A Winter's Child (49 page)

‘I don't know. It just shouldn't. It doesn't fit.'

‘How clever of you. No – no – it doesn't.'

Once again he was moved, not this time to anger: and hearing the crack in the ice she reached out to steady him, not caring whether or not she was rebuffed.

‘No,' he said, throwing the word at her, ‘it doesn't belong here. Neither do I. So we may as well keep one another company.'

‘I don't understand you, Benedict.'

‘Good. That has always been my intention.'

‘You say you don't belong here. But High Meadows belongs to you.'

‘Does it? Oh yes – since they buried me alive under the foundation-stones. Yes. One would have to call that belonging …'

It was her own childhood nightmare of suffocation, of Edward Lyall burying her in sand while Dorothy stood by, fondly smiling. She shivered, her hands – when had they become so cold? – twisting together in her lap, her whole mind straining towards him.

‘Please,'
she said. ‘Just tell me.'

Silence. And then an irritable hand reaching for a cigar, his eyes, blackened by fatigue, closing in a head that had started to ache. And in that bleak hour of winter daybreak, as she felt him weaken, so she felt her own strength return, a female strength, quieter but deeper than the male, far less spectacular than the armed warrior yet infinitely more dogged, more patient, longer-lasting.

‘Benedict?'

The fire was burning low, grey morning tossing handfuls of rain at the windows, waking the household to activity. Soon there would be a tap at the door, an apologetic voice asking permission to draw the curtains, lay a new fire, enquire about breakfast. Soon there would be Polly's exuberance to contend with if Roy Kington had smiled at her, or her clamouring misery if he had not; Miriam's knowing sympathy; Eunice, hurrying up the hill to see what she could see. And, leaning forward into the quietness which had fallen, thick and heavy, between them, he began to speak quickly, curtly, anxious to get it over. ‘Ail right. Very well. There's no mystery about me, Claire. None. I am just as you have seen me. There is no more. I am a man who enjoys sex with strangers and then turns his back on them. Not for any of the complex reasons you may have imagined but because I want them to remain strangers. That's all. I also rule this family with a rod of iron because that is the way my father taught me. And to make sure I obeyed him he tied me up so tight that in fact – although they don't realize it – the family control me. I can't get rid of them, Claire – any one of them. In simple terms, they're entitled to annual payments which I have to earn. I can't pay them off in full because the business couldn't stand it. No business could. My father knew that, of course, and in effect, he gave me to Miriam, and the rest of them, for life. I resent the position in which I find myself. But I accept it. It makes me responsible, you see, not only for the family but for the livelihood of several hundred employees. And one can imagine rather too well how they would fare at the hands of Polly or Toby. So I am bound – absolutely – to this house and this family and-the marriage which goes with them. Why should you be interested in such a man?'

He paused, but she had no time to answer before the rapid, toneless flow of words began again.

‘God dammit, Claire, you know well enough the man I am outside this house. I made sure you knew it. It was the kindest thing I could have done for you. The best gift I could have made you. Don't deceive yourself. I enjoy women like Lois Chiltern, They suit me and satisfy me to perfection. I don't want anything more.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Claire.' And the desperate sincerity in his voice claimed and held her own attention. ‘They are the truest words I have ever spoken.
I
–
want
–
nothing
–
more.
I am not equipped for anything more.'

She shook her head.

‘Then let me put it this way. I can afford nothing else. When one is a prisoner, of circumstances, or of one's own nature, or whatever, and one knows escape to be impossible, then the trick is to stop wanting to get away. My particular prison is very comfortable. I have made sure of that. Don't trouble me, Claire.'

‘Tell me why the lily bowl is here?'

‘To remind me –'

‘Of what?'

‘How wrong I was. Of what a mistake you were. Of how much better off I am with women of my own kind.'

‘I very nearly fell in love with you, Benedict – so nearly that I think I did.'

‘How can you say that?' he said, aghast. ‘How can you admit it?' And it was so clearly beyond him how anyone could admit to such an enormity that she found herself smiling.

‘Well – I felt it. So why waste it by pretending I didn't.'

‘I can't,' he said. ‘You find it all so very simple, don't you – opening yourself up, lowering your guard. I can't.'

She waited a moment. ‘The lily bowl.'

‘Damn your lily bowl, Claire, and damn you. I should have left you alone in the first place. And you should leave me alone now.'

‘Benedict – the lily bowl.'

He swung round towards her, his eyes black slits in a white face which seemed leaner than she remembered, fiercer than she had ever imagined and, with one lightning movement, came at her so fast, so violently, that she braced herself instinctively for a blow. ‘Because I need it here,' he snarled at her, ‘I look at it, like the fool I swore I'd never be, and think of you. I sent you away, didn't I, for that very reason – because I was thinking of you too much – and you damn well know it. And when I want you back badly enough, which happens fairly often –'

‘I'm here,' she said.

‘What a fool you are. What a selfish brute you make me.'
She smiled. How little that seemed to matter.
‘Benedict – I'm here.'

Four weeks had passed, leading them to the gentle beginning of April, cool sunlight from a sky washed pale blue-white by showers of fine, mild rain; a fluted carpet of daffodils. Nola, accompanied by her Cousin Bernard's capable wife, Nanette, had set off for a month's convalescence in Eastbourne. There had been no scandal. Miriam herself, to whom scandal was indeed a fate worse than death, had seen to that, soulfully informing an assortment of Greenwoods and Redfearns and Templetons just enough of the truth to cover herself, should the real truth ever come to light and then obscuring it, bending it with consummate artistry into what was never
quite
– never completely – a lie. It had been unwise of Nola to attempt an addition to her family so late in the day. Mrs Templeton who, had produced her daughter, Sally, at the surprising, embarrassing age of forty-two, and Elvira Redfearn who had conceived once when she had been well under thirty and never again – one child being all that was needful to prove herself as capable of conception as anyone else – both nodded their heads. Nola's miscarriage, therefore, was not to be wondered at, particularly when one remembered the difficulty with which she had brought Conrad and Christian into the world. Elvira Redfearn who had given birth to her own handsome, healthy, highly-intelligent son as efficiently as she did everything else, and plain little Miss Greenwood to whom all bodily functions seemed dangerous and distasteful, both smiled their agreement; Elvira feeling rather pleased and very superior, Miss Greenwood simply relieved that there seemed little chance now of it ever happening to her. Miriam, of course, had warned Nola to take care, to little avail.

‘I do understand,' sighed Mrs Templeton, reminded of how little attention her own daughters ever paid to
her
advice.

‘A little late in the day for taking care,' murmured Elvira Redfearn.

What could she mean? wondered Miss Greenwood, whose narrow education had allowed no room for the lectures of Doctor Marie Stopes.

‘Quite so.' Miriam, who knew nothing about Doctor Stopes either except that one did not discuss her in polite circles, gave them all three a sad, sweet smile. ‘Poor Nola. Poor Benedict. One tends to forget the feelings of the father in these cases. But – in the strictest confidence, of course, Benedict was greatly disappointed. Naturally he will put a brave face on it – one would expect no less. But can one blame a man with two sons for wanting a daughter?
I
cannot blame him.'

Yet, by accepting responsibility for his wife's pregnancy, Benedict had condoned her adultery, cancelling out any possibility of divorce. And the thin, empty-eyed, washed-out woman who had gone with Nanette Crozier to Eastbourne had looked unlikely to be committing adultery in the foreseeable future – perhaps never again.

But divorce, in any case, had never been Benedict's intention. Nola would remain his responsibility. He made that much very plain, both to her and to Claire.

‘Yes, of course,' Claire had answered.

Nola had simply closed her eyes.

‘What is he going to do with me?' she asked Claire. ‘Find out for God's sake!'

And she had reacted strangely when the answer seemed to be that he was sending her to Eastbourne to convalesce and then-nothing.

‘I think my father would have starved my mother to death if she'd done this to him.'

‘Hardly practical these days, Nola.'

‘Better though –. I told you it would be.'

Her physical weakness had made her tearful, suspicious, prone to a melancholy in which she took refuge, almost welcomed as a friend. She had made up her mind to die. She had been ready for it. And it would have been easier, too. After all,
she
would not have been expected to cope with it, recover from it, sit up and eat her dinner, draw some kind of conclusions about what to do next. Therefore, she would be ill. Very ill. And from there, as this most unmaternal of women began to realize that she had taken a human life, it was only a step away from believing she deserved her sickness. The reaction took her completely by surprise. Until now it had been a matter of
her
life or
her
death. Not the child's. Yet there were times during the long hours she lay in bed with nothing to do but brood, dissect, turn her mind inwards, when that dead child seemed to be a symbol of her own failures, the chaotic, self-destructive impulses she had allowed to rule her life. And waking suddenly in the night or the dawn of a chilly day, finding herself still captive in the house she had never recognized as home, still the wife of the man she had never felt to be her husband, two thoughts would flash into her mind, one after the other, ‘I shall have no luck now'and ‘I shall never be forgiven.'

She had not wanted the child. She had not even thought of it as an identity. Had she given birth to it she would have paid it no more attention than Christian and Conrad, which was no attention at all. Yet, just the same, it seemed to her now a damned shame that the poor little mite had never had a chance. And perversely, perilously, since no one cared for her and she cared for no one else, she began to identify with it.

She blamed herself. Yet she also blamed others for making her as she was. When her father, a gentleman of imperial dignity, arrived from Bradford she refused to see him and, when he insisted, lay back on her pillows, eyes closed, defeating him by the very qualities he had wished to instil into his daughters. He had declared women to be weak. Very well. She was too weak to be disturbed for more than a few moments… He had insisted upon bashfulness as an essential to femininity. She was too bashful, therefore, to answer his questions. She was in no hurry at all to get out of bed. Her room became her refuge, ‘her lair,' said Polly where she lay all day long staring at the wall or at books she often held ostentatiously upside down. And when the doctor advised her most strongly to come downstairs, her appearances were erratic and eccentric, causing alarm to Miriam who, several times, found her stretched out on the drawing room sofa fast asleep, wearing an assortment of flimsy draperies with a lighted cigarette in her hand.

Nor could one be certain just when or how she might make an appearance. Miriam's tea party guests might welcome the diversion of Nola stalking into the room and out again without speaking a word, but Miriam did not. Roy Kington may have promptly forgotten his reference to Nola as ‘that elderly Ophelia'when he came across her one afternoon wandering about the garden quoting aloud from a book of German poetry, but Polly burned for the rest of the day with the shame of it and was at great pains to explain to everyone that she and Nola were related only by marriage which did not transmit hereditary madness, rather than by blood which probably did. She upset Eunice too, by staring at her in what she felt to be a most critical fashion; and upset her even more by staring at her children so that the whole of Eunice's protective instincts were hotly aroused, leading to something of a scene between her and Toby when he expressed the view that if Nola really
was
planning to kidnap one of the boys, which seemed unlikely, then so far as he was concerned, she would be welcome.

Yet, perhaps worst of all, was her humble manner with Benedict, her air of walking barefoot along the convent wall in penitence whenever he appeared, her instinct being not only to fly from him but to let him see her in flight, waiting, at the sound of his car on the drive, until he had entered the hall before she came bursting through the double doors from the drawing room, draperies flying, and dashed blindly yet all too visibly upstairs, out of his way.

It had been something of a relief, therefore, certainly to Miriam and to Polly, when practical, bustling little Nanette Crozier had arrived to take Nola to Eastbourne.

And on that following Sunday afternoon of early spring, a young, uncertain sun just keeping the rain at bay, Claire sat once again in Benedict's study watching the sky mellow towards dinner-time, perfectly at ease with him now as they sat by his open windows, enjoying the hazy ending of a fragile day.