The Victory (73 page)

She looked at him now, and recollection softened the lines
of her mouth. 'They were a good pair,' she said. 'Bobbin and
Sandlewood; nice action, except that Sandlewood had a
tendency to scoop with his off-fore. You should have
corrected that when he was a colt, but you left it too late.’

James laughed. 'What a memory you have for horses! You
must have been about thirteen or fourteen then, and an
extremely grubby child you were too, but you had the best
hands I've ever seen, man or woman.'

‘
Thank you,' she said, and he could see she was pleased.
She was watching the game again, but he saw some of the rigidity go out of her shoulders, and her hand reached out
and plucked a stem of cocksfoot to chew, an unconscious
gesture of ease. 'Edward was driving those blacks, do you remember?' she said. 'They simply wouldn't pull together,
but he would have them because they looked good. It was all
appearance with him in those days. That was Chetwyn's
influence.' She sighed. 'He never was a horseman.'

‘
I remember, at that picnic, the three of you taking your
shoes and stockings off, and sitting on the bank with your feet
dabbling in the river,' James said, and watched her smile.
Chetwyn and Edward, the inseparables, had admitted Lucy
like a favoured younger brother to their company.

‘Poor Edward,' she said after a moment.

James remembered how Ned had been when he returned
after the funeral, and how many hours he had spent closeted with Father Aislaby, trying to expiate his guilt. What he felt he had to be guilty about, James had soon discovered, as the
rumours sifted upwards, as rumours always did, from the
servants' hall. 'I suppose it was an accident, wasn't it?' he
asked tentatively. 'I don't mean to upset you, Luce, but there
were rumours —'

‘
Of course it was,' Lucy said, and then turned to look at
him. There was no concealment in her face. 'Of course it was.
He would never have done a thing like that, even if he had
reason, and what reason could he have?' James did not offer a
suggestion. 'Besides,' Lucy added, ‘Chetwyn always liked the
easy life. If he had wanted to kill himself, he would have taken laudanum or something like that, and done it in the comfort of his own bed. No, Jarnie, it was an accident all
right. Poor Chetwyn!' She looked away. 'We've been unlucky,
haven't we, in our marriages?'

‘
Perhaps because we always wanted too much,' James said.
'It would have been better to be single-minded like Mother,
who just wanted an heir for Morland Place.'

‘
And now there's Fanny,' Lucy said, watching Fanny with
sceptical eyes as the child bellowed furiously at Rosamund for
dropping the cat. 'What would Mother think of her now, I
wonder?'

‘
Fanny's all right,' James said irritably, jumping to defend
his chick as he always did. 'She's only young. She'll settle
down as she grows up.’

Lucy eyed him a moment, and then refrained from point
ing out that he had been saying the same thing for the last six
years at least. 'I wish Mother were here,' she said instead.
‘Everything seemed to go wrong when she died. She would
make things right again.'

‘
I wonder if everyone goes on feeling like that about their
mother,' James said thoughtfully, 'or are we different? Is it
unnatural still to feel more like her child, than like anyone's
father?’

The point was too philosophical for Lucy. She threw away the chewed stem and picked a fresh one. 'We must make sure
that they do better than we did,' she said, watching her own
three establishing their place in the game. 'I mean to see mine
are brought up properly, so that they don't make the same
mistakes.'

‘
It sounds most uncomfortable,' he said. 'You don't mean
to start now, this minute, do you?'

‘
Of course not, not until I get home,' she said, and then
realised she was being teased. 'Don't be a fool, Jamie. You
might do worse yourself than to take a pull on Fanny's reins
now and then.’

Her mouth was more than ever grim at that moment, and
James thought that it was a poor outlook for her children
when they grew older. Her expression spoke volumes about
rigid discipline and hard work, but very little about pleasure.
But perhaps she was right. Everyone said he was too soft with
Fanny. On the other hand, perhaps children would grow up
the same way, whatever you did, turning into what was in
them to be. How could one tell?
But thinking of his mother, which he did no less often as he
grew older, he could not help feeling that Fanny, much as he
loved her, was not the true heiress of Morland Place that
Jemima had longed for. When his mother had died, he had
felt that none of them who were left was big enough to fill her
place; and he went on believing that the feeling he always
had, of the house lacking its mistress, was not simply the
effect of his longing for a certain person who remained
unalterably twenty miles away.

 
Hobsbawn House presented a very different aspect to the
world from the dusty, neglected look of a few years before.
Now the elaborate furniture glowed with rubbing, the heavy
drapes were freshly laundered, the rich carpets well-beaten.
The air was filled with the scent of beeswax polish and pot
pourri, and bowls of flowers, tastefully arranged in corners,
and on the multitude of side-tables, bureaux and commodes,
spoke of a woman's presence in the house.

Mr Hobsbawn, too, wore the sleek air of content. His
appearance had always been neat and proper, but without
pretensions to finery. Now his hair was more elegantly
dressed, his shirt-points stiffer, his neckcloths more elaborate,
and his waistcoats more festive; and if he did not quite attain to pantaloons and Hessians, his breeches were certainly more
stylishly cut, and his topboots bore a high gloss that no
manservant of a careless dresser would ever have had the
heart to work at.

A change had come over his behaviour, too, for while
nothing could make him lie late abed, or be careless about his
business, he began to leave more matters in the hands of his
overseers, and unless there were an emergency or some
special order to be put through, he left his mills in time to
come home and dress for dinner in the evening. The fashion
able of London Society might dine at three or four in the
afternoon, but the hardworking millmasters of the industrial towns must wait until the day's work was done before taking
their pleasure.

While Mary Anne was 'home', there were few evenings when they did not have guests at their dinner table, or an
engagement abroad. There were dinner-parties, card-parties,
and routs; and also public assemblies, balls, and concerts, for Manchester was becoming a very sociable town, and its public buildings were the envy of all Lancashire.

And whether walking with Mary Ann on his arm up the
grand staircase of some public building, or standing by the
fireplace in his own drawing-room, watching her receiving his guests, Mr Hobsbawn's heart was filled with pride at the sight
of his daughter so effortlessly leading society. Her manners
were more polished, her clothes more elegant, her whole air so
much more sophisticated than the other Manchester ladies
that, despite his misgivings about his chick's worthless
husband, he had to confess that being at Morland Place had
given her something.

It had given her also little Henry; and if Mr Hobsbawn
loved Mary Ann deeply, his adoration of his grandson
reduced him quite frequently to tears. Not least among the
reasons that he hurried home early from the mills was so that
he could take part in the ceremony, which repetition had hal
lowed into tradition, of putting Henry to bed. This involved a
pick-a-back up the stairs, a romp or a pillow-fight in the bed
chamber, and the reading of a story while Henry battled
valiantly with his eyelids and the soporific quality of Mr
Hobsbawn's voice.

If business delayed him, little Henry would be put to bed in
tears by a nursemaid, and some special treat would have to be
arranged in compensation, for Mr Hobsbawn's was no
unrequited passion: Henry adored ‘Granpa' quite as much as
Granpa worshipped him. The happiest moments for both of
them were on Sundays when, after church, they would go for
a drive in the carriage in their best clothes along the principal
lounges, and wave and bow to their acquaintance. Mr
Hobsbawn rarely went to the mills on a Sunday, now, and
when he was obliged to go, he usually took Henry with him, for the pleasure of hearing the extravagant praise his employ
ees lavished on the boy, and of saying to him, 'One day all this
will be yours.’

Mary Ann watched the progress of their love with fond
eyes. It was right and proper that they should be close, and it
seemed to her also the most natural thing in the world, for
her father was the kindest and cleverest man, and Henry the
most remarkable child, who ever lived. She was happy here in Manchester, and was able to banish for a while all thoughts of
Morland Place and her other life, as though it were a recur
rent dream. and bein
^g
here at home was being awake. Thiswas all she had ever wanted, a comfortable home, respectable
acquaintance, a secure place in the world where she was
valued for those things she valued in herself; a little sphere on
which to impose order and symmetry. She had tried to bring
order to the chaotic world of Morland Place, and had been
baulked at every turn. Morland Place was not like home. She
did not belong there.

It was the rational approach to life that the lower orders of
Manchester were so signally lacking, and it was on this
subject more than any other that she and Father Rathbone
argued.

‘
You can't expect them to think rationally, when they are
living in such misery,' he would say.

‘But if they addressed their problems rationally,' she would
argue, 'they would not be living in such misery. Look, for
example, how the men spend their wages on strong drink,
when their families are starving.'

‘
But their wages would not be enough to feed them
properly, even if they didn't. So they drink to make
themselves feel better.'

‘
But how can that help? Then they have even less to eat.
And the ale is so adulterated, it makes them ill, and then they
can't work. And the women — how often have we seen them
just sitting around doing nothing, when they should be
washing clothes or bathing their children? I know they have to fetch all the water from a common pump, but if they have
time to do nothing, they have time to do that.’