3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You mean she could always sell herself if she had to.’

  ‘I suppose so dear, yes.’

  ‘Conspicuous consumption is the mark of the unfree servant,’ said Minnie and her mother groaned and asked her not to start.

  ‘You read too many books,’ she complained. Minnie said it was her mother’s fault because she had booked them on the Oceanic on the trip over and there had been nothing to do but use the library. You couldn’t look out of portholes; there were just big round, modern electric lights where they were meant to be.

  ‘The sooner you’re married and settled the better,’ said Tessa. ‘Before you turn into some cranky old maid. Aren’t you looking forward to going shopping? Have they found something wrong with it? All you thinking young women are such goshdarned wet blankets.’

  ‘The Oceanic’s library had all the latest books, naturally. I was reading Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. But the library was only for first class passengers. Four hundred of us. The thousand in steerage were not allowed in. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that those who need to read most are not allowed to read?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Tessa. ‘The poor things would only dirty the pages with their grubby fingers.’

  ‘Mr Veblen talks about women’s dress as a burden placed upon them by men, to bring order to the confused and transient social structure of a highly organized industrial community.’

  ‘Spare me,’ said her mother. But Minnie would not.

  ‘It has never occurred to me before,’ she said, ‘that women wear corsets and white gloves to show the world that they need not scrub floors,’ she said. ‘But it’s true. Fashion renders you helpless. High heels and hobble skirts stop you running, corsets stop you breathing, and hats stop you seeing. The more fashionable you are the more helpless you are. A man hangs you with jewellery to show you off as a possession. In the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still the economic dependant of the man.’

  ‘Cuss that boring library and Mr Vabberlin too,’ said Tessa. ‘All he wants is for everyone to have nothing and look miserable. Don’t let your young Arthur get a whiff of these fine new opinions or he’ll be off like a shot. A man likes a girl to dress well.’

  ‘I’m afraid my young Arthur is already off like a shot,’ said Minnie. ‘A full week and I haven’t heard a word.’

  ‘Oh, that’s why you’re so darned cranky,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t you worry. He’ll be back when he thinks you’ve missed him enough. Any time now, I’d say.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Minnie, ‘a woman can’t be forever wondering what a man thinks or doesn’t think.’

  ‘Oh yes she can,’ said Tessa firmly. ‘What else is there to do? I’d best wire your father for more money. Things are so dear over here. Back home a girl gets proper value for what she spends.’

  When they got back to the hotel, there was a card from Arthur asking Minnie if she’d go riding with him on Saturday.

  Minnie Prepares to Go Riding

  In the Morning, Saturday, 18th November 1899

  Minnie was in such a good humour the next morning that Grace, who had been thinking it might be as good a plan to tell Miss Minnie about Master Arthur’s carry-on with Flora, as to tell Master Arthur about Miss Minnie’s scandalous carry-on with a married madman, did not have the heart to do it. A ride in Rotten Row, she told herself, was as likely to put them off each other as put them on. Minnie looked too delicate to be much of a rider and would have no idea how to conduct herself with the formality required on the Row.

  Her practical concern now was that Minnie had neglected to pack her riding habit, and there was no time to purchase a new one, let alone fit and alter it by Saturday. So Grace walked all the way over to Belgrave Square in the hope of borrowing one from Miss Rosina.

  Rosina rarely rode, seeing riding as demeaning to dumb animals, though she looked extremely handsome in her habit. It would be a good enough fit for Minnie. When laced, Rosina had the same twenty-two-inch waist as Minnie, though unlaced Rosina’s was a good three inches more. The habit consisted of a very nice tailored jacket in grey twill with a flared skirt, silk-lined, smart waistcoat, gaiters which made the most of dainty feet and a jaunty and very modern bowler hat.

  Rosina was happy enough to lend the costume out. Grace presumed upon the almost-friendship she managed at times with Rosina to ask her what she thought Master Arthur’s motives were in relation to the O’Brien girl.

  ‘Viscount Arthur’s motives? Arthur has no motives. He has no brain. Not even enough to successfully marry for money,’ Rosina snapped. She was in a hurry, as so often, on her way to a meeting of the Fabian Society in Essex Hall just off the Strand, and not interested in pursuing the line of conversation. She was having to go without Grace as an escort, and that put her out. Grace tried, in passing, to persuade Miss Rosina to wear a corseted dress if she was going out alone in the crowds, but failed.

  ‘They’re only Fabians,’ Rosina said. ‘They wear sandals and socks and never trim their beards. They talk a lot about the Life Force and Free Love but are far too nervous to do anything about it. I will be perfectly safe. Far safer than you will ever be amongst your revolutionaries, properly done up and corseted though you are, and with not an inch of flesh showing.’

  ‘I have an escort in Mr Eddie,’ said Grace, proudly, and was pleased when Rosina darted an almost friendly smile at her in response.

  Miss Rosina was not so bad. At least lately she had taken to feeding Pappagallo on Brazil nuts and not oily pine nuts, so that the peevish creature left a less messy trail behind it as it half-flew, half-hopped with its clipped wings about Miss Rosina’s rooms. When both Miss Rosina and her Ladyship were safely out of the house Lily would be sent to clean up after the creature. She was proving really useful.

  It seemed to Rosina unfair on first principles that, of the two of them, Arthur would succeed to the title and the estates. She was the elder child, but the younger male took precedence and would inherit the lot, whereas she was obviously the more competent. One day she would raise the matter at a meeting of the Fabians. They fought for social justice, and surely the equality of the sexes should be amongst their aims; they shouldn’t only be interested in the betterment of the poor. It took courage to stand up and speak in public – one’s voice squeaked and rose in pitch when one was nervous – but one day she would manage.

  Mind you, her voice could be no squeakier than that of Mr H.G. Wells of whom everyone took an inordinate amount of notice, but whom she found rather disappointing to meet, he being rather smaller than one had supposed. He had an interesting gift for stirring up trouble, she’d observed. She’d been to a talk by him about his novel The War of the Worlds. He’d suggested that the cruel Martians with their invincible fighting machines were perhaps the human beings of the future, when human brains had outstripped all of their other organs, and that technology was the path to victory. It seemed reasonable enough to her, but various religious groups, both the Quakers, who were pacifists and the Catholics, who were anti-evolutionists, had been loud in protest. Blows were exchanged. Grace had had to hurry her out before things grew nasty, and Rosina, annoyed by her persistence, had failed to give her the usual five-shilling tip. She quite liked Grace and sometimes she had stimulating things to say; she liked to think that she, Rosina, had helped educate her, but Grace had to remember she was a servant.

  Warm Toes in Golders Green

  7.50 a.m. Thursday, 16th November 1899

  The smart new bronze-plated letterbox made its customary clack and Naomi ran in her stockinged feet to see what the postman had brought. The carpet – newly fitted, three-ply Australian wool, a beautiful dark red with a light olive scroll decoration, was thick and soft beneath her toes. The whole house was warmed by the best and slimmest grey iron radiators available. Eric had spared no cost. There was no invitation amongst the letters but Naomi now had the feeling that one day soon it would come.

  She was suddenly feeling more cheerful, at la
st, she imagined, recovering from the death of her mother, becoming accustomed to the peace and quiet of the suburbs. The children’s noses no longer ran. The necks of their shirts were not grimed with dirt after a couple of hours’ wear. Their faces had smoothed out and their cheeks glowed. The carpets were in and the builders almost gone. She had a lovely home. The streets outside were being paved and the mud would soon be under control. The street even had a name. The plates had just gone up. Hampstead Way. A few more Jewish families were known to be moving in. The local butcher had agreed to sell kosher meat, and she didn’t have to schlep the children all the way to St John’s Wood to buy it. Eric was generous with the housekeeping: if she wanted something she asked for it and the money to do it would be there.

  Her beautiful built-in wardrobes were filling up with dresses; she had a beaver coat. She had a very pleasant shiksa girl to live-in, so that on Saturdays the life of the household need not stop. Her husband loved her. She knew she was lucky. So her student life was behind her, and her dreams of being a famous scientist, another Marie Curie, were at an end. But how else could it have gone? A woman had to choose between children and a scientific calling. And what kind of woman would she be if she denied Eric a family?

  It troubled her that Eric now so seldom went to the synagogue with her on Saturdays. Change the rituals and you weakened the faith that had kept the Jews together through the centuries. The argument, which you heard mostly from men, not women, that the rules could be relaxed, that some of the customs and rituals that went with desert life could be altered to fit in with an age of automobiles and machinery did not impress her. Sometimes she felt Eric was quite capable of denying his faith altogether, allowing himself to be subsumed into gentile society altogether. Well, she would not let that happen.

  If only she had an entrée into High Society she need not lament the past, but could be part of a brighter life. It had to be faced that nothing about Golders Green glittered. What was the point of a beaver coat if there was nowhere to be seen wearing it? By lunchtime Naomi was feeling discontented again; she wanted to be free of the feeling that the centrifuge of life had whisked her up and flung her round and landed her abandoned on the outskirts of existence and there she would remain for ever.

  When he came home that night, she waxed quite lyrical to Eric, who looked at her with his gentle eyes and said he was doing his best. She wanted her invitation to Belgrave Square, to the charity dinner on December 17th where the Prince of Wales himself would be present. She had seen it announced in The Times. Eric had told her it was on its way. But he had told her the same, as she reminded him, about an invitation to a glamorous charity function that had been and gone and no invitation. Until this next invitation turned up she would not keep Eric out of her bed, which would be failing in her wifely duty, but she would take care not to enjoy it when he was.

  Minnie Asserts her Rights

  2 p.m. Thursday, 16th November 1899

  Minnie, presented with Rosina’s riding habit, borrowed by Grace for the occasion, expressed her admiration, for it was indeed splendid, both jaunty and exquisite, but refused to wear the skirt, and demanded jodhpurs.

  ‘I hope you don’t mean to sit astride,’ said Grace, aghast.

  ‘I most surely do,’ said Minnie. ‘Side-saddle at a gallop isn’t safe. Do you want me to break my neck and die?’ Minnie sometimes thought Grace might want exactly that. It wasn’t that she said anything at all out of turn, but the way Grace spoke left Minnie in no doubt but that she disapproved of her. She hoped the secrets of her past had not travelled with her. It was not impossible. ‘No, Miss Minnie,’ said Grace. ‘I want you to sit side-saddle, take the air at no more than a gentle trot, and not bring mockery down on the house of Hedleigh.’

  ‘Oh very well then,’ said Minnie kindly, respecting her judgement. ‘If you insist. But why are you all so frightened of bodies over here? Everybody has one!’

  Grace thought, and said that when she was small a kindly family had taken her in and that when she had taken her weekly bath she’d had to do so in a sort of tent so as not to get sight of her own body, and once she had been caught peeking, and been beaten so hard she had never forgotten it. Minnie said she had been sent to a convent and the same thing had happened to her but she could never think about bodies as the nuns thought of them, or of not using them as nature suggested.

  ‘When I was fifteen,’ said Minnie, ‘and on one of my father’s ranches, I stayed on a bucking steer for four whole seconds before I fell off.’

  Grace looked horrified. But Minnie seized her by the hands and whirled the maid around the room, crying ‘Oh Grace, Grace, Grace, forgive me for being me. Really you know I can’t help it.’ Which did actually evoke a little smile of sympathy in Grace. However irritating the ‘Yankee’ girl was, she had the gift of saying what she felt, a rare thing in Grace’s experience. Upstairs was too refined: in the basement, the wrong side of the green baize door, all was a peculiar blend of prudery and rudery. She suffered from it too, she knew. She wasn’t like Rosina: she couldn’t loosen herself from her own background.

  But Grace blenched when Minnie then told her to unpick the seams and draw out the whalebones with which the riding jacket made a mono-bosom of her chest. Grace stopped smiling. The girl seemed determined to exhibit her body as nature made it, not as garments rendered it decent. It was as though she had the instincts of a whore, but without the excuse of needing money to survive.

  Riding in Rotten Row

  11 a.m. Saturday, 18th November 1899

  Rotten Row was not the morass of deliquescing mud Minnie had somehow expected, but a handsome, broad, sanded thoroughfare, like an avenued racecourse, along the Knightsbridge side of Hyde Park. There had been a violent gale the night before and any last leaves had finally left the trees.

  Arthur went riding in a top hat, which Minnie found rather strange. At home people used horses for getting about rather than for showing off their best clothes. They just wore flat caps to keep their heads warm or wide brimmed hats to keep the sun off. But Arthur looked good, she granted, in a top hat: the formality suited him, for on occasion he could look too boyish, spontaneous and floppy-haired for his own good. This afternoon he certainly looked like a man. For the first time she was slightly in awe of him, and when he laid an elegant grey-gloved hand on her arm and smiled, she felt gratified and flattered. Last time she’d been with him there had been engine oil beneath his nails: there probably still was, but what you didn’t see you needn’t dwell on.

  Her father’s broad, reddened hands were often ingrained with dirt, no matter how her mother nagged him and oiled them. He was a cattleman and proud of it, wealthy beyond his own belief, but changed in any way because of it? No sir, not at all. Or so he presented himself. He shook hands with presidents, but wouldn’t think of wearing gloves to do so. Her mother’s hands too were broad and big, and these days puffy as well: she thanked her own good fortune that this particular inheritance had passed her by, so that the hand that now Arthur pressed to his lips in greeting, was small, long-fingered and in all manner elegant. Minnie did not wear gloves – how could you get the feel of reins, let alone your mount, through gloves? Arthur’s were grey suede, fashionable no doubt, but would be the devil to keep clean.

  Minnie felt of a sudden at a loss to know what to say to him. She had no brothers, her father was mostly too busy to be anything but remote, and she had been well chaperoned, until her sudden wild flight with Stanton. His discourse could be strange and sometimes irrational, but certainly did not amount to small talk. And in this country, she had quickly learned, polite small talk was valued. Few addressed subjects head on, from the weather to fashion, to the difference between country and town, or one country and another. Only yesterday conversation with Arthur had flowed so well: today, as it became self conscious, it faltered.

  ‘If you don’t know what to say to a man,’ Tessa had told Minnie often enough, ‘ask him a question. Then they can feel less of an eejit than you bec
ause they know the answer. Just don’t ask him something he doesn’t know. He’ll hate you for it.’ Minnie took the risk.

  ‘Why is it called Rotten Row,’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

  Arthur raised his eyebrows and complained that she was a stranger from a strange land – which in this country seemed something of an insult – and she replied that from where she sat in her saddle his land was a lot stranger than hers. It’s just older, he said, a lot older. Rotten Row had been named Route du Roi two hundred years ago when William of Orange had it cleared and lit as a safe route for him to get to Whitehall, and vulgar tongues had reduced it to a crude phonetic parody in the intervening years.

  ‘That was back when your land was still inhabited only by buffaloes and Red Indians,’ he remarked, and she didn’t bother to deny it, wondering why he seemed so set on condescending to her about her supposedly ‘colonial’ character. She had an intuition that perhaps something had happened since she last saw him to change his mind about her desirability. What, though? Or perhaps he was just tired.

  Arthur was in truth feeling a little exhausted. He had been staying up late in the garage seeing to the Jehu’s new condenser, which was to his own design. This had involved borrowing a set of blacksmith’s tools from the stables – forge, anvil, grinding machine, drills, ratchets, files and so on. He had only stopped for outings to Flora, sometimes accompanied by Redbreast, sometimes not. Today he was still slightly dazed by last night’s encounter, but on the other hand invigorated by a world full of new possibilities, new excitements. Marriage to Minnie was still desirable, but only if it did not mean giving up Flora. His bride, for her part, would have to come to accept the unspoken mores and imperatives of the well-born English. He would behave honourably towards Minnie, of course he would; she would provide the Hedleighs not just with a new heir to carry on their name and create a new Dilberne, and fresh generations of children out of new breeding stock, but the life of his senses would remain his own. Intimacy with Minnie would be to do with the procreation of children, as the Church decreed, and a higher and better thing set apart.