Habits of the House

by Fay Weldon

  Impressions of her Ladyship’s dressed dinner table had even been sketched once or twice and published in the Illustrated London News. The Prince himself was happy to dine at 17 Belgrave Square. Once Princess Alexandra herself had been a guest, a rare compliment.

  Grace sat quietly taking notes, which her Ladyship would later consult, the better to judge the success of the menu. A responsible society hostess left nothing to chance. This morning her Ladyship showed a degree of anxiety in the slight tremble of her fingers and a high colour – not in the apple of her cheeks, which would have been becoming, but around her nose, which was not. Grace wondered what news Mr Baum had brought. Elsie’s garbled ramblings in the servant’s hall about the African mine being flooded and the family ruined had been dismissed as hysteria, and Grace was inclined to agree. The rich stayed rich. Mr Baum had been the one to be upset, muttering an imprecation and spitting upon the steps as he left.

  Her Ladyship’s discomposure, Grace concluded, was most likely to do with tonight’s dinner. His Lordship had once on impulse asked the Prince to ‘come round tomorrow for a bite to eat’, greatly to her Ladyship’s upset, since invitations for that evening’s event had long been issued, a table plan drawn up, and a fitting menu organized, as his Lordship would well know. To make matters worse the Prince had responded with a vague ‘what a pleasure, unless of course something turns up’, thus leaving her Ladyship in a state of uncertainty. Her Ladyship had tried to make a joke of it, asking if that meant Daisy Greville turning up and his Lordship said that was one way of putting it, and both had laughed, but Grace could tell that, like the Queen, her Ladyship was not amused. On that occasion the Prince had not turned up, and all had been well, but if his Lordship could do it once he could do it again, and this was perhaps what her Ladyship feared, particularly as tonight young Lady Peaburton was to be one of the guests.

  Lady Peaburton was soon to give birth and the situation was delicate. It would hardly do for the Prince and she to be at the same table. In the servant’s hall it was rumoured that the Peaburton child was a royal by-blow, and that the newly knighted Sir William Peaburton, whose fortune was in fisheries, had been bought off to marry the mother.

  There had been much discussion as to whether her Ladyship was doing the right thing in receiving the pair at all.

  ‘Lower your standards and where will it end?’ Smithers had demanded. ‘I don’t want to be emptying the slops of those what don’t deserve it. It will be guilty parties in divorces at dinner next.’

  Her Ladyship’s voice firmed as she went through the menu, and her hand stopped trembling. Her colour evened out as she spoke. Familiar tasks brought calmness. Minced sturgeon – the fish was new to Cook, a delicacy imported from the United States – lightly poached and garnished with parsley and lemon, its roe or caviar handled separately, served from silver bowls together with very finely chopped hard boiled egg and sweet onion, offered with paper-fine sheets of buttered brown bread. There was foie gras for those who might find the caviar too adventurous. (Her Ladyship certainly had no intention of economizing, Mrs Neville marvelled later: proving that the news that had brought the agitated Mr Baum to the door so early in the morning could not have been as bad as Elsie reported.) Clear mock turtle soup followed by turbot with horseradish sauce. Lark pie – Rosina alone to be served with chicken croquettes. (The girl had let it be known that she was repelled by the idea of gulping down a whole bird, while not apparently minding eating part of a big one.) Saddle of mutton with crab-apple jelly. Pommes de terre rôties and choux de Bruxelles. Marbled jelly, almond pudding, lemon ice cream. Cheeses and devils on horseback.

  No fear then that the Prince would turn up, Grace concluded – if there had been her Ladyship would have improvised another two extra courses at least – lobster perhaps, a vanilla soufflé with a wine sauce, both favourites of his Highness, but easily prepared, and leaving the ovens free for their already daunting task. No, something had happened at the table after Mr Baum had left, and Miss Rosina had slammed the door as she left, to disconcert her Ladyship.

  The menu had been settled a week back, and the sturgeon and turbot would be brought in by six in the evening to ensure its freshness. Otherwise all the ingredients were already in the pantry. The servants’ dinner – to accommodate in addition two agency staff employed for the occasion – was to be served at five: upper and lower servants were to have the same: soup made from bones and trimmings with macaroni; roast ribs of beef with Yorkshire pudding and greens, followed by cheese. Cook’s breath, Grace noticed, smelled slightly of sherry. Her Ladyship noticed it too and when the others left asked Grace to stay behind and asked her if she thought Cook might have been drinking.

  ‘If she has, your Ladyship, it will not be enough to imperil the dinner.’ Which soothed her Ladyship’s anxiety just a little.

  Another Task for Grace

  1.00 p.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

  ‘There is something else, Grace,’ said her Ladyship, ‘it has come to my notice that you can use a typewriter.’

  ‘That is so, my Lady,’ said Grace.

  ‘Such an incessant clacking,’ said Isobel. ‘To write with a machine seems unnecessary when God gave us perfectly good hands to write with, but I suppose we must move with the times. And it is true handwriting can be hard to decipher.’ She remarked that the Countess d’Asti now employed a full-time social secretary to keep proper files and lists, not her usual scraps of paper in drawers, and added that though one would not want to go quite so far, it would be convenient if Grace extended her duties to take up a few minor secretarial tasks.

  ‘By all means, ma’am,’ said Grace, quite gratified. She boldly asked if her extra duties would meet with extra remuneration and was told no, because Grace was quite idle a lot of the time, was she not, as her attendance at typing classes confirmed, and so her duties could not be seen as onerous. Grace murmured that Miss Rosina by rights would have her own maid, but she had to be looked after as well. Her Ladyship kindly said she would consider the possibility of taking on another girl to train up.

  What her Ladyship wanted, it turned out, was a typed and carbon copied list of wealthy heiresses suitable for her son the Viscount, which Grace would help to compile.

  Gossip and information garnered from the best servants’ halls in the land, Isobel was well aware, tended to be more accurate than recommendations from friends, who would keep the best names to themselves: or would simply not know enough about possible candidates. The servants knew a great deal about the bad habits, disagreeable manners, and perversities of their betters. They made the beds, after all, and saw what soiled them.

  Grace said she would be happy to do so, and could come back with names before the end of the week.

  ‘The sooner the better,’ said her Ladyship. ‘And I suggest you start your enquiries in Kensington, though it may seem rather far afield.’

  In other words, thought Grace, the d’Asti servants’ hall. The Countess had two sons in their late twenties. They too would be seeking good matches, though presumably amongst the older aristocracy than the mercantile class. What the d’Astis needed was family rather than money.

  ‘And of course your friends in Dover Street,’ said her Ladyship. ‘The Oceanic is due in soon from New York.’

  The Oceanic was the latest White Star transatlantic liner, designed for beauty and speed: it could make the crossing in just over five days. Her Ladyship’s friends would often stay at Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street when arriving or leaving for Southampton, and Grace would on occasion be lent to help out with packing or last-minute sewing for hard-pressed travellers. Her Ladyship was always generous with Grace’s services, if there seemed something to be gained from it.

  ‘As Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power, and it applies as much in society as it does to politics. Scientia potentia est,’ Grace had once overheard Lady Isobel say to his Lordship; he had wholeheartedly agreed and told his wife she was the best society hostess in the land and she had asked
, ‘Better than the Countess d’Asti?’ and he had rather rashly replied, ‘Not even in the same class, my dear, though one has to admire the woman’s nerve. Not to mention her embonpoint.’

  The Count and Countess had land near Piedmont, in the north-west of Italy, a singularly mountainous area far from Rome. They had come to live in London in search of a livelier and more cultural life than was available at home. They were seen as a little too colourful for comfort, their title inconsequential and dubious – Italian Counts were two a penny – and the connection to some foreign royalty which they claimed was somewhat opaque. But they were immensely rich, socially energetic, had a good table, and were indubitably good company. They did not shoot or hunt, however, and the Countess’s new red brick house in Pont Street in Knightsbridge was considered a trifle vulgar and over-ostentatious. Where 17 Belgrave Square was grand and dignified, Pont House was vulgar and ornate: plaster harpies peered down at the visitors from its balconies, and passers-by could see into the bay windows. Nevertheless the thinkers and writers of today gathered at the d’Asti table.

  The Dilberne’s place in society was obviously more secure: they could offer the best shooting in the country and the best dinners in London; this was the true heart of London Society: the genuine thing; guests knew how to behave and could be trusted if ever a new acquaintance was to be made. The conversation might be duller behind the stone walls of Belgrave Square than the brick of Pont House, but it was safer. You would for example never have encountered Emile Zola, in flight from a prison sentence for what amounted to treason, at the Dilberne table. He had appeared three times at Pont House. Where the Dilberne’s table was solid mahogany and could seat twenty-four comfortably and twenty-eight at a pinch, the Pont House table was of a light maple laced with mother of pearl and seated thirty-four with ease, in itself a sign of too much openness. All kinds of unusual people were these days being accepted from the lower strata of society – guilty parties in divorce cases, fashion designers, racehorse owners, Jews, actresses, Americans, architects. Who knew where it would end?

  Her Ladyship was accustomed to keeping an eye on what went on at the maple dining table of her upstart rival, both from the relayed gossip in the servant’s hall, and from, if only inadvertently, her own guests. To this end she used Grace. If anyone was desperate for a competent seamstress – so hard to find, these days! – to sew a spray of diamonds onto black velvet for a special ball, or to let out a waistband, or as when the newly married Lady Peaburton needed to minimize her pregnancy, with a tuck here, a flounce there, Isobel would say ‘Oh do borrow Grace! Grace is a miracle!’ and Grace would catch the bus to wherever it was, and oblige, and bring back such morsels of gossip as she found interesting.

  It was Grace who, back from the d’Astis’ establishment in Pont Street, had informed Lady Isobel earlier in the week that marbled jelly in yellow and green with an ice sculpture table motif in the form of entwined white storks was quite the thing of the moment. This was to celebrate the success of the International Hague Convention, which was to limit the manufacture and exchange of weapons, and ban the dropping of explosives from balloons.

  ‘But why storks?’ asked Lady Isobel.

  ‘I believe they are the symbol of the City of The Hague,’ Grace had replied, and her Ladyship had thought for a little and then remarked that Freddie was really rather a silly woman and ice sculptures were all very well at the beginning of a meal, but by the time desserts were served were bound to have lost shape and definition, especially as white storks suggested a milk ice.

  The Countess d’Asti, when not seeing to the proper display of her diamonds, or attending the theatre, the opera, or travelling to anywhere Mr Elgar, whom she much admired, was conducting his own work, had lately revealed herself as an admirer of Annie Besant, an earnest and influential mystic who campaigned for peace between the nations, the end of world misery, anti-vivisection and so forth. Isobel felt that allowing these worthy preoccupations to seep into the dinner table arrangements was a mistake. Who wanted their consciences disturbed while trying to eat dinner?

  Her Ladyship had allowed the yellow and green marbled jelly on this occasion but banned the storks. Amelia Peaburton was on the guest list; she was a dear sweet girl, and would not want attention drawn to her condition. The fact that the stork was the heraldic symbol of The Hague might well escape her. She was charming but not renowned for her interest in world affairs. Amelia had been married for a mere two months but had clearly been expecting for several months more. Times were changing, one had to face it; and just occasionally they changed for the better. Once Lady Peaburton would have tactfully gone abroad for a year. Now it seemed totally possible to ask her and her new, recently knighted young husband to dinner, forget any possible doubts about the baby’s parentage – she had been seen once or twice with the Prince himself – and even look forward to the girl’s company. One did not go so far as to invite Lady Peaburton’s parents, even on occasions when perhaps they should have been, not because they had at first barred the door to their own daughter and son-in-law, and one disapproved, but because it occurred to one that they were just, frankly, irremediably old and boring.

  The Countess d’Asti might go too far, too fast, but Lady Isobel was the first to acknowledge that at least she moved in the right direction.

  And Grace understood by the reference to the Oceanic that her list of suitable candidates for the role of future Countess of Dilberne could be stretched just a little: that not to be English was not necessarily to disqualify. Perhaps not even to be a virgin. Though Arthur would have his own opinions on that, and she, Grace, certainly did. If one was going to be ‘in service’, reciprocal rights and duties applied. The least girls of the upper classes could do was stay virgins until they married. How else could they produce heirs with a lineage that made them fit for privilege? How did the Bible put it? Leaders of the people by their counsels… wise and eloquent in their instructions? Or as Smithers had put it: ‘I don’t want to be emptying the slops of those what don’t deserve it.’

  An Informal Party Comes and Goes

  8 p.m. Tuesday, 24th–1 a.m. Wednesday, 25th October 1899

  The dinner party went very well. Cook remained sober and no one noticed any shortage of courses. Conversation flowed easily. Rosina had relented and made an appearance, looking quite normal and indeed rather fetching in pale yellow silk and wearing a proper corset which made the most of her figure.

  There was much speculation as to what the new century would hold.

  It was unfortunate perhaps that when her father related that ‘In the Prince of Wales’ opinion, by the end of the new century everyone would be healthier, happier, taller and fatter, Rosina was heard to say: ‘Only if the evils of poverty, illness and ignorance are removed from our streets and I don’t see that happening for long time. And it isn’t a new century at all, only a new year. 1900 is the last year of the nineteenth century. The twentieth begins in 1901.’ But no one was listening at this juncture, as Lady Peaburton had been seized by a sudden faintness and was taken home early by her husband.

  When the conversation resumed and turned to the stork motif in ice at the d’Astis’, Rosina glared but did not deign to reply when her father, presumably from the influence of more glasses of wine than was his habit, teased her by saying that the Hague conference was a frippery inspired by Annie Besant and her friends, and the nations were only happy when at war with one another.

  There were oohs and ahs over the caviar; and no one would have believed for one minute that the ancient family of their hosts was in grave financial difficulty.

  Carriages were at one a.m.

  Grace Presents her List

  10 a.m. Thursday, 26th October 1899

  One way and another it was a full two days before Grace could come up with a reliable list of suitable heiresses. Lady Isobel had hoped for it within the day. But tact had been needed, as her Ladyship required, and no sense of urgency conveyed. The d’Astis were only just back from
the Howards’ place at Arundel Castle – ‘Roman Catholics, of course,’ remarked her Ladyship, doubtfully – and it had been Thursday before Grace could meet up with Sarah, the d’Asti lady’s maid. Nor had Sarah been of much help. The d’Asti boys were careless of their inheritance, such as it was, and were as likely to marry outside their circle as in. There were no lists, no plans. Agatha, the lady’s maid at the Austrian Embassy next door had a good list of the plainer girls, although most had been through three or four seasons and not yet been picked: and so not likely to appeal to Master Arthur.

  ‘Leave that for me to decide,’ said Lady Isobel, taking Grace’s neat lists and folders, old copies of the Illustrated London News and McCall’s, relevant portraits and photographs carefully ringed and flagged.

  Grace’s chief informants had been George, maître d’hôtel at the Savoy Grill, and Eddie, the head concierge at Brown’s. The Savoy was awash with pretty girls ripe for marriage, even out of season, but none with noticeable fortunes.

  Eddie at Brown’s had a friend who worked for the White Star Line and had access to the First Class passenger lists of all the transatlantic liners. Grace did what she could to put him in a good mood, in the cosy little concierge’s office just off the foyer. Eddie then divulged that the Oceanic had just docked at Southampton, but the only possibles were the O’Briens: they were wealthy enough, being the meat baron O’Brien’s wife and unmarried daughter but he couldn’t recommend them.

  ‘Not right for our young Viscount,’ he advised. ‘Dry goods is one thing, meat’s quite another, not so much barons in that world as mobsters. And from Chicago, not even New York, so no idea of how to behave.’ The mother had snored so loud the next door cabin complained, and the girl was a looker but had the kind of past there was no overlooking. ‘If they’re looking for a title they’d best forget it.’