The New Countess

by Fay Weldon

  Fortunately, even Minnie had realized upon inspection that the Gatehouse was scarcely suitable for any family, certainly not for one with servants. He knew what Minnie was up to – his mother had told him she had been asking about the Dower House. But she would soon forget and settle down when she had another baby.

  ‘A gatehouse is such a peculiar building,’ she’d said. ‘An arch with rooms which does nothing but tell you how grand and important it is. This country is so full of the unnecessary.’

  He did not like it when Minnie separated herself out from him by talking about ‘this country’ but he overlooked it. He loved her.

  ‘It would be very useful to me as an office,’ he’d said, and indeed, he realized, it would: just a few hundred yards from the workshops – now a cluster of six – at Isobel’s insistence hidden from the drive by a curtain of trees.

  He would at last have somewhere to put all the papers and blueprints, which as it was, flew about the oily floors and got neglected at best, and rendered unreadable at worst: an office where he could receive business associates properly dressed and with washed hands, where the telephone would be on the desk and not lost beneath a pile of metal on the floor. He would have a properly trained secretary to separate orders from invoices, probably even a female one. Plain, of course; he was a married man and a father and loved his wife, and had a business to run, and no time to waste for the emotional involvements which so preoccupied his friends, even the married ones, let alone energy for the sexual indulgences which made fools of them all.

  ‘I thought perhaps you could have an office in London,’ said Isobel. ‘Surely you could run the business from there?’

  ‘London is a place for gentlemen, not business men,’ he said. ‘And anyway it is too distracting.’

  He meant it, too. He remembered Flora, the girl he had kept in Mayfair before he turned sensible and married Minnie, and what a fool Flora had managed to make of him. Sex was like a good meal, something you wanted most when you couldn’t have it. But now he had Minnie. All the same he could see propinquity could be dangerous; female secretaries could be risky, they were said to be quick, adaptable and competent, but also had the reputation of making themselves most agreeable at first, but then turning out to be predatory blackmailers. Like Flora, of the ample bosom, pretty eyes, and soft, silky, entwining limbs.

  Well, once bitten, twice shy. He would hire a Sussex girl, respectable and plain, even a married one, caught in the gap between marriage and motherhood. To have female staff was the mark of a forward-looking, modern, effective business, not afraid of risk taking.

  Things moved fast after the decision had been made. Tommy was moved out, in spite of his grumblings about age, infirmity and so forth, to live with his nephew in one of the estate cottages, where he would doubtless be more comfortable. Traffic was now so heavy in and out of the Court it was tiresome to have to keep opening and shutting gates. Horses had quite liked stopping for a rest, but the motor traffic of today preferred to just carry on through.

  Isobel had builders moved from the big house, and the Gatehouse was plumbed and wired in no time, the ground-floor room on the right pier was set up as a reception area, the one on the left pier as a little private room for Arthur. It was eccentric but it worked. The long upper room at the top was the office, complete with office desks and neat loud-speakers for quick communication between rooms, filing cabinets, two Hermes typewriters – the secretary might need an assistant – and high-backed office chairs.

  Minnie was happy enough to help Arthur buy furniture for the reception and office areas. Indeed, they’d had a very happy outing to Liberty’s, to buy some small, light, elegant pieces – William Morris, especially designed for small-scale living – and Minnie had chosen a carved Mackmurdo panel in pale elm to nail up over the office door – tree trunks and a recumbent female figure with a breast exposed; which he himself would not have dared put up, but he could see its charms. Minnie was no prude. But when over dinner with the family a couple of days later he asked Minnie to buy a bed for his private room, she burst into tears.

  ‘But what’s the matter?’ he asked, taken aback.

  ‘I know men,’ she wailed, and ran from the room so the Earl and Countess raised their eyebrows. Arthur was horrified by ‘scenes’. He felt rather insulted. He trusted Minnie, surely she trusted him. It was a pity, he sometimes thought, he had married a girl with a past, who did indeed ‘know men’.

  He asked his mother later what the matter with Minnie was, and she said,

  ‘She’s American and sometimes it shows. She’s homesick and broods rather a lot. Don’t worry about it. I’ve found a dear little shop in Brighton – it’s called Brewers – where I’m getting my wallpaper and paints and they have a little range of bamboo beds – I’ll bring one back.’

  ‘Bamboo? Is that strong enough?’ he asked without thinking.

  ‘What for?’ she asked, and looked perplexed, and then quickly moved on, and a few days later the little bamboo bed was delivered. It was not so little and perfectly steady, and exactly fitted the alcove, but Minnie refused to admire it; and after that seldom walked up to see him at his office, or even his workshops, which he thought showed a lack of proper feeling – had he not delivered his own son with his own hands while finishing the prototype of a new Jehu? Did he not deserve a trusting wife?

  He asked her one night as she got into bed if she would like to go home with the children to visit her mother in Chicago, but she just looked more hurt than ever and didn’t even reply yes or no, just turned over and went to sleep. He concluded that women were simply an utter mystery and gave up all hope of trying to understand them. One simply lived with them.

  Self-Inspection

  30th September 1905, No. 3 Fleet Street

  Anthony Robin looked into his mirror as he shaved and considered why he enjoyed the company of William Brown so much and why his sister Diana so enjoyed Rosina’s. Perhaps something was ‘wrong’ with them both.

  He had understood and come to terms with his own Uranian tendencies a year or so back. He had spent his twenties trying to prove his normality, both to himself and to the outside world, frequenting prostitutes, setting up mistresses. He’d given that up in his thirties, and, having no wish to go to prison, tried to live, at least in public, the life of a prudent single man about town, a bachelor with literary leanings. Perhaps Diana was his female equivalent? He had not heard that such a thing was possible, but he could see that it could well be. Why not? She and Rosina had persuaded him to go with them to the Royal Academy to see the latest John William Godward painting, In the Days of Sappho.

  Sappho, sitting on a marble bench, every glint and fold of her chiton beautifully and carefully painted, had stared with cow-like eyes from out of an unadventurous classical background. He had not thought much of the painting, but had noticed how the two girls held hands as they had studied their heroine in apparent rapture. Girls were forever touching one another, as men were not, but it had seemed that Diana and Rosina, in taking him here, were trying to tell him something significant. Women were meant to have babies, not sexual pleasure, which was for the men; the fact that on occasion desire slipped over and happened between men and men was hardly surprising, though seeming horrific to ordinary men and women. It was not prudent to keep the company of one’s own kind, and he had avoided associating with the greenery-yallery crowd as much as possible.

  He was glad to have Rosina in residence, she was fun, and he could go round with her to Longman’s and meet William and discuss the progress of the The Sexual Manners and Traditions of Australian Aboriginals – and no one find anything strange about it.

  He admired the sharp unfleshy firmness of his chin as he stooped his head to splash the foaming cream away.

  Earlier that morning his sister Diana had stared into the same mirror as she brushed her long hair the required one hundred times and wondered if she were right to do so. The one hundred times rule was meant to make your hair glossy and th
ick but so far as she could see it merely made it greasy, so that the once a month washing recommended in the interest of optimum hair health wasn’t sufficiently frequent. And no combing it out until the hair was almost dry turned the combing into an act of attrition. Even though they now had a bathroom with hot running water at No. 3, a bath and a shower head, and liquid Palmolive soap to help with hair washing, doing so was still an ordeal. Even when all was done there’d still be a layer of white dried soap left on every tooth of the comb after use. She really resented having to pay her appearance so much attention. Anthony refused to let her bob her hair; it was, he said, in The Modern Idler’s interests that she looked pretty, sweet and biddable, in other words normal, when writers came through the door. He had not minded when she had taken the scissors to Rosina’s roughly cropped hair and tidied it up, taking the locks in one hand and simply cutting through at ear length.

  ‘Cut away,’ he’d said. ‘Talent and eccentricity go together. They are encouraged in visiting writers but not in the editorial team.’

  Being seen as part of the editorial team was flattering, even though it meant more washing coffee cups and clearing grates and making up spare beds than Diana had anticipated. Mrs O’Hennessy the charlady came in every morning, but she was as likely to smear every surface as clean it, so slimy were the cloths she used, and she breathed alcohol fumes over everyone when she came near. Anthony would not get out of bed before she had been and gone, for fear of running into her, but life at The Modern Idler seldom began before noon, so she supposed there was no cause for concern. Anthony still refused to let her write a piece on Doric aspects in the excavated Roman buildings of Ancient Britain unless she (a) turned it into a ghost story, or (b) got married – or at least pretended to – so as to be taken seriously. But Diana was proud and would not. He would weaken in time, she thought. Now Rosina was staying everything seemed worth while.

  Rosina had been welcome at No. 3 from the beginning. She paid a whole pound a week for her keep. Her bobbed hair, still bleached from the sun, now curved into her chin in a most fetching way. Her skin, in the comparative cool of the English climate, began to look less leathery and her face to soften: she began to look more, well – English, than the intrepid traveller who had stepped off the Ortona. Even her voice had become less strident. Anthony was happy enough to have Rosina as a guest: she would join Anthony and his friends as they sat late into the night drinking absinthe or on occasion smoking opium or nibbling slices of fresh fruit soaked in ether – no one ever seemed to settle as to exactly what substance best proved their bohemianism and talent. You could buy it all from Boots the Chemist across the road from the Law Courts in Fleet Street. Pappagallo entertained everyone with his ‘Too right, mate, too right’ interventions, and with the way his eyes would roll wildly if he smelt hashish.

  Diana would excuse herself when the group grew somnolent, foolish or over-excited – she did not enjoy the changes of mental state that Anthony so craved – and would go up early to bed. Someone had to be around to keep sensible and clean up, and since it was generally assumed it was in her nature she had better accept it and just get on with it. She had been born boring, she supposed, a Martha to Rosina’s Mary.

  Rosina could be annoying, Diana conceded. Pappagallo had developed an infestation of mites, which kept the bird scratching and scattering feathers. Diana had wanted to use a solution of fly agaric from the Fleet Street chemist to treat it, but Rosina had become almost hysterical, saying Diana was trying to murder the bird with a deadly poison, and then had powdered him with arsenic instead, which Diana felt was far more dangerous. They had had their one and only major quarrel and had kissed and made up. After that Rosina would sometimes slip into Diana’s bed when Diana had fallen asleep and embrace her and they would comfort one another – Rosina’s wretched widowhood, Diana’s orphaned state – and all was warm, soft and wordless. When sleep began to overtake them Rosina would slip back into her own bed in the spare room, and be there when Mrs O’Hennessy let herself in in the morning.

  Rosina made no mention by day of these nocturnal activities and Diana did not like to bring the matter up. She thought perhaps she was in love with Rosina. Why else did she allow herself to behave in this peculiar way? Because, she decided, loving a man seemed impossible; they were so bristly and angular, all elbows and knees – while loving a woman seemed pure, gentle and sacred. Rosina had given her, wordlessly, a copy of Bliss Carman’s translation of Sappho’s poetry and then taken her and Anthony to the Royal Academy to see John William Godward’s Sappho painting. Neither seemed particularly good as works of art, but Diana had taken the theme of the poems and the way Rosina had held hands with her at the Academy as amounting to a declaration of love. Women could love women, it seemed, in the same way women and men loved – not that she had ever been very clear as to exactly what that was either. Certainly she, Diana, would be dreadfully upset if Rosina decided to go back to Australia when the book was published. To miss her and their nights together would be unbearable. She supposed that amounted to love.

  Rosina and Anthony, she knew, had long meetings with William Brown at Longman, discussing whether the book would come out under her own name or a pseudonym. Rosina was reluctant to publish under her own name for fear of unsettling her family. Robin guffawed at this and said that the Dilbernes getting unsettled might be the best thing that could happen to them. The days of the bloated aristocracy were coming to an end. There had been another clutch of articles in the press on her ridiculous brother and his Jehu motor car. Herbert Austin, a man of the people, was the one to watch when it came to automobile production.

  ‘But Anthony,’ Rosina had objected, ‘you are as much a member of the bloated aristocracy as anyone. Like my poor brother Arthur, who is not very intellectual, it is true, but nevertheless a good business man, you also are the son of an Earl.’

  ‘But only a second son,’ said Anthony. ‘That makes all the difference. To be a penniless second son is to be cast back into the working classes.’

  Rosina wanted Longman to publish under Anthony’s name, but he refused and wanted her to serialize Manners and Traditions in instalments in The Modern Idler. William Brown would rather he didn’t, so as not to steal thunder from Longman’s publication. Book publishing was clearly not just a matter of getting a book into print, but of endless conversations. And Anthony vied with William as to who could dress most fashionably, and all the extra money Rosina brought in was soon gone.

  Affairs of State and Matters of the Heart

  30th September 1905, Belgrave Square

  In Belgrave Square the Earl of Dilberne looked into his mirror and deplored the increasing greyness of his beard. He was annoyed in general. He had a meeting at the House at eleven, and then was free until five in the evening when Mr Balfour the P.M. ‘wanted a word’ about Curzon. It was an irritating gap in time, and not a ‘word’ Robert looked forward to. George Curzon – pushed rather than jumped – had resigned as Viceroy of India after endless and mostly pointless disagreements with Balfour. He had let it be known that he expected at least a further title for his pains. An earldom would suit him very well.

  While Viceroy of India, George Curzon and his heiress wife Mary Leiter had enjoyed the greatest pomp and circumstance, while – as Mr Balfour was at pains to point out – ‘millions of Indians starved to death and vast sums were spent restoring the Taj Mahal.’ Curzon had caused the Foreign and Colonial endless trouble back home, forever nagging about the state of the Indian Army, interfering with accepted policies on Tibet, Afghanistan, Russia – insisting against all advice that the popular but quarrelsome Kitchener be put in charge of the Indian Army, and then doing his best to get rid of him. Balfour, irritated beyond endurance, had no intention at all of granting Curzon another title. Now if Balfour ‘wanted a word’ it would be so that Robert could tell him that he was doing the right thing.

  ‘Forgive my indulgence in using you as a sounding board, Robert,’ Balfour had once explained. ‘
But you are a good man to have around me. I know you are not fat but you sleep sound a’ nights, as Shakespeare recommended; and you are lucky, as Napoleon preferred his generals to be. If I am short of any quality it is the common touch. You have an instinct for the way a man should jump.’

  ‘Sound away,’ Robert had rashly replied. ‘See me as the man on the Clapham omnibus.’ But lately he had found his days much interrupted by Balfour’s insecurities, as the Unionist government tottered towards collapse.

  It seemed to Robert that Balfour was wrong about Lord Curzon. Balfour did rather tend to lack the milk of human kindness. The two great men had once been friends – now each was motivated by a personal animosity that Robert could see would do neither any good. Balfour regarded Curzon as a vain and self-serving simpleton; Curzon saw Balfour as a cold man of intellect who believed more in ghosts than in God and empire, and was unmoved by passion for anything at all. Both were partly right, partly wrong about the other and nothing could be gained by Balfour’s act of meanness; this would be perceived by the public and press as a cruelty to poor Curzon, whose wife was ill and whose back was bad, and who was an honest man though lavish in his habits. The Indians themselves, not just Curzon, would be humiliated. But Balfour would be hard to persuade, and seldom, Robert was well aware, was anything gained by speaking truth to power. Besides, Balfour had a way of letting his cool contempt for anyone who disagreed with him shine through his courtesy. One way and another Robert did not look forward to the meeting.