A Song Twice Over

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Tristan, you must learn to control your wife a little better, you know.’

  ‘Oh – is it really so desperate as all that, my darling? Just a storm in a stirrup-cup, maybe? The Larks and the Covington-Pyms aren’t inclined to fret over it, I can tell you.’

  She smiled at him, coolly but very patiently.

  ‘The Larks and the Covington-Pyms have different standards, Tristan. So, very possibly, do you and I. But if the Colclough’s find Gemma’s behaviour shocking, then I – my darling – have no choice but to be shocked by it too. Therefore I am shocked. Most deeply. It damages me, Tristan. Can you allow that?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Then do keep your wife in order, my love. For my sake, and your own. The Chartist candidate is a very handsome man, they say.’

  Smiling easily, lazily, he threw an arm around her shoulders and hugged her tight.

  ‘No fear. I don’t think Gemma goes in for that sort of thing, you know.’

  ‘I do know. But “knowing” doesn’t matter, does it. It’s what people are saying that counts. And until I’m Mrs Colclough we’ll just have to be above suspicion, won’t we? Even Gemma. So help me now, Tristan darling – as you know I’d help you.’

  Of course he knew it. Dearest Linnet. Still the loveliest girl in the world. He’d never yet seen anybody to compare with her, at any rate. And when had she ever let him down? Never. She never would. But, when he saddled his new bay gelding and rode over from Almsmead to Frizingley Hall, his interview with Gemma came a day too late, producing nothing but a calm statement that the appointment of Mr Daniel Carey had been sanctioned, in fact suggested in the first place, by her father.

  ‘If you object so strongly, Tristan, then all I can tell you to do is have a word with him about it.’

  ‘Well – no. Perhaps not.’ Tristan knew, none better, how futile that would be. ‘But you know, Gemma, I do feel … Well, shouldn’t you have talked it over with me first? I mean, at least mentioned it, and given me a chance to speak my piece …?’

  ‘Would you really have minded, Tristan – one way or the other?’

  Her eyes looked very clear to him, not unfriendly but with a cool, knowing look about them which not only made him uneasy but reminded him far too much of her father.

  ‘Dash it all, Gemma, of course I mind. You’ll be getting yourself talked about. And that’s one of the worst things that could happen to a woman – surely?’

  She smiled at him, quite pleasantly, sitting well away from him, he’d noticed, in this strange little low-ceilinged parlour, made almost circular by its wide bay window, which her father had used as a smoking-room and her mother had called, for form’s sake, his study. Gemma’s study now, it seemed, with a gentleman’s leather-topped, somewhat battered oak desk – a relic, he supposed, of the Goldsboroughs – placed solidly in the window, the tiny panes of glass making their coloured reflections behind her.

  ‘That’s right, Tristan,’ and her voice, too, was cool and friendly, rather as if she was explaining a joke she didn’t even expect him to understand. ‘A woman should never get herself talked about. That’s one of the first things I ever learned. My grandmother was so proud of her obscurity that she even had them put it on her gravestone. “Mary-Jane, beloved wife of Tom, who never drew attention to herself in any way.” But what they also taught me, Tristan dear, is the absolute obedience one owes to a father. And in the matter of the schoolmaster I am merely carrying out my father’s wishes. Surely no one can blame me for that?’

  Linnet, of course, could blame her – Tristan had no doubt about it – and did so, thoroughly and finally, when he rode back to Almsmead to report his total lack of success. Although she did not, of course, blame him.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, smiling at him because she loved him and had always known he was not strong. ‘What a pity. Never mind, of course. Although you do realize, darling – don’t you? – that, as her husband the law allows you to compel her – to ensure her obedience in just about anything you’d like her to do. Lucky for her you’re not that kind of man.’

  He smiled down at her, loving her too, wishing he had the whole world to lay at her feet, but knowing his own limitations. As she knew them.

  ‘Yes. Lucky for Gemma. Not so lucky for you, though, Linnet.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But I can’t tackle that old man, my darling. And even if I had the courage to try – which I haven’t – it wouldn’t work. He’d out-fox me in the first five minutes flat.’

  ‘Of course.’ She lay her cool, narrow hand on his arm and leaned against him companionably, as light and fragrant as a drift of lavender. ‘Because he’s a horrid old money-grubber. And you’re a gentleman. But one should take into account, of course, that poor Mr Dallam is an old man, and very far from well.’

  He chuckled and dropped a kiss on her lovely, passionless forehead, her ‘angel’s brow’as Uriah Colclough called it although he had kissed it only with his eyes.

  ‘That’s right. Not well at all. So – it means you’re ready to wait, then?’

  ‘My darling, I see no alternative,’ she said and, returning to the house, wrote a note to Gemma full of tea-parties and dinner-parties and ‘I do hope you are coming over on Thursdays to meet dear Mr Adolphus Moon who is bringing a musical friend to play the violin’, followed by a rather longer note to Uriah Colclough in which she endeavoured to suggest that it would be a ‘Christian duty’indeed, and one very likely to score heavy points in heaven, should he attempt her rescue from this house of the ungodly, where her chaste warnings had fallen on such stony ground.

  And within a week or two the scandal of the mill-school had effectively blown over, helped not a little by Rachel Colclough’s agonized midnight revelation that she was destined not for the wealthy Rochdale cotton spinner and lay preacher they had found for her but to become a nun; Frizingley finding ample diversion in the attempts of her mother – and Miss Cara Adeane – to nip her sudden vocation in the bud.

  The wedding-invitations had been sent out, after all. The wedding-dress ordered. The Colcloughs had spent money visiting Rochdale during the courtship, which had involved new clothes, gifts to the fiance’s mother and sisters and a sizeable donation to the restoration fund at his chapel. And one could not allow such generosity to be thrown back in one’s face by a hysterical girl’s notion to enter not just a nunnery but presumably – since one did not find such establishments attached to Nonconformist chapels – the High Church of England.

  Scandal indeed, particularly when it became clear how inextricably the pale-lipped, blank-eyed Rachel had confused her devotion to the Anglican Christ with one of His ministers, a golden-skinned young curate at the Parish church, the resulting Colclough horror providing enough entertainment to put Gemma Gage and her Chartist schoolmaster altogether in the shade.

  Sending the amethyst cat to Daniel Carey had been the greatest act of daring in Gemma’s life. The brooch, of course, was her own to do with as she pleased, a jewel of only moderate value which could have been given to a woman friend as a keepsake or to an obliging maidservant as a reward without arousing any particular comment. But to give it to a man who was not a servant implied a degree of intimacy which, irrespective of whether or not intimacy had ever taken place – since who cared for pale truth when one could have multi-coloured scandal – could have seriously damaged her reputation and, at the very least, caused him embarrassment.

  Unthinkable, of course. A type of recklessness to which she had never been prone. But when she had seen him in the street outside Miss Adeane’s shop her hand had gone at once to the little cat with its amethyst body and sparkling diamond eyes, her mind emptying of all the fussy conventions and proprieties with which she had been taught to fill it, remembering solely and acutely the day in the manor garden when other people’s wishes and values – not her own – had made her clumsy about inviting him into the house and had prevented her altogether from giving him her b
rooch.

  He could hardly have noticed her, she supposed, on the other side of the shop window, with silver-and-ivory Linnet on one side of her, the tawny magnificence of Miss Adeane on the other, the self-righteous fury of the Colcloughs all around them. He could have seen no more than a blur of faces and would have been unlikely, she concluded with realism but with not a trace of self-pity, to pick out hers. Yet she had thought of him very deeply and very seriously all the way home, her reverie effectively removing her during the carriage drive and for the rest of the evening from the posturings of Linnet and the Colcloughs who were coming to dine.

  As they dined very frequently at the manor these days, she had reminded herself, in accordance with Amabel’s policy of pushing ‘our two dear bashful little lovebirds’into the same nest.

  ‘We must really do all we can to help them along,’ Amabel was always telling her. ‘Linnet is so devoted. And Uriah may look stern, sometimes, Gemma, I quite agree with you there, but not small-minded. No, dear. He is merely rather shy. She will be such a good wife to him. And one can tell with half an eye that he positively worships and reveres her. She is an angel from heaven to him, Gemma. You must see that.’

  But what Gemma saw, that evening, was that beneath all his pious talk of angels Uriah Colclough was burning for the kind of access to Linnet’s body which no one – except Uriah himself – could pretend to be other than acutely carnal. Whereas Linnet, despite the melting glances of encouragement she kept bestowing upon him and all the clever ways she had of sitting with her bare shoulders in a pool of candlelight, was not only revolted at the mere idea of his touch but, if she ever managed to become his wife, would do everything in her power, on every possible occasion, to avoid it.

  What Gemma saw was hypocrisy which could lead only to misery. Lives built on little but self-deception which could so easily crumble. Was her own so very different? Self-deceptions, one upon the other like bricks building up into a cloister wall. Self-denials and petty restrictions, a multitude of rules and regulations with which to fill one’s hours and days, as her mother did.

  She had wished to be free of that. Had schemed her own brand of scheming in order to achieve her measure of freedom. Yet how far had she really succeeded? How firmly did the strait-jacket of her childhood still crush her? Only a little over two years ago it had prevented her most effectively from making a simple gift to a man who had certainly deserved it. Just how thoroughly, she wondered – if at all – had she discarded that strait-jacket now? She had gone upstairs, written her note to Daniel Carey, unpinned her brooch and put the two together in a neatly sealed parcel. What next? Where to send it? And even if she had an address she would be unlikely to use it. She would find it as impossible, she told herself, as it had been impossible, two years ago in the manor garden, to hold out her hand, the brooch already in her palm, and say in an open, friendly, natural manner, ‘It would please me so much if you would keep this, Mr Carey, to remember me by.’

  Impossible.

  And then. ‘Martha-Ann,’ she had called out, summoning the sharp-eyed, clear-headed girl who kept house for her now that Mrs Drubb had gone to Almsmead. A girl who knew on which side her bread was buttered and whose family lived in St Jude’s.

  ‘Yes, madam?’

  ‘I wonder if you would know how to get this little parcel to the Chartist candidate?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’ There had been no hesitation, no show of surprise. No explanations either.

  She had thought it wise, then, to forget the matter as best she could. Possibly the parcel would never reach him. And even if it did, then what could it mean to him? He would be unlikely to do more than write her a line. What more, in fact, did she want of him? Nothing at all. Her action may have been foolish but had had very little, when she examined it closely, to do with him. It had been for herself. A small exercise of her power to choose. Which made it quite unnecessary for her to see him. Much better not. But when he called, the day after the election, her gladness was so immediate, sprang so naturally to her, that it did not even take her by surprise.

  Of course she was happy to see him. And why not? Why not? Therefore, with a sensation of unusual lightness, a feeling of casting off winter garments and breathing through open pores, perhaps dangerously bare skin, she told him so. Nor was there any hesitation, this time, in inviting him into her drawing-room now that everyone had returned to Almsmead, leaving her – if only in their absence – the mistress of her own words and deeds.

  She was a married woman, after all, permitted to know more of life than the pressing of dried flowers in tea-table albums. He was a man still ruled by impulse whose need that morning had been to escape from the hurt of remembering Cara Adeane on the tavern stairs with Christie Goldsborough’s hand on her shoulder. It had not surprised him. He knew the man by reputation and had he allowed himself to draw up a list of her possible lovers he supposed Goldsborough’s name would have been on it. Braithwaite. Colclough. Lord. Goldsborough. What difference did it make which one of these substantial citizens of Frizingley possessed her, since he did not?

  He would do well now to harden his heart.

  He had lain awake in Luke Thackray’s narrow bed for most of the night convincing himself of that. She had made her choice. And if he could not respect it, then at least – God help them both – he understood. But, as for himself, when morning came, pale grey and cold-eyed, no doubt cold-hearted, through the sparsely curtained window he watched it for what seemed a long, black time, listening to the army of clogged feet on the cobbles outside, the blaring of factory hooters calling to one another like ships in a fog-bound sea, knowing that – as so often before – he had made no choices, reached no decisions as to where he wished to go.

  The election was over. He had done what he had been sent here to do. Had scored a triumph, in fact, for both the Charter and its People, or so they had all been telling him last night, although the taste of it now, in his waking mouth, bore an uncomfortable similarity to ashes. And this morning who would really care to know him? He was the Chartist candidate no longer, just a wandering Irishman with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps, but a black shadow on his soul, who felt himself to be fit for nothing else – at the moment – but to wander.

  Very well. He would pack and go. He was used to that. What else had he been doing, after all, for much more than half his life?

  And, when all was said and done, the redoubtable Mrs Sairellen Thackray would see no sense in burdening herself with him now.

  Back to London, he supposed. Where else? To write articles about freedom and justice which would never come to pass – he was suddenly very certain – in his lifetime. Probably never. Although that was no reason to give up the fight. What else had he to do, after all?

  Leave, then. It would take him no more than a few practised minutes to get his shirts and linen and brushes together and slip away. A brisk walk across the moor to the nearest station, a train to Leeds and then …? Wherever his fancy took him. Liverpool and then to Ireland? Or South to his desk at the Northern Star, which would not stay empty long if he should not hurry back to claim it? Or just any train which happened to be standing ready on the first platform he came to? He had done that before. But first he would put a note through Mrs Adeane’s door for Cara, wishing her well, asking her to forgive him, forgiving her, saying … Christ, what did it matter? Saying anything.

  And then there was that funny little brown girl who had sent him a jewel. Ought he to return it? She might be worrying herself half to death by now about what he’d do or say about it, whom he’d tell – since she hardly knew him – and it would be a kindness to put her mind at rest. For although he had long ago rejected the values of his own middle-class boyhood he still remembered them. Poor little brown girl. She’d be a social outcast, among her own kind, if he let it be known what she’d done. And since a note might all too easily fall into the wrong hands – her husband’s for instance, or her father’s – then it seemed only decent to go himself and reassure
her that she was perfectly safe with him.

  Ten minutes, he’d thought, at the most, unless her husband was at home, in which case, since the man would very likely recognize him as the Chartist candidate, he’d have to brazen it out, say he was calling to take leave of everybody in the constituency, and hope they didn’t set the dogs on him.

  But Gemma had been alone. As plain and sturdy as he remembered her, brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair coiled smoothly but very simply – too simply, by his reckoning – on her strong, short neck; twenty-five years old he estimated, since he was now twenty-six; and looking older – not with the brittle sophistication of Cara, but with a composure he found too matronly – too soon. Yet her welcome had been warm, its spontaneity surprising him and then giving him pleasure as he saw how it took the years away from her.

  ‘Mr Carey, I am so happy you felt able to call. And if you have any thought of returning my brooch, then I must warn you that it will offend me. And since I am sure you cannot wish to do that, then please come inside and take some refreshment.’

  He had followed her, her frank, pleasant manner telling him plainly that no reassurance had been needed. She had trusted him. Rightly, of course. But how had she known that? And as he sat in the long, low drawing-room full of venerable oak pieces polished alike by beeswax and antiquity, dark brown shadows falling across the stone floor between dappled pools of light, he had felt deep-rooted memories of ease and contentment stirring within him.

  His mother’s house had been like this, very old and dim and quiet, low rooms opening one from the other with no particular plan or purpose; stone-cool in summer, cosy nests of wood smoke and the scent of winter hyacinths in the bad weather. He had grown up – or very nearly – surrounded by scarred oak cabinets and Persian rugs the colour of brick dust and varnish like these; by massive copper bowls reflecting the firelight, and small window-panes of thick, flawed, jewel-tinted glass shutting out an ancient, always slightly overgrown garden.