A Song Twice Over (41 page)

What Gemma saw was hypocrisy which could lead only to misery. Lives built on little but self-deception which could so easily crumble. Was her own so very different? Self-deceptions, one upon the other like bricks building up into a cloister wall. Self-denials and petty restrictions, a multitude of rules and regulations with which to fill one's hours and days, as her mother did.

She had wished to be free of that. Had schemed her own brand of scheming in order to achieve her measure of freedom. Yet how far had she really succeeded? How firmly did the strait-jacket of her childhood still crush her? Only a little over two years ago it had prevented her most effectively from making a simple gift to a man who had certainly deserved it. Just how thoroughly, she wondered – if at all – had she discarded that strait-jacket now? She had gone upstairs, written her note to Daniel Carey, unpinned her brooch and put the two together in a neatly sealed parcel. What next? Where to send it? And even if she had an address she would be unlikely to use it. She would find it as impossible, she told herself, as it had been impossible, two years ago in the manor garden, to hold out her hand, the brooch already in her palm, and say in an open, friendly,
natural
manner, ‘It would please me so much if you would keep this, Mr Carey, to remember me by.'

Impossible.

And then. ‘Martha-Ann,' she had called out, summoning the sharp-eyed, clear-headed girl who kept house for her now that Mrs Drubb had gone to Almsmead. A girl who knew on which side her bread was buttered and whose family lived in St Jude's.

‘Yes, madam?'

‘I wonder if you would know how to get this little parcel to the Chartist candidate?'

‘Yes, madam.' There had been no hesitation, no show of surprise. No explanations either.

She had thought it wise, then, to forget the matter as best she could. Possibly the parcel would never reach him. And even if it did, then what could it mean to him? He would be unlikely to do more than write her a line. What more, in fact, did she want of him? Nothing at all. Her action may have been foolish but had had very little, when she examined it closely, to do with him. It had been for herself. A small exercise of her power to choose. Which made it quite unnecessary for her to see him. Much better not. But when he called, the day after the election, her gladness was so immediate, sprang so naturally to her, that it did not even take her by surprise.

Of course she was happy to see him. And why not?
Why not?
Therefore, with a sensation of unusual lightness, a feeling of casting off winter garments and breathing through open pores, perhaps dangerously bare skin, she told him so. Nor was there any hesitation, this time, in inviting him into her drawing-room now that everyone had returned to Almsmead, leaving her – if only in their absence – the mistress of her own words and deeds.

She was a married woman, after all, permitted to know more of life than the pressing of dried flowers in tea-table albums. He was a man still ruled by impulse whose need that morning had been to escape from the hurt of remembering Cara Adeane on the tavern stairs with Christie Goldsborough's hand on her shoulder. It had not surprised him. He knew the man by reputation and had he allowed himself to draw up a list of her possible lovers he supposed Goldsborough's name would have been on it. Braithwaite. Colclough. Lord. Goldsborough. What difference did it make which one of these substantial citizens of Frizingley possessed her, since he did not?

He would do well now to harden his heart.

He had lain awake in Luke Thackray's narrow bed for most of the night convincing himself of that. She had made her choice. And if he could not respect it, then at least – God help them both – he understood. But, as for himself, when morning came, pale grey and cold-eyed, no doubt cold-hearted, through the sparsely curtained window he watched it for what seemed a long, black time, listening to the army of clogged feet on the cobbles outside, the blaring of factory hooters calling to one another like ships in a fog-bound sea, knowing that – as so often before – he had made no choices, reached no decisions as to where he wished to go.

The election was over. He had done what he had been sent here to do. Had scored a triumph, in fact, for both the Charter and its People, or so they had all been telling him last night, although the taste of it now, in his waking mouth, bore an uncomfortable similarity to ashes. And this morning who would really care to know him? He was the Chartist candidate no longer, just a wandering Irishman with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps, but a black shadow on his soul, who felt himself to be fit for nothing else – at the moment – but to wander.

Very well. He would pack and go. He was used to that. What else had he been doing, after all, for much more than half his life?

And, when all was said and done, the redoubtable Mrs Sairellen Thackray would see no sense in burdening herself with him now.

Back to London, he supposed. Where else? To write articles about freedom and justice which would never come to pass – he was suddenly very certain – in his lifetime. Probably never. Although that was no reason to give up the fight. What else had he to do, after all?

Leave, then. It would take him no more than a few practised minutes to get his shirts and linen and brushes together and slip away. A brisk walk across the moor to the nearest station, a train to Leeds and then …? Wherever his fancy took him. Liverpool and then to Ireland? Or South to his desk at the
Northern Star
, which would not stay empty long if he should not hurry back to claim it? Or just any train which happened to be standing ready on the first platform he came to? He had done that before. But first he would put a note through Mrs Adeane's door for Cara, wishing her well, asking her to forgive him, forgiving her, saying … Christ, what did it matter? Saying anything.

And then there was that funny little brown girl who had sent him a jewel. Ought he to return it? She might be worrying herself half to death by now about what he'd do or say about it, whom he'd tell – since she hardly knew him – and it would be a kindness to put her mind at rest. For although he had long ago rejected the values of his own middle-class boyhood he still remembered them. Poor little brown girl. She'd be a social outcast, among her own kind, if he let it be known what she'd done. And since a note might all too easily fall into the wrong hands – her husband's for instance, or her father's – then it seemed only decent to go himself and reassure her that she was perfectly safe with him.

Ten minutes, he'd thought, at the most, unless her husband was at home, in which case, since the man would very likely recognize him as the Chartist candidate, he'd have to brazen it out, say he was calling to take leave of everybody in the constituency, and hope they didn't set the dogs on him.

But Gemma had been alone. As plain and sturdy as he remembered her, brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair coiled smoothly but very simply – too simply, by his reckoning – on her strong, short neck; twenty-five years old he estimated, since he was now twenty-six; and looking older – not with the brittle sophistication of Cara, but with a composure he found too matronly – too soon. Yet her welcome had been warm, its spontaneity surprising him and then giving him pleasure as he saw how it took the years away from her.

‘Mr Carey, I am
so
happy you felt able to call. And if you have any thought of returning my brooch, then I must warn you that it will offend me. And since I am sure you cannot wish to do that, then please come inside and take some refreshment.'

He had followed her, her frank, pleasant manner telling him plainly that no reassurance had been needed. She had trusted him. Rightly, of course. But how had she known that? And as he sat in the long, low drawing-room full of venerable oak pieces polished alike by beeswax and antiquity, dark brown shadows falling across the stone floor between dappled pools of light, he had felt deep-rooted memories of ease and contentment stirring within him.

His mother's house had been like this, very old and dim and quiet, low rooms opening one from the other with no particular plan or purpose; stone-cool in summer, cosy nests of wood smoke and the scent of winter hyacinths in the bad weather. He had grown up – or very nearly – surrounded by scarred oak cabinets and Persian rugs the colour of brick dust and varnish like these; by massive copper bowls reflecting the firelight, and small window-panes of thick, flawed, jewel-tinted glass shutting out an ancient, always slightly overgrown garden.

He was at ease here. At ease, too, with this girl – he could not think of her as a woman – who so exactly matched her surroundings. He told her so. Why not? For although he remembered this world of hers and all its petty obsessions it had no hold on him, no power to prevent him from speaking as he pleased.

Except that, every now and then, nothing pleased him.

He told her that too. She nodded sagely, with quiet understanding. And when she began to speak of her school it was the steady, sustained intelligence in her face, the quietly ardent nature of her enthusiasm, her even more quietly ardent need for personal expansion, experiment, adventure, which held his attention.

The woman, far more than the undertaking.

‘Would you like to come and see it?'

Not really. He knew what ‘ragged-schools'looked like and did not expect this to be any different. Sore-eyed urchins slumped half-asleep on what amounted to workhouse benches, with no thought of learning but simply because it was warmer than playing, half-naked as most of them were, in the street. No different from Sunday schools, he remembered, except that Sunday-school-children were required to wear boots or shoes and to wash their hands.

Could an industrial school, built to comply with reforming ideals in which the industrialists themselves did not believe, show him more than that? A few clean pinafores, perhaps, on a few little girls who might well be mothers themselves before they had learned to read. A few little lads in well-darned trousers who would be in the Dallam mill, working cumbersome and dangerous machinery before their bones were fully grown.

Yet he wanted to please her.

‘Do
come, Mr Carey. Unless you have an urgent train to catch, that is? I have so many plans and, as a schoolmaster yourself, you must be able to advise me.'

He doubted it. His own teaching experience – none of it recent – having involved the preparation of young gentlemen for public school by cramming them with large doses of Greek and Latin.

He told her that too and she smiled at him calmly, hardly listening, her mind leaping ahead as her father's always did whenever he saw something he wanted and was on the brink of working out how best to get it.

‘I am not totally naive, Mr Carey. I know that most of the children who come to school can hardly wait for the home-time bell to ring. But not all. And when one considers the tedious lessons to which they are submitted – all that dreary chanting of the alphabet without the least conception that those letters can be made into
literature. Poetry
. Then who can blame them? And I doubt if education for girls is taken seriously anywhere in the world. Certainly not in Frizingley. The charity-schools teach them nothing but darning and mending. The workhouse schools prepare them for domestic service. In the kind of school young ladies such as myself are likely to attend it is fine embroidery and domestic service of another fashion. Yes, yes – I know that many girls find this more than sufficient. But some do not. And since I cannot believe that intelligence of the academic variety is confined exclusively to the male sex of the upper classes – no matter what upper-class gentlemen may have to say to the contrary – then I
know
I can find quick minds to educate. Both boys and girls.'

‘Few upper-class gentlemen would thank you for it, Mrs Gage.'

‘Ah well.' And her brown eyes had suddenly looked very clear to him, sparkling with a humour that seemed almost to be impish. ‘If they dislike the competition – these gentlemen – they will just have to work a little harder. Won't they?'

‘If you have set your mind on it, Mrs Gage, then I do believe they will.'

‘It is my dream, Mr Carey – to give these children at least a
chance
.'

But when, having taken him to inspect her sore-eyed, undernourished, very sleepy little dream, she had asked him to help her convert it to reality, he had answered with a peal of incredulous laughter.

‘Mrs Gage, I am a feckless, footloose Irishman. A Catholic by birth and a Chartist revolutionary by inclination. How can you think of letting me loose on these innocent, Protestant, factory children? And even if I accepted your offer both your husband and your father would feel very much obliged to chase me out of town, for your protection.'

‘Mr Carey.' And once again her eyes had looked clear and very steady. ‘Will you make a bargain with me? If I can persuade my father – and my husband, of course – to agree to this, then will you allow me to persuade you?'

Impulse. But so had he always lived. In essence there seemed no difference between this and boarding the first train out of Leeds station. He had encountered the train here, instead, in Frizingley where as yet there was no railway track, a circumstance which would have greatly appealed to his sense of the extraordinary had it not been for Cara.

His one clear aim had been never to see her again and he knew he could not avoid her in a town which, although choked by layers of population – native, immigrant, vagrant, one on top of the other – was small in area. Therefore, when Mr John-William Dallam so astonishingly handed over to him the keys of the school and the snug two-roomed house attached to it, he steeled himself to visit her, advising her beforehand of his intention, so that when he arrived her mother was beside her and – clearly at Cara's command – did not leave them alone together for a moment throughout a scrupulously polite, exceedingly painful half hour.