by Francis King
‘Why not?’
Mademoiselle shrugged, drawing the Latin primer towards her. ‘He is hardly bien assorti.’ She had arrived knowing no Latin, and now constantly had to keep a lesson or two ahead of her pupil, who, at nine, was displaying an aptitude far superior to her own.
Alexine constantly sought Sammy out, when he was not performing one of his vaguely prescribed duties for her father. That he so often himself seemed to be avoiding her was no deterrence to her. She remembered how, when Ginger had first arrived in the household, he had, as a result of years of mistreatment, been totally unapproachable. But Nanny Rose had eventually succeeded in her wooing of him, so that, instead of arching his back and hissing when she put out a hand, he now came to it, prancing up, head tilted sideways, eager for her to scratch him under the chin or stroke his long, lean back. That was how, with infinite patience, Alexine now herself wooed Sammy.
Seated beside him, she would point to objects around them – a table, a chair, a picture, a vase. Then, with a piece of chalk (Aunt Addy would put her hands to her ears, gritting her teeth and rocking from side to side each time that she heard its squeak) Alexine would carefully inscribe on the schoolroom blackboard the letters representing it. She would hand the chalk to him. He would copy what she had written. Then, with a duster, she would hurriedly wipe out both sets of words. She would point to the same object again, then hand the chalk back to him. Sometimes his transcription was totally wrong; but, increasingly, it was, with a few errors, more often right.
None of the women around her approved of what she was doing, but none of them actually forbade it. Had they been sure that Sammy was in the house as the master’s servant, they would certainly have done so. But they were not sure and therefore uneasy. From time to time Harriet or Addy would, in conversation with Philip, make devious attempts to define the intruder’s status. But he seemed to take pleasure in its ambiguity and would not let himself be drawn.
Once, as Harriet and Philip were going through her housekeeping accounts together, she looked up abruptly, as though intuiting that something was amiss, to peer out of the window of his study. She frowned. ‘Those two are at it again!’
‘What two?’
She fingered the large, taut chignon at the nape of her neck. She was a plain woman, whose best feature had always been her luxuriant, shiny auburn hair. She therefore took great care of it, having Liliane wash it daily with a shampoo of glycerine and lemon juice and then massage macassar oil into it. ‘Alexine and the boy.’
He said nothing, merely smiling, as with one hand he stroked his beard.
‘Do you think it a good idea?’
‘A good idea? What do you mean, my dear?’
‘That they should be friends.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, they’re so different. And their future lives will be so different.’
‘Does that matter? They’re happy together. So …’ He shrugged.
At the time, Harriet was exasperated and bewildered by his indifference. Surely he could see that a friendship between his daughter and that little savage was highly unsuitable – and might even have its dangers in the future? But then, as Sammy slowly began to learn to write isolated words – ‘Come’, ‘Dinner’, ‘Carriage,’ ‘Master’, ‘Horse’ – on the slate that he now always carried, along with a piece of chalk, in a bag worn over a shoulder, she too began to share her daughter’s excitement. ‘ It’s a miracle, darling,’ she more than once told Alexine. Even those once incoherent sounds, the groans, yelps and rat-tat-tat stutterings, now seemed to be gradually coalescing. Any day now, she was sure, something intelligible would emerge.
Alexine had many friends who, not unnaturally, were curious about the mysterious black boy who had taken up residence at the house. But just as Nanny Rose was possessive of Ginger, not in the least liking it if he showed friendliness to anyone but her, so Alexine was possessive of Sammy. ‘Couldn’t he join us in our game?’ one of these friends, invited over for Alexine’s tenth birthday, suggested, and the others agreed ‘ Yes, yes, yes! Go and fetch him!’ But Alexine shook her head. ‘Papa and Mama don’t allow me to play with him,’ she lied. ‘He’s really a kind of servant. He helps Papa. That’s why he’s here. To help him.’ ‘Oh, please! Come on!’ But Alexine was adamant.
One evening Addy returned from her duties at the palace, to hurry upstairs to her sister’s bedroom. Philip and Harriet had ceased to sleep in the same room or even to have sexual relations soon after Alexine’s birth.
‘Oh! I didn’t realize you were having a fitting.’ Addy was so eager to say what she had to say that she felt an upsurge of unreasonable anger when she opened the door and saw the young Hungarian dressmaker, Madame Molnar, with pins in her mouth, and Harriet standing, with uncharacteristic docility, head bowed and arms hanging limp, in the half-sewn evening gown before the cheval glass. Madame Molnar was a lithe, ample-breasted, beautiful young woman, with high cheekbones and long, glistening eyelashes.
‘It’ll soon be over. What do you think about these sleeves? Aren’t they too long.’
‘No, no, madame. They are perfect,’ Madame Molnar said, even though the question had been put to Addy and not to her.
‘Yes, they’re perfect,’ Addy concurred. Madame Molnar had the reputation of always being as right about the cut and fit of a dress as Philip about business.
Addy seated herself in a chair by the chimney-piece, torso stiffly erect, chin tucked in and foot rhythmically tapping against the fender. Only the day before Harriet had noticed that the brass of this fender was smeared and dull, and one of the two housemaids, having been scolded, had energetically polished it, so that it now shone in the late sunlight slanting through the window.
‘Was she in a better mood today?’ Harriet asked. ‘She’ was how they usually referred to Queen Sophia, so that others would not know about whom they were talking and so carry gossip to the outside world.
Addy shook her head. ‘It’s her time of life, I suppose.’
‘Oh, surely she’s long past that!’ Harriet laughed.
Addy shrugged. ‘She was making a fuss over not being able to find one of those wretched water-colours of hers. Of Windsor Castle. She even accused me of having thrown it away. If I’d produced such a daub, I’d have certainly done so. Out of shame.’ She gave her brittle, dry laugh.
‘You have a lot to put up with.’ Harriet had been alarmed by that reference to Windsor Castle. Might it not enable Madame Molnar to infer the subject of their tape? Addy was always so indiscreet, and Madame Molnar was notorious for taking advantage of her clients’ indiscretions.
After Madame Molnar had carefully folded and packed up the dress, she asked: ‘ For the French Embassy Ball next Friday?’ She was aware of even far smaller events than this in the social calendar of The Hague.
‘Please. Do you think that you can have it ready by then?’
‘Of course, madame. Even if my girls have to stay up all night.’
Madame Molnar gone, Addy jumped to her feet. ‘I heard something rather disturbing today. It was from Juliana. You know what a poisonous little gossip she is.’ Juliana, the daughter of a Dutch nobleman and his Bavarian wife, a cousin of King Ludwig, had recently joined Addy as one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting.
Harriet, unlike Addy, had no interest in gossip, so that it was with some weariness that she went over to her dressing-table, picked up a comb and began to draw it slowly through her fringe, looking at the same time at her reflection in the glass. ‘ So what titbit did dear Juliana produce for you today?’
‘There’s apparently been a lot of talk about the boy.’
‘The boy? What boy?’ But Harriet knew perfectly well.
‘Sammy.’
‘Yes?’ Harriet prompted, since her sister, now fearful of upsetting her, was hesitant about whether to go on or not.
‘It’s all too absurd but apparently people are saying that he’s – he’s Philip’s son.’
Addy was amazed by
the calmness of her sister’s reaction. ‘I’ve often wondered that myself.’
‘You have!’
‘Well, it’s all been so odd. Bringing him here like that. Treating him now as one of the family and now as a servant.’ She put down the comb, peered into the mirror to examine her large, pale face, and then sighed, dissatisfied, as so often, with the image before her. It was because of that dissatisfaction that, like her equally plain mother before her, she spent so much money on clothes. If only she had been born with the looks of Addy and the rest of her siblings, who all took after their handsome father, instead of their mother!
‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve also often wondered. One senses something between them. Une tendresse.’
Harriet moved away from the mirror and walked briskly to where the dress that she had been wearing before Madame Molnar’s arrival lay over a chair. She reached for it. ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Philip will always lead his own life. That’s how he is.’
Chapter Four
THE TWO SISTERS – Harriet born only a year after Addy, so that they were often assumed to be non-identical twins – had always been far closer to each other than to any of their seven siblings. People, even when the sisters had grown up, would often refer to Harriet as ‘the plain one’ or ‘the brainy one’. What they did not realize was that she was also the tough one and the adventurous one. Always she had felt that there were things within her – a capacity for the sort of work that no woman was allowed to perform, an emotional response that no man had ever demanded of her, an ability to surmount obstacles that had never been placed in her privileged path – that had lain idle and that, she had by now decided with melancholy fatalism, would always remain so.
Her father, Jonkheer Van Capellen, an Admiral in the Dutch Navy, had been taken ill with dysentery on board his ship when on duty in the Caribbean. All his life, despite the courage that he had displayed in the Battle of Algiers and the subsequent decisiveness with which he had taken the lead in the restoration of the House of Orange after the fall of Napoleon, he had been a man prone to panicky attacks of hypochondria. Some minor ailment – a prolonged attack of influenza, an unusually sharp bout of indigestion, a headache that persisted despite repeated doses of laudanum – would at once convince him that he was dying. It was said derisively of him that he spent far more money on his doctors than his wife did on her dressmakers. But the attack of dysentery was genuine enough. It made this once-commanding man shrivel away to a mere seven stone; indeed it seemed to everyone, even to the uppity, over-confident young English doctor called in to attend him, to be a death sentence.
Philip, then on the threshold of middle age but already growing rich, heard of the Admiral’s presence on the island, and at once called at the house of the Governor, where the Admiral had been carried on a stretcher, to offer his help. Had the Admiral not come from a family so distinguished, he would probably not have done so. All through his life he was to show remarkable shrewdness not merely in predicting all the vagaries of the market but in befriending people who, in the future, would be of use to him. Daily he would arrive on horseback. With solicitous insistence he would then reassure the Admiral that, no, he wasn’t dying, of course he wasn’t dying, he was putting on weight, his colour was so much better, his hand-clasp was so much stronger. The Admiral was short-sighted, and night after night Philip would read to him into the early hours. Since the Admiral was also rehgious, what Philip was obliged to read were theological commentaries, collections of sermons and even the Bible. He hated the task but performed it with an appearance of enjoyment. Why, he used to wonder, should a man on such good terms with his Maker, be in such terror of His final judgement?
When not reading, Philip would play chess with the Admiral – who, though crass at the game, showed peevishness if, as was usually the case, he failed to win. In the early stages of the illness Philip would also perform tasks even less agreeable, removing the Admiral’s soiled nightshirt and washing his soiled body, after he had repeatedly complained, in his high, rasping voice, of the roughness or incompetence of the two black male servants appointed to his care.
Of that period of illness, slow recovery and then prolonged convalescence, the Admiral would often say: ‘He was like a son to me,’ even though the difference in age between the two men was merely sixteen years. He would also often say: ‘But for him I should now be in my grave.’
When Philip returned to The Hague, it was not surprising that he at once got in touch with the Admiral, as the old man had repeatedly urged him to do. But it was to find Van Capellen once again distraught – not, on this occasion, because he feared, as so often, that he was dying, but because some unwise investments in the East Indies had brought him near to bankruptcy. He needed money quickly, and Philip, after a series of brilliant financial coups, was in a unique position to advance it.
Cautiously, over a period of months, interrupted by a visit that Philip could not avoid paying to Constantinople, the men, as in one of those interminable games of chess that they had played in Demarara, edged their way, each in turn offering a piece, to a check-mate. As almost invariably in those games of chess, Philip was eventually the victor. For a sum small in his eyes, though not in the Admiral’s, he saved the old man and his ancient family from ruin; and in return he married one of the old man’s daughters, Harriet, and achieved the entrée to the Court that he had always thought to be unattainable by someone of his birth.
It was not Harriet, the plain one, whom he had first wanted to marry but Addy, and he had been bewildered by the Admiral’s embarrassed rejection of this proposal. They had been sitting together, wholly relaxed in each other’s company, once again circling and then edging towards a conclusion to their prolonged and wholly amicable negotiations.
‘Addy! Oh, no, my dear fellow. She wouldn’t be suitable for you. Not at all. But my Harriet! She has a wonderful nature and she’s so talented – she paints, she plays the piano, she sings, she has virtually run the household since her mother’s death.’
For a while Philip persisted. He had a passion for what was beautiful – whether the mansion that he was soon to buy for his renewal of residence in the Netherlands, furniture being sold by impoverished aristocrats in barns of houses in England, or Addy, so tall, so grave, so often silent, with her huge, dark eyes and her magnificent embonpoint and profile. ‘She is one of the most – perhaps the most – beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
The Admiral gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘ Many men have thought that. But believe me – it’s because of my affection for you and for no other reason that I think that Harriet is the one. I promise you! She’ll make you a wonderful wife.’
Later Harriet would say that hers had been an odd betrothal: it was the man who brought the dowry to the marriage, not the woman.
By then, she had begun to think that she would end her life as a spinster. Men never seemed to notice her as they noticed her sisters, and particularly Addy. She was plain, yes, she had overheard that said of her and she knew it. Her eyes were too small, her brow too low, and her ankles were thick. When she smiled she revealed an eyetooth broken in childhood. Philip’s proposal therefore came as a wonderful surprise to her. ‘Oh, but Harriet, he’s old!’ Addy protested. ‘You can’t, you can’t!’ But Harriet could. She was intoxicated by the sense of power that exuded like a rare musk from him. That power seemed to be symbolized by the broad, muscular shoulders, the thick neck and, above all, the huge, white hands, with their perfectly manicured nails. The brutality of his love-making in the first months of their marriage only made him even more irresistible to her.
As a young girl she had been invited to a party at the Palace at which Clara Schumann had played. When, after that thrilling performance, Harriet had been introduced to the great pianist, noticing how after the effort of playing the monumental Liszt Transcendental Studies, a number of tiny beads of sweat still nestled in the wrinkles around her down-turned mouth
and on her sallow neck, her father had said: ‘My little girl also plays the piano. But as an amateur, a total amateur of course.’
The hump-backed woman, dressed entirely in black, stared at Harriet with dull, hooded eyes. Then she smiled, nodded. ‘Why don’t you play something for me?’ She added, with a fleeting smile: ‘But nothing too long.’
Harriet looked at her father. She felt no fear, only a steely resolution. She would play, she would play well.
‘Do you really wish –?’
‘Yes. Yes, certainly. Play!’
The Johnkheer, having spoken to the Queen and received her permission, led Harriet over to the Pleyel grand. Totally without any nerves – she might, she thought later, wondering at her own behaviour, have been practising in the drawing-room of her own home, her mind half on other things – she waited, head bowed, for the chattering to die down around her. Then, taking a deep breath as though before a plunge into an icy sea, she began to play the Schumann Humoresque. By a fortunate coincidence, she had only recently learned it, so that she still retained every note of it in her memory.
Clara Schumann appeared hardly to listen. There was an abstracted expression on her face, she never looked at Harriet, and from time to time, since the room was hot and she had not yet recovered from her previous exertions, she agitated before her face a huge, black, lace-fringed fan, with spokes of mother-of-pearl that from time to time caught the reflection of the giant chandelier above her. But, as soon as Harriet, head once again bowed and hands now resting on knees, had finished, the great pianist jumped to her feet. ‘Brava!’ She raised the by now closed fan in her right hand and brought it down, with vehemence, on the palm of her left. The applause from everyone else, even those who had no knowledge or love of music, then swelled to a crescendo.
Clara Schumann crossed over to Harriet, who at once jumped to her feet. She tapped the girl on her shoulder with the fan, in accolade. ‘You made one or two mistakes – you know that, of course. Twice that B natural instead of B flat – and those final arpeggios – well, that doesn’t matter. You can play, yes, you can play! You played that with all the necessary caprice – imagination – allure. Now you must study, study every day. Who is your teacher?’
