The New Countess Read online

  ‘It sounds such a wonderful machine,’ she enthused. ‘A 30-horsepower, high-class, touring model, with magneto and coil ignition and a four-speed gear box, all for a mere £650.’

  ‘I would be happier to talk about the colour of my shirt,’ said Arthur, ‘or whether I sing lullabies to my children, but automobiles? These are serious matters, Miss Braintree. It is a woman’s place to sit in them and look pretty, not to understand them.’

  ‘Then please be serious,’ said Miss Braintree. ‘I have a job to do, and not much time to do it in. It seems to me that young Mr Austin is a long way ahead of you in the race.’

  ‘There is no race, only competition amongst enthusiasts,’ he said. ‘Let me give you some figures.’

  Miss Braintree was doing her best to provoke him. He must play for time. Life was moving too fast. His mother and Mr Strachan? It was an absurdity even to imagine it. But now this: equally unbelievable that respectable women should behave in this way. Don’t think about it. He needed Minnie.

  He pretended to be looking up files: moved papers around. Women were so tricky. They smiled and smiled and then they traduced you. Flora had the same talent: she had so easily bamboozled him into paying her rent on the assumption that he, Arthur, would be her sole visitor, only to find he was sharing her with another – who was it? – one’s memories for these things was so vague. A bird of some kind? Of course, Anthony Robin; Redbreast, whose fag he had been at Eton. Some nonsense about the law and the technicalities of who paid the rent for what – the solicitor had sorted all that out. But he suddenly had a terrible vision of Miss Braintree, not Flora, velvet-handcuffed, naked and smiling up at him from the bed. The bamboo bed. These were not the visions meant to assail a man trying to run an engineering business in a competitive world. Where was Minnie? Keeping the company of her children, no doubt, neglecting her husband, scorning the love of his life: the automobile. Also, suddenly, gratifyingly, he recalled Redbreast’s member: it was distinctly smaller than his own. He found himself laughing. He had soon got the better of Robin Redbreast.

  Miss Braintree was looking at him strangely. He pulled himself together.

  ‘Mr Austin rather overstates his claim,’ said Arthur, summoning up the special smile that he knew well enough made women melt and envy Minnie. ‘We have all heard of the Phaeton; Austin has a very good publicity team, perhaps even better than the one in charge of his engineering. But the Phaeton’s horsepower will only be twenty-five or thirty at best. The Jehu’s full four and three-quarter-inch bore and a five and a quarter-inch stroke yields a good thirty to thirty-five.’

  ‘But the Phaeton’s out next Spring and so cheap! And that adorable dark red! Our information is that the Jehu won’t be coming out until Christmas of next year at £800 and no mention of colour. Have you not been rather trounced in the race by young Mr Herbert Austin?’

  ‘Christmas always comes sooner than one thinks,’ said Arthur and Evelyn wrote it down in her strange squiggles and underlined it.

  ‘That makes a good headline,’ she said.

  ‘Also,’ said Arthur, ‘Mr Austin is not so very young. He has at least five years advantage over me.’ He was rather beginning to enjoy this. Most journalists were either seedy, if they came from the yellow press, or unbearably pompous if they came from The Times.

  ‘But he’s a farmer’s son,’ said Miss Braintree, ‘and went to a grammar school and you’re a Viscount and went to Eton. Has he not done rather well?’

  ‘Of course he has,’ said Arthur, adding, ‘but then I am a magnanimous fellow, you know.’

  She asked him how to spell magnanimous and he told her.

  ‘I trained at Pitman’s Secretarial College,’ she said. ‘I can do a hundred words a minute shorthand,’ she said, ‘and I can type at sixty. But long words hold one up so. It’s lovely and cool in here but so hot outside.’ Miss Braintree dabbed at her brow with a little lace handkerchief and opened a button of her shirt. Now he could see the swell of the breasts. He wondered if the nipples were pink or brown – pink, he suspected. Minnie’s tended towards brown.

  ‘I am looking for a secretary,’ he said, before he could help himself. ‘Perhaps you know someone who would suit?’

  Some plain girl, he thought, someone with bad teeth, no figure and a hairy chin, or else Heaven help me! I am a married man and have no time for frivolity. At the same time he was still a man.

  ‘From the state of your papers you certainly need one,’ she said. ‘You need someone with knowledge of automobiles,’ she said. ‘And if you want a girl they will be thin on the ground and want paying at least as much as a man. And if they have an aptitude for publicity, so necessary in the modern age, they will want even more.’

  ‘I can pay well,’ he said faintly. The bamboo bed came into his mind for no apparent reason, just a few feet away, the solid smooth thick yellow-brown legs, the curly swirls at the head of the ornate bedstead: rather like Miss Braintree’s curls. He shivered.

  ‘Personally, I would be happy to work for you,’ she said, tossing the curls. It was so hot some of them clung damply to her skin; others rioted and glittered around her skull. ‘I so want to get out of London and write a novel. I need part-time employment. I’d work for you five hours a day: the rest of the time would be my own. The accommodation here would suit me very well – just right for one person. We’d get on, I imagine.’

  ‘Yes, I do imagine, Miss Braintree,’ he said, ‘but I think it would be wiser not. Cheaper and more sensible to have an ordinary male secretary.’

  ‘Ah, cold feet already?’ she said, with another careless toss of those curls. ‘And you so go-ahead! Anthony Robin said you were a stick-in-the-mud at heart and he was right. A pity. Let me know if you change your mind.’

  ‘Anthony Robin?’ Arthur was startled. ‘What can you possibly know about Anthony Robin?’

  ‘I take the odd glass of wine at El Vino’s with him,’ said Miss Braintree, coolly. ‘He works in Fleet Street. He edits The Modern Idler. He seems very interested in your progress and not very fond of you. I wonder what you did to annoy him. He and I used to be thick as thieves, of course.’

  Thick as thieves? Did that mean what he thought it meant? Quite extraordinary. And was the past never done? This was proving a most disconcerting day, one way and another. The sooner she was out of the place the better. But she hadn’t finished.

  ‘Nowadays of course he’s as thick as thieves with your sister Rosina, but I can only imagine it’s a meeting of souls, not bodies. She’s one of his contributors, and these days I rather think he prefers the company of men, and now I come to think of it probably always did. And Rosina’s written this startling book about Australia, hasn’t she. I believe there’s quite a split in your family. Your mother threw her out of the house. I won’t write about that. I could, of course, but I won’t. I’m much too nice. Are you sure you don’t want to employ me?’

  His mother had been right. The Times was one thing: the gutter press quite another.

  ‘Quite sure, Miss Braintree,’ he said, ‘though I am sure it would be a delightful experience. As for the rest, the Dilberne view is Wellington’s publish and be damned.’

  ‘It is certainly your sister’s, my Lord,’ she said, with a certain sardonic tone in her voice, as if the form of address was worth more mockery than respect: people split into two camps, he’d noticed: those who paid too little respect, and those – by far the greater number – who fawned.

  She prepared to go. She asked him outright where the bathroom was and he told her. Most women of his acquaintance would have died rather than admit to so basic a need. But she showed no signs of mortification. Her backside stuck to her dress as she went upstairs. The fabric was thin. There was a cry of alarm from the bathroom, and she rushed out onto the landing. Her hair was dripping wet and her shirt was drenched. That too stuck to her body.

  ‘But I turned on the bath tap and water came out of the shower,’ she complained. ‘Now look!’ He went upstairs, pushi
ng past her, and found a towel and handed it to her. One did not want to be written about as ungentlemanly.

  He heard the Jehu clattering down the drive to collect her. He was glad that she was going but the clatter was something of a worry. The exhaust valve regulator might need more attention. And as the vehicle drew up there was a series of explosions, which made Miss Braintree giggle rather indelicately as she stood on the stair beside him. The sudden expansion of hot gases under high pressure made the unfortunate noise – suggesting that the silencer holes were still ragged and needed yet more smoothing. Anything which impeded the passage of escaping gases from an engine must be avoided, be that engine organic or inorganic. Back to the workshops.

  The door opened and Minnie came in.

  ‘Darling,’ she cried. ‘Little Connor took five steps on his own today. On his feet at last! Five whole steps. I thought you’d like to know.’ Her voice drained away.

  Arthur could see that the sight of Miss Braintree on the stair in her wet, all-but-transparent shirt, rubbing her curls with the towel Arthur handed her, might give Minnie the wrong impression. But surely not so great a one as to justify what his wife did next – which was to run off, get back into the Jehu and tell Reginald to drive her back to the house, leaving poor Miss Braintree to walk to the station.

  ‘Oh dear, dear me,’ she said, as she left, still giggling. ‘That was most unfortunate. I can see I’ll never be the secretary now.’

  She could take nothing seriously. He claimed pressure of work and did not offer to accompany her. He locked up, mindful of Inspector Strachan’s warnings, and went on up to the house to explain matters to Minnie.

  Minnie Runs

  30th September 1905, Dilberne Court

  Minnie ran. She pushed through the great door, not waiting for anyone to let her in, and ran. She ran through the great hall where a team of embroiderers were restoring the wall tapestries, through the ante-room with its newly restored gold-leaf ceiling, and through the chandelier room with its glittering glass, where Mr Neville directed Elsie how to lovingly wash and polish each hanging prism and globe so as to be fit for a King – as if she didn’t know. Minnie ran down a corridor which never got the sun, but builders were knocking in a new window, and another painted in three different colours to see which one was best; she ran up the steep back stairs which Isobel couldn’t do much to but paint, and the fumes still lingered, into the East Wing where Mrs Keppel and her husband George were to sleep, and into her own and Arthur’s quarters.

  She ran away from her life and into her future. She ran blindly, all else blotted out by a vision sealed into her mind and she knew she would never get rid of: the sight of Arthur on the stairs handing a towel to a near-naked girl whose hair hung loose around her shoulders. It was as if she had always had it in her mind: there was a certain relief in being able to see it so sharp and clear at last. Abandonment, loss. She flung herself upon the bed and opened her mouth as if to howl.

  But her feet were hurting, so she pushed off her little laced boots without bothering to undo the laces, using force – the right foot dealing with the left, the left the right – on to the floor where Isobel had taken away the old worn rug she loved and replaced it with a brassy one from Heal’s which didn’t suit the room one bit.

  This was why Arthur wanted the Gatehouse. To frolic with a female secretary, some snippet of a girl: no, not some snippet, some blowsy trollop with creamy shoulders. Reginald had said to her as she crouched in the Jehu on the way back to the Court.

  ‘Don’t take on so, my Lady. It doesn’t last long, with Master Arthur.’

  Was that meant to be comfort? That it was a meaningless habit. And how dare he speak to her like that? He was a servant.

  Now she was on her feet. She meant to escape, get away from this accursed place. Lily pushed the door open.

  ‘Mr Neville told me to come up to see if you were all right, Miss?’

  ‘I am leaving this house,’ she said. ‘Fetch me a suitcase.’

  ‘How big a one, your Ladyship?’

  Minnie said sharply, ‘One I can carry myself, girl,’ and Lily went off to fetch it, and no doubt to report back to Isobel first. She flung the things she needed on the bed. What did one want? A couple of skirts and dresses, some under-things, a toothbrush, soap and a towel. She wanted nothing that belonged to here. She wanted her life before Arthur back. She found her little drawstring purse – so pretty, antelope suede with a silver clasp, a present from Arthur when once they had loved each other (she would not cry, she would not) and in it two pound notes, three shillings, a sixpenny piece and two farthings. She found her cheque book, so long unused, at the bottom of a drawer where she kept her lace stockings and took it out. No. 3 Fleet Street. She was running to Rosina, of course, where else? One needed comfortable shoes if one was to run.

  When Lily came back she did not wait for proper packing; one had to run or one began to think. If she gave herself a moment the sight came back, pulsing in and out of definition. Arthur stood upon the stair, looking up at the girl as she looked down. Longing, such longing. Her heart would break. She grabbed a coat, any coat; one needed a coat to keep out the cold. She was shivering. Her lips were salt; she’d been weeping, was weeping, and didn’t know it. She ran; she ran from love and loss and the habit of endurance, she ran from the vision of Arthur and the girl upon the stair, she ran through rooms and down corridors and up stairs and past staring decorators and plumbers and servants and found herself at the nursery door. She pushed it open and Edgar and Connor were standing stiff and uncomfortable and ready to be brought down for tea. She held out her arms for them.

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ she said. ‘Nanny, get them ready.’

  But they shrank from her and little Connor opened his mouth and started to wail. She realized she had frightened them; that she must look strange. Nanny put her arms round them and stood as if guarding them against an enemy.

  ‘You leave these poor wee mites alone,’ said Nanny. ‘You wicked woman.’

  Minnie looked towards Molly at the back of the room. Wasn’t there an ally here? But Molly just shook her head. No hope.

  ‘Go now,’ said Isobel’s voice behind her. She turned, and there was her mother-in-law, her face oddly soft. ‘I know how terrible it is,’ she said. ‘Go now, come back when you can. I’ll look after them.’

  Edgar stuck out his little jaw as his father did when she had annoyed him, and little Connor hid his face in Nanny’s skirts and Minnie brushed past Isobel and ran and ran from them all. Lily was beside her and Reginald driving – Isobel said the train was not advisable – with a picture of Arthur on the stair with the girl seemingly engraved into the very glass of the Jehu windows – she would never travel in a Jehu again – all the way to No. 3 Fleet Street where the door was opened by Rosina and Rosina let her in.

  Reginald and Lily went off, presumably to Belgrave Square, where Minnie had been expected to go, but, just like Rosina, had not.

  Part 2

  What Happened Next

  …in Minnie’s Life

  Minnie marvelled at how quickly things could change. Three weeks after her flight from Dilberne Court, she stood in her stockinged feet in front of an easel and pasted up next month’s edition of the The Modern Idler.

  ‘I could spend my life doing this, and be happy,’ she thought.

  ‘Pasting-up’ was a simple matter of working out in your mind’s eye what the page would look like; making what was important bigger and what was less important smaller, cutting up typewritten columns into pieces and pasting them down with Mendine glue onto the large page sheets, getting the matching wood blocks in place, fitting it all together so it was aesthetically pleasing, and taking the finished sheets and a couple of white five-pound notes down to the Daily Mirror (where Anthony had a friend) and the typesetters could do 2,000 copies of The Modern Idler on good-quality paper in two hours using an old-fashioned flatbed. Minnie could do in three days what it took everyone else five. She just ha
d a talent, rare in women she’d been told back at art school in Chicago, for spatial arrangement. The others waved scissors around and panicked and scattered the floor with bits of screwed-up paper and blobs of glue, and took days when Minnie took hours.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ Anthony Robin said. It was a long time since anyone had said that to her. She thought she was probably in love with him. His face was all planes and angles.

  They’d put her to work straight away, ‘to stop her brooding’. She slept on the sofa the first night and after that she had a little back room of her own. She could see down to the Inner Temple church and gardens and even got a glimpse between rooftops of the river. They’d been astonisinghly nice to her. Rosina had moved out of the spare room to make room for her when she’d turned up in the middle of the night, and now Rosina shared with Diana and said it was okay by her if it stayed like that.

  People came and went all the time at No. 3: artists and writers. Conversation was lively, food came when people were hungry, not when mealtimes dictated. Rabbit pie was a favourite and the Fleet Street butcher sold blocks of pastry to go on it. Diana did the cooking when she was not cleaning up after everyone, and now Minnie could help her keep up with the secretarial work. She worked and she was welcome.

  Every now and then Anthony would emerge from his room and wander around, and if she was pasting up would stroke her head a little and turn her chin towards him and look into her eyes as if he saw her soul there, and then wander off.

  Rosina slept in late and would then go round to Longman’s in Paternoster Row to prepare her book for the printers: Minnie had begun engraving a couple of wood blocks for the illustrations: a group of thin, naked natives dancing round a fire – none of them seemed to have washed their hair, so the engraving of their tangled locks was fiddly and difficult. Minnie had not tried her hand at engraving before. Perhaps it was her true vocation. It was rather nice wielding a knife rather than a paintbrush. It made one feel more in control of one’s life. Or perhaps she just wanted to kill? Only she wasn’t like that, was she – or perhaps she was? She didn’t know who she was, and didn’t care. Here and now was good enough. Every night was a party of one kind or another, though she didn’t use the same potions that seemed so to entrance the others.