Give Us This Day (18 page)

Several men glanced at her approvingly, among them Tim Clarke, owner of Spanish Flyer, placed third in the last race. Like everybody in the Pale, she knew Tim, a rare character in a city teeming with characters, and wealthy to boot, having made his fortune as an importer of Continental wines and spirits, of which he had what amounted to a monopoly hereabouts. He had two famous sons, she recalled, Rory and Desmond; the first was an M.P. for a Meath constituency and a prominent fillibuster in the Home Rule campaign at Westminster, and the second was holding a commission in the 2nd Dragoon Guards, a brilliant steeplechaser who had twice come close to winning the Grand National at Aintree. Thus old Tim, fat as a wine vat and oozing a geniality that ran counter to his reputation for striking hard bargains, had a foot in both camps. Rory’s fiery speeches at Westminster established him as a true patriot, and Desmond’s profession, plus his sporting reputation in England, ensured the goodwill of Dublin Castle. Tim was also said to have a gallant reputation with the ladies and at once proved it by being the first to catch her eye, doff his hat, and take advantage of the fact that she was the only unaccompanied woman in the buffet. He said, with a bow, “Mrs. Clinton Coles, I believe! Allow me to get you something. Glass of champagne, eh?” Without waiting for assent, he snapped his fingers and two waiters came at the double.

“Tea, if you please, Mr. Clarke. I’m parched for a cup, and I’ve lost my husband.”

“You mean he’s lost you, and it’s mighty careless of him,” he said, ushering her to a seat. “Why, if you were my wife, Mrs. Coles, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight at the Curragh. A rare lot of garrison mashers on the prowl today, ma’am.”

“He went to place a bet,” Joanna said, enjoying the small stir she seemed to be causing in here.

“He didn’t back my horse, I hope,” Clarke said.

“No, indeed,” Joanna said, matching his sauciness, “Clinton said Spanish Flyer isn’t due to win until next time out, Mr. Clarke.” He laughed heartily, his sharp blue eyes lost in ripples of rosy flesh.

“Very spry of him. Tell him I’m saving the colt for something better, but I’m not such a fool as to be more explicit in here, my dear.”

He somehow managed to imply that a few moments privacy with her might prove a worthwhile investment, and it suddenly struck her that she could exploit this encounter to her own and Clinton’s advantage. She recalled Clint grumbling, only last week, that he had underquoted for Tim Clarke’s all-Ireland distribution but still lost out to an Irish haulier, Brayley. She also remembered what Clint had said on that occasion, telling her that old Clarke would not risk his son’s displeasure by putting money in English pockets. She thought:
If I can put in a word for the firm with someone of his standing, Clint is going to look very foolish when he shows up here as soon as he’s done flattering the Donnelly filly
, and she said, carefully, “I’m not sure I should be civil to you, Mr. Clarke. My husband tells me he pared an estimate to the bone on your behalf last week, and you accepted Brayley’s tender in spite of the fact that his quotation was higher and his service far less reliable.”

The thrust seemed to delight the old fellow. He wheezed for a full half-minute before saying, “Bless my soul, Mrs. Coles, you’re a chip off the old block and no mistake! I knew your father when he opened up over here. Shrewd man. He brought haulage costs down with a bump and not before time. The Dubliners were holding the lot of us up to ransom. Now when would that be? Five years ago?”

“Eight. My husband replaced Mr. O’Dowd as Irish manager, soon after we were married. Now be so good as to tell me, Mr. Clarke, why did we lose the contract? I have to know, for when Clinton finds I’ve been talking to you he’ll quiz me all the way home. Was it simply because Mr. Brayley is an Irishman?”

The attack, pressed home in this way, momentarily disconcerted the wine merchant, so that he welcomed the respite granted him by the arrival of the teatray. But then, before he could counter, Clinton arrived out of breath, and not seeing Clarke at once, scowled his displeasure and said, “Really, my dear, wasn’t it rather silly to disappear like that? I wasn’t gone but ten minutes…” but broke off when he became aware of Clarke’s grin across the table.

Tim said gently, “Come now, don’t scold her, man. She’s only here to argue your case, and how many wives would do that in public? Especially young and fetching ones like yours. Here, let me buy you a drink to take the sour taste of that contract out of your mouth,” and again he summoned a waiter, this time ordering two whiskies and sodas. “I know that’s your tipple, Coles. It’s my business to know these things. Don’t let your tea go cold, my dear.”

Then followed, for Clinton Coles, one of the most bewildering intervals of his sojourn in Ireland, for it soon became clear that a man whose patronage could mean as much as two thousand a year to the firm and who had resisted all his efforts (including costly backhanders to warehouse clerks) to point custom Swann’s way, had taken a great fancy to his wife and was vulnerable on that account, if half they said about Tim Clarke’s gallivanting was true. For ten minutes they talked horses, but they soon got around to business, and the upshot of the occasion was a promise from Clarke that he would review the contract when it came up for confirmation at his quarterly board meeting next month.

By then the last race was run, and they had downed a couple of whiskies apiece while Joanna sipped her tea and concentrated on looking excessively demure. It was when they rose to leave, however, that Clinton Coles became fully aware of his wife’s potential as a business asset. Clarke said, “If you’re thinking of attending the garrison supper-ball on Thursday week, could I prevail on you and your charming wife to join my party as my guests? The fact is, I’m short of young people this year, and we ought to take advantage of a gel as decorative as Mrs. Coles.”

Clinton murmured that he would be delighted to accept, and Joanna, glowing with triumph, added that they would anticipate the occasion with the greatest pleasure. She reasoned that old man Clarke would have no means of knowing that year after year had passed without the Coleses having received a coveted invitation to the liveliest event of the Dublin season.

They were bowling homewards before Clinton, slowly recovering from the shock of acknowledging his wife as an emissary extraordinary, squeezed her hand and said, feelingly, “My dear, you were sensational! We’ve as good as hooked that old rascal, and it’s all your doing. How did it come about? You went into that buffet in a pet, didn’t you?”

“Oh, not really,” Joanna said, generously, “I was aware you were one of the wasps buzzing round Deirdre Donnelly’s jampot, but why should that bother me? I really did need some tea, and as soon as the old goat started sidling up to me I thought I’d take advantage of it. After all, where’s the harm? He’s over sixty and only playing games with himself, isn’t he?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” Clinton said, chuckling. “They tell me he can still give a very good account of himself with the barmaids, and seeing how dashing you look today no one can blame him trying his luck. I would have thought, however, he’d turn glum as soon as I appeared on the scene. Maybe he reasoned I’d turn a blind eye for two thousand a year.”

“Ah, and would you?”

He looked outraged. “Good Lord, woman, you surely don’t mean…” but she laughed and pinched his knee, underlining the tolerant and cheerfully sensual relationship that had developed between them since she and her sister Helen had switched beaux at a Penshurst picnic in their youth. She knew very well that he was not in love with her in the way she had been with him since she had surrendered to him on a Kentish hillside, but she flattered herself that she could still make him forget the Deirdre Donnellys of this world when she had him in her arms.

“I’m only teasing,” she said, “and you surely know it. Well, we didn’t back a winner, but, taken all round, I’d call it the most profitable day we’ve had at the races, wouldn’t you?”

“I would indeed,” he said, “and it isn’t over yet, my dear.”

Neither was it, in the sense he implied. That night, in their pleasant bedroom overlooking the Kingstown busy harbour, he was a boy again and she reflected that he was never likely to be anything else, despite his cares of office and a propensity to spend rather more than they earned each year. And yet, in the event, she was wrong in assuming today had been a profitable day for the Dublin branch of Swann-on-Wheels. She had no means of knowing that her chance encounter with Tim Clarke, at a Curragh race-meeting, was the very first detonation in a chain of explosions down the years that would, by the spring of 1916, divide her loyalties and Clinton’s, and that the wounds inflicted by the breach would not be healed until Dublin itself was a battlefield.

* * *

Two months’ voyaging and a week’s uncomfortable land trek from the Dublin Pale, where the London Mission had its pitch under the walls of Peitang Cathedral in the Imperial City of Peking, Helen Coles, once boon companion of Joanna, and sister-in-law to Clinton, was also recalling the famous picnic on the wooded hillside above Penshurst Place in April 1888, an event that had led to her marriage with Rowland Coles and her presence here in the enervating summer heat of the Chinese land mass. The heat, the smells, and the unceasing clamour of the great city were factors that disinclined her to continue the battle to persuade herself that she had the best of the bargain on that occasion.

In the years of traipsing that had followed her acceptance of Rowley’s proposal, she had made sustained efforts to convince herself that she was very privileged to be the wife of a man whose sole ambition in life was to relieve suffering, teach aliens the rudiments of Western hygiene, and bestow upon them the benefits of a Christian way of life. Having her full share of Swann tenacity, however, she stuck gamely to her endeavours, but here in Peking, a mild improvement on their billet in East Africa, she was conscious of losing ground rapidly. Her temper was not improving and neither was her health but, what was more depressing, she was coming to terms with the certainty that she was thoroughly unsuited to the life of a medical missionary dedicated to his calling, and was wishing heartily that something would stifle her yearning for a humdrum life in the company of Europeans, living out selfish lives in a comfortable background. And this made her feel shamefully disloyal to poor Rowley, whom she still cherished, but in the way one might cherish the chief of a tribe, or the austere and remote father of a large and indigent family.

She had come to look upon Rowley in this way by slow and arduous stages, signposted over nine years of marriage by his expectations of her as a helpmate and deputy, rather than someone licensed to release him, from time to time, of his fearsome responsibilities, but she had proved miserably unequal to the task and awareness of this made her a failure in her own eyes.

She knew, at the deepest level of consciousness, that it was not her fault, that no mere woman could wean him, even momentarily, from his resolve to work miracles among the heathens, first upon their bodies, and then (providing he had the time) upon their souls. She learned this very early in their marriage, possibly by the manner in which he made love to her on the rare occasions he could be coaxed from this quest in savage, fly-pestered backwaters for his personal Holy Grail. On all occasions, even when on leave and at a remove from his flock, it was she who had to initiate each encounter and remind him shyly that she was his wife as well as his dispenser; and when he acquiesced, in his quiet, grave way, he performed his marital functions absentmindedly, as though he was carrying out some repetitive task, with a particle of his mind. Then he would lie flat on his back, pondering some problem concerned with the spread of typhus, or the contamination of drinking water, or an antidote for the bite of some lethal reptile, and was quite lost to her in the physical sense until the next occasion.

It had a very depressing effect on her, this withdrawal, as though, each time it occurred, he was saying that she was incapable of stimulating his senses; and fleetingly, with a kind of terrible nostalgia, she remembered the frolics of other, less exalted men, who had embraced her in dark corners of Tryst, sometimes letting their hands stray over her breasts and buttocks, proclaiming what she had always assumed a male compulsion to fondle and be fondled. Sometimes she found herself envying his convert nurses when he lost his temper on account of their clumsiness or dilatoriness and snapped at them in a way that sent them scuttling. It would be gratifying, she thought, to goad him to a point of fury where he would unhitch his belt and thrash her and make her smart and cry out, for this would at least establish that she stood for more than a mute, unpaid assistant in the wards where his patients queued for a few moments of his time.

All the other missionaries’ wives—and there were more than a dozen here in Peking—seemed to adapt to this passive role; but mostly they were middle-aged, with complexions dried and skins wrinkled by equatorial suns, whereas she was still only twenty-seven and could never banish from her mind the greenness of Kentish hopfields and the freshness of meadows and coppices in the Weald. The death of their child, after a few sickly weeks of life, had been a double tragedy for her. Its survival might have prevailed upon him to send her home to await his next leave. As it was, he seemed to take it for granted that she would remain as isolated from civilisation as a female Crusoe, and she had begun to doubt whether she had the hardihood to endure a three-year stint at the Peking Mission.

The possibility of their being shifted, she gathered, was remote. Nothing dramatic ever happened out here, as China pursued its timeless journey down the centuries. The Chinese had developed a way of life that nothing could hope to alter, and the great powers—Britain, America, Germany, and Austria—enjoyed their limited concessions in this incredibly old city. She discounted rumours of a growing opposition to the foreigner building in northern and eastern provinces. The wily old Empress would never be so stupid as to challenge the might and technology of the West, and any move against isolated missions and trading outposts would be savagely repressed by Imperial troops.