Distant Choices (67 page)

‘Exactly.' Kate hugged her knees again, pressing her cheek against them. ‘Poor man. So impossible to live up to. And so unlike him, as it turns out. I didn't know him at all when I went away. You're quite right. I thought he was Adonis coupled with – well, yes, the side of my father you may never have thought particularly charming, but which could have charmed me, I must confess, if he'd ever taken the trouble. That was the image of Francis I took away with me. And although I realized – fairly quickly – that he wasn't Adonis because nobody is, and he wasn't that idealized version of my father either – well, that was as much as I could honestly say about him for certain.'

‘In fact you'd lost your Adonis Stangway.'

They laughed together. ‘So I had. Not that it worried me. I soon lost the taste – or the need – for mythical heroes.'

‘And now?'

She wrinkled her nose. ‘I came back to meet him as a stranger. I knew I'd have to meet him because of the money and the child, and because of my conscience. I didn't know what kind of man he'd turn out to be. Dull, I may have thought, and getting somewhat pompous as squires do. Willing to split the money with me, perhaps, but not wanting me near
his
daughter. Possibly – in fact quite likely – with another woman he didn't want me to upset either. I was quite prepared for that. But to tell you the truth, what I didn't expect was to find him so attractive.'

‘Oh dear,' murmured Oriel, ‘dear me …'

‘You might well say so. Which is what made me take an extra glass or two of champagne last night and end up so flirtatious. Heavens – such
fun
. And that's the last thing – surely – we ought to have been having, a couple with all the agony and desertion and sheer dreadfulness there's been between us? Fun? I was quite ready, if he had another great lady-love, to go abroad and pretend to be dead – so long as he promised to keep up my income … Then he could have pretended to be married to her and move her into the manor. Don't laugh. Such arrangements work very well so long as everybody involved goes on properly pretending. It's only to satisfy the “friends and neighbours” – like most of the things those of us in “good society” think we have to do.'

‘Did you mention it to Francis?'

‘Yes. He suggested I might like to change my name and use a foreign accent and move back as his mistress myself. It sounded very amusing last night, I expect, sitting under your willow tree in the moonlight. Flirtation is one of my very favourite things, so long as one conducts it properly. By which I mean verbally, and
cleverly
…'

‘Of course.'

‘Yes, Oriel. I suppose Quentin is accomplished in that direction too.'

‘Ah well. Are we going to talk about Quentin now?'

Oddly it neither worried nor surprised her.

‘We are. That's what I really came for.' And coming back to sit on Oriel's bed she said, very clearly, ‘Did he tell you he loves you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you know?'

‘I did when he told me.'

‘And you love him?'

‘Yes. I love him.'

‘Oh Oriel – Oriel – I thought so.'

‘Don't worry, Kate. I also know he wants to be a famous Member of Parliament and have a place in somebody's government – I don't think he much minds whose – and make a lot of money and have influence and prestige, so that he can do what he has to do for his family and a lot for himself. I know he's worth the influence and prestige. The money goes without saying.'

Taking one of Oriel's hands in both hers Kate squeezed it gently. ‘Yes, Oriel. I know all those things about him myself. You're quite right. I also know he wants you too. I've known it for ages. He used to tell me about it very nearly every time he came to see me in France.'

‘Did he?' It pleased her to imagine it.

‘Oh yes. So I know for certain what you mean to him. But Oriel – listen – you're not the reason he's never married. If he'd met a woman capable of financing his way into politics, and upwards towards that influence and prestige you were talking about – and which we both know he's capable of – then he'd have taken her, Oriel …'

Smiling, she returned the pressure of Kate's hand. ‘Darling, I know – I know. That's Quentin. It doesn't shock me. It doesn't make any difference, either, to what there
is
between us. No matter what we actually do about it in the end.'

‘Oriel, just do the right thing, that's all.'

‘For me? Or for both of us?'

‘Oh Lord.' Kate shook her head, biting her lip quite hard. ‘Both – if you can. If not, then you. It has to be. Although he means a great deal to me too.'

‘Thank you, Kate.'

Kate once more shook her head. ‘You know you'll have to go abroad if you decide to live together, don't you?'

‘I do. I also know he'd be unlikely to get any government appointments there.'

‘And you know if you stayed in England as his mistress you'd be forever in the shadows of his life – waiting up here while he made his name in London, or wherever he thought likely – and then when you're both forty or fifty he could still marry some young heiress, if he'd made his name well enough, and leave you in this cottage, with your cats and that abominable dog – and possibly me.'

They were both laughing, on the very edge of tears, love and the need to defend each other, the need to go on crusade for the other's cause and be ready, with anything that might bring comfort, if it failed, rushing through the air between them, even reaching the dog, still at his post behind the door, who – seeing no reason why anyone else should usurp his readiness to defend – tried to growl it down.

‘I know,' promised Oriel. ‘I know. I'll take care. Don't worry.'

‘Worry?' Biting off a sharp laugh Kate shrugged her shoulders. ‘Good old worry. That's what I'm made of, love. Aren't you? We're women, after all, and how many of us manage to escape it? So I'd better say now what I've been sent to tell you …'

‘Sent? By Quentin?'

‘Of course. You
do
know him well, I'm glad to see. All right. He gave me a message for you, yesterday – round about the time he told me to make some excuse to go upstairs and keep out of the way for a while. You remember the apple sauce on my sleeve?'

‘Yes. So he told you to tell me …?'

‘All right, Oriel. Here it is. He came up on the train from Lancaster to Penrith yesterday with your husband. Quite by chance, of course. Your husband came up to him and said he wanted to see you. Quentin explained your house would be full of guests for the next few days but your husband said he didn't want to come here in any case. He's staying at the George in Penrith and the message is that he'll ride over here to the Buck Inn at ten o'clock this morning and wait half an hour. If you decide not to walk over and see him, then he'll ride back to Penrith. Quentin didn't say whether or not he thought you ought to go, but I expect he does. He asked me to wait until he'd gone back to wherever he's staying – Askham, isn't it? – before I told you. I don't know why.'

Drawing her knees up under the bedclothes and resting her folded arms on them, Oriel, although she had paled a little, smiled. ‘Don't you?' How well, how very well, her mind flowing so smoothly, so surely along with his, did she know herself. ‘He knew I had to be told. He also knew he was going to speak to me himself, to decide if we could have a future together when the time seemed right. Perhaps meeting Garron on the train convinced him we'd have to make that decision now – or perhaps never.'

Of course. Oriel was in no doubt about it, remembering – as she knew he had remembered – that other time when he had waited too long for the
right
moment which, because of his courteous, fastidious delay, had never come at all. Lowering her head to her folded arms she allowed herself a moment of her own to contemplate that delay of his, those desperate days following Kate's wedding, when, by hesitating to speak to her himself, he had allowed her to come here to Miss Woodley, and Garron. A delay which, they both knew, had made her Garron's wife, not his.

‘Naturally,' she said aloud, ‘he couldn't risk another.'

‘Oriel …?'

She raised her head. ‘Oh, I'm just thinking aloud.'

‘And suffering too?'

‘Well – yes, so I am. But we're women, aren't we, Kate? It's just part of our stock-in-trade. He left Garron's message with you, love, because he knew I had to have it. He realized he couldn't trust himself to give it to me – that's all – so he committed himself by telling you.'

‘You really
do
know him, don't you, Oriel?'

‘Yes. I know him.'

‘And your husband?'

‘I think so.'

‘You'll be walking down to the Buck Inn to see him, then?'

Drawing back the bedclothes Oriel stood up, stretching herself beneath the frilled, immaculate cambric of her nightdress. ‘What time is it now? Eight o'clock. That gives me two hours. Yes, I expect I'll walk over …'

Kate stood up too, clutching her flamboyant, none too well laundered Oriental satin around her, sudden tears in her eyes. ‘Oh Lord, Oriel – I almost wish you wouldn't. I almost wish I hadn't promised to see Francis again today. God dammit – dammit – I wish we didn't feel we had to – and might even like it in the end – or think we do …'

‘Kate …'

But the dog, picking up the note of high distress, began to claw so frantically at the door that Oriel let him in, falling back on the bed again as his huge body, his huge joy, his huge desire to save her from everything that was not himself, overcame her.

‘What a
man
that dog is,' said Kate, laughing her fierce tears away.

But not Quentin, never him, it seemed to Oriel as, picking herself up she caught a glimpse through the window of the lean, fastidious dark grey cat in the garden directly below, his long topaz eyes looking up at her, his casual, elegant pose in no way betraying that he had been waiting there for some time – since dawn, very likely – to make whatever checks seemed necessary to him on her presence, the state of her health and the balance of her human and consequently somewhat muddled mind.
Dear human woman, I am guarding you, you know, in my fashion, just as thoroughly as that fearfully red-blooded, hopelessly ardent savage of a dog
.

She knew.

The Buck Inn was no more than ten minutes away, less had she chosen to walk briskly, although, having chosen to wear nothing more elaborate than the garden dress and shawl she usually wore at this time of day, she saw no reason to hurry, even pausing, as she reached the water's edge, to look up, just as she always did, at the fells, veiled this morning in fine curls of mist, a taste of rain in the air, a single, amber-tipped leaf taking flight on a sudden, sharp breeze, the first lovely casualty of autumn coming to settle at her feet and then, a moment later, two others, one gold, one a burnished, poignant copper. Bending down she picked up the gold leaf and then, having lingered a moment over its colour and fragility and its sharp, emotive scent, set it adrift on the lake, a last adventure which might take it to Watermillock or Pooley Bridge or straight to the bottom should the rain come on, but which seemed better, she thought with a smile, than a certain trampling to death underfoot on the narrow path.

Walking on, abandoning the gold leaf to its fate as she had usually – so far – abandoned herself to her own, she felt a surprising lack of anything to which she could give a name. She felt no fear, no hope, no remorse, no urge either to defend or to blame, no anxiety as to what she might, or might not, be asked to give up, take on, explain, suffer, make amends. That such things would be asked she was in no doubt. Or some of them. But having decided this meeting with Garron to be inevitable, the only sensible thing, it seemed to her, was to go and meet him, maintaining her energy and her often fluctuating courage, safeguarding the fine, pale shell into which she knew she had once again slipped, until she discovered in which direction they should be needed. And even when she saw him, his caped greatcoat filling the doorway of the long, low, slate grey inn, her emotions – of all temperatures and colours – remained obediently dormant, allowing her to walk up to him across the yard and, glancing at his coat with its rich fur lining, to say to him, quite pleasantly, ‘Are you cold?'

‘Yes,' he snapped, in order to say something – anything – as she had done, acknowledging, as men of status are apt to do, that one could not air one's domestic grievances at an inn door: a precaution he would have disregarded with some swagger, she rather thought, ten years ago. ‘Yes, I'm cold. I always am up here. You don't want to walk up those damned fells, do you, and ruin my shoes? There'll be rain coming on, any minute. They've offered to lend us a room at the back and leave us alone – for an hour or two.'

It was a small bar-room, low and square, richly timbered with gleaming black wood, red velvet framing a clerical, ruby and emerald window, a red chair on which she sat, an ornately carved bar with an air of a medieval past about it, at which he leaned, pouring himself a glass of the whisky he had purchased, she supposed, along with their privacy.

‘You look like some hill-farmer's housekeeper on her day off,' he said tersely, casting an eye that found no favour over her grey wool dress and Paisley shawl, her sensible country boots – in case he
had
wanted to take her up the fells – the absence of the gold chains and rings which, she supposed, he had locked away at Lydwick, or given to his daughters.

‘Thank you,' she said.

‘You've got a better dress than that, haven't you? Or have you sold the good ones already …?'

Seeing he did not expect an answer, she folded her hands and waited, quite comfortably in the deep red chair, noticing, as he took a swift drink, the taut muscles in his throat, the angle of his hard, fighting jaw which struck her as thinner than she remembered it, his whole face pared down to the heavy bone, covered by a skin still tanned and rugged yet lined, now, she saw, in tell-tale places, with crinkles fanning out from the eye-corners, tense furrows on either side of the mouth from heavy nose to truculent chin; a face that, without its necessary exposure to the sun and wind of his construction sites, would have been pinched and grey, she abruptly realized, and ten years older – she realized that too – than the face she had known – how long was it? – barely six months ago.