A Marriage of Convenience (7 page)

‘Well, sit down, Mr Higgs,’ she said waving a bare arm impatiently in the direction of a sagging armchair next to a cracked cheval glass. As the dresser lifted off the wig, Theresa shook out her own rich copper coloured hair, which fell to her shoulders, at once softening and transforming her face. Without the stiff black mascara around her eyes and the white layer of make-up, Clinton was suddenly
aware of the beauty of her eyes and skin. Disconcertingly she had not wiped the carmine from her lips.

‘Don’t you think it rather presumptuous, Mr Higgs, to involve yourself in a man’s affairs without his consent or knowledge?’

‘Concern for his well-being compelled me, madam.’

‘I’m a fiend, isn’t that so, Mary?’ she asked the dresser, who was now waiting to unhook the back of her dress. ‘Demanding this spot for my entrances, that one for my exits; bullying everyone in sight … ruining my lover.’

The old woman shook with silent mirth and then broke into wheezy laughter.

‘You demand anything, Miss Simmonds … bully people …? Oh dear me … oh …’ Her laughter caught her breath and changed to a violent fit of coughing.

Theresa turned and faced Clinton.

‘Being a humanitarian, I’m sure you won’t want to delay Mary getting home.’ She stood up and picked a towel from the floor, which she handed to the dresser. ‘Put that over Mr Higgs and we can get on.’

Mary advanced on Clinton and looked at him sternly.

‘No peeping, mind,’ she croaked, dropping the towel over his head.

While Clinton was shrouded, Theresa’s bodice was carefully unhooked and her skirt unlaced at the back. As Theresa stepped out of the dress, wearing only a petticoat, Mary, herself bent and withered, cast a solicitous eye over her mistress’s full upward tilting breasts. There was nothing the younger girls could improve on there. She hastily fetched Theresa’s long cambric dressing-gown, and, with a covert eye still on Clinton helped her into it.

‘You can go, Mary; and you may come out now, Mr Higgs, if you haven’t suffocated.’

How in his own character he would have responded to having a damp towel placed over his head, Clinton did not know, but in the role of Mr Higgs, he thought it best to accept any indignities gracefully. The stilted awkwardness of his note had predetermined his behaviour, however ill it accorded with his appearance. When the dresser had gone, Theresa sat down on her dressing stool and smiled kindly at Clinton, as though trying to help a gauche embarrassed boy.

‘You look like someone well-accustomed to coming backstage, Mr Higgs. A man much in society, I’d imagine.’

Clinton studied the peeling flower-patterned wallpaper with dignity.

‘Society and I, madam, only have a nodding acquaintance.
Insignificance has that advantage.’ He leant forward and said as solemnly as he could: ‘Mr Danvers is not a happy man, Miss Simmonds. It’s not right, you know, to tantalise a man of his character.’

‘You sound like a physician, Mr Higgs.’

‘It needs no special knowledge to diagnose his disease and prescribe the cure.’

‘Which is?’ asked Theresa, her face completely composed but her eyes glinting.

‘Marriage, madam.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Marriage is the cure. Why do you live as his wife in fact, and yet refuse him the honourable satisfaction of making you that in law?’

Theresa lowered her eyes.

‘The life of an actress makes me unfit for that honour.’

‘You mock me, Miss Simmonds.’

‘On the contrary; rank is not an illusion but a cruel hard fact.’

Knowing very well that she was being insincere, Clinton had no idea how to make her honest without abandoning the restraints imposed upon him by being Mr Higgs.

‘Should an artificial social distinction,’ he asked, ‘part two people in other ways ideally suited?’

Theresa bowed her head.

‘Mr Danvers is no ordinary broker. He is a nobleman’s son. His brother is a viscount.’

‘Actresses have married dukes.’

‘I cannot marry into his family, Mr Higgs.’ She clasped her hands as though violently agitated. ‘His brother would prevent it.’

‘His brother?’ echoed Clinton, bemused but also suspicious. Yet when he looked directly into her eyes, Theresa gazed back at him without the least trace of mockery; in fact tears were beginning to brim over.

‘If you knew a fraction of the things I know about that man, you wouldn’t doubt me.’

‘Tell me some,’ he sighed, wondering where his mistake had been.

‘He once bit an actress’s leg; he likes chasing young children.’ She rose and leant against the wall for a moment before coming close to Clinton; her manner was conspiratorial. ‘I hardly know how to say this, Mr Higgs.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘He’s about to contract a scandalous marriage to a woman old enough to be his grandmother.’ She looked into Clinton’s eyes, her own opened wide with horror. Clinton fought to stop himself smiling, but in the end could not help himself. She shrugged her shoulders and turned away. ‘You’re a poor actor, Lord Ardmore,’ she said quietly.

‘You knew all along?’ he asked, annoyed to have done so badly, but amused too by the absurdity of his situation.

‘From the moment you walked in. My poor daughter described you down to that little scar over your eye.’

Clinton did his best to laugh.

‘What can I say?’

‘What about what you intended to?’

‘That’s no longer possible. I’m afraid my brother might find it in rather doubtful taste.’

‘And how would you describe what you have done?’

‘Provided an intelligent woman with an excellent opportunity for making a fool of me.’ Her regal scorn was so superbly convincing that he laughed out loud. ‘You really should try that expression on the stage; poor old Sir Charles would take to his heels before his exit. How can I help what Esmond’s told you about me? That old story about biting an actress. The lady in question asked me to bring her a necklace in my mouth on my hands and knees.’

‘So you bit her like a dog. How witty, my lord.’

‘I thought so at the time.’

Clinton got up. Her disdain no longer seemed so funny. He said mildly:

‘Aristocratic villains are more common in plays than in life.’

‘How fortunate,’ she murmured, removing the carmine from her lips.

‘One day someone will write a melodrama with a bestial heroine and a virtous aristocrat instead of the other way round.’

‘As a burlesque it might be successful.’

Her ability to deal out sarcasm in a quiet almost gentle voice left him speechless. Looking at her silky hair and her milk white skin, lightly etched with the first faint traces of age at the corners of her eyes, he was filled with admiration for this woman, so unlike the pampered daughters of luxury. A widow of thirty-two or three could not be ruined by slander like a girl hoping for marriage; more experienced and therefore less prone to the emotional upheavals of younger women, she could afford to be herself serenely. With little time to waste, she would choose with greater caution; and, with less histrionics, feel more. He wanted to explain that he knew he had been mistaken in coming to see her in the way he had, but his mind felt dulled by the wine he had drunk during the play.

In the brief silence which followed her last words, the doorman knocked and told her that her coachman was waiting. She held out a formal hand, which Clinton took with equal formality. She smiled wistfully.

‘Goodbye, Lord Ardmore.’ As he was going out, she called him
back, and said with a hesitance that astonished him: ‘If you’d chosen any other subject, I wouldn’t have …’

‘Whipped me so hard?’

‘It was a good practical joke … your letter. I mean that.’

‘You’re kind to take that view.’

‘Perhaps I can hope to meet you properly at your brother’s house?’

‘So we can all laugh about it?’ Clinton smiled and shook his head. ‘I think not, Miss Simmonds.’

The stage door had been locked, so he was shown out through the dimly lit auditorium. Trying to remember exactly what he had hoped to achieve, he found himself laughing aloud. Nothing could have made any difference to his predicament. Tomorrow Theresa would be equally passionate about the hearths and firesides, which probably meant nothing to her; tomorrow he would leave London to propose to Sophie, with about the same degree of sincerity. Dooming some to deceit, others to nobility—life going on.

A hot windless day in late July, and the country lying tranquil under a soft haze. The meadows after the cutting of the hay looked brown and scorched, and the leaves on trees and hedges were tarnished and dull. Clinton had been met at the station by one of the Lucas’s coachmen, and had asked the man to drive him to Ammering Court by the longer way, which took them through Dinsley woods and up onto Aylsham ridge. Already the hindquarters of the trace-horses were flecked with streaks of sweat, and their legs were hidden, except for the occasional flash of a metal shoe, in clouds of driving dust which billowed out from under the blurred wheels of the black and yellow phaeton.

Up on the ridge, Clinton told the coachman to stop, and jumped down without waiting for the step to be lowered. He clambered over the nearest gate into a field where the air was heavy with the scent of hedgerow honeysuckle and freshly mown hay. From the nettles in the ditch behind him came the constant chirping of grasshoppers. Ahead lay a wide panorama of fields and woods: white chequering of barley stubble, golden squares of wheat, greeny brown patches of pasture, all sloping away to the darker tints of a thickly wooded valley. On the far side was a farmstead with ricks and barns, and to the right a rolling park skirting a small village. Near the grey spark of the church spire, stood a long line of elms: an avenue, and at its end a massive Elizabethan house in dark red brick. Clinton had not seen Markenfield for five years.

He thought of the dark panelled rooms and the bright thick panes of diamond shaped glass, the armorial windows in the hall staining the floor with reds and blues, and the grey leaded roof where he had loved to sit in summer. More vivid than any sights were remembered smells: beeswax on mellowed timber, linseed oil in the gun room, the mossy pithy smell of the logs in their baskets waiting to be burned. Closing his eyes he could see the pictorial story of John Gilpin on the nursery wallpaper and the holes in the skirting where he had placed traps for the mice whose dried skins had provided winter clothing for his lead soldiers. Again he was in the village
church, tracing the grain of the wood in the family pew with his finger nail, confusing Biblical names with real people, watching his father’s bored face during the sermon. He tried to recall the pictures in the long gallery but there were tiresome gaps; what had been between Romney’s portrait of his grandfather and Marco Ricci’s painting of people walking in the Mall? With furniture and china too his memory was poor, and yet he could remember every door and corner under the pantiles in the yard behind the servants’ hall. The leather fire buckets filled with sand outside the butler’s pantry, the dangling bell rope in the kitchen passage used for summoning the outdoor servants, and the rows of polished jelly moulds and gleaming meat covers on the long shelves of the kitchen dressers—all these had remained far clearer in his mind than the wealth of detail in the famous Soho tapestries.

Sophie had often come over to Markenfield from Ammering Court with her parents. On the first occasion Clinton could remember, he had been twelve and she seven, and she had said that unless he played trains with her along the narrow paved paths in the topiary gardens, she would scream and say he had punched her. From the age of fifteen she had regularly told him that one day they would marry. Until three years ago, Clinton had treated the idea with tolerant amusement.

With his hands thrust deep into his pockets, he stood for several minutes with half-closed eyes before walking slowly back across the field to the carriage.

*

When the clock in the cupola over the stables struck three, Sophie was close to tears and her maid was little more composed. Sophie had tried on and rejected not only her Pannier dress with looped side flounces, but also her Redingote Princess dress, her Balmoral Bodice, and her favourite white silk walking dress with Greek key pattern frills on the skirt. In the end, still dissatisfied, she had selected a scarlet Garibaldi shirt and a Zouave jacket, which she had not worn for two years. While the maid was pinning up her chignon, she moved and the girl accidentally pricked her neck, making her scream with pain and anger. As soon as the chignon had been secured in a net of black chenille, she told the servant to leave, and sat down on the bed, her arms clasping her knees. Her forehead was burning and her head throbbed with going over and over the same thoughts. How, after her last letter to him, could Clinton be coming unless he intended to propose? Yet when she had seen him in London three months earlier, just before his departure for Ireland, she had been equally convinced that he would ask her.

Her mother was enraged with her and her father could not bring himself to speak about Clinton. She was making a fool of herself, they said, refusing to go to town for the Season and behaving with impossible rudeness to every other eligible man her mother had asked to dine with them during the two brief weeks which she had grudgingly consented to spend in London that spring. Didn’t she realise that he was playing with her in an insulting and humiliating manner? According to Sophie’s mother, her daughter’s heroic fidelity to Lord Ardmore was due to diseased pride—a twisted determination to go on loving him whatever he said or did, thus proving herself in some inexplicable way victorious. Often her mother accused her of loving her pain and resentment more than the actual man.

Sophie’s passion for Clinton had began in earnest shortly after his return from China three years earlier, when the change in his appearance had both shocked and thrilled her. A thinner, paler face with the eyes and cheekbones more prominent and distinct lines scored at the corners of his mouth. He had spoken and smiled far less, and had often worn a haunted remote expression that had puzzled and fascinated her. She had had no idea what he had been thinking about, and this, combined with the uneasy alertness common to men who had spent many months in danger, had made her love him more. When she had heard that he was having an affair with Lady Cawthrey, she had been ill with grief and anger, yet because she had admired the woman’s poise and inaccessible beauty, her rage towards Clinton had been tempered by an equally powerful feeling of jealous desire. Lady Cawthrey’s love for Clinton had increased his value still further in Sophie’s eyes.

Sophie was too much a realist to feel that she understood him, but his mystery was what she loved best; even the idea of vices and bad women attracted as well as revolted her. When she had been sixteen he had patiently helped her improve her riding and had sometimes ridden beside her when hunting to make sure that she kept up with the field. Her memories from these days were still like precious stones to be taken out, polished and admired, regardless of whether Clinton himself had any memory of them. For almost a year after his father’s suicide, Clinton had remained at Markenfield with a handful of servants living the life of a recluse. Then he had let the house, bought a cornetcy in the cavalry, and, almost
immediately
, gone abroad. The China War and then Lady Cawthrey had taken him out of Sophie’s life for almost four years. When he had later renewed his spasmodic attentions, Sophie had ignored her mother’s remarks about his mercenary motives but had welcomed him warmly without any pretence of anger or indifference. Spoiled
from birth, she had never doubted that in the end her childhood passion for Clinton would be gratified. Though she could swoon in the most lady-like manner, when her mind was fixed upon a given object, Sophie could be as tenacious as any terrier. If Clinton did not love her when they married, she was confident that in time she could make him. A month ago her mother had threatened to refuse to receive Clinton unless he made his intentions clear. In the last letter Sophie had written to him in Ireland, she had told him this. For this reason alone, his imminent arrival had a significance far beyond that of any of his previous visits.

When four o’clock came and Clinton had still not arrived, Sophie was feverish with anticipation. Time seemed to pass in fits and starts, as she waited on the verge of happiness or great sorrow. One moment she was aware of everything she did and every detail in the room around her, and the next, minutes slipped by unnoticed as she sat in a waking dream. If he did not come what could she do? How face the days and weeks to come? When she went downstairs and talked to her mother and father, she was amazed that she could speak normally. The next moment she could not remember what she had said. Her thoughts were as incoherent as a swirling mist. And still he did not come.

As the phaeton drew up in the carriage sweep in front of the austere and elegant Palladian façade of Ammering Court, Clinton experienced the same conflicting emotions as a flank marker during a cavalry charge. Until almost the last moment they could still sheer away and pass to the side of the waiting infantry square. A few words to the driver and he could be speeding away again through the deer park towards the tall gates with their heraldic greyhounds. With bowed head he started resolutely up the broad steps, a small figure under the shadow of the lofty pediment.

The proper order of events was very clear to him. Until he proposed to the girl nothing could be said about the purpose of his visit by either of her parents. If she accepted, she would tell her mother, who in turn would inform her father, who would then wait for Clinton to come to him to ask for his daughter’s hand. But
courtesy
demanded refreshment after his journey, and so he was shortly drinking tea with Mr and Mrs Lucas in a magnificently panelled room, decorated with elaborate festoons of fruit and flowers carved by Grinling Gibbons. Among cabinets of buhl and ormolu, seated on chairs worked in Gobelin needlework, Clinton talked about Ireland and listened to his host’s sparse theories on the subject. William Lucas, related by marriage to the Gurneys, Norfolk’s most famous banking family, was a stout white haired man, whose height enabled him to carry his corpulence with dignity. His nose was
sharp and his eyebrows thick and bushy like little wigs. His wife, who had once been pretty, still retained a girl’s silvery voice and manners to match, though now her face was slack and puffy and her figure as solid as her husband’s. Both husband and wife were subdued and sad. Though Clinton was titled, his father had made the family notorious in the county and the Danvers’s poverty was widely known. Sophie could have been expected to have made a better match. But neither parent had been able to stand against the tears and tantrums which had greeted their earlier opposition.

Since Mr Lucas had an idea that people should not talk unless having something worthwhile to say, he said little, and what he did say was so marvellously to the point that further comment was usually superfluous. This, coupled with Mrs Lucas’s excessive politeness, which conveyed her resentment more plainly than open hostility would have done, made conversation a difficult matter. In fact Sophie’s arrival, which Clinton had dreaded, actually came as a relief. Mrs Lucas’s sudden remarks about the pleasantness of the day and the beauties of the garden, would have made her purpose obvious to a man possessing a fraction of Clinton’s intelligence. He smiled at Sophie.

‘A turn in the garden, Miss Lucas?’

The gardens on the south side of Ammering Court were laid out in a series of wide stone-walled terraces connected by balustraded steps. The upper terrace was a long lawn geometrically patterned with clipped box hedges, but below were rose gardens, and less formal walks between homely borders of delphiniums, columbine, and foxgloves. Down such a walk, flanked on one side by a pergola heavy with honeysuckle and climbing roses, Clinton and Sophie walked together. Looking at the pale drawn face of the girl beside him with her black hair and expectant eyes, Clinton felt a dream-like sense of unreality. Around them the fragrant air and the gentle humming of bees.

‘How lucky you are to be able to walk here every day,’ he murmured.

‘Perhaps I’ll take root like that Latin lady who turned into a tree.’

Clinton’s lips felt very dry and light tremors of agitation made his breathing uneven. Ask her now? Or at that corner by the rustic bench? Or wait till they reached the gate to the rose garden?

‘I’ve become the leading light of the Ladies’ Sick Visitation Committee.’

‘Which you think a worthless activity?’ he asked, recognising her ironic tone.

‘Little better than my music or my drawing.’

‘You draw very well.’

‘I have a lot of time to practise.’

Though the tension and sadness in her voice reproached him, he still could not say the words. Her red merino blouse with its dark braiding suited her perfectly, complementing her mass of black hair and showing off her pearl-like complexion. Pretty hands, a mouth with soft inviting lips, and her delightfully serious way of listening to whatever was said to her, however trivial, all pleased Clinton. But the untouched youthfulness of her face woke nothing in him.

He stared as though in a trance at some butterflies fluttering around a flowering buddleia. Ever since he had seen Markenfield through the shimmering haze, everything happening to him had seemed like some inexplicable nightmare. Could he really marry, change his whole life, solely to avoid selling a house which now seemed more remote than his own boyhood? Even the memories which had given it clearest form were ephemeral: fire buckets, torn wallpaper, the pumping house in the woods where he had kept a tame owl. His father had once said, if a man owns land, the land owns him, and Clinton had accepted this as a fact needing no proof. What was an aristocrat without his acres?

And yet today, looking across the valley at his childhood home, he had found out something else, at first without realising that he had done so. Markenfield had always been a region in his mind, as well as a physical place. And in ownership of such a house, that inner vision of it, a kind of intangible affinity, mattered as much as title deeds. Markenfield was not just a building but an idea, the sum of all the impressions of those who had lived in it—the servants too. The horses, the dogs, even the trees all played a part. One generation planted what another generation saw reach maturity; the animals overlapped the generations, just as individual servants might have first come in their teens to serve a father, and finally stayed on to serve his grandson. Stories of the family and the house were stored over the years in so many minds. This was the true meaning of being owned by what one held—to be inextricably part of the continuity it embodied.