by Fay Weldon
By now the soup was cold and the steak was not the kind that melted in the mouth, though the onions and carrots were good: she ate up and mopped up the gravy with bread and felt almost happy again.
February – 1902
A New Career for George
Ivy’s kindness to Adela over the years had not gone unnoticed in Yatbury. Her absence from her proper bed on the night of the fire was somehow overlooked and she was awarded £200 from the parish funds to rehouse herself and replace her belongings. This may have had something to do with a fondness for Ivy’s mother Doreen on the part of the Parish Council clerk. He visited Doreen weekly, being a widowed man. Ivy’s return to her maternal home after the fire was proving a little awkward.
Ivy’s gentleman friend George, Adela’s rescuer, lost no time in using Ivy’s funds to set up in business in Bath. He had finished with his exams and was looking for employment as a science teacher, while spending some useful hours working as a lab assistant at the college. He thought he could profitably use such spare time as he had trying his hand at the afterlife business. Ivy agreed to come in with him: she had been out of a job since the fire. It seemed something of a laugh. People were gullible, but seemed comforted by the idea that the dead lived on and could be contacted. It was no great crime to make money out of them. George, along with his tutors and a handful of students in the new Department of Paranormal Studies, had come to the conclusion that a few genuine and talented mediums did occur amongst the many fakes, just as a few great artists would always turn up amongst the many who daubed away. And as some artists specialized in miniatures, some in still lifes, some in landscapes or portraits, so some of those with a special talent for the paranormal would find themselves specializing in telepathy, or teleportation, or had the gift of prophecy or communication with those passed over.
‘I don’t understand a word of it,’ Ivy said.
‘You don’t have to,’ said George. ‘Just stand back, trust me, and wait for the money to roll in.’
She did trust him. Since the funeral, since he’d become a local hero, since he’d struck Adela’s young man to the ground – a lolloping colonial with glasses – he seemed to have grown in energy and determination.
‘We’ll take lodgings in Bath,’ he said. ‘You can’t go on moving out whenever your mother’s fancy man chooses to come round.’
‘It’s not all that often,’ Ivy said, ‘and I don’t mind. My mum does everything for me.’
‘I mind for you,’ he said. ‘It isn’t decent. Next thing he’ll be turning his eyes on you and you’ll have to say yes or he’ll take your mum’s name off the parish poor list. I’m warning you. You don’t know men like I do.’
‘But living in sin with you wouldn’t be decent either,’ she protested.
‘Just say the word,’ he said, ‘and we’ll be married. I’m mad for you, Ivy. You know that. It’s bad for my health. I’m beginning to get headaches. It’s all your fault.’
She believed him. She’d led him on; she couldn’t deny it, ‘Never lead a man on,’ her mother had said. ‘Once you’ve led them on they can’t stop without getting ill. It all builds up inside and they get headaches and sometimes die.’
He took her to Woolworths in Milsom Street and she waited outside while he bought her a threepenny brass wedding ring. Then he took her to the gardens down by the river, knelt on one knee, took her hand, slipped the ring on her finger, and said she was now his wedded wife.
‘Oh do get up, George,’ she said. ‘You’re making a fool of me.’ At which he looked quite hurt, so it occurred to her that he might really love her. They took lodgings together in a boarding house in Bath, Ivy wearing a brass wedding ring from Woolworths and calling herself Mrs Topp. She could have wished for a more elegant name, but if you took a man, you took his name with you. They spent many an enviable and noisy night cavorting about in the creaky bed, neglectful of the other guests. The coiled wire springs of the bed, worn through by rust, had a tendency to snap under pressure and poke through the horsehair mattress and cause nasty scratches, but otherwise the second-floor front of the Journey’s End Guest House in Station Street served their purposes well enough. Ivy quickly overcame her distaste for illegal sex: you got used to it soon enough and it did not end you up with a bun in the oven.
They went all the way to Paulton on the bus to visit Purnells the printers to discuss using colour lithography for the leaflets and flyers Ivy was to distribute in Bath, but the sour-faced man behind the counter took one look at George’s sketches for Princess Ida of Bucharest, the World-Famous Clairvoyant and Spiritualist, and shook his head.
‘I won’t have none of Witch of Endor stuff on my premises,’ he said. ‘Gives me the creeps. What will my men think of me?’
‘Why,’ said George, ‘they’ll think of the good they’re doing the widows of the parish, bringing them news of those who have passed over, and work for free!’ But the printer was not moved. He did, however, suggest that old man Pitman in the Caledonian Road might treat them more kindly, being into heaven and hell and angels and that kind of thing.
‘Princess Ida is an angel sent down from heaven to help us poor mortals,’ George said.
‘She looks pretty much like flesh and blood to me,’ said the printer, looking Ivy up and down, in a way that was hardly respectable. ‘Wouldn’t you do better, young man, with someone more, shall we say, ethereal?’
On the way back to Bath George nuzzled into Ivy’s ear and murmured he was glad she was flesh and blood, and his hand strayed where it should not, but the conductor began to look uneasy so thankfully George sat up straight and looked respectable.
After that they went to visit Pitman & Co. just down the road from George’s college – George told her on the way he’d given up being a science teacher: these days there were easier paths to fame and fortune for an enterprising fellow. The owlish young man who served them at the printing works behind the shop told them that old man Isaac Pitman had died a couple of years back, that he was his great-nephew Ronald, and was now running the business. George showed him his sketches for the leaflets –
Princess Ida of Bucharest, the World-Famous
Clairvoyant and Spiritualist.
Levitation and Spirit Mysteries.
Watch While the Dead Return from the Other Side.
Hear What Your Loved Ones Have to Say to You.
– and Ronald became quite excited, his round glasses shivering and glittering in the electric light.
Ronald turned out to be not only sympathetic to ideas of the afterlife – old man Pitman had had direct experience of the Celestial Kingdom – but was himself a fan of the great medium Charles Foster, having had the good fortune to attend one of his Salem Seer séances, and witnessed him in conversation with the poet Virgil.
‘You’ve come to the right man,’ Ronald said. ‘It is so important for the people to understand that emanations from the other side are not a matter for fear but for reassurance’ – and offered to do colour printing at cost price and access to the secret block of the Cherub Angel of Wisdom kneeling at the feet of the Maker, which old man Pitman had engraved just before his death.
‘I knew the right person would come along,’ said Ronald, ‘and here you are. Only trust in the Lord.’
‘Luck’s on my side,’ said George later, studying the card Ronald had given him, on the back of which was now written an address in the Royal Crescent, that of a wealthy devotee of the afterlife. Ivy could see that it was true. George was lucky in the way most people she knew were unlucky. She still didn’t quite trust him but life with him was a hundred times better than life without. She would stick with him. She liked the way men looked at her nowadays. George said it was because she was ‘aware’ and transmitting life-force energies, and she believed him.
He changed his plans. He would put off the public séances until he was more secure in what he was doing: the big money was in these, no doubt, but they would start small in the darkened drawing rooms of the Roy
al Crescent. They would refine their skills on a gathering of the hostesses’ wealthy friends, who paid good money to sit round in a circle holding hands – and learn to concentrate on what went down best –voices from the other side, spirit guides, the planchette board, mysterious knockings, or simpler tricks of telekenesis, hypnotism, the sudden chilly wind, the extra finger of the rubber glove and so on. Ivy would be the medium: with her extra powers of attraction she would have no trouble: he would teach her how to go into trances and come out of them convincingly. George would manage the technical side of things.
‘But no one sensible will believe me,’ she said.
‘People who want to believe, believe,’ he said. ‘And that’s that.’
‘It doesn’t seem right,’ Ivy murmured once or twice, ‘cheating those poor people,’ as she practised rolling her eyes and connecting with the infinite.
‘We are not cheating them,’ said George crossly, ‘we are providing them with a service.’
A few nights more and George had persuaded her that her qualms were foolish and naïve. It was better not to find fault, in any case. He did have a tendency to lash out, or go to the pub and sulk. ‘I wish you looked a little more mystic, Ivy,’ he’d complain. ‘More underfed, like the Hon. Rev.’s little girl, not such a strapping country wench, more in tune with the other side, like an angel. Then we’d really make money.’
He was trying to work out how levitation could be achieved in a drawing-room setting. ‘Some kind of pulley contraption,’ he supposed, ‘a board on which a girl’s lying under a black blanket. The board gradually rises, the blanket goes, the audience is too transfixed to see a prostrate girl in white rise in the air to notice anything else. The accordion has started playing and the audience is hearing that, not wheels creaking.’
‘But there are only two of us doing it, George,’ Ivy pointed out. ‘It’s too complicated.’
‘You are such a wet blanket,’ he said.
But later that night he sat up in bed and said, ‘Of course. You’re right. We need a third person. Adela! I knew it would come to me.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Ivy, alarmed.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You were always good to her, she owes you a lot. She owes her very life to me. Time for her to do something for us. We can be her family.’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Ivy. ‘You don’t understand. She’s just not our sort. You’d have to kidnap her first.’
‘Then that’s what we’ll do, he said, and hurled himself upon Ivy, seizing her breasts as if they were handles, pounding the flesh as if it was rising dough, then on top of her, his great thing in her mouth, driving down like a piston, almost suffocating her so she tried to push him away, angering him so he pounded her this way and that as he seemed to feel she deserved, out of the softness here, pound, pound, into the tightness there, pound, pound, without ceremony. Someone from the outside world pounded on the ceiling with a broom. George just pushed her head further into the pillow so she couldn’t make a sound and continued with yet more ferocity, as a man whips up the horses when asked to go more slowly. By the time he finished she was half-conscious, swirly in her head. She quite liked the rough stuff, but could see it could go too far.
After that he was sweet and kind, and told her he loved her and she believed him, and they started planning how to get hold of Adela. They agreed it might take time. Jenny the housekeeper up at the Bishop’s Palace had heard from Ivy’s mother Doreen that the girl’s family wanted nothing to do with her, and that in any case she was going to enter a convent as a nun in May.
‘So we’ll be rescuing her,’ said Ivy, ‘not kidnapping her?’
‘See it like that,’ said George.
The landlady, blushing, asked them to leave, they were disturbing the other guests, but George was charming and complained about the rusty springs of the bed breaking and they ended up staying in a better room on the first-floor back and with a new bed, without even paying any more. You had to admire him. It was the downstairs tenant who went.
A Prime Minister in Waiting
His Lordship called in to see Arthur Balfour at the House of Commons, and found him at his desk, his handsome head bowed over his papers, and his great blue melancholy eyes tired.
He seemed pleased to see Robert, rose to his feet and extended his hand, urbane and charming as ever, but seeming more puzzled than usual by the demands of the material world.
‘Ah, Dilberne,’ he said, ‘a friendly face at last. The least judgemental of my colleagues.’
‘I’m not in the Education Office,’ said Robert. ‘You are quite safe.’
He and Balfour had met on occasion in the past over a whisky at the Royal St George golf course, admired each other’s drives and agreed to be in favour of the new Haskell golfball, the bouncing bounder of the tees, which so alarmed the more staid members of the golfing fraternity. Nowadays poor Balfour had little time for golf; he was determined to get the nation’s children educated while his own party and clerics of every hue stood in his way.
‘I’m not even PM,’ he said. ‘But poor old Uncle Salisbury’s grown so old everyone behaves as if I am. He can still make a fine speech but that’s all. Everyone hates me. Simple yeas or noes are beyond me.’
‘I beg to differ,’ said Robert. ‘I’ve watched you choosing your irons, and you never hesitate.’
‘Oh, golf. I can manage rain and wind well enough, but people? No. They are far more unpredictable. Every light remark I make is scrutinized, every decision criticized. I am more accustomed, frankly, to the adoration I received when I played the philosopher and affected indifference and languor. And now this Coronation – the King insists on pomp and ceremony and I daresay he’s right, but the cost escalates, and I am required to defend him with facts and figures, which I loathe. It is all most unsatisfactory.’
‘You still seem to have the critical adoration of any number of women,’ observed Robert cheerfully. ‘Be content with that.’
‘Oh that,’ said Balfour, dismissively. ‘That is easy enough. So long as one inclines one’s head to a lady at dinner and appears to be paying careful attention to any kind of nonsense they fall in love at once. Then they go away and persuade their husbands to vote for one. But you know this very well. I have seen you inclining your head quite often in the direction of the delectable Duchess.’
‘Consuelo, can you mean?’ asked Robert, not without alarm. Had it really been so noticeable?
‘Oh don’t reproach yourself, dear fellow,’ said Balfour, who Robert had long ago decided had the gift of reading minds. ‘Half the chaps in London feel the same and half the women are in a frenzy of jealousy. But no one doubts her virtue, while wondering how on earth she managed to marry such a little man. She can, after all, afford her own diamonds.’
‘Dukes are thin on the ground,’ said Robert. ‘Earls are two a penny, alas,’ and lured him off to the House of Commons bar for a tot of whisky: two good-looking men with fine moustaches, neither as young as they used to be, but with their political futures before them.
Balfour expressed surprise that Robert was still in town and not off on his estates ‘killing things’ and Robert said he had had more than his fill at Sandringham and now had his wife with him in Belgrave Square: she was, as he was, taken up by matters to do with the Coronation, and it was best to be in London. ‘A storm of trivia,’ said Robert. ‘Of ermine trims and silver slippers, but my wife makes short work of it.’
‘Alas,’ said Balfour, ‘I have no wife.’
Twenty-five years since Arthur had lost the love of his life, his cousin May Lyttleton, to typhoid fever. He had stayed unmarried, and many, including Isobel, wondered why. ‘It is not in the nature of men,’ she had said, ‘at least normal men, to love anyone for more than a year who is out of reach and out of sight. And to be dead, like poor May, is to be both.’
To which Robert had replied sternly that Balfour was the most normal of men. He did not hunt or shoot like other men but at least
played golf and was frequently seen in the company of attractive women, although admittedly often other men’s wives, and he did not want further conversation on that subject. Nor was there.
‘We must see it as a relief,’ said Balfour now, ‘that the New King is so unlike the Old Queen in his happiness to show his face in public, and it is true that his dependence upon public affection rather than military might may well save the country money in the long run, but in the short term it is damned expensive on the public purse!’ And he asked for an account of Robert’s Christmas at Sandringham.
‘I cannot pretend not to be interested,’ he said. ‘But I will not ask you to be indiscreet.’
