The Bohemian Girl

by Frances Vernon

  ‘Now, my love, I’m sure your headache is better. Come down to the morning-room and join us,’ said Angelina.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and there would be no callers, or entertainment of any kind: thus it was quite permissible for Diana to be downstairs. Lord Blentham would be present, for he refrained from going to one of his clubs on a Sunday. The girls would spend their time reading and sewing and playing illicit Patience; while Lady Blentham generally looked at The Christian Year or Idylls of the King, and mused over the past and coming weeks of well-managed events.

  Diana followed her mother downstairs and there, just as she had expected, she found Maud reading Fabian Essays, which had already occupied her for two months, her father asleep, and Violet fidgeting over a new novel from Mudies’. Lady Blentham did not reach for The Christian Year, but took a hank of wool from the bottom drawer of her bureau and asked Diana to hold it while she wound it into a ball.

  They sat in silence for a while, all looking more or less unhappy, listening to the ticking of the grandmother clock and the tiny click of driven rain upon the glass in the windows. Then they heard noise in the hall, a door banging, the butler’s murmur, and the loud voice of Edward. The Blenthams revived.

  Edward Blentham was twenty-seven, and at the beginning of this London Season he had horrified his family by quitting the Army three weeks after gaining his captaincy in the Coldstream Guards. He now lived alone in very expensive rooms off St James’s Street, and his parents were worried both by his extravagance and by the inefficient taste he had always shown for literature and the arts. Like Maud, he had inherited Lady Blentham’s fine-boned beauty, but like her also, he could not make others see that he was a strikingly handsome person. He was fair and slender, with an aquiline nose, a brief moustache, a sharp expression, light-blue eyes and quickly-moving lips and eyebrows. His complexion was slightly ruddy, like his father’s, and in secret, he blamed this defect on army life.

  ‘Well, Mater! Father – hullo, girls,’ Edward said, walking into the room and pulling Diana’s hair-ribbon. He wore a morning coat, and his very well-brushed hair had been faintly disturbed by the removal of his hat.

  ‘This is a surprise, Edward,’ said Lady Blentham, continuing to wind her wool. ‘Surely you have more amusing things to do than visit us on a Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Nothin’ at all, Mater.’ When Edward was a child, Angelina had so adored him that she had feared herself guilty of idolatry.

  ‘It is nice to see you,’ said Violet.

  Lord Blentham woke ostentatiously, got to his feet, and went to stand with his back to the fire. He eyed his son, who two days ago had broken an appointment to meet him at Brooks’s for a glass of madeira and a little chat, and said: ‘Very nice, I must say, Edward.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Edward, spreading his coat-tails and sitting down behind a miniature palm-tree, ‘I thought it best to come today, as I knew you’d all be at home, no Sunday callers. I’ve got some rather important news, don’t you know.’

  ‘Edward …’ Lady Blentham smiled, for she was suddenly hopeful, though she could not quite think why or for what. ‘What is it, good news? Perhaps you mean to travel?’

  Edward twirled his knobbly cane, and put his head on one side to gaze at it, so that his collar cracked. He had always been a man of fashion, ever since he left school. ‘Fact is, I came to tell you that I got married quite recently. I thought you ought to know.’

  There was silence for several moments, until one of the terriers began to yap and had to be shushed by Maud. Violet was the first to speak.

  ‘Teddy dear, who to? To whom, I mean? You can’t really be married! Goodness, why didn’t you have us as bridesmaids? I do think it’s unkind!’

  ‘Be quiet, Violet!’ said Angelina. She looked at her husband, then said: ‘Girls, I think you had better leave us. You’ll learn about – this marriage of your brother’s in due course, I don’t doubt, but he ought not to have made such an announcement in front of you. Your father and I must decide what is to be done.’ She stopped, and fixed her eyes on them.

  Maud, Violet and Diana slowly prepared to leave, and they all looked equally resentful. Diana thought that if she were Maud’s age, she would not submit to Mamma’s pieces of arbitrary tyranny no matter how much she loved her.

  Suddenly, their father said: ‘I don’t see why they should. If Edward’s married, it’s a great pity they can’t be bridesmaids at the wedding, but his marriage does concern them, after all, and we’ve no reason yet to believe it’s a scandalous affair, Angelina!’

  Angelina sat back in her chair, glanced at Diana, and shook her head at her daughters with a sad, angry smile.

  ‘Just so, Pater,’ said Edward, adjusting his monocle.

  ‘Well, Edward, who is this fortunate young woman?’ said Charles, with his hands behind his back, swaying gently back and forth in front of the fire in a way he usually considered to be rather pompous, a habit suitable for a certain type of judge, a comfortable tradesman, or an ambitious politician from the middle class.

  ‘Well, her name used to be Kitty Dupree,’ said Edward.

  ‘Oh… Miss Kitty Dupree? An actress, ain’t she? At the Gaiety at one time, I believe?’ He spoke very quietly. Though his son did not know it, Charles enjoyed the Gaiety burlesques, and had even met the theatre’s manager, John Hollingshead, and liked him.

  Edward jumped. ‘She did start off at the Gaiety, perfectly correct, Pater, but latterly, don’t you know, she’s been with D’Oyly Carte, at the Savoy – sang in nearly every one of theirs since Iolanthe. And she was dashed good as one of the three little maids in The Mikado. You took Maud to see that, I think, Mater,’ he finished with perfect blandness.

  Lady Blentham was sitting absolutely still.

  ‘She’s been on the stage since she was quite a child, of course.’ Edward paused. ‘She’s only been retired a matter of a few months, in fact. Always supported herself jolly well!’

  ‘And since her retirement?’ said his father. ‘How old is Miss Dupree, by the by?’

  ‘Mrs Edward, don’t you know. We’ve been married since then. Awful long time, I know.’ Edward lit a cigarette with a slightly awkward hand. Kitty Blentham was four years older than himself. ‘But as she says, we can’t keep the thing a secret forever, and this seemed as good a time as any to break the news, what? She’s a charmin’ girl, absolutely sound – full of old-fashioned ideas, Mater, simply refused to come here without your invitation –’

  ‘Edward,’ said Angelina, ‘put out that cigarette! How dare you try to smoke in here? How often have I said that in my house men will use the dining-room – after dinner?’ Everyone stared at her and murmured.

  ‘I say, Mater!’ said Edward.

  Lady Blentham rose from her chair and said something: then suddenly and peacefully fainted, as she had not done since she was a girl at boarding-school with her waist laced down day and night to eighteen inches. Lord Blentham grabbed her, Violet cried: ‘Mamma!’, and both she and Maud slapped her wrists and unbuttoned her collar. Maud’s face ran with slow, unstoppable tears.

  Edward turned his face from the scene and, with his eyes closed, murmured to himself one of Kitty’s favourite songs from Princess Ida:

  Politics we bar

  They are not our bent

  On the whole we are

  Not intelligent.

  He beat time and bit his lip, longing for his mother to come to her senses, and wondering whether her swoon was put on.

  Diana, who had run out to call for Lady Blentham’s maid and smelling salts, came back into the morning-room. ‘I suppose you think you’re very brave, Teddy,’ she said quietly to her brother. She looked a little over-excited, and ashamed.

  ‘Actually, I s’pose I do.’ They looked at each other with dislike; then Diana smiled.

  ‘I don’t think it’s awfully brave to tell Mamma in front of us. I expect Papa will want to see you alone?’

  ‘Didie, you’re a very impe
rtinent, tiresome little girl,’ said Edward, removing his monocle and replacing it.

  ‘Well,’ she whispered in a hurry, seeing that her mother was coming round, ‘no doubt it’s very – very romantic to marry an actress!’

  Maud, still crying silently, left the room unnoticed.

  *

  Kitty Dupree, the Hon. Mrs Edward Blentham, was wide-hipped and full-bosomed, but so short and small-boned and dark that it had been easy to mistake her for a real Japanese when she was playing Pitti-Sing in The Mikado. Her real name was Ellen Rosenthal; but she was only one quarter Jewish, for her paternal grandfather had married a Gentile, and his son’s wife, Kitty’s mother, had been of French descent. Edward Blentham had never believed that his wife’s stage name was her true one, though at first she had told him it was. He had not minded her lying to him when he first knew her, for the truth about her origin did not really interest him. He was only concerned with the fact that she was a very pretty, clever little woman who loved him.

  When she told him some of the truth about her background, saying that her mother was a Huguenot, whose silk-weaving family had once owned one of the best houses in Folegate Street, Spitalfields, and that, though her father was a tailor, one of her great-great-grandfathers had been a professor at the university of Heidelberg, Edward did not believe her. He smiled indulgently at her, and preferred to think that she was a pure London urchin, even though she did not talk like one. Edward imagined that he would spread many different rumours about Kitty round London, when his marriage was known. Her own story would do for one, but he would tell some of his more liberal-theoried friends that she was a workhouse child, others that she was part Lascar, and more that she was the natural daughter of some distantly hinted-at eminent man.

  Kitty did not introduce Edward to any of her relations, most of whom disapproved of her being on the stage and thought that only trouble could come of her marriage to a peer’s son, if her marriage was a true one at all and he was not a deceiver. She knew that her people would have to be dropped, and Edward quite agreed with her.

  Sometimes Kitty herself could not wholly believe in her marriage. This was partly because it was of course so extraordinary that she, Nellie Rosenthal, truly was to be a baroness and the mistress of Dunstanton Park, and partly because, after fifteen years, she had found a man who was not only a peer, who would marry her, but a darling boy whom she could adore. There was a third and slightly less agreeable reason for her irrational doubt: Kitty had spent these first six months of her marriage living more like a mistress than a wife.

  She did not share Edward’s rooms off St James’s Street, but lived in a rented house in Brompton Square which was considerably drearier than most kept mistresses’ establishments. It was the financial strain of keeping two places in London on a bachelor’s allowance which, a few days ago, had enabled Kitty to persuade her husband that it was time, at last, for his family to know.

  Kitty studied her face in the bedroom mirror and narrowed her eyes, as she waited for Edward’s return from Queen Anne’s Gate, and imagined the Blenthams all together. She was wearing a silk dressing-gown over elaborate stays, and as she brushed her hair she sang, with the impertinent air of doubt her husband loved:

  Hearts just as pure and fair

  May beat in Belgrave Square

  As in the lowly air

  Of Seven Dials.

  Then she stuck her tongue out at the mirror and said: ‘Ya!’ Such vulgarities did not come quite naturally to her, but they were amusing.

  Kitty’s face was often called amusing, enchanting, impish, but above all lovely. Edward said she looked quite deliciously the girl of the period. She had little parted lips, discreetly noticeable white teeth, very big tilted hazel eyes, and waving hair which was almost black. Her nose was retroussé, her chin pointed, and her only fault was a slightly sallow complexion which a dab of rouge could entirely cure. She photographed very well, and she favoured big elaborate dresses, ostrich feathers and furs, for such things made her look like a wonderfully promising girl-child, although she was thirty-one.

  Suddenly as she was twisting her hair up, a flicker of evening sunlight made Kitty lean forward and examine her face in detail. There was a tiny, soft crack between her nostril and the corner of her mouth: another two under her eyes. She looked up fearfully at the photograph of herself in white lace which had once been publicly for sale. It had been taken nine years ago at a high point in her career, before she quarrelled with the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. Kitty tried to think that she had not aged at all; then remembered that she was very good for her age in spite of her little lines of character, and that she was married and retired besides.

  Just as she was thinking that one day she might miss the stage, which was by no means so immoral as Lady Blentham thought, else she would never have become an actress in the first place, Edward opened the door.

  He startled Kitty, and when she looked up, she thought he looked ridiculously startled too. ‘Well, Teddy my love?’ she said. ‘How was it, then?’

  ‘Dear little Kitty,’ he said, ‘dear little girl.’ Edward sat down on the bed, removed his monocle, and sighed. His face was pale.

  Kitty watched him for a few moments, then said: ‘Well, before we talk, you can help me dress. That’s what I’m going to wear tonight, and you can button me down the back.’

  ‘How soothin’ you are,’ said Edward, as he rose to obey her. ‘But I don’t think I can face the thought of Frascati’s tonight. Besides,’ he added dully, ‘it ain’t time just yet to dress, is it?’

  ‘What, as bad as that?’ said Kitty, seeing his expression. She paused. ‘Well, good Lord! Come, Teddy, didn’t we agree to celebrate your telling them, whatever the outcome? A brave stand, my boy! Our first appearance as a couple!’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Edward, raising loving eyes. He smiled, and reached out for her.

  Kitty pulled her peignoir round her and went to sit firmly beside him on the bed. ‘So they are coming the ugly?’

  ‘Oh, awful. Mater fainted and then refused to say a word. Absolutely. Just said she wouldn’t know you, or bow to you, etc, etc.’ Edward began to look a little better. ‘The fact is, darlin’ one, nothing and no one can remove her deepest native prejudice that every actress is a lady of the night! Mrs Siddons of sacred memory? A courtesan, don’t you know! Our own Miss Terry? Worse and worse!’

  Kitty hissed. She said after a moment, ‘I suppose of course she’s too much of a lady to say such things aloud?’

  ‘What, in front of the girls? My darling!’

  ‘I was never such a bloody fool as to get caught by any man that way,’ said Kitty, very quietly. ‘Presents and promises!’ This was not true. She had been seduced at the age of eighteen.

  ‘Darling, I know. You’re a clever girl and, as Cornwallis says, you do deserve your coronet.’ Cornwallis was Edward’s closest friend; he had been at Oxford with him, but instead of leaving after two years to become a Guards officer had become a literary man and the master of a little literary circle. Long ago, Cornwallis had admired Edward for going into the Army out of boredom with juvenile Oxford.

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Love!’ he cried. ‘Oh darling, not offended? I say!’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really, if you’re sorry.’ She looked at him and waited.

  ‘Awfully sorry. Never sorrier.’

  Kitty patted his knee. ‘Well then, what about your Papa?’

  ‘He says he’ll raise my allowance to fourteen hundred a year.’ This was an increase of five hundred pounds. ‘And pay my debts, you know.’

  ‘Nice old gentleman!’ said Kitty, surprised. She wondered for a moment, then added: ‘Teddy, did you tell him alone first of all?’

  ‘I ought to have done,’ said Edward. ‘But it was so awfully hard to resist the temptation to announce the news in front of Mater and the girls! When Mater left the room – awfully dramatic – he took me into the study. Felt like a s
choolboy.’

  ‘H’m. Wouldn’t it have been better to have told him straight off, and left him to – break the news to your mother?’

  ‘Yes, I know, darling.’

  ‘Oh, you are a foolish boy. What did he say besides?’

  Edward moved further up the bed and Kitty, though she was usually more passionate than he, hoped he would not want to make love just yet. ‘Kitty, I don’t know how we’re to manage on fourteen hundred. The old man knows damn’ well I’ve spent more than that per annum ever since I was at Oxford! Don’t mean he hasn’t been good about paying up once in a while, but now – Kitty, what are we going to do?’

  ‘Well, for a start you’ll give up those lodgings of yours. That’ll be a considerable economy. And then don’t worry: I’ll contrive somehow. Lord, Teddy, when I was a kid my dad thought himself lucky if the shop brought in a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and there was six of us! I know a good deal about keeping house. Now then, what else did he say, darling? We can talk about the money later.’

  Edward sat gazing round the bedroom and holding his wife’s hand. He thought of how, already, she had improved upon the heavy and old-fashioned decoration of this furnished house, with its dark papers and curtains, overstuffed balloon-backed chairs and billiard-cloth carpets. Kitty had bought small things in odd places for surprisingly little money, had somehow quite changed the house’s general effect: she was wholly perfect. As she looked at her distant grey reflection in the dressing-table mirror, Edward laid his head on Kitty’s lap. ‘Darling.’

  ‘Come now, Teddy-love. Tell Kitty.’

  ‘I tried to explain what sort of a girl you are – anyway, he said he was satisfied that I wasn’t such a fool as to be caught by one who was, well, bad, darling. But he didn’t like it.’

  ‘And why not? It’s happened before, our sort of marriage. And may I ask what sort of catch you are for a girl, Mr Blentham, compared to His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge?’