by Fay Weldon
A Clash of Admirers
Adela was relieved to see that Ivy, as she had hoped, was amongst the mourners. It was because she so much wanted to see Ivy, and cry on her shoulder, and saw no other way of doing so, that she had gone to such lengths to be allowed to attend.
‘Oh please, please let me go,’ she’d begged Mrs Kennion. ‘And then I can settle down to the fact that they’re—’ To say ‘dead’ seemed unaccountably rude to her parents, so it came out rather lamely as ‘passed over’.
‘It isn’t seemly,’ said Mrs Kennion. ‘It’s a very modern fashion for women to go to funerals, and in any case you’re too young. Ask the Bishop, if you want, but he’s bound to say no.’
It had taken some courage to argue with the Bishop: you never knew with men; they could so easily erupt with rage, bang the table and shout, but she had his wife’s permission and had spoken cheerfully and softly and smiled, and it had worked. It was how, it seemed, Mrs Kennion dealt with the Bishop. Her mother, faced by her father, had seldom smiled, but just lapsed into more passive dolefulness, which gave him more liberty to behave as badly as he felt inclined.
Adela walked slowly up the aisle behind the two coffins, one large and one small, and tried to not to think of what was in them, and the practical business of getting two melted-together bodies properly separated, and how she should be crying but was not, but rather tried to pretend she was walking up the aisle as a Bride of Christ, and the funeral march was really the wedding march. St Bart’s had a fine organ, better and bigger than the one at St Aidan’s, as her father had often complained. But now there were no coffins, just Jesus with his gentle smile and crown of thorns waiting for her by the altar. Alas, the vision would keep changing and the crown of thorns and robe dissolve in favour of a faceless young man in a cotton shirt about to throw her over his shoulder and run off with her, against a background of flames, noise and general chaos. She was damned, confounded, hopeless. Three quarters of the way up the aisle, just before she was meant to take her place in the front row, she caught sight of Ivy, and felt such a surge of pleasure and relief it was all she could do to continue the mournful pacing, and not run off to embrace her.
Then she saw that the figure next to Ivy was the tall, broad, fair-haired young man of the smoke and flames. He, like Ivy, was smiling at her. His teeth were very white, perfect. All of him seemed perfect, more dream than reality. Except he was wearing spectacles. She walked on.
Be still, my soul; your best, your heavenly friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end . . .
All sang, or rather piped and squeaked, the final hymn. It was not at all a full-throated congregation. Adela could pick out Ivy’s voice – she was a strong, enthusiastic hymn singer, so much so that the Rev. Edwin would rebuke her for drawing attention to herself – and from next to her a strong male voice, powerful and confident. Frank Overshaw was sitting just behind her; his was a tentative, apologetic kind of voice, annoying and over-reverent; as if the old masters in Tibet to whom he kept alluding had somehow denatured him.
After the final hymn Adela pushed her way through the crowd to find Ivy, they embraced, and George joined them. He was taller and broader and younger than most around. ‘My fiancé,’ said Ivy.
Adela tried to reconcile this information with the George who was waiting for her at the altar and failed and found tears were pouring down her cheeks. Now she was really weeping, great sobs and gasps she could not help. As they left the church people murmured and sympathized. ‘Poor little thing!’ ‘All in one night, father, mother, home, everything!’ and someone – ‘She’s far too young to be here,’ and then she was laughing so hard she could hardly breathe at all.
‘Hysteria,’ said Ivy, coolly. ‘George, she needs a slap.’ Before Adela knew it there was a sharp sting across the cheek, first one side and then the other, more startling than painful, and she could breathe again, and she was staring up at George, who was staring down at her. She could not read the expression on his face.
‘I didn’t mean so hard, George,’ protested Ivy, and then George himself was whirled round and there was Frank Overshaw, squaring up to him with fists clenched; and one of the fists hit George’s jaw, but it lacked power, and George merely staggered and recovered his balance. Now Frank was on the ground clutching the bottom of his stomach and gasping, moaning and writhing in the mud; George was laughing.
Someone else dragged Adela off to the graveside to watch the coffins being lowered into the open grave. She composed herself enough to throw the first handful of soil, as was expected. First the big one, then the little. It was raining and the mud made her hands dirty. But at least she had behaved properly, and cried for everyone to see. And she did miss them. They were what she was accustomed to.
The worms crawl in,
The worms crawl out,
They go in thin
And they come out stout . . .
Well, perhaps. She remembered a time when Ivy had left the joint in the oven overnight and they had had to eat up the charred remnants the next dinner time. There was not much nourishment in it, you were just left with a dusty mouth black around the edges and the faint flavour of what might have been. The worms would come out pretty much as thin as they had gone in.
Mrs Kennion behaved very strangely on the way home in the carriage, sitting stiffly and seeming not at all friendly.
‘I told the Bishop you were too young to come,’ was all she said to Adela, snappily, ‘but he wouldn’t listen. And as for you, Frank—’ and that was all. Frank sat pale and winced at every bump, of which there were very many. The road from Yatbury to Wells was rough. Still, the funeral was over and Adela could lean back beneath a rug and dream of St George and go to sleep. In her dreams, he did not wear spectacles.
January – 1902
The Search for Lost Invitation Cards
‘By the way,’ said his Lordship to Isobel, ‘you did send off those invitations to the Baums?’
‘Oh goodness me,’ said Isobel. ‘I forgot all about them. I’ll do it this very morning. But there’s lots of time.’ She had forgotten all about the Baum invitations, what with one thing and another. She would have to declare them lost and set about a general search in the household, which of course would fail to find them, and then declare them missing. It was a perfectly ridiculous thing to have to do, but she could see no other way out.
‘The days pass by quicker than one likes,’ said Robert. ‘This Coronation takes up a deuced amount of time. The King wants a new open landau built, at great expense to the public purse, but what if it rains all day? We can use the Coronation coach his mother used as an alternative, a gold spectacular, but it’s deuced uncomfortable. William IV said it was like being abroad in rough seas. And what about everyone else? Do we need alternatives for all the landaus, or shall the footmen just carry umbrellas and put up with looking ridiculous? At least Sunny is back from Moscow and he’s a stickler for detail. Consuelo is being a great help: she has a female eye for what things looks like which we men tend to overlook.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be a great help,’ said Isobel. ‘Did she have a good time in Moscow?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ said Robert, ‘but she was wearing a diamond choker I hadn’t seen before, so I expect she did.’
‘What, isn’t that a little, well, ostentatious? Diamonds to the office?’ asked Isobel.
‘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 embroide
red 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.
Adela Manages
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.
