Distant Choices (37 page)

He would come to see his mother every Sunday morning and spend a conciliatory, hopefully pleasant hour with her. That much at least had been obtained.

‘Why have you turned against me?' shrieked Letty every Sunday the very moment she saw him. ‘What have I done to deserve it? Am I not good enough for you – now …?' And, for the rest of the week, she would write frantic notes to Hepplefield, begging his pardon, excusing herself, blaming herself on Mondays and Tuesdays, blaming him by midweek, accusing him of heartlessness and callousness and promiscuity by Friday evening, lying prostrate with nervous exhaustion all day Saturday. Going slowly mad – who could doubt it? – and driving her vague, petulant husband and her far from naturally robust children mad with her.

It could not continue. And since all hope that Quentin might do the decent thing and return had faded it became a matter of urgency – particularly to Letty's reverend husband – that some other, stronger, more capable woman must take over the roles of housekeeper and mother in Letty's place. A procedure considered perfectly normal in the case of widowers and husbands, like Mr Saint-Charles, whose wives, for one reason or another, had failed them.

Yet only two candidates could be made to come forward, both unwillingly. Maud, the elder, unmarried sister of the ‘sick' wife, and Susannah, her eldest unmarried daughter, either or both of whom could be asked very much as a simple matter of family duty to give up whatever private affairs a spinster lady might be supposed to possess, and devote themselves exclusively and with a tender heart to the household of their suffering male relation, Mr Rupert Saint-Charles.

‘Maud,' murmured Evangeline. ‘It will be a great wrench, of course, but I know I must let you go. Letty needs you, it seems, far more at her vicarage, than I – and
my
husband – in our home.'

‘It is Susannah's place,' declared Susannah's sister, Constantia, who, already expecting another child saw no reason why Susannah should escape her own share of drudgery. And what, after all, would Susannah – with not even a prospective husband in tow – have to sacrifice except her visits to Oriel at Lydwick, her strange friendship with Oriel's stepdaughter Morag, her peculiar obsession about bringing Christian principles and some basic notions of hygiene to the navvy camps which she kept on visiting in the company of the High Grange curate, the weak-eyed and – in Constantia's opinion – the weak-headed Mr Field?

‘My mother needs Susannah,' she said.

‘No,' assured Evangeline, seizing her opportunity to reign alone at High Grange. ‘It must be Maud. An older woman with more authority – more endurance.
Maud
.'

Much acrimony ensued. Constantia, with something of her brother Quentin's cleverness, applied at once to her father – who did not really care which woman looked after him so long as one of them did – obtaining his agreement, because it was easier to say yes than no, that he would feel more comfortable with Susannah, would feel more of a sense of
rightness
about it himself.

‘His own daughter, you see, his own flesh and blood …' Whereupon that daughter, in a state of near hysteria, flew at once to Oriel begging her to make it absolutely clear that the entire Keith household needed her, relied on her, far too often for her to commit herself elsewhere; an opinion enthusiastically backed by Evangeline who, in her desire to be rid of Maud, believed herself entitled to Oriel's support in full measure.

‘This is my golden opportunity, Oriel my love. So you will come with me now to their family council – won't you, darling? – and put in your own bid for Susannah …'

‘Mamma, I have been doing my very best for the past year and more to discourage her …'

‘I know, dear. But your time will come. Only think how long I have been sharing my home with Maud? I rather feared it to be a case of until death us do part –
hers
if at all possible. But now – well, dearest, such a chance is not likely to come again. I really can't miss it. So, if Susannah annoys you, as I know she must, then compensate by making good use of her. Put her to work, my darling, at least until I have got Maud properly out of her splendid bay-windowed front bedroom in
my
house, and safely installed, somewhere or other, in Letty's. She can have Quentin's room, I suppose, unless his mother insists on keeping it untouched, just as it used to be when he was her precious virgin boy and her heart's darling. A long time ago, I imagine. Longer than she likes to think.'

‘Poor Quentin.'

‘My dear, what
do
you mean? You must know he is earning himself a tidy little fortune from railway business and Merton business.
Such
a tangle those Merton affairs are always in – not just his lordship's either – they must be more than glad of all Quentin's famous discretion. And have you seen that handsome housekeeper of his? Thirty-five at the most and moves like one imagines a Spanish empress ought to move. She undulates, dearest, and smoulders. Your husband would understand what I mean.'

‘
I
understand, mamma.'

‘Of course. So – having grown so worldy-wise – you will help me to rid myself of Maud, I know. You have only to tell the famous “family council” how much you rely on Susannah, your husband being so much away, and I should then find it fairly easy to prove that no one relies – nowadays – on Maud. Yes?'

‘Yes, mamma.' Where her mother was concerned she allowed herself no choice.

‘Thank you, my very best love. And please don't look in such despair about it. You know very well that as soon as I have disposed of Maud we can turn our attention to Susannah who will be “got-rid-of” double quick – you have my promise.'

She accepted it, bore with it, even though the often hysterical presence of Susannah, throughout the summer and autumn while the domestic issues of the vicarage were still being decided, not only kept her away from Ullswater – the calm acre she did not mean, in any circumstances whatsoever, to share with Susannah – but distracted her rather from Kate, who, for her part, had no pity to spare for her vicarage cousin.

‘The solution is simple,' she told Susannah one sparkling Lydwick morning, tapping her riding-whip with sheer impatience against her high, black boots, the man's top hat on her head garlanded now with scarlet. ‘Stop moaning and wringing your hands, for Heaven's sake, Susannah, and pestering us with problems which might sound positively boring – for all you know – compared to our own. Just run away, Susannah. Disappear and be yourself somewhere – if you know what that is – where they can't find you. That's what I'd do …' And as the inevitable young men who had ridden over to Lydwick with her began to chorus ‘Oh no, Kate – we'd search to the ends of the earth …' she suddenly struck her boot one sharp, final blow and, calling out, ‘All right then – I'm off – let's see who finds me.
Now
,' ran off down the garden to her horse and galloped away. ‘Wait for me, Kate.' ‘And me.' The men who hoped to be her lovers were after her.

‘To Arabia on a camel,' murmured Oriel, suddenly close to tears which – happily, she thought – Susannah was in no mood even to notice just then,

‘What? Arabia? Francis used to live there, didn't he?'

‘Yes.' She had seen no more of him, this long year, than had been strictly necessary, offering him the exact degree of courtesy – no more. How could it be more? – than he gave to her. Quite enough.

‘Do you mean they're going back there …?' demanded Susannah, briefly alarmed about it. With Celestine,
her
goddaughter, she was really saying.

‘No. How could they? How could
he
?'

Yet how, on the other hand, could he continue to endure the life he was leading here? How – not a few of his acquaintances wondered – could he bear to live with Kate? Surely her fast behaviour, her constant junketings at Merton Abbey and elsewhere, her neglect of her own home and child must be a bitter grief to him? Brave, noble,
handsome
Francis, going so quietly and so very competently, it was said, about the business of his estate, with never a complaint, the shadow of anxiety everyone could see hovering about him disappearing the very moment he knew himself to be observed. A man to be admired and pitied. Yet when Madcap Dora Merton, who was not precisely passionate about her fiancé, offered her Cousin Francis a most direct form of consolation one summer evening after a champagne picnic lunch and a good claret at dinner, he had rejected her so gently, with such exquisite consideration and wry good-humour as to transform that very rejection, although quite positive, into one of the most romantic moments of Dora's life. Causing her, even, to discard her current fiancée and take another who, ultimately, suited her no better.

She continued to be romantically in love with Francis. So too did his daughter's nanny who turned out to be far less stiff and starchy than she had seemed. So too did most of the young maidservants at Dessborough and one or two of the daughters, and wives, of his tenants. So too – perhaps – did Mrs Oriel Keith, although she managed never, or at least only very rarely, to think of it; whereas it simply did not occur to Francis, who had never been aware of her love in the first place, to look for signs of it now.

He would have considered it to be presumptuous, pointless, holding to the view that ‘Miss Blake', who had married a richer, far more ambitious man than himself, was far better off – as it had turned out – without him. And to regret her now, to indulge himself by wondering how different his life, his child, his peace of mind, possibly his honour, might have been in her calm hands, could only be hurtful and unsettling and wasteful of his energy at a time when he needed all the strength and patience he could muster.

He was in love with no one and did not envisage the possibility of ever being so. Although, since he had first looked closely at his daughter, emotion had not been lacking in his life.
Present
emotion in the black-eyed, beguiling scrap of humanity produced by his own inability to control his passions.
Remembered
emotion in the black-eyed woman – not Kate – who had been his wife. And then emotion of another kind – he shrank from calling it pity – for Kate herself who did not know how to be a wife any more than a mother and was terrified – he knew it – by her own lack of understanding. Emotion, of a sort, was there too.

But he could not teach her. She had asked him for miracles he had known, from the start, he could never perform. She had asked him not only for total love but for total freedom which the love itself had inevitably cancelled out. She had seen him as a liberator, yet it had been her own passion for liberation confused so tragically with her passion for him, that had led her even deeper into the very trap from which he – and he alone, she believed – had come to rescue her.

She believed it no longer. All her fine faith and hopeful excitements had gone. And, watching love itself die in her, he had felt only pity which, knowing how much it would insult her, he had concealed by pretending to notice nothing amiss.

Indeed, what could be amiss that either of them dared admit? She was his wife and he her husband. He had never truly wanted it. She did not want it now. Rather than fall in love they had simply taken each other prisoner. He had known that from the start. She had learned it in slow agony. And if, having recognized in advance the extent of his own sacrifices – the journey to Mecca not least among them –
his
regrets must be more specific, he accepted her fear and confusion to be the greater.

He might suffer – indeed, he did suffer – the crushing of his true self into the false identities of husband and country squire. But at least he knew exactly what that true self had been. Whereas Kate, still wandering in her own dark places, her own deserts, had never found herself at all. She had found him instead, had attempted desperately to
be
him and, in her inevitable failure, had imprisoned them both.

It was not in him to blame her. On the night she had thrown herself into his arms he had been a man of more than adequate experience, she a child who ought not to have been beyond his control, who could have been stopped – by him – had he retained the good sense to do it. He had not stopped her. During their short engagement he had submitted, without the least struggle, to the role she had allotted to him in her intensely woven romance, playing the lover to her precise instructions, encouraging her fantasies, stopping short only at the act of physical possession which she had freely offered. And afterwards he had taken her away to the ‘abroad'she had always thirsted for and made love to her all night and all day, infected perhaps only by
her
fever but doing nothing to cure himself, only too glad, in fact, to remain delirious until she fell victim – he knew she saw it as that – to the fatal disease of pregnancy.

He had done nothing to prevent it. She had spoken, during those honeymoon nights, of wanting his child and had even appeared to do so, until the feel of it stirring not in her erotic imagination but in her own belly, had thrown up into her mind, suddenly and undeniably like nausea, the word she had proved unable to stand. Mother.

‘I can't do this,' she had told him then. ‘I can't do it, Francis. I can't
be
it.' But, like everything else, it had already happened and, with mystical Arabia still firing her imagination, with flight, escape, liberty – always liberty – filling her mind, he had brought her back to Dessborough and had watched, with helpless distress, what had seemed to him the process of one child giving birth to another.

Had she died in that process he would have felt, for the rest of his life, that he had murdered her. Yet it had been largely to stop himself from contemplating what her death might mean to him – his own liberty, in fact – that he had first gone to look at his child and had realized – before that first look had been over – that liberty of the kind he had once known and still longed for, could exist no longer. There had been Arshad, the woman whose mind and heart and most intimate nature he had known as well as he knew his own. The woman to whom love and knowledge had bound him. Now there was Celestine, unknown to him as yet but who, no matter what the turn of her mind or the balance of her nature might be, would always hold him. The woman he had loved because of her qualities. The child he would love with any qualities or with none at all, for the frighteningly simple reason that she was his daughter.