Flint and Roses (70 page)

‘Aunt Verity—?'

‘Yes, Faith. You know as well as I do that he has no relationship with Georgiana, which is not entirely her fault. I have told him so and he agrees with me. I have told him that if he made the first move she would probably be ready to make the second—glad to make it. He agrees with, that too. Nicholas was very close to me, Faith. All his life he has done things in temper, in stubborn pride, and then regretted it. You have cause to know that, I imagine. Even his temper is different now. It burst out of him, once, quite spontaneously—a true, snarling, red-blooded rage, a true emotion. Now he uses it when he needs it, manufactures it almost to order, which is not at all the same. And gradually, this past year or so, I have felt him moving away even from me. It has been like entering a familiar house and finding that all the doors are closing one by one. Well—I am sorry for that, and even sorrier that he has felt the need to shut out his children in the same fashion. Yes—they have a great deal of Georgiana in them, Venetia even more than Gervase. Nevertheless, they are his children—my grandchildren, like Blanche and Caroline's boys. And I think I would like to tell you, Faith, that, if I seem to give more of my time and attention to Venetia than I give to Blanche, it is because—well, who else is here to do it?'

‘Aunt Verity, please don't worry about Blanche.'

‘Oh, but I don't worry about her, Faith dear. She has you, and if Blaize is something of an absentee father I imagine he gives her good measure when he is at home. And besides, she has enough of Blaize in her to be able to cope with life very well on her own, when the time comes, Venetia is very different—the wildest little girl I have ever known—not wilful and headstrong like Caroline or like Nicholas himself. No—altogether Georgiana's child. It is Venetia, believe me, who most resembles Peregrine Clevedon, not Gervase, and because she is enchanting and open-hearted at the same time, so eager and hopeful, my heart bleeds for her. Nicholas will always take care of them, of course. He will pay their bills, and very handsomely. They will have the best of everything money can buy, there's no doubt of that. Quite simply, he doesn't wish to be personally involved with them. He doesn't want to know them and he doesn't want them to know him. It worries me dreadfully.'

The calling-in of the Hobhouse loan became common knowledge soon enough, causing all the resentment my aunt had feared; for, although Mr. Hobhouse had been foolish, and there was usually little sympathy in Cullingford for a man who could not hang on to his money, he was popular, had been with us for a very long time, while Nicholas Barforth, a much younger man, had shown himself too devious, was not much liked in the Piece Hall in any case, where it was felt that he already had too much and had got it both too easily and too soon.

Cullingford, with the exception of Mr. Rawnsley of Rawnsley's Bank and the astute Mr. Oldroyd, believed that Mr. Hobhouse should be given time to pay. Nicholas Barforth would not make that time available. Mr. Oldroyd was applied to again, Mr. and Mrs. Hobhouse, Freddy, Adolphus and James spending the best part of an afternoon at Fieldhead, reminding him perhaps of his wife, their dear Aunt Lucy, who had come to him from Nethercoats with a considerable dowry in her hands. Mr. Oldroyd was seen in Lawcroft Mill yard the following day, in conversation with Nicholas, and dined with him at the Old Swan that night. The next morning Mr. Oldroyd conveyed his regrets to Nethercoats, declining to throw good money after bad, a decision for which Nicholas Barforth was blamed, since his purchases of Oldroyd-spun yarn were considerable enough to allow him to exercise a little persuasion.

And it was largely to escape the gossip, in which Prudence was inevitably involved, that I packed Blanche's boxes and mine and went to Galton with Georgiana, looking for quietness and finding instead that I was soon infected by her restlessness, the impulses which drove her on her wild, midnight riding, that caused her suddenly in mid-sentence to take flight, splashing across the Abbey Stream, scrambling up any stony hillside which seemed steep enough, dangerous enough to challenge her reckless spirit, moving so as not to stand still, shouting so as not to listen, running without direction, unless it was towards Julian Flood's equally restless arms.

I was not sure of it. ‘Julian, darling, I have stones in my shoes', and, flopping down on to the grass, she would stretch herself full length while he undid her shoe, pulled off her boot, his fingers curving far too easily around her ankle, as if he had done it all too many times before for any outward show of passion. It was not flirtation. They simply touched each other a great deal, jostling and back-slapping in the stable-yard. ‘Help me over this fence, Julian.' ‘Lift me down from this gate'; and she would lean against him as frank and affectionate as she had been with her brother.

‘You
love me at any rate, don't you, Julian?'

‘Of course.'

‘That's good—we're alike, aren't we, you and I?' And although she had talked in exactly the same fashion to Perry, Julian Flood was not her brother, and in his case the barrier of comradeship, which had been fragile enough with Perry, could easily be crossed.

‘Faith, darling, I'm going off with Julian this morning—over the hills and faraway—God knows where! You don't mind seeing to Venetia until I get back, since my nanny is half-witted and yours so supercilious that I daren't for the life in me ask her myself.' And, while she roamed the hillsides, the highways and by-ways of her beloved outdoors and of her own nature, I found myself for the first time involved with a girl-child who had no time for my stories and my games of make-believe, a tiny red-haired imp who found nothing to amuse her in my trinket boxes, an agile little creature who did exactly as she pleased and was impossible to catch. One moment she was there, passive, her face, like her mother's, growing plain with the ebb of her vitality. The next moment she had vanished from the face of the earth, no one had seen her go, no one could find her. Consternation, my pulses fluttering, my mind full of that perilous Abbey stream, the quarry a mile away, the shaft of some ancient, worked-out mine; my sympathy going out to my sister Celia, who experienced this terrible anxiety, needlessly perhaps, but every day. No trace of her anywhere and then, in the very place one had looked a moment ago, she was there, her woodland green eyes blinking in amazement at the fuss, the sorry spectacle of Aunt Faith on the brink of nervous tears.

‘I went outside,' she would tell me. ‘Just out—' And no more than that could I ever discover.

Gervase was with us too, playing truant again from the grammar school, his presence another bond between Georgiana and Julian Flood, for, failing Perry, what better example than the future lord of the manor of Cullingford could she find for the future squire of Galton to follow?

‘Julian, do show him how to load that gun. No—no, darling, you have to really make your horse
work
to get him over that gate—watch Julian. There, you see, he did it with a yard to spare. No, darling, you're too stiff in the hips and the knees, sit
easy
in the saddle, like Julian. And Gervase, look at Julian's feet—straight forward, darling, not sticking out like yours. Do look, Faith. Isn't he coming along splendidly?'

One morning, as they were all three riding up and down the stream to accustom Gervase's nervous animal to the fast-flowing water, and I was leaning on the bridge taking a final breath of Galton air, since I was going on to Listonby that day, I looked up and saw Nicholas walking towards us from the house.

‘Georgiana!' I called out, conveying, against my will, a warning; and, seeing him too, ‘Damnation,' she said, and, turning her horse's head, sent it careering out of the water and up the hillside, turf and stones flying, and was off across the open fields, Julian Flood behind her.

I waited until Gervase got his horse up the bank, and taking his bridle walked him back along the path where Nicholas was waiting.

‘Father,' he said, very pale, that wild look in his eyes again, clearly expecting to be blamed. But Nicholas merely nodded and told him, ‘Take your horse to the stables and then tell them to clean you up and get your things together. It seems to me you should be at your lessons.'

‘Yes, father.' And he rode away, his toes turned sadly outwards, slouching in his saddle, smaller than he had been a moment ago.

We were quite alone, the whole of the Galton estate spreading around us, the bare hillsides, the empty fields, a vast, smoky autumn sky, Mr. Gervase Clevedon away somewhere at his Quarter Sessions, two little girls—his daughter and mine—safely indoors in the care of a few indifferent maids, six years separating us from the last time we had been together and he had persuaded me, against my own judgment, to go and wait for him in Scarborough. I didn't know him now. He had been the boy who had defied his father and refused to ride on Cullingford's first train, who had said so often ‘Faith will know what I mean'. He had been the young bridegroom who had told me, ‘They will say it is for my money on her part, and because I am stubborn. It is more than that.' And later he had said to me, ‘Faith, I won't let you go.' He was a stranger now, the man who was about to ruin the Hobhouses, who had shut the doors of his nature to his mother, his wife and his children. The man who would ruin his own brother—my husband—if he could. I didn't know him.

‘Good morning, Lady Barforth,' he said, and I laughed quite easily.

‘Heavens! Don't call me that. Every time I hear it, I look over my shoulder expecting to see your mother.'

‘I daresay. She's at Listonby. I've just come from there. I understand you're to join her.'

‘Yes—with Blanche, and with Venetia too, if you don't mind. Are you taking Gervase back to Tarn Edge? Nicholas—I don't know how long Georgiana will be—'

‘Don't you? She'll be back as soon as she sees me leave, I imagine. I just came to pick up the boy. She knows that and knows she can't prevent it—so what point is there in starting a battle she can't win?'

We walked in silence up the narrow little track and into the cloister that would lead us to the Abbey house.

‘And how are you Faith? Well?'

‘Yes—very well.'

‘I'm glad to hear it. How long have you been here—five days? Six days? And how long has Julian Flood been with you?'

‘Nicholas, I don't think you should—'

‘What? Ask you to betray a confidence? Darling, you don't have to tell me. He's been here night and day, I imagine. And why not? What else has he got to do? These things happen.'

I walked a step or two ahead of him, stung by his familiarity, which had been intended to sting me; embarrassed by his mention of Julian Flood, which had been intended to embarrass, the word ‘darling'having come as coarsely from his tongue as if I had been a music-hall dancer. And I was aware again of the silence around us, nothing but my angry footsteps to break it, that vaulted roof arching away into a timeless, treacherous distance.

‘Come, Faith. You're a sophisticated woman. You understand how it is.'

‘Yes,' I said, turning to face him, meeting the granite wall that was his anger. ‘I understand. As you say, he's been here all the time, and so have I. I've seen nothing to suggest that there is anything between them but friendship.'

‘Then he's a fool,' he said bluntly. ‘And so is she. So far as I'm concerned, it couldn't matter less. You have my permission to tell her so.'

‘I don't want to know about it, Nicholas.'

He stopped and lit a cigar, the fragrant trail of tobacco in the air somehow very wrong in this place, a quite deliberate desecration.

‘No. I imagine you don't. I merely mention it in case you should feel uncomfortable—adultery does have that effect on its spectators.'

‘Nicholas, there
is
no adultery.'

‘So you tell me. In which case I'll tell you again—he's a fool. I took him for a man who could recognize his opportunities.'

I walked on again, and then came to a halt somehow facing the fluted, crumbling stone of the old wall, my hands clasped tight together, my whole mind remembering him, knowing he was still there, unwilling, perhaps, but painfully present behind the hardness, the coarseness, the grim-textured façade.

I could neither hear him nor see him. I could simply feel him there, know him there, one part of me finding it ridiculous that I could not turn around and touch him, the rest of me anguished, terrified that I might do it. And already there was a whisper inside me, a warning that said, ‘Be very careful'; for his will had vanquished mine often enough, easily enough, in the past, and I had no greater resolution than before.

‘My dear sister-in-law,' he said, a certain harsh amusement in his voice. ‘You seem very agitated. I do apologize if I have given you cause.'

‘There's no need to apologize.'

‘Good. Nevertheless, you
are
upset?'

‘Yes.'

‘And is there anything I can do?'

‘You could believe me about Georgiana and Julian Flood.'

‘Could I? I'm not so sure of that. Belief, you see, implies a measure of trust and, I really don't think it would be wise. I imagine you know what I mean.'

‘Yes, I know. And you're quite wrong.'

‘Really? I should need to be convinced of that. Could you convince me?'

‘No,' I told him, sighing out the words, despairing over them. ‘Because there are things I can't tell you.'

‘And have I asked any questions?'

‘No, I almost wish you had.'

He came to stand beside me, heavier than my body remembered him, his nearness creating an imbalance in my reasoning, so that at the same time he was the man I knew best in the world and a total stranger.

‘In fact you'd like me to shake the truth out of you to ease your conscience, so that afterwards—like most women—you could say “he made me do it”.'