Flint and Roses (47 page)

‘My word, what a sultan you are! You'd like that, wouldn't you, thinking of me lying here all day, ready and waiting for you?'

‘I would,' he said, his eyes narrowing, his hands touching me again, awakening so easily the tremor, the faintly expanding glow that was the beginning of wanting him. ‘Yes, I'd like that, Faith. By God, I would!'

And although it was a joke—or so I imagined—I was obliged to take him seriously enough on the afternoon when, having accompanied my mother on a shopping expedition to Leeds, I returned, parcel laden, to be told by a smug Mrs. Marworth that ‘the gentleman'had called.

‘Oh dear,' I said, no more than that, disappointed but not seriously alarmed until he strode in, late that night, his jaw tight, his whole body crackling with the anger everybody at Lawcroft Mills had learned to dread.

‘Nicholas—darling—'

‘Don't make excuses,' he snarled, throwing his hat viciously on to a chairback, although I had made no attempt to do so, having done nothing, I believed, which required it. ‘You could at least be here, couldn't you, when I call? That's all I ask. I don't ask you to come to me, do I? I don't ask you to walk up that damned rutted back road, night after night, from the Swan—no, I do that little job myself. I don't ask you to get out of a warm bed in the middle of the night and ride five miles in the rain—well, do I? I don't ask you to snatch every chance you can to get to Millergate and then be obliged to go away again, like as not, because your sister, or some other damned interfering female has got here before me. I just ask you to be here. Can't you do that much for me? Aren't I worth that much? And what else have you to do? Where the hell were you, in any case? In Leeds with your mother. Splendid, Faith—just splendid. All right—I won't trouble you again in the daytime. I'll make a bloody appointment if you like—or I won't come at all.'

And after that my days became, each one, a small earth-tremor of anxiety, shooing callers away from my tea-table before they wished to go, hovering always within sound of the window and the door, refusing, adamantly, nervously sometimes, to go out unless I had first made Nicholas aware of it.

‘Oh no, mamma. I don't want to go into town today. No, I am not as bad as Celia—it is simply that I am not inclined.'

‘Good heavens, Prudence! If you need a new bonnet I imagine you may choose it without me.'

‘Celia—I never expected you to come today, in this weather. I imagine you will not be staying long? Oh—Jonas is to collect you on his way from the office. Well, you had best have your bonnet on ready, for he is always in a great rush.'

And if it was Thursday, market-day at the Piece Hall, and the likelihood of Nicholas in town, I would be on tenterhooks until she had gone away.

I saw no one else. Blaize, who represented my greatest danger, was abroad that Autumn, Aunt Verity in Bournemouth, my uncle joining her whenever he could, which in Nicholas's view could not be often enough. Caroline was occupied with the building of a new servants' wing at Listonby, Georgiana—although I quite deliberately did not think of Georgiana—was rarely in Cullingford during the hunting season. Prudence, blessedly, was busying herself with the progress of Mayor Agbrigg's reservoirs, her attention being diverted from me by such considerations as the transporting of so tricky a substance as water the twenty-five mountainous miles from its sadly porous resting place at Cracknell Bridge to Simon Street. My mother was making ready to embark on her new life as Mrs. Daniel Adair, Aunt Hannah intent on preventing it if she could, and, if not, of devising some other way in which Oldroyd wealth—anybody's wealth—might be channelled to Jonas.

Yet there were other dangers besides discovery, not least among them being Nicholas's inability to tolerate frustration, the headstrong, possibly ruthless side of his nature which was fast making him a force to be reckoned with in the textile trade, but which caused him to howl with the rage of a maddened bull sometimes, when it became too clear to him that he could never organize his personal life as logically and conveniently as his weaving sheds. In the world of commerce Nicholas did not walk around obstacles, he smashed them, flattened them, got rid of them one way or another, and if he hurt his own iron fist in the process then he would have allowed for it in advance, made sure that the price would be right. But in the world of personal relationships, the complex tangle of feelings and demands and recriminations, the conventions which governed us, the decencies we were forced to observe, irritated him, goaded him often to recklessness.

‘I don't want to leave you tonight, Faith. Why should I? I could stay until morning—couldn't I?—and go to the mill from here.'

‘No, you couldn't. Not in your evening clothes.'

‘Christ—it won't do, Faith. It's not enough—is it? Well, is it?'

But always—because I was not ready to talk of his wife and his son, because it was too soon, and I was afraid in any case of how I would feel when I faced the reality of it, afraid of the questions I would ask and of his replies—I would hush him, smooth the moment away, pour the length of my body against the length of his to distract him from the future, filling his mind only with me, as I was at that one, irreplaceable, fleeting moment.

And when I had pushed the forbidden images of his domesticity away, I was left to consider the appalling possibility that I might conceive a child I would be able to explain to no one.

Yet, on the first occasion I was obliged to make Nicholas aware that I was not enceinte, his immediate reaction puzzled me. He would be relieved, surely, I had thought; but I had forgotten the solid Law Valley belief that a pregnant woman is a docile woman, who will cling to the father of her child forever—or for as long as he finds convenient—and I was surprised when he pressed the palm of his hand against my stomach and said, ‘If it should happen, you know, it wouldn't be the end of the world.'

‘It would be the end of mine.'

‘Thank you, Faith.'

‘Heavens, Nicholas—for what?'

‘For telling me you don't want to have my child.'

I took his wrist in the tips of my fingers and moved his hand away, got up, angry and very hurt, striving to push away from my memory the image of Georgiana's spent face, her thin, exhausted body after her son—Nicholas's son—was born, my own terrible hesitation before I had taken Gervase in my arms, my fear, on returning him to his cradle, that I had injured him.

‘I wish you hadn't said that to me, Nicholas.'

‘Yes, so do I.'

And then, standing behind me, his arms around me, his mouth against my ear: ‘I'm sorry. You're quite right to be put out. I am unjust. I am ill-tempered. Anything you like. I love you, you see. I want all of you, and it sours me, sometimes—You‘ll have to put up with it. But if it happened, Faith—and it's only sense to admit that it could—yes, I know, by rights, we'd have to call it a disaster. But don't be afraid of it. You can trust me, I reckon, to look after you. Can't you?'

‘Of course.'

‘I'd take you away from here,' he said decidedly. ‘Your mother would have to know, but I could fix her. She could go abroad with you until it was over—not that I'd care who knew about it, but I know you couldn't take the scandal and I wouldn't expose you to it. I'd get you a house somewhere and set you up in style. I know you've got money of your own, but I wouldn't want you to use it. To tell you the truth, I sometimes think it would suit me better if you had no money at all. Don't worry, love, I'd look after you.'

But what he really meant was: ‘You'd belong to me then. You'd
have
to belong to me, for nobody else would want you'; and, although it was what the purely female part of me craved for, I had a cooler, more rational side to my nature which was unwilling to be so close confined. He would get me a house, a splendid one I had no doubt, but where? Far enough, certainly, from a suspicious, hostile Cullingford; too far for his lightning afternoon visits, too far to leave his horse at the Swan and walk to me those three or four nights a week that now formed the basis of my existence. A secret house where I would bring up a secret child in luxurious solitude, nourishing myself on his visits, with nothing else to do but wait for him, dreading, as I grew older, that eventually he would not come. And, although I loved him enough for that, and did nothing but wait for him in any case. I was still to some extent in control of my life. I might never avail myself of it, but I still had the possibility of choice, and change.

‘Am I completely selfish, Faith?'

‘Oh yes—but so am I. I expect I would make a prisoner of you too, if I could.'

‘Is that what you feel—that I want to imprison you?'

‘Yes—I feel that.'

‘Christ!' he said. ‘You'll have to forgive me, but I believe you're right. All I can promise is that I'll try not to torment you with it—I'll try.'

But the promise, as I suppose we both knew, was in vain, his jealousy proving so acute, so all-consuming, that it often passed beyond reassurance, beyond reason, to a point where nothing less than my actual imprisonment could have given him ease.

‘Nicholas—it can only mean you don't trust me?'

‘God knows what it means. All I know is I can't help it and I can't stand it. A moment comes in the day—or in the night—when I feel—Christ!—I feel bereft. And when that happens I have to see you, and more often than not I have to make you suffer for it. I know, believe me, how much I hurt you. And what eats into me then is wondering how long you'll put up with it. Please—Faith?'

And, knowing what he wanted me to say, I said it quickly, lovingly, and went on saying it until his need—for that day at least—was over.

‘I love you, Nicholas, I understand. It doesn't matter.'

We returned to Scarborough in November, four days this time, shortened from the week he had intended by the exigencies of his combing machines.

‘I'm making money,' he told me as we sat by the happily crackling fire, my head on his shoulder. ‘My own money, Faith. And I can't tell you what that means to me. I could live easy, for the rest of my life, on what comes out of Lawcroft and Tarn Edge and Low Cross. My father has fixed them up so well that I wouldn't have to change a thing. I could just saunter down there two or three times a week—when he's gone—to interview my managers, which is as much as I reckon Blaize means to do, and the boost they've had from my father would see me through. Well, Blaize may be content to live like that, with nothing to show for himself but another man's money in his pocket. But not me. I said I could do it and I'm doing it. The Wool-combers is mine and it's growing, and I've got plans for Lawcroft and Tarn Edge as well, if my father could just bring himself to trust me or take himself off to Bournemouth and leave me alone.'

‘But he's in Bournemouth now, surely most of the time?'

‘Oh yes. But he keeps coming back again. One morning my door opens, or I walk into a shed or into the counting-house, and there he is, going through the ledgers, checking up on me. And I've got to admit that the questions he asks are the very ones I'd rather not answer. Eyes in the back of his head, my father—unless, of course, he's had a word or two with Blaize the night before.'

‘Does Blaize really know what goes on?'

‘Aye,' Nicholas said, chuckling into my hair. ‘Blaize knows. It's his money, love, same as mine—the Tarn Edge part of it at any rate—and he don't mind getting his hands dirty when it comes to counting it.'

Perfect days, once again, soon over—too precious to waste by talking of an impossible future—and on my return I was embroiled at once in the fierce opposition to my mother's marriage, which would take place, she declared, at Christmas time.

Celia invited Prudence and myself to dine, a council of war which would have been uncomfortable enough without the tensions of Celia's table. And, after a perfectly served but none too ample meal. Celia's anxieties as a hostess being for the spotlessness of her silver, the perfect arrangement of her plates and dishes rather than the food, we returned to her drawing-room to discuss what might be done.

My sister, need it be said, allowed no tobacco anywhere in her house, obliging Jonas to step outside if he wished to smoke an after-dinner cigar, complaining fretfully on his return that the noxious fumes still clinging to his coat were more than her carpet, her damask wall-covering and her stomach could be expected to tolerate.

‘Well,' she said, quickly inspecting the coffee-tray from which I knew we would be foolish to expect more than one cup. ‘So here you are Jonas.'

‘Yes, Celia.'

‘Good—since we are all awaiting your wisdom, and the coffee has gone quite cold while we were about it.'

But Jonas, aware that her habit of measuring out exactly so many coffee beans and no more from her store-cupboards disallowed the ordering of a fresh pot, merely accepted his lukewarm cup and drank it quite slowly, disinclined, it seemed, for wisdom.

‘And what have you to tell us, Jonas?'

‘Not a great deal.'

‘Then I have something to tell all of you. It strikes me you are taking this matter very calmly—so calmly, in fact, that I wonder if my mother is even aware of the repugnancy everyone, absolutely everyone, must feel. She has always been inclined to make herself conspicuous, ever since my father died. And this marriage—Well, she can only have one reason for it—you must know what I mean. Yes, of course you do, and although I don't like to speak of such matters, especially in the hearing of a single woman—Goodness, it is disgusting at her age—at any age.'

‘You mean she is in love with him?'

‘If that is what you like to call it. No doubt she calls it by that name. I believe there is another.'

‘Passion,' Prudence said tartly, irritated as always by Celia's assumption that at twenty-five she must by virtue of her single status be as blindly and totally innocent as Celia herself had been at sixteen.