‘Which was a long time ago.’
This seemed needlessly ungallant. ‘There are plenty of people living in exile who look to her brother for leadership.’
‘Oh, I see. You think we’ll all attend Feodor’s coronation? I hope he can get the time off work.’ He laughed suddenly, with a kind of sneer in the sound, as he brought his face round to Dagmar’s, that she might fully register his contempt. It was intolerable. ‘I’m afraid I find all that stuff is just an excuse for a few snobs to bow and curtsey and gee up their dinner parties.’ He shook his head slowly, as if he were making a reasonable point. ‘They should pay more attention to what’s going on around them today.’ He sipped his drink to punctuate the finality of his argument. In other words there could be no further discussion on the subject.
I turned to Dagmar. ‘Do you agree?’
She took a breath. ‘Well-’
‘Of course she agrees. Now, when’s lunch?’ I saw then that the real burden of William’s song was that for years he had endured being treated as Dagmar’s moment of madness, the shaming mesalliance that had overtaken the Moravian dynasty, and now he didn’t have to put up with it any more. Things had changed. Today, he was the one with the money, he was the one with the power and weren’t we going to know about it. Worse than this, having triumphed, he could no longer tolerate Dagmar having any sort of position of her own. She must have no value at all other than as his wife, no podium where she might shine independent of his glory. In short, he was a bully. I understood now why the Grand Duchess’s approval had been equivocal.
Luncheon was a curious event, providing as it did an endless series of opportunities for Dagmar to be publicly humiliated. ‘What on earth is this?’ ‘Is it supposed to taste burnt?’ ‘Why are we eating with nursery cutlery?’ ‘Those flowers deserve a decent burial.’ ‘Shouldn’t there be a sauce with this or did you ask for it to be dry?’ If I had been Dagmar, I would have stood up, broken a large plate over his head and left him forever. And that was before we got to the pudding. But I know only too well that this kind of wife-battering, for that is what we were dealing with, destroys the will to resist and, to my sorrow, she simply took it. She even gave credence to his complaints by apologising for shortcomings that were entirely fictional. ‘I am sorry. It should be hotter than this,’ she would say. Or, ‘You’re right. I should have asked them to seal it first.’ The limit came when William took a bite of the little crepes Suzette that had been brought in and spat it back onto his plate. ‘Jesus!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘What the hell is this made of? Soap?’
‘I don’t understand you.’ I spoke carefully. ‘It’s delicious.’
‘Not where I come from.’ He gave a merry laugh, as if we were all enjoying a jolly joke.
‘And where do you come from, exactly?’ I said. ‘I forget.’ I stared at him and he held my gaze for a second. Behind his head the housekeeper glanced quickly at a maid who had been helping to serve to check if she’d registered this exchange. I could see them silently acknowledge that they both had. In fact, they were nearly smiling. However, whether or not it was entertaining for the staff to witness the tyrant brought low, it was snobbish and self-defeating of me to do it. William, red in the face with fury, was on the brink of ordering me out of the house, which would have rendered my journey completely pointless. Mercifully, he was never one to allow his anger to undo him. Years of tricky negotiations in the City had made him cleverer than that. And I would guess the thought of the story going round London, coming from someone who was perhaps better known than he (not richer, not more successful, just a little better known) was something he was not prepared to risk. Of course, my chief crime in his eyes wasn’t that I had been rude to him and failed to take his part. It was that I seemed to find his wife more congenial and more interesting than he was, which was even worse than my reminding him of the long journey he had traversed since we first met. I knew he made a point of editing every visitor who entered the house, so presumably this kind of challenge seldom, if ever, happened. He was out of practice when it came to being contradicted.
With a deep and deliberately audible breath, he put down his napkin, painstakingly rumpled, and smiled. ‘The awful thing is I have to run. Will you excuse me?’ I saw, to my amusement, he was trying to be ‘gracious.’ It was not in his gift. ‘I’m at home on Fridays, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have to work. If only it did. Dagmar will see you off. Won’t you, my darling? It’s been such a treat to catch up again.’ I smiled and thanked him, as if I had not just been instructed to leave, and we both pretended everything was fine. Then he was gone. Dagmar and I stared at each other, her little, crumpled face and narrow shoulders suddenly making her look like a picture of some starving child in war-torn Berlin. Or Edith Piaf. Towards the end.
‘Do you feel like a walk after that?’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you if you want to get away. I won’t be offended.’
‘Hasn’t he just told me to get off his land?’
She made a little pout. ‘So?’
‘Don’t make him angry on my behalf.’
‘He’s always angry. What’s the difference?’
The gardens at Bellingham had been tidied, replanted and restored to an approximation of their Edwardian appearance, with a large walled garden and separate ‘rooms’ containing statues surrounded by box hedges or roses in neat and tidy beds. It was all very nice, but the park was something more. Survivors of the original build, the giant oak trees, ancient and venerable, gave the whole place a sober beauty, a gravitas lacking in the quaint gardens or the newly refurbished interior. I looked around. ‘You’re very lucky.’
‘Am I?’
‘In this, anyway.’
She also stared about her, admiring the stately trees and the roll of the hills surrounding us. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am lucky in this.’ We walked on for a bit. ‘How was he?’ she said suddenly, out of the blue. I did not immediately understand her. ‘Damian. You told me you’d seen him recently.’
‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’
She nodded. ‘I heard that. I was hoping you’d tell me it wasn’t true.’
‘Well, it is.’ Again, we were silent as we crested a shallow slope with a wonderful view across the park towards the house.
‘Did you know I was mad about him?’ she said.
I was becoming used to surprises. ‘I knew you’d had a bit of a walkout. But I didn’t know it was the Real Thing.’
