A drop of cerulean blue dripped from the end of Minnie’s brush, and she bent down to mop it up with her turpentine-soaked rag. Mr Neville the butler, who had come all the way up to the East Wing attic with Minnie’s mid-morning beef tea, intervened.
‘Let me call a servant to do that, Miss Minnie,’ said Mr Neville. Minnie ignored him and only succeeded in leaving a nasty smear of blue on the polished floor. He raised his eyebrows slightly as he went away. Rosina, who had settled in the studio to watch Minnie paint, which Minnie rather wished she wouldn’t, said, ‘Now you’ve annoyed Mr Neville. You really need to give the servants work to do, Minnie, otherwise they get nervous in case they lose their jobs. They’re worried enough that the parents have so few looking after them in Belgrave Square. Supposing we learned to live without them? Then what would they do for employment? And are you sure the smell of oil paint isn’t bad for an unborn baby?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Minnie.
‘Is that a fur waistcoat you’re wearing? I know it’s draughty up here, but I hope not. An animal has had to die to keep you warm. I don’t approve of the infliction of pain on any sentient being, man or beast. George Bernard Shaw is of the same opinion. Is it mink?’
‘It is beaver, Rosina,’ said Minnie, ‘and my mother gave it to me to keep me warm.’
‘You should be content with wool,’ said Rosina. ‘That at least is only theft, not murder. The sheep goes on living.’
Minnie tried to ignore her and went on painting. It was a landscape: the long and majestic avenue of oaks which lined the quarter-mile drive from the gate to the front steps of Dilberne Court. It was what she could see from her window.
‘But Minnie,’ said Rosina, ‘trees aren’t blue in the first place, but green, and the oaks are still not in leaf so why are you painting in blue leaves that aren’t even there? Do you know better than Nature?’
‘Rosina,’ said Minnie, ‘I am an artist, not a copyist. Try and understand. I paint a mixture of what I see with my eyes and the truth of what I see in my head.’
‘But we are in a new century, Minnie. I think a photograph will always be more truthful than a painting, and certainly take less time to produce. Could you not be a photographer? It would be less messy.’
Minnie put down her paintbrush and asked if Rosina was setting out to annoy, and Rosina stopped pouting and laughed and said yes, she supposed she was, it was a habit of which she was trying to cure herself, and apologized. She had toiled all the way up to the attic to tell Minnie that they had both been summoned to attend the Countess in Belgrave Square that very day, without so much as a by-your-leave. She, Rosina, was to abandon her book just as she was getting to the index, and Minnie was to abandon Arthur’s bed not to mention her easel, and neither had any choice in the matter, any more than Minnie had a choice as to what colour the nursery was to be painted, or which local wet-nurse was to be engaged. Moreover they were to go by carriage, not train, because Minnie would not want to expose herself to the public gaze.
‘The public is welcome to gaze on me as much as they want,’ Minnie said. ‘I am having a baby, and proud of it. Why should I pretend I’m not?’
‘Because this is England and not Chicago. It’s embarrassing for everyone. A public and shameless declaration of what you have been up to in bed.’
She had married into a family of aliens who pretended no one had sex, a race who never acknowledged weakness, physical or emotional, who did not weep or get drunk at funerals, or run to the side of orphaned family members, or countenance pain if they fell off a horse and broke an arm, but just remounted and got on again. They demanded servitude and got it. Insisted on inequality and were not defied. She was going to give birth to another one. Well, they ran a mighty empire. It could be worse.
Arthur was in Coventry for the week, discussing the possibility of a motorized landau to follow the coaches at the Coronation. Daimler were to provide a twenty-two-horsepower four-cylinder vehicle, which could reach forty-five miles an hour if it had to, which on this occasion it certainly wouldn’t, could be armour plated if assassination was feared, and was fairly impressive. Arthur, whose very presence carried an implicit promise of increased Royal patronage, was trying to persuade Daimlers to incorporate the Arnold Jehu’s new electric ignition system into their future designs. Daimler, he was able to argue, was regrettably German in its roots; English input would do much to help the firm’s credibility in the British market. It was working. He was turning into a business man as well as an engineer. Minnie, who was developing quite an interest in the way the automobile trade worked – it was not so different from selling hogs, after all, and at least machines did not squeal when slaughtered – had suggested to Arthur this particular route to Daimler’s essentially Prussian heart, and it had worked. She would be happy enough to spend the week in London. She looked forward to another meeting of the I.D.K. and another lively argument between the rationalists and the idealists.
Rosina cheered up. In London, Minnie reminded her, she would be able to pay the £3 membership and work in the peace of the London Library, with access to far more books than she could find in the Boots Booklovers’ Library in Brighton. And even run into her literary hero George Bernard Shaw writing some play that went on for ever about the meaning of everything.
‘You mean,’ said Rosina, ‘that I might find some vegetarian husband there. I am thirty-three years old. I was born to be an old maid. Too late.’
‘Thirty-three’s nothing at all. George Eliot married when she was sixty. She was a writer.’
Rosina laughed. ‘That is no comfort, Minnie. She was a scandalous woman and a freak and plain as a pikestaff, and the man she married killed himself almost at once. You know even our little cousin Adela, not yet seventeen, her parents scarcely cold in the grave, is engaged to be married to a rich colonial farmer twice her age? They are to be married any minute and leave at once for Australia.’
‘I thought she was going to be a nun,’ said Minnie. ‘But perhaps she decided any man was better than no man at all. I certainly would have. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I suppose the news came through the shipping clerk to some hotel concierge to the servants in Belgrave Square through Mrs Flowers at the local telephone exchange, and by-passed the family altogether.’
‘Reginald told me,’ said Rosina. ‘Mother didn’t even bother to mention it. More evidence of my failure in the marriage market, I suppose. Reginald also told me she’s actually a princess of the Gotha-Zwiebrücken-Saxony line.’
‘But that’s rather useful,’ said Minnie. ‘She could replace me as Isobel’s partner walking up the aisle in the Abbey on the 26th. If she hasn’t already been whisked off to be the only princess in Australia. She might have to stay by Royal Command. She may not be of the direct Dilberne line, being daughter of a fourth son, but any connection on the Gotha side might count. Imagine if she was allowed six inches of ermine trim, twice as wide as a countess’s!’
‘Ah, Minnie,’ cried Rosina, ‘you really have become one of us. I am quite cheered up and Mama says I can take my parrot. She must be in a good mood.’