A Song Twice Over (63 page)

She was saying goodbye not only to her lover but to her identity, slowly letting it slip away from her among these odours of chalk and starched pinafores and new paint, her vigil lasting so long, her face so sad and so deeply serious that long before the class was dismissed, he knew. And although he too had known that it must surely come to this he had not expected it to be today. Not yet. Not
just
now, when he had wanted to tell her – wanted to show her – wanted to find out from her …

Ah well.

The children left. She touched a few tousled heads in passing, the scarred top of a wooden desk, a slate, and then Daniel's hands, grasping hers in the same speaking silence in which she had first offered her love to him. And there was no thought in her mind now of taking it away.

Yet, because her instinct in love was to nurture and to cherish, she knew that she must part from him in a manner that would cause him no remorse, no unease, no awkwardness. What she wanted most of all – the only thing she now desired for herself – was to smooth the way for him so that he would have no cause to look back over a worried shoulder and ask himself whether he had done her more harm than good. She wanted his leaving to be a warm and glowing memory of time well and truly spent; no ache of guilt. It was a last gift of love to him. And when she had smiled and seen him on his way she would cope as best she could – adequately and competently, she expected – with her own hurt.

She was strong enough.

‘My father has had another attack,' she said. ‘A very serious one.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘And so I am needed at home now, Daniel, as I told you I would be.'

‘When?'

‘From today.'

How could she speak so calmly of what, to him, had the force and horror of a sentence of imprisonment for life? He knew she felt that horror too and her courage overwhelmed him, his pity for her making him brutal.

‘He will die, you know,' he said roughly, thinking – for her sake – the sooner the better.

‘I know. But then there is my mother.'

‘She will die too.'

She smiled at him very gently, recognizing that what was speaking in him was hatred of her condition, not of her family.

‘Oh yes, she will. But she is not yet out of her forties and – well – although she appears rather frail I think it likely that she will live to be a hundred.'

She saw the sneer in his face, heard the words in his mind. ‘Yes. Very likely. A woman like that who battens on others, feeds on others, who never stirs herself hand or foot for herself. Child-mother. Vampire-mother would be nearer the mark.'

‘Don't dislike her, Daniel,' she said, still calmly. ‘She is only as the rules of our society have made her. You remember what we have said about lotus-feet? How the Chinese ladies bind them? And once the growth has been stunted and the bones of the feet broken then that is the end of it, Daniel. It would be the most appalling cruelty to expect a woman whose feet – or whose spirit – had been so bound, to walk.'

‘They bound your feet too.'

‘Yes,' she nodded her head very quietly. ‘So they did. It was because they loved me. It was because they believed it was for my own good. I have to remember that.'

‘In your place,' he said. ‘I'd walk away from them.'

‘No, you wouldn't.'

‘That I would. I'd tell them my life was my own and they had no right to it. They've had their own lives. They're not entitled to a double share. I'd tell them so.'

‘No, you wouldn't.' She sounded patient, a little amused. ‘Because, in my place, you'd be a woman with a woman's conscience – which is a terribly weighty thing.'

‘Then I'd stay – and hate them for it.'

‘I shall try not to do that.'

He never doubted, for a moment, that she would succeed.

‘You are so brave,' he told her, ‘that I can hardly stand it.'

‘You are no coward yourself.'

He clicked his tongue. ‘By fits and starts. When the mood takes me. That's how my courage comes. I might tackle a lion if one happened to be running amok in Market Square. And if I happened to feel like it. But the courage of everyday, the patient courage that has to be switched on every morning and has to last all through the day – and the year – until God knows when … No. I'm not brave like that. Like you.'

Suddenly Luke Thackray came into his mind. Another tough, enduring, quietly valiant soul like Gemma's. Perhaps this damp and dismal climate bred them here.

Ah well.

‘I suppose it would be best for me to go away,' he said.

‘Yes. I am sure it would.'

‘When?'

‘Today, if you like.'

‘And close the school? I can't do that. Footloose I may be, but I'll not be leaving until you have another teacher.'

‘Thank you,' she smiled at him. ‘But Mrs Ephraim Cook can take care of it. And the delay would be irksome to you, Daniel. I don't want that. Truly not. Take a train – the one that appeals to you most as soon as it appeals to you. And set off.'

He took her face between his hands. ‘Are you dismissing me?' And he could feel the prudent tension, the careful control of her skin beneath his fingers.

‘No. I am giving what one gives to the person one loves. Or what one ought to give. The thing he wants.'

‘Gemma.…?'

‘You want to go. Of course you do. By your nervous fits and starts you have wanted it all the time, I think – I know –'

He pulled her towards him and held her brown, sturdy, gallant little body very tight, feeling it tremble.

‘And by the same fits and starts, do you know how much I have wanted to stay? All the time?'

‘Thank you.'

‘Don't thank me!' he shouted at her, suddenly beside himself at the idea that she might be grateful to him –
him
– when
she
– Dear God in Heaven – when she had given him so much.

‘And you,' she told him, standing a little away from him, her hands against his chest, perfectly understanding his trouble. ‘You should feel no guilt – and no regret. None. I am not asking, but insisting – I want you to take that train, Daniel, with your bag across your shoulder and I want you to feel all the excitement in journeyings and wanderings and seeing what happens next as you used to feel. Only a year ago. And if you come to a harbour and there happens to be a ship standing there that takes your fancy then go aboard – find out what's on the other side of the ocean – experience it – Live it.'

‘For you?'

‘For yourself, Daniel. And no guilt. Remember that. Because I think you have felt guilty sometimes, haven't you?'

He had. At times he had been consumed with it. He wished he could tell her so. But since it had concerned his inability to fall in love with her in the head-over-heels way he believed he ought to have done, as he had even wanted to do, how could he say it?

Putting the palm of one square, brown hand gently against his cheek, she said it for him.

‘It would be nonsense, you know, Daniel, to worry because I love you rather more than you love me. I have never thought of it as an exercise in mathematics where both sides must turn out equal. You have loved me enough –'

He began to tell her that no amount of love could ever be enough for a woman like her, began to spill out a wild Irish flow of words to ease his soul that was aching now, with an equal soreness, both for her captivity and his inconstancy, her gilded, overcrowded loneliness and his freedom peopled with so many chance-met, easily forgotten acquaintances. Her depth and his own damnable superficiality.

Nothing in the world, at that moment, would have given him more joy than to throw himself in an abandonment of true passion at her feet.

He could not.

‘Daniel,' she said firmly. ‘You have loved me enough to make me happy. I have been happy. And since I am the only person in a position to know how I feel then you may take my word for it.'

He did not answer her.

‘Daniel.
You have given me everything I asked for and much more than I expected. You have been good to me and good for me. You don't want to fail me now, do you?'

‘That I do not.'

‘Then be big enough to accept my love for what it is. As I can accept that you – well, you like me very much, Daniel. You are fond of me. I know. But you didn't force me to love you, after all. I wanted it. I made it happen. And if, now, you won't take it then I shall have wasted my time. Which would be a pity. I love you. Take it away with you. It belongs to you, surely – since I am the only one who can give it. And I do give it, wholly and freely. How could you possibly turn it down? I wouldn't, you know – if I were you.'

And through all her luminous sincerity and tenderness there still came a faint, far nuance of her pugnacious father, John-William Dallam, who would have said, ‘Now let's have no nonsense, lad. Take it, since it's good for you and comes free of charge.'

He walked away from her, tears stinging his eyes, and then, having blinked them away, came back again.

‘Gemma, should you ever need – anything.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘I don't know where I'll be going …'

‘It doesn't matter. I shall be here. Should
you
need anything …'

‘No, Gemma …'

‘Mrs Ephraim Cook,' she continued as if he had not interrupted, ‘would let me know. You have her address.'

He nodded.

They were reaching the end of everything that could be said.

‘I had better go and see to my packing,' she offered, almost presenting a solution, and they walked hand in hand to the door, civilized people who had always known that this must happen and who could never have been allowed to make a life together in any case.

She did not mention his salary. She would send it by messenger later that day, the last thing she did before leaving Frizingley, so that when he saw it to be more than was due to him he would be unable to return it.

He did not mention that, having helped the wife and family of an imprisoned Chartist friend to settle their most pressing debts, he had little more than the price of a train ticket to London left in his pocket. Such a thing did not even enter his mind.

He tidied up the schoolroom when she had left it, wanting nothing more urgently now than to leave too, to put behind him what had to be abandoned – and go. He had acquired books during his occupancy of the school-house which, judging too heavy to carry, he left in a conspicuous pile, hoping she would claim them. He wrote a note to Mrs Ephraim Cook the mill manager's wife, explaining his departure and left it, and the school-house keys, in the care of that lady's parlourmaid.

He was on his way. A year and a half ago he had walked this same road to return an amethyst brooch a virtual stranger had given him. Now it was pinned underneath his lapel for luck he thought he would probably need.

He smarted from the conviction that he had failed her, felt humbled by her greatness of heart and grieved that his own had not matched it.
But
he was on his way. Across the moor to Leeds, he thought, a much longer walk than Brighouse where he could just as easily catch a train but the night was warm, the sky full of stars, a breeze just stirring. He would walk an hour or two in the mysterious, exciting dark, sleep an hour or two in a fold of the land, watch the sun come up and then walk on again, straight into the sunrise. With no one waiting for him. No one worrying. Least of all himself.

Crossing Market Square he felt his step lighten and, catching sight of a blue and gold sign announcing the business premises of Miss Cara Adeane, he suddenly changed course, vaulted the wall which separated her back-yard from its neighbour and knocked on her door. An impulse he immediately regretted when the door opened on a scene of unmistakable domestic drama, Odette Adeane, looking years older than when he had last seen her – surely only a month ago? – lying in an armchair by the hearth quietly sobbing; the boy Liam kneeling beside her, his young face strained with some ghastly emotion far too strong for him, that looked suspiciously like hate; Cara herself bristling with nervous anger, her turquoise eyes gleaming in a way which, he remembered, boded no good.

But he would not be coming back to Frizingley again. It would have to be now.

‘Daniel …' she sounded shocked.

‘Yes. I'm sorry. Is it an awkward moment?'

She shrugged. ‘No more than usual, these days.' And letting the door slam shut like a curtain closing on the first – or final? – act of a tragedy, she came out into the yard with him, her arms folded across her chest, shivering slightly as if her body had not noticed the warm summer breeze.

‘What is it?' This time she was sharp, asking him, he thought, to state his business and be done.

‘Just goodbye.'

The glance she darted at him seemed to hold suspicion, calculation even. ‘Why? Where are you going?'

He laughed. ‘I don't know. That answers both questions.'

‘Do you need any money?'

‘Cara.' The sudden intensity in her, the quick, almost furtive glance she cast around her own very evidently empty yard, amused and slightly embarrassed him. ‘I'm not on the run, if that's what you're thinking. There's nobody after me.'

‘Nobody? Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure.'

‘You've just got tired of being a schoolmaster, then?'

‘I suppose so.' He explained about John-William Dallam and Gemma's removal to Almsmead.

‘So it seemed a convenient moment for me to get away too …'

‘And you're all right?'

‘Yes I am. Are you?'

She shrugged. ‘Splendid.'

‘I shouldn't think I'll be back.'

‘No. There's nothing here for you.'

That
, at least, was plain enough.

‘I
have
called at the wrong time, haven't I?'