by Fay Weldon
Silence fell.
‘It was stunned,’ said a voice from the audience, ‘that was all.’ The voice came from the rationalist camp. The audience had divided itself roughly into two, the idealists on the left, the rationalists on the right, choosing the propinquity of the like-minded, as, his Lordship had noticed, people will usually do if left to their own devices.
‘No,’ said another. ‘It cracked that great window. That bird could not ordinarily have survived.’ That came from the don’t-knows.
‘It had a heart attack?’ said someone else irrelevantly.
‘It’s a miracle,’ piped up Consuelo, from the front row where the grandees sat – so it carried more weight than perhaps it should have. ‘First it was dead: then it was alive. We watched a miracle.’
‘It was a trick,’ grumbled the rationalists. ‘Imbeciles!’ His Lordship, agreeing, decided that chicanery could indeed be the only answer.
The grandees left the I Don’t Knowers to their noisy debate, and gathered round Balfour in his antechamber. He seemed not to be much concerned with the incident of the bird. May had come back from the other side and spoken to him. He was distressed, happy and overwhelmed all at the same time. He seemed to feel the need to explain. ‘We were indeed engaged,’ he was saying. ‘It was her voice, the dearest girl, I would know it anywhere. I had the ring, ready to give her, before the illness overcame her. I put it in the coffin. It was the least I could do.’
‘I know the story, Arthur,’ said Consuelo, with surprising acerbity. ‘But knowing you, I don’t suppose you got round to actually asking the poor girl. Ever the bachelor!’
Balfour ignored her. The Society for Psychical Researchers were agreeing that Princess Ida had a well-developed mediumistic talent, and that they would ask her to participate in their next controlled experiment. She was indeed very pretty.
His Lordship slipped away and took a cab back to Belgrave Square and Isobel. Whatever game Consuelo was playing it was dangerous. He would steer well clear of her in future. One had to be very careful of pretty faces. Look at the S.P.R.: faced with an obvious piece of trickery (though how it had been achieved, he had no idea) a pretty face reduced them all to idiocy.
A Night at the Savoy
Rosina was in the lobby of the hotel, engaging with the reservation clerk, suggesting that perhaps the reason she had been given an inferior room was because she was a woman, when Frank Overshaw, flustered and distraught, came in through the swing doors of the lobby.
Seeing Rosina at the desk, he crossed over to her saying, ‘Oh, your Ladyship, Rosina, I am so pleased to have found you! I thought we’d missed each other!’
To which Rosina replied crossly, to the reservation clerk as much as anyone, ‘I am Lady nobody, I am reserved under the name of Miss Rosina Hedleigh,’ and gestured Frank to wait on one of the armchairs under the great central chandelier. The clerk seemed to believe Frank, since instead of arguing, as he had been inclined – there was nothing wrong with the room, other than that the maid had neglected to turn down the sheet and pull the curtains to on her late-night round – saw fit to upgrade her to one of the superior rooms: one argued with Misses, but not with Ladies.
By the time the room was sorted out Frank had quite recovered his composure. He took her to the bar, and though the bartender looked surprised he consented to serve them Manhattans. Rosina watched while the bartender had a surreptitious word with the concierge who had a word with the desk, who looked over to where they sat and nodded a discreet approval. She was not a lady of the night.
‘I missed the train,’ he said. ‘I was wrangling with the Bishop. Mrs Kennion had become hysterical. I regret nothing except causing trouble to my Aunt, who has been so good to me.’
‘I thought you had changed your mind. I sat there at the dinner table next to an empty seat and told myself he is just another deceiver, a man who likes to lead women on with false hopes only to dash them at the last moment. They delight in it. There are men like that.’
‘Not Australians,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the bloody time.’
‘Hush, Frank,’ she said. ‘That’s a word for the Australian bush, not the Savoy.’
‘Then the sooner we have you out there the better,’ he said, ‘so you can say it too. My bloody oath!’
He said the purser of the Cuzco was happy with the change of name on the tickets but would be pleased to have a glance at the marriage lines, if only to keep the owners happy. Serious efforts were being made to keep undesirables out of Australia. ‘I told him I was marrying a Lady of the Realm and he soon shut up.’
The problem, and why he had missed the train, was that the Bishop refused to give Rosina away, a girl he hardly knew, or permit the Canon to marry them. The Bishop found it outrageous. A man could not simply replace one girl with another in order to suit a shipping company’s timetable.
‘I can see it is unusual,’ said Rosina, ‘but it is certainly practical.’
‘And there is the question of the banns,’ said Frank. ‘I had forgotten about those.’
‘Then we will get married in a Registry Office, not a church,’ she said. But he balked at this: he wanted to be married to a girl in a white veil.
Both said they loved each other, agreed they were made for each other and had probably met in another life. Then they had another Manhattan; and then another Manhattan. He said he’d had a wonderful dream in which poor Adela appeared in the guise of Eostre the Saxon Goddess of Spring, with flowing robes and flowers in her hair. She gave him and Rosina her blessing and wished them well. Adela’s fate had been to die in the fire: a mistake had been made, now corrected. Rosina had been the one intended for Frank Overshaw. Karma had been served: all should be happy.
Rosina thought perhaps the dream was a little self-serving, but belief was so much easier than doubt. She had finished the index: the book was at the publishers: she wanted very much to go to Australia and look after the aboriginals, and teach them mining. Her own family had a mining background. There was a new study called ethnography: she had been to a few lectures: it was all about the origins of different cultures: she would do some studies.
She could see that Western Australia was the back of beyond, and probably very uncomfortable. But Frank was a decent man, and she did not see that Theosophy was any stranger than anything else anyone believed in. The acquaintance was certainly very short; but they had got on very well in the Bishop’s Palace: embraced sufficiently in the library to understand it would be pleasant to embrace more, gone on to exchange increasingly fond and intimate letters – he had enclosed some sketches of her, which had not been at all lacking in imagination – and she had been so upset when he had not turned up at the I.D.K. dinner she could almost say truthfully she loved him.
She would miss the Coronation but she could put up with that. She would miss Minnie but Minnie would soon be having a baby. Her brother Arthur cared only for engines, her mother cared only for clothes, her father only for politics and, if tonight was anything to go by, girls young enough to be his daughter.
She did not want to stand by to see Isobel’s distress when her father’s secret came out, as secrets always did. She only hoped the scandal would not be public. It was the kind that could rock nations, if the girl in question was who Rosina thought it was. She would rather go to Australia.
She assumed her parents would give her some kind of allowance. Frank said he had more than enough wealth for both of them, but it was always advisable for a woman to have at least some money of her own.
They had another Manhattan and worked out ways of smuggling Frank up to her bedroom. The best way, they decided, was for her to say goodnight and go publicly to her bedroom and for Frank to take another room in the hotel and join her later. No one would be fooled but the proprieties would be observed. Frank did not quibble about the unnecessary cost. She was glad of that. One would not want to be stuck out in the Australian desert, or anywhere, with a mean man. She would have to face her parents’ wrath,
but she would worry about that tomorrow.
The next morning Minnie was taking breakfast in her room; her condition was now most obvious no matter how full her skirts, and while the intellectuals of the I.D.K. delighted in their advanced thinking, guests at the Savoy were of a more conventional mould. She was surprised when there was a knock at the door and was taken aback when Rosina came in, accompanied by a youngish man she did not know. Rosina introduced him as Frank Overshaw of Western Australia, her betrothed; they were to be married by special licence and sail for Freemantle within the week. Their tickets were booked. No, her parents did not know: she would be going round to Belgrave Square with Frank that morning to tell them.
Minnie remembered what living with Stanton had been like, in that other world, long ago and far away, when the unexpected and rather alarming was a day-to-day occurrence. She recovered from her annoyance that Rosina had misled her so and wished her and Frank every good fortune. She declined to go with the happy pair to Belgrave Square. She would make her own way back to Dilberne Court to be with Arthur. She was feeling perfectly well, thank you very much. She thought Frank Overshaw a little strange and not someone she would have married but every girl to her own taste.
She rang for room service and ordered breakfast for her guests. There would be some talk but really in the circumstances what did it matter? Frank Overshaw asked for Bircher-Muesli, a concoction of raw oats, nuts and raisins moistened by cream and lemon juice. Minnie tasted it and found it quite delicious.
Carlotta Turns Seventeen
After the gig in Milsom Street bookings for Princess Ida had been steady: there had been enquiries from as far away as London. Carlotta continued to do the platform work, George to plan and manage lighting and props, and Ivy took the money, kept the books, and helped out George. They developed a few extras: psychokenesis, in which Princess Ida lifted a chair in the air by the power of thought and moved it towards her before sitting in it; another one in which a panama hat materialized out of darkness to land on someone’s head. That always got a laugh. Levitation would need another person. They did small private sessions and larger public ones, which proved to be less profitable after you paid for the hire of the hall and overheads. George’s only problem was deciding which way forward to take the show. Raising the spirits of the dead was their mainstay, but this didn’t bring in a class audience, just the poor and the gullible who had very little to spend. They expected ectoplasm, too, which was messy stuff and hard to control, and which both Carlotta and Ivy hated. The show, he reckoned, had to be positioned somewhere between a music-hall act, an uplifting demonstration of the power of the human mind when released from doubt, and spooky voices from the grave.
They’d moved to London when they had built up a good enough network of connections. Mrs Henry had good contacts in fashionable circles there. George observed that Princess Ida’s looks and cultivated voice opened many doors that would otherwise be closed. They’d rented rooms in a boarding house on the fifth floor of a big house in Earls Court: the advantages being that it was cheap and their comings and goings would not be noticed, or the strange equipment they carried about: the disadvantage was the stairs. Ivy did most of the housework and cooking and complained that Carlotta didn’t like getting her hands dirty.
‘Well, she is a lady,’ George had rather rashly replied and Ivy had gone off into a huff which had lasted days. It was remarkable how a sour face affected takings. George could see something had to be done. Jealousy was rearing its ugly head. He was fond of Ivy, and had resigned himself to Carlotta being out of his league; yet wondered quite why. He would look at her on a platform, the way she moved, spoke, inclined her head, with a kind of reverence that ill became him, a young entrepreneur of the new century.
Carlotta moved about the house with a childlike confidence, laughing and chattering, which made him feel fatherly. But he was not her father. He could not do without Ivy: he did not want to do without Ivy. She was of the flesh rather than of the spirit, he doubted that Carlotta would ever consent to what Ivy consented to, and nor probably would he want her to. The rational thing would be to live in a ménage à trois: if men proposed this, women sometimes consented. Half a man, they thought, was better than no man at all. Ivy could probably learn to settle into it; Carlotta was so off into her own head she might not even notice. One way or another he imagined she knew all about the birds and bees by now. How could she not? He and Ivy made enough noise.
In fact he was confused; he thought perhaps he was in love. The tune of Come into the garden, Maud kept coming into his head. Granted, he had worked the accordion to play the first few phrases but it kept surfacing in his head:
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown.
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone . . .
The lover, waiting, while the scents of the night drifted around. Beautiful. He wanted to call her Adela. She had never been a Carlotta, this girl he had rescued from the flames, her arms so trustingly, childishly, round him. May the 21st was going to be her birthday. She seemed to have forgotten. She had put her past behind her so admirably. She looked ahead into the future, straight as a die, clear-eyed. Perhaps he should encourage her to go into the healing business but then she wouldn’t want him any more. He wanted her to need him. She looked blank when he mentioned the Mrs Henry business, and just said it must have been some kind of fit. And of the other night’s bird incident, all she said was she had stroked the creature, it had recovered and then flew out.
What was odd about that?
‘What was odd,’ said Ivy sourly, ‘was that a bird dashed itself to pieces in the first place, possessed by a demon, like as not. Things are getting too spooky.’
Carlotta had been all set to do a child’s voice when the young woman who’d died of typhoid fever had come through and taken over. George said he’d intervened to seize the moment; having done so much research he didn’t want to waste it. But he knew in his heart it wasn’t true. The voice had been echoing all around. It was kind of a phenomenon that did happen. They’d talked about it at college as ‘a non-conscious intelligence’: an energy that happened when a lot of people were concentrating on the same thing.
A week or so after this conversation, when Ivy’s mother in Yatbury fell ill, Ivy had to go and sort things out. This meant she had to leave George alone with Carlotta and she was none too pleased, but there was little she could do about it, except to warn George to leave Carlotta alone. Once done, of course, she regretted it: tell a man what to do and he will do the opposite. One show had to be cancelled and another simplified so that George and Carlotta could manage.
So it was that George was able to take Carlotta to the Prospect of Whitby to celebrate the birthday she had forgotten all about. They travelled by pleasure boat to Wapping. It was a truly beautiful evening. George surprised Adela – he would call her that name from now on, he said – by quoting Tennyson, though she suspected much of it came from Come into the garden, Maud.
He held her hand, and she wished he wouldn’t. She had hero-worshipped George for a time, but it was hard to adore someone who lived so close to you: they were just people, with noses to blow and tempers to lose. He was like a brother and brothers and sisters didn’t hold hands that way, she knew enough now to know that. It was still a bit vague, but a girl she’d met in a queue had explained what men did to women to have babies. It seemed they did it even when they didn’t want babies. It was rather revolting but judging from George and Ivy it was enjoyable, once you had realized it wasn’t someone’s death throes. ‘No better than you ought to be’ meant you did it when you weren’t married. George was moving his knuckle up and down in her palm, and talking about the evening star, Venus. She wanted to laugh, it was so unlike him.
She would rather he didn’t call her Adela; that was another world she had once lived in, full of flames and fire and palaces and complete unreality. But he seemed bent upon it. She wished
Ivy had been able to come; it spoiled things not to have her around. She never knew what to say to men, they struck her dumb.
The Prospect of Whitby was an enormous public house with lots of rooms and little stairways leading to nowhere in particular, and she wondered why he had taken her to this place of all places. When George had called her Adela again she’d had a vivid memory of the dining hall at the Bishop’s Palace, with the harpist and the gold candlesticks – Babylonian, her father had called it. Now George led her into a bar that was full of men and women in a state of more or less undress and intoxication sharing cigarettes; it seemed a very odd place to have come to. Here he plied her with glasses of gin and tonic. She had rather too many, which she supposed was his plan. She did not like the smell of the cigarettes: he smoked but she certainly did not.
He said it was her birthday, she was seventeen and it was time for them to know each other better. He knew a place where they could go. He slipped his arm under her jacket and squeezed her breast. He said he loved her.
‘That’s a strange way of showing it,’ she said. ‘It hurts.’
He said she had cast a spell over him. He wanted only to serve her. Adela! Adela! He beseeched her. She could see this was so much nonsense. She remembered Frank Overshaw wanting to take her off by ocean liner to teach the aboriginals of Western Australia mining. This one only aspired to a river boat and Wapping. She thought she was worth more. She could tell the difference between a fairy prince and Rumpelstiltskin. She slapped his hand very hard and told him to stop. He did so at once and took her to a place where they served rather good steak and kidney pie and beer, and there was no nonsense from him any more. She was relieved. He was her brother again.