The Bohemian Girl

by Frances Vernon

Lady Blentham never had any difficulties with her servants, even though she was not able to pay the highest wages. She considered it vulgar to discuss servants’ failings. She had told Violet, though not Diana, that they would work well and stay if given good living quarters and treated with considerate but firm authority. That, she said, was all that mattered. Diana assumed she was perfectly right, but the system did not work with her cook-general. She felt rather a fool when giving instructions about how to buy food economically, because it was an art which she had so recently learnt herself from Michael’s kind, snobbish, former landlady.

  Life in the old lodgings had not been serious, it had consisted only of learning and playing and love. Michael had barely worked at all. Things were to be different in Mornington Terrace, where Diana was drifting down into peaceful sediment, having been shaken up and down in a champagne bottle ever since the spring.

  On the day after her marriage, Diana had written to tell her parents that she was safe, happy and married, and that she would soon send her address so that they could write to her. This she had now done, and she knew that they would have to look Mornington Terrace up on the map. She had had no letter from them in a fortnight, but one had come today, and it was from Arthur Cornwallis.

  My dear Diana, he had written,

  I was nearly as distressed as your dear mamma when I learnt of your marriage, and naturally, I blame myself in part. I have, I think, succeeded in persuading her that not in a hundred years would I have encouraged you to become so wretchedly entangled, as Violet seems to have done. My fatal, wicked desire for entertainment!

  Enough of this. I have been speaking hitherto from my worldly standpoint, but I most sincerely pray for your happiness, my dear, and in fact, there are moments when I think the social milieu you have chosen may suit you very well – so long as you are not too distressingly poor. I know that you will never pine and complain, and make life very much worse for yourself in so doing. Love does not invariably lead to personal disaster – only to social setbacks, shall we say?

  Perhaps you will think me too horribly condescending, if I say that I shall do all I can to advance Michael’s career, now that he has so wickedly caught you, my dear. As you know, his earnings are very irregular, and the money he occasionally receives from devoted maternal relations cannot amount to much. Money he must have, and there is but one way for an artist to gain it – not by way of the Turf.

  He must prostitute himself, alas. He must do his best to become a fashionable painter, that is, one who paints portraits of vain women in just the style they like. À la Sargent, need I say. A faint suggestion of flow, but no hint of impressionism – a glorying in rich silks – a hint of mystery, and not mere beauty, in the faces of his more intelligent subjects. Of course there can be no mystery about such subjects’ faces for the most part.

  Diana laid down the letter and looked at the half-finished pictures lining the walls. She had made a discovery since her move, and Michael, before she spoke, had accused her of making it and confessed that she was right.

  He would never make a great, innovative painter. The work he liked to produce was in a very advanced style, in which splotches of strange colour were used to enhance the immediacy of an evening, morning or lamplit interior. Painted with his hand, these bright shadows did not produce the impression that the subjects were living persons with hidden depths.

  Michael was humble about the artists who succeeded in doing what he longed to do, but he was often angry too. He said that there was only one English artist worthy of consideration: Joseph Mallord William Turner. Some French moderns approached his genius. He, Michael, was at the bottom of the heap. When depressed, he would drink whisky by the half-pint, and invite his least reputable Irish friends to insult his paintings and himself. Then Diana, thinking that it was easy enough to be Patient Grizelda, would comfort him.

  Cornwallis’s letter continued:

  One never knows, my dear, what will take in this world of ours. Of course a great many people don’t wish for portraits, not even the most sugary nonsense, they only wish to be painted and have it known they were painted by the most presentable and expensive Academician to be had. Michael’s talent however is real, though not what he likes to think it in his moments of high optimism. In short, he may turn out a more than competent portraitist, admired and commissioned though never, I think, highly fashionable with the great and the good.

  Very few people besides myself will like to entertain him, but my dear, one never knows. In time your marriage may prove a distinct advantage to him, and your romance, skilfully presented, may help him to gain and you to regain just as large a footing in ‘Society’ as you desire – no more, no less. Your birth and his talent together may produce all manner of marvels. If only it were not for his Fenian connections! But as dear Lady Blentham says, Society is declining at such a rate that it may soon enough be considered that it is delightfully amusing to be a suspected – how shall I put it?

  I think I may be able to persuade the correct authorities to hang Michael’s portrait of Mrs Baring-Wilder’s charming children (that is the style I mean. He knows full well he is a master of it, though he insults it – so rightly! But he was glad enough to be commissioned) in next year’s Academy exhibition. Do not, I beg of you, permit Michael to inveigh against the wickedness of further corrupting his art.

  Our unfortunate friend may have said of Mr Frith’s great memorial, was it really all done by hand – but there is not the least likelihood of your Michael’s ending either as a latter-day Frith, or as poor dear Oscar did, to be sure. I have the oddest feeling that hard work at hack portraits will paradoxically improve Michael’s real work.

  I have the highest regard for you and for Michael, and believe me when I say that, though I was perfectly horrified by the story of your elopement, I shall never have the impertinence to ‘cut’ either of you as I believe your unamiable sister-in-law was ill-bred enough to do in Regent St. She shall receive no more invitations from Mabel.

  Both of us, my dear, send our love. Mabel adds, I may say, that there is no use crying over spilt milk. An expression of wisdom none the worse for being used by servants.

  Yours in the best of good faith, Arthur Cornwallis.

  The letter’s tone angered Diana, but there were parts of it which softened her.

  She knew that Michael must do more or less what Cornwallis said, and she meant to talk to him about it. She had no intention of going into places where it would occur to people to cut her: the memory of that world sickened her, and she wanted only to live on it, never inside it. Occasionally, it seemed to her remarkable that this view of hers had not been modified in the course of three whole months of marriage and Bohemia.

  Diana sat down, opposite Michael’s charcoal sketch of herself in the nude, and thought about her meeting with Kitty in Regent’s Street two weeks ago.

  She, Diana, had been wearing her new style of clothes: fashionable enough in cut, but without whalebone or padding, or hot bands encircling her neck and wrists. Now she wore only one petticoat, and when she went out, low shoes and an old boater hat. A combination, she supposed, looking back, of the Aesthetic Lady of the previous decade and the New Woman of today. To Kitty, dressed with absolute propriety in clothes buttoned tightly over every curve, Diana had looked like one trying to ape a street-urchin from her native Commercial Road.

  Diana, walking along and carrying a parcel, had called up to Kitty sitting in her borrowed landau with a hat-box at her feet. Kity had looked at her, turned aside, and spoken to her son, Diana’s eldest nephew. He had been sitting in the corner with his back to the horses, complaining loudly about the treat of being taken out in Mamma’s carriage.

  Diana had laughed. ‘Do call on us in Mornington Terrace, Kitty – we shall be moving there pretty shortly, you know. Come and see your Aunt Diana, Frankie!’

  She had attracted attention, one man had recognised her, and it had been one of the finest moments of her life. Diana closed her eyes now, a
nd remembered swaggering down to Piccadilly Circus with her brown-paper parcel in her arms. It had been delightful to be young and notorious, yet protected, full of virtue unrecognised by the world.

  Looking once more at the charcoal portrait, Diana let a few angry tears fall out of her eyes. Soon, she hoped, she would have a baby. She wanted a girl, and she would call her Alice, after Alice in Wonderland and Alice Bateman, her nurse: who now no longer remembered her birthdays.

  *

  That evening, Michael returned from some race Diana had never heard of, and threw a wallet of gold sovereigns into her lap. He also presented her with a necklace made of delicate links, from which hung silver-framed moonstones the colour of unthreatening summer cloud.

  ‘Michael!’

  ‘I backed the first outsider whose name I liked and it won by a head. Fifty to one, Diana!’ Michael looked like a boy reciting poems as he said this.

  ‘How much did you stake? What was the horse’s name?’ she said, handling the necklace, which could not be worth more than thirty shillings, but which she thought the prettiest she had ever seen.

  ‘Wearer of the Green, is the answer to your last question.’

  ‘Of course!’ She laughed, and after a pause said: ‘Goodness, what a lot of money. Darling, how much did you stake?’

  ‘Ten quid merely, my dear Diana.’

  ‘Michael, promise me …’

  His sudden frown came down on his face. ‘Never to gamble and game again, is it? My lady Blentham’s warnings and the Reverend Roderick’s sermons again, is it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so unfair. I just want you to promise never to bet more than ten pounds – if we can afford it.’

  ‘I’ll promise,’ he said, picking up his wallet and throwing the coins at her one by one, glowering all the while. ‘Now, have I been extravagant, Diana? Have I wasted the ready? Are we going to end in the workhouse, then?’

  ‘Just when I was a trifle worried about the bill for bedroom china,’ said Diana, fending them off. ‘Do you know, a man, a dun, came round the other day and was quite rude to me?’

  ‘Was he, by God!’ said Michael, looking rather like Lord Blentham.

  ‘I saw him off, Michael, but it was rather unpleasant,’ she told him.

  ‘There’s my brave girl,’ he said, squeezing her shoulder. ‘But it won’t happen again, that I promise.’

  ‘Oh well, it happens a good deal, to people like us, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I won’t have tradesmen importuning you with their rubbish,’ said Michael with his hands in his pockets. Diana smiled, but he ignored it. ‘They’re to come straight to me – when they’ve anything to complain of, which won’t be often. I’ll tell the girl. Or whoever we have in her place. Yes, I don’t want a char,’ said Michael.

  Quite suddenly Diana suffered one of her rare panics, which would spin her for a few unreal moments round the pivot called but this is for life.

  Michael saw her dead expression, and took her in his arms. ‘Come, I want to take you to bed – don’t take off that necklace. Ah, I knew how well it would suit you.’ He kissed her until lust overcame her, and then said: ‘Ah, passion’s the thing, damn you.’

  When they had made love, and eaten the cook-general’s liver and bacon, Diana drew the curtains in the sitting-room, and showed her husband Cornwallis’s letter. Michael tore it up after one reading, then pieced it together like a jig-saw on the table. He examined it, while Diana stroked the cat and looked at the crowded bookshelves in the space between the windows. Next week they were to give their first party, to several of Michael’s friends whom she did not know very well, and she wondered whether to ask Cornwallis.

  He would find this house amusing, for Diana thought most of its interior falsely artistic, rather old-fashioned, and even faintly vulgar. The previous owner had put up a dado of tulips, and wallpaper designed by Morris, and the fireplace was made of black iron and lined with china tiles. The Molloys had bought little furniture so far, and in this sitting-room their few pieces looked over-important, set against the dark patches on the blue carpet and the wallpaper where once there had been low bamboo stands, pictures and Japanese fans. The chairs, table and tallboy they had bought were all Queen Anne, like the Cornwallises’, but they were scuffed, country-made pieces of furniture, not good of their kind. Diana was determined to imitate nobody, though she knew that conscious originality was to be despised. She had put some large cushions down on the floor for comfort and economy’s sake, and this was an arrangement she had never seen before.

  She sighed, then suddenly remembered that Michael had been angry enough with Cornwallis to tear the letter up. Yet she had quite forgotten him. She felt frivolous, and too young.

  ‘Intolerable,’ said Michael.

  Diana got up from her cushion. ‘I know,’ she said, fingering her new necklace. ‘But do you think – possibly – there’s another side to the case?’ She put her arm round him, and waited.

  ‘Oh, I know he means well! But he knows nothing – nothing about us, you may be sure – it’s clear he didn’t even expect you to show this to me.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he did.’

  ‘Expected you to be a cunning little wife and use your wiles to get your own way, damn him. And I’m painting no more flash portraits of anyone, not now I’ve got you. I’m obliged to him for all he’s done for me, putting me in Mrs Wilder’s way, and others’, but from now on I’m not footling around, Diana. Oh, I’ll support you, and I won’t quarrel with Cornwallis because I can’t damn well afford to, but I’ll ask him please to recommend me as a drawing-master to young ladies of his acquaintance. That’s how I’ll earn enough.’

  ‘But dear one – Fierce Fenian Seducer –’ Diana said, ‘just think. Your marriage to me has put that quite out of the question, beyond the pale. Do remember!’

  ‘Under a false name, I mean,’ said Michael, who failed to laugh at the oddest moments. He was scowling now.

  ‘Oh, darling! Yes, Arthur might be amused – why not? Oh, it would be amusing. And you’d be so good.’ She watched him.

  ‘Would it, indeed? I suppose so. Oh, you have a sense of humour, Diana, a neat little English girl’s sense of the amusing.’ He looked at her with his mouth twisted, making Diana love him as though he were a child. He was remembering the suit of Rational Dress which he had once sent her. ‘Raphael Macallan from Glasgow, that’s who I’ll be – Digby will be able to recommend a Scottish school for me to have gone to – no, no, it will be better to stick to Paris and M. Clement’s atelier, won’t it? That should impress the ladies, indeed. A grain of truth strengthens any lie you please, as my uncle who was hanged was used to say to me. Ah, Diana.’

  Diana’s slight anxiety vanished. Michael took hold of her shoulders, and she noticed for the hundredth time how unusually pale he was and how, when he flushed, the colour took only on his jawbone and round his eyes. ‘Diana, I’m going to be a great painter, if it’s at all within my power. I’m not wasting any energy on rubbish fools will think grand.’ He paused. ‘I believe you have the power to make me one – to save me from bloody mediocrity. Look at that picture of you, upstairs!’

  ‘It’s good, Michael.’ She looked down at his waistcoat.

  At that moment, the maid came in, snuffling and holding a letter on a tray. ‘This came for yer by the afternoon post, mum – I forgot it.’

  ‘Thank you, Eliza!’ said Diana crossly. The handwriting was Lady Blentham’s: Diana put it in her pocket before Michael could say anything. With her heart beating fast, she told him: ‘We’ll be happy – so much happier than others – even when we cease to be passionate as all married people do – because we have no illusions, even though we’re in love.’

  He said: ‘My noble wife,’ and he vowed not to bet, drink, or run up debts, and never to hit Diana in one of the hot little quarrels which they so much enjoyed. She was so very beautiful, and cleverer than he was, and the most truly sexual woman he had ever known. ‘I’m not good enough for you but
I’ll make you good enough for me.’

  He compared Diana daily with his dead mother who had adored him, with his loud father, and with his skinny sister, Eileen: but he did not talk to his wife about his family, it was as though that would be to contaminate her when she loved him for himself alone.

  Eileen had regarded him as an immoral person and one to be despised ever since their father, whose favourite she was, had been able to send her as a day-girl to the local convent school of the Sacred Heart. His father, who had taught him to read, write and keep double-entry books, had considered Michael too sinful and shrewd to benefit from a religious education. Michael thought himself sinful, but in the grand manner.

  CHAPTER 11

  ONE YEAR LATER

  The Blenthams and Montroses gradually mended their quarrel over Diana’s marriage, and who was responsible for what, in a series of letters and meetings in London. For a long time they did not go to each others’ houses except for parties, but met privately at Gunters’ and the Ritz, in Brooks’s and at the House of Lords.

  It was not until November 1897 that all except Kitty gathered together at Dunstanton. They meant to assure themselves and each other that the matter was closed, and also to reassign small portions of blame. Then they would be a good family once more: for the public scandal had long since faded, and Diana was forgotten.

  On the day the Montroses were coming down to Kent, Maud found an announcement on the front page of The Times, and read it out to her parents after breakfast. Diana had had a daughter without any of them knowing.

  Late that afternoon, when Violet and Walter were newly arrived, and were seated with the others at the end of the Long Gallery, Maud came in with the paper in her hand. She held it up to her spectacles, as Violet continued to chat about London and the trains from Scotland.

  ‘I just went out to fetch this … please listen.’ They were all silent, and her parents and her brothers stirred their tea. ‘“To Diana, wife of Michael Molloy, a daughter, Alice Maria.” Isn’t it most interesting news? I had an idea that it was rather vulgar to put one’s child’s name in the announcement,’ she said, which showed she was not as dull as her family thought her. ‘At least, at one time I thought it was rather democratic.’