Air and Angels (8 page)

They sipped the sweet, dark wine. She was about to tell him some remark of Adèle Hemmings’s aunt, when he said quietly, ‘I want you to assure me that you will say something to her.’

She waited.

‘It is intolerable, Georgiana.
I will not have this
. I cannot bear it – I do not – I am not interested in that woman
– or in any. I do not want to be – hunted. Hounded. Above all, I do not want to think that you are in some sort of conspiracy about this – whispering, plotting, like silly young girls, behind my back. I have spoken of it before and I have listened to the things you have said. But please understand me now. I was angrier than I know how to express to you when I came in this evening.’

‘Yes. It was
wrong of her, very wrong. Of course she should not have gone into your room. But I am sure that she meant no harm.’

‘We neither of us know what she meant and I do not wish to hear any reasons, or excuses. I do not wish to hear the matter mentioned again. I would just ask that you – say something – make my feelings plain. I know I can trust you to behave tactfully – to – to respect my wishes.’

‘Of course. It is only – oh, that I am so sorry you feel as you do. Not only about Florence but … you are my brother, I should so like to see you settled – loved. You are a good man, a …’

But she could find no way to continue. Only said, ‘I am sorry if
I
have done anything to disturb you.’

He inclined his head. ‘Let us talk no more about it. I know that you have understood. And now, you had better
have a second glass of wine and go up to put on dry clothes.’

Obediently, she did so.

Old Mrs Gray played her cards wth meticulous slowness, periodically looking up from them to scrutinise her daughter’s face.

But Florence was giving nothing away. She was only grateful for the pauses and that she was not required to think or to play quickly. She was still considerably upset.

There is something,
Mrs Gray said, something, and soon, I shall go to bed and think about what it can be.

In the meantime, she contemplated the queen of spades.

No one tends the garden behind the house of Adèle Hemmings and her aunt, it is entirely overgrown, as the garden of some ruin or uninhabited place, and so the cats have it quite to themselves, and rustle and slink there and often pounce, among the weeds
and the tall grasses, and the skeletons of years lie unburied, white and frail, and the soft, furred, rotting bodies of those more recently murdered, it is a graveyard of small mammals.

But in the house, the cats preen themselves and are cosseted, they lie sleekly on cushions and in the folds of eiderdowns, with bland, closed faces.

When it is very late, Adèle Hemmings opens the door and stands,
listening to the night, and imagines herself a cat, free to walk off alone and where she chooses, wonders about possibilities, shadowy in her mind.

But she does not move, goes nowhere. Only the cats flick past her skirts and merge with the darkness.

Florence was trying to remember what it was like to be married. She had a photograph of Chester Bowering, wide-browed, with the huge moustache that
made his face look so foolish. But it yielded nothing, she could not breathe life into it, make him the reality he had been.

Deliberately, she thought of walking beside him, her hand in the crook of his arm. But she had taken the arm of other men in the formal, everyday manner, many times since then, and so the thought was meaningless.

Occasionally, she had woken in the night, and it had all
been absolutely clear, so that she had almost believed he had been there, she had felt his hands, smelled the hair oil he had used. But fleetingly, confusedly, and nowadays rarely, so that even the wedding photographs and the ring she wore hardly convinced her that she had been married at all.

Chester Bowering had been an American. They had returned to live in Boston after a protracted honeymoon
tour of Europe and she had begun to settle into society there as the wife of such a prominent man (he was a widower and almost forty, when he had married her), into being an American.

Eight months later, Chester Bowering was dead, fallen on his bathroom floor one morning from a haemorrhage of the brain. Florence had returned to Cambridge a few weeks later, bewildered and rather rich but, otherwise,
strangely untouched by the whole business. The episode of her marriage seemed scarcely to have left a mark upon her.

Now, she wondered what she had ever felt for her husband. She had no recollection of it. She supposed there must have been love. She remembered a fondness, and an excitement, and she had been flattered, certainly. Above all, there had been a reassurance about him, he had seemed,
in spite of being American, safe and familiar. Nothing more. But perhaps nothing more had been necessary.

But now, there was more. Passion, she thought. Passion. Though still, she knew it was not love.

Thomas had been white-lipped with anger. He had spoken to her as to a servant, caught in an act of petty theft, had asked her coldly to leave his house. Confused, disconcerted, she had not known
how to respond, had simply gone. But outside, the feeling that had flared up within her had been anger. Anger, and a bitter determination.

Want, she thought.
I want
. And calmly, turned the photograph of her husband face downwards in the drawer.

In the end, weary of thinking, Mrs Gray fell asleep, though it irritated her that she had not found a solution. There is something, she said, over and
over again, something. But, waking in the middle of the night, as she regularly did, realised that she had not been able to understand what there was because her daughter had looked and behaved in a way she had never done before.

EUSTACE PARTRIDGE put his head in his hands and wept and the tears ran between his fingers and down his wrists.

Thomas, watching him and shocked beyond belief, had no idea what to do or say. The boy had burst into his rooms, white-faced, in the middle of the morning, had said what he had to, and then, simply, sat down and wept.

A girl was to have his child. He scarcely knew her. She was the
sister of an acquaintance from school, daughter of neighbours in the country. But otherwise, it seemed, quite insignificant.

He had been home. The whole story was out. There had been confrontations with both families. And now, Thomas.

After a while, Eustace raised his head and pushed a hand through his hair, said, ‘I am most dreadfully sorry, sir.’

‘Yes.’ Thomas could not look at him. ‘Yes.’

‘Of course, I shall have to go down. I am to marry her.’

‘And then?’

‘I … I really don’t know. That is – there is talk of the army. India. I don’t want that at all. Or there is a possibility of helping to run the estate. They are … it is all being discussed.’

‘I see.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘It is hardly necessary to apologise to me.’ Though of course, he believed that it was.

The boy stared miserably
at his hands. You are a child, Thomas thought, glancing at him, for the face was open with misery and had somehow become a child’s face again, soft, unformed.

A strange desire to console him came to Thomas, to treat him as tenderly, as lovingly, as he supposed one would treat a small boy who had come to confess some trivial offence, and burst into tears in just this way.

But the offence was
not trivial, though commonplace enough. And it disgusted him, he could neither understand nor sympathise with it. Above all, he felt, somehow, personally rebuffed, and was angry. So that in the end, rather than trust himself to speak at all, he simply sent the boy away.

Eustace Partridge went hopelessly, to stare out of the window of his room down onto the college courtyard and across the roofs
of the town, in despair that through a folly he scarcely understood, or even remembered, he was to lose everything.

But the bitterest shame had been having to speak to Cavendish, and the bitterest disappointment too, for he had believed that his tutor not only thought highly of but warmly towards him. He had seemed to be an ally and a friend. The contempt on his face, the way it had closed against
him, had shown him that there was no one on his side, and that he had no supporter, after all.

He remained at his window, brooding, regretting, and already felt quite detached from his surroundings, as though the college and its life and purpose already excluded him.

Of his future, and of the pert, pretty Mary Wimpole, he could not bear to think at all.

In the end, Thomas saw the Dean, and
the Dean, who was a broad-minded and tolerant man, heard him out patiently, soothingly. Though Thomas could not be soothed.

‘It is the waste, the foolish, unnecessary waste. He was a pupil I was proud to teach, he had one of the finest brains it had been my good fortune to encounter. There was excellence, there was achievement, and then, there was such promise.’

‘You speak as if the boy were
dead.’

‘He is dead to me.’

‘Try to see it this way – that this incident, and the disgrace of it, have ruined his life. To us, it is merely a passing disappointment. We have been let down. But he has failed his whole self. And so, we must be charitable.’

‘He has thrown everything away – and for what?’

‘Perhaps for a good wife and family, a happy life? We cannot tell. The situation could have
been considerably worse. At least the girl is marriageable.’

Later, he spoke to Georgiana, not only of Eustace Partridge, but of the Dean. She said, ‘He has a forgiving nature. He is a man of tolerance.’

‘He took an easy attitude – a
lazy
attitude.’

‘You are hurt. You feel that you have been personally betrayed.’

‘He has betrayed us all, let us all down, for some idle passion. No – not even
that, he said as much. He has not even that excuse.’

‘And is there no possibility of his staying up to complete his degree? Could his father not …’

‘The father is a boor and a philistine. I daresay this is all in character. He will like nothing better than an excuse to take the boy away. He has a dim view of scholarship.’

‘Try to be forgiving.’

But he felt that his heart had been turned to
stone and all his hopes and expectations dashed and he could not forgive.

Only, much later, he was overcome with remorse, and a picture of the young man weeping in his rooms came to his mind with such force that he put on his coat again and returned to college, meaning to see him and speak gentler words.

Georgiana had said, ‘I hate it when you are so hard. That is not the brother I know.’

He bowed his head, against the wind and rain, and in acknowledgement of his own lack of charity.

The boy’s rooms were in darkness, and when he sought out the servant, it was to hear that Eustace Partridge had already left the college.

Returning to his own desk, he wrote a short, anguished letter of contrition and, after addressing it, walked across the court and into the chapel. There, he knelt
in the darkness and poured out his heart, prayed for the young man and his lost future, for the young woman and the unborn child, commended them all to God, and then turned his attention inward and searched his own soul, asking for the grace to have a right judgement in all things, and for the gifts of mercy, of humility and of love.

And the air seemed to seethe around him with the prayers of
the centuries, they pressed in upon him, and he felt touched and uplifted by them, and as if his own prayers and his solitary voice had joined others, to become part of the fabric of the building. Relief filled him, and gratitude, he had a more immediate sense of the holy and live-giving than for years, and was profoundly comforted.

Three days later, he took the train to Norfolk.

OTHER GIRLS sit out on the verandah, sewing, writing diaries, sketching, gossiping, giggling. Drinking sodas and lime. And perhaps, later, a piano lesson.

But their mothers sit, too, and write endless chits, about that evening’s dinner or the stores, or send messages, by the boy, about dances and dress patterns (for now the young women have arrived from Home, everyone is very much concerned
with fashion, and refurbishing last year’s dresses and ordering new. The returned girls are quizzed relentlessly for details of the latest collars and trimmings, hats and hems, the local dressmakers driven frantic with orders, toil and toil.)

And other women on other verandahs hasten to reply.

But Kitty does lessons every morning.

(And if they have ever disagreed about it, Eleanor has told
Lewis that at least if Kitty is educated, she will make a better companion for a husband. Though she knows there is more to it than that.)

‘Men don’t want clever women. They don’t want that sort at all.’

He has been tetchy, at the end of a day, gone off, irritably, to his bath.

But they talk on, through the open door. Only the boy has got the water at the wrong temperature, or else the soap
does not lather.

‘Kitty is going to marry. It goes against all natural thinking that she should be
clever
. Let her have fun, be admired. So long as she does not damage her reputation. George Springer’s girls …’

She lets him grumble on, hearing the regular sluicing of the water down his back.

And of course, when he is out and dried and dressed, it has all been smoothed away. Then, they agree
about Kitty after all, discussing George Springer’s buck-toothed daughters, and having higher aspirations for their own.

For she is all they have.

Miss Hartshorn is much recovered.

(Though the terror will disfigure her dreams, sleeping and waking, perhaps for ever.)

But she is up and about and anxious to put on a brave face and be back to work, at least for the time being.

So here is Kitty,
sitting beside her, listening.

It was a threatening, misty morning – but mild. We first rested in the large boat-house, then under a furze bush. The wind seized our breath. The Lake was rough. There was a boat by itself, floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock …