Habits of the House (17 page)

Arthur was glad he had been to a proper school, as had Redbreast. Gentlemen knew how to deal with any social situation they happened to find themselves in, and how to surmount embarrassment. One kept one’s cool and made a joke.

‘I think this is my property, Redbreast,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is some misunderstanding here?’

‘Oh my dear good man!’ said Robin. ‘If it isn’t Dillybutt! Of all people!’ Arthur winced at the use of his nickname. He hadn’t heard it for a good ten years.

‘Don’t tell me this lass has been misbehaving? Flora, have you?’ Redbreast bent over her, the end of his old school tie tickling her breasts, so she wriggled and giggled the more.

‘He promised to marry me and he let me down,’ said Flora. ‘I owe him nuffink.’ She usually managed a proper ‘nothing’, but in what could only be a surfeit of guilt her pronunciation had reverted to its original.

She tried to slip off the bed but Redbreast caught her wrist and tied the silk scarf or whatever it was to the shiny brass rail so tightly she fell back on it, gave a little cry of alarm and quickly put her legs together.

‘You promised, Dillybutt? Had you been drinking?’

‘Indeed I had,’ said Arthur. ‘I would hardly have asked her sober. But since I pay well over the odds for exclusivity, old fellow, I can’t quite work out what you’re doing in my house?’

‘Then you are not entitled, Flora,’ said Redbreast, ‘and must
keep your side of the bargain. I too have paid over the odds.’ Redbreast tied her other wrist to the bed, and though she tried now to keep them together, parted her legs forcibly.

‘See to her ankles,’ said Redbreast, speaking with the authority of a fag master, so Arthur felt he had no choice but to obey. He found what he thought must be the white silk belt Flora had been wearing at Pagani’s and used it to grab the left ankle and tie it to the bedpost – she tried to kick out at him, but he got the leg caught soon enough – and used Redbreast’s now discarded old school tie, black silk with blue diagonals, to secure the other ankle.

Flora did not seem too aggrieved by the process. She kept talking and imploring for mercy and occasionally giggling. ‘A silent woman is above rubies,’ said Redbreast. ‘Be quiet.’ And, surprisingly, she was – if briefly.

Life was very curious, thought Arthur. There was Minnie, with her discreet body, her quick mind, her formality, with whom one could have one kind of intimacy and this one, a plump rosy shape full of exits and entrances, which offered quite another.

The matter was settled amicably enough and to both their advantage. Redbreast had first happened upon Flora weeping in the park, claiming to be an unfortunate virgin abducted from school by the man she claimed had now ‘let her down’. She needed funds to sue for breach of promise: then she took him home, explaining that the expensive flat had been borrowed from an actress friend until she had raised the necessary money. It wasn’t as if she was a whore. She wasn’t used goods, she claimed, on the contrary, she was good as new.

‘She has quite a way with words,’ Redbreast said. ‘That almost put me off. One doesn’t want to think of a brain working too hard behind that pretty face.’

Redbreast had agreed to pay Flora’s rent, and ten pounds the hour on top of that. She brushed up well, he’d even taken her to Pagani’s, and risked meeting anyone he knew. You’d never know from the look of her what kind of girl she was.

Neither of them wanted to lose her. They would simply share her, as she had tried to share them. She had started it. They agreed Redbreast would pay half the rent, from now on. Arthur would continue with the keep. Arthur must have the lion’s share, for was he not paying more? Granted, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, but it was still 70/30 in Arthur’s favour. Things Arthur had thought not possible, Redbreast assured him, were.

‘Oh no, no, please,’ Flora moaned as Redbreast delineated exactly where and how they would attend to her. Arthur remembered the word from
My Secret Life
: ‘doodles’, faintly ridiculous, were always going stiff, stiffer, failing, growing stiff again – as his was doing now – a source of anxiety as well as satisfaction, rubbing here, rubbing there, explosions and squirtings of juices and so on, mucky stuff, ridiculous and disgusting. But looking at Flora, he began to see the charm of it. Something, whatever it was, had to
happen
. Redbreast had his clothes off. His ‘doodle’ was magnificent, surprising for so lank and academic-looking a man. Flora seemed to regard it with admiration, even fear, but then so she had honoured Arthur’s ‘doodle’ when first she saw it. Mind you, Arthur’s was not bad, better than almost anyone in his House at Eton for his height.

While Flora cried for mercy and regularly moaned ‘Ow, it hurts, have mercy, sirs, please don’t,’ and so on, and even managed a tear or two, she continued to offer herself, he noticed, by no means averse to sharing any of her attributes to amplify her pleasure. Really, these women were corrupt; they
made beasts of men: he would only marry a virgin and make sure she knew nothing and never got to find out anything.

Why did one do this, he wondered, why was one driven to these slippery, mucky endeavours: the instinctive jerking and pumping, in and out, in and out, as if seeking out some vital centre that was so frustratingly elusive, and when you found it, ceased to be of any importance at all? It was an appetite like hunger, he supposed, that had to be satisfied if you were to live, and the same sort of unreasonable drive, just that this could only be honoured when it was employed to keep the race alive. Unlike food, which had dignity, elevated you, honoured you – a good
tournedos
, a delicate
soufflé Curaçao
– desire was designed to humiliate you by making you as low as the filthiest rutting beast; it made Flora mock the squealing of the sow as she was serviced, he and Robin mimic the stupid grunting of the boar as it did its business; yellow satin, pink gauze, white mink, scarlet damask, but still underlying it the sour black mud of the pigsty.

And why was he so glad to see that Redbreast’s doodle, though stouter than his own, if not necessarily longer when fully extended, did not have such excellent staying power? Why did that make him want to crow like some cock? It was beyond all sense.

When the pair left, some three hours later, Reginald and Redbreast’s driver were not only still patiently waiting, but, Arthur was sorry to see, in conversation; no doubt comparing the habits of their masters and betters. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Boys would be boys, everyone knew.

Reginald was unnecessarily inquisitive and asked Arthur ‘How it had gone’, and Arthur said he thought the girl had learned her lesson – though in truth when he left he had the distinct impression Flora was laughing at him, and when he told her he and Mr Robin would be coming round for her
attentions together every Saturday afternoon to get what they had paid for, and separately whenever they felt inclined, she seemed not too vexed at all. Girls were difficult to impress.

‘I’ve known some of these girls take on six or seven at a time,’ said Reginald, ‘and not turn a hair. You say she was out with Mr Robin last night?’

‘They turned up at Pagani’s.’

‘Did she, sir!’ said Reginald.

‘She can’t possibly have known I’d be there,’ said Arthur.

‘Very few secrets in this town,’ said Reginald. ‘I reckon Grace and Mr Eddie have something going on. What’s the betting your little friend was wearing a white mink stole? If she was, it’s the one the girls pass round. Nothing like a jealous man to part with cash. She knew you’d turn up. How much more did she get out of you tonight?’

Arthur deliberately failed to answer. She’d got ten pounds more because he’d felt bad. He’d been a mug, that was the truth of it. Now he saw himself, not Flora, as the one who had been used and abused. Reginald, seeing the set of Arthur’s jaw, prudently fell silent.

Arthur took a hot bath when he got home, and spent a long time in it. His father had recently installed copper pipes for running hot water and Arthur was glad of it. Otherwise Mrs Neville would have made a fuss having to fetch hot water from the kitchen while the staff was doing dinner, and been curious. He was not proud of what had happened. He wished it had not. But he looked forward to the next time he saw Flora, with or without Redbreast, and also of course to riding with Minnie O’Brien on Rotten Row. But he had the Arnold Jehu to see to first. He had missed dinner but Cook might find him some bread and cheese and then he might spend a little time in the garages with his real darling.

The Gift of Equal Status

11.10 a.m. Tuesday, 7th November 1899

Tessa had arranged that she and Minnie should go first to Belgrave Square to collect Lady Isobel, and accompany her to her dressmaker in Kensington. One way and another things were progressing nicely. Greater love hath no woman than to share her dressmaker with another. Lady Isobel was granting Tessa the gift of equal status.

‘It’s all very well, Mama,’ said Minnie, ‘but a whole day shopping! Perhaps I could slip away after lunch and go to the National Gallery! So many paintings I long to see.’

‘I’m sure we have far better ones at home in Chicago,’ said Tessa. ‘And no, there’ll be no slipping away. You just concentrate on turning yourself into a future countess. See how it’s done.’

And Tessa tapped her rather plump foot in its little, heeled crocodile shoe, rang for the carriage, and without further discussion she and Minnie went shopping.

The Earl of Dilberne Contemplates the Future

11 a.m. Tuesday, 7th November 1899

It was a remarkably boring morning in the Lords, thought Robert. Dreary bills about electric power, dull debates about the various principles of inheritance in the Colonies. Lunch, though, was livelier. There was much animation about Ladysmith: it seemed things were not going too well, horse fever was rampant, the hills around the town were awash with fleeing refugees. Reports came escaped by heliograph and messenger – the Boers had cut the telegraph – that grown men, delicate ladies, children alike, were being herded into carts and shipped out of the area with little water and less food, carrying what pitiful possessions they had with them. Many Boers in all probability travelled with them, making their escape with the genuine refugees, to link up with their friends. Underground tunnels were being built where families could shelter from weaponry, but they were dusty, dangerous and vermin-infested.

Rumour had it that the northern firm Armstrong Whitworth was selling the Maxim machine gun to both Boers and British forces – a claim Robert was able to dismiss. One thing to sell arms to both sides in the American Civil War, as had indeed occurred, but surely Armstrong was a fiercely patriotic man, and would never do anything to harm British citizens or their interests. The Maxims were coming from
Sweden via Germany; Robert had it on good authority. That is to say, the Austrian Ambassador had let it slip.

News of the Modder Kloof mine disaster had spread through the House. There was much sympathy for Robert – ‘just the kind of thing we’re fighting these Dutch to prevent. To save the diamond and gold mines – our boys will get it back, don’t worry.’ The kind of thing the irritatingly bumptious young Winston Churchill had been saying the other month: no wonder he’d lost his election at Oldham to the Liberals – too brash, too moody, too warlike for the North, but determined not to give in and to stand again.

But something else Churchill had said in that conversation came back to him now, a sudden shaft of light cutting through into the sepulchre of a subdued House. Churchill, wide-eyed and excitable, animated rather than cast down by obstacles, had declared: ‘The only way to make money is to spend money.’

‘But you must have some, to spend it in the first place,’ Robert had pointed out.

‘Borrow it,’ said the young man. ‘Borrow more, make more. My late father’s good friend Ernest Cassel could be helpful. You should meet him.’

‘As it happens we are acquainted,’ his Lordship observed, and added that his affairs were with Courtney and Baum. To which Winston had said, ‘Then you’re on the right road. My father was a great man for diamonds. Did him no harm. But in my view diamonds and gold are too risky: they
cause
wars. Best to choose something less sparkly, something that gets less attention. Manganese? Dull stuff, but mix it in with iron and mine flooding ceases to be a serious problem. The supports won’t rust. If you can drain a mine you can save a mine.’ He himself was sailing straight away for Capetown to report the
new war for some newspaper. The new ease of communications – telegraph, telephone – was a boon to journalists. Imagination could flourish, feeding on immediate news and extremity of event. He would be back in time to take on Oldham again.

At lunch the Earl was nodded over to the powerful table for port and brandy, and discovered to his surprise that he was considered as an expert on the troubles in Natal. News travelled almost as fast in the House as it did at home. His voting against the Exportation of Arms Bill had marked him out as someone who at least had opinions on the matter. Having a view on Armstrong and Maxim guns had added to the general perception of Dilberne as a fount of knowledge.

Robert feared for his country if he was considered thus. Salisbury was an old man: his hands trembled as he took his glass. He forgot what he had just been told. His cabinet was still stuffed with lords, earls, viscounts, the odd marquess – most of them set in their ways, unable even to bring themselves to equip the army with Mausers or Maxims because they were repeater weapons and somehow ungentlemanly. One shot at a time was fair; more was too reliant on vulgar machinery, not valour. If one was to believe Churchill, the fight to crush the Boer was apparently more to protect the diamond and gold mines of the Natal than because the Boers were so unpleasant to the natives, which was the construction given to the public.

Well, the old chaps hadn’t done much of a job protecting his mine.

The need was for a steady hand at a steady wicket, one that didn’t tremble with age, as did Salisbury and his cronies, old tremblers all. Perhaps in a coming upheaval something in the War Office might come his way, or in the Colonial Office; bugger Fisheries. He must aim higher. He needed to. The
rewards were more attractive. Times were hard when a man must pay more attention to his prospects than his integrity.