A Song Twice Over (64 page)

But there had never been a right one. How beautiful she was. How hard and brilliant. And
hurt
.

‘Goodbye then, Cara.'

She nodded her head. He hesitated and, when she continued to stand there in silence, her arms tight folded, he moved away.

‘Daniel,' she called after him through the dark. ‘Take care. Not that you ever will …'

He had heard her voice break on the final word, could not have answered without a similar, tell-tale tremor and so, having need of haste now, he lengthened his stride, desperate to leave this filthy, tortured town behind him and feel real air in his lungs again, clean empty space washing all around him.

What a cruel farce life was. What a poisonous, cheating tragedy in which the pawns thrown down on the board to play – like himself and Cara and Gemma – were doomed, despite their good intentions, to hurt one another.

Let him get away now, far and fast and alone. Let him have nothing now but those chance-met companions of the road who asked little, gave little, began with a shrug and made scarcely a ripple at their ending.

That was all he wanted. It was as much as he could accommodate. Yet, before the night was over, he sat himself down, exhausted, on a flat rock somewhere on the dark moor between Frizingley and Leeds and
knew
– as he had known all along and tried not to know – that the brave and generous words spoken to him by Gemma Gage, her assurances that he had given her everything and more than she had asked for, had been compassionate lies.

She had not been content with his liking and his friendship. She
had
wanted him to love her.
Had
wanted to hear those passionate vows of devotion he had never made.
Had
wanted to believe herself – if only for a moment or two – to be the cherished cornerstone of his life.

She had denied it only so that he might leave her with a light heart.

She had given him a treasure of which he believed he would do anything to feel himself worthy.

Except lie to her.

Over his right shoulder the sky began to lighten with the new morning. Colder, he thought, than he had expected.

An altogether rougher journey.

Ah well.

He picked up his bag, finding it heavy, and walked on.

Some days later Cara accompanied her mother and son to Liverpool on the first step of their journey to America, returning alone to Frizingley.

Her decision had been five months in the making, bitter months she would not care to live again, during which the sight of Odette ageing beneath her eyes and the conviction that Liam hated her, had gradually worn her down.

Throughout April she had stood firm. Odette may do as she pleased but no one would take Liam from her. If Odette cared so much for her grandson then she would just have to stay in Frizingley too. Very well. In May, when Kieron Adeane, unable to neglect his business interests any longer, sailed for New York, Odette did not go with him. She became ashen-faced and hollow-eyed instead, Liam watching her closely, watching his mother, watching – one felt – his own back, his eyes growing blank and enormous, his mood alternating between an unnerving silence and astonishing bursts of viciousness. And when Cara tried to talk to him, tried to explain that she was his mother and had always taken care of him, he struggled between her hands screaming that she was wicked and cruel and he wanted Odette.

She had slapped him. He had kicked her. The injustice of it had scarred her badly.

May had been hideous. June little better except that she had begun to make tentative enquiries about her father's situation. Both Christie Goldsborough and Marie Moon had friends in New York. Yes. Her aunt's bakery existed, or rather several of them, all doing well so far as any friends of Christie's or Marie's – not being particularly well-versed in bakeries – could see.

The money was there. ‘Go to him if you like,' she told her mother. ‘But Liam stays with me.'

‘He doesn't want to stay with you, Cara.'

‘He's a child. I'll tell him what he wants and he'll do as he's told.'

Liam fastened himself like a limpet to Odette, screamed himself sick, sank his teeth into Cara's arm when she tried to comfort him and kept them there, worrying her like a bull-dog until his jaws were prised loose.

He was defending his grandmother, and himself, against an intruder.

‘You are killing your mother,' Madge Percy told her, greatly daring, keeping her job only because Cara knew it was true.

She tried once again with Liam, promising him trips to the seaside, train-rides, puppies, making him accompany her on tense, silent ramblings on the moor on warm evenings until, deliberately distracting her attention, he ran away, submitting her to the torment of searching for him in the dark, passing from annoyance to a desperation in which she ran in circles, wildly praying that if only he should be not dead in a ditch, not stolen by the gipsies, she would be kind and loving and never speak a cross word to him again.

But she boxed his ears soundly when she came upon him hiding behind a rock where he could not have failed to hear her frantic cries, marching him home in a bitter fury which did not ease the next morning when he awoke in a fever and lay cowering away from her, calling for Odette.

She wrote a crisp and imperious letter, from Miss Cara Adeane of Frizingley to Miss Teresa Adeane of New York, demanding to know, should her mother and son ever find themselves under Miss Teresa's roof, the nature of the welcome to be expected there. Miss Teresa, after all, had opposed her brother's marriage and had shown no inclination to hospitality ever since. What had happened to change her mind?

To which Miss Teresa, in due course, briefly replied that in view of the valuable assistance she had lately received from her brother, his French wife and her grandson would both be welcome in her home; an invitation she did not extend to Cara, feeling, no doubt, that two brisk and imperious women named Adeane might be one too many for New York.

Cara put the letter away. And then, a week later, on a morning when she was feeling herself to be criminal and victim, martyred saint and black-hearted devil all together, she wrote again in the same brusque manner, to the effect that, should Liam be permitted to make the journey, she would hold her Aunt Teresa wholly and entirely responsible for his well-being, her father's disposition being such that she would not care to trust him with the care of her tabby-cat much less her son. She would, therefore, expect her aunt not only to supply her with regular news of him but to give her a solemn undertaking that he should be returned to her at once should her father's situation deteriorate. In fact she would like her aunt to deposit these instructions with her lawyers or bankers or whoever one employed for these matters in America, in case Miss Teresa Adeane – when the emergency arose – might be too infirm or too deceased to see to it herself.

Miss Teresa Adeane answered through her lawyer that Cara's will – in this matter if in no other – would be done.

She put that letter away too. Endured another silent moorland ramble with Liam. Watched Odette's misery flowing around her like a mourning garment, wider and denser and more intolerable every morning.
Endured.
And then could stand it no longer.

‘Take him!' she said suddenly. ‘This is killing all of us.' And then, floundering in her bitterness, losing her head. ‘Take him – take him – why not? You might as well, since you've taken everything else.'

That was July. And having made her decision she did not care to go on living, day after day, with a festering wound. Let them leave at once. But August was already half way done before they finally set off for Liverpool to meet Kieron Adeane who, with great gallantry in his wife's opinion and criminal extravagance in his daughter's, had crossed the Atlantic to fetch them.

No goodbyes were said. Leaving Madge Percy in charge of the shop for the day, Cara drove up St Jude's Street in the carriage hired for the purpose, collected her mother and son, locked the door of their cottage behind her and pocketed the keys. In the yard next door where the Rattries had once swarmed and squabbled and stolen her water, a vacant woman stared listlessly at the horses, a child on her hip, a gaggle of them around her ankles. Across the street the Thackrays'house looked like a despoiled virgin. Sairellen had gone. A motley crowd of tinkers and tarts and vagrants who wanted a room not for Sairellen's meticulous twenty-five years but only for a month, a night, had taken her place. But Cara made herself far too busy with her mother's trunks to dwell on it. They were brand new – those trunks – and crammed full with clothes, for both Odette and Liam, to cover every eventuality and every season, woollen and cotton dresses for everyday, silk dresses to cut a dash in, underwear to last a lifetime, garments to fit Liam now and lengths of good quality materials to accommodate him as he grew. Everything that could be embroidered having been embroidered, everything that required one frill receiving at least two.

Just as she had done for Anna Rattrie.

She had seen to it that her mother would not arrive in New York empty-handed, as a supplicant. Yet she still could not forgive her for going, could neither relent in her outraged hurt, her most bitter sense of betrayal, nor reach out a hand to Odette no matter how hard she tried.

‘Come along, then. Let's be off.' She bundled them into the carriage as if they were prisoners under escort to the Assizes at York, maintaining a silence, all the way to Leeds, which began to seem natural to her for the simple reason that she had nothing more to say. There was no conversation on the train from Leeds to Liverpool either beyond the strict necessities of the journey, Liam snuggling close to Odette and keeping a wary eye on his mother in case she should suddenly snatch him away again – although the time when she might have performed such an act of desperation had long gone – Odette very hushed and pale and still, not daring as yet to be joyful. Not wishing to let Cara see how much she longed to be with her beloved husband again.

And although Cara saw and understood both her son's anxiety and her mother's timid blend of hope and happiness and sorrow, there was still nothing she wished to say to either of them. After all, Liam would not be anxious for much longer. He would soon start to smile and chatter and be at ease with the deck of a ship beneath his feet, Kieron Adeane to tell him stories and Odette to hold his hand.

They would be happy enough – both of them – once her hurt and hurtful presence no longer stood in their way. It was a straightforward story, after all. They had needed her and taken what they needed. Now they needed her no more. It was as simple and commonplace as that. And what she now wanted most of all was to get it over and done with. She was bringing them to Liverpool because she did not trust Odette to manage the journey alone. She had even agreed to take them to the rooming-house where her father would be waiting, for the same reason. She had filled Odette's purse with money and her trunks with expensive clothes. She had written further letters to her aunt's American lawyers, instructing them, very firmly, to return her son to her in case of need and explaining how the expenses of his voyage home would be met. She had written also to a friend of Marie Moon's who, being of an enquiring disposition, could be counted on – for the simple outlay of an occasional gift of cashmere or satin – to relay any gossip about the failure of the bakery trade in New York.

She had taken every possible precaution, every care. But her heart felt like a lump of granite in her chest, sharp-edged and heavy, altogether immovable. She watched her son fear her and, with that granite heart, she bore it. She saw the ease with which Odette had rejected the life for which
she
– not her mother – had made so much sacrifice. She suffered the taste of her own love and loyalty as it curdled and turned sour. Her spiky, cumbersome, unyielding heart bore all that too.

She did not even glance at Liverpool. There was the station, another hired carriage, the very decent, almost impressive house where her father had taken rooms, a bedroom and sitting-room and dining-parlour she had heard without listening or caring, for the few days before the ship sailed again. Time, she thought grimly, to equip his wife with an outfit that would pass muster before the scrutiny of his sharp-eyed sister.

Well. There would be no need for that.

She got out of the cab and stood on the pavement, the trunks and boxes around her feet, feeling so far away from Odette – even farther from Liam – that they might already have made the crossing to New York. So be it. She would not disgrace herself now, in her own eyes, by breaking down and begging them to stay.

‘Goodbye, then.'

‘Cara …' Odette's face was suddenly ghastly. ‘You can't leave now – like this … my dear child …'

‘What is it mother?' she said unkindly. ‘This is the address he gave you. Are you afraid he won't be here?'

But he had seen the carriage from the window and came running to greet them, tall and healthy and handsome, wearing his new air of prosperity as jauntily as the flower in his buttonhole, so vibrant, so rejuvenated by the success which had polished him like a diamond that Odette, as he clasped her in his arms, looked faded and old.

Never mind. No doubt the magic of New York would transform her too.

‘Cara,' he said, holding out a hand to her, ready, should she take it, to draw her into his arms, into his life again and hold her there, reminding her that no colours had ever been brighter than the ones he painted, no air fresher or sweeter than the air one breathed with him.

‘Father,' she replied, without touching him.

‘Come inside.' She shrugged and shook her head but, in the end, as Odette began to tremble and declare she could not part from her daughter in the street, it proved easier to obey. Quicker, perhaps. And so she went with them, aware, as the trunks were carried inside, only of a vague impression of comfort and the easy manner – no surprise to her – with which her father distributed largesse to the porter and called out, in his rich, lilting voice, for tea.