Distant Choices (21 page)

‘Could she have been feeling faint?' suggested Quentin.

‘I expect so,' agreed Evangeline. ‘She
has
had a dizzy turn or two lately – several of them. You must all have heard her mention it. Oriel – have you not?'

But, behind her, Oriel had frozen to pale marble, Maud to granite, while Matthew, with an invitation to play whist in Lydwick after dinner, looked irritable and bored.

‘Go and see to her,' he told Maud, glancing rather peevishly down the hall where the butler was waiting to hand him his hat and gloves. But then, incredibly at this hour and with a game of whist in mind, he appeared to remember something – quite suddenly – which made him smile.

‘Ah no, on second thoughts, my dear, perhaps
I
had better see to this particular matter myself.'

‘Matthew.'
Evangeline's voice was sharp-edged with warning.
Don't interfere. Leave this to me. I can salvage it
. To which he responded with a slight nod of the head, as one accepts a challenge, his eyes narrowing with a far from charitable amusement. And very little had amused him of late.

‘Evangeline – my darling – if there is a man in my parlour kissing my daughter then surely it is my place to interfere? If only to enquire the exact nature of his intentions?'

Kissing
my
daughter, his eyes told her with cool enjoyment, when you expected him to be kissing yours. So, if your little schemes have gone awry – my love – then
do
permit me the pleasure of laughing, just a little, behind my hand. Surely you won't grudge me that, Evangeline?

He walked past her, still smiling, playing the master of his household with a light, malicious touch, aware – so very pleasantly – of her fury and Maud's, of Quentin's cleverly concealed frustration and Letty's terrible suspicion that she, with the best intentions, was somehow to blame for it; aware too of a stillness in Oriel, a suspension of breathing he understood to be painful. Was she piqued at the loss of a comfortable husband, or had she loved the man? He neither knew nor wished to enquire.

‘Now then, Francis my dear boy,' he said, leaving the parlour door open to allow his voice to carry, ‘by the look of things there must be something you wish to say to me?'

And all those who waited in the silent hall knew it could only be a proposal of marriage.

‘This is – too much,' said Maud.

‘No doubt it could have been avoided,' said Quentin, glancing coldly at his mother.

‘I hardly think I am needed here,' said Evangeline turning with studied grace and walking, back straight, head very high, upstairs.

Oriel remained quite still, looking as if she might well stay in that same spot forever, until Matthew, and Francis, and a glowing, dishevelled, wild-eyed Kate came all together through the parlour door.

‘It seems we are to have a wedding,' Matthew said.

‘How splendid.' That was Maud. While Letty, who always wept copiously at weddings in any case, burst into tears.

‘May I offer my congratulations.' Quentin's voice was no cooler than usual, the hand he offered to Francis perfectly steady, the kiss he placed neatly on Kate's cheek neither more nor less affectionate than the circumstances – had they been normal and expected – would have required.

‘Oriel …' Kate's hands reached out eagerly, fiercely. Oriel, her friend who would rejoice with her. ‘Oriel – this is what I couldn't tell you – the thing that couldn't be told – you remember? – until it happened – Oriel?'

She remembered. She remembered other things, too, other confidences, other fears. Fears for Kate, not herself.
Dear little sister, don't wear your heart on your sleeve like this, or somebody may break it
. How odd, how ironic that the heart to be broken – the guarded, careful heart – had been Oriel's own.

She did not think she could move. Yet because it had to be done, she moved, came forward, uncertain of her ability to speak until she opened her mouth and heard the correct formulas tripping from her tongue. The words one learned, like prayers she suddenly understood, to ward off the evils of ‘letting oneself down in public', the crime of failing to conceal that one had just lost everything one had hoped and cared for. Thereby losing one's self-respect. And she would be in desperate need of that from now on.

‘Kate – how wonderful.' Had no one noticed that her lips were trembling? Thankfully not. And then, because this too, this above all, was absolutely necessary. ‘Francis. I hope you will be very happy.' She gave him her hand, spoke yet another formula, and then withered and died, it seemed to her, although he saw no outward change in her. Not that his eyes, just then, could see anything clearly through the humiliation, the self-disgust, the growing apprehension he was feeling.

Rose Oriel, pale cream and ivory, who would find a more steadfast heart than his to love her, he supposed, ere long. How badly had he hurt her? Less, he hoped, than he had hurt himself since – through his own folly – the things which really mattered, the freedom, the adventure, the journey to Mecca, were certainly lost to him now. For how could he leave a fragile soul like Kate to keep his house and bring up his children? He had known, for the last ten minutes, that he could not. Not this year. Or next year. By which time someone else would have got to Mecca and back before him: and he did not care to be second.

Not this year. Perhaps never. ‘I would follow you barefoot – don't you know that?' she had said to him, ‘just to lead your life.' How ironic, how cruel, if she had condemned him instead to lead hers. His blood ran cold within him – already – at the thought of it.

‘Thank you for your good wishes, Oriel,' he said. She smiled and continued to move, anywhere so long as it was away from him, finding herself in the South parlour where the act of love, the act of destruction perhaps, had just occurred, wishing to face it more intimately and doing so, retaining her calm until she saw the bouquet of roses left behind on the table. Pale, long-stemmed roses from Dessborough. Her roses. Why had he brought these particular ones to Kate? Or had they been the first that came to hand, just roses for a lady, any roses. And any lady too, it seemed.

The door opened behind her.

‘Ah – Oriel.'

‘Yes, Quentin.' Thank God, once again, for the formulas, the mechanical words that spoke themselves, the mechanical smiles acting as a shutter to the mind. Thank God, even, that it was Quentin, passionless and rigidly controlled who, although he had lost as much, in his fashion, tonight as she, would not rant and rave and make accusations like Maud and his mother. Her own mother, too.

‘Oriel – are you – quite well?'

Anxiety, or mere curiosity? She could not tell.

‘Of course. And you, Quentin?' For, after all, this affected him more nearly since everyone knew he had intended to marry Kate, whereas her own hopes of Francis had been secret – surely – from everyone? Surely? Unless
he
knew? She saw that he did.

‘Of course,' he said, smiling at her, his eyes like glass. ‘I am suffering merely from surprise. And you?'

‘Possibly.'

‘From which I shall recover in good time to draw up the marriage-settlement and the list of bridesmaids. Shall your name be on the list?'

‘Naturally.'

Was he taunting her, or simply reminding her that if he could undertake the legal procedure of transferring the Stangway property – which should have been his – to another man, then she too could play her part at the wedding – which should have been hers – of another girl?

Of course she could.

And afterwards? What then? She felt the shock of it, the dread of it, rising in a great tremor through every vulnerable part of her. Yes, it would be terrible. For when this numbness faded there would be pain and grief and a great fear – just now beginning – of never finding her way back to the state of resignation in which she had taken refuge before. She had taught herself to want very little. Francis had seemed to offer her the world. Nothing remained to her now but the obligation to endure its loss. The obligation to behave with good taste and dignity: even – perhaps especially – when others did not.

The cream roses caught her eye again. ‘Oh look – I believe Kate has left her flowers. I'll just run and take them to her …'

But raising his hand in a gesture somewhere, she thought, between restraint and congratulation, he smiled and shook his head. ‘No – no,' he told her, his voice so quiet that later she thought it had been almost gentle. ‘No, Oriel. There is no need, I think, to go quite so far as
that
.'

Evangeline recovered quickly enough from her husband's treachery in what she termed the ‘Ashington fiasco', accepting it, quite simply, as a round of their conjugal sword-play which he, this time, had won. Yet she experienced a depth of emotion most unusual to her, veering between anger and a positively maternal sorrow, that her lovely, her
perfect
daughter had lost the best matrimonial proposition ever likely to come her way, to Kate, Eva Kessler's daughter who ought never to have been born at all in her opinion, much less to have become – since September – Mrs Francis Ashington of Dessborough, presently enjoying a lengthy honeymoon in Paris, the Merton's villa in Monte Carlo, and the Madeira home of an Ashington cousin in the hills above Funchal.

Evangeline could neither get over the injustice of it herself, nor allow Oriel to do so.

‘Discretion is all very well, Oriel my love, but one can hardly help thinking it odd – certainly unfortunate – whenever one remembers, that here
you
are, with all your social and physical, and every other kind of perfections. And there is Kate, who has not an ounce of sense in her silly head, married and provided for and visiting
the Mertons
– her husband's cousins – and Heaven alone knows who else … How, do you suppose, could it happen?'

‘It
has
happened, mamma.'

‘Indeed. And, Good Heavens, Oriel – how could you allow it? How could you?
Kate
– who cannot hold a candle to you in any shape or form – ever. Oh yes – I know her methods were crude and obvious from what one can gather. Lying in wait for him in Merton Woods and then throwing herself at him – physically – which is just what her dreadful mother would have done. But it succeeded, Oriel. Obviously the man is quickly aroused. But men
are
, dear. One supposed you would have known that.'

‘Yes, mamma.'

‘Ah – so you do know.' And because she could not show her anger to anyone else, without giving the game away, she grew angry. ‘I am amazed. May one take it, then, that when the next man comes along you will put your knowledge into action? Just a whisper of encouragement, no more, my love, to make a man overstep the mark and then – hey presto – wedding bells and all the rest of it. Just like clever, scheming, thieving little Kate. Come now, dearest, you can hardly deny that she stoie the man from you? Nor that it was devious and very cunning of her?'

No, she did not deny it. At least, not in words and certainly not to Evangeline. But, in her aching heart – and how bitterly and silently it ached throughout that autumn, that dreary approach to winter – she did not blame Kate for anything. Nor did she blame herself. She had behaved in what she understood to be the proper manner. She had obeyed the rules, had waited to be asked, while he – fully understanding those rules – had conveyed to her, quite clearly enough, the seriousness of his intentions. He had meant to ask her. Something had occurred to change his mind. And she could think of nothing more likely than some revelation about her background and parentage, made to him no doubt by the Mertons; the revival of some old scandal which he did not wish to see reflected in his own children. The very disaster which, in fact, she had always expected and before which her spirit, almost naturally, bowed. Of course. What was it in the Bible about the ‘sins of the fathers', and of the mothers too, on this occasion? No doubt Lady Merton would know. ‘
Miss Blake
. My dear boy,
who
is Miss Blake? Can any of us be certain? A bastard Stangway, perhaps. But, there again, one cannot help but wonder …?' So Lady Merton might well have warned him, going on to suggest how much better it would surely be to take the real Miss Stangway with all her land and all her Kessler money, and then one would know
exactly
to whom one's children were related.

Such, she knew, would have been the advice of the Mertons and even of Evangeline herself had it not concerned her own daughter. Such was the way of the world. And if a man so enlightened, so fine, as Francis Ashington had declined, at the last moment, to take a woman the world condemned, then she saw little hope, in any direction, for the future. And since she could not blame the whole world for her troubles without sinking into an irrevocable bitterness and thus doubly destroying herself, it seemed best to blame no one at all. She could neither change what had happened nor run away from it. They would be there, Francis and Kate together, living their shared lives just a few miles away at Dessborough, within easy driving distance, easy dinner-party distance, no distance at all for Kate, in her terrible innocence, her certainty that Oriel must be overjoyed at her happiness, to invite her, day in day out, to be its witness, the young Mrs Ashington's constant companion, the favourite aunt of her children.

Quite simply, and with a great deal of carefully concealed panic. Oriel knew she could not bear it.

There had been a short, intense engagement, a hurried wedding between a bridegroom who did not care for Christian ceremonies and a bride who still saw herself riding to church on an elephant, wrapped in musky, gold-threaded, orange silk. But, rather more appropriately, a white dress and a veil of Brussels lace had been duly provided, Maud overseeing the trousseau with an almost visible taste of ashes in her mouth, Letty withdrawing herself from the situation, very possibly on the instructions of her competent eldest son, by taking to her bed with a malady generally thought to be ‘convenient'. A handy little upset to the nerves and to the stomach, brought on not only by the shock of discovering Kate in that lecherous, bare-bosomed embrace, but by Quentin's all too evident displeasure that she had seen fit to mention it. She had been championing his cause, after all. Why then did he look at her so coldly, freezing her constant attempts to explain herself with a clipped ‘Just so, mamma. Let us say no more about it.'