Distant Choices (64 page)

It terrified her now how much she did not want that to happen, how much, in fact, she wanted Elspeth to find some sensitive, open-hearted, open-minded man to value her, not for the silvery airs and graces Oriel herself had taught her, but as the girl who, refusing to ignore her disgraced stepmother, might be capable of so much more.

And Morag. She had written to Morag through Quentin, not explaining her innocence, simply asking Morag not to blame herself, not to let it burden her, asking her – if she still could – to value the affection which had started, tragically too near the end, to grow between them. Too late, of course. And far too easy to blame Susannah. Far, far too easy when she knew that, had she so desired, she could have sent Susannah packing from the start, as firmly and immediately, if not as obscenely, as Garron had now done. She had smiled when Quentin had told her about that. But now, still staring across the lake, her chin still on her hands, the exasperated pity – but pity nevertheless – she had felt for Susannah no longer served as an excuse for all she had allowed it to do to Morag.

She had made the wrong choice. Convenience, doing what others called the right thing, keeping sweetly out of trouble instead of briskly causing it whenever the cause seemed worthy, as Morag had certainly been. And now, after all her tact and elaborate consideration, after all the years of smiling and understanding and biting her tongue, her achievement consisted of Elspeth rushing into a refuge which, perhaps quite soon, would bore her, Morag keeping her father's house in a mood of rigid penance for the woman she had helped to dismiss, Susannah insinuating herself into the bosom of another family, instructing another woman how to run a home and bring up a child Susannah herself had in no way paid for. And Garron? Could he too be there, across the lake at the Landons, hearing how Mrs Landon had snubbed her today in Penrith and – much worse – how Elspeth had not? She thought it likely. If not today then some other day, if Elspeth's marriage went ahead. Too young, of course, at sixteen. Although perhaps her mother had not been much older. Kate, after all, had been eighteen, herself just twenty-one. Too young. Would Garron come over here, crossing the lake, it seemed to her in sudden panic, in two colossal strides, to demand how she dared pollute the air that was to be his daughter's, defending what had now become
his
territory as fiercely and fundamentally as the dog, over there, would one day guard his?
This is mine. Kill me to take it. Or I'll kill you
.

Too quickly, already hearing the crash as he burst her door down, she got to her feet, the dog, waking from the blank depths of sleep to instant and acute awareness, leaping towards her with love huge enough to be an invasion, a desire for possession – to claim her yet also to belong to her – massively beyond his control. A young dog still, who had not learned the defence of hiding his passionate heart behind a fighting shield, a block of rough granite, like Garron. Shivering, she sat down again and picking up her pen, holding it a moment until the slight shaking to which her hand subjected it had ceased, began – in her so exquisite copperplate – to write: ‘Dear Mother of the Bride – One can be in no doubt of your obligation to entertain such bridesmaids as come from any little distance in your home for at least three days, one before the wedding so that the dear young ladies can compose themselves, and two afterwards to enable them to recover. Your further obligation to chaperon them most adequately cannot be overstressed, never for one moment forgetting the flights of emotional fancy induced in them by a wedding, made ever more dangerous by the presence of an equal number – one could hardly settle for less – of groomsmen. May I congratulate you and caution you in the same breath.' And she was smiling again, quite calmly, as she came with a flourish to the signature ‘Lady Penelope Peel'.

The summer passed, her accounts of the London Season, her descriptions of how any lady ‘in society'must be up by seven-thirty to prepare for her obligatory ride in the park at nine o'clock, followed by a breakfast party at eleven, luncheon with friends at two, a mad rush to a concert or an exhibition of anything considered fashionable at half past three, an even madder one to a garden party at four o'clock sharp, the usual round of theatres, dinners and balls between seven o'clock and three in the morning, followed by the scramble to get up for the nine o'clock ride again, winning her an increase in salary to which, sitting out on the fells with a cheese sandwich, writing an account of the Regatta at Henley where she had never been, she felt herself fully entitled.

‘I liked your piece about how a girl should never dance more than three times with the same partner,' said Kate who had come up to the cottage to celebrate her important twenty-fifth birthday that September. ‘And your breakfast menus – Good Heavens – for people who've been dancing all night, potted shrimps, pigeons in jelly, broiled whiting, devilled chicken, steaks and chops, I seem to remember – as well as all the usual eggs and bacon and muffins and good old marmalade. We never had all that at Dessborough.'

‘You did at Merton Abbey though.'

‘Ah yes.' Kate sounded almost sad. ‘So I did. I expect they still serve it all every morning to Dora who might eat a muffin and then wander off while the servants pack it up and – well, sell it, I suppose, in the village. Or to somebody like that quiet, shrewd man I've seen on your kitchen doorstep – just the kind who'll take Dora's breakfast off to Hepplefield Market while it's still fresh on one of your husband's trains. I wonder if your husband knows he's a poacher's friend?'

‘I expect so.'

Kate smiled. ‘Yes. So do I. But Dora won't know what's going on, of course. She'll just sit at the dinner table in front of a quarter of beef like the ones she's been looking at all her life – you know, the kind her mother used to order to serve three dozen. Poor Dora. There's no sign of either her father or her mother coming home yet, and Adela never will. I can't think why she stays rattling around that mausoleum all by herself.'

‘Can't you?'

‘Ah – you think she's still in love with Francis, do you?'

Now Oriel smiled. ‘I haven't seen her for a long time, but she used to be.'

‘So did I,' said Kate, very steadily.

Little sister, so did I
. But because, at some moment she had never identified, that love had changed to something which made her far happier, she merely said, ‘I hope you haven't forgotten Francis is coming here for your birthday?'

Oh no. She had not forgotten. Her birthday morning rising pale gold and tremulous above the fells, a smoky tang of autumn, a lingering sweetness of summer blending together in the September air, a kitten getting beneath her feet as she came down the narrow cottage stairs so that she stumbled into the kitchen laughing, attempting to retrieve and comfort the startled animal which, running for cover beneath Oriel's skirts was startled once again when the two women came together in a huge birthday hug. Oriel scooped it up under one arm, frantic paws catching in the pale, ruffled lace of her collar, while with her other very steady hand she gave her sister the breakfast mug of hot chocolate and cinnamon with its birthday dash of Caribbean rum, waiting on top of the stove.

Kate was a rich woman today; Oriel a serene and, it seemed, very nearly a free one; Quentin, arriving for a mid-morning glass of Old Sercial, which he brought with him, looking his usual immaculate, faintly amused self; even Francis, walking down from the inn at nearby Askham with jars of rare Oriental spices for Oriel, a box of Kessler jewellery for Kate, finding no difficulty in easing himself into this house, this atmosphere which he knew at once – having encountered such things before – to be an oasis.

A necessary interlude perhaps in a lifetime, to be enjoyed to the full extent of one's capacity, for the simple reason, it seemed to him, of discovering exactly what that capacity might be. An interval – no more – when time receded like a tide, leaving one standing on a sandbank of possible wonder and delight, a possible gathering of self-knowledge, not all of it just as one had imagined about oneself or desired, until the water rushed back and carried them all off into the mainstream again.

So that when Oriel's slender glasses were raised, full of Quentin's vintage champagne, in the conventional toast of good health and long life, it was Francis who murmured, ‘I wonder where next year will find us all, at this time?' Not here, it seemed to him, in this beguiling, calming, so gentle oasis. Not even Oriel.

‘Do you not find yourself too isolated here?' he asked her, entirely forgetting that the house was legally his property, having purchased it and all its contents through Quentin's agents who, working in strict secrecy, had taken no greater advantage than to help themselves to some of her best china and crystal.

Although today her luncheon table, pulled out into the middle of her small parlour, was decorated by some half-dozen glass vases along its centre each one full of September roses, a velvet stream of pink and cream and apricot – Rose Oriel, he suddenly remembered – flowing between the birthday meal she gave them; scallops, obtained at her back door from the gamekeeper with Scottish connections served in their natural shells in a sauce of wine and chives and tarragon, grouse provided – indeed, shot – by Francis, with vegetables from Oriel's garden, apples puréed with sweet cicely, a plum cake with pink icing, wide enough for twenty-five pink candles which Kate, first declaring the feat to be impossible, just an antic for children, far more than any poor twenty-five-year-old woman could possibly manage, blew them all out nevertheless with a single breath of accurate determination.

Francis had spoken to her only once, so far, an interview in Quentin's chambers which had begun and ended with Kate's promise that soon – quite soon – she would talk to him about his child, his home, herself. He had come today to claim that promise, meant to claim it, no matter how easy it was to blend with the calming, lotus-eating mood of this room, this even more enclosing mood of wit and warmth and amity, whispering even to him that it was good enough, surely, intriguing enough, rare and special enough, to last forever.

Yet when Kate, making a sweeping gesture to emphasize some point about the scandal of the wounded British soldiers being left to rot in the Crimea, dipped her sleeve in the bowl of puréed apples and went off upstairs to change her dress, it was Quentin who held out his hand to Oriel and, clasping the hand she gave him – Francis noted – very willingly, said, ‘Shall we go out and get some fresh air, a little way along the fells, perhaps – and leave these two alone?'

Smiling she got to her feet as if she had been waiting for his command and, her hand still in his, walked out into the mellow afternoon, along her garden and down the grassy slope to the lakeside, her height and Quentin's about the same, noticed Francis as he watched them from the window, a couple strolling together who – he could see very clearly – had strolled together many times before, each step in tune with the other, each movement in harmony, a turning together that seemed, not passionate perhaps, but entirely natural. A couple indeed. Oriel who could never be free in her husband's lifetime, Quentin whose professional status could afford no breath of scandal with a woman of his own class. Yet – nevertheless – a couple, Francis' clear vision showing him an unmistakable pair of lovers lingering by the lakeside willows who may never have touched each other – he thought probably not – but whose natural harmony, even at this distance, brought a warning tightness to his throat.

But emotion would not serve him now. And turning away from it, he found himself face to face with Kate who had been standing behind him, in a different, dark red dress with hints of gold about it, for rather longer than he knew.

‘Oh – Kate.'

‘Yes, that is my name.'

He smiled, but nervously, a shade irritably he felt. ‘Quentin has taken Oriel out walking,' he said. ‘So that we can have some time together.'

Brilliantly, with no trace of nerves in her anywhere, she smiled back. ‘Is that what he told you? He told me to make some excuse to go upstairs and stay there as long as I could to make it easier for
him
to have some time alone with Oriel. And since I knew how badly he wanted it I thought apple purée on my sleeve a small price to pay.'

He waited a moment, allowing her triumph to pass, and then said, quite smoothly, ‘Nevertheless, we are alone together just as effectively, are we not?'

‘Oh yes,' she nodded her pleasant agreement. ‘A matter of getting two birds with one stone, I expect. Quentin is very good at that.'

‘And does Oriel want to be alone with him?' he enquired, realizing only when he saw her smile that his voice had been somewhat too sharp.

‘Sadly – I think she does.'

‘Why sadly?' And he heard the sharpness himself now.

‘Because I think it may be too late for them. Ten years ago they could have married young, right in the teeth of family opposition, and then struggled side by side – very happily, I think – until they succeeded. It seems too late for that now. He has succeeded already, you see, and he'd have to throw it all away – wouldn't he? – if he took her on. While she has that giant of a husband of hers and his rather promising daughter to worry her.'

‘So it won't come to anything between them, you're saying?'

‘Francis – Good Heavens.' She raised both her shoulders and the extremely elegant line of her eyebrows. ‘I'm saying nothing of the kind. It may come to a great deal. And though I shall congratulate them both very heartily if it does and do everything I can to help … Well, what worries me most is that in
another
ten years – who knows? – she might start spending too much time thinking she's ruined him, as well as the other one – the giant, I mean, and his clever little girl. And Quentin might start regretting the legal practice in London and the seat in the House of Commons that Dora Merton – for instance – could have given him. I expect all that worries him too. He's quite wise enough.'