3 Great Historical Novels (85 page)

The fact was, though Isobel was not to know this, for her back was to the entrance lobby, that during the
borscht
course, Flora had entered the restaurant in the company of the Honourable Anthony Robin, a slim, lordly fellow whom Arthur knew, having fagged for him at Eton, where he was familiarly known as Redbreast, and known him later at Oxford, where he had been, like Arthur, a member of the Bullingdon Club. Flora in Pagani's? This was just not right. With another man? With Anthony bloody Robin of all people? She had slipped off a white mink stole and handed it to a waiter. When did she last have a fur stole? She was looking rosy and very happy, like a girl having a good time rather than a girl earning a living, her smile friendly enough and not calculated. Though perhaps – could one really tell? She was wearing a silky white dress, uncorseted, with leg of mutton sleeves and little white satin bows fastened everywhere. Her hair was piled up loosely as Arthur's own mother sometimes wore hers. Redbreast was looking unbearably proprietorial.

Flora caught Arthur's eye and gave him a little apologetic smile, which made him suspect her the more. The two of them
were led to one of the more private booths where diners who did not want to attract too much attention were put. Now he could not see them but watched as champagne and lobsters went to their table.

He tried to pay attention to what was going on at his own table but it was difficult. Mother was unashamedly hurling the O'Brien girl at him. He'd hoped she'd forgotten all about the marrying money business, but apparently she was still bent on it. The O'Brien mother was a nightmare, a circus act, she hooted when she laughed and threw herself about all the time as though she had all the space in the world, which he supposed in her own country one did. The girl didn't seem, well, objectionable. She looked virginal enough but then so did Flora. He marvelled at how the worst kind of woman looked no different from the purest kind. Prostitution was meant to show in a woman's eyes, in the hardness of her glance, but in his experience this was by no means the rule. The effects of poverty would show, in tired skin, a mean look, hardness of expression, but not always the effects of disreputable character. He wondered briefly what the reality behind Minnie's gentle demeanour might be, but did not dwell on it. He was too taken up with outrage at thoughts of white-bosomed Flora and Redbreast conjoined that were too disgusting to face. He felt ill. Yet it was not as if he loved Flora. Men didn't love whores, they used them. No, the problem was that she was taking advantage of him. He was paying for exclusive rights, and she was failing in her side of the bargain. She was royally cheating him, taking him for a fool. Exclusive, my foot!

When, over coffee, his mother suggested he accompany Minnie to the Victoria and Albert Museum to view the oriental ceramics, Arthur did not have the emotional energy to wriggle out of the arrangement. He found he had agreed to
call for Minnie at two the next afternoon. Von Demy then suggested that Jan and Janika came along too, and Arthur agreed to this too though Mama was looking daggers. Better four of them than two; conversation would be easier. With any luck Jan would know about steam cars and leave the girls to look at old bits of heathen china to their hearts' content.

He thought it was strange that when their party was leaving his father caught sight of Flora and said, ‘But isn't that—?', and then broke off, and when Isobel quizzed him, said, ‘Oh, nothing. Just the way that nowadays the strangest people get to the grandest places.'

Not that Pagani's was in the least grand, Arthur thought. Gold wallpaper and a sprinkling of famous people with greenery-yallery pretensions did not make a place grand. Give him Rules or the Savoy Grill any day. Though the food hadn't been too bad. The
perdreaux voisin
was just plump partridge slices on lettuce leaves with some kind of red sweet sauce. The meat baron's wife was like a rather plump partridge herself. The daughter was like the
sole Pagani
, delicate and fresh with chewy bits in the sauce, mussels and prawns.

But Flora, ah, Flora, she was the
soufflé Curaçao
, evil, frothy and aromatic, and infinitely desirable. He realized he too had drunk quite a lot, especially of the Saint-Estèphe, the better to blot out the infernal vision of Flora and Redbreast in each other's arms.

If Grace was angry with her Ladyship for ignoring her advice, and found it painful to realize just how lightly she, Grace, could be relegated from almost-friend to mere employee, Mr Eric Baum was incensed with the whole Dilberne family. They had mocked him and made light of him and worse, had failed to realize just how much consideration he offered them – running half the way from Lincoln’s Inn to Belgrave Square, kept waiting first on the step and then for breakfast – or even to take seriously how much they owed him. Money came easily to them, but had not to him. But it was not just his pocket they had hurt, but his pride.

Grace had gone straight down to the servants’ hall where they were having tea to let everyone know that Miss Minnie O’Brien, soon to be affianced to Master Arthur – not that the girl knew anything about it, but her Ladyship had set her mind on it and wouldn’t stop until she had her way – was not just a fortune-hunter but a title-hunter too and no better than she ought to be. But all that happened was that the staff ganged up against her.

‘Good for her,’ said Elsie. ‘You’re just jealous because you’re still sweet on Arthur. But he’s a big boy now.’

‘That’s enough of that,’ said Mr Neville. ‘And I’m surprised
at you, Grace. Tell-tale tit, your tongue shall be split, and all the little puppy dogs will have a little bit?’

‘Pull the other one, Grace,’ said Reginald. ‘Master Arthur’s lady friend in Mayfair wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘You’re going to get done for pimping one day, Reggie,’ Smithers said, ‘and serve you right. The law’s changed. Taking Master Arthur along the way you do.’

 ‘Isn’t against the law,’ said Reginald. ‘It isn’t a brothel, just a nice little flat. It’s only when one or two gather together it counts as a brothel. Now if Miss Rosina was to move in…’ It had become known that Miss Rosina believed in free love; Reginald had driven her to a lecture by a Dr Havelock Ellis on sexual inversion. ‘Only then they might get me for procurement.’

‘That’s enough of that,’ said Cook. ‘Smithers, there’s gristle in the shepherd’s pie. You should have gone through the meat before you put it in the pan. And the porridge this morning was lumpy.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Smithers, ‘but I am the parlour maid not the cook. I occasionally help out, that’s all.’

‘Now now,’ said Mrs Neville, ‘see what you’ve done, Grace? Set them off!’

‘Another thing,’ said Grace, ‘the reason we’re still in this Belgrave hellhole and not in Hampshire is because his Lordship owes Pickfords so much they won’t send the movers in until he’s paid the bill.’

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.

‘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.