A Song Twice Over

by Brenda Jagger

  Daniel heard her name without a tremor.

  ‘I know Mrs Gage,’ he said.

  ‘A fine woman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was true. He knew it, remembered it, yet could not feel it. A fine woman who could still vomit and blacken with typhus as easily as any coarse-grained peasant woman from a pig boat. He spoke her name and then, as he had trained himself to do with all names, forgot it.

  He occupied himself, instead, with his candidature, worked on his speeches, saw to it that his pamphlets were well distributed throughout the town, addressed meetings of his supporters, paid well-brushed, top-hatted visits to such voters who appeared undecided and also, at Father Francis’s request, to the town’s few prosperous Irish residents.

  ‘I can see they don’t like me crossing their thresholds,’ he told Daniel, ‘considering the den in St Jude’s they know I come from – me with my hand out begging their hard-earned money and bringing God knows what pestilence with me into their fine houses. So if you could just go knocking on those doors for me, my lad, and remind them of their origins and obligations – with that cold smile of yours, that looks like the vengeance of the Lord …?’

  Was his smile cold? He had not looked at it recently, had not studied any human face in detail for a very long time and did not expect to do so again. But, he went, nevertheless, to the Irish owner of the livery stables in St Jude’s Square who gave him a guinea, to a gentleman in Frizingley Moor Road whose wife had been born in Dublin and who gave him a guinea more on the promise that he would not call again; to Ned O’Mara of the Fleece, drunken and demoted now to a mere bartender subject to the overall authority of Oliver Rattrie; to one of the many pawnbrokers in St Jude’s Passage; to a spinster lady who had once been a governess to an Irish peer; and to the dressmaker and milliner, Miss Cara Adeane.

  Her name, too, caused him no emotion beyond a flicker of amusement on seeing it writ so very large in ornately scrolled gold letters on the front of her shop which now occupied a whole corner of Market Square, its windows, on one side, staring boldly at the new station hotel and, on the other side, at a small public garden laid out with sculptured flower beds and young, very hopeful trees.

  A doorman in pale blue livery stood ready to open the door and direct him to left or right according to his requirements, a saleswoman, also in pale blue, asking him to be seated on one of a row of spindly blue and gold chairs while she moved off very smoothly – her pace implying that one had all the time in the world to browse and spend – to find out if Miss Adeane would see him. Was he a salesman, perhaps? The representative of some exotic foreign establishment dealing in brocades or rare satins? The woman, making her judgement, had smiled at him encouragingly, but he had not enlightened her, simply sending in his card, the correct, deckle-edged white square which told nothing but his name. And while he waited he looked with a shrewd, journalist’s eye at the expanse of pale blue carpet, the air of space and ease and tranquillity, the quiet but very distinct impression of success. The almost casual display of garments he knew to be minor works of art, the showcase at his elbow full of tiny, precious objects, jewelled combs, scent bottles, mother-of-pearl boxes, embroidered gloves, a shimmering rainbow of beads and brooches, fans and feathers and satin slippers. The arched opening, leading, through a bead curtain, to another room and then, he thought, another, which offered him enticing glimpses of movement and colour.

  ‘May I give you a glass of Madeira while you are waiting?’ a soft voice said, offering the wine in exquisitely cut crystal on a silver tray. And because those who have seen famine do not refuse any kind of sustenance he smiled at the woman – who had Cara’s air and manner and her slender, elegant figure – and took it.

  ‘Thank you,’ his eyes said and then, automatically, ‘How pretty you are,’ because that, too, was a kind of sustenance to be taken like bread and water, whenever one could and for as long as it lasted.

  ‘Miss Adeane will not be long,’ the girl murmured, so visibly flustered and flattered by the message of his cold and wary but nevertheless still handsome eyes that it took Cara’s crisply pronounced, ‘Good morning, Mr Carey. And how are you this fine morning?’ to deflate her.

  ‘I’m very well, Miss Adeane. And yourself?’

  ‘Never better. Would you care to step into my office?’

  It was the room he remembered as the one in which she had worked and lived and slept, her bed in one corner her dining-table in the other, her work-table somewhere in between, littered with sketches and account books and ledgers; the room in which he had last seen her mother weeping, her son glaring at her with that burdensome hatred, much altered now and given over entirely to the purposes of her business, a new walnut desk of impressive proportions, high-backed leather chairs, pictures of jewelled women in Gainsborough hats on her pale damask walls; a pale carpet covered with cloudy, overblown roses, vases of flowers which looked expensive and out of season; only her dog, it seemed, left over from the old days, snoring as always in his basket by her new white marble hearth.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said and he sat, watching her as, her wide taffeta skirts rustling and swaying, she walked around the desk and took her own seat, a queen on her throne, attentive yet remote. And beautiful. Her skin smooth and unlined as pale amber, older only in its sophistication, the gleaming blue-black hair coiled high and intricately on top of her head, its weight giving length and grace to her neck and her broad, straight shoulders, its colour deepening the astonishing aquamarine of her eyes.

  How beautiful and how hurt, he had thought when he had last seen her, three years ago in this very place. Crisp and composed now, and cold too, as he had grown cold himself. And although he knew he had loved her and could well remember the reasons, he could not feel even a faint echo of that love again. Desire, by all means. Plenty of that. But, merely by closing his eyes, he knew he could make himself forget her. So completely, in fact, that the news of her death by typhus or hunger or by any of the other obscenities he had witnessed lately would not unduly distress him. She would be only one among many. He was safe from mourning her.

  ‘Is it thinking you are,’ he said lightly, rejoicing in his freedom from caring, ‘of that old adage about the bad penny turning up again – and again …?’

  ‘Yes,’ she was still very crisp and cool and imperial. ‘That’s just what I might have been thinking.’

  ‘Is it any wonder? You’re looking beautiful, Cara. And rich.’

  ‘I don’t grumble.’ She began to tell him why. ‘I took over the shop next door and then the two next door to that as they became vacant and as I could afford them. So now I have separate departments for hats, dresses, lingerie, perfumes, fancy goods. And separate saleswomen who are expert – or supposed to be – on the particular thing they sell. My workrooms are upstairs, of course, and an apartment for myself above them …’

  A whole floor to herself, in fact, a rose-pink bedroom with lace bed-curtains and a pink marble bath-tub; a sitting-room in the pale pastel shades she loved not only because they pleased her eye but because they were impractical, less than hard-wearing, and she liked it to be seen she could afford them; a dining-parlour in traditional mahogany with apple-green Chinese rugs and apple-green silk walls. A kitchen down below with a cook-housekeeper in it. A little housemaid to carry the hot water for that precious rose-pink bath up three flights of stairs.

  Had he now come to tell her she was unworthy of all that? To make her feel unworthy by looking at her, in the way he now had beneath all his light-hearted jauntiness, of an avenging angel? A stern, celestial judge weighing and measuring her with those keen eyes, that cold smile. When his smile had once been – nothing like this. An enchantment. Warm and wonderful, inviting her not to contrition but to folly, as magical in its way as her father’s rainbows.

  What had happened to change him?

  ‘So – as you see – I don’t complain,’ she ended.

  ‘I do see. If you were a man I’d be here to coax your vote out
of you. I reckon this amount of property must qualify for it?’

  ‘It does. But since women don’t vote – And I’m a woman …’

  ‘I see that too …’

  Clearly, it seemed. And not liking the open appraisal of his glance, as if there had never been anything between them but that, she said quickly, ‘What are you doing here, then?’

  He told her, briefly, that he had come directly from Ireland to stand once again as the Chartist candidate, information she already knew and in which her interest did not seem intense.

  ‘Politics …’ she murmured, the shrug of her shoulders dismissing it as a game designed by men to be played among themselves with all the noise and fuss and disregard for the convenience of others as unruly children. Men who might call themselves ministers but would have their work cut out to make the profits she made, year in, year out, from her shop. No, she had no time for children’s games. Nor their fantasies.

  ‘Politics.’ The word had a bitter taste in her mouth, it seemed. A sour apple of a word she could do well without.

  He smiled. ‘I know. You never cared for it. So tell me instead – how is your mother?’

  ‘In America,’ she said flatly, throwing the words at him like a challenge. ‘Three years now. My father is in a good way of business in New York. I sent my boy over with them. I decided the change would do him good. And so it has. He writes to me very often – about all kinds of things …’

  She had said too much and knew it, although the reason for her anguish escaped him. Eight years ago she had refused him because she could neither separate herself from her mother nor trust him with the care of her son. Now she had sent them off to the other side of the world without any backward glance that he could see. And it meant nothing to him. No hurt, no resentment, not the least pang of jealousy that she had done, presumably for another man, the very things she had denied him.

  He felt nothing at all. He almost wished he did.

  ‘Yes – he writes and tells me about all manner of things he’d never get the chance to see here …’

  She had to let him know, whether it mattered to him or not, that her contact with Liam had not been broken, that she was still present in his life, his mother, although in fact, his letters were infrequent and stilted, prompted, she knew, by Odette. Each one a thorn in her heart.

  ‘What things?’ Daniel’s eyes and her own were not in focus, no longer looking in the same direction. ‘What is there to be seen in New York these days but the starving Irish …?’

  She tossed her head in irritation, having no intention – she really didn’t know why – of telling him that she had already given some money to Father Francis, and all the calico she had bought from Miss Ernestine Baker, in a spirit of pure malice, when that good lady had finally liquidated her stock and closed her doors. She had even thought of taking in a couple of little Irish apprentices, orphan girls straight out of the bog that nobody wanted and giving them a chance, changing her mind only when her workwomen had started muttering and losing their heads about the Irish fever. And even now, if Father Francis could pick her out a likely child, she might just get her scrubbed and deloused and into the workroom before anybody had time to complain. But, for as long as Daniel sat there, smiling and carefree on the outside, judging her like that vengeful angel of the Lord within, she knew she could not tell him so.

  ‘There’s no need to go to New York to see the starving Irish,’ she said, issuing another challenge. ‘Only to the old navvy-camp at the top of St Jude’s Hill.’

  ‘And have you been there, Cara?’

  Folding her beautifully manicured hands she smiled at him. ‘No, I have not. And don’t intend to. A fine thing for me to be going up there – to do what, I’d like to know? – and then coming back to start an epidemic in Market Square.’

  ‘A fine thing indeed.’

  ‘So I won’t do it.’

  ‘Have I asked you?’

  She was not sure of that. ‘What is it then, Daniel? Has Father Francis sent you round with his begging bowl?’

  ‘So he has.’

  For a moment she felt relief, since money was easy enough. Very easy, these days. And then, because it always pained her to realize that the coins upon which she could now quite casually lay her hands were somehow no longer the same golden miracles as in the days when she had had to struggle hard for even one of them, she said tartly, ‘And if I gave you a hundred pounds how much good would it do?’

  ‘Not much.’

  She was surprised he knew that.

  ‘A thousand pounds, then?’

  He smiled at her, a covering of charm light as a gauze veil over the stern, dark countenance of blind justice, naked truth, a refusal any longer to compromise.

  ‘Oh – it might be of some help to a few of the squatters in those foul cellars at the top of St Jude’s, Cara. Those who aren’t already beyond help, that is. It might patch them up a little, so they can stagger on to the next disaster. It might put a better class of tramp on the roads, that’s all. There’s been no shortage of private charity. A million dollars has come in from America. And even England – Perfidious Albion herself – has raised upwards of five hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘That has to go somewhere, Daniel.’

  He shrugged. ‘Indeed. But when it has to be spread so thinly one hardly notices. Private charity can never provide a real solution, Cara. Only governments can do that. This tragedy should never have been allowed to happen. There was no need for it. Government could have prevented it. Government can make sure it never happens again. Any Government, with any famine, anywhere in the world. There is enough of everything to go around. There always has been. Only Governments can distribute it so that no man has to sit at the roadside – any roadside – dying of hunger and staring at a side of roast beef. Only governments can create conditions – if they want to – where nobody has to starve. The fact is they don’t want to. I’m in the business of changing their attitudes. Father Françis is in the business of patching up, mending and making do. Which is why it’s his begging bowl I’m bringing you, not mine.’

  ‘And what do you want me to put in it?’

  ‘Whatever makes you feel justified. Your vote, if you had one.’

  ‘So you can change the world with your People’s Charter? Nobody is going to vote for you, Daniel.’

  He shrugged again and smiled. ‘Not this time, perhaps. I’ll just have to keep on trying. I’m young enough.’

  But it was not true. The youth had gone out of him. She saw that and mourned it, her own youth having left her long ago. But, while she had retained her resilience, her sense of sap rising and renewing, there was something dry and brittle about Daniel, something so fine-drawn and tenuous, so likely to snap that she was suddenly very much afraid for him. Yet what help could she give? What help would he take from her now? Did he even trust her judgement which to him, she supposed, must seem self-centred and commercial. Ought she, perhaps, to send him to Gemma Gage?

  Not yet.

  ‘What makes you certain,’ she said, ‘that your Chartists would keep their promises if they ever did come to power? Nobody else does. How do you know they wouldn’t turn grasping and greedy, like everybody else, once they got their hands on something worth grasping? And they’d find plenty of excuses, then, for putting off all these “better conditions” of yours and keeping everything for themselves. How do you know they wouldn’t do that?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well I know.’ She was suddenly furious. ‘Because that’s what people do – that’s what people are. Dog eat dog – except that dogs don’t behave so badly …’

  ‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘They eat dead children on street corners – all over Ireland.’

  Her fist smashed down hard and angry on her desk-top. ‘Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know that. I made sure my own child wasn’t there, didn’t I, and that’s as much as I could do, isn’t it? – He could have starved a dozen times over before any o
f this started, but I wouldn’t have it. I saw to it that he didn’t …’

  But she had lost him just the same. Not in the small, pine coffin which had so often haunted her, his famished little body just a handful of sparrow-bones tucked away inside it, but just as finally. She knew she would never see him again. She knew he did not want to see her.

  ‘Well, it’s safe he is now,’ she said flatly, knowing she must be grateful for it. ‘In America.’

  ‘Do you miss him very much, Cara?’

  ‘No.’ In a way it was true. Or at least, not the child who had bitten her arm and kicked her shins and cowered away from her, crying for Odette. Not him. But Liam as he might have been – ought to have been – had her life really allowed her to have a son. Had she found the way to keep his body and soul together and be a mother to him at the same time. For that child her arms ached sometimes: and her heart.

  ‘No,’ she said, very brisk and competent again. ‘I don’t miss him. He’s well. And I’m busy. Very busy.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  She gave him the wide, dazzling, quite empty smile she reserved for her more troublesome customers, for her suppliers when they began to show signs of raising their prices, for the men she might find it convenient, from time to time, to fascinate.

  ‘And what about you, Daniel? What are you planning for yourself?’

  And once more he matched her false brilliance with his own light veil of charm, that transparent, faintly contemptuous sketch of the blithe and carefree wanderer who, for so long, had been Daniel Carey.

  ‘Well – let’s be thinking now – first I’m going to lose the election …’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And then, if it’s a by-election I can be finding somewhere I may have a crack at losing that too.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll succeed – at losing, I mean.’