I’m an arse, he thought, driving away. He drove past St James’s Theatre, seeing the large Major Barbara poster with his face all over it. He pointed at it. ‘You, sir, are an arse.’
Humphrey came rushing to meet him in the hall. He had shoe polish on his hands. ‘Good evening, sir. It’s quite late.’ Humphrey had watery eyes, perpetually so, which glistened like raw egg whites. Bart and Bettina called him The Crying Butler behind his back and concocted stories about his life which accounted for such emotional fragility, the latest of which was that he was a virgin with a romantic history of unrequited love and brutal rejections, and all he wanted was someone to hold him.
‘Are you my father now?’
‘No, sir, I was merely making an observation.’
‘Please don’t.’ Bart headed up the stairs. He paused halfway up and looked around to find Humphrey still there, an imposing, neat figure in the large hall, those wet wobbly eyes turned up to him. ‘Humphrey?’
‘Sir?’
‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘Sir?’
‘I want you to start calling me Arse. That is my new name from now on. Arse.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Humphrey.
‘That was an order.’
‘There is nothing in my contract that stipulates that I must lower myself to such base terms. You’re drunk. Sir.’
Bart waved his hand. ‘Fine. You’re fired.’
He tripped up the last step and landed with the whisky bottle between his body and the carpet runner.
Bettina was in her bed, reading a novel by lamplight.
‘Your arse of a husband is home,’ he said, bowing deeply.
She lowered her book. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I’ve been taking the night air, darling.’ He shrugged off his coat and flopped onto the bed bellyfirst. ‘Don’t mind me. I’ll be asleep shortly.’
She pulled his shoes off. ‘Roll over,’ she said, pushing at his waist. He rolled onto his back. She undid his belt and his buttons and pulled down his trousers. ‘There’s mud on the knees.’
‘I was praying. In the garden.’
‘Oh?’ She pulled his socks off and started unbuttoning his shirt. ‘What were you praying for?’
‘For a fixed heart.’
‘Oh, Bart.’ She climbed onto the bed next to him and struggled with his shirt sleeves, rolling him this way and that. ‘I don’t think God listens to the prayers of drunks.’
Bart lifted his arm as she pulled his shirt. ‘Or homosexuals.’
He was down to his underpants and vest. She made him move up the bed till his head was on a pillow. ‘Turn onto your side. I’m going to get you a sick bowl.’ She pulled the bottle out of his hand. ‘This is going in the bin. Don’t you dare get another.’
He called her just as she was nearly out of the door.
‘What?’
He raised his head off the pillow and tried to focus on her face. ‘While you’re down there, tell Humphrey he’s not really fired, will you? Tell him I’m sorry.’
‘What have you done, Meow?’
He dropped his head back onto the pillow. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Was just being a bit of an arse.’
Chapter 15
December 1927, Davenport House, London
Could she do better? The dress was divine – a luxurious silk that brought to mind creamy coffee pouring into a cup, and it had tiny opal charms embroidered along the neckline. One could always do better. She poked her fringe into place then bent forward, checking her cleavage in the mirror. Her breasts sagged and separated like large milk puddings. Maybe tonight called for something less lovely. She didn’t need to go rubbing things in her poor cousin’s face.
Tuna’d had a miscarriage recently, her third in a row, and had apparently taken to staying at home, bringing her five o’clock vermouth forward to half past four, then four, then half past three. She’d put on three stone. All of this gossip, of course; Bettina hadn’t visited Cousin Tuna in over seven months.
But Tuna didn’t have a monopoly on misery! Bettina had suffered the most evil morning sickness in the early months, unable to keep anything down until mid-afternoon. She frequently felt dizzy with anaemia, endured sciatic nerve pain along her buttocks and needed to urinate every five minutes. Her feet and hands were bloating at such a rate that she fancied she could almost see them swelling in real time, like a beached whale carcass slowly filling up with gas.
The dress clung to her stomach. God no. Here, Tuna, would you look at this new life growing inside me! God no. Poor thing. She took out a magenta dress, picking off a speck of lint. Perhaps – and she was big enough to acknowledge this – perhaps, deep down, she’d been avoiding Tuna all this time. As if Tuna might taint her in some way. As if miscarriage was catching.
What a ghastly thought.
The magenta dress was fine. Fine. She checked her nostrils in the mirror and went downstairs to find Doris the cook at the kitchen table, fixing a clock with her sleeves rolled up and a small screw bit between her teeth. She asked her to do up her dress buttons and Doris gave her a peevish look, thinking, undoubtedly, that she wasn’t a bloody lady’s maid. Still, she did up the buttons, saying, ‘Lovely fabric on this,’ in her wheezy Scotch drawl.
They only had a live-in cook now, with the gardener coming in twice a week and a girl doubling as maid and housekeeper coming in every day until seven at night, noon on Sundays. Bart was unwilling to sell the Brighton house, not wanting to displace his mother. Bettina imagined Lucille as a huge, cracked tortoise, her scaly hide like peeling whitewash, slowly creeping from room to room, leaving her droppings under dust-sheeted furniture.
‘My mother is too spoiled to tolerate a decline in her living standards,’ Bart told her, ‘and I am, as you know, a proud, unabashed mummy’s boy.’
So they had to ‘tighten their belts’. Bart’s stage salary was glorified pocket money, he claimed, and the ‘fortune’ left to him by his father, while generous, would not last long if he insisted on employing butlers and valets, all of which he could do without frankly, because he wasn’t a ‘damn child or a cripple’ and anyway, ‘how can a nation call itself great when its elite cannot do basic things for themselves?’
Bettina remembered Étienne saying similar things.
‘Can you imagine,’ he said, ‘if we were to lose everything? Every penny? And suddenly having to do everything, entirely everything for ourselves? Cooking our own food, cleaning our own home. Have you ever imagined that?’
Bettina nodded; she had. Of course she had. It was telling that he was thinking about loss. And of course there was the great unspoken thing: Bart and Bettina were idiots with their money and had squandered hundreds of pounds on wild parties and luxurious holidays abroad. After their wedding they’d been like children handed a hammer and a piggy bank and left unsupervised.
Bart was currently rehearsing for the part of Peter in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. He hated Chekhov, finding his plays ‘dull enough to induce coma’, but Bettina positively nagged him to take the part, thinking that any role was preferable to his constant moping around the house. ‘You might even meet someone,’ she came close to saying.
Bart did not want to meet anyone. Bart was terrified of love, if this was what its loss – there’s that word again – could do to a person.
Jennings the butler opened the door and a cloud of incense smoke enveloped his shoulders, lending him a fantastical vampiric air. ‘Please, come in, Mrs Dawes, you are very welcome,’ he said, his tone kindling dry. Jennings had been on Tuna’s staff ever since her marriage – he’d previously butlered for her husband Max’s family. His hairline started in wispy jags three quarters of the way along his head, leaving a waxy, mole-dotted pate; his eyelids drooped like melted cheese and his forehead, in Bart’s charming words, was as creased as an old spunk rag.