Read Long Live the King Online
Authors: Fay Weldon
And he stalked out. Isobel caught the train back to Paddington as soon after breakfast as she politely could, dragging a reluctant daughter behind her. Rosina seemed not to have taken in a word of what went on over breakfast. Nor was she forthcoming as to what had gone on between her and Frank. It was a boring journey back home. But the unpleasantness of the breakfast seemed a proper punishment for sins of omission, if not commission.
Adela was a fast learner and a good worker, George had to hand it to her. She was also in love with him; he could tell that from the way she would drop her eyes whenever he caught hers, and would stumble over words when replying to anything he said. He only had to make a move and she would look up at him with worshipping eyes and do whatever he wanted, and he could not deny he was sometimes tempted, and the thought of her asleep in the next room certainly fired him up. But he didn’t want to upset Ivy, and anyway he didn’t go after children. Whatever the law said sixteen was still young. A slum girl grew up early; Adela’s kind took a long time ripening. When she reached her seventeenth birthday he might feel differently. The fact of her virginity was a kind of asset he hoped he would not have to realize but if the worst came to the worst always could, to further capitalize the business.
At first there were police posters up everywhere advertising a £50 reward for information leading to the return of Adela Hedleigh to her family.
‘I could do with fifty quid myself,’ said Doreen, ‘to finish off my thatch. All I have to do is drop a hint to Jenny. I bet Adela looks good in that dress. They all think she’s dead but I know better.’
George had to hand over £50 to keep her quiet. There was no mention of any ‘princess’ on the poster so all assumed that particular fantasy had come to nothing. Lots of little girls dreamed they were princesses who had been switched at birth. The sketch on the poster didn’t look anything like Adela for a start – done by the Australian fiancé, apparently: there was a lucky escape! – and by the time Ivy had hennaed Adela’s hair, and darkened her eyebrows she looked just like the Carlotta St Cross she’d chosen as her new name for her new life. She still went on asking what was meant by ‘no better than she should be’, and both George and Ivy refrained from answering, ‘Someone who looks like you, dear.’ But it did make them laugh. Quite a lot of laughing went on. They were a team, and a jolly one, all with their new lives.
Miss Reynolds the landlady was now on their side – she gave them a proper English breakfast with eggs, bacon and black pudding, and in addition, for their health, she said, an orange each; they had bread and cheese for lunch and fish, chips and mushy peas wrapped in newspaper from Seafoods restaurant most evenings for supper.
They saw it as their business to train Carlotta up. She seemed a natural, and loved an audience. She longed to do platform work. They’d taken her to a couple of small private séances up in the Royal Crescent – four shillings a head – one featuring as the medium Miss Maia of Tottenham, a real dab hand at tipping tables. Jehovah himself had turned up to that one, accompanied by peals of thunder and a floating trumpet.
Miss Reynolds lent them a spare room to practise in and even served as an audience as the nimble Carlotta crept about the room dressed in black and her face smeared with Nuggett boot polish and learnt how to stay invisible and tip tables by lying on the floor by pushing away supports rather than having to lift from above. It was her idea to play
The Last Rose of Summer
on a real trumpet, painted black, placed behind the silver one, as it rose in the air on invisible strings.
‘The best ideas are the simplest,’ she said, and George could go along with that. She was better than Ivy at going into trances, turning her eyes heavenwards and rolling them before passing out, managing the while to look ethereal and even beautiful, where Ivy managed just to look mad. Ivy could get a clear note on the trumpet. Carlotta struggled rather. Lights tucked under Carlotta’s fading red hair gave her the appearance of having a halo; tucked under Ivy’s, Ivy looked gaunt and more spectral than the shades she was meant to attract.
‘You be the medium,’ Ivy herself suggested to Carlotta, ‘I’ll do the crawling about on the floor. Honestly, I’d rather. I don’t have the heart for audiences.’
So Carlotta became not Princess Ida of Bucharest, but Princess Ida of the Cherub Angels of Wisdom, and Isaac Pitman’s great-nephew added an extra line to the leaflets:
‘Words of Advice and Comfort Straight from Heaven to You.’
They took tickets to another séance, where the medium presented herself as Mrs Ada Pennington: strange childish voices issued from her mouth and spectral figures floated from her nostrils. Or at any rate they formed when they were a foot or two beyond her nose.
They puzzled for a time as to how this was done: Carlotta said she thought it could be done with a fan blowing a very fine white gauze which would wrap itself round a wire frame, but then, after the apparitions had been sent back to hell from which they came (
Samuel 1, verse
28
), brushing against her hair while they fled, she found her hair was sticky with ectoplasm, and changed her mind and said it could possibly be a spun-sugar frame, not wire, and boiling water had been used to collapse the figures, but some had stuck to the floating gauze. Next day she boldly went back to the house, told them they were guilty of fraud, demanded her three two-and-sixes back and got it. George marvelled. She seemed afraid of nothing.
A platform event with an audience of a hundred and fifty with famous medium Rosa from Paris cost only two shillings a ticket. The medium’s customary familiar, a tabby cat, lay sleeping on the table when Rosa made her entrance. She was very fat and had a moustache. She brought with her a Bible, a bowl, a lily and a bell and placed these on the table next to the cat, to ward off any evil spirit.
‘Best to be on the safe side,’ said Madame Rosa. ‘One is very vulnerable to possession by demons when in a trance.’
She went into the expected trance and slumped back into her chair, not so deep as not to be able to receive greetings from the other side, introduced by Rosa’s spirit guide the Indian chief Hiawatha, who spoke much like anyone from rural Somerset, and summoned up an Uncle Eric, recently passed over, who spoke of how life and health was restored on the other side, when suddenly Rosa’s snores were replaced by demonic guttural groanings, and the cat leapt into the air spitting and yowling and ran off. The audience gasped at the time, and though a few left complaining it was no demon, just a cheap trick, someone had jabbed the cat with a pin, it was remarkable how many remained to watch Rosa wrestle with her demon.
‘Money for old rope,’ said George to Ivy, ‘I told you so.’
Carlotta watched carefully and took notes. Some things became apparent. If you first talked about evil spirits people believed in them. If you shivered and said you felt a cold wind, others felt it too. If you made an audience concentrate on moving a bell on the table they thought they saw it move and didn’t notice when another hand moved the lily. If you hoped for a sign from a passed-over loved one, the more you paid the more likely you were to receive such a sign.
George described it as ‘the power of suggestion’. Carlotta said it was more like ‘the power of wishful thinking’. Ivy said she was almost out of money and the sooner they started making money, not spending it, the better. Her mother’s roof was leaking again.
By the time George’s poster about Princess Ida of the Cherub Angels of Wisdom brought in a booking for a session above Jolly’s, a smart draper’s shop in Milsom Street, they had their act worked out. Mrs Henry, who had booked the session at short notice, ran a costumier business and called George in for an interview. She had invited a dozen of her best customers to the entertainment and tea and cakes afterwards; her regular medium had fallen ill. Could Princess Ida oblige? George looked at the wording of the invitation card and was pained. What he offered was not an entertainment, but a profound experience, a meeting of the two worlds, the corporeal and the spiritual. If she would change the wording on her invitation, he would be happy. The dead were not to be mocked, any more than were the living. Mrs Henry – having seen the two letters of recommendation that George produced, one on good thick paper and signed in an educated hand by a Mrs Kennion from Wells and another, more workaday, on thin, lined, but headed paper, from a dairy farmer in Yatbury, both attesting to Princess Ida’s great and rare talent in communicating with loved ones – agreed to do so.
George got a good notion of the room, was able to check to what degree the drapes kept out the light, the whereabouts of furniture and fittings, and so forth. Doreen, having been assured that money was shortly on its way to mend her roof, helped out with information as to Mrs Henry’s friends, family, and customers.
All worked out very well. Princess Ida rolled her eyes convincingly, and John the Baptist materialized in front of her, half naked, to the shock and pleasure of the company. He was very well muscled and oiled. A glowing ball circled above Carlotta’s head (it dangled from the end of a fishing rod held by Ivy, who had a strong arm and a steady hand) and was black from head to toe. St John the Baptist spoke, saying that he was a burning and a shining light returned from the other side for those who were willing for a season to delight in his light, and then he faded out. As did the glowing ball over the Princess’s head.
Princess Ida uttered a few phrases, which she had learnt from Frank, about the hidden mysteries of the universe, and how all must learn to love one another and be at peace, and forgive any who had offended them that day, and then answered questions from the audience as to what they were to do to be saved. Her words fell easily into patterns she remembered from her father’s sermons. The accordion suddenly played the tune of
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
– apparently of its own accord; a few people laughed, and the atmosphere was broken. There was a break for tea and cakes, during which George put his clothes back on and his glasses and returned to the parlour as Princess Ida’s manager. Ivy washed her face and hands and took off her black clothes and put them in a bag to be reclaimed after the show, and came into the parlour as a guest who had been delayed waiting for a bus.
‘George,’ Carlotta asked, getting in as much seed cake as she could manage and still look ladylike. ‘Whatever made you play the accordion? The worms crawling song? It made people laugh.’
‘But I didn’t,’ he said, surprised. ‘I tried to set it up for “The Last Rose of Summer” as in the Daniel Home book but I gave up. It was too complicated.’ He had found the Daniel Home exposé of fraudulent mediums in the College library and now used it as his Bible. ‘I didn’t hear any accordion, anyway. Perhaps it was Ivy?’
But Ivy denied it. She’d never played the accordion and never wanted to.
George said in that case Carlotta had set it off herself. It was her powers acting up.
‘I don’t have powers,’ she said, but she felt chilled. It was the last thing she had expected. She had done enough experiments while George tried to test her psychic powers: lifting things by willing them to lift, breaking cups by sending hate waves at them, reviving wilting plants by loving them, guessing what objects other people were thinking of. She had managed to revive a plant but that was probably because she’d felt sorry for it and watered it while no one was looking. She had come very low in paranormally gifted charts and she was glad of it.
But George, for one, could see that what happened next was very strange. Mrs Henry seemed right as rain as she poured tea and served cakes. Most of the company was at the window, watching a rather spectacular thunderstorm raging over the hills of Bath. Few saw her drop the teapot and fall into a kind of fit, go into spasms, roll about on the floor and in a few merciful seconds lose consciousness. Those who did see busied themselves with the spilt tea, the broken pot, or else looked politely the other way. George, standing near, thought for a dreadful moment that Mrs Henry had expired. He took her pulse but could have sworn that there was none. But Carlotta knelt by her side and whispered something in her ear, and Mrs Henry’s colour returned and after a few minutes she sat up, stood up and drank more tea – someone brought in a new pot and fresh cakes – and nibbled her almond slice as if nothing had happened. The whole episode could only have taken three minutes.
Carlotta, hungry as ever, chose the pink meringues, eating at least three: otherwise seemingly unmoved. Ivy, at the other end of the room, dodging admirers while pocketing the string which linked the drawer of the painted French armoire to the fishing rod, had not even noticed Mrs Henry’s collapse.
After the break the guests settled down in a circle round the big table and held hands. George and Carlotta joined them. Ivy kept the rubber hand under her skirt. Candles spluttered briefly, only for a chilly wind out of nowhere to blow them out. The thunder had not cleared away; the atmosphere was heavy. George, respectable in his suit, deciphered what the planchette board had to say. A child spirit declared himself as Harold, an eight-year-old who had died from drowning six years back, but now happy in paradise. Mrs Henry wept and said her eight-year-old nephew had died in a boating accident and never been found. Princess Ida gave a little speech about how science had proved the continuation of life after death and the existence of the universal over-soul, and how she would be giving away sacramental ribbons from the table in the hall after the session.
The guests went away convinced; none asked for their money back. People even left money for the free ribbons (stock from Doreen’s stall she’d had trouble moving) in the Cherub Angel of Wisdom’s collecting box. Mrs Henry required forty percent of the takings but George easily beat her down to twenty-five percent. She did not argue. She seemed slightly dazed. Perhaps she knew it was a small price to pay for her life. Geroge said as much to Carlotta but she didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.