A Song Twice Over (22 page)

His body had been expecting her.

‘Come to me, Cara.'

She was here. And his. If he could take her
now
, over-powered as she was by her emotion, and take her
quickly
, before she started to reason and to be afraid again, then he thought he would be able to keep her. She might be angry afterwards and certainly she'd be terrified in case he'd made her pregnant, but she'd get over that. And once she'd given herself to him, she'd stay with him, one way or another. She'd be his woman, which was all he wanted. Faithful to him, even if they would have to be apart sometimes, as he'd be faithful to her, although he knew she'd take more than a little convincing about that. He loved her. And it was love, just as much as that damned dog by the hearth suddenly growling and raising its hackles, which made him hesitate.

Had he simply desired her he would have taken both her and the consequences then and there, booted that evil-looking brute of a dog aside, and made love to her, gloried in her, possessed her once and for all, on the hearth-rug. But the dog rose shakily on its bandy legs and bared its teeth. And his desire had too much love in it, too much natural chivalry, to take what he knew to be advantage of a vulnerable moment. Loving her, he wanted that moment to be perfect, to be hers as well as his. And since whatever happened he would have to take the London train, could he really expose her – a woman who had one child and so could surely have another – to the risk of her own fertility? Only if he knew her to be ready to take that risk herself.

He knew she was not. Knew, indeed, that she feared it more than anything else in her life.

Yet, even then, he could neither leave her nor cope with the weight of his frustrations, and the blurred, cumbersome feeling growing inside him, which, when some of the numbness wore away, he knew would be misery.

‘Come with me, Cara.' It was a last and desperate chance. ‘Come now – while we can …' She was shaking, crying as if every teardrop scalded her.

‘Come where?'

‘Anywhere.' That too he had said before. ‘Just come with me. Cara … God knows how much time there is left in the world for any of us.'

‘Not much,' she said. ‘Not much, if I have to walk barefoot through my share of it, following you – waiting for you – being left behind by you – with a tribe of children trailing after me.'

‘Cara …'

‘And see you hanged at the end of it, like as not.'

She was shaking again. Horribly.

‘I'd rather die now, Daniel Carey, believe me. So I would – now – this minute – than go through all that. Like my mother.'

Because if he treated her as her father had treated Odette, she knew she would not bear it so patiently, would not bless him on the day he finally left her, as Odette had done, but would go after him with a knife to hunt him down. One fatal blow to his heart. The second to her own. Since, all too probably, she would love him still.

She did not see him leave. She turned her back again, her shoulders heaving, her eyes blind with tears. And when she calmed herself sufficiently to face him he had gone.

Thank God, at least, for that. Much better so. Or, at least it would be when she managed to dry up these damnable tears.

She was still crying, quietly but persistently, when her mother returned.

‘I'm perfectly all right,' she said.

‘So I see.'

‘Wonderful news, mother. Just look at this glorious satin …' She told her tale of triumph.

‘Wonderful news,' said Odette.

‘So we should make a start now. I've already cut the pattern. Shall I cut the dress while you do a sample of a fleur-de-lys? Have we any gold thread?'

‘Yes. Gold thread we have. Sorrow we have too, it seems to me.'

‘I'm all right, mother.'

And she sat down, took out her scissors, wiped the backs of her hands against her eyes, found her pins and linen pattern.

Shed her tears.

‘I'm all right, mother.'

‘Yes, my darling.'

It would have helped, she thought, if Odette had pretended to believe her. It would have helped, perhaps, had she not known that Odette, in her place, would have given up everything and anything – had, in fact, already several times done so – for love.

By Friday morning the brown satin dress was ready to be fitted, its rare, coppery sheen catching even the perpetual sooty twilight of St Jude's as Cara folded it in layers of clean muslin and stowed it carefully away in her bag. She had cut the skirt wide, the neck low into a broad band falling away from Miss Dallam's perfectly presentable shoulders into huge, puffed sleeves which finished above the elbow, giving a curving softness to Miss Dallam's square-cut silhouette which, in turn, would have a narrowing effect upon her waist. The embroidery, a pattern of golden lily-flowers dotted here and there, each one at a fair distance from the other, would be confined to the shoulder band and to a broad sash fastening at the back in as large a bow as Miss Dallam would tolerate, its ends falling to the hem of her skirt.

Miss Dallam's mother would, at first glance, think it Quaker-plain. But Miss Dallam would not only feel at ease with it but would look well in it too. Far better at any rate, than in the diaphanous sweet-pea tinted frills in which her mother and Miss Ernestine Baker seemed intent on smothering her.

Not that Cara had anything against tulle frills. Far from it. On Miss Linnet Gage, for instance, one could create a positive sea-foam of gauzy draperies dotted with lace bows and silk rosebuds to the extent of one's imaginings. On Mrs Marie Moon one could write a fresh drama every morning in black lace, sequined taffeta, white watered-silk with one huge splash of crimson at the waist. On every woman Cara had ever seen one could do something to enhance what Nature had given, or cover up what had been left out. She loved clothes. She understood them too. She knew how to dress other women and how to dress herself. And when Mrs Amabel Dallam remembered to pay her for all those wedding chemises she might just take a few shillings to a certain bazaar in Leeds where she'd heard good dress-lengths were to be had at bargain prices and make
herself
a new dress for Christmas.

That, at least, would be something to look forward to, a new dream, albeit a small one, a poor one, to spread wanly into the corners of her mind and try to fill them; now that the real dreams had gone.

But a dream – God dammit – nonetheless.

She wished to arrive at Frizingley Hall that day around two o'clock, a convenient hour when, with luncheon just over, Mrs Amabel Dallam would be lying on her bed recovering from the exertions of ordering and then pecking at her food, Miss Linnet Gage reading aloud to her, perhaps, as an aid to the digestive processes of one lady, the nest-building of the other, so that Cara might give Miss Gemma Dallam her fitting alone. And, further wishing to appear brisk and fresh, as if she had simply alighted at the manor gates from her carriage, she allowed herself plenty of time for the familiar trudge down the cobbled hill of St Jude's Street to the flat plain of St Jude's Square and Market Square in the valley below and then up the other side, past the brewery and the iron foundry, through the maze of brewers'and iron-workers' cottages, to the manor, the skyline beyond it dominated by the squat, square bulk and the huge, foully belching chimney-stack of Dallam's mill.

She was as much a part of this murky landscape now as if she had been born here, every step of the way between Miss Gemma Dallam's cloistered corner and her own – in spirit a universe apart – being so familiar to her that it seemed she had always known them, or had known them before, in another place, a dozen other places; another life. A wheel designed just to go on turning, never stopping, so that for a hundred years with a hundred more to follow, she had been coming out of this cottage doorway, carrying her carpet-bag, filling her lungs with this damp, sooty air which had started to make Liam cough, reminding herself – as one simply
had
to do – to be thankful for such mercies as came her way, however small. Thankful that this was the
top
of St Jude's Street, for instance – with the immaculate Thackrays on one side of it, the abominable Rattries on the other – and not the bottom end, where the factory smoke collected, hung low, never lifted, spreading a deep, damp gloom in which old men coughed and spat blood, and women – old before their time – bred babies like rabbits, who died like flies.

Not that the Rattries were doing much better, three of the youngest – Cara did not know which – having died the week before of measles, Sairellen Thackray thought, or some such childish ailment involving a rash and a cough. No doctor having been called, even had they been able to find one willing to attend since one glance would have been more than enough to convince any practitioner of medicine that his fee could not be paid. And no other care taken either, except for the broth Sairellen had sent round, and the collection she had organized afterwards to pay an undertaker and avoid the consequences of a paupers'grave.

Cara had not seen much sense to it. Or so she had said. The Rattries were destined for the workhouse anyway, sooner or later. Everybody knew that. So why not sooner? Why not now, by leaving them to admit, to the Poor Law Officer, that they had no money to bury their children? At least that way the remaining infants would be deloused, taught to read and write, fed, and Mrs Rattrie, by being separated from her husband – since paupers were not allowed to breed – would have been spared the trouble of having any more. But when Luke Thackray came round with his cap, she'd put a penny or two in it just the same, like everybody else, knowing, as they all did, that Disaster, which had struck the Rattries today, might strike any of them tomorrow.

She'd tacked a few scraps of old cotton into a baby-gown too and sent it round next door for the new Rattrie baby, born very inconveniently, as it turned out, the day after the funeral, her fit of generosity entirely misplaced, since the child had only lived a few hours and the gown – upon which Odette had worked a few hasty stiches of embroidery – had ended up in the pawnshop – Cara had seen it herself in the window – to help pay, she supposed, for yet another infantile disposal.

Ah well. Never mind. The Rattries would remain abominable, the father drunk, the mother vacant, such children as survived a damned nuisance. Just like all the other children who swarmed in their rat-packs all day and half the night in the nooks and crannies of St Jude's. Turned out into the street, most of them, every morning – Cara knew well – while their mothers went to the mill, a ragged band of infant desperadoes, all under the magic age of nine when they too could be put out to labour Little pests until then though, scuffling and squabbling, paddling their bare feet in the sewage channels, hanging about the shop doorways for warmth and anything else they could manage to lay a hand on before the baker or the pork butcher, both mighty men, sallied forth and scattered them like a flock of starlings. Little boys of seven, bandy-legged as old men expertly running for cover, little girls of five or six remembering, more often than not, to pick up the new baby and last year's baby, to grab the two-year-old, the three-year-old before they ran off too.

Cara nodded and smiled at the pork butcher as she passed him by, being fond of the pies he would sometimes sell off at half price before closing his shop on a Saturday night. She smiled at the baker too, rather warmly, not for the sake of Saturday's bread bought cheap on Mondays but because his wife detested the Irish in general and that ‘bold, brazen strumpet from the top of St Jude's'very much in particular. And because her bag was light, with only Miss Gemma Dallam's brown Chinese satin in it, and her hopes as high as she ever allowed them to be, she smiled at everybody else who came her way, the fishmonger, the old-clothes dealer pushing his cart with its flea-ridden bundles; the organ-grinder whose emaciated monkey, cowering sadly on his shoulder, always caused her a stab of pain.

She smiled at the decent, hard-working housewives like Sairellen Thackray – too busy to smile back at her – who were scouring their doorsteps with pumice stone and polishing their door-knockers; waging war to the death – their own, quite likely – against soot from the mill chimneys which attacked their washing lines; against foul air and foul water which attacked the bodies of their children; against bad housing, bad weather, a spell of bad trade when a reduction in a husband‘s wages could cause their whole, grimly con-structed edifice to crumble.

She smiled at the slatterns too – why not? – most of them living a little lower down the street, who, for one reason or another, had lost all taste for building edifices of any description, hanging on by the skin of such teeth as they had left, to a precarious existence of borrowing today to pay what one owed from yesterday and hoping that tomorrow would somehow take care of itself. Inadequate women, some of them, both by nature and by inclination. Others who had coped well enough to begin with on those scanty mill wages, who had even picked themselves up and patched things together, the
first
time that demon of bad trade had halved their weekly pay; the
first
time there had been sickness and doctors'bills to eat up anything they had been able to put by during the good times – never much; the
first
time a husband had suffered injury at the mill or the foundry, which meant no weekly pay-packet at all. Nothing, if the injury persisted, but whatever a man's mates might collect for him by passing round a hat. The first time. Sometimes even the second. Rarely the third; when gin might seem a cheaper and faster way of easing pain than any other.

Nevertheless Cara smiled at them that morning, as she smiled at the frail, clerical-looking gentleman who was both their saviour and their torment, the pawnbroker who held his court on one corner of St Jude's Passage, the other corner housing the red-headed madam of the fringed shawl who did not emerge from behind her green shutters so early in the day. Two establishments of furtive commerce which marked the end of the part of St Jude's Street which even tried to be respectable. The place where even the barest sketch of family life ended and vagrancy began.