A Song Twice Over (19 page)

‘Good luck, Mr Carey.'

She had a strong impression that he would need it, his way of life being precarious and hard, perhaps, beyond her understanding. She would like to hear, some day, in some roundabout fashion, that he had succeeded. That he had done whatever it was that mattered to him most.

‘Goodbye, Miss Dallam.'

Yes. That was the right word to use. Goodbye. She echoed it and watched him very intently for a moment as he walked away from her towards the garden gate, so that when she turned to Tristan her eyes were full of a hard, dark, arrow-straight, wholly male beauty which made the blue and gold of him seem garish, and then insipid.

‘A very pleasant fellow,' he said. And his voice, after the low, harmonious lilt of Daniel Carey, sounded flat and loud, abominably self-assured.

‘Yes. I think so.'

Had the scoundrel touched her heart? Tristan thought it rather looked like it, and so much the better since it meant that she had a heart that could be touched, and passions, therefore, which might be aroused.

‘Gemma?'

‘Yes, Tristan?'

‘Everything
will
be all right, you know.'

Gradually, word by word, his voice – it seemed to Gemma – was returning to the familiar accent with which she was comfortable; with which she could cope. Slowly, as her eyes emptied of Daniel, he was becoming handsome again, elegant, familiar. Beautiful, shallow, unloved and unloving Tristan who neither confused nor threatened her.

Much better so.

She had made up her mind to it.

And what harm could it do to remember, from time to time, a young man who would not remember her and could not know that she had had, with him, the first real conversation of her life?

No one could take to the black and white dog. Sairellen Thackray, on sight, had named him cur, trouble-maker and thief. Luke, who often came over in the evenings to read his books in the Adeane's chimney corner which was far quieter than his mother's, gave fair warning that a nature so warped by the fighting-pen and the heavy diet of blood that went with it, could never be tamed. Liam observed the animal sidelong, as it lay snorting and snuffling on an old blanket by the hearth, and kept well away. Even Odette, disposed by nature to seeking out the best in every living thing, could find no good in him.

‘My poor child, whatever are you thinking of now?' she had enquired with a gesture approaching despair when Cara had almost fallen through the door bearing her grisly birthday gift. And indeed, Cara herself often wondered why she had not simply dumped the animal in the first alley she came to and left him there to heal, or to die, alone. A fate by no means uncommon to fighting-dogs who had had their day.

Yet, instead, she had staggered through that maze of treacherous streets and up the whole, steep length of St. Jude's with the beast in her arms, buckling at her knees with the weight of him, cursing him – and his master – every time she stumbled on the cobbles, a pain in her chest and pure despair in her heart every time she thought of the blood, all over her pale blue bodice and her white lace collar, which would probably not come off.

It had not done so.

Nor – while she set about the dismal process of soaping and soaking her ruined garments – had the dog shown the least sign of remorse or gratitude, having done his level best to bite Odette as she bathed his injured legs, snapping at her hands whenever they came near him, only the pain it caused him to move his head preventing him from doing her serious harm. And when Cara who had spent what remained of the night making a new bodice for her dress from two old ones, brought him a saucer of water, having nothing else to give him, he had bared his teeth at her and, with a spiteful jerk of his muzzle, had spilled her offering disdainfully all over the hearth-rug.

Damned dog.

‘You can't afford to feed him,' Luke had told her, with sweet reason. ‘He needs meat and, when he's better, if he doesn't get it he'll kill for it. He'll raid everybody's hen-runs and rabbit hutches and cause you trouble.'

Luke was right. She knew that. He usually was. Damned dog.

‘I expect he'll die,' she said. ‘Let's hope so.'

Yet that same evening she begged a marrow bone from Ned O'Mara which, as Sairellen Thackray acidly pointed out to her, would have made broth for every one of the eleven undernourished children in the house next door, and tossed it within reach of the dog's scornful jaw.

‘Go on then, foul creature – eat it.'

Eventually he had condescended to do so, growling ominously, until the marrow was scraped clean, if anyone came within a yard of him; unless their intention was clearly to make up the fire. The following night he accepted, with crushing condescension and grossly bad manners, the scrapings from every plate Cara had been able to lay hands on at the Fleece, supplemented by some scraps of raw shin beef she had snatched at the last minute and simply hoped no one would miss.

So it went on.

‘He'll keep the mice down,' she told Odette. ‘And you might feel safer with him here at night when I'm at work. If he lives.'

He lived. Mainly on the rag rug in front of the fire snoring and snuffling somnolently at the coals, heaving deep, jerky sighs, sleeping a great deal and whining occasionally in his dreams; although he woke up fast enough if anyone seemed to threaten his territory or lay hands – except to fill it – on his dish. Squat, ugly, evil-tempered, totally unlovable. Fit for nothing but to limp outside to foul the gutter – which was already foul enough – two or three times a day. Or, if the sun happened to be shining, to lay himself down with a thud and a rattling sigh between Cara's two precious rainwater barrels where, in fact, the wickedness of his temper proved quite useful whenever the woman next door, a slattern for whom it was too much trouble to wait at the stand-pipe for water and carry it home like everybody else, sent one of her brood with a water-jug, to steal.

Before the dog came the water barrels had been a source of open conflict, the next-door children, a pack of sore-eyed weasels, dipping in sly hands whenever Cara was not looking, leaving off the lids so that the soot and everybody's stray cat could get it, throwing in noxious things themselves, sometimes, to pay her back whenever she had boxed one of their ears too soundly; a rusty horse-shoe, a handful of nails, once a never-to-be-forgotten load of frog-spawn so that Odette, who never liked to be hard on anybody, had almost had a fit. Dreadful children. No wonder Liam ducked his head and closed his eyes whenever he saw them coming, refusing absolutely to play with them. And although Cara made no bones about slapping them or pinching them or pulling their hair whenever she caught them near her barrels, the dog saved her the trouble of all that.

They feared him. Their father, when he came to complain that the dog had bitten a hole in his son's trousers and reduced several of his daughters' pinafores to rags, feared him too, being an undersized weasel of a man himself, ferocious only when drunk.

‘Your children have always been in rags,' Cara told him, standing tall, her hands on her hips.

‘That is hardly their fault,' Luke told
her
when the little weasel-man slunk away.

‘I'm
not in rags, Luke Thackray.'

‘You haven't got eleven children, Cara.'

‘No. I make very sure of that.'

He smiled, his quiet tolerance making her just a little ashamed; a feeling which soon faded once she had reminded herself of all the many good uses to which she put her water. To wash herself, for instance, and her child. To wash her clothes, and his. To scrub her floorboards so that they never stank of urine and worse, like the house next door. To soak her bedding so that it never crawled with bed-bugs, just as her son's head never crawled with lice like those abominable little Rattries who hung about all day, scratching and picking their fleas, rubbing their sore eyes, grinning at her and showing their little blackened stubs of teeth; stealing her water. Although for what purpose they required it she could not imagine.

‘Mrs Rattrie doesn't have your good judgement, Cara,' Luke said quietly. ‘Nor your energy.'

No. She agreed wholeheartedly with that. For, while the next-door Mrs Rattrie lay on her mattress all day recovering from the birth of one baby or just about to produce another,
she
was out and about, working, coping, stirring herself. And what temptations could ever have come the way of this washed-out weasel-woman that could be compared with the invitations to sin and indolence – and eventual maternity – which were offered daily to Cara? No. The woman was a slattern. Her husband either half asleep or dead drunk. Her children withered in the bud. Not one of them at work and at least five of them over ten years old. Two of them well into their teens. A family worth no one's trouble.

Yet Luke Thackray took the trouble, during the sharp days of October and November when Cara's dog first began its grudging defence of her property, to show the eldest of the Rattrie daughters – carrying water being classed as work for women – how to manage the stand-pipe. And when Mr Rattrie, maddened as he often was by cheap gin, threw his wife and children out of the house one frosty night in their underwear – or what passed for it – and barricaded himself inside, it was Luke again, without making much fuss about it, who brought a shawl for pregnant Mrs Rattrie as she stood shivering and whimpering in the street. Luke who broke down the not particularly solid Rattrie door, dragged the man out and deposited him, with a certain wry humour, in the horse-trough at the end of St Jude's Passage.

‘That's Luke,' Sairellen told Cara flatly. ‘Don't think you're the only one he's ready to fetch and carry for – Miss Adeane, Dressmaker and Milliner. And keep that dog of yours away from my clean doorstep. He'll get pepper in his eyes if I catch him loitering there.'

Sairellen, Cara concluded, felt safer with the Rattries who would neither question her authority nor be likely to entice her son. Yet did Cara herself entice him to any warmer thoughts than friendship? She was never quite certain. Arriving home at the odd hours her employment forced upon her, she would often find him there, sometimes reading in the chimney corner while Odette sat tranquilly embroidering the Dallam trousseau; sometimes reading aloud to Liam who would not talk to him or answer his questions other than with a swift ducking of the head to signify yes or no, but who, at least, did not shy away from him and cling to Odette as he was still prone to do.

But sometimes Luke would be alone, both Odette and Liam in bed, the dog – she had no name for him, just Dog. Damned Dog, more often than not – snoring on the hearth-rug, the fire carefully banked up for the night. And at such times, always a little out of breath from that perilous walk home, either satisfied with her day or devastated by it – emotions which any man could use to his advantage – she felt no awkwardness with Luke, was simply and whole-heartedly pleased to be safe home, to feel the warmth of her own fire; and to see him sitting there, quietly beside it.

Occasionally, whenever the town was more raucous than usual, when the navvies from the railway camp had drawn a substantial bonus or there were soldiers passing through, he would come down to the Fleece to meet her, or rather to the iron gate of St Jude's churchyard just beyond the square, where she would see his pipe glowing its signal to her in the dark. And when she saw that dull gleam, caught the scent of his pipe tobacco on the air, she would feel instantly secure, not simply because of his protection against the designs of strangers, but because Luke himself did not threaten her.

Nevertheless – every now and again – she found it wise to ask herself just how she would feel should he suddenly take her in his arms, something men tended to do sooner rather than later in all her previous experience. With Luke she could not imagine it. Not that she doubted for one moment his masculinity. It was just that, in a world where the desires of men had always stalked her, where over-heated hands were always grabbing her and clutching her and trying to undress her – where men so often wished to satisfy their bodies by the use of hers, without responsibility – she did not think so poorly of Luke. He would not touch her unless he knew – as Daniel had known – that she was longing to be touched. And if the longing never came then he would settle, without a word of reproach, for the friendship they already had.

Friendship. How strange. She had never before considered it even as a possibility between a man and a woman. Not surprising, perhaps, when the men she knew rarely took the trouble or felt the need to look beyond the gleaming fall of her hair, the brilliant turquoise eyes, the lithe, sensuous body which, although it had had one lover and borne one child, had no real knowledge, as yet, of sensuality. Perhaps – she thought dimly, still groping for an explanation – it made no real difference to Luke whether she was beautiful or not. Perhaps what mattered to him was the smaller, often fearful, frequently wrong-headed, usually well-meaning girl who lived inside her skin, very well concealed, more often than not, by the boldness of her smile, the deliberately nonchalant swaying of her hips.

He would never take advantage of a girl like that. Of any girl. And, in the meantime, while she still attempted to wrench Daniel Carey out of her heart, she had Luke's undemanding companionship, his decency and good humour, his quietness on the many occasions when, very noisily, she lost her head; his large, unhurried hands not exploring the nape of her neck and her backbone as poor Ned O'Mara was always trying to do, but mending the lock on her coal-place door so that no thieving Rattrie could help himself to a furtive shovel of her precious winter coal; replacing a pane of glass which a Rattrie stone had splintered; offering her a handclasp, from time to time, not of lust but of reassurance.

She knew that Odette, her own romantic mother, would have liked her to marry him. She knew that
his
shrewd, hard-headed mother would rather see her dead than as her son's wife.