Fall of Giants

“Is Boy’s tummy still poorly?”

“Yes. The doctor is coming.”

“You’d better send him to me while he’s here-not that a country doctor is likely to know much.”

“I’ll tell the staff. I take it you won’t be coming down to dinner.”

“How can I, when I feel like this?”

“I was just asking. Maud can sit at the head of the table.”

Fitz returned to his dressing room. Some men had abandoned tailcoats and white ties, and wore short tuxedo jackets and black ties at dinner, citing the war as their excuse. Fitz did not see the connection. Why should war oblige people to dress informally?

He put on his evening clothes and went downstairs.

{II}

After dinner, as coffee was served in the drawing room, Winston said provocatively: “So, Lady Maud, you women have got the vote at last.”

“Some of us have,” she said.

Fitz knew she was disappointed that the bill had included only women over thirty who were householders or the wives of householders. Fitz himself was angry that it had passed at all.

Churchill went on mischievously: “You must thank, in part, Lord Curzon here, who surprisingly abstained when the bill went to the House of Lords.”

Earl Curzon was a brilliant man whose stiffly superior air was made worse by a metal corset he wore for his back. There was a rhyme about him:

I am George Nathaniel Curzon

I am a most superior person

He had been viceroy of India and was now leader of the House of Lords and one of the five members of the War Cabinet. He was also president of the League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, so his abstention had astonished the political world and severely disappointed the opponents of votes for women, not least Fitz.

“The bill had been passed by the House of Commons,” Curzon said. “I felt we could not defy elected members of Parliament.”

Fitz was still annoyed about this. “But the Lords exist to scrutinize the decisions of the Commons, and to curb their excesses. Surely this was an exemplary case!”

“If we had voted down the bill, I believe the Commons would have taken umbrage and sent it back to us again.”

Fitz shrugged. “We’ve had that kind of dispute before.”

“But unfortunately the Bryce Committee is sitting.”

“Oh!” Fitz had not thought of that. The Bryce Committee was considering the reform of the House of Lords. “So that was it?”

“They’re due to report shortly. We can’t afford a stand-up fight with the Commons before then.”

“No.” With great reluctance, Fitz had to concede the point. If the Lords made a serious attempt to defy the Commons, Bryce might recommend curbing the power of the upper chamber. “We might have lost all our influence-permanently.”

“That is precisely the calculation that led me to abstain.”

Sometimes Fitz found politics depressing.

Peel, the butler, brought Curzon a cup of coffee, and murmured to Fitz: “Dr. Mortimer is in the small study, my lord, awaiting your convenience.”

Fitz had been worrying about Boy’s stomachache, and welcomed the interruption. “I’d better see him,” said Fitz. He excused himself and went out.

The small study was furnished with pieces that did not fit anywhere else in the house: an uncomfortable Gothic carved chair, a Scottish landscape no one liked, and the head of a tiger Fitz’s father had shot in India.

Mortimer was a competent local physician who had a rather too confident air, as if he thought his profession made him in some way the equal of an earl. However, he was polite enough. “Good evening, my lord,” he said. “Your son has a mild gastric infection which will most likely do him no harm.”

“Most likely?”

“I use the phrase deliberately.” Mortimer spoke with a Welsh accent that had been moderated by education. “We scientists deal always in probabilities, never certainties. I tell your miners that they go down the pit every morning knowing there will probably be no explosion.”

“Hmm.” That was not much comfort to Fitz. “Did you see the princess?”

“I did. She, too, is not seriously ill. In fact she is not ill at all, but she is giving birth.”

Fitz leaped up. “What?”

“She thought she was eight months pregnant, but she miscalculated. She is nine months pregnant, and happily will not continue pregnant many more hours.”

“Who is with her?”

“Her servants are all around her. I have sent for a competent midwife, and I myself will attend the birth if you so wish.”

“This is my fault,” Fitz said bitterly. “I should not have persuaded her to leave London.”

“Perfectly healthy babies are born outside London every day.”

Fitz had a feeling he was being mocked, but he ignored it. “What if something should go wrong?”

“I know the reputation of your London doctor, Professor Rathbone. He is of course a physician of great distinction, but I think I can safely say that I have delivered more babies than he has.”

“Miners’ babies.”

“Indeed, most of them; though at the moment of birth there is no apparent difference between them and the little aristocrats.”

Fitz was being mocked. “I don’t like your cheek,” he said.