We lay for a while in silence, recovering, easing ourselves apart, and, when it seemed to me that his breathing had slowed and deepened into sleep; I got up and went to the window, needing, I think, to be a yard or so away from him to experiment with the sensation of shame. Yet, taking a deep breath, waiting for it to start, nothing happened to me with which I could not cope.
I knew, in this cooler moment, the enormity of the social and moral crime I had committed, for which I, as a woman, would be required to pay a far higher price than Nicholas. Discovery for him, would mean no more perhaps than a personal explanation with his wife and with his father, a certain winking and sniggering among the crowd when he entered the Piece Hall. ‘The young devil, he got the Ashburn woman, did he? Good luck to him!’, since it was well known that a man took his pleasures where he could find them, and a woman who surrendered was no better than a whore in any case.
But for me the retribution would be terrible and complete, a total casting-out which would oblige even my mother and Prudence to treat me as a stranger, if they wished to retain their own reputations. But—although I did not wish to lose them, had no idea how to face life without them—I had done nothing I could find it in my own heart to regret, had done nothing, certainly, that I would not be prepared to do again. And, having decided that much. I could see no purpose in self-torment.
I am no longer sure if I thought of Giles in that solitary quarter of an hour; it simply seems to me now that I must have done so, for I could hardly have been so calm had I not realized that my feelings for him had been so different that they could still exist, quite independently, alongside my love for Nicholas, which had always been there. I sought no excuses, no justifications. That was simply the way of it. And, if there was a price to pay, then, because I was a Law Valley woman who understood about the settlement of debts, I would pay it.
‘Are you awake?’ I murmured, and he crossed the room in two strides, his arms coming tight around me.
‘Aye—awake and watching you. You’ll be thinking about your husband, I expect, and maybe I’ve been thinking about my wife. And I’ve got this to say to you, Faith Aycliffe. I reckon you must love me a fair amount or you’d not have let me near you in the first place, and whatever it costs me—whatever it costs you—I’ve no mind to let you go. Don’t whine to me now, and say you didn’t mean it to go this far, for I won’t take it. It’s happened. I’ve got you and I’ll keep you—one way or another—that’s one thing you can be sure of.’
‘And when did you ever see me whining, Nicholas Barforth?’
‘Never,’ he said. One hand going gently now into my hair, finding my cheek and the nape of my neck. ‘I never did.’
‘No—just as I’ve never seen you romantic.’
He pressed his mouth against my forehead, and I felt his lips curve into their slow smile. ‘Yes—well I did promise that, didn’t I? Come back to bed then, Faith. What we did just then was need—I expect you know that. So we’ll go back to bed now, I reckon, and make love.’
Chapter Nineteen
It was enough, at least for Nicholas, in those early days to know that his physical possession of me was beyond dispute, to rejoice in his complete mastery of my body’s needs; and if he did not precisely wish to see me in a state of abject slavery—and I am not altogether certain of that—he desired, most assuredly, to increase those needs, did increase them, so that my body, quite separately from my heart, was famished and painful without him.
I lived through fevered days that should have terrified me and did not, content to take what I could, as if I stood somehow at the very rim of the world, some outer threshold, where I must clutch each moment as it came and live it intensely, to the limits of myself.
And having no experience of the stage-management of adultery, I was surprised how often we could be together.
His horse in the Old Swan yard would cause no comment, and, should anyone look for him in the bar-room and not find him there, there was the Piece Hall across the way, Mr. Rawnsley’s Bank, the offices of Jonas Agbrigg, who handled the legal complexities of the Barforths—no reason at all to suppose he had taken the brisk, ten-minute stroll to my kitchen door, conveniently screened by a high-walled yard, with no neighbours to bother us. And if he should be seen in Millergate, coming to me or leaving me, what of it? It was a busy, commercial thoroughfare, containing not only the millinery and the bakery he would hardly patronize, but the premises of the architect, Mr. Outhwaite, who dealt with all repairs and extensions at Lawcroft and Tarn Edge, the saddlery, the importer of cigars and fine wines, where no one would be astonished to see him.
I could not be certain we were safe. I rather thought that we were not. But that first breathless August, that first mellowing of the year into September, my eyes were too dazzled for caution, my mind lulled, not by recklessness, but by the perilous, languorous philosophy of the opium-eater who, knowing perfectly well that he may die of his addiction, does not even want to resist it.
To begin with he came only in the evening, having purchased the discretion of my Mrs. Marworth, who, being too afraid of him to betray us in any case, and wordly enough to rather enjoy this kind of thing, would admit him through her kitchen and then prepare herself to tell anyone else who called that I was not at home. But he required, I think, some further commitment, some act of rashness on my part, and was soon urging me to folly.
‘We have a house in Scarborough, Faith. My parents never go there now, and I will confess to you that Blaize has used it, and that I have used it—I’m being honest, you see, like you said. I’ve done this before, except that I haven’t, because it’s different now, if you see what I mean? We could stay the whole night together, Faith—two whole nights. I’ve never made love to you in the morning. Of course you can get away. Yes, yes you can—you can if you want to.’
‘But I can’t go to Scarborough, Nicholas. I’ve never travelled alone.’
‘You can. You’ve travelled all over Europe with your mother, who is the most feather-headed female imaginable. If you got her from here to Naples and back again, then you can find your way to Scarborough. Mrs. Marworth can go as far as Leeds with you, which will take care of chance meetings on the platform in Cullingford, and I’ll have someone meet you at the other end. Do it, Faith. The couple who keep the house open for us won’t even remember your face—I’ll pay them to forget it. Do it. It’s October now. Nobody we know goes to Scarborough at this season. You’ve got a friend, somewhere, haven’t you, that you can say you’re visiting?’
And so I went to Scarborough, arriving in a state of extreme nervous exhaustion, convinced that every tree I had passed en route concealed a prying Cullingford face, that the spare Mr. Collins who had been sent to meet me in a closed carriage, and his comfortable wife waiting to give me tea, were spies in Georgiana’s or Aunt Hannah’s pay. But the house, set high on the cliff-top, was surrounded by trees in full, burnished, Autumn leaf, its garden offering a view of the little grey town climbing downwards to the bay, the castle a stern sentinel above it, the streets empty, it seemed, of anything but the fresh October wind, the stirring of salt-dried foliage, the tang of sea-spray.
‘This is the first property my father bought outside Cullingford.’ Nicholas told me. ‘His first attempt at being alone with my mother.’ And for three miraculous days we were alone together, three rain-washed days; grey-tinted mornings which found us still in the same bed, no hurry, no sudden, chilly departures, a slow and lovely reaching out for one another in the moment of waking, free to enjoy this new-found luxury of making love in the uncertain, marine daylight which revealed to me, more exactly than any candleflame, the complex pattern of bone and muscle beneath his skin, the tight-clenching of his jaw in the moment of pleasure, the harsh hands and limbs of conquest, allowing me no quarter, and then the warmth of him afterwards, the cherishing.
‘Dear God, Faith! It gets better every time. Doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Then tell me�
�tell me what it does to you.’
‘It consumes me—and then it makes me dream about the next time.’
‘Now that’s what I like to hear. Give me half an hour, will you, and then we’ll see about that dream—’
There were three, blustery afternoons, my hair tangled with sea-wind, walking together through a mist beaded with raindrops, losing ourselves in the grey sweep of sea and sky, laughing as we took shelter from the suddenly slanting rain, running back along the cliff path, giddy with freedom and laughter, to doze on the sofa before a busy tea-time fire.
There were three evenings that could go on forever, until we chose to end them, and which led us warmly, gently, to love and sleep and the new morning. It was the best time, the special time, so good that there was bitterness at its ending, for those three perfect days had shown us too clearly how all the days of our lives could have been, and we were no longer satisfied.
He startled me badly a few days later by striding into my house in the middle of the afternoon.
‘Nicholas! Good heavens!—anyone could have been here.’
‘Mrs. Marworth said not, and I’ve told her to say you’re not at home to anybody else. I was thinking of you. I was there, in Millergate, at the saddler’s, and I thought why the devil shouldn’t I see you? Why the devil shouldn’t I? Give me a kiss, Faith—I’ve got all of five minutes.’
And so it continued.
‘Faith—are you there? I’m just up from the Piece Hall, and I was thinking of you. Come here—closer than that—ten minutes, that’s all.’
Until one day, at the perilous hour of tea-time, he strode into my drawing-room, his arms lifting me roughly from the ground.
‘I was thinking of you—badly. And why the devil not? I’ve got half an hour, Faith. Come to bed.’
‘Nicholas.’
‘Yes, in the afternoon. Scandalous—your Mrs. Marworth thinks so too, I expect, but she’s ready to stand in your doorway and say you’re gone to Leeds, should anyone want to know.’
And I went upstairs, laughing, and locked my door, undressed myself slowly as he lay on my bed, allowing him time to see how the late autumn sunshine, slanting through the chinks in my curtains, dappled my bare skin. I was, I think, half shocked, half excited—since no decent woman made love in the daytime except in Scarborough—and perhaps that in itself was exciting, for, leaning over him, pouring myself against him, I was full of a wicked, tantalizing playfulness that became at its conclusion the purring content of a slumbrously stretching cat.
I watched him dress, loving him, adoring the hardness, the darkness of him, a body that would take on weight perhaps in middle life, as his father’s was beginning to do, but which now was wide at the shoulder, narrow in the hips, his stomach taut and flat, beautiful. And sitting down at the bedside, his hands finding me beneath the covers, he said. ‘Why don’t you stay here, in bed, until I come back tonight?’
‘My word, what a sultan you are! You’d like that, wouldn’t you, thinking of me lying here all day, ready and waiting for you?’
‘I would,’ he said, his eyes narrowing, his hands touching me again, awakening so easily the tremor, the faintly expanding glow that was the beginning of wanting him. ‘Yes, I’d like that, Faith. By God, I would!’
And although it was a joke—or so I imagined—I was obliged to take him seriously enough on the afternoon when, having accompanied my mother on a shopping expedition to Leeds, I returned, parcel laden, to be told by a smug Mrs. Marworth that ‘the gentleman’had called.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, no more than that, disappointed but not seriously alarmed until he strode in, late that night, his jaw tight, his whole body crackling with the anger everybody at Lawcroft Mills had learned to dread.
‘Nicholas—darling—’
‘Don’t make excuses,’ he snarled, throwing his hat viciously on to a chairback, although I had made no attempt to do so, having done nothing, I believed, which required it. ‘You could at least be here, couldn’t you, when I call? That’s all I ask. I don’t ask you to come to me, do I? I don’t ask you to walk up that damned rutted back road, night after night, from the Swan—no, I do that little job myself. I don’t ask you to get out of a warm bed in the middle of the night and ride five miles in the rain—well, do I? I don’t ask you to snatch every chance you can to get to Millergate and then be obliged to go away again, like as not, because your sister, or some other damned interfering female has got here before me. I just ask you to be here. Can’t you do that much for me? Aren’t I worth that much? And what else have you to do? Where the hell were you, in any case? In Leeds with your mother. Splendid, Faith—just splendid. All right—I won’t trouble you again in the daytime. I’ll make a bloody appointment if you like—or I won’t come at all.’
And after that my days became, each one, a small earth-tremor of anxiety, shooing callers away from my tea-table before they wished to go, hovering always within sound of the window and the door, refusing, adamantly, nervously sometimes, to go out unless I had first made Nicholas aware of it.
‘Oh no, mamma. I don’t want to go into town today. No, I am not as bad as Celia—it is simply that I am not inclined.’
‘Good heavens, Prudence! If you need a new bonnet I imagine you may choose it without me.’
‘Celia—I never expected you to come today, in this weather. I imagine you will not be staying long? Oh—Jonas is to collect you on his way from the office. Well, you had best have your bonnet on ready, for he is always in a great rush.’
And if it was Thursday, market-day at the Piece Hall, and the likelihood of Nicholas in town, I would be on tenterhooks until she had gone away.
I saw no one else. Blaize, who represented my greatest danger, was abroad that Autumn, Aunt Verity in Bournemouth, my uncle joining her whenever he could, which in Nicholas’s view could not be often enough. Caroline was occupied with the building of a new servants’ wing at Listonby, Georgiana—although I quite deliberately did not think of Georgiana—was rarely in Cullingford during the hunting season. Prudence, blessedly, was busying herself with the progress of Mayor Agbrigg’s reservoirs, her attention being diverted from me by such considerations as the transporting of so tricky a substance as water the twenty-five mountainous miles from its sadly porous resting place at Cracknell Bridge to Simon Street. My mother was making ready to embark on her new life as Mrs. Daniel Adair, Aunt Hannah intent on preventing it if she could, and, if not, of devising some other way in which Oldroyd wealth—anybody’s wealth—might be channelled to Jonas.
Yet there were other dangers besides discovery, not least among them being Nicholas’s inability to tolerate frustration, the headstrong, possibly ruthless side of his nature which was fast making him a force to be reckoned with in the textile trade, but which caused him to howl with the rage of a maddened bull sometimes, when it became too clear to him that he could never organize his personal life as logically and conveniently as his weaving sheds. In the world of commerce Nicholas did not walk around obstacles, he smashed them, flattened them, got rid of them one way or another, and if he hurt his own iron fist in the process then he would have allowed for it in advance, made sure that the price would be right. But in the world of personal relationships, the complex tangle of feelings and demands and recriminations, the conventions which governed us, the decencies we were forced to observe, irritated him, goaded him often to recklessness.
‘I don’t want to leave you tonight, Faith. Why should I? I could stay until morning—couldn’t I?—and go to the mill from here.’
‘No, you couldn’t. Not in your evening clothes.’
‘Christ—it won’t do, Faith. It’s not enough—is it? Well, is it?’
But always—because I was not ready to talk of his wife and his son, because it was too soon, and I was afraid in any case of how I would feel when I faced the reality of it, afraid of the questions I would ask and of his replies—I would hush him, smooth the moment away, pour the length of my body against the length of hi
s to distract him from the future, filling his mind only with me, as I was at that one, irreplaceable, fleeting moment.
And when I had pushed the forbidden images of his domesticity away, I was left to consider the appalling possibility that I might conceive a child I would be able to explain to no one.
Yet, on the first occasion I was obliged to make Nicholas aware that I was not enceinte, his immediate reaction puzzled me. He would be relieved, surely, I had thought; but I had forgotten the solid Law Valley belief that a pregnant woman is a docile woman, who will cling to the father of her child forever—or for as long as he finds convenient—and I was surprised when he pressed the palm of his hand against my stomach and said, ‘If it should happen, you know, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’
‘It would be the end of mine.’
‘Thank you, Faith.’
‘Heavens, Nicholas—for what?’
‘For telling me you don’t want to have my child.’
I took his wrist in the tips of my fingers and moved his hand away, got up, angry and very hurt, striving to push away from my memory the image of Georgiana’s spent face, her thin, exhausted body after her son—Nicholas’s son—was born, my own terrible hesitation before I had taken Gervase in my arms, my fear, on returning him to his cradle, that I had injured him.
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