3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  That made more of an impression. There was silence, broken by Reginald.

  ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen to toffs.’

  And Elsie said, ‘If they’re as broke as all that, how can Minnie O’Brien be a fortune-hunter?’

  All reflected.

  ‘She wants his title and he wants her money,’ said Grace, ‘just because you don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t so. We’ll all be out of a job soon enough.’

  Another silence.

  ‘If they did go bust,’ said Cook, ‘I’d be all right. I’d go over to chef for the Countess d’Asti in Eton Place. She keeps two live-in kitchen maids, not one live-in and one agency, like here, and two afternoons a week off.’

  ‘We’ll join you, Cook.’

  ‘You haven’t been asked,’ said Cook.

  ‘Yes we have,’ said Mr Neville. ‘We’ve had the odd sign of interest. But she’s nouveau, she doesn’t know how to keep servants, the way Lady Isobel does. No one would guess her Ladyship’s father was in trade.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to it,’ said Mrs Neville. ‘It’s true, old money’s easier to work for than new. Old money looks after you, new money uses you.’

  ‘Bad blood has to out,’ said Smithers. ‘See it in Master Arthur and his whore, see it in Miss Rosina and her bloody parrot. No consideration.’

  ‘Always darkest before the dawn,’ said Elsie. ‘If we were all let go, Alan would have to marry me. I’d have no one else to turn to. I’d have a baby.’

  ‘It won’t come to it,’ said Reginald. ‘Toffs know how to look after themselves.’

  And all agreed, over roly-poly pudding, a boiled suet pastry jam roll cut into slices and served with custard, and very comforting and filling, that this was probably the case, and their employment was secure.

  ‘Speaking for myself, I like being in London. Nothing ever happens in the country,’ said Smithers. ‘I miss my mother but at least we have Royalty to dinner.’

  ‘I don’t have a mother,’ said Lily, and snivelled a little. She had barely spoken before. All turned to look at her.

  ‘You have us,’ said Mrs Neville cheerily and decisively. ‘Make yourself useful, girl. Clear the plates and bring in the cheese.’

  Which Lily did. She was the flower girl from Whitehall his Lordship had stopped to give money to. She was so small and thin Reginald had taken pity on her, brought her in and fed her. Then Mrs Neville had warmed her and washed her so she didn’t smell. Elsie had given her some old shoes. She was a street child, homeless. They’d made up a bed for her in the cupboard under the stairs. Smithers had argued against it: the child had impetigo, someone would have to pay for a doctor, someone was bound to start asking questions; but the next day Lily had scraped the parsnips for Elsie very efficiently (always a nasty job if the tubers are not fresh and firm) and somehow or other, like a stray kitten, the child had charmed her way in and here she still was.

  ‘I can always start up a brothel,’ said Reginald, watching her little hips squeeze behind a chair to get to the sink.

  ‘No joking matter,’ said Mrs Neville.

  ‘Wasn’t joking,’ said Reginald.

  Mrs Baum Waits

  7.50 a.m. Wednesday, 1st November 1899

  ‘Still nothing interesting in the post, dearest,’ said Naomi Baum to her husband Eric. She was expecting the invitation from Countess Dilberne which Eric had promised her was on its way. Every morning she looked, every morning there was nothing. She had a nice new wire cage for letters to fall into but all that fell into it was an amazing number of bills for Eric relating to the new house. It was a lovely house, and when the garden had had time to grow would be beautifully situated, and of course she was grateful to him: but here she was with no friends and no neighbours and where was her life? Gone, gone, along with her grandmother and all memories of the family past.

  Eric Baum, with his wife Naomi and their little children Jonathan and Barbara, had recently moved, along with Naomi’s eighty-year-old grandmother, from St John’s Street in Islington, where he and his family had an adequate rental above a carpet shop, to a spot between the villages of Hampstead and Golders Green. Here he had had built a quite splendid eight-bedroom house, set in a garden which was still, on this the first day of November, no more than a large patch of mud, and was likely to stay so until the spring. The road was still unmade-up and waiting a name from the Council. But the land had been cheap and it was obvious that London must soon explode out of its containment in the Thames basin and creep up the hills to the north. The air would be cleaner and the fog might not reach so far. Also, rumour had it that the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway Co. was to drive the tube northwards from The Regent’s Park; in five years time what were now green fields would be prosperous suburbia and land prices extortionate.

  The move had proved expensive, and tragic too. On the rough roads to North London, Pickfords had managed to shatter Naomi’s grandmama’s Russian tea-set, delicate porcelain cups and saucers. On opening the precious shoe-box, initially taken with her on the long trek out of Odessa when she was a child, finally in 1899 to be set on a mantelpiece in North London still wet with fresh paint, the old lady had discovered nothing inside but splintered shards of red and gold porcelain. Nothing would do for her but that it was an attack upon all Jewry by anti-Dreyfus forces.

  Baum, irritated by her irrationality, harassed and tired, had mocked her. ‘What, Pickfords’ men, anti-Dreyfus?’ It had seemed a small enough crime, in the circumstances, but the old lady, nervous of the move in the first place, becoming more and more agitated on the journey out of London, had fallen into a rage at this final blow, accused him of betraying his own people, flung up her arms, clutched her head and collapsed senseless there and then, in front of Edward and Barbara. A doctor had moved her, acutely ill, to the hospital at New End in Hampstead where she could at least receive emergency medical care, and there had died within hours, before more suitable arrangements could be made. It had not been the best start for Naomi. She had not wanted the old lady moved. But Eric and the doctor had insisted, knowing it was the only chance she had of living.

  And shiva had to be sat as best it could be in an unfurnished house in a strange community, and Harris Price the rabbi had to travel all the way from the St John’s Wood Synagogue. Naomi was most upset and saw the death as a bad omen for the future.

  Eric kept to himself his belief that actually it was a good omen, that the broken tea cups were a sign that a dismal past was behind him and his family: that his children would grow up into a new century, in an England where to be a Jew would be a matter of pride, and not to be a victim, hated, feared and despised.

  He felt he owed everything to Naomi, clever, kind and pretty Naomi, who had met the middle-aged Maude Cassel, daughter of old Ernest Cassel the financier, when both were working for a Jewish children’s charity in Spitalfields. Naomi was a struggling young chemistry student from the Royal College of Science, who still had time for charity work, and Maude did what she could to help and encourage her. Girls like Naomi would create the future. Naomi had recently become engaged to a brilliant fellow student, one Eric Baum. Maude had attended the wedding, and told her father Ernest about the boy’s successful studies in gold cyanidation. Ernest asked to meet him, was impressed and linked him up with John Courtney, the international lawyer, suggested the boy acquire a background in law, and funded him to do so. Now Courtney, Baum and Co. specialized in mining law in South Africa and handled a percentage of the many Cassel investments in Natal.

  Maude had taken the Baums to a Christmas party at the d’Astis’ place. Eric had set up an – well, ‘acquaintance’ was hardly the word: the social gap was too great – but at least a business association with the Earl of Dilberne. Courtney and Baum now acted as the Hedleigh family business management, replacing their former stick-in-the mud advisers, Stitch and Stitch. Viscount Arthur’s Hedleigh cousins – plain masters and misses all, the children
of his two uncles – Alfred and Edwin Hedleigh, had inherited small sums through their maternal grandmother, which Stitch and Stitch now also administered. The children had not lost, but neither had they gained, and money must be made to work, that was the way of the new world. Money could not be left alone just to lose value.

  The deal with Cassel which had enabled Eric Baum to lend Dilberne money had gone somewhat awry, and Eric had actually lost money on it. Not much, but the subsequent personal debt, which had remained unpaid month after month had somewhat soured the relationship on both sides. What he’d mistakenly thought was a real friendship with the Earl of Dilberne, which would perhaps end up with a spot of shooting on the Dilberne estate and a new social life at a level appropriate to his own rising income, had not transpired. He had been kept waiting deliberately at his Lordship’s front door. He had nevertheless ventured to push his luck, and hinted, perhaps rather strongly, that an invitation to his wife for one of the Countess’s social events would be in order. But no invitation had ever arrived. He had led Naomi to expect one, and Eric hated to disappoint her.

  The ‘garden’ was still a mound of builder’s rubble. Naomi was often in tears as she tried to set up house so far from the East End, so far from the shops; buying from unfamiliar and on the whole unfriendly shopkeepers who did not understand bargaining, had not heard of feather quilts, and sold strange bland foods which her forbears would have spat out in disgust. There was no synagogue near Golders Green. With the arrival of the children her whole life had become circumscribed with domestic obligations. Enough to do as wife and mother and to keep the religion alive in this land where she was often made to feel a stranger. Her children were to be enrolled in the City of London School on the Embankment where their religion was tolerated, even encouraged. Until the Tube actually arrived at their doors – and no sooner was a transport company created, with great fanfare, than it seemed to go bust – the journey there and back would be time-consuming. If they’d only stayed where they were life would be easier.

  ‘Not with an east London address,’ Eric had said firmly. The NWs will very soon come into their own, mark my words. Friends and associates are buying round here. Now we’ve gone first they’re following. Start a school in the garden room while the children are little. I promise you an invitation from the Countess of Dilberne will arrive soon. I will see to it. You will charm and delight society as you charm and delight me.’

  He did not tell his wife the humiliation he had been exposed to on the steps of Belgrave Square. But he would show them. He would pay them back, squeeze a little harder. His Lordship had at least voted against the Exportation of Arms Bill. That must have gone against his landed gentry grain.

  But the Countess of Dilberne had evidently not taken the hint about the invitation. She was nothing but a selfish snob. Attractive, yes, not thin-blooded and high-browed like so many of the real aristocracy, but looked as if she was capable of having a good time in bed. She had no reason to give herself the airs she did. Her father had started as a miner. She was living off borrowed money. Her good fortune was due to luck and looks, not hard work like his own. He would like to see her brought down a peg or two.

  The bad news was that building the house had been far more expensive than he had anticipated. Land prices had shot up while he was mid-transaction. The building of the new Underground station, which had lured him to Golders Green in the first place, was to be delayed, perhaps for years, and he’d have to take the bus to Finchley Road, and thence to Chancery Lane, changing at Oxford Circus. He rose at six each morning and did not get home until eight, sometimes later.

  They would be made to pay. He would tighten the pressure.

  Tessa Tells Minnie How It Is – Or Tries To

  9.30 a.m. Thursday, 2nd November 1899

  ‘He would make your life easy,’ said Tessa to Minnie. ‘And it would please your father very much. You could have a big society wedding in Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s.’

  ‘I don’t know that I want an easy life, Mama. I would rather have an interesting one.’

  ‘You had an interesting one with your Mr Stanton Turlock. And look where that ended.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have ended if you hadn’t interfered.’

  ‘He was a madman! Of course it would have.’ They were breakfasting in their rooms at Brown’s. The coffee was rich and strong, the rolls and the butter fresh. They were enjoying their stay. They bickered, but idly. Minnie was recovering from a broken heart and public humiliation. She had fallen in love with her art teacher, Stanton Turlock, a handsome young painter of unfashionable subjects, mostly Red Indian chiefs, whom he painted in the same way that he made love to Minnie, with verve and ferocity. Alas, buyers preferred landscapes to put on their walls, rather than depictions of the mighty now brought low. Both Minnie and Stanton saw this rejection as a sure sign of his genius. In the name of free love and the power of the muse, and celebrating the event with a very public party, Minnie left home and moved into his studio in the romantic Burnt District. She later told Tessa that the heady fumes of turpentine and paint must have besotted her and drugged her senses. There was uproar at the Institute and of course at home. Tessa and Billy had had Stanton Turlock tailed by a private eye who came back with the information that the painter had a double life. He was already married, and had a wife and children in San Francisco: money from Minnie’s bank account was already being filtered off for the wife.

  Billy O’Brien had Turlock, never reckoned wholly sane, it transpired, beaten up and locked away in a lunatic asylum, and Minnie was obliged to return home. She was ashamed, chastened and stunned by the extremity and rapidity of dramatic events, but told herself she had recovered from Stanton’s betrayal quickly enough. It was the idea of Stanton Turlock she loved, not Stanton himself. Fortunately she had not fallen pregnant. But her reputation was lost amongst the decent families of Chicago, and her beloved father even forbade her to go on painting.

  She’d come home to Prairie Avenue with a sex-inspired Monet-style flower-subject canvas tucked under her arm and Billy had just torn it to bits in front of her eyes. That had offended and upset her more than losing her lover and her ‘reputation’, for both of which she discovered she cared very little.

  ‘I’m a practical man,’ Billy had said. ‘I don’t blame you. You take after your mother. A girl on heat’s no different than a sow on heat. She takes it where she finds it. Just stop this art shenanigan. I don’t mind it in a gallery but it has no place in a decent Catholic home. Your mother wants grandchildren, and no one in this town is going to marry you. You’d best go abroad and buy yourself some toff who doesn’t know your history. Your mother would like an outing. And a title in the family is good for business.’

  Tessa was indeed happy enough to go on a European tour, to stay just around the corner from the Royal Academy where so many of Eyre’s paintings were exhibited. There could be no harm in just looking, in reminding herself of the past, when she had been the kind of buxom blonde girl painters liked around, as bed companion, model, cook and laundress, preferably all at once. She had heard that he was still unmarried, there was no Mrs Crowe. There would be nothing untoward in her visit, no risking her own marriage; so many and so much depended upon it, Billy himself, her standing at the Art Institute of Chicago, charities all over the land, and there could be no upsetting any of it all.

  But still it would be interesting to see The Dinner Hour, Wigan, of which she had seen a copy, painted in 1874 when Eyre had returned to England, and see whether the girl in the foreground was as like her in the original as it had been in the reproduction. She’d worked in the packing factories in Chicago when first she met Billy – well, that was not quite accurate. She’d met him in the burlesque theatre where she worked of an evening. He liked to watch but couldn’t do. It didn’t stop him loving her or she him. He’d had a nasty accident in the yards when he was a lad and would never have children. All his energies went into making money. But he was always good for a cuddle and
had even let her know that if she wanted his friend Murphy to sire a child, he would look the other way on one occasion and one occasion only. The occasion had arrived and in the same week, as it happened, had an impulsive encounter at the rather drunken opening of the Art Institute of Chicago with Mr Eyre. Minnie had arrived, and if the baby didn’t look in the least like Murphy, Billy wasn’t to know a thing like that.

  Life never turned out the way you expected it. One way and another, it was quite a marvel Minnie had turned out as steady as she had, and with any luck another marvel was in store for the bog-Irish O’Briens when the girl ended up as Lady Minnie Dilberne, society beauty, in quaint old England.

  ‘Besides, I don’t think they let commoners marry in Westminster Abbey,’ Minnie said.

  ‘You wouldn’t be a “commoner”, you’d be a viscountess.’

  ‘Only on the way out, not on the way in.’

  ‘But you’ve been thinking about it?’

  ‘Oh sure,’ said Minnie, casually, as if it was nothing to anyone.

  ‘So you like him? Really like him?’

  ‘Ma, I scarcely know him. We spent one hour in the Victoria and Albert museum. Which is so impressive – do you know the Queen herself, whom no one ever sees, actually came to the opening? It is all very glorious. I am so in love with England. As for its native sons… I daresay one is much like another, and this one is good-looking and pleasant enough. Though all he can talk about is the number of birds he’s killed, and steam automobiles, and what a disgrace it is that electricity is taking over from steam – or maybe he thinks that’s a good thing, I don’t remember; I didn’t listen all the time. But then Pa can talk about nothing but hogs, sows, cattle and refrigeration cars, and you and he get on happily enough. One has to take men with a pinch of salt.’