by John Pearson
In fact he felt like bounding across Parliament Square. Big Ben was striking ten. He was much later than he’d thought, and had eaten nothing. Almost light-headed with euphoria and hunger, he set off past the Abbey and up by St. James’s Park to Hyde Park Corner, swinging his walking stick and humming to himself. He hadn’t felt like this since he was at school and heard he’d won his scholarship to Oxford.
He was still in this state of pure excitement when he reached Eaton Place. The downstairs lights were on, and although he let himself in with his latch-key, Hudson was waiting for him in the hall. Richard failed to notice the look of strain upon his butler’s face.
“God, I’m starving, Hudson! Is there a cold bird in the house— and some champagne? Perhaps a bottle of the 1860 Krug?”
Normally a request for a bottle of the best champagne would have elicited from Hudson a tactful “Something to celebrate then, sir?” and Richard would happily have told him the cause of his excitement. He might even have suggested that Hudson join him in a glass (Hudson, like Richard, had a taste for good champagne).
But tonight it was a very wary Hudson who replied, “The best champagne, sir?”
“Certainly,” said Richard. “Oh, and Hudson—is Lady Marjorie still awake?”
“To the best of my knowledge, sir. But if I might suggest …”
“Capital, Hudson. And bring up the champagne. Blow Nanny Webster! I’ll take it up to her and she can have a glass!”
By night Marjorie’s boudoir was a pretty sight, with its gilt mirrors, flowered curtains, and the twin gold cherubs holding the draperies above the big rococo bed. The room was lit by gas-lights with pink silk shades. It was the one room in the house that really breathed her presence, and Richard very often felt just faintly uneasy there with so much total femininity. But not tonight. After his maiden speech, his triumph in the House, and with the champagne on a silver tray, he felt that he had more than justified himself.
Marjorie was sitting up in bed, her hair unpinned, her skin just tinged with rose from the lamps, her eyes mysterious with deep shadows round them. This was the sort of sudden beauty which she could always summon up and which took his breath away. So near her time, she was enormous, and her size gave her a sort of majesty as she sat enthroned on her silvery pillows. The room was heavy with her scent of lilies of the valley.
He kissed her and she smiled indulgently. His hair was rumpled, his cravat askew. This was a side of him she loved—the mischievous schoolboy she enjoyed detecting in her sophisticated husband.
“Are you training as a waiter, dearest?” she said, laughing at his tray.
“Not a bad idea. It looks as if the government will soon collapse and I might need a job after the election.”
He uncorked the champagne, filled the two glasses, and began telling her about his maiden speech. But there was something on her mind and he soon realised that she was not listening to him.
“Marjorie, what is it?” he asked, rather more sharply than he intended.
“Nothing,” she said, “nothing at all. Please go on. You were saying?”
“Marjorie, what is it? I refuse to say another word until I know.”
And then, emotionally and tearfully, the story of her afternoon emerged. How Nanny Webster had been getting worried about her, how she had summoned Dr. Cowley up from Southwold.
“That old quack!” exploded Richard.
“Dearest!” said Marjorie, shocked as people always tend to be when doctors, priests and other childhood pundits are referred to disrespectfully. Then she went on to say that Dr. Cowley gave it as his opinion … Here she was overcome with tears and for a while would not continue. Finally Richard calmed her.
“What did he say?” he asked anxiously. Marjorie all but whispered her reply.
“He said that for my well-being and the safety of the baby I should be in the country.”
“Say it. At Southwold!”
Majorie nodded. “Dearest,” she said, “do please try to understand.”
“I understand too well!”
“But for the baby, Richard. Surely it’s not much to ask.”
She was sobbing now, great tears that seemed to rack her body, but Richard was stony in his anger and said nothing, in case bitterness might make him give vent to something he would regret. How typical it was of the whole pattern of his marriage. Even at a time like this, a moment that should have been a happiness to be enjoyed alone with Marjorie, the Southwolds still insisted on intruding. And they spoiled everything. If he allowed them to continue they would destroy his marriage, possibly his life.
“There’s no question of it,” he said finally. “The house is more than adequate, and everything’s prepared. Just because your mother wants to rule you—and spite me—she will use any trick she can, even her old doctor, to attain her ends. No, Marjorie. I wish you to stay here and have our baby in the house.”
He kissed her goodnight and left the champagne on the dressing table—where Miss Roberts found it next morning when she came to wake her mistress.
“It’s disgusting how these people waste the good things of life,” she said as she carried it away.
Richard was resolute—but of course his resolution could not last. What mere man’s could in such a situation? Marjorie had quietly made up her mind that her first child was to be born in Southwold, and as well might Richard have attempted to resist the march of time or the power of an earthquake. Not that she nagged him (she was too smart for that), nor did she resort to further argument (again she realised her weakness against Richard in straightforward argument). She just relied upon the female power of silence, of refusing to discuss the matter when Richard brought it up again next morning.
“I’m sure that you know best, my love”—which made him wonder whether he really did.
She also secretly enlisted Prudence Fairfax in her cause.
This was a canny move, for Prudence was the only one of Marjorie’s friends whom Richard respected. She was intelligent and could make him laugh. And so, that selfsame afternoon, when Prudence called on Richard in the Commons and then had tea with him, she was able to convince him without too much trouble.
“Richard,” she said, “I think you’ve been—forgive me if I say it but I must—just a little selfish with poor Marjorie. Don’t you realise how lonely she has been in London, and how much she misses Southwold? She’s very loyal, but this feud between you and her mother naturally distresses her.”
“Well, Prudence dear …” said Richard, trying to be reasonable.
“And besides, don’t you realise that every male Southwold has been born there in the house since fourteen hundred?”
“I never realised,” said Richard.
“Well,” said Prudence, big blue eyes wide open with surprise, “I think perhaps you should.”
So Marjorie went to Southwold two days later, with Miss Roberts and the embattled Nanny Webster. The baby was due in ten days or so. Richard was needed in Westminster for at least another week, until Parliament adjourned for Easter. He would then go down to Southwold for those last few days when the birth was due.
It was a tense week in the Commons, with the whole opposition pressing hard and the government still managing to hang on to its majority. Richard spoke again, this time on foreign policy, with which he felt at home, and this time he was at ease and in command from the start. Within a matter of two weeks it seemed as if he’d passed from parliamentary innocent into the role of hardened old debater.
Finally, in that first week of April, just before Easter, Parliament adjourned, and Richard was free at last to join Marjorie. He had mixed feelings about going. On the one hand he was longing to see her again and genuinely missed her. But on the other, all the talk about the Southwolds and the way he felt the family had exploited her fears about the birth seemed to have robbed the whole event of its original excitement. He also dreaded seeing Lady Southwold. He hated scenes and arguments. Christmas had upset him dreadfully and one simply never
knew what she would pick on next.
So it was a wary—as well as weary—Richard Bellamy who caught the evening train to Salisbury and found himself struggling through the crowd of passengers to see who had come to meet him. It was drizzling, and in the dark it took some time for him to find the carriage they had sent: not the phaeton, nor even the victoria, but the small hacking coach they used for carrying the servants. Old Mandible, the half-retired coachman, touched his derby with his whip when he saw Richard and smiled his knowing, toothless smile, looking as if the tip of his nose would touch his chin.
“Evenin’, Mr. Bellamy,” he said. “Great news from Southwold!”
“News? What news?” said Richard.
“Why, of ’er ladyship, of Lady Marjorie. A fine boy, born this afternoon. A great day for Southwold now and no mistake.”
He laughed and cracked his whip, and the old cob broke into an uneasy trot. Richard shivered and buttoned his coat against the rain.
So this, he reflected bitterly, was how he got the news that his son was born—from an old drunken coachman. Typical, he thought. Just one more insult from the family. Throughout the drive his anger quite outweighed all sense of the excitement of the moment. He could not even think with tenderness of Marjorie.
As they drove down the long avenue of limes leading to Southwold he could see the lights gleaming through the rain. They passed the giant figures of Gog and Magog by the courtyard entrance, and then Mandible reined in by the back door before clambering off the box like an old crab in livery. Nobody greeted them and the coachman opened the door. Richard entered.
As he did so there was a smell of woodsmoke from the fire in the hall, and Cromwell rose barking angrily at the intruder: then he recognised Richard and came hobbling over, his peg-leg thumping on the floor, his great rope of tail swinging with pleasure. Richard patted him.
“Good dog, Cromwell,” he said. “Good old boy. Where’s everybody?”
Cromwell barked mournfully but no one came.
So Richard walked across the hall and up the great Southwold staircase to the Prince’s Landing, the long, galleried landing that runs the length of the first floor of the house. And there he saw Hugo. He was rather drunk.
“Richard! Good Lord, how most appropriate!”
“Hugo, where are they?”
“Who?”
“My wife and my son!”
“Oh, they’re in Lord Henry’s Room. Why don’t you come and see them? You really should, you know, old boy.”
Lord Henry’s Room was one of the great historic apartments overlooking the formal garden at the back of the house, and it was there, in the huge four-poster where generations of Southwolds had been born, that Marjorie lay. The whole family was there—Lord and Lady Southwold, Great-Aunt Helena, Cousin Alec of the Grenadiers, and several of the household servants. Even Geoffrey Dillon had been summoned, and they were all busy (as Hugo put it) “wetting the baby’s head.”
But Richard barely noticed. Once he saw Marjorie, all the bitterness and anger of the past few weeks completely vanished.
“Dearest,” she said, and held out her arms to him.
“My love,” he said, and held her very tight.
“Richard,” she whispered, “you’re forgetting somebody.” And then Richard saw his son. He was beside her on the pillow—monkey-faced and tinged with yellow, with sharp tufts of darkish hair (slightly premature, the baby weighed a mere six pounds at birth).
“He’s yours,” she said, and held him up for Richard, who took him warily.
“Funny-looking little devil,” said Lord Southwold. “Still, they all are. Marjorie was just the same.”
“Marjorie was beautiful,” said Lady Southwold.
“What are you calling him?” asked Lord Southwold.
“I hadn’t really thought,” said Richard.
“I have,” said Marjorie. “I want to call him James, after Richard’s father.”
“But we’ve never had a James in the family before,” said Lady Southwold.
“Then it’s time we did,” said Marjorie.
1885–87
6. Setbacks and Successes
There are Certain Absolute Realities Great Families Acknowledge: property, of course, is one, money another, power yet another. And so is birth, legitimate birth, for birth and pedigree establish certain rights to the whole jealously acquired and guarded mass of rights and wealth and land which a great family like the Southwolds represents. Because of this, the birth of James did far more to establish Richard’s status in the family than his marriage to Marjorie.
It would still be a slow and sometimes painful process as the Southwolds gradually accepted him. But it effectively began now with the birth of sickly and undersized James Francis Bellamy. Even that weekend Richard felt the difference as the family began those feudal celebrations which for generations had been held at Southwold when a male was born. The fact that the infant’s father was not a Southwold did not matter. The Southwolds no longer had their ancient right of descent through the female line if the male one failed. But this scarcely lessened James’s importance. Until Hugo married and produced an heir, little James Francis was the effective heir of all that wealth and splendour that surrounded him. He seemed supremely unaware of his importance as he lay with his mother in that great four-poster. (She still felt weak, but quietly triumphant. James cried a lot, but Dr. Cowley had pronounced him healthy: already he was proving quite a greedy baby. Marjorie fed him and enjoyed it.)
So in the absence of his wife and son it fell to Richard to have the place of honour in that Sunday’s celebrations. He stood beside Lord Southwold in the Southwold pew as the Reverend Prothero, in a shaky, old-man’s voice, gave “heartfelt thanks to our Creator, Jesus Christ, the source of all life, for the happy delivery of our beloved Lady Marjorie.” He also joined the prayers for his son—“May he be upright, just, and fearless in the Lord!”—a strange sensation.
“Now comes the moment everyone’s been waiting for,” said Lord Southwold as they left the church.
On the green beyond the church the ox had been roasting on its spit all day and Groundsel the bailiff had set up a great barrel of the strongest Southwold ale, brewed for the occasion. There were two fiddlers from Bordon and already the green was crammed with villagers, several hundred of them, yokels and wood-men, labourers and craftsmen from the estate. Richard saw old Dan Hegarty, who claimed to have been a drummer-boy at Waterloo. He had his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren round him. Like all the villagers, they were dependent on the Southwolds for their living, and his lordship was something more to them than the rich man in the big house up the road. He was their lord, employer, benefactor. He settled their disputes, knew them by name, punished them for poaching and gave them a guinea when they married. Their grandfathers had served his grandfather. Whether their grandsons would continue the tradition was another matter, but in that year 1885, in a changing world and with the aristocracy threatened by death duties and the Liberal Party, Lord Southwold still continued much as the feudal Earls of Southwold had for centuries.
He was extremely popular (her ladyship, “a regular tartar” to the villagers, less so), and as he stepped onto the green there was a loyal cheer from everyone. There was also a cheer for Richard and a short loyal speech from Foat, the Southwold carpenter, thanking his lordship for the party and congratulating one and all on “this happiest event.” Then Groundsel tapped the cask, the cooks began slicing at the ox and the fiddlers struck up. That night, in celebration of the birth, the village ate and drank, and the traditional bonfire blazed on Bordon Hill.
The Southwolds celebrated too, with slightly more sophistication than the villagers. James’s birth seemed to have induced a new touch of family feeling in the egocentric Southwold clan. Southwold himself appeared much moved by the villagers.
“This is the world that matters,” he said several times to Richard. “Not London, nor that claptrap about the Empire, but the real heart of England.�
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Even Lady Southwold seemed mellowed by her new role as grandmother. For the first time in her life she addressed her son-in-law as “Richard,” and she spoke quite sentimentally about the baby. Hugo, jovially drunk, repeated several times that he would have to start thinking seriously about making heirs himself.
“Best to get married first,” said Richard cheerfully. And Hugo, whose long-drawn-out attempt to land an American heiress was rather a sore subject, winced.
Marjorie came down to dinner. The unhappiness and jealousy that had marred the end of her confinement still lay uncomfortably between them. Despite himself, Richard still resented the way she had made him let her have the child at Southwold. Also, he always found it hard to feel happy with her in this unhappy house. (Only in Eaton Place, in their own home, was he completely at ease with her.) But he was very proud of her that night, and she too made an effort to offset the bitterness against Richard in the past.
So the evening turned out to be the happiest one that Richard ever spent at Southwold. He felt himself accepted there at last (a premature assumption, as events would prove) and even managed to enjoy the stormy personalities of both of his wife’s parents.
Much of the credit for this happy state of things must go to Widgery, the butler: he knew Lord Southwold well enough to understand that on a night like this he would demand the very best champagne. And very good it was—three bottles of the legendary Château Jubloteau of 1848.
“The year of revolutions,” Southwold murmured gloomily. “The year the rot began. The world has never been the same again. But it was a great year for champagne.”
It was indeed. As Richard savoured the caress of that mysterious, flat, wonderful champagne, he felt that he was tasting the last sad flavour of a world forever lost. It was Southwold’s world, not his, but as he drank, toasting his son and the latest heir to Southwold, he could understand his lordship’s passion for the past, for that vraie douceur de la vie which old aristocrats remembered.