A Dark and Distant Shore (39 page)

But nothing had gone right. As effectively as if she had intended it, Lucy had displayed him to Vilia in the worst possible light. He had been dropped back, as neatly as a round peg, into a series of round holes. Erring husband and uncaring father. A gambler who levanted from his debts of honour. A liar, and a poor one, who couldn’t even sound convincing about the problems of communication between New York and Scotland. And an unsuccessful entrepreneur in a cheap and shabby business. It didn’t help that Perry himself, all his mind on Vilia, had talked more openly than was wise about these matters. But there had seemed to be no possible subject for conversation that wasn’t alive with dangers. Except the raspberry beds and the fishing at Kinveil. And even Kinveil was dangerous, given Vilia’s obsession with it.

There was something else, too. Until Saturday, he had thought that the experiences of the last seven years had stripped him of every last remnant of pride, but he had been wrong. It had been bitter as gall to match Vilia’s achievements against his own. She had started with more, much more, but that didn’t matter. He knew that, through her eyes, he must seem to have failed again, as he had failed before.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘No apologies. But I must give you some explanations.’ He didn’t allow her time to speak. He had to get it over with, even though he already felt that nothing would convince her. ‘You know why I left when I did. Magnus Telfer put pressure on his friend Wendell to demand immediate settlement of what I owed him. Another day, and all would have been well. My life – our lives...’ He glanced up from his locked hands, but her eyes were still fixed on the heart of the fire. ‘Yes. Well, it’s hardly profitable to speculate, is it? I fled, as I assume you know by now, to sanctuary in Edinburgh, where I drank most of the little money I had. I decided, there, that I could never go back to Charlotte, but the irony was that the only person from whom I thought I might borrow enough money to go to America was Charlotte’s father.’

He stopped and sat back, flexing his shoulder muscles a little. He was trying to be cold and factual. No excuses. Nothing of the agony of mind. Nothing of the self-disgust, the exhausted desire for oblivion.

Vilia said, ‘The refreshment tray is on the table over there, if you would like something to drink.’

He looked at her sharply, but she didn’t seem to have meant anything by it. ‘Thank you, no.’ Even though he was feeling the strain. Confession wasn’t as easy as she pretended. ‘Mungo Telfer was very kind to me. Once he was persuaded that there was no possibility of Charlotte and myself being reconciled, he gave me my fare and a hundred pounds to tide me over when I arrived in Nova Scotia. I won’t bore you with the expedients I was reduced to during those first years. They weren’t very prepossessing. But I survived, even though I still have nowhere I can call home. On the other hand, I have some good friends now, and a business that looks promising. No more than that.’

There was a note of finality in his voice, although he had stopped only because he needed to find the right words for what he wanted to say next, on a subject of overriding importance. He had been watching her profile intently, but it had told him nothing. The soft glimmer of the flames, warming her skin, illuminated only the same calm detachment, as if nothing he had said had made any impression. He knew now that her mind had erected an insuperable barrier against him, and that there was no route by which he could scale it unaided.

Vilia completely mistook his silence. She had discovered on Saturday that seven years of deadly separation had only served, week by week, month by month, year by year, to burn her need for him deeper and deeper into her soul. Most of the time she had been able to ignore it by losing herself in the rigorous schedule of her days, but it seemed the passion had not grown less, and neither had the pain. On Saturday, because of Lucy, there had been no possibility of expressing the passion, and for the last two days, believing he had gone, she had been ruled only by the pain.

She had been angry at first, over his sudden, unceremonious arrival after all the years of silence, but it hadn’t been an irrevocable anger, and it had been exorcized by the coolness Lucy’s presence had forced her to assume. And then he had said he was leaving again almost at once. It was hours before the agony of that really reached her. She had never known whether her reaction to great sorrows and great joys was unique to her, or perfectly commonplace, but it was as if her brain accepted and noted the message, and then scanned every tiny detail for proof of validity before passing it on to her heart. She had learned, now, to use the interval to advantage. This time, the hurt had been on a scale too great to contemplate, so that she had pushed it away, deliberately deadening herself to it and retreating into a kind of emotional limbo. It seemed the only way she could defend her sanity.

But her success wasn’t complete. When Perry Randall walked into the room, there had been two Vilia Camerons waiting for him, one numb and quiescent, the other superstitiously terrified of inviting new suffering, and at the same time consumed by love and need for this man who was so like, and yet so unlike, the Perry Randall of seven years ago.

It was the neutral Vilia who, thinking he had finished what he wanted to say, asked, ‘Is that all? Is that the “explanation” you owe me? It leaves a great deal out, don’t you think?’

Diverted from his purpose, he snapped, ‘What do you want me to say? I thought I’d said it! I was weak, spineless, irresponsible, and I ran away. As far as I knew, you were safe and cared for. Don’t ask me whether I wanted you to forget me, or to wear the willow for me, because I don’t know.’ He stopped. ‘Hell and the devil confound it! Of course I know. But I also know that if I had been confined in a debtors’ prison, everything would have been over for us, for ever.’

‘And isn’t it?’

Frustration exploded within him, and he leapt to his feet and strode the length of the room and back again, before coming to a halt before her, his arms folded tightly over his chest. ‘What do you think I have been
doing
these last years? I have been trying – under God knows what difficulties and handicaps – to build up something I can ask you, some day, to share with me!’

She understood the words, but the censor in her mind needed time to consider them. She studied his handsome, furious face carefully. ‘Perhaps you should have written and told me.’ The long silence had hurt more – or almost more – than anything. It had been the proof that he hadn’t really cared at all, or that he had forgotten her. The one fault, among all his faults, that persuaded her not to listen to him now.

‘God damn it, Vilia! How could I write? The minute I set foot in Nova Scotia I began to think of ways and means. I can scarcely bear to remember what I went through!’

He threw his head back, and his next words were forced out through clenched teeth. ‘How many times –
how many times
did I put pen to paper and then throw it away? As far as I knew, Andrew was still alive and back with you, now that the wars were over.’ His eyes, grey and compelling, returned to hers again, as if he could will her to understand. ‘For your sake, I didn’t dare write. Then, at last, I thought to hell with Andrew and I did write. And nothing happened. I gave you a string of addresses where, with luck, a reply might reach me. But I heard nothing. And nothing.
And
nothing.’

He swung round savagely. ‘So then I wrote to Mungo Telfer. I thought you might have moved, so that you hadn’t received my letters. I prayed that was what had happened. And I thought that Mungo might at least pass on the message that I was alive and reasonably well, because I knew you would never lose touch with Kinveil. But I gather from what Lucy Telfer said that he told no one. Is that true?’

Her eyes were narrowed and half-believing under frowning brows. ‘He told
me
nothing. When did you write?’

‘About four years ago, I think it was, and again a year or two later.’

‘He said nothing about it.’

Perry flung himself down in his chair again. ‘I couldn’t have foreseen that. But you do understand, don’t you? After those first months when I feared to write, I didn’t know where you were, and I couldn’t find out. I could have asked Mungo to write to me, at some friends’ in New York, and tell me. But I didn’t know whether he would be prepared to. It would have been asking a good deal, considering I was the man who had deserted his daughter, and it could so easily have wrecked your life.
You do understand
?
’

It was all so simple. Such a reasonable explanation of something that had come near to breaking her heart. She dropped her eyes. ‘Yes, I understand.’

If he hadn’t thought her mind was shuttered against him, he might have stopped, perhaps, to give her time, but he went on. ‘And then I heard that Andrew was dead, and from that moment I began to gather together every penny I could, so that I could come and find you.’ However uselessly, it had to be said.

If only she had said nothing, or even ‘I don’t believe you’, everything might have turned out differently. But it was too important and too dangerous a subject for her at that moment, and instead she asked, ‘And how
did
you find me?’

To Perry, it sounded like rejection. ‘From the people who manage the house in Half Moon Street. They told me in person what a few months ago they refused to tell me by letter. And so I came here.’

Her mind running along quite different lines, she said, ‘I would have expected you... You should have gone to Glenbraddan.’

Of all things, he didn’t want to talk about Glenbraddan. ‘No,’ he said.

The bluntness of it jarred her back to the present. With a calm that astonished her, she opened up a topic that her voice was just capable of discussing. The worst betrayal of all, the betrayal that had almost killed her. She said reasonably, ‘But you must understand, I have to ask. You and Charlotte...’

‘We can never be reconciled. I have no feeling for her, nor she for me. She made it clear before I left that she felt nothing for me but distaste.’ He hurried through it, as if by dismissing the question that hung in the air he could efface it for ever.

Vilia said, ‘Surely not.’

It stopped him dead. For a moment he floundered, and then he said, ‘If I had gone back prepared to beg for mercy, things might have been different. But as soon as she realized I was determined to leave, it was the end.’

He was treating it all very casually, she thought, as if he were talking of some meaningless encounter with a woman of the streets. Suddenly, at long last, her temper began to rise.

‘Hardly the end,’ she said sharply.

He raised his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the child, of course! That poor, unfortunate child whose mother can
still
scarcely bear to look at her. Little Shona!’

His response baffled her at first, for his face went perfectly blank. Then a slow, stark horror began to dawn on it. ‘Oh, no,’ he said on a falling note. ‘No. Oh, my God!’ He buried his face in his hands.

She stared at him. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that you didn’t know?’

He ran the long, capable fingers through his hair, but didn’t look up. Then she heard him take a deep, ragged breath and, slowly, he shook his head. ‘I didn’t know.’

She was diverted, for the moment, from the real point at issue between the two of them. Thinking back, she remembered that he had been at Kinveil for only three or four weeks in the autumn of 1815 before he sailed, so he wouldn’t have known then. And he had received no news at all from home in these last seven years. But he had said on Saturday that he had exchanged letters with Mungo since he had been back here. Why hadn’t Mungo told him about the child? For the same reasons he had given for advising Perry not to visit Kinveil and Glenbraddan? And, perhaps, because he didn’t want to add to Perry’s burden of guilt? That would be like him.

She rose to her feet and went to pour a glass of whisky, Johnnie Meneriskay’s twelve-year-old best. She would have put it in Perry’s hand, except that she didn’t trust herself to touch him. There was nothing more she wanted in the world than to have this dark tormented stranger, this lost lover, take her in his arms and make her forget all the fear and misery and heartbreak that held her back from him. But she mustn’t give in.
She must not give in.
It was too dangerous and she was too afraid. She couldn’t live through such agony again, and wouldn’t believe that, this time, the need might not arise. So she merely set the glass down on the little table at his side, and said, ‘You need a drink.’

He picked the glass up and drained it, shuddering violently as it began to bite on its way down. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said again. But he did know, now, something of what had happened to change Vilia during their separation, and he had no idea how to fight it. He could remember, still, his own anguish as he had driven himself to fulfil his part of the bargain with Mungo, sharing Charlotte’s bed, caressing Charlotte’s body as if that might, somehow, bring them together again. In trying to be honest with Mungo, he had been dishonest with Charlotte, and himself, and Vilia. It had been a dreadful charade, that ever since, in retrospect, had sickened him. He had believed, he had hoped, that Vilia would never find out, but she had, and in the most irrefutable way. He looked at her, his eyes full of pain, and said, ‘How you must have hated me.’

‘Hated you? No. That, perhaps, would have been easier. But I was – unwell – at the time, and I...’ She allowed her words to tail away. Somehow, during the empty years, it had never occurred to her that there might be things he didn’t know. About his daughter, Shona. And about...

And about his son, Drew. Sometimes, even now, she tried to convince herself that Drew was Andrew’s son, but she knew he wasn’t. Not because of any magic awareness of the kind of union that brought forth a child. She would have distrusted any such romantic notion, especially after these last years when she had seen haggard factory wives bring a dozen children into the world, and bury half of them, without ever knowing a moment’s joy in their procreation. Sex, for them, was nothing other than a brutal, drunken imposition. No. After Gideon’s birth, following so soon after Theo’s, Vilia had talked to the midwife and the wet nurse. ‘A little bit o’ sponge,’ they had said. ‘Soak it in oil and tie a scrap o’ ribbon round it. Put it in before you goes to bed, and you’ll be all right, missus. Don’t always work, but it’s better than nothing. Fifty-fifty chance, or a bit better, they say, the people wot knows.’ After that, she had used it when Andrew was home, and he hadn’t even noticed. But with Perry... The first time, she hadn’t expected to need it, and the second, she had been so happy, so full of wild anticipation, that she hadn’t even thought of it.