Next to her, her mother was talking about her new girl, Jennifer, who painted for her with William. ‘Such a talent,’ Anna said. ‘Her family are potters, from Burslem,’ and Amos said, ‘Ah, one of t’five towns. Very interesting union ’istory in Staffordshire.’ Maya glanced at her mother, who winked at her, and seeing this Amos said, ‘I’m only saying. Carry on,’ but Anna said she’d finished, really, and if Amos wanted to tell them about unionisation of the potteries they were all ears. Amos said, in a voice that showed he was sorry, ‘Tell me some more about this Jennifer girl,’ so Anna did, and Amos listened without interrupting.
Under the table the grass was worn by peoples’ feet, and there were cigarette ends, some of them quite long: certainly long enough to re-light and smoke. Not that Maya would do such a thing; she simply wondered why, if people liked the taste of smoke and tobacco, they wasted such a lot of it. Then, suddenly and quite out of the blue, she remembered the invitation.
‘Dad,’ she said. Amos was speaking again now, recounting a tale about a market stall near Cheapside that sold chamber pots with an image of Mr Asquith’s face on the inside, and Anna, who was laughing, said, ‘Don’t interrupt, sweetheart,’ but Amos stopped and smiled. ‘No,’ he said to Maya, ‘You’re all right, go on.’
‘We’ve been asked if we’d like to sail to Cowes on Lady Henrietta Hoyland’s boat,’ Maya said in a voice that gave away just how much of an honour she felt this to be. But instead of answering her Amos just looked at Anna, and no one said anything at all.
Norah was in the parlour with her feet – still shod – up on the ottoman when they walked in. She leapt up like a scalded cat and, for once, was stumped for something to say. Maya, a great one for propriety, raised her eyebrows but Anna didn’t seem to notice.
Not even a hello, thought Norah, switching instantly from the fear that she might have given offence to being mightily offended herself. She began to bustle pointlessly round the room, lifting and replacing objects, trying to look occupied.
‘Are you back now, then?’ she said. She sounded peevish, as if she never knew where she was with all this coming and going.
‘For the time being, yes,’ Anna said. She put down her suitcase and said, ‘Will you unpack please, Norah? The garments that need to be washed are at the bottom,’ and then left the room. Norah looked at Maya, who was standing like a lost soul, still hanging on to her bag, and said, ‘Is your daddy not with you’se?’
Maya shook her head, and her brown eyes filled with tears.
‘I think he’s angry with me,’ she said with a tragic expression. ‘He said he had some business at New Mill, but I don’t think he does. I just think he doesn’t want to be here.’ Tears rolled freely now down her face and Norah, overwhelmed with sympathy and love, wrapped her arms about the girl so that she knew she wasn’t alone.
‘Now, child, your daddy loves you more than the king loves mustard, and you know how much the king loves mustard, don’t you?’
It was a book they’d read together lots of times, about a king whose kingdom ran out of condiments. Maya nodded into Norah’s soft bosom and sniffed.
‘Wipe your nose on my pinny,’ Norah said. ‘No one’s looking, and the Good Lord knows I’ve done it myself plenty.’
She stood there holding Maya for a long while, and let the child be. It was all well and good, thought Norah, having grand, important, busy lives, but sometimes all a wain needed was to stand still and be loved.
‘Will I make a brew for you missus?’
It was much later, and the gas lamp that stood on the street, directly outside the house, filled the parlour with a diffuse and greenish glow.
‘No, thank you Norah,’ Anna said. She was sitting on the couch with a pile of letters on her lap, though how she could read anything in the gloaming was a mystery to Norah.
‘Will I light the lamps for you then, missus?’
‘I suppose so,’ Anna said, as if it was of no interest whatsoever.
Norah moved around the parlour, putting on the gas and lighting the wall lamps, cheering up the room. ‘Do you know the poem about the street lamp, missus?’ she said to fill the wretched silence. ‘For we are very lucky with a lamp before the door?’
‘And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more.’
‘There, that’s an improvement,’ Norah said as the last lamp glowed into life. ‘Well, I always thought it a stroke of luck myself, to be lit from the outside as well as in. But you can’t be managing with only a street lamp if you’ve letters to read.’ She nodded down at the stack on Anna’s lap, desperate to know who they were from, and – uncharacteristically – not quite bold enough to ask.
‘Oh these,’ Anna said. ‘They’re old ones, from my friend in Jamaica.’
‘Old ones is it?’
Anna nodded; quiet as a clam, thought Norah.
‘Can I get anything at all for you, missus?’ She was reluctant to leave her, looking so small and sad and lonely. Anna shook her head. ‘Nothing, thank you.’
‘Is the mister coming home, missus?’
Anna looked at her. ‘That’ll do, thank you Norah.’
So the maid retreated, but as she climbed the stairs she heard his boots on the steps outside and heard his key turn in the lock, so instead of continuing on up to her attic room she stood in the shadows of the first-floor landing and listened to their voices. Norah had never seen the harm in eavesdropping; she did it at every opportunity. Now, though, it seemed almost a question of duty. If no one would tell her what the bejesus was going on, she had no option but to find out for herself. She quietened her breathing and held herself still, and tuned in her ears to snatches of a conversation that sounded bitter and resentful, and altogether bleak.
T
he king’s yacht had dropped anchor off the south railway jetty at Portsmouth Harbour, and out at sea the entire Northern Fleet of the British Navy was assembling for the Spithead Review. Aboard the
Lady Isabella
there was a general, pleasing sense of being in the right place at the right time. Tobias was on deck with
The Times
spread out before him, pinned down against the breeze with four brass weights he had pinched from the galley.
‘This is simply fascinating,’ he said. ‘Thea, look.’
She had been recumbent on a jauntily striped deck chair, but she obliged him by clambering out – there was no elegant way to exit a low-slung canvas chair – and wandering over to look down at the newspaper. She cocked her head and squinted at the complex chart he was poring over. ‘What on earth?’ she said.
‘It’s a plan of the ships’ positions,’ he said. ‘See? Twenty-four battleships, sixteen armoured cruisers, forty-eight destroyers and so on and so forth. Here, you see, are the flagships –
Dreadnought
,
Indomitable
,
Inflexible
and
Invincible
.’
‘Indomitable and inflexible: that reminds me, what time does your mother expect us?’
She waited for him to laugh, but he was intent on reading the tiny names attributed to the ships and hadn’t heard. For a confirmed landlubber, Tobias seemed extremely committed to the details of ocean life, thought Thea. But then, her husband was a man of readily adopted enthusiasms. She admired this about him; it helped bring out the enthusiast in her. Too many people of their acquaintance believed it the height of sophistication to display ineffable ennui, as if they were so boundlessly privileged, so limitlessly wealthy, that everything in life that should be seen or done
had
been seen or done, and now they were simply having to do it all again. Thea recognised in herself the tendency to fall in with this fashionable affectation, when, in fact, one could always find something interesting to do if one would only drop the pretence of world-weariness.
Granted, what Thea found interesting was not always within the parameters of acceptability and usually involved sex. Out of sheer curiosity she had made passionate love repeatedly to Henrietta in the weeks up to and after her marriage to Tobias, until Henrietta discovered an enthusiasm of her own and cooled off the affair. Then, during the Eugene Weeks – which is how she thought of that period: capitalised, like Cowes Week or the Boer War – she had filled her days with either sex or the pursuit of sex, which had been interesting but fundamentally unrewarding: a sort of gluttony, a greed for something that was in any case too readily available. Eugene Stiller might have been an almost-renowned artist, but still, his remarkable capacity for gaining and maintaining an erection was far and away his most fascinating characteristic. Dropping Eugene had been terribly easy for Thea, because London was full of erections, if that was all one wanted. She had turned back to Tobias in the end because he was more fun than most. He came up with schemes and followed them through. He didn’t trail doe-eyed behind her, waiting for crumbs from her plate. He was always up for a romp in the sack – or anywhere else, for that matter – but it wasn’t his only form of diversion. He looked up now from his chart, and the sunlight on his reddish hair made him appear gilded. He smiled. She hoped, not for the first time, that the baby was his. Certainly, she would make sure the next one was.
‘It’ll be a sort of naval ballet spectacular,’ he said. ‘A hundred and fifty vessels across eighteen nautical miles. Let the kaiser stick that in his pipe and smoke it.’
‘Is that what it’s all about? Sabre rattling?’
‘More or less, yes. We’re very good at showing off, here in the British Isles. All these naval vessels on display and not a single one has had to be recalled from our foreign outposts; we’re magnificent. Wilhelm will be spitting with fury.’
‘Poor little kaiser,’ Thea said. ‘He seems a very striving sort of man.’
‘He is. It’s the withered arm and the Hohenzollern personality defect,’ Tobias said. ‘Quite bonkers.’
Thea raised her eyebrows. ‘We don’t see it in Uli, do we?’
‘Not yet,’ he said, and crossed his eyes. She laughed.
‘It’s all such a game,’ she said, looking again at the parallel lines of the fleet depicted in the illustration. ‘Keeping Ahead of the Kaiser.’
‘He’s a sneaky cove, though. Never quite know what he’s up to. He’s put the wind up the Admiralty, who’ve heard he’s building more warships than he says he is. That’s why we have to build more ourselves, y’see. Up the ante.’
‘How silly,’ Thea said. ‘Who’s counting anyway?’
‘Oh, well, best to stay on top if we possibly can. He built the fastest yacht in the world, did Wilhelm. Spent four and a half million marks on it, just so he could beat his uncle at Cowes, which he did the very next year. Put Bertie right off racing. He packed it in after that, if I recall.’
‘How like the king,’ Thea said. ‘So petulant. He shouldn’t expect to win all the time.’
Tobias, no ardent fan of Edward’s, nevertheless felt the need to defend him since Thea was, after all, American. ‘It isn’t that he’s a bad loser,’ he said. ‘Rather, that the kaiser is such a frightful bore about his victories. Takes all the fun out of the race.’
There was a breeze across the harbour, and Thea pulled her shawl tighter around her narrow shoulders. Tobias, all concern, moved over to her at once and, positioning himself behind her at the rails, wrapped his arms around her and laced his hands across the subtle bump of her belly. He lowered his head and she felt his breath in her hair.
‘I’ll keep you both warm,’ he said into her neck, and she experienced the familiar, liquid rush of desire that the onset of pregnancy had done nothing to diminish. She arched her back and pressed herself into his groin, and felt, immediately, his response to the pressure.
A discreet cough alerted them to the arrival on deck of a third party. Parkinson allowed them precisely long enough to appear respectable before approaching with a silver salver balanced on the flat of his white-gloved hand.
‘Mrs Pickersgill has sent hot beef tea,’ he said, feeling at once the superfluity of the gesture. The countess smiled a little archly for his tastes and said, ‘How kind of her, and how timely. Darling,’ she said, turning to the earl, ‘I can manage without you now I have beef tea.’
The butler blushed and placed the tray on the nearest flat surface. At Netherwood Hall he would never dream of seeking out the earl and countess to offer them unasked-for hot drinks, but here on board what he now had to accept was the family yacht, the usual rules seemed not to apply. As Sarah Pickersgill delighted in telling him, he was all at sea. The beef tea had been entirely her idea; he should never have listened to her. Still, he thought, the countess was sipping at her drink now, and looking contentedly across the choppy greyish-green waters towards the open sea, and the earl had given him a friendly nod by way of dismissal, so perhaps it hadn’t been too great a blunder. His personal pride was all but restored, when the boatswain shouted at him for leaving the salver and the silver pot on a case that contained life jackets and must never on any account be obstructed. With pink cheeks Parkinson retrieved the tray and beat a retreat below deck. If he was sharper than usual with Sarah that afternoon, she had – he felt – only herself to blame.
Anna had arranged to spend two days and three nights in Cowes. This did not, she believed, seem excessively indulgent, or suggest that she went with any intention of damaging her husband’s political career. She and Maya would travel alone – on the public rail network, and without Miss Cargill – and rather than stay on the Hoyland yacht she had rented rooms in a small house in old Cowes. This demonstrated an appropriately modest spirit, as well as an independent one. Together she and Maya would explore the town, watch a few races and experience something utterly new and exciting. Anna would collect ideas for future commissions; Maya would collect memories. No harm was meant, and none would be done. If Amos wished to come too he would be very welcome. She expressed all of this in a letter, which she sent to him at Bedford Square, where he was currently staying. If she declined Lady Henrietta’s invitation, she wrote, it would be entirely because his will had subjugated her own. If she didn’t go, she didn’t think she would ever be able to forgive him for this.