A Dream of her Own (6 page)
Gerald slumped back in the cab as it rattled down Westgate Road to the city centre a bare mile away. The sexual release he had just experienced had been overwhelming, almost agonizing. At its peak there had been very little difference between pain and pleasure. For a while afterwards, all his senses had been intensified, but now that feeling of heightened awareness was beginning to dissipate.
He began to think of the meeting with his friends that lay ahead, and frowned. They would all be at the usual place, Alvini’s, the fashionable restaurant next door to the Palace Theatre in the Haymarket, and he was very late.
He knew what they would say: ‘Wouldn’t they let you out again, Gerald?’ ‘Did Gerald’s mama want to tuck him up in bed, then?’ ‘Did the pater insist he applied himself to his studies before he allowed him out to play?’
Once, when they had been playing cards and drinking for some hours, and Gerald was beginning to worry about his reception when he returned to the house on Rye Hill, he had let slip how difficult his father and mother could be. The others were drunkenly sympathetic at the time but they had never let him forget it. Tonight they would assume that he had had the usual opposition from his parents and they would mock him for it. The banter wasn’t always friendly. Sometimes Gerald imagined that the others, from much wealthier families than his own, were pleased to have an excuse to make fun of him.
But what if they knew the real reason why he was so late? He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the pleasure he had felt when he had had Constance so completely in his power. Could he tell them about this conquest of the little skivvy? No ... Gerald sighed. That would hardly impress them. If his friends’ stories were to be believed, deflowering servant girls was a rite of passage. No, they would hardly admire him for allowing something so banal to delay him.
Still, his spirits began to rally as the cab pulled up outside Alvini’s. Perhaps he could embroider the truth a little - rather than a simple business transaction for which he’d paid her well, too well, he could hint that it had been some sort of assignation ...
And then he had it. By the time he paid the cabby he was grinning. He needn’t mention Constance’s social position, but he could say that he had had a rendezvous with a beautiful girl on the very eve of her wedding. A girl who had made her attraction to him so plain that it was obvious that she was asking for it. What could Gerald have done but oblige her? Consequently, she would be going to her bridegroom tomorrow in a far from virginal state.
That would amuse them. It might even ensure that he wouldn’t have to buy a single drink for himself all evening.
Constance hurried through the terraced streets, thankful that the fog was not so dense now that she was further away from the river. Her body was sticky with sweat and her legs were hurting but she could not allow herself to rest.
The houses at this side of the West Road were not so grand as those of Rye Hill but they were still respectable. She knew the area well; she had walked this way to the park many a time on her afternoons off. With nowhere to go and time to kill, she had enjoyed looking at the houses, the scrubbed front doorsteps whitened with soapstone, the shining brass, the immaculate net curtains, the neat flowerbeds in the tiny gardens. Lazy cats sunning themselves on windowsills, children playing tag or hopscotch until their mothers called them in for tea.
She had often wondered about the lives that were lived behind the neat redbrick façades. The children were nowhere near as privileged as she had once been. They had no wardrobes full of pretty clothes, no nurseries full of more toys than they could ever play with.
But when her happy childhood had ended so abruptly, Constance would have given anything to join in the simple street games, pick up the skipping ropes and the hoops and run in with them to one of those spruce little houses, sit at the table with its simple fare and stay there, safe, cherished and secure.
At this time of night all those children would be fast asleep, save one - she could hear the thin cry of a new baby and a shadow moved across the flimsy curtains in an upper window, but most of the houses were dark and still. Here and there, a passage light glowed dimly behind a frosted fanlight. A church clock began to strike the hour. It was midnight.
She had reached the park. There was no gate, and the gas lantern hanging from the centre of the wrought-iron entrance arch illuminated a path that cut straight through to the other entrance on Moorside Drive. There were other archways with lanterns at spaced intervals and she could see well into the distance. Her way appeared to be clear. And yet, she hesitated.
The kind of people who came here at night would hardly seek the light. Suddenly a muffled argument came from the shadowed pavilion, followed by a stifled scream and a curse. Constance stopped and listened.
‘Gan on, hinny!’
‘She’s nivver said no before!’
Other voices called encouragement and then there was laughter. Constance held her breath. She was reluctant to go through the park but the only other way to reach the Elliots’ house in its exclusive location on the edge of the Town Moor would be to walk round the perimeter. That would take very much longer and it was already past midnight. She had no choice.
Clutching her box to her body with one hand, she picked up her skirts with the other and, keeping to the very centre of the broad pathway, she ran as fast as she could.
As the last chimes of midnight faded Nella turned restlessly in her narrow bed. She had lain awake worrying about Constance out in the streets on her own and grieving for her own future without the only friend she had ever had.
She was cold. She had opened the window about an hour ago when she thought she had heard someone cry out. She leaned out as far as she could and peered down into the mist but could see nothing. The ensuing silence convinced her that she had imagined it and she moved her chilled head and shoulders back into the room.
But by the time she closed the window again, the damp air had seeped into every corner of the attic. Even the bedclothes felt clammy; Nella pulled her shawl around herself more tightly before burrowing down under the threadbare sheets and the rough blankets. Her skinny limbs squirmed around trying to find a more comfortable place on the lumpy horsehair mattress. She couldn’t settle, her body was weary, but her mind was too active to allow her to sleep.
She must be there by now, Nella thought. She’ll be tucked up in a warm bed in John’s friend’s house in Fenham. It wouldn’t have taken Constance long to walk that distance.
During the years they had been working together in the Sowerby household, it had sometimes happened that Constance and Nella had the same afternoon off and Constance would allow her friend to go with her on her long walks about Newcastle. Nella had lived for those moments when she’d had Constance to herself, away from Mrs Mortimer’s beck and call, and they’d been able to forget, for a while, the never-ending drudgery of their lives.
Nella loved the town, the busy streets and the throng of people. She couldn’t understand why the parlourmaid, Isabelle, went on about the countryside and the farm near Allendale where she had been born.
Nella couldn’t imagine walking for miles without seeing another house, and the idea of streams and trees and moorland being beautiful was baffling to her. What on earth would you do with your time off if you lived in the country? There were no cafés, no bandstands, no theatres. She had always been intrigued by the gaudy posters and the playbills posted on billboards and the gable ends of buildings.
Then, earlier this year, she had seen the London train disgorge a troupe of actors at the Central Station. She had stopped to watch them as the seemingly endless supply of bags and boxes and trunks was loaded on to a wagon. She observed the actors’ brilliant clothes, their exaggerated movements and the extravagant way they had of calling out to each other, and she was entranced. Ever since that day, Nella had been saving up to go to the Christmas show at the Palace.
But she also liked looking in the shop windows in the city centre, at the furnishings, the fabrics, and the fashions.
‘Constance, you would look lovely in that blue tulle!’ she had said once.
Constance smiled. ‘So would you.’
‘Me? Don’t be daft!’
‘But you would. We are about the same height, the same colouring—’
‘No, Constance, no, we’re not the same at all. You are bright - bright and beautiful - and I’m just faded, washed out and ugly as sin.’
‘You’re not ugly, Nella.’
‘Amman’t I?’
‘No. You have a sweet little face.’
‘And what about these little arms and these little legs? They’re not sweet and shapely like yours are. They’re more like sticks.’
‘Nella, stop it!’
‘And most of all, Constance, what about this twisted little back? If you dressed me in one of them fine dresses from Bainbridge’s window, I’d look like Mr Punch in the sideshow.’
After that day, she remembered, Constance had hurried them past any display of fashion in the shop windows. Nella would see her friend’s eyes linger regretfully on the new displays - the hats from Paris, the feather boas, the elegant parasols - and she longed to tell her that it didn’t matter. Nella wasn’t a bit envious of her friend’s beauty, and she would have longed to stop and dream of how lovely Constance would look in that cream muslin day dress or the turquoise satin evening gown with the black lace draped and trailing romantically. But Constance would hurry on, away from the shops and into the smart suburbs north of the city.
Here, Nella would observe a different kind of longing in her friend’s eyes. As Constance gazed at the substantial terraced houses and the spacious villas in Jesmond she would grow silent - but there was no need for speech. Nella could see, only too clearly, what kind of hunger it was that was consuming her friend.
One day they had paused at an open gateway. They could see a neat lawn, almost velvet smooth, bounded by flowering shrubs. It was a late summer evening and the scents of the flowers lingered in the lengthening shadows. They stood very still, savouring the fragrance, then Nella saw that Constance was looking at the house beyond.
As they watched, a lady walked towards a table placed near the window and lit an oil-lamp. The soft glow revealed a graceful drawing room, not solid and oppressive like the Sowerbys’, but light and airy, with small gilt-framed pictures on the walls. A gentleman appeared and the lady turned and placed a hand on his shoulder. They seemed to be smiling at one another as they drew closer. A moment later he broke away and drew the curtains.
Nella turned, grinning, to face her friend, and was frightened to see how very still Constance had become. Her eyes were wide and glittering in the dusk and she was clenching her fists tightly.
‘Constance ...’ Nella whispered.
‘Mm?’
‘Constance, was ... was your house like that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The house you had to leave. Was it like that?’
‘No, Nella.’ Her words, when they came, were like a sigh. ‘Not like that. My father’s house was much better than that.’
She turned abruptly and walked away. Nella scurried along behind her, not daring to question her further. They had never spoken of it again.
But Nella had thought about it often. From the moment she had first met Constance and her mother, she had known they were used to a much better life than the other poor souls who ended up in the workhouse. Agnes Bannerman never spoke of it. Never explained to anyone how she and her daughter had sunk so low but, although mother and daughter didn’t ever complain, Nella grew to believe that they had not accepted what fate had brought them to.
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