Distant Choices (49 page)

He too glanced down into the coffin and then, before Maud had had time to complete her trick with the white satin cover, walked away with an air of one who has ‘arrangements'in hand.

‘The flowers,' murmured Letty, on a note of agony. ‘Such a profusion which – under the circumstances … So kind.'

‘You will want to look at them, Oriel – and read the cards,' said Maud, wishing it to be known by one and all, even by Oriel, that the sympathy these cards and other tributes contained was addressed exclusively to Matthew, regretting the humiliation he had suffered – since what else could it be but that? – on the death of his wife.

‘No thank you. I would rather not,' said Oriel, very politely, moving into a corner of the room where Francis Ashington quickly joined her, cutting her off most adroitly, she noticed, from the rest.

Francis had been kind to her. She saw that he wished to be kind now and found herself wondering how best to give him the opportunity. Already he had ridden over to Lydwick and spent time with her, a commodity of which she understood the value, talking of very little, never once of Evangeline but simply being there, his presence in her home which he had never before visited, not only giving her comfort but making a declaration that he, a cousin of Lord Merton and a relative, to some extent, of every sizeable landowner in the Gore Valley, had no intention of withdrawing his acquaintance from Mrs Oriel Keith. He had even met her, one day, in Lydwick High Street, probably not at all by chance, and, dismounting from his very noticeable black mare, had engaged her in a lengthy conversation of which Lydwick's elite had been acutely aware.

Several people had sent cards of sympathy after that, improving her status at least with Elspeth, and now he was beside her once again, in this hostile South parlour which would, one day, belong to him, guarding her – she thought with a smile – from her mother's enemies who might well transfer to her, at any moment, the pent-up grudges they had been nourishing for years against Evangeline.

The gallant Squire of Dessborough, his sword at her service, letting it be known that in his view Mrs Oriel Keith was in no way responsible for her mother's sins. His defence of her causing him some embarrassment, she quickly realized, from several of these old Stangway ladies – Letty among them – who thought him heroic to have come to the funeral at all when Evangeline's betrayal of Matthew could only remind him of all that Kate had done – appeared still to be doing, alas – to him.

‘Thank you, Francis,' she said, knowing how easily, almost how naturally, she could have added ‘my dear friend'.

Men in black frock coats and tall hats swathed in black crêpe came in to close the coffin and remove it, piling the polished mahogany lid with a display of floral tributes more magnificent than several of the spinster great-aunts believed they had ever seen.

‘How kind,' murmured Letty, signalling to her daughters, by taking out her own handkerchief, that it was time for tears. ‘How truly generous everyone has been. There is even a posy from Dora Merton. One hardly knows
what
to say.'

‘Perhaps nothing would be best?' suggested the voice of Evangeline, speaking crisply through Oriel.

The coffin was carried through the door and in the direction of the waiting carriages, the church of High Grange parish being a tidy step away. And, realizing she must go with it, Oriel was suddenly aware of Matthew Stangway standing before her, looking no more remote and weary than usual: although that, of course, was very remote indeed.

‘I think you will have to take my arm,' he said, and, surprised that he could sense her reluctance to do so, she nodded, put her hand on his immaculate sleeve and went with him to the leading carriage where Maud and Letty joined them, taking their places as the ‘nearest and dearest'of the deceased.

The last time Oriel had entered High Grange church with Matthew Stangway had been on her wedding morning. The time before that it had been as a bridesmaid to Kate. The time before – the first time – had been his marriage to Evangeline. And now, as on those other occasions, the church was full, the Stangway tenants and employees crowding on the hard wooden benches at the back, the Stangway ‘friends and neighbours'taking up the upholstered pews at the front in numbers upon which both Maud and Letty remarked in gratifying whispers as they kicked their prayer cushions into place and arranged their skirts.

Oriel did not exchange a word nor even a glance with anyone, remembering nothing of the service which, delivered in Rupert Saint-Charles'weak, nasal voice was perhaps meant to be assumed rather than heard, her senses tuned to the very lowest key she could manage so that neither the fussy weeping of Letty nor the elegant, empty presence of Matthew Stangway – closer than she would normally have found easy – meant anything to her.

But once outside in the cold churchyard, standing at the very edge of the newly dug grave, the crowd of ‘friends and neighbours' behind her became oppressive, their very pity for Matthew excluding her, consigning her to the ranks of his enemies, as she had seen clearly enough in the way they had all shaken his hand just now at the church door – not hers – inviting him to dinner the very moment he could manage it, reminding him that he was, after all, ‘one of them', as. most regrettably, his wife and – by the small, embarrassed smiles they kept on giving him – his wife's daughter too, had never been.

‘How kind,' he had said, several dozen times over, without paying anything that could be called attention to anyone. ‘How kind,' he said again as, the ceremony completed, he led Oriel, closely followed by Maud and Letty, back to his carriage, wishing, she supposed, to reach High Grange before the congregation, who were all coming back to drink tea or Madeira and to remind Matthew, all over again, that he was not alone, having good friends in plenty, a loving sister in Letty whose children would surely be a consolation for the sorry end of his own, and, above all, a sister like Maud to look after him.

‘I shall do my best,' Oriel had heard Maud say at least twenty times that morning, lowering her voice whenever she noticed Oriel, to whisper, ‘I don't expect it to be easy, after all he has had to put up with. Heavens – if you knew the half.'

They would all know far more than that by the end of the afternoon, thought Oriel, shivering as she reached the carriage, dreading the hour – could she escape in less? – which she must now spend at High Grange, enduring veiled hints and glances or close scrutiny from those who hoped, by taking her unawares, to find out some detail, some snippet, of Evangeline's immoral, yet – for all that – certainly entertaining past. An ordeal she would have to face alone, by the look of it, Francis being nowhere in sight and Quentin, when she finally caught a glimpse of him, engaged in what looked like a private conversation, very much on the fringes of the crowd, with a woman in a heavy mourning-veil.

She did not know who the woman was, nor, as she allowed Matthew to help her into the carriage, did she think it of any importance, an opinion not shared by Letty who, with her foot on the carriage-step, suddenly snapped, ‘Who's that? Over there with Quentin? Maud – who is it?'

Maud, who had rather washed her hands of Quentin, snapped just as crossly that through so much black veiling she could hardly be expected to tell.

It did not suffice for Letty. ‘Who? Is it his housekeeper? Would he bring that woman here today?'

‘Hardly,' said Maud.

‘Letty,' said Matthew, ‘do get in the carriage.'

‘So who is it then? Who is he carrying on with now? Some married woman, I expect. And not for the first time.'

‘Letty.' Matthew did not sound patient. ‘Get in.' She did, leaning out of the carriage as far as she could to give herself a platform and calling out, half appeal, half command, ‘Quentin', to which he merely replied with a nod of his lean head as she drove by, before turning back to his companion.

‘There. Did you see the way he snubbed me? Have I deserved that? His own mother.'

And she proceeded to enliven the drive to High Grange with an account of the dissipated life her son lived in Hepplefield, to which Maud did not listen, and which Matthew eventually cut short by a terse ‘Letty – I do believe I have heard enough.'

No one spoke to Oriel. Walking once again into the South parlour she sat down, arranging her black silk skirts in the elegant lines Evangeline would have liked to see, removing her veil and then, as the room began to fill with those Stangway ‘friends and neighbours'to whom any sympathy shown to her would be an act of disloyalty to Matthew, waited until she could take her leave without appearing to run away. She did not expect to come here again and therefore wished to make her final departure with dignity, proving – when the moment came – to one and all that she was going not because their coldness or any feeling of shame on her part had chased her out, but because she was ready. Yet when Quentin approached her in his professional, family-lawyer manner and asked her, loudly enough to be overheard, if she would mind stepping into the book-room for a moment, she was glad to get up and follow him, walking straight-backed and graceful, through a cloud of speculation as to his motives. Money, of course. What else, where Mr Saint-Charles was concerned. Money, or rather, in this case, the lack of it, none of the ‘friends and neighbours'expecting, for a moment, that she would be allowed very much, no matter what her mother's will – if she had made one – might have to say.

But at the book-room door he merely said, ‘There is someone to see you, Oriel,' and giving her a little push across the threshold, disappeared, leaving her alone with the woman in the heavy mourning-veil – with whom, to his mother's chagrin, he had been caught in that churchyard conversation – the veil removed now to reveal a dark but not funereal travelling coat, a thin, elegant body suggesting the woman of fashion, a faintly Oriental head of black hair pulled back into a chignon that was startlingly severe yet just as startlingly effective, a face of high cheekbones, a nose imperious rather than heavy, slanting eyes very slightly crinkled at their corners, a long, quizzical mouth, its colours discreetly enhanced by paint as the sallow skin had been turned to amber by a bloom of powder. A woman of brittle but undoubted sophistication, several years too old to be Kate but who – nevertheless …

‘Kate?' Five years of silence, of total absence, brought a question to Oriel's voice, but not to her arms as they reached out, nor to the rest of her body as Kate stepped forward and hugged her, bringing a musky, intentionally voluptuous scent of tropical flowers with her.

‘Yes, it's me. Don't collapse with the shock.' Even the voice was different, its tone much lower, its accent polished yet quite neutral like those who, belonging anywhere and everywhere, do not wish to be identified.

‘How …?' Oriel was still too overcome to put her own words together.

‘Oh – Quentin got in touch with me …'

‘You never answered my letters.'

‘Well, no. But this time Quentin said you needed me. Or, at least, if not me and me alone, then somebody you'd be able to feel entirely on your side. I could see I filled the bill.'

Obvious questions,
little
questions, which had nothing to do with all she was really feeling, began to pour now from Oriel's tongue.

‘And so you came all this way …'

‘I did. You once sneaked into Hepplefield for me, didn't you, and spent every penny you had on that red sash and those firefly pins – do you remember? I still have them. I even wear the pins sometimes. And when people start oohing and aahing about the style, the originality, the
je ne sais quoi
of our clever little Kate, I tell them about Oriel, who first showed me the way.'

‘Kate.' She didn't want to think too much about that. ‘Hepplefield is nearer than France …'

‘But it's not how far you travel, my love, it's what you do when you get there. So don't thank me. Don't dare. Just take me for granted, as I probably used to take you.'

There were smiles at that, a flash of studied brilliance from Kate, a brave attempt from Oriel.

‘Kate – how
are
you?'

‘Very well. We'll come to that later.'

‘When did you arrive?'

‘Not a moment too soon. Quentin did all his clever things, of course, with tickets and timetables, but for all your husband's trains, there's still that awkward stretch of water to get over. Why doesn't your husband dig a tunnel under
that
? They'd make him a lord and give him a million. Quentin was quite peeved with me for arriving too late for the service. He was taking me to task for it when Aunt Letty spotted us – poor soul – and got rather the wrong impression. Not that she'll be better pleased when she finds out it wasn't one of his lady-loves, but me …'

As Maud would not be pleased. And others.

‘Kate, who knows you're here?'

Kate smiled, by no means wildly, understanding the implications, it seemed, with great accuracy.

‘My father knows. Quentin thought it best to get his permission for me to enter his house. And since no one has tried to throw me out I assume he got it. I also assume my father recognized me in the churchyard, even under these veils Quentin provided, although he hasn't been near me yet. And Francis knows. Quentin said it wasn't right to give him a shock. He said I'd done enough of that already. So he went over to Dessborough, even before he telephoned to me, and Francis said yes – absolutely – whatever Oriel needs she must have – and he'd even come to the funeral just the same and risk bumping into me so he could look after you himself in case my train broke down, or my ship sank … That was noble of him, I rather thought.'

‘Yes. He is noble.'

‘And thoughtful of Quentin. He was
furious
with me for being late, although he must have known I couldn't help it. So there are those of us who do care for you, Oriel, some of us maybe even more than we should.'