The New Countess Read online

  Last night everyone had only unmade beds to get into. So no one could be bothered to do so, and had settled down after a night of absinthe drinking – and for Anthony and Rosina some nameless white powder – to sleep in their clothes on armchairs and sofas. Diana hoped Rosina was getting on well with her parents, fearing that after such a night she might be at her contentious worst. But it was wonderful news about the book, though dreadful the way Anthony had told lies – Ward Lock had not yet been even considered let alone approached – and she supposed Anthony might now try and get the work himself to serialize in The Modern Idler; she would have to caution Rosina against it. In the meanwhile she was hungry. Lunch at Simpson’s with its rich red beef, starched white tablecloths and attentive waiters sounded very inviting indeed.

  And William Brown was most agreeable, thought Diana, if something of a dandy and given to waving his hands about, and was currently re-publishing Oscar Wilde’s response to Henry James’ essay on the Art of Fiction. One could possibly marry such a man and not share a bed with him by mutual consent but no doubt there were other ways in which he would be trying. There would be no room in the wardrobes, for one thing.

  It took her five minutes to comb her hair, find a fresh blouse – she had found a Chinese laundry round the corner – put on gloves and a hat, and make herself respectable enough – just – for Simpson’s in the Strand. Anthony took longer but looked agreeably artistic when he finally emerged, with almost as much white shirt as Mr Brown on display, the new baggy trousers and some very fetching two-tone shoes in cream and beige with brown ribbon laces.

  She was hungry and since it was Friday chose a lemon sole after her mushroom soup, while Anthony and William had the roast beef after oysters on crushed ice. The beef was spit-roasted by the waiters in front of a roaring open fire. Diana hoped the waiters got paid more for the heat, the fumes, the burns and the flying cinders entailed but didn’t suppose so. The honour of working at Simpson’s would be considered reward enough. The beef looked so moist and tender she rather regretted her virtuous and simple sole.

  ‘Miss Hedleigh will have to be prepared for a lot of public attention when we publish,’ said William. ‘I hope she is prepared for that. When a man enquires into society’s sexual practices it is one thing – Havelock Ellis has got into trouble with the law over Sexual Inversion but still has some friends – it may be different for a woman.’

  ‘I think she is sufficiently brave,’ said Anthony. ‘She presents the truth, after all. By the way, Diana here tells me she has already written a great deal about the life of the rural peasant in this country.’

  ‘Oh Anthony,’ said Diana. ‘Don’t mention that. Mostly about their wages: only a little about how they avoid pregnancy.’

  She thought William’s eyes lit up. So did Anthony’s. She should not have spoken. Rosina had taken that section out before she had let Anthony see it. It was too near to home and her family – and she still cared about them – would not like it. They could just about put up with the courtship customs of Australian aboriginals – and the mating habits of horse and hound were of great interest to them, as was the fecundity of the birds they loved to rear the better to shoot – but the less they knew about those of their employees the better. Mr Brown said he would call on Miss Rosina at Belgrave Square in the afternoon – or was it Lady Rosina? – to talk about it.

  Diana said Rosina abhorred titles and preferred to be called Miss. Titles were nonsensical. She and Anthony would be ‘Honourables’ but their father, although a Lord, was only a baron. So only the older brother got to inherit and end up a Lord. But she had annoyed Anthony again. He said sharply that such matters were hardly of interest to Mr Brown, and when Mr Brown said on the contrary, a titled author could be guaranteed to sell, Anthony looked positively sulky.

  Mr Brown left promptly at three and Diana lingered on with Anthony in the bar while he had a glass of brandy. A corner was reserved for chess players, and one of them, unusually, was a girl, and a young and pretty girl at that; at any rate she attracted Anthony’s attention. She was very much Anthony’s ‘type’– fair, bright blue-eyed, animated, rounded to the point of fatness but with a little waist: she was the kind one of her male fellow-students at Cambridge had graphically described as ‘round-heeled’ – that was to say ‘one push and she falls flat on her back.’ Many students resented the presence of women around them, and would take pleasure in shocking young girls – ‘if they want to be men, let them live like men’ – and made no effort to moderate their language, rather the contrary. The trouble with being educated with men was that you grew up knowing only too well what they were like – why would one want to marry one if there was any way of managing not to?

  The girl finished her game – she lost – and came over to Anthony, whom it seemed she already knew. Anthony introduced her.

  ‘Eve Braintree, on the Woman’s Page of the Daily Mirror; we published a story of hers last Christmas. It was very well received.’

  ‘That’s a year back,’ she said, and her voice was light and sweet. ‘I’m promoted to the motoring column. I write under Evelyn Braintree.’

  Anthony expressed surprise.

  ‘I can write about motors,’ she said, ‘as well as any man. They are not so difficult to understand. Bits go round which link with other bits which make the wheels turn, that’s all. Fletcher Robinson promoted me just before he died.’

  ‘A tragedy,’ said Anthony. ‘He was only thirty-seven. Completely sudden. Struck down in his prime. I spoke to him just before he died: he was convinced the Egyptian “Unlucky Mummy” was responsible for his illness. She certainly looks a malevolent creature, only just containable by all the pillars and stones of the British Museum.’

  ‘Fletcher put me onto that story,’ Evelyn said, ‘but then he said it wasn’t safe, and took me off the Woman’s Page and put me on Motoring. He wrote it up himself and now he’s dead.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d write for us on the subject?’ he suggested. She said she’d think about it, but would need danger money. He said his proprietors didn’t have any danger money, so she shrugged. Perhaps Longman’s Review would take it. They liked other-worldly stuff and were well funded. So what had he been talking to William Brown about?

  ‘I’m Rosina Hedleigh’s agent,’ he said.

  ‘Oh Anthony,’ protested Diana, but he was looking so hard into Evelyn Braintree’s eyes he scarcely heard her.

  ‘Longman are thinking of publishing her book,’ Anthony went on, ‘but she might do better with me – I can run it as a serial.’

  ‘Rosina Hedleigh? Isn’t she the Motoring Viscount’s sister, who ran off to Australia? The brother’s all over the news. So good-looking and they say he’s – well, never mind what they say. I’m going down to Dilberne to interview him. He’s entering his Jehu for the Isle of Man race in September.’

  ‘I might pay danger money for a piece on Arthur Hedleigh,’ said Anthony, ‘if it wasn’t too flattering a piece, that is. Idle young upstart.’

  ‘I can read you like a book,’ said Evelyn, and, having ascertained that Anthony would actually commission a piece, said she’d think about it and went off out of the dark, smoky recesses of Simpson’s into the hot summer glare of the Strand.

  ‘What do they say about Arthur Hedleigh that Eve wouldn’t say?’ Anthony Robin asked his sister when she had gone. ‘There’s very little Eve won’t say. A very new woman indeed.’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ said his sister.

  ‘Tell me,’ said her brother.

  ‘You know how on Boat Race day there’s always a competition between Oxford and Cambridge to see who can field the biggest, well, you know what, I shan’t be indelicate. Hedleigh was always in the team.’

  Anthony seemed a little taken aback but then laughed lightly.

  ‘I rather doubt the truth of that,’ he said. ‘I daresay he spread the tale himself. Lucky little Miss Minnie O’Brien from Chicago.’

  Diana shuddered.

  Nev
er Darken My Doors Again

  29th July 1905, Belgrave Square

  While Rosina composed herself for an afternoon rest, Isobel took action. She sent Reginald to buy a ticket for an evening train back to Dilberne Halt, and arranged for Mr Courtney the family’s solicitor to go down within the week to talk to Rosina and set about selling the Wandanooka property in Western Australia and transferring the proceeds to her father’s estate. It was perhaps unfortunate that Rosina couldn’t settle and came down in time to overhear some of the conversation. Isobel put the phone down.

  ‘But Mother—’

  ‘Rosina. Leave financial matters to Mr Courtney and your father. You are not in a fit state to decide anything for yourself.’

  ‘But Mama—’

  ‘I heard you say that because one is rich, that is no reason to travel comfortably. It hardly makes sense, Rosina. You are distraught. This book of yours – it comes from the same stable as Havelock Ellis, I imagine, and propagates vile ideas. Mr Ellis’ name is hardly mentioned in polite society. Do you want this for yourself? It will affect your father’s reputation.’

  ‘Father hasn’t written the book, I have. What has he got to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t be so naïve, child. You know perfectly well. He will be mocked because he can’t control his family. If he can’t control his family, how can he control a nation? And your poor brother Arthur; people will giggle and point after him because his sister writes these appalling books and no one will buy the Jehu. They will feel besmirched just sitting on its cushions.’

  Rosina, unfortunately, took it into her head to giggle.

  ‘Not much sitting goes on, I can tell you, in the outback. People walk, or run, or stand, or dance, or chant, or crawl, or occasionally stoop, but you don’t often see them just sitting.’

  Isobel ignored her but inwardly she seethed.

  ‘And poor little Minnie! Her parents will ask her not to let their grandchildren associate with you. Give me the manuscript and I’ll burn it.’

  ‘But it’s with a publisher, Mama.’

  ‘Then our solicitor Mr Courtney will write to them and forbid them to publish it.’

  ‘I can do as I like. I have enough money and to spare, thanks to my marrying someone you did not want me to marry. And now I have no husband to stop me doing whatever I want.’

  ‘You’re a silly little girl who has no idea how to look after herself.’

  Her mother’s words cut into Rosina. She felt she was eleven again. She remembered climbing trees in the park with Arthur: she’d worn a pair of his trousers, taken from his wardrobe when Nanny wasn’t looking, because skirts got in the way. They’d been discovered. Her mother’s rage had been great. There had been talk at the time of sending her to Roedean on the coast, a school set up for girls who had the misfortune to be ‘clever’, but after the tree-climbing incident the talk had abruptly ceased. Rosina remembered the rare hard edge of her mother’s voice. ‘You’re nothing but a silly little girl.’ Thus for life, she had been defined.

  You could escape and marry, she realized, in order to come to terms with those absurdities; you could go to the ends of the Earth and suffer freezing cold and burning heat, to a place where a letter home cost you two weeks of your life getting to a post box – but come home and nothing had changed. You were still nothing but a silly little girl, and so you would always be. This was the reality of it. She had failed. Her whole side still ached, black and blue from where a bad sea in the Bay of Biscay had thrown her to the deck. She should have stayed in her cabin as the passengers had been ordered to do. She had thought she was immune from disaster but she was not. Every movement of her hip still reminded her. Mother was right. Mother had won.

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ she said. ‘It’s only a book. I don’t suppose they’ll publish it anyway.’

  Her mother lifted her eyes to Heaven in thankfulness and smiled upon her daughter once again. She told Rosina she was booked on the five-thirty from Waterloo Station to Dilberne Halt. There was a late debate in the House so there was no point in Rosina waiting up for Robert. Her father would be down to see her as soon as affairs of State allowed, no doubt. Minnie would be so happy to have her about.

  Rosina was to have back her old rooms in the East Wing. Isobel had had the place renovated, plumbed and wired for Adela when she had moved in.

  ‘But Mummy,’ cried Rosina. ‘They were my rooms. You shouldn’t have given them away like that. How could you have altered them without asking me! And all my books and papers? Seebohm’s letters!’

  ‘I burned them. You shouldn’t have gone without warning, and without proper discussion. What was I meant to do? Close the East Wing and use it as a shrine to your memory?’

  All the chairs and sofas, Isobel said, had been re-upholstered with a nice new chestnut and cream-coloured print from Liberty’s and the walls papered with a pretty floral pattern which quite enhanced its tranquility. Minnie had helped her choose. Of course, Rosina had not had the privilege of meeting her cousin Adela – such a spiritual girl – now married to the charming young Hungarian Count, Michael Nàdasdy, and had moved with him to Ascona in Switzerland.

  ‘She writes to say she plays a lively part in a religious community,’ said Isobel proudly. ‘Hardly a week passes, Rosina, in which she doesn’t write to me.’

  ‘She must be very bored, then,’ observed Rosina. ‘And an Austrian Princess marrying a Hungarian Count? Rather a come-down, surely. Though not as bad, I can see, as me marrying a colonial theosophist whose only claim to family was an aunt related to a bishop by marriage. But at least Frank was rich. Continental nobility are usually poor as anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rosina,’ said her mother, ‘Adela was as much a member of this family as you are. And more of a daughter to me, come to that. All you’ve done all your life is upset everyone, forever chasing after false gods.’

  Rosina held her tongue, though it was difficult. It was not prudent to make too much trouble. Her head was in turmoil. Mention of Adela did not help. Adela had nearly married Frank; that was water under the bridge, of course, but it was still difficult to feel generous. Frank had come across an old copy of the London Times in the Geraldton store and read the news of her betrothal to the Count of Nàdasdy.

  ‘To think I nearly married her,’ Frank had said. ‘How pretty and ethereal she looks! Princess by name and princess by nature! But we’re nature’s lords and ladies at Wandanooka, aren’t we, sweetheart. I don’t regret choosing you one bit.’

  Had he chosen her, or just wanted not to waste a fare to Fremantle? She had to acknowledge that his ‘love’ seemed to be more practical than ethereal. On the way back from Geraldton, a mile or so inland, they’d dismounted, and Frank had thrown down a horse blanket and proved his love for her then and there, the better to make his point. But it was, she felt, as much Frank’s way of making the most of what he had as anything more romantic.

  It was on just such an occasion that the brown snake had bitten Frank on his naked buttock; she and he had rolled up against a rocky crag when it attacked him. The ludicrous nature of the world outside all established order struck Rosina so powerfully these days. Tears were now running down her cheeks. Mother was right. She, Rosina, was very tired. Was it grief for Frank that made her cry? She’d never liked being the girl Frank had run off with when his real fiancée had disappeared: the younger sister without an education because she was only a female: the kind of person who went to the lecture but never the one who gave it; the one who was seen as good company for Minnie the Viscountess, never the other way round.

  And her book, her book? It had been in another country, long ago. Her mother was probably right; it was rash to publish. But when in her younger days had she ever been prudent? All she reported was what actually happened in other cultures: she wasn’t recommending them, although it did relieve women of the burden of procreation in a land where food was short. She felt a sudden stirring of hope.

  It occurred to her that perhaps she could publ
ish the book under Anthony’s name? Sexual Manners and Traditions in Pagan Australia and Rural England: A Comparison by Anthony Robin rather than Rosina Hedleigh. It was certainly a solution. But would he mind?

  ‘And I will be down at Dilberne Court quite a lot in the near future,’ her mother was saying. ‘We can take some nice walks, though I am going to be really busy.’

  ‘Too right, mate. Too right,’ Pappagallo squawked and plopped a chunk of greyish-white liquid from under his tail feathers onto the table. Isobel rang for Mary.

  ‘Busy?’ Rosina asked.

  ‘I’m having enough trouble getting the place seen to before Mrs Keppel visits,’ said Isobel, forgetting her smile. ‘And that bird can’t possibly go with you. It’s just mess, mess, mess. You have no idea how much needs to be done and what a trouble it all is.’

  ‘You have Minnie,’ said Rosina.

  ‘Minnie is very sweet and being a great help, but her taste in furniture is a little, shall we say, colonial. She likes all the dark, old-fashioned, mahogany stuff. Heavy to look at, heavy to carry. To my mind it just needs burning, and she keeps arguing.’

  ‘Mrs Keppel the King’s harlot?’ asked Rosina. ‘You have invited Mrs Keppel to stay at Dilberne Court? Is that respectable?’

  ‘The King is coming down for a shooting weekend in December. You know how he hates to be dull. He is bringing Mrs Keppel with him.’

  ‘But where will you sleep her? A lady of Mrs Keppel’s discrimination can’t be expected to put up with the cracked chamber pots of Dilberne Court. And how can she entertain the King properly without an electric lamp to guide him to her bed? Though they do say candles are much kinder to the complexion. One does rather fear for her when the King dies and Princess May becomes Queen. There will be no King’s favourites then.’