I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Everyone knows now what Osborne looks like: the Italianate, three-storeyed stone building with the twin campaniles, and the great bow window on the seaward front of the Pavilion. On that first day of our first visit together, Albert had said that the view reminded him of the Bay of Naples; and so he had built me a Neapolitan villa to suit. When it came to the interior, he filled it with marble pillars and statues, arched niches and coloured tiled floors. Italy was come to the Isle of Wight – even down to the word Salve inset into the floor of the Grand Corridor – and though some of the intelligentsia deplored the taste (of course! for we had done something different without consulting them!) the fashion for Italian villas soon began to spread throughout the country.

  The house had very much Mr Cubitt’s stamp – ‘rather Londony’, one of my ladies called it – and incorporated many of his clever contrivances. He was very concerned about the danger of fire (not unreasonable in those days of lamps and candles) and so he built the house on a framework of cast-iron girders instead of wooden beams. This had the advantage also that they could be manufactured in his workshops and bolted together on site, and made the house very strong. The floors were further strengthened by brick arches, and layers of cockle shells were put down between floors, both as insulation against sound and to prevent fire spreading upwards from storey to storey. The skirting-boards were not of wood, either, but of concrete – though that was partly to accommodate Albert’s idea for heating the corridors by blowing hot air into them through iron grilles, as the Romans did. I think it was Cubitt’s idea to cover the shutters on the inside of the house with looking-glass, so that when they were shut at night they reflected the interior and made the rooms more spacious.

  But the sanitary arrangements were all Albert’s, though of course Cubitt had to engineer them. But I can say we had a great number of extremely modern water-closets, and no smells (unlike either of the royal palaces); and we enjoyed the inexpressible luxury, for those days, of baths that were not only supplied with hot water, but which were also fitted with drains for emptying themselves.

  Cubitt’s greatest virtue in my eyes was in working to budget. Because he had control of all parts of the process, he was able to furnish exact estimates at every stage, and I must say he never once exceeded them. I appreciated very much the accuracy of his accounts; I have no respect for those who are careless with money. And Cubitt did not hesitate to suggest several clever contrivances to keep down the cost for us. Portland stone, for instance, was horribly expensive, and it was his advice that we used it sparingly, only where it would really be noticed, as in the grand entrance. For the rest, though the house appears to be stone built, it is really made of bricks, and covered in Roman cement which has been moulded and coloured to resemble stone. Again, the ‘marble’ pillars inside are concrete, plastered for the finish and then painted to resemble marble – and few there are who can tell the difference. Cubitt had a marble-painter of his own amongst his employees, and the man was certainly an expert. I loved to watch him work.

  The work went on with amazing speed. On the 23rd of June 1845 Albert and I, with Vicky and Bertie, had a little ceremony of ‘laying the foundation stone’. First the children brought a little glass box containing coins from my reign and an inscription of our names and the occasion, and this was put into a hole and cemented over, and then the huge foundation stone was lowered on top, and we all walked around it and hammered on it for luck. It was a solemn and joyful occasion, half holy and half pagan, and I added a fervent prayer, that God would bless the work, and that we would spend many happy years in this house with our children and our children’s children.

  That was, as I say, June; only three months later the main bulk of the first wing of the new house (which we called the Pavilion) was up, though it lacked a roof. By November the tower was up, and I was relieved to see that it did not look out of proportion, for I had feared from the drawing it was too tall. On the 1st of March 1846, Albert and Cubitt took me on a tour of the interior, and I was astonished to see how much had been accomplished, for now the ceilings were in. There was a surprise for me when we reached the staircase hall: I had always admired the grand cantilevered staircase at Claremont, and Albert had had Cubitt copy it (only a little smaller) in Osborne House in order to please me.

  The Pavilion was finished in September 1846, just less than a year and three months from the laying of the stone – fast work indeed! (The Household Wing, containing accommodation for the Household, the offices and the servants’ quarters, was finished by August 1847. The old house, which stood between the two, was demolished the following year, and all that now remains of it is the fine front door with its fanlight, which were incorporated into the wall of the kitchen garden, as a memento. The Main Wing, joining the Pavilion and the Household Wing, was built on the site, incorporating the foundations of an even older Osborne House uncovered by the demolition. It was finished in 1851, and the house as Albert envisaged it was then complete.)

  The arrangements in the Pavilion were gemütlichkeit itself. It was a horseshoe-shaped building, with the staircase in the middle, and the rooms leading one out of another around it. On the ground floor were the living rooms: the dining-room, the drawing-room with the bay window facing the sea, the billiard room, and a small sitting-room. On the first floor were Albert’s and my apartments: our bedroom above the dining-room, then my dressing-room, then our sitting-room above the drawing-room, with the bay window and a little balcony outside from which we had a beautiful view of the sea, then Albert’s dressing-room, and then the rooms for his valet and my dresser. On the second floor, where we could reach them easily, were the nurseries: the nursery bedroom was above our sitting-room, and Lady Lyttleton’s apartments were over the dining-room.

  It was all as snug and neat as could be, and on the 15th of September 1846 we spent our first night in our new house. It was light, clean, and airy, but gave the feeling of being most solidly built; and there was, for a wonder, not the slightest smell of paint! What delighted me most was that everything was new, and everything was our very own, right down to the china ornaments, and Albert’s Italian Primitives on the walls. As I walked in at my own front door for the first time, one of my younger maids threw an old shoe in after me, for luck, which she said was an old Scotch custom, and made the children laugh very much. They were wildly excited and rushed about from room to room, and only with the greatest difficulty could they be got to bed. Then Vicky took it into her head to be frightened of the newness and strangeness, until I pointed out the statue of her papa, which was placed in a niche at the head of the staircase on the nursery floor, which I said was there to keep guard over them, and then she went off as meek as a lamb. (The truth was that the statue was one we had just been given, of Albert in Greek armour, which I liked a great deal; but he said that the bare legs and feet were indecent and could not possibly be displayed in a public room, so it had been relegated to the nursery floor. The children liked having it there, and every year on Albert’s birthday they would put flowers in the niche around those shocking, naked feet.)

  As darkness fell we went into our new dining-room for dinner, leaving the shutters open so that the lights from our brilliant chandeliers would be seen right across the water and everyone would know we had come home. After dinner everyone rose to drink a health to me and Albert by way of a ‘house-warming’. Albert rose to reply, and gazing down into my eyes he said in his quiet, simple way, ‘We have a psalm in Germany, for such occasions as this. It begins: Gott behüte dieses Haus / Und die da gehen ein und aus.’

  ‘God bless this house, and our going out and coming in’, it might have been translated; the words so fitting, so solemn that my eyes filled with tears. The others around the table were touched too, and murmured approbation to each other. But though the words were for everyone, his look, and the tender, lingering smile that touched his lips, were for me alone.

  Afterwards, when we were alone in our sitting-room, we walked out on to our little balcon
y and stood there, Albert’s arm warm around my waist and my head against his shoulder, breathing the soft autumn air, and staring out into the darkness. It was beautifully spangled with tiny lights – of ships on the water, and across the water of houses on the mainland.

  ‘If they can see us, we must look like a great ship floating in the sky, all lit up for a grand occasion,’ I said. ‘They will think we are having a ball, and imagine the music and the dancers and the lovely coloured dresses.’

  ‘I hope the ships do not take us for a lighthouse and go upon the rocks,’ Albert said.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Nothing but good can come of this house.’

  Albert squeezed my waist and looked down at me. ‘So, kleines Frauchen, are you happy? Do you like your new home?’

  ‘So much!’ I said fervently. ‘More than I can tell you.’

  He kissed the top of my head and turned to look out again. ‘We will be happy here. The children will run and play, you will sit under the trees and sketch, and I—’ He stopped there.

  ‘Yes? What will you do?’ I asked contentedly. I did not know why he had broken off, and I looked up at him. There was a strange look on his face, almost of sadness, and I was alarmed. ‘Albert? What will you do?’

  He looked down, abruptly as if he had been a long way away in his thoughts. ‘I will make you a beautiful pleasure-ground,’ he said. ‘I will dig and plant and “improve”, make a vista here and a tantalizing glimpse of the sea there, so that you will think you are in Arcadia. A winding path down to the shore through plantations of rhododendrons and magnolias; fine stands of English oak and English beech; lovely dark myrtles and cypresses clustered against the pale green of the lawn. A terrace, with arcading, and a parterre, and beyond that the land tumbling away so naturally, as if God had indented it with His thumb. The slopes are not right as they are, but I shall reshape them.’ He looked at me again, smiling. ‘I shall move earth for you, darling one. Not quite mountains, perhaps, but a great deal of earth!’

  I laughed, partly with relief that he was not sad after all. ‘You will have a new name,’ I said, ‘Capability Coburg.’

  ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing, ‘will be the terrace; and in the middle, right opposite our bedroom window, we will have a great fountain like the one at Rosenau, and in the summer when the windows are open we will lie in our bed and hear the sound of the water falling into the basin. We will walk on that terrace, my darling, you and I, and talk of love. The years will pass and at last we shall be two old people, with our children all grown up, still walking there together, with their children running about us just as they once did.’ I was picturing it all, and drew a great sigh of happiness. ‘But you are getting cold,’ he said.

  I was distressed that he had misinterpreted my sigh. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I am not cold, I am never cold.’

  ‘But you are,’ he said very firmly. ‘What am I thinking about, keeping you standing out here? I must take you in to bed.’

  ‘Oh,’ said I, understanding at last, ‘I think you must. I fear I can be warm nowhere else.’

  And so in our handsome rosewood bed with the nice chintz hangings, all smelling of newness, Albert and I had a second, private house-warming of our own. Long and slow and tenderly did we love each other; and afterwards as I drifted off to sleep in his arms, I thought I could hear the plashing of a fountain below outside the window. My head was resting on his chest, my ear against his heart, and so perhaps I was catching the sound of it from his inmost, half-asleep memory.

  20th July 1900, at Osborne

  WE MADE the move here yesterday, and already I feel fresher. The journey down was most comfortable, despite the scorching sun. The Royal Saloon was kept beautifully cool with blocks of ice, and buckets of ice surrounded by bouquets of flowers were placed in all the corners. The carnations smelled so beautifully! But poor Marie Mallet, who has only just come into waiting, was quite overcome with the heat and Reid had to help her from the train. She is now confined to her room with lumbago, of all things, a most painful and depressing ailment, especially in hot weather when one wants to be out of doors.

  Beatrice and her children are here, of course, and Lenchen and Thora, and the little Yorks come next week. Louise comes next month for a visit, but Affie is not coming over after all, which is a great disappointment because I have seen so little of him in recent years and was so much looking forward to a long visit. It seems his health is a matter for great anxiety. I hope he has been prudent lately. He drinks far too much, as we have all warned him time after time, but men will not be told.

  The new Royal Yacht is lying at Portsmouth, and it appears she is rotten from stem to stern. I have told the Admiralty that I will not accept her at any price. I am warned there will be a ‘row’ about it, and the Government mutters about wasting half a million pounds, but if everyone did their business properly in the first place these things would not happen.

  It is impossible to be really downhearted or cross here, though, at Osborne. It is Eden, this perfect and private garden Albert made for me on the English Bay of Naples, and sometimes, even now, I can still find him here. His quick, light step is in the pattering of the water into the bowl of the fountain; his thoughtful whistle, when he was thinking out a problem, is in the hesitant song of the robin; the touch of the sun on my upturned face is like the benison of his smile, which he never failed to bestow when he passed me.

  On warm summer days I still like to breakfast in the alcove on the lower terrace, as we used to; and if I close my eyes I am wrapped in the familiar smell of hot gravel and the deep, heady fragrance of honeysuckle, roses, orange blossom and white jasmine, which deck the walls and clamber over the pergola. Smells, of all the senses, have the strongest power to carry one back, instantly, to a place loved and a time lost. A little breeze rustles the papers on the table, and I know that he is sitting opposite me, turning the pages of a letter propped up against his coffee cup. In a moment he will read out to me some item of interest or amusement – I will hear his voice again! And if I keep my eyes shut, he may reach out, as he so often did, without taking his eyes from the page, stretching between the bowl of fruit and the bread-basket to find me, and I will feel again the shape of the palm and the long fingers which I knew better than any, the smooth warmth of that hand laid over mine, whose touch was one soul saying to another I am here. Then someone moves or speaks – a dog sneezes – a cup is set down clumsily in its saucer – and the spell is broken. I open my eyes, and it is only Baby sitting opposite me, or dear Jane Churchill; and I am old. The hand that lies on the tablecloth before me is one that Albert never knew, wrinkled, veined, large-knuckled with age.

  I cannot now walk the paths he laid out for me, but I have myself wheeled or driven where we walked together so indefatigably, talking and planning, arm in arm. Beyond the little gardens that the children tended is a meadow, of waist-high grass, tawny-fronded in summer, and bright as a tapestry with wild flowers: purple vetch, clover of three colours, blue and crimson bugle, white and gold moon daisies, green-white angelica, cornflowers the colour of the sky, and the little wild orchids the bees love so, purple and yellow and white like Easter vestments. Here once I remember sitting down with my sketching-book in the shade while he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves for the pleasure of cutting grass with a scythe. All the sights and sounds and scents of that day are etched in my mind: the swish of the scythe, the smell of bruised grass; the sleepy drone of bumble bees pottering from one flower to the next, unhurried amongst such summer plenty; a rustling of breeze in the treetops, and the intermittent sound of the children’s voices, high and echoing under the summer sky as they played nearby. Behind me was a thicket of bamboo, whose shadows gave off a cold, dark smell of earth and mould, and it came to me now and then when the little breeze dropped, a sharp contrast to the bright, warm scents of the summer meadow.

  After a little my darling stopped to rest and came over to me, dropped down on to the grass beside me, pulled out his han
dkerchief to wipe his brow. I smelled the sharp odour of his sweat, exciting to me, quickening my senses. ‘I am not used to such labour,’ he said happily, taking off his hat – the low-crowned, wide-brimmed straw hat he wore when he was ‘playing the rustic’ – and squinted up into the perfect sky, which might have sighed for shame that it was not more blue than his eyes. ‘What a day!’

  ‘You should not tire yourself,’ I said. ‘It is too hot for working in the sun.’

  ‘Who else should I tire?’ he laughed. ‘I shall sleep well tonight, at all events.’ He rested an arm companionably on my lap, and I let my pencil fall idle. I was pressing down the desire to kiss the top of his head, on the place where a glimmer of scalp was beginning to show through his fine hair. He did not like me to notice it – it was his one vanity, his fretting over the thinning of his hair – but that spot was very dear to me. It somehow enhanced his perfection that he had that one little imperfection, and made him more precious and more mine in his vulnerability. Now he felt my eyes on him, and looked up at me. ‘Have you been drawing me working, Wifey?’ he asked, trying to see my sketch. ‘Show me!’

  I tried to hold it away from him, but he was too quick for me. My drawing was only of the meadow and the woods behind – ‘A landscape without figures,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘So, my vanity is well served,’ he said, laughing ruefully, restoring it to me. ‘You never do draw me, do you? All the children, Mamma, Laddle – even George Anson, but never me. Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t trust my pencil,’ I said. ‘I could not do you justice.’ But it was not that. It was superstition. I had drawn him only once, when we were first married, and afterwards, when I looked at it, it made me go cold all over. I felt as if I had put him at some terrible risk; as though I had taken his soul out of his body to look at it, without knowing whether it could be put back.