Habits of the House

by Fay Weldon

  ‘There’s misfortune and misfortune in life, I daresay,’ Grace said calmly. She had been destined for service from the beginning: a foundling, taken in by Dr Barnardo, and sent to a good Ragged School where because she was clever, she was kept until she was sixteen. She was not taught shorthand or typing, her Headmaster believing that the skills were dangerous to society – the presence of unmarried girls in the office would lead to the collapse of family life – what married man could resist the temptation? She had no savings or family to support her, so her choice was a career in service, where if you were diligent, honest and pleasant, you could rise from kitchen maid to housekeeper, or factory work, which meant you could end up somewhere like the match works, where your skin turned yellow and your jaw got eaten away from the phosphorous, and you never got your full wages if you so much as dropped a match on the factory floor. Service was certainly preferable; the Dilbernes were good employers and kept a good table. All the same she found it hard to sympathize with Miss Rosina’s troubles. Grace went to the master bedroom to attend to her Ladyship.

  Her Ladyship’s Troubled Morning

  8.45 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

  As it was, even without the annoying arrival of Mr Baum, Isobel anticipated a busy day. There were eighteen to dinner and Rosina had upset her seating plans, deciding the company was not interesting, and had found a meeting she had to go to at a new ladies’ club in Bayswater, this one in support of the movement for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Pleas from her mother merely hardened Rosina’s resolve. Isobel sometimes complained to her husband that Rosina had stuck at the age of sixteen, when girls were at their most wilful and argumentative. Isobel would rely on Grace to help her with the seating and the place names. Grace had her finger on the pulse of society, on the many-tongued gossip which travelled from lady’s maid to lady’s maid, concierge to concierge, footman to footman all around London: only butlers could be relied upon to be discreet. In any case that was the common perception.

  At least the Prince of Wales had not been invited, as Robert sometimes threatened. Then the seating would become a nightmare, though Grace could be relied upon to know who would be welcome sitting next to the Prince, and who had best be kept at the further end of the table. And, after a great deal of fuss and bother, news might come in any case that he was unable to attend after all. In the same way as Rosina was so good at finding meetings that simply had to be attended or her very life would collapse, so the Prince would find his mother the Queen had summonsed him, or affairs of State had arisen that needed his attention. Or perhaps he would decide suddenly that his wife demanded him by her side. Not that this courteous and well-mannered woman caused her husband any trouble unless she felt his reputation was in danger.

  It was not the expense of royal dinners that worried Isobel – though the Prince was a hearty eater – but extra agency staff would have to be brought in, usually undertrained and prone to spill food and chip plates in return for outrageous wages. Robert worried about large sums of money but not the small, assuming that the normal workings of a large household came to him by right and were therefore free of charge. Isobel had been brought up by a mother from the North, who would say things like ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ and ‘look after the pence and the pounds will look after themselves’, and her daughter knew it to be true. ‘Come round to dinner,’ his Lordship was quite capable of saying to the Prince, but instead of the pleasure and pride that a normal dinner party would avail, the inclusion of royalty brought only anxiety and tension. She reflected that the way Robert dealt with problems was first to invite them and then deny them. When Grace called her she was already fully awake. After his Lordship’s earlier attention she felt languid and relaxed and her bed more comfortable than usual.

  Her ladyship protested when roused that she saw no reason why she should be summoned early to breakfast just because of Mr Baum’s presence. He was just a trumped-up tradesman who dealt in money, not even goods. He did not know how to behave. Coming to the door so early was not the mark of a gentleman, nor was asking himself to breakfast. She could not for the life of her think why his Lordship put up with Mr Baum and did not send him packing,

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Grace, whose normal role was to agree, receive information but not comment on it. His Lordship put up with it, thought Grace, because the Prince had recommended Mr Baum, because his Lordship was in all probability quite heavily in debt to Mr Baum, and because the children’s affairs were – rashly, in Grace’s opinion – dealt with by Mr Baum, which was why their mother needed to be in attendance. But hers not to reason why, let alone offer an opinion, just to decide what her Ladyship was to wear that day.

  For Lady Isobel’s immediate morning wear Grace picked out one of her new health corsets, which did not grip the waist and force the bosom up, a mere four layers of petticoats, to be topped by a loose brown woollen dress that did not sweep the floor but approached the ankle, with a high collar in cream lace to frame the face. She twisted her Ladyship’s long, thick, fair hair into a simple top-knot. She needed no jewellery. It was merely a breakfast, after all. Only when her friend and rival the Countess d’Asti was in the offing, Grace knew, did her Ladyship worry greatly about her appearance. Then she had be firmly laced, encased in vast masses of expensive and heavy fabric, hair tonged and tortured into fashionable shapes, simply so as to keep up appearances with the Countess. Grace thought Lady Isobel looked even more lovely and youthful when simply dressed, as now. She might be the child of a coal mining family but there was nothing dwarfed or rickety about her, as there was, frankly, about the Countess, whose invitations were so eagerly sought after by all London society. The Countess was witty, mean, and, Grace always felt, slightly fraudulent. Why her Ladyship took the woman so seriously Grace could not imagine.

  Her Ladyship, once dressed, shook off whatever mood had been oppressing her and remarked that times were changing: these days the doctor came to the front door not the servants’ entrance, and no one showed surprise – though some felt it: and if the Queen’s son could make the banker Cassel his confidant, friend and apparent equal, and invite him to State dinners? She supposed she must move with the times.

  ‘At least Mr Baum is only coming to breakfast,’ remarked Grace, ‘not dinner.’

  Lady Isobel allowed the comment, and even smiled a little. Grace was a favourite. The poor tended to be misshapen and vengeful at worst, pimply and sullen at best – but Grace was tall, slim and fair and an excellent lady’s maid, quick, reliable, clean and willing. She seemed to have an instinctive eye for fashion. The Countess d’Asti had tried to poach her, but Grace had not been tempted away. As a result Isobel had raised her wages from twenty-four pounds to thirty the year: reproachful friends had told her this amounted to a betrayal. For one thing, if you paid more, other servants would feel entitled to more. For another, give them more, and they felt not that you were being generous but had underpaid them in the past. But Grace would use the money to buy card and water colours, and had decorated her room with really quite pretty little landscapes, and Rosina had claimed to have seen The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and The Collected Works of Tennyson in her room. Grace’s parentage was of course unknown. Rosina sometimes speculated that Grace’s father was a famous artist and her mother his model who had left her illegitimate baby on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital in Coram Street. Lady Isobel said Rosina must be responsible and not put these silly melodramatic ideas into Grace’s head: it might make her feel sorry for herself when actually she ought to be extremely grateful. She had been promoted swiftly through the servant ranks from kitchen to parlour to lady’s maid, and now had a good place.

  It would be bad for Grace, and certainly bad for Lady Isobel, if the girl got ideas into her head, and decided to leave service and seek employment as a seamstress, a milliner or even a lady typewriter as had Rose, Fredericka the Countess d’Asti’s lady’s maid. Rose had simply left without giving notice, and had been seen workin
g in a Bond Street milliner, leaving poor dear Freddie altogether in the lurch with a big ball in the offing and no one to do her hair. These days, staff showed alarmingly little loyalty.

  ‘Well,’ said Rosina, with the lack of pleasantry and tact which marked her, and was another reason, her mother supposed, that the girl was nearly thirty and not married, ‘I suppose if people are going to go on referring to you as “a beauty”, you’re going to need her services more and more. You are nearly fifty. You could try paying her more.’

  ‘I have done so,’ said Isobel, stiffly. ‘And it might be a good idea not to invite Grace in to your various meetings. God knows what ideas these peculiar speakers put into her head. Let her wait outside in the carriage.’

  ‘I daresay Mr Baum is going to be boring and scold Arthur about his tailor’s bills,’ said Lady Isobel to Grace now. ‘Poor Arthur must have something to cover his back. Tradesmen should know better than to try and sue for their money through the courts. Whoever is going to want their services if they make a nuisance of themselves?’

  Grace did not mention what was common, if possibly inaccurate, knowledge in the servants’ hall, that his Lordship’s debts were out of control and that his close acquaintance with the Prince of Wales did not bode well for his marriage. Mr Neville kept an eye on the newspapers: agricultural rentals had struck an all-time low and the price of land had plummeted; and had not many thousands of Dilberne acres been sold off at a bad time to help pay ‘debts of honour’? That is to say, his Lordship had been gambling and it was possible that what he was losing, the Prince was gaining. So much was known for sure, and a great deal more rumoured. Documents that Reginald had glimpsed on his Lordship’s desk suggested that much of Lady Isobel’s inheritance from Silas Batey, her coal mining father, now deceased, had already been mortgaged to pay the Dilberne debts.

  She feared Mr Baum’s attack upon the front door was likely to be of more importance than the clothes on Arthur’s back. A very handsome young back, Grace would be the first to agree; the vision of his golden hairiness this very morning was hard to forget, and with it came a churning sense of the awful injustice of the ways of the world. Grace found herself humming as she left the room and went down to breakfast. A hymn was running through her head.

  The rich man in his castle

  The poor man at his gate,

  He made them high and lowly,

  He ordered their estate.

  Really? Did He? Why?

  When she got down to the staff dining room, everything was in disarray. The downstairs staff breakfast had been abandoned, cancelled. Upstairs must take precedence.

  A Whole Day to be Reorganized

  9.00 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

  By nine o’clock a light breakfast was in the chafing dishes on the morning room sideboard: the servants would have to go without their pork stuffing patties for the time being. When she could find the time Cook would serve up what was left from the upstairs table. A whole hour had been stolen by Mr Baum from the day’s routine: and the staff thought the less of him for it. Between them, Smithers, Elsie and the sleepy Cook had within half an hour prepared porridge, haddock, bacon and fried potatoes, brown loaf (yesterday’s, the range’s oven not yet being sufficiently hot for baking), toast and honey, cold tongue and apples, kippers and buttered eggs. A dish of warm scones, cream and raspberry conserve had been purloined from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy at No 18 – Reginald was wooing the parlour maid there, and also – or so Smithers put it about – Janika von Demy, the Ambassador’s niece.

  But Smithers’ stories had to be taken with a big pinch of salt, she being sweet on Reginald who never so much as looked at her, preferring, as she lamented, ‘the fine-boned type’. Nevertheless it had to be remembered Janika was foreign and so might quite possibly not know how to behave – Queen Victoria herself had married Albert, whom everyone knew was the bastard son of a German groom by his mother, the scandalous Louise of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Reginald’s sons might yet end up vons, if not Princes. Love, just occasionally, won over the basic laws of an ordered, God-fearing society, where the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate did indeed know their proper place.

  When all were finally seated upstairs and Mr Baum felt he could at last open his mouth to speak, the Earl of Dilberne said shortly: ‘Breakfast first, then business.’

  Mr Baum, silenced yet again, felt truly affronted, and now he didn’t care if it showed. His own wasted time meant nothing to them. It was a full two hours since he had run up the steps and rung the bell, since when he had been kicking his heels while his Lordship attended to his horses, the son to his automobiles, and the ladies to their dress. He had tried to be a friend, had hoped to be included, had put himself out for both father and son – the Skinner court case, which he had settled out of his own pocket, would have brought disagreeable publicity and it might have emerged that his Lordship owed his tailor even more than did the son – yet they continued to treat him like a glorified servant. Well, they would learn. They had gone too far. What was that line from Hamlet, which Mrs Baum had insisted on dragging him to – One may smile, and smile, and be a villain? Why had that come into his head? Sarah Bernhardt, a woman, had played Prince Hamlet – it had been most unnerving. Mrs Baum said it was because Hamlet had many feminine qualities, which he supposed to be true enough, in that Hamlet seemed to be confused, moody and much taken up by his own wrongs. His own view was that people went to see the play simply for the novelty value of seeing a woman playing a man, a mere fairground trick. Mr Baum composed his face to display a more friendly countenance. A man may smile and smile.

  Lady Isobel was picking at toast and honey, having greeted Mr Baum coldly and failing to ask after his wife. Naomi Baum had met Lady Isobel briefly at a Charity Tea, and now lived in hope of receiving an invitation from the Dilbernes, any invitation. She could not hope for dinner, of course, but a simple ‘At Home’ one morning would help her into society, where she deserved to be. Naomi went to plays and concerts and had twice the wit and artistic sensitivity of any of the Dilbernes. Yet no invitation arrived. Mr Baum’s sorrowful brown eyes darkened at the thought, temporarily dimming the smile. There was a new determination, a new hardness in his heart. Why did he put himself out for these people?

  He watched the daughter eat an apple, some scones and all the strawberry jam; she simply acted as though Mr Baum was not in the room. Rosina was a very strange girl, too clever for her own good. It was unfortunate for a woman to be born intelligent: it deprived her of essential womanly skills. Mr Baum, tall, melancholy, and not unattractive, was accustomed to having a response from young women, if only the second look, the glance held an instant too long. It was noticeable that no response at all came from Rosina. Her mother, on the other hand, responded, if only with an all-purpose haughtiness. At least, he thought, the girl had not brought her ghastly unhygienic parrot to the table, which practice had disturbed him more than once in the past.

  Arthur ate hugely and happily, helping himself to all the fried potatoes and bacon left, and leaving none for Mr Baum, who was still picking bones out of his haddock. Had Mrs Baum served haddock for breakfast, Mr Baum thought, there would not have been a bone left in it. He would not have eaten the bacon, of course, but he would have liked some of the fried potato.

  Arthur was at least talkative, smiling at Mr Baum with jovial, confident eyes, assuring him that he would get his ‘pound of flesh’ in due course. Indeed, he said, Mr Baum could fry it up for the tailors’ dinner if he felt like it, or his own dinner, come to that, though that might go against the Jewish religion. Mr Baum managed to laugh, sharing the joke. It seemed to be innocent fun, but how could Baum possibly be complicit in it? He felt teased and humiliated. Why was he even in this country, where insularity, stupidity, and xenophobia ruled? He would be in America by now had not his parents, impoverished and knowing no English, in flight from the Odessa pogrom, been put off the boat at Cork, when they had paid to be taken to New York.
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  The Earl of Dilberne seemed genial enough, and made a point of sharing the scrambled eggs with Mr Baum who, still hungry after his morning rush, treated himself to the remaining kipper, picking the bones out of the bright orange smoked flesh with scrupulous, silent care. At least in kippers one expected bones.

  Elsie, hovering in the background, serving coffee and tea as required, realized there would be precious left of this meal for the servants. Leftovers would be nothing better than porridge, yesterday’s brown loaf and picked-over scones and jam.

  ‘Well,’ said his Lordship finally, dabbing his mouth and putting down the napkin. ‘Get on with it, old chap. Breakfast was the good news, now let us broach the bad.’

  The Bringer of Bad News

  9.40 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

  Mr Baum murmured that it would be wiser if the conversation they were about to have were conducted in private, but they did not even deign to respond. They were unworried by the maid’s presence. He had spoken out of turn, he realized, the servants being as of little interest to these people as the furniture.

  ‘Lord Dilberne,’ said Mr Baum, ‘news has come that Ladysmith is besieged by Boer troops. It was thought they would be already fully stretched at Mafeking but apparently not. They are well organized and have men and equipment to spare.’

  Arthur filled in the ensuing silence by remarking that in his opinion, whatever anyone said, the Boers were an undisciplined rabble of farmers, that Kruger was no leader but a bible-thumper who believed the Earth was flat, and that he, Arthur, had it on good authority from army friends that the garrison in Ladysmith numbered at least five thousand disciplined and trained troops and was well prepared to withstand any attack. They would give the enemy a good thrashing into the bargain.