The New Countess Read online

  ‘I married a man whom everyone spoke ill of but whom I loved,’ said Rosina, briskly. ‘He was bitten by a brown snake and died of the bite, rather quickly and horribly, which was most distressing to me and everyone on the station. But that was eighteen months ago, and as for being a widow, I do not define myself in terms of my marital status. No sensible woman does. I inherited the station, all forty thousand acres of it, and with the advent of a passable road from Geraldton to Perth land prices have soared, as has that of the wheat which we produce. If I wanted to sell I could, and even as it is I shall never need a penny from you and Pater, Mama, for the rest of my life.’

  ‘And do you then plan to sell?’ asked Isobel. ‘A pity you didn’t see fit to give us more information or more warning as to your return. Let alone your departure from these shores.’ Isobel spoke a little acidly. She could not help herself. Her daughter’s sudden marriage had given rise to a good deal of gossip. Rosina was known to have spent a night with her suitor in the Savoy before even announcing her engagement. Word had got round. Society turned out not as forward thinking as many had supposed. Isobel had been cut dead once or twice. These things got forgotten but Isobel had spent a disagreeable year. Since the Prince of Wales had become King, free love had become unfashionable. Mrs Keppel was still seen out and about with His Majesty, but no longer took his arm in public. And now she, Isobel, was expected to receive Mrs Keppel, and Rosina wore no wedding ring. Scandal could be so easily revived.

  Pappagallo the parrot, seeming to feel tension in the air, stirred on Rosina’s shoulder, cleared its throat rather horribly, and then spoke. ‘Too right, mate. Too right,’ it squawked, fluttered to adjust its position, and left a grey splash on the white Aubusson rug Isobel had recently chosen with Minnie at Maples. Isobel kept her composure, though she rang at once for Mary the parlourmaid. If it was quickly removed it would do less damage.

  ‘I am in two minds about selling,’ said Rosina, when order was restored. Mother and daughter waited in vain for Robert to return for lunch, as he had sent a message to say he would. Rosina rather remarkably asked the kitchen to send up steak and a fried egg for lunch ‘to remind her of home’. Isobel picked at a cheese omelette when finally they gave up waiting for Robert and lunch was served.

  ‘I find outback life quite appealing, if rather hot and full of quite dangerous creepy-crawlies,’ she told her mother, ‘but it is quite fun telling other people what to do, sending them here and there to do as one decides. It is almost like being a man.’

  ‘I thought Australia was all desert,’ said Isobel, who was trying to absorb what she felt was too much information, too unambiguously passed on, and still keep her equanimity. It was evidently Rosina, but a Rosina who had become quite the foreigner in her absence; even her vowels had a drawling quality, no longer clipped and authoritative, and her sentences, though well-constructed, rose in pitch at their end as though to cheer rather than command the listener. But yet she was speaking with Robert’s eloquence.

  If only Rosina had been born a boy how much better off everyone would have been. Rosina as, say, Roland Earl of Dilberne would have quite enjoyed managing the estate. As it was, it was becoming clear that Arthur’s heart was not in the land. All his energy and emotion was spent on the development of smelly, noisy, expensive engines for the road, when it would have been better spent on new ways of farming, the breeding of dairy cattle, or even the development of an automobile plough, which was now much talked of. She had been very glad when he married Minnie and ceased being an idle young man and ‘found his interest’, but the interest now seemed to dominate his life. He had none of his father’s knack of easy approach. Which Rosina seemed to have developed in good measure, seeming to have no reticence at all. Steak and fried egg! One had these children, and one was never free of concern, both for them, and about them. It was too bad.

  Rosina explained that though most of Australia was desert-like, hot, dry and for the most part unpopulated, it was so vast anything could happen. There were pockets of great fertility wherever there was water. She herself farmed wheat and lupins, very productively, on a farm called Wandanooka in the Nyoobgah tribal areas.

  Oh yes. My daughter in Nyoobgah. Where, your Ladyship? Oh, you must know. Her Wandanooka estate! Everyone knows the delights of Wandanooka! My little grandchildren Nyoob and Gah simply love it there.

  Isobel felt she was on the brink of hysteria. Rosina sat with her legs plonked apart as if she were Long John Silver, a man with a parrot perched on his shoulder, digesting steak and fried egg. Her daughter, quite unchaperoned, a widow, said she was developing a dairy farm and a ‘training school for the black fellas’, where she was ‘teaching basic literacy and good farming practice’. The aboriginals were apparently nomadic within their tribal areas, but when there was a purpose to it they would settle in one place.

  ‘If it’s so very pleasant, why have you left?’ Isobel asked.

  ‘I’ve finished the book. Seebohm Rowntree has read it and thought well of it and wrote to Longman’s the publishers to recommend it. I took it round to them yesterday. If the book’s a success I daresay I will stay in London and be a literary person: if I find I am wasting my time I will go back to Wandanooka.’

  ‘How nice, dear,’ she said. ‘Is what you’re writing a novel? I hope it is nothing to embarrass your father.’

  ‘It is about the marital customs of the aboriginals. Well, hardly marital; let’s say sexual. We in Europe have a lot to learn. A man can have up to ten wives and treat his child as his wife but must never speak to his mother-in-law. I compare it with the equally irrational practices of Sussex villagers. Do you know about bundling, Mama? It is very commonplace in Sussex.’

  ‘I do not,’ said Isobel grimly. ‘Write what you will, but please, not under the family name Hedleigh. Have some mercy on your father, please.’

  ‘Father doesn’t notice anything I do,’ said Rosina, ‘I hadn’t seen him for over three years and he couldn’t be bothered to welcome me home. It was nice of Minnie to come.’

  ‘He would have come if he could,’ said Isobel, ‘and so would I. The Russian business has flared up again. Odessa is in revolt: the Foreign Office has to give an opinion and your father is needed to help form it. He has become quite a force in politics in your absence. You should be very proud of him.’

  ‘Father was always extremely good at being elsewhere when required,’ said Rosina. ‘The gambling den or the bookmaker or the company of some Duchess always tempted him away. How you put up with it for so long I cannot imagine. At least my aboriginals can see what’s going on under their funny flat noses.’

  Isobel wished her daughter well, but just not in this room now. Enough was enough. She suffered a spasm of rage. She felt it rise in her loins, tauten her stomach, tighten her chest, constrict her throat and heard it burst from her mouth in a low, hard pitch, as if she was spitting out a lump of coal.

  ‘Go back where you came from!’ Once it was out Isobel felt better. There had been some blockage, she realized, now released, caused by decades of never saying what she wanted to say.

  ‘But of course, my dear,’ she added quickly, moderating what had been so intemperately said, and even managing a little light laugh, ‘this is exactly where you do come from.

  This is your home.’

  In turn Rosina’s hostility seemed to ebb away, like molten iron cooling as it drained from a cauldron. Her legs closed, her shoulders drooped, her chin dropped, her mouth worked; she sobbed – great gulping sobs – and tears ran down her poor sunburned cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  She wept loudly and unreservedly, like a servant, and Mary quickly packed up her brush and basin of soapy water and disappeared from the room. At least, thought Isobel, my servants, unlike my children, know how to behave.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mama, I am,’ Rosina wailed. ‘I don’t mean to be horrid. I’ve had such a terrible time, Frank dying so awfully and only me and him for hundreds of miles. You’ve no i
dea. He was a really good man but he had very strange habits. He’d have never left me up the duff the way he did it, for all he tried. He just wouldn’t listen. Do you understand?’ Isobel, gently reared, didn’t. ‘And it was a terrible voyage back; I travelled steerage. I don’t see just because I’m so rich I should be more comfortable than anyone else, but people kept vomiting all over me and when finally I got off the bloody boat I took one look at Reginald and Minnie and couldn’t face coming back here. I knew you’d be cross. I try so hard to be brave and not to care about anything but then I just go to pieces like this. Mama, I’m just so tired and upset.’

  Isobel allowed herself to be embraced but remained stiff.

  ‘Oh please, I’ve said I’m sorry. Please.’

  Isobel allowed herself to soften a little. Rosina hugged her tighter and snivelled and gulped and quietened.

  ‘But this book of yours simply won’t do, Rosina. You know that.’

  It was Rosina’s turn to stiffen.

  ‘I am the book, Mama. I can hardly not publish it. It’s the truth, that’s all. We have to be able to face the truth.’

  ‘I don’t see the virtue of rubbing people’s noses in what is distasteful. And truth is no good at all for the populace, as your father well knows. They don’t have the wit to make sense of it. The whole art of government lies in the distortion of facts in the interests of the nation as a whole. You’re simply overtired and need a good rest in the country, some food other than steak and eggs, and to keep out of the sun. You must go down to Dilberne.’

  ‘Very well, Mama.’

  ‘And now you must go to your old room – I have had it opened up for you, and you must lie down and have a little sleep and recover your composure. And then you can go home and be with Minnie.’

  Rosina went, meekly, and Isobel was much relieved.

  Ah, Minnie, thought Rosina, as she composed herself to sleep in the room where she had spent so much of her childhood. (Pappagallo flew without questioning to his old perch. Parrots had very good memories.) Of all her family she was perhaps fondest of Minnie; it had been good to see her, even if briefly, on the dockside at Tilbury. It was just the crushing weight of what lay behind her, the complexity, the formality, the implicit reproaches, that had made her take to her heels and flee. But the previous evening, when they had been well into the absinthe, there had been a rather strange scene, which made her wonder if she had fled from a frying pan into a fire. Anthony had remarked that Minnie seemed to be a very sweet and pretty girl, and no doubt a kind mother, but unawakened. She was the kind of girl to whom you would be doing a kindness by teaching her a thing or two before sending her back to her husband.

  ‘Oh Redbreast!’ Diana had exclaimed, seeming to take unwarranted offence, and had hit Anthony on the arm and told him not to be so ghastly. He’d got her in an armlock and made her cry. Rosina had then got Anthony in a headlock but he’d hooked her leg and brought her down on the carpet and stood over her with his foot planted in her stomach. She’d wondered what was going to happen next, and no doubt would have happened in some native encampment back home in Western Australia. But this was Fleet Street round the corner from Paternoster Row and nothing happened, at least then.

  Anthony just laughed as Rosina squirmed beneath him – she had landed on her hip – and said bluestockings were not his style, being ‘too judgemental’: he only liked silly girls, and then not much, and helped her up. They had all drunk too much, of course. She, Rosina, had become accustomed to the alcohol of the Nyoobgah, fermented gum tree sap and wild honey, which rendered those who drank it friendly, not mad. The episode had all been so sudden, oddly disturbing and upsetting.

  Lunch with a Publisher

  30th June 1905, Fleet Street

  At around twelve noon, as Rosina slept in Belgrave Square, the doorbell jangled at No. 3 Fleet Street and Anthony Robin opened the door to William Brown from Longman’s the publishers. Brown had had a brisk walk down the hill from No. 39 Paternoster Row and had the alert and cheerful air of a man who was not afraid of exercise; his knock on the door was convincing and brooked no argument, as befitted a partner in a prestigious publishing business that had brought the works of the greatest and best writers to the attention of the public for two centuries. Even Anthony was slightly awed: for the publisher of The Modern Idler, a small imprint which dealt in large part with the stories, poems and essays of the young and untried, a personal visit from a publisher of Longman’s status was full of promise. Someone, something, in the magazine had caught their attention.

  It had been at Diana’s insistence that he had taken Rosina and her manuscript round to Longman’s in the shadow of St Paul’s the previous day. Finding Mr William Brown out – what had Diana expected? – they had left the manuscript with a young man at the reception desk and departed. Anthony had assumed it was an improbable mission: he had glanced through the manuscript of The Sexual Manners and Traditions of Australian Aboriginals and assumed it was unpublishable – too long, too untidy, badly-typed, written by a woman, and with almost more numbers on the page than words. A publisher such as Longman’s was hardly going to be interested in the louche habits of savages. But Diana had persisted, and he liked Rosina: she was quite the opposite of her brother, a natural socialist with a lively mind – though people had stared slightly as they walked up the hill to St Paul’s. Gentlewomen – and she obviously was one – did not go about the streets wearing neither hat nor gloves; let alone with bare ankles showing, no matter how hot the day.

  But here was Mr Brown on Anthony’s turf asking if he could speak to Miss Rosina Hedleigh. Anthony told him she had been staying overnight but had now gone home to her parents in Belgrave Square.

  ‘The Earl and Countess of Dilberne,’ Anthony added. People might as well know where they stood.

  ‘Sister to the Motoring Viscount then?’ asked Mr Brown. ‘An interesting family. It obviously has talent. Perhaps he could be induced to write a guide to motoring.’

  ‘It would hardly be literature,’ said Anthony. He was conscious of still being in his dressing gown, albeit one bought at some expense from Henry Poole, in rather elegant grey and black stripes.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Mr Brown. ‘But today’s readers want nothing more than to read about the motor car which is transforming all our lives. Anyhow, I read Miss Hedleigh’s manuscript overnight. I find it admirably written, and excellently researched.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Anthony. ‘So you mean to make her an offer?’

  ‘I do,’ said Mr Brown, ‘and I thought it would be preferable to do so in person. Readers these days are fascinated by other lands and other customs, especially if they are of an intimate nature. I understand Miss Hedleigh prefers not to be known by her married name. Since she gives this address am I to understand that she is perhaps under your guardianship?’

  Mr Brown stood hesitating on the step. An admirable figure, Anthony thought, in spite of wanting the upstart Viscount to write him a book on motoring. He was wearing an American-style, single-breasted, cutaway frock-coat in grey tweed, fetchingly tailored to allow an agreeable amount of bleached linen shirt to show, its creaminess smartly punctuated with a narrow red tie with a very small knot. His trousers were of the new loose style. The lot was topped by a shiny light-brown bowler with a curly brim. Anthony’s impulse was to ask him where he had acquired the suit – Savile Row normally provided only the most conservative of suiting – but since he himself, after a hard night’s carousing, was still in his dressing gown and rather the worse for wear, he desisted. But he asked Mr Brown in.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you can safely infer that.’

  To his credit William Brown did not blench at the full sight of Anthony’s déshabille and bare feet, nor at the sight of Diana, who, though at least up and dressed, had a broom in her hand and was surrounded by packing cases and furniture. Anthony quickly introduced Diana as his sister, aware that appearances might be misleading.

  ‘I am glad Miss Hedleigh fi
nds herself amongst literary friends. And so these are the new premises of the The Modern Idler,’ Brown said, rifling amongst the confusion of papers on various surfaces with such assurance Anthony could not object. ‘You have taken over from Jerome, I understand.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Anthony. ‘The Modern is a mere offshoot while the Idler itself lies fallow.’

  ‘I had heard,’ said Brown. ‘Jerome Jerome has left the gentle slopes of humour and taken to religion. It’s rather ill-advised of him, but don’t cite me as saying so. He is writing some play, I believe, about the presence of Jesus amongst us.’

  ‘The interest now is less in the Christian God and more in the esoteric,’ observed Anthony. ‘We seem to crave a return to the reign of many gods rather than just the one.’

  ‘Ward Lock is certainly doing tremendously well with Haggard’s Ayesha,’ said Brown. ‘We at Longman take that rather badly – we’ve published so many of the Haggard stories from the Idler. And the Kipling. Of course he’s in a different league.’

  ‘I nearly took Rosina round to Ward Lock at Salisbury Square,’ said Anthony, ‘but you were nearer.’

  ‘Oh Anthony!’ came a little wail of protest from Diana, quickly curbed by a look from her brother.

  ‘Well,’ said William Brown, ‘if anything else interesting turns up in your post, do remember us at Longman. Minor talents can blossom into major with a little help from a good publisher.’

  ‘Or indeed a good editor,’ said Anthony, and Mr Brown suggested that they all go down and lunch peacefully at the recently renovated Simpson’s in the Strand and continue this most stimulating conversation. He would pay.

  ‘Ooh yes!’ said Diana. The last few days of life without servants had been tolerable, except for the way food did not automatically appear at set intervals, but had to be bought and cooked before it could be served – where was the time for an educated woman to think about art, literature and politics, let alone be involved, even if you weren’t your brother’s dogsbody. The socialist principle of doing away with the servant class was all very well for the men who espoused it, but, she agreed with Rosina, women who looked forward to a servant-less world were out of their minds.