Habits of the House

by Fay Weldon

  ‘In other words, Minnie, you and I are to act as lady’s maids. Next thing Consuelo will be asking us to carry needle and thread!’

  ‘Little Minnie from Chicago,’ was all Minnie said. ‘If my friends could see me now!’

  ‘I hope your friends are not so ordinary,’ said Isobel, severely, ‘as to be impressed.’

  Minnie did not explain she had been joking, what was the point? When jokes fell flat better let them lie where they fell. Her father Billy had often told her so. This was not just something else to take for granted. She, little Minnie, the bad girl from Chicago with her unfortunate past, was to walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey behind the Queen of England and an assortment of duchesses, watched by kings and queens assembled from all over the world, and by the highest statesmen in the land, in all the pomp and circumstance to which humanity could aspire. How could she grumble? She was privileged beyond belief.

  Isobel went on reading: ‘She tells me the ceremony is to be on June the 26th,’ she said, suddenly and sharply, lifting to the light her pale, pretty face, with its high cheekbones and fashionable little mouth so very much in the mode, ‘and that Balfour is to make an announcement next week. But I already know that. Why would she think I might not? Robert told me last night. Oh, all these Palace people with their plots and plans and messages from on high!’

  Reginald coughed and asked her Ladyship if there was to be a reply, and when she said no, clicked his heels and left the room – no doubt, it occurred to Minnie, to go down immediately to some fly-by-night betting house on Millbank. There he would place a bet on the 26th of June as the day of the Coronation, since bets were open on it, and the exact date currently the nation’s preoccupation. Reginald, in Minnie’s opinion, was very much a raggle-taggle-gypsy-oh, dark-haired and handsome and not to be trusted, though Isobel seemed to. The trouble with assuming that servants were invisible, springing into life only when needed, was that no one bothered to keep secrets from the lower orders. Anything upstairs knew one minute, downstairs made it their business to know the next.

  Her Ladyship went back to the business of wrapping up parcels. Minnie wondered what Adela of the Rectory at Yatbury would be getting. Some kind of dress or cloak, she imagined. She caught a glimpse of what looked like deep red velvet and a flash of very expensive-looking Brussels lace as it was folded into its box. Minnie helped arrange the sleeves neatly and nicely. It was not in Lady Isobel’s nature to save money when it came to clothes, even for poor relatives. It would be the most expensive Bond Street could manage. The eventual brown-paper-and-string parcel – the string was green, which did look a little festive and was a little more expensive – still looked rather workaday, so Minnie cheered things up by adding a row of the bright, gummed-paper stickers of garlanded reindeers her mother had sent over in a parcel from Chicago. Isobel winced slightly when she saw them. But then Isobel winced at quite a lot of things.

  The Gathering Storm

  After the robin had eaten the crumbs and flown off, chirping angrily, as robins will, on the grounds that the offering had been in some way wanting, Ivy came out with Adela’s cloak, a grey woollen affair, rather threadbare but better than nothing, though hardly what one would expect for the daughter of the younger brother of an earl. Not that the Hon. Rev. would have his high birth spoken of within the village, and it was wiser not to call him that within his hearing.

  ‘Take this before you catch your death,’ Ivy said. ‘Not that outside is much colder than in, your ma being so mean with the coal.’

  ‘There are others much colder than we are in the world,’ said Adela piously. ‘You shouldn’t speak so of your employers but give thanks instead for this beautiful day.’

  It was indeed a lovely day; a hard frost and the tower of St Aidan’s next door clear against a bright blue sky. The rising sun was still low enough to make distinct the diamond patterns on the thatched roof of the long tithe barn that backed both church and rectory, and caught the gilded weathercock as it turned slowly in a wind that couldn’t make up its mind whether it was westerly or southerly.

  ‘Says you,’ said Ivy. She was a girl of great irreverence, big-boned, high-coloured and noisy, nearing thirty and not married. She seemed to Adela clever enough, but had some trouble reading and writing, otherwise no doubt she would have found a better job than maid-of-all-work at the Rectory. She lived in, but sometimes went to stay with her mother in the village, and was allowed to, being what was called a ‘treasure’ – that is to say competent, reliable, God fearing and honest, though Elise railed against her frequently, as being no better than she should be. ‘Perhaps you should be the one thanking God and not crying your eyes out because you can’t go and see the Coronation.’

  ‘I am not so, crying,’ said Adela. ‘It is a wicked waste of money and time which the country can ill afford; nothing but vulgar ostentation. I wouldn’t go if you paid me to.’

  ‘Says you,’ said Ivy again. ‘Me, I’d love to go, see the King and Queen in their robes; I’d stand in the rain for days but they’d never give me the time off. And am I crying? No.’

  ‘If I’m crying,’ said Adela, ‘it is because my father despises me. I can never please him. He says I’m stupid and plain. Am I?’

  It was hard to tell. Her father thought she was clever when she agreed with him, and stupid when she did not. As for looks, the only mirror in the Rectory was above her washbowl stand; a small framed square in front of which she brushed her teeth. It was hard to get an overall view of herself, no matter how she moved the mirror this way and that. Her teeth were white and even, her eyes were blue, her hair a peculiar colour, and even though she brushed and brushed would kind of coagulate into thick reddish-gold clumps, so she was glad when her mother put it into plaits, although Elise tugged dreadfully and could make Adela’s eyes water all day. Her eyebrows were quite dark against a good clear skin, except there were often ugly little white pimples round the base of her nose. Ivy told her not to squeeze them; it made them worse. So much, she knew. She could look down and see a bush of rabbit-coloured hair between her legs but did not like to investigate further with her fingers. ‘Down there’, as her mother called it, was forbidden and dangerous territory. The same with her new bosom. It was beginning to bounce up and down when she ran. Enquiry seemed not so much forbidden as vulgar.

  ‘You look all right to me,’ said Ivy.

  ‘Not that stupid and plain matters if you’re going to be a Bride of Christ,’ said Adela, haughtily. She hated to be seen crying. ‘Good is all that matters. And obedient. And chaste, whatever that is.’

  ‘Keeping your legs together,’ said Ivy, smirking.

  ‘No really, Ivy, please,’ begged Adela, ‘tell me what it means!’

  ‘It’s as much as my job’s worth,’ said Ivy. ‘But I’ll tell you this, your father doesn’t think you’re plain. That’s his problem. But as for Bride of Christ, Miss Adela, I can’t see you settling down to be a nun.’

  ‘Not just a nun,’ said Adela, ‘I would be a proper Sister, and in the end a Mother. I would rise in the ranks. I would not be cloistered. I’d be allowed out to teach. It wouldn’t be too bad. They say I have a vocation.’

  ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they,’ said Ivy. ‘They’re after your inheritance. That’s how convents keep in business.’

  ‘That’s a wicked thing to say, Ivy,’ said Adela, ‘and I don’t have any inheritance. Father has nothing, only his pittance as a Rector. His brother Robert took everything.’

  ‘Better be a bride to a man of flesh and blood and lie in a warm, soft bed at night than on a hard, lonely one for the rest of your life,’ said Ivy.

  ‘The nuns I met seemed perfectly happy,’ said Adela, ‘and I don’t want another word from you on the subject.’

  Her parents had taken Adela to visit the Little Sisters of Bethany in Clerkenwell six months back. She had very much liked what she had seen. Sister Agatha, leader of the postulates, had shown them around. She was dressed in a grey habit
with a grey scarf that covered grey hair, was round and gentle and had smiled a good deal. She was also kind and considerate, even noticing with what care Adela carried the ring finger of her left hand. Adela had slammed the finger into the train door at Bath Station as they set off for London and two hours later it still smarted and had swollen up. Sister Agatha inspected the finger and enclosed it between the palms of her hands saying, ‘Oh you poor little thing!’ at which Adela had started to cry, though it was the last thing she wanted to do. To which her father had said crossly, ‘Hardly what Jesus suffered on the cross, Adela,’ and Elise had said, ‘Don’t make such a fuss, Adela, no one wants a cry-baby.’

  The finger had given two or three great throbs that had made Adela feel faint, sway, and then had stopped hurting altogether. But Sister Agatha still sat her down and made much of her and bandaged the finger carefully and gently and then asked her if her plaits were very tight.

  ‘Nothing wrong with her plaits,’ said Elise, before Adela could say, ‘Yes, they are rather.’ Which they were. ‘I have to do them firmly or her hair’s all over the place in two minutes.’

  ‘Hard to think of God,’ Sister Agatha had observed, ‘when one’s hair is pulling and one has a headache,’ and somehow managed to ease the hair round Adela’s ears so the plaits pulled less tightly.

  The next day when Elise put Adela’s hair into plaits she didn’t pull so hard, and they hardly hurt at all. Her mother insisted on taking off Sister Agatha’s bandage, on the grounds that it was ugly, bulky and hardly necessary. Nor was it. The finger, once un-bandaged, was no longer a swollen purple sausage with a line of broken skin across the knuckle where it had caught in the door, but its proper shape, smooth and lean like the other fingers and all but healed, just a little pinker than normal.

  ‘What on earth were you making all that fuss about; there’s nothing wrong with it at all,’ said Elise, but Adela thought it was all very curious and felt quite a spasm of anger against her mother. That and the matter of her plaits. But also anger with her father, for agreeing so easily to her being a Bride of Christ and not stopping her even though that was what she wanted. But she said nothing, and then reproached herself for not loving her father and mother as God said she should.

  But she would not mind being a Little Sister of Bethany one bit: not only did they heal your ailments by a simple touch, but the rooms they showed her had been pleasant and warm. The nuns were surprisingly chattery, like a flock of friendly little birds, and there was no great booming voice always coming out of nowhere to startle and discommode everyone. The books on the shelves were more interesting than the ones at home, the food far more sustaining and full of flavour, the praying certainly frequent but no more onerous than at home. They’d said she could join as a postulant when she was seventeen, which would be in six months’ time, and she’d said, ‘Yes please,’ and so all was arranged, and Ivy had no business trying to put her off.

  ‘We’ll leave “chaste” be then,’ she said. ‘But tell me, when my mother says you are no better than you should be, Ivy, what does she mean?’

  There was a commotion in the bright sky above them. Crows from the elm trees were mobbing a bird of prey whose presence annoyed them. The garden birds set up their alarm calls in sympathy. The buzzard escaped its oppressors and soared away, all elegance and grace. The garden quietened. A tiny vole landed with a little thud in the grass at Adela’s feet. It was soft and warm and apparently unmarked by beak or claw.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ said Ivy. ‘It’s dead. The buzzard dropped it.’

  Adela bent down and stroked the little creature’s furry back. It opened its eyes and scuttled off into the wintry undergrowth.

  ‘You caught something at that convent,’ said Ivy, ‘better not caught. I don’t forget the way that finger of yours healed when it shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It was one of God’s smaller creations,’ said Adela, ‘and only stunned. Don’t change the subject. How can someone be no better than they ought to be?’ But Ivy just snorted and went back into the house to put on the cabbage for lunch. It was barely ten in the morning but Elise liked to have the green leaves boiled for three hours or so, the water changed three times during the boiling process to get rid of any poison, then the mush put between two trays and the liquid squeezed out of it, set to dry, kept warm, and the resulting green vegetable cake cut into squares before serving. That way the cabbage was safe to eat.

  Ivy wondered if the Palace was taking on extra staff for the Coronation. They might be, but it was not likely it would be the likes of her. She doubted that ‘good at cooking cabbage’ would be seen as much of a skill. You would have to know someone important, even to be able to scrub a floor the Queen walked upon, in her jewelled slippers, clanking in diamonds and pearls.

  The Invitations Arrive

  The Lord High Steward’s office had reserved seven seats at the coronation ceremony for the Hedleigh family, guests to be chosen at his Lordship’s discretion. This was most generous, as Isobel observed to Robert, and more than she had hoped for, the Duchess of Montrose having complained to her over a game of Bridge that she, of a ducal family, had been allocated only four.

  ‘We are fortunate to have friends in high places,’ said Robert. The pair were breakfasting alone in the breakfast room, winter sun shone through tall windows, and the new pale-gold brocade curtains flung back more light than seemed reasonable for midwinter. Isobel had gone to Maples furnishing store in the Tottenham Court Road with Minnie, and between them, they had refurnished No. 17 as, Minnie said, ‘fit for the new century’. Gone were the heavy mahogany furniture sideboards, the tapestry fire screens, the dismal bronze curtaining and Axminster carpets; everything now was light and bright.

  ‘What friends in particular?’ Isobel asked, thinking perhaps Robert meant the King himself, or Arthur Balfour, Leader of the House, or Chamberlain, First Lord of the Colonies, or Sunny Marlborough, now throwing his weight around as Lord High Steward, a post brought into existence only when a coronation hove into royal view – oh, if you reckoned a man by his friends her husband was man indeed and she, Isobel, Countess of Dilberne, was so very proud.

  ‘Oh, it was Consuelo,’ said Robert, casually. He happened to be in Sunny’s temporary office in Buck House when Consuelo came by with a list of her Majesty’s personal guests; they had on examination found three spaces left unfilled so Consuelo had told Robert he could add them to his allocation of four if he wished, and Robert had said, of course, please, yes. How could he not? Hundreds who felt entitled to a place in the Abbey for the great occasion would be turned away. This was good fortune indeed. Now the only question was how Robert was to find homes for three extra gold-embossed invitations.

  But Isobel thought, no, that is not the only question. The main one is how does this chit of a girl, with her long elegant neck, with the pretty head perched on top of it – held in place, one could almost think, by the diamond chokers that kept it high – with her tiny waist and her happy smile, manage to turn the heads of so many people, men and women too, that they allowed her to wander freely not only in the Palace of Westminster but Buckingham Palace too, and be the one to hand out these precious, almost sacred pieces of gold-embossed card that meant so much to so few? Dear God, the girl was only twenty-four. Yet she had been married five years, was a mother to two sons, and of all the Duchesses foremost in the land, a foreigner with no breeding, but immense wealth and all the confidence that brought with it. No scandal was yet attached to her name – yet she announced freely to all and sundry that she felt no emotional attachment to her husband, and by implication was therefore free to be wooed and won. That was the question, but Isobel did not put it to her husband. One would not want the possibility put into his mind that he might be the one to win her, not in marriage but quite possibly in bed. The phrase ‘Just happened to be there’ was not one any wife was happy to hear. It could so easily mark intent. Nevertheless, it was a bright morning; she had Robert to herself, and would make the most
of it.

  Minnie and her lady’s maid Lily had been packed off to Dilberne Court the previous day. Isobel had been pleased enough with Minnie’s company – she learned the habits of the house remarkably quickly for a meat baron’s daughter from Chicago – but felt it was important that the girl spend as many nights as possible with Arthur. The young couple had been married for more than a year and still no sign of a baby. If the impossible happened and the quick-witted Minnie turned out to be barren, and if Alfred continued to have only daughters, Edwin would inherit if he survived him. It did not bear thinking about, so Isobel seldom did. It was hard to worry about anything on so bright a morning. Three extra invitations! It was more than she had hoped for. She was wearing her favourite tea-gown, a kind of yellow silk kimono splashed with red flowers, which when she bent forward to study the invitations more closely fell open and revealed more bosom than the servants thought decent. But Robert smiled to see it, and Isobel thought, what a handsome man he is, and how lucky I am that after thirty years of marriage I can still make him smile like that.

  ‘Minnie and I will be processing behind the Queen and Arthur and you behind the King,’ she said, ‘which uses up our four allocated seats, so we have three over. It would be natural to ask our daughter Rosina, but she will wear strange clothes and like as not alarm other guests by haranguing them about the iniquities of royal ritual in the modern age.’

  ‘But she will be hurt and offended if she knows there is a spare ticket and she is not asked; she is quite capable of behaving if she wishes.’

  ‘But she may very well not wish,’ said Isobel, ‘and she is quite happy to be hurt and offended. Let it occupy her all next year. Better a real grudge than an invented one. She is quite likely to take her parrot with her to glorify some avian deity, or go without a hat, or let off fireworks. I most strenuously advise against one.’