‘Ah—Faith,’ he said. ‘Are you well?’
‘Yes, Nicholas. Are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. Look here, Blaize, is this what you want for Grassmann?’ And he handed the samples of cloth to Blaize who took them to the window, where they examined them together in the daylight.
‘It’s not what I want for Grassmann,’ Blaize said. ‘It’s what Grassmann wants for himself. What about that piece for Remburger?’
‘Christ! It’s still on the loom.’
‘But you’ll have enough ready for me to show? Remburger arrives in London on the twentieth.’
‘Aye—you’d better come downstairs and have a look. It’s still got a boardy feel to it, to me.’
‘Well—it’s not my place to put that right. I thought Mayor Agbrigg was supposed to see to it?’
‘So did I. And where the hell is he? I should have been at Lawcroft an hour ago. Every time I show my face in these damned sheds it’s the same story. If you’re coming down, you’ll have to come now.’
They walked to the door, warp and weft, delivery dates, profit and loss on their minds, and holding myself very still I said, ‘Nicholas—is Georgiana feeling better?’
‘Yes—she’s mending. Kind of you to inquire.’
And, as in most moments of intense crisis, it was over before it had begun. He had neither taken my hand, after all, nor refused to take it. He had spoken to me. I had answered. The next time we met we would speak again. ‘How are you?’ ‘I am very well.’ It had happened.
It was possible after all.
But, as I drove home, my mind once again inexplicably linked with his, it seemed to me—who had always known what he meant—that he would rather have seen me dead than married to Blaize, that he would forgive neither one of us, would make no effort to understand, would not wish to understand, and that Blaize, who knew everything that went on around him, must from the start have known that very well.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blaize, with his usual skill in avoiding times of domestic crisis, was not at home when our daughter was born, returning some days after the event, when she had lost that first crinkled petulance of the new-born, and I was reclining comfortably—even elegantly—among my lace pillows, my wrists and shoulders scented with lavender water, my hair well-brushed, my humour tolerant, since I had not suffered a great deal and could not have imagined him holding my fevered hands and sharing my groans in any case.
‘You will have to forgive me,’ he said. ‘And you must admit you were a little ahead of yourself.’
‘So I was. I thought it best to hurry, since there is Caroline’s hunt ball to consider, you know. She is expecting me to be up and about in plenty of time for that. She’s over there—your daughter—behind that frilly canopy.’
‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘Good heavens!’ his enthusiasm for parenthood being only lukewarm, having thoroughly disliked Georgiana’s haphazard nursery arrangements at Tarn Edge. But, as he glanced down into the cradle, expecting nothing but red-faced, peevish anonymity, I saw his glance sharpen momentarily with interest, his eyes narrowing as he took a longer look.
‘Well—I must say she’s not quite the ill-tempered little frog other babies seem to be. In fact she’s really rather nice.’
‘Of course. But then, you always do things better than other men, don’t you?’
‘So I do,’ he said coming back to my bedside. ‘But not too often, darling, in this case. Faith, are you really as well as you look? I did come back as soon as I could, you know, and I really thought there’d be a week or more yet.’
‘Good heavens! Blaize Barforth, can it be that you are feeling guilty?’
‘I wonder.’
‘Then there is no need. I did quite well without you. In fact I did so well that I am beginning to wonder what all the fuss is about. And Celia is most upset with me for being so cheerful. She thinks it positively improper.’
‘Yes, but then, you see, you don’t have to work hard to attract your husband’s notice, like Celia—do you?’
My daughter, her birth so physically easy but so emotionally overwhelming, the first unconditional love to enter my life, since no matter what kind of woman she might become—and I had no way even of guessing—we would remain bound together. It would not be necessary for me to approve of her. I would not even need to like her. I would always love her. And the certainty of it gave me peace and purpose, transforming me from a decorative object to a useful one. I had done something of note in the world. I had taken on the kind of total commitment my nature craved, and, even though the nurse and the nursery-maid were of more practical use to my daughter in those early days, I knew that her health, her appetite, the bloom in her cheeks, the growing flesh and fibre of her, had come to her through me.
We called her Blanche in compliment to her pale, quite exquisite colouring, the fair hair and almost transparent blue eyes, the ivory and silver of her.
‘She’s beautiful,’ everyone said.
‘She’s like her mother,’ Blaize replied.
She was beautiful. I was deeply content. So long as I remained in my lacy, flowery bedroom, within the four walls of my elegant house, the limits of my garden bordered by its hedge of lilacs and rhododendrons, I was happy. But I was married to a man for whom the world was very wide, who had chosen me not for my breeding qualities but as a partner in the gracious style of living he required, as a mistress, an entertainer, a good friend, and my new role of mother was simply added to these, in no way supplanting them.
‘Should you really get up so soon, dear?’ my mother asked me, holding my three week’s old Blanche carefully on her satin lap.
‘Oh yes, I think so. There are some German customers coming north in a week or two—and then some Americans—and they will have to be entertained.’
‘Dearest, I never thought to see you so busy. It suits you.’
Remembering the sparse, cheerless nursery of my childhood, I decorated a fairy-tale, upstairs world for Blanche, pastel walls enlivened with sprays of vivid dream-flowers, bright rugs which Caroline thought gaudy and would collect dust, window-boxes crammed with daffodils that first springtime, and china bowls of the Crimean hyacinths Julian Flood had given to me and which my nurse—believing the flowers would use up the air and suffocate my daughter—never failed to remove at night. I dressed her like a princess—better than a princess, since it was my experience that the aristocracy did not spend lavishly on childhood. I pampered her, played with her, placed incredibly costly, incredibly fragile ornaments on her mantelpiece so that she might grow up accustomed to beauty.
‘You will make her very soft, and very vain,’ Caroline told me, but, knowing rather more of the world, I thought, than Caroline, I believed that every female was entitled to her share of vanity, that it was, in fact, a most useful weapon, a great comfort.
I was the first woman in Cullingford to wear a cage crinoline, delighting in the freedom of movement this light metal structure gave me, for it had taken a dozen horsehair-stuffed petticoats to puff out a skirt even half so far, and if some of my acquaintances—Caroline among them—were uncomfortably aware that this vast, gracefully swaying skirt had nothing beneath it but lace pantaloons, fresh air, and legs—‘My dear, how can you manage to sit down? And what on earth is to happen in a high wind?’—it suited me, and it was not long before others followed my lead.
My clothes became much talked about, not only in Cullingford but in the neighbouring, more cosmopolitan Bradford and Leeds, where Blaize had many friends. And I did not dislike it. I had plain, pastel-tinted afternoon gowns, delicate creams, near whites, with the exotic contrast of a richly patterned crimson shawl draped loosely around them. I had a walking dress—much copied the first year I wore it—of coffee-coloured foulard des Indes trimmed with black velvet, a brown bonnet trimmed with black satin and black feathers, a sable muff Blaize had brought back from some unspecified journey. I had light summer dresses with sleeves of puffed muslin and tulle, wrist-ban
ds of ribbon, pearl and coral, an evening gown—worn for the Listonby Hunt Ball and greatly appreciated by not a few fox-hunting men—in a deep, grape purple, cut scandalously low and worn with no jewellery, contriving to give the impression of a nude body emerging from a dark, gauzy cloud. I was the first of my acquaintance to wear my hair in a net made of strands of pearl, a net of gold chains, the first to order black, military style boots from my husband’s bootmaker, to wear Spanish mantillas of black and white lace. And when I persuaded Caroline and Prudence into their first crinolines I had already mastered the little gliding steps necessary to make those capricious cages dip and sway, how to get myself through a doorway and into a carriage without disaster, how to walk across a room without leaving a trail of broken china to mark my passage, how to judge correctly my distance from the drawing-room fire, the bedtime candles, for even I was obliged to admit that, once these colossal skirts were set alight, there would be little for even the most agile of women to do but burn with them.
Blaize gave me a victoria to drive in, far preferable to the more conventional landau, since the victoria, which had no doors, allowed for a better arrangement of my skirts. He abandoned his own curricle for the newer, light-shafted, far more vicious cabriolet which, when he was in residence, carried him from Elderleigh to Tarn Edge at a killing speed. And we became a fashionable couple, as Blaize had intended, giving easy, quite informal dinner-parties when he was at home, the house at all times ready for his return and the reception of anyone he might bring with him.
‘Faith darling—this is Mr. Remburger from New York.’ And I no longer said, ‘Blaize—you didn’t tell me he was coming,’ but ‘Mr. Remburger—I have so looked forward to meeting you,’ knowing that if it happened to be winter there would be a fire in the best spare bedroom, if it happened to be spring there would be bowls of lilacs and forsythia, roses in the summer, profuse enough to please the most exacting guest. I knew—because I made it my business to know—that my pantry shelves, although minute in comparison with Caroline’s, contained at all times their share of delicacies and dainties, that the wine which should be chilled would be chilled, the wine which should be allowed to breathe would already be breathing; for, if my staff was small and my own temperament not exacting, we were all aware that in domestic matters Blaize was very exacting indeed, and my household functioned around a general desire to please him.
When he was at home I existed in a state of pleasant anticipation, of surprise blended sometimes with a mild annoyance, sometimes with an honest delight, a certain stretching of my intellect and my powers of invention, for, although he was never morose, never ill-tempered, suffered no jealous rages as Nicholas had done, no urge to punish me in order to test the depth of my love—since he did not ask me to love him and was not in love with me—he did require to be entertained.
He was not in any conventional sense a domestic man. He wanted comfort, certainly, luxury whenever possible; but, although he knew the cost of it and was ready to pay most generously, he did not wish to know the details of how his candlelit dinners, his scented pillows, his immaculately laundered linen, were contrived. Nor did he expect to find me harassed or gloomy—since he was never so himself; expecting no passionate welcome on his homecoming, no questions, no complaints, no demands—since he made none himself; but requiring, instead, the same affectionate companionship he gave to me.
And he was a witty, easy, charming friend, an imaginative lover.
‘You might care to wear this for me, Faith,’ and he would toss me a peignoir of scandalous transparency or an evening gown that appeared to commence at the waist. And when it transpired that Mr. Remburger of New York was also an admirer of bare, blonde shoulders, Blaize was immensely amused, by no means displeased to see that other men desired his wife.
It was, perhaps, not a marriage in the way the Law Valley understood it, since Law Valley men did not encourage sensuality in their wives, being more inclined to fall sound asleep after domestic lovemaking than to lie easily entwined together in the lamplight, drinking champagne and telling each other how very pleasant it had all been. And most Law Valley wives, far from encouraging such nonsense, would have been acutely embarrassed, if not downright horrified by it.
But within the privacy of our bedroom Blaize treated me neither as a sexual convenience nor as a matron who could be asked to do no more than her duty, but as a high-priced courtesan, showing no signs of burning passion and expecting none, quite simply enjoying me, an essential ingredient of his pleasure being that I should enjoy him. And, if the Law Valley would not have understood the black lace peignoir, the velvet ribbon I sometimes left around my neck when all else had been discarded, the leisurely arousal that could begin as he leaned through the candlelight towards me at dinner-time to touch my hand, or brush his mouth against my ear, and might not reach its conclusion until after midnight, then I understood it very well.
‘Now then, darling—are you longing for me now?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Then I think you may long a moment more, Faith, and appreciate me better—don’t you?’
‘Yes—since you do so like to be appreciated.’
‘That’s right, darling—drift over me, just melt. You know, I think we do this very well.’
‘You mean you think you do it very well.’
‘Mmmmm—but you’re coming along nicely, Faith.’
He made no inquiries into the state of my emotions. He saw Nicholas daily when he was at the mills and talked of him quite easily when the occasion required it, displaying a lack of curiosity about the past—even as to what my feelings might have been for Giles Ashburn—which I at first mistook for consideration until I realized that he was, quite simply, not curious.
‘Blaize,’ I asked him, just once. ‘Why is everything so easy for you?’ And laughing, understanding my meaning exactly, he had replied, ‘Because I am shallow, darling, and superficial and immensely self-centred. And it is my firm intention to remain so.’
But it was, of course, less simple than that. He felt no anxiety with regard to me or to Nicholas because, never having been in love himself, he did not really believe in it. He enjoyed what he had, he had everything he enjoyed, and had not spoken in jest of his childhood belief that everyone, sooner or later, must prefer him to Nicholas. We had made an arrangement which was clearly congenial to us both, had sealed it with the birth of our daughter, Blanche. What more was there to be said?
The war with Russia ended, largely, it seemed to me, because everyone had grown tired of it, rather than because anybody had actually won, and we celebrated the peace with fireworks in the park at Listonby where Blaize and I were frequent guests, especially now that Caroline, in hot pursuit of the Duke of South Erin, needed to show his sister and his sister’s friends that not all the Barforths were unsophisticated. I continued to sit on the committee, chaired by Aunt Hannah, for the relief of the mauled remnants still dragging their way back from the Crimea, remembering Giles acutely every time I visited one of them in Simon Street, a fine, charitable lady I wondered if he would recognize. I found employment for the wives of men who were now unemployable, gave money to those who had no women to support them, took arrowroot and soup and blankets to sick children, to soldiers’ women—beggars’ women—who, despite my aunt’s instructions to the contrary, became pregnant again and again.
Yet, when a gentleman who reminded me strongly of Giles as he would have been had he lived to be a little older, gave a lecture in what had once been a church hall at the lower end of Sheepgate on the use of contraceptive sponges, which, if soaked in vinegar and washed occasionally, might be of help, there was a frisson of horror among the respectable middle classes, my sister Celia, who had miscarried now for the sixth time, finding it too disgusting to contemplate; others, for vocal if somewhat vague reasons, considering it contrary to the law of God; while Aunt Hannah condemned Prudence soundly for her support of this charlatan, and me for inviting him to dinner.
‘Ther
e is such a thing as self-restraint,’ Aunt Hannah said.
‘I have never noticed it,’ Prudence told her.
‘Not the most romantic suggestion I’ve ever heard,’ Blaize murmured, wrinkling a fastidious nostril when I mentioned the matter to him. ‘But, of course, if it could be contrived by a clever woman so that there might be no distinctive odour—so that the gentleman concerned might be quite unaware of it—then I can’t really think the gentleman would mind.’
Prudence spent as much time as she could in my house, escaping whenever possible from the restrictions of Blenheim Lane, the Irish cousins, the affectionate but eagle-eyed Mr. Adair. She was twenty-eight now, approaching twenty-nine, a desperate age for a single woman, and although her unmarried status did not disturb her—since Freddy Hobhouse was still willing to put an end to that—-she was frequently in despair at the slow frittering away of her time, the bonds with which my father, even from the grave, continued to bind her, and which Daniel Adair had no intention of letting go. She had longed to go out to the Crimea and offer her services to Miss Florence Nightingale, and had been prevented not by the general outcry but by a simple withdrawal of funds which had made her journey impossible. She longed to set up a school where girls of the new generation could be taught—as she put it—to raise themselves above the level of pet animals, but Mr. Adair, being fond of pet animals, would not hear of that. Young ladies belonged in their mothers’drawing-rooms. Young ladies did not go out unchaperoned—as Prudence had been accustomed to do. Young ladies did not read newspapers, nor hold political discussions, nor express their opinions on the subject of back-to-back houses, which Mayor Agbrigg’s new building regulations were striving to prohibit. Young ladies, on all topics of importance, shared the views of their senior male relative, and the only alternative open to them was to take a husband, who would be selected by that senior male himself. And although Daniel Adair did not really believe a word of all this, and, far from disliking Prudence, was rather fond of her, he was a man who enjoyed a good fight, finding it a pleasant change from a surfeit of conjugal bliss, and could never resist his part in the running battle between them.
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