Flint and Roses

by Brenda Jagger

  But Georgiana’s barb seemed always to wound herself, would turn almost immediately to a laughing, flaunting self-reproach.

  ‘Well, thank goodness for my mother-in-law, since I can do nothing right, and at least now the fires are lit when they should be, and there are muffins at tea-time. How is it that I could never manage muffins? She simply orders them and they appear, but she remembers to interview Cook every morning, you see, and tells her what will be required—whereas I—well—I can never remember tea-time, let alone muffins. I am a sorry creature, Julian—come and drown me in the stream. It’s all I’m fit for.’

  And, as that sad year merged into the next, she was rarely seen in Cullingford, riding off very early in the morning before Aunt Verity—or anyone else—had time to pack Gervase off to school, or, failing that, going herself sometimes to snatch him from his academic prison under the startled eye of a headmaster who could refuse nothing to a Barforth.

  ‘Why not?’ she told me. ‘He learns nothing in any case. He just sits there wishing himself at Galton, so I may as well make his dream come true just as long as ever I can.’

  Yet, although he showed no aptitude for the manufacturing life, I was by no means certain that Gervase’s enthusiasm for country pursuits matched his mother’s. He could, indeed, ride the tall, spirited roan she had bought him, looking, with his auburn hair, his sharp-etched profile, for all the world like a miniature Perry Clevedon, but I wondered if the excitement in his face was perhaps occasioned not so much by a dash of his late uncle’s recklessness as by the over-straining of his nerves, a spice of something that could be akin to terror? He could trudge out with Georgiana across the dry August fields, a gun across his arm, to attend the annual slaughter of grouse on Galton Moor, but I—a frequent guest at Galton in those days—couldn’t help noticing that he was often sick the same evening, feverish and chilled the morning after, apologetic, when he was told to stay behind, but happy enough, I thought, to allow Liam Adair to go in his stead.

  Gervase Barforth, in fact, was a child who belonged nowhere, a boy who, wishing to please his mother because he loved her and to please his father because he was afraid of him, seemed unlikely to please either, torn by a conflict which did not exist at Listonby where the young Chards were being raised in the belief that it was their duty to please only themselves.

  ‘He’s soft,’ said Liam Adair, a boy no longer but a young man approaching fourteen, with all the insolent swagger of a guardsman. ‘He never hits anything when he comes. Georgiana hits everything, and I don’t do so bad—we got a hundred and twenty brace last time we were out. But Gervase just dithers and shuts his eyes. And I’ll tell you this, he don’t much like the dogs.’

  But when a pair of hound puppies ran off, one of them to a mangled death in a man-trap in Galton woods, the other only barely surviving an encounter with some sharp-toothed woodland predator, it was Gervase who resisted Georgiana’s immediate intention of putting the bleeding, whimpering little creature down.

  ‘Darling—it’s merciful.’

  ‘But it might get better, mamma.’

  ‘Oh no, darling. And, even if it did, it could never chase foxes, which is what hounds are made for. It would not be fair to it, Gervase.’

  ‘I think it should be given its chance.’

  ‘Well,’ she told him, her face very serious. ‘If that’s what you want to do—if you think it’s best—then I think you should do it. But if you take the decision, darling, then you must take the responsibility as well—all on your own. That’s what people in command, or in office, have to do, and if it goes wrong they have to take the blame.’

  Yes, mamma.’

  I sat up with him half the night on a bale of straw, sharing the vigil which Georgiana felt—perhaps rightly—he should have endured alone, because I could see no empire-builder in him, rather a glimpse of Giles Ashburn, who as a boy might well have done the same.

  Georgiana came once, lantern in hand.

  ‘Are you sure, Gervase—quite sure?

  ‘Yes, mamma.’

  ‘He’s going to die, you know, darling.’

  ‘You can’t really know for certain. I understand about taking the blame.’

  And, nodding her head, courteous and friendly as her grandfather, she went away.

  ‘You don’t have to sit up with me, Aunt Faith—unless you want to.’

  ‘Well—I’ll stay a little longer.’

  And, having done what we could for the ailing pup, we buried it at two o’clock of a cool, damp morning, Georgiana’s child ashamed that he had lacked the good sense, the guts, to shoot it in the first place, Nicholas’s child scowling, telling himself it was a dog, that was all—a damned dog—and refusing to cry.

  ‘He’ll know what to do next time, at any rate, the poor lamb,’ Georgiana said. ‘Don’t think me hard, Faith. He had to choose, you see. He knows now that he chose wrong and made the poor dog suffer longer than it need have done. He made that decision—a gentleman’s decision—and he’s faced up to it like a gentleman. He’d never have learned that lesson, you know, at the grammar school.’

  Caroline had taken her father’s death very badly. She had set off on her visit to the South Erins, believing him safe and well in Bournemouth, had been called from the ducal breakfast-table to be told he was dead in Cullingford. And she was haunted by the confusion, the shock, the terrible disorientation she had suffered. Caroline had always known where she was, what she was doing there, what she intended to do next, but his loss had disturbed her sense of direction, set her askew, and she could not entirely right herself. He had left her enormously well provided for. She could continue to dazzle the county with her receptions, could extend her house and improve her estate as much as she desired, but, without her father there to see, without the deep satisfaction it had always given her to please and impress him, that desire was considerably diminished, arousing in her a melancholy which not even gifts of venison from the Duke of South Erin’s deer-park, nor Lady Hetty Stone’s firm promises of luring her brother to Listonby, had the power to dissipate.

  Sir Joel, not Sir Matthew, had been the audience before which she had played out her life; his applause, not Matthew’s, her chosen reward; and she was bewildered at its loss.

  ‘He liked it here, at Listonby, Faith. He didn’t want it himself, but he liked to see me have it, doing it all so much better than Hetty Stone could manage in a thousand years, even if she was born to it. And do you remember, the last time we were all here together, how sulky everybody was—how nobody would speak at dinner, and how Georgiana went tearing off in her ballgown? I’ll never forgive her for that. I’d planned it all for him, and I wanted him to be proud. I wanted him to see what I was doing with his money—because it was his money—and that night before he went to bed he walked me down the Long Gallery and kissed me, and he said, “I’ll say this for you, lass, you’ve always been a good investment. One of the best I ever made.” And he was telling me he loved me. Oh Faith, I didn’t know how ill he was. I wouldn’t have gone near the South Erins if I’d known. I’d have gone straight to Bournemouth, I’d have stopped him from coming up here, tiring himself out for those brothers of mine, who could do nothing but plague him. Look—you remember the portrait I had done of him last year? I’ve moved it from the dining-room and put it in the Gallery—I don’t care what the Chards may say.’

  And when the future Sir Dominic Chard, home from his exclusive public school for the holidays, was heard explaining to a friend, ‘Oh no, that is not a Chard, that is my manufacturing grandfather’, he was no doubt amazed at the violence with which his mother fell on him and boxed his ears.

  ‘Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.’

  ‘What have I said wrong? He wasn’t a Chard, was he? He wasn’t born at Listonby?’

  ‘No he wasn’t,’ she shrieked, raining haphazard blows on him with every word, an assault, I might add, which his public school training enabled him to withstand like a rock. ‘And if it hadn’t
been for him there wouldn’t have been a Listonby. Just you remember that, young man—just you remember it.’

  ‘Dearest—’ Hetty Stone murmured, as always slightly amused if a little pained by her friend’s occasional breaches of good conduct. ‘The servants, dear—one really doesn’t give them cause to gossip.’ But Lady Chard—Caroline Barforth now, in full fury—pushed her astonished mentor away, ruining, perhaps, all hopes of that ducal visit, and, aiming a final, most accurate blow at her son, screeched contemptuously, ‘The servants! They eat my bread and they’ll do as they’re told. And so will you.’

  I had never been very close to Aunt Verity. She had been kind to me, in my girlhood, as she had been kind to most people, but she had been too radiantly happy in her own life, perhaps, to require any affection from outside, and I knew she had been suspicious of my marriage, worried, quite naturally, on her son’s account rather than mine. Yet, in those first months of her widowhood. I was increasingly drawn to her, finding, even in her bereavement, that she was the most complete woman I knew, knowing very definitely that her marriage was the only one I had ever envied. I knew that everything I had ever desired for myself had been shown to me, very plainly, during those hours I had spent at my uncle’s bedside. I had witnessed the kind of love of which I believed myself to be capable, the intense, exclusive emotion which I had glimpsed between them in my girlhood, had wanted then, wanted now. But I had failed to give it to Giles, had been prevented from giving it to Nicholas—largely by Nicholas himself—-and Blaize did not much care for intensity. There were times that year when I suffered a great hollowness of the spirit, when I looked at myself and saw a graceful, beautifully adorned, empty shell.

  Had I been born a citizen of Simon Street, my anxieties could not have extended beyond rent-money, porridge money, the stark necessities of shelter, a blanket, a coldwater tap, a few pennies desperately hoarded to pay a doctor for a sick child. Had I lived in Simon Street, I would have been too exhausted to care. But life had given me the leisure and the luxury to contemplate the condition of my heart and soul, and to understand that, once again, the pleasant pastures of my existence were not enough.

  In the eyes of Cullingford I had everything any right-minded woman could possibly desire: a place in society and the income to maintain it; a fascinating if somewhat footloose husband, who had even given me a title, his father’s death, which had made him Sir Blaize, having created me the second Lady Barforth of Tarn Edge. But I could not recognize myself in that title, could hardly remember myself as Faith Aycliffe, had failed to live up to the expectations of Faith Ashburn. What was I? The wife of a man who shared less than half his life with me. The mother, of a girl who would become a woman entitled to a life of her own, which might hardly include me at all. And, increasingly aware that the silk and champagne atmosphere of my marriage no longer sufficed me, I took the false solution many women find in similar circumstances. I gave more dinner-parties, ordered more clothes, dressing Blanche, as she became five and six, in miniature copies of my gowns, a child with her father’s cool stare, her mother’s vanity, accepting quite naturally that a father was someone who took the train and came back with presents. I tended my garden, made vast indoor arrangements of daffodils and forsythia, white and purple lilacs, roses and ferns, polished beech leaves and dried grasses in season. I joined this committee and that committee, all of them chaired by Aunt Hannah, for the improvement of this, or that, evil. I took care of Liam Adair, of Grace Agbrigg, of Venetia and Gervase Barforth when no one else was inclined to do it, my house—when Blaize was away—being a depository for inconvenient children; harassed women, occasionally of a hopeful gentleman whose advances I resisted, since Blaize allowed me to be flirtatious only when he was there to see. I did what I could for Celia, removing from her shoulders the burden of Jonas’s ambitions by inviting them both to dine as often as possible with me, always including in the party those people who could be of most use to Jonas. I visited the Lady Barforth Academy for Young Ladies whenever Prudence would have me, even my services being appreciated during an outbreak of measles, an occasional bout of homesickness among her boarders. I went to Leeds with my mother, to London now and then with Blaize, occasionally to Paris. I should have been happy.

  Perhaps I could have been. Blaize had not slept the night his father died nor even tried to, remaining alone downstairs, smoking, brooding, refusing both my comfort and my company.

  ‘Darling, do go back to bed,’ he had told me. ‘I’m restless and wide-awake, and—really—I can manage very well.’ And I supposed that Nicholas might have said much the same, if more bluntly, to Georgiana: ‘Leave me alone. I don’t need you.’

  They had stood at their father’s funeral as granite-faced as any Flood, any Chard, and had gone, both of them, to the mill that same day, Blaize returning very late, his face unusually strained and grim. Yet which particular thing had worried him, angered him, hurt him the most, he would not say.

  ‘Brother Nick is preparing to be unreasonable, it seems.’

  ‘And will you be unreasonable too?’

  ‘I imagine he will think so.’

  I was still very careful of Nicholas, a relationship resting entirely on ‘Good evening, are you well?’, not even listening to the answer, a dryness in my throat even now when I encountered him a chair or two away from me at the Mandelbaums’dinner-table, a refusal to discuss him at those gossipy, feminine tea-times which—in view of the known hostility between him and Blaize, and of Georgiana’s supposedly scandalous conduct—won me an undeserved reputation for family loyalty.

  ‘Faith will not say a word against any of her relations,’ they said of me in the better areas of Cullingford, but I was obliged, often enough, to hear others speak those words for me, to learn—from Mrs. Mandelbaum, Mrs. Hobhouse, Mrs. Rawnsley—that the Nicholas Barforths, far from living in peace, were scarcely living together at all.

  ‘My dear, there’s no point in inviting them to anything, since she’s always at Galton and he’s always at the mill. If she bothers even to come, the chances are she’ll come abominably late and unsuitably dressed. And if he comes without her he never has a word for the cat—just scowls and makes cutting remarks, and drinks. Well—she drinks too, there’s no doubt about it, for the maids at Tarn Edge make no secret of it. She can match him glass for glass, I hear tell, which is more than my poor husband—Mr. Rawnsley, Mr. Hobhouse or Mr. Mandelbaum—has ever been able to do. Poor Verity—my heart goes out to her. It can’t be easy, when she’s brought up a family of her own, to be saddled with those grandchildren while their mother goes a-gallivanting. And they’re not easy children. That little Venetia is a handful—anyone can see it; and I wouldn’t want a boy of mine to look so peaky and so over-strung as that Gervase—which is not at all to be wondered at, since, when she has him at Galton instead of sending him to school, he’s allowed to sit up until all hours of the night, playing cards and drinking her brandy too, if the truth be known.’

  I heard—in Blenheim Lane, at Nethercoats, at Albert Place—of the terrible evenings at Tarn Edge when husband and wife would not exchange a word. I heard of the glass a frantic, probably tipsy Georgiana had hurled at her husband’s head, the fork she had hurled after it, both missiles striking the back of his chair, ‘Speak to me, dammit!’ she had shrieked at him. ‘Curse me to hell if you like, but say something.’

  ‘I’ll say good-night, I reckon,’ he had told her, calmly brushing the splintered glass and the drops of brandy from his sleeve. ‘I’m expected at the Swan and I ought to change my jacket. Sleep well.’ And he had left her.

  I heard about her screaming rages; the slap he had once been seen to administer, not passionately, but merely to silence her; the night he had dragged her upstairs, pushed her through her bedroom door and locked it, remaining himself on the outside, his motive once again no passionate revenge—no passion at all—but simply to prevent her, at a late hour of the night, from taking Gervase to Galton. I heard of the night she had returned f
rom Galton wet through, having driven herself in her brother’s old curricle.

  ‘Nicky, I came—It occurred to me—in fact, I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘And you’ve driven ten miles in the rain to tell me that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve left Gervase behind you at the Abbey?’

  ‘Oh—yes.’

  ‘Then how is he to get to school tomorrow? Isn’t that the very thing you should be sorry about?’

  I heard it all, and all of it, every word that was spoken, every word that was implied, hurt me. I had cared for Nicholas all my life. He had been my hero in childhood, the tremulous dream of my adolescence; as a woman I had loved him, I had committed myself to another man and would fulfil that commitment to the letter. But there was no magic ingredient in my marital fidelity, my maternity, to obliterate that caring. Most of the time I cared for him only at a submerged level. I did not burn for him, no longer thought of him in that way—managed, for periods of varying lengths, not to think of him at all. But I continued to care, to be concerned, to suffer acutely, at unguarded moments, from a surge of guilt against which I had no defence. I wanted to ask, ‘Am I entirely to blame for his bitterness, his stubbornness? And if so what can I do to mend it?’ But, since Blaize was the only person I could have asked, and I was not certain I could cope with his answers, I kept silence.

  Yet in other ways Blaize talked of Nicholas quite freely, enjoying the fast-accumulating tensions which he, from time to time, quite deliberately set himself to aggravate.

  Nicholas had always been ambitious but now, with no one to restrict his management of the mills, his appetite for expansion became keener, his requirements more exacting. With Blaize so often away, he was the Barforth Cullingford knew best, the man who commanded instant attention when he entered the Piece Hall, the man his operatives looked out for in the mill yard, since he was known to be a hard master—as autocratic and shrewd as his father had been, not always quite so fair—and nothing went on at Lawcroft or Tarn Edge, at Low Cross, or the Law Valley Wool-combers, or at Sam Barker’s dyeworks either, now that it was his own, that he wasn’t aware of. He worked long days, long nights, taking the escape, perhaps, of many men who are not content at home, and the feats of endurance he performed himself he expected in others.