A Song Twice Over (75 page)

Times were changing. Expanding and contracting both together. The streets of central Frizingley, Daniel noticed, cleaner, better-lit and better-policed than they used to be, one half of Market Square dominated now by the ornate façade of the station, the other half by a tall, Grecian-columned hotel offering seventy double bedrooms, a number of suites and private apartments, a banqueting-hall, a ballroom which had so displaced the old Assembly Rooms that they had been knocked down. The site used for the construction of Frizingley's even more Grecian town hall built to the taste of the gentleman who owned not only the land but the demolition and construction companies employed in its redevelopment, Captain Christie Goldsborough. The building to be opened, sometime after the elections, by Councillor Benjamin Braithwaite, mayor of Frizingley, and skinny, flamboyant Magda, his mayoress.

Several of the old coaching inns had gone too, the Rose and Crown and the whole cobweb of narrow streets around it being replaced by a double row of spick-and-span commercial establishments, so new that their ornate stonework was as yet unblackened by the soot from the Braithwaite and Dallam factory chimneys. A bank and a firm of shipping and forwarding agents stood on the site of the Dog and Gun. The Beehive from where the Leeds coach had left twice daily, had closed its rowdy doors for lack of custom, its business swallowed by the railway, and, after a great deal of refurbishing, had become a well-mannered commercial hotel where the Chartists – also much better-mannered and better-dressed than they used to be – had taken rooms for their candidate.

Only the Fleece remained intact, no longer the home of Captain Goldsborough who had moved into the greater luxuries of the station hotel, but still his headquarters in a manner of speaking nevertheless, looked after by his lieutenant, Mr Oliver Rattrie, a thin, crook-shouldered, almost painfully elegant man whom Daniel – his mind on other matters – did not remember. Although he remembered the Fleece and, behind it, the sorry raggle-taggle of St Jude's, a thousand miles away in spirit from the pompous splendours of Market Square but, in reality, just five minutes' brisk walk between self-conscious, well-drained affluence and those decaying alleys where the sewage ran untreated in open gutters for every child to play in, every stray cat to drown in, in which every disease which squalor bred could lurk and multiply. St Jude's, a greater pesthole than ever now that the landlord's agent, Mr Oliver Rattrie – doubtless on the landlord's instructions – had, these three years past, carried out no repairs, no maintenance, allowing broken windows, rotting woodwork, flooded cellars, to remain in the condition they had fallen, not turning a hair when floors collapsed and ceilings caved in, concentrating – in the painstaking manner for which Mr Rattrie was famous – on the sole purpose of laying down in precise, mathematical arrangements, as many mattresses, and therefore as many tenants, as a room would hold. From one to two dozen, on average, in the better, predominantly English houses. Far more than that when it came to the Irish for whom straw tossed down on bare floorboards seemed sufficient and for whose benefit the demolition of certain, almost totally derelict streets had been halted so that they might squat, for a penny or two, among the wreckage.

An invasion, Daniel was at once aware, which had horrified Frizingley as much as it had Liverpool, a ragged, famished horde descending upon them, a ghastly procession so distorted by famine as to seem members of another species not quite humanity, wilder and more primitive and perhaps more colourful, close to the earth in a way industrial Frizingley had long forgotten, believers in a religion which made Frizingley, and the English in general, frankly nervous. A foreign people worshipping a foreign Pope, speaking what amounted to a foreign language, who, having long been in the habit of crossing to the mainland in dribs and drabs to beg on English roads or, by working for less than any Englishman would take, forcing the price of labour down, were now here in their terrifying hundreds and thousands. A deluge of them, a crushing burden on the poor-rates, filling the workhouses so that the English paupers could not get in, tumbling into paupers'graves for which
somebody
had to pay the bill, living and breeding and dying in horrible promiscuity in those damp cellars and the abandoned navvy-camps which ringed the town. A skeletal hand looming out of every shadow, these days, to beg. Gangs of them huddled like the droppings of a rag-and-bone merchant's cart on the
front steps of the new town hall
, crying for bread, until the constables cleared them away. Bringing nothing to Frizingley but their fleas, their vermin, their idolatry, the strange personal habits of their alien culture, and their fever.

And although no attempt had been made, as in other, smaller places, to bar their entry into the town, Frizingley did not welcome this drain on its facilities which had been sketchy enough to begin with, this blight on its hard-won respectability, the over-tipping of its scales in the direction of degradation and misery, the outbreaks of dysentery and assorted fevers which had started with the first half-naked scarecrows to stagger down the hill from Frizingley Moor.

‘You can't blame the people for not liking it,' Daniel heard from the priest who had come with them, a man with the build and seasoned toughness of a navvy, the carefree jauntiness of the farm-boy from Kildare he had once been, not too long ago. ‘Who wants plague and vermin, when all's said and done? If you had half a dozen fine, healthy children, Daniel Carey, you might not be standing here in the middle of it talking to me quite so casually yourself.'

Just as well then, thought Daniel, that he had no children. No one at all, in fact, to care for at the personal level which might worry him. No reason, any longer, to fret about the weakness, the terrible frailty of one particular human body. No cause to agonize when the wind blew cold, or pest-laden, in any particular direction. All men – all women – were the same to him now. Thank God. Thank Him most truly. For how else could he bring himself to enter Frizingley's own fever-shed, a sounder model than the one he had helped to build in Dublin, and stroll between the rows of narrow beds with a cool but merciful detachment, looking not for a loved or even a familiar face but for the mechanics of the care that was being given, the distance between the mattresses, the number of blankets, the rapidity, or lack of it, with which excrement and vomit were cleaned up. Not flinching at any odour nor at any voice raised in a plea for assistance or for mercy, since all men and women stank alike and cried out alike in fever.

Was there a future for any of them here? Father Francis thought not. Or not in this world at any rate. Little hope for himself either, he cheerfully concluded, if the epidemic lasted much longer, since he was now the sole survivor of the dozen priests who had crossed the water with him. An occupational hazard, it must be said, since one took in a man's breath, after all, with his dying confession, like the good doctors, on both sides of the water, who had been dying like flies. More's the pity.

A bad business. Although Frizingley, after the initial moment of recoil, had done what it could, realizing – with good sense, thought the good Father – that so many people could not be asked, for reasons of sanitation and economy, to drown themselves in the Irish sea. There was the workhouse, of course, although it had soon filled up with the widows and orphans, the lame and the old, who would otherwise be rounded up as vagrants and shipped back to Ireland again. The same boat-load of disease and despair sailing backwards and forwards, shuttling the same diseased, desperate bodies from one unwelcoming coast to the other. Often Father Francis dreamed of that. But on the whole, Frizingley had been as charitable as could be expected. Official charity – the cold kind – in those bread-tickets and bowls of workhouse gruel. Cold private charity too, maintaining its distance, from ladies who sent blankets and cast-off clothing with the tips of their fingers. Charity of a warmer sort from some other women, like Mrs Gage for instance, who had not only turned her school-house into a soup-kitchen but served an excellent beef and barley broth there to all-comers with her own hands.

Daniel heard her name without a tremor.

‘I know Mrs Gage,' he said.

‘A fine woman.'

‘Yes.'

It was true. He knew it, remembered it, yet could not feel it. A fine woman who could still vomit and blacken with typhus as easily as any coarse-grained peasant woman from a pig boat. He spoke her name and then, as he had trained himself to do with all names, forgot it.

He occupied himself, instead, with his candidature, worked on his speeches, saw to it that his pamphlets were well distributed throughout the town, addressed meetings of his supporters, paid well-brushed, top-hatted visits to such voters who appeared undecided and also, at Father Francis's request, to the town's few prosperous Irish residents.

‘I can see they don't like me crossing their thresholds,' he told Daniel, ‘considering the den in St Jude's they know I come from – me with my hand out begging their hard-earned money and bringing God knows what pestilence with me into their fine houses. So if you could just go knocking on those doors for me, my lad, and remind them of their origins and obligations – with that cold smile of yours, that looks like the vengeance of the Lord …?'

Was his smile cold? He had not looked at it recently, had not studied any human face in detail for a very long time and did not expect to do so again. But, he went, nevertheless, to the Irish owner of the livery stables in St Jude's Square who gave him a guinea, to a gentleman in Frizingley Moor Road whose wife had been born in Dublin and who gave him a guinea more on the promise that he would not call again; to Ned O'Mara of the Fleece, drunken and demoted now to a mere bartender subject to the overall authority of Oliver Rattrie; to one of the many pawnbrokers in St Jude's Passage; to a spinster lady who had once been a governess to an Irish peer; and to the dressmaker and milliner, Miss Cara Adeane.

Her name, too, caused him no emotion beyond a flicker of amusement on seeing it writ so very large in ornately scrolled gold letters on the front of her shop which now occupied a whole corner of Market Square, its windows, on one side, staring boldly at the new station hotel and, on the other side, at a small public garden laid out with sculptured flower beds and young, very hopeful trees.

A doorman in pale blue livery stood ready to open the door and direct him to left or right according to his requirements, a saleswoman, also in pale blue, asking him to be seated on one of a row of spindly blue and gold chairs while she moved off very smoothly – her pace implying that one had all the time in the world to browse and spend – to find out if Miss Adeane would see him. Was he a salesman, perhaps? The representative of some exotic foreign establishment dealing in brocades or rare satins? The woman, making her judgement, had smiled at him encouragingly, but he had not enlightened her, simply sending in his card, the correct, deckle-edged white square which told nothing but his name. And while he waited he looked with a shrewd, journalist's eye at the expanse of pale blue carpet, the air of space and ease and tranquillity, the quiet but very distinct impression of success. The almost casual display of garments he knew to be minor works of art, the showcase at his elbow full of tiny, precious objects, jewelled combs, scent bottles, mother-of-pearl boxes, embroidered gloves, a shimmering rainbow of beads and brooches, fans and feathers and satin slippers. The arched opening, leading, through a bead curtain, to another room and then, he thought, another, which offered him enticing glimpses of movement and colour.

‘May I give you a glass of Madeira while you are waiting?' a soft voice said, offering the wine in exquisitely cut crystal on a silver tray. And because those who have seen famine do not refuse any kind of sustenance he smiled at the woman – who had Cara's air and manner and her slender, elegant figure – and took it.

‘Thank you,' his eyes said and then, automatically, ‘How pretty you are,' because that, too, was a kind of sustenance to be taken like bread and water, whenever one could and for as long as it lasted.

‘Miss Adeane will not be long,' the girl murmured, so visibly flustered and flattered by the message of his cold and wary but nevertheless still handsome eyes that it took Cara's crisply pronounced, ‘Good morning, Mr Carey. And how are you this fine morning?' to deflate her.

‘I'm very well, Miss Adeane. And yourself?'

‘Never better. Would you care to step into my office?'

It was the room he remembered as the one in which she had worked and lived and slept, her bed in one corner her dining-table in the other, her work-table somewhere in between, littered with sketches and account books and ledgers; the room in which he had last seen her mother weeping, her son glaring at her with that burdensome hatred, much altered now and given over entirely to the purposes of her business, a new walnut desk of impressive proportions, high-backed leather chairs, pictures of jewelled women in Gainsborough hats on her pale damask walls; a pale carpet covered with cloudy, overblown roses, vases of flowers which looked expensive and out of season; only her dog, it seemed, left over from the old days, snoring as always in his basket by her new white marble hearth.

‘Sit down,' she said and he sat, watching her as, her wide taffeta skirts rustling and swaying, she walked around the desk and took her own seat, a queen on her throne, attentive yet remote. And beautiful. Her skin smooth and unlined as pale amber, older only in its sophistication, the gleaming blue-black hair coiled high and intricately on top of her head, its weight giving length and grace to her neck and her broad, straight shoulders, its colour deepening the astonishing aquamarine of her eyes.

How beautiful and how
hurt
, he had thought when he had last seen her, three years ago in this very place. Crisp and composed now, and cold too, as he had grown cold himself. And although he knew he had loved her and could well remember the reasons, he could not feel even a faint echo of that love again. Desire, by all means. Plenty of that. But, merely by closing his eyes, he knew he could make himself forget her. So completely, in fact, that the news of her death by typhus or hunger or by any of the other obscenities he had witnessed lately would not unduly distress him. She would be only one among many. He was safe from mourning her.