He asked that he might come with her and meet her family, but she said no, thinking it safer; until one day Teddy came upon them a few hundred yards away and, to cover her hesitation, Stephen introduced himself and explained that he knew Mrs Ferguson slightly and that he had met her by accident when he was on his way to call on Mr Blake, to whom he had been recommended, about a valuable clock which needed attention.
All this went over so smoothly that in a very short time Stephen was being asked in and was taking tea in the kitchen and discussing the cooking of Eccles cakes with Mrs Blake as if he’d known her all his life. Because of Stephen’s quick-thoughted explanation and because he had come in with Teddy as well as Cordelia, he was accepted as a new friend common to all.
When he left they all asked Cordelia questions about him but with perfect innocence of manner which showed they suspected nothing.
At the end of May a soirée was to be given at the Free Trade Hall by the Philosophical Society. Stephen was making up a party to attend. He invited Mr Ferguson and Brook and Cordelia and a number of others.
Once a fortnight Cordelia stayed to supper with her family and Teddy took her home. On the middle Thursday in May she came as usual about four and was told that they had invited Stephen to supper.
The supper was a lively one. Hugh Scott, Essie’s fiancé, was there, and he and Stephen kept them all amused, Hugh telling Scottish stories in a rich brogue and Stephen capping them with Irish tales. It was a surprise to hear the chorus of clocks wrangling together through nine o’clock. Cordelia got up.
‘Let me save you a walk, Teddy,’ Stephen said. ‘I can see Mrs Ferguson home.’
‘Oh, no, please don’t bother,’ she said. ‘ There’s no reason for you to leave so early.’
‘On the contrary, I must leave soon as I’ve an appointment in Town at ten. I think that is Marcus now. And Teddy is very comfortable and has his slippers on. I’m sure you’ll trust me with her, Mrs Blake.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Mrs Blake, though a little uncomfortable. ‘If Mr Crossley is so kind, Cordelia …’
They left with gracious good-byes all round. In the carriage there was silence as they drove off.
At length Cordelia said: ‘It wasn’t wise of you, Stephen. Hugh Scott knows Brook and–’
‘I couldn’t resist it. I see so little of you. It gets on my mind and I can’t get it off. Are you listening to me?’
‘Mr Ferguson will hear the carriage and ask who has brought me.’
‘We can stop outside. Or better still … It’s a rare and lovely evening.’ He leaned forward and told his coachman to stop. ‘The lady and I will walk, Marcus. Meet me at the end of the Grove in half an hour.’
Cordelia got slowly out. The last daylight was fading out of the sky and stars were glimmering through a faint summery haze. Northwards over the city was another faint loom of light, and the uneven buildings of the Oxford Road showed grey through the darkening trees. The victoria drove discreetly off, creak-creak, clop-clop, diminishing down the road, clop-clopping away into silence.
‘Marcus is very close,’ he said. ‘ He wouldn’t open his mouth to a living soul.’
They began to walk. Oh, well, what does it matter? she thought wearily. Perhaps this is part of the fun of life, taking risks. All the evening has been lovely.
She said: ‘What a wonderful mimic you are, Stephen.’
‘It comes as second nature, and can you wonder?’
‘Were you brought up in the theatre?’
‘The first thing I remember is a dressing-room back stage. My mother was an actress, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know. You never told me.’
‘Oh, well – it’s precious little to brag about. She was a very good actress, but a poor wife and mother.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘Why should you be interested?’
‘Well, I am.’
He looked at her. ‘Lift up your veil. It’s wicked to cover your face.’
‘D’you want me to be recognized?’
‘There are few enough lamps this way.’
‘All right then.’ She did so. ‘Go on.’
He looked at her face for some seconds in silence. She was conscious of his gaze and conscious of the pleasure that it gave her.
‘Go on.’
‘She was a beautiful woman. Not so beautiful as you but–’
‘Oh!’
‘I mean it. But she had the makings of a rare good actress, so I’m told. She married Dad when he was assistant stage manager in a little sort of a theatre in Bristol. After a few months they took up their stakes and went to London. It was bad in London and they nearly starved. Then she took a walking-on part at the Lyceum, and he found work at a place called the Grapes, one of the early music halls, it was. Thanks to his backing and training, she began to get on – and then I came along with my screeching and squalling to spoil her first good part. After that it was not so long before she decided that Dad had taught her all he knew and that I would be a pack on her back and a burden to her career. So she left us and went off on her own like the self-seeker she was. She had two or three big hits and then went to New York and stayed there.’
‘How old were you when she left you?’
‘About three.’
‘Have you seen her since?’
‘No. She died ten years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was all for the best. Do you think she would be a very nice person?’
‘It must be strange not to have had a mother – ever. It must make you look at life differently.’
‘I think I should have forgiven her more if she’d gone off with another man.’
She was silent, thinking it over, trying to visualize growing up like that. In a way she understood him better tonight than she had ever done before, the different claimant influences upon a nature not yet perhaps fully integrated. At times his easy tongue offended her. At others the warmth of his generous admirations filled her veins with a responding warmth, heady and throbbing and sweet.
He said: ‘Isn’t it more human, more natural, a failing we can understand and forgive if a woman chooses wrong and finds she’s married the wrong man and falls in love again and goes off with her second choice? There, that’s weakness and we excuse it. But if she throws off her husband and child because they stand in her light and might spoil her career? That’s meanness, I’d say, and good riddance.’
‘I suppose it depends whether your career means more to you than anything else in the world.’
‘Well, it shouldn’t, that’s all I can say.’
‘You mean it shouldn’t in a woman.’
‘It’s worse in a woman, I admit …’
It was growing darker and the birds were giving up their evening songs.
‘I like your family,’ he said suddenly. ‘All of them. They’re grand people. And I like to see you in the middle of them. That’s where you belong – so much more than at Grove Hall.’
‘Why?’ she said, curious to know what he would say.
‘The Blakes are alive and kicking – more like me; and you were born and made by nature to be more like me. I can sit there and watch you expand. Cordelia, I’d like to invite your father and mother to the soirée next week – and Esther and Teddy and Hugh Scott.’
‘Thank you, Stephen.’ She was genuinely gratified. ‘But I don’t think it would work. Mr Ferguson looks on them as not quite good enough for him.’
‘What? Why ever not?’
‘Anyway, I don’t think Papa would come,’ she said. ‘ He hasn’t been to Grove Hall for nine months. Perhaps you could ask Essie and Teddy and Hugh only? I hate to see Mother deprived of an evening, but–’
‘Very well, it’s as you say.’
‘Thank you for the kind thought. And do invite them again, please, when you can take them alone and when perhaps I can make an excuse to join you.’
She had enjoyed the walk, and they had b
een serious and not flirted, and she was sorry it was over.
He said: ‘Shall I not see you again before the soirée?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Cordelia,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
They turned in at Grove Hall. There were three lights on the ground floor and two on the first floor.
‘Uncle Pridey’s at work on his book,’ she said.
Their feet crunched on the gravel path. It was very dark here except where the lights from the windows fell upon the shrubs and the lawns. About them was the scent of lilac and laburnum.
He stopped. ‘Cordelia.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m crazy about you.’
‘You mustn’t say that, Stephen.’
‘I’ll not say it again. I promise. Or not very often. But sometimes it’s – well, it’s necessary.’
‘I understand.’
‘Do you? I wonder.’
‘Of course.’
‘I doubt you can understand when you’re so cool and so calm.’
‘Not always so cool and so calm,’ she was forced to say.
He put a hand on her shoulder. Aware of crisis, she took a step backwards and found her back against a tree. He kissed her. It was rather a clumsy kiss for it was very dark. At the second attempt his lips found hers. And that wasn’t so clumsy.
For a few seconds they did not move. Then she started from him and turned her face away.
‘Now the promise is broken all ways at once,’ he said. ‘And I don’t care. Let it break. I don’t care.’
‘Please go now.’
‘Are you offended?’
Offended? That wasn’t the word.
‘Cordelia, I can’t leave like this. Tell me, it isn’t going to make any difference, is it?’
‘Stephen,’ she said. ‘Please, please go.’
Chapter Ten
Not at the soirée – so soon after – as if nothing had happened. Be ill. Haven’t had an illness since I was married. My turn to catch a cold instead of Brook’s. A chill. Something that makes one feel ill and nothing to show. Another week to think things out. Must think. I can’t just drift, especially now. I might have known something like this … Closed my eyes to it, pretending, pretending …
‘Cordelia,’ said Mr Ferguson. ‘ I find it would be convenient for you to pay your visit to the works this morning. I happen to have an hour or two free – very rare – and the promise is of long standing. Brook won’t be back from Oldham until this afternoon, but we can take care of you without him.’
‘I should love to come, but I’ve a headache this morning. I think perhaps another day …’
‘The drive will do you good and the air will blow it away. Another day I will almost certainly not be free.’
‘There’re some things I should see to in the house. Mrs Meredith says–’
‘Let Mrs Meredith take care of them. The house can spare you for one morning.’
Might have known better than to argue. Is my nature weak, weaker than Margaret’s that I’m always giving way to him, or is it my duty to do so? Is it weakness or strength to stand up for your own way in all the small things, the petty things?
A lovely May morning with not a breath of air to stir the young leaves, and a great bank of white clouds motionless in the north.
They took the phaeton and drove at a fine pace into the town, past the plodding buses and the horse-drawn drays and boys pushing handcarts and the tattered beggars; past the tall old houses of Ardwick Green and up the London Road; and there they turned sharply off and broke through the fine crust of trade and prosperity and plunged straight into poverty and slums.
In a few moments it was no longer possible to drive at anything but a slow pace through narrow streets in which ragged children played and naked babies crawled. Rickety houses, four storeys high, shut off a daylight which was already filtering through a smoky cloud in the upper air. Thin dirty women in clogs and shawls sat in doorways clutching babies, or screamed at other women across the road. Side streets showed glimpses of narrow alleys with washing stretched across and cobbles sloping down to a middle gutter. Factories clustered behind with tall black chimneys wreathed in smoke, amid acres of battered hoardings and murky brick. Cordelia had seen poverty before, there were bad patches not far from where the Blakes lived, but she had never seen anything like these tenements, this universal squalor.
‘It is better near the canal,’ said Mr Ferguson, noting her expression.
Her own problems seemed suddenly trivial beside those of the people who lived in this district. Here men and women had no time to be concerned with flirtations: they worked to live and when there was no work they starved. Very recently they had been starving in their thousands – literally starving, and dying off in their weakness of typhus and cholera. She could not understand how the rest of the town continued to live in peace while this great community festered in its heart. Yes, there had been riots during the cotton famine; she remembered them when she was at school; but they had been quite small compared with the distress there must have been. And there were no riots now.
She felt herself intolerably fortunate living in opulence and comfort – and intolerably wicked to be expecting something more. Did she live off these people? Was her opulence and comfort gained at their expense?
Mr Ferguson said: ‘ You haven’t been here before?’
‘No.’
‘It would do everyone good to come this way once or twice a year.’
She glanced at him in surprise. ‘Yes … I was thinking that.’
They turned under a railway arch plastered with tin advertisements, passed a shunting yard and a cemented playground where children were running and screaming.
‘That used to be an old cemetery until last year,’ he said. ‘ It was at my instigation that it has been made use of. Better to have some care for the living than too much respect for the dead.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, reluctantly finding common cause.
‘Are you quite happy at Grove Hall?’ he asked.
‘Yes!’
‘Brook is a queer young man. But he has many sterling merits.’
‘Oh, yes. He’s very kind. I’m very fond of him.’
Fond of him? Was it fondness that made your heart beat and your blood go racing?
‘Well, we are here.’ Mr Ferguson helped her down. He was being more agreeable than ever today, and she was uncomfortable under it.
They went in at wide iron gates, and were at once among the reek of chemicals. They passed some sheds and walked along the cobbled way towards the counting-house at the end. There were several men in here who rose and said respectful good mornings as Mr Ferguson made his lordly and benevolent way through. She was conscious of their eyes following her.
They came out again into a yard where water was dripping. The rumble of machinery was close at hand.
Mr Ferguson said: ‘This is the section devoted to calicoes. You’ll find it perhaps the more impressive.’
In a dark shed were several huge machines. They were like great crabs, lifting up bales of material with hundreds of cogs turning, the men tending them dwarfed and shadowed by their size. It was not a pleasant hum or a steady buzz but a clanking, clanging metallic noise, jerky and awkward and laboured.
‘This,’ said Mr Ferguson in her ear, ‘is known as mordanting. With these machines a mordant is fixed on the cloth to prepare it for absorbing the dye. You see …’ He turned up a corner of a roll of calico lying near. ‘ This is the untreated cloth. Here we are printing this cloth with six colours. Each of those machines has six rollers which, as you see, engrave their particular colour upon the calico as it passes round the drums. You’ll appreciate how intricate an arrangement of the machine is necessary to enable each colour to adhere exactly to its own part in the design.’
A man had followed them from the office, a tall thin anaemic man with a prominent adam’s apple; and Mr
Ferguson introduced him as Simnel, the head foreman.
After a while they moved on and out of the shed, and Mr Ferguson stopped a boy labouring to push a truck into the next shed. He lifted up a piece of cloth to show her.
‘This is the same calico, etched with the colours as you have seen. It has now gone through processes to get rid of the acetic acid; you’ll notice how little at present is to be seen.’
The calico was barely different from the piece she had seen before except that by peering at it a faint design could be distinguished.
‘Wait. Let us go on a little way.’ They entered another shed in which the smell of chemicals was overpowering. Here there were great metal baths full of yellow-brown fluid. Following the boy with his load, they watched two men prepare to drop the calico into one of the baths.
‘That is a chemical called alizarin. Watch the effect.’
The men plunged the calico into the bath, and she stared as it was presently brought out. It seemed as if magic had suddenly imprinted on it a vivid flower design of reds and yellows, pinks and lilacs and blues.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ he said pleased with her astonishment.
‘Yes, wonderful!’
‘The action of a single chemical. Yet it is not a new thing. The machines are new, but the process was known to the Egyptians.’
They went on through the starching room to watch the calendaring, and then across to the designing and engraving rooms, where the rollers were prepared for the printing machine. At the other side of a cobbled yard the dyeing was done. Long rows of women in grey calico frocks were cutting the threads of the velveteen by hand. With big knives they cut along the weft of the material, in magnificently expert undeviating lines, backwards and forwards, over and over again, endlessly active, endlessly patient. He said that it took an hour to cut a two-yard length.
Beyond were the open sheds with their damp flag floors, the heavy cross frames of the room low on their heads, where men were tending the dyeing rollers, working them by hand, squat, sparsely built, grey-faced men who did not look up as they passed.
Out at last at the end of the sheds, and she found herself on the banks of a small stream. The sun was trying to break through the drifting smoke overhead.
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