by Tim Jeal
Looking at her father’s lined and careworn brow and his stooping shoulders, Clara wished that he could admit he was angry with her. The fire of the brandy had stolen through her body, making her limbs tingle and her emotions veer wildly from levity to maudlin rage. Her father’s mask of subdued sorrow added guilt to her other burdens, filling her with irritation one moment and sympathy the next. The poor man had never understood Charles’s appeal and so pitied her. His own idea of an ideal son-in-law was, predictably, a self-made monument to thrift, combining commercial canniness with religious piety. When Clara was nineteen, her father had introduced her to several likely men, one quite attractive and already owning a share in a local works. This paragon devoted his Sunday afternoons to superintending the men’s Bible class at the West Street Congregational Chapel and two evenings a week to teaching boxing at a boys’ club. Though kindly, and not without humour, he had no small talk and no interests beyond business and good causes.
But with Charles everything had been quite different. He despised practical pursuits and thought the cultivation of leisure the finest way to spend a life. He had inherited a magnificent estate at the age of twenty-six and saw no reason to worry about how or why his good fortune had arisen and whether he deserved it. Few days had passed without his sending to London for books on anything from Caravaggio to cannibalism and the limits of sea power. Like many poorly educated people, Clara tended to think too highly of those who had been more fortunate in this regard. She imagined, incorrectly, that Charles’s intellectual curiosity owed much to his years at Oxford. Taught from childhood that happiness not arising from service to others was self-indulgence, Clara had been captivated by Charles’s zestful descriptions of visits to Florence and Rome. His passion for Renaissance painting and his tales of seeking out lost masterpieces in remote villages had made her long to accompany him. Feeling ignorant and provincial, she had been thankful to have been given this chance to improve herself.
Up in her room after dinner, Clara kicked over the artist’s easel she had bought when starting life classes at the Sarston Institute of Arts and Crafts. Eager to learn, she had read numerous books on art history – all on Charles’s recommendation. She had replaced the religious prints of her childhood with vivid photogravure reproductions of Botticellis, Raphaels, and Bellinis. She had bought antique casts, odd bits of Oriental curtains, a Venetian mirror, some Chinese fans. Now these pretentious things made her sick with self-disgust. She ripped her own charcoal sketches from the walls and tossed them on the fire, along with the wilting flowers and puckered fruit that had been the subject of a still life. The oranges hissed and spat as they burned. She watched them for a moment before going to her desk by the window. Ripping open a drawer, she pulled out a bundle of letters. Yet the moment they too were on fire, she gasped with horror and fished them out with the tongs.
Her head was aching, and her thoughts tumbled about like the cargo in a rolling ship. Why care so much for a man who no longer cared a fig for her? But perhaps he did. Perhaps the Heydon girl had flung herself at him again without a word of encouragement; had turned up at Holcroft uninvited and been taken in out of pity. Charles’s snobbish mother might have urged the poor creature to come. Quite possible. Charles himself needn’t have been a party to it at all. All Clara’s memories of Charles’s tenderness towards her declared him innocent. And how could he have written such loving letters if he’d really intended to take back Alice Heydon? Yet even as her new hopes grew, old doubts returned. Why had Charles persisted in keeping their friendship secret? Because he had guessed all along that he might one day betray her, and had therefore been keen to ensure that very few people knew of their friendship? Then there was his failure to give any explanation of Lady Alice’s presence at Holcroft Park – a most damning omission. But Clara knew that however painful the truth might be, knowing it could hardly be worse than her present uncertainty.
She took a lamp from the central table to her writing desk. How could she compel him to see her? Since he hadn’t been able to bring himself to write a note, was it sensible to imagine that he would willingly face the unpleasantness of a meeting? Rage and thwarted passion made her cheeks flame. How dare he treat her like this? Would he have behaved so callously if she’d been a nobleman’s daughter? Certainly not. But a grubby tradesman’s girl was another matter. She snatched up a pencil and pressed so hard that she ripped the paper.
Charles,
Meet me in the Art Gallery at three o’clock on Wednesday, or Lady Alice sees your letters.
Clara
She scrawled his name and address on an envelope; then, fearing a change of heart, she ran downstairs. Not bothering with sealing wax, and pausing only to stamp the letter, Clara ran out into the snow without a coat or boots. She reached the box in time to catch the final post.
*
Clara had chosen to meet Charles at the Sarston Civic Gallery because it was the only public place likely to be empty in the middle of the afternoon. The main gallery was up a flight of marble stairs, and as Clara climbed them, her heart was thumping hard. She had deliberately worn her art school clothes – a tight-waisted coat with large pockets for sketchbooks, a floppy tie, and a soft felt hat – since she thought these garments made her look adventurous and capable. She was determined not to try to appeal to his sense of pity by seeming frail or pathetic. Under her skirts her legs shook, and she knew she was breathing too fast. Absurd, she told herself, for her to feel nervous, since she had harmed no one. Charles should be the one to feel wretched. Yet Clara’s nervousness showed no signs of easing.
In the gallery itself, he was nowhere to be seen. Clara looked around at the familiar pictures without really taking them in. The collection reflected the tastes of the aldermen and councillors who had chosen them: Alma-Tadema’s A Silent Greeting, in which a Roman soldier placed a tender hand on his intended’s arm as she gazed at his gift of flowers. In Arthur Hughes’s The Long Engagement, two besotted lovers held hands, shielded from prying eyes by an ivy-covered tree. Similar works hung on every wall. When Clara had last been here with Charles, he had ridiculed them all. This one was sentimental, that one melodramatic, its neighbour unintentionally humorous, and so forth. Clara had never thought to question a word he said. But now his mockery struck her as cruel and self-admiring. True love and piety were not to be mocked as hypocrisy by arrogant young men. Yet as she heard hurrying steps on the stairs, she feared she might faint.
Charles was wearing a tweed shooting jacket and mud-splashed gaiters, as if his visit to town had not been worth the trouble of a change of clothes. But he came towards her with a look of humble dejection on his handsome face. ‘You needn’t have threatened me, Clara. How can you think I’d refuse to see you?’
His gentle, apologetic tones momentarily dulled her anger. ‘Why didn’t you write to me?’ she asked in a shaking voice.
‘Clara, my sweet Clara, try and understand my situation. I’d asked Alice to marry me before we met. When her damn-fool father suddenly changed his mind and consented, what could I do?’
‘Told her you’d fallen in love with somebody else.’ Her words burst out in a breathless rush.
‘But I’d never withdrawn my offer of marriage. Lady Alice had been working on her father all that time. She’d never stopped hoping.’
‘Then was it right to mislead me?’ cried Clara, suddenly beside herself.
She plucked several envelopes from a pocket just as a dignified man in a frock coat was entering the gallery. Clara recognized Mr Harsent, the manager of Sarston’s largest bank. But had he been the Prime Minister, she could not have kept silent. She chose a letter at random and started to read in a trembling voice. ‘“I can’t endure not seeing you, my sweet. Please, please, my love, let me touch your hand and breathe the air where you have stood just for a few minutes each day. I must look into your lovely eyes and—”’
‘Clara, please … we’re not alone,’ gasped Charles, no longer suavely insouciant.
�
��How could you write like that while knowing you hadn’t finished with her?’
‘I never expected her father to relent. So of course I saw no point in hurting her a second time by ending it formally.’
‘What about my feelings, Charles? Didn’t they deserve the same consideration?’
He moved closer, blocking the bank manager’s view of her. Then he said in his saddest, most caressing voice, ‘Clara, I can’t bear you to think I didn’t adore you. Never in my worst nightmares did I dream of a situation like this.’
Clara detected traces of normal Charles peeping through cracks in his contrite mask. He darted an oblique look at her from under half-closed lids – exactly the kind of covert glance he always employed when judging the effect he was having on anyone. But his physical presence still dazed her: the way his hair was brushed up like burnished wings on either side of his head, the confident curl of his lips, his graceful movements. And yet she felt a spasm of fierce dislike.
Clara said very quietly, ‘Why lie to me, Charles? You did exactly what you wanted. She was your first choice, but in case you couldn’t have her, you thought you’d better have a second string. No time wasted then.’ Only while actually saying this did Clara know in her heart that she had been used. A wave of grief left her gasping and sniffing.
‘Don’t cry, Clara. I can’t bear us to part like this.’ Again the tender catch in his voice. He tried to take her hand, but she thrust him away furiously. Her breasts were heaving as she struggled not to weep. Her sense of outrage was so great that she no longer cared what he thought. She saw her reflection in the glass of a small watercolour – a face as melodramatic as any depicted on the gallery walls. Like a madwoman, she thought, sobered by it. Would Lady Alice ever demean herself like this? She who had grown up under the gaze of gamekeepers and ditchers, coachmen and parlourmaids? Of course not. Lady Alice would be an asset to her husband, however badly he behaved. Clara had imagined being proud and dignified. But now behaving well seemed a forlorn and empty consolation. Wouldn’t it only make their parting easier for him if she remained stoical? And then she simply decided she had had enough.
She was turning to go when she felt his restraining hands on her shoulders. A party of schoolchildren with their teacher was entering the gallery.
‘Please let me go,’ she murmured coldly.
‘Can I have the rest of my letters?’ he asked in a low, urgent voice.
Across the gallery, immediately beneath the soft white flesh of a large Lord Leighton nude, the children were being warned by their teacher not to snigger. Clara did not take in his words as he urged them to show respect in this ‘temple of art’. All she was aware of was a smile hovering on Charles’s shapely lips. Moments before their parting forever, he was smiling – actually smiling. She couldn’t believe it. He had been shameless enough to ask for his letters, having made her no apology for his behaviour. It was perfectly obvious that without her threat to send the letters to Lady Alice, Charles would never have met her here. With a shout of rage, she plunged her hands into her pockets and tossed handfuls of letters up into the air. As she turned to go, she heard a burst of ragged laughter from the children. Charles Vyner was on his knees, scrabbling to retrieve his lying words.
CHAPTER 2
In the months that followed her rejection, Clara’s pain and bewilderment did not fade away. Her worried father held himself partly responsible. By spoiling Clara, he believed, he had led her to expect to get whatever she wanted and had therefore left her ill prepared to endure failure or disappointment. During their largely silent meals, Alfred often recalled how happy and talkative she had been as a child before her mother died. Afterwards, he had thought that her faith would enable Clara to accept her loss. And sometimes, in the years that followed, she had seemed to come to terms with it, but little incidents had kept reminding Alfred that her deepest wounds remained unhealed.
One day, three years after her mother’s death, Clara – then fifteen – had been walking home with Alfred from a chapel meeting. It had been early evening, and they could see into many lamplit rooms. The area of town was a poor one, with numerous rooming houses. In a drab basement room of one such house, two children were sitting up in little cots, while their mother bent over them. ‘That’s the only heaven there is,’ Clara had blurted out. A few weeks later, she had stopped coming to chapel with her father, and soon she had pained him by visiting friends on the Sabbath and by playing tennis – though in deference to chapelgoers’ feelings, she always wrapped her racket in brown paper on her way to the courts.
Clara’s friends were mostly the daughters of affluent people – solicitors, potters’ valuers, commission agents, and so forth. With them, she attended dress shows and Palm Court concerts and went on shopping expeditions. Alfred sometimes wept at the change in her. He remembered Clara in childhood begging to accompany her mother, whenever she visited sick old women or read the Bible to the girls employed in a local cardboard factory. Some of these workers had been tubercular, and this was later thought to explain the infection that had killed Mrs Musson.
Clara knew she was making her father wretched by absenting herself from the chapel’s social functions as well as from its religious services. But she could not help it. As a girl she had loved to do good deeds. But the impulse had died with her mother; and afterwards, charitable acts, performed against the grain, had made her feel mean and hypocritical. She had gone on helping people only out of a sense of duty, and so had lost the afterglow that had once rewarded her spontaneous acts of generosity.
Years earlier, Clara had prayed that her bullying dancing teacher would die. And although God had not answered this prayer, Clara had never quite broken the habit of appealing for special favours. ‘Please let my mother live’ had merely been the last and most urgent appeal of all. Yet even then Clara had known in her heart that no God could be worth believing in if He listened to individual pleas. He was omniscient, so if something was right and just, He would do it anyway, without needing to be nudged. After her mother’s death, the process of praying had become synonymous with giving up hope. How could it have been right or just of Him not to have spared such a good and blameless person? Clara felt that she had been talking to herself. It was now nine years since she had prayed.
In the months after losing Charles, Clara tried, with limited success, to be rational about what had happened. She had loved him, she told herself, without knowing what sort of man he was. It was shameful to admit it, but she had probably been influenced by the romantic novels of Miss Braddon and Charlotte M. Yonge. Their humble heroines obeyed their hearts and fell for well-born heroes who, if sometimes feckless, at least always lived in elegant surroundings. And in Clara’s case, surroundings had been important. The plain and ugly furniture in her father’s house, the wax flowers and beadwork, the devotional texts in their heavy frames, had made Clara hungry for beauty. The drabness of the town had added to her sense of artistic deprivation. So when Charles Vyner preached his gospel of high art and hedonism, he had found a receptive pupil in Clara. How delightful, after she had admired magnificent rooms, to sit under a parasol in an open phaeton en route to a bluebell wood, there to enjoy a picnic of tender lamb cutlets on a bed of asparagus tips, followed by cold partridge and a crisp salad, all washed down with chilled champagne. Looking back on such halcyon days and on Charles’s many amusing sayings, Clara told herself that without loyalty and respect between people, nothing they did together could signify a thing – and yet she still could not end her grief.
*
On a freezing evening almost a year later, Alfred asked Clara to come with him to a fund-raising lecture in the town’s Temperance Hall. He had noticed a marked improvement in his daughter’s spirits, and so felt hopeful that she would come. The lecture was to be delivered by a missionary who had just returned from Africa and had already given some very popular talks in London. Such men were received by the faithful of Sarston with almost as much adulation as was lavished upon world-fam
ous explorers. But while Alfred knew that he could hardly expect Clara to react in that way, he was confident that she would be impressed. He had met Robert Haslam at a prayer meeting in an alderman’s house and considered him superior to most missionaries.
Knowing how disappointed her father would be if she refused to come, Clara accepted his invitation. Being familiar with the jargon of evangelism, she expected to be bored. When she arrived, the atmosphere in the Temperance Hall was expectant and emotional. People wanted to be moved by tales of noble endeavour. Clara, seeing the missionary step on to the dais, was at first amused. His skin had been so darkly tanned that he looked like a Negro himself. His jutting brows and slightly emaciated face reminded her of Elijah (or had it been Elisha?) as depicted in a well-remembered child’s edition of the Old Testament. As he began to speak, she stifled a laugh. His voice was strange, as if his tongue had trouble framing ordinary words; he spoke English with perfect grammar but with a most peculiar accent.
Yet the rustling of dresses and scattered coughs soon died away. Although Clara was irritated by the rapt expressions on so many admiring female faces, even she could not deny that Robert Haslam was a peculiarly persuasive man. Instead of treating them to missionary clichés about dark and degraded minds being illuminated by the Gospel, he asked his audience to consider what they would think if a stranger arrived in Sarston and asked them to abandon their customs.
‘Would you give up monogamous marriage because a foreigner said it was wrongheaded? I’m sure you wouldn’t – not even when he told you that in his country a man can be respected only if he has many wives and children. Or would you agree to give your house and land to the king because an African told you that only kings are entitled to own land?’ Robert Haslam gazed benignly at the well-dressed people sitting in the front row. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. It’s hard to abandon one’s own customs, even when somebody who may know better tells you why you should. That’s why missionaries have to understand the people they wish to convert.’ He looked around. ‘Are there any bankers here tonight? If so, prepare to be shocked. I’m afraid Africans think that thrift is evil. In my small village, if my harvest is better than my neighbour’s, I’d be wise to share my grain with him. Next year my harvest may be poor and his may be abundant. Africans survive famines by sharing their grain and not by selfishly saving it for themselves.’ Again he looked around. ‘There must be many shopkeepers and manufacturers here. Well, my friends, you won’t like to hear this: Africans care nothing for punctuality. They’ve no clocks and have never heard a factory bell. They think it’s better to take life easy than to rush from place to place.’