by Fay Weldon
‘There is some mistake,’ the new King accused Dr Reid, her friend and physician, who with the family here at Osborne House had attended the Old Queen’s deathbed and recorded her last breath. ‘This is neither possible nor reasonable.’
‘There is no mistake,’ said the good doctor. ‘Everything is to her exact specifications. Here, see, on her left, a lock of John Brown’s hair – to her right your father’s bath-gown.’
‘But the left hand is the hand of marriage,’ protested the King.
‘I know,’ said Dr Reid, bleakly.
‘I suppose—’ started the King.
‘There was always a rumour of a secret marriage,’ said Dr Reid. ‘But I think not. Sire, do not distress yourself so. All are dead and gone.’ As a young man he had attended Prince Albert’s death. He was weeping himself.
‘Find a bunch of flowers,’ said the King. ‘Anything. Cover up the photo. The public must not see it. Get the coffin sealed as soon as decently possible. And you are wrong: not all are dead. Get that blasted Indian waiter out of the house at once.’
But the Indian waiter, known as ‘the Munshi’, declined to leave before the funeral, and Alexandra suggested that it was perhaps wiser to let the Old Queen’s favourite stay rather than cast him out: he had letters and documents in his possession it would have been better that he had not. Dr Reid agreed. Abdul Karim had first appeared at the royal dining table resplendent in turban and sash, and gone on to become the Queen’s confidant and intimate, to a degree it was impossible to determine. The Munshi, said Dr Reid, was without doubt an imposter, a fraud and a slippery cove who for thirteen years now had been robbing the Queen but whose affection for her seemed genuine enough. He could be allowed to stay for the funeral, as a favourite dog is allowed to follow the coffin of master or mistress. The Old Queen had seen the Munshi only as dotty old ladies often saw their pet dogs or cats, lavishing affection on them, and furious with anyone who dared make an accusation of biting or scratching. The association, Reid swore, had been no more or less than this.
‘Dotty old ladies,’ said the King bitterly, ‘do not sign letters to dogs or cats as from their mothers.’
But he contented himself with demanding that Karim hand over all letters, papers and notes that concerned the Old Queen, and feeding them to the flames of the bonfires in which all mementoes of John Brown’s reign were to be burned. The King himself would light the bonfires, with his sisters Louise and Beatrice looking on. The past would be expunged.
‘Oh, let the Indian waiter stay,’ the King said, in Alexandra’s hearing. ‘There will be more talk if he does not walk behind his beloved “mother” than if he does.’
Bertie’s bitterness, Alexandra remarked to Consuelo, lay in her deceased mother-in-law’s apparent preference for a servant than for her own son. Victoria had despised Bertie and let it show: saw only his faults and not his merits: failed to consult him in matters of State: wished that he, Bertie, had died in place of his eldest son Eddy, Duke of Clarence: even blamed him, Bertie, for causing his father’s death – Albert had fallen ill on a trip back from Cambridge, where he had been reprimanding Bertie for libertine excesses of one kind and another – and in general made Bertie’s life a misery when she could have made him happy. She had done what no mother should do – failed to love her own son. And all the while indulging in her own secret sensual excesses, if the mementoes consigned to the flames at Osborne were to be believed. The letters to Karim signed ‘your mother’ could only be further evidence of actual insanity, as Bertie had long suspected.
‘More,’ Robert said to Isobel, ‘the Queen is annoying the King very much by telling him that his appetite – once great, not gargantuan, and a worry to herself and his doctors – is in some way connected with his mother’s death.’
‘The Queen may be right,’ said Isobel. She could see it. With every fresh discovery of the Old Queen’s love letters to Brown, every fresh curry recipe from Karim unearthed, Bertie would suffer and come home demanding extra courses for dinner, and he being the Monarch how could anyone forbid him? Alexandra could tell him, his doctors could tell him, that he must eat less and move around more, or he would meet an early death, but death was perhaps what he wanted in his heart. While Alexandra continued to pick away at the odd breast of chicken thinly smeared with mustard sauce, her husband ate with suicidal zeal, puddings and pies and roasts, sauces and gravies and relishes, the better to punish his mother.
‘Consuelo says the same,’ said Robert, and laughed uproariously. ‘You women! The man has the best cooks in the land, why would he not eat? And I daresay he is hungry from making bonfires. I’ll grant you that.’
‘He is hungry for his mother’s love, and now he will never get it,’ Isobel said.
‘That is what Consuelo infers, but you express it more neatly,’ said Robert.
It was meant to be flattery, she could see, and she was duly flattered, although actually it was not original, just something her friend the Countess d’Asti had observed – but why did Consuelo’s name keep coming up in casual conversation? Perhaps better that it did than not; at least Robert was not trying to hide anything from her. Still she brooded. She did not enjoy the new pattern of her thoughts; they seemed scarcely to belong to her. They disturbed her sleep. She had begun to wake at four in the morning with a mind full of unreasonable doubts and fears. She had a kind of waking vision of Consuelo’s curly black head burrowing into the hollow where Robert’s naked shoulder blade met his breastbone. It haunted her.
She had spoken about her state of mind to her friend Freddie, the Countess d’Asti. Freddie came from Austria and was artistic, almost of the haut bohème, and knowledgeable about things most well-bred Englishwomen were not. It was Freddie’s ambition to go to Vienna and become a patient of the alienist Sigmund Freud but her husband would not hear of it. Bad enough that Freddie was a member of the Theosophical Society, wore flowing Liberty gowns, long strings of large wooden beads, and no longer served meat at her table, since when her reputation as a Society hostess had somewhat dwindled.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me these days,’ Isobel complained to Freddie. ‘Everything upsets me. I lose my temper and snarl where I should smile. I feel that nobody likes me and I certainly don’t like them. I am not the woman I used to be.’
‘It is the Change,’ Freddie said. ‘It happens to all of us. You must eat lots of lettuce and it will pass. You will be yourself again and need not bother any more about having babies.’
Which had cheered Isobel quite a lot, but still not enough. She ate a great deal of lettuce and thought it made her feel better. The night after she had sent Reginald to the post with the envelope for Yatbury she had gone to bed unworried and composed. She woke at four in the morning next to Robert. He had returned from the House at midnight, come to her bed and now slept soundly and innocently, showing no sign of wishing to return to his own. She woke as if from a bad dream but there had been no dream, just the feeling that there was something badly wrong. For once, the worries were not about Consuelo. She half slept, half woke. Was it perhaps about the state of the Dower House? She had a vision of her future widowhood clear in her mind; she herself moved out into the Dower House, Minnie reigning over all as the new Countess of Dilberne, and herself, Isobel, demoted to mere Dowager Duchess. The Dowager, figure of fun, was that to be her future? At least Minnie was an amiable girl; aggrieved daughters-in-law, once into their titles, were famous for the revenge they could impose upon their one-time tormentors – roofs left unmended, servants not hired, carriages not available, rats nesting, the cesspit man not summoned, there was no end to it. The one who held the purse strings, as ever, held the power.
But no, it was not that. The Dower House was in no worse a state of repair than it usually was. All over the land dower houses were allowed to go to rack and ruin. Sheer superstition kept them that way; to keep them in good repair was to invite their occupation.
Was it the responsibility of acting as lad
y’s maid to the four Duchesses? Could that be worrying her? Sleep seemed so desirable and yet so impossible. Things could go wrong, it was true: bosoms had been known to fall out of bodices, heels to break; the very greatest in the land were not immune to falling and tripping on their own trains – but she could cope with that. Life was full of mischance, and what she could not deal with, processing up the aisle, Minnie surely could. She was a resourceful girl. No, it was not that.
‘My God!’ Isobel sat up in bed, eyes wide, as vague thoughts suddenly crystallized into actual memory. Robert stirred; she had spoken aloud; but fortunately, he slipped back into sleep. Three spare tickets to the Coronation, put in an envelope, addressed to Yatbury Rectory, and given to Reginald to take to the post. She had acted on a generous impulse. Or perhaps she had just been angry? At best an extra present for Adela, a girl she had never met or wanted to, but now in all likelihood would. At worst an act of spite against her husband, the man she adored. There had been no covering letter; she had meant to slip the envelope into the parcel, but it had been so perfectly packed and tied up with green string it had seemed a shame to open it up again. She fought for recollection, but found it hard, as if she’d fallen off a horse and forgotten everything on either side of the accident. She remembered Minnie’s little reindeer stickers and thinking how hopelessly vulgar they were, but then that she was American and couldn’t help it. People from God’s own country seemed to have an inbuilt childishness: a liking for the bright and useless. Now Edwin would receive the envelope and like as not assume the tickets came straight from the Palace. He would turn up with his wife and daughter on June 26th and find himself sitting next to the brother he hated, and, eaten up by anger and jealousy, have to watch him process behind his liege lord down the nave of Westminster Abbey. Quite what had caused Robert’s falling-out with his brother she did not know, nor had ever wanted to know, but thought it must be to do with his right to his inheritance. Perhaps Consuelo knew; she seemed to know everything else.
She must retrieve the situation. She could not face Robert’s wrath when she told him what had happened.
‘No,’ he would say, not what ‘happened’ – what you have ‘done’.
She would get the tickets back: if she could not, she would say they were lost and set the household to searching: she would write to Consuelo to say she had invited the Baums and Rosina – and then not ask them – and Edwin and family would be stopped at the door and the three seats could just sit empty, as indeed would the family’s, until the processing had been done, and the choristers finished with ‘I Am Glad’, and the service over, when they would return to listen to Hubert Parry himself playing the organ, waiting for the wedding party to depart. It was only then the lack of occupants would be truly noticed, missing teeth in an otherwise full set of the great, grand and famous – and the post could always be blamed for anything that went wrong.
Oh, for heaven’s sake – it was all too complicated: it was Consuelo’s fault for not checking the numbers on the Queen’s list properly: she, Isobel, Countess of Dilberne, the beautiful one, the competent one, was a peeress of the realm and could not be bothered with such troubles. She, as Countess, was to have a three-inch ermine trim on her train and Minnie, Viscountess, a mere two inches. Their robes would be made of crimson silk velvet, open down the front to show a dress of heavy silver and gold brocade – they must decide on the design – close-fitting, with short fitted sleeves edged with miniver fur. Her arms were still good, thank heaven. Robert would have three rows of dark sealskin spots on the ermine cape that went over his robe, also in crimson silk. Sunny, as a Duke, would have four rows; but the men had no trains to worry about: all the same she would have to check the length of Robert’s robe. It had been made for him ten years ago when he came into the title, and he rarely wore it. Elderly peers often tripped over too-long gowns. Better perhaps to get Ede and Ravenscroft to make one up new. She would not let a matter of invitations spoil her anticipation of the great event. She fell asleep.
In the morning she rang for Reginald and asked him to go down to the post office and see what could be done to retrieve the letter he had taken to the post yesterday. The parcel could go as intended but she needed the letter back.
Reginald, knowing full well the post had gone long ago and that apart from intercepting the letter as it went through the letterbox at Yatbury Rectory there was no way of retrieving it, went through the motions of enquiring at the Post Office. He knew what was in the letter, having steamed it open as was his wont, had marvelled that such valuable contents were being sent by unregistered post, and decided against purloining them. Seats seven, eight, and nine of row four of the west nave of Westminster Abbey on June 26th could mean only one thing, and the risk was far too great.
Whose Fault?
After Ivy had gone off to the Almshouses, Adela sat for a little under the ancient yew and enjoyed her misery. Everything nice was always snatched away from her. Not just a parcel addressed to her – one could understand that, though one didn’t like it – a father surely had a right to protect his daughter from malign influences – but all that she had loved about St Aidan’s, its very familiarity, the way the sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows at certain hours, at certain times of year, the old pews; the wooden floor, worn down by the feet of worshippers, would soon be gone to be replaced by soulless, practical tiles, easy to wash. All the consoling patterns she knew were to be disturbed. She had loved the elegant flow of St Cecilia’s wooden gown: now it lay in wormy shreds on the ground. Even the pulpit was in pieces, and with it her father’s dignity. The Rector, at his Bishop’s bidding, must now pray at the same level as his congregation, no longer elevated above it as the saints had been above the people. It was too bad, her own superiority as the Rector’s daughter was being brought down as his was. No one envied her being her father’s daughter, but at least they had respected her.
She had trusted her father to stand up against the Bishop’s ecumenical zeal, his strictures that everything must change, everyone be made equal before God – and her father had failed. Why should she pay him the respect she did, since others gave him so little? He was not the man she thought he was. Worse, closer even to home, he had told Ivy to hide the parcel and Ivy had ignored him. He had told her mother to burn it, and her mother had not. And still no one had been struck by lightning, though it was true the day felt heavy, dull, and thundery.
She had somehow imagined that God would be swifter in retribution. ‘Swift in retribution’ – she liked the phrase. Even God had let her down. She cried a little from self-pity and then pulled herself together and prayed for forgiveness. She must honour her father and mother: these random disloyal thoughts could only be from the devil.
Presently Edwin came out of the Rectory with two young men from Jones and Willis the Church Furnishers, presumably so that all could see how the work of destruction was progressing. Adela thought they were inappropriately dressed, in coats with fur collars and soft felt Homburgs, but it was a new century and no doubt they thought they were arbiters of new thinking. She moved behind a tall gravestone so as not to catch their attention. The taller of the two men was smoking a pipe and tapped it out on the low wall of the lych-gate, next to where the builders were piling the old wood. Adela thought that was sacrilegious; the lych-gate was where coffins could wait under cover for burial, where the preacher could stand to deliver the service during bad weather. But her father made no objection to the liberty the pipe smoker took, and the three of them went back into what they had left of her church, laughing.
The sky was already darkening, though it was nowhere near dusk. Black cumulus clouds were piling up behind the steeple, their paler edges lined with a purpled red. The gilt weathercock swung first this way, then that, unable to make up its mind where the worst danger came from, but flashing a general warning. There’d be a storm in the night. Adela rather hoped so. She loved storms. It crossed her mind that she should check that the embers of the tobacco we
re properly out as she walked back to the Rectory, but she didn’t bother, why should she? It was going to rain, in any case.
Rosina Complains to Minnie
‘I think it is outrageous,’ said Rosina to Minnie, ‘that given three extra tickets for the Coronation, my parents have not seen fit to invite me. Not only does Arthur process, but you do too. Both of you are younger than me, sillier than me, yet you get to dress up in crimson silk and ermine trim and tiara, and I am stuck here in the country, practically walled up like a delinquent nun. You know she haunts the green room down the corridor?’
‘I have heard as much,’ said Minnie, ‘but I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Then you are flying in the face of the spirit of the times,’ said Rosina. ‘Everyone who’s anyone believes in ghosts; the Leader of the House believes in them and holds séances in Carlton House Terrace. They found a planchette board in the Old Queen’s room when they were turning out Osborne and burning everything before the public got to know about it. Some say the King got to hear about it and dragged it from the flames and now he has it, and is trying to bring back his mother to tell her she should be ashamed of herself. And even Father had the Psychical Research people down here the other week when you were in London. They didn’t find a thing, there was nothing to find, just a rumour that in the year 1701 a servant girl sinned and the lady of the house locked her in the green room without food until she and the baby died of starvation. That’s the Hedleighs for you. They care nothing for women. I am the first born, Arthur the second, but I don’t even get a seat to sit on at the Coronation.’