‘We have years to think of a story,’ says Gaskell drily.
Christabel leans down and gently lifts the baby out. She arranges the shawls tenderly, and then holds him out to Daniel, who takes him to the window. Felix blinks in the light, and Daniel sniffs the top of his head. ‘Nothing smells so sweet and delicious as a baby’s head,’ he says.
‘I know. Isn’t it gorgeous?’ says Gaskell. ‘It compares very well to behind a cat’s ears. Or a golden retriever’s.’
Daniel says, ‘I think I have unintentionally set myself up for a lifetime of sadness and regret.’
Christabel says, ‘But you’ve made Gaskell and me delirious with happiness.’
‘Yes,’ says Gaskell. ‘We really couldn’t be more overjoyed. We’ll never be able to thank you enough. And we so much want you to come here as often as you can. To be with Felix as much as you can.’
‘And we don’t want to stop at one,’ says Christabel.
Later, in the studio that was once a ballroom, with Felix becoming heavier in his arms, Daniel looks at their latest work. Christabel has taken photographs of Gaskell’s parents, lying newly dead on their beds, having met their grandchild and then miraculously contrived to die within two days of each other. ‘I hope you don’t think it’s too morbid,’ says Christabel. ‘It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’
‘There’s no tragedy in a peaceful death in old age,’ says Daniel. ‘You’ll be able to remember them at peace. In repose.’
‘They got madder and madder,’ says Gaskell. ‘They so much enjoyed the ends of their lives.’
‘A consummation devoutly to be wished,’ says Daniel.
He goes to look at the paintings and is disconcerted to see half a dozen portraits of a reclining naked woman, executed in bold, thick brushstrokes, depicting the progressive stages of pregnancy. He instantly recognises Christabel’s body, because it is a body he has grown to love, but the head is Gaskell’s. Her extraordinary green eyes gaze out of the canvas with an expression of disdainful confidence and defiance. There is a plain black ribbon about her neck, as there is on Goya’s Naked Maja.
Daniel takes her arm and says, ‘That’s my girl.’
At that moment he suddenly understands with complete clarity that it will only be in the spirit of renunciation that he will be able to be a father to this child.
Later that evening, he and Christabel are in the conservatory alone, because Gaskell wants to paint by candleglow in order to see what the colours will look like the next morning. She has recently realised that her left eye sees colours differently from her right, and so she is trying experiments in painting first with one eye and then the other, in all the different kinds of light. Daniel and Christabel are looking out on a quiet night with a full moon rising above the elms. She has her arm threaded through his; he can smell her hair, and the French scent that she likes to dab on the insides of her wrists. Christabel and Gaskell have made a practical little nest in almost every room, where the baby can be set down. In the conservatory, a drawer has been pulled out of the old chest that is otherwise full of string, trowels and small brown-paper packets containing seeds. Felix is asleep again, suckling his thumb.
‘I have to ask you something,’ he says.
‘What about?’
‘Fidelity.’
‘Oh.’
‘What are we to do?’
‘I can’t ask you to be faithful,’ says Christabel. ‘I can’t be faithful to you, can I? Well, I can be faithful in the sense that you’re the only man I’ll ever have. Or want, probably. And I don’t want any father for my children except you. But it can’t be enough for you, can it? Is there someone else?’
Daniel hesitates, and says, ‘The Honourable Mary.’
‘Oh Lord,’ says Christabel. ‘Oh well, I suppose it shows that you have good taste.’
‘Nothing’s happened yet, but it’s very obviously coming on.’
‘She’d have to leave Mother and The Grampians.’
‘Your mother’s become completely impossible,’ says Daniel. ‘Mary says she has to go anyway, for the sake of her own equanimity. She hates the way that Rosie tries to keep the children from me, and says that she just has to keep biting her tongue. I’m sure she could find plenty to do, wherever she is.’
‘But you can’t marry her. Won’t she want children? And she won’t want to live in sin, will she? She’s not a cynical reprobate, like me.’
‘No, she won’t. She’s quite conventional. She isn’t innocent though. She had a fiancé who was killed at Beersheba. They thought they might never see each other again.’
‘Don’t you mind?’
‘Only in theory. When I see the loss…the sadness in her eyes, I can’t mind. And I couldn’t be less innocent myself, could I? In the end one can’t be a hypocrite. What about us?’
Christabel is suddenly alarmed. ‘You can’t tell her about me.’
‘I mean, what about our next child? You say you want more children. So do I.’
‘You’ll just have to be unfaithful,’ says Christabel with determination. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll still know that you love me, and Gaskell and I will still love you. And, look on the bright side, by that time Lady Mary may have given up on you and upped sticks.’ Christabel falls silent, then adds, ‘But it really would make my heart ache, the thought of you with someone else. It would be hard to bear.’
‘Christabel,’ says Daniel, ‘when I was younger I had absolutely no idea that it’s utterly impossible to live without so much subterfuge, so many compromises, and secrets and lies.’
‘You can perfectly well live a dull life without them,’ she says, ‘but who wants a dull life? When I’m on my deathbed, I don’t want to be lying there thinking about all the things I never did.’
31
The Honourable Mary FitzGerald St George
I was with Daniel for several years, and moved to be with him when he found work at Brough’s, in Nottingham.
Of course I had to confess to him that I wasn’t an ‘Honourable’ at all, and neither was I a St George. I worked up to it for months, and when I finally told him, one Sunday morning when we were lounging in bed with a cup of tea, he just laughed, and said, ‘What a tangled web we weave.’
Daniel absolutely worshipped George Brough and his motorcycles. He called Mr Brough ‘St George’ and he had two of the motorcycles for himself, which he called ‘George the First’ and ‘George the Second’. They were guaranteed to do at least one hundred miles per hour, and kept breaking speed records. He told me that every Brough motorcycle was a one-off, built for a particular customer, and each one was built twice. It was put together once to make sure that everything fitted and worked, taken apart for chroming and painting, and then reassembled. I’m afraid that when he explained their virtues and specifications my eyes would just cloud over and I could feel my brain closing down, but I do so well remember the lovely low burbling note of the exhaust, and how I never seemed to get tired or uncomfortable on a long run, and the only times it broke down were when we had punctures caused by horseshoe nails. Daniel developed quite a vehement hatred for horses, although he said he’d become very fond of a bay horse in Ceylon.
At first we lived in Lenton, a village that’s been somewhat swallowed up by the city, but it was still a proper village, in between the Clifton Hills and Peveril Castle. There was a gorgeous little river called the Leen, and in the church was an absolutely massive Norman font made out of one big block.
We chose Lenton because we liked it, but we hadn’t realised that it was where Captain Albert Ball had come from. Daniel had known Captain Ball quite well, and often spoke of him, although it was always an annoyance to him that Ball was the only British ace that anyone seemed to have heard of. He died when he was only twenty years old, having won the Légion d’Honneur, the Order of St George of Russia, the Victor
ia Cross, and the DSO three times.
Daniel said that Ball was wildly brave, so recklessly courageous that the enemy didn’t know how to cope with him, but he mainly remembers him as a young man who was completely passionate about flying, who would sing his heart out all the time that he was aloft. He used to light a fire at night and circle it, playing his violin to the flames. Like Daniel, he was somewhat obsessed by mechanics and machinery.
I remember the first time we went into the church and saw the memorial plaque. Daniel just stood before it, clenching and unclenching his fists. I left him there to grieve.
We left Lenton after a few months because it was difficult for Daniel to get to Haydn Road by crossing the centre of the city every day, so we moved to the north, to Arnold, near Cockpit Hill. The church had a memorial to William Johnson, another VC.
I found myself a humble job as a solicitor’s secretary. Oddly enough, I enjoyed it in a quiet and mundane sort of way. Working for Mrs McCosh had never felt like proper work. Daniel was doing terribly well at Brough’s, and he bought me a tiny two-seater Morris Tourer. It cost him £120, plus £10 if you wanted the bumpers, and it looked like a little sports car, but it could only do fifty-five miles an hour, and the steering was so imprecise that it wandered all over the road, especially if it wasn’t a level one. It didn’t have a boot or even a dicky, and you had to carry anything you had behind the seats. It was a lovely British racing-green colour, with black mudguards, and red leather seats. We’d tried out an Austin 7 on the same day that Daniel bought it, and the Morris was definitely miles better. I often wonder whether Enid Blyton got the idea for Little Noddy’s car from the Morris Tourer.
Bucketing around with Daniel in that quirky little Morris was just the most fun I’ve ever had. In the summer we’d go out with the canopy off, all goggled up, and our hats firmly clamped down on our heads, and drive up to Dorket Head to have a picnic and enjoy the views. He insisted on my driving it most of the time, because proper vehicles had handlebars or joysticks. I would sit there on the rug, look at my false wedding ring glinting on my finger in the sunlight, and be two-thirds happy.
For a while Daniel was a friend of Lawrence of Arabia, who was also a Brough fanatic, and owned several different models in succession. Daniel used to scoff about Lawrence pretending to be Aircraftman Shaw, when everybody knew perfectly well who he was. I know he used to rib Lawrence about it. He was deeply envious, not of Lawrence’s heroic past, but of his stainless-steel petrol tank.
Lawrence came to stay with us one weekend, and I had been expecting a thrilling time, with tales of derring-do and blowing up railway lines, and encounters with sheikhs and their camels, but the two boys just talked about the latest aircraft and Brough Superior Motorcycles. They went on and on about Castle forks and mousetrap carburettors, and Enfield brakes, and the torque effect of rotary engines. Never in my life have I experienced so much difficulty in restraining my yawns, and I was really dreadfully pleased when our guest finally left. Even so, I was saddened and shocked to hear the news when Lawrence was killed, riding one of his beloved Broughs.
I never regretted leaving The Grampians. The fashion for lady maids had long gone, and it had been a stultifying occupation in many ways. It was beneath my intelligence, and it wasn’t living, it was existing. I’d become completely bored with pretending to be a lady, and Mrs McCosh’s relentless obsession with the royal family had been driving me up the wall for years. She almost made me a republican. She was a hopeless snob about absolutely everything, including whether or not the butter knife was silver or silver-plated, and if there was no butter knife at all she just wouldn’t have any butter, and if there was marmalade in somebody else’s house she wouldn’t eat it if it had come from a shop. She went shopping with a Harrods bag even if she was just nipping out to buy a darning needle. She had also become accustomed to brandishing her air rifle whenever she found an annoyance in me, and of course I know it’s difficult to kill someone with such a weapon, but I didn’t relish the prospect of having an eye put out. In any case, I was scarcely needed any more because Rosie was there with the children.
That was another reason to move, of course. Daniel was a kind man who adored the children, but she treated him as if he had leprosy. After he moved out she would do anything to prevent him from seeing them, even telling him blatant lies about them being ill, or being somewhere else, or not wanting to see him. I caught her more than once burning his letters to them, until the letters stopped arriving at all. Of course I found out later about the arrangement with Mrs Pendennis, but at the time I thought that Daniel must have given up in defeat, and it made me terribly sad. I couldn’t say anything to Rosie, so had to bite my tongue.
Daniel didn’t deserve to be treated so badly. Quite apart from having made a name for himself in the Great War, he was energetic and humorous and hard-working, and he loved having fun. A fun-loving man is difficult for a woman to resist, especially when he is compassionate, and as much concerned with your pleasure as he is with his own.
I don’t feel comfortable talking about that kind of thing, but it matters, it really does. If he had been more disappointing, perhaps it would have been easier to leave him a great deal sooner.
The main reason I left The Grampians was that Daniel and I fell in love. We came together because for a couple of weeks we had to look after his brother Archie, who had fallen on hard times and was terribly sick. It was then that I realised what a tender heart Daniel had, and in his case I suppose it was obvious that a man in his situation needs some consolation. I was very beautiful when I was young, and that is a most convenient shortcut to a man’s heart, as everybody knows.
It was no easy thing, having his wife in the house, and she treating him so badly, and expecting me to be supportive. After a great deal of havering, Daniel and I realised that it was quite impossible for us to have any kind of life together unless I bit the bullet and left, and that’s how it came about that I had to swallow my pride and agree to become his mistress.
It was not such a bad thing to be the mistress of a man as amusing and appreciative as he was.
Sometimes he brought his rather antiquated two-seater Avro down from Hexham, which was such fun, and we did seem to spend an awful lot of time hurtling about with his combination, going sightseeing, or just out on jaunts. I still have a lot of photographs in a shoebox, and of course I kept all the little presents he gave me, like the ‘wedding’ and ‘engagement’ rings that we wore for the purpose of going to hotels, and my brooch in the shape of a honey bee.
We did all that at weekends, of course, because after I left the solicitor’s, I found clerical work in the Northern and Provincial Bank. They thought I was a respectable but childless wife, and quite often I thought what fun it was that I was really the secret mistress of a great flying ace. It’s surprising how quickly one becomes used to being unrespectable, as long as no one else realises.
Sometimes we went out into the sticks for weekends, because Daniel had a friend with an empty tied cottage. It was very small and cold, and we spent an awful lot of time cutting logs and humping them about. We had water from a well, and a thunderbox outside the back door that was just absolutely perishing in winter. Eventually Daniel found a stove, and used the workshops at Brough’s to alter it so that a pipe went through the back to a tank upstairs that made enough hot water, and of course the pipes heated the house a little bit too. Daniel said it would work on the ‘thermosyphon’ principle, and it really did. To this day I have never got round to finding out what a ‘thermosyphon’ is. I felt I couldn’t ask Daniel in case he thought I was just another silly woman. Sometimes it’s best just to nod wisely.
When we were there we lived mainly off pheasant and partridge and wood pigeon, and trout from a stream in the woods. Daniel would go out with a twelve-bore or a fishing rod, and not return until we had some supper. I remember picking whole bathfuls of blackberries and never being able to fini
sh them before they began to go mouldy.
We did have a wonderful time for several years, despite his frequent absences when he went to see his children. He quite often went to Hexham too, to fly his aeroplanes and see Gaskell and Christabel, who were becoming more and more outlandish and successful by the day. He was terribly fond of Christabel’s adopted children, and would talk about them rather a lot. It was ‘Felix said this, and Felicity did that’ and Christabel used to send him letters about how well they were doing. It was very much easier for him to see his godchildren than it was to see his own. When he came back from Hexham he was always agitated or sad, or both, and I suppose that that was the reason. Obviously Daniel couldn’t take me too, although I am certain I would have loved it there, and I’d always been fond of Gaskell and Christabel, and I was really not so easily shocked any more. The person who shocked me the most was me. I suppose Daniel couldn’t really tell Christabel about me, no matter how ‘modern’ she was. He was married to her sister, after all.
It’s difficult to be a woman in her early thirties, with fading beauty and no prospect of children or any kind of security. Daniel and I did talk about having children, but in the end it always seemed too fraught and difficult, and we lacked the courage. I did, anyway. I’m just not the bohemian type. Daniel was about as bohemian as is possible for a military man. We never did take the risk, however much we were tempted or got carried away. The worst thing was not being able to get married. I would have married him if Rosie had agreed to a divorce, but she doggedly refused every time he asked, on religious grounds. She accidentally blighted my life as well as his. No one does more harm than someone who’s obstinately trying to stick to a principle.
And I also think that deep down she really and truly still loved him and wanted to be married to him.
She was a casualty of the war, the same as me. Her fiancé died in France and mine died in Mesopotamia. I did understand what was going on in her heart, I think. The thing is, when your fiancé dies, you’ve never had the chance to see their bad side, and so they’re perfect forever. I tried not to be angry and bitter, and now I appreciate that my passion for Daniel was what laid the ghost of my poor dead soldier to rest.
So Much Life Left Over Page 18