Sometimes, particularly when she was riding her cob Stocky around the park or down the towpath of the river as far as the village, she would find herself yearning to participate in some tremendous adventure of the kind that Adam seemed to have had in plenty but to have taken very lightly, but then she would tell herself that she was not so much in need of this kind of stimulus as a boost of a more personal nature, of being the very core, for instance, of some man's world and for rather longer, she would hope, than it took Adam to satisfy his storming impatience the moment they were alone.
Not that she had the least quarrel with the demands he made upon her. Indeed, she wished he was on hand to make them more often, although perhaps in a more restrained manner for gradually, under his gay tutelage, she had rid herself of those feelings of guilt she had experienced during moments of intimacy in the past and had learned to accept his boisterous advances as a welcome bonus of marriage to a man who came and went like a Jack-in-a-box.
She had hopes, that spring, of being pregnant again, and producing another son who would grow up to join the Navy, and perhaps engage in a friendly rivalry with Alexander of the Household Cavalry, but when it proved a false alarm she felt cheated and was sufficiently self-analytical to understand why. Deep in her consciousness she still saw her main function in life as the mother of a tribe of big, lusty men, who campaigned in the furthest corners of the globe, and came home loaded with honours and clanking with medals. She was aware that Adam thought this obsession of hers ridiculous but it was not ridiculous to her, remaining the one focal point of her dreams and, as such, the only aspect of her that survived the time when she was a fifteen-year-old, reading stirring tales of the Crimea and the Mutiny in newspapers that Sam brought into the house. It therefore qualified as nostalgia, and it was very easy to indulge in nostalgic dreams when she was alone so much, and had her being in a place like Tryst, with its whispering stairs, its overgrown coverts, and its subtle garden scents. It gave her a sense of living a life within a life, of identifying not only with the heroines of Miss Yonge and Mrs. Wood, but with all the heroines of poetry, and perhaps the most haunting of these was that unfortunate Lady of Shallott, whose brief, tragic career had been graphically illustrated in one of her magazines. There was a special reason for this, of course. A mile or so down the river, at a point where the stream broadened after threading its course through a belt of timber, there was a small wooded islet, and whenever she passed it she would glance across just to make sure that Lancelot was not in view, and to satisfy herself that no battle-mented tower showed above the willows that grew down to the water's-edge.
These kinds of fancies, of course, were forgotten the moment Adam returned from his Bermondsey headquarters, or from one of his visits to those areas he called by outlandish names, “The Crescents,” “The Polygon,” “The Western Wedge,” and the like. Then, as though she was deliberately stepping out of the Middle Ages into a life of stir, bustle, and laughter, she would become Henrietta Swann again, or even Henrietta Rawlinson, the girl a real Lancelot had kidnapped, married with a mere pretence of wooing, saddled with a house and a couple of children, and now liked to treat as though she was his toy to be taken from the cupboard and tossed about with a kind of exultant glee, against the time when he had more urgent matters on hand.
It was very disconcerting to sit on such a seesaw, and one morning, in March of that year, when the noise of birds in the wisteria outside the window awakened them simultaneously, she opened her heart to him, telling him that she ached with loneliness when he was away, and asking him if it was not possible, now that he was well established, to spend more of his time at home. He was not angry or irritated, as she feared he might be, but sat up in bed, yawned, and looked down at her indulgently.
“Now why tell me that,” he said, tolerantly. “You’re happy here, aren’t you? You’ve got the house and the children and the Colonel for company, and it's what you wanted, isn’t it? Because if it isn’t and you would sooner move nearer London, we’ll move and the devil take the tail-end of the lease. It was what I originally intended, to live much closer in. If I did I could get home two weeks out of three, and every night when I was in town.”
The prospect of being deprived of her foothold in the world of the real gentry dismayed her so that she said, hastily, “Oh no, dearest. I love this place, and so does Stella and the Colonel, and so will Alex when he grows a little older. I wouldn’t like to live in a city but…well…it would be nice if you were here to enjoy it more often.”
“Enjoy you or the background?” he said, with one of his infuriating grins and she said, impatiently, “You know perfectly well what I mean! Why won’t you stop treating me as if I was a ninny?”
“Oh, come now,” he said, though still amiably, “if I talked business to you you’d yawn your pretty head off and I can’t say as I’d blame you. Being immersed in a job like mine is one thing. To have to listen to second-accounts of it, and supply the dutiful ‘Really, dears?’ and ‘How splendids!’ every so often, is quite another. Besides,” he continued, passing his hand across her rumpled hair, “it wouldn’t be you, Henrietta. It wouldn’t be the little scapegrace I married. I’m satisfied with you as you are and by now that ought to be obvious to you.”
“But we’re not talking about your satisfaction,” she protested, “we began talking about mine, and I don’t mean by that I want more things and clothes and friends, but more of you.”
“That brings us back to the original question,” he said, and she was encouraged to see that he was no longer teasing her but at least moderately interested. “If you enjoy being a wife to me, and you’re still bewitched by the house, what the devil have you got to complain of?” Then, with that knack of his he had for rooting among her secret thoughts, “Are you trying to tell me you were disappointed that you weren’t having a third child? I suppose I understand that if you were. Children to you are what a new branch is to me, and that isn’t as silly as it sounds. It's fulfilling a purpose, creating something, and you’ve never made a secret about wanting a thumping great family.” He paused again and she saw that he was now regarding her with a kind of speculative interest. “That's unusual too, come to think of it. Most women of your age would only pretend to be pleased if they found themselves pregnant a third time in four years. Did you know that?”
“I often suspected it,” she said, her humour restored by the fact that at least he had stopped talking down to her, “they bill and coo too obviously, and start boasting as soon as the men have left the room.”
He laughed at that and she reflected that she invariably made him laugh when she spoke her thoughts aloud. But she had no intention of letting him turn the conversation aside, as he usually did when she was advancing a point of view, and went on, “Honestly, Adam, I’m at a loss to know why you married me at all. Men—or your kind of man—could get along very well without a wife, and you actually did for years. You’ve got your business, and clearly get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of building it up, and well…as for the shameless way you use me up here, there are those other kinds of women, that nobody mentions but anyone with a hap’orth of sense knows about. Of course, you spoil little Stella, but you’re not really a family man. If I had a dozen children I’m sure you would mix up their names when you came back after one of your tours.”
She had him interested now and experienced a certain satisfaction at her own cleverness. He said, seriously, “I’ve asked myself that many a time, Henrietta,” and her glow of self-satisfaction faded. “As you say, I’ve done precisely what I set out to do, founded something vital and constantly developing, and I never even thought about marrying until I was turned thirty. But for all that I did, didn’t I? And without second thought when it came to the crunch.”
Her vanity began to steal back, re-entering a room from which it had just been banished and recalled by an indulgent parent. She said, “Well?” and when he said nothing, “Come now, it's not fair to leave it like that! You’ve often h
alf-told me but never properly, never in a way that I can think about when you aren’t there.”
She touched him then, as she often could with her impish ways and little spurts of rebellion. He kissed her on the mouth and kicking the bedclothes clear with his heels ran his hand the length of her body, so that she knew this promising conversation might as well not have been started. She did not care either, or not that much, for suddenly his towering masculinity impinged itself on her in the way it invariably did when they were alone in this great bedroom, with its ghosts of innumerable earthy Conyers, none of whom had bothered to debate the abstracts of marriage. She said, stroking his chin, “Oh, fiddlesticks, you can tell me later. Tell me something else. Why don’t you grow whiskers, like other men? I thought of it when I went to that fete over at Kynaston House, for there wasn’t a man there who wasn’t stroking his mutton-chops, or twirling his moustaches. I said to myself, ‘How horrid it must be to be kissed by someone with hair all over his face.’ Apart from those bristles of yours before you’ve done shaving, of course.”
He said, with tremendous emphasis, “Why, that's it, Henrietta! That's your answer! That's why I married you.”
She was genuinely astonished. “Because I never complained of your bristles?”
He said, laughing, “Good God, no, woman. Because you were a nice shape in and out of corsets; because you were fresh and pretty; because you never could stop being a little rascal ready to run away in the middle of the night if you didn’t get your own way, but mainly, because you can make me laugh without even trying!” and he seized her and emphasised his approval with a powerful smack on her behind that developed into a wrestling match and came near to depositing them on the floor. He said, when they were breathless, “Wait…wait…! You asked me a question and it deserves a serious answer. I don’t grow a beard because everybody else grows one without knowing why. Or if they did they’ve forgotten.”
“How's that? No, really, I’m interested.”
“It's to do with this soldier measles that you and everyone else seems to have caught. We were innocent of whiskers, the whole damned lot of us, until the winter before Sebastopol, when shaving in redoubts was a penance. That was the time photography started, remember? Or were you too young? The patriotic gentlemen at home saw pictures of Raglan's heroes looking like rustics, and suddenly—hey presto—beards were in vogue! Now, of course, they daren’t shave them off for fear of losing their authority. Ask any barber and he’ll tell you the same!”
She was kneeling above him now and suddenly, almost involuntarily, she was moved to express her extreme satisfaction with him. “Oh, Adam,” she cried, “Adam, darling, I do love you! You’re so different, so—so unstuffy, if you see what I mean! Times like this, when we can talk and shut everyone else out, I think myself the luckiest woman alive!”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” he said, “for maybe you are.” He swung his long legs from the bed, sniffing the morning air with obvious relish. “Suppose we go down, saddle up, and ride over the heath? It's a rare day for a gallop, and nobody will be stirring yet. Would you like that, Mrs. Swann?”
“Yes,” she said, eagerly, “I’d like that better than anything,” and skipped out of bed a child again, forgetting that she had awakened in such a self-questioning mood, or that he had said very little to resolve the terrible restlessness she felt all the time he was absent. Their marriage was like that, she supposed, a kind of rollicking, tomboyish game they had learned to play with each other, and from which, a little unreasonably to her way of thinking, he could withdraw at will, leaving her to play by herself. And yet, when he was there, and her cheeks were tingling with the scratches inflicted by his bristles, nothing but a deep feeling of thankfulness for his being found its way into a brain that she sometimes thought must be as immature as he had always declared it to be. But she didn’t care, not in his presence, and certainly not on a morning like this. She went singing to the clothes closet and yanked out her riding habit, the waisted velvet jacket with big buttons, tight sleeves and wide revers, and the voluminous blue skirt that hitched up at the right to give freedom to a leg hooked over the saddle-horn. He had not yet seen her in this outfit and while he was in his dressing-room, splashing himself, she perched the little hat with its curled ostrich feather on her head, lifting her nightgown to her thighs and prancing back and forth in front of the mirror. He heard her giggling and called, “Hurry now, before Stella catches us and begs to come along.”
2
Sometimes her trivial conversations and pouting complaints planted a seed in his mind that would enlarge itself and emerge as an idea that he thought of as his own. It was so in this case for, a day or so later, when he announced that he would be gone for a few days, he suddenly suggested she might occupy herself by arranging a supper dance on the occasion of her approaching birthday.
It was unusual for him to suggest anything of this kind. Such entertaining as she did was of her own or Ellen's ordering, and he very seldom brought guests to the house, telling her that the people with whom he did business were dull dogs outside their counting houses, and he had no mind to inflict them on her. There were several families, however, whom they had met at church, and who had paid calls in his absence, and until then she had always assumed he would dismiss them one and all as “twitterers,” a favourite word of his for the kind of people who left cards, went in for charity fetes, and made a solemn round of “At Homes.”
She had made some kind of place for herself in this parochial society but had never aspired to giving anything as grand as a supper-dance that would require, she supposed, a great deal of organising, and the hiring of musicians. She saw his suggestion, however, as a challenge and decided to meet it, saying, “I’d like that, Adam, but on two conditions. One is that you’ll promise faithfully not to make a fool of me by staying away, the other that I have new hangings for the double room, for the fire smokes horribly and the furnishings are quite black. It needs a new carpet but we won’t want a carpet for dancing and I can get someone to wax the floor.”
“Well, that's your concern,” he said, carelessly, already in a hustling mood. “Buy what you need, so long as it isn’t too fancy, and I promise to be home for your birthday. I’m only going as far as Crescent South and looking in on The Bonus on the way down.”
She went about the preparations with the greatest enthusiasm, sending out fourteen invitations to families who she knew had sons and daughters who would enliven the occasion, for so far nearly all her visitors had been couples of another generation. The response startled her. Everyone accepted, and the final tally was thirty, of whom nearly half were people of her own age, or younger.
Under Ellen's eye she pretended to supervise the cleaning and clearance of the big double room west of the porch, where there would be ample space for the polka and even, at a pinch, a set of lancers. Above it, the minstrel gallery added by the Conyer who had composed his own madrigals, was cleared out to make room for two fiddlers and flautist, promised by the rector, Mr. Bascomb, who earned an invitation on that account. The floor coverings were removed, an accumulation of dust banished, and the maids told off to beeswax the pine floor, after which Henrietta drove into Croydon to spend a pleasant day selecting brocade in a shade of sunflower yellow for the new curtains, and a length of green, bobble-fringed silk for a mantelshelf drape that Ellen arranged in carefully regimented folds.
All other work about the house was scamped, and the staff responded nobly to her appeals, so that the days flew and every morning she awakened with a renewed flutter of excitement and sense of having overlooked any number of essentials. Among them, not recollected until forty-eight hours before he was due to return, was the rogue chimney, for when Ellen lit a trial fire in the grate dense clouds of smoke threatened to leave a layer of soot over the new curtains and asphyxiate the guests into the bargain if a fire was lit on the night.
Ellen dried her tears by promising to get hold of Millward, the sweep, within the hour, explaining th
at at this season of the year a fire was essential, and that the chimney needed a thorough scraping. To her certain knowledge, she added, it had not been swept in seven years.
Millward appeared that same afternoon, and Henrietta thought she had never made the acquaintance of a dirtier or more brutalised man, not even among the town rowdies of Seddon Moss. It was difficult to judge his age under so much grime, and he might have been anything from forty to sixty. As well as masking his features and coating all other exposed areas of his body, soot had apparently taken residence in his windpipe. Every time he inhaled he whistled and his slurred speech emerged as a sustained hiss that was sometimes difficult to interpret. He took a close look at the chimney with which, he said, he was familiar, having climbed it himself when he was an apprentice during the tenancy of the last Conyer occupant.
“Rare blessing you sent for me an’ no other,” he wheezed. “I know that chimbley of old, and she's a reg’lar tartar, M’m. She goes up a matter o’ twenty feet, turns sharp left level wi’ the first floor, goes on another ten feet, and comes aht under the woods where the stack ketches the downdraught when the wind's in the west. She’ll smoke then, no matter what, but not nearly ser bad, not when I done wi’ her. But that level stretch is fair choked, and’ll need to be dug out be the sackfull. After that I dunno, tho’ we’d best cross our fingers fer a shift in the wind, in which case she’ll burn sweet an’ free.”
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