Flint and Roses (35 page)

Blaize went to America in the spring, a trip which gave him so much personal satisfaction and filled the Barforth order-books with so many remunerative demands for fancy worsteds that a return journey seemed beyond question and would prove, one felt, a standard feature of his life.

‘I thought at the very least you would come back with an heiress in your luggage,' Prudence told him.

‘Next time,' he promised. ‘Yes—it may well be, for some of those girls are quite extraordinary. They sparkle, just like a June morning—very wholesome, very nice. Unless, of course, I should encounter a Red Indian princess. How about that, Prudence? That may even satisfy my craving for originality.'

‘I imagine it would kill your father. But you should not stay away too long, Blaize, for I understand your brother has stolen a march on you this time.'

‘You understand that, do you?' he said, his grey eyes amused but unusually careful. ‘You mean the combing company, I suppose? Yes, I expect it could look rather sinister—as if he had taken advantage of my absence to convince my father. But he has been talking about combing machines for a long time, you know, and all it really means is that this time he has finally got his figures right, or my father would not have listened to a word. Well, it is a dirty business, wool-combing, and I am not on fire to get into it.'

‘I understand he didn't ask you.'

‘Why, Prudence, how very understanding you are. And how sharp. No, as it happens, he didn't ask me. Law Valley Wool-combers is to belong to Nicholas—and my father, of course—which is a very sensible move, since all our wool needs combing, and Nicholas will be obliged to give us priority over the Hobhouses and the rest. My word, my brother is going to be busy. A new wife, a new venture of his own to get off the ground, and our sheds at Lawcroft and Tarn Edge to manage all by himself whenever I am away, which will be a great deal of the time. But, dear Prudence, if you imagine he is trying to push me out, you may be easy, for I shall have my share of the Barforth mills—oh yes—and keep my hands clean of engine grease while I'm about it. Nicky will probably make a fortune for himself, but he will also increase mine, you know. The new combing machines are speeding up the whole industry: the faster the wool can be combed, the faster we can spin it and weave it, which means there will be more of it for me to sell—no more long faces from the shed managers and my brother when I tell them the delivery dates I've agreed to. Don't worry about me, Prudence. I confess I like it. But there's really no need.'

Nicholas's venture, of which he had spoken to me so eagerly, so long ago, soon became a reality, a low, scowling building not too far from Lawcroft Fold, dominated by a sign which proclaimed it ‘Law Valley Wool-combers', an enterprise, like all its predecessors, which brought prosperity to some, great hardship to the hand-combers whose slow, laborious, none too healthy calling would soon be at an end. Some of them, of course—a few—would be employed by Nicholas; others would find work elsewhere, any work, but most of them, quite soon, were simply cast adrift, abandoned, unnecessary, their presence at every street corner becoming so menacing, so inconvenient, that something, it was felt, would have to be done.

‘They're hungry,' Mayor Agbrigg said, once again, knowing from his own meagre past that, in work or out of work, the rent had still to be paid, body and soul held somehow—if only barely—together.

‘They're impertinent,' Aunt Hannah replied, having received her share of muttered threats and obscene gestures from men who, having witnessed the death of their trade and their hopes for the future, were not concerned with good manners.

‘They're a damned nuisance,' said many others, and so Mayor Agbrigg and my sister Prudence formed, almost single-handed, the Wool-combers'Aid Association with the object of placing these men in other situations or, when that proved impossible, of helping them to emigrate; Mayor Agbrigg persuading his colleagues to allocate fifteen hundred pounds from the rates for the purpose, Prudence, for many years after, continuing to receive letters from Australia and Canada offering ill-spelled news—both good and bad—of the families she had befriended.

‘I am collecting for the hand-combers,' she told Blaize at the start of the troubles. ‘Now then—I am curious to know what the size of your donation will be?'

‘Oh—you may put me down for twice as much as my brother,' he told her, those grey eyes wickedly twinkling, frankly admitting that he was offering her nothing at all.

But whatever strife there might or might not be among the Barforths, I was not directly concerned in it. They were rich and would be richer, but I had riches too, a man who needed to see me and touch me, who hesitated, frowning, in the hallway if it seeemed to him I was not there, his face warming instantly when he discovered himself mistaken. And if I was anxious about anything it was my conviction that I could not possibly give him enough, the inexplicable failure of my body, which so desired his caresses, to achieve the climax of pleasure he had described to me and wished me to share.

‘Giles, I am so sorry. Is something wrong with me, do you think?'

‘No, no, darling—don't think about it. Don't try. Just let it happen—there's time—'

But always, turning to him eagerly in the night, my limbs would begin to glow expectantly beneath his hands, everything in me wanting this perfect unity he spoke of, a fluttering at the core of the body, the hopeful wing-beating of a caged bird I wanted to set free, struggled to set free, not for my own pleasure but to please him. Yet always, at the final moment, when I was sure that this time, finally, I would succeed, I could feel it begin to slip away, receding forlornly back to its source, unfulfilled, leaving me so desolate in the face of his disappointment that I could have wept.

‘Giles, I'm so sorry.'

‘Darling, don't be.'

‘Does it make your pleasure less?'

‘No—my pleasure comes in any case. And the real pleasure is that I love you.'

‘Oh yes—and I want to give you everything you want. You
have
to be happy, Giles. I must make you happy.'

‘You do make me happy. Don't distress yourself—that alone could make me miserable.'

But the physical pleasure I could not attain became a symbol in my mind of the differences between us. I loved Giles. I was not in love with him in the piercing, consuming way I had been in love with Nicholas. And, in my desire to transfer that total feeling, all of a piece, from one man to the other, I came to believe this physical climax to be not only desirable but essential. If I could experience it, I would belong to him, and he would know that he possessed me. I must give him the satisfaction of seeing me completely enraptured, needing him, my body enslaved by his. I must. And my own determination, my fear of failure, created such tension inside me that night after night I did fail, my body defeating its own purposes.

‘It doesn't mean I don't want you, Giles. I do—I do.'

‘I know, just let it happen. Darling—I am asking too much, too soon.'

‘No! You're not. You could never ask enough. Why must you always try to take the blame? Don't be so
nice
to me, Giles, when I don't deserve it. If I'm inadequate, then tell me so.'

And there were times when, my teeth clenched with frustration, I would have allowed him to beat me, to force out of me in any way he could the response I was so desperate to give.

But he was unfailingly gentle, and in all other ways I knew we were happy. This was my life—and his—together, inseparable, my purpose, my reason for occupying my place in the world. I had recovered my pleasant pastures, and wanted no other.

Caroline was confined that June, a year after her marriage, bringing forth with characteristic flair not one child but two, a pair of healthy boys who came into the world with no apparent fuss, and were allowed to make none thereafter, lying quietly in their cradles at her bedside while she made out her lists of the furniture, the groceries and the guests she desired to be delivered. Dominic Chard, who would be Sir Dominic one day, master of Liston by and all it contained, just a shock of dark hair at present, on a lace pillow, a diminutive fist reaching out for the sunbeams as they came through her window, looking quite capable, I thought—like his mother—of grasping them. And his brother, his junior by just ten vital minutes. Master Noel St. John Chard, who, with no lands and titles to inherit, would have to look beyond Listonby for his livelihood.

‘I suppose the young one will be a soldier,' she told me, having accepted my gifts and compliments. ‘Yes—a colonel of Hussars. I am not quite sure just what that is, but if it should be as grand as it sounds then that is what I shall make him. Colonel Noel St. John Chard—it sounds well, at any rate. We have already had a set-to about the christening, since Matthew has two cousins who are bishops, and my suggestion that we should settle the matter by having them baptize one infant each was not well received. They both expect to baptize the eldest, of course, and unless they come out of their sulks I shall ask the vicar of Cullingford to officiate, which would really put the cat among the pigeons. Well—I am ahead of Georgiana and she is not likely to catch up with me. In fact she is so flat still that one wonders if it is really more than her imagination. She will have the poor mite in a ditch, if she is not careful, with her horse for midwife. Well then, Faith, I shall expect you and your clever husband to the Christening Dinner.'

Georgiana, however, gave birth a month later, luxuriously if not easily in her bedroom at Tarn Edge, her labour, despite her athletic habits and stoical turn of mind, lasting for thirty-six agonizing hours and requiring both the old-fashioned Dr. Overdale and the progressive Dr. Ashburn to bring about its conclusion.

She was still very weak when I called to see her, still confined to her bed, although I had allowed a full three weeks to pass by, but her face on the pillow looked so spent, her body so boyish and frail, somehow so vulnerable, something about her light green eyes and the tumble-down mass of her coppery hair so touching, that my lurking fear of Nicholas—for this was his bed, his child, his woman—was evaporated by my sympathy.

‘Georgiana, was it so very dreadful?'

‘Oh yes,' she said, smiling. ‘How nice of you to ask me that, for now I can say that indeed it was—quite dreadful. Everybody else has been telling me how well I look—when I know I look a perfect fright—and how brave I was, when in fact I screamed so loud that Nicky must surely have heard me above the racket of his looms or whatever. Yes—dreadful. I was quite angry, really, at being proved such a coward, which made me scream the harder. Your husband was marvellous. Dr. Overdale told me to “Hush, hush little woman”, but your husband told me to scream if I wanted to and swear too, which I did, I can assure you. Well, there he is—the cause of all the trouble: Master Gervase Clevedon Barforth. He is rather small—one could lose him, almost, among all that muslin and lace they have draped over him—but when he fills out a little I believe he may resemble my brother. He has not much hair now, but you can see that what bit there is will quite definitely be auburn, like Perry's. Would you like to hold him? Most people seem to think it obligatory, but, if you shouldn't care for it, I will perfectly understand.'

I picked him up awkwardly, having no experience of the new born, and, feeling nothing beneath the elaborately swathed shawls more substantial than a kitten, I put him hastily down again, worrying, as I returned to her bedside, that I had somehow injured him.

‘I wanted him to be born at the Abbey,' she said wistfully. ‘I confess to you that I was quite wicked and went over there as often as I could towards the end, hoping that my pains would begin and I would have to stay. The walks I took—you can't imagine—striding out up hill and down dale with Perry, who even took me up in his curricle to give me a good shaking. Heavens, we drove all the way to Patterswick, hell for leather, to no avail. I did so want him to be born at Galton. I wanted to call him Peregrine, too, but Nicky says one Peregrine is enough, although no one in the world could have objected to my naming him Gervase for my grandfather and Clevedon for myself. It is only right, after all, that he should have our family name, for, if Perry does not marry, then it will be this little Gervase, none other, who will inherit the Abbey.'

‘Our cousin Nicholas may not care for that,' Prudence said later when I had made my report. ‘I cannot think he has set himself to build an empire with the intention of seeing it squandered by the Clevedons. It is Caroline who wanted the land and the title. Nicholas merely wanted the woman, and Georgiana may as well make up her mind that Master Gervase Clevedon Barforth is destined for the mills.'

The Clevedons, too, had relatives in high ecclesiastical places, but the christening of the infant Gervase was a very private affair in the Abbey chapel, far removed in spirit from the ceremony at Listonby, which seemed more like a launching into society of the future baronet, the future colonel of Hussars, than a baptism. The house, where alterations were still in progress, was crammed with Chards of all varieties, noble, religious, sporting and military, who, having said all that was necessary on the subject of Master Dominic and Master Noel, attended a christening banquet in the eighteenth-century dining-room, a triumph of truffled roast chickens and partridges in aspic, of lobster
au gratin
and spiced sirloin of beef, while outside in the park a whole ox was roasted for the Listonby tenants assembled at tables beneath the sycamores and elm trees.

Caroline's new upstairs ballroom was still littered with carpentry and unfinished plasterwork, but nevertheless there were two dances at Listonby that evening, the Great Hall cleared for family and friends, a marquee erected on the lawn and stocked with several barrels of ale to accommodate the farmers and villagers, the huntsman and his wife, the kennel-huntsman and his exceedingly pretty daughter, who did not seem too alarmed by the attentions of Peregrine Clevedon.