Road to Berry Edge, The (15 page)

Ida said nothing.

‘Talk to me, damn you!' Rob yelled, and she jumped. ‘You began this wretched conversation.'

‘Sarah's been dead two years. I won't have you ruining your life over it.'

‘Do you really want me to bring another woman into this house to take Sarah's place?'

‘If Sarah had still been alive you would never have left,' Ida said steadily.

Rob went to her, got down beside her chair.

‘This is my home.'

‘You say that, but I can see what's going to happen and then I will have lost all three of you.'

‘I swear it to you, Ida, I'm coming back. I just want to get the place pulled together first. Will you stop worrying? And no more parties, eh? No more Miss Castletons with their breasts falling out of their dresses. Please?'

Ida smiled. Rob kissed her.

*

He and Harry were there two weeks. It was the shortest fortnight that Rob could ever remember, and the house and the grounds and the area around it were so precious to him. He went to Sarah's grave and there was no reluctance in him as there had been in Berry Edge with John's.

He had had to watch Sarah die. He had had to watch her grow pale and thin until sometimes he thought that he could see through her. She had wasted from him in that autumn and early winter of two years ago. Nothing could stop it. The doctors, even the best London doctors, did not know what to do.

She had wanted a child, and when nothing happened became impatient. And then her monthly bleeding stopped for a while and she rejoiced, and then it began without apparent change of any kind. She began to tire easily, she did not want to ride her horse or go out in the evenings. Sometimes she fell asleep in the afternoons. She bruised when she knocked even slightly against anything. She seemed able to do less and less. She fainted. Rob insisted that she went to the doctor, because her mother had begged her and she had said that there was nothing the matter. When things got worse Rob took her to London but nothing helped. All she wanted was to go home.

The doctors prescribed liver sandwiches and a lot of rest. They thought it was something to do with the blood.

Raw liver sandwiches became the bane of Sarah's life. She loathed them so much that quite often she was sick either during or after so that it was almost a waste of time struggling to get them down. She did not get better. She became more and more tired, so that even when Rob came
home she could barely make the effort to spend the evening with him. There were black shadows under her eyes.

That autumn Rob rarely went to work. They sat by the window in her bedroom watching the leaves drop from the trees on to the lawns below, the way the leaves turned orange and brown and fell, sometimes in twirling motions, sometimes gusted by the wind as the garden prepared itself for winter. The leaden skies and short afternoons were a pleasure to her when she could lie in front of a log fire and watch the dusk gather.

One cold December evening, snow began to fall as he and Sarah were sitting together by the window.

‘Do you remember last year?'

Rob said that he did. Last year there had been a future.

‘Would you carry me outside? I want to see it.'

‘You can see it from here.' She was in her favourite place, even though her mother complained that it was too cold for her there on the chaise longue.

‘No, I want to really see it. Take me. Please.'

He wrapped her up in a big rug and carried her down the stairs and along the hall and down the outside steps that she used to run down and never would again. She insisted on going right across the lawn to see the trees. The snow on the branches was already weighing them down and some of it was falling off. There were drifts beside the wall, graceful slopes. She lifted her hands and put out her tongue like a child and laughed at the feel of the snow.

‘We could have a white Christmas, Rob. Just think how that would be. The children will go sledging and everything will be so pretty.'

‘We should go back inside. You'll catch cold.'

‘Just a minute longer.'

‘Not another second,' Rob said.

They did have a white Christmas, but Sarah didn't live to see it. On Christmas Eve, with the snow piled high outside the window, Vincent Shaw took his son-in-law into his arms.

‘It's all right, Rob, I've got you,' he said.

*

When Rob and Harry went back north there was snow in Berry Edge. Being so high it got more snow than almost anywhere else, and all autumn and winter and early spring people went around in thick coats, and the women wore scarves and boots, because the wind bit across the moors and didn't stop just because madmen had placed a town there. As they drew further north it became colder and colder, and he thought the place had never looked as bleak as when he finally arrived again at the gates of the house where he had been born. He had no desire to be there. He longed for the abbey and its comforts, but Harry was with him, and later, when his mother and father went upstairs, he and Harry sat by the fire and drank whisky which Harry had brought with him from home. It was single malt and superb. Vincent had bought it specially.

‘I miss him already,' Rob said.

‘I couldn't wait to get away from the old bastard. When are you seeing Susannah?'

‘Saturday.'

‘There are certain things about Durham which Nottingham doesn't have,' Harry said, and grinned.

*

Susannah was dressed as she had been that first time, as plainly as she could be. It made him smile though against himself.

‘You dressed for me.'

‘Of course.'

She got up and kissed him briefly as though they were friends, and gave him wine and asked him about Nottingham. They sat by the fire on a big sofa. They made love on the sofa and then on the rug in front of the fire, and she wasn't defensive or controlled. Her eyes were lit for him. They went to bed and she lay there in his arms half asleep, and Rob remembered what being happy was like,
how he had not wanted to be with any woman since then as he wanted to be like this with Susannah Seaton now.

*

The fire was burning brightly. It was long after midnight. The curtains had closed out the cold night, the lamp was burning. She moved back and opened her eyes.

‘There's something the matter, isn't there?' she said softly. ‘Did something go wrong in Nottingham?'

‘Susannah, have you ever been in love?'

She smiled in surprise and didn't answer immediately.

‘Do you mean am I in love with you?'

‘No—'

‘Do you mean do whores ever do it free? Am I costing you too much?'

‘No. It doesn't matter.'

‘It's all right, I'll tell you. I thought I was in love once, he was called Sam. When I think about it now I think that it was never real, that it could not have been because I could never have loved somebody so … He didn't love me, I don't think that he had ever loved me but then … men see me and then they think that's love. Men don't love women, they admire their beauty and try to gain it for their own benefit.'

‘What did he do?' Rob asked her softly.

‘He did the worst thing that he could ever have done to me. He betrayed me.'

‘With another woman?'

Susannah smiled.

‘Only a man would think that. We were engaged to be married. He had a farm up near Hexham, it was the prettiest place. The house was old and had small square windows, and the fields around it were small and square too, and he was … he was rather like you, young and very nice to look at, dark. We were going to be married in the summer and I could see us there, having children, living the days out. And then one night just after Easter I was set upon by two men. I was living in Newcastle at the time. It was late and I
was going back to the house where I worked as a maid and they …' She stopped and looked sharply at him. ‘What am I doing telling you this? I never tell anybody.'

She got out of bed and fastened a thick dressing gown around her and went over to the brightly burning fire.

‘They took from me what no man had ever had and after that he refused to marry me.'

‘Didn't you have anyone to help you?'

‘No. My parents had died. They were good people. My father was named Mathias, he was quite religious. He called me after John Wesley's mother. When … when something awful like that happens to a woman, people somehow assume that she caused it. I was so distressed that I allowed people to know what had happened to me, and after people knew there was a kind of terrible shame. I lost my work and my friends, everything. I spent the money I had left on fine clothes and good food and a room and I waited until I found a gentleman. I got him to pay me what seemed such a lot of money to have me. Not nearly as much as I get now of course. You learn.'

She looked at Rob.

‘I don't learn some things though. Since then I've never told anybody that except Claire. I've especially never told a man. You're a very dangerous person, Robert Berkeley. You seem so nice, and beyond that niceness …'

‘What?'

‘I don't know. Can I ask you something?'

‘Certainly.'

‘What is your wife called?'

That knocked Rob, he hadn't expected it. ‘Sarah.'

Susannah looked long at him and when she spoke again a hardness had come into her voice.

‘Don't you love her any more that you come to me?'

‘I loved her very much. She died the winter before last.'

‘I see. I'm sorry, I didn't realise that.'

‘Susannah, if I were to pay you sufficient, would you give the others up?'

‘I might, if it was enough.'

‘And I could come and see you any time I wanted?'

‘Any time.'

Rob smiled. Susannah came back to bed, and he took her face in his hands and said, ‘I'll never let anybody hurt you ever again, I swear it to you.'

‘Oh, Rob, don't swear. Don't tempt fate.'

‘I love you.'

‘No, no.' Susannah put her hands over her ears but Rob dragged them away.

‘Don't you care for me at all?'

Susannah looked at him. ‘I didn't want to. I thought you were married. I was sure that you were.'

‘Don't pretend to me. Tell me. Is the past too much in the way? Can't you love anybody, Susannah?'

‘I don't want to. You can see why I don't want to.'

‘But I'm not like that, and I love you. I'll take care of you. There'll be just you and me if that's what you want. Is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

Rob kissed her and held her and whispered words of love into her ears and Susannah was soon blind and deaf, lost to the world.

Harry didn't miss his home at all once he got used to Berry Edge. The last two years, since Sarah had died, his parents had concentrated on him more and more as though he was about to disappear, so to actually leave and have his freedom was a heady feeling.

He regarded everything about Berry Edge as a challenge. He and Rob didn't go home again, and his father became used to the idea and more fair and stopped asking them to. It was a hard winter; when it was cold the wind blew relentlessly, and when it was less cold it snowed heavily. Rob's father became so ill that he didn't leave his room; that made mealtimes much better without the old man complaining and Rob's polite silences. Often Mrs Berkeley would take her meals upstairs on a tray in her husband's bedroom and he and Rob would have the dining room to themselves. Harry liked these times, talking over the work, making plans for the future. One cold February evening when they had finished dinner and were sitting around the table in the way that he liked, talking idly for once, he said, ‘Do you think we should take Faith out somewhere?'

‘Faith? Whatever for?'

‘She doesn't seem to go anywhere.'

‘She likes her dull life.'

‘Does she?'

‘We could take her out if you like, but it won't alter things, Harry.'

‘How do you know? It might. We could try. We could take her to a concert. There's one on Saturday. Let's go over and ask her.'

They went. The Normans' house was a disappointment to Harry; it was even plainer than Rob's parents' house. Faith was wearing yet another boring dress which didn't suit her. It was an awful colour between grey and off-white and, to Harry's experienced eyes, years out of fashion. No wonder she didn't attract anybody, he thought. Her hair was pulled back severely from her face; she wore no jewellery except a cross around her neck.

Her father and mother were polite to him and welcoming to Rob, and it was obvious to Harry that they thought part of Rob's duty in coming back to Berry Edge was to marry this cold female. He began to regret having thought about her.

She watched Rob a lot but she didn't see him, Harry thought. She wanted to see John so that was what she saw. It was strange. In Nottingham neither of them would have given her a second glance. Here in Berry Edge they were asking if she would go out with them. Her mother had gone to make some tea - Harry was beginning to hate tea, there was so much of it drunk here - and her father had gone to find a book which he was convinced they ought to read, and which Harry had already decided would be too boring. Rob asked Faith about the concert and she turned him down; she took pleasure in doing so, Harry could see, and it annoyed him because he had had to persuade Rob to ask her in the first place, and because he knew how much Rob wanted to make things up with her.

‘What are you doing that evening, polishing the Chapel?' he said. ‘I think you're very rude.'

‘I'm rude?' Faith stared. ‘There's a special meeting—'

‘You could miss it for once. The place wouldn't fall down.'

‘I said I would help with the tea.'

‘I'm sure there's somebody else who can pour tea. Would you rather do that than go out with us?'