Distant Choices (3 page)

‘Yes. Quite well, thank you, Mr Stangway. My mother has just stepped out for a moment. She asks me to say she will not be long.'

Had the girl realized, even after a liaison of such long standing, that it was still Evangeline's policy to keep him waiting, keep him guessing, keep him always a little unsure not only as to her whereabouts but as to the state of her heart? Did the girl realize there had been a liaison at all? He had not the faintest notion. And although he had now lived for eighteen years under the same roof as Eva's daughter, he did not pretend to know her any better. His Kessler daughter with her sallow skin and dark, disconcerting stare, so very like Eva who, to Evangeline's intense disappointment – why deny it? – had failed to die in childbirth, although she had taken little interest in the child thereafter, beyond handing him a list of names which he had at once rejected. Artemis, she had wished to name her daughter. Or Lalage. Ondine. Gaia. The Lord knew what other pagan nonsense. ‘Katharine,' he'd ordered curtly, tearing her list neatly in half and consigning both pieces to the fire, before the servants got a look at them. ‘Katharine,' his sister Maud had firmly seconded. His mother's name. Plain Kate, acceptable everywhere. And Kate it had been, with Maud's name, as the child's godmother, to follow it. Katharine Maud. Yet even then, looking down at the slant-eyed, brittle-boned changeling in the Stangway cradle, it had struck him, uneasily, that Lalage, or Ondine, would not have gone much amiss.

Eva's child, soon forgotten by Eva who had forgotten everything in her last years but her compulsion to record in impossible colours the scenes and faces of her life. Becoming a distant, disgraceful, paint-smeared figure, rarely emerging from her work-room in the attic, leaving the care of her daughter to his sister Maud who had taught her – he supposed – what any young lady needed to know. Not a great deal, in his judgement. A little music and drawing. Some embroidery and dancing. French within reason and a suitably watered-down version of history unlikely to turn the head. How to serve tea and press flowers and make herself agreeable to gentlemen. Accomplishments notably lacking in his daughter Kate but which anyone with half an eye could find in their smooth and polished abundance in Miss Oriel Blake.

His daughter too. Did she know it?

‘Darling – of course not.' Evangeline had appeared scandalized at the mere idea of such a thing. ‘One must have respect for the truth – naturally – I do so agree. But such a
burden
sometimes – don't you think? Rather more – perhaps? – than our innocent little lamb could carry. And – innocence apart, my love – these young girls do chatter so, one to another, like a flock of little starlings, heads all together. And we could not have her telling
our
secrets, after all, to today's best friend, who will be tomorrow's enemy for sure. No. She is Miss Blake. And so long as I remain Mrs Blake, her widowed mother, then I – Matthew, my dearest love – have my reputation to think of …'

He had remained, therefore, remote from this eldest daughter of his. A distance which suited him. Although he was marrying her mother today for her sake. Or so he told himself. So Evangeline had told him, repeatedly, after Eva's death, wasting no time and making no bones about it either, since she had waited so long.

‘We shall observe the necessary proprieties, of course – shall we not, Matthew, my darling? – by waiting a twelvemonth more. And then, just as soon as we are all out of black gloves, you may ask me to marry you. What could be more natural after all? A widow and a widower, no longer so young as they used to be, each with a darling daughter. So suitable, Matthew …? I had better move back to Hepplefield at once, so that the whole town may bear witness to our meeting again, after so many years apart. You will be able to find me a suitable house, I know, my darling – not too grand, not too small, just right …
Do
see to it, Matthew.'

Had there been a hint of desperation in her? A stark dread, at this eleventh hour, of losing her final chance? He believed so, although it had not influenced him greatly. He was marrying her because he chose to acknowledge the obligation. Because – in bleaker terms – there was nothing else, nothing whatsoever, he wanted to do. Let her have her triumph, then. The prestige of his name. The comfort of his fortune. What remained of his passions – very little. Hardly anything at all. Let her have it. She had earned it. And what real difference could it make to him?

Fascinating, scornful, suddenly fragile Evangeline, who by still wanting so many things, so urgently, thus exposed her own weakness. Did she know how totally his own capacity to hope, to enjoy, even to desire, had deserted him? Or how comfortable he was, these days, with his own indifference?

Of course. She knew it very well. Yet, as she reached his side at the altar the thought uppermost in her mind was that she had come here, this bright, cold morning, not to be sentimental but to be married. And if a girl of her daughter's age – or Eva Kessler's daughter's age – might expect the two to go together, Evangeline knew they did not.

Dear Matthew. Still handsome but as cold – these several years past – as a marble statue, and as empty.

‘My dearest, I truly believe we were made for one another,' she had murmured to him the other evening, in the hearing of his sister Maud, on purpose to infuriate this woman who had always been her enemy.

‘Indeed – my love – I believe we were,' he had answered, his cynical eyes passing from Maud, who believed him to be in the grip of a renewed infatuation, to Evangeline herself who – having no taste at all for physical passion – was much relieved to find that he was not. But she had heaved a sigh nevertheless and breathed a few meaningless whispers into his ear, to further annoy his devoted sister Maud who could not know that his long infatuation had actually ended, perhaps not on the very day but certainly within a few months of having possessed her. At about the time, she shrewdly supposed, that she had managed to conceive his child.

A gamble, of course. But with her thirtieth birthday jeering on her horizon such a gamble had seemed quite justified. It would not be the first time, after all, that a Slade had risked everything on the turn of a card. And what had there been to lose but a lifetime of genteel drudgery as a paid companion with nothing to hope for beyond a fifty-pound ‘remembrance'in her employer's will? The sin of adultery, if committed in sufficient luxury, must surely be better than that? A coolly considered decision. A cool hand, too, with which she had written her dramatic note of surrender to her lover. ‘Matthew, my darling – come to me. Take me.'

And so he had taken her, a flirtatious, possibly unscrupulous, yet nevertheless immaculate virgin of thirty, as if they had both been eighteen, his ardour coming as a great shock to her, almost an indignity, until she had realized the power it gave her. And then there had been Oriel; the love-child, born, she readily admitted, when love – such as it had ever been – was drawing to a close, but whose very existence entitled her mother – at the very least – to a comfortable home of her own. Her own carriage, too. Her own status, albeit false, as the dashing widow Blake who, in the course of her wanderings from one spa town, one seaside resort, one country house visit to another, had made many friends. Once, in the black year of Eva Kessler's pregnancy, she had considered marrying one of them. But Eva's child had not been the son Evangeline had dreaded, only this skinny, nut-brown little Kate who could be no threat to her – no threat to her own polished pearl of a daughter either – and she had decided to wait.

The waiting was over now. The wedding service had begun. And with it the intense joy she expected to feel, every day of her life now, in showing these worthy citizens of the Gore Valley just what it would mean to deal with Mrs Stangway of High Grange. A lesson they would begin to learn soon enough. Tomorrow morning, very likely, when her husband's spinster sister Maud, who had kept his house for thirty years and brought up his wife's daughter, let it be known that the household keys and accounts, the guest list and the menu book had been taken from her.

Nevertheless, ‘Dear Maud,' she murmured, as she stood, half an hour later, on the church porch among her wedding-guests, the focus of all eyes, as she so dearly loved to be. ‘Dear Maud.' And she bent forward through a shaft of winter sunlight to kiss the cheek of a woman of her own age who looked – Goodness, how very pleasing –
at least
ten years older. Maud Stangway, straightbacked, thin-lipped, overbearing in her manner and exceedingly decided in her opinions who, having found no one grand enough to marry had married no one, remaining with her brother as first lady of High Grange Park and Low Grange village. Maud – who would be an autocrat without authority tomorrow.

And then, having kissed Maud twice for good measure, ‘Dear Letty …' enthused Evangeline, reaching out to take the hands of her husband's younger sister. ‘The pretty one'they had called her in the old days when – for a month or two – she had been Evangeline's ‘very dearest, sweetest friend', her most reliable source of invitations to High Grange until Maud had spotted the use Evangeline was making of her as a stepping-stone to Matthew, and put a stop to it.

Letty had written Evangeline a letter, dictated by Maud. ‘I think it unwise for our friendship to continue, in fairness to us all …' Meaning, ‘Unless you stop tempting my brother to marry you instead of Money, then who will I ever find to marry me?'

And who had she found, even when the coal revenues had started to come in, but a country parson, well-born of course, but good for little else that Evangeline could see beyond the fathering of Letty's – how many was it? – ten, or eleven children. A whole tedious tribe of them, in any case, all with that elongated, washed-out greyhound look of overbreeding, forever scuttling in and out of High Grange Park where Evangeline had already come across them far too often, consuming quantities of cakes and tea from the best china, lounging all over the drawing-room in the best chairs, staying on to dinner whenever their doting Aunt Maud chose to invite them. At least four times a week by Evangeline's reckoning.

And even as she smiled with warm affection at their mother, she had made up her mind to put a stop to that.

‘Dear Letty – how wonderful that we are sisters now, as well as friends …'

Poor
Letty, it seemed to Evangeline's sharp eye, in every sense of the word. Poor in that chilly little vicarage of hers with its threadbare, overcrowded gentility. Poor in her hopeless little husband who could barely afford to clothe all those children, much less establish the boys in suitable professions and get the girls decently married. Poor in the loss of her looks – with the best will in the world one could hardly help noticing it – her face sadly shrunken and faded, her figure, which had once been so neat and trim, saggy and puffy now, so that one could hardly tell, any longer, whether she happened to be pregnant or not. Poor in her nerves, too, by the look of it, her chin being rather apt to quiver and her eyes to fill with tears without warning and for no specific reason that Evangeline could see.

Was she tearful now as Evangeline took her in an exquisitely condescending embrace? Remembering perhaps – as Evangeline herself was remembering – how she and Maud had once let it be known that they could accept no invitations to parties of any kind if the dubious Miss Evangeline Slade was also to be a guest. Thus bringing Evangeline's social engagements in the neighbourhood to an effective close.

Now here was Letty, the ‘pretty one', an old woman at forty-five; and Maud, the ‘clever one'with nothing in the world but a ‘spinster sister's'pension to call her own. And here was Evangeline at fifty, with the best of her life still before her, holding her court already in the churchyard among those false friends who could no longer afford to be her enemies.

Despite her outward composure, the cool courtesy of her voice and her manner, Evangeline Stangway was ablaze with a fierce joy that had nothing whatsoever to do with her husband.

She did not even look for him among the crowd –
her
crowd – as he stood back cynically, wryly, to watch her play the role for which she had undoubtedly been created. The wife of a rich man.

‘Congratulations, papa. Is that what one says?' His daughter Kate spoke from behind him, startling him as she often did, so that he was frowning – by no means unusually – as he turned to look at her.

‘Ah – Kate.'

‘Yes, father. Kate.' Was she reminding him of her existence? Kate, his Kessler daughter, with those black Kessler eyebrows, wide forehead, sharp, birdlike nose, the overcrowded,
clever
Kessler face which he had always found – displeasing.

‘Thank you for your good wishes, Kate,' he said.

‘And what does one do now, papa? Congratulate the bride?'

She was being insolent, of course. But then, she often was, usually with Maud who had always dealt with her, harshly he supposed, knowing Maud, although he had never interfered, finding it better – more convenient, at any rate – not to notice.

He nodded. ‘I believe so.'

‘Oh – good.' She bounded away, coltish, skittish, haphazard, the sudden focus of several dozen pairs of interested eyes as she came face to face with Evangeline.

‘Dear child …?' And Matthew Stangway, with a cool spurt of amusement, interpreted the message of his wife's outstretched arms. ‘Dearest Kate, you must think of me as a mother now.' Nor did he fail to note the masterly fashion with which she concealed her annoyance when Kate, with what looked like an excess of awkward enthusiasm, heartily kissed Evangeline's proffered cheek and, at the same time, managed to dislodge her elegant gauze and feather hat.

No easy matter, since Evangeline was the taller and had an expert way with a hat-pin. An expert ear, too, for the few discreet titters from her ‘well-wishers'who knew how easily a woman with her hat askew can be ridiculous.