Long Live the King (12 page)

The staff worked late and rose early, and by noon the great dining room was prepared for Christmas dinner at one, the oak beams waxed – an epidemic of death-watch beetle had first to be smoked out – the great chandelier dusted and its many faulty light bulbs replaced – electricity now took the place of candles, not nearly so flattering to the female complexion – and Mrs Neville the housekeeper had worked wonders with the great refectory table. The linen was spotless white, five glasses glittered beside each of the three table settings: the best silver and china had been put out: napkins shaped into white swans: sprigs of holly and ivy, set in cut-crystal bowls, formed a charming centrepiece. Even Rosina allowed herself a gasp of admiration at the sight.

The turkey, a golden, diligently basted giant, reared especially for the festive day on the home farm, and stuffed with veal and pork, was placed early on the sideboard, to rest on its silver hotplate. Three courses of suitable midwinter fare came first – game soup, scalloped oysters and jugged hare – then Mr Neville the butler carved the bird, and Reginald the head footman served roast potatoes and a bean purée from the ornate silver tureens it took strong arms to manage, and ladled plenty of good gravy from the porcelain sauce boats – a wedding gift to the young couple from her Grace, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough – followed by mince pies and Christmas pudding lit with plentiful brandy and decorated with holly. In the absence of the Earl and Countess all felt particularly young and free. The servants, knowing that what upstairs failed to eat, they would in time, were cheerful too.

Mr Neville had come up with the best bottles the cellar could provide: from Bordeaux, a Pomerol and a St Émilion; from Burgundy, a Chablis; and for dessert a sweet Sauternes. Also, in honour of Minnie, his Lordship had purchased some rather more dubious wine from outside France, an Inglewood from the Napa Valley, which had not yet had time to gather any cobwebs.

Four hundred years’ worth of ancestors looked down from the walls. All were distinguished, most were handsome, few looked exactly likeable. Three of the eldest sons had died unexpectedly in tragic accidents when young.

Rosina had laughed when Minnie asked if it was some kind of curse and said, ‘Three in four hundred years isn’t many. It happens in all the best families.
Cui bono?
The second sons, of course,’ which rather shocked Minnie. The upper classes in this strange, wet, ruined, winter landscape seemed to have ingested a lofty cynicism along with their mothers’ milk – but since she supposed that for generations all had been put out to wet-nurses the phrase was misplaced. Perhaps it was the very absence of mother’s milk did it? And wasn’t it rather tactless of Rosina to bring the subject up at all? Robert had inherited the Earldom on the death of his elder brother. What was she doing here with these people she did not understand? If only they asked her to add her own family portraits, Billy and Tessa O’Brien, with their wide faces, generous features and smiling lips, she would feel better. But she could see it was never likely to happen. It was not individuals who were honoured, just their titles. There was one done by Stanton before he had gone mad and just painted streaks: perhaps she could ask her mother to bring it over when she came. If she ever came. No, she must not think like this. She had made her bed; she must lie on it. It was a pleasant enough bed, with Arthur in it. Love carried you along for so long, then dreams became reality, practicalities began to seem important. She thought she might be pregnant. What then?

She tried not to think about it. The conversation turned to royal rumour.

‘Pater’s so stuffy about what goes on,’ complained Arthur. ‘One longs to know. But he shuts up as tight as a clam when it comes to the Palace.’

He talked of how he’d asked his father about the rumour going round the Mews about a letter found in the archives of the House of Lords, written to the Lord Chancellor in the Prince’s hand a week before his sudden death of abdominal pains and fever – symptomatic of typhoid, it was true – yet dying so quickly and unexpectedly. Typhoid sufferers usually lingered. In the letter he had asked how one might set about divorcing the Queen of England. Arthur had asked his father if there was any truth in the matter and he had been given short shrift.

‘You’re a fool to listen to gossip and no child of mine to repeat it,’ was all Robert had said, refusing to be drawn.

‘And the death of Eddie, Bertie’s son: in direct line to the throne,’ said Rosina now. ‘That was rather strange. The boy may have been half-witted and probably Jack the Ripper, but he was twenty-eight and perfectly healthy. First they said it was influenza: then it was typhoid. Sudden death within the week, like Albert. That must have suited a lot of people.’

‘Great-Grandmama as a Borgia Queen!’ said Arthur. ‘Let’s hope the parents get home safe from Sandringham.’

‘And poor Bertie got the blame for both deaths,’ said Rosina. ‘First for his father’s – Albert got the alleged “chill” on his way home from stopping Bertie running off with an actress; and then for his son’s – Bertie was off seeing Lady Daisy when Alix was away and he should have been at home keeping Eddie off the streets.’

‘Lady Daisy?’ asked Minnie faintly. Chicago was as nothing compared to this.

‘Daisy Warwick,’ said Rosina. ‘Bertie’s long-term mistress. They’re all going to be there at the Coronation in a specially built showcase. His triumphs laid out for everyone to see.’

‘That’s enough, Rosina,’ said Arthur, suddenly. ‘He is the King, after all, and Pater’s friend.’

After that Arthur and Rosina lost interest in scandal, but began to behave as they would not dare to do in the presence of the Earl and Countess. They became children again. They teased the servants. Rosina declined the soup, summoning Mr Neville and saying animals were her friends and she did not eat her friends; Mr Neville must understand that from now on she was a vegetarian. Arthur chimed in to complain about the absence of boiled beef and carrots from the menu. He could tell from the cutlery, he complained, that there was to be no meat course after the bird, was Cook trying to starve them? What had got into the two of them? They were all desperate, given so much by fate, she decided, but never what they wanted. Arthur had his mother’s approval, but never his father’s. Rosina had her father’s, but never her mother’s.

And then hearing herself, to her sorrow, tell Mr Neville that she had joined the Temperance movement and that lips which touched liquor would never touch hers, Minnie had to wonder what the matter was with herself. That she was pregnant? Surely, surely not. Oh, please. She was a slip of a girl, not a woman.

Mr Neville stayed polite, just rather rigid in his body movements; then as the staff ran off to change glasses, add cutlery, squeeze lemons for lemonade, provide turnips, carrots and parsnips to bolster up the bean purée, and set a salted topside to boil, shame set in.

‘We are too bad,’ said Rosina, ‘I know the better way and approve, as Ovid said, yet I follow the worse.
Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.
You went to Eton, Arthur, you should know. You are excused, Minnie, because you didn’t. We should say sorry because of course we are, but one isn’t allowed to say sorry to servants. It is shocking that the most idle amongst us live so well and those that work so hard should exhaust themselves obliging our whims.’

‘One can hardly live without servants,’ said Arthur. ‘And they can hardly live without us. They like a small panic from time to time. One is doing them a favour.’

‘You and I could live perfectly well enough without them, Arthur,’ said Minnie, ‘if we were only back home. The houses are newer and heated and the windows fit, and there are machines to pick up dust and wash the clothes and even the dishes. The few servants we have are black and are happy enough working for us. My father says he’d rather employ them than our own kind, who are so often drunk and dissolute and fall into the machinery, no matter how many guards you put up.’

She didn’t add that when whole thumbs or bits of fingers were found in the hamburger mix they were usually white not black. It was the kind of information the Hedleigh family didn’t like to hear, even Rosina, who fought so assiduously for truth and justice. Only the lower orders talked of health and horror. Oh, she was learning fast. Too fast.

The servants came, bustled, crashed around a little, re-warmed chafing dishes, and went. Reginald the footman replaced Mr Neville – and Christmas lunch continued with its extra course, except all were now hoist with their own petard, Rosina feeling obliged to eat the parsnips, Arthur the topside, and Minnie to eschew wine in favour of lemonade. None of which any of them particularly wanted. It set them all to giggling again.

‘At Eton when it got to this stage,’ said Arthur, ‘we’d fire butter pats at the ceiling until the beaks stopped us. At Oxford we’d break the places up after a good dinner.’

‘Your mothers mistreated you,’ said Minnie. If she was pregnant and it was a boy what then? They would make her send him away when he was eight in case he ended up one of those men who never married.

‘We are both of us a terrible trial to our parents,’ said Rosina. ‘They did so want us to be like them, and look at us. I turn out a bluestocking, and you, Arthur’ – and she helped herself, as the footman offered none, to a slice of turkey along with her vegetables and a considerable spooning of rich meat gravy, and washed it down with the Pomerol – ‘digging up good grazing land, filling the air with noisome fumes which give Mother headaches, frightening the birds, annoying Father’s friends, and the King is hardly going to visit a country house where the hoi polloi run motor races round him. We have spoiled their lives. As for you, Minnie, Mother longs for someone to discuss ribbons and fashions with, and all she has is someone who wears a painter’s smock, day in, day out, covered with splashes of cobalt blue and chrome yellow.’

‘It is the tools of her trade,’ said Arthur loyally, ‘like the engine oil under my fingernails. We are in a new century. Everything changes. And she had to do something while we wait for the heir.’ And he enquired whether Minnie would join him in a slice of boiled beef with carrots; would it not remind her of home, now that Billy O’Brien was moving out of hogs and into cattle and Minnie said yes, though leave out the carrots. Her father could not abide vegetables. She spoke lightly. But it bothered her that he kept worrying away at her father’s trade, like a dog with an unsatisfactory bone. His own grandfather had started life as a coal miner, after all.

‘I think I may be having a baby,’ she said. The staff were listening. She could tell by a kind of sudden stillness in the air. But then they were always listening. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, quickly. ‘I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.’

Arthur got up and came over and kissed her on the cheek. He looked so pleased she wondered what she had been worrying about.

‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘How could you not be?’

Rosina stayed quiet and then said, ‘Perhaps it’s too early to know for sure,’ she said. ‘If so, you will be in no condition to process at the Coronation, let alone be seen in public. There will be an extra place. Perhaps now Mama will let me have it. If she can’t have her daughter-in-law she might just put up with her own daughter.’

‘You’d have to sit next to the Baums,’ said Arthur, ‘who are complete nobodies, just rich. Papa can be so obvious one is almost ashamed.’

There was a crash and a bang. Reginald had dropped the great silver dish which carried the turkey.

George and Ivy’s Christmas

George was trying to develop Ivy’s psychic powers. Both had time to spare. His hands were still bandaged from the fire, so he could not work: she had no work to do. Farmer Swaley’s son Andy, back from agricultural college, had obliged his father by taking over the milking. George, having run in and rescued the Hon. Rev.’s little girl from the flames, was now the local hero. The Bath Technical College was closed for the holidays. Ivy’s place of employment was dust and ashes. Her employers were in the mortuary awaiting burial, and no one grieved for them: the village just looked forward to the funeral, though who would provide food for the wake no one knew. It was hoped the Church would: they had been known to put on a good spread if one of their own went. Adela was safe and warm in the grandeur of the Bishop’s Palace at Wells. Ivy would go and visit her but thought she might be turned away. She was only the servant after all. But her mother had been told that Ivy could look forward to a substantial contribution from the parish emergency fund towards replacing her bits and pieces.

‘Someone up there loves you,’ her mother said. ‘No mention that you weren’t in your own bed when the place went up. You were good to that little girl, I’ll say that for you. You can stay with me until you get yourself fixed up.’ Everyone was being kind to her, even her own mother.

Doreen had even asked George to share their Christmas meal. They’d had chicken, mashed potatoes and peas and a bottle each of Inde Coope beer, and done themselves proud. Doreen, who always liked a bit of trouser, had entertained George mightily by talking about ghosts; the headless horsemen on the Bath to Wells Road and the legionnaire soldiers she’d once seen marching on the old Roman road up by Dyrham, a spooky place where three Celtic kings had died fifteen hundred years ago. George had been really interested, and asked her if Doreen had second sight, and if so had she, Ivy, inherited it. And Doreen, to Ivy’s embarrassment, had talked about how when she was a little girl Ivy had talked about the lady who bent over her bed sometimes when she was trying to go to sleep.

After which she and George had repaired to the barn and nothing would now do but that George was trying to make her shift things by the power of thought.

‘Tell you what,’ said George now, ‘see that button over there?’ It was one of the buttons from her skirt which had popped off when she had removed it without undoing it properly, though he seemed to have lost interest in her, only in what he called her kinetic powers. She’d put the button on the table for safe keeping. The table was covered with dust and powdered corn husks and feathers where stray hens had been roosting in the warmth of the milking shed.