He stood there, his hair hanging roughly over his forehead, his face florid with excitement.
“Cara and I are going to have a child,” he said.
She was dumbfounded. All along — what she hardly dared to imagine — he and Cara had still been intimate.
“We’re going to adopt a baby girl.” So it wasn’t what it seemed.
“But … how wonderful,” she said. “I’m so happy for you.”
He didn’t smile, but continued watching her face, as if collecting himself before he delivered the next words. “The child is mine,” he said. He was silent, pausing for her response.
“Yours?” So there were others. That possibility had remained unspoken between them, something she wanted to ignore because of her need for him, the gaiety he brought to her life, the distraction, the kindness.
“Yes, mine,” he said.
Her voice faltered. “But who is its mother?”
“Hannah is the mother. Hannah Steane.”
Her face burned with anger. Hannah, the cook, full-breasted, round-bodied Hannah, with her high color and dimpled wrists, who smiled sweetly and brought them their meals and lived with her mother and sister nearby on Radford Road. But right under her nose? And she hadn’t noticed it. She thought back. Hannah had grown plumper recently, her eyes were somehow deeper and shining. And, she realized, she hadn’t seen her at Rosehill for several weeks.
“You knew,” Charles said, warning her as if to forestall her anger. “You knew that we’d agreed, Cara and I. I told you from the beginning. We had an agreement.”
“But somehow I thought that I —”
“Marian, I never told you you were the only one,” he said flatly.
She felt tears threatening to burst through her. He was right. And she had chosen to ignore it. She couldn’t answer.
“Oh, Marian. I was honest with you. I made it a point of honor.” He came around and sat beside her on the green velvet divan, the place where it had all begun. He drew her to him and kissed the top of her head. “You knew that Cara and I have given each other the freedom to love other people …”
Her head was swirling. All this time she’d so needed his love and affection that she’d chosen not to think about the fact that he could still share a bed with Cara, and … with others.
“Cara and I are going to adopt Hannah’s baby. We’ll have a little girl of our own, Marian. We’re rejoicing.”
“But Hannah will give up her baby?”
“No. Hannah’s agreed to come and live with us as her nursemaid.”
“I see.” She tried to control her anger, to have some pride.
“She’s a precious thing, Marian. She looks just like me. Cara has seen her and has fallen in love with her. We’ve named her Elinor. We’ll call her Nelly for short.”
He was watching her, waiting for an answer. “Well,” he said, “what do you think? Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I’m going home,” she said. “Papa’s waiting for me.”
He went to take her in his arms. But she pushed him away.
“Please, don’t go away from us,” he said. “Will you still come? We both love you, Cara loves you, I love you.”
She left the house. An icy rain had begun, little spikes of cold on her skin. She pulled her scarf tight around her. A fog lay over Coventry, obscuring the low-lying areas, the timber-faced workers’ houses. Halfway down the hill, her face suddenly crumpled, like a struck child’s.
She stayed away from Rosehill. She was angry, angry at him and at herself for her willful blindness, her need. As the days passed, any residual desire she’d felt for him vanished within her. Her response to him, her enjoyment of him, had been dependent on the illusion of trust, the illusion she’d created for herself, and that had been broken now.
Again a note came from Cara. “Please come. Our baby is here, and we want your blessing. We have missed you so much. Please don’t stay away. I need you.”
Perhaps he had told Cara about her reaction? But to stay away would convey that she’d been hurt by his revelation. She must meet him on his own terms, as if she too had somehow been indifferent enough to him not to mind that she wasn’t the only woman he slept with. And he had on his side the fact that he had told her the truth from the beginning.
She relented, and went to the house. There stood Cara, holding the little bundle tightly in her arms, radiant, Charles beside her, stroking the baby’s cheek with his finger. “Would you like to hold her?” Cara said. She took the infant and gazed down at her heart-shaped lips, a tiny blister at the tip from nursing so hard. She was making little sucking sounds. Marian bent over her soft scalp and smelled its warmth. The wonder of the baby filled the air, and for now, at least, there was no echo in the room of what had happened with her and Charles.
“There,” said Cara. “See how peaceful she is in your arms. She loves you already. Hannah will sleep in her room at first,” Cara said, “so she can be her wet nurse.”
Gradually, she began going back to the house. When Cara went to see Edward Noel in Bishops Teignton, she asked Marian to go to Rosehill and see that little Nelly was well.
At first she ignored Charles. As he stood there in front of her, there was an acknowledgment in his eyes, a pleading, hidden from the others. He was still saying that he wanted her. But she refused to return the look.
One afternoon in the study, he reached out for her again, but she put up her hands and refused him.
“No,” she said. “That’s finished. Forever.”
He stepped back. “I understand,” he said. “If that’s the only way we can have you in our lives. But know that I will always love you, in every way, as a sister too. We both love you, and we will always take care of you.”
She couldn’t help herself. “Why?” she asked bitterly.
“Because neither one of us has ever known anyone like you, anyone as brilliant and good and kind. There is no one quite like you. One day, Marian, you will be a very important person in this world. Mark my words.”
“As if that were enough,” she said ruefully, and turned and left.
And that was the quandary. Rosehill was the center of her existence now, these were the only real friends she had. All life was there, parties and music, people forever broadening her horizons, giving her a glimpse of the world beyond and its possibilities, challenging her. Without them, she would be a prisoner in her father’s house, she would have to retreat to her fate as his spinster daughter and caretaker. But she couldn’t retreat now that the world had opened up before her.
She and Charles resumed their conversations. They never mentioned that they’d been lovers. It was easier that way. He still came eagerly to greet her when she arrived, put his arm around her and kissed her cheek.
But there was a wall between them, a wall that she had raised, and he respected it and didn’t attempt to bridge it.
November came, and once again she was a bridesmaid at someone else’s wedding, this time Charles Henning and Rufa Brabant’s at Finsbury Square Chapel. As she listened to the marriage blessing, she realized that this was now the third time she’d stood behind two people at a wedding, she, dressed up and awkward, stooping to hide herself.
After the wedding, at the reception, Dr. Brabant spotted her and approached her. He studied her with his shrewd blue eyes. “Marian,” he said. “I’ve thought of you often.”
“It must be very difficult for you to lose your daughter,” she said. “I know you’ll miss her terribly.”
“She’s the apple of my eye.” A look of sadness crossed his face. She was his only child, and now he was bereft.
Then, as if seized by an impulse, he asked brightly, “I wonder, if your father would permit it, if you’d like to come to Devizes for a few weeks to stay with myself and Mrs. Brabant? It would help us so much to fill the gap left by Rufa’s going. My wife, Elizabeth, is blind, and her sister, Miss Hughes, lives with us and helps us.”
She had never been to Devizes. She’d heard it wa
s a pretty town, the streets laid out in medieval fashion, a famous system of locks that went up the canal. Winter was coming and perhaps it would be a little warmer there. It would be good to get away from Rosehill, to put a punctuation point to what had happened.
Her father was irritable because she was leaving him yet again, and so soon. But he said, “Well, go if you must.”
A week later she was there. The Brabants lived in a large stone-faced house, Sandcliff, on Northgate Street. Mrs. Brabant’s eyes were surrounded by the dark shadows of blindness, and when Dr. Brabant introduced them, she searched the air for Marian. Her sister, Miss Hughes, guided her toward her and she ran her fingers delicately across Marian’s face while Miss Hughes stood there, a thin-smiling, watchful presence.
After supper — the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were excellent — Dr. Brabant showed her his library, which was filled to the brim with books, the kind dear to her heart, books on theology and science and medical texts, mostly in German.
“Now, I want you to think of this as your own room,” he told her. “You can spend as much time here as you want. No one will disturb you. Except myself,” he said with a smile. He took her hand and kissed it. “May I call you ‘Deutera’?” he asked her. “As if you are my second daughter?”
“How very sweet,” she told him. “I’m touched.”
She lingered among the books, her fingertips moving along the rows of titles. She was conscious of his standing there, watching her, still smiling.
When it was time for bed, she found that warm water had been set out for her bath. She was being spoiled, cherished by a kindly man who was like a father to her.
The next morning, she and Dr. Brabant took a walk through the old market town and along the canal and climbed up along the locks on Caen Hill.
She asked Dr. Brabant about his book on the myths of the Gospels, and he sighed. “It’s a great sorrow to me,” he confessed. “It goes so slowly. I’ve been at it for over two years now. I find myself constantly writing, then rewriting. I’m too much of a perfectionist and I can’t bear to let anything go.”
After lunch, he told her, “I have a surprise for you in the library.” Eagerly she followed him there. He closed the door behind them, went to his desk, and picked up a manuscript. “This is it,” he said. The whole thing was less than a half-inch thick.
“How wonderful.”
“If you’re a good child,” he said, almost coyly, “I’ll let you read some.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’d be pleased to.”
“Very well.” He handed it to her. “Sit here, by the light. I’ll leave you alone with it.”
“This is all?” she asked. Immediately she regretted her words.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “At the moment, I’m completely stuck. I just can’t seem to go any further. Perhaps you can give me your thoughts.”
It didn’t take her long to read the twenty-eight pages he’d completed. But it was totally unoriginal, simply a recapitulation of the arguments of Strauss and Hennell. She already knew it all from her own reading.
When she’d finished, she went out into the parlor where she found him seated tensely forward in his chair, waiting for her response. Seeing her, he sprang up.
“Yes?” he asked, hopefully.
“It’s brilliant,” she said. Well, not quite brilliant, she added to herself. He seemed so eager for her approval. She couldn’t bear to hurt him. “Such a succinct summary, so smoothly put, an important summary.”
“Do you really think so?” he asked brightly, like an uncertain child.
“Of course. It’s so difficult to do, to link them all, but you’ve done it.”
She handed him back the pages and he clutched them to his chest. His face was filled with gratitude, he, a sixty-three-year-old man, old enough to be her father, and she but a twenty-four-year-old woman. “I — I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “Your words heal me, they give me hope.”
“You must continue,” she said. “You’re synthesizing things, and explaining it to the world. The world needs your book.” She was exaggerating again, but he seemed so vulnerable.
“Thank you, dear child. Thank you with all my heart. You’re such a sweet, brilliant girl,” he said. “I’ve found a beloved friend in you.”
He was almost forty years older than she, infinitely warm, and he paid such close attention to her every word. And because Mrs. Brabant was rarely with them, except at meals, it was as if they were always alone.
As the days passed, she read to him aloud in German, and they read Greek together. She was happier than she’d ever been, adored by the little man, given nourishing meals, and left alone with him to expand the reaches of her mind. She felt suffused by a warm glow in his presence. For the first time, next to him she felt almost beautiful, perhaps because she was so much younger. Her skin seemed fresh and glowing, her hair soft, her figure lithe, her eyes shining. When she spoke, he gazed upon her with a kind of rapture. It was as if every word she uttered was a silvery thing. She was drawn to him, lit by his adoring eyes. Never had she felt so loved and cosseted, cherished for everything she was, for her youth as well as her intellect.
In the library after supper, when Mrs. Brabant and Miss Hughes had retired for the night, they read Archilocus together side by side on the couch in the candlelight, the fire glowing warm in the grate. “A slender, lovely, graceful girl,” they read, “Just budding into subtle line —” He looked up and said, “Like you, my dear girl.”
He touched her breast and kissed her. Then he made love to her, and when it was finished, he stroked her hair and peered into her eyes as if he were awed by her. “You are such a sweet girl,” he said. It wasn’t the passionate coupling she’d had with Charles, it was gentler, as if she were a sacred object to be cherished, and his gratitude toward her was unending.
The next evening, they read Sappho exultantly in unison, alternating the lines between them and then finishing together in triumph. Suddenly, she stopped and found herself on her knees before him. “Please, let me stay with you forever,” she said. “I’ve never been so happy. I’ll help you with your book —”
Just then, behind her, the library door opened. Abruptly, he stood up from the couch and looked past her at the person who’d interrupted them. “My dear —” he said, addressing not her but someone beyond. She turned and there was Mrs. Brabant, so happy at the sound of his voice, but blind. And behind her, Miss Hughes. Miss Hughes had seen it all. She stepped in front of her sister.
“Robert!” Miss Hughes said. “Miss Evans, my God —” Her eyes were bright with anger. “Elizabeth,” she said to her sister, “go to the parlor. I will attend to this.”
Elizabeth Brabant stumbled from the room, groping along the furniture to find her way out. Miss Hughes stood before them. “Robert! What’s going on here? How could you allow this? Miss Evans, you’d best leave at once.”
Marian stood up. “But I —”
“Don’t try to explain,” Miss Hughes said. “I can see for myself.”
Dr. Brabant’s voice came to her. “Susan, I’m very sorry about this. The young lady suddenly, quite unexpectedly … I think she was a little overcome by her feelings. I’ll go to Elizabeth at once.”
He was transformed. He looked at her now as if he too was appalled. “Really, Miss Evans. I must say, I’m afraid you’ve let your emotions get quite out of hand in the past few days.” He turned to Miss Hughes. “I’ve tried to stop her. I’ve explained that this just can’t be. It’s completely improper —”
“But, Robert —” Marian said, “Dr. Brabant, you —” She couldn’t find the words. “I thought —” She left the thought unfinished.
Miss Hughes interjected, “Go to Elizabeth, Robert. Leave this to me.”
Tight-lipped, she faced Marian in a fury. “You’ll leave tomorrow morning on the first train.”
Marian pushed past her, up the stairs to her room, and began throwing her clothes pell-mell into her trunk.<
br />
The next morning on the way to the station through the streets of Devizes, she wept. The coachman pretended not to notice. He had lied, lied! But why? Had she meant so little to him? The way he’d stood there as if made of stone, after all the love and praise he’d lavished on her. The betrayal was greater than any she’d ever known. He’d cared nothing for her.
She returned to Coventry, wounded. Hurt turned to anger at him, and contempt. He was a pathetic, selfish old fool. What had she done? Once again, need had overtaken her, smothered her judgment, all awareness. She hated herself for it, for giving in. Why wasn’t she stronger? Why didn’t she have a solid core that would enable her to survive without the love of a man?
Rufa Hennell, now married, announced that she couldn’t finish her translation of Strauss’s, Das Leben Jesu. She had already translated two volumes of it, but simply didn’t have time to devote to it anymore. The only person whose German was possibly good enough to finish it was Marian. Rufa apparently did not know of the scene between Marian and her father, Dr. Brabant. If Marian would undertake it, Rufa promised to help her. And besides, Joseph Parkes, a wealthy radical politician from Birmingham, had promised to underwrite the costs of publication to the tune of three hundred pounds.
Yes, Marian said, she would do it. It would be her first book, though only a translation of somebody else’s work. But she’d earn a little money at it, twenty pounds out of the three hundred — very little indeed, but something. It could be the beginning of a way to earn a living.
The Brays offered her a place of her own to work, a room on the second floor of Rosehill, with a little mahogany desk where she could retreat when she wasn’t caring for her father at Bird Grove and running the household. “I will do everything to help you do it,” Charles said. “It’s a vitally important document, and only you have the learning to do it justice.”
The Honeymoon Page 9