Great Historical Novels (118 page)

She was suddenly feeling more cheerful, at last, she imagined, recovering from the death of her mother, becoming accustomed to the peace and quiet of the suburbs. The children’s noses no longer ran. The necks of their shirts were not grimed with dirt after a couple of hours’ wear. Their faces had smoothed out and their cheeks glowed. The carpets were in and the builders almost gone. She had a lovely home. The streets outside were being paved and the mud would soon be under control. The street even had a name. The plates had just gone up. Hampstead Way. A few more Jewish families were known to be moving in. The local butcher had agreed to sell kosher meat, and she didn’t have to schlep the children all the way to St John’s Wood to buy it. Eric was generous with the housekeeping: if she wanted
something she asked for it and the money to do it would be there.

Her beautiful built-in wardrobes were filling up with dresses; she had a beaver coat. She had a very pleasant
shiksa
girl to live-in, so that on Saturdays the life of the household need not stop. Her husband loved her. She knew she was lucky. So her student life was behind her, and her dreams of being a famous scientist, another Marie Curie, were at an end. But how else could it have gone? A woman had to choose between children and a scientific calling. And what kind of woman would she be if she denied Eric a family?

It troubled her that Eric now so seldom went to the synagogue with her on Saturdays. Change the rituals and you weakened the faith that had kept the Jews together through the centuries. The argument, which you heard mostly from men, not women, that the rules could be relaxed, that some of the customs and rituals that went with desert life could be altered to fit in with an age of automobiles and machinery did not impress her. Sometimes she felt Eric was quite capable of denying his faith altogether, allowing himself to be subsumed into gentile society altogether. Well, she would not let that happen.

If only she had an
entrée
into High Society she need not lament the past, but could be part of a brighter life. It had to be faced that nothing about Golders Green glittered. What was the point of a beaver coat if there was nowhere to be seen wearing it? By lunchtime Naomi was feeling discontented again; she wanted to be free of the feeling that the centrifuge of life had whisked her up and flung her round and landed her abandoned on the outskirts of existence and there she would remain for ever.

When he came home that night, she waxed quite lyrical to
Eric, who looked at her with his gentle eyes and said he was doing his best. She wanted her invitation to Belgrave Square, to the charity dinner on December 17th where the Prince of Wales himself would be present. She had seen it announced in
The Times
. Eric had told her it was on its way. But he had told her the same, as she reminded him, about an invitation to a glamorous charity function that had been and gone and no invitation. Until this next invitation turned up she would not keep Eric out of her bed, which would be failing in her wifely duty, but she would take care not to enjoy it when he was.

Minnie Asserts her Rights

2 P.M. THURSDAY, 16TH NOVEMBER 1899

Minnie, presented with Rosina’s riding habit, borrowed by Grace for the occasion, expressed her admiration, for it was indeed splendid, both jaunty and exquisite, but refused to wear the skirt, and demanded jodhpurs.

‘I hope you don’t mean to sit astride,’ said Grace, aghast.

‘I most surely do,’ said Minnie. ‘Side-saddle at a gallop isn’t safe. Do you want me to break my neck and die?’ Minnie sometimes thought Grace might want exactly that. It wasn’t that she said anything at all out of turn, but the
way
Grace spoke left Minnie in no doubt but that she disapproved of her. She hoped the secrets of her past had not travelled with her. It was not impossible. ‘No, Miss Minnie,’ said Grace. ‘I want you to sit side-saddle, take the air at no more than a gentle trot, and not bring mockery down on the house of Hedleigh.’

‘Oh very well then,’ said Minnie kindly, respecting her judgement. ‘If you insist. But why are you all so frightened of bodies over here? Everybody has one!’

Grace thought, and said that when she was small a kindly family had taken her in and that when she had taken her weekly bath she’d had to do so in a sort of tent so as not to get sight of her own body, and once she had been caught peeking, and been beaten so hard she had never forgotten it. Minnie said she had been sent to a convent and the same thing had
happened to her but she could never think about bodies as the nuns thought of them, or of not using them as nature suggested.

‘When I was fifteen,’ said Minnie, ‘and on one of my father’s ranches, I stayed on a bucking steer for four whole seconds before I fell off.’

Grace looked horrified. But Minnie seized her by the hands and whirled the maid around the room, crying ‘Oh Grace, Grace, Grace, forgive me for being me. Really you know I can’t help it.’ Which did actually evoke a little smile of sympathy in Grace. However irritating the ‘Yankee’ girl was, she had the gift of saying what she felt, a rare thing in Grace’s experience. Upstairs was too refined: in the basement, the wrong side of the green baize door, all was a peculiar blend of prudery and rudery. She suffered from it too, she knew. She wasn’t like Rosina: she couldn’t loosen herself from her own background.

But Grace blenched when Minnie then told her to unpick the seams and draw out the whalebones with which the riding jacket made a mono-bosom of her chest. Grace stopped smiling. The girl seemed determined to exhibit her body as nature made it, not as garments rendered it decent. It was as though she had the instincts of a whore, but without the excuse of needing money to survive.

Riding in Rotten Row

11 A.M. SATURDAY, 18TH NOVEMBER 1899

Rotten Row was not the morass of deliquescing mud Minnie had somehow expected, but a handsome, broad, sanded thoroughfare, like an avenued racecourse, along the Knightsbridge side of Hyde Park. There had been a violent gale the night before and any last leaves had finally left the trees.

Arthur went riding in a top hat, which Minnie found rather strange. At home people used horses for getting about rather than for showing off their best clothes. They just wore flat caps to keep their heads warm or wide brimmed hats to keep the sun off. But Arthur looked good, she granted, in a top hat: the formality suited him, for on occasion he could look too boyish, spontaneous and floppy-haired for his own good. This afternoon he certainly looked like a man. For the first time she was slightly in awe of him, and when he laid an elegant grey-gloved hand on her arm and smiled, she felt gratified and flattered. Last time she’d been with him there had been engine oil beneath his nails: there probably still was, but what you didn’t see you needn’t dwell on.

Her father’s broad, reddened hands were often ingrained with dirt, no matter how her mother nagged him and oiled them. He was a cattleman and proud of it, wealthy beyond his own belief, but changed in any way because of it? No sir, not at all. Or so he presented himself. He shook hands with
presidents, but wouldn’t think of wearing gloves to do so. Her mother’s hands too were broad and big, and these days puffy as well: she thanked her own good fortune that this particular inheritance had passed her by, so that the hand that now Arthur pressed to his lips in greeting, was small, long-fingered and in all manner elegant. Minnie did not wear gloves – how could you get the feel of reins, let alone your mount, through gloves? Arthur’s were grey suede, fashionable no doubt, but would be the devil to keep clean.

Minnie felt of a sudden at a loss to know what to say to him. She had no brothers, her father was mostly too busy to be anything but remote, and she had been well chaperoned, until her sudden wild flight with Stanton. His discourse could be strange and sometimes irrational, but certainly did not amount to small talk. And in this country, she had quickly learned, polite small talk was valued. Few addressed subjects head on, from the weather to fashion, to the difference between country and town, or one country and another. Only yesterday conversation with Arthur had flowed so well: today, as it became self conscious, it faltered.

‘If you don’t know what to say to a man,’ Tessa had told Minnie often enough, ‘ask him a question. Then they can feel less of an eejit than you because they know the answer. Just don’t ask him something he doesn’t know. He’ll hate you for it.’ Minnie took the risk.

‘Why is it called Rotten Row,’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter with it?’

Arthur raised his eyebrows and complained that she was a stranger from a strange land – which in this country seemed something of an insult – and she replied that from where she sat in her saddle his land was a lot stranger than hers. It’s just older, he said, a lot older. Rotten Row had been named Route
du Roi two hundred years ago when William of Orange had it cleared and lit as a safe route for him to get to Whitehall, and vulgar tongues had reduced it to a crude phonetic parody in the intervening years.

‘That was back when your land was still inhabited only by buffaloes and Red Indians,’ he remarked, and she didn’t bother to deny it, wondering why he seemed so set on condescending to her about her supposedly ‘colonial’ character. She had an intuition that perhaps something had happened since she last saw him to change his mind about her desirability. What, though? Or perhaps he was just tired.

Arthur was in truth feeling a little exhausted. He had been staying up late in the garage seeing to the Jehu’s new condenser, which was to his own design. This had involved borrowing a set of blacksmith’s tools from the stables – forge, anvil, grinding machine, drills, ratchets, files and so on. He had only stopped for outings to Flora, sometimes accompanied by Redbreast, sometimes not. Today he was still slightly dazed by last night’s encounter, but on the other hand invigorated by a world full of new possibilities, new excitements. Marriage to Minnie was still desirable, but only if it did not mean giving up Flora. His bride, for her part, would have to come to accept the unspoken mores and imperatives of the well-born English. He would behave honourably towards Minnie, of course he would; she would provide the Hedleighs not just with a new heir to carry on their name and create a new Dilberne, and fresh generations of children out of new breeding stock, but the life of his senses would remain his own. Intimacy with Minnie would be to do with the procreation of children, as the Church decreed, and a higher and better thing set apart.

Arthur could see that he should perhaps bring the subject up – as the Prince of Wales, to all accounts, had brought it up
with Princess Alexandra before their marriage – out of simple respect for Minnie’s intelligence, but now was hardly the time. He had too recently been in Flora’s bed to think clearly, let alone to work out how best to introduce the subject tactfully. Perhaps a mention of the Princess’s acceptance, indeed friendship, with some of her husband’s mistresses, would work well? He had an idea that the Americans, for all their apparent frankness and vulgarity, were more Mrs Grundyish, more prone to moral disapproval, than was reasonable. But there was plenty of time before he had to deal with that.

He gasped a little as the silk of his shirt caught his shoulders where Flora’s nails had torn the skin. The pain was pleasure as well. These were worlds far beyond Minnie’s comprehension. He thought perhaps he could go back and see Flora in the evening. On the other hand a short sleep would be extremely restorative.

‘You must understand that you are perfectly at liberty to change your mind about our getting married,’ she was saying. ‘I found our conversation the other day most exhilarating, and very un-American, and I will never forget it, but we may not have been in our right minds.’

He liked the way she spoke to him in this direct manner. He said he was as sane today as he had been two weeks ago, or was ever likely to be, and they would carry on the courtship as planned, and then announce it in a month or two. And he was pleased when she dimpled and looked happy. Flora had all kind of expressions, but a straightforward look of happiness did not seem to be amongst them. When you offered her money the look of lasciviousness would increase and the aggrieved air decrease, and her limbs arrange themselves perhaps in a more accessible way, but it was not happiness for its own sake.

Minnie was looking very neat and chaste, he thought, in her perky little bowler, and perfectly suitable for a Dilberne wife. He would have to settle down one day and good wife material was hard to come by. She seemed efficient, competent and clear-headed, qualities which were necessary for her part in running the estate. He was rather vague as to what his mother actually contributed to the running of the estate, other than she paid visits to villagers, kept an eye on the sick and afflicted, and had started a school. Another reason, he suspected, why Isobel preferred life in Belgrave Square to that at Dilberne Court. Country life could be quite tedious for a woman, especially if she were not keen on horses, as his mother was not, and did not hunt. He was glad to see that Minnie was good on a horse. He had arranged a quiet mount for her.

As for Minnie, she realized that away from the constraints of everyday life, it seemed a girl could develop a great recklessness. What was she doing? This was not how most respectable courtships proceeded, slowly and cautiously. But she certainly did not want to go back to Chicago where Stanton lived with his wife, and she, Minnie, was an object of scandal. Even her new art teacher at the Chicago Institute, who had encouraged her, and talked so much of free love and the life force, had begun to look her up and down in a most speculative way, and wanted to paint her in the nude, so she had felt obliged to stop attending. She might as well have had a scarlet letter ‘A’ painted on her forehead.

The art schools in London actually encouraged women to paint and make it their profession; best to choose this perfectly amiable young man, whom she really rather liked, and her mother approved, and her father would if her mother told him to, and be done with it. She would end up with a title and no doubt a big wedding, even if not in Westminster Abbey – where
she’d heard only royalty could marry – and have better-trained servants than they ever had in Chicago, and the fashions in London were so much better than at home. And the food over here – the Brown’s breakfast was a joy, and the dinner at Pagani’s had a
finesse
she’d never encountered anywhere: even in the new Silversmith’s in Chicago the steaks were thick and bloody and the size of a plate, with sauerkraut on the side. And here in England there was culture. Everything had its history; even a riding track called Rotten Row was once a king’s back yard. Her children would be part of all this, not of the mean, lace-curtain culture of the Irish in America. And she could study at the Royal Academy, or at the Slade. The Dilbernes would hardly object to that. And Paris would not be so far away.