Distant Choices (54 page)

‘She doesn't know. She was out, so I just told Elspeth and set off …'

Evidently there had been a quarrel. But – as Morag ought to know – one did not break the rules of hospitality for a thing like that. Coolly, precisely. Oriel told her so; Morag standing tall and tight-clenched, one narrow hand nervously clasping and unclasping the other, her jaw set at a hard angle.

‘Ah well,' sighed Oriel, coming to an end. ‘I'll have to find the gardener's boy and send him around to Watermillock with a note letting her know you've arrived …'

‘As you please,' said Morag, spitting out the words with a bitterness which seemed – surely – out of all proportion?

‘It doesn't please me, Morag.'

‘Don't worry.' Suddenly Morag seemed altogether beside herself, as if some deep, long pent-up fury had finally spilled over. ‘I won't come here again – to displease you. I detest this place …'

‘Really?'

‘Yes – really – hate it …'

‘Why is that?'

She hesitated, shook her head, rather as if the words rising in her throat were strangling her and then, evidently thinking better of them, snapped, ‘Elspeth has friends here. She's all right. So are you. I have nobody. You should let me invite a friend of my own, as I asked you – as I always ask you …'

But the friend in question having been Susannah, Oriel calmly shook her head.

‘No, Morag.'

‘Next time, then?'

Oriel knew she was being challenged. ‘A friend of your own age, yes – certainly.'

‘You mean not Susannah.'

‘Yes, Morag. That is what I mean.'

Morag, in a state of nervous irritation so strong that it seemed almost to bewilder her, tossed her head. ‘Well, it must be as you say, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘But what I'd like you to admit is why you dislike her so much, when she's been such a great help to you …'

It was an old argument over which Oriel, in the interests of domestic harmony, had always skated lightly. But perhaps she had been discreet and compassionate for too long. Perhaps the time had come – at last – to tell the truth.

‘Susannah has not been a help to me, Morag. I have been a help to her …'

‘Really.'

‘Yes, Morag. Really. I have never needed her company – quite the contrary – but she has always been in great need of mine …'

‘I won't hear this – not from
you
…'

‘… which I have given because I understood her need and felt sorry …'

‘I'm going upstairs – to write to her, if you must know …'

‘You will go when I tell you. I understood her need, Morag, and her fears.'

‘What fears?'

‘Of the very things she wants most. She wants marriage but she lacks the courage to take on a husband. She wants a family but not every day, not three hundred and sixty-five days – and nights – a year, whether she feels up to it or not. She wants authority without responsibility. She only wants to get involved with the bits and pieces she fancies and leave the rest – which is most of it – to somebody else. And the only way she can do it is to impose on some other woman who is kind enough to put up with her …'

‘That's disgusting …'

‘Of me, I suppose you mean. Never mind.'

‘I do mind. And what amazes me is how
you
can bring yourself to criticize anybody.'

Because of Evangeline? Oriel smiled. ‘With a perfectly clear conscience, Morag,' she said.

The next few days passed uneasily, Elspeth returning from Watermillock of the opinion that Morag, by upsetting the Landons, had ruined her life, the only decision remaining to her now being whether to drown herself, or her sister, in the lake.

‘Please do it when the gardener is here,' Oriel warned her, ‘since I shall not rush to pull either of you out.' But Mrs Landon, a woman of an easy disposition, soon invited them to stay with her again, accepting with a tolerance in which Oriel noted a hint of relief, Morag's decision to spend a few days instead with an acquaintance in Penrith, a Miss Broderick, the only daughter of a local solicitor.

‘It might even be a kindness,' Mrs Landon assured Oriel pleasantly, the Brodericks having just lost so much money, through no fault of their own, that they must surely be in need of someone to cheer them up. Had Oriel not heard, Mrs Landon wondered, that the Milne, Morrissey Bank had failed to open its doors for business a day or two ago? A terrible shock for any poor widows who had trusted Messrs. Milne and Morrissey with their savings, or any men of business who now would be unable to draw their money out, even to pay their workers'wages. A most distressing affair, bank failures, bringing down so many perfectly good businesses with them, and giving rise on every occasion to a crop of suicides by those who, on the day before, had had so much to live for. Thank goodness Mr Landon was not affected. She hoped one could say the same for Mr Keith?

Oriel hoped so; although, enjoying her solitude, walking out every morning to the giant yew tree in Martindale and then beyond in search of the red deer, the sound of running water never leaving her ears, the feel of it always beneath her feet, any anxiety – which had not been much – about the Milne, Morrissey Bank receded until the afternoon when, coming down from the fells totally at ease with herself, feeling clear-sighted and sure-footed and only slightly out of breath, she found Garron waiting for her in the cottage as irritably and accusingly as Morag had done.

‘Where the hell have you been?'

‘Fell-walking.'

‘Yes. So the mud on your skirt tells me. You look like an Irish tinker.'

‘Thank you.'

No compliment intended. Get me something to drink, will you? Whisky if you have it. And then go and make yourself look decent.'

Pertly – knowing that it
might
, although not necessarily, make him smile – she dropped him a housemaid's curtsey.

‘Straight away, sir. As soon as I've sent off a note to Water-millock and one to Penrith, to let the girls know we're going back to Lydwick – if that's where we are going.'

‘I don't know. We might be. Just fetch the whisky. And a decent crystal glass.'

She brought it, went upstairs to wash and change into the plain black silk dress her mourning for her mother and the man she could not really think of as her father demanded, brushing her hair into a decent chignon, rinsing her hands in chamomile water to sweeten them, her face in a lotion of elderflower to make herself pale again after her hour in the cold, open air, putting long drops of jet through her ears, a cameo at her throat, several rings on her fingers, banishing the Irish tinker – or was it, she suspected, the Scottish fisherman's daughter he had first married? – and returning to him as the ‘lady'his present position required.

He was sitting in the armchair by the fire, smoking a cigar, a glass of whisky, which did not seem to be his first, in his hand, his long legs stretched out on the hearthrug, dominating the whole fireside area so that, the second armchair pushed well away, she had no choice but to sit down, already apprehensive, on the low stool rather too near his feet.

‘Why is it, madam,' he said, his eyes never once leaving the brightly burning logs to look at her, ‘that you are never to be found in your own home – as you ought to be – but in this Godforsaken place which brings me miles out of my direction …?'

‘Because,' she murmured, ‘you told me you would not be back until the second week in March, and as we are still in February …'

‘A man may change his mind.'

‘Of course.'

For a long, uneasy moment they both continued to stare at the fire, Oriel listening very carefully to the crackling of the logs, the faint, pleasant scuffling of the cats, the occasional, familiar creak of the elderly house as it settled around her, the weather announcing itself outside the window, the sound of her not particularly excellent whisky – since she mainly kept it for the gardener – splashing once more into his glass. Which meant, of course, that he had filled it too full.

‘You look tired,' she said. ‘In fact you don't look well.'

‘I don't feel it.'

‘Then let me get you …'

‘No,' he said. ‘There's no need to fly off on your broomstick to fetch those herbal teas of yours. The whisky will do.'

‘For what?'

He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed and keen, his mouth tight-drawn. ‘To get up my courage, Oriel – to say a word to you that has to be said …'

Courage? She could not believe he had ever lacked it. But, just in case he did, then she – who had so often felt crushed and defeated – thought it only right to help him along.

‘Is it the bank? Milne, Morrissey?'

‘Christ. What do you know about that?'

She told him and, leaning back again in his chair he gave a heavy, echoing sigh, coming from a very deep and now very raw part of him, and briefly closed his eyes.

‘So there we are,' he said. ‘Milne bloody Morrissey. Three days ago I'm a rich man, getting richer by the hour. Every one of my contracts running full steam ahead for completion day, no viaducts falling down, no tunnels caving in, every mountain I meet on the way small enough to run the track over instead of blasting it through – which is cheaper – and safer. Every man who works for me getting his pay and his bonus the minute it falls due. And then, this Monday morning, my bank doesn't open its doors for business and won't, until it can settle its debts. Ten million it owes. Not bad, eh?'

Her throat had gone unbearably dry, yet, imagining
his
anguish,
his
turmoil, she knew she would have to speak at once.

‘What does it mean?' For the moment it was the best she could do.

He smiled, rather, she thought, like a man going to the gallows or surveying a battlefield. And knowing it was for a crime he had not committed, a massacre of which he had not been the cause, she felt her throat grow parched and burning again, her heart beinning to pound, in jerky fits and starts, against her chest.

‘It means,' he said, staring into the fire again, ‘that I can't draw out my money through closed doors. And when they sort themselves out, if ever, they might pay me ten shillings or two shillings to the pound. Or nothing at all. Which is bad enough …'

‘But there's worse?'

He gave his strange smile again and then glanced at her, relieved, she thought, that she had kept her voice so steady.

‘I don't expect you to understand business. You weren't brought up to it.'

‘That's not to say I couldn't understand, if you wanted to tell me.' Once again her voice was very steady.

‘All right.' He paused, choosing his words, and then, shaking his head sharply as if to dislodge a persistent, nagging pain, he turned to look at her. ‘All right. I gamble a little. I take risks that pay off a lot more – if they pay off at all – than other men's solid certainties. You'll have an idea how much it costs to build a railway – the iron and the wooden sleepers and the bricks I have to buy,
and
pay for, a hell of a long time before anybody pays me. And the men of course, who have to be recruited and housed and provided with picks and shovels and carts and heavy horses to pull them – all that – before they've even laid a yard of track. So I finance my contracts by taking something like half of my payment in shares from the railway company, at a discount and in advance. Just pieces of paper, at that stage, offered for sale at a pound apiece, shall we say, but not really worth a brass farthing until the railway gets built. All right?'

She nodded, her chin on her hands, giving him the only thing she could just then: her utmost attention.

‘So then I deposit my shares in the bank as security for the money they graciously lend me – at a high rate of interest, I might add – month by month to pay my suppliers and meet my wages bill until I get the job done. At which point, if it‘s a
good
railway which happens to be going where people want to travel, those shares that I got for one pound each might be worth two pounds – or three. Or more. Enough for me to settle my debt with the bank and ample to spare.'

‘All right,' she said. Enough for her to live on, too, in the luxury he had always encouraged, the lavish daily spending, the expensive dallying in foreign hotels, the gold bracelets and silk dresses and extravagant hats which he – she realized – had needed to give her rather more than she had needed to possess.

‘If I'm guilty of anything,' he said, his voice ringing hollow, ‘then it's over-trading. Taking on too much at once. Spreading myself too thin, if you like. But – God dammit – there's only so much railway track a country can stand and once it's in – then it's in – and we'll be reduced to laying down track that doesn't go anywhere, which is a mug's game. I set out to avoid that. To get in fast and furious and grab as much as I could. And it
worked
– until Monday morning. You know that.'

‘Yes. I know.'

‘So I'm in a vicious circle. I've taken contracts all over the place, some of them within a few months of completion. And I may not be able to complete even one. The money I borrowed to do it doesn't exist any more. It's just scraps of paper called railway shares in Milne, Morrissey's vaults, worthless until I finish the railway I
can't
finish because Milne, Morrissey can't release the money to pay my suppliers, which means not only that they'll stop supplying me but might well take me to court for what I've had from them already.'

A vicious circle indeed.

‘What can you do?'

He grinned, looking suddenly – although only for a moment – himself again. ‘A “gentleman” might shoot himself, I reckon. So I won't do that.'

‘I'm pleased to hear it. What, then?'