by Fay Weldon
Minnie and her lady’s maid Lily had been packed off to Dilberne Court the previous day. Isobel had been pleased enough with Minnie’s company – she learned the habits of the house remarkably quickly for a meat baron’s daughter from Chicago – but felt it was important that the girl spend as many nights as possible with Arthur. The young couple had been married for more than a year and still no sign of a baby. If the impossible happened and the quick-witted Minnie turned out to be barren, and if Alfred continued to have only daughters, Edwin would inherit if he survived him. It did not bear thinking about, so Isobel seldom did. It was hard to worry about anything on so bright a morning. Three extra invitations! It was more than she had hoped for. She was wearing her favourite tea-gown, a kind of yellow silk kimono splashed with red flowers, which when she bent forward to study the invitations more closely fell open and revealed more bosom than the servants thought decent. But Robert smiled to see it, and Isobel thought, what a handsome man he is, and how lucky I am that after thirty years of marriage I can still make him smile like that.
‘Minnie and I will be processing behind the Queen and Arthur and you behind the King,’ she said, ‘which uses up our four allocated seats, so we have three over. It would be natural to ask our daughter Rosina, but she will wear strange clothes and like as not alarm other guests by haranguing them about the iniquities of royal ritual in the modern age.’
‘But she will be hurt and offended if she knows there is a spare ticket and she is not asked; she is quite capable of behaving if she wishes.’
‘But she may very well not wish,’ said Isobel, ‘and she is quite happy to be hurt and offended. Let it occupy her all next year. Better a real grudge than an invented one. She is quite likely to take her parrot with her to glorify some avian deity, or go without a hat, or let off fireworks. I most strenuously advise against one.’
‘I will abide by your judgement, my dear,’ said her husband, pacifically. ‘But do remember she is your daughter too. I see your father Silas in her. He did what he wanted, said what he wanted, and took no notice of what people thought of him. They are traits better suited to a man than a woman, it is true, but at least she is not dull.’
Isobel kept her composure and said that if dullness was a qualification for attendance it might be seemly to invite his brother Edwin and his wife and daughter. Edwin was a Dilberne, and, heaven forbid, in the line of succession to the earldom. She should not have said it, but did so to annoy, and as soon as she had, regretted it.
Robert said, over his dead body, that his brother was a scurrilous rat. And his sister-in-law a pious vengeful little thing, not only dull but plain, and the jubilant crowds who gathered in such number to enjoy the pageantry and fine dresses of the notables who descended from their coaches at the Abbey gates expected to see tall beautiful people not hunchbacks. They would disappoint by coming by hansom cab or even by District line with its fetid smells and grimy walls.
‘Then whom shall we ask?’ asked Isobel. Better that Robert had disdained Consuelo’s offer, but what man would refuse so generous a gift from someone so charming, pretty and young? And why had Consuelo chosen Robert for her favours? He was twice the girl’s age, surely, possessed a tenth of her wealth, and held a title a good notch or so below her own. On the other hand Robert was good-looking, sociable and probably, most importantly in the Duchess’s eyes, as cheerful as Sunny was not. If she wanted to curry favour with anyone, why did she not set her sights on Arthur Balfour, who was so absurdly clever, kind, unmarried and available? But there were some young wives, the kind really close to their fathers while disliking their mothers, who enjoyed nothing better than to steal other women’s husbands, simply because that was what they were. Perhaps Consuleo was such a one? No, Isobel did not like it one bit.
‘We could ask the d’Astis,’ said Isobel. ‘She would give her eye teeth for such an invitation.’
‘Too vulgar,’ said Robert. ‘Too foreign. Lion hunters. All those greenery-yallery people. But we could invite the Baums.’ Eric Baum was Robert’s financial adviser, thanks to whose backing of Robert’s gold and mineral mines Robert was quickly becoming very rich indeed. ‘That would at least be useful.’
‘So others might observe,’ said Isobel. ‘Such an odious little man. And what a little social climber she is.’
At which Robert rose to his feet, and said she must do as she thought fit, these were domestic matters, he must be getting back to the House, old Salisbury was dragging himself to his feet to speak on land reform though heaven knew that after his wife’s death the poor old man, once such a fighter, could scarcely speak sense any more. The sooner Arthur Balfour was in place the better.
‘Of course,’ said Isobel sweetly, ‘I shall see to it,’ but one way and another she was furious; and once Robert had left the house, she took the three invitations and posted them off along with the Christmas gift to Adela, to the Honourable Reverend Edwin Hedleigh at the Rectory at Yatbury – such a dreary little coal town by all acounts, grown too quickly from its ancient heart, its one claim to fame the mediaeval panel in the musicians’ gallery of St Aidan’s, the twelfth-century church, showing a playful St Cecilia kicking up her skirts and dancing with her musicians.
Breakfast at Yatbury Rectory
The letter and parcel arrived at the Rectory as a still grey dawn was breaking over Yatbury. The town’s winding wheel had disappeared into mist and fog. Even the weathercock on the squat church tower was barely visible. Tim Peasedown the postman stared with disbelief at the line of dancing reindeers stuck onto the brown-paper-and-string parcel. Such needless expense and frivolity seemed out of place in a hard-working world.
Ivy opened the door to take in letter and parcel. She glanced at the strap of leathery seaweed she kept nailed up above the door. A friend had brought it all the way from Lulworth Cove. When it was dry and limp, it meant the weather would be fine: when it swelled and the buds plumped out, it meant a storm was on the way. Today the buds were well plumped. She did not ask Tim in for a cup of tea. It was not that kind of household. The Mrs Hon. Rev. would have hysterics, and Ivy’s boyfriend George wouldn’t like it.
The letter was addressed to the Hon. Rev., the parcel for Miss Adela Hedleigh and the sender’s address on both was given as Belgrave Square, London. This meant that they would either be returned to sender unopened or thrust into the kitchen stove and burned. She slipped the envelope into the pocket of her apron and was wondering how best to deal with the parcel. She had seen nothing like the row of Christmas reindeers before and did not much care to again: they seemed as if they were bringing the Royal Mail into disrepute, making light of a serious matter. But if she could steam the stickers off they might make a few pence in Bath market, where her mother ran a novelty stall on Saturday mornings, and no one be any the wiser.
Before she could do any such thing the tall, thin figure of the Hon. Rev. himself appeared behind her without warning, up early for his morning constitutional, took the parcel from Ivy’s hands, turned it this way and that as if it were something truly loathsome.
‘Keep this frippery out of my daughter’s way,’ he said, ‘and ask my wife to put it in the fire at the earliest opportunity.’
Then he strode out into the fog. Ivy watched him through the scullery window and was reminded of some great flapping bird of ill omen. If it wasn’t for Adela, she thought, she would simply be off. They were looking for staff at the new hotel in Bath. She cleared the ash and lit the stove; it was the kind that burned anthracite and could perfectly well be kept in overnight, but that was seen as a wicked waste. At Yatbury Rectory cold was good for the soul. As was apparently being always a little bit hungry, a little bit uncomfortable, and washing the dishes in cold water.
‘A parcel came for Miss Adela,’ Ivy said, when Elise came into the kitchen to make the breakfast porridge. She made it with water and served it with salt. No wonder the lot of them were so thin and solemn. ‘It’s on the table there. The Reverend said to burn it, but it would on
ly smoke the place out, the way the wind’s in the north. It’s some kind of fabric, I think.’
Elise turned the parcel over and inspected it carefully. She was wearing a grey dress, which matched the rest of her: hair, hands, face. Ivy thought for a moment there was as much fog inside the kitchen as outside the window but could see it could hardly be the case.
‘It will be from her Aunt Isobel,’ Elise said. ‘She often does this kind of thing at Christmas, such a very vain and frivolous person. The stove is the best place for it. And what are those silly little creatures? What on earth are they meant to be? Like no creature I have ever seen. Is it a very dark morning, or has the time come when I need spectacles? Oh dear, I hope not.’
‘It may be both,’ said Ivy. ‘One day you don’t need them, the next you do, my mum says.’ This morning Elise was talkative. When her husband left the house and went for a walk, which was seldom, she could become quite friendly.
‘I think the little creatures are meant to be Christmas reindeers, walking across the page,’ said Ivy, helpfully.
‘What have reindeers to do with Christmas?’ Elise was puzzled.
‘Father Christmas from the North Pole,’ said Ivy. ‘He brings presents on his sledge.’
‘Fairy tales and poppycock!’ Elise was indignant. ‘At home in Innsbruck when I was a child, St Nicholas came on Christmas Eve and gave you an orange if you were a good child and a lump of coal if you were naughty. Once I was given a piece of coal. I cried a great deal, but they would not tell me what I had done that was bad. I never found out. My husband is not a great believer in presents at Christmas time, and neither am I. Better that Adela does not receive them. Christmas is a happy time, but that is to do with the birth of our Lord, not self-indulgence, overeating and presents brought by reindeer, which harks back to the old pagan ways, and must be rooted out from Christendom.’ But Ivy thought that perhaps Elise was trying a little too hard to persuade herself. She was poking the paper with a finger.
‘I wonder if it’s velvet,’ she said. ’My sister-in-law is famous for her gowns.’
‘It seems a wicked waste to burn it,’ said Ivy, ‘whatever it is. Perhaps I should take it down to the Almshouses and give it to the lady superintendent there? On Christmas Eve they distribute gifts for the poor of the parish. Then we’ll know it’s gone to someone deserving. The Reverend doesn’t have to know.’
‘Very well,’ said Elise and gave Ivy the glimmer of a smile.
Ivy decided she would never marry, not if you ended up married to some man who so crowded your mind you could smile only when he was out of the house.
Later that morning Ivy cut through the churchyard on her apparent way to the Almshouses. She would drop the parcel off at her mother’s cottage, reindeers and all. The fog had burned off and the day was suddenly bright and cheerful. The yew trees which stood in rows along the path from the lych-gate to the church door were bright with berries – except as ever the one with broad sinewy trunk and gnarled branches, said to date from William the Conqueror, which managed only a few pitiful orange-red berries every year. The weathercock on the steeple glittered in the sun, and was beginning to flash as the wind got up.
As it happened she encountered Adela, and pushed the parcel further into her basket. Better if it was not seen. Adela was in tears, as she so often was. The workmen had been busy the day before, and the remnants of the musicians’ gallery, its pale wood splintered and powdery, lay in pieces on the ground, piled ready for the bonfire. Adela was in a state of lamentation, wringing her hands over the wreckage. Was she more like Helen, Ivy wondered, Helen watching the burning towers of Troy, or Dido weeping for Aeneas, or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott? Ivy’s mother Doreen loved to pin up prints of sad, beautiful ladies on her cottage wall, rescued from her novelties stall, fly-blown and damp-stained though they might be, and Ivy knew and loved them all.
Adela stood and watched, and Ivy too, as a couple of brawny men carried out the old gated pews, almost black with age, to add to the pile for burning. The new open pews, in a lightweight, orangey-coloured wood which Ivy did not recognize, had already been delivered and were stacked against the stone walls. She could hear the uneven sound of axe blade against wood, and looked inside the church door to see a scrawny lad make splintered firewood of the high carved pulpit from which the Hon. Rev. had so often thundered. A few of the older villagers looked on curiously. St Aidan’s had a small and dwindling congregation – most had fled to the Methodists at St Bart’s, where a friendlier atmosphere ruled and the hymns were more to their taste.
‘It’s all my fault,’ said Adela to Ivy. ‘I shouldn’t have made Father so angry. Now look. God’s punishment!’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ said Ivy, ‘God’s got bigger things to worry about than you answering your father back.’
Still Adela gulped and wept, and asked if she could go with Ivy wherever Ivy was going: if she stayed where she was she would die of a broken heart. Ivy said Adela was better fitted for the stage than for a convent, but her heart would break even more if she knew where Ivy was going.
‘Where’s that?’ asked Adela.
‘Down to the Almshouses with a Christmas gift for the poor.’
‘Let me see it,’ said Adela, so Ivy showed it to her. In case the matter of the missing parcel ever arose, which was doubtful, she would have covered her tracks well enough.
‘But it’s addressed to me,’ said Adela, horrified.
‘Your father thinks you’re too young to receive unsolicited gifts,’ said Ivy. ‘He told your mother to burn it but I told her it was a wicked waste so she told me I could take it away and give it to the poor.’ Ivy crossed her fingers as she spoke, but it was true enough. Her mother surely counted as poor, and enough of the charity gifts that were left at the Almshouses ended up on her novelty stall anyway.
‘But it’s from Belgrave Square, which means it’s from relatives. What harm can there be in it? I don’t understand.’
‘You know what your father’s like about your family. Your uncle’s on the wrong side in the House, your aunt’s a walking clothes horse, your cousin Arthur married a Papist whore and your cousin Rosina as good as killed her own grandfather. They’re all bound for hell. Just let me get it down to the Almshouses and forget about it, there’s a good girl.’
‘It’s very strange,’ said Adela, ‘that one side of the family should be so very good, like ours, and the other side so very wicked, like theirs. What’s a whore?’
‘Never you mind,’ said Ivy.
‘I shall shrivel and die for lack of information,’ said Adela sadly. ‘The sooner I am a Bride of Christ the better. Well, take my only Christmas present away, Ivy, and give it to the poor. Do you think one feels hungry and cold in heaven?’
‘I might drop by Swaley’s Farm and see if there’s any cream going free,’ said Ivy. ‘Your ma put out some stale bread for the birds. I could put it aside, and with some cream and a drop of sugar from my mum it’ll make a good supper tonight.’
‘Thank you, Ivy,’ said Adela. She poked the parcel with her finger. ‘It feels squishy,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s velvet. Please can’t I just see what’s in it?’
‘It’s more than my job’s worth,’ said Ivy, putting the parcel back in her shopping basket, and went on down towards the Almshouses, missing the first turning to her mother’s cottage but taking the second, once out of Adela’s sight. This took her past Swaley’s Farm, where her boyfriend George worked mornings, milking. He’d already left for Bath, where he was at college, so she stuck the envelope from Belgrave Square in a gap between the plaster wall and one of the milking stalls where no one would notice it, and went and had a cup of tea with her mother.
A Deed Once Done
The enormity of what she had done was slow to dawn on Isobel. She had been feeling over-emotional lately, prone to bouts of crying, behaving quite irrationally, and flushing with embarrassment when there was nothing to be embarrassed about. She knew perfectly well that h
er worries about Consuelo’s closeness to her husband could only be absurd. If anything Consuelo saw him as a father – Robert was so pleasant, wise, fatherly and kind – a Melbourne, perhaps, to the young Victoria. But then again, there had been talk at the time about that; the crowd even chanting ‘Mrs Melbourne! Mrs Melbourne!’ after her carriage. These things happened. And lately, somewhere in the gossip columns, Isobel had read a rather tendentious comparison between the giddy young Princess Victoria, she of the slender neck, tiny waist and dancing slippers, before age and sorrow clouded body and mind, with Consuelo, princess of today’s social scene. Not, perhaps, that the Old Queen had been quite as sorrowful as her later subjects had assumed.
As Queen Alexandra had confided in Consuelo, her new lady-in-waiting, who had passed the gossip on to Robert, who in turn had told Isobel, the King had found out more about his mother’s life when he looked into her unsealed coffin than he cared to know. Bertie had found the corpse to be dressed in a white gown with her wedding veil over her face, and seen that in her left hand she clasped a photograph of her Scottish ghillie, John Brown, and only with her right did she entwine her fingers with the plaster cast of the hand of Bertie’s long-deceased father, Prince Albert.