Long Live the King (33 page)

A Queen is Dressed

The new King and Queen were moving out of Marlborough House and into Buckingham Palace, but by degrees. Their daughter-in-law, the new Princess of Wales, back with her children after her nine-month tour of the Empire and anxious to settle into her new official residence, found the move going rather slowly. But with the date of the Coronation looming, Alexandra at last moved her extensive wardrobe to Buck House. It was here that Consuelo and Isobel found themselves inspecting the clothes set out by the staff for the great day. Alexandra was on her way back from Windsor, where the King had decided to stay, at a distance from domestic turmoil, busying himself with changing the staff’s livery from blue to brown with the help, or as he felt, hindrance, of Horace Farquhar, Master of the Household.

The King would not, Alexandra complained on her arrival, could not, leave well alone. Nor would he come with her to London for the rehearsal at Westminster Abbey which she felt was so necessary. It was all very well for him, of course: he would have the Bishop of Bath and Wells by his side, instructing him, telling him where to go and what to say and when, and she, the Queen, would have no one. She would have to remember the prayers and the moves herself. The Bishop would assist her up the steps – she being a woman it was assumed she needed supporting – but then he would desert her for the King. If anyone needed supporting, Alexandra observed, it was Archbishop Temple, who was at least eighty and liable to expire any minute.

The Queen sent Isobel and Consuelo to the Robing Room while she retired to bed and took some lemon tea. She was not usually given to complaint, Isobel thought, let alone being critical of the King. But perhaps she was just tired.

‘Troubled is the head that wears a crown,’ said Consuelo, once they were in the Robing Room. The Queen’s new crown stood on a plinth in pride of place, looking, both thought, rather cheap and ridiculous, as if borrowed from Mr Maskelyne.

‘It’s a disaster,’ Consuelo said bluntly. ‘It’s ugly. It’s squat and has too many arches.’

‘I think the idea was that afterwards you could turn the arches into diamond necklaces.’

‘Most strivings for economy are misguided,’ said Consuelo. Isobel was obliged to agree. Even the central Koh-i-Noor diamond had not been improved. It had been re-cut and seemed smaller and duller even than before.

The coronation dress sat on its dressmaker’s dummy, Alexandra’s shape and size, adorned with its jewels, bisected with its imperial purple sash, and was another matter.

‘Magnificent,’ said Isobel.

‘Magnificent does not add up to style,’ said Consuelo.

But for once it did, thought Isobel. The dress was made of a kind of liquid gold fabric, designed and cut in India, Isobel knew, at the instigation of Lady Curzon who as Vicereine of India knew where to go and what to buy. If ever there was a woman who understood luxury, Consuelo conceded, it was Lady Curzon, née Mary Leiter. The dress had then been finished in Paris and tinkered with in London. It had a low square neckline, and a lacy ruff sprinkled with diamonds, amounting to jewelled epaulettes: an almost Queen Elizabethan effect and very clever. Down the centre of the skirt was a panel hung with Queen Victoria’s famous set of diamond-bow brooches, from each of which pendants fell; probably sapphire, Isobel thought, but certainly very pretty. A diamond-fringed girdle outlined a narrow waist. But it was hard to see the bosom of the dress for the jewels. The Dagmar necklace – notoriously one hundred and seventeen pearls and two thousand diamonds linked by gold medallions – had suspended from it, reaching to below the bosom, the large, ancient, elaborate, enamelled Dagmar Cross. It had been given to Alexandra by Frederick VII when she married the Prince of Wales, now her husband the King of England, certainly a great possession. But also round her neck she wore her favourite nine-string row of pearls, finishing up with Victoria’s diamond coronation necklace, worn as a choker. And creeping up from her waist all was then covered with brooches which had taken her fancy, including a large diamond-pin cockade with turquoise which would look better on a hat, and somewhere lurking there a glimpse of a really nice blue sapphire, but much was covered by the rather erratic fall of the nine-string pearls, crowded by the silver, gold and pearl droplets of the Dagmar necklace.

‘It may be too much,’ said Isobel.

‘One can never have too many diamonds,’ said Consuelo, who seemed to have decided enthusiasm was the better part of valour. ‘Every time Bertie took a new mistress he would buy Alix diamonds or sapphires. With Alice Keppel it is turquoise. Now Alix is the Queen she wears them all with pride. They were her consolations; they are her victory now. I know about consolations. I buy my own, mind you.’

‘Then I am pleased I own only a modicum,’ said Isobel.

‘You are very lucky in your husband, Isobel,’ observed Consuelo. ‘A good man in a naughty world.’ She put her little hand on Isobel’s arm: she wanted understanding. ‘I do so want Sunny to divorce me and set me free.’

Ah, thought Isobel, so that was all that was about.

‘But he will not,’ said Consuelo. ‘I give him every cause, or pretend to, but it is not really in my nature to be bad, and he knows it.’ Isobel thought she was almost crying.

Consuelo couldn’t say any more, and Isobel was rather glad of it. The Queen had come into the room, wearing little more than a silk wrap. She looked good in it, flattered by its simplicity, a fine figure of a woman, nearing sixty but handsome still, a slight limp and a tendency to stoop because of her height, but when she remembered to hold her head high, upright, brave and resolute.

‘I am quite restored,’ she said, ‘and ready for practice. This is not just a gown to try on, I realize, but something I must learn to walk in and move in. Do you like the crown?’

‘We love it,’ chorused the Duchess of Marlborough and the Countess of Dilberne.

‘I mean really,’ Alexandra said, and when they hesitated, added, ‘I know. It was a mistake. But it is too late now. And the King loves it so that is that. I will just have to carry it off.’

It took Consuelo, Isobel and two lady’s maids three hours simply to transfer to the living, talking, moving Queen what was on the still and silent dressmaker’s dummy. The jewels were almost all pinned or hung by now. Isobel murmured that without the pin cockade the other jewels would come into their own. Alexandra looked doubtful. But Consuelo, recovered from her fit of conscience, was mischievous.

‘That would be such a shame,’ she said. ‘Jewels are there to be worn, especially if they are of personal significance.’

‘Quite so,’ said Alexandra, satisfied. ‘I do so love the cockade. It is one of my favourites. My husband gave it to me. It’s a miniature Fabergé fan. Diamond, gold and turquoise.’

Isobel thought she caught the lady’s maids exchanging glances and smirking. Turquoise gladdened Mrs Keppel’s heart, everyone knew. It was said that there was to be a special enclosure in the Abbey for the King’s favourites, past and present, but not everyone believed it. The cockade pin was added.

The jewels were all on now, and Isobel had to agree, whatever the outfit was, it was magnificent.

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

It was such a lovely June day, thought Minnie, she would walk down and see Arthur. The baby had fallen quiet, and stopped its barrage of kicking, while giving her the occasional nudge just to show it was all right. The day was not too hot, not too cold, a gentle wind, the smell of honeysuckle in the air, and of new-cut grass where the gardeners had been scything. She would take the short cut to the workshops so no one would see her. Nanny Brown hated to let Minnie out of her sight, saying the baby would be here any day, but her physician Dr Hodson gave it another two weeks. She was very attached to her baby now, though she couldn’t quite see how it would ever get out. She’d said to Dr Hodson that she presumed it was the same way as it got in, from between her legs, but that had made him look rather shocked. But then many things made him look rather shocked. She persisted and said it needed a very small hole to get in but such a large one to get out, how did it happen? Dr Hodson was vague and said that Nature knew what it was doing, more or less letting her know that it wasn’t hers to enquire, but his to inform. She was a healthy young woman, that’s all he would say, she should call for him when the pains were two minutes apart; he would come straight away from Brighton. He had a reliable car – a brand-new Arnold Jehu with automatic ignition, he told her with pride – and before she knew it she would be sitting up in bed with a new baby in her arms receiving visitors. She’d got a look at his obstetrics bag once and it was terrifying. Strange metal instruments to claw, drag and crush and God knew what, and little bottles marked ‘poison’. Minnie told Dr Hodson that a midwife not a physician had attended her birth in Chicago, and he said that was barbaric: here the medical profession was doing what it could to keep midwives out: they were a dirty, slovenly, drunken lot who killed more babies than they ever saved.

Isobel wasn’t around to ask questions of: she was too caught up in the Coronation, only days away. Minnie still felt disappointed that she would miss this event of events, though the very idea of parading in a hot ermine-lined gown and wearing a tiara seemed oddly trying. The aim of all life was surely to sit down and be comfortable, though no doubt that was her body speaking; it was so very vocal, these days.

Rosina was no longer there to answer questions. Rosina was gone; Pappagallo was gone. Rosina would have looked up some medical books and given her some facts. She hoped Rosina would be all right. It was dreadful when people sailed away out of your life like that. Her mother had sailed away out of her life, or perhaps she had sailed away out of her mother’s?

There was no point in asking Nanny Brown anything: Nanny Brown seemed to think everyone she encountered was a child who had to be reminded that ‘those who asked no questions wouldn’t be told no lies’.

Arthur said he knew everything about the inside of engines but he would rather know as little as possible about women’s insides. Men had engines, women had babies. He would say anything for a smart phrase.

But such a lovely June. A blackbird singing a fresh melody on a branch, trying it out for size, clucking and chucking, and then trying it again. She walked slowly and happily down to the workshops. She could see them from a distance, smell the occasional waft of engine oil, hear the generalized clinking and clanging workshop noise, the occasional roar of an engine being tested for size, or vibration, or speed, or whatever his engines happened to be currently aspiring to. She was glad Arthur was the man he was: that he had something to strive for: he didn’t have a great deal of time for her but then he wouldn’t have any time or attention for anyone else. His father had a wandering eye; she could only hope Arthur had not inherited it. She had told no one, not even Arthur, that she’d seen his Lordship out with Consuelo Vanderbilt; such things were better not reported. Isobel would be devastated. And perhaps in any case Minnie had been mistaken. Though it was rather hard not to recognize her tall, impressive father-in-law, let alone the infinitely glamorous Duchess.

She couldn’t be bothered walking any more, she felt sleepy. The imperative was to sleep, not walk. She took off her cloak, it was getting hot anyway, and put it on a grassy bank for a rug and lay down on it. She would have trouble getting up again she was so top-heavy, but she would worry about that later. She watched a lark soaring into the sky. She fell asleep. When she woke her skirt was drenched. She was ashamed of herself. She must have wet her knickers as if she was a little girl. She hauled herself to her feet. She would get to the workshops and with any luck nobody would notice. These were men who loved engines: they didn’t notice much else. She felt a rather sharp slow pain as she walked up the ramp to the workshop where Arthur was usually to be found. The pain was rather like cramp, only a strange place to have it. Cramp usually came three times and then let you alone if you waited for it to do its worst and then it released you.

Arthur was running an engine and standing over it with a stop-watch in one hand. He looked at her with pleasure. She was glad of that. She was unexpected. Supposing his first reaction had been irritation? She couldn’t have borne that.

‘I think I am having the baby,’ she said. ‘If only they told me more I would know more.’

He took a rug from over the back of his office chair and she lay down on the oily floor. Her skirts were wet. Perhaps it would be better to get back to the house, only she couldn’t work out how to do it. Another of the cramps came and she asked him to time it. He did. Then he timed the next pain. He said there was a minute between them.

She said, ‘Dr Hodson said every two minutes, then to call him. But it’s still only one.’

‘We’ll wait then, until it calms down to two. I suppose it’s like an engine cooling down.’

‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I stay here? I don’t want to get in your way.’

‘I’m always delighted to see you,’ he said.

He was relieved, though it seemed rather strange, lying down on the floor the way she was. There was another rather bad pain and a strange blocked feeling between her legs.

‘I don’t think this baby should wait any longer,’ she said. ‘Get someone to go and fetch Dr Hodson. Near the clock tower in Brighton, that’s where his surgery is.’ Someone roared off to Brighton. It was seventeen miles. She heard Arthur ask if anyone knew anything about babies, but nobody did. They were all quite young, apprentice mechanics.

It wasn’t exactly pain, anyway, just an extraordinary feeling that Nature knew best and there was nothing she could do about it. She was caught up, whirled up, in something amazing. She was lying down; legs bent, everything exposed. Arthur with his sleeves rolled up and something coming out of her, with a couple of pushes which she couldn’t have stopped even if she wanted to, which she didn’t. She looked down and saw that Arthur held a baby in his hands, it’s head covered with sticky stuff. It needed to be washed. The baby opened its mouth and made a noise, and then there was a kind of answer from inside her, another final surge and then there was something squishy and messy like liver lying on the rug. That would have to be washed too. Arthur looked very surprised.