Aunt Caroline and her husband spent an hour with me, the Duchess jollying me along, telling me, in effect, to take my disappointment like a man; the Duke, with embarrassed kindliness, wishing me better luck next time. Mr. Nicholas Barforth looked in and instructed me in the curt tones which made his managers tremble to take care of myself. I felt surrounded by friendship and affection and was grateful—once again with those absurd tears—that my welfare should be of concern to so many. I ate up my broth, drank my chocolate and the red wine my mother-in-law insisted was good for me, and promised them all—when they required it of me—that I would get well.
Gervase, of course, came too, but contrived adroitly never to be alone with me for very long. I never learned where he had spent the day of the storm, except that it was neither at the mill nor at the Flood’s, as became clear when they called to pay me their respects. He offered no explanations. I did not enquire, which was in itself a sure sign of danger and decay. Once—just a week or so ago—when I had believed he loved me and needed me, when there had been trust between us, I would have demanded to know his exact whereabouts and expected a quick and convincing answer. But now, when the trust had gone, I did not ask. For now—until I was stronger—I could not risk the truth. I was still too weak to quarrel, too weak to make demands or decisions and it seemed safer—while the weakness lasted—just to be polite.
I got out of bed after five days or so and into a chair, a feat considered unworthy of admiration by my village doctor, who informed me that a peasant woman or a mill woman would have been back in the fields or at her loom long ago. But soon graduated to the parlour sofa and almost immediately became available to the ministrations, the sympathy, the curiosity of Cullingford’s ladies—Miss Mandelbaum, Miss Tighe, Mrs. Sheldon and the rest—who had felt unable to visit me while I remained upstairs. And, when all this feminine gentility began to cloy, there was Liam Adair, dividing his attention so neatly between Venetia and myself that not even the lady’s husband—had he condescended to notice it—could have complained.
Liam had not, of course, grown prosperous, his flirtation with the Cullingford Star satisfying his instincts as an adventurer and winning him a certain notoriety which he frankly enjoyed, but by no means filling his pockets. The Star, for all his efforts, remained a shoddy and irregular publication, its continued existence depending largely on money borrowed from my Grandmamma Elinor, Liam having made the journey to the villa she shared with Lady Verity Barforth near Cannes on purpose to acquire her championship of his cause.
‘I coax what I can out of her,’ he frankly confessed, ‘and she enjoys it. Better me, I reckon, than the casino or that black-eyed violin player she had about her the last time I was there. And when I printed that piece about the houses her first husband built being unfit for pigs to live in, she near died laughing. In fact she offered to put her own name to it to give it an extra dash of spice. I tell you—she enjoys it.’
I believed him, for if the air he brought into my sickroom was not precisely fresh, being too heavily laced with tobacco and Irish whisky for that, it was at least bracing and had a far greater chance of stimulating my still-flagging energies than Miss Fielding’s gentle committees for the relief of the not-too-wicked poor, Mrs. Rawnsley’s obsession with her neighbours’social and sexual peccadilloes, even Miss Tighe’s oft-repeated conviction that the vote should only be given to women of property and militant virginity like herself.
Liam Adair was not much interested in the Prince of Wales’s visit to India nor in the recent atrocities in far off Bulgaria, being more concerned with atrocities in the poorer areas of Cullingford, in those dingy streets and verminous dwellings which had made my Grandmamma Elinor’s first husband his fortune. The Turkish empire, no doubt, was crumbling. The Russians, equally without doubt, would take advantage of it to strengthen their position—and weaken ours—in the East unless we sent a few timely gunboats to prevent it. But Liam, nonchalantly dismissing those gunboats as something designed to please the readers of the Courier & Review, was far more impressed by the astuteness of our admittedly very astute Prime Minister Mr. Disraeli in purchasing, before the ruin of the Turkish empire came about, a majority shareholding—177,000 shares out of 400,000—in the Suez Canal company, thus ensuring without bloodshed our passage to India no matter which empire—Turkish, Russian or British—should gain effective control of Egypt.
‘I believe Mr. Disraeli to have great influence with the Queen,’ murmured Miss Fielding, who was uncomfortable with share manipulations but perfectly at ease with royal widows. And indeed the artful Mr. Disraeli appeared to show the same skill at coaxing the Queen little by little from her seclusion as Liam himself when it came to increasing his allowance from Grandmamma Elinor, although there were few in Liberal Cullingford with a good word to say for this exotic, imaginative Tory whose greatest claim on the affections of Liam Adair lay in his legislation to control the purity of our daily bread and of the butter with which—if we could afford it—it was spread.
The practice of increasing the bulk, improving the appearance or simply reducing the price of foodstuffs by the addition of odd and in some cases downright lethal substances was as long-established as the poverty of those who purchased them, and their need to fill the mouths of hungry children with anything that was cheap and could be made to ‘go round’. All my life I had been hearing whispers of brick-dust in cocoa, sand in sugar, flour whitened with chalk, red lead used to colour the rind of cheese. I had heard of brewers who added green vitriol or sulphate of iron to put the froth on their beer and improve, with deadly results, its flavour, while as a child I had been warned never to accept sweets from strangers, since these tempting little confections might well be coloured with copper and lead. One learned to purchase one’s tea with care, for the green China variety could have been doctored with verdigris, the black Indian variety with black lead. All the world knew that water was frequently added to milk and no one expected a cow-shed to be clean.
But the Cullingford Star, from its squalid little offices in Gower Street, expected it, and availing himself of the services of a chemist—paid for, one supposed, by Grandmamma Elinor—Liam Adair had purchased loaves from every baker in Cullingford and its environs, sent them for analysis and published his results, naming the place of origin of all bread in which traces of chalk or alum or any other dubious ingredient had been found.
The ground-floor windows of the Star had been broken a night or two later, and for the sake of expediency had been roughly boarded up again, since the following week he had printed a tale of dried ash leaves added as a makeweight to someone’s tea, and mentioned the sour welcome he had received in certain ale-houses, which had caused him to suspect that their landlords had something to hide.
He had, of course, increased the circulation of his paper and thoroughly enjoyed himself, but Liam, while not for one moment forgetting either his profits or his pleasures, had the Irishman’s instinctive sympathy for the oppressed, and Disraeli’s Act to control the sale of food and drugs had pleased him at a more personal level than he cared to admit. He had no real conviction that it would be adequately enforced, no real convictions about anything, or so he insisted; but sitting at ease in my mother-in-law’s parlour, his long legs stretched out to the fire, he could easily be persuaded to tell us, with a chuckle, about the shopkeepers who put up their shutters rather than sell him a pound of tea or coffee, and of the landlady who, as the sister of a local baker, had felt obliged to ask him to return the keys of his lodgings and move on.
‘What next, Liam?’ breathed Venetia.
‘Oh, something will turn up. There’s always a crusade.’
‘A crusade? I hadn’t thought of that. Now I would have gone on a real crusade, Liam—sold all my possessions and set off without even a map to rescue the Holy Land. But not you.’
‘No, not I. I’d get myself a map all right, which would make me a useful man to meet in the desert. Because one has to get back, you know.’
&
nbsp; But Venetia laughed and shook her head. ‘Oh no, Liam, if one thought about getting back safe and sound that wouldn’t be a crusade, don’t you see—just an expedition. The whole point of a crusade, surely, is that one gives everything—one just goes forward and does what must be done, without a thought for what happens after? That is what I call a crusade. Had I been a knight in the Middle Ages—yes, do you know, I would have been very comfortable with that. I would have been right for it—don’t you think so?’
I did, and for just a moment I felt a prickle of unease, a premonition, perhaps, which began to take shape and was then scattered by her frank, wholehearted laughter. She had been constrained and silent with Liam for a long time after her marriage. She had been constrained and silent with everyone, but now, in her mother’s house, it was a delight to see the return of her vivacity.
I asked her no questions, for the facts of her life remained the same. She, who had believed so ardently in love, had married for convenience, and it would have been too much to expect that Life, or Destiny or whatever one might choose to call it, should now arrange by way of compensation for her to fall in love with her husband. But human nature finds its own compensations, acquires the good sense to compromise—at least my nature intended to do so—and perhaps she too was learning now to live with herself and with Gideon. I hoped so, and was dismayed to be so soon proved wrong.
There was a day of strong sunshine and sparkling frost, glorious holiday weather which had Venetia and her mother out of doors by early morning, so that I was alone when Gideon came, his arrival producing in me a condition I could only describe as flustered, an enormous reluctance to admit, even in the veiled phrases of good society, the physical and sexual nature of my malady. At Tarn Edge I concerned myself with his dinner, ordered his carriage to take him to the station, kept his bed well aired for his return, and was as remote from him as the owner of a good hotel is remote from her guests. But here, where we were both guests together, it was not the same. Here I was obliged to meet him, not as a brother-in-law or a second cousin, but as a man whose presence, for reasons I saw no sense in examining too closely, embarrassed me so much that I was glad when the excited yelping of a dog advised us of the approach of Venetia.
She had been heaven knew where, following the wind and weather like a gypsy, her arms full of heather gathered for good luck, the tangy fragrance of the moorland all about her; unkempt perhaps—for the hem of her dress was splashed and stained, and her hands clutching the purple heather were not clean—but enchanting, a woman, surely, who was like no other?
‘Good God, what have we here?’ said Gideon, by no means displeased with her, looking, on the contrary, as if this gypsy charm could please him enormously, could please her too if she would allow him to show her the way. But it was not to be.
She had not seen him for ten days and now—taken completely unawares—she stared at him aghast, as if she had forgotten his very existence and was now most painfully remembering, her vivacity draining from her and leaving her no longer a captivating woodland nymph but a rather awkward young lady who no longer knew what to do with that armful of heather.
She put it down on the table and spent a moment retrieving the sprigs which fell to the ground, the dog which had come in with her yapping around her heels in shrill excitement, leaping on and off the chintz-covered armchairs, treating us all to the antics of a half-trained, muddy and extremely boisterous pup until Gideon, who was no longer smiling, said coldly, ‘Should that dog be allowed in the house?’
And when, looking as flustered as I had felt ten minutes before, she failed to retrieve the playful little hound, he eventually took it by the scruff of its neck and dropped it none too gently through the parlour window.
‘Until a dog can behave, it should stay outdoors.’
‘I suppose it should.’
‘There are no dogs allowed inside, ever, at Listonby.’
‘Well, you country people don’t really care for animals. You eat them, or ride them, or train them to retrieve your game-birds for you—work for you, in fact—but you don’t like them.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. And of course you kill them too. But never mind. Have you been here long, Gideon?’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Not long. And I cannot stay long either. I thought you might care to come home with me now, since Grace comes back tomorrow.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, because those were the words assigned to the role she had been given to play in life. ‘That seems a good idea. I will tell them to pack my things. How long before we must leave?’
‘An hour.’
‘Yes.’
And smiling, she turned dutifully away, her manner telling me that there had been no compromise, no adjustment, that these ten happy days had been, quite simply, a reprieve which now was over.
Chapter Thirteen
I remember no precise moment, no single event, no threshold between the condition of a woman who, having once been happy and loved, believed she could be so again and a woman in true emotional disarray, whose marriage—like so many others—was no more than a financial and physical convenience, a hollow but indissoluble sham. The two conditions, it seemed, had blended together, had perhaps always simultaneously existed, the condition of failure gradually becoming the stronger until it had absorbed the other.
I had allowed the silence to fall between us because I had been too weak to break it and when I regained my strength I could think of nothing to say. Gervase brought me home from Galton. He enquired carefully as to the progress of my health, ate his dinner more often than not at my table, slept in my bed. He gave me his escort and his company when the social niceties required it. He behaved, in public, as a husband and I as a wife, and in private we remained polite.
We even became lovers again, or rather he reclaimed his conjugal rights, since I could not glorify what passed between us by the name of love-making; his body, which had turned its fastidious back to me all night, being drawn to mine sometimes in the moment of half-waking, a performance part duty, part need, which any nameless female could have satisfied and during which I lay quite still, as nameless females do, despising myself for this submission, despising him for accepting it. But the law, which called me his wife, forced me to give him free use of my body whenever he required it. He was not even obliged to ask, simply to take, and gradually, as the rift widened, I learned how to insult him with my passivity as his hurried satisfactions insulted me. And when we had reached that dismal stage I was no worse, perhaps, than those many thousands of other women for whom this side of marriage had always been a burden, or those many thousands of others who prided themselves on their skill in avoiding it altogether; except that it had not always been so with us.
Nor could I recall any single moment when I became certain of his infidelity. I merely anticipated it, so that by the time I became aware of it I understood that it had already been taking place for some time; and although I suffered I was not surprised. He was not, at the start, unfaithful to me with Diana Flood, as I might have expected, nor with anyone else I could identify. I simply knew that there was someone, and then someone else, learning with a delicate species of self-torture to read the signs, an indefinable but to me quite unmistakable air about him that fluctuated from wariness to nervous gaiety, from a brooding self-disgust to a bruised and satiated fatigue, his humour varying with the woman who—for the days or the hours these affairs lasted—had tempted him, amused him, consoled him, briefly delighted him, left him only half satisfied, or who had revealed, in a few cases, some new aspect of his carnal nature which in the clear daylight appalled him.
And I did nothing.
Even on the summer night when, strolling into the cloister at Galton, I saw him at the far end of the tunnel kissing the bare shoulders of a woman I vaguely took to be one of Blanche’s London friends, I did nothing. I simply turned and hurried away, thankful he had not seen me, hoping the woman had not seen me either. I did nothing becaus
e I was proud, and afraid, and for the stark and simple reason that I could think of nothing to do. I was a betrayed wife. So were hundreds of thousands of others. Woman was, by nature and by necessity, a faithful animal. Man was not. Brood mares stayed peacefully with the herd. Stallions ran wild. ‘My dear,’ I could imagine a dozen female voices murmuring to me, ‘men are simply made that way. You must forgive him and understand.’ And above the other voices would be Mrs. Rawnsley’s shrill, smug whisper; ‘Make him buy you something, Grace, to apologize—something really expensive. I always do.’
I could not tolerate those whispers.
There was, of course, the time-honoured and possibly effective method of running home to my father. But I could not do that either, knowing as I did what my happiness meant to him. He had had few joys in his life. His main concern now was that I should have joy in mine, and I was determined above all not to let him down. He desired to see me happy. He would see me happy. He did see me happy. It was the least I could do for the man who had done so much for me. And even had I been tempted to weaken—and I was not tempted—I could never have contemplated the possibility of sharing a home with Mrs. Agbrigg again.
But even so, had I retained just a small measure of hope, I might not have been so scrupulous. Had I believed it possible to be truly reconciled, I might have turned to anyone, resorted to anything which might have brought it about. But I well knew that Gervase’s neglect of me and his infidelity were in themselves only symptoms of the disease. The real tragedy—and so I named it—lay in the one simple fact that my husband, who had thought he loved me, no longer did so, no longer found me desirable nor even interesting. And how could I, or anyone, remedy that?
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