Northanger Abbey
Page 27
‘I’m not a lesbian, Henry. I swear. I don’t even know any lesbians. Well, apart from the women who run the Post Office, and they don’t count because they’re older than God. Where did your father get this mad idea?’
Henry stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and began to pace back and forth, as if he were in court. ‘He was in London for a meeting, then he went to play poker. He ran into Johnny Thorpe—’
‘That pig?’ Cat was immediately wary. What fresh harm were the Thorpes intent on wreaking on her family?
‘My father likes him for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom. Anyway, they got talking and Father said you were staying with us and he rather thought you and I might end up as an item.’
Cat flushed. ‘Jeez! Talk about presumptuous.’
Henry looked discomfited. ‘Whatever. According to my father, Johnny burst out laughing and said he was barking up the wrong tree. Johnny said he’d been sniffing around – his words, not mine, before you slap me – but then he’d found out from his sister that you’re a lesbian.’
Furious, Cat turned on him. ‘And your father – and now you – believed it, of course. You men are so vain. All this because I told Bella I wasn’t interested in her tedious brother. If a woman doesn’t fall over herself to go out with one of you – because you’re a pig, or you’re a drunk, or you’re a bore – then she must be a lesbian? How dare you, Henry Tilney. How dare you come here and say these things to me?’
He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. I came to try and put things right.’
‘But you started off assuming this shit was the truth. Like you could trust Johnny Thorpe ahead of me, just because he’s one of the boys.’
‘My father said it made sense to him. You have to admit, Cat, you and Ellie are very affectionate with each other. Always hugging and stuff.’
‘That’s just how girls are, Henry. I don’t have any guilty secrets. The people with the guilty secrets are your family.’ The words were out before she could stop herself. She had never been so angry, and her judgement had disappeared with her equilibrium.
He gave her a look of contempt. ‘You’re not still banging on about my father being the secret slayer of the west wing?’
‘You know what, Henry? For the longest time I thought you were vampires. The way you all avoid the sunlight. The way you all look young for your years. The fact that none of you looks like the woman you call your mother. The food you eat – rare steaks and liver, all that blood. But you Tilneys are a different kind of bloodsucker. It’s money you’re interested in, not blood.’
Henry stopped in his tracks, his mouth open, his expression bewildered. ‘Vampires? You mean, like in those books and films? With all that misogyny and oppression and werewolves and shit?’
‘Exactly. Because what is your father if he’s not oppressive and misogynist? Treating me like dirt, and all because he believed Johnny Thorpe. Even if he’d been telling the truth, what sort of excuse is that for throwing somebody out of your house in the middle of the night? So what if I was a lesbian – which, by the way, I am definitely not. So what if Ellie is a lesbian? Though God help her if she is. So yes, I think your family is riddled with secrets. I found the Bible, Henry. I found the Bible.’
Henry cast around histrionically, as if looking for an escape route from this madwoman. ‘You found the Bible?’ he said in tones of exaggerated calm. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘The family Bible. With the births and marriages, but not many deaths. Where all the boys called Henry Tilney seem to live to adulthood, which is unheard of back when loads and loads of babies and young children died.’
‘We’re not a family that has ever celebrated death, Cat. It’s a tradition.’
‘Oh, bollocks, Henry. You’re a family that has your own chapel and graveyard. You’re not exactly, “death where is thy sting”, are you? But more than that—’
‘Wait a minute, is this the Bible with the bullet hole?’
Cat was taken aback at his willingness to own something of her argument. ‘Yes.’
‘And that proves what, exactly?’
Cat hesitated. She hadn’t taken the opportunity to ask her father what he thought about the Bible with the bullet hole. ‘Well, only a creature steeped in evil would shoot a Bible.’ She was floundering and she knew it, but she wasn’t giving ground.
‘That’s a bit racist, Cat.’ He couldn’t restrain a wry smile, and she felt her resistance challenged.
‘What do you mean, racist?’
‘That bullet came from a German gun. And that Bible is the reason I’m here today.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My great-great grandfather was an officer in the First World War. He carried his Bible inside his tunic and it took a bullet for him on the Somme. If not for the Bible, he would have been killed, and I wouldn’t have been born. Cat, we’re not vampires. That’s crazy. Vampires don’t exist in the real world. Any more than the zombie apocalypse is just round the corner.’
Hands on hips, she stared him down. ‘Prove it.’
He burst out laughing. ‘You can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove there are no such things as vampires any more than you can prove you’re not a lesbian. You’re a vicar’s daughter, Cat – surely you of all people understand there’s a point where you have to have faith? Take people on trust?’
They stood staring at each other, neither willing to capitulate. Then Henry made an impatient gesture. ‘This is stupid, Cat. I came here to apologise for my father, that’s true. But that’s only part of the reason. I came because ever since I met you at Fiona Alexander’s dance class I’ve been falling in love with you.’
Her mouth suddenly dry, Cat took a step backwards. ‘No.’
He looked stricken. ‘You don’t feel the same?’
At last, Cat composed herself and spoke sense. ‘Oh, Henry, I’m completely crazy about you.’ And she threw her arms round the startled young man, who quickly recovered himself and gathered her into a warm embrace. Finally, Cat knew the kiss she’d dreamed of since that first dance. They stood locked together in the orchard, oblivious to anything but each other, as young lovers are inclined to be.
It was some time before they reached the Allens’ house and afterwards, neither would have been able to give any sort of account of the conversation that took place there. By the time they returned to the vicarage, the matter was sealed. Henry explained to the Morlands that he had argued so fiercely with his father that he feared there could be no reconciliation. ‘But I have a profession,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fully qualified by the end of the year. I can support myself without taking a penny from him. I’ll be fine. Straightening things out with Cat has been worth much more than any amount of money.’
The two young lovers looked at each other. ‘Vampire,’ she said.
‘Lesbian,’ he replied.
And to the astonishment of the Morlands, they burst into helpless laughter.
Epilogue
Four years later
Henry had never looked more handsome, Cat thought as she walked down the aisle of the parish church at Farleigh Piddle on her father’s arm. Her husband-to-be had the perfect figure for full morning dress, and the pearl grey of his cut-away coat emphasised the golden glow of his tanned skin and the sun-bleached highlights in his dark blond hair. There wasn’t a more handsome man in the church. Probably not in the whole Piddle Valley, she reckoned.
In the four years that had passed since her enforced flight from Northanger Abbey, our cast of characters had undergone a bewildering kaleidoscope of changes. Cat herself had pursued her mother’s suggestion of training as a nanny. Once qualified, Henry had found her part-time work with one of his colleagues, so their two-year commute between Newcastle and Edinburgh was finally ended. They’d lived together quite happily in the little flat in the Lawnmarket, but Henry’s growing success meant they were considering a move to something more spacious.
‘Something with a nursery,’ Cat had confided to her mother the night before the wedding. ‘Not right away. Don’t get the wrong idea. But down the line.’
Spurred on by Henry’s confrontation with her father, Ellie had also taken her life into her own hands. She accepted a place at the Edinburgh School of Art to pursue a course in design, funding herself by selling some of the jewellery her mother had left her. ‘I only sold the ugly pieces,’ she told Cat. ‘Big stones in clumsy settings. I’ve kept the antiques. But my father really does have dreadful taste in jewellery. I’m not sorry to see the back of most of it.’ Of her romantic life, she never spoke, perhaps with good reason.
Ellie and Cat had continued with their children’s book project. They’d collected a raft of rejections, but finally an indie publisher in Edinburgh had bought the first two books in a series of comedy vampire stories. ‘Because of our family experience,’ Ellie had said with a giggle when they finally met their editor. Cat kicked her under the table. Not everyone could be expected to share their sense of humour.
Freddie’s tour of duty in Afghanistan being over, he had resigned his commission and taken up a lucrative position with an armament company. He was unable to attend the wedding because of a sales trip to a Gulf emirate. Nobody minded.
James Morland had carved out a niche in immigration and human rights law in his chambers in York. He’d fallen in love with one of his clients, a Somali woman who had just opened a restaurant near the university that was already winning rave reviews. James had gained both happiness and half a stone in the process.
Bella Thorpe had featured briefly in a reality TV show but had been eliminated in the first public vote of the season. Her brother Johnny had been fired by his bank after a series of dubious transactions came to light. Susie Allen took great delight in reporting their misfortunes to the Morlands, and even the vicar could not avoid the sin of schadenfreude.
And what of General Tilney? His first reaction to the rebellion of his younger children was to cut off their allowances and bar them from Northanger Abbey. His capacity for cutting off his nose was remarkable, but he had reckoned without the compassion their mother had installed in Henry and Ellie. A year after the terrible night when he had cast Cat out of the abbey, his younger son arrived there, having colluded with Mrs Calman to ensure the General was home alone.
Henry never revealed what had passed between them, but although there was never much subsequent warmth between father and son, neither was there the bitterness there had been previously. Ellie too had been welcomed back into the fold; now she had completed her degree, she was to take up residence at Woodston, where her father had promised to build a studio at the water’s edge.
The moral or message of this story is hard to discern. And that is as it should be, for as Catherine Morland found out to her cost, it is not the function of fiction to offer lessons in life.
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title
Also by Val McDermid
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue