Long Live the King (32 page)

‘I hope that doesn’t mean your husband’s talents will be lost to us,’ said Balfour. ‘It would be too bad if he ends up growing vegetables in a desert.’

‘I don’t see it quite like that,’ she said, ‘and nor should you.’ She was bold and serious. She didn’t prattle on, as so many women did. But then she belonged to a bold and serious race. Quite extraordinary how through their nomadic life the Jews had clung, century after century, to their rituals, their religious beliefs, always in the face of hostility. Now the new wave of pogroms, this time in Roumania. They deserved a better deal.

‘It may be desert,’ she said, ‘but it too would benefit from a little Handel, a choir, a string quartet. We will build concert halls and theatres, as well as grow vegetables. There is nothing wrong with vegetables.’

Another starry-eyed idealist, he thought, but the idea caught his fancy. The new land a handful of international Jewry demanded seen in a different light – not just an armed encampment, but one ruled by a concert hall, with Bach and Handel drowning out the sound of warfare. Unlikely, but the most surprising things could happen. He was not surprised she had tiffs with Baum, or he with her, but she had the great gift of enthusiasm.

He laughed politely, changed the subject, and asked how Baum was getting on with the Dilberne household. He thought he’d caught a glimpse of the daughter at the I.D.K. debate but she must have left early. He gathered there had been some trouble? Naomi was pleasantly indiscreet. Balfour had the feeling she did not like Lady Isobel very much. Apparently it was true: the daughter had run off practically overnight with an Australian, after a marriage by licence.

‘Isobel wanted Bishop Kennion to officiate, but he refused. He said the groom was a Theosophist and worshipped strange gods and graven images: a Bishop only married Christians.’

‘Reasonable enough for a Bishop, I daresay,’ said Balfour. ‘Though many today manage to add Theosophical leanings to their Christian faith.’

‘The Bishop could have chosen a dozen other reasons,’ said Naomi. ‘The Dilberne girl was so desperate to get away from home she threw herself at the Australian, who just a month back had been engaged to poor Adela, the one who disappeared and was found drowned. Lady Isobel had been too busy with her charities to visit her. The shipping company wouldn’t refund Adela’s ticket so he married Rosina rather than waste the fare. Well, that’s what they’re saying. It’s going to be a disaster.’

‘I hope there was a little more romance than that,’ said Balfour and Naomi softened and said yes, she hoped so too. She only had it all from Eric, and the matter of Adela’s inheritance was driving Eric mad.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘the young couple sailed away on the good ship
Cuzco
with no bands playing or flags waving, in disgrace because they’d spent the night together in the Savoy. Eric got the bill.’

‘At least they have a daughter off their hands.’

‘But she left with nothing but a husband, a Gladstone bag and her parrot. Her father refuses to give her an allowance. It would never happen in a Jewish family. And now with her daughter missing Isobel has to parade at the Coronation with the Countesses, not behind the Duchesses. Poor thing. She won’t like that. I try not to be nasty about her but I can’t help it. She did send us tickets for the Coronation, I know, though that will have been his Lordship’s doing, not hers. I’m talking too much, I know, I’m nervous.’

She fell silent, embarrassed. Balfour asked her if she was looking forward to the Parry anthem and she said she was, very much. And up to a point to the Elgar rendering of the National Anthem.

‘You doubt that either will rise to the heights of Purcell or Handel?’

‘I hope you don’t think me unpatriotic,’ she said, ‘but no.’

He agreed that earlier composers wrote for the glory of God more than monarchs, but it was perhaps understandable if in such a year as this modern composers devoted themselves to national pride. She conceded a point, and asked after the health of the King.

Balfour was surprised: so far as he knew the King was perfectly healthy, dedicated as ever to duty, caught up with the detail of the Coronation, even down to the designs licensed on ceramic commemoration mugs, and the decoration on lamp posts along the Mall. Potentates and dignitaries from abroad had already been sighted bowling along through London in their carriages, only occasionally colliding with automobiles that were slow getting out of the way. Commonwealth and Empire troops with wonderful headgear had been seen on parade. London boroughs had promised tenants a day off work and free beer for everyone; street parties were being organized. Twenty-four days to go and expectation was building nicely. If the weather was bad now it would be better by the end of the month.

‘The King has taken to a milk diet in place of his evening meal,’ he said. ‘So much I’ve heard. But I imagine it’s due to vanity rather than ill health. His waist is forty-eight inches and bigger than his chest, as happens to many a man of his age. I daresay that like a bride he wishes to be at his best on this day of days. Ceremonial sashes must fit, ermine capes hang gracefully. The Queen is the same. She eats like a bird.’

Naomi said she had heard a rumour that the King had lumbago; she knew it to be a very painful ailment and she hoped it didn’t mean he’d have to hobble up the aisle to receive his crown. Balfour laughed.

‘Though his Majesty has to crawl up the aisle he will get there, while pretending it doesn’t hurt one whit. He will die rather than let his people down.’

He asked Naomi what her religion had to say about death.

‘Very little,’ she said, surprised. ‘I suppose we think how we conduct our lives is more important.’

‘No belief in an afterlife, in the continuation of life after death?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’ He found himself confiding in her; told her about the séance and how May’s voice had come to him out of the past, so much like her yet not her.

‘A voice of your own creation,’ she observed. ‘You want to hear her; it does not mean you did.’ He liked her. So many people said what he wanted to hear – friends, colleagues, lovers – all wanting praise, acknowledgement or preferment.

‘But I heard her. It was not an illusion. A shadow of her living self, but still her. The dead do lack the clarity of the living. Sometimes I think they are just shadows of the real thing, an echo imprinted on the past. If one could only be sure. It is very annoying to have to live with such uncertainty. No one can prove that God exists, but neither can they prove that he does not.’

Mrs Baum said that so far as she was concerned, dead was dead. Balfour laughed.

‘It would certainly be something of a relief to think so when it comes to political enemies. One does not want them to live for ever; one reserves reincarnation for friends and family, I find.’ It was wise to appear light-hearted about these things.

But he came to the decision that he would invite Princess Ida to a further séance and see what came up. He had resolved to keep away from the paranormal: hearing May’s voice had been most disturbing, and there had been some talk of a demon-possessed bird which had hurled itself into a wall and killed itself. A sense of debilitation and oppression could descend when one trespassed into the next world. But another foray seemed appropriate. May’s voice had sounded less as if it came from heaven as from some vast echoey waiting room where the dead waited to be housed in their new lives. Hers had not been an easy death: the wait would be long before mental equilibrium was restored; it fitted with the theory. Just one more time. The S.P.R. thought very well of Princess Ida; she had been very
sympathique
, as well as pretty.

The secretary came back with news that the matter of the invitations had been solved: the replacements would be with the Baums in the next post. His Grace the Duke of Marlborough wished to speak to Mr Balfour when he had a moment. Mrs Baum rose to go. Mr Balfour said he had enjoyed the conversation, which was true. He privately thought it was rather a waste to lose such an excellent couple to Palestine, but he rather liked the idea of European-style tiffs and Handel on Mount Zion. Let neurosis and exultation be exported. The rain had still not stopped.

Lady Isobel Waits

The storm over Rosina’s abduction – as Robert saw it – by a colonial mountebank and fortune hunter, who had a poste restante address and lived amongst primitive savages in a land populated by convicts, red-back spiders and kangaroos, for some reason put paid to Isobel’s black fog. There had been such a scurry of activity – perhaps that’s what she lacked? Things fell back into proportion. She soothed Robert as best she could. He was angry with himself, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Frank Overshaw, herself, and Rosina in that order.

She too was annoyed with Rosina, not least because she had lured Minnie out on an excursion on false pretences when she should have had her feet up, and then abandoned her in London to make her own way home. Though why Minnie had not just made her way to Belgrave Square Isobel could not imagine. But at least she had come to no harm and was now waiting her time out in peace and comfort. The baby was kicking well and was carried high, so it was sure to be a boy. Nanny Brown was installed and waiting. Minnie had been so passionate about requiring no wet-nursing that Isobel had given in; the baby would feed the modern way, with condensed milk. Isobel had to agree it had done Minnie well enough.

That of course was not the worst of Rosina’s sins; marrying without her father’s consent, and though Minnie had said nothing about what happened at the Savoy, no doubt breaking the rules of decency and common sense by giving herself to a man before marriage. And she herself was at fault for not supervising Rosina more closely when they spent the night at the Bishop’s Palace. Men without families too often got what they wanted and then moved on. But Rosina had been lucky. More, Frank Overshaw’s ‘family’ turned out to be some connection, however loose, with an ex-governor of Adelaide, which was better than nothing but not enough to placate Robert.

‘But Robert,’ she had said, ‘would you rather the girl ended up an old maid than married a commoner?’

‘I’d rather she stayed unmarried than she married the fool of a man she has,’ was all he’d say. ‘Theosophy! Bunkum! The Great Oneness, all that. Did you hear him? And I thought Rosina was a clever girl!’

‘A clever girl agrees with her husband,’ said Isobel primly, thus fuelling Robert’s outrage further. She found herself oddly thrilled by her daughter’s leap into the unknown. She looked forward to the first letters home. When Robert threatened to give Rosina no allowance she said she would pay it herself out of the miserable scraps of her own inheritance, and he capitulated. She put that down to his bad conscience.

Robert felt bad about his initial rejection of Adela, his own brother’s daughter. He felt bad about his inability to mourn Edwin.

He felt extremely bad about the girl’s disappearance and apparent
felo de se
. The coroner had thought so – the same coroner who had passed judgement on the parents’ death now passed judgement on the unhappy child – the verdict was suicide when the balance of her mind was disturbed. At least she could be buried in sanctified ground, next to her parents. At least Robert had consented to go to that funeral and very upsetting for everyone it had been.

He felt bad about putting himself so much in the wrong in the Bishop’s eyes, and saw fit to speak ill of him as a result: after first all but kidnapping the girl the Bishop had failed to protect her and look after her, and once she was gone, had made little effort to find her.

He felt bad about Frank Overshaw because he, Robert, had failed to find Rosina a better husband. Because he had not loved his daughter better. Or so it seemed to Isobel. His instinct was to blame others for his own failings. He was, after all, a man. He blamed Isobel for not having saved him from himself. He blamed her because he had a brief almost-flirtation with Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough and then had thought better of it.

The night before Rosina had ignited the fire of his rage, he had told Isobel about his evening at the I.D.K. dinner, the séance, the company, the debate. The prettiness of Princess Ida. The folly of Mr Balfour who had allowed, even encouraged, the debate, pretending an interest in science but actually serving his own ends, assuring, he hoped, a victory for idealists; but how Mr Shaw and Mr Wells had routed Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc. How the séance had been a disgrace of its kind, exposing Mr Balfour to public ridicule, when the voice of his former lady friend, long dead, had spoken and a bird had been brought back to life. How Consuelo had disappointed him, crying out, ‘It’s a miracle,’ when it was obvious to all intelligent people that they were witnessing a fraud.

Isobel assumed that the reason for this outburst of information was to tell her that whatever it was it was over. He was disappointed in Consuelo.

Later that night when she was safely in his arms he told her why he had turned against Edwin. It was because Edwin had turned against him. It was not just Edwin’s refusal to come to Minnie and Arthur’s wedding; that could be put down to general disagreeableness, a difficult wife and bigotry. These were cardinal not mortal sins. But Edwin had also written to say that he had proof in the form of a letter from his father to his mother accusing her of adultery over a long period; asserting that neither Robert or Alfred were his sons, but Albert, the eldest, and Edwin, the fourth, were. That therefore he, Edwin, was by rights the earl.

‘I did not believe him,’ said Robert. ‘The man is mad who impugns his own mother. My father never wrote any such letter. It was not in his nature. I burned my brother’s letter and heard no more from him. Which was just as well, or I would have killed him.’

This off his chest, he fell soundly asleep, and Isobel, who had never met her mother-in-law, was left wondering if this could possibly be true, and thinking that if such a letter ever had existed, with any luck it would have gone up in flames, together with the invitations she had so rashly sent out, hoping to bring the family together.