A Song Twice Over (3 page)

They were travelling in the same direction.

‘And is there no one to meet you in Liverpool, at all?'

‘No one.'

‘You'll be needing help then, I'm thinking.'

She smiled and nodded, making a helpless gesture at her bulging carpet-bags with long-fingered, brown-skinned hands which had no real helplessness in them whatsoever. No wedding ring either, he was quick to notice, although he felt no urge to condemn her for that, his own inclinations being far from domestic, his tolerance for the sins of the flesh extremely broad.

‘Then if you will allow me to assist you …?'

Of course she would. What else might she allow? For another half hour her bright, bold eyes smiled and seemed to make promises in direct contrast to the careful pitch of her voice as softly, demurely, she offered the picture of herself she wished him to see. And when he leaned a little closer, hearing only the unspoken promises, she enquired suddenly but just as demurely, ‘Is it no baggage you have, then?'

‘None to speak of.'

She smiled at him. ‘Daniel Carey, how does that happen? What can you be running away from?
Home
?'

He returned her smile, his dark, shrewd eyes meeting her shrewd, blue ones and holding them a moment in a kind of acknowledgement. A recognition. He was twenty-three years old and ‘home'had been very long ago, an impression, merely, at this distance, from which he could gain nothing now by remembering.

‘Home'had ended suddenly, very savagely, forcing him overnight, as one forced hot-house plants, from a serious, studious child to a disciplined, tempered man, and he knew that this girl did not really care what – if anything – he might be running from now. What mattered to her was the convenience of his protection on her way to Leeds. What mattered to him was getting there, and then the next place. The one after.

They were two coins disturbingly alike on one side, dangerously dissimilar on the other. He was a young man who believed in grand designs and complex ideals of truth and freedom. While Cara Adeane, on that golden summer morning, believed in nothing but herself.

‘Have you made the crossing before?' he asked her.

‘That I have. Twice before. And you?'

‘I come and go.'

Yes. She had understood that much about him at once. And she supposed that the authorities – who did not care for
too
much talk of freedom when they remembered what it had led to in France – while not snapping at his heels precisely, had already started to be
curious
about him, just beginning to take notice of his ‘comings and goings'and the identity of his friends.

Not a wicked man. Not a criminal. Just someone – and the Adeanes had always known plenty of those – who wanted something that others did not wish them to have. The opening of English ports to cheap foreign corn perhaps to make the price of bread more reasonable. Or the right of the common man to vote at election time. Even a secret ballot so that he could use his vote against his landlord if he chose, or against his employer without fear of losing his cottage or his job. None of these things being greatly to the taste of landlords and employers like the Duke of Wellington or my lords Melbourne and Palmerston and the rest of the Queen's ministers who seemed forever alarmed that the revolution of the common man, which had begun so bloodily and not really so very long ago, in France, might spread with its tumbrils and guillotines and its Rights of that dangerous common Man, to London Town.

And to which particular brand of Liberty, Equality or Fraternity, she wondered, might Daniel Carey subscribe? For she knew every one of them by heart, having heard them expressed heatedly, poetically, violently, evangelically, in every lodging-house and workshop and servants' hall she had ever frequented, while she had listened, smiled, agreed with each and every solution and put her faith in none. So that she felt no concern – why should she? – about the exact cause for which Daniel Carey chose to risk himself, as she supposed he did, or to go hungry for, as it seemed he sometimes must by the pared-down, fine-drawn look of him. He was just a man, after all, who would take advantage of her if he could. Unless she put a stop to it. Or seized her own advantage first.

Yet his lean, dark face had an oddly slanting smile of a kind she had never seen before, a sudden, entirely
different
smile at which she had to stop herself from looking, while his eyes – flecked with brown and amber like an agate stone – kept on looking openly at her, seeing her too clearly for either her comfort or her vanity, so that she found herself bending her neck to show him the heavy black gleam of her hair, displaying her hands, too broad and brown and capable for good-breeding but which had never yet cut peat or dug potatoes and did not intend ever to try. Wanting his admiration. Knowing, quite soon and with a deeply felt satisfaction, that it was hers.

‘And what do you do in the world, Daniel Carey?'

‘Oh – what I can. I am a schoolmaster sometimes.'

That
could hardly impress her when her father had half a dozen brothers – dry as dust, he called them – who did the same.

‘And have you been to France?'

‘I have.'

That was better. Indeed, it was the highest proof of sophistication, in her eyes, that he could offer. Although – since poor schoolmasters did not go to France for a whim or a fancy – it also marked him as someone who had found it expedient to leave his own country for a while, a political exile in Paris as she had been a financial one, who had concerned himself far more with the rights and wrongs of his fellow men than with the embroidered satins and osprey feathers which
she
had found so enchanting.

‘What did you do there?'

‘I looked about me.'

‘And what do you do now?'

He gave her a slight bow and his faintly slanting smile.

‘Oh – shall we say – yes, let's say that I escort beautiful strangers on their way to Leeds.'

She neither expected nor wanted him to say more. And it sufficed, in any case, for her to label him as a dangerous acquaintance who could disappear to suit his own need at the very moment when she might need him the most. And it was in her mind, therefore, from the start, that it would be foolish – most foolish – ever to need him
too
much at all.

Handsome, of course. And exhilarating – if she had the leisure, one day, to be exhilarated in that particular fashion. A challenge to the mind and the senses. But so was her father. And she could see little difference between the dreams of Kieron Adeane, professor of grandiose schemes, creator of false and fascinating rainbows, and the dreams of another kind which she had detected in Daniel. The result, in both cases would be the same. Cheap lodgings, darned linen, a gnawing, never-ending anxiety about the payment of a doctor's bill, a pawn-ticket, the rent. And although her mother had settled patiently and sweetly for a lifetime hovering on the fringes of such disaster, Cara already knew that she could not.

Stirring against her side her son, Liam, opened eyes as dark and velvet-textured as the heart of a violet and, finding the sea too vast for his contemplation, the sky too distant and nothing else to interest him on the crowded deck – crowds being his natural habitat – burrowed down into the folds of his mother's skirt and fell asleep again. Or at least appeared to sleep. She was never sure. For he had been very quiet since Odette, his adored
grand'maman
, had sailed for England, leaving him behind. Too quiet? Had she allowed herself to dwell on it she may well have thought so. But she had had enough to do, surely, with finding the means to feed him and clothe him, running all over Dublin tracking down work wherever it could be found, and in her fatigue and flurry she had not encouraged her son to prattle. Had she even told him, in any way he could understand, that now – at last – she was taking him to Odette? Glancing down at him, feeling the sharp tug of almost anguished affection she often felt for him but rarely managed to express, she hoped so.

‘A fine child,' said Daniel Carey, meaning it, for he had once been a silent, secretive boy himself, observing the world minutely, critically even then, basking in the adoration of a mother as handsome as this one, although softer, sweeter; a saddened woman – her image fading now in his recollections – who often reminded him how overwork in the cause of the mass of suffering, downtrodden humanity had killed his lawyer father. A woman meticulous in the discharging of her social and charitable obligations, who had taken him driving in a carriage piled high with lilac silk cushions, delivering invitations to reform meetings to her friends and blankets to the poor, until a soldier, faced with the sudden menace of an angry crowd during a famine year – did it matter which? – had fired wide as they drove by and put an end to her.

But it was a long time now since he had dreamed of red stains on lilac upholstery; and on his hands.

He had gone to France, to spend the rest of his boyhood with an uncle, the editor of a radical journal living abroad to escape the prison sentence imposed for his refusal to pay the stamp duty on his publication which would have made it too expensive – as the government had intended – for the working man to read. A good man, or so Daniel supposed, but one whose burning concerns for the welfare of mankind
en masse
left him no time even to notice whether or not his own small nephew had been adequately washed or warmed or fed.

Not that Daniel had ever minded that, since it had hardened him and made him resolute. And now, his uncle bankrupt, disillusioned and dead, he lived as he pleased or as best he could on a small private income which had come to him from his mother and would have been just sufficient had he not been so ready to give it away, not carelessly nor even generously but merely to avoid the weight of possessing it, money having no interest to him beyond travelling expenses, the freedom to move, to learn to ‘look around'.

And in any case if he wished to understand poverty he must first endure it – his uncle had taught him that; not only the carefree, bohemian insolvency of his student days, when to be short of money had seemed part of the fun, but the constant, grinding hardship of men who, born to poverty, would very likely die of it. As his father had died, worn out from paying other men's bills and rarely charging for his own professional services as a lawyer. As his uncle had died. As Daniel himself did not intend to die, having equipped himself for his chosen life of endurance by the simple process of learning to endure, by a stripping away of unnecessary flesh and unnecessary emotions, a reduction of appetite, tempering himself like steel to a sinewy hardness of nerve and muscle, a sharp, sometimes cold strength of mind, so that he would be fit to do whatever he might one day be asked to do, not for any one nation or creed or power – his vision sweeping infinitely further than that – but for his fellow men.

Attitudes hardly likely to match the vanities – he was well aware – of this self-possessed, self-polished girl sitting on a heap of dusty sacking as if it were an imperial throne and who, when the position of the sun and a certain hollow ache in her own body reminded her of hunger, simply unwrapped a parcel of bread and bacon which Daniel could not bring himself to share when so many others around him had eaten nothing that day, very little the day before, and had no guarantee about tomorrow. It would be his pride to fast with them. But Cara, unabashed, shrugged half-amused, half-scornful shoulders at his refusal, broke her bread and fed crumbs to her child as to a sparrow and shreds of apple to quench his thirst, with no apparent concern for the hollow stares of a dozen other children, or the native dignity with which the knot of famished men and women close behind her turned their heads away.

Had she
looked
at them, of course – really looked and fully considered – then something would have pierced her, she knew it well, the same pang of remorse and uneasy tenderness she often felt on catching a sudden, unguarded glimpse of Liam. Therefore – because nothing could be gained by it,
because it could make no difference
– it was no more than sound sense not to look at all. She had worked hard – well, hadn't she? – for this half loaf of indifferent bread, these few wizened apples, this knob of salt bacon, and what was the good of dividing it a hundred ways, as she supposed Daniel Carey would like to see her do, so that no one's appetite would be satisfied?

She thought him foolhardy; and fascinating.

He thought her insensitive. And magnificent.

He wanted her badly now and knew it, with none of the quizzical, fleeting passion he usually felt for the women he wanted but with a sharp, almost painful desire not just to have her but to
take
her. And keep her? Hardly that. Nonsense even to think of it, since he had not the least inclination to alter his wandering, uncertain life and was too much a gentleman – despite his rejection of such things – to ask any woman to share it. No. Certainly not to keep her. Yet he could not keep his eyes away from her. It was as simple as that. Nor she from him – which seemed far from simple to her. Desire creating a mood of languor between them, an intensity of listening, watching, feeling, which it took the approach of Liverpool to break.

‘Here we are.' The sudden tumult around her seemed to take her by surprise, as if she had woken suddenly from sleep. Liverpool. She had never greeted the end of any journey so reluctantly. And she knew that it was not wise.

‘Dear God,' he said. ‘These dark grey cities. I always forget the look of them.'

And there was an old woman among his fellow passengers, from a mud cabin somewhere in the far west of Mayo or Donegal who believed – as someone may even have told her – that her few shillings passage-money and these few miles of coldly swelling sea had brought her to the golden land they called New York. And if there should be no one to meet her in Liverpool – as Daniel Carey well knew, though the old lady of course did not – then she might be picked up for vagrancy tomorrow or the day after and, as a cheaper alternative to keeping her in one of the new English work-houses, could find herself being shipped quietly back again to Mayo or Donegal.