by Jean Stubbs
At last Naomi was able to say quite naturally, ‘And how are you? And how is your poor head?’
Ambrose struck his forehead theatrically and replied, ‘Almost as good as new!’ Then, as if the blow had revived his memory, ‘By the by, Naomi, I was puzzled to understand why on earth you were out last Monday at such an hour of the morning?’
‘And I meant to ask you — how did you come to be there also?’
Their former camaraderie had been re-established.
‘You answer first!’ cried Ambrose.
‘As you wish!’ she replied and proceeded to act out her tale.
‘On Sunday afternoons, when Hal has gone back to Manchester, I go to see Mary. I help her to put the children to bed, and then we have our supper together and talk, and work on the fair copy of Page Seven, and then I come home at ten o’clock. It is very nice for both of us. But this Sunday, one thing upon another happened.’
She lifted her eyes as if to ask help of heaven.
‘Poor Mary had not seen Hal that weekend, because he is down in the south of England. Philomena was ill with the croup and Mary had sat up with her all night. Her article was still in notes. Ach!’
Naomi pressed both hands to her brow.
‘So! So at length everything is done, and I tell Mary to take a little sleep and I will stay with Philomena, just for an hour or two. But Mary is exhausted and sleeps like a child, and I do not want to wake her. It is very, very late. She wishes me to stay the rest of the night — which would have been sensible. But by that time, you know, I did want to come home!’
‘Oh, I do understand!’ Ambrose said solemnly, amused.
‘And, after all, I thought myself quite safe. Joseph was with me, and he had a pistol.’
‘Much good it did him!’ said Ambrose drily. ‘So Philomena has fallen sick again? That child is a cross which Mary will bear to the end of her days. Ah, well! How is Santo? How is our goddaughter?’
‘They are both hearty!’ she replied, smiling. ‘Mary is keeping them away from the sickroom, in charge of a nursemaid, so that they do not catch the croup. Alice is a very lively baby, and Santo grows taller and handsomer every day!’
‘They are the product of young and healthy parents,’ Ambrose remarked, ‘whereas Philomena was the last of a long litter.’
Then he fell silent as certain thoughts occurred to him, but Naomi chattered on.
‘The haughty young Santo — who said all girls were silly, and quarrels with Philomena at every trick and turn — simply worships Alice. It is quite charming to see them together!’
She saw that he was no longer interested and changed the topic.
‘And now, sir, how did you happen to be in the High Street at such an hour, last Monday?’
There was no help for it. Ambrose looked directly at her.
‘I woke up in the early hours of the morning, feeling that you were in danger and that you needed me.’
She did not answer him. She looked down at her wine glass and slowly twirled the stem. Her lips moved slightly, as though in prayer. Ambrose could not tell whether it was a plea for help or words of thanksgiving.
‘You did need me,’ he added firmly.
Still she neither answered nor looked at him.
‘I was afraid that the only need was mine,’ he went on humbly, sincerely, ‘but in the last month or so, I have begun to think and hope that our needs are the same. There are two main obstacles in the way. The first is me, for I am a poor bargain in the marriage market. The second, Naomi, is your suspicious nature!’
He had hoped to draw her fire, but she smiled a little, frowned a little, gave a little shrug.
‘Are you not going to assist me at all?’ Ambrose asked ruefully. ‘You must know what I am trying to say. I don’t ask for an answer outright, but could you not give me some indication of how you feel?’
She hesitated. Then said, eyebrows raised, eyes resolutely on the wine glass, ‘I am considering your two obstacles!’
‘Consider away!’ he cried, relieved. ‘I am not asking you to commit yourself one way or the other without due thought.’
Now she regarded him gravely.
‘Why are you a poor marriage bargain? Tell me that.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Ambrose said, almost cheerfully. ‘I earn only enough money to keep myself, and have no prospect of becoming rich. I have no home or property of my own. I am devoted to a profession which keeps unsociable and inconvenient hours — Mary was always grumbling about cold or burned dinners! And I am considerably older than you.’
The last remark interested her most.
‘Indeed? How much older?’
‘It would be indelicate to be exact in my arithmetic,’ he answered, smiling. ‘Let us say that I was a student at Cambridge when you were born.’
‘So?’ she mused. ‘I did not realise that. You look and seem young for your age, and I have always felt much older!’
‘Well, so you are, in one way.’
She consulted her wine glass again.
After a moment or two, she said, ‘All those other things about you, I knew anyway — and they are not of great account.’
Hope blazed in him, but the result was too important to be jeopardised by haste. He let her take her time.
‘As for my suspicious nature, I have good cause to be suspicious of men and marriage — but not of your intentions.’ Again she looked at him, so that he should understand the import of her words.
‘I do not suspect you, for instance, of being a fortune-hunter, or you would have found a rich wife long ago!’
‘You’re very kind,’ said Ambrose, flattered.
‘I do not suspect you of looking for a home — although I think you need one! — or you would have found that also. Your strange hours do not frighten me, either. My father left all domestic arrangements to me. True, we lived in hotels. We had plenty of money. But he expected his clothes to be brushed, his shirts to be clean, his bills to be paid, his suite of rooms booked, his meals ordered, his business appointments made, his secretarial work done. I speak five languages. I tell you, I needed every word in every one of them!’
‘What an astonishing woman you are!’ he cried, proud of her.
Naomi gestured his compliment away.
‘So it is not those things which I suspect. No, I am suspicious of what you and I would become if we were married.’ She paused and asked him, ‘Do you remember talking of the cost of love?’
‘I was only being clever,’ said Ambrose fearfully.
The waiter had swept the cloth clean and fetched a decanter of port and a bowl of walnuts.
‘Will you not join me?’ Ambrose asked, pouring out two glasses.
She sipped her port composedly and set it down again. She said, ‘My father told me that a marriage contract was the most binding legal document he knew. Other partnerships can be changed or dissolved. Not so, this one. If you are fortunate, well and good. If you are not, then you face every difficulty which life can heap upon you, and there is no way out. There are no escape clauses.’
Somewhat dashed, Ambrose replied, ‘I take your point. But on the other hand, we know each other pretty well by this time. We have been good friends and partners for two years, and our mettle has been tested more than once.’
Her cool approach incensed him. He spoke more sharply, more passionately now, than he had done.
‘You believed in me and the future of The Northern Correspondent though we were in a sense unproven! You found premises and bought machinery at the height of the cholera epidemic when most people would have held back and waited! When I suggested that we might not live to publish the paper, you replied, “We act as though we shall!” You put forward a philosophy that life should be lived courageously, risks taken, misfortune — and even death — accepted. “Let durance be your watchword!” you said. Do you remember that?’
She nodded her head.
‘Then why the deuce don’t you believe in us, and have the courage to t
ake the risk with us, and see us through?’ he cried, incensed. ‘Are we worth less than a damned newspaper?’
She gasped, swallowed.
‘The newspaper is your life! Do you remember saying that?’
‘I was wrong. Last Monday, your life was more important to me than my own. It still is — if you will allow it to be so. Throw me back again into my bachelor pond and that’s where I shall flounder — comfortably enough, I daresay! — to the end of my days. I have neither the courage nor the energy to try love again. God knows I never asked to be inconvenienced by it in the first place!’
And he drank down his port as though it were water.
The face opposite him was as old as Eve. Over its mirror, a dozen impressions delicately shifted and flitted until a great tenderness overlaid them all. Then she smiled most beautifully and placed one hand on his, and spoke to his condition. Her foreign turns of phrase were so marked as to indicate the depth of her feelings.
‘Why do you think I come to help you all that long time ago?’ she asked. ‘Oh yes, I believe in you and your Northern Correspondent, that is most certain. I do not throw my money down the drains! But there are always many investments. Do you not occur to think that perhaps I might also like you a little? Am I not a woman? Shall all my dealings be of the head and not the heart?’
He glanced at her hand but not at her, abashed in his turn.
‘Do you know what I feel when I see you lying wounded,’ she pronounced the word to rhyme with grounded, ‘wounded to the earth for my sake, that I do not suffer? Do you know what I suffer? Do you know what I think?’
Her eyes were dark pools of tears.
‘I think, “How shall I live without him? What will this life be, without him?”’
‘Naomi! Dearest Naomi!’
‘No!’ she cried. ‘First you speak. Now I speak!’
She withdrew her hand. She had been wounded in her turn.
‘You come to me in your beautiful new clothes, and I am like butter turned. You have thought of me so much that you take me out to a beautiful dinner — you cannot afford it, I know, I have done the books! — and you buy beautiful new clothes…’
‘I borrowed them!’ Ambrose cried, exalted.
‘Be silent! What do I care you borrow? What do I care? You do it for me. That is what I care. And then you talk of marriage and reason and this and that, and ask why I do not help you out. Only at the end do you speak of love, and then you say it is inconvenient!’
‘But you were pretty damned cool yourself about…’
‘No more! I have enough talking. You have to say only one little small thing — that you love me. That is all. And you say it wrong!’
She swept back her chair. She drew herself up to her full height.
‘Naomi!’ Ambrose beseeched.
He was truly sorry, but could not help smiling.
She stared at him, enraged.
‘Kindly escort me to home!’ she ordered.
Her dignity, her anger, could no longer deceive him.
‘Very well,’ said Ambrose, grinning. ‘I shall most kindly to escort you to home.’ He held out her mantle. ‘Allow me!’
He put Charlie’s top hat on at a killing angle.
‘I have been remiss, madam, very much remiss. I shall now make full amends. The whole of Millbridge shall know how much I love you! I shall shout it in the street. I shall waltz with lamp-posts. I shall serenade you exceptionally loudly upon the steps of Thornton House.’
Naomi’s face changed.
She said, ‘You would not do such things? You would not!’
She could not help smiling. She tried to hide the smile. She caught Ambrose’s eye and giggled. She struck him, not very hard, with the handle of her fan.
‘You are disgracious!’ she cried.
‘Disgracious? I like that word! I love that word. Let’s kindly to go and be disgracious all the way down the High Street! Waiter!’
He settled the bill with a flourish. He held out his arm with exaggerated courtesy. In amusement and apprehension, she laid a gloved hand on his sleeve.
‘Would you be disgracious enough to marry me?’ he asked.
‘Not until you are better behavioured!’ she answered with some spirit, and he laughed aloud at the slip.
‘I think we have both drunk far too much wine. What a sensible thing to do. Mr Tyler! Congratulate me!’ he cried, as they entered the coffee-room. ‘This lady has consented to become my wife!’
It was late. The mood was merry. They were local celebrities. Strangers and acquaintances cheered boisterously, and once again they had to push their way through a friendly and demanding crowd.
Outside, the moon was high and all the stars were out. Ambrose stood in the centre of the market square and cried out exultantly to its uttermost corners.
‘I love you!’ And then, ‘Naomi!’
The echoes in the square answered him.
‘Love you. Love you. Love you. Naomi. Naomi. Naomi.’
She covered her mouth with her hands in horror, in rapture.
He took her hands away and kissed them reverently. He kissed her very gently and lovingly upon the lips. His boisterous mood was melting away.
At the top of the High Street, he spread his arms and waltzed a yard or two ahead of her from lamp-post to lamp-post, embracing the waist of each as lightly and carefully as though it were a dancing partner, and ended at the steps of Thornton House, bowing low.
One emotion chased another out. Naomi followed him, laughing, protesting. Finally, in tender silence, she watched him.
On the topmost step of Thornton House he sang his four-line madrigal, but only to her, and very softly.
Not a shutter creaked, not a soul stirred. Simultaneously they reached out their arms, one to the other, to seal the alliance.
Marvelling, they drew apart to see this new half of their future self.
‘You will marry me, won’t you?’ Ambrose asked.
Slowly, solemnly, Naomi bent her head.
‘I hereby promise,’ said Ambrose, lifting up one hand, ‘that I will in no way alter or encroach upon the perfect partnership we have enjoyed so far. And I have this to say to God or the Fates or whatever powers rule our destinies. So long as we are together, nothing can harm us. So long as we are good in ourselves, nothing can do us evil.’
He smiled at the bright darkness of her face.
‘And what do you say, dearest love?’
But Naomi could only find an image rich enough for this rich present from the rich past her father had renounced.
‘Oh, it is like the seven-branched tree my mother told me of. Like a tree full of stars and birds. And all of them are singing and shining for us.’
PART THREE: NEW EDITIONS, 1835-1843
SEVENTEEN: REAL FINGERS
28 September, 1835
Ambrose sharpened another pen and looked suspiciously at the office clock on the wall. As he thought, it had stopped. Then he saw the hand pause and hang like a water drop and fall from twenty-two to twenty-three minutes past five. He sighed, dipped his newly mended pen in the ink, and resumed work.
Sir Richard Grey and his party of Whigs were swept into power on the Wings of Reform, and so far they have proved to be a busy but in some ways a disappointing government. Already we are seeing the effects of their disastrous Poor Law, which has turned the workhouse from a public charity into a public threat…
On second thoughts, he crossed this out and began again.
In this modern age of industrial growth and expansion, the old-fashioned style — we will not say ‘system’ — of local government is insufficient. The finest reforms are rendered useless if they cannot be put into operation, and so far the Whigs seem to have provided us with a carriage and horses and forgotten the driver! However, their latest Act will put a coachman on the seat who can take our local politicians for a nice brisk gallop!
He had a happy burst of inspiration, and grinned as he scribbled, tucking the foot of one leg
around the ankle of the other.
The Municipal Reform Act should make a considerable difference to our present Mayor and Corporation, who will henceforth be elected or rejected by the ratepayers, instead of voting each other in as usual. Moreover, our local government will have the legal power to undertake major improvements and developments, thus giving them no excuse to squander public money on banquets fit for the Romans and a new Town Hall not quite fit enough for the Greeks. Finally and most cruelly, their accounts are to be audited — a state of affairs which will cause the stoutest heart to falter!
Now he was well into his stride.
Whilst we congratulate the government on this latest Act, might we suggest that they provide their new driver with a whip, and take a cut at the excessive powers wielded by our Justices of the Peace? Were these landed gentlemen both just and peaceful, we should have no cause for complaint, but human nature being what it is, some of them fall short of the ideal. Then we shall have Reform indeed! It will be interesting to see…
But his own interest faltered at this point. Ambrose laid down his pen in defeat and stared hard at the minute hand, which appeared to be unable to reach the hour. Then it laboured forward, and, on the instant, St Stephen’s clock chimed six, and a knock on the door announced Frank Ormerod, carrying the Friday-night mock-up.
Ambrose sharpened another pen, to convince them both that he was not wasting time. He spoke briskly.
‘Just putting the finishing touches to the editorial, Frank!’
‘No hurry as yet, Mr Longe.’
Ambrose said as casually as he could, ‘Any news from home?’
Frank Ormerod shook his head almost in reproach.
‘Nay, Mr Longe, you should know me by this time. If there was any news, I’d have sent Jimmy running up to tell you.’
Ambrose nodded, and pretended to examine the mock-up.
‘The ladies got Page Seven done, I see!’ said Frank heartily. ‘I like that. Shows spirit and dedication. Under the circumstances.’