We were married a few days before Christmas in the parish church at Bradeswick, the inconvenience of the season giving us the excuse we needed for a quiet ceremony since several of our guests were ill-at-ease in the presence of several others, while several more would have preferred not to be there at all. I wore white lace and a cloud of embroidered chiffon for I was, after all – if only barely by then – a virgin bride; attended by my sisters in ice blue taffeta cut to show off the good points of Victorine’s figure, since Madelon would always look enchanting in anything.
I walked down the aisle to Robin on my grandfather’s arm in a state of bliss far beyond all powers of reason or caution, entranced so totally by joy that I could have floated through a furnace and felt no pain. I knew – with a certainty which seemed to render me immortal – that for the rest of my life I was going to be gloriously happy. It was as simple as that. And having achieved the ultimate aim so soon, what else remained beyond my reach?
My interview with my grandfather on the night of my engagement had not been easy. No doubt he had been waiting to see me make a false move, to set my cap at an adventurer like Max or, quite simply, with the lack of true purpose only to be expected in my mother’s daughter, to give up and go away. Instead I had chosen a man who had claims of his own on Clarrow Fell, a cousin of the house who had a perfect right to bring his wife there and whose income – in the course of time – would be sufficient to keep the estate intact. My grandfather did not care for this and, summoning me alone to the Justice’s Room did not scruple to tell me so.
‘What are your motives, Olivia?’
And although my motive was love, his presence was so awesome, so cynical, that my mouth dried on the words and I said primly, seeking to defend rather than to explain myself, ‘Natural ones, I think.’
‘Emotion?’
He too could not bring himself to use the word ‘love’, not to me at any rate, perhaps no longer to anyone. And standing before him, enduring a scrutiny that seemed to peel away a layer of skin, I felt the snap of his impatience with all these unruly, inconvenient emotions. What a nuisance you are, Olivia, he was really saying. Could I not see that he wanted nothing more from life but to be left alone with it, to withdraw into the shrinking world of his personal values where this horde of chatterers and posturers and self-seekers which had suddenly descended upon him had no place? Go away, Olivia. Go back to your own high-coloured, high-pitched world and take my brother’s unscrupulous son and that light woman, your mother, with you. There is no room for your shrill, foreign voices, your greedy eyes fixed on the future, in this house which is all that remains to me of the past.
He neither hated us nor felt threatened by us. We were not sufficiently important to him for that. Yet, nevertheless, our persistent hoverings on the fringes of his attention irritated him, my marriage to Robin was a complication he found distasteful, foolish, unnecessary. Olivia – Olivia – what a nuisance you are.
‘The marriage is unlikely to succeed,’ he told me curtly, ‘You have nothing in common. On his part it is entirely an affair of the senses. On your part I am less certain. You are a schemer, Olivia, I am well aware of it. Perhaps you have had to be. But an understanding of the cause does not necessarily incline one to tolerate the results. And schemes can go awry. Of course you know that. You have seen it happen to other people and are probably still young enough to believe it can never happen to you. It can. Anything can happen to anyone, particularly to someone who participates so much in life, as you do.’
His own days of participation were definitely over. He did not care to involve himself in mine. But having issued his warning and ascertained – as he had expected – that I would not heed it, he shrugged his spare shoulders and made his concessions coldly and quickly, grudging each and every one.
We were both of full age and good family and no real objection – except his firm conviction that it would fail – could be made to our union. Colonel Esmond, far away in the Transvaal, would be more than happy to welcome a daughter-in-law who happened also to be the heiress of Clarrow Fell, while the local gentry, the Pottertons and the Nasebys and the rest, would follow the Squire’s own lead in the matter. Therefore, in real terms, he could make me or break me in local society and while he felt fully entitled to please himself as to his treatment of Olivia Heron he would be bound, by the laws of kinship and hospitality, to show a certain degree of consideration for an Esmond bride. My schemes, he supposed, had taken account of that.
‘No, grandfather.’ But it was not entirely true and raising one scathing eyebrow he went on to inform me of my right to be married in the village church at Clarrow and hold my wedding breakfast in the great hall afterwards, privileges which he would grant – since the tenants and the neighbours and Colonel Esmond would all expect it – on the single condition that no invitation to Clarrow Fell, even on her daughter’s wedding-day, could be extended to my mother.
‘Darling,’ she had said, ‘I don’t mind – really I don’t. Just go ahead and have your wedding with all the church bells ringing and the log fire blazing in the hall afterwards – and all the candles. I’ll just stay here, dearest, good as gold, and wish you well.’
But I knew she had already chosen her hat and told all her friends, had already immersed herself in sketches of wedding veils, bridal posies, cake frills.
To have left her behind would have been unthinkable. I knew, at once, that I could not do it and quickly accepted the compromise of Bradeswick parish church, the ceremony – by arrangement with Bradeswick’s vicar – to be conducted by my uncle, the Reverend Toby Heron, with my grandfather to give me away.
‘The seal of approval you require,’ he said brusquely, ‘will thus be quite plain enough.’ And should anyone doubt its authenticity my future residence was to be the Gatehouse at Clarrow.
And so we were married before a small and in some cases hostile congregation, my mother, with every conceivable shade of blue feather in her hat and a spray of Mr Greenlaw’s prize orchids at her bosom, sharing a front pew with Aunt Sibylla who had been glacial and sharp and with Alys who had continued to be her vague, sweet self, her enchanted, ivory tower sleep evidently still unbroken. Amyas was there, of course, and the housekeeper, Mrs Long, a fine distinction here arising since, although they had travelled from Clarrow together and appeared sufficiently well acquainted to have given rise to a small but persistent amount of gossip, he – as an estate agent which was almost a profession – joined the family at the front of the church while she – an upper servant – sat at the back.
Mr Greenlaw was present with both his daughters-in-law and the least enterprising – therefore the most dependent – of his sons, and Mr Septimus Cross, the banker, sitting among the sprinkling of Bradeswick ladies and gentlemen who, interpreting my engagement as a declaration of respectability, had started to call on us in Aireville Terrace. But the Pottertons had returned to their house in London for the Christmas season, and Mrs Naseby – that other social lioness – who wintered badly had gone to Rome to avoid the inclement weather and to spend Christmas with her son who was ‘finishing’his education there. While to my great relief Max de Haan had left, presumably for Madeira, at the beginning of September; having reacted sourly, I thought, beneath all his languid well-polished scorn to a marriage which would be more than likely to complicate his purchase of Clarrow Fell.
‘So you are to join the stampede to the altar, I hear.’
‘Have you such a poor opinion of marriage, Max?’
‘I have no opinion of it. If one really cannot avoid it – and I find one nearly always can – then it would seem advisable for like to marry like. And you do not resemble Robin Esmond, my pet, not in the very least.’
‘You hardly know him.’
‘My dear girl, I have known him in hundreds. Eton and Harrow and Hexingham are full of him. He is the English country gentleman at his best, that is to say that he hunts and he shoots and he fishes with the rest but he also thinks – which admittedly is better than most. But just the same he will bore you, Olivia, when you really get to know him. And if you ever allow him to know you then you will very likely scare him to death.’
‘Thank you, Max.’
‘My dear, don’t mention it. At least you are saving him from the Yeomanry since not even his father could expect him to go Boer-hunting on his honeymoon.’
‘I shall ignore that, Max, since I am feeling so very well today and can afford to be generous.’
‘You’ll be lucky to afford a new petticoat should you decide to keep on that ancestral home of ours,’ he had snapped, for just one moment quite visibly angry. And the day before his departure he had tossed into my lap a wedding present of embarrassing value, a gold bracelet with my initials in diamonds on the clasp and long gold earrings containing a single diamond like a tear drop.
‘Wear them or sell them,’ he’d said. ‘They’ll go a long way to repairing the roof at Clarrow.’
‘Wear them,’ my mother urged me on my wedding morning. ‘People will assume they came from Robin or from the Squire, and Max is not here to say differently. Somebody may even suppose they came from me, since there was some good jewellery in my family and I would have given it to you, darling, if Sibylla had not made off with it.’
And so Max de Haan was present in the touch of his diamonds swinging against my cheeks, their glitter around my wrist as I held out my hand to Robin and became his wife, completing my personal destiny once and for all – I was very sure of it – by that exchange of vows. I would be happy now forever. So would Robin. I stood at the very centre of the world on a fabulous, enchanted carpet of silken textures and jewelled colours, walking on patterns of my own devising. The December day was cold and probably dull but I did not see it. I floated through deep blue air and breathed pure sunshine. I believed, as the organ chimed and the bells pealed and the choir sang only slightly out of tune, that I had nothing more to wish for.
We had no honeymoon, midwinter being no time for journeys, the threat of snow hovering about us as we drove in an open landau to the Station Hotel to drink champagne and eat a luncheon of cold pheasant provided by my grandfather and a monumental wedding-cake baked by Victorine.
‘Let us drink to the health and happiness of the bride and groom,’ said my grandfather, strictly doing his duty.
‘Darling …’ breathed my mother, emptying her glass and bursting into tears, remembering how many times she had heard this toast before, to no avail.
‘Not all days are wedding-days,’ declared Aunt Sibylla, sipping her wine with an air of one who detects the taste of vinegar. ‘Marriage, like most things, is hard work and perseverance – no laughing matter.’
‘Olivia will persevere,’ said Victorine.
‘How beautiful you look, Olivia,’ said Alys.
We remained in Bradeswick when our guests had gone, spending our first night together at the Station Hotel in the large front room which had been my mother’s not so long ago, no reticence in me anywhere as I flung myself into his arms, my body sparkling with pleasure wherever he touched it, my breasts straining forward to meet his hands, arching myself this way and that so that no part of me would be deprived of his caress, wanting him to overpower me with love, to possess me in so complete and final a manner that we would never, thereafter, be able to think of ourselves as separate.
I was not only in love with Robin but with the act of love itself. I adored him and I adored everything we had just done together. I adored his nudity and my own, the freedom of unfettered limbs, the sensation of bare skin in contact with mine, and the varying textures and odours of that skin, the quite silken width of his shoulders, the coarser feel of the chest with its scattering of blond hairs, the multiplicity of bone and muscle and sinew, the hollows and angles, everything that he had in him: everything that I had in me. I adored the emotion my body visibly caused him, even the slight pain of penetration and the sudden flood of his desire which so wildly and wonderfully overwhelmed him, leaving me with none of the feelings of subjection, of being used and invaded that women so often experienced – I’d been told – on these occasions. He had entered my body. Yes indeed. But my body had closed itself around him, holding him fast, fusing us together with love and need and self-abandonment, so that – while the need lasted – he was wholly mine.
I did not even realize that my own body had not attained its full orgasm. And had anyone explained it to me it would not, just then, have mattered, I had not groaned and trembled as Robin had done, but I had been the cause of his ecstasy. I had aroused it, held him within me and received its fulfilment, had seen his helpless abandonment to the very senses my grandfather had implied could not endure. But my grandfather was an old man who had forgotten or did not care to remember the intoxication of young bodies clasped together in sensuality and tenderness, and I had no fear.
‘Darling Olivia – I do love you.’ Was there still a question? I had never acknowledged it in the first place and could not hear it now.
The next morning we took the train to Clarrow Fell and walked hand in hand through the steep, black-browed village to the Gatehouse, laughing at the frosty wind, jumping the puddles, giddy and happy as holiday children, my hope for the future so bright and tremendous and golden that I could see it dancing ahead of me on the thin, grey air. Snow began to fall, soft as feathers, and whooping with delight, we ran helter-skelter the last few yards up the hill to our new home.
‘Shall I carry you across the threshold?’ And swinging me up into his arms, bending his head to negotiate the low doorway, he carried me into the tiny parlour and straight upstairs.
‘At least let me take off my hat.’
‘I’m not at all certain I can wait that long, Olivia.’
‘Oh yes you can. And you’ll take off your own wet things too, Robin Esmond, before you catch cold.’
‘Do it for me, darling. When a chap has lived out east as long as I have, he never quite loses the fancy for a slave.’
I undressed him carefully, caressingly, dried his hair with a new wedding-present towel, turned back the covers of the deep, feather bed which had been scented with herbs and dried rose petals, and when he was installed therein, undressed myself slowly, in languorous display like a harem dancer for his pleasure, shaking loose my hair, offering him the point of a shoulder, the curve of the thigh, the length of a brown and – I believed – shapely leg, until he reached out and pulled me on top of him.
‘What a pagan you are, Olivia.’
‘Is that wrong?’
‘Oh, very likely. Brides are supposed to be bashful and coy and not at all sure they like it – or so we’re told.’
‘So I disappoint you, master – or do I?’
‘You dazzle me – completely dazzle me. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else clearly since April when you first walked into Clarrow as if it belonged to you.’
‘It does belong to me.’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we darling?’
Of course we would, for my grandfather could live another ten or fifteen years yet, whether he liked it or not, by which time there would be our children, a new generation of Herons entirely unblemished by any shadows from the past, who could not fail to win his heart.
And, for the time being, I was content to be exactly where I was, here in this deep, soft bed, a bleak afternoon outside the window, rich firelight within, the body’s luxurious repose after love-making drifting to the edge of sleep.
‘I love you, Olivia.’
I no longer felt that uneasily whispering need to question it.
The Gatehouse, my first home as a wife, was small but entirely – if only temporarily – perfect, a dining parlour and drawing room with low oak-beams and thick stone walls, two slope-ceilinged bedrooms above, furnished with the unremarkable items left behind by other Heron dependants, all the family widows and spinsters, the pensioned-off colonels and eccentric bachelors, who had occupied the house before me. But I had never chosen furniture of my own, had always made the best of whatever one’s landlord thought suitable for one’s situation, and I was more than content. I had a solid roof above my head and not just any roof, at that. In nine months I had moved from my precarious perch in the rue du Bac through Bradeswick to the gates of Clarrow Fell, their wrought-iron magnificence filling my front windows, my rear windows giving me a view of a walled garden, anonymous with winter, largely covered over with last year’s leaves, but arousing great enthusiasm from Robin. No one had touched it for years, not since a very ancient Miss Matilda Heron had passed away, but Robin would remedy that. There would be purple clematis flowering around my door in summer, he told me, honeysuckle draping itself around my windows, apple blossom and cherry blossom in season and a carpet of bluebells, if he remembered rightly, down by the willow-tree once he had cleared away the scrub. There was a herb-garden too, or what remained of one – for Miss Matilda had been a great one for herbs, quite a witch, he and Alys had once liked to think – and plenty of room to extend it, to plant evergreen rosemary to darken my hair, wild red flowers of bergamot to attract the bees – did I really not care for that drowsy, humming bee chant of midsummer? – lemon balm for its scent, long pink spikes of hyssop and grey-leaved lavender, slow-growing, raven-skinned Juniper berries; green flowering sweet marjoram and white-flowering sweet basil.
And now that he put his mind to it he could easily recall, in Matilda’s day, a profusion of old-fashioned cottage-garden flowers, clove-scented pinks and their delicate silver-green foliage, marigolds, primroses, hollyhocks, columbines, and over there, just before the hawthorn hedge, trellis upon trellis of sweet peas in every dainty shade of mauve and pink. He could hardly wait for winter to be over so that he could re-discover them, restore them, with his patient gardening skills, to life.
‘I should have been a horticulturist, you know – not a lawyer.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yes, I really do. I might even have gone in for it, too, if they hadn’t pointed out to me that I couldn’t do a thing like that to my father. I mean – “What’s your boy doing now, Esmond old chap?” “Oh, he’s a jobbing gardener, don’t you know.” What a sensation in the officers’mess. The Squire was none too keen on the idea either. So I settled for the law.’
I smiled at him lovingly, indulgently, not seeing him as a lawyer or a gardener or as anything else except my lover, the man whose body could not sleep until it had been caressed by mine, who woke early to love me, whose need for me brought him home in the middle of those honeymoon afternoons, laughing and telling me that I had bewitched him.
I had never lived anywhere long enough to see anything grow and so had never planted, had regarded flowers as belonging to public parks and florists’ windows and could not really believe horticulture to be a serious occupation. But if Robin wanted a herb-garden or a rose-garden, or even an orchid house like Mr Greenlaw’s, then I would move heaven and earth to make sure he had them. And when, in the fullness of time, we moved the remaining quarter of a mile from the Gatehouse to the Manor, he would have all the broad acres of Clarrow Fell to nourish and beautify.
My anxieties, that first winter, were so few, so insignificant, that they were hard to find, being mainly the small, eternal matters of curbing my mother’s extravagance and settling her bills, convincing Luc that he should not only go to Hexingham but stay there, keeping a sharp eye on any young man who paid, or whom I thought ought to pay, attention to Victorine. While my joys were many and various, set within my memory like jewels in pure gold.
We explored the countryside, walking out on crystal mornings of hard frost and brilliant winter sunshine to farmhouses that were long, dark smudges on the horizon, where the farmers’ wives, tenants of Clarrow Fell, gave us crusty bread hot from the oven, curd tarts and treacle puddings and spicy gingerbread – the specialities of the region – perfectly at ease with ‘Master Robin’, less so with me since the fate of their tenancies lay in my hands.
When the weather was grey, or snow obscured the moorland pathways, we confined ourselves to the village, each squat stone cottage containing its degree of curiosity about the Heron-granddaughter: old women to whom I was ‘gentry’ and entitled to deference, young women who were less sure of it and rather more interested in my French hats; children who were not interested in me at all unless I had something edible to give them.
‘Do you think they like me, Robin?’ I asked quite nervously.
‘Does it matter?’
Yes. Far more than I was prepared to say.
‘Do you like them, Olivia?’
Of course I liked them. Enormously. I had neither looked at them closely nor seen them clearly. It was enough for me that they were part of Clarrow Fell.
We kept no carriage but whenever I wished to drive out the acknowledged distance for carriage horses – five miles there and five miles back – I had only to mention the matter to Amyas who would provide me with a park landau and a team of bay geldings from the Clarrow stables. I had one servant only, an unobtrusive little girl, to make beds and light fires and serve five o’clock tea, all the heavy work and the skilled work of my household being done by a relay of maids from Clarrow, sent over several times a day by Mrs Long. My bread came to me hot and fresh every morning from Clarrow kitchens, my eggs, butter and meat from Clarrow home farm, while my share of the season’s pheasant, partridge and grouse was delivered to my back door not by a poacher – the method to which, as a city-dweller, I was accustomed – but legally, if just as silently, by Amyas.
I had become almost, in fact very nearly, a daughter of the house, walking that significant quarter of a mile of driveway to my grandfather’s door on the slightest pretext, still marvelling inwardly that Robin needed no pretext at all. The Manor was home to him in an easy, casual fashion I envied. When he wanted a book he made free use of the library. When he wanted a gun he helped himself, whistled to the yellow retriever one could always find basking and drowsing near the fire and shouldering a gamebag, walked away. When he wanted a slice of plum cake or apple tart or a handful of raisins he slipped into the kitchen, as he’d done as a boy, smiled at the cook and held out his hand. I followed him one day, feeling an intruder, to be greeted warmly by the diminutive, inquisitive Mrs Timmins who had been cooking the Squire’s dinner for so long that she stood on ceremony with no one. She gave me tea and currant buns and unquestioning acceptance. I was Olivia Heron. She had always expected the Squire to send for me. It was only right. And she proceeded, through many firelit winter afternoons thereafter, to tell me anything I cared to ask about my father and his family, not even lowering her voice when Mrs Long, in her immaculate housekeeper’s black silk, paused in the doorway and raised pained eyebrows at the kitchen clock.
The kitchen itself was an arched vault of stone with bunches of dried herbs, smoked meats and smoked fish hanging from its rafters and a huge brick oven permanently filled with the scents of ginger and cinnamon and vanilla. While Mrs Timmins herself had little to do in the afternoons the Squire was away from home but gossip, since the maids could eat yesterday’s leftovers for their supper and Amyas would take his cold pheasant or his cold beef and his bottle of claret in the housekeeper’s room, with Mrs Long.
‘They’re very close, those two,’ said Mrs. Timmins, shrewd and obliging and certainly malicious. ‘Close in more ways than one.’
I had noticed it, regretted it even, since I had come to depend on Amyas just as everyone else at Clarrow seemed to do, and there was something tense and sarcastic, something tight-lipped and rigid about Mrs Long which would be unlikely to make her an accommodating lover. I believed that Amyas could do better and was sorry.
Every Sunday morning I rose early, put on my best blue velvet hat with its spotted net veil, my blue wool coat with the squirrel cuffs and collar and three rows of fur around the hem and walked on my husband’s arm not merely to Clarrow church but to the Heron family pew, luxuriating in the feel of its ancient, elaborately carved wooden gate, its scarred seat covered with dusty crimson plush. And there I would stand tall and straight and proud as a peacock between Robin – busily sketching caricatures of Aunt Sibylla in the margin of his hymn book – and my stern grandfather.
Ours was the only private pew in Clarrow, a circumstance which forced Mrs Naseby to worship in a neighbouring and rather inconvenient village; the Pottertons having their own chapel at Dawney Park. We were the family. The people crowding the pews behind us, finely graded in accordance with their social status – tenant farmers, shopkeepers, publicans, the schoolmistress and the doctor and Amyas in front, upper servants, smaller tradesmen and Mrs Long at the back – were our people. The farm labourers and housemaids sitting on the wooden benches which came last of all were our people too, all of them singing, with apparent enjoyment, Aunt Sibylla’s favourite hymns.
‘The rich man in his castle’, they cheerfully chorused, ‘the poor man at his gate. God made them, high or lowly. And ordered their estate.’
I did not even hear the words, so ablaze was I with happiness, and therefore did not question them.
On our first Christmas morning we exchanged gold earrings and gold cuff-links, drank hot spiced wine in bed and then walked up the drive to Clarrow to eat our traditional roast turkey and plum pudding beneath the great window in the hall, the candles burning in their wall sconces, a log fire blazing, the Squire doing his duty and no more, even when a crowd of tenants came jostling in to wish him the compliments of the season.
‘Long life to you, sir.’
‘Quite so,’ he said, his tight, sardonic tone implying that it had already been long enough. But when they made it plain that they wished to drink my health too he merely nodded, refilled their glasses, and stood apart from us in front of his stone hearth, grimly watching me.
‘Long life to you, Mrs Esmond.’
And smiling, including them each and every one in my impossible, immeasurable bliss, I was quite certain – like Max de Haan – that I would live at least forever.
But my gift of immortality was clearly not meant for everyone. For on the 22nd January that year Queen Victoria died in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the eldest son of her eldest daughter, a difficult man with a withered arm and a somewhat hysterical disposition who – in common with the rest of Europe’s royal highnesses – had all his life been intimidated by the diminutive and, one had heard, equally hysterical Victoria.
She was eighty-one years old, had had nine children and sixty-four grandchildren and great-grandchildren, an élite band including not only the German Kaiser but the Empress Alexandra of Russia, the Queens or queens-to-be of Greece, Roumania and Denmark. She had reigned as Queen Empress of the British Empire for sixty-four years, the last forty of which she had spent in full, deep black mourning for her husband, the German Prince Albert, and had thoroughly mistrusted all men – including her eldest son – who did not resemble him. She had been morbid, self-indulgent, passionate and prim both together, narrow in her views and autocratic in her manners, and had suffered, during her long reign, several bouts of serious unpopularity. But extreme old age had redeemed the worst flaws in her character, since old ladies are allowed to be reclusive and temperamental, and on the day she died she was the nation’s mother, for whom the entire nation was ready to mourn.
I visited Bradeswick on the morning of the 23rd to find every shop window and every door knocker draped in black, every man I passed wearing a black armband, even the road-menders who were completing repairs to Aireville Terrace wearing dark-coloured sweat-rags and keeping their voices most respectfully low. The haberdashers’ shops in Station Square had sold out their entire stock of black ties by noon and three days later ready-made mourning dresses of all qualities – from silk and crèpe-de-chine to paramatta, whipcord and common hopsack – had not only trebled in price but were virtually unobtainable.
By the end of the week a yard of black dress material was harder to find than gold not merely in Bradeswick but from Land’s End to John o’Groats, several ladies of our acquaintance having feverishly scoured the warehouses of Bradford and Leeds to no avail; a situation – like all others – which brought grief to some and profit to many. Florists, gentlemen with substantial quantities of black dye in stock, owners of houses along the funeral route who were letting their front windows for amounts as high as £170, did well enough. Jewellers and caterers fared badly as parties and balls and the finery that went with them were cancelled. The flower shop at the corner of Aireville Terrace took on extra hands to complete the rush of orders, to be sent with tens of thousands of other floral tributes to Windsor. The tea-shop, recently opened in Market Street – the only establishment in Bradeswick where ladies could obtain refreshment and, as the coy phrase had it ‘powder their noses’ – went out of business, tea-parties no longer being the order of the day. London’s theatres closed as a mark of respect, with the result that three thousand theatrical employees lost their wages.
‘How sad,’ my mother said, her deep sigh expressing a passing thought for the Queen and a real anxiety that so much unrelieved black did not suit her. ‘It is to go on until April, I hear. Do you know, Olivia, I feel quite tempted to take a little trip, somewhere warm and colourful, until this sorry business is done.’
But by that same afternoon her volatile spirits had been much revived by the unexpected return of Max de Haan, coming himself from a climate warm enough to have added a deeper layer of bronze to his skin and colourful enough to have kept him very adequately amused for the five months he had been away. He looked hard and brown and polished as a nut, wearing, the first time I saw him, a full-length motoring-coat of black fur and his usual air of audacious, questionable prosperity.
‘Max – what a pleasant surprise. Are you well?’
‘Never better.’
I believed him. For, hearing of the Queen’s death while on his way though France – from exactly where he did not say – he had made a rapid assessment of the situation, hurried at once to Roubaix where he had purchased ninety precious tons of black dress material and shipped it to England; thus making himself yet another audacious, questionable, probably quite sizeable fortune.
‘How very clever,’ my mother said. ‘He has even brought enough jet beads and black veils for us to look positively bereaved for the funeral.’
Yet the funeral procession itself took the whole nation, let alone my mother, by surprise for although the number of Highnesses in attendance – Royal, Serene and Imperial – was perfectly satisfactory, Queen Victoria herself had repudiated the black mourning gowns she had worn for forty years and lay in her coffin, at her own express command, in a white dress and her white lace wedding veil, a bride again returning to her Albert.
And so the Queen was dead. Long live King Edward, the name an act of defiance in itself – or of liberation – against his mother’s last and dearest wish that he should style himself King Albert in memory of the father he had failed so utterly to resemble. He was sixty years old and because his mother, believing him unfit for responsibility, had never allowed him to have any, his talents had been stretched no further than the selection of race-horses and attractively mature married women. While Prince of Wales he had launched the dinner-jacket so much despised by Mr Greenlaw, pleated dress shirts and Homburg hats and was entirely responsible for the fashion of leaving the bottom button of the waistcoat undone. He was a man of varied and considerable appetite, eating enormous, complex dinners of a dozen courses followed by suppers of grilled oysters and champagne, smoking an impressive total of twelve huge cigars and twenty cigarettes a day. He was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, vain.
‘Good old Teddy’, they were calling him a day or two after that startling white funeral. For the Victorian age was now over. We had a new century, a new King. An entirely new set of aims, means, values. What could be better? Good old Teddy.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Max de Haan, strolling into my mother’s drawing room late one afternoon, bringing with him a case of champagne and accompanied, to everyone’s surprise, by Alys, dressed in a light brown coat and skirt with not even a black-bordered handkerchief or a black ribbon in her unseasonal straw hat.
‘I found this young lady darting across Market Square,’ Max told us, ‘in flight from her mamma, I rather imagine.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, laughing and frowning both together, not knowing quite how to sit down or whether it would be better to go on standing; ungainly, vulnerable, impossibly, dangerously charming. ‘Oh dear – yes I was. Aunt Lavinia will think me very remiss …’
‘Why no dear – by no means. But what I do think is that you are the first female I have seen in ten days who is not in black.’
‘I do not believe in the wearing of mourning, Aunt Lavinia, not even for those with whom I have been personally acquainted.’
‘Well, yes dear,’ my mother said, not taking it too seriously. ‘I daresay. Many of us would not entirely disagree. But belief, you know, has very little to do with it. One simply does these things. It is far easier in the long run and saves a great deal of annoyance.’
‘My mother says so too.’
‘And you are able to stand up to her and defy her?’ Clearly my mother was now impressed. ‘Heavens – I never could.’
But Alys, smiling, shook her head, tendrils of fine blond hair escaping from their pins.
‘Oh no, I never defy her. I am just deceitful.’
‘Alys! I cannot believe it.’
‘But it is quite true, Aunt Lavinia. I have been deceitful every day of my life, these twelve past years – at least.’
‘My goodness …’ said my mother.
‘How intriguing,’ said Max.
‘What she means,’ said Robin, drawing out a chair for her, ‘is that she is forever saying “Yes, mamma” and then going off to do exactly as she pleases. Poor Aunt Sibylla – how many pairs of black gloves have you conveniently left on the train, Alys, or how many yards of black crèpe have somehow just fallen off your hat, since the Queen died?’
‘You don’t believe in mourning either, Robin.’
I bit my lip, conscious of my own beautifully cut black silk which I had browbeaten an overworked seamstress into making for me, my collar of jet beads and the long jet earrings I had purchased, via my mother, from Max. If Robin did not believe in mourning why had he allowed me to go to all this trouble and expense? I had no particular views on the subject and would have seized the opportunity of pleasing him with both hands had I realized it existed, defying the established custom because ‘Robin and I’not ‘Robin and Alys’did not believe in it.
Should I have known his opinion? Perhaps. Should he have told me? I rather believed he should. It hurt me and made me angry to think that he had not. It hurt me rather more when I began to wonder why.
‘Well, now,’ said Max, a respectful black tie around his neck, a celebratory glass of champagne in his hand, ‘having declared Alys a revolutionary and having seen Victoria safely – and once and for all – into her grave, shall we drink to our new King? Here’s to good old Teddy. Long may he reign. For I have a feeling his reign will be good to me.’
He raised his glass, his diamond taking fire in winter lamplight, his smile satisfied and a little mocking as if he had just flung down a challenge to this new era, a declaration that the time of men like Prince Albert the Good, the traditionalists, the moralists, the Squire Heron, was over, the time of the entrepreneur, the men of openly declared wealth and unashamed appetite, just beginning.
Queen Victoria had only cared for serious men. King Edward liked his friends to be amusing, adventurous and rich.
‘Good old Teddy. And here’s to your courage, Alys.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking startled, ‘I have no courage, Max.’
‘On the contrary – enough, at any rate, to open that cage door one of these days and fly away.’
And leaning forward, too intent on his meaning and too serious in her exploration of its possibilities to be embarrassed, she sighed, her face suddenly and touchingly naked. ‘If I could …’
‘What stops you? The cage is not real, you know. Nothing holds it together but convention. Nothing holds you inside it but your own conscience.’
‘Max,’ she said, ‘it is not so simple. One can open a cage door but even then the bird does not always fly away – cannot.’
And it was as if he had asked her to fly away with him, today, this very minute, to some impossible, exotic land of freedom, leaving nothing behind but a note for Aunt Sibylla.
‘Dear boy …’ said my mother, evidently sharing my impression.
‘Steady on …’ said Robin, who should have said nothing, noticed nothing, who should not have cared that other men could be intrigued by Alys.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, glancing quickly at Robin, replying to the silent communication still operating between them, her mind picking up the anxiety in his, her voice answering it, reassuring him and at the same time injecting that first cold trickle of fear into my blood; a seed, a germ which, as it bred and multiplied within me, would become the terrible, self-crippling disease of jealousy.