The Favoured Child (42 page)

‘I wish we knew someone,’ I said as we went into the Pump Room and hesitated in the doorway with three dozen strangers looking at us.

‘We will,’ Mama said cheerfully. ‘Bath is the most sociable place in the world. It always has been. We will have dozens of friends before the end of the week.’

‘There’s that girl!’ I said suddenly. ‘The girl we saw at the doctor’s!’

She was sitting at a table, drinking a glass of the waters, among a group of young people. I looked for the brown-eyed man, but he was not with her. There were two other girls, one standing behind her chair and laughing with a young man, and one sitting beside her looking at plates in a fashion magazine. Two young
men were looking over her shoulder and laughing at something. In the bright candlelight of the public room, with her friends around her, she seemed to look more frail and vulnerable than ever. As if she felt my eyes on her, she looked up, and recognized me. She rose from her seat and walked over towards us, shrugging her shawl on her shoulders. She dropped a curtsy to Mama and said, ‘How do you do? I am Marianne Fortescue. I think I saw you at Dr Phillips’s, did I not?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Mama said. ‘I am Lady Lacey and this is my daughter, Julia.’

‘I have not seen you there before,’ Miss Fortescue said. She had a soft languid way of speaking, as though she were extremely tired. ‘I go to the doctor every morning now.’

‘I have to go every morning too,’ I said. ‘While we are staying in Bath, that is. We will go home in April.’

She nodded. ‘Where is your home?’ she asked.

‘Sussex,’ I said. There was no singing in my head. I could have been saying an ordinary name. ? place called Wideacre, near Chichester,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘We live in Clifton, near Bristol,’ she said, ‘so I drive over every day. My brother brought me today in his phaeton. I was quite sure he would overturn us. And I quite froze on the journey.’

‘Will you drive home this evening?’ Mama asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Miss Fortescue said. ‘There is a concert tonight which my brother especially wanted to hear. We stay tonight at my aunt’s house. Do you go to it?’

‘Yes,’ said Mama, much to my surprise. ‘Perhaps we shall see you there.’

Oh, good,’ said Miss Fortescue and curtsied once more to us and walked back to her group of friends. ‘Concert, Mama?’ I asked.

She shot me a quick mischievous look. ‘You wanted friends in Bath, Julia,’ she said frankly. ‘You are on the way to having them. Miss Fortescue’s shawl alone would have cost two hundred pounds. I think her a perfectly suitable acquaintance for you!’

‘Very vulgar,’ I said. ‘I am surprised at you, Mama.’

‘Town polish,’ she said witheringly. ‘You would not understand, my Sussex milkmaid. Now we must put our names in the book and buy you a new gown for tonight.’

Mama designed that evening as my formal introduction to Bath; and she showed me that I was indeed a Sussex milkmaid, for I did not know that it could be done so smoothly. Marianne Fortescue was there with her brother, whose name was James, and the two girls who had been with her in the Pump Room – her sister Charlotte and her cousin Emily. She was in the party of Emily’s mama, Mrs Densham, who lived in Bath and who remembered my Grandmama Havering from all those years ago. Somehow we joined their party, and I sat on the concert bench between Marianne and Emily; we went into supper with them and drank tea with them at Mrs Densham’s house when the concert finished early.

Marianne ate nothing at the supper table; later she only drank a dish of tea and did not touch the little cakes or the savoury pastry. I saw her brother’s eyes on her, and then I saw him scowl at Emily when she said softly, ‘Marianne, please eat a little cake at least.’

He interrupted them at once and complained that his tea was cold and had been standing too long. Between Emily’s protestations that the pot was fresh and had been properly heated too, whatever he might say, the moment when Marianne had blushed and then suddenly paled passed unnoticed by anyone except me.

‘I expect we shall meet at the doctor’s tomorrow,’ Marianne said to me as we stood at the head of the stairs waiting for my mama to say goodbye to Mrs Densham. ‘You will forgive me if I don’t speak to you then. I never feel very well after I have been with him, though I know he is an excellent man. I know he is doing me good.’

‘Quack,’ said James Fortescue so suddenly that I jumped. ‘Quack! Quack! Quack!’

Marianne laughed aloud, the first time I had heard her laugh
all evening, and she flushed pink and her eyes sparkled. ‘Don’t, James!’ she said. ‘And you should not say so! Miss Lacey will think you so rude!’

‘Quack! Quack!’ said James Fortescue, unrepentant and smiling at me. ‘Miss Lacey can make her own mind up. Just because he lives in a big house and has some of the smartest girls in Bath trailing in to cry on his sofa does not make him any less of a quack than if he was selling flour as medicine in Cheap Street!’

Marianne shot an apologetic look at me. ‘My brother has a prejudice against him,’ she said. ‘Everyone I know speaks very highly of him…’

‘A pwejudice,’ James said outrageously. ? pwejudice indeed!’

‘Why do you see him?’ I asked shyly.

Marianne glanced downwards. ‘I find it very hard to eat,’ she said as if she were confessing some secret vice. ‘It sounds very silly. I
am
very silly to have such a difficulty. Mama and Papa have become so concerned that they have sent me to a number of physicians.’

James Fortescue grimaced. ‘I believe in none of this,’ he said frankly to me. ‘I like to take her, and I like to collect her, because everyone else thinks it an act of high tragedy that she started off eating little, and has gone on to eating less, and will no doubt eat more when she is hungry.’

Marianne smiled at me, that odd smile of complicity. ‘Things never seem that simple when other people talk at you, do they?’ she asked. ‘What about you?’

I flushed scarlet. ‘I have dreams,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Sometimes nightmares. And I had one dream which was…’ I broke off and looked around the brightly lit stairs, the chandelier sparkling above the stairwell, the bright silk wallpaper and the rich carpet. I could not tell this world about a world where thunder crashed and a church spire fell and I stood on the lichgate steps like some old warning prophet. ‘I have disturbing dreams,’ I said lamely.

James took my hand and raised it to his lips very gently. It was a courteous kiss to bid me goodnight, but he kept my hand for a
moment longer than I expected, and he smiled at me with his brown eyes crinkled. ‘I have bad dreams too,’ he said. ‘Especially when I have eaten toasted cheese for supper.’

Marianne and I both laughed, then Mama was at my side and it was time for me to go. But I knew I liked James Fortescue, and I smiled all the way home at the thought of telling Dr Phillips that I dreamed because I ate toasted cheese late at night.

I
truly was a Sussex milkmaid, for it took me several days to realize that I had been adopted by the best society that Bath had to offer this season.

That first day set the pattern for my days in Bath. In the morning I would go to the doctor and sit in his soft armchair by the flickering fire and tell him about Wideacre and about the dreams. I tried to hold tight to what I was saying, to keep as much as I could from him. There was so much I did not want him to know: the lightning glinting on the blade of the knife and Ralph’s face in the thunderstorm when Beatrice went out in the rain to meet him; the dream I had of love-making in the summer-house with Ralph and the knowledge I had that no young lady should have of that delight, the secrets of Acre, the way animals feared Richard, that night of dark unsayable pleasure before the fire; and the dream that had come over and over again of the falling spire and me standing under the lich-gate calling the people to pull down the cottages to make the village safe.

I did everything I could to lie to Dr Phillips and to lock the Wideacre secrets safely away in a corner of my mind. But he was clever, and the room was too hot, and the firelight flickered as I watched it, and day after day he drew more and more from me until I felt robbed and betrayed, and I knew I was losing my Wideacre self. It was being sucked from me and I was becoming an empty, pretty shell.

‘Now, tell me,’ he would say insinuatingly. And something inside me would flinch as if a snail had crawled on to my hair as I lay in the grass. ‘Tell me about this woman, your Aunt…Beatrice, is it? Tell me why you think you are like her.’

And I would start haltingly to tell him, trying all the time to tell him as little as possible. ‘I look like her, I suppose,’ I ventured. ‘And everyone in the village says I look like her.’

‘Have you seen her picture?’ Dr Phillips asked.

‘No,’ I said slowly. I shifted in my chair. The cushions were very deep and soft, the firelight flickered on my face.

‘Then how do you know you look like her?’ he asked. Whenever he asked a question like that, his voice took on a slightly querulous note of surprise. He was inviting contradiction.

‘Because…’ I broke off. ‘They all say I do,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so!’ he said sweetly. He almost sung the words. ‘I don’t think that is why. Have you dweamed her, Julia? You can tell me, you know.’

‘I have not seen her in dreams,’ I temporized. But he was quick to hear the note of deception.

‘But you have dweams with her in them?’ he asked.

I sighed. There was a strange perfume about the room, as if the windows were never opened, as if all the air had been burned away by the flickering flames, as if I should never be free, like some poor Persephone, underground, for ever.

‘Yes, I have dreams with her in them,’ I said wearily.

‘And yet you say you do not see her?’ His voice was very soft, very sweet.

‘Only in a mirror,’ I said.

‘In a mirror’ he repeated as if that were a little bon-bon to be savoured. ‘How do you see her in a mirror? Are you beside her?’ He did not wait for me to reply. ‘Beside her? In fwont of her? Behind her?’

‘I am her!’ I broke in, suddenly impatient. ‘I dream that I am her!’

I expected him to be shocked. Instead he put his pudgy fingers together like a little tower over his rounded waistcoat and said softly, ‘Vewy good, and I think that is enough for today.’

It was like that every time. At the very point when I thought I had said something so startling that it would break the spell of the room, shake his poise, release me, then it was always time for
me to go. The next day when I went again, he would start from where we had left off. And somehow, in the interval, the shock had gone from what I said. It had become
his
information. My dream had become his dream. I was, each day, diminished by the loss of my dreams and my secrets.

There was nowhere I could be renewed. Every morning the dreams I spoke of seemed more and more remote. The sight seemed less likely, a mistake, or a lucky guess. Soon Dr Phillips was not just listening to me, he was telling me that I must have misunderstood, that things could not happen the way I had thought, that Beatrice could not walk Wideacre and see through my eyes, that the land had no heartbeat.

Bath itself eroded the bedrock of my certainties. Ralph Megson was right when he said that if one was to choose anywhere to forget the land, then Bath would be a good place. I sighed for the smell of Wideacre air as I walked in the parks and gardens. Bath was so paved and cobbled and tiled that I never saw a scrap of pure earth all the time I was there. I never saw a leaf that had not been trimmed into some fashionable shape. I never saw a flower which had grown of its own free will. Even the river, flowing through the town, was walled in and channelled and guided under the pretty bridge and over the stone-built weir.

As for the hot springs, I thought them simply disgusting. Not just disgusting to drink, which Mama insisted we did – three glasses every day! – but I found the very idea of hot water coming out of the ground quite repellent. It was hot enough to bathe in! Every time we passed the bath-houses and smelled the steam coming out and the hot metallic odour of the water, I longed for the downs at Wideacre, where all along the spring line the water comes out from the chalk as cold as ice and tasting of clean rain.

I longed for Wideacre then, when I smelled the baths. I longed for Wideacre when I awoke in the morning and looked out of my window and saw row on row of stone-tiled roofs, stretching, it seemed, for ever and ever. I longed for Wideacre at night when I could not get to sleep. The rattle of the coach-wheels on the cobbles seemed to be sounding inside my head, and my bedroom
grew bright and then black as the dipping light of a link-boy went past, instead of being lit by the cool beam of a Wideacre moon. I longed for Wideacre at meal-times when I thought the bread looked grey and the milk tasted strange, and we did not know where either had come from, whose cows had given the milk, whose wheat had made the flour.

I longed for Wideacre most of all when I walked in the park and all there was to see was a frozen patch of ice with sulky ducks around it begging for bread, and nowhere to walk but meandering little paths which ran round and round in circles instead of going the quickest straight route as we do in the country. But in the country we walked because we wanted to get somewhere, not because we wanted to waste time. In Bath wasting time was all people ever did. Every day I spent there was full of minutes and hours when my only occupation was spreading out little tasks to fill up the emptiness. Then I would walk in the park and look at the toes of my new half-boots – which would not have survived one minute in the mire of Acre lane – and wonder what on earth I was supposed to do with myself to fit myself for the life they wanted me to lead. I did not know how I could bear to change that much.

One day I was so deep in such hopeless rebellion that I did not hear at first when someone called my name.

‘Julia!’ the voice said again, and I looked up and saw Mary Gillespie.

‘You were far away!’ she said teasingly. ‘Were you dreaming of James Fortescue? Elizabeth will hardly speak to you this morning. You danced twice with him last night, you know!’