A Marriage of Convenience (20 page)

She did not bother to change her stage dress but threw a mantle over it. On the way to the stage door, they passed behind the scenery flats and the numerous ropes which were used to lower the drops. Seeing what looked like a cannon ball, Clinton stopped and picked it up.

‘They’re used for thunder,’ she said. ‘Half-a-dozen rolled up and down that wooden trough.’

He bent down and lifted the end of the long sloping trough sending the metal balls racing away with a loud roar that
reverberated
and echoed through the theatre.

‘Good God, it works,’ he shouted above the din.

‘We can make lightning too, and rain … we can do anything,’ she said with a laugh that caught in her throat and escaped as a sob.

‘Thunder’s good enough for me,’ he said, ‘thunder and love.’

Theresa was too absorbed by the simple fact of walking beside him to think about where they were going. She saw buildings and lighted windows in isolation, her eyes taking in random details with fragmentary clarity—at the end of a long alley the river shone like polished ebony; in a silversmith’s barred window candlesticks and tankards gleamed palely. Far from distressing her, Clinton’s silence seemed to affirm their new confidence in each other. What
emptiness
could there be in silence, for minds filled with the constant murmur of unspoken thoughts? When she looked at his face she saw a subdued radiance; the mirror-image of her own contentment.

Suddenly her fingers tightened on his. They were approaching the Black Swan.

‘I don’t want us to be Mr and Mrs Danvers.’

‘If my title’s impossible, the best I can do is use my family name.’

‘Yes,
your
name,’ she said urgently. ‘If you’re real, then I’m a sort of mirage. I want you to make-up a name for us … I want us both to be the same. I won’t be mythical on my own.’

‘But you are mythical. You can’t help it. Any other woman would have said, “I don’t want to pretend to be your wife”.’ He smiled; that slow irresistible smile she remembered from Ireland. ‘You won’t be Mrs Danvers and I can’t be Mr Simmonds. If I can’t take your name, I can take your profession. How about Mr and Mrs Garrick? Mythical enough for you?’

‘Too mythical,’ she murmured. ‘Dramatists are less public?’ he suggested.

‘Congreve,’ she said, ‘I like Congreve.’ But as soon as she thought of some of the cynically witty lines that used to make her laugh, she suddenly found them sad and bitter. Her earlier reservations about posing as his wife seemed less important. She told him she would not mind being Mrs Danvers. A silly scruple was not worth going to another hotel. He seemed surprised by her volte-face but did not question it. Entering the hotel, Theresa felt the euphoria that had carried her along since leaving the theatre begin to wane. Fears that she would disappoint him nagged her. Too often bathos followed joy.

Above them, a flaking rococo ceiling: crumbling cherubs and clusters of vine leaves. Faded red damask on the walls, and a mustiness about the room in spite of a generous log fire. She sat
down in a chintz covered chair and hid her face in her hands. A little later she felt his lips gently touching the backs of her fingers.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘That I know what it’s like to be a shot bird … winged, but not knowing it. Flying on for a bit and then dropping without knowing why.’

She lowered her hands and looked at him with amazement.

‘You feel that?’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said so. Lovers oughtn’t to say too much. Not to start with …’

‘It gives them time to think?’ she asked with a faint smile.

‘Time to become cautious and scared.’

‘Is it safer to do things first and think about them later?’ She intended no mockery but saw his face darken.

‘Do you suppose I had no time to think after you’d gone? No time when I tried to follow you? While I waited to hear where you were? I’m done with thinking.’

She gazed at him in silence as if till that moment she had been blind; his passionate suffering face scattering her doubts like the blast of a cannon. Again she felt the overpowering weight of physical attraction that had knocked her sideways in the theatre. She pressed herself against him and felt the deep throb of his heart.

‘Kiss me,’ she sighed, and the touch of his lips sent a tingling shiver under her skin and a warmth of relief that was like homecoming. Her hands, stiff and awkward a moment ago, were soft now and warm; her whole body striving to mould itself to his.

She felt his fingers at her back, trying to loosen her dress, and knew that he would not succeed without help. She tried to assist without parting their lips but could not do it.

‘It’s terrible,’ she said, ‘all broken laces and bent hooks and eyes. I die in the last act. Heroines always have to die in white … and this thing’s so full of whalebone that it holds me up even when I try to fall down.’

To her relief he laughed, and she no longer felt awkward when with his aid she finally stepped out of the dress, wearing only a thin chemise and petticoat. They had both needed to laugh.

‘Why do you die?’ he asked, still smiling.

‘I’m a faithless wife,’ she whispered sorrowfully. ‘Impure heroines always have to die if they can’t marry their repentant seducers. It’s a very moral play.’

‘It sounds vile.’

‘It’s quite jolly to start with. The trouble comes later … the fiend casts me adrift.’

‘He must be mad,’ said Clinton, lifting her up like a child and
carrying her into the bedroom. She lay back on the bed watching him undress, impatiently tugging at his watch chain until a link parted, strewing his clothes on the floor. Before taking off his long woollen undergarments, he undid her chemise and cradled her breasts in the palms of his hands, breathing faster.

‘I want to look at you,’ he murmured in an intense but faraway voice. She got up and slipped off her petticoat and drawers, standing naked in front of him without moving. He stared at her avidly, eyes following the flowing line of her flanks, moving from the auburn warmth of her hair to the whiteness of breasts tipped with coral pink. Looking down, she saw that the dress had left marks and indentations on her skin. She covered them with her hands but he came to her and kissed these places tenderly.

‘My left shoulder’s a little higher than the right. When I was little I wore a sort of steel and leather thing to improve my posture … it didn’t work.’ She found herself blushing.

‘I’m glad it didn’t. I love your shoulders. I’d hate them to be different.’

‘Hold me. It’s lonely being looked at.’

He came to her and kissed her shoulders, then pressed his cheek against her breasts. When he held her, she could feel the hard lump of his penis through his drawers and reached down to touch it. He stripped off his remaining garments and they lay hugging each other, caressing and stroking, limbs intertwined; his hands deftly exploring; sliding between her thighs, as Esmond’s had never done, arousing her as Esmond had never done. His mouth strayed from her lips to her nipples and back again, kissing her throat and the lobes of her ears, until she ached for him.

‘Please, my love,’ she gasped, guiding him, raising her hips, moaning with pleasure as he entered her. She did not care how he had learned what he knew; did not think of it at all, but gave herself totally, her body responding to his rhythm as if they had been lovers for years. Never had she known such instinctive understanding of the flesh; her hands and fingers stroking his hair, tightening on his back, pressing down on him.

Afterwards, searching his face for pride of possession, she saw nothing but tender astonishment.

‘You weren’t acting with me?’ he asked with sudden doubt, moving from her.

‘Do that? You couldn’t think it …’

‘You never will?’

‘How could I ever need to?’

He lay back and closed his eyes, his relaxed lips and long lashes making him look as if smiling.

Later he mentioned his regiment’s engagement with the Fenians in Tipperary, and her heart grew cold.

‘It’s nothing yet,’ he said, sensing her alarm. ‘A few brave men against regular troops; it’s butchery … not fighting.’

‘And if there’s a rebellion?’

‘We’d welcome it, believe me. It’s only the small groups that can’t be dealt with easily. But a large gathering. A battery of horse artillery. Just one battery. It’s kinder not to think about it. I hope I won’t be there.’

‘You could be shot in the street.’

‘If they start that game, they’ll try for the Chief Secretary or the Lord Lieutenant.’

‘But you’ll be careful?’

‘Boredom’s the only thing I’ll die of over there. That and missing you.’

She stroked the hairs in the central hollow of his chest and kissed him. Lying back, she watched the pale flickering reflections of the fire on the ceiling, listening to the slower pace of his breathing, until, imperceptibly, sleep came.

*

Because Theresa had not wanted to eat lunch in the hotel, they had gone to a chop house in Stonegate, which Harris had previously found out was reputed the best in town. Afterwards they walked through the labyrinth of alleys around Monk Bar, looking at strange little shops, open, without it seeming possible that they would ever do any business: key shops filled with thousands of rusty keys, sweet stuff shops with farthing and halfpenny literature hung on strings in the window, herb shops selling preserved tapeworms and calves’ stomachs. For the first time since coming to York, Theresa no longer found the narrow streets and grass-grown courts sad and oppressive. Nor did the cries of the knife-grinders and wandering sellers of matches and penny toys jar on her nerves as before. She enjoyed the bustle and activity in the streets, sharing with Clinton anything worth remarking upon: a woman in an absurd poke-bonnet, the multiplicity of different objects in a pawnbroker’s window.

At last they came past half-timbered St William’s College to the Minster, and stood looking up at the towering mass of masonry, the broad expanses of glass, and jutting pinnacles and gargoyles. Inside, the light was dim silver-grey, beating down softly from the cold clerestory. The tall columns rose like an avenue of immense trees, their branches the ribs of the fan-vaulted roof. Beyond the chancel screen, the east window glowed with ruby, sapphire and topaz. In
the aisles behind the choirstalls, they looked at the mural
monuments
and brasses. A Jacobean husband and wife knelt under an elaborate marble canopy, not facing one another but with the woman looking at the man’s back.

‘How awful to be like that forever,’ she whispered, squeezing his arm. Other things she said also touched him. The sadness of being as old as the niched statues in the chancel screen; having to suffer the slow loss of noses, arms and fingers through the centuries, as if smitten by some never-ending leprosy. She was wearing a dark green Zouave jacket, frogged with braid like a hussar’s uniform, which he thought delightful, because it enhanced by contrast a new softness he sensed in her—the indefinable beauty which comes with happiness and love, as subtle as a flower’s scent or the bloom of fruit.

They looked at the Zouche chantry chapel and the chapter house, and returned to the nave in time to see a genteel congregation assembling for evensong. Respectable tradesmen and professional men with their wives, soberly dressed in black and grey. Normally not caring a jot about such people, Clinton was surprised to feel uneasy at their appearance. The idea that they would scarcely condescend to look at Theresa if they knew she was his mistress made him feel sick. One code on their lips, another in their hearts. Thwarted in their ambitions, undernourished in their pleasures, of course they would be venomous.

The little procession of canons, headed by a black robed verger with a silver wand, and the pure-faced choristers in their surplices, epitomised that well-regulated and morally certain world which would unhesitatingly condemn his liaison as dishonourable. If Theresa ever agreed to live with him, though he would still be received in the same places as before, her existence would be denied, even where it was perfectly well-known. She would be considered a person unfit to mix with virtuous women and as such, the victim of every social slight and insult. That he would be powerless to alter this, increased his indignation but also made him ashamed. She had attempted to escape him and had done her best to end their relationship, but he had come after her, and by doing so had bound himself in honour to protect her. He felt in his bones that he owed her something more than assurances of his love. Yet equally he realised that any offer of support would offend her. Though on the surface happy, these doubts gnawed at him unseen. He had not yet told her that he would only be able to stay one more full day before returning to Ireland. Several times he had been on the point of breaking the news, but had dreaded ruining for her the little time they had together.

On the way back to the hotel, they passed a mantua-maker’s, and Clinton stopped, seeing something in the window which he wanted to buy for her. He told her to go on ahead, promising not to be long. Theresa waited for him in their rooms, noticing that in their absence Harris had cleared away his master’s clothes. On the mantelpiece were some coins, a box of lucifers, a cigar cutter and several crumpled letters, evidently taken from the pockets of the coat he had worn the day before. With unashamed curiosity she picked up one of the envelopes and took out the folded paper.