3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You are too cruel,’ she said. She was looking at her most charming – plentiful light brown hair loosely piled on top of her small head, her bright, large blue eyes mischievous. He realized that in choosing Flora he had chosen someone very like his mother. The distasteful Dr Freud over in Vienna would have something to say about that. Something rather unpleasant, no doubt. Rosina would keep quoting the psychiatrist’s views on ‘sexuality’ and ‘neurosis’ over the dinner table, even when there were guests. It was most embarrassing.

  ‘May I remind you that your father married me for my money, and we have lived happily ever since?’ Isobel now said to her son.

  ‘But you were a beauty,’ he said. ‘You are,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘Then what are we to do?’ she asked. ‘Starve?’

  ‘Pater can sell his stables and stop gambling,’ he offered. ‘Rosina can stop giving money away. Money is such a vulgar subject, anyway.’

  ‘My dear boy,’ said his mother, ‘we are moving into a new century. The acceptance of vulgarity is the beginning of wisdom. I thought, of the two of you, you might be the one to live in the real world, but I see you do not. What is to become of us if you do not grow up and rather quickly? You are bright enough, just idle. Like your father, who is perfectly intelligent, but so easily diverted.’

  ‘I’ll go and see Baum if you like,’ said Arthur. ‘Perhaps he will lend Pater more. He’s rich as Croesus.’

  ‘Arthur,’ asked his mother, ‘do you even know the meaning of the word “interest”, as it relates to money?’

  ‘No,’ said Arthur. His mother sighed.

  ‘In order to lend,’ she said, ‘people have to be offered an inducement. It is normally money. The percentage of the original loan is known as simple interest. Compound interest is when interest is added to the principal, so that from that moment on, the interest that has been added also itself earns interest. And then of course favours can be asked on top of that. The Prince, for example, offers Mr Cassel honours in return for loans. This very year, and against the Queen’s wishes, Cassel was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire.’

  ‘Mother, that is a scandalous rumour. Her Majesty does only as her duty directs.’

  ‘I daresay,’ said his mother, ‘but you are very ignorant of the ways of the world. We have little to offer Mr Baum other than to receiving his wife into my drawing room to meet others with whom she can ingratiate herself, and so enter Society. There is no end to the ambitions of the children of Abraham.’

  A most dishonourable thought flashed through Arthur’s mind, quickly to be dismissed. If his mother was to sacrifice her son to an unknown and plain heiress for the sake of money, perhaps she should consider sacrificing herself to Mr Baum? She was beautiful enough, though past her best years. It might work.

  ‘Your young lady friend, whoever she is,’ said his mother, ‘at least provides an honest service in return for her pay. Perhaps you could share her with a friend and halve the cost? No one will think less of you.’

  Arthur was shaken. How on earth did his mother know about Flora? Of course: as ever, the servants’ hall. One imagined as a lover that one was invisible, but it was not the case. Others saw, looked, noticed, talked. Arthur usually and prudently asked Reginald to drop him off ‘somewhere in Mayfair’, but occasionally, if it were raining hard, he asked to be taken to Flora’s exact address. Reginald would take the news back to the servants’ hall. Someone, probably Grace the go-between, must have told his mother.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I don’t think this is a suitable conversation for you to be having with your son. It’s the kind of thing fathers are meant to talk about. Just don’t worry about things so, old thing. Something will turn up. We won’t starve. Pater wouldn’t let us.’

  He declined to look further at the list drawn up by Grace.

  ‘Absurd,’ he said, and left the room and took a bath.

  Something Turns Up

  5.45 p.m. Friday, 27th October 1899

  It was Minnie O’Brien who turned up, only daughter of Billy and Tessa O’Brien of the Chicago stockyards. She was twenty-five, a slight fine-featured girl, with strong eyebrows which lent her face character and intelligence. She was delicate in her habits – ‘fussy’ according to her mother – her chin a little pronounced perhaps and her neck a little long, but her arms the right length for her body. She had little white hands, a bosom neither too pronounced nor too slight, and with the plentiful brown hair and blue wide eyes Arthur so favoured. Better still, from a young man’s point of view, she was without annoying ideas of social progress of the kind that made Rosina such difficult company: she liked to paint and draw and was interested in the history of the decorative arts. Her voice was soft and sweet, and her accent when she spoke was only slightly American, she had had the best elocution lessons money could buy in Chicago.

  Even as Arthur left his mother’s side that afternoon, Minnie was driving round Belgravia, perched next to her mother Tessa in an old-fashioned four-wheeled growler, noisy but comfortable, provided by Brown’s hotel for visiting guests – Americans always asked for them; they were ‘cute’.

  Tessa was a large, red-faced, energetic woman who spoke her mind and spoke it loudly; how she had produced so refined and spiritual a girl as her daughter no one could understand. Though some of her cattier friends did murmur that on the occasion of the foundation of the Art Institute of Chicago – of which, as wife to a leading meat baron and philanthropist, Tessa was naturally a founder member – she had vanished for an hour or two behind the antiquities with a certain well-known English painter, Eyre Crowe, whose slave painting ‘Slaves Waiting for Sale’ had graced the walls of the Institute thereafter. The meaner would even search for likenesses and compare Minnie’s wide-apart eyes and strong brows with a sketch of Eyre Crowe also held in the Institute. Some said yes, some said no. And rumour had it that Billy O’Brien was not capable of producing a child. There had been some unfortunate accident in the stockyards when he was boy. Others said no, Billy had a gruff enough voice, didn’t he?

  Tessa O’Brien’s husband Billy, broad, big-bellied, vigorous and ruddy-faced, had started in the stockyards at seventeen, was running a single abattoir at the early age of twenty-five, and five of them by the age of thirty. By the time he was forty, he was the capitalist conquistador of all Chicago, where the hogs, cows and sheep of the USA were gathered, slaughtered, packed and from thence dispatched. He was too busy to be jealous or possessive of his wife – either emotion would divert him from his main business of making money – but all knew that his daughter Minnie, so fragile and refined, was his darling. He kept her well away from the blood, splintered bone and occasional accidental human remain which went into the hamburgers for which the nation was now famous.

  ‘Belgrave Square, honey,’ Tessa was saying. ‘And what d’ya know. There’s the Mexican flag. Don’t say the beaners actually have an embassy in a proper country? We want number seventeen, driver.’

  ‘Mama, where are we going?’ asked Minnie, alarmed. ‘You can’t call on people you don’t know. Not here in London.’

  ‘I am simply leaving my calling card,’ said Tessa, ‘as Mr Eddie that nice concierge suggested. It is all the done thing here. Then they’ll be in touch with me. It’s the Earl and Countess of Dilberne’s place. Fancy us from the stockyards making it to Belgrave Square. When you do meet the son make sure you don’t say anything clever.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ asked Minnie.

  ‘Because it puts men off,’ said Tessa. ‘Don’t you want to end up with a husband?’

  ‘Not particularly, Mama,’ said Minnie.

  ‘Do try to be not so peculiar,’ said Tessa. ‘After all that’s gone on you can’t afford to be choosy.’

  The growler drew up, and Tessa gathered her plentiful skirts and went up the broad steps of No. 17 Belgrave Square and pulled the front doorbell. Mr Neville came to answer it, took one look at who was waiting, and assuming it was someone calling about the vacancy
for an assistant cook said, ‘Down the steps to the servants’ entrance, please.’

  Tessa was not easy to put out. She thrust her calling card upon him. ‘Don’t go dropping it, honey,’ said Tessa. ‘It’s not muck. Neither am I. Tell her Ladyship Mrs Billy O’Brien and daughter are staying at Brown’s and waiting her call.’

  ‘What I do for you!’ she said to her daughter, nevertheless, as she hoisted up her skirts and got back into the motor carriage. ‘Even their servants are stuck-up snobs. But you can’t live with your mother all your life. You won’t be able to stand it and I certainly can’t.’

  ‘I don’t mind that much,’ said Minnie. ‘And there’s Father too. He’d like it.’

  ‘Your father wants the past forgotten, you married off, out of his hair and with a title he can crow about. Surely you owe him that, after all he’s done for you?’

  His daughter had spent some weeks living in sin with a painter in his studio in the lively post-fire Burnt District in Chicago, and taking no care whatsoever to be discreet about it, until she discovered he was already married and had three children. After that Minnie had ceased to be a marriageable prospect at home, just an endless source of gossip. Now she was twenty-five and ageing fast.

  ‘But does it have to be an Englishman?’ begged Minnie, examining the perfect ovals of her pink fingernails, as the driver resumed his trip around the grander residential areas of London. ‘I have met a few. All they do is hunt foxes, kill birds and eat meat. Couldn’t it be a Frenchman? A Parisian artist, perhaps? How about Toulouse-Lautrec? He has a title.’

  ‘How you do delight in teasing me,’ said Tessa. ‘He’s a dwarf and a drunkard and the Good Lord knows what else.’

  And she tightened her formidable jaw, and Minnie’s sensitive mouth took on its six-year-old’s sulky downturn, which only happened when she was in her mother’s company, and they continued their sightseeing in silence. Tessa was glad enough to be in London, for the winters in Chicago were monstrously cold: their house at home was centrally steam-heated, pipes clanking and banging as if they had a life of their own – but set your nose outside the door and it froze off. Here icicles melted almost as soon as they formed. London houses were poorly heated but at least were quiet; servants moved about on tip-toe and spoke in hushed voices, at home everyone shouted as if they were out of doors in a high wind and herding cattle.

  She missed Billy and his strong arms round her at night – he liked a cuddle and she liked a grope, and it was pleasurable enough even if it couldn’t ever be quite the real thing – but the Brown’s Hotel’s box-spring mattresses were magnificently comfortable and she resigned herself to being apart from Billy. She must concentrate on getting Minnie settled. The sooner it was done, the sooner she, Tessa, could get home.

  Tessa wondered if perhaps while in London she could leave a card at Eyre Crowe’s residence. But perhaps better not to stir things up. He was an old man by now, successful and wealthy. It would be simple enough to find out where he lived. The Art Institute of Chicago had links with the Royal Academy. He might be pleased enough to see his daughter: but his wife, should he have one, and most men of wealth and position did – might not be pleased: word might get back to Billy, who would see it as disloyalty after all he had done for Minnie: and heaven knew how Minnie would react – it could be opening a Pandora’s box of trouble. Besides which, she could not be 100 per cent sure – it was just that as Minnie got older she looked less and less like the other contender to her parentage, Billy’s red-headed best mate Kevin Murphy, a man without noticeable sensitivities, and looked more and more like the English artist. Minnie belonged amongst the English titles, not the stockyards, and that was the truth of it.

  Her Ladyship Receives Tessa O’Brien’s Card

  10 a.m. Saturday, 29th October 1899

  It was ten the next morning before her Ladyship was handed Mrs O’Brien’s card. The butler had seen no need to hurry. He was a small bald man with a mild squint in gentle brown eyes, and half the size of his wife. ‘But Mr Neville, why did this take a day to come to me?’

  ‘I did not think your Ladyship would particularly care to receive it. She looked like trade to me, your Ladyship. Certainly she did not know how to behave. Calling cards are received and delivered in the mornings only.’

  ‘You must learn, Mr Neville, that times are changing. The most significant in our society can often seem the most shabby. They are so busy making money they have no time for style. It is a pity but it is the case. Fetch me Grace.’

  ‘Grace,’ said her Ladyship, when the latter appeared, ‘why did Minnie O’Brien not appear on my list? She seems by far the most suitable contender.’

  ‘I did not see her as at all suitable for the Hedleigh family, ma’am. According to the concierge at Brown’s, Mrs O’Brien and her daughter Minnie were due in on the Oceanic – and it does seem the girl’s single, has trust money and is heir to the father’s fortune. But he’s an Irish meat baron; nothing but a jumped-up butcher, and the girl has a reputation. She’s soiled goods, ma’am, and doesn’t try to hide it. She won’t do.’

  ‘And Mr Arthur is not soiled goods?’ asked Isobel.

  ‘It’s different for men, ma’am. The lady of the estate needs to be above reproach. Women need to set an example. I’m not putting myself up as an angel, but they say Minnie O’Brien lived for a time with a married man. It’s like dogs or horses, the way I’ve heard his Lordship say. Once a bitch has got out, she never breeds true.’

  ‘As a matter of interest how did this news get to you, Grace?’

  ‘The concierge at Brown’s got it from the Oceanic’s purser, who got it from the chef of the new Silversmith hotel in Chicago, who was a passenger, and he got it from an art dealer in New York – I can’t exactly remember the details but news travels fast. I didn’t think a cattle family, ma’am, would be what you wanted. Aren’t they only one step up from gangsters? Hang their enemies from meat-hooks in their abattoirs?’

  ‘Low gossip, this is, and rumour, Grace, and you are not to spread it beyond these walls. Speak to the Brown’s concierge – and explain to him that this is a calumny, both pernicious and false. The girl is spotless, and everyone must know it. There’ll be a good tip for him next time I come by for tea.’

  And no tip for me for telling lies, thought Grace. She was still hurt and angry. Where was the acknowledgement of the ingenuity, time, effort and skill required of her to come up with the list? She had even ‘been nice’ to Mr Eddie to get hold of it, though it was true she might well have done that anyway, and now her advice was simply ignored, swept away. You just couldn’t trust the gentry. They would treat you as one of themselves when it suited them, and treat you like muck when it didn’t.

  Grace was feeling generally discontented. She was fond enough of the young Viscount and wished him well, but if he was going to marry for money, let him at least marry a girl fit to carry on the Hedleigh name. Well, she would see to it that he did.

  Eating Out: a Dinner Party at Pagani’s

  8.30–11 p.m. Tuesday, 31st October 1899

  So that was how it was that less than a week later Arthur and Minnie were seated next to one another at a dinner party in Pagani’s in Great Portland Street, a restaurant favoured by American visitors, a place where Tessa was recognized and felt at home. The Countess had booked a private room but Tessa would have rather they’d sat in public to see and be seen, so that she could recount back home which famous world musicians and artists she had encountered. They compromised on an alcove where they could see but not easily be seen.

  ‘My, oh my, I must say, I must say,’ she kept repeating. ‘Little Tessa sitting in London at Pagani’s! If my friends could see me now!’

  Mrs O’Brien, as Robert and Isobel agreed, when comparing notes later that night, was both outlandish and oddly attractive. She spoke too loudly as Americans were given to doing, and was alarmingly overdressed, more as though for a ball than a restaurant. Diamond necklaces were not for dinner, nor for too
large an expanse of décolletage not in first youth. A clip, or ear-rings would have been right. She actually thanked the waiter when he brought the beetroot soup rather than pretended he didn’t exist, which was the English way. Yet, both agreed, she was good-natured enough, while she didn’t know quite how to conduct herself, who from the land of log cabins and cowboys ever did?

  The girl had made a better impression: pretty enough, if a little quiet, although the mother made up for both of them, and aesthetically acceptable, wearing a triple string of pearls, and a simple uncorseted blue dress with modest neckline, which clearly came from one of the new, very fashionable and expensive French couture houses. What Arthur thought of her it was impossible to say. He’d yawned once or twice, but perhaps he was tired, though from what Isobel could not imagine, and had seemed distracted.

  There were a mere eight in the party: his Lordship and herself, Tessa and Minnie, Arthur, the widowed Austrian Ambassador, Francis, and his niece and nephew – Janika, nineteen, beetle-browed, stout and serious and the eighteen-year-old Jan – from next door, had joined them. Jan had the looks and style of a young god, broad-shouldered, bright-eyed and with a thatch of blond hair and clean-cut features, and very little to say. His Lordship took the head of the table. Isobel feared it would not be an easy occasion: ‘eating out’ was still something of a novelty, and rather exciting, a trusting to the fates of ambience, company, food and comfort. But as it was, everything went smoothly enough. Any awkward silences were quickly filled by Tessa, and they were far enough from the other tables not to draw too much attention when she whooped with excitement or dismay. Isobel found she was enjoying herself. So apparently was her husband: his presence was required but hardly his serious attention.

  Asked politely about the journey over Tessa O’Brien talked at length, and volubly about the crossing in the Oceanic. No, she said, the O’Briens had not enjoyed the trip one bit: the boat was vastly overpraised. It had been built for speed rather than for comfort, and rattled. There being no deck for a healthy promenade in the salt air, one was obliged to walk about inside the ship. There had been nothing to do but eat and use the library. It was a very grand library with a glass dome on top, true, but left room for only two chimneys when all the other Blue Riband contenders had three or four.