Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (16 page)

SECOND FRUITS

Stephanie Tillotson

Rosamunde Shaw neatly folded together the pink pages of the
Financial Times
and, finding little consolation there, asked herself, ‘Now, I wonder how all this will end?’

Her gaze slid cleanly down from the thickening autumn clouds above her to the glass and black wall of the building opposite, down to the wet London pavements thirty-two storeys below. In the offices around her own, the flames of fluorescent light were catching, running along the ledges and leaping from atom to atom in the recycled, dry oxygen of the city air. Now that the bank had failed she wondered if they would see people jumping from these windows, as they had done in Wall Street after 1929. What determination had resolved that leap into oblivion, was it simply the fear of something yet worse to come?

Guto had told her, on the first day they met, about a play he’d seen, the tale of a Welsh queen who, in middle age, had taken a young lover with passionate, unquenchable fervour. When the King had discovered her betrayal, he had ordered that the lover be hanged outside the Queen’s chamber window, where she could heed the hammering and the intensity of the execution drums.

‘That’s a horrible story. Why did you tell me that?’ Rosamunde had demanded.

‘They didn’t hang him,’ replied Guto earnestly, his mouth almost touching her face so that she could hear him above the sound of the waves and the wailing of the boat’s engine. ‘With the noose around his neck, the Queen’s lover jumped from the scaffold to his death. Don’t you think that is wonderful, Rosa? What courage! What defiance!’

She hadn’t understood but she had enjoyed the feel of his breath on her face. She thought it might just be despair that had caused the lover to jump but she hadn’t understood Guto then, after all she was only sixteen. It was August and her newly received exam results had been even better than predicted. For once her father had seemed pleased, pleased enough to allow her to join a small party of girls from school, boarding the day ferry from Penarth pier to Ilfracombe bay and back again. What he didn’t know was that Amelia Edwards had invited her brother and some of his friends to come along and that Amelia’s brother had brought several bottles of wine with him. Guto was one of the brother’s friends and, an hour or so into the trip, when the cliffs around Cardiff and Barry were little more than a charcoal smudge on the horizon, he had brought over a cup of red wine. Rosamunde did not drink it, though she had sipped it once. At Ilfracombe they had eaten light-brown scones with sweet strawberry jam and sticky cream. Later, as they stood on the beach, he had tried to kiss her. She had decided that she liked this, though she was nervous of what else he might try to do. Amelia said a boy had pushed his hand down the front of her knickers and put his finger inside her but Guto had never once done that to Rosa. Now she wondered what it would have felt like if he had.

She turned from the window back to the television in the corner above the filing cabinet. There had been a time when she only switched on the set to check the market prices. Tonight she was watching the early evening news. She could see a young man on the screen, someone with whom it seemed she had worked. He was crossing the crowded concourse in front of the building, a cardboard box in his hands. The dark jacket of his suit stirred as he walked, his rounded shoulders taking the weight of the box. A voice stumbled on, a voice unable to hide its excitement at the latest catastrophic news from the bank. Thirty-two storeys above the now empty concourse, Rosamunde watched the young man leaving the building, walking towards the Underground.

Her father had not approved of Guto. Because of the way his Welsh name is pronounced (the ‘u’ sounding like an ‘i’ to her father’s ears), he was always referred to as ‘the little git’. But then Guto’s father had not been pleased by his son’s growing attachment to a girl who only spoke English. Guto’s parents had both been teachers of Welsh and had brought up their children to be proud of their otherness. Guto’s dad now worked for the Examining Board and Guto’s mum was the headteacher at the comprehensive school he attended, where he was taught through a mysterious language Rosa had only ever heard on the television. He told her stories from books she had not known existed and learned of a history that seemed to have almost nothing to do with Shakespeare or English kings and queens. And all this in a building only twenty minutes walk away from her own school, where she was expected to devote herself to the development of her natural talents for Mathematics, Latin and Lacrosse.

‘Why did your Dad send you to that snobby girls’ school?’ Guto had asked.

‘It was when Mrs Shaw ran back home to her mammy,’ she had replied.

‘You see,’ he had laughed, ‘It’s just not normal!’

‘Aberystwyth University,’ her father had sneered in exasperation. ‘What the hell does he want to go there for?’

‘To study Welsh Literature.’

‘And what will he be able to do with that? He’ll be fit for nothing but teaching if he’s not careful and teachers earn a pittance. That boy of yours has no ambition.’ In her father’s eyes not to have any ambition was the worst failing possible. He had never spoken of courage or defiance with admiration, not to her anyway, yet how much he had displayed as the cancer threatened to overwhelm his failing flesh. It had been no more unnatural than the tide going out but Rosa’s father had clawed and hammered against it every minute of every day, steadfastly refusing to die in peace. The hospice had rung her late one Monday afternoon somewhere in the middle of this surprising month. ‘Come now,’ the doctor had advised and an hour later she was running down the platform at Paddington Station, cursing her short legs and her expanding waistline, leaping for the door just as the whistle blew on the train to Cardiff Central. All night long she sat by her father’s bed watching his chest expand and contract. She had remembered the prayers her mother’s religion had taught her, even though her father had nothing but contempt for ‘frail subservience and ignorance’.

‘Not in my house,’ he had shouted, ‘you will not teach my children the ways of fawning and toadying.’

‘Your father is a bad man, Rosamunde.’ Her mother had stood her ground and, when he had forgotten to collect her from the hospital after the birth of Rosamunde’s little brother, had taken the next taxi to the airport and gone home to her own mother in Tipperary. Thereafter Rosa’s father only referred to his wife as ‘Mrs Shaw’, who continued to stand her ground and would not entertain the idea of divorce until Rosamunde was forwarded to her mother in Ireland. In response, her father had taken Rosa out of the convent primary and made her sit the entrance exam to an exclusive girls’ school in Cardiff. She had passed easily, so her father’s next move was to buy a two-bedroomed luxury flat on the cliffs above the sea in posh Penarth. Suddenly their neighbours were judges, barristers and wealthy businessmen and her friends at school were the daughters of judges, barristers and wealthy businessmen. There had never been any further talk of divorce.

‘Do you think he knows that I am here?’ Rosamunde had asked the nurse.

‘He can probably hear you. Why don’t you talk to him?’

‘I’m still here, Daddy,’ she had told him time and time again through that night, her hand around his. ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,’ she murmured as his chest contracted. This time the breath did not shudder out, his body remained silent and still. ‘Has he gone?’ she asked. The nurse took a step towards the bed as his body rippled and reached out for life once again.

‘Listen to this, Rosa.’ They sat together on the sea wall, the sun shining on the last days they shared before Guto went away to university. He had made her promise she would come and see him but her father later steadfastly refused to let her leave the flat now that her A level exams were in sight. ‘You’ve got far too much work to do,’ he’d said and Guto had grown resentful of taking the bus to Cardiff and then being forbidden to see her. So Rosa’s father achieved his heart’s delight. He was able to stand in wine bars, an empty glass in his hand, boasting of his daughter who was studying Law at Oxford.

‘Listen to this, Rosa,’ side by side on the sea wall at Penarth, Guto with a book in his hand. ‘It says here that the greatest mystery in the world is that man is mortal and yet greets every day as though he were immortal. That can’t be right,’ he’d said jumping from the wall and holding out his hand, inviting her to follow him. ‘We’re not that important. What do you think is the greatest mystery, lovely Rosamunde?’ He caught her as she slid down onto the beach.

‘A volcano,’ she had replied, ‘the most beautiful, terrifying, wonderful thing on earth.’

He grinned mischievously. ‘Did you know,’ he draped his arm casually across her shoulders, ‘in Nicaragua, to appease the god of fire, only the most beautiful virgins were sacrificed to the boiling lava lake of Masaya Volcano?’ His other arm was catching her across the backs of her knees so that she was powerless to stop him lifting her above the shallow waves. ‘How would you have liked that?’ he asked and then let her drop into the water, standing above her laughing.

It was in the last few minutes before dawn that Rosamunde’s father had stopped breathing. She waited for the returning spasm but this time it had not come again. Afterwards she sat with him for an hour. There had been more tea and, suddenly, there were biscuits. He was exactly as he had always looked but she would not touch him again, afraid that he had already grown colder and that this would be her last memory of him; afraid that, in her subsequent dreams of him, she would reach out and he would be like stone. Across his cheeks, steel grey tips had begun to appear, ‘You need a shave, Dad,’ she said and walked away.

‘It’s not fair!’ she shouted, as she stood in the car park trying to call a taxi. ‘People don’t die at sixty-four.’ In Rosamunde’s hand her mobile phone began to scream. Automatically she answered it, though she recognised the number.

‘Thank Christ, Ros! Where the hell are you?’

‘Cardiff.’

‘Well get the next pony and trap back here immediately, the Bank’s about to go tits up!’ Her angry boss disconnected. A synthetic bubble of water rose and floated vertically over the screen.

She did not go back to London that day but stayed and registered her father’s death. Kieran Shaw, born Dublin, 1943, died Cardiff, 15 September 2008. She signed it, Rosamunde Shaw, daughter, present at the death. When she returned to work her boss had told her how sorry he was to have disturbed her at such a sad time and then he had sobbed dryly for his annual bonus: ‘I earned that money, I deserve it.’ But they both knew that no one was going to step up to the plate and save this moribund bank.

Now, an empty cardboard box on her desk, Rosamunde tried to sweep away the final meal of bread, brie and apple from the crevices in her computer keyboard and then switched off the television. In the end she left the box, taking only the fountain pen her father had given her on the day her mother went. There were no family photographs anyway, only a novel she had half read and no longer cared for. Tomorrow she would put her London house on the market and, once again, take the train from Paddington back to Cardiff. There she would carry her father’s ashes down to Penarth pier, to the exact splinter of wood where, twenty-one years before, on the very day she had left school, she had stood in her summer gingham dress and blazer and thrown her straw hat into the sea. She had watched as it nudged and shrugged across the gentle undulations until she grew tired of waiting for it to drown. It would be different this time. She knew that what was left of her father, sealed in his expensive urn, would not float but be gulped up and sink to the bottom of the bay. Then she would move into his flat, book a ticket to Sicily and, she promised herself, however demanding the climb, she would find the tenacity to make the four-day trek up the volatile slopes of Mount Etna.

Rosamunde and the month of October had settled into her father’s flat when, sitting in a café opposite the travel agent’s, comparing prices in holiday brochures for Italy, she looked up to see Guto’s mother crossing the floor.

‘I read about your father in the local paper. I am so sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied.

‘Would you mind if I told Guto?’ his mother asked.

‘Of course not. How is he?’

He had done well, rising to a senior rank among the civil servants at the Welsh Assembly Government. A respected and trusted translator, he had worked at the UN as well as in Cardiff and London. ‘In London?’ Rosamunde interrupted.

‘He often asks after you,’ Guto’s mother buttoned her coat to leave and then, as if changing her mind, she leant forward over the plastic table. ‘I know he was only a boy but he nearly broke his young heart over you.’

A postcard dropped onto her father’s doormat the following morning. The photograph was of a sandy sweep of bay and the Irish Sea stretching flat out to Cardigan Island. On the back he had written:

Dearest Rosa – Mum has just rung to tell me about your dad. I am so sorry and hope you know that I am thinking of you at this miserable time. Over is the view from my garden. After my divorce came through I decided to buy some land out here. I am
now working for the Welsh Pony and Cob Society and am hoping to do some breeding myself in the next year or so. Come anytime – we could walk and ride or just sit by the sea and drink some red wine. My love, as always, Guto.