Read Long Live the King Online
Authors: Fay Weldon
‘What did you say to her?’ George asked Carlottta a week or so later. He had been shaken by the incident, but it seemed prudent to say nothing. Things were going very well as they were; bookings were pouring in, they had a stage show to prepare and the healing business was something he knew little about.
Carlotta looked blank and said she couldn’t remember; something like, ‘You poor thing,’ because that was what she felt. It must have been horrible for poor Mrs Henry to have lost her little nephew the way she did. The pointer on the planchette board had moved by itself, she said: she couldn’t stop it. George let the matter lie. Young girls often had psychic powers which faded when they got older.
Ivy let out a few more seams on the red velvet dress; soon it would be too tight. Carlotta’s hennaed hair had faded with frequent washing to a reddish gold, and if she stopped penciling her eyebrows she looked more like an angel and less like a whore.
‘What’s a whore?’ asked Carlotta and Ivy laughed and refused to tell her. Carlotta would again be Princess Ida for the next show – a hall which took three hundred and fifty people – and if she came over as some pure creature hovering between the two worlds, so much the better. She would hardly be recognized now. No one had come forward for the reward, the wanted posters had fallen off the walls, and a girl’s body had been found in the Kennet and Avon canal. She was forgotten.
George went all the way to Southampton Buildings in London to talk to the examiner at the Patent Office about the possibility of patenting his new device, the Distant Accordion, and was told new laws made it practical, though still expensive. George’s other idea of patenting the whole show they had devised under the business name Life after Death Ltd., or L.A.D., as a kind of blueprint which could then be leased out nationwide, was seen as impractical.
Minnie thought Rosina was acting strangely. Some days she glowed and blushed and seemed twenty, other days she looked cross and pale and rather old and anxious. Minnie would have thought she was in love, but how, when? Rosina and she were back at Dilberne Court; Rosina back in her room with Pappagallo finishing her index; Minnie herself back in her studio, though mostly sitting rather than standing because her centre of balance had changed and using watercolours because the smell of oil paint made her dizzy. Arthur was being most attentive, and came back from the workshops every lunchtime to make sure, as he put it, ‘her gears were in good order’, and was so gentle in bed it could be rather aggravating. She was not about to rust through.
Isobel had called Nanny Brown out of retirement to look after the new baby. Minnie worried that perhaps, having seen both Rosina and Arthur through their growing years, Nanny Brown might be rather old and tired, and the kind to believe a good dose of laudanum was the way to keep a baby tranquil, but Isobel laughed away her fears. Experience was important, and Nanny Brown could be relied upon to choose nursemaids – three would be needed – that were not slovenly or unkind. And when Nanny Brown turned up she seemed such an amiable old duck, and Arthur so pleased to see her, that Minnie gave up worrying. She was in Rome: she would do as Romans did.
Minnie called by Rosina’s room one morning to hear the parrot squawking not ‘Votes for women’, but clucking and chirping, ‘I love you, I love you,’ as Rosina, greatly embarrassed, tried to throw its cloth over its cage. The parrot, seemingly angered, jeered a few more defiant ‘I love you’s’ loud and clear before lapsing into silence. Rosina refused to elaborate, but asked Minnie to come with her to another meeting of the I.D.K., this one at Carlton Gardens, which Arthur Balfour would be hosting.
‘I can’t possibly,’ said Minnie. ‘Your mother would never allow it.’
‘She needn’t know,’ said Rosina. ‘We will do it within a couple of days. She is so taken up with ermine trim and getting the Queen’s diamond fringe girdle to fit round the royal waist she will not notice. We will tell everyone we are going to Brighton for a day’s outing, because you need the sea air. You are eight weeks or so away from your date, so it is perfectly safe. We will manage to miss the last train home and be obliged to stay with my good friend Louisa Martindale in Brighton – I will warn her – but actually we will be in the Savoy. If I can’t listen to some intelligent conversation I will go mad.’
‘You have already,’ said Minnie. ‘Who is it? Seebohm Rowntree?’
‘Good heavens no,’ said Rosina. ‘That is a meeting of minds, not bodies.’
‘Then who?’
‘I am not going to tell you,’ said Rosina. ‘I care for him but I do not know what he thinks of me. He writes to me from time to time but so strangely it is hard to tell. He has a beautiful mind.’
‘I am glad to hear that,’ said Minnie. ‘Is he a rationalist or an idealist?’
‘An idealist,’ said Rosina, indignantly.
‘Then it must be true love,’ said Minnie, sadly.
She thought she had better go with Rosina if only to serve as her chaperone. Her sister-in-law had invited her anonymous beau to the meeting and he had agreed to come. It was hardly proper. And she, Minnie, also longed to get out of the house.
Carlton Gardens was sufficiently grand to please anyone, with its pillars and wide Nash windows, and the guests, some fifty of them, sufficiently intelligent and talkative. Minnie, who had become quite accustomed to the peace and slowness of the countryside, felt almost alarmed by the noise of argument, and fervent opinions defended to the end by noisy and passionate advocates. Over drinks before dinner Rosina pointed out people she knew and claimed were famous, a number of Fabians – little-by-little-socialists – H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw from the rationalist camp, and from the idealist camp the Chesterton brothers, though both seemed to be arguing bitterly, and writers from the
Saturday Review
.
A strange thin man who claimed to be its editor came up to Minnie and congratulated her on her condition and told her he had rewritten the Lord’s Prayer to its great advantage and when she politely asked him in what way said he had changed the words ‘for thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory’, to ‘the Kingdom, the Power and the Beauty’. Minnie agreed it was an improvement and he went on to complain about the weakness of his digestion and how when he had been obliged to stomach-pump the contents of his lunch that day he had found whole peas, to his horror completely untouched, in the contents. Minnie, rather taken aback, was suggesting he tried chewing his peas so they arrived in a more manageable state, but did not get very far: a rather dandyish writer by the name of Edgar Jepson with a lean intelligent face and a good moustache quickly dragged him away, saying Harris was a genius and a fine editor, but not a fit companion for a young lady. Minnie thought this was probably true. For the most part the guests were male but Rosina pointed out Beatrice Webb, who looked fierce and intimidating, the notorious Violet Hunt and her very plain lover Ford Madox Ford and the children’s author Edith Nesbit, who seemed quite friendly and normal and even rather pretty, though batting her eyelashes at GBS who was so busy talking he did not seem to notice.
An etiolated man of venerable mien silenced everyone by proclaiming, ‘Ha! A thought.’ All waited and he announced that war had a glorious effect on the noble qualities of man.
Clearly no one agreed. Jepson broke an embarrassed silence with his full-blooded dismissal, saying loudly, ‘Ha! Call that a thought?’ and the noisy rhetoric of the evening resumed. Jepson had a quite frightening book published that very day, it seemed, called
The Garden at 19
, all about the Great God Pan surfacing in a London suburb and putting paid to respectability. He belonged to the Golden Dawn literary movement, had friends like the abominable Frank Harris and the peculiar poet Walter de la Mare, and as such had no respect at all from the fashionable rationalists.
At nine a simple dinner was served at individual round tables, and a comparative and welcome peace fell as watercress soup, followed by roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was served with plentiful gravy. GBS, a vegetarian, was handed instead three hard-boiled eggs. They were a hungry lot, Minnie observed, tending to eat as if this might well be their last meal. But thinking back to Stanton, the artist lover of her early years, this constant gnawing hunger in the presence of free food seemed to be symptomatic of so many writers and artists. There was a vacant seat next to a disconsolate Rosina. The place card remained, for one Frank Overshaw.
‘I suppose that’s him,’ Minnie said to Rosina. ‘The one who isn’t here. Frank Overshaw, one of the jilting kind. Eat up your apple pie and Cheddar and forget him.’
‘I can’t,’ Rosina said. ‘We have an affinity. We are joined in the oneness, together in the Dreamtime. There is so much for us to do together. The strength of it frightens him, that’s all.’
At this point Arthur Balfour stood up at the top table and greeted his guests, saying that no philosophy in the present age could be other than provisional, and how remarkable it was that mankind, who unlike the birds and the bees could apprehend reality, so delighted in the exercise of reason, for which cause this evening all of opposing views were gathered together – and so on and so forth. All trooped down to a lower lecture hall, where the panel arranged themselves. Frederick Bligh Bond, an architect, sat with the idealists and said as evidence of the continuation of life after death the Society for Psychical Research was to hold a short, live, twenty-minute séance in which Princess Ida, the talented and well-known international medium from Roumania, was to raise a spirit from the dead, and convince the unconvincable. The announcement was met with whistles and catcalls from the rationalist ranks and cheers and claps from the idealists. The lights dimmed. There was a small commotion from the back of the hall; someone was arriving late. Rosina and Minnie both turned to see who it was and saw Rosina’s father, Minnie’s father-in-law, the Earl of Dilberne, in the company of a tall slim young woman with a swan-like neck, black thick curly hair and a rosebud mouth. She was shrouded in a black velvet cloak and obviously wanted to be unnoticed but there was no un-noticing her. It was Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough. If by nothing else you could recognize her by the glitter of diamonds at her throat where the edges of her cloak failed to hide them.
Minnie and Rosina looked at one another, and without a word, and simultaneously, found a side door and slipped out of it. Their leaving was not noticed. Arthur Balfour would have to do without their polite goodbyes. It was too bad. What have I done, Minnie thought, what have I done? Worse, what has
he
done? Her own father-in-law?
The enormous marbled baths of the Savoy, the giant showerheads, the good paintings in the corridors – one or two of them originals, but which? – the lights twinkling on the Thames, a few early coronation wreaths swinging gently from the lamp posts, the serene face of Big Ben as seen from her balcony window, did much to calm her. But what Minnie wanted was just to be home in Chicago with her mother.
‘What have I done?’ asked Naomi Baum, weeping.
Her husband had burned his hands snatching the bracelet from the fire. The gold had not lost its shape or the diamonds dimmed, but Eric’s right hand was raw and blistered. Jane had run into the garden and fetched some comfrey leaves, great green tough prickly things which the gardener should have got rid of but hadn’t. These she folded between muslin and then soaked and mashed the poultice in vinegar and water, with a splash or two of slippery elm, and now handed to Naomi to wrap round her husband’s hand. She had moved so swiftly and competently. Mr Baum wept too, from pain and misery mixed.
‘No, what have
I
done?’ asked Mr Baum, of the universe. ‘Your invitations! What have we both done?’
The doorbell rang. The first of the Ladies for Zion had arrived. Naomi asked Jane to go down and let them in, explain their hostess had a sudden migraine and could not be there to welcome them in, but suggested they hold the meeting without her, making sure that someone remembered to take the minutes. Jane asked if it would be all right if she stayed for the meeting, and Naomi said, of course, yes.
‘Poor Mr Baum,’ said Jane, as she went. She seemed to be crying too, and Naomi wondered how she could ever manage without her, while Mr Baum realized that whatever he had done to upset Jane he should be careful not to do it again: if Naomi loved him there would be no temptation. Perhaps the girl would withdraw her notice: perhaps everything would be good again.
‘It’s my fault,’ said Mr Baum, ‘please don’t let us be like this.’ And they sat on the bed together and rocked and wept gently in each other’s arms. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I give you everything.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but it’s not what I want.’
He asked what it was she did want and she said she didn’t know, but she would live wherever he wanted and never refuse him again. Soon they were laughing as much as crying at their own sudden attack of silliness. Eric said he would tell his Lordship the invitations had been lost, and would have them replaced.
‘Won’t that be awkward?’ she asked, and he said yes, it would be but he would do it happily.
She said no; she was going to a rehearsal of the Handel Society in the Queen’s Hall, and would explain the situation to Mr Balfour himself; no doubt replacement invitations would be forthcoming. Eric acknowledged it would be a relief if she did that. His relationship with Lady Isobel was not easy and she, not his Lordship, was in charge of the family’s social arrangements.
‘It’s easier to know what you don’t want than what you do,’ Naomi said. ‘What I don’t want is living my life as a special case: I so hate not quite belonging, people feeling sorry for me. I love my religion and being what I am, but I simply do not like being one of the dispossessed, the wretched ones.’
The next day Eric stayed at home to nurse his hand and did not go into the office. Late in the morning they walked up to The Bishops Avenue to look at the building site he had bought, Naomi chose the one she preferred, though both looked pretty much the same, desolate and dusty, and the land around arid. She said the land, like all of Hampstead Heath, was not fit for much; it could manage a few roses and a lawn but not much else. It was the scree from an old glacier, stones and rubble built up in its path in the Ice Age. When it got to Hendon the glacier stopped and all the rubbish came tumbling down. Eric marvelled at how much she knew. She reminded him that yes, before the children she used to go to lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, and so did he: he had been a mining man before he was a financial genius. Then she did something strange. She knelt down in the dust and scooped up some soil and let it trickle through her fingers.