‘Do you have companionship?’ he asked, and his voice was so soulful that Henrietta laughed.
‘Oh Tobes,’ she said.
‘Well, they all look so beastly.’
‘I’m not here to add to my social circle. In any case, no one’s being actively unpleasant, apart from a couple of the warders. I’m left alone for the most part. The Ritz dinners inspire some hostility, mind you. Mixed grill yesterday, with the most delicious lamb-loin chops.’
He managed a watery smile.
‘Monsieur Reynard sends his special regards,’ he said. The French chef had left Netherwood Hall three years ago to take up a position in Cesar Ritz’s new hotel on Piccadilly. Tobias had gone to him on the day of Henrietta’s arrest and commissioned his services – at considerable expense – for the duration of her ordeal. It had surprised Henrietta that such concessions were allowed in Holloway. Toby, however, felt it was the very least they might allow for the sister of an earl; if he had his way, she would be held prisoner at the Ritz too. ‘He prepares your meals himself, you know. Doesn’t let the underlings anywhere near.’
‘Sweet of him,’ Henrietta said. ‘Look, can we talk about something other than my plight? I find my spirits are flagging. Tell me something interesting.’
He nodded, and heroically rearranged his features into something less tragic.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘Isabella’s Season continues apace. Hectic schedule, every day, from lunchtime onwards. Mama sends Thea in the evenings from time to time. She’s terribly choosy.’
‘Who is?’
‘Mama. She sends Thea to the functions she doesn’t want.’
Henrietta raised a brow at this news. ‘Thea as chaperone: novel idea.’
‘She enjoys it.’
‘I’m quite sure she does. Anyhow, go on.’
‘It’s Izzy’s dance in three weeks. They’re preparing the ballroom at Fulton House because the proportions are better than Park Lane.’
‘Why not Denbigh Court?’
‘Too far, and from what I gather, Archie’s household isn’t geared up for big flings. So Mama is treating Fulton House as her own and has quite taken over. Absolute mayhem, ladders everywhere.’
‘Not repainting it I hope?’
‘No fear. But the chandeliers are being cleaned, and some of the gilt needs touching up on the plasterwork. It’s to be transformed, on the night, into a flowery bower. Isabella wants garlands of jasmine or some such.’
‘Does she indeed?’
‘Every time she attends a dance she comes home with another scheme. Last night she and Thea drove to Farnham Park for Minty Harrington’s ball. Mama jibbed because they’re new money.’
‘Parvenus throw the best parties. Was it lavish?’
‘Of course. Excess was the order of the evening, apparently. The house dripping with lights and flowers, urns sculpted out of ice and filled with strawberries, that kind of thing. The grounds were lit with hundreds of blazing torches and they brought extra deer into the park to make majestic silhouettes for the benefit of departing guests. You could see the house for miles, Izzy said. Plus there were swing boats on the gravel at the front.’
‘Golly. Do tell her it’s vulgar to compete, though.’
‘Oh, well, Mama makes all the decisions anyway, and she’s constitutionally unimpressed by anything the Harringtons do.’
‘And Thea?’ Henrietta said. ‘How does she amuse herself on these occasions?’
‘Oh, well, she has to take a back seat, naturally.’
‘Not easy for her.’
‘I’ll say not. Positively painful, to play bridge with the oldsters while the youngsters frolic in the next room.’
Bridge my Aunt Fanny, thought Henrietta; if I know Thea, she’d be plucking the young men – and, perhaps, the occasional young woman – from the ballroom like sugared plums from a silver bowl. She was disappointed in Thea: two weeks in prison, and her sister-in-law was yet to visit. Granted, it was a long time since their mutual passion had cooled, but still, Henrietta had fully expected an appearance by now, if only inspired by curiosity. Not that she had been short of visitors in general: Sylvia and Emmeline had been, Eva too. Mary Dixon – released without charge that day in Downing Street – had come every day, with the result that they were beginning to run out of conversation. Henrietta had started to wonder how to shake her off. There was something dogged and desperate about the way she clutched Henrietta’s hand and kissed her on leaving; it gave Henrietta the urge, sometimes, to treat her unkindly, and at the last visit she had asked Mary to come a little less, to give them both time to think of something to say. Yesterday, out of the blue, Anna Sykes had visited – down from Yorkshire for two busy days, but still finding time to look in. She had talked brightly about her commission for the de Lisles and her waiting list of notables, and just how considerable their wait was to be as she was actually trying to spend the summer in Ardington in order to help her grumpy husband with his constituency business. Anna had not, of course, called Amos Sykes grumpy; Henrietta supplied that adjective now, as she related the encounter to Tobias.
‘Anna Sykes,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. Pretty blonde?’
‘Well there’s rather more to Anna than the colour of her hair, but yes. She married Amos Sykes – used to be one of our miners, now MP for Ardington. Loathes me.’
‘Does she? Then why did she come?’
‘Idiot. He loathes me, not she. He’s against inherited wealth and privilege. I’m just the sort of person he most dislikes in life, and it maddens him that Anna and I get on rather well. Very cross man generally, in fact.’
‘Never met a socialist who wasn’t.’
‘Tobes, you’ve never met a socialist full stop.’
‘Have, in fact. Lloyd George, at the club. Week last Wednesday.’
‘He’s Liberal, dear boy.’
‘Same difference these days. Have you heard his views? Pretty rum, I’d say.’
‘Not rum enough, in my opinion. His ideas for reform certainly don’t extend to enfranchising women.’
There was a pause in their conversation, a natural break, a perfectly comfortable hiatus, yet because of it, the sounds around them became suddenly evident: here a raucous laugh, there a hawking, phlegmy cough; at the back of the room a harsh bark of command from a warder, a snarl of assent from a prisoner and, underneath all of it, a constant, quiet, desperate sobbing from the young woman nearest to them, whose head was low to the table and whose visitor stared at her with impassive eyes. This little tableau in particular seemed to augur a hopeless, helpless immediate future, and Henrietta and Tobias suddenly and simultaneously became aware of the intrusion of awfulness, pushing its way into this innocent break in their own cheerful dialogue. It was as if they had each, for a short while, forgotten where they were, and had now reluctantly remembered: as if, waking from a pleasant dream, they found themselves back in a dire reality. And at this very moment a bell rang out, shrill and startling, telling them that the visit must end; telling them that Tobias would now return to the considerable comfort of Fulton House and that Henrietta must stay within the walls, and behind the bars, of Holloway Prison.
‘Oh God, Henry,’ Tobias said. His voice cracked and his face was once again stricken.
She hesitated on the brink of misery, collected herself, stood up. ‘It won’t be much longer, Toby,’ she said, speaking quickly and low because, after the bell, further conversation was forbidden. ‘By the time the case comes to court I shall have had four weeks in here, and the lawyers say there’ll be no further custodial sentence.’
He leaned across the table and took her face in his hands. It was a gesture of pure tenderness and concern, such as their father might have made, back in that other, simpler time when he presided over their lives. Again Henrietta fought tears; again, she conquered them. She was glad, in fact, that her father wasn’t here to witness her imprisonment. Before he’d died, she had been in the process of modernising him, thinking to bring him in line with her world and away from his own. She’d made some considerable progress; this, though, would certainly have been too much.
‘So,’ Tobias said, releasing her. ‘No Ascot, but at least you’ll be out for Cowes,’ and his voice, face and entire manner had lightened with relief.
This was so like her brother, thought Henrietta; he saw time not as a series of days or weeks, but of social milestones, events to be attended. She smiled encouragingly, although she was moving now into the stream of inmates heading through a door into the body of the prison.
‘Thea sends her love!’ he called at the last moment, just as Henrietta disappeared from view. Kind of her, she thought. Shame it isn’t true.
Tobias wasn’t sure if his sister had heard. He thought, on balance, that she probably hadn’t, which was just as well because it was a spur-of-the-moment fabrication, a well-intentioned impulse to supply the compassion that his wife seemed entirely to lack. Her unconcern troubled him more than he liked to admit, even to himself. Thea seemed to be turning the pursuit of pleasure into a vocation; her dedication to this cause was unwavering, formidable and excluding. She had always been free of care, and this cavalier spirit had once been, to Tobias, the most attractive and endearing of her qualities, for in marrying Thea, he had lost none of the privileges of bachelorhood: she made few demands of him and he made few of her. They each had liaisons, because he was not a hypocrite who expected his wife to turn a blind eye to his own affairs while indulging in none of her own. And yet, he had begun to wonder if the pair of them weren’t going too far with this freedom business; he wondered if they might have a go, instead, at mutual obligation and respect. He wondered if they might try conventionality. He wondered if they might make an heir.
He stepped through the final wooden door of the prison, out into the June sunshine, and stood for a moment, a frown of concentration on his face. How to tackle this? No point laying down the law. Thea had never warmed to instructions or edicts: quite the reverse, in fact. Perhaps she could be wooed? Once upon a time he had wooed her. He was expert at wooing: he did it all the time. Yes, he decided, he would woo his wife. And, having wooed her, he would tame their relationship into something more respectable, something less avant-garde. The thought of this, the mere idea, made the day seem brighter and more productive. There was a new spring in his step as he put Holloway Prison behind him.
His car was waiting for him on the Holloway Road.
‘Home, Your Lordship?’ said the driver.
‘Yes, Wilkinson, but via Hampstead please. There’s a flower seller on Heath Street, I think.’
‘Righto, Lord Netherwood. Who’s the lucky lady?’
Wilkinson was prone to this kind of jaunty informality. Also, he happened to know that the recipients of the earl’s floral tributes were manifold. Bouquets for actresses, nosegays for society hostesses, impromptu single roses for a beautiful girl in Regent’s Park, Hyde Park, Green Park: Wilkinson had seen it all. This did not, however, give him the right to be impertinent.
‘Drive on, Wilkinson,’ said Tobias.
Thea was at home. What’s more, she was at home alone. The Eugene phase had passed: gone almost a week, now. His oils and brushes had been snapped back into place in their wooden travelling cases and a lingering smell of turpentine was all that remained of him at Fulton House. It had been a pleasurable seduction, but ultimately pointless and though Eugene had wept for love for her, Thea had merrily tutted at his misplaced devotion. He looked like one of her spaniels, she had said, with his sad brown eyes turned upon her in that way. This had been as effective a cure for his ardour as a bucket of cold water, which is exactly what Thea had intended. She was shallow and callous, he had said. The scales had fallen from his eyes. Excellent, she had replied: so pleased you’ve wised up, now shut the door on your way out and have a good trip. She had meant it kindly. She wished him only well, though she wished him gone.
Now she was in the garden of Fulton House, on a wrought-iron kissing seat with no one to kiss. Already, she felt the lack; not of Eugene, but of the idea of him, or someone, anyone. She sighed in the sunshine, thinking of lust and its splendid capacity to banish ennui. She had found that deadheading the rose garden only exacerbated the
tedium of an empty day. She knew it was the sort of pottering activity countesses were meant to enjoy, but the trug and the secateurs lay beside her, barely used. She appreciated the garden, of course; she just had no instinct for it as an activity. In any case, they had staff for that. She gazed about her and saw perfection. This was where Daniel MacLeod used to garden before he went to Netherwood Hall, and she could see that this long narrow portion of London land bore all his hallmarks: a parterre, clipped box, borders of entirely white or entirely blue, a small canal endlessly refilling itself by means of an electric pump. Barney and Fred, protégés of Daniel, busied themselves in front of Thea, snipping at the lawn edges with long-handled shears. They kept it exactly as Daniel had, and they worked as if he was still here watching them. Thea, however, was barely aware of them. She wore a straw hat but her face was tilted up to the sun, rendering the wide brim quite pointless. Clarissa, her mother-in-law, treated sunshine the way she treated beggars and urchins: she shunned it, hid from it, turned her back on it. But Thea was a child of the great American outdoors and she preferred a light honey glow to Pierrot pallor.
She heard Tobias before she saw him. First, the ruckus of arrival through the
porte cochère
, the dying of the engine, the slamming of the motorcar doors. Next, the cheerful exchange of manly small talk, an indecipherable conversation between the earl, the chauffeur and Samuel Stallibrass, the family’s elderly coachman who had never learned to drive a motorcar but was kept on out of fondness and because, once in a blue moon, the horses and carriage were called for. Then the clip on the courtyard stones of Tobias’s new calfskin shoes – Italian, parcelled up and sent by Dickie from Italy. The footsteps were coming around the side of the house and without turning Thea called, ‘In the garden,’ and then she did turn to see Tobias, his arms spread wide with their burden of flowers, his face and torso entirely hidden by them.