The Cardboard Crown (19 page)

Alice went to bed in the small room they had allotted her, a great deal relieved and more than a little amused. She was even amused at their giving her this room, while they occupied her own. If they had wrecked Westhill they had not wrecked themselves, and that had been her main anxiety. She did not admire poverty of spirit, the sort of thing one noticed in the declining Mayhews. She was sorry for Sarah, but she could not help laughing at the way they were quite unconscious of her malice. Everything was far, far better than she expected.

The chief cause of her satisfaction was the discovery of Wolfie’s creative ability. There was nothing she admired more. She would have been more genuinely proud of a son-in-law who was a good painter or writer or musician, than of one of the highest rank. She was naively pleased to meet duchesses,
but she mentions in her diary with much greater pride the few meetings she had with creative artists of any eminence. In the morning she had a long talk about Wolfie with Professor Handley and he was quite serious in his assertion that Wolfie was a first-rate composer. In the afternoon she offered to take the Flugels back to England with her, and they both exclaimed: ‘Then the symphony can be performed in London.’ They were delighted with the invitation but not over-grateful. The same day Alice arranged with Burns, the farmer, to rent the land at Westhill, and then went down to Melbourne and installed herself at Menzies Hotel. Pleased as she was with Wolfie and Diana, she could not face another of those meals with beer and tea.

A married couple was engaged for Westhill, but Sarah stayed there, and it was used as a holiday home by various Dells and Craigs. Alice sailed with the Flugels, the baby and a nurse three weeks after she had arrived. They left the ship at Marseille and stopped in Paris to buy Diana clothes. They stayed a day in London and Alice bought her pearl and diamond earrings, and bracelets to go with the pearl necklace which Mildred had refused, and which she gave her as soon as they arrived at Waterpark. Alice was compensating herself, or satisfying her conscience for the meanness she had shown Diana at her wedding and for the austerity of the past three years. She also had to give Wolfie some money to buy suitable clothes for the English country. He looked a little fat and Teutonic, but that was not a social disability, and in Somerset a German accent was preferable to an Australian one. Again in the northern hemisphere the standards were changed.

Alice at last thought she was happy. She no longer had that dull ache and anxiety about what was happening at Westhill, and she had someone of her own whom she could exhibit with pride in the county, or in a box at Covent Garden or at Biarritz. Her illusion did not last long. The only permanent Flugel resident at Waterpark was the baby. Diana and Wolfie were always dashing off to London or Germany in search of music. They would announce their return on a certain train, generally one most inconvenient to meet. A carriage was sent to Frome for them and they were not there. They turned up the following day in the station fly, explaining there was a concert the previous night which they simply had to hear. Alice would not have minded so much if they had sometimes suggested that she should accompany them, as she liked music and she liked travelling
en famille
, but the only thing she shared of their travels was the expense. Wolfie had probably been impressed by the Langtons with the dignity of their ancient seat, but he was frankly disappointed in Waterpark.

‘My cousin has a castle in Württemberg,’ he said. ‘It is very noble.’

Austin had the irritating sensation of a man whose financial position is being assessed by a pauper, who having nothing himself is able to stand aside and compare him detrimentally with a millionaire. Some relatives of ours in Melbourne were once asked to be kind to one of their cousins, a titled young Englishman who was coming out on a battleship. When he had left they exclaimed: ‘Be kind! It was all we could do to get him to be civil to us.’ At the end of this 1891 summer Alice must have felt much the same about
Diana and Wolfie. The symphony had not yet been performed and one evening Diana said to Alice:

‘Don’t you know any important people, mama?’

‘I know the Diltons,’ said Alice, taken aback, and she mentioned one or two other landed families in the neighbourhood.

‘But I mean really important people,’ said Diana impatiently, ‘someone who could get Wolfie’s symphony performed.’

‘I am afraid not,’ said Alice with dignity. ‘In one way our position here is better than it is in Melbourne. It has a more solid basis. It is one that no amount of wealth could buy if you were not born to it, but it is not a particularly high position. There are strata above us. In Melbourne there are none. It’s the old choice between being king of your village and serving in Rome.’

Diana looked bewildered and disgusted. She had a slight affectation of manner which reminded Alice of Mrs Dane, a faint air of drama. Alice preferred this to Mildred’s complete absence of any kind of distinction, but that night she wrote in her diary: ‘If one could take hold of the ends of the threads of evil and misfortune which are woven into the good to make our lives, and draw them out, would the rest fall to pieces?’

As Wolfie did not hunt she rented a little house in Knightsbridge for the Flugels for the winter. She thought she could stay there when she went up for a few days. She went once and they were quite pleased to see her, but when she left they did not suggest she should come again, and the ménage was so uncomfortable that after this visit she went back to the rooms in St James’s.

At last we come to the entry which Alice made on the 25th January 1892, the one which attracted my attention on that night when with Julian, I brought in her diaries from the harness room:

‘George rode with Steven to Boyton Manor. Austin had his horse taken by the groom and drove with Laura, Bobby and me. A lovely day, rather too fine and frosty for hunting, but the sun melted it by twelve o’clock, about the time they started. We saw Mr Phipps, Mrs Martin, the Duke of Somerset, Lords Percy and Algernon St. Maur, Mr and Miss Knight, and many others. Mr A. Tunstall was driving with his sister-in-law Lady Dilton. When he saw me he at once came over to us. He said that he was only in England for a few days to see his trustees. He was charming to Bobby, who wins all hearts, and he brought us refreshments. Boyton a beautiful house and grounds with a large pond. The meet very picturesque, but not many in pink owing to the death of the Duke of Clarence. We drove home when they started. I bought some plants at Boreham, white hyacinths, all flowering.’ She continues in French. ‘A. T. said to me that if I was in Italy I must certainly come to Rome. He gave me his address, but I had not forgotten it, even in twenty years. He has not changed very much. I was exceedingly pleased to see him, and I felt very happy for the rest of the day. He laughed into my eyes when he said that I had not changed either. It seemed only yesterday that I was in Rome.’

A few days later the Flugels made one of their sporadic descents on Waterpark, and Alice took Diana over to call at Dilton. She writes: ‘Only Lord Dilton and Miss Tunstall were at home. They told us that Lady Dilton had gone up to
London that morning with Mr A. Tunstall, who was returning to Italy. I was very disappointed.’ It was not likely that Alice was disappointed at missing Lady Dilton, whom she often saw. She wanted to show Diana to Aubrey, perhaps rather pathetically to let him see, that even if she no longer was beautiful she had a beautiful daughter. But she may only have thought that he would know the kind of people who could arrange for Wolfie’s symphony to be performed. She does not mention Aubrey again for over eighteen months. During the following summer she was concerned about George. The engagements and marriages of her children seemed fated to bring her trouble.

It is not very clear what George did after he left Cambridge. There is still talk of examinations and of a cousin at the War Office who was doing something for him, so presumably he was trying to enter the army. He failed in some examination by two points, and when next mentioned he is at Carrickfergus in Ireland with a regiment of militia. While there he met a Miss Dorothea Potts, the daughter of a Major Potts, a widower, who lived at a small country house called Rathain somewhere in the neighbourhood. He mentioned her frequently in his letters and at the end of June he arrived at Waterpark and asked Austin’s permission to become engaged to Dolly Potts, a complete reversal of the procedure at Austin’s own engagement. Austin agreed but Major Potts would not give his consent unless what he called a ‘proper settlement’ was made on Dolly, and the amount he asked for was half as much again as his own income. He did not expect to get it, but he was determined to stop his daughter from marrying, as he wanted her to be a comfort to
his old age. He did not imagine that anyone would pay £1,500 a year for Dolly, and certainly Alice was not very willing to do so. She had a large income, but like club members she had ‘calls’ on it. Austin had a settlement of £1,000 a year, which went entirely on his own pleasures. My parents were allowed £1,000 a year, and they also had no household expenses. George, Maysie and Diana had £500 each and Mildred £250. Out of what was left Alice had to keep up Waterpark and Westhill, pay P. & O. fares and all hotel bills when they were on the Continent. She also gave her children on their birthdays a present of a pound for each year of their age, which ranged in this year from about £30 for my father to £20 for Diana. She also had ‘calls’ from other relatives in restricted circumstances. If she had frightened fits of so-called meanness it is hardly to be wondered at. The onion woman did not want her skirts to be altogether torn away.

The wrangling about the settlement went on between the respective lawyers for over a month. Aunt Mildy went about saying in her piercing voice, or possibly with the elocutionist’s overlay: ‘I don’t know how anyone can ask for money with my brother. How can people mix money and love! I never should.’ At last a compromise of £1,000 a year was reached, and Dolly Potts came to stay at Waterpark. On the same day Alice had a letter from her lawyer in Melbourne saying that Maclean, the tenant of a building in Bourke Street, which provided a large part of her income, was unable to pay the rent. Dolly Potts on that first night must have thought that she had arrived in an extraordinary household. Mildred and Wolfie were sufficiently unusual, but Austin hardly said a word, except at intervals to give
a little cynical chuckle and mutter: ‘So the boom has bust!’

This did not cause them immediate embarrassment, as Alice had three or four banking accounts, all with good balances. The summer life at Waterpark went on as usual, made more cheerful by the presence of Dolly, but punctuated by letters from Uncle Albert Craig, full of caution and foreboding. They made their habitual excursions to Bath, to Longleat, to the ruins of Farleigh Castle. At home the men shot clay pigeons or they played tennis, or ‘had some archery’ at which Dolly Potts excelled. I cannot give much account of the love affair of George and Dolly. I only know its sorrows which did not lie within themselves. Her name was a symbol of romance for us in our childhood. I once saw a photograph of her which Uncle George kept in a drawer, as Aunt Baba would not have cared to see it on his writing table. She had a round, fair English face, with a rather large mouth and very straight eyes. Everyone liked her and years afterwards, ten thousand miles away, her sad sweet name would be mentioned with affection. I like to think that for two or three months she and Uncle George were intensely happy, driving together along the steep and shadowed lanes to sit among the ruins of Farleigh or pick wild flowers along the road to Longleat. In the evening they must often have walked out after dinner, and crossed the lawn to the stream and murmured there together in quiet voices which blended with the sounds of the twilight, the mourning of the small gnats, the splash of a trout rising, or the last twitter of a bird, while all around them was the drowsy beauty of the English summer meadows, the scenes and scents of home. They were not yet disturbed by the fact that Alice did not think it right
to sign the marriage settlement until the financial situation in Melbourne was more clear. I think this must have been so, as Waterpark always meant far more to George than to any others of his generation. He had in his study a print of the house, and a painting by my father, who was not a bad amateur artist, of the three oak trees on the lawn. Whenever it was mentioned a faraway look came into his eyes. He had probably enjoyed there the only months of perfect happiness in his life.

At the beginning of September Alice writes: ‘There is still no satisfactory news of Maclean.’ Then suddenly without any explanation, the whole household packed up and fled like swallows to the south. My mother often spoke to me of things that happened on this trek, but she never told me the reason for it. I always assumed that it had something to do with the financial crisis, but it may have begun with the simple wish to spend a few weeks in Brittany. The party consisted of Austin and Alice, my father and mother, my three brothers, Wolfie and Diana, their little girl, two nurses, some English cousins who joined them in Dinan, and George and Dolly Potts. The marriage settlement was still unsigned. Major Potts had not forbidden his daughter to join the party, but he said: ‘If you go I shall not write to you.’ He seems to have been a horrible old blackmailer with a strong sense of other people’s duty. Alice makes some references to financial transactions between her different banks, but does not at first appear to be short of money. They were only concerned with amusing themselves, making excursions to Mont St. Michel and going in boats on the Rance. She bought old furniture to be sent back to Waterpark, and in the lobby here there is an
oak cupboard, on the back of which is still tacked a faded card, addressed in foreign handwriting: ‘Mrs Langton, Waterpark House, near Frome, Angleterre.’ They must have intended to return in October, when the English cousins went home, but perhaps the crisis became worse, and it was cheap in Brittany. Dolly Potts stayed with them. She would not go home until her father wrote to her. Her married sister let her know that he would not do so until the engagement was broken off, his real aim.