Flint and Roses (42 page)

‘My nieces will be accompanying me,' she told them in a voice that permitted no argument, but in the end only Prudence made the trip, returning to tell me that, although Jonas had treated her as if she had been a schoolgirl, he had been quite informative on occasions, rather more human, she believed, on the days when the monumental splendours of the Machinery Court, the thrust and jostle of the galleries, had proved too much for Aunt Hannah and had obliged her to remain at home.

‘It is really not to be missed, Faith, since it is not likely to happen again. You should go.'

But I hesitated, decided against it, and then, as the anniversary of Giles's death approached, I took fright and was persuaded by Aunt Verity to go down to London and visit the Exhibition on the expensive, exclusive Friday and Saturday, and then to be her guest in Bournemouth for a week or two.

It was the hottest part of August, intense in all its colours, all its odours, the richness of grass and flowers pollen-heavy at the summer's end, the park swollen with its excited but orderly crowds, the crystal mansion itself an enormous, many-faceted diamond in the sun, every bit as miraculous as I had expected.

‘We will take it in stages, my dear,' Aunt Verity told me, lingering at the breakfast-table of the very cosy little house she had taken for the season. ‘It is very vast and very fatiguing. There are pretty things and fearful things, and things which seem to have neither rhyme nor reason. And quite splendid things. My dear, in the civil engineering section they have a model of Liverpool docks with more than a thousand rigged ships—it is quite amazing. Gird yourself, darling! for at the risk of throwing you into a fit of the vapours I had best warn you that there are something in the region of fourteen thousand exhibitors. You will need a good pair of boots, and a smelling bottle.'

Vast indeed and, for a while, exciting to be a part of that international throng, snatches of foreign speech, glances from liquid, foreign eyes returning me to the carefree journeyings I had made with my mother, her ‘special time', her butterfly days which she had known even then could not last. But, as my mother had said, once I had marvelled at the twenty-four-ton block of coal at the entrance, the crystal fountain refreshing the nave, the fifteen hundred feet of Cullingford exhibits, dominated, one was obliged to notice, by the Barforths; when I had spent an amusing half-hour watching the medal-making machine with its steady production of fifty medals a minute, the envelope-making machine with its even more impressive output of two thousand, seven hundred envelopes an hour; when I had admired the texture of Aubusson tapestries, of Turkish silks and Indian pearls, the gleaming blades of Bowie knives, made in Sheffield for American Indian-fighters; when I had marvelled at household furnishings and fittings of every conceivable shape and size and ornamentation, and my aunt and I had further amused ourselves by guessing the possible uses to which many of them could be applied, I discovered that machines have a tendency to look very much alike when one has seen several hundred of them, and I was not sorry to go outside.

Blaize, who had spent the winter abroad, escorted us about the Machinery Court on our second day, looking bronzed and handsome and very much in his natural habitat, having so many acquaintances now, both in London and overseas, that he could move through this cosmopolitan crowd with the ease of a man in his own drawing-room. But I had seen little of him since Giles died, his light nature disliking too close a contact with life's harsher realities, and it was Uncle Joel himself who supplied us with lemonade, found us a seat in the shade, entertained us to a prolonged and lavish luncheon and then—unwilling to leave his wife to the mercy of underlings—saw us on our way to Bournemouth.

Their new house, Rosemount, which had been described to me as a ‘holiday cottage', was of course quite grand, a white-painted villa in a landscaped acre set high above the pleasant hilly little town, its rooms a shade impersonal, being new and freshly decorated in apple-greens, mossy tints of lilac and rose, but spacious, airy, offering an undisturbed view of a green hillside scattered with poppies, scented with the freshness of blue air and a peaceful, sun-flecked summer sea.

‘We shall be quiet for a day or so,' Aunt Verity said, ‘and I confess I shall be glad of it.'

But the Barforths were never quiet for long, the very next morning bringing a smart, highly polished landau to the door containing a dimpled, mischievous little lady—my mother—peering at us from the shade of an enormous ruched and frilled bonnet and an elaborate, ivory-handled parasol, accompanied by a gentleman I had never seen before, a curly-haired Irishman somewhere in middle life but by no means in the state of decay of which my mother had been complaining. He was well-fleshed, square-cut, with dark eyes that were never still, a smile perpetually tilting the corners of his restless, possibly insolent, but certainly well-formed mouth.

‘Good heavens!' Aunt Verity said, scattering the rose-petals she had been gathering for pot-pourri. ‘Surely—it is Mr. Adair?'

‘The very same, ma'am,' he told her. ‘Absolutely at your service. You'll pardon the intrusion, I know, for I couldn't resist the temptation of making the acquaintance of Elinor's daughter.'

And feeling that this was perhaps a man not much given to the resisting of temptation—a man, in fact, who liked to be tempted—I held out my hand, finding his grip firm and warm, if a trifle too much inclined to linger.

‘Mrs. Ashburn,' he said, his merry eyes concentrating totally on my face, inviting me to believe that for as long as his hand was in mine no other woman existed.

‘Mr. Adair.'

‘She's beautiful,' he said to my mother, still gazing at me, a man, it seemed, who appreciated his own charm and knew how to use it, who had relied on it, perhaps, more than once to ensure his survival.

‘Of course,' my mother said. ‘Could any daughter of mine be otherwise? Faith, this is Mr. Daniel Adair who was employed—a long time ago—by your father. You will give us tea, Verity, will you not? And then I am afraid we cannot stay. I simply thought you may care to renew your acquaintance with Mr. Adair, and would be interested to see that had renewed mine. We are returning to London later in the day. Daniel, you may take my arm across the grass, for I declare the sun has weakened me—or something has at any rate.'

And, understanding from the sparkling quality of her laughter, the languorous, faintly wicked but completely joyful glances she had once bestowed on M. Fauret and Signor Marchetti, that she had taken another lover, I was amused at the thought of Mr. Oldroyd—who might still become her husband—and I was glad for her.

Georgiana arrived with her maid the following Friday, worn out, she said, and bored to distraction by London, her views on crystal palaces, on internationalism, on this pandering by royalty to the middle classes, exactly matching Matthew Chard's.

‘Well, the city was always a poxy place,' she said. ‘I must get it out of my system one way or another,' and helping herself, not to the suggested tea and cakes, but to a bottle of red wine, she went out into the garden and remained there, sprawling gipsy-fashion on the grass, drinking and dozing, plaiting daisy-chains with a listless hand, so that when Nicholas and his father appeared she was sufficiently mellowed to throw her arms around her husband's neck and bite him, quite hard I thought, on the ear.

‘You've got grass in your hair,' he told her.

‘Yes. And I've been asleep with my face in the sun, which is going to make me as brown as a peg-hawker. I've had a glass of wine too, darling, which has made me feel—oh—very glad to see you.'

They went off to their bedroom to change for dinner, my aunt and uncle to theirs, and, spending a moment or two longer in the garden, since my own dressing, with no one to help or hinder me, would take less time, I eventually followed them. My black-beaded evening dress and its half-dozen petticoats were laid ready on the bed, a cheerful, fresh-faced girl of the type Aunt Verity always had about her waiting to assist me. My silver-backed brushes, my black velvet ribbons, the perfume my sister Celia considered too exotic for a lady, scandalous for a widow, were all to hand. And, as I brushed out my hair, peering at myself in the mirror with accustomed concentration, it could not matter to me that in the room next to mine Nicholas Barforth was very probably making love to his wife. It
did
not matter to me. I had not spoken a dozen words to him these past three years beyond the bounds of common politeness. I was better acquainted now with the unusual, annoying, fascinating creature he had married than with Nicholas himself. But I had been obliged recently, by events totally beyond my control, to admit that my body, like my mother's, had acquired the need for a man's caresses and had proved far less docile these past few months than I liked.

Emotion did not trouble me. Emotionally I was cool and serene, indulging myself, as I had always done, with a little humour, a little vanity, remembering, even in these mourning garments, how to make my hair paler by running a black velvet ribbon through it, the effect of dark jet earrings against a fair skin, nothing to break the stark elegance of black and white but a pair of blue eyes which, because they were short-sighted and weak, looked vague and cloudy and—one hoped—mysterious. And I took these pains, resorted to this artifice, not for the admiration of Nicholas or anyone else, but because beneath them I was still the plain, lanky girl my father had despised; and I would not let her show.

Cool, then, in the daylight; composed, even, with a branch of bed-time candles in my hand; less so when my disobedient body woke me in the night, or, worse than that, carried me in my sleep to the brink of an unfulfilled sensation and abandoned me there, the pit of my stomach burning, my limbs aching, straining to grasp that extra moment which would give me the relief I craved, and which was always denied. Relief, not love. Yet, as I well knew, the only relief available to me was in remarriage, and since that was still unthinkable I had no choice but to endure—as my father had taught me—with dignity.

I was the first to join my aunt and uncle in the drawing-room that night, Nicholas and Georgiana lingering upstairs, Blaize not yet arrived, my uncle by no means pleased at the delay.

‘He left London two days ago, and in a damned hurry at that. And now where the devil is he?'

But Blaize, who was fond of a good entrance, made one now, heralded by a mighty clattering of hooves and tearing-up of gravel, flinging his hat and cane to an eager parlourmaid and sauntering to greet us already in his evening clothes.

‘I changed—en
route'
he said, the perfection of his attire proof enough that it had not been in a carriage. ‘And, if I've kept you waiting, I know you'll forgive me, mamma, since I
am
your favourite son—which leads me to wonder where your other son has got to?'

‘He's here.' Nicholas said, coming into the room. Georgiana a step or two behind him, her green silk dress certainly expensive, its lace trim quite exquisite, but put on anyhow, shrugged on at the last moment with laughter and whispering, her body, still languorous with pleasure, her bright hair ready at the first abrupt movements to come swishing and tumbling down.

‘I presume we may eat now?' Uncle Joel said, and so we ate, a delicious meal, as Aunt Verity's meals always were, Nicholas eating to satisfy his appetite, Blaize with a shade more appreciation than that, Georgiana pecking sparrow-like at this and the other, drinking, ‘to drown the memory of London', she said, raising her glass, and then, ‘to the memory of green meadows and pastures'.

‘To ploughed fields and muddy ditches,' Blaize answered her, refilling her glass, leaning across the table to tuck a loose strand of her hair back into its uncertain, copper-tinted coil, his eyes straying, perhaps only from force of habit, to the low neck of her dress.

‘To wet moorland mornings,' she toasted him.

‘To wind and foul weather,' he replied.

‘Don't you hate London, Faith?' she asked me.

‘No. I like it. I like cities altogether.'

‘Yes,' she said, considering me, her head on one side, her glass, I noticed, empty again. ‘I suppose they suit you—you're so polished and sculptured and poised. I can't even imagine you in a flutter. Oh Faith—Faith—why is it you always do things right, whereas I—? It's not fair. Why do you look like a swan, when I'm such a bedraggled duck? Doesn't she look like a swan, Nicky? Blaize, doesn't she?'

‘She does,' Blaize said raising his glass to me. ‘A very gracious, clever swan, my Faith.'

‘
Your
Faith?' Nicholas said, looking up sharply, scowling through the candlelight.

‘Oh my!' Georgiana chuckled, her tipsy face alive with delighted mischief. ‘Goodness gracious—wishful thinking, eh Blaize? My brother Perry took a fancy to her too—oh yes he did—he saw her at that dreadful concert hall and very nearly had a fit. Who is she?
How
is she? Possible, likely, not one chance in a million? Get her to Galton, little sister, and—'

‘That,' Nicholas said through his teeth, ‘is enough, Georgiana, I warn you—'

‘Oh lovely, he's angry with me,' she said, bathing us all in her smiles. And then, just as abruptly, her flaunting recklessness changed to a quite touching remorse.

‘Oh dear. Faith, I do apologize. I like you so much, and I wouldn't upset you for the world.'

‘I'm not upset.'

‘You must be.'

‘Only if you insist on it. I think I'd rather feel flattered instead, although I can't agree that you look like a duck, Georgiana.'

‘Nor I,' Blaize murmured, smiling at me. ‘A little bird of the wild wood, perhaps, swimming all bewildered and amazed in a duck pond. How's that?'

We went back into the drawing-room, disposing ourselves suitably. Aunt Verity's eyes watching both her sons with care, ready, as she had always been, to step between them.