“YOU ARE SO SELFISH,” said Edwina to her mother. Edwina was thirty-one. She hated her name. Her parents had expected a boy: “Edwin” had been ready and waiting. They’d just added on an “a” and ignored her thereafter. Edwina was Hughie and Beverley’s first-born. Hughie, Duke of Cowarth, father: Beverley, a fortune-hunter from New Zealand, mother. Now, decades into family disapproval, Beverley was sixty-one; Hughie had died three months back. Edwina had affairs, rode to hounds and drank too much. The family had just about got over the shock of the death. Now it was all wills, or rather no wills, and inheritance, or no inheritance, and who got what title: that is to say whatever sad crumbs of comfort spilled out after death could be picked over and scrabbled for. Hughie had been much and genuinely loved. “But then,” Edwina remarked, “you always were selfish, Mother.”
“What is so selfish,” asked Beverley, startled, “about wanting to live in my own home?”
“Because it’s far too big for you now,” said Thomasina. “Sell the place and find somewhere small and sensible to live, and divide the money amongst us.” Thomasina was the second daughter. She’d been meant to be a Thomas. She was thirty. Now she was pregnant and had long blonde curls. That should show her mother a thing or two. “Little middle tom-boy,” her mother had Once referred to Thomasina: cropped her hair short and tossed her a gun so she could join in the shoot. How Thomasina had cried. So many poor dead birds, falling about her ears!
“We must hear what Mother is saying,” said Davida, the third daughter. Honestly, it was beyond a joke, and Hughie had never even laughed in the first place. He’d wanted a male heir. Davida was twenty-nine. She was a therapist, married to a psychiatrist. Her once bouncy hair had flattened out and grown limp from the strain of wisdom: her bright eyes had turned soulful: her voice gone soft from understanding her own anger, and that of others. “In my experience it is counterproductive to cling to the past,” said Davida, “though we must all find our answers within ourselves.”
Beverley’s answer was to stay at Cowarth Court, on her own, all thirty-one bedrooms of it, three dining halls, two ballrooms, three bathrooms—hopeless, hopeless, one to every ten bedrooms, but the water supply in these Elizabethan mansions is always tricky, and at least Hughie and Beverley’s en-suite bathroom was properly serviced, plumbing-wise, and moreover warmed. In their childhood the girls had taken refuge with the horses whenever the weather got really cold. The heating never reached the nursery wing, but got to the stables okay.
Hughie had gambled and drugged the inheritance of generations away, spectacularly, with Beverley intermittently preaching prudence and common sense. The girls had taken the father’s side: Hughie knew how to live in style; Beverley, the feeling went, had the mentality of a New Zealand sheep-farmer’s wife—which was what she had been born to, after all—all practicalities and no panache. Now of course there was nothing left to inherit. The family seat, Cowarth Castle, and most of its lands, had been hived off in lieu of tax into the National Trust’s care ten years back. Only dilapidated Cowarth Court and a rather ugly Titian, both made over to Beverley by Deed of Gift during one of Hughie’s bankruptcy panics, remained. But the moral right to these was surely the girls’. They were Cowarths, after all. Their mother was not really even a blood relation, not if you were talking Cowarth. Which they so often were.
But Beverley was proving remarkably stubborn. She declared she would live in Cowarth Court staring at the Titian—which was profoundly under-insured—just as long as she liked. She was unreasonable; the painting would bring in at least four million: they could all have done with their share—who would not?
“Royalty alone is allowed a female succession,” the family lawyer had once explained to Beverley, whose grasp of these matters was flimsy, no matter what her reputation as a fortune and title hunter. “It’s no use looking to them for example. Royal daughters are treated as sons so long as they have no brothers. George VI dies leaving two daughters: Elizabeth gets the throne and all the goodies. The younger, Margaret, gets zilch. Elizabeth’s first-born is Charles; when Anne comes along, she’ll only inherit if Charles dies without heirs. Then Andrew and Edward come along anyway to keep her in her place: she can forget it. But Hughie’s just an Earl, so normal rules of primogeniture apply. That is to say, girls don’t exist. Forget any thought of equal opportunity: male winner takes all. That’s how such a mass of wealth gets totted up to these families over the centuries. Napoleon got rid of the system in France, zonks ago: great egalitarians, the French! Hughie being an Earl, you’re technically a Countess, the girls are Ladies. If Hughie dies—heaven forfend, Lady Cowarth—without male issue, the title and property—such of it as survives his life—will go to the nearest male relative: in this case Hughie’s younger brother, John. Your husband is Lord Cowarth only because his elder brother died in a hunting accident—all too frequent an occurrence in this backwater of English society. Firstborns die; don’t ask me to explain that.”
The original Charter from Queen Mary by which the Cowarths—Catholic stalwarts all—held their land and wealth laid down that what the monarch gave only the monarch (i.e., alas, the Inland Revenue) could take away. It had, in the form of the National Trust, done so. But under the terms of the Charter not even the Inland Revenue could have kept the inheritance away from a direct male succession. Torn between the risk of Hughie’s bankruptcy and the risk of an intermediate heir turning up, the Inland Revenue chose the latter. The husband, after all, was Catholic, the wife well over childbearing age.
“What option does an Earl without heirs have,” Hughie would boom, “but eat, drink and be merry, and spend the lot! If you don’t like it, Beverley, you should have given me a son!” (Three children in three years had finished off what little maternal instinct Beverley had in the first place.) In his apparently careless and scandalous contract with the National Trust, Hughie had ensured that if the girls got nothing, brother John would get nothing either, or only a title, and he had one of those already. Hughie made no will, although he’d had six months’ warning of death, leaving the tricky business of satisfying the girls entirely to Beverley. That too was his habit.
And Beverley came up with the idea of not attempting to satisfy the girls at all: simply keeping what was hers by legal right. The girls settled down to the situation presently. When Beverley died, after all, Cowarth Court and the Titian could be sold, and the funds divided, and in the meantime their mother was quiet, and in mourning, and dwindling in a somehow satisfactory way: a thin, grieving figure in grand surroundings on a low income, wandering dusty halls but at least maintaining the fabric: keeping the roofs mended and the chimneys cleaned. And the Titian was improving in value year by year. The girls would visit from time to time to see it was safe, and their mother well.
John failed in his inevitable legal battle with the National Trust. He didn’t even get costs. Beverley was unsympathetic. “You English nobs think you can live off your past,” she said. “That’s all finished, but you won’t face it.” Which was a bit rich, the girls agreed, considering how well Beverley had done out of exactly that past. And not even a blood relation!
Exactly a year after their father’s death, Beverley asked her three daughters to tea. She told them she had an announcement to make. “She’s going to sell the house!” they rejoiced. “She’s going to sell the Titian! She’s going to move into sheltered accommodation!”
The girls came together in Edwina’s car, though fearfully. Edwina was a ferocious driver. They were surprised to see scaffolding up on Cowarth Court and workmen busy everywhere. “Where’s she got the money from?” They were wild! “Has she made some deal with the National Trust? If she has, we will have her declared incompetent by reason of insanity!”
But Beverley came down the steps towards them serene and cheerful. She was out of widow’s black and into a pale yellow sweater and a very short skirt. She had on 15-dernier tights and the girls remembered how good her legs had always been. Accompanying her was a short but good-looking guy of, they guessed, around forty. Twenty years younger than she. An architect, perhaps? A lawyer? What was their mother up to?
“This is my fiance, Brian,” said Beverley. “We’re getting married next week.”
“Hi, Edwina, Thomasina and Davida,” said Brian. “I’ve heard such a lot about you lot. I guess your mother wanted a boy!”
“You are completely disgusting!” said Edwina to her mother later, on the phone. “What will people say? You have betrayed our father!”
“I know older people do have sex, but do you have to flaunt it?” asked Thomasina. “That short skirt! And you were holding that man’s hand! It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“Now Mother,” said Davida, “you can’t replace Father so why do you try? You can only make a fool of yourself. Pop stars and actresses can get away with toyboys but a woman like you simply can’t. You just don’t have the style. Can’t you be content to just be yourself?”
“They none of them know what kind of woman I am,” said Beverley to Brian later, in bed. “They’ve only ever thought of me as Mother, something you draw the strength out of till there’s nothing left.”
“Don’t get upset,” said Brian, “they were bound to take it hard.”
“If I’d been the one to die,” said Beverley, “they’d have expected Hughie to marry again. And someone younger too. What’s the matter with them?” The girls wouldn’t come to the wedding. No. They wouldn’t.
“We don’t have to get married,” said Brian, “if it upsets everyone so much. Perhaps that’s the answer. We love each other. I’ll just move in and we’ll live as man and wife.”
“Besides,” said Beverley, “if I do marry you I become plain Mrs.; Countess is out the window.”
So they didn’t get married. The entire extended Cowarth family pretended Brian didn’t exist. Beverley found herself marginalised. It made her angry. All those years of being on nothing but Cowarth sufferance! The male protection goes, and you’re out, out, out.
“He’s immensely rich,” said Edwina to her sisters. “She’s done it again!” Edwina had set a private detective on to their mother’s lover. He was found to be an Australian without education—he had made a fortune in computers, and now, no doubt—so typical of the nouveau riche—felt he deserved to look at a Titian after a hard day’s work. He had first met Beverley three years ago, one evening when he’d been installing—in his Aussie hand’s-on way—the National Trust’s great new state-of-the-art computer. Had their mother and this man been having a secret affair all this time? Was this why Hughie had got cancer and died? Suddenly, to believe anything about their mother, no matter how dreadful, became second nature to the girls.
“She used her title to trap him!” declared Thomasina. “Why else should one of the world’s most eligible millionaire bachelors”—for that was what Brian had been before she nobbled him—“take up with a cowgirl from New Zealand?”
“She’s a manipulative, greedy bitch,” said Davida, for once losing her cool. “I hate her! She only didn’t marry him so as not to lose her title.”
Oh, the girls were angry with their mother. But as children will, they soon settled down to the new situation. Brian gave them a few thousand pounds between them and they looked at him with more favour. At least their mother was too old to disgrace them by having a baby. She’d had a shot in the arm, that was all, of life, love and energy. Grudgingly, they thought, Good for her! If Beverley left Cowarth Court away from them, or tried to give the Titian to her new lover or anything like that, they agreed they’d go to law.
“I don’t know why they’re all so difficult and moody,” said Beverley to Brian, “it must come from Hughie’s side of the family.”
Two years to the day after Hughie died, Beverley summoned her children again.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “There’s a clinic in Rome does it for women of my age. They take away one of your eggs, fertilise it with your lover’s sperm, re-implant it and Bob’s your uncle. Or at any rate your little brother. Sometimes one has to use a surrogate womb, but they think in my case it won’t be necessary.”
The girls would hardly speak to their mother. Sex at sixty was disgusting, but now to talk of a baby! Good God!
Edwina said she found something perverse about a baby emerging from withered loins: it was flying in the face of nature; the very idea made her feel sick.
Thomasina said poor little baby! It wasn’t fair to it: its mother mistaken for its grandmother—even its great-grandmother—at the school gate: who would play football with the child at weekends? What happened when it found out its origins? The discovery could only cause unbearable trauma and suffering. She knew about babies! She’d had one. Society hadn’t begun to think through the ethical implication of this kind of thing.
Davida said Beverley was being entirely selfish. She was trying to dance long after the music had stopped: it was pathetic; Beverley was sick in her head. For all her training, Davida said, she, Davida, just couldn’t come to terms with this: it was too monstrous.
And the rest of the Cowarths said that to do such a thing was against God’s will, or if God didn’t exist—which as a family they increasingly believed—nature’s plans for humankind. Hughie’s widow, they complained, seemed indifferent to the fact that the Cowarths were, traditionally, a Catholic family. But what could you expect of a woman who used contraception and had thwarted Hughie of his heir and so driven him to his death? But Beverley was deaf to the lot of them. She said to Brian:
(1) It was no more perverse and unnatural to accept medical help to have a baby than it was perverse and unnatural to use penicillin to stop pneumonia. If it could be done, what was the matter with it? Women commonly used HRT to postpone ageing: the menopause was not some sacred watershed, some divine punishment to women for their sexuality, just a gradual insufficiency of oestrogen. People just got hysterical about older women having babies. They became totally irrational and invented nonsensical arguments.
She was sure that if you asked the child at any stage in its life it would state it would rather be alive than not born at all. If it decided otherwise it could soon enough take itself out of this world. But it should certainly at least be offered the choice. Who was her second daughter, anyway, to seek to deny her fourth child life? Had Thomasina’s childhood been perfect? No! Then by what right did Thomasina insist on perfection for others on pain of their death—or non-existence, which was the same thing? Was it better to be met at the school gate by, say, an alcoholic, or an old mother? No one stopped drunken mothers having babies: or ill mothers, or poor mothers; or only surreptitiously. And at least she, Beverley, could meet the child in a Rolls-Royce. As for the football argument, that was pathetic. What percentage of the nation’s children were taken to football matches by their fathers, anyway? Precious few! What made Thomasina think they’ d enjoy it if they were? Beverley was glad, however, that her daughter recognised the next baby would be a boy.
As for being sick in the head she was not: she, Beverley, was profoundly sane. She’d given birth to three ungrateful and ungracious girls who had been mean to her from the beginning, despised her for her origins and taken their father’s part against her, whenever they could. She wanted a fourth child. She wanted another chance. Fourth time lucky. Dear God, she too wanted a boy, and now medical birth technology made it possible, she’d have one. It might not be pleasant, it might not be easy, but she was strong, happy, wealthy and wise. And the nursery wing, thanks to Brian’s money, was finally properly heated. If she tired or weakened, a battery of nurses would be available to help, and though that too might offend some who felt only a mother’s care would do, and a baby ought not to be born at all who couldn’t experience it, her daughters had had her, Beverley’s, total care and were they grateful? No! They chose to remember the things that went wrong, not the things that went right. The worm has turned, said Beverley, and I’m off to Rome in the morning.
It was as well that the Rome clinic had taken its fees in advance—hundreds of thousands of dollars—because on the way to Rome news broke of a discovery in the field of artificial intelligence that would eventually put Brian out of profit, and probably altogether out of business within the year.
Three years to the day after Hughie’s death, Beverley stood on the steps of Cowarth Court, Brian by her side, and showed her new baby to her daughters. “His name is Edwin,” she said.
They sulked, especially Edwina.
“But that’s a Cowarth name,” they said, “and you’re not even a Cowarth.”
“This is a Cowarth,” said Beverley. “This is Hughie’s child and heir. Hughie had his young and healthy sperm deep-frozen years back, in case I died and he eventually re-married. It seemed the least I could do for your father, finally to bear his son—so this is the new Lord Cowarth.”
John’s claim to the title was outdated. The National Trust lost its gamble and its claim to the Cowarth estate. All now belonged to baby Edwin and, through him, in effect, to Beverley and Brian for the next twenty-one years.
“Just as well I didn’t ever marry Brian,” said Beverley to her daughters, “or the child would have been legally his, and not Hughie’s at all, forget whose sperm was whose. Baby wouldn’t even have had a title!” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, she could have added, but didn’t.
Eventually Beverley married Brian and by nature of being mother to an Earl continued to call herself by the courtesy title of Countess. The College of Heralds are still arguing the rights and wrongs of the matter.
In time the girls came to accept their little brother and, I’m sorry to say, respected their mother the more, if only for being so thoroughly selfish and bad. They certainly became far more polite to her, and agreed that it was their father’s doing that their names were what they were, rather than their mother’s, though without much evidence either way. As to their being obliged to shelter from the cold in the stables, had they not liked horses anyway? They were good girls at heart.