Flint and Roses (39 page)

‘You cannot go, Faith. He asked us to keep you away. The Infirmary is dangerous still, and he will not have you there!'

Once again I don't know what I answered, merely that I went on walking towards the door, fighting her when she tried to stop me, dragging her with me, for I was taller and heavier and crazed, in any case, with my urgency. And I would have struck her, I think, and knocked her down had not Mayor Agbrigg taken me by the shoulders, his hard workman's hands biting through the numbness of me, shaking me—since I was shouting something now—to silence. But even then, shocked by this first experience of male violence, I kicked out at him and hurt him, I think, although he did not let me go.

‘I'm going to him, I warn you. I'll walk—'

‘Lass,' he said, holding me in his thin, crook-shouldered embrace, the wiry strength of him greater than I had supposed. ‘Lass—see the sense to it.'

‘There's no sense. He's my husband. You can't keep me away from him.'

‘He doesn't want you,' Prudence shouted, bursting painfully into tears, and when I lashed out at her Mayor Agbrigg shook me again.

‘Lass—have your wits about you, You know what the cholera is. It stinks, lass. He doesn't want you to see him like that. There's nothing you can do for him. Let him fight it. And then be here, to welcome him home.'

‘I can't. You must understand. I know you mean well, but I can't. He needs me—he
must
need me—what good am I if he doesn't need me now?'

‘He wants you to be here, when he's well again. You'll weaken him, love, if you worry him now, when he needs all his strength.'

‘Write him something,' Prudence said, and they brought me pen and paper and sat me down before it. I began to write, docile, foolish words, and then, as they swam into meaningless hieroglyphics beneath my eyes, I clenched my hands into fists and brought them crashing down on to the table.

‘No. You may go to hell, Prudence Aycliffe, and you too, Mr. Agbrigg. You will not treat me like a child any longer—none of you, not even Giles. I will go to him and stay with him, and when he is fit to be moved I will bring him home and nurse him here, where he should be, not in that pest-hole. You can't stop me.'

‘I can,' Mayor Agbrigg said, his big-knuckled hands biting into my shoulders again. ‘Now listen to me. I love that lad as if he was my own—I've wished he was my own. He pleaded with me, not long since, to keep you way—begged me. I promised him. And if I have to knock you out or tie you down, then I'll do it. No matter what you may be suffering, lass, if I'd to choose, I'd sooner be in your place than his. Think on that.'

And when I had written my pathetic scrawl, ‘Giles. I love you. I love you', they took it from me and went away.

He died early the next morning with Prudence and Mayor Agbrigg beside him, and when they came to tell me I sat down and saw no reason to get up again. They told me they had given him my letter, that he had read it and understood it, but I didn't believe them. I had said to him so many times, ‘Giles, please love me.' I had said, ‘I want you. I need you.' But I had never told him that the gratitude, the desire to be warm and safe, the second-rate emotions he had settled for, had started slowly to transform themselves into the total commitment I had longed to give him. And I believed he had died without being aware of it.

He had loved me, and I had not only lost him, I had failed him. I had held back from him. I had been too honest, refusing to say, ‘I am wildly in love with you,' until it became the truth, not wishing to insult his integrity with even the whisper of a lie. Now I knew that I should have lied to him, since it would not have remained a lie for long, had already, for months, been very nearly true. And what I felt mainly was a hard anger, a bitter self-disgust. I was worthless. He had been important. There was no justice, nothing to believe in, just the blind, idiot-drooling of Chance, with which I did not care to associate.

A day passed—or so it seemed—and once again Mayor Agbrigg put his hard hands on me.

‘I had a wife,' he said, ‘a long time ago. We married young and we were poor and ignorant and content with each other. I never looked beyond her, and couldn't imagine a day when I'd be without her. We had eleven children, being young and ignorant, as I said—and lost ten of them, three in two days, something that happens often enough in Simon Street. But it was too much for my Ann. She turned inside herself, and died—of heartbreak, I reckon—leaving me with Jonas and a girl, Maria, who had a look of Ann, and died, you may remember, a year or two after I married your Aunt Hannah.'

‘I don't care about that, Mayor Agbrigg. I know I should care, but I don't. I know that you're trying to help me. It doesn't help.'

‘No. Maybe it just helps me to talk about it. I've had more experience of losing than you have. But it still hurts me, lass, for all that. I was angry when my Ann died, like you are now, I reckon. By God, I was angry. I lived for her, you see, and she'd never harmed anybody. I hated the whole world the day I buried her. It passes, Faith, little by little.'

‘I don't care.'

I didn't attend his funeral. I hadn't seen him die and I refused to watch them put that wooden box into the dry summer ground, refused absolutely to contemplate what it contained. And, when they came back from the churchyard to tell me who had been there and who had not, I wouldn't listen.

I sat in the dark, doing nothing. I put on the black dress Mrs. Guthrie got out for me and would have gone on wearing it until it hung in ribbons had she not taken it away from me and handed me another. I left the sheets on his bed and then, unable to sleep with his ghost—the nightmares that asked me was he really dead, since I had not seen him die?—I moved to the cold, narrow bedroom at the head of the stairs, a nun's cell, a place to do penance; and spoke sharply to Mrs. Guthrie when she tried to light the fire, to add a vase of flowers, an extra counterpane.

The cholera abated. For a day, a week, six weeks, there were no new cases. Three months passed and no one else died. And I didn't care about that either.

My mother went to France, Blaize to Germany to sell cloth, Georgiana miscarried a child whose conception she had not divulged, and was confined to her bed. Caroline began to issue invitations again. Mayor Agbrigg completed his purchase, on the town's behalf, of the waterworks company and brought me his schemes and plans for the new reservoirs.

‘Twenty-five miles of waterworks, lass,' he told me, his craggy face warming as Jonas's never did. ‘Eleven reservoirs, when it's all done. A water area of over three hundred acres with a cubic capacity of two thousand million gallons. Think of it, lass. They say I'm crazy, some of those colleagues of mine—plain crazy—but, if I get what I want, and I shall, then there'll be no water shortage in Cullingford, no matter what. A tap in every house in Simon Street. I've said that often enough. The trouble is, they're all gentlemen on the council, lass, and they don't understand. I'm the only one who's seen it from the inside, the only one who's lived in the muck, instead of just turning my nose up at it as I drove by. And my colleagues don't all see the point in spending all this money to provide something they're not short of themselves. But I'll get my way. I'll get my water. I spent the first forty years of my life dragging myself out of the gutter, and the next ten earning my place in the Piece Hall. Now I'll do something worth doing, lass—something
I
want, I reckon.'

I didn't care.

Jonas called, when Celia had satisfied herself that my house was safe again, coming as a brother-in-law to offer his condolences and as Giles's lawyer to assure me that I was well provided for. It was of no interest to me.

My half-brother, Crispin Aycliffe, wrote to me from London, expressing deep regret, suggesting he could come north to see me, or I go south to him, if he could be of use. I didn't answer.

Aunt Verity, remaining in Bournemouth at the insistence of Uncle Joel, who had no intention of taking the slightest risk where she was concerned, wrote a long, warm letter, inviting me to stay with her. I didn't answer that either.

Mainly I sat in the dark, and would have remained there, perhaps, too long, passing the moment when it was still possible to open the door, to walk outside again, had not Prudence entered the room one afternoon, pulled back the curtains with a brisk hand, and said, ‘This is quite enough, Faith. He's dead. It was important to him to keep you alive, although if he could see you now he might wonder why. Look at you. Have you brushed your hair this week?'

‘Leave me alone, Prudence.'

‘I have no intention of leaving you alone, make up your mind to it. You are coming upstairs now. You are going to make yourself respectable, and then we are going to Aunt Hannah's.'

‘Why Aunt Hannah's?'

‘Because she has invited us, and it is necessary to make a start somewhere.' I got up because, knowing her stubborn nature, it was easier to obey than argue.

‘You will have a mare's nest in your hair ere long,' she said, taking a brush to it with a vengeance, hurting me deliberately, perhaps, in order to rouse me, although I was not aroused.

The late October sun was very bright as I went outside, very cruel with no tree-foliage to shade it, dazzling me so that I was not obliged to look at anything as we drove up Millergate and Blenheim Lane, past my mother's house, and turned the steep corner which brought us to Lawcroft Fold.

The mill yard looked as it had always done, my aunt's house still there on the terraced slope above it, the sun glinting on the window where I had stood with Giles, at our first meeting, and watched the Chartists bringing their petition for the factory hands to sign. The Chartists were gone now, defeated, and I was defeated too. It didn't matter.

Aunt Hannah came into the hall to meet us, regal as always in her rustling purple, a handsome Barforth woman who had married a mill-hand and made a mayor out of him, who had laboured at Prudence's side through the days, of the cholera, and who must think me a poor, spineless creature, a nuisance. I believed her to be quite right.

‘Sit down, dear,' she said, and I sat.

‘Will you take tea, dear?' And I took it, accepting milk and sugar, although I did not in fact care for sweet tea, because she had the sugar-tongs in her hand and I saw no point in asking her to put them down.

‘Are you well, Faith?'

‘Yes, quite well, thank you.'

‘Good. You are certainly very pale, but a little fresh air will put that right.'

‘I imagine so.'

‘You will have heard that Mayor Agbrigg's plans for the reservoirs are progressing well?'

‘Yes. It is all very splendid.'

‘Your husband would have thought so.'

‘I believe he would.'

‘I am very sure of it. And, while we are on this obviously delicate subject. Mayor Agbrigg and I were both wondering, in view of Dr. Ashburn's undoubted services to the town—well, dear, the fact is that old Miss Corey-Manning is to move to the coast to join her brother, which means, naturally, that her property is to come, up for sale. The house is old and small and in a sorry state of disrepair, but the gardens, as you may know, are extensive and extremely attractive. If my husband could persuade the town to purchase it, then it could be most easily converted into a park—the Giles Ashburn Memorial Gardens, we thought. Should you object to that?'

‘Not in the least.'

‘You are very obliging, Faith,' she said, putting down her cup and saucer rather sharply, allowing me to feel the snap of her impatience, her contempt for all silly females who engulfed themselves in melancholy when the world was so wide, when there was so much to do. ‘Yes, most obliging. I regret that your sister Celia is not so accommodating. I had hoped to persuade her to take tea with us today, but without success. You will have heard, I suppose, that she is in a delicate condition again? Well, she will insist on making herself into a recluse at such times, which cannot be good for her. I have told her repeatedly that we are all aware of the facts of life, that women do change their shape in pregnancy, but she has this morbid fear of being looked at—quite ridiculous. She should go about more and keep her spirits high. In fact—and I am sorry to have to say this—she should think of others for a change, instead of dwelling so exclusively on herself. Jonas has his position to keep up, after all, and has as much right to her support as she to his. You did know she was expecting again?'

I did, but I failed to see how it concerned me. I had no child of my own, had been too concerned with loving, or not loving, Giles, to wonder why I had not conceived. Now it was too late.

Prudence made her excuses. She had another call to pay and would come back for me in an hour. I nodded, drank more tea, saw quite clearly that Aunt Hannah, who had never much cared for me, was trying to be kind and, somewhat vaguely, since it could not really matter, I wondered why.

‘How is your mother, Faith?'

‘Quite well, I believe. She writes that Paris is very gay again. She may be home, she says, by Christmas time.'

‘I am relieved to hear it. Her presence will be needed—and yours too—in the New Year. The concert hall is to be opened in April and, if it is to be dedicated to your father, then his widow and daughters must certainly be present. Naturally all building work has been delayed by the epidemics—a great many labourers were infected and the rest too drunk to be of service—but I have the most positive assurances that it will be ready in time. And so it should be. My word, it is a year now since the foundation stone was laid and I have heard nothing since then but excuses—architects and builders attempting to blind me with their expertise, telling me that construction is a slow process and that I must be patient. And now what do I hear? They are building a vast exhibition hall in London,
of glass,
my dear, to house this great international peep-show in Hyde Park we are hearing so much about, and although it was only begun a week or two ago, at the end of September, they mean to have it ready for the grand opening in May. Seven months, my dear, no more, for something of quite colossal proportions and all this eternity for one relatively modest provincial concert hall. However, one must only hope that Prince Albert and his committee are in possession of all the facts, for the man they have got to build it for them is quite extraordinary—a gardener, it seems, in the employ of the Duke of Devonshire. Yes, you may stare: a gardener. Although he attracted much notice by his construction of the conservatories on the Duke's estate, one can only call him a brave man to undertake a project of this importance. Just think of it, Faith, a giant greenhouse to house exhibits from every corner of the world, and all the hundreds of thousands of men and women who will flock to examine them.'