She closed her eyes then, and let the sound possess her totally.
They were beautiful melodies. You could sing them, but you didn’t want to. Even choirs of voices could not get that loveliness out of such tunes—not heavenly choirs, either. It was already perfect. She envied those players, whose life was passed so close to that perfection.
An image arose in her mind then: the image of Boy, whom she loved…loved…loved, and never could have. This music was her love for Boy. Its celestial reach was hers. Its great calm and permanence was everything that the world could never diminish from her. Its fleeting passage was the poignancy of all that she had lost in losing him. Its dying fall was the death of her hope. Its memory, on into the silences, was her life. She clung to the banisters as she clung to the music as she clung to the memory of her sweet, tormented Boy. The tears that ran down her cheeks were no more intrusive than her breathing.
Mrs. Jarrett, passing the open door, looked down and saw the dirty little scullery maid sitting out on the gentlefolks’ landing, cheeky as you please. “Hey, miss!” she called out sharply. The girl began to stir, as if rousing from a deep slumber.
The call did not reach down to the guests, but Caspar, on the landing below, and opposite where Mary sat, heard it. He looked up and was astonished to see the girl there. He had never seen Mary anywhere but in Connemara, so it was a second or two before his identification became fully conscious. When it did, he sprinted on and up the last flight of stairs to where she sat.
“Psst! Come off out of it!” Mrs. Jarrett was hissing at her through the doorway.
“That’s all right, Mrs. J.,” Caspar told her. “I’ll look after this.”
Had it been any other servant, she would have drawn herself up to her full majesty and, ignoring him, have ordered the girl back into bounds. But she stood there uncertain, remembering that the first big, blistering disagreement between the master and mistress—years ago—had been about this girl; the master was known to be very solicitous of her; the mistress had made the girl sit in the drawing room this afternoon, had given her refreshment—and had hastened out of doors immediately after. A housekeeper’s job was to peer and pry, she knew; but, she decided, there were times when it was best not to push too hard. Anyway, she could not bear to look at the girl too long.
“Very well,” she said, and went, ostentatiously stiff, up the servants’ stair.
Mary flashed Caspar a smile of gratitude.
“I’m amazed to see you,” Caspar said. “Obviously I’m the only person who doesn’t know you have come back to us. Or didn’t know.”
She could not hear him. The music had claimed her again.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
She nodded, not opening her eyes.
He waited, knowing the music would soon end. These scrape-scrape merchants needed their fizz like everyone else. He took advantage of her closed eyes to scrutinize her face. The unblemished half really was rather serenely good. She’d have been a stunner if she’d got out of that fire a bit quicker.
The outlines of her body were clear beneath her light scullery dress. He remembered how perfect and pale her flesh had gleamed with Boy in that grove. Idly, with little sweat, he wondered if there’d be a chance for him here—though she was a bit old. He looked at her scars without reaction; you could forget them when you knew her well enough. Someone should do that. Someone should marry her. Anyway, it was quite exciting to sit beside her. She was even warmer than the air.
The music finished. She heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction. “God, I never heard the like o’ that,” she said.
“Once a week all summer,” he told her. “Bring me the good tidings, Mary. How are you here?”
She looked at him steadily and for an uncomfortably long time; then she closed her eves and shook her head.
“Poor Boy nearly went mad,” he said shrewdly.
He saw the anguish in her eyes. “Ah! Tell him…” she blurted out, then stopped.
“Tell him what? ‘Oh yes, and I’ve seen Mary Coen. Yes, she’s in London. No, no particular message, I’m afraid.’ Tell him that?”
“So he…” She could not think of the word.
“He’s bad, Mary,” Caspar said seriously. “He’s convinced you ran away because of what he did.”
She looked uncertainly at him.
“I know what you and he did,” he said, unable to rid his mind of the memory of her nakedness, knowing it was the same nakedness that now lurked only a fraction of an inch beneath the plain brown cotton of her dress.
She knelt up and, walking on her knees, came to sit beside him on the top step. The movement pulled her dress so taut he had to look away.
“Did he tell you?” she asked. Afraid to raise her voice, she put her lips close to his ear. Her hair fell on his shoulder. The smell of her was something…citrus: clean and strong. His neck tingled.
He leaned back, to look her in the eyes. Her blemished side was nearest him; funny, she used to be much more self-conscious about that—always putting herself on the other side. “Of course he didn’t! You should know Boy better than that.” He looked away. “I saw you both. Boy doesn’t know I saw you.” He turned to her again. “But I’m glad I did. If I hadn’t, I’d really have thought he’d gone mad after you ran off. So…what d’you want me to tell him?”
“Say…” She let out all her breath. “Nothing! I can’t tell him.” She began to sob. Not violently. Not loudly. But—to Caspar—all the more heartrendingly for that.
He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. He forgot his own rather shallow urges and wondered how he could ease her pain. “You must tell someone,” he said. “If you want to tell me, I give you my word I’ll let it go no further. Come on. You can’t keep this…whatever it is…to yourself forever.”
Still she sobbed. “Is there anyone you can tell?” he asked.
She shook her head vehemently.
He did not know what to suggest next. He took his arm away and moved to sit a little apart from her.
Then she spoke. “Promise not to tell anyone?”
Caspar thought. “If I think Boy is going to do something stupid, I will tell him—or I will tell him as much as he needs to know in order to stop him.”
“Stupid?” she echoed.
“Of course! I told you—he’s taken it very badly.”
“You won’t breathe to your mammy, though? Nor Mrs. Thornton—nor anyone?”
“That I will promise.”
So she told him.
She told him of the dreadful things Nick Thornton had proposed to her and the night upon night of the remaining holiday he had sketched out for her in libidinous detail—all under pain of exposure of herself and Boy. Once it started there was no stopping her; the story poured out. Her love for Boy. His for her. His impossible ideas about their future. How it all became too much for her, until she fled to the master. How the kind young lady had given her money and told her of Mrs. Thornton’s Refuge. Then the big fat man who told her of a country where they’d think her beautiful and would give her, in a day, more money than she’d see in a year, just to adore her. And Mrs. Thornton finding her, and saying the man was a wicked liar and only wanted to enslave her. And then coming back here.
She was quite calm, almost serene, when she had finished. “What d’you think, Master Caspar?” she asked. “D’you think he was lying?”
“Who? Nick Thornton?”
“No,” she said impatiently. “The big fat fella. Do you think there is a country where I’d be beautiful?”
Suddenly he felt ten years older than Mary. How could he tell her it didn’t matter? How to share with her the insight he had achieved just now—that you forgot her scars when you knew her? He wanted to kiss that side of her face—purely—but he did not dare. Instead he took her hand. “Of course there is,” he said.
“Where? I never was told of it.”
“We all love you, Mary. Boy most of all. We went right across Ireland looking for you. We can’t think of Keirvaughan without you. That’s the country where you’re beautiful.”
But when the music started again and he saw her face light up he knew she would never freely go back there again; nothing he could say had half that power over her.
Chapter 24
Stay for some supper, Rocks,” Nora said when the last guest had gone. It was not an invitation but a command. Not that Roxby, despite his now fairly dominant position among the country’s younger painters, would have refused an invitation. Too much of his bread was still buttered by Nora and her friends.
“I shall never know where you find the energy,” he said, “even at the best of times. But…in this heat!”
It was a very light supper: quenelles of plover fillets made with pâte a choux panadas, followed by fanchonnettes garnished with a fanciful design of pistachios and currants; only two wines—a Montrachet ’48 and pink champagne.
Roxby, raising a glass of the champagne to her, asked, “What are we celebrating?”
“My liberation,” Nora answered, toasting him in return.
“Is that what the end of a season represents now!” He chuckled. “How blasé we soon become. Time was when every ounce of your…”
“The end of a season,” Nora interrupted. “Yes. That is it exactly. Just…a season. There will be others, no doubt.”
“To be sure there will,” he said, looking at her somewhat sideways. “Nora, you wouldn’t be ever so slightly tipsy, would you?”
“Why?”
He looked at the wine coolers. “Because there’s two soldiers left to kill—and you surely aren’t relying on me, are you?”
“What a strange thing to worry about.”
He looked away and coughed. “The fact is…” he began.
“No, Rocks!” Nora said.
“The fact is I was going to ask you…”
“Rocks—no!”
“…could you possibly…?”
“No!” She almost screamed the word.
“A hundred. Just a hundred?”
She looked steadily at him, waiting for his eyes to return to her. They did, but too briefly to communicate anything.
“You wouldn’t miss it,” he said. Still she watched him. “Guineas, then?” he added.
He looked at her then. She smiled and shook her head.
“Why not?” he began to whine.
“Because you don’t need it. That’s why. You have plenty of money.”
He drained the champagne and poured another glass, filling hers, too. “How do you know what I need?” he asked lugubriously.
Her laugh said, What a stupid question! “Because, dear boy, you made the mistake of letting me manage your finances.”
“I did? You gave me no choice.”
“Though what sort of ‘mistake’ it is that gets you from three thousand pounds in debt to…”
“To five thou’ I can’t touch!”
“…to an income of three hundred, I’m sure is a mystery. And you’re earning a good two thousand from your painting.”
“Ah well,” he said, all cheerful again. He sipped his champagne and smiled at her. His whole attitude said, It was worth a try.
“Why d’you do it, Rocks?” she asked. “Especially why d’you try it on me? You know you haven’t the slightest need of it.”
He giggled. “I don’t know. I just feel I have to touch people for a loan. It’s just a thing.” He buried his face in his hands and laughed silently.
“Go on,” Nora said, laughing already. “Tell me.”
“I touched Billy Holman Hunt for a thousand last week. I don’t know why I did it. I just couldn’t seem to stop myself. We were talking about nature and colour—you know, the old problem—and just out of the blue I asked him for the loan of a thou’. You should have seen his face! You know what he’s like.”
Nora almost shrieked with laughter. “I think it’s a disease. Like Lady Hobo, who keeps slipping off with my silver and then doesn’t know what to do with them and sends her footman out to pop them back through my letterbox. A disease. There ought to be a name for it.”
“Tangomania—the mania to touch people.”
“I didn’t know it was recognized.”
“No, I just made that up. Not bad, is it! I say, am I really earning a couple of thou’ a year?”
“You’re getting it. If your celebrated artistic conscience tells you you are also earning it, then I suppose you are. It’s still nothing to what you will make before you are finished.”
He smiled at her gratefully, then laid his hands palms upward on the table and looked at them in the way that painters tend to look at commonplace objects—with a critical absorption. “These are the fellows,” he said. “Not me. I don’t earn it. They do.” He looked at her with that same absorption, making her shiver. “Half a painter’s life, you know, is spent emptying this”—he tapped his forehead—“into this.” He held up his right hand and wriggled the fingers. “It’s not safe until it’s down here. But now, this year, for the first time in my life, I begin to feel this fellow actually knows more than I do.”
Nora breathed out, envious and admiring. She took his two hands in hers and squeezed them. “They’ll take you to the very top.”
Snakelike he flipped his hands away and then trapped hers in his much larger grasp. “Got you!” he said.
She looked down at their hands like a remote spectator. “So you have! But what are you going to do with them?”
She delayed returning her eyes to his, but when she did, her gaze was level and unblinking. A light, amused smile parted her lips.
He stopped breathing. She felt his grip tighten, then waver. His tongue darted out and wet the centre of his lips. She had never behaved this way before.
He made a slight movement of withdrawal. She thrust her hands deeper into his. Again their eyes dwelled in each other’s. He cleared his throat.
“Nora,” he said.
“Yes, Rocks?”
“Where is Nanette?”
“In bed, I trust.”
“Why?”
“Because I sent her away.”
He swallowed and stared at her. “Yes,” she said.
Not “Yes?” Not “Yes!” Just yes.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
She laughed. “Oh, Rocks! If I were serious, would I have chosen to sup with you! I seem to have caught a different form of ‘tangomania,’ that’s all.”
***
Next morning she rose early, sent Roxby away, and wrote to Winifred to tell her she was to come to stay at Hamilton Place that autumn and enroll at Bedford College. Then she went to find Caspar.
But he was out, riding with Greaves in Rotten Row, so they did not meet until breakfast.
She was glad of Greaves’s presence. Caspar was such a self-sufficient and secret-keeping fellow it was hard to pin him down in public, impossible in private. With Greaves there he could not be his usual slippery self, at least not so blatantly.
“I’ve been thinking about your wanting to go into business, Caspar,” she said. “Were you quite serious?”
She chose a moment when his mouth was full of devilled kidneys, to give him time to take stock. She herself ate only water biscuits and apple marmalade at breakfast.
“Don’t know, Mama,” he said at length. “There’s a lot in what you said yesterday. I shall have to give it a lot of thought.”
“Well, think quickly. There might just be a very good business opportunity in the offing.”
He pretended to be unmoved but she noticed that his ears twitched.
“Small,” she said judiciously, “but it could show a good return. It might just suit a young fello
w.” She did not precisely wink at Greaves but she pulled a complicit face that flattered him into joining her. Both were amused to watch Caspar’s nonchalance crumble.
“You mean an actual one?” he said. His heart began to race. What could it be? What could he do—still at school?
“What else?” she answered. Her tone implied it was all very natural. “A real business, real goods, real money. And a real disaster if you fail. Which you very easily could. I just want to see if it’s all talk on your part.”
“How could I do it though?” Caspar laughed nervously, unwilling to believe it. “I mean…staying at school?”
Nora shrugged. “The true business of business lies in overcoming such difficulties.”
Greaves cleared his throat and wiped his lips. “Er…Lady Stevenson…I don’t think Fiennes School could be used as a place of business,” he said diffidently.
“Naturally not,” she answered, not taking her eyes off Caspar. “That would be out of the question. But is there any school rule to forbid a boy from partaking in business with another location—if, for instance, all correspondence was directed elsewhere—not to Fiennes?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I doubt, of course, whether it has ever…”
“If a boy went into the town to buy toffee for half a dozen of his fellows and charged them a ha’penny each?”
Greaves laughed. “Oh, that. I’m sure that would happen every day.” He raised his eyebrows at Caspar, who nodded his agreement. “But the sum involved is so trifling.”
“Or if some young nobleman’s signature or assent were needed in a matter of the family estates during term time, he would presumably not be whipped for it?”
“Naturally not, but…”
“Or if one of your young gentlemen held shares and it were advantageous to sell, he would not be rusticated or gated or striped for doing so?”
And Greaves had to allow, reluctantly, that such activity would be quite in order.
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