A Song Twice Over (72 page)

‘Oh Tristan,' she said. ‘I don't know what to say to you. I just don't know. Your
best
. Oh – Good Heavens …' She burst into tears hovering on the brink of something she recognized with mild surprise to be hysteria. She also saw that she had embarrassed him again.

‘Lord – Gemma. I knew it couldn't last. These things don't, you know.'

‘Don't they?'

‘No.' He sounded very certain. ‘I was just damned glad he didn't hurt you. I suppose looking after your father took your mind off it. But the thing is now – Dash it all, let's forget it, shall we?'

‘Tristan – have you said all this to Linnet?'

He nodded. ‘Hadn't much choice, had I?'

‘And was it – very bad?'

‘The worst thing I've ever done in my life.'

‘Oh Tristan – I am so sorry, I am really so sorry …'

He sat down, elbows on his knees, biting his lip again, his face stricken. ‘Gemma, you'll have to try and understand about Linnet. She's beautiful and clever and she wasn't born to play second fiddle. If she'd been a man she'd have made her way in the world all right – worked her way up through the ranks and no mistake. She'd have been a cabinet minister by now, or a general. But she's a woman and the only thing a woman
can
do is get married. That's right, isn't it? And she'd have been the best wife any man could have. She knows that. And when she sees other women getting what she ought to be getting – Well – she's hurt and miserable and whatever she may have done or said I love her, Gemma, there's no getting away from it, and I'll always look after her – give her what I can. I have to tell you that.'

‘Yes, Tristan.' And how could she tell him – this simple, physical,
honourable
man – that she would do anything to ease his pain? ‘Tristan – I understand.'

‘And will you go on living with me?' He threw the question at her so much like a hurt child that the force of his bewilderment, his need to be reassured and consoled, lifted her to her feet, aware simply that she must protect him. That she must heal him, as best she could, from the wounds he had received, so gallantly, so painfully, in her defence.

‘Is that what you want?'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘Tristan, I don't know why you should. You must know that I …'

‘No,' he said. ‘Don't tell me about that other chap. That belongs to you. I know it must have meant a lot to you, otherwise you wouldn't have done it. You're a good woman, Gemma. If it seemed right to you, then I just reckoned it would be. So keep it. I'll never ask. That's a promise.'

He was standing now just a few inches away from her, his athletic body unusually clumsy and overburdened with a weight of emotion he was not accustomed to feel. A physical man who understood only physical remedies and who had been badly scarred today. An honourable man embarrassed by his own gallantry. A knight-errant, she thought suddenly, who probably thought all his splendid chivalry to be no more than simple good manners.

A simple man who seemed to need her. What had he said to her just now? ‘
If it seemed right to you, then I just reckoned it would be
.' So had her mother always spoken of her father. ‘If John-William said it would be all right, then it would be.'

Could she bear so unexpected and yet, in some ways, so wonderful a burden?

Stepping forward she put her arms around him, a huge sigh of pure and utter relief escaping his body as she touched it. Was it over, then? With a bit of luck he rather thought it might be.

‘Thank you, my darling,' she said.

One year and a half after leaving Frizingley Daniel Carey made the crossing to Ireland as a cabin passenger on the regular steamer from Liverpool, returning eighteen sorry months later on the deck of a pig boat tight-packed with the half-naked, stupefied skeletons which were the Irish people, reduced to bone and blank-eyed terror by famine and the pestilence it brought with it.

His first journey, in the late autumn of 1845, had been a professional assignment, an investigation into certain rumours regarding the state of Ireland which had reached the radical London editor who employed him. Famine, it seemed. What else? Daniel had raised his shoulders in resignation even as the question was asked, Famine being a regular enough visitor to an undeveloped land without industry or trade, with nothing to sell but its talent – for which the going rate was never much – and no money to spend. A country without coal mines or iron foundries or factories to employ the people who, in their hungry millions, had no other way of life but the cultivation of the potato.

Ah yes, now what of the potato, his editor wanted to know? It took as little as one acre, did it not, to feed a small family for a year? Far, far less than would have been required to grow wheat and keep one's children alive on bread. Was it then
really
the case that over half the population of Ireland fed themselves entirely on the potato, fourteen pounds a day to maintain health and strength and the raising of all those beautiful children, brought up, in many cases, in total ignorance of any other food? Could it
really
be?

So much so – as Daniel remembered it – that there was no doubt, in Ireland, that a man who lost his potato-patch also lost his life, no other work and no other crop being available, so that he had little choice but to squat in some muddy ditch somewhere with his fine children about him until starvation slowly and quietly took them off. And when the potato crop was poor, or failed altogether in some regions as it sometimes did, then many died. Very many. As Daniel's own mother had died, not from lack of nourishment since his family had had money enough to buy English bread, and French wine too if it came to that, but from a stray bullet aimed, in conditions of riot, at an evicted and therefore already dying man.

Famine and Riot. They went together, in the early stages, until starvation ate away both flesh and fury and the combination became Famine and Fever.

It had happened before.

But this year? Daniel's editor had frowned and shook his head. Rumours, perhaps. Bad weather. A wet and foggy summer. But what was new or strange about that? Trouble with the potato crop in North America the year before – a blight of some kind – and now in Southern England, Belgium, France: and spreading. Bad enough, of course, in countries like these where other crops were, one supposed, fairly readily available, and the working population regarded their staff of life to be bread. But what would happen in Ireland – where bread was foreign and by no means easily obtainable outside the cities – should there be no potatoes whatsoever?

Was it even understood, in England, that for the Irish peasant, no other diet existed? That the holdings into which the land was divided were too small to permit the cultivation of other foods? That such profit as a man could make from pigs or hens or anything else was reserved strictly to pay the rent for the land without which he would starve? And that landlords, in times of distress, were far more inclined to clear their farms of an unprofitable tenant than assist him to soldier on and stay? Did the English labourer, with his wages, however sparse, paid weekly into his hand, even know that his Irish counterpart often earned no wages at all, working wholly for food and shelter, the peat he dug for fuel and the potato – the blessed, fickle potato – from his precariously rented ground?

What would happen to Ireland, then, where three million people came near to starvation in summer in any case, without the potato? And if there
was
no likelihood of failure on a massive scale, if the stories one heard of a whole year's crop, or very nearly, turning to a stinking black ooze in the ground
were
mere exaggerations, then why was it that Sir Robert Peel, the English Prime Minister, was thought to be considering the repeal of the Corn Laws to give Ireland cheap bread? And to ruin himself, of course, while he was about it, since he was the leader of the Tory Party, backed by the landed gentry who grew the corn, and had pledged, at his election, to protect it by keeping foreign corn out and the price, therefore, of English bread high. An astonishing, courageous, and generous step, one might think. For if he carried it out he might do something to ease the hardship both in Ireland and England's own industrial cities but the man himself, as a political leader, could not hope to survive. That he should be willing to sacrifice himself seemed a fair indication of the coming emergency.

Perhaps Daniel – a man who knew Ireland – would care to take a trip across the water, and see?

Not that his knowledge of his native land was, in fact, so very accurate, having left it at the age of twelve for France where he had been taught to think of himself as a Citizen of the World. Yet his landing in Dublin that autumn and his subsequent wanderings had shown him few changes, a people cheerful in adversity as he remembered them, who did not realize, or did not choose to realize, or had not been told, their peril. A naturally optimistic people who believed that if one kept smiling, things would surely turn out for the best? As they probably would, thought the British Commissariat officer with whom Daniel soon made acquaintance, a burly, briskly spoken man who had seen long service in India, and who now, being involved in the work of famine relief, had begun by making what he liked to think of as a ‘thorough study'of Ireland.

No, it would not be so very terrible, in his view. Or not much more than usual. Not until April or May, that is, by which time most people would have eaten up their surplus, made a hole in their savings, taken whatever could be taken to the pawnshop; thus enabling themselves to last until August when the new potato crop would be in. While such official measures as seemed appropriate had already been set in motion. The usual things one expected from government departments. The local landlords organized into relief committees, for instance, to collect money among themselves to purchase stores of food which they could hold and then sell, at need, to distressed persons. And since these persons would be unlikely to have any money left by then with which to buy it, these same landlords were being asked to create employment for them on their estates and pay wages which could then be used not only to keep body and soul together but to pay the rent. Owing – of course – to these self-same landlords again.

A neat scheme – the Commissariat officer wondered? – for making Ireland's gentry pay for the feeding of Ireland's poor? Or a vicious circle? Depending which way one looked at it, he supposed. Particularly if one took into account that the gentry themselves, although not starving, were, in many cases, a far from thrifty lot, having spent too heavily, over the generations, on fancy manor houses and thoroughbred hunters to have anything much put by.

And should this scheme – or this circle – be found too complicated in some districts, the Irish Board of Works had been instructed by Westminster to set in motion the building of roads and bridges or anything else which might come in useful and provide mass employment for the same reasons. Although most of the cost, in the long term, would fall on the landlords who were already muttering, rather loudly in some quarters, about the point of so many roads which rarely had any specific destination, so many bridges over streams quite shallow enough to be crossed by stepping stones. Should anyone want to get to the other side, in the first place.

Furthermore, as a supplement to whatever stocks of foodstuffs the landlords were presumably building up – no, he did not think anyone had actually gone around to check – the Government had also purchased, from America, a supply of Indian Corn, choosing this admittedly very alien cereal for the simple reason that no one knew anything about it, no British merchants appeared to trade in it and could not, therefore, accuse the government of poaching their business preserves. This Indian Corn to be held in depots – one of which Daniel's new friend was to be in charge – and sold, if strictly necessary, at bargain prices only to those who could prove their hunger to be a direct result of the present crop failures, rather than a habitual condition.

Although what use the Irish people would make of this ‘Indian Corn', the Commissariat gentleman was uncertain. After all, had the government even considered just how many corn mills could be found in a country where only the gentry and the alien English were accustomed to eat bread? Precious few outside the cities and, when one arrived at those green and lovely but isolated regions of the South and West he was prepared to take an oath that there would be none at all.

And if that ‘Indian Corn', floating out there in Cork harbour still waiting to be unloaded, could not be ground for bread then what good was it? And even if it could, how many of those mud cabins in the country areas he had just mentioned were fitted with ovens? None that he'd ever seen. How many of the women who lived in them knew how to bake a loaf or had ever seen one baked, or cooked anything, if it came to that, but a few potatoes in a single pot?

‘Indian Corn'indeed! No doubt they knew what to do with it in the American South, or had stronger stomachs and teeth. But not in the South of Ireland.

But of one thing he was certain. Whether it could be milled and baked or not, there was nowhere near enough of it to go round. Not a mouthful apiece to be eked out even among the so-called ‘genuine applicants'who, in normal years, could feed themselves. And what about the three million destitute who hovered on the brink of starvation every year, no matter what the state of the potato crop? Could anyone tell him how, when the doors of his food depot finally opened, he was to distinguish among these? Easy enough to write out instructions from behind a cosy desk in London. Not so easy when it came to looking starving children in the face.

Well, thank God it was only until August, when the new crop would be in. Eight months away. Until then life would – or would not – go on.