by Fay Weldon
Her ladyship protested when roused that she saw no reason why she should be summoned early to breakfast just because of Mr Baum’s presence. He was just a trumped-up tradesman who dealt in money, not even goods. He did not know how to behave. Coming to the door so early was not the mark of a gentleman, nor was asking himself to breakfast. She could not for the life of her think why his Lordship put up with Mr Baum and did not send him packing,
‘No, ma’am,’ said Grace, whose normal role was to agree, receive information but not comment on it. His Lordship put up with it, thought Grace, because the Prince had recommended Mr Baum, because his Lordship was in all probability quite heavily in debt to Mr Baum, and because the children’s affairs were – rashly, in Grace’s opinion – dealt with by Mr Baum, which was why their mother needed to be in attendance. But hers not to reason why, let alone offer an opinion, just to decide what her Ladyship was to wear that day.
For Lady Isobel’s immediate morning wear Grace picked out one of her new health corsets, which did not grip the waist and force the bosom up, a mere four layers of petticoats, to be topped by a loose brown woollen dress that did not sweep the floor but approached the ankle, with a high collar in cream lace to frame the face. She twisted her Ladyship’s long, thick, fair hair into a simple top-knot. She needed no jewellery. It was merely a breakfast, after all. Only when her friend and rival the Countess d’Asti was in the offing, Grace knew, did her Ladyship worry greatly about her appearance. Then she had be firmly laced, encased in vast masses of expensive and heavy fabric, hair tonged and tortured into fashionable shapes, simply so as to keep up appearances with the Countess. Grace thought Lady Isobel looked even more lovely and youthful when simply dressed, as now. She might be the child of a coal mining family but there was nothing dwarfed or rickety about her, as there was, frankly, about the Countess, whose invitations were so eagerly sought after by all London society. The Countess was witty, mean, and, Grace always felt, slightly fraudulent. Why her Ladyship took the woman so seriously Grace could not imagine.
Her Ladyship, once dressed, shook off whatever mood had been oppressing her and remarked that times were changing: these days the doctor came to the front door not the servants’ entrance, and no one showed surprise – though some felt it: and if the Queen’s son could make the banker Cassel his confidant, friend and apparent equal, and invite him to State dinners? She supposed she must move with the times.
‘At least Mr Baum is only coming to breakfast,’ remarked Grace, ‘not dinner.’
Lady Isobel allowed the comment, and even smiled a little. Grace was a favourite. The poor tended to be misshapen and vengeful at worst, pimply and sullen at best – but Grace was tall, slim and fair and an excellent lady’s maid, quick, reliable, clean and willing. She seemed to have an instinctive eye for fashion. The Countess d’Asti had tried to poach her, but Grace had not been tempted away. As a result Isobel had raised her wages from twenty-four pounds to thirty the year: reproachful friends had told her this amounted to a betrayal. For one thing, if you paid more, other servants would feel entitled to more. For another, give them more, and they felt not that you were being generous but had underpaid them in the past. But Grace would use the money to buy card and water colours, and had decorated her room with really quite pretty little landscapes, and Rosina had claimed to have seen The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and The Collected Works of Tennyson in her room. Grace’s parentage was of course unknown. Rosina sometimes speculated that Grace’s father was a famous artist and her mother his model who had left her illegitimate baby on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital in Coram Street. Lady Isobel said Rosina must be responsible and not put these silly melodramatic ideas into Grace’s head: it might make her feel sorry for herself when actually she ought to be extremely grateful. She had been promoted swiftly through the servant ranks from kitchen to parlour to lady’s maid, and now had a good place.
It would be bad for Grace, and certainly bad for Lady Isobel, if the girl got ideas into her head, and decided to leave service and seek employment as a seamstress, a milliner or even a lady typewriter as had Rose, Fredericka the Countess d’Asti’s lady’s maid. Rose had simply left without giving notice, and had been seen working in a Bond Street milliner, leaving poor dear Freddie altogether in the lurch with a big ball in the offing and no one to do her hair. These days, staff showed alarmingly little loyalty.
‘Well,’ said Rosina, with the lack of pleasantry and tact which marked her, and was another reason, her mother supposed, that the girl was nearly thirty and not married, ‘I suppose if people are going to go on referring to you as “a beauty”, you’re going to need her services more and more. You are nearly fifty. You could try paying her more.’
‘I have done so,’ said Isobel, stiffly. ‘And it might be a good idea not to invite Grace in to your various meetings. God knows what ideas these peculiar speakers put into her head. Let her wait outside in the carriage.’
‘I daresay Mr Baum is going to be boring and scold Arthur about his tailor’s bills,’ said Lady Isobel to Grace now. ‘Poor Arthur must have something to cover his back. Tradesmen should know better than to try and sue for their money through the courts. Whoever is going to want their services if they make a nuisance of themselves?’
Grace did not mention what was common, if possibly inaccurate, knowledge in the servants’ hall, that his Lordship’s debts were out of control and that his close acquaintance with the Prince of Wales did not bode well for his marriage. Mr Neville kept an eye on the newspapers: agricultural rentals had struck an all-time low and the price of land had plummeted; and had not many thousands of Dilberne acres been sold off at a bad time to help pay ‘debts of honour’? That is to say, his Lordship had been gambling and it was possible that what he was losing, the Prince was gaining. So much was known for sure, and a great deal more rumoured. Documents that Reginald had glimpsed on his Lordship’s desk suggested that much of Lady Isobel’s inheritance from Silas Batey, her coal mining father, now deceased, had already been mortgaged to pay the Dilberne debts.
She feared Mr Baum’s attack upon the front door was likely to be of more importance than the clothes on Arthur’s back. A very handsome young back, Grace would be the first to agree; the vision of his golden hairiness this very morning was hard to forget, and with it came a churning sense of the awful injustice of the ways of the world. Grace found herself humming as she left the room and went down to breakfast. A hymn was running through her head.
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate,
He made them high and lowly,
He ordered their estate.
Really? Did He? Why?
When she got down to the staff dining room, everything was in disarray. The downstairs staff breakfast had been abandoned, cancelled. Upstairs must take precedence.
A Whole Day to be Reorganized
9.00 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899
By nine o’clock a light breakfast was in the chafing dishes on the morning room sideboard: the servants would have to go without their pork stuffing patties for the time being. When she could find the time Cook would serve up what was left from the upstairs table. A whole hour had been stolen by Mr Baum from the day’s routine: and the staff thought the less of him for it. Between them, Smithers, Elsie and the sleepy Cook had within half an hour prepared porridge, haddock, bacon and fried potatoes, brown loaf (yesterday’s, the range’s oven not yet being sufficiently hot for baking), toast and honey, cold tongue and apples, kippers and buttered eggs. A dish of warm scones, cream and raspberry conserve had been purloined from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy at No 18 – Reginald was wooing the parlour maid there, and also – or so Smithers put it about – Janika von Demy, the Ambassador’s niece.
But Smithers’ stories had to be taken with a big pinch of salt, she being sweet on Reginald who never so much as looked at her, preferring, as she lamented, ‘the fine-boned type’. Nevertheless it had to be remembered Janika was foreign and so
might quite possibly not know how to behave – Queen Victoria herself had married Albert, whom everyone knew was the bastard son of a German groom by his mother, the scandalous Louise of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Reginald’s sons might yet end up vons, if not Princes. Love, just occasionally, won over the basic laws of an ordered, God-fearing society, where the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate did indeed know their proper place.
When all were finally seated upstairs and Mr Baum felt he could at last open his mouth to speak, the Earl of Dilberne said shortly: ‘Breakfast first, then business.’
Mr Baum, silenced yet again, felt truly affronted, and now he didn’t care if it showed. His own wasted time meant nothing to them. It was a full two hours since he had run up the steps and rung the bell, since when he had been kicking his heels while his Lordship attended to his horses, the son to his automobiles, and the ladies to their dress. He had tried to be a friend, had hoped to be included, had put himself out for both father and son – the Skinner court case, which he had settled out of his own pocket, would have brought disagreeable publicity and it might have emerged that his Lordship owed his tailor even more than did the son – yet they continued to treat him like a glorified servant. Well, they would learn. They had gone too far. What was that line from Hamlet, which Mrs Baum had insisted on dragging him to – One may smile, and smile, and be a villain? Why had that come into his head? Sarah Bernhardt, a woman, had played Prince Hamlet – it had been most unnerving. Mrs Baum said it was because Hamlet had many feminine qualities, which he supposed to be true enough, in that Hamlet seemed to be confused, moody and much taken up by his own wrongs. His own view was that people went to see the play simply for the novelty value of seeing a woman playing a man, a mere fairground trick. Mr Baum composed his face to display a more friendly countenance. A man may smile and smile.
Lady Isobel was picking at toast and honey, having greeted Mr Baum coldly and failing to ask after his wife. Naomi Baum had met Lady Isobel briefly at a Charity Tea, and now lived in hope of receiving an invitation from the Dilbernes, any invitation. She could not hope for dinner, of course, but a simple ‘At Home’ one morning would help her into society, where she deserved to be. Naomi went to plays and concerts and had twice the wit and artistic sensitivity of any of the Dilbernes. Yet no invitation arrived. Mr Baum’s sorrowful brown eyes darkened at the thought, temporarily dimming the smile. There was a new determination, a new hardness in his heart. Why did he put himself out for these people?
He watched the daughter eat an apple, some scones and all the strawberry jam; she simply acted as though Mr Baum was not in the room. Rosina was a very strange girl, too clever for her own good. It was unfortunate for a woman to be born intelligent: it deprived her of essential womanly skills. Mr Baum, tall, melancholy, and not unattractive, was accustomed to having a response from young women, if only the second look, the glance held an instant too long. It was noticeable that no response at all came from Rosina. Her mother, on the other hand, responded, if only with an all-purpose haughtiness. At least, he thought, the girl had not brought her ghastly unhygienic parrot to the table, which practice had disturbed him more than once in the past.
Arthur ate hugely and happily, helping himself to all the fried potatoes and bacon left, and leaving none for Mr Baum, who was still picking bones out of his haddock. Had Mrs Baum served haddock for breakfast, Mr Baum thought, there would not have been a bone left in it. He would not have eaten the bacon, of course, but he would have liked some of the fried potato.
Arthur was at least talkative, smiling at Mr Baum with jovial, confident eyes, assuring him that he would get his ‘pound of flesh’ in due course. Indeed, he said, Mr Baum could fry it up for the tailors’ dinner if he felt like it, or his own dinner, come to that, though that might go against the Jewish religion. Mr Baum managed to laugh, sharing the joke. It seemed to be innocent fun, but how could Baum possibly be complicit in it? He felt teased and humiliated. Why was he even in this country, where insularity, stupidity, and xenophobia ruled? He would be in America by now had not his parents, impoverished and knowing no English, in flight from the Odessa pogrom, been put off the boat at Cork, when they had paid to be taken to New York.
The Earl of Dilberne seemed genial enough, and made a point of sharing the scrambled eggs with Mr Baum who, still hungry after his morning rush, treated himself to the remaining kipper, picking the bones out of the bright orange smoked flesh with scrupulous, silent care. At least in kippers one expected bones.
Elsie, hovering in the background, serving coffee and tea as required, realized there would be precious left of this meal for the servants. Leftovers would be nothing better than porridge, yesterday’s brown loaf and picked-over scones and jam.
‘Well,’ said his Lordship finally, dabbing his mouth and putting down the napkin. ‘Get on with it, old chap. Breakfast was the good news, now let us broach the bad.’
Available now
Original Publication Details
The dates the published stories first appeared in print:
Angel, All lnnocence was first published in The Thirteenth Ghost Book [Barrie and Jenkins, 1977]; Alopecia in Winter’s Tale, [Macmillan, 1976]; The Man with No Eyes in New Stories 2, Arts Council, 1977; Breakages in The Midnight Ghost Book [Barrie and Jenkins, 1978]; Weekend in Cosmopolitan, 1978 and BBC radio, 1979; Delights of France or Horrors of the Road in Cosmopolitan, 1984; A Gentle Tonic Effect in Marie Claire, 1988; Chew You Up and Spit You Out in Woman, 1989; Baked Alaska in Wicked Women [HarperCollins, 1995]; Down the Clinical Disco in The New Statesman, 1985; GUP or Falling in love in Helsinki in Leader of the Band [HarperCollins, 1989]; Knock-Knock on BBC Radio, 1993; Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo in The Observer, 1988; Wasted Lives in The New Yorker, 1993; Love Amongst the Artists in The Times, 1991; A Knife for Cutting Mangoes on BBC Radio, 2000; Smoking Chimneys in Harpers and Queen, 2001; Happy Yuletide Schiphol in The Times, 2003; Christmas on Møn in Politiken, 2009.
The dates the published stories were first collected:
Angel All Innocence, Alopecia, The Man With No Eyes, Breakages, and Weekend were first anthologised in Watching Me, Watching You [Hodder and Stoughton, 1981]; Delights of France or Horrors of the Road in Polaris [Hodder and Stoughton, 1985]; Down the Clinical Disco, A Gentle Tonic Effect, Chew You Up and Spit You Out and Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo in Moon over Minneapolis [HarperCollins, 1991]; Baked Alaska, Love Amongst the Artists and Wasted Lives in Wicked Women [HarperCollins, 1995]; GUP or Falling in love in Helsinki, and Knock-Knock in A Hard Time to be a Father [HarperCollins, 1998]; A Knife for Cutting Mangoes and Smoking Chimneys in Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide [HarperCollins, 2002].
About this Book
Fay Weldon’s inimitable voice has never gone short of praise. Here in her own words she introduces her pick of twenty-one favourite short stories from a fifty year career as one of Britain’s foremost writers – with the added bonus of a new novella, The Ted Dreams, a ghost story for the age of cyber culture, big pharma, and surveillance.
Reviews
‘Queen of words – she’s a tribal elder.’
Caitlin Moran
‘If you want to know about the man-woman thing, read Fay Weldon.’
New York Times
‘Weldon reinstates irony to its rightful high place in literature.’
John Irving
‘To read Fay Weldon is like drinking champagne.’
The Times
‘Fay Weldon is a national treasure.’
Literary Review
‘Wickedly stylish. Bursting with intelligence and fire.’
Daily Telegraph
‘Prolific and provocative, Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists.’
Time Out
‘One of the great lionesses of modern English literature.’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘A sparkling river of wit.’
Mail on Sunday
‘Readable, articulat
e and fascinating.’
Scotsman
‘Witty and highly entertaining.’
The Times
‘Wise, knowing, forthright.’
Independent
‘Outrageously funny.’
Daily Express
‘Funny, absolutely hypnotic... heartwarming.’
Irish Press
‘Fay Weldon’s novels are sharp as needles.’
Daily Mail
‘Fay Weldon’s voice is as unmistakable as her acerbic wit.’
Financial Times
‘The social and sexual soothsayer of our literary times.’
Company
‘Weldon’s writing is seductively readable.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘When she’s on form – marshalling those elegant, deadly, sentences – there’s simply no touching Weldon as a writer.’
Observer
‘Intoxicating.’
Spectator
About the Author
FAY WELDON is one of the foremost chroniclers of our time, a novelist who spoke to an entire generation of women by daring to say the things that no one else would. Her work ranges over novels, short stories, children’s books, nonfiction, journalism, television, radio, and the stage. She was awarded a CBE in 2001. She has seven sons and stepsons and one stepdaughter, and lives on a hill in the west of England.
