Theirs Was The Kingdom (104 page)

He had the impression then that she wanted to re-open the inquest on their relationship, perhaps harking back to all they had said to one another during that final confrontation in Eaton Place, but he gave her no chance, sensing that the only way to prise her loose from this dismal place was by giving her no choice in the matter. He took the bag in one hand, her hand in the other, and led the way out on to the landing.

From the stairwell the hesitant melody of “Allan Water” could be heard, as though the youth with the grubby cuffs was playing to keep his courage up. He said, “Wait one minute,” and setting down the bag took out one of his cards and a pocket diary containing a pencil. Using the banister rail as a rest he tore a page loose and wrote,
“Mrs. Pedlar. Please accept this as Miss Mostyn’s notice and inform Mr. Birley that she left in my charge. Any further communication between us can be conducted through my firm. Faithfully, Giles Swann.”
After a moment’s reflection he added,
“I think you should know Miss Mostyn’s father is Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn, the well-known industrialist, also that she is my fiancée and her father is aware of this.”

He found a paper clip attached to some correspondence in his wallet and clipped card and note together. At the foot of the stairs he knocked on the same door and again the music stopped abruptly but this time there was no movement inside the room. He went in, finding a smaller dormitory, almost identically furnished, if furnished was the word. The youth, now wearing a collar and jacket, was sitting on his bed beside an open window. He said, “Give this to Mrs. Pedlar the moment she comes in. Say that you tried to stop me and if they ask questions I’ll back you up.”

“It don’t matter what I say I’d get the push,” and he locked his hands behind his back, as though to touch the note would involve him in irretrievable ruin.

“Listen, you must have heard of Swann-on-Wheels, the carriers?”

“Yes, but…”

“If you’re sacked come to me at this address. I’ll find you a job and it’ll be a damned sight better job than you’ve lost. I’m Swann’s son, Giles Swann. Now take the note.”

He took it, handling it as though it would bite and laying it down very carefully on the top of his locker. Giles thought he had never seen a human being look more desperate as he said, “That’s a promise, Mr. Swann?” and when Giles said it was, “Then I’ll do it. She never really belonged here, not with people like us. We all knew that.” He called, through the open door, “Good luck, Miss Mostyn. Run for it!”

He piloted her into the stifling alleyway, then down to the tram terminus and through the side streets to Talavera Road. With his free hand he held her arm above the elbow. She said nothing, walking like someone in a trance.

Mrs. Rawson had made ready for her. Cold supper was laid on the parlour table and from some attic or cupboard she had excavated a battered truckle bed, pushing the chairs back to clear a space on the hearth-rug. Prune was there, lying with his head between extended paws, and when Romayne came in he wagged his tail but did not rise. She sat down and patted him absently as Mrs. Rawson said, “I saved you some supper. Make her eat it, Mr. Swann. She needs fattening up. I’ll bring cocoa later, when the others are back. Where are you booked in, Mr. Swann?”

“Nowhere,” he said, “I was only passing through. I’ll get a room at one of the hotels.”

“You won’t. There isn’t a bed in the town. I could let that old truckle ten times over.”

“Then I’ll stay here, with Miss Rycroft, if you’ll permit it.”

She hesitated, common sense and compassion doing battle with her notions of propriety. Finally she said, “All right then. You’re a gentleman, I can see that,” and went out.

Very slowly, like a wax figure in a peepshow coming to life, the extreme rigidity of her posture relaxed. A trace of colour came back to her cheeks and finally, after making what seemed to Giles a tremendous effort, she smiled. He said, “Mrs. Rawson’s right. Try and eat something,” and was encouraged when she got up, crossed over, and sat at the table, picking up knife and fork and nibbling at the edge of a slice of steak pie. Prune, true to form, rose at the rattle of cutlery, stretched himself, and moved over beside her, lowering his head on her lap and turning his mournful eyes upward. She said, without looking at the dog, “He kept me sane. It was a kind of link. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s easy to understand.”

She went on eating, slowly but determinedly, and when Mrs. Rawson came in with two cups of cocoa she took the drink and sat musing, her hands clasped round the mug as though the temperature in the room had been below zero instead of in the seventies. A muted uproar reached them from unseen areas of the house, feet stumping on floors, children crying, men calling out in strong Lancashire accents, a high-pitched laugh that ended in a spluttering cough. Still they sat in silence over the ruins of the meal, the dog waiting for the occasional piece of crust that Romayne popped into its mouth. She fed Prune without looking at him. Her thoughts seemed to be concentrated on something outside the range of their present circumstance. He said nothing to prompt her. Instinct told him that a resolution, of one kind or another, would have to originate from her.

At last she said, in a quiet, level voice, “I couldn’t begin again, Giles. Not without telling you, not without your knowing. That would be an unforgivable thing to do.”

“There’s no need to go into it now. You’re shocked and tired. We’ve got the rest of our lives to talk.”

“
No!
That was how it was last time. I won’t go through that again.”

“You love me?”

“More than ever.”

“Well, then, there’s nothing more to be said. I’ll never let you go again.”

“I think you might. Most men would, if they knew.”

“Knew what?”

“What I’m really like. Or was when we were to be married. I’m not talking about running away but—other things, things that happened before I met you.”

He began, dimly, to understand. The crazy segments of their erratic association began to make some kind of pattern. He said, “Whatever it is, now isn’t the time. Later…”

“
No
, Giles!”

She was suddenly very emphatic. Her vagueness, that he had half-mistaken for a kind of drowsiness due to shock and despair, left her. A little more colour came back to her cheeks and there was something of the girl he remembered in the way she jerked herself up and thumped the table so that the crockery rattled.

“Well, then, tell me if you have to.”

She faced him. Prune, sensing he was unlikely to get more scraps, lumbered away and flopped down on the hearthrug, head between paws, eyes still watchful.

“It’s about the kind of person I am—was. If you’d known you wouldn’t have wanted me. No man would, except as a woman he could… use!”

He could see the tremendous effort it was costing her to say this, but all it did was to increase his compassion to a point where he wanted to hold her close, stifling anything she felt impelled to say.

“I know about all that. Your father told me.”

The disciplines of the drapery trade had left their imprint on her. She was able to absorb this without a great deal of difficulty. He saw her throat muscles contract as she swallowed. Her glance, that had been level with his, dropped.

“Father told you? About Gilpin, the groom who thrashed me? About Mr. Bellocq, and that manservant, Dodge?”

“All of them. It was then I decided I could never work for him.”

“Well?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Three lovers before I was eighteen and you say it doesn’t matter? It
must
matter. I was only fifteen when…”

“It doesn’t. I love you more than anyone in the world. We can get married at once. I’ll take you to my sister-in-law and my grandfather in Manchester. We can be there by noon tomorrow and I’ll make all the arrangements.”

She began to cry, very quietly and without altering the level posture of her head so that the tears ran a straight course down her cheeks, dropping from her long jawline and splashing on to the backs of hands folded on her lap. She let them fall unchecked. After a minute or so he took his handkerchief and passed it to her. It was soiled with sweat he had wiped from his forehead earlier in the afternoon, when he had pursued her and Prune across the esplanade. She pulled herself together as he knew she would, sniffing a little and dabbing her eyes. “That’s the first time since the night I tried to buy the hat. There were plenty of times when it would have helped, but you can’t cry to order. That’s another thing I found out.”

Her defencelessness, so manifest and so childlike, was terrible to watch. And yet, in a way, it drew them closer with every passing second.

He said, “Why the drapery trade? You must have known it was the worst of all. Why not one of those posts for a governess or a companion that people advertise for in the Home Journals?”

“It wouldn’t have been the same.”

“The same as what?”

“That Welsh girl, the one who refused to serve me and then fainted.”

“You’re saying you deliberately inflicted this kind of life upon yourself
because
of her? Because of what I said that time?”

“Not entirely… that was what prompted me, but there was much more than that. It was the only way to find out. To really find out.”

“About people like her, about those other girls in Birley’s dormitory and that poor devil with the banjo?”

“In a way. But even that isn’t all the answer.”

“Tell me then.”

She got up and went over to the armchair, seating herself on the arm and beginning, in some indefinable way, to recapture a little of the vivid personality he remembered.

“ To find out why people like you cared. Why you were interested enough to care. Without understanding that, there was no real hope of belonging to you as I wanted to belong, ever since the first minute I talked to you that morning at Aberglaslyn. Does that sound silly? Something I’ve made myself believe?”

“No.”

Neither did it. Somewhere—it might take him years to define—but somewhere behind this extravagant, exculpatory gesture was logic of a kind he had never hoped to find in her, or in anyone like her. It made up for so many things. For her wildness, perverseness, selfishness, and promiscuity; for all the wearisome dances she had led him over the past four years; for inhuman calculating machines like her father and Birley the draper; for all the injustice and ignorance and stupidity he had encountered since that day he had stood on the grass verge outside a labourer’s cottage at Twyforde Green and watched an aged, ailing couple evicted and despatched to separate workhouses like old slaves being sold down the river. It gave him not merely hope but also an access of strength and courage, for it surely followed that if she could set herself to learn, then anybody could. Even her father. Even Mr. Birley, who housed his staff like convicts, fed them on slops, and sacked them for not using their one rest day to worship in his tin tabernacle.

He said, “You must have learned a very great deal. Far more than I. More than anyone like me could learn. Books can’t teach you that kind of thing, and what you’ve learned I’ll learn from you. Go to sleep now. I’ll pull up another chair and make do with a shakedown. I should take your dress off. You’ll be too hot to sleep if you don’t.”

He moved into the window bay and drew the calico blinds and when one of them flew up again he heard a sharp brittle sound that made him swing round. She was laughing and said, through her laughter, “It’s a kind of honeymoon, Giles. Unhook me, there’s a dear.”

He unhooked her, stooping to kiss the back of her neck. She reached up and seized his hands, pulling them down and pressing them hard against her breasts. Her hands, he noticed, were warm again.

The touch did more than anything else to clarify his complex feelings concerning her essential place in his life, if it was to be the life he had contemplated in happier days and not the drab, day-to- day existence that had been his ever since he had turned on his heel in Eaton Place. He had to make a decision for both of them then, whether to claim her here and now, in this stuffy, cluttered room, or exercise an entirely different kind of restraint from that of the past, when she had done her utmost to make him run contrary to his instincts concerning their association. He wanted her most desperately, but not solely in the physical sense. He wanted to exorcise any lingering doubt in her mind that they had somehow attained new levels in their awareness of one another as man, woman, and, above all, comrades. Her insistence that possession of her could achieve this did not seem extravagant and fanciful now, but logical and necessary, so that he was on the point of telling her this between kisses when his eye met the steady gaze of the late Mr. Rawson, staring down at them from his fumed oak frame over the mantel. Then, most improbably, humour took a hand, the kind of humour that had never been absent from their relationship and had played its part in repairing so many ruptures up to the moment of their parting. He said, kissing her lightly, “Not here. Not in front of Rawson,” and magically she laughed, the familiar dancing light returning to her eyes as she looked from him to Rawson and back again. She withdrew from him then, sitting and unlacing her dusty boots. Through a threadbare patch in the blind he watched a last gleam of evening sunshine light on a copper curl behind her ear. He left her to get into bed, gathering the crockery and cutlery from the table and taking it out into the narrow passage.