Cordelia

by Winston Graham

  ‘There is more to show you,’ he said. ‘ But perhaps you are fatigued and would like to leave the rest.’

  ‘No, thank you. But I’m glad of a breathing space.’ The smell of the dyes and the noise of the machines were overpowering. Yet she was fascinated, felt the lure of it.

  The water of the stream was a rusty red colour and smelt vilely.

  ‘Do you drain your used dyes into here?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. But we are above our outlet. The colour is from Henshawe’s– the two chimneys by the railway bridge.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see.’

  Mr Ferguson stared reflectively at the muddy bank, the cemented gulleys.

  ‘My father built these works. I remember while they were building it the workmen used to pick the primroses on the banks of this stream. It was strange and remarkable, that reference of the medium. You remember – in February?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the time it gave one the feeling of some supernatural influence. But now I’m not at all sure. I believe that my father recorded it somewhere, in one of the pamphlets he wrote. I haven’t traced it. It was very strange. Even Mr Slaney-Smith was impressed.’

  They went on.

  ‘Where is Brook’s office?’

  ‘We passed it on the way in. But there is nothing to see there.’

  She glanced at him, noticing the tone of his voice.

  ‘I suppose when you are away Brook has charge of all this?’

  ‘In principle, yes. Unfortunately he has very little talent for management or supervision.’

  ‘Brook is always doubting himself. If he could get out of that, Mr Ferguson …’

  ‘I have to confess,’ he said, not listening, ‘ that Brook has been a great disappointment to me. I had always hoped and prayed for a son with the same sort of capabilities as my own. Brook is a highly intelligent young man, but his abilities are literary and artistic, not practical. I wish he had some of your talents, Cordelia.’

  ‘Mine?’ she said. ‘Oh, running a house – that’s different from running a great business.’

  ‘Different, but it needs the same capacities. I have mentioned it before. We have never had so little trouble with the staff of Grove Hall. It has never cost me so little to run, yet the quality of everything has improved.’

  She said: ‘Perhaps that’s because I’ve never been rich before.’

  ‘I wasn’t rich once. Like you, I know the value of money. I like to spend it, but I like it well spent.’

  ‘I’m glad I please you.’

  ‘Sometimes recently,’ he said, ‘ I’ve quite seriously been considering whether your talents are not wasted at Grove Hall.’

  She met his gaze inquiringly. He looked down at her and she felt the power of the man. An all-seeing Heavenly father, almost.

  ‘All my life I have had one failing: a reluctance to delegate responsibility. I like the reins in my own hands. I know I only can drive as I wish. But the result has been to limit. Inevitably. The people under me are unused to responsibility, and in the main are incapable of it. I lack sons and daughters, people I can rely on because they know my interests are their own. For some years now it has been the one thing holding me back from the things I want to do, from taking a larger part in public things, in the life of the city.’

  She said: ‘But Brook–’

  ‘You are Brook’s wife – and you are your own mistress. This is no more than a passing thought, a casual suggestion thrown out.’

  ‘Do you mean you have something seriously in mind?’

  ‘If you choose to look at the thing seriously.’

  ‘But what?’

  He frowned at his coat. ‘Especially when I am away for several days it would be of advantage to me to have someone with a general grasp of the business here, my personal representative, repository of my instructions yet capable of initiative of their own. A few hours a day. Not as a manager or as an employee. Of course, it would be many months before anyone could act in that way. It would mean study and trouble. But think it over. No more now.’

  They walked on in silence, approaching some other gates through which several horse-drawn tarpaulin-covered cars were coming.

  She felt a little overwhelmed. She was also embarrassed. It is always embarrassing to be shown some special gesture of liking and trust by a person one has, however reluctantly, come to dislike.

  ‘I don’t know what Brook would say.’

  ‘No more now, please. We have said enough. We’ll both think it over just for a week or two. Now look at those. I am fond of experiments. That is another experiment for you.’

  Beyond the gates was a narrow dismal street, unevenly cobbled, with a piece of blackened rubbish-strewn wasteland at one end, sloping to the stream. Opposite them was a three-storey building newly built of brick with a lot of windows and balconies.

  ‘A tenement for some of my workers,’ he said. ‘ Finished last year. Not a palace, but little less compared with the places they had before. More than half of them lived in cellars or a whole family to a single room. Here they have a little breathing space. It is not built as a profit-making venture but as an experiment in welfare. You’ve heard of Robert Owen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A great innovator in this field. But he went too far. The prime essential of any experiment is that it should succeed.’

  An hour later she drove home alone, and that evening she had her first real quarrel with Brook.

  He instantly resented her visit to the dye works, that he had not been there, that he had not been even told; but this was nothing to the explosion touched off when she told him of his father’s extraordinary proposal. He saw it as a deliberate insult levelled at himself, and pretended to think that she had connived at or even invited it.

  When she suggested he should go and see his father and have it out with him, he said he would indeed and left the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  It was all rather petty and upsetting, the more upsetting for her because she found herself for once ranged on what she instinctively knew to be the wrong side. She was flattered by Mr Ferguson’s change of front and the tremendous compliment he was paying her. But this quarrel took her gratification away. She had set out to please Mr Ferguson. She had told Brook she was going to do so, more than twelve months ago. She had done it for his sake – often it had been hard and bitter and against the grain – yet now her success had somehow taken on the appearance of treachery. In the subtle stress and counter-stress of family life they had all shifted their positions relative to each other.

  Yet she knew that, even to begin to preserve some sort of balance in the house, she must side always with Brook against his father. While he was out of the room she tried to school herself to see this from his point of view. What upset her was that he seemed to suspect her of motives which had never entered her head. She was in the awkward position of: ‘This animal is dangerous, when attacked it will defend itself.’

  In the meantime she remained, most unwillingly, in Mr Ferguson’s camp.

  Chapter Eleven

  She went to the soirée.

  Her efforts at illness had been a failure. On her Monday visit to her family she thought to prepare the ground by complaining of feeling unwell, but this roused such curiosity in her mother as to the exact symptoms that she was feeling better before she left for home. She realized that if she had two days in bed at Grove Hall with the most obvious sore throat in the world, every woman in the district would jump to the wrong conclusion.

  The soirée was to be presided over by the mayor and would be addressed during the course of the evening on ‘Scientific Signs of the Times’ by the Rev. Claude Boxley, D.D., a notably forward-thinking member of the church militant. When Mr Slaney-Smith heard this, he wrote to the committee in protest and refused to attend the soirée, as no member of that degenerate class could be forward-thinking enough for him.

  A fashionable evening, with dancing, refreshments, and the Cathedral Glee Sing
ers. Stephen had made up a large party.

  Cordelia was wearing a new dress of green and black checked taffeta, with a silk underskirt of a paler green. She persuaded herself that the event of a week ago did not mean as much to her as she’d thought. Seeing Stephen at a distance, she was able to admit his good looks without qualms, to slip quickly over the memory and feel it was not important.

  The Glee Singers gave ‘By Celia’s Arbour’ and ‘ When Winds Breathe Soft’, and before the clapping had died he turned to her and said:

  ‘May I have the pleasure of this dance, Mrs Ferguson?’

  Brook was listening to a captain of the Lancashire Hussars. Other people were near: she couldn’t think how to say no to her host.

  ‘Isn’t there to be another song?’

  ‘No, not at present.’

  The band struck up. A waltz. She allowed herself to be led towards the floor.

  He said: ‘I’ve been looking forward to this for six days.… Good evening, Mr Tracey, good evening, ma’am … I was scared to death you might not come.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come if I could have found a reasonable excuse.’

  ‘Praise the Saints for reason then.’

  ‘Don’t talk of it now.’

  ‘When I got home … Oh, I took unfair advantage, and I know it.’

  ‘I think it was I who was unfair.’

  ‘You lift the weight off my mind: You’re always so kind and forgiving.’

  Was that what she had come here to be?

  He had taken her on to the floor and with his arms about her had steered her into the dance.

  ‘You must listen,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It isn’t that I’m forgiving but that I realize the blame was partly mine. I shouldn’t ever have agreed to meet you. It must end now.’

  ‘Do one thing for me,’ he said. ‘Say no more of it till we’ve ended this dance. We’re committed to waltz together, even if it’s for the last time, so let’s have the pleasure of it and leave farewells till after. What do you say, now?’

  ‘… Yes,’ she said.

  They were both good dancers and the floor was not crowded. For a minute or two they were just two figures among many, adapting themselves to the floor and to each other, troubled in mind, conscious of their separateness. Then the rhythmic movement began to have its effect on their bodies and their minds. They went round and round in unhurried gyrations, reversing and twisting among the other figures, finding perfect balance and union. After a time the weight of their bodies coming at the end of each swing seemed enough without effort to carry them through to the next; the music swung them on, not their own wills; their track was an endless spiral woven and interwoven among the rest. In a little while her stiff body grew softer and bent a little on his arm, her thoughts relaxed, she felt faintly but pleasantly dizzy and was only aware of his face looking into her own. They were not two people any longer but one.

  Oh, God, she thought, I love him. Oh, God, what is to become of me? I love you, Stephen. I love only you. No one else matters, nothing matters but this dance, let it go on for ever, drift away, close my eyes, don’t let it ever stop …

  And when it did stop they were fortunately in the centre of the room, for her face was so pale that he took her arm and said was she quite well? And she said yes, she was quite well. And when the band struck up for an encore, he said would she prefer to sit down? And she said no, she wanted to dance.

  So it all began again, like a sensuous experience deliberately sought for a second time, as if she disbelieved it had happened and wanted the reassurance of knowing it afresh.

  And this time when it was over she walked dizzily back with him to her party. Fortunately a man was talking to them, occupying their attention; she was sitting down before any of them knew she was back.

  The man was Dan Massington. She hardly saw him.

  ‘Mrs Ferguson. Mrs Brook Ferguson. As pretty as ever, I see. And Mr Crossley. Good evening, Crossley.’

  ‘Good evening, Massington.’

  He was drunk. Something objectionable or embarrassing had been taking place. Frederick Ferguson, very handsome and imposing in the great bulk of his evening dress, was standing behind his chair frowning at Massington; Brook angry and pale.

  She saw hardly anything of this, sat back frightened and shaken, trying to hold her thoughts, trying to realize what had happened to her.

  Massington said to the Captain of the Hussars: ‘ There’s no telling, Frith, whom you’ll meet anywhere these days, is there, Frith? It’s a breakdown of society, Frith. I dreamt last night that I went into my club and who was sitting there with her feet up but our old cook. It shows, Frith. It’s broken my dream, Frith. I shall be afraid to go anywhere soon.’

  Captain Frith said uncomfortably: ‘ Yes, old man. Now supposing you go and sit down somewhere. It’s time for the address.’

  ‘“Scientific Signs of the Times’’,’ said Massington, shaking his long thin head. ‘“ Social Signs of the Times’’, that’s what it should be about, Frith. The social collapse of North Country society, Frith.’

  ‘If,’ said Mr Ferguson, ‘ it were worth arguing with you to correct your manners, I should do so. But drink is a poor help to logic. Will you please go away as Captain Frith has asked you to?’

  ‘Drink?’ said Massington. ‘Drink? Have you had too much? Well, it’s no more than I might have expected. People who’ve come up often don’t know how to hold their liquor. ‘‘Jumped-up uns’’ is the vernacular term. They ape the gentleman but you can’t bring out what’s not bred in the bone. Drink makes ’em soft, makes ’em rotten …’

  There were so many ‘shushes’ all round him now that he became aware of them and, seeing general disapproval, he turned and meandered off to a vacant seat. There was applause as the mayor came on the platform, followed by the Rev. Claude Boxley, D.D.

  Nothing of the address, which seemed to last for hours. It meant nothing to her at all. After it she did not look at Stephen but went to Brook. For the first time in four days Brook and his father were at one. Adversity had united them. Mr Ferguson would not discuss Massington’s insults – it was beneath his dignity to do so in public – but she could see how he felt. She listened to Brook’s bitter comments without taking in what he said.

  She nearly said to him: ‘Something more important has happened than an insult to your dignity.’ Was it more important, to him, to them, father and son? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything tonight.

  There was another dance and this time Teddy asked her for it.

  She was glad. She could relax with her brother – need not think, need not talk. But Teddy had other ideas.

  ‘Who was that frightful bounder who came up just now?’

  ‘Dan Massington,’ she said absently.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘His sister was Brook’s first wife.’

  ‘Oh … I wonder if that’s who he was talking about. No, I suppose it couldn’t have been.’

  ‘About Margaret?’

  ‘Yes, Margaret was the name. I think he was drunk, wasn’t he? That couple can’t dance; look at the way they bob up and down. He was talking about somebody called Margaret – her death. But I thought from the way he spoke it had happened quite recently.’

  ‘She’s been dead over two years now …’ For the moment her interest was caught. It held, a thin thread in a rushing stream. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, something about it being all hushed up. And about things only being hushed up when there was something to hide. And if he’d had his way, he said, there would have been an inquest.’

  She did not reply. Now at this moment in the midst of all her confusion of mind … She could not face it fully but she knew something ugly was there. Now at this moment when above all others she needed every help to buttress up her loyalty to Brook – that loyalty which, whatever her feelings for Stephen, must go on and on and on. She had a sensation of sickly hurt but was too dejected and confused to be sure of its absolut
e source. Stephen, Margaret, Brook, Dan, Teddy, Stephen – they whirled round in a kaleidoscope of doubt and loyalty and emotion and fear.

  ‘I say, d’you think there’s some truth in it?’ said Teddy.

  ‘No, of course not. He’d had too much to drink, that was all.’

  ‘But what did she die of, Delia? Do you know?’

  ‘It was quite ordinary. There was nothing sinister about it.’

  Teddy looked faintly disappointed.

  ‘Is this Massington man an aristocrat?’

  ‘He’s a gentleman – or supposed to be. It’s an old family.’

  ‘I must say I was amused.’

  ‘Amused?’

  ‘Yes. I expect you missed most of it. Brook and his father – well, I must confess I thought it funny how indignant they were when someone started looking down on them!’

  ‘I thought they’d both been very friendly tonight.’

  ‘So they have. I say, that’s a pretty girl in blue! Delia, you’re not offended with me?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘I forgot to tell you, Mother sent her love and told me to say you were not to overtire yourself. And I was to hope you were better from Monday.’

  ‘Yes, oh, yes, thank you.’

  ‘You look all right. You look fine, as a matter of fact. You’ve not been painting your cheeks?’

  ‘Heavens, no!’

  ‘Hugh and Essie are enjoying themselves. It was nice of Stephen to invite us. I think he’s a jolly good fellow, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  There was quite a lot more of the evening. Refreshments and polite conversation; the Glee Singers came on again, and more dancing. Stephen, not free from his own confusions of spirit, left Cordelia alone. He didn’t want to press his attentions unduly while Brook and Mr Ferguson were there; and also he couldn’t fathom her state of mind. He knew it to be touch and go whether she carried out her threat not to see him again, and he didn’t want to frighten her into it.

  But then at the end of the evening, moth to flame, he could stand it no longer and, hearing another waltz, he slid up behind her chair and asked her to dance. This time, to his surprise, she made no attempt at excuse but rose and went with him to the floor.