Distant Choices (65 page)

‘So are you, it seems, Kate – sometimes.'

‘Ah yes, but only about other people's business, I expect you mean,' she said, folding her hands quite neatly before her, lowering her head like a good schoolgirl as he had seen her do once before, years ago, when he had taken her to task for risking herself among the man-traps in Merton Woods. A world ago. Or, at least,
her
world, into which he had not even meant to linger. Did he recognize it now as his? He rarely allowed himself to think too much about it, pacing himself only to the levels and limits of Celestine.

‘Francis, are you actually unhappy?' she rapped out at him very abruptly.

‘No,' he said, startled into giving the answer which leaped first into his head. The right one? He would not, given the time to reflect, have thought so.

‘Are you actually happy, then?'

But now he made time. ‘My dear girl – are you?'

‘More often than not,' she said. ‘Which is quite wonderful – isn't it? – when one remembers how I used to be. All I really have to contend with now is guilt, you see …'

He saw far too clearly. ‘Good Lord, Kate, not on my account, I hope …'

‘Good Lord,
Francis
.' And although he could not know just why she was laughing, it intrigued him. ‘Of course on your account. What dreadful things I have done to you. I fell in love with you far, far more than could ever have been reasonable, and when I suddenly couldn't feel the full, furious mountain of it any more I wasn't stable enough to discuss it with you – to try and work it out as I expect Oriel would have done. I just went on howling to myself in my own dark – getting worse – hurting more people and not knowing how to stop myself – certainly not knowing how to tell them how much they were all crucifying me. I didn't seem to belong in this world. It seemed – almost – as if I'd got myself into the wrong skin, or the wrong species. If this was humanity then I wasn't human. No – no – please let me finish, Francis – I've been thinking what I ought to say to you for long enough. Don't stop me now. When the child was born I couldn't stand life – humanity –
people
– at all. Lying in bed with them around me, all I could think was that Maud had got me again. I was terrified she'd get the child too. You stopped that. But you couldn't stop me – could you? – from being such a danger to us all. So I thought, for a while, about killing myself and ended up – of course – nearly killing Dora Merton instead. Poor Mertons, really – with me and then Evangeline to contend with. They've never got over us. But never mind that now. I took myself out of your way, Francis. It seemed the least I could do.'

Watching her as she stood beside the window, her hands no longer demurely folded, her pose taut yet decided, her profile sharp and elegant, older, he saw, in both texture and experience than twenty-five, he felt his throat tighten again. What an interesting woman – damned interesting in fact – she was.

‘And now?' he said, his voice no longer sharp at all.

‘Yes,
now
, Francis. First I must apologize to you …'

‘My dear – please don't.'

‘Oh yes. I know, you see, more or less what happened. I have never mentioned this to Oriel but Quentin knows you intended marrying her. Evangeline was already bargaining with him for dowry money and a decent marriage settlement. A wife for Dessborough, so you could go off again adventuring – and seeing no more of Dessborough, I expect, than seemed strictly necessary. So Quentin said. Poor Oriel – I daren't ask her if that's what
she
wanted. I couldn't bear to know.'

‘I think, at the time, she would have accepted.'

‘Ah –' She smiled across the rose-strewn room at him. ‘I see you don't mean to spare me. Not that I blame you, since you found yourself with me, and then we so oddly changed places – me going off to find myself, which didn't take long once Quentin put me in touch with the French and German Kesslers, and you, who already knew yourself very well, staying in the last place you wanted to be. I'm sorry, Francis.'

‘Don't be, Kate. It serves no purpose.'

‘Ah but it does.' And turning her faintly Oriental head towards him, her long eyes half closed, she gave him, once again, her brilliant, almost professional smile. ‘We have a child. I may not seem to be aware of it, but – nevertheless, there she is. You have given her six, almost seven, years of your life. I have only given her nine months of mine. And since these lives of ours are not repeatable – neither yours nor mine – and she, the child, with luck has rather longer to go than we have …'

‘What
are
you saying, Kate?' He hardly liked the sound of it.

‘Just this. The world is still as wide, Francis, and even though Captain Richard Burton has beaten you to Mecca there must be other places you might care to strive, and possibly die for. In which case, it seems only fair that you should do so. And that I should stay at Dessborough – how long? She is nearly seven. Ten years, then – or fifteen – before she is married and has no need of either of us.'

‘Kate.'

‘Oh – don't worry, Francis. I shall get on with her quite well enough. Little girls are easily charmed at seven. I have taught whole classes of them, from time to time, in Paris and Tours and Vienna, and the ones I wanted to like me have always done so.
Your
daughter, my dear, may even be glad to see the back of all those good ladies who keep falling in love with you. And she will be very proud of your letters from faraway places and – well – whatever those places may have in their bazaars for you to send her. And when the Queen makes a “Sir Francis” of you, for having discovered something really saleable which royals tend to like, I can bring the child to watch …'

Silence. And then, biting off each word with curt precision, he said, ‘And if I die in the attempt she can always collect my medals for me.'

Silence again, broken this time by Kate's even, very low-pitched, almost gentle laughter. ‘Ten years ago, Francis, such a thing would never have entered your head.'

‘I suppose you mean something very wise by that, Kate.'

Her smile was gentle now. ‘I mean that you probably couldn't bear to leave the child and may not want to leave Dessborough now, either. I mean, through my madness – which is often the way things work out, one finds – you are in the place you ought to be.'

‘And you?'

‘Ah – no – no, Francis. All I want is to assuage my guilt, you see, by convincing you that instead of ruining your life I actually did you a great favour … You would very likely have been dead by now in a heap of camel dung somewhere, if I hadn't just
almost
killed you with my nonsense.'

‘Thank you, Kate.'

‘Or if not precisely dead, you'd have been rather withered, wouldn't you, and maimed, I expect – not at all attractive as one tends to think of you now.'

He swallowed, quite hard, and then, realizing he had never met this woman before, much less ever spoken to her, he smiled and bowed very slightly, his eyes meeting hers with the salute of one pleasantly flirtatious adult to another. ‘May I know who suffers from this tendency to think me attractive?'

‘Oh – a fair number, I would imagine.'

‘Might you be among them?' He had not said
still
among them, aware, more deeply than ever, that this was a first and possibly vital encounter.

‘Oh –' she said, making him wait for her answer by the slowness of her smile. ‘I might. You could bring me another glass of champagne, while I am thinking about it.'

Carefully, not insulting her by hurry – as he would have taken care not to rush an intriguing stranger – he poured the wine, neither his hand as he gave her the glass nor hers as she took it, quite steady, her voice sliding into the refuge of light amusement, teasing speculation, as, turning away from him to the window, she said, ‘Oh look how far Quentin and Oriel have gone. Over there, on the fell path. You can just see them. I wonder if he is telling her he loves her?'

Not yet. They had walked, so far, in the companionable silence by no means strange to them, talking intermittently of Kate and Francis rather than each other, of Evangeline and, from her, to Lord Merton who had recently announced his permanent settlement in Monte Carlo, his wife enjoying her refuge in Scotland too much to leave it, Adela only a step away from becoming a nun. And Dora?

Reaching the top of the fell path, the lake far beneath them, the vale of Martindale lying just ahead, the sound of water never far away, rising beneath the tufts of coarse grass, falling fast and ribbon-fine down every slope of the encircling hills, Oriel looked around her for a moment, making a familiar, wholly natural communion, and then, turning to the man who now seemed, himself, so natural to her, said with the smile of calm affection she gave to no one else, ‘Kate thinks you might marry Dora Merton.'

Once again he held out his hand to her. ‘If I could get the chance, she means?'

‘Could you?'

His hand remained firm and cool around hers. ‘Yes. Amazing, isn't it – and rather sad, I suppose – but I think her father would be relieved now if I made the offer. It is Adela's estranged husband, remember, who inherits the title and the Abbey. But Lord Merton has a great deal more property – a house in London, for instance – and a fortune apiece to leave his daughters. Somebody must administer it. Somebody will have to look after the Abbey as well, since Timothy Merton can hardly settle in Adela's ancestral home with his foreign mistress and a bastard son. Particularly if Dora should be married and have a son of her own by then, who would eventually inherit the title. And since Dora's young men have never done her much good in the past, and she seems to have rather lost her taste for them nowadays anyway, her father is feeling desperate enough to lower his sights to me. The family lawyer – Good God. But at least I can be relied on to keep the door well-polished and everything inside it turning over just as it should. And one tends to forget that my father is the cousin – if somewhat distant – of an earl. Which would give Lord Merton something to talk about, at least, in his club.'

But Oriel, of course, knew all this. ‘Does Dora like you, Quentin?'

‘She trusts me. Rather pathetically sometimes. There are days – not always easy ones – when she hardly likes to take a step without my direction.'

‘Do you want to marry her?'

She thought she knew this too, but they walked on, a while longer, tasting the fresh wind, before he said, ‘Oriel, I have six brothers and four sisters younger than myself, all of them, at the moment – including Susannah – in need of assistance to establish themselves in life, one way or another. My mother could never begin to supply that assistance. My father ignores it. He always has. And when he “passes on” and the vicarage passes with him into other hands it will astonish me more than anything in my life if he has made the slightest provision for anybody. No doubt he considers such provision to be the rightful business of his God. Possibly so. That may even be the reason I was born to him.'

‘To provide?'

‘So it seems. In which case would it be right to neglect one's opportunities?'

They walked a while longer, the lake now very far behind and below them, the ancient yew tree of Martindale churchyard already in sight, the low stone church looking small yet somehow invincible beside it, before she said, ‘I asked if you wanted to marry her, Quentin?'

‘I know.'

‘Yes. I know you know.'

He did not look at her, his eyes on the high fells. ‘Oriel, you are the only woman I have ever
wanted
to marry. Do you know that too?'

Not until now. Or not for certain, although, even as she denied it, she knew how right it was, now
natural
; knew – so deeply and totally that she seemed to have known forever – his nature to be the one for which her own had been moulded; knew – without any need to peer into the past – how serenely they might have moved together, grown together, in friendship and a love that would have been so rich and yet so peaceful. Loving friends, companionable lovers. Had it not been, of course, for the Stangways, and Evangeline, the Reverend Rupert Saint-Charles and his hungry, affectionate tribe of children.

‘When?' she said, walking a step ahead of him and then waiting at the churchyard gate until he came and stood beside her.

‘I have more than my share of sisters,' he said, taking her hand again. ‘When I first met you I remember thinking what a pity they weren't more like you. What a pity – at times – that I even had them, since it meant I'd have to marry Kate. Naturally it never once entered my head not to marry her. I merely wished
she
could be like you.'

‘I had no notion, Quentin – not then.'

‘Of course not. There seemed no point in telling you. You had no money. Neither had I. And did either of us disagree when our mothers said how much we needed it?'

‘No, Quentin. We were both so well brought up, weren't we?'

‘You were, my darling. I was just naturally acquisitive. And then you fell in love with Francis. I was almost glad. It encouraged me, rather, to fall out of love with you myself – if I could.'

‘You were very kind to me the night of Kate's engagement.'

‘I hope so. Yet – sadly – seeing you behave so graciously, with that knife in your heart, made me want you all over again. Marrying you would have done my career no good at that stage, of course, and would have somewhat upset the Stangways … But there it was. I wanted to marry you quite enough, by then, to stand all that. A decent interval of time, I thought – my vicarage upbringing making me cautious I expect. But then you went off to see your friend Miss Woodley and came back engaged to your railway baron. Your mother was not the only one to be appalled by that. I almost – almost – never quite – asked you to break off with him and marry me. And please – I do mean
please
– don't tell me now whether you would have agreed to do it, or not.'