He caught her to him. She lifted her face to the leaden skies above his bowed dark head, arched her back to offer her breasts. Pain and pleasure were inseparable. He bore her to the floor, took her as she lay, with urgency and an oddly gentle strength. They lay afterwards together in silence, their clothing in disarray, arms and legs still entangled, neither quite certain of the cause of the unexpected storm that had swept them. Anna came slowly to herself. He moved away from her. She became suddenly aware of her bared skin, of her shameful posture. She sat up quickly, ducking her head, rearranging her clothes. The room had darkened further; she could hardly see him.
Say it. Please say it. Tell me you love me.
“I’ll light the lamp,” he said, and his voice was soft but the words were wrong.
Her pregnancy was a discomfort from the start. She lost weight, was constantly sick, her energy seemed to desert her. She struggled through the winter months cossetted by Mrs Lacey, lectured to and organized by Hermione Smithson, counselled upon every subject under the sun by her grandmother who, though physically frail, had lost none of her strength of mind. Indeed, a distracted Anna discovered, the whole world seemed to have at its fingertips advice for a pregnant woman, and the whole world insisted upon giving it. Nobody but Anna seemed to regard it as an invasion of her privacy for near-strangers to be kept informed of her slightest physical problem or discomfort. She did not bloom, as some women do: on the contrary she found the whole business little to her liking, from the bulky, cumbersome body that seemed no longer to be entirely her own, to the feelings of resentment that she discovered herself to harbour for the small intruder who now shared that body and her life at considerable cost to herself in pain and discomfort. A large part of this resentment undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that the unborn child, she felt, came between herself and Joss just as they were beginning to find some kind of understanding. From that October afternoon when they had first truly made love to the time when her pregnancy began physically to affect her was the happiest time of her life; everything she had hoped for seemed to be almost within her grasp. Then the sickness began and the debilitation, and the time had been too brief, and nothing had been established between them. She knew herself to be short-tempered and mortifyingly and constantly tearful. She could not bear Joss to touch her swollen and painful breasts: from there it was a simple step for him not to touch her at all. She was permanently exhausted. The idyll – such as it was – had passed. Her irritability, which she seemed incapable of controlling, caused quarrels about the most insignificant things. In February she caught influenza. Hermione Smithson, contacted by an anxious Mrs Lacey, made short work of packing Anna, her small case and her medicine into a cab.
“But – Aunt Hermione – what about Joss? He’ll—”
“He’s more than capable of taking care of himself. Besides, he has Mrs Lacey, doesn’t he? It’s you we have to look after, my dear – you and the baby. Just look at you! Skin and bone!”
Anna felt too wretched to argue. With some relief she allowed herself to be put to bed with a warming pan and a cup of comforting lemon and honey, and drifted into a feverish sleep. It was not until her illness was over and her head finally cleared that she realized that in ten days Joss had visited her only twice and seemed in no great hurry to persuade her home. She tried, unsuccessfully, not to think of a pair of red stockings.
Yet it could not be said that Joss was not pleased about the baby. Indeed, on occasion he would fuss about Anna almost as much as Mrs Lacey did – yet even this could not please her, for she felt strongly that his attentions were not those she desired from him – the attentions of a man for the woman he loved – but those of a conscientious doctor for a valued patient. His thoughts were always for the coming child, and her resentment grew. She knew she was being perverse, disliked herself for her own moodiness and quarrelsome touchiness. She began to look forward to June and the birth of the child with a passionate intensity that had nothing to do with a longing for motherhood. She wanted the business over and done with. She wanted her body to herself again. She wanted to be normal, to get back to her own life. Her work suffered badly during those months – she could not concentrate, her drawings and designs seemed to her to be as heavy and as dull as her own body felt. When Hermione, thinking to distract her, offered to introduce her to the needlewoman she had been so keen to meet she made an excuse and refused. Her mind seemed incapable of its normal enthusiasms. Even the stirrings and rumours of more trouble in South Africa hardly seemed to pierce the self-centred and peevish veil with which pregnancy had invested her. The Boers wouldn’t take on the might of the British Army; they wouldn’t dare. Crossly, she dismissed the war talk. April. May. The months dragged on. Her distended belly was sore and uncomfortable. She could neither sit nor lie comfortably. She cried when James came to see her to tell her that his regiment was posted to South Africa, but her tears were more of self-pity than for him. Nothing would happen to James. But she – she was beginning to be very frightened indeed. In the last weeks she was haunted by the memory of her mother’s ordeal when Margaret Jane was born.
Oh, God – would it never happen? Would she never be free?
The birth, on a warm June night with thunder rumbling in the distance and the heaviness of storm in the air was slow, painful, and utterly exhausting. Anna never herself knew where she acquired the strength to fight the fight of all mothers to bring a new life into the world. At last, after inconceivable effort, it was done and the bawling scrap was laid in the crook of her tired mother’s arm.
A daughter. Blue-eyed, fair-skinned, the downy hair already thick, curly and glinting silver-gold.
Joss stared at his daughter, his eyes sombre, lifted his gaze to Josef who stood on the other side of the bed.
“She’ll be beautiful,” Josef said, painfully, his eyes tormented.
“Yes. She’ll be beautiful.” Joss’s voice was even.
Josef bent to the child, offered a slightly unsteady finger. He looked old. There was an unhealthy tinge of grey to his skin. Anna smiled, sleepily. “A little granddaughter, Papa.”
“Yes.”
“She looks like—” she stopped suddenly, frowned a little, “—like Boris,” she finished.
Joss bent and scooped his daughter from her mother’s side. Above the small, vulnerable fair head his eyes upon the older man were totally unforgiving.
Chapter Eleven
Whilst through the temperate days of an English summer Anna fought an often losing battle to adjust to motherhood and to a marriage that she was coming to understand was going to be anything but easy at the best of times, in the cool of the South African winter the gulf between high-handed British and stubborn Boer widened inexorably. As the inevitable end drew near both sides prepared for it as best they could, then settled to wait – the one for reinforcements from home, the other for the fresh grass of spring that would feed the horses and oxen of their commandos. In the event, perhaps predictably, the grass grew before the reinforcements arrived. When Paul Kruger demanded that the British give up their claim to the Transvaal and issued an ultimatum that expired late in the afternoon of October 11th 1899, 47,000 men under the command of Sir Redvers Buller were still en route for South Africa. Within a month and before the desperately needed extra men had arrived, the towns of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking were under siege. In Britain war fever flickered, flared, then flamed through the country as it had not for a century in a wave of jingoistic excitement. Headlines screamed, bands played and young men queued to enlist. National pride was outraged; it simply was not possible that an army that had built and defended an empire could be held at bay – more, could be beaten into retreat – by a rabble of Bible-thumping Dutch farmers. The recruiting sergeants banged their drums and spoke to eager ears. The troopships sailed, bravely, amidst fluttering handkerchieves and the tears of women. Then reports began to filter back, blacker by the day and the tears for many were shed in earnest, no longer simply the sad tokens of parting but t
he bitter gall of final loss. Those that commanded the British Army were slow to learn that scarlet-coated, rigidly ranked discipline and courage were simple lunacy when pitted against a handful of crack shots and rough riders whose home and hunting ground that wide, wild country was. Columns marched to relieve the besieged towns, and one by one the marchers died, picked off like wooden soldiers in a fairground shooting gallery by marksmen who had learned to handle a rifle and a pony in the same year that they had learned to walk. In just such a way Subaltern James Rose died, marching to Kimberley where was imprisoned Cecil Rhodes, certainly the most important Englishman in South Africa and, so it was said, the richest Englishman in the world. James never saw the man who shot him, did not feel the mortal blow of the bullet that scattered his brains on the dusty soil. In this, at least, he was lucky; more than half of those who marched with him died harder under the African sun in the defeat that followed as officers too blinded by regulations to see that their enemies were fighting a different kind of war, led charge after desperate charge against a hail of viciously accurate bullets and an enemy who simply refused to stand still to be charged. Hundreds of men died that day, and for nothing; the lessons so painfully offered were not learned and the columns kept marching.
The news of his son’s death was a blow from which Josef was slow to recover, and one which further confirmed his growing conviction that those malicious fates from whom he had imagined he had escaped had found him once more. Despite his efforts, his hard work, his success and his repentance for sins past, the things and the people that he loved were not, after all, safe. Tanya, Grace and now young James – all dead. Alex, his eldest son, hardly a son at all now and scarcely recognizable as the boy he had been as he ruthlessly pursued his own life and ambitions separately from his family’s. And Anna – his pride, his special child – what of Anna? That she was not happy was clear to anyone who cared to look beneath the brittle veneer she always assumed in company. Since the baby he hardly saw her. She had done little or no design work, rarely came to the shop or the workshop, almost never visited the Bayswater house except at direct invitation. When she did come he was always taken aback by her appearance. A beauty she had never been, but always she had had her own slightly eccentric charm and never had her dress or toilette been less than meticulous; since the birth of little Victoria she had become lackadaisical, her hair scraped unbecomingly back, her clothes crumpled and sometimes stained. Each time he saw her it seemed to him that her eyes were reddened as if by recent tears. Yet she would not confide in him, as once she might have done, and though he grieved for her he could see no way to help. She and Joss must work things out between them.
Joss.
If anyone could be said to personify Josef’s worry and confusion it must be Joss. Entirely gone was the boy, bitter to be sure and always difficult yet eager in his own way to please, to care and to be cared for – and in his place a man that Josef, no matter how hard he tried, could not come to know. Some part of Joss was closed to him, and he did not know why, though sometimes in his darkest moments a terrible suspicion assailed him. How often, oh how often, as the years passed did the memory of those last long hours that Tanya and Joss had spent together before she had taken her life nag at his mind like a toothache that would not be soothed? What had she remembered? What had she told him? He could not bring himself to ask. Nothing, said his common sense stoutly – for surely no man could smile and be civil and keep such a secret? And yet through long nights the thought of Joss’s sister haunted him and he knew that atonement must still be made, somehow, by someone. He found himself plagued too by thoughts of the tainted stone upon which all their lives were based. More and more, as he tried to tell Anna on the night before her marriage, he had come almost superstitiously to see the diamond as the root cause of the trouble that seemed to dog him and those he loved; the cursed thing had been nothing but bad luck for anyone who had had anything to do with it. And now, as if to confirm that belief, he was beginning to suspect that the very business in which he had worked so hard and which was founded upon that unlucky stone was no longer as secure as it had been. Still grieving for the son cut down in South Africa, aware sometimes fearfully of growing ill-health, he found himself now for the first time in years uncertain of the financial status of the business. Joss guardedly assured him that the setbacks were temporary – the shortage of diamonds and of gold caused by the South African war, a slight change in fashion, to which Rose and Company had not been quick enough to adjust, the now not so propitious situation of the shop – times were changing, Rose’s now found themselves in a popular rather than prestigious premises; the rich and titled demanded to be wooed – new premises were called for. In Conduit Street perhaps, or New Bond Street – to Josef the idea of spending more money to improve their apparently failing profits was more than a little confusing, but he was getting old and for so long now he had trusted Joss to take care of the financial side of the business that to take his advice, especially since Grace’s death, had become second nature, to question it a departure from the norm. He hoped that Joss did not know of his own personal recent failures in the Stock Market; when the tide of fortune turned against a man it turned, it seemed, with a vengeance.
“Do we actually have the money for this new venture?” he asked his son-in-law one day in December, the last month of the nineteenth century. The day was dark and dreary, the news matched it. The names Magersfontein, Stormberg, Colenso were on every tongue, there were rumours of incompetence, of massive casualties, of defeat and humiliation.
“We’ll make a profit on the Piccadilly premises. The rest we’ll borrow.”
“Borrow?” Josef’s voice shook a little. The wearying breathlessness was upon him again.
“Of course. As you know our capital is rather tied up at the moment.”
“But, Joss—”
Joss looked up from the ledger he was studying. Waited with polite, barely veiled impatience. “Yes?”
Josef hesitated, his troublesome breath catching in his chest. Suddenly he was aware as never before of the younger man’s vitality, of the power and restlessness so severely penned in the slight frame. All at once Josef felt very tired. “Nothing. Of course, you know best. We’ll borrow.”
Christmas was a subdued affair that year. Alex, busy as it seemed he more often than not was with his other and in his eyes more prestigious family, did not manage to put in an appearance at all. Ralph, home from his seminary but wrapped up in his own religious observances of the season, was like a vague and gentle shadow in the house. Michael, home early from his first term at university and strangely subdued, spent much of his time uncharacteristically quiet in his room. Joss, Anna and the baby visited on Christmas day, but the laughing ghost of James was too evidently present for them all and the occasion was a mockery of those other, happy festivals when they had all been children and Grace had presided at the Christmas table.
After dinner Anna found herself sitting with her father before the dying fire in the parlour. Ralph had gone again to church. Victoria lay, mouth milky, fast asleep upon the couch next to her mother. At six months she was a pretty robust child, even-tempered and well-behaved.
“Where are Michael and Joss?”
Anna lifted her head from her silent contemplation of the flames. “Still in the dining room. Michael wanted to talk to Joss about something. It’s odd, I think, that they should get on as they do.”
“Why odd?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Joss doesn’t make friends easily. He has very few,” – that I know of anyway; she did not speak the thought. “And Michael’s so much younger.” She leaned back and added, tartly tired, “Perhaps it’s just that Joss knows that Michael thinks he’s first cousin to God Almighty. He’d appreciate that.”
Her father looked up sharply at her tone, but curbed his tongue and refrained from comment. “Anna?” he said, gently, after a short silence.
“Yes?”
“We haven’t seen much of you lat
ely. Here. At the workshop. Tom was asking the other day – the design he spoke to you about – for the silver box for the Marquis – have you done it?”
Anna turned her head. “No. Not yet.”
“Tom’s waiting.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. But—” she sighed a little, helplessly “—I’m sorry, Papa, I just can’t seem to—” She stopped. In the lamplight he thought he saw the sudden gleam of tears.
“Anna! Anna, my pet, it’s nothing to cry for! I just promised Tom that I’d ask—” Josef was concerned.
She blinked rapidly, fussed with the sleeping child. “I’m not crying.” She was crying. Again. She hated it. Hated herself. “Anna?” His voice was quiet, questioning.
She glanced at him. She had noticed over dinner how ill he looked. Even in this flattering half-light his face had in it an unhealthy tinge of grey, the eye sockets shadowed. He was grieving still for James, she knew, as indeed were they all. How could she add to his burdens with her own silly worries? How could she even put into words the things she could not explain to herself; the depressions, the tears, the inability to cope with the smallest thing that seemed to have overwhelmed her since Victoria’s birth. A spoiled dinner, the baby crying, a broken bootlace – everything assumed the proportions of a disaster. No wonder Joss was hardly ever at home – if those odious rooms in Kew could be described as such. She remained silent. The baby beside her stirred, settled back into sleep again. Absently Anna adjusted the shawl that covered her. She and Josef sat for a long time unspeaking, with too much to be said and no way of saying it.
The Rose Stone Page 21