A Song Twice Over (48 page)

‘Come, Cara. Surely you wouldn't have me put the poor man in the street? Tut, tut – how very unfeeling.'

‘I dare say. But all he does now is stand in the street complaining about my ladies'carriages blocking his door, and quarelling with their coachmen – which does
me
no good. Not that he ever sells anything, so why should it matter whether his entrance is blocked or not? All he knows how to do is breed mice in his corn sacks and send them round to plague me – I swear it. And the place is filthy – dropping to bits – you'll lose money on it if you're not careful. He has a daughter in Hebden Bridge. He could go there, if she'll have him. I need the space, Christie – I really do.'

‘So you keep on saying. His lease expires next year. We'll see.'

‘I want it now.'

‘Yes. I know you do.'

‘Can I get it?'

‘In
my
time, Cara.'

She shrugged. ‘Oh well – I'd have done better, I suppose, to tell you I didn't want it and let you force it upon me.'

‘Would I have believed you?'

She shook her head. But then, what would he believe? She knew no more about him now than she had known three Christmasses ago when he had first brought her to this room and spent three festive days and nights instructing her in the vast yet somehow impersonal study of ‘appetites', feeding her rich food and wines, dressing her in barbaric silks from wild places, massaging heavy scented oils into her skin as she lay posing for him on the rug before his fire, moulding her body to the needs and whims and fancies of his own, eating her and drinking her, toying with her, taking whatever remained of her innocence which, in fact, had been a great deal. Far more than anyone would have supposed.

‘What a savage you are, Adeane,' he had told her. ‘You know almost nothing at all, do you, my lamb. Luckily – for you, of course – I can change that.'

And so she had passed the orgy that had been Christmas Day and Boxing Day and the day after in a bemused, almost a drugged condition, knowing many things, at the end of it, about the broad-chested, thick-set, powerful body which had acquired such dominion over her, little about the man inside it.

A voluptuous education during which she had earned the lease of her shop. Three Christmasses ago. And now nothing had changed except that this year she had her own money in her hands.

The week before Christmas Mrs Ethel Lord brought her daughter-in-law Amanda to Miss Adeane's, risking a serious family crisis since Amanda's mother, Mrs Lizzie Braithwaite, had remained persistently faithful to Miss Baker.

‘It is time this child had something decent to wear,' said Mrs Lord.

‘Certainly, madam,' said Miss Adeane.

‘For Christmas Eve?'

‘Of course.'

Odette turned pale when Cara came into the workroom with the good news. Madge Percy put her head in her hands. Anna Rattrie's eyes filled silently with tears although one heard distinctly from somewhere in the room a loud, indeed almost a defiant sob.

‘Isn't it
wonderful
,' said Cara with no question in her voice whatsoever, issuing an undoubted threat to any who might disagree with her.

‘Wonderful, Miss Adeane,' they chorused.

And by eight o'clock on Christmas Eve the workroom tables were bare, the workroom floor swept clean of pins and tacking thread, every frill and flounce and feather packed into its pale blue box and carried to its destination, every one of Miss Adeane's ‘women' on her way home with a Christmas goose, a bottle of Madeira wine – all inveigled at cost price from Christie – and Miss Adeane's permission to rest the whole of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, after which there were two February christenings to consider, a March wedding, stock to take and replenish, and a certain amount of thought to be given to Easter-bonnet time.

Cara came out into the frosty evening air to wave them all goodbye and then, walking briskly across Market Square, bought every toy she could find that might please Liam, chocolates and crystallized fruits for Odette, offered a courteous ‘Compliments of the Season' to all her fellow tradesmen, including the grocer of whom she was doing her utmost to be rid, obtained a more than usually generous marrow-bone for her dog and, still in her rustling black taffeta with its scarlet bows locked her door and collapsed across her bed.

The Christmas bells of the parish church woke her the next morning and by the time she had scrambled into a dark wool dress, the wonderful black velvet cape with its scarlet lining which she had made for herself in an off-season, and reached the top of St Jude's with her heavily laden market-baskets, Odette and Liam had already returned from mass, held by the Irish priest on a strip of wasteland beyond St Jude's Passage, there being no Catholic church in Nonconformist Frizingley. Even the Queen's Church of England being held, by some, to be a shade idolatrous.

The morning was clear and hushed and very strange. No factory hooters, for this one day of the year, no clattering of clogged feet on the cobbles, no grey river of bowed, shawl-wrapped heads flowing sluggishly to the mill-gates and out again, at breakfast time. An unaccustomed silence, familiar streets made alien by their emptiness as Frizingley's worker-bees, drudges and drones together, slept late – for this one blessed morning of the year – in their beds.

An odd reversal. Since it was the masters, not the men, who were abroad – on this day – so early. Ladies and gentlemen with souls as well as bodies to consider – and who had other opportunities for sleeping late in any case – who, as Cara hurried across Market Square towards St Jude's, were proceeding solemnly to their places of worship, the Colcloughs, mother and son in the same carriage, to their chapel; Mr & Mrs Lord of the brewery driving a smart new landau to the parish church which – unlike the chapels – was not given to preaching against strong drink; Mrs Lizzie Braithwaite, by no means averse to a drop of port wine herself although she did not think the workers ought to have it, going to a chapel of her own, Methodism of a different brand and in a different building to the Colcloughs.

They raised gracious hands to Cara as they drove by. So did Mrs Magda Braithwaite, wearing her flamboyant gold and orange stripes to the parish church, having decided to be an Anglican largely because she liked the organ music and the altar cloths and because Lizzie, her mother-in-law, did not.

So did many others, to whom Cara replied with a brilliant smile, her good humour helped not a little by Christie Goldsborough's sudden decision to spend a ‘hunting Christmas'at Far Flatley where, she supposed, he would be standing now in the ancient village church among his kith and kin, while the vicar – a minor Lark of exceedingly high church persuasions – preached his doctrine of obedience to God in the form of one's local squire. Particularly should his name be Lark or Covington-Pym.

He would be away at least a week. Ned O'Mara no longer presented any threat to her. For the first time in her life her income exceeded her expenditure. For the first time in her life she could hold up her head and see her way forward. Perhaps – for this one day of the year – she could even allow herself, as a Christmas gift from Cara to Cara, a measure of satisfaction? Why not? Particularly when, all around her, other people were indulging themselves. Christie Goldsborough and the Larks with their old style Boars' heads and punch-bowls and their ritual slaughtering of foxes, the Dallams and Braithwaites with Queen Victoria's Germanic innovations of Christmas Trees and present tables. Could she not find her own enjoyment? Surely, now, she had
some
reason? And although Liam's reception of his toys was less boisterous than she would have liked – than her own would have been at his age – she stopped herself, just in time, from saying so. From scolding him, in fact, which would have served no purpose but to distress Odette.

Let him amuse himself in his own way and if he chose to neglect the rather splendid army of tin soldiers she had brought him, and the drum, and the hobby-horse which had caused her so much trouble on the way up St Jude's hill, then she would just have to swallow her disappointment and make the best of it. Perhaps he would turn to them later when he had finished scribbling in his picture book. Never mind. And at least there were other pleasures. The goose, for instance, the biggest and best she had been able to find, roasting in Odette's oven with a large ham beside it. The game pies and pork pies on the larder shelves. The oranges and nuts. The giant slab of plum cake. The bottles of port wine and Old Sercial. All brought here, on her instructions, by her own delivery men. The turkey it was her great joy to carry across the street as a gift to the Thackrays, although all she had received in exchange was a curt nod from Sairellen and a ‘Put it over there, lass.'

Yet, having spent an unaccustomed night in her mother's cottage she awoke feeling restless and ill-at-ease, faintly unwell, an ache in her head, another – every now and again – in her back, the morning an empty space with no urgent tasks to fill it, giving way to an afternoon in which she made slow conversation with her son, who did not really wish to be distracted from his book, and quarrelled with Odette about a letter from her father.

‘I don't want to know how he is, mother.'

‘Cara – such bitterness –'

‘That's right, mother. Bitterness. He sends you his love, but has he sent you any money?'

‘My child, is that all you can say?'

‘All I can think of, you mean? One tends to starve without it, I find. And what use would all this cheap affection be to you then?'

And it was a relief, as well as a pleasure, when Luke Thackray invited her to walk over Frizingley Moor with him. His presence making her feel right with herself, comfortable inside her own skin, allowing her to forget the prickling discomfort she had felt all day whenever her own son had turned his deep, uneasy eyes on her almost, she thought, in some kind of judgement.

‘What is it, Liam?'

Nothing.

He did not say so in words, only with swift, down-drooping eyelids shutting his eyes – himself – away.

‘Liam …?'

She had never received a reply. Nothing at all but the satisfaction of watching his soundly growing limbs, the almost unnerving sensation, sometimes, of him watching her.

How
did
he judge her? Had it meant anything, this afternoon, when, during her argument with her mother, he had suddenly but very quietly closed his book, got up and – just as quietly – crossed the room through all the Christmas debris and Cara's anger to stand beside Odette, saying nothing, doing nothing, just there, his hand sliding, once again with that strange quietness, into hers, his blank, judging eyes on Cara's face.

Had he understood the reason for her anger, or for Odette's weeping? Or, in the opinion of those troubled, troubling eyes, was Cara simply an angry person, Odette often in tears? Or, even worse, did he judge Cara, with his stark logic of childhood, as no more than the woman who made Odette cry?

Surely not. She must ask Luke about that. Or Liam.

It was a sharp afternoon of sunshine and frost, the air, as they emerged from the smoky confines of the town, striking them hard, clean blows which brought colour to their cheeks and made them gasp, whipping Cara's heavy black and scarlet cloak around her ankles, invigorating her although she could see nothing much to admire but a wasteland of coarse grass in front of her, the wasteland of St Jude's behind.

What a grim place. A dry, dusty place in which to settle. Yet she had settled here. She had done the best she could. And it meant nothing – it was foolish, even, to be distressed – when Odette shed quiet tears over those cheerful,
cruel
letters from America and Liam could hardly trouble to talk to her.

Children of that age – she supposed – were difficult to please. And Odette, after that glorious Christmas rush, must surely be tired. Perhaps she could manage without Odette at the shop for a week or two. She would try to arrange it. Perhaps – in the summer – she might even manage to send Liam and Odette away for a while – as the Colcloughs and Braithwaites might send their children – to the sea. It would mean paying three separate lots of rent, of course. The shop, Odette's cottage and whatever accommodation might be had for them at Whitby or Scarborough. Her jet and coral merchant would be sure to know. But … Yes. She would do her best, whatever it took, to achieve it.

For a while she kept pace with Luke's stride, for she was hardy and strong-winded, her legs almost as long as his, but eventually the weight of her cloak – the very symbol of her success – impeded her and she called him to a halt beside a flat rock upon which, having dusted it down with her hands, she sat.

‘This is far enough, Luke.'

‘You're growing soft.'

‘Oh no I'm not.'

Smiling he lit his pipe, a leisurely, steady-handed procedure, and sat down beside her, decently dressed in his brown tweed ‘Sunday' jacket, only a brown-checked shirt beneath it which could hardly be much protection, from the cold. Yet he seemed oblivious to the weather, sitting in apparent contentment smoking his quiet pipe, his light, untroubled eyes watching the flight of a bird, a mere charcoal sketch of wings against the pink winter sky, and then turning to check a rustling in the tufted, heather-mixed grass which might be a rabbit.

‘You like it up here, don't you?' she said, the accusation in her voice making him smile.

‘Yes. Is there any reason why I shouldn't?'

And suddenly – she didn't really know why – because the day had let her down a little, perhaps; because she had cared more than she liked to show about Liam's silences and Odette's preoccupation with her father's letter; and because she was tired and her nerves fraying at their edges in any case, she found herself saying angrily, bitterly, ‘Because it's not enough for you, Luke. You could do better than this – much better …'