A Dark and Distant Shore (81 page)

He was damnably perceptive, and his cool realism oddly comforting. Gideon had never tried to analyse what he felt about Theo. Though there was only a year between them in age, it had always seemed as if there were a century in terms of experience. Theo had been adult by the time he was five.

Three days later, with relief, they said good-bye to the Lawries’ kind, uneasy house, Tim still deeply chagrined – despite all Gideon could say – that a horse from his stables should have been responsible for Elinor’s death. It had been as much as Gideon could do to persuade him not to have the mare shot.

There had been little opportunity for the three Lauristons to find any peace or quiet, and for the first twenty miles of the way home they scarcely spoke. Only when the landscape began to change and they could see ahead the Forth and Clyde valley, did Gideon brace himself to confront what must happen next. He didn’t think Lizzie would respond other than quietly to the news that her mother was not coming back; he had been troubled to see how much happier she was with Lavinia and, after a few days, Juliana, at Marchfield House than she had ever been at home in London. But after that, what?

Vilia said suddenly, ‘You mustn’t take Lizzie back with you to an empty house in London. She would be acutely unhappy.’

‘Your father took
you.’

‘Yes. And although you think I was born strong, I can assure you I wasn’t. I was miserable, but I survived – perhaps because what I missed was a place, and I knew that it wouldn’t change, or not in essence, while I was away. Lizzie is different. She seems to have no sense of place at all, only of people. It matters deeply to her who she is with. Take her away, especially from Lavinia, and leave her to some governess for a few years, and you will be performing an act of something very near cruelty.’

‘She would have
me.’
He was aware of the defensive note in his voice.

‘Oh, Gideon! Don’t be foolish. Above all, don’t be commonplace! That might be all very well if you led the kind of regular life that suits a child, and if you were soon going to settle down again into cosy domesticity. Are you?’

‘No.’ The answer came out more uncompromisingly than he had intended.

‘You love your daughter but don’t, please, try to persuade us that you would consider abandoning, or even adjusting, your career for her.’

He dropped his eyes and plucked at a thread adhering to the knee of his trousers. ‘No,’ he said again, after a moment. ‘Do you have an answer to the problem?’

‘Ideally, she should stay at Marchfield. Shona would have no objection. She would love the child just as she loves her own. She has a natural turn for motherhood.’

It was, of course, the sensible solution, but Theo intervened drily, ‘If it were only Shona!’

Vilia stared at him. ‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘Just that Drew has a say in the matter, too, and he has never forgiven Gideon for stealing the family chronicle. Or, to put it vulgarly, the income that goes with it. Very reprehensible, no doubt, but there it is.’

‘He can’t possibly need the money?’

‘No. But I can envisage his thought processes, can’t you? The family chronicle money was, morally, Shona’s. With it, she would have been perfectly at liberty to bring up as many motherless children as she liked. But where
his
income is concerned, he cannot feel justified in depriving his own family – etcetera, etcetera.’

Gideon exclaimed, ‘That’s easily settled! I wouldn’t dream of asking them to take care of Lizzie without contributing to her keep.’

Theo’s particular smile gave his face wings. The slanting brows, so like Vilia’s; the curly, upcurving nostrils; and the way his lips lifted at the corners. ‘But Drew could never bring himself to take money
from his brother
for looking after a poor, orphaned little niece!’

There was a nonplussed silence.

Vilia said, ‘You’re being ridiculous, Theo. I never heard such nonsense!’

‘But you don’t know Drew very well, do you?’ It was said gently, but his mother’s face stiffened. He went on, ‘That, I assure you, is how he will think. Not being very subtle, he might even put some of it into words. Checkmate?’

Gideon said, ‘It
is
ridiculous, you know!’

‘When has that ever bothered our brother? We didn’t call him “the brat” for nothing when he was young.’

It was just as Theo had said, although Drew – conventional Drew – took the greatest care not to mention anything as crude as money. A gentleman didn’t, even within the family circle. Gideon found it hard enough even to catch his brother in an unoccupied moment, for when he wasn’t arguing out the merits of fine art versus functional castings, he was furiously trying to catch up on a backlog of work. What he did constantly – and, to Gideon’s extreme irritation, with every evidence of sincerity – was sympathize.

Vilia and Theo were no help. They didn’t even try to make the right kind of conversational opening when Drew was trapped at the dinner table. Vilia, in fact, had fallen into the oddest mood after a few days back at Marchfield. Her puzzled second son could only define it as jaunty, and he felt let down by it. Illogically, he knew. Why, after all, should Vilia weep for Elinor when she had never liked her?

As it happened, although Vilia had always considered her late daughter-in-law shallow, vain, and unsuitable, Elinor had been driven completely out of her thoughts by an incident that had satisfied her vanity as much as it had offended her sense of fitness.

Soon after Drew’s return, she had been passing von Sandemann’s office at the foundry, and moved partly by curiosity and partly by an honest desire to find out what he meant by ‘good taste’ in castings, she had knocked and gone in. He had been sitting behind his desk – a perfectly ordinary desk – and his expression when he rose to greet her had been what she thought of as his Number One expression. Number Two – and he only had two – differed simply by being a few degrees sourer.

‘Have you drawings for some of your projected designs?’ she began, and then stopped. The next words were wrenched out of her. ‘What an
extraordinary
...
Good heavens! Is that a chair?’

Since he had been sitting on it, the question was rhetorical. He said, ‘What you might call a piece of experiment.’

‘Experimental piece,’ she corrected him automatically. ‘It can’t be comfortable, surely? And it most certainly isn’t beautiful! I thought German design was supposed to be advanced.’

The chair looked as if someone had knocked together a few offcuts from the workshop floor – flat bits of metal, sections of gas tubing, and a thick slab of wood for the seat. It was the ugliest thing she had ever seen.

There was an edge of something that was almost amusement in von Sandemann’s voice. ‘Oh, it is,’ he said. ‘But this chair was designed by an Englishman. You don’t like it? But you can scarcely complain that it is ornate.’

She felt her face tighten in annoyance.

‘Perhaps you prefer that?’ He pointed.

‘That’ was equally odd, in a different way. It was as if someone had taken a piece of rope and allowed it to fall into graceful loops, and then fossilized it. She said, ‘I... What is it?’

‘Bentwood. Wood that has been boiled and moulded. It was made by a family friend of ours called Michael Thonet. He has been commissioned to furnish the Liechtenstein Palace. Interesting, is it not?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You don’t see, do you?’

‘See what?’

‘The shape! This chair I am sitting in is ugly, but strong. That one has a kind of beauty, but is weak. Yet it is a shape we could
make
strong, in cast iron.’

She hesitated. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, like something that had grown rather than been made. Frowning, she tried to visualize it in iron, and shook her head. Whether black, gilded, or bronzed, it would look heavy. Painted white, perhaps? But no one would ever buy white furniture; there wasn’t a house in the country it would fit into.

‘No,’ she said, her chin up. ‘You and I, Mr von Sandemann, may see a certain elegance about it, but this foundry can’t afford to make things to be sold only in tens or hundreds. I am afraid you will have to do better than that before you have any support from me.’

She turned away. There was a real, if reprehensible, pleasure in laying down the law, secure in an authority that needed to make no concessions to others. For five years of marriage she had guarded her words every day, muted her opinions, expressed her feelings as circuitously and softly as if she were dealing with a rattlesnake. But not here, not at the foundry. And especially not now, when Theo had suggested she might like to become involved in the management again.

Two heavy hands grasped her by the arms and whirled her round. ‘You arrogant – you arrogant...’ Von Sandemann bit off some word that, from his expression, would have been unforgivable. ‘Will you
never
admit you might be wrong? While you have been hidden in your Highland castle the world has changed, but you see it not. You come back here acting as if you never away have been. Ja! I know that it was you who built this foundry and ruled it like some petty tyrant! I honour you for it. You are a formidable woman. But it gives you not the right to say, here and now, I will have this, or I will have that!’

She had never felt such emanations of violence since that day in 1814 when she had faced up to Duncan Lauriston in the workshop; it had been almost a week before the bruises faded from her shoulders. Mesmerized, she stared up into Felix von Sandemann’s eyes, all of her concentrated in her mind, estimating, assessing, and in a suspended way, waiting. She didn’t even know that her own eyes were wide and water-green and empty, her face soft and smooth, and its muscles as relaxed as in sleep or death.

Sharply, he drew in his breath and then, without warning, his grip changed and his mouth came down hard on hers. There was nothing lover-like in the kiss, only a need to impose himself on her, in this way if he could contrive it in no other. But even while she fought, outraged, her body played her false, and a betraying quiver sprang up somewhere in the small of her back and ran, like molten fire, down into her loins. She struggled even harder, then, but his iron grip only tightened and he dragged her crudely against him, locking her arms to her body with one of his, and dropping the other hand to the base of her spine. And that was too much! Her anger won, and with a violent effort she managed to free one arm and tried to push him away. She didn’t succeed, but she forced him to shift his grip, and that momentary relaxation was all she needed. Raising her right foot as high as she could, she stamped it down on his with all her strength. By good fortune, her foot was at an angle, and the heel of her shoe ground cripplingly into the base of his toes.

He froze for a moment, and then growled somewhere deep in his throat. Suddenly she was frightened. But as the paralysis travelled up his leg and began to cramp his calf muscles, he released her, his hands splaying out, his shoulders a little bent, and his mouth so tightly shut that his lips were invisible. She backed away, watching him, and after a while he let out his breath again and said,
‘Danke schön.
Thank you. Thank you very much.’

She could feel the coil of her hair slipping – silver-blonde again as it had been in her youth, instead of the warmer gold of the years between – and she reached up to adjust the pins, her heart pounding in her breast and her arms trembling. For a traitorous moment, she wished she hadn’t stopped him so soon. Why had she, when her body cried out with starvation? For convention’s sake, or because this wasn’t the man? She had tried to forget what it was to be hungry, tried to convince herself that that side of life was over for her. But whatever von Sandemann’s motives had been, they had included a strong element of the physical. She lowered her eyes, in case the smile deep inside her showed through. After the atrophied years with Magnus, who had made her feel plain and middle-aged, it was like being born again. The life essence began to flow back into her.

She had to say something, and the circumstances seemed to require that it be something repressive. ‘Do the ladies of your country not object, Mr von Sandemann, to being treated as if they are no more than objects to satisfy men’s baser needs? Why should you think physical strength is a proof of mental superiority? In this country, Mr von Sandemann, it is the custom for gentlemen to show respect to ladies. Since you are a stranger here, I propose to overlook this episode, but you will oblige me by remembering that I am not accustomed to being treated so, and that I will not tolerate it!’ And that, she thought, a bubble of laughter welling up inside her, was probably one of the silliest speeches she had ever made. She wanted respect for her mind, certainly, but why was it so impossible to admit that she wanted other things, too? Was she alone in that? Was there something peculiar about her? If only it were possible to talk to someone about it, but it wasn’t, and she didn’t know the answer. Once, in a very roundabout way, she had tried to find out whether Shona enjoyed the pleasures of the bed, but Shona had turned scarlet even when Vilia asked whether the mattress was comfortable, making Vilia feel that there was something very indelicate about pursuing the subject. She brushed aside the thought that there was one person in the world – one man – who might have told her, if ever she had thought to ask. But the question hadn’t mattered, then.

Von Sandemann didn’t look in the least crestfallen. He was wearing his Number Two expression. Patronizingly, she said, ‘In the matter of the foundry, I see no reason why our differences of opinion should be so intense. You must have had differences with my sons before now. Did those make you so angry?’

His nostrils flared and then he replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘You are correct. They did not.’ He drew himself up, and clicked his heels together.

It was quite impossible for her not to giggle at the spasm of pain that crossed his face. With a faint gasp, she said. ‘I believe a cold compress is the sovereign remedy for bruises.’ Then she turned and fled.