by Fay Weldon
The next day George’s eye fell on an advertisement – which he could just make out despite the grease – in the discarded newspaper wrapping from their fish-and-chips. It was, he said, ‘meant to be’, which was not the kind of thing he’d usually say but he seemed excited: it was for a public séance to be held that night in a school hall behind Pierrepoint Street.
George said going to it was necessary research. He already knew what went on but she also needed to – after all she, not he, would be the one on the platform. It was worth the investment of two shillings and sixpence a head. She said he should pay: it was a capital expense, not sundries. He sighed.
‘Squinny again,’ he said. She didn’t want him to fall out of love with her, and paid up, and remembering how once Adela had practised forgiveness, she tried practising trust. It gave her such a nice warm feeling she quite fell into the habit of feeling it.
The world-famous Mrs Tate was appearing with her spirit guide Hui Neng. George said she was probably a fake and these false mediums brought serious research into disrepute, and Ivy said but they themselves were going to be fakes and George said that was beside the point. Ivy shrugged and let it go.
The hall was full: there was standing room only: the room was steamy with damp coats, noisy with coughs and colds, and made foggy with smoke from oil lamps and cigars. Most in the audience were elderly women of the down-at-heel widow variety, but there was a fair sprinkling of the better dressed, and quite a number of student types. Everyone wanted to know about life after death. There was someone there from George’s college.
Mrs Tate made her entrance. She looked, rather disappointingly, like the farmer’s wife from Devon she was, in a not very crisp white blouse and a rather dusty navy skirt, not at all smart. She stood alone on a stage, empty other than two chairs and a plain table covered with a cloth which hung halfway to the floor. She talked in a high, refined voice for some ten minutes about the peace and presence of the Lord and the happiness of the other side, where the dead were finally at peace and restored to the wholeness of their youth. The audience liked and trusted her. She stopped talking mid flow, and her eyes began to roll upwards. She grunted and then as Ivy and George watched she turned into an elderly Chinaman. What kind of trick could turn smooth apple cheeks into dusty, wrinkled hollows, narrow European eyes into slits, change female into male, a mane of hair into a pigtail and a circular embroidered cap, an ordinary plain blouse and skirt into a flowered silk robe? To which George said, ‘A change of lighting, of course.’
The audience sighed in wonder and satisfaction. The spirit guide Hui Neng had taken over Sylphia Tate’s body. No one now must disturb the union or when he left for the other side he might take her with him.
‘This is for real,’ said Ivy.
‘She took off a wig and screwed up her face, that’s all,’ said George.
‘It’s so hot and smelly in here, George,’ pleaded Ivy. ‘Can we go?’
But George’s hand was on her arm, and forceful. She stayed where she was.
‘That tablecloth reaches the floor,’ said George. ‘They’ve painted the lower half black so it matches the back wall.’
When Hui Neng spoke it was with a strange accent and a high reedy voice that might well have come from the other side of the grave. He, or she, looked upwards into the fog of cigarette smoke and oil fumes that rose from the crowd. The audience looked upwards too.
‘Are you there? Yes, I hear you now, Fan Yip. I see, a message from Henry for Mary.’ There was a sharp rap from the ceiling. ‘Sorry, Fan Yip. Not Henry, Harry.’ There was a sharp cry from the audience.
‘Harry, is it you, my darling?’ and a sob of pain. The audience gasped. So did Ivy.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ivy,’ said George. ‘There are four hundred people in this crowd. How can there not be a passed-over Harry?’
‘Oh do hush!’ said Ivy. ‘People can hear you!’
Hui Neng/Mrs Tate and Mary had a conversation in which Mary asked Harry if his leg was still giving him trouble, and Fan Yip quoted Harry as saying he was young and strong again and Mary would be joining him soon in paradise, and when she asked how soon, said before next Christmas. Mary gave a little shriek. Hui Neng said time on the other side was different, being eternal, and quickly went on – to a little boy coming through from the other side, he had a caliper and big eyes, was there a mother present looking for a son with a caliper and big eyes, and found a father if not a mother. Was there a pet mouse? The father said not a mouse but a pet dog, and Hui Neng said the voice was indistinct, the wind of heaven was blowing strong today from the other side, and the lampshades above the table began to swing, so moving shadows crossed to and fro across the audience.
But now Sylphia Tate was moaning and twitching and a kind of white mist was coming from her mouth and ears, and forming in front of her into a shape, no, two shapes.
‘Ectoplasm,’ said George. ‘Gossamer and a draught. Look beneath the table.’ It was hard to see because of the dimmed lights and the fog of smoke and oil fumes. There was a disturbance in the audience. Someone had fainted.
‘They pay someone to do that,’ said George.
But Ivy’s heart was beginning to pound. On stage two shapes were beginning to form, a man and a woman. One was the tall craggy impression of Edwin Hedleigh, the other was that of little Mrs Hedleigh, both misty and dissolving and reshaping as clouds do, and cartoon versions at that; but them, nevertheless, her employers come back to take her with them to where they had gone, for the sin of going with George and letting them burn to death. She wanted to move, to flee, but she was paralysed. Others were also making for the doors.
Someone was screaming. The reedy voice turned into a croak. ‘Fire! Fire!’ and flames seemed to leap from Mrs Tate’s mouth.
‘Camphor,’ said George. ‘Take two parts of aquavite to one each of quicksilver and liquid styrax and set a match. Flames appear but do not burn. A simple trick. Our Professor showed us in the lab. For a moment even I was convinced. It’s the fumes in here. Shall we go?’
‘Stand back, stand back,’ Hui Neng was saying to the ceiling, as if to unseen spirits crowding in. ‘So many of you! Such a busy time.’
On the stage Hui Neng himself seemed alarmed. His voice squeaked like chalk on slate.
‘Death comes unannounced. The Avenging Angel. Death comes by flame and smoke. No, no.’ Now his voice was guttural again: a voice from hell. Mrs Tate was back, jerking and fitting away, leaning back stiffly.
George and Ivy made for the door.
‘But that was them,’ wept Ivy. ‘The Hon. Rev. and his missus.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said George. ‘The Rectory fire made quite a stir. They study the local papers when they arrive at a town, and pull something like this. One tall man, one short woman, easy. She’s pretty good, Mrs Sylphia Tate, I’ll say that for her. Two and six a head and they’re making a fortune. If there was someone like Adela on the platform we could charge three shillings – and they’d line up.’
‘Rather her than me,’ said Ivy, pulling herself together. ‘But I can’t say I like it. Too spooky.’
‘Then we’ll make the voices come from heaven not hell, and charge three and six. You’re married to a genius, Ivy.’
‘Not quite yet,’ she said.
The Illusionist’s Shop was still open, up the poor end of Milsom Street, and they went in together and bought some castanets, a guitar, some black paint, some gossamer and a rubber hand with a stout clip on the wrist and rubber fingers, and when George said it was for private work the shopkeeper came forward with a novelty number from America, a little miniature fan run by a battery. The whole lot came to fifteen pounds, eight and thruppence and George said it was cheap at the price, and Ivy paid up happily. But it did all seem somehow grubby as a collection of purchases, especially the rubber hand.
George slipped next door to the chemist, where he bought a bottle of chloroform and some gauze pads but Ivy didn’t know that.
Minnie’s Condition
Mrs Flower at the post office telephoned through to the station master at Brighton to tell him that the 10.00 train needed to make a detour and stop at Dilberne Halt. The fifth Earl of Dilberne had sold the land to the Brighton Railway Company in 1835 on condition that the train stopped at the Halt whenever so required by any occupier of Dilberne Court. Reginald drove Lady Minnie and Lady Rosina to Dilberne Halt, where they caught the 10.25 train to London at 10.30. They were on their way to see Lady Isobel. Minnie had news, good and bad, for her mother-in-law: Rosina wanted to get in some shopping and go to a debating club the following evening when Mr Gilbert Chesterton was rumoured to appear, and William Butler Yeats, over from Ireland. It seemed that Rosina was in correspondence with Seebohm Rowntree and he was coming down to London to attend – it was to be an argument between the rationalists and the idealists – but Minnie was not to let her mother know.
‘He is a happily married man,’ Rosina was at pains to tell Minnie, ‘it is a meeting of minds, that is all.’
‘In that case,’ said Minnie, ‘perhaps I could go with you?’
‘It is in Bedford Park,’ said Rosina, ‘one of the new garden suburbs, and the houses are all pebble-dashed with peculiar chimneys: it’s very writery – and I don’t think it will suit you at all. You have to get there by steam train and you are in a certain condition and I’m sure once Mama knows she will not let you go anywhere at all.’
‘Then I will go first and tell her afterwards,’ said Minnie. She had heard of Bedford Park; there was a school of art and Pissarro had lived there and T. M. Rooke still did, the famous artist who knew Ruskin and had worked with Burne-Jones. ‘We will spend two nights away.’
‘Papa and Mama are there with only a couple of servants,’ objected Rosina. ‘It is a great deal of trouble for them.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Rosina,’ said Minnie. ‘I promise not to overhear whatever you say to this Seebohm of yours, and not tell a word to anyone if I do.’
‘We will be talking about rural poverty, that is all,’ said Rosina, then added, ‘more’s the pity,’ and smiled. She had a pretty smile, and when she used it, thought Minnie, looked ten years younger.
Minnie asked what the name of the club was and Rosina replied the I.D.K. debating society.
‘What’s I.D.K.?’ asked Isobel.
‘The I Don’t Know debating club. When anyone asks you for the password you say I.D.K. and they let you in.’
‘Then nothing in the world will stop me going,’ said Minnie.
Mrs Neville had packed a lunch hamper, but they decided they would far rather eat in the Pullman restaurant car, so they found an empty third-class carriage and decanted the packed lunch – hard-boiled eggs and ham; butter, cheese and rolls; and apple pasties and ginger cookies especially for Minnie – onto the bench and left it there for the next lucky passenger, and made their way to the restaurant car. No one would know. They felt very delinquent and very happy. Now Minnie was resigned to her condition, she had stopped feeling sick. She put it down to crystallized ginger.
The good news that Minnie planned to give her mother-in-law was that a baby was on its way: the bad news, from the doctor, was that it was likely to arrive in the last week of June and that it would be unwise for Minnie to attend the Coronation.
His Lordship Passes By
His Lordship knocked on the Lord High Steward’s door. Accommodation for his Grace the Duke of Marlborough had now been made in the Offices of the Lord Great Chamberlain in Buck House, the Marquess of Ancaster being even less busy than usual. It was a rather splendid room overlooking the Gallery: nicely if rather eccentrically furnished as a drawing room, with white lace curtains, plump crimson chairs and sofas, some darkish landscapes of rocks and storm clouds, heavily framed ornate mirrors and a couple of potted palm trees, but the whole dominated by a great mahogany desk, as if everything that had not fitted in the rest of the house had ended up here because there was nowhere else for it to go. A small light voice told him to come in, and he found Consuelo seated behind the desk, rather briskly sorting papers, her plentiful black hair piled on top of the little head, fixed by a couple of Spanish-looking combs, and her frail body and slender neck dwarfed by the size of the desk.
‘Oh Consuelo,’ Robert said, ‘I hoped to see you, but I thought Sunny would be here.’
‘Sunny is off lunching with William Waldorf Astor, who is immensely rich and immensely powerful and even more miserable than Sunny, but we need him on our side because of his magazines, so at this very minute I daresay Sunny will be chomping through roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at the Carlton Club. Poor Monsieur Escoffier, he creates these wonderful dishes, but has to cook for all these people who will only ever eat what they were given at Eton. He may have better luck with William, of course, who is American, and so will favour hamburgers, but at least spent some of his childhood in Italy, and of course the King, who never went to school at all, is always partial to something new. They say the King learnt his love of sauces when he was the Prince of Wales and he and Lily Langtry used to frequent the Savoy, where Escoffier worked until they fired him and César Ritz for stealing fine wines. You did not know that? It had to be hush-hush because chefs know only too much about where the bodies are hidden. So Robert, no Sunny today, you will have to put up with me.’
She seemed very nervous, thought Robert. Chattering on, as if to fill an awkward space, to give time to a lover hidden in the bedroom cupboard to slip away. Or indeed, as a woman chatters on when waiting for the lover to make the first move, holding him with her eyes.
‘The King assured poor Sunny that Lord High Steward is a purely honorific title but of course it is not. It turns out to be his duty to see to everything that other people are likely to forget. The Earl Marshal is too old to remember a thing, likewise the Archbishop of Canterbury. There will be four hundred peers and peeresses in the Abbey and four thousand ordinary people. So many what ifs. Like what will happen if it rains? Where will everyone’s umbrellas go? If someone runs out of the crowd waving a gun? If the red carpets have been eaten by moths when they are taken out of storage? If Astor’s Pall Mall Gazette digs up some real scandal about the Old Queen? Luckily I am very good at what if’s. Do come in, Robert, and sit down. And it might be wise to shoot the lock on the door, so no one walks in on us. Then pour yourself a drink. No, don’t ring for the servant, they will only talk if they find us alone together. Pour it yourself. A man alone in a room with a woman always causes talk, even though I am known to be above suspicion. Indeed, it is because I am above suspicion, and no breath of scandal ever touches me, that others long to blow me away on winds of disgrace. One must always be on one’s guard. But no one ever comes in here. We are quite safe.’
Robert could see he had a choice, either to go, which might seem rather rude – the little light charming voice, with its faint American overtones, seemed in no hurry to fall silent – or to shoot the lock on the door and pour himself a drink.
He did the latter.
‘Robert, I would like some whisky too,’ so he poured her one – but was not whisky a man’s drink? – and added a little water and she came out from behind the desk and looked up at him, and then sank down in one the armchairs. Her dress was very proper, high-necked and long-sleeved, a dark red which seemed to match the chair: its sides rose up on either side to frame her. She looked up at him, and her eyelashes were very dark against the clear pale skin of her cheeks. There was a glittery belt around her tiny waist. She seemed breakable, and very young. She sipped her drink not as a man drinks from a glass, straightforwardly, but with the hand curled round it, as if it were something precious but forbidden to be savoured in secret. Their secret.
‘You and Arthur,’ she said, ‘two men to depend upon! I so love Arthur. He is one of my truest friends. Such a fine disembodied spirit. Pure, logical, like listening to Bach. Those blue eyes, that immense distinction; transcendent, spiritual. But disembodied, Robert. That’s the trouble. Disemb
odied.’
Quite suddenly she sounded immensely sad, and started to sing in her little light voice, but as if she were singing to herself. The voice hardly escaped from the confines of the tall wings of the chair. He had to crane to listen.
I leaned my back against an oak
Thinking it were a trusty tree,
But first he bended and then he broke,
Thus did my love prove false to me . . .
‘Oh Consuelo,’ said Robert, before he could stop himself, ‘what happened?’
She sang:
Oh love is handsome and love is kind,
Bright as a jewel when first it’s new,
But love grows old and waxes cold
And fades away like the morning dew.
‘That’s what happened,’ she said. ‘Love fades away like morning dew. The thing about you, Robert, is that you’re not disembodied. Bright as a jewel! Do you like my hair combs? Lalique; enamel and sapphires. A real find.’
‘True, I am not disembodied, very much not so. I am a married man and twice your age. And yes, I like the combs very much. And the belt. Are those sapphires too?’
‘Ah yes but very rare, they’re pink; shaped like acanthus flowers linking the gold medallions. Fabergé. Sunny gave them to me last time we were in Moscow. They were far too expensive but of course only a tenth of what he spent tiling acres of roof at Blenheim, at my father’s expense. I could have bought them myself but it’s nice to be given things.’ She asked for more whisky. It seemed the least he could give her; he poured her more, a little more than seemed reasonable, and for himself too.
He should not have mentioned the belt. It drew attention to the gold medallions round the waist and the waist was so little. Robert pulled himself together. He was not quite sure what was happening, but he did his best to be businesslike, and remember the purpose of his errand. ‘Consuelo, I came to ask you a favour. You very kindly gave me three spare invitations to the Coronation, to sit amongst the peers.’ He stayed standing. His instinct was to kneel in supplication in front of her.
