He paused for breath, needing it.
‘John-William, I implore you …’ moaned Amabel.
‘Be quiet, woman,’ he said. ‘And those bruises you tell me she gets from falling down drunk.’ He snorted his contempt. ‘The man beats her. He drags her about by the hair and takes a dog-whip to her. For his pleasure. Every villager in Far Flatley knows it, Miss Linnet Gage, and so do you. A silly little woman like my Amabel now, oh no, she doesn’t know it. Because she doesn’t believe that anybody she’s ever met could do such a thing. It never enters her head. But you’re no milk-and-water innocent, are you, my lass? You know what a filthy brute the man is and so long as he puts a ring on your finger and makes you the mistress of that fine house and gives you your horse and carriage, you don’t care. And you’ll do anything he fancies to pay for it, so long as it can be done in such a manner that nobody will ever know. Aye lass, I’ve watched the pair of you, him dangling his worldly goods like a carrot in front of you, and you tempting him with your Bartram-Hynde pedigree. Whispering behind your pretty fan, in your pretty little voice, how best to strip his wife bare and put her away. I’ve watched you. And there’s not an ounce of decency in you, Linnet Gage, nor a scrap of human feeling. You’re not fit to clean my Amabel’s shoes with your Bartram-Hynde connections …’
Scraping back his chair he walked out through the open windows and set off down the garden, away from them, unable to bear either his wife’s tears or his own choking contempt for Linnet, walking fast into the heat, towards the sun, he supposed, since something was certainly dazzling him. Damn the woman. Damn her. Desperate she may be. In his better moments he could even pity her. Once or twice he’d even considered buying her the kind of husband she needed. Not Colclough, of course. He would have come too dear. But somebody with enough prestige to make her feel a success. He hadn’t done it because … God knows. When it came to it he hadn’t seen why he should. But he’d have to get rid of her now, one way or another and no mistake, although already he was dreading the scenes there would surely be with Amabel. The tears. The supplications. The nonsense.
Was that why he was feeling so dizzy? He was feeling sick, too, although that, he supposed, was from losing his temper last night before he’d digested his dinner, and losing it again this morning over his toast and that dreadful weak, scented tea they kept telling him was all the fashion.
But his head was really most peculiar. Was it the heat? He was still asking himself that question when he struck the ground, grunting and snorting, regaining consciousness without realizing he had lost it, just in time to see two female figures, at what seemed the end of a long tunnel, running towards him like giant moths, their wide, muslin skirts coming at him – he was sure of it – to suffocate or drown him.
Amabel. And Linnet Gage.
And there was something wrong with his face, some leaden weight dragging it sideways out of shape. Something wrong with his legs. He couldn’t move, couldn’t transfer the words in his racing mind to his tongue. Couldn’t speak. Dear God. Couldn’t make himself understood. Couldn’t tell them what he wanted done. Couldn’t defend himself.
And here was Amabel who would always lean to the strongest will; and Linnet already inviting her to lean.
John-William Dallam, for the first time in his life, was terrified.
‘Gemma,’ he said. ‘Fetch Gemma.’ And when they failed to translate his harrowing grunts he used what he knew might be his final strength, not caring if it killed him – the sooner the better it now seemed to him – and painfully, grotesquely, like a retarded child fighting for speech, enunciated her name. ‘Gemma.’ ‘Gemma.’ Until he was understood.
He had no care any longer for the welfare of his wife. He was afraid now for himself. Not of death but that his present state, not death but not life in any way he valued it, might be prolonged. The helplessness of a child without a child’s acceptance of helplessness. His towering will imprisoned, buried alive, in a dead body which lay now at the mercy of women he did not trust. Amabel who would not know what to do. And Linnet who would do anything to gain her own advantage.
Timid, loving, ineffective, useless Amabel. And Linnet, her dainty hands already reaching out to take control. Of the house. Of his wife. Of him.
Gemma.
The doctor was in attendance when she arrived and although he attempted to prepare her she was deeply shocked by the twisted, mottled face on her father’s pillow, the eyes pleading with her as her father had never pleaded with anyone, the gnarled hand on the counterpane that had her father’s diamond ring on the little finger, feeble and questing, groping as if those naked, frightened eyes had been blind.
‘Help me,’ he said. It was as much as he could say. He had held the words in his mind for what seemed to him an eternity, clinging to them with the dregs of his determination, willing her to understand.
She understood.
‘Gemma, dear,’ Linnet had murmured on her arrival. ‘Such a tragedy. Your poor mother. And your father has always been so good to me. I am so distressed. I surely have no need to tell you that you may count on me, absolutely, for anything. And I am no stranger to this, you know. I nursed my mother for a long, slow time and what I have done once I can do again. I know the pitfalls. And since my life is here, in any case, it seems pointless to disrupt yours … And Tristan’s – naturally.’
‘Where is my mother, Linnet?’
‘Oh, lying down, dearest. You may imagine the state she was in. I have given her a whisper of laudanum and I doubt if she will wake before evening. Much kinder. And I have settled with Dr Thomas about the nurses. A clean, competent woman for the daytime and one who can be trusted not to fall asleep at night. Although, of course, it always pays to watch the level of the gin bottle. They usually have one with them.’
Linnet had escorted her to her father’s bedroom door very ready to go rustling in ahead, crying out, ‘Now then, we have a visitor,’ had Gemma not prevented it.
Yes. She understood.
‘Are they fretting and fussing you, father? Don’t worry. I’ll keep them at bay.’
And, seeing that his mind still actively lived, she knelt down beside him and explained in detail and with care, that she would now make the move to Almsmead that she had promised him. She would be a daughter to Amabel, a wife to Tristan, a prop to her father’s old age and the guardian of his dignity. She would do what she had been conceived and conditioned to do. Her duty.
Her measure of time was over. Not full, of course. She had realized, months ago, that it could never be that. But it had run its course. And although she had known full well that the blow must fall it was no less painful when it did.
Returning to Frizingley the following afternoon to supervise the packing of her trunks and boxes, she went first to the mill-school, standing for a long while in the doorway, signifying by a gesture to Daniel that she did not wish to interrupt him. Only to watch him. Only to be here in this place where her joy had started, where she had lived, so briefly, not as John-William Dallam’s daughter, but as herself.
She was saying goodbye not only to her lover but to her identity, slowly letting it slip away from her among these odours of chalk and starched pinafores and new paint, her vigil lasting so long, her face so sad and so deeply serious that long before the class was dismissed, he knew. And although he too had known that it must surely come to this he had not expected it to be today. Not yet. Not just now, when he had wanted to tell her – wanted to show her – wanted to find out from her …
Ah well.
The children left. She touched a few tousled heads in passing, the scarred top of a wooden desk, a slate, and then Daniel’s hands, grasping hers in the same speaking silence in which she had first offered her love to him. And there was no thought in her mind now of taking it away.
Yet, because her instinct in love was to nurture and to cherish, she knew that she must part from him in a manner that would cause him no remorse, no unease, no awkwardness. What she wanted most of all
– the only thing she now desired for herself – was to smooth the way for him so that he would have no cause to look back over a worried shoulder and ask himself whether he had done her more harm than good. She wanted his leaving to be a warm and glowing memory of time well and truly spent; no ache of guilt. It was a last gift of love to him. And when she had smiled and seen him on his way she would cope as best she could – adequately and competently, she expected – with her own hurt.
She was strong enough.
‘My father has had another attack,’ she said. ‘A very serious one.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And so I am needed at home now, Daniel, as I told you I would be.’
‘When?’
‘From today.’
How could she speak so calmly of what, to him, had the force and horror of a sentence of imprisonment for life? He knew she felt that horror too and her courage overwhelmed him, his pity for her making him brutal.
‘He will die, you know,’ he said roughly, thinking – for her sake – the sooner the better.
‘I know. But then there is my mother.’
‘She will die too.’
She smiled at him very gently, recognizing that what was speaking in him was hatred of her condition, not of her family.
‘Oh yes, she will. But she is not yet out of her forties and – well – although she appears rather frail I think it likely that she will live to be a hundred.’
She saw the sneer in his face, heard the words in his mind. ‘Yes. Very likely. A woman like that who battens on others, feeds on others, who never stirs herself hand or foot for herself. Child-mother. Vampire-mother would be nearer the mark.’
‘Don’t dislike her, Daniel,’ she said, still calmly. ‘She is only as the rules of our society have made her. You remember what we have said about lotus-feet? How the Chinese ladies bind them? And once the growth has been stunted and the bones of the feet broken then that is the end of it, Daniel. It would be the most appalling cruelty to expect a woman whose feet – or whose spirit – had been so bound, to walk.’
‘They bound your feet too.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded her head very quietly. ‘So they did. It was because they loved me. It was because they believed it was for my own good. I have to remember that.’
‘In your place,’ he said. ‘I’d walk away from them.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘That I would. I’d tell them my life was my own and they had no right to it. They’ve had their own lives. They’re not entitled to a double share. I’d tell them so.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ She sounded patient, a little amused. ‘Because, in my place, you’d be a woman with a woman’s conscience – which is a terribly weighty thing.’
‘Then I’d stay – and hate them for it.’
‘I shall try not to do that.’
He never doubted, for a moment, that she would succeed.
‘You are so brave,’ he told her, ‘that I can hardly stand it.’
‘You are no coward yourself.’
He clicked his tongue. ‘By fits and starts. When the mood takes me. That’s how my courage comes. I might tackle a lion if one happened to be running amok in Market Square. And if I happened to feel like it. But the courage of everyday, the patient courage that has to be switched on every morning and has to last all through the day – and the year – until God knows when … No. I’m not brave like that. Like you.’
Suddenly Luke Thackray came into his mind. Another tough, enduring, quietly valiant soul like Gemma’s. Perhaps this damp and dismal climate bred them here.
Ah well.
‘I suppose it would be best for me to go away,’ he said.
‘Yes. I am sure it would.’
‘When?’
‘Today, if you like.’
‘And close the school? I can’t do that. Footloose I may be, but I’ll not be leaving until you have another teacher.’
‘Thank you,’ she smiled at him. ‘But Mrs Ephraim Cook can take care of it. And the delay would be irksome to you, Daniel. I don’t want that. Truly not. Take a train – the one that appeals to you most as soon as it appeals to you. And set off.’
He took her face between his hands. ‘Are you dismissing me?’ And he could feel the prudent tension, the careful control of her skin beneath his fingers.
‘No. I am giving what one gives to the person one loves. Or what one ought to give. The thing he wants.’
‘Gemma.…?’
‘You want to go. Of course you do. By your nervous fits and starts you have wanted it all the time, I think – I know –’
He pulled her towards him and held her brown, sturdy, gallant little body very tight, feeling it tremble.
‘And by the same fits and starts, do you know how much I have wanted to stay? All the time?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me!’ he shouted at her, suddenly beside himself at the idea that she might be grateful to him – him – when she – Dear God in Heaven – when she had given him so much.
‘And you,’ she told him, standing a little away from him, her hands against his chest, perfectly understanding his trouble. ‘You should feel no guilt – and no regret. None. I am not asking, but insisting – I want you to take that train, Daniel, with your bag across your shoulder and I want you to feel all the excitement in journeyings and wanderings and seeing what happens next as you used to feel. Only a year ago. And if you come to a harbour and there happens to be a ship standing there that takes your fancy then go aboard – find out what’s on the other side of the ocean – experience it – Live it.’
‘For you?’
‘For yourself, Daniel. And no guilt. Remember that. Because I think you have felt guilty sometimes, haven’t you?’
He had. At times he had been consumed with it. He wished he could tell her so. But since it had concerned his inability to fall in love with her in the head-over-heels way he believed he ought to have done, as he had even wanted to do, how could he say it?
Putting the palm of one square, brown hand gently against his cheek, she said it for him.
‘It would be nonsense, you know, Daniel, to worry because I love you rather more than you love me. I have never thought of it as an exercise in mathematics where both sides must turn out equal. You have loved me enough –’
He began to tell her that no amount of love could ever be enough for a woman like her, began to spill out a wild Irish flow of words to ease his soul that was aching now, with an equal soreness, both for her captivity and his inconstancy, her gilded, overcrowded loneliness and his freedom peopled with so many chance-met, easily forgotten acquaintances. Her depth and his own damnable superficiality.
Nothing in the world, at that moment, would have given him more joy than to throw himself in an abandonment of true passion at her feet.
He could not.
‘Daniel,’ she said firmly. ‘You have loved me enough to make me happy. I have been happy. And since I am the only person in a position to know how I feel then you may take my word for it.’
He did not answer her.
‘Daniel. You have given me everything I asked for and much more than I expected. You have been good to me and good for me. You don’t want to fail me now, do you?’
‘That I do not.’
‘Then be big enough to accept my love for what it is. As I can accept that you – well, you like me very much, Daniel. You are fond of me. I know. But you didn’t force me to love you, after all. I wanted it. I made it happen. And if, now, you won’t take it then I shall have wasted my time. Which would be a pity. I love you. Take it away with you. It belongs to you, surely – since I am the only one who can give it. And I do give it, wholly and freely. How could you possibly turn it down? I wouldn’t, you know – if I were you.’
And through all her luminous sincerity and tenderness there still came a faint, far nuance of her pugnacious father, John-William Dallam, who would have said, ‘Now let’s have no nonsens
e, lad. Take it, since it’s good for you and comes free of charge.’
He walked away from her, tears stinging his eyes, and then, having blinked them away, came back again.
‘Gemma, should you ever need – anything.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I don’t know where I’ll be going …’
‘It doesn’t matter. I shall be here. Should you need anything …’
‘No, Gemma …’
‘Mrs Ephraim Cook,’ she continued as if he had not interrupted, ‘would let me know. You have her address.’
He nodded.
They were reaching the end of everything that could be said.
‘I had better go and see to my packing,’ she offered, almost presenting a solution, and they walked hand in hand to the door, civilized people who had always known that this must happen and who could never have been allowed to make a life together in any case.
She did not mention his salary. She would send it by messenger later that day, the last thing she did before leaving Frizingley, so that when he saw it to be more than was due to him he would be unable to return it.
He did not mention that, having helped the wife and family of an imprisoned Chartist friend to settle their most pressing debts, he had little more than the price of a train ticket to London left in his pocket. Such a thing did not even enter his mind.
He tidied up the schoolroom when she had left it, wanting nothing more urgently now than to leave too, to put behind him what had to be abandoned – and go. He had acquired books during his occupancy of the school-house which, judging too heavy to carry, he left in a conspicuous pile, hoping she would claim them. He wrote a note to Mrs Ephraim Cook the mill manager’s wife, explaining his departure and left it, and the school-house keys, in the care of that lady’s parlourmaid.
A Song Twice Over Page 48