a question of status. Two women could not just turn up on foot walking from the station.

‘We can, you know, Mama,’ said Rosina. ‘Or we can hire a brougham at the station and arrive in perfectly good style.’

Rosina thought perhaps it was the coming Coronation that had so disturbed her mother, shaken her confidence, taken her back to a childhood in which she was less than no one, just a clever, bright, pretty child out of the
haut bohème
, conceived the wrong side of the blanket, who had married well, and slipped into a high society which so quickly forgot her origins she had almost done so herself. But now, a notch or two higher up, finding herself in the company of royals and duchesses, she showed the unease of the lowly born. Rosina, though she griped and struggled against her lack of formal title, had no such problem.

She said as much to Minnie and recited the flea nursery rhyme:

Big fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite ’em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas,

And so,
ad infinitum.

Minnie said it was like the Jonathan Swift piece about vermin only teasing and pinching their foes superior by an inch, and Rosina was grateful that God had sent her a sister-in-law who at least understood what she was talking about.

The practicalities of getting the old disused coach out of the Dilberne Court stables and the organization and time now required to effect a coach journey of a hundred miles or so, were such that her Ladyship agreed to a train journey. Rosina was greatly relieved. Minnie wanted to go too but the Countess would not hear of it: it was Minnie’s duty to see to the welfare of her child, not amuse herself. Reginald, in the absence of an available man, was to accompany the party, and Lily as lady’s maid. Isobel would have taken more staff but an earlier phone call to the Bishop’s Palace made it clear that accommodation for servants was limited. The young man who ran the Bishop’s office, approached the day before, had spoken with a colonial accent, and was polite enough – if not quite, Isobel thought, ‘one of us’, but seemed slightly taken aback, when they announced their forthcoming arrival. Perhaps, Isobel wondered, this was the prospective groom? She felt instantly suspicious of his motives, but knew herself well enough not to give in to the doubts and fears that these days so easily grabbed hold of her thoughts, like an attacker seizing her throat. But if you just waited they would melt away.

It came to her on the journey that Reginald and Lily were rather too fond of each other and it would have been wiser for her not to have chosen this particular pair for the journey. But she felt safe with these two – they were willing and spirited, not dozy or easily cowed as were so many of the staff. The servant classes increasingly lacked initiative, accustomed as they were to being looked after.

They travelled without reservations, and at Paddington discovered panic and confusion. There had been some stoppage on the line which meant that their train was to run without first-class carriages, was overcrowded, and the station-master nowhere to be seen. Reginald found them seats in second class, but Lily, if she was not to stand, would be obliged to share their carriage. Reginald found a seat in third class, Rosina wanted to go home and wait until the trains were running normally but Isobel over-ruled her. She wanted to arrive when she said she would arrive. Rosina sulked and said very little.