Long Live the King (21 page)

Minnie asked what the name of the club was and Rosina replied the I.D.K. debating society.

‘What’s I.D.K.?’ asked Isobel.

‘The I Don’t Know debating club. When anyone asks you for the password you say I.D.K. and they let you in.’

‘Then nothing in the world will stop me going,’ said Minnie.

Mrs Neville had packed a lunch hamper, but they decided they would far rather eat in the Pullman restaurant car, so they found an empty third-class carriage and decanted the packed lunch – hard-boiled eggs and ham; butter, cheese and rolls; and apple pasties and ginger cookies especially for Minnie – onto the bench and left it there for the next lucky passenger, and made their way to the restaurant car. No one would know. They felt very delinquent and very happy. Now Minnie was resigned to her condition, she had stopped feeling sick. She put it down to crystallized ginger.

The good news that Minnie planned to give her mother-in-law was that a baby was on its way: the bad news, from the doctor, was that it was likely to arrive in the last week of June and that it would be unwise for Minnie to attend the Coronation.

His Lordship Passes By

His Lordship knocked on the Lord High Steward’s door. Accommodation for his Grace the Duke of Marlborough had now been made in the Offices of the Lord Great Chamberlain in Buck House, the Marquess of Ancaster being even less busy than usual. It was a rather splendid room overlooking the Gallery: nicely if rather eccentrically furnished as a drawing room, with white lace curtains, plump crimson chairs and sofas, some darkish landscapes of rocks and storm clouds, heavily framed ornate mirrors and a couple of potted palm trees, but the whole dominated by a great mahogany desk, as if everything that had not fitted in the rest of the house had ended up here because there was nowhere else for it to go. A small light voice told him to come in, and he found Consuelo seated behind the desk, rather briskly sorting papers, her plentiful black hair piled on top of the little head, fixed by a couple of Spanish-looking combs, and her frail body and slender neck dwarfed by the size of the desk.

‘Oh Consuelo,’ Robert said, ‘I hoped to see you, but I thought Sunny would be here.’

‘Sunny is off lunching with William Waldorf Astor, who is immensely rich and immensely powerful and even more miserable than Sunny, but we need him on our side because of his magazines, so at this very minute I daresay Sunny will be chomping through roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at the Carlton Club. Poor Monsieur Escoffier, he creates these wonderful dishes, but has to cook for all these people who will only ever eat what they were given at Eton. He may have better luck with William, of course, who is American, and so will favour hamburgers, but at least spent some of his childhood in Italy, and of course the King, who never went to school at all, is always partial to something new. They say the King learnt his love of sauces when he was the Prince of Wales and he and Lily Langtry used to frequent the Savoy, where Escoffier worked until they fired him and César Ritz for stealing fine wines. You did not know that? It had to be hush-hush because chefs know only too much about where the bodies are hidden. So Robert, no Sunny today, you will have to put up with me.’

She seemed very nervous, thought Robert. Chattering on, as if to fill an awkward space, to give time to a lover hidden in the bedroom cupboard to slip away. Or indeed, as a woman chatters on when waiting for the lover to make the first move, holding him with her eyes.

‘The King assured poor Sunny that Lord High Steward is a purely honorific title but of course it is not. It turns out to be his duty to see to everything that other people are likely to forget. The Earl Marshal is too old to remember a thing, likewise the Archbishop of Canterbury. There will be four hundred peers and peeresses in the Abbey and four thousand ordinary people. So many what ifs. Like what will happen if it rains? Where will everyone’s umbrellas go? If someone runs out of the crowd waving a gun? If the red carpets have been eaten by moths when they are taken out of storage? If Astor’s
Pall Mall Gazette
digs up some real scandal about the Old Queen? Luckily I am very good at what if’s. Do come in, Robert, and sit down. And it might be wise to shoot the lock on the door, so no one walks in on us. Then pour yourself a drink. No, don’t ring for the servant, they will only talk if they find us alone together. Pour it yourself. A man alone in a room with a woman always causes talk, even though I am known to be above suspicion. Indeed, it is because I am above suspicion, and no breath of scandal ever touches me, that others long to blow me away on winds of disgrace. One must always be on one’s guard. But no one ever comes in here. We are quite safe.’

Robert could see he had a choice, either to go, which might seem rather rude – the little light charming voice, with its faint American overtones, seemed in no hurry to fall silent – or to shoot the lock on the door and pour himself a drink.

He did the latter.

‘Robert, I would like some whisky too,’ so he poured her one – but was not whisky a man’s drink? – and added a little water and she came out from behind the desk and looked up at him, and then sank down in one the armchairs. Her dress was very proper, high-necked and long-sleeved, a dark red which seemed to match the chair: its sides rose up on either side to frame her. She looked up at him, and her eyelashes were very dark against the clear pale skin of her cheeks. There was a glittery belt around her tiny waist. She seemed breakable, and very young. She sipped her drink not as a man drinks from a glass, straightforwardly, but with the hand curled round it, as if it were something precious but forbidden to be savoured in secret. Their secret.

‘You and Arthur,’ she said, ‘two men to depend upon! I so love Arthur. He is one of my truest friends. Such a fine disembodied spirit. Pure, logical, like listening to Bach. Those blue eyes, that immense distinction; transcendent, spiritual. But disembodied, Robert. That’s the trouble. Disembodied.’

Quite suddenly she sounded immensely sad, and started to sing in her little light voice, but as if she were singing to herself. The voice hardly escaped from the confines of the tall wings of the chair. He had to crane to listen.

I leaned my back against an oak

Thinking it were a trusty tree,

But first he bended and then he broke,

Thus did my love prove false to me . . .

‘Oh Consuelo,’ said Robert, before he could stop himself, ‘what happened?’

She sang:

Oh love is handsome and love is kind,

Bright as a jewel when first it’s new,

But love grows old and waxes cold

And fades away like the morning dew.

‘That’s what happened,’ she said. ‘Love fades away like morning dew. The thing about you, Robert, is that you’re not disembodied. Bright as a jewel! Do you like my hair combs? Lalique; enamel and sapphires. A real find.’

‘True, I am not disembodied, very much not so. I am a married man and twice your age. And yes, I like the combs very much. And the belt. Are those sapphires too?’

‘Ah yes but very rare, they’re pink; shaped like acanthus flowers linking the gold medallions. Fabergé. Sunny gave them to me last time we were in Moscow. They were far too expensive but of course only a tenth of what he spent tiling acres of roof at Blenheim, at my father’s expense. I could have bought them myself but it’s nice to be given things.’ She asked for more whisky. It seemed the least he could give her; he poured her more, a little more than seemed reasonable, and for himself too.

He should not have mentioned the belt. It drew attention to the gold medallions round the waist and the waist was so little. Robert pulled himself together. He was not quite sure what was happening, but he did his best to be businesslike, and remember the purpose of his errand. ‘Consuelo, I came to ask you a favour. You very kindly gave me three spare invitations to the Coronation, to sit amongst the peers.’ He stayed standing. His instinct was to kneel in supplication in front of her.

‘That is so,’ she said, ‘Arthur Balfour asked me to. Arthur Balfour pares away every nonsense, every folly, to get to the heart of things. But so disembodied.’

‘My foolish wife has mislaid them,’ said Robert. ‘Is it possible for you to give me replacements? I have offered them to the Baums and they are expecting them.’

‘Ah yes, the Baums. So very sensible of you. Arthur told me to put them by. How tall are you, Robert?’ she asked.

‘I am not sure,’ he said, ‘perhaps six foot and one inch. But the invitations—’

‘Arthur Balfour is six foot and two inches, Sunny is five foot and six inches. Why do you call your wife foolish? I think she is a very clever and charming woman with great style and of all the countesses I like her the most.’

‘I called her foolish by way of apology for her having mislaid the invitations. In that sense yes, she is foolish. In no other.’

Consuelo stood up and smiled at him. He supposed she was some five foot seven inches, with her straight back and fine neck, and the little waist.

‘How many inches do you think my waist is?’

‘Really, Consuelo, I have no idea, and I don’t think this is a very fitting conversation for us to be having.’

‘Why ever not? It is only about feet and inches. See if your hands will meet around my waist.’

If he put his hands around her waist he would embrace her; there was no way he could not. His hands would meet around her waist, he was sure of that. It was smaller than Isobel’s: his hands, big and clumsy as they were, would not quite meet around his wife’s middle. But did Consuelo want him to kiss her? He could not be sure. He felt like a blundering ass, out of his depth. Women had thrown themselves at him before, and mostly he had repulsed them. Occasionally, not.

‘It is very tempting, Consuelo, and I am very honoured, but I think I had better not.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I do hope you were not thinking – really I am only interested in measurements. I think you had better go now, Robert.’

She went over to the door and slid back the bolt, seemingly offended.

‘The invitations—’

‘Your wife has already been in touch with me about them. I am meeting her for lunch at the University Women’s Club and I will give them to her then.’

She held the door open for him to go. But as he went she said, ‘Do call again and see me, Robert. Sunny is so often away at lunchtimes. And you are so, well, embodied!’

He hastened away, hopelessly confused.

April – 1902

Frank’s Wooing of Adela

It came to Adela that when she had watched the swans on the moat fight off the ducks, the ducks were like the nuns, with their white wimpled heads and dark bodies, and the swans like princes and princesses. The ducks were vulgar and in the right – why should they not have what others more fortunate had? – the swans elegant and beautiful and in the wrong, given everything and sharing nothing. More and more, she found, she was on the swans’ side, and she shocked herself. Perhaps Satan was creeping into her soul: it was possible, she supposed, to be very, very bad and not know it. Why was there no one to talk to about these things? If she tried people looked at her as if she was a little odd. She had no friends. Jenny the housekeeper’s daughter Agatha was about Adela’s age but curtsied and shrank away from her as if she had the plague. Perhaps people thought misfortune was catching, and if you touched an orphan you would lose your own parents? She missed Ivy. Ivy was only a servant but cheered her up. Ivy was unfinished business: someone with whom she could talk about the past, so at least she had a past; as it was she had somehow sprung fully formed into the world on Christmas Eve, 1901. And Ivy had not even seen fit to come and visit her, too caught up with her new boyfriend. What was it men did to women that made them look so happy and want to brush up against one another all the time? The answer was something very simple, but finding out was like trying to reinvent the universe.

Adela gave up thinking and went back to her book and the story of the Little Mermaid – she had just discovered Hans Christian Andersen – and it made her cry, which was why she had given up reading and gone to watch the swans at war with the ducks. The Little Mermaid loved her prince so much she gave up her tail for legs and whenever she put foot to ground it was like treading on knives. But the love and the sacrifice did her no good at all. What was Mr Andersen trying to say? The prince would always get the princess? The swans stuck to the swans? It was too bad.

When there was a knock at the door and it was Frank, she was relieved. He was bringing her lime juice, his now customary mid-afternoon offering. His slight nervous tic, which Mrs Kennion attributed to his being, as she put it, ‘highly strung’, seemed today rather worse than usual. But he smiled affectionately. His pebbly eyes were kind and his smile patient.

‘Lime cordial, Miss Adela.’

‘That is very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but you know, Frank, I am becoming quite grown-up, and if you need to talk perhaps we should do so not in my bedroom, but in the library?’

‘You don’t know how much of a child you still are,’ he said. Adela was suddenly put in mind of how the snake charmed Eve into eating the apple. She wondered if the sin lay more in Eve eating the apple in the first place or in tempting Adam? Couldn’t Adam take the blame for his own sin? Her father had been rather like that with her mother. If he forgot his prayer book when he left for church, the fault lay not in his own forgetfulness, but in some other random fact: Elise had not been quick enough bringing his socks, or Ivy had not sewed on a button and so put the prayer book out of his mind, or she, Adela, had made him angry with her stupidity. But what was Frank saying, in his ironed-out, flat voice?

‘But you will grow up soon enough and I am happy to wait for you.’ Perhaps Frank was a serpent, slithering over grass? Twitch, twitch, went the muscle at the side of his mouth, reaching for his ear. Poor man. Mrs Kennion said he had been lured away from true belief by false gods, though apparently you could not exactly call the Buddha a god, merely a great preacher, so it was excusable. Mrs Kennion thought the world of Frank, and said Theosophy was only a stage he was passing through.