by Jessica Mann
‘You should publish that section of the letters. It would make a good paragraph in Antiquity.’
‘I suppose I could ask Margot Ellice if she’d let me.’
‘It is about time you started publishing in national journals, Tamara. You are concentrating on archaeology these days aren’t you?’
The question had been delicately put, and was probably justified from someone who had once been in academic authority over her, but Tamara chose to misunderstand it. ‘There’s no bloke to distract me, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Since the last man I saw you with was the rather ineffectual Magnus Paull, that’s good news. Not that you should stay celibate. Someone better will turn up.’
‘It’s been two years,’ Tamara said. Ever since Ian Barnes’s death, Tamara had repeatedly told herself that nobody was indispensable, that Ian would have wanted her to replace him, and that she wanted to do so herself. It is a natural instinct to remember only the good of the dead, and Tamara used to force herself to list Ian’s faults. She knew that he had not been perfect. She knew that time and custom might have made them enemies, and that if she had not met him by chance, she would have met and married some other man. But she had not yet managed to feel very passionate about anyone else. She said aloud, ‘All the same, Thea, I haven’t been celibate.’
‘I am glad to hear it. But that wasn’t what I meant. How’s my old acquaintance Tom Black?’
‘I didn’t think that was what you meant. But the answer is the same. I haven’t set eyes on Mr Black for months.’
‘Pity.’
‘What can you mean?’
Thea hesitated. She concentrated on pouring more coffee from the silver pot, and split some onto the pink tablecloth. A waiter darted forward to wipe it up. ‘Here, Tamara, finish the macaroons. Your figure can take them better than mine. I suppose what I mean is something Sylvester said about you.’
The division of labour in the Crawford family meant that Thea’s ideas about other people had usually been derived from her husband. He possessed their share of perceptiveness and intuition. Thea’s own thought processes were objective and logical. It seemed to make them a happy couple in a semi-detatched way.
‘Sylvester wondered whether you could ever be happy with an uneventful life. He thought once you’d seen some action you would want more of it.’
‘Nonsense, Thea.’ Yet could it be true? Tamara was achingly reluctant to believe it. Not action, Sylvester, but the men who go with it. She said firmly, ‘I just like men of action.’
‘All the same . . .’
Tamara asked after the Crawfords’ son Clovis. He was in Cambridge writing up his doctoral thesis. She asked after Sylvester. He was writing weekly columns in a highbrow left-wing weekly. She kept the conversation firmly on gossip, as she and Thea strolled back along Piccadilly. By the time that Tamara was back in Savile Row the morning was over. She went into the cloakroom to repaint her face. She stared at herself in the unflattering light. That deceitful mask revealed nothing. Yet Sylvester Crawford, that observant man, had seen more than the face of a pretty innocent.
Tamara left her bicycle chained to the railings in Savile Row and took a taxi to the Tate Gallery. Waiting in traffic jams, she answered the Crawfords in her mind. But it was true that she had enjoyed using her inadmissible skills on Margot Ellice’s attacker. Had that episode been like the whiff of his drug to a reformed addict? She tried to be honest with herself.
Tamara Hoyland had returned from her last assignment for Department E feeling disgusted with herself, a failure in her own, if not in Mr Black’s eyes. She had sworn to give up her involvement in secret work, in exactly the same way that she sometimes swore to give up a favourite food on which she had gorged.
But one soon longs for the forbidden taste again. More nourishing and less sinful meals become unenticing.
‘There are perfectly satisfactory substitutes,’ she said aloud.
The taxi driver said, ‘Did you say something, darling?’
‘I was talking to myself.’
‘First sign of madness, that is. Save it for your bloke.’
But I haven’t got a bloke – that’s the trouble. I need sex, not violence, Tamara thought.
Kim Rice was as attractive as he had seemed at first sight. He was waiting for her on the steps of the Tate Gallery, but had already booked a table and ordered food and wine, and did not let either the meal or Whistler’s murals divert his attention from Tamara.
It’s very seductive to be concentrated on, she thought analytically, but took pains to let her own eyes wander around the pretty room, and to ask Kim once or twice to repeat his words.
She drank Chablis and claret. Kim was talking about picture restoration. Mr Black was wrong, she thought. He thinks I’m committed to his underworld.
The flooding of the Arno in Florence in 1965 . . .
Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself without strings or suspicion?
Botticelli’s Primavera . . .
The trouble with secret work is that it destroys one’s spontaneity.
The restored sequence of Fra Angelicos in San Marco . . .
If I fancy a man, why shouldn’t I just . . .
The excavations in the crypt of the Duomo . . .
Tamara’s hand lay on the tablecloth, and Kim covered it with his. His skin was dry and warm. When she leant closer, she could smell faint verbena.
Coffee was sobering. After the meal Tamara went to run cold water over the pulse points on her wrists, and looked at her reflection, thinking, Be careful, pull back, lay off. But the face that looked back was not that of one who feared experience.
‘The picture is in Pimlico, shall we walk?’ Kim said.
Tamara had forgotten about the alleged Giotto. Kim took her hand, inside his, into the warm pocket of his coat. ‘We are going to see a young man who has set up as a middle man in his own flat. He buys at sales and sells to dealers.’
The painting was on an easel in the centre of a small sitting room whose walls were hung with paintings of soulful madonnas and tortured saints. Kim’s eyes did not pause on them.
The seller was jittering with nerves. ‘I was ever so glad when you got in touch.’
‘You buy on spec, do you?’ Tamara asked.
‘Yes, well, you have to when you are starting. I go to country sales and gamble. That’s what it is, gambling.’
‘Backing your own judgement instead of the auctioneers?’
‘Yes, but of course, country auctioneers! Enough said. All the same, it takes some nerve. That’s why I was so relieved when –’
Kim, who had been examining the picture on the easel, interrupted, ‘Come and have a look, Tamara. See what you think.’
The painting was of several square shouldered, heavy figures, formed up on either side of a madonna and child. The colours were faded, and there was no frame.
‘I wondered, at first, a Cimabue . . .’ the young man said. Beside Kim he looked etiolated, only half alive, and with his fluttery movements, and gasping speech, seemed to admit inferiority.
Kim laughed. ‘Hardly.’
‘No, well . . .’
Tamara was used to identifying and dating objects of antiquity. She watched Kim exercising his similar craft. For a while he stood quite still, looking. Then he moved closer and began to peer at the details on the surface, both with the naked eye and through a magnifying glass. After spending a long time going over every centimetre, he moved round to look at the back of the board on which the holy scene was painted.
‘What I thought,’ said the seller. ‘A Giotto di Bondone . . .’
‘Thirteenth or fourteenth century, I’ll give you that.’
‘And Florentine?’
‘Humph.’ More silent poring. After a while, Kim said, ‘Would there be trouble about an export licence?’
‘You’ll buy it then?’ The young dealer’s face was transformed. Kim’s own remained dead-pan until he and Tamara were well away. Then he laughed and s
aid,
‘Let’s celebrate.’
‘Do you think you’ve found something special?’
‘My client will think so, and that’s what matters.’
‘Who is he?’
‘An American. He’ll pay any money for works of art, it’s some tax fiddle. If they have a pedigree, the sky’s the limit.’
‘That picture didn’t have a pedigree.’
‘Not yet. I shall have traced it by the time he sees it. I have done a good day’s work.’
*
Tamara did not do a good day’s work. In fact, she did not go back to work at all. She took Kim back to her flat, and they stayed there until he said he had to go and meet a potential supplier of some Chinese porcelain.
‘But it’s early,’ she protested. ‘Couldn’t you stay?’
‘Another time. That is – another time?’
She said, ‘Yes. Another time.’
But I don’t know anything about him, she thought, listening to his light footsteps running down the stairs. I don’t even know where he comes from or where he’s staying. And then she thought, does it matter? She felt more relaxed and at the same time more stimulated than she had during all the last boring months.
A dealer in fine art. A handsome man. An amusing talker. Do I need to know more? She dressed and re-made the bed. With great speed she polished off two reports she had been working on for weeks, and corrected the proofs of an excavation report describing her work in the Isle of Wight the previous spring. Then she cooked herself a substantial supper, and settled down to finish reading Margot Ellice’s manuscript.
Chapter Ten
Royal persons are not alone in wanting to avoid those who have experienced sorrows they especially dread for themselves, but they are better able to do so. Like her mother, the Princess Royal did not wish even to consider the possibility of being widowed, and Artemis was not summoned to court in Berlin again. She remained as a member of the extended family of the new Prince of Horn, and her son Heinrich shared the nursery of Waldemar and Ulrike’s children, Augusta and her baby brother. Heinrich was not a Prince, and without Joachim to insist on it, Artemis was not called Princess. After a while Waldemar, who claimed unlimited power over the members of his House, announced that she was to be known as the Baroness Artemis von Horn and take precedence after the numerous princesses and countesses who lived with them.
It is clear from her letters that Artemis regretted the relegation only insofar as it affected her son. She did not miss the ceremony herself, or the perpetual company of ladies-in-waiting and maids, or, it seems, her husband. She was totally devoted to her baby, and wrote long paragraphs about his sweetness and brilliance.
During the next two years Artemis must have changed: grown up, in fact. Released from the supervision due to the wife of a reigning prince, she began to educate herself in the library at Horn, and when the household moved to town, she attended lectures by Professors at the University in Berlin, and made friends in a circle that the Princess of Horn could never have entered. It is possible that she was at first introduced to such scholars while she was in attendance on the Princess Royal, though she did not mention them at that time in her letters. But others have written of Vicky’s enthusiasm for learning, and how her husband had invited some of his own former professors from the University of Bonn to meet her. They came warily, having heard that the English Princess was a tiresome girl, but were disarmed. The scientist Professor Schellbach records that she ran down the stairs to meet him herself, her hair loose, her dress childish, gushing, ‘I love mathematics, physics and chemistry.’ Other philosophers, historians and classicists followed, all flattered at being asked to talk about their own subjects to royalty, and all treated by royalty to Vicky’s usual indiscreet pronouncements about her political views.
Waldemar would not have allowed a member of his family to meet such people, and that is probably why Artemis only mentions them once or twice, in passing, to Clementine. She believed that her letters were read before they left Germany. But memoirs published in later years by others who moved in such circles mention the Baroness von Horn; and Wally Hohenthal, who left Vicky’s service to marry an English diplomat called Paget, occasionally refers to a ‘Diana’, her nickname for Artemis, as being present at gatherings of English people and thinkers. In one of her letters she mentions also Philip Ehrenstamm.
It must have been a schizophrenic life for Artemis. Her own inclinations were liberal, anti-authoritarian and even republican, yet she was living and bringing up her son in the house of one of the reactionary party’s most ardent supporters. Waldemar was a close associate of Bismarck, to whom (since he was abroad at this time) Waldemar wrote screeds of exhortation and gossip.
With hindsight we know that Bismarck and his followers succeeded entirely, that in September 1862 the King (Fritz’s father, who had by then succeeded to the throne) appointed Bismarck as Minister President; that the King lived to a great old age; that during his long reign Bismarck had complete control, and the liberals, of whom Fritz and Vicky were the figureheads, were impotent; and that by the time Fritz became King, he was a tired, middle-aged man, dumb and dying from throat cancer, who reigned as German Emperor for three months before being succeeded by his son, known to us as the Kaiser.
In 1861, however, everyone supposed that Fritz would soon be on the throne. King William was old, had always had poor health, had escaped several assassination attempts – who could have guessed that he would live to the age of ninety-one? The conservatives feared Fritz’s accession, and with even more reason, feared his strong-minded English wife. And some conservatives were not the type of people to await passively the outcome of fate.
Waldemar did not hide his disappointment that Vicky survived the birth of her first child; so young, so small, she might well have died, as so many women then did, in childbirth, and indeed, hers had been an especially frightful confinement during which her husband was warned to abandon hope. But she did live, and Artemis told Clementine some of the comments she had heard.
Having lost her husband, Artemis had lost her status, and often heard things that would have been concealed from her if the speakers had thought she mattered. I cannot bring myself to repeat the words that were used about the Princess and her family, suffice it to say that all was disrespectful in the extreme, and that some allusions were incomprehensible to me. But I understand enough to know that Waldemar and his friends regret that Prince Frederick William was not set free to marry a German princess.
It may have crossed Artemis’s mind that Waldemar and his associates would take more active steps to rid themselves of the English connection, but the ensuing letters are bland and uncontroversial. So long as Artemis lived in the Prince of Horn’s house, she guarded her words. The first letter in which she seems to be candid is dated August 1860. It was written from Berlin, the Neues Palais, where Fritz and Vicky lived, and it opens with the remark that Artemis will be able to send it by messenger along with HRH’s letters.
I am so grateful to you, dear sister, in this as in everything, that you suggested to Her Majesty that I should accompany the Royal party to Coburg, for I shall have the pleasure of seeing those who have so recently seen you.
Clementine had herself become a maid-of-honour to the Queen by this time. She was to remain in royal service all her life.
While it is safe for me to write freely I must tell you of my fears. I have heard such dreadful things from Waldemar and his friends. I do believe that they would put an end to the Princess Royal’s life if it were in their power, so much do they fear the influence of the Prince Consort and of all things English. My friends in Berlin tell me of the extravagant threats they have heard uttered against her. I think you will have understood that I am acquainted with a circle of scholars and scientists, far from the court, with whose philosophical outlook I am more in sympathy, since they agree with our dear Mrs Lambert – to whom, also, I shall take the opportunity of writing freely. Have you gathered from my hi
nts, dear sister, that among those in whose company I have found enjoyment, has been Mrs Lambert’s brother, Mr Ehrenstamm? He is a distinguished political philosopher, and accepted in the most superior academic circles. I am so often reminded by his appearance of his dear sister, and of happier days.
Artemis accompanied Vicky and her family to Coburg in September; they were to meet the Queen and the Prince Consort there. The visit started badly, with the funeral of Prince Albert’s step-grandmother; but there followed a positive orgy of royal reunions, and Artemis found that she had most of her time to herself.
I should be perfectly happy in this imposing and picturesque place, were only my baby here with me. But I am anxious for him in my absence. I have to tell you, dear sister, that my anxiety grows lest he is neglected or even cruelly treated, in that house where his status, even his legitimacy, is not recognised, so scornfully do his aunts and cousins speak to him and of him – even the servants are insolent – and he the rightful prince! Such protection as I can afford is quite inadequate, and very soon his understanding will be sufficiently developed for him to become aware of the inferior status awarded him. Oh, could my husband only see how his son is treated in his own house! Ulrike has even dared to doubt the validity of any marriage contracted by a reigning prince outside Germany. Thank God my marriage lines are incontrovertible. But would that I could take the child elsewhere. Even to be brought up as the son of a poor widow must be better than to be always the butt of cruel jokes, and to see his cousins favoured over him. When he is of an age to understand that it is his own inheritance so disdainfully withheld, how it will hurt him – and all the more because he will necessarily see that his poor mamma is the unwitting cause of his suffering. Oh, happy England, where morganatic marriage is abhorrent!
Artemis returned to the theme in another letter. When I see the palaces, the estates, the jewels and silver, all property of the Prince of Horn, and realise that Joachim’s only son is to be forever deprived of them, and that Joachim’s widow – for I was his wife indeed, though they now treat me as something else – has less to call her own than one of his peasants, I do not know how I am to contain myself. You must know, dear Clementine, how indifferent I am to rank and status, indeed, since I have lived at courts I agree more strongly than I ever did in our youth with Mrs Lambert’s derision of all such vanities. I daresay I am as egalitarian, republican and liberal a woman as ever lived, and could I only retire to a humble home with my son and a sufficiency on which to maintain him, I should be the happiest of mortals. I tell you, sister, I suffocate at Horn, and in the other establishments that were my husband’s and should be my son’s. I have asked Waldemar if he would not make it possible for me to take my baby and live elsewhere. I have even asked Ulrike to intercede for me, but he adamantly refuses all I ask, little though it is. But now I hear that he is to come to Coburg, to pay his respects to Her Majesty – for which his hypocrisy ought to choke him, and I pray for the courage to ask him again for that to which I should be entitled, whilst I am under Her Majesty’s protection. Mr Ehrenstamm advises me of the least I should accept. Oh, if only I had the means to return to England and to live in peace and retirement with my little son I should feel that the prison gates my father closed upon me had opened at last.
