No Angel (Spoils of Time 01) (3 page)

‘Or so ugly. You think of foals, lambs, puppies even, all much prettier, and a lot more interesting.’

Celia had decided – having read a great many rather modern books on the subject – to breast-feed him, but he was a finicky feeder and she found trying to thrust an agonisingly tender nipple into his ungrateful mouth so unpleasant that she handed him over with great relief to the nursemaid after two days. At least that way she got some sleep.

‘Very sensible,’ Lady Beckenham said, ‘so common, really, breastfeeding, the sort of thing the tenants do.’

But if Giles was something of a disappointment to Celia, he gave great pleasure to his father. Oliver would spend literally hours holding him, jiggling him on his knee, studying his face for family resemblances and even, to the nursemaid’s horror, giving him the occasional bottle.

The arrival of Giles prompted a truce between Oliver and Lady Beckenham; she was a naturally talkative woman and not prepared to sit with him in silence at mealtimes during Celia’s lying in. Moreover he had managed to find a topic on which he could ask her advice. Lyttons were to publish a book about the great houses of England, and since his mother-in-law had personally stayed in at least half of them, she was able to give him a great deal of information.

She had photographs sent from Ashingham of the shooting parties which she had attended and given. Oliver looked at them, at the men in their tweed suits, greatcoats and brogues, at the women in ankle-length gowns, with large hats on their heads, and realised the pictures encapsulated the 1900s, the decade already known as the Edwardian era: an era when the rich lived lavishly and with extraordinary self-indulgence. At the great houses, Lady Beckenham told Oliver, tea was a full dress meal, ladies in elaborate gowns, gentlemen in short black jackets and black ties.

‘And at dinner, seven or eight courses, full evening dress of course with decorations.’

After dinner at Cheyne Walk one night, slightly drunk on Oliver’s finest claret, she explained what she called the disposition of the bedrooms at house parties.

‘One had to know who should be near whom. The card placed on each door wasn’t just to let every guest know where to sleep, but to be a guide – if you follow me – for anyone else who needed that information.’

Oliver nodded courteously while Celia sat transfixed, waiting for further revelations, but they did not come. Her mother realised she was talking too much and retired to bed.

It was a measure of her warming attitude towards Oliver, that she actually offered to introduce him to a few owners of the great houses. Nevertheless she still did not invite him to call her by her first name.

‘I can’t think of anyone who does, except Daddy,’ Celia said, ‘and she calls him Beckenham, you know, even to this day’ but she did at least begin to address Oliver by name for the first time.

‘I still think he is a rather odd husband for Celia,’ she wrote to Lord Beckenham, ‘and a very odd father, far too involved with the baby, although one has to admit he is devoted to Celia and Giles and is certainly trying to do his best for them both. He does have a certain facility for conversation, and can be quite amusing, but I worry about his political views. He expresses some sympathy for the idea of the trades unions; I suppose that is his background and can’t be helped. I’m sure he will learn in time.’

Giles was christened in Chelsea Old Church with at least some of the splendour that Lady Beckenham had wanted for the wedding. He wore the Beckenham family christening robe, a one hundred-year-old mass of frothing lace, received the family silver spoon and teething ring from his maternal grandmother, a large cheque from his paternal grandfather, and numbered an earl and a countess among his five godparents.

‘Is it really necessary to have so many?’ Oliver had asked, and yes, Celia said, it was.

‘Caroline’s baby had four and I’m not going to be outdone by her at the christening as well as the wedding.’

Oliver didn’t quite like to point out that it had been entirely her fault their wedding had been such a low key affair; she had become slightly formidable since Giles’s birth. Something to do, he feared, with the arrival of her mother in the household.

Edgar Lytton particularly enjoyed Giles’s christening; he spent much of the time holding the baby, giving him his finger to suck, rocking him when he cried, and appeared in all the official photographs beaming with happiness. It was extremely fortunate that the day gave him so much pleasure, that it had been, as he remarked to LM later, one of the happiest of his entire life, for that night he had a heart attack and died just as dawn was breaking. Oliver was at his deathbed, summoned urgently by LM, but was never quite able to forgive himself for failing to stay and have a glass of brandy with his father after escorting him home from the christening.

‘Do stay,’ Edgar had said, ‘I don’t want the day to end.’

But Oliver had refused, said he must get back to Celia and the baby. What he was actually anxious to be getting back to was not the baby, but Celia, and moreover a Celia naked in bed, as she had whispered to him that she would be before he left Cheyne Walk. She had only just felt able to resume their lovemaking after the traumas of childbirth. To the relief of them both, it was as rapturously wonderful as ever; but it was a long time before Oliver was able to experience it without a sense of guilt and betrayal.

The other legacy of Edgar’s death, delivered into Oliver’s hands at the end of a hideously sad time, was the control and, indeed, the ownership of Lyttons.

CHAPTER 2

Celia picked up a silver candlestick (being the nearest object to hand) and hurled it at the nursery door which Oliver had just closed gently behind him.

‘He’s a beast,’ she said to Giles, who was sitting placidly in his cot waiting to be taken out and dressed, ‘an old fashioned stuffy beast.’

Giles smiled at her; she glared at him for a moment, then smiled back. He had an oddly radiant smile which transformed his rather solemn little face. He was a year old now, and while still not beautiful, he was a nice looking child, with large dark eyes and brown hair. He was also extremely good; after the first fretful few months he had suddenly become an angel baby, sleeping through the night and between feeds, and when he was awake, lying gazing at the teddies which Jenny, the nursemaid, kept propped up on his cot and at the mobile of tiny cardboard birds which Celia had made and strung across it, after reading that children should be stimulated from the earliest possible moment.

He had developed a little slowly, probably, Celia felt, because he was so placid and happy with the status quo, but at thirteen months, he was doing all the requisite things, standing, and crawling in a perfectly textbook manner and saying mum-mum and dad-dad and na-na which was his name for Jenny. Jenny had proved a great success; only nineteen years old when she arrived in the household, and virtually untrained, she had swiftly become a model nursemaid, adoring Giles, while not being foolishly indulgent with him, surviving the sleepless nights and noisy days with cheerful resignation, and managing the mountain of washing and ironing for her charge with formidable energy.

After Edgar Lytton died, and Oliver became modestly well-off, there was talk of hiring what Lady Beckenham called a proper nanny, but Celia had resisted this. She would rather have a proper cook, she said, and a decent housemaid; Jenny was more than competent, and pleasant to have around, indeed Celia had come to regard her as one of her closest friends during the first difficult months of motherhood. She said as much to her mother, who replied that she hoped Celia wasn’t making the all too common modern mistake of thinking that servants could be dealt with on a friendly basis. Celia, stung by this, said Jenny had done more for her sanity since Giles’s birth than anyone else in the world, and she didn’t know where she would be without her.

‘Well, you are playing with fire,’ said Lady Beckenham tartly, ‘and I should know. Very tolerant with the first couple of Beckenham’s housemaids and simply made a rod for my own back, even expected to give houseroom to a baby, which she swore was his. Of course it wasn’t,’ she added. ‘You have to keep servants where they belong, Celia, which is at a distance, both literally and metaphorically.’

Celia said nothing more and continued to regard Jenny as a friend, and when Jenny asked her on her twentieth birthday if she could be called Nanny now, Celia was quite hurt.

‘Jenny’s your name, that’s how I think of you, why do you suddenly want to be called Nanny?’

‘It’s the other girls, Lady Celia, the other nursemaids and the uniformed nannies in Kensington Gardens. They think it’s very odd you call me by my name. And I’d like to be called Nanny, it would make me feel proud. As if I had a proper job, wasn’t just a nursery maid.’

‘Oh – all right,’ said Celia, ‘I’ll try and remember.’

But it wasn’t until Giles started calling Jenny by his pet name that she made a real effort, again at Jenny’s request, and still felt hurt at what she felt was a rejection of her friendship.

The reason for the hurled candlestick that morning had been Oliver’s second refusal to let her play even a modestly active role at Lyttons. Celia was bored; she found domestic life and motherhood intellectually unsatisfying. She was extremely intelligent and she knew it. Moreover she was becoming well-read; during the long days of her pregnancy she had pored over the works of Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, George Eliot; she also devoured the daily papers,
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
, and had persuaded Oliver to take out subscriptions to the
Spectator
and the
Illustrated London News
, so that she had a better grasp of current affairs. She also, with great daring, occasionally bought the
Daily Mirror
; among other things she shared with Oliver was a degree of social idealism. It was one of the first things she had loved about him and found fascinating.

She had read the writings of such people as Sydney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells and found that what they had to say about social injustice made absolute sense to her. She and Oliver had agreed that they would vote for the Labour Party in the next election, and spent long evenings in the small downstairs sitting-room at Cheyne Walk discussing the rise of Socialism, the increasing role that the state should play in improving the lot of ordinary people, and how to combat the poverty which underpinned the wealth of the upper and middle classes. It was for Celia, at least, largely an emotional reaction; part of her stormy move away from her roots, a discovery of yet another new world which appealed to her idealistic heart.

But she also wanted to do more than run her household and care for her child; she found the company of her immediate circle dull at best. Gossip, except of a very high calibre, bored her; she hated cards, she even grew tired of shopping, and although she enjoyed entertaining and giving dinner parties, these hardly filled her days and certainly didn’t employ her brain. Neither, for that matter, did playing with Giles.

Oliver’s life, on the other hand, fascinated her; she read all the literary reviews in the papers and the magazines, and whenever Lyttons gave a party for an author, or to launch a new series, she felt herself in heaven. She loved talking to writers, liked their odd blend of self-confidence and self-doubt, never tired of hearing how they wrote their books, where their ideas came from, what inspired them. She found illustrators equally fascinating. She had a strong visual sense; changing fashions in design and colour particularly intrigued her. Often, rather than go to yet another tea party, she would wander round the Victoria and Albert museum or the Tate Gallery; she had books on the work of the great art nouveau masters, Aubrey Beardsley, Mucha, Boldini, and was au fait with the more modern artists such as Augustus John and Duchamp. And then she loved Lyttons itself; the big imposing building in Paternoster Row with its wonderfully grand entrance hall leading into a series of untidy dusty rooms, with battered old desks where Oliver, Margaret, and other senior members of staff worked. The place felt like a library and study combined from the huge basement where the books were stored and where a tiny wooden train whizzed truckloads of books around on a metal railway line, to the wrought iron spiral staircase at the back, which rose dizzily up the full height of the building.

Edgar had been well off rather than rich when he died; he had left only £40,000 to be shared between his four children, but the value of Lyttons was considerable. Assets consisted not only of the books themselves and the worth of the authors under contract, but the very substantial building which Edgar had shrewdly bought with the money left to him and Margaret by George Jackson.

Celia had become more and more fond of LM. Where she could have met with hostility and condescension, intruding as she did into a very tightly bonded professional and personal relationship, she found only friendship and a genuine interest in her. And LM, too, shared the new liberal attitude to society which had so charmed her in Oliver. Their friends intrigued her too: they were not quite part of the bohemian set so prominent in London at that time, their lives and concerns were a little too commercially based for that, but they were intellectual, free-thinking people, given to rich conversation and with attitudes and views which would have shocked the Beckenhams. It was meeting those people, writers, artists, lecturers, other publishers, that made her daytime friends, as she thought of them, seem so unsatisfactory and so dull; and that had led, indirectly, to the candlestick being hurled at the nursery door.

‘I want a job,’ she said to Oliver, ‘I want to use my brain. I think you should let me come and work at Lyttons.’

The first time she made the suggestion he had been almost shocked; it surprised her, for many of the women she had met through him worked for their living.

‘But you are my wife,’ he said, his blue eyes quite pained as he looked at her, ‘I want you to be in our home, taking care of our son, not out in the rough world of publishing.’

Celia said it didn’t seem very rough to her, and had argued her case for some time. ‘You don’t have any women on the editorial side, and I think you should. I might not be much use at first, but I’d learn quickly. And I’d love it so much, darling, darling Oliver, working alongside you, being part of all your life, not just the dull bit at home.’

Oliver had said, even more pained, that he was sorry she found home life so dull; Celia told him he should sample it for himself and then he would see what she meant, and that she found it almost insulting that he should consider her suited to it. They had quarrelled quite badly after that, and only made up in bed, as they always did; she had left it for a little while, and then tried again, that very morning; Oliver’s response had been exactly the same, the pain mixed this time with some irritation.

‘My darling, I told you before, you’re my wife. And the mother of my son. And—’

‘So that excludes me from doing anything more challenging than seeing to the laundry and singing nursery rhymes, does it?’

‘Of course not. You know I value you far more highly than that.’

‘Then prove it. Let me show you my real value: working with you, making Lyttons even more successful than it already is . . .’

‘Celia, you know nothing about publishing.’

‘That’s a ridiculous argument. I could learn.’

‘It isn’t quite as easy as that,’ he said, and she could see he felt defensive; it amused and annoyed her at the same time.

‘I suppose you think I’m not capable of it.’

‘No of course I don’t. But—’

‘Then why not? Because I’m your wife?’

‘Well – yes. Yes, that’s right.’

‘And that’s the only reason?’

‘I—’

‘Is that the only reason, Oliver?’

‘Celia, I don’t want you working outside our home.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because I want you supporting me from inside it. That’s far more valuable.’

‘So a wife shouldn’t work. Is that what you’re saying?’

He hesitated. Then, ‘Yes. Yes it is,’ he said, very firmly. ‘And now I must go.’ And walked out, shutting the door rather loudly behind him.

Later that day, LM walked into Oliver’s office.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

‘Oh yes? What about?’

‘Celia.’

‘Celia? If she’s been talking to you—’

‘She has, yes,’ said LM calmly. ‘Isn’t that permitted?’

‘About her working here? I’ve told her, I will not have it, she has no right to bother you about it.’

‘Oliver, you sound alarmingly like Lord Beckenham,’ said LM. ‘I’m surprised at you. Celia has every right to telephone me if she wants to. You don’t own her, and I hope you don’t think that you do. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Celia hasn’t even mentioned working here. She simply telephoned me to say that she’d been thinking about the letters of Queen Victoria which John Murray are about to publish. I’d told her I thought it was a marvellous coup, so she suggested that we commission a biography of the queen, to coincide with their publication. It seemed to her that we might benefit from all their advance publicity. I think that shows a rare combination of editorial and commercial sense. It’s a marvellous idea and I’m convinced we should go ahead with it. And if Celia did ever want to work here, I, for one, would encourage it greatly. We would be foolish to reject her. Now, you might like to consider who should write this book; in my opinion, it should be put in hand immediately. Oh I hope you’re not going to turn the idea down because of some outdated idea about wives and where their place might be . . . yes, I thought so. I see I have struck home. Really Oliver! I’m shocked at you.’

When Oliver arrived home that night, Celia was not downstairs. She heard him moving from room to room looking for her; finally he opened their bedroom door, his expression a mixture of irritation and anxiety. It changed then; she was sitting up in bed naked, her long dark hair trailing loosely over her shoulders and on to her breasts.

‘I’m sorry if I made you angry,’ she said after a moment, holding out her hand to him. ‘I only, truly, wanted to be of use to you. Please come and join me, I can’t bear to be quarrelling with you all the time like this.’

He did what she said, as she knew he would; he was still completely unable to resist her. Later, over a rather belated dinner, he said slightly awkwardly, that LM had persuaded him that perhaps he had been wrong, and he should consider allowing her to work at Lyttons. She did not take issue with the word allow; her triumph was too fragile to risk.

Looking back, she saw the evening as the major turning point in their relationship: more important in some ways even than the one when she had told him she was pregnant. She had defeated him, just as she had defeated her parents, by a mixture of deviousness and determination. From then on, she had her way: both at home and, more importantly to her, at Lyttons.

Celia moved into Lyttons a month later; she was given a modest office on the second floor which she turned into her own small kingdom, with a large leather-topped desk, on which she installed several silver-framed pictures of Giles, an exquisite library lamp, and a small portable typewriter. The walls were hung with framed book covers and Mucha posters, and on either side of the small fireplace she put two leather-covered button-backed sofas.

‘So that I can talk to writers in a relaxed atmosphere,’ she said to Oliver.

Oliver, who was still not entirely comfortable with the arrangement, said rather stiffly that it would be quite a while before she was talking to writers.