A Song Twice Over (43 page)

‘So Miss Adeane must have suffered hard times – unbearably so. Except that I am sure she has always somehow managed to bear it – courage being one of the first things one understands about her.'

It had been the first thing he had understood about her too. Instantly. Along with the hot leap of his desire, which had never eased.

‘Yes. She is very brave.'

‘And things are going well for her now – surely?'

‘I believe so, Mrs Gage.'

‘I
hope
so. I have always liked her. And admired her too. I can't pretend to understand the difficulties she has had to face. I only wish I could. But I can be very glad of her success. It cheers me, I can't tell you how much, that a woman – alone – should be capable of such a thing. Unless …? She
is
alone, I am assuming …?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

She smiled again, frankly, the clean, open nature of her honesty taking his breath away.

‘No, Mr Carey. I beg
your
pardon, for I have asked an indiscreet question – as you have so rightly reminded me. One which your code as a gentleman may not permit you to answer. I understand that. But I know very little of Miss Adeane's world. And whereas – believe me – I am not concerned with vulgar curiosity, I have often wondered …? Miss Adeane is very beautiful. Fascinating, in fact. You have confirmed, as I suspected, that she arrived here penniless and unprotected. In
my
world such a girl would have no choice but to look for a man to marry her – any man. Probably an old one since they are usually the only kind who can afford to buy youth and beauty. In effect – in
my
world – such girls can find no solution but to sell themselves for a position in society. A roof over their heads. A little pin-money. And, even taking into account that young ladies of my sort are trained only to be decorative and idle and are actively discouraged from making themselves useful … Well – can it have been so totally different for Miss Adeane who is capable, I am sure, of turning her clever hand to anything? Mr Carey, is true independence really possible for a woman – in either Miss Adeane's world or mine?'

‘No,' he said. With clarity. And regret.

‘I am so sorry,' was her answer.

‘Yes. So am I.' He had always believed a woman's life to be unenviable. Now, through her eyes, he saw it to be frightful.

‘Poor Miss Adeane,' she said. ‘So she has a – what does one call it? – a protector? Someone rather powerful, I suppose. And rich. No, no – please don't tell me his name. In a town of this size I must surely be acquainted with him. Or with his wife. And I should not wish to start disliking him more than I may well do already. Does she care – at all – for him?'

‘She would hardly confide in me, Mrs Gage. But I am sure she does not.'

‘Oh dear, I
am
so sorry. It seems to have meant rather more to me than I knew – thinking of her going about her own business in her own fashion, answerable to no one. She had always seemed so free. So unfettered.'

‘She can have had little choice,' he told her quietly. ‘Only between sexual submission or destitution. And with a child to think of, what choice is that? I would have done the same, in her shoes. Who would not?'

It eased his heart to say it.

‘You are quite right, Mr Carey.' There was no hesitation in her at all. ‘It merely seems to me quite terrible that she should lack the securities and luxuries of my world, yet still be subject to the same captivities. I had thought –
at least
– that she would have had the compensation of freedom. I have never suffered hardship in my life and so I cannot judge what the fear of it might do to me. But I have been obliged, so very often, to
plan
– to make arrangements – and careful ones, in order to get myself what has amounted to a measure of fresh air to breathe. I have had to
obtain by stealth
, I suppose, instead of simply asking, or taking, or stating my intentions. And not very drastic intentions either. Just the ordinary happenings of daily life. It saddens me immeasurably that a woman like Miss Adeane must do the same.'

Her small hand lay palm down on the table and, with a movement that was purely instinctive, he put his own hand over it, his touch banishing restraint between them, sending it scuttling away into the far shadows like the false creature that it was. He held her hand because it seemed right to him. She did not draw her hand away.

‘I know,' he said. ‘I believe I have always thought so. You are a captive species.'

‘Why, Mr Carey?'

She was asking him to be eloquent and it was an invitation he rarely declined.

‘Because we desire you, I suppose. Which makes us afraid of losing you. So we can have no peace of mind until we have put you in chains. And then – there's no denying – you can somehow manage so easily to make us feel small when we are so anxious to be big. Because those of you who do rise above the petty goals we set you become far more truly adult – it seems to me – than men ever do. A man will sacrifice himself to get his name in the history books. Quite readily. It takes a woman, I think, to sacrifice herself unseen, unsung, knowing she won't even be thanked for it because Society has cast her in the role of sacrifice. So all she's doing, according to society, is her duty.'

‘Yes, Mr Carey.' He had never received more ardent encouragement to go on.

‘I suppose it is the same everywhere. In my country, when famine strikes, it is the women who die first because – as a matter of course – they give their food to their children. You would do that, Mrs Gage. So would Cara Adeane.
I
might succeed in convincing myself that I had much better stay alive and get a law passed – or start a revolution. In your country –
here
– your father employs women in his weaving sheds, not men, because women will work for even less than Irish wages, just so long as they can get their children fed. He knows that. He also recognizes it, I imagine, as a kind of courage and maturity few men possess. Which is probably why – forgive me – he keeps your mother a child, so she cannot challenge him. Men have created themselves a society, Mrs Gage, in which we force you into a position of inferiority and then despise you for being inferior. Which makes you horribly dissatisfied. And very resentful of us. We have enslaved you for our own pleasure and find very little pleasure in it at all. Because we want you to love us – God help us – and slaves don't love. They cheat and deceive and grow sly. It is a natural result of servitude. They plot against us. They “obtain by stealth”. They become small-minded and petty and childish and lazy. They marry us for the money we have passed laws to prevent them from earning. They sit about all day on sofas with smelling-bottles. They mock us. We grow cruel and blame them for it. The fault is ours. Do you understand me?'

‘I do.' She had spoken her wedding vows less fervently.

‘And it is wrong, Mrs Gage. I am against all this talk of man and woman, class and creed and nation. I am against anything which divides us. We are people. Just that. Each one of us to be judged only on our merits, not by the labels society has put upon us. I was not born to live in a cage and neither were you. I believe I was born to grow. And I must fight anything which stunts me or stifles me. So must you. All of us. Perhaps we were born to free ourselves of prejudice and the obsession with saving our own souls which makes us so narrow and mealy-mouthed and petty. Perhaps we were born to save and to free one another. I would like to think so.'

Swept along by the flow of his own words he squeezed her hand hard, in a spirit of whole-hearted camaraderie and, hearing the clock strike, they got up both together, their hands still joined so that inevitably he drew her very close to him and held her a moment, as he would have held any other comrade in arms. A declaration of spiritual unity, until he suddenly understood the soft, dove-yielding of her little body, all its stiffness gone, the look of rapturous drowning on the small brown face she lifted up to him to be kissed.

There was no doubt. None whatsoever. Every line of her body and of her drowning face spoke to him with a voice he recognized. He knew her to be helpless and overwhelmed by entirely natural forces within herself of which
he
had never been ashamed but which she, surely, did not understand. The same sweet delirium of physical desire to which he had surrendered many a time, losing his head gladly and completely, for as long as desire prevailed. Since he was a man, after all, to whom ‘consequences'need not matter.

He had regretted nothing. So far as he knew he had done no harm. The last thing he wanted was to harm this woman, now.

This
woman, least of all.

Yet her face remained lifted towards him, small and smooth and impossibly enraptured, waiting with the hushed and almost terrifying intensity of an initiate before a shrine, for an act of revelation. Although the reality – he knew – could hardly match the expectation.

To kiss her could only be to confuse and distress her, to give a harsh jolt she would not, afterwards, find welcome to her fragile world and her own uncertain place therein. Not to kiss her would be rejection.

Rejection, it seemed to him, would be the most cruel. For both of them. Therefore he kissed her, gently, hesitantly, paying homage to her womanhood rather than seeking to possess it until her lips, opening readily, made direct appeal to his body in which – being healthy and only twenty-six years old – desire could be quickly kindled.

She was young. Her scents were fresh and wholesome and delicate. She had his respect. His
liking
. Suddenly, in full awareness of her well-muscled, sturdy, resolute limbs, her well-nourished stamina and endurance, she seemed so frail in his arms that he was terrified.

He must not hurt this girl.

And therefore when the long kiss ended he said, breathlessly, rapidly, so that she might think the passion, the loss of control, the instigation, had really been his, ‘Please forgive me. If I have offended you …'

The conventional words. The polite formula. He could think of no other.

‘
Can
you forgive me?'

‘Oh please …' she whispered. ‘Don't say that. Please. Don't even think of it again.'

That too was what women said, had been taught to say, on these occasions. Even when their hearts were overflowing, their values shaken, their senses dizzy and timidly ecstatic as hers now were. When something momentous, that would disturb and unsettle her for a long time, had overtaken her.

He had done no more than kiss a pleasant, willing girl. She had broken the most serious taboos of her class and of her conscience.

Forget it, she had told him.

Please don't think of it again.

Very likely. And it might well be that tomorrow he would find the sounds of those trains and boats more than ever enticing. He was far too honest not to admit that.

But a tame agreement to forget, never to think of it again, was far less than he owed – far less than he wanted to give – to this girl. And if he gave her nothing else then, at the very least, he could convince her that she had been truly desired, that he had kissed her in a pure, white-hot passion – as he had first kissed Cara – rather than the far more muted and complex temperature of his real reasons. Whatever they had been.

‘No,' he said, drawing her close to him again, making his voice unsteady and wilder, he hoped, than she had bargained for. ‘Don't ask me that.'

‘Mr Carey …'

‘No – no,' he repeated. ‘I may never take the liberty again – if that's what you're telling me. But what I won't do – and don't want to do – is forget.'

She awoke early the next morning and lay for a long time listening to the sounds of the manor garden, in a state of frank and considerable astonishment. She was in love with Daniel Carey and what amazed her was her happiness. Joy. Incredible joy. No shame whatsoever. No sorrow either. Not yet. Although – being somewhat less innocent than he had supposed – she knew he did not love her. And, in any case, since every possible social and legal and moral barrier separated them then, for his sake, she ought also to be glad that he did not.

Nothing could come of it. Nothing real, that is, or lasting. Better then, just to savour it while the taste remained so sweet. Better just to accept it naturally, passively, without resistance or recriminations. It had happened. Why reproach herself this morning when, assuredly, she had loved him yesterday, a month ago, perhaps much longer. And she had blamed herself for nothing then.

She would simply continue. Go on. Content – for the moment – just to
feel
, to gaze at the miracle without any urgent need to touch. As she would not have disturbed a closely-curled, new-born child. Thus would she walk on tiptoe for a while around her love, cradling it in silence and in secret, brushing heat and cold and noise and every speck of dust away from it with a vigilant hand. Keeping it safe from the outside world of harm. And it if turned out that it had been born to grow – or she had …? If he and she might grow – in some way that gave no pain to anyone else – together?

She doubted it.

Was she even equipped, after these dry, dutiful years, to cope with so rich a flood?

Probably not.

Better then just to
continue
. To tread warily. To find a way of loving him from which only good might come.
His
good, most of all. Even if it meant giving him up.

Could she really doubt that it would come to that?

Yet she ordered her carriage later that morning and drove to Miss Adeane's shop in Market Square simply to be in the presence of someone who was acquainted with Daniel, someone whose accent resembled his, whose childhood memories were of the same green Irish meadows, someone who may even have the familiar use of his Christian name as she, as yet, did not.