Long Live the King (20 page)

The worms crawl in,

The worms crawl out,

They go in thin

And they come out stout . . .

Don’t think about it.

A Trip to Bath

‘I hope you are not having second thoughts,’ said George to Ivy. They were walking hand in hand up the road to the Registry Office, there to give the fifteen days’ notice required before registering a marriage.

‘Well, I am,’ said Ivy. ‘I don’t want to think I’ve been married for the sake of £200 worth of parish relief money.’

‘Think yourself lucky,’ said George amiably. ‘You’re a bad girl. Everyone in Bath knows. Who else is going to marry you?’

‘All kinds of men who want my two hundred quid,’ said Ivy. ‘I’m not daft.’

‘Your mother wants it for her roof,’ said George. ‘I know. I like your mother. Get her to put up with one more winter and we’ll not only re-thatch but put in running water too. It’s a promise. The money will come pouring in.’

‘Says you,’ said Ivy. ‘And this business of kidnapping Adela. It’s daft. Even though she’s willing she’s still under age. It’s bound to be against some law or other.’

‘So it’s worry keeps you awake at night,’ said George. ‘Funny. I could have sworn it was me,’ and he bumped against her as they walked so she got a fit of the giggles, forgot her qualms, and signed the necessary papers.

‘If you go to the bad I can’t testify against you once we’re married,’ she observed. ‘Is that why?’

‘I’m marrying you because I love you,’ he said. ‘You are so suspicious. It makes your eyes go squinny: it doesn’t suit you. Careful I don’t fall out of love with you.’

‘You be careful I don’t change my mind before the fifteen days are up,’ she murmured.

They went to the Post Office where he started a savings account and she transferred £200 from her account to his. She was already spending three and sixpence a night on the boarding house and fares had mounted to a good two shillings. Nothing was cheap. They took the bus to Wells and strolled round the Cathedral and then crossed to the Bishop’s Palace where they knew Adela was imprisoned. They pretended to be ordinary sightseers and watched the swans being fed. Ivy swore she saw Adela looking out of one of the windows at the swans, but George said she was being fanciful. It was just too easy and she could see that it was.

‘But it’s the kind of thing she’d love to do,’ said Ivy, regretfully. ‘It’s all so poetic.’

‘You saw it because you wanted to see it,’ he said. ‘It’s the kind of thing we learn at lectures. You just be guided by me, Ivy. I’m your husband.’

‘Not yet you aren’t,’ she said. But he jostled her from the back and she could see that she was as good as.

They were pleased to see that all kinds of people – clerics, servants, delivery boys – wandered up and down the drawbridge and though there was a porter’s lodge saw that for the moment at least it was unmanned. If Ivy put on a maid’s bonnet and George a coachman’s cap it would be easy enough for them to get in and out. But they needed to know exactly where in the palace Adela was. The longer they spent wandering corridors the greater the danger of being challenged and detected.

They could see they’d have to think about it, and took the bus back to Bath – another fourpence – where they had a cup of tea and bought some good crispy cod and chips wrapped in the
Bath Advertiser
to take back to their room – another eight pence for the two of them. It was strange that he now had nearly all the money but she was expected to pay. She said as much.

‘I wish you didn’t keep getting that squinny look in your eye,’ said George. ‘I’ll fall out of love with you. We don’t want that. It would spoil everything.’

It would too. She tried not to look squinny even if she still felt it. She handed over the eight pence.

The next day George’s eye fell on an advertisement – which he could just make out despite the grease – in the discarded newspaper wrapping from their fish-and-chips. It was, he said, ‘meant to be’, which was not the kind of thing he’d usually say but he seemed excited: it was for a public séance to be held that night in a school hall behind Pierrepoint Street.

George said going to it was necessary research. He already knew what went on but she also needed to – after all she, not he, would be the one on the platform. It was worth the investment of two shillings and sixpence a head. She said he should pay: it was a capital expense, not sundries. He sighed.

‘Squinny again,’ he said. She didn’t want him to fall out of love with her, and paid up, and remembering how once Adela had practised forgiveness, she tried practising trust. It gave her such a nice warm feeling she quite fell into the habit of feeling it.

The world-famous Mrs Tate was appearing with her spirit guide Hui Neng. George said she was probably a fake and these false mediums brought serious research into disrepute, and Ivy said but they themselves were going to be fakes and George said that was beside the point. Ivy shrugged and let it go.

The hall was full: there was standing room only: the room was steamy with damp coats, noisy with coughs and colds, and made foggy with smoke from oil lamps and cigars. Most in the audience were elderly women of the down-at-heel widow variety, but there was a fair sprinkling of the better dressed, and quite a number of student types. Everyone wanted to know about life after death. There was someone there from George’s college.

Mrs Tate made her entrance. She looked, rather disappointingly, like the farmer’s wife from Devon she was, in a not very crisp white blouse and a rather dusty navy skirt, not at all smart. She stood alone on a stage, empty other than two chairs and a plain table covered with a cloth which hung halfway to the floor. She talked in a high, refined voice for some ten minutes about the peace and presence of the Lord and the happiness of the other side, where the dead were finally at peace and restored to the wholeness of their youth. The audience liked and trusted her. She stopped talking mid flow, and her eyes began to roll upwards. She grunted and then as Ivy and George watched she turned into an elderly Chinaman. What kind of trick could turn smooth apple cheeks into dusty, wrinkled hollows, narrow European eyes into slits, change female into male, a mane of hair into a pigtail and a circular embroidered cap, an ordinary plain blouse and skirt into a flowered silk robe? To which George said, ‘A change of lighting, of course.’

The audience sighed in wonder and satisfaction. The spirit guide Hui Neng had taken over Sylphia Tate’s body. No one now must disturb the union or when he left for the other side he might take her with him.

‘This is for real,’ said Ivy.

‘She took off a wig and screwed up her face, that’s all,’ said George.

‘It’s so hot and smelly in here, George,’ pleaded Ivy. ‘Can we go?’

But George’s hand was on her arm, and forceful. She stayed where she was.

‘That tablecloth reaches the floor,’ said George. ‘They’ve painted the lower half black so it matches the back wall.’

When Hui Neng spoke it was with a strange accent and a high reedy voice that might well have come from the other side of the grave. He, or she, looked upwards into the fog of cigarette smoke and oil fumes that rose from the crowd. The audience looked upwards too.

‘Are you there? Yes, I hear you now, Fan Yip. I see, a message from Henry for Mary.’ There was a sharp rap from the ceiling. ‘Sorry, Fan Yip. Not Henry, Harry.’ There was a sharp cry from the audience.

‘Harry, is it you, my darling?’ and a sob of pain. The audience gasped. So did Ivy.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ivy,’ said George. ‘There are four hundred people in this crowd. How can there not be a passed-over Harry?’

‘Oh do hush!’ said Ivy. ‘People can hear you!’

Hui Neng/Mrs Tate and Mary had a conversation in which Mary asked Harry if his leg was still giving him trouble, and Fan Yip quoted Harry as saying he was young and strong again and Mary would be joining him soon in paradise, and when she asked how soon, said before next Christmas. Mary gave a little shriek. Hui Neng said time on the other side was different, being eternal, and quickly went on – to a little boy coming through from the other side, he had a caliper and big eyes, was there a mother present looking for a son with a caliper and big eyes, and found a father if not a mother. Was there a pet mouse? The father said not a mouse but a pet dog, and Hui Neng said the voice was indistinct, the wind of heaven was blowing strong today from the other side, and the lampshades above the table began to swing, so moving shadows crossed to and fro across the audience.

But now Sylphia Tate was moaning and twitching and a kind of white mist was coming from her mouth and ears, and forming in front of her into a shape, no, two shapes.

‘Ectoplasm,’ said George. ‘Gossamer and a draught. Look beneath the table.’ It was hard to see because of the dimmed lights and the fog of smoke and oil fumes. There was a disturbance in the audience. Someone had fainted.

‘They pay someone to do that,’ said George.

But Ivy’s heart was beginning to pound. On stage two shapes were beginning to form, a man and a woman. One was the tall craggy impression of Edwin Hedleigh, the other was that of little Mrs Hedleigh, both misty and dissolving and reshaping as clouds do, and cartoon versions at that; but them, nevertheless, her employers come back to take her with them to where they had gone, for the sin of going with George and letting them burn to death. She wanted to move, to flee, but she was paralysed. Others were also making for the doors.

Someone was screaming. The reedy voice turned into a croak. ‘Fire! Fire!’ and flames seemed to leap from Mrs Tate’s mouth.

‘Camphor,’ said George. ‘Take two parts of aquavite to one each of quicksilver and liquid styrax and set a match. Flames appear but do not burn. A simple trick. Our Professor showed us in the lab. For a moment even I was convinced. It’s the fumes in here. Shall we go?’

‘Stand back, stand back,’ Hui Neng was saying to the ceiling, as if to unseen spirits crowding in. ‘So many of you! Such a busy time.’

On the stage Hui Neng himself seemed alarmed. His voice squeaked like chalk on slate.

‘Death comes unannounced. The Avenging Angel. Death comes by flame and smoke. No, no.’ Now his voice was guttural again: a voice from hell. Mrs Tate was back, jerking and fitting away, leaning back stiffly.

George and Ivy made for the door.

‘But that was them,’ wept Ivy. ‘The Hon. Rev. and his missus.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said George. ‘The Rectory fire made quite a stir. They study the local papers when they arrive at a town, and pull something like this. One tall man, one short woman, easy. She’s pretty good, Mrs Sylphia Tate, I’ll say that for her. Two and six a head and they’re making a fortune. If there was someone like Adela on the platform we could charge three shillings – and they’d line up.’

‘Rather her than me,’ said Ivy, pulling herself together. ‘But I can’t say I like it. Too spooky.’

‘Then we’ll make the voices come from heaven not hell, and charge three and six. You’re married to a genius, Ivy.’

‘Not quite yet,’ she said.

The Illusionist’s Shop was still open, up the poor end of Milsom Street, and they went in together and bought some castanets, a guitar, some black paint, some gossamer and a rubber hand with a stout clip on the wrist and rubber fingers, and when George said it was for private work the shopkeeper came forward with a novelty number from America, a little miniature fan run by a battery. The whole lot came to fifteen pounds, eight and thruppence and George said it was cheap at the price, and Ivy paid up happily. But it did all seem somehow grubby as a collection of purchases, especially the rubber hand.

George slipped next door to the chemist, where he bought a bottle of chloroform and some gauze pads but Ivy didn’t know that.

Minnie’s Condition

Mrs Flower at the post office telephoned through to the station master at Brighton to tell him that the 10.00 train needed to make a detour and stop at Dilberne Halt. The fifth Earl of Dilberne had sold the land to the Brighton Railway Company in 1835 on condition that the train stopped at the Halt whenever so required by any occupier of Dilberne Court. Reginald drove Lady Minnie and Lady Rosina to Dilberne Halt, where they caught the 10.25 train to London at 10.30. They were on their way to see Lady Isobel. Minnie had news, good and bad, for her mother-in-law: Rosina wanted to get in some shopping and go to a debating club the following evening when Mr Gilbert Chesterton was rumoured to appear, and William Butler Yeats, over from Ireland. It seemed that Rosina was in correspondence with Seebohm Rowntree and he was coming down to London to attend – it was to be an argument between the rationalists and the idealists – but Minnie was not to let her mother know.

‘He is a happily married man,’ Rosina was at pains to tell Minnie, ‘it is a meeting of minds, that is all.’

‘In that case,’ said Minnie, ‘perhaps I could go with you?’

‘It is in Bedford Park,’ said Rosina, ‘one of the new garden suburbs, and the houses are all pebble-dashed with peculiar chimneys: it’s very writery – and I don’t think it will suit you at all. You have to get there by steam train and you are in a certain condition and I’m sure once Mama knows she will not let you go anywhere at all.’

‘Then I will go first and tell her afterwards,’ said Minnie. She had heard of Bedford Park; there was a school of art and Pissarro had lived there and T. M. Rooke still did, the famous artist who knew Ruskin and had worked with Burne-Jones. ‘We will spend two nights away.’

‘Papa and Mama are there with only a couple of servants,’ objected Rosina. ‘It is a great deal of trouble for them.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Rosina,’ said Minnie. ‘I promise not to overhear whatever you say to this Seebohm of yours, and not tell a word to anyone if I do.’

‘We will be talking about rural poverty, that is all,’ said Rosina, then added, ‘more’s the pity,’ and smiled. She had a pretty smile, and when she used it, thought Minnie, looked ten years younger.