A Song Twice Over (66 page)

His smile broadened into a grin, showing what always seemed to her to be a powerful array of teeth, a heavy contrast of colour which made the skin swarthier, the teeth stronger, the mouth more full-lipped and widely-curved and self-indulgent than ever.

‘I may have expected you to abandon him, you know – although I may be rather glad you didn't.'

‘Do you even remember giving him to me?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Well then …' For some reason he had made her feel awkward. ‘Here he is …'

‘So I see. Overfed and much indulged, by the look of him. Does he pay for it by guarding you well and faithfully?'

‘He does not.' The glance she shot at her treacherous ‘Caligula' was as vicious as his own. ‘If you wanted to cut my throat I expect he'd let you.'

‘Luckily I don't.'

She had no answer to that. Nor was she really certain just why she was gritting her teeth and clenching her hands in the pockets of her taffeta skirt. It was only a dog, after all. The ugliest brute in creation. Why, in God's name, should she care about it? How was it that she could hardly stop herself from crying like a fool because he had gone wagging his stubby tail so fondly to Christie? A dog. When she had lost a son and a mother and two men she could have loved –
had
loved – how could she feel betrayed by a dog?

He sent the animal away with a snap of his fingers.

‘When did you get in from Liverpool?'

‘Late.'

‘And did it go well?'

What a ridiculous question. Fiercely, losing such caution as remained to her – not much – she told him so; asking
him
how he expected a woman to feel when she had given her son away.

To which he replied with unusual, possibly deceptive, mildness that he was hardly in a position to know.

‘I have no sons to part from, which is no particular grief to me, I do assure you. And for once, my dear, you can hardly blame
me
in this matter.'

‘Oh yes I can.'

‘Cara – I hardly think so. I may have had a hand in the removal of Mr Thackray, but what advantage is there to me in getting rid of your son? Not at all the kind of thing one would care to do, in any case …'

‘Although
one
would do it, wouldn't one, just the same – if it happened to suit?'

He nodded very slightly, his eyes amused and keen, acknowledging her mockery of his aristocratic ‘one' to avoid the pushy, self-aggrandizing, middle-class ‘I'to be a sure sign that she had not only abandoned her caution but flung it to the winds.

‘One might,' he said pleasantly. ‘But it did not suit. Therefore I have done nothing against him.'

‘Oh yes, that you have.'

‘My dear – do tell me about it.'

Leaning back in her best armchair,
her
dog lying at his feet, he helped himself to another glass of her wine – no, the wine, she supposed, was really his – and appeared to be settling down very comfortably to listen.

Goading her, of course. She knew that and even welcomed it. For if she could spill out even a little of her hurt and anger then it would do something – surely – to ease the rock she still seemed to be carrying inside her chest. And no matter what she said to Christie he would not care.

‘Of course I blame you. You knew I had a child but what did he ever matter? Whenever you wanted me I had to drop everything – drop him – and come running – to you and your strange games …'

She could feel amusement rippling in him even before he answered her. ‘My dear, what games are these? The only ones I know seem entirely natural.'

‘I'm not talking about
that
,' she shouted at him, refusing to call it ‘making love'and knowing no other acceptable description. ‘I'm talking about – oh, you know very well. Playing chess with live pieces – isn't that what you call it? And if you've come here now to do it again – and you're
very
good at it – to make me admit to myself that I'm a bad mother as you've made me admit other things – made me look at myself and then watched me not liking what you've made me see … Well – if that's what you want tonight I can save you the trouble.
I am
a bad mother. I know. I know.'

‘Are you?' he said quietly. ‘I have never thought much about it. Are you quite certain?'

‘I gave my son away, didn't I?'

‘Yes,' he gave her a nod of encouragement. ‘Can you tell me why?'

‘Because …'

‘Yes?'

‘Because …' She pressed her hands to her cheeks, suddenly aware of the tears that were cascading down them, horrified and awkward and angry in her weeping, alarmed at the extent of it and even more alarmed that she could not stop.

‘Don't worry about that,' he said. ‘You can talk and cry at the same time, I imagine. Why did you let him go?'

‘Because he wanted to,' she sobbed. ‘Because he was afraid of me. Because I never had the patience to find out why he was so quiet and odd and separate. I was tired at the end of the day, you see, when he was a baby. Twelve hours in a sweatshop making shirts like the one you're wearing now will tire anybody, won't it? Well,
you
wouldn't know, but you can take my word for it. And so I just fed him and paid the rent and sat up making shirts for him out of scraps I'd …'

‘Stolen?' he suggested.

‘Yes, from the workroom. And put off talking to him until … Until I had the time, dammit – which I never had. Never. There was always
something
. Things I couldn't tell a child about, could I? That's what I tell myself now. And it's excuses – excuses – that's all – just to make myself feel better, because the truth is I hardly ever thought about it. He was just there. I just expected him to love me. I loved him. At least, I loved my little boy – and that's who he was. And I wasted my time. Because he doesn't know me and he doesn't want to know me. He knows my mother, which is all right – all right – she looked after me, it seemed natural for her to be looking after him. I didn't mind. I couldn't afford to mind. We both did the best we could, my mother and I. She looked after the child and I earned the bread. I knew he loved her. So did I. If he'd even thought of me as a kind of older sister, it would have been something. But all I was to him was an intruder. A damned nuisance. And then an enemy who kept threatening to take Odette away. To have kept him here with me would have been cruel. Once I realized that – and I tried hard enough not to – Well – that's why I sent him away.'

‘An act of love,' he said.

‘What? What was that?'

He did not repeat it. He stood up instead, poured her a glass of wine and then made her sit down beside him with instructions to drink up her good Old Sercial and dry her tears. He was being kind to her and the realization shocked and worried her so much that the effort of searching for his motives gradually restored her calm.

‘I'm sorry,' she said stiffly, wiping her eyes with a wisp of cambric she did not intend anyone to steal from
her
workroom.

He shrugged. ‘I have more confessions made to me than you might think. Are you better now?'

She nodded, watching him like a hawk.

‘Then you really shouldn't reproach yourself much more, or for much longer. How old is your boy? Seven? Eight? I went away to school at that age and took no harm. And before that I rarely remember seeing my mother for more than ten minutes a day. They used to dress me up and take me downstairs at tea-time so she could have a look at me. What lady with her social and charitable obligations to fulfil could be expected to take more notice of an infant than that? It is altogether the way things are done, my dear.'

‘In your world, I dare say it is.' Her own world being so very far removed from it that she could imagine no similarity, no point of recognition between his childhood and Liam's. Between the parties and dances and riding to hounds, the dinners and idle afternoons of gossip and flirtation which had filled his mother's hours and the hard grind of her own.

‘I see little difference,' he said airily, filling up her glass again. How many times was this? ‘Poor children go to the workhouse, rich children are sent away to school. It amounts to much the same.'

Startled and scornful – since what did he know of workhouses? – she gulped her drink, coughed, and then, to ease the coughing, finished the glass. He gave her another.

‘You know nothing about it,' she told him. ‘You've never been hungry. You can't even begin to imagine what it feels like. And if you're cold sometimes then it's only because you've lived in the Tropics, not because there's ever been a lack of fur blankets and rugs. You've always had a roof over your head, and a good one. Probably never less than a choice of two or three. And if you've always been sure of those things then you don't know what hardship is.'

Suddenly her contempt for him and for anyone and everyone who had never struggled and endured as she had, overwhelmed her. He saw poverty in terms of being unable to support a pack of foxhounds for a season or two and having quietly to dispose of half the family silver. She saw it in terms of boots and bread.

Sitting up in her chair and raising her head she felt her superiority swirling around her like a wrap of ermine or sable, or something, at any rate, that was a cut above the black fox lining of the cloak
he
sometimes wore.

‘Oh yes, I've always had a roof, I'll grant you that,' he said, not appearing to notice the trailing magnificence of her furs. ‘But the kind of schools attended by young gentlemen such as I was, are designed to build character, you know, not for comfort. To turn out soldiers and statesmen and colonial governors and masters of foxhounds, not scholars. And the only way to build character, don't you know, is through deprivation. I had to wash at a stand-pipe, my dear, in the school-yard every morning, and stand in line – a long line – winter or summer, stripped and waiting my turn. One may never learn to like it, but one learns to
endure
. That's the great thing. So that if one happens to be posted to some particularly inhospitable corner of the empire there's no fear of letting the side down by asking for tubs of decadent hot water. One learns to take a flogging too without batting an eyelid, much less making a sound, although it's rather hoped one won't develop a taste for that, even if some of the masters regrettably do. And although one can lead a good life in the army there are certain aspects of it one finds wearisome, to say the least. One gets shot at occasionally, for instance, which can be a bore. So my path has not always been strewn with roses …'

The army? She could not imagine him taking orders from anyone, much less some heavy, pompous, elderly schoolboy like Colonel Covington-Pym whose wife, she knew, had sometimes been his mistress. Perhaps he had never been a soldier at all. Perhaps it was just a story to cover up something else. Happily, something worse? With the wine pleasantly swirling in her head she decided that he had been a smuggler, a white slaver, the captain of a convict ship to Australia. A pirate.

She told him so and, with the smile that showed his teeth, he shook his head, not at all offended. ‘A soldier,' he said. ‘My grandfather – General Sir Jarvis Covington-Pym – was obliging enough to buy me a commission in what is known as a crack regiment. The uniform would have pleased you. And I had a private income, in those days, just big enough to keep a few polo ponies and hunters and pay my mess bills. Not a bad life.'

‘Why did you give it up, then?'

‘Oh – at their request.'

‘You mean they threw you out?'

‘I do.'

How wonderful. She had, in fact, no real idea just why young officers might be dismissed from their regiments. She simply hoped that, in his case, it had been something very bad. Although if it had caused any real scandal – if he had cheated at cards, or led his men into an ambush and left them there – would he now be on such excellent terms with his extremely conventional cousin, Colonel Covington-Pym? Doubting it, her elation faded.

‘I was insubordinate,' he said.

‘Is that all?' It was something she could have been accused of every day of her life.

‘If one works at it sufficiently and regularly then it tends to be enough.'

‘Were you in disgrace?'

‘I was.'

She felt considerably pleased about that.

‘And did they break your sword and cut off your medals?' She really did hope so.

He smiled. ‘Hardly so dramatic as that. My grandfather, after all,
was
a general. But bad enough. However – I rallied. Instead of shooting myself or drinking myself to death I went out to the West Indies and made myself some money in rum and sugar and cloves. Now that really was a good life.'

‘Why didn't you stay there?'

‘Do you wish I had? I came back when my father died. As lord of a manor which had been sold years before and of what was left of the manor lands. Enough to make me a handsome fortune when the time is ripe. I think you really are a little better now, aren't you? There's no healer more certain, it often seems to me, than curiosity.'

So that was it. ‘Thank you. I'm quite well now,' she said almost primly and then, very suddenly, she was not. Once again – and really
very
suddenly and well nigh completely this time – her grief had come over her. And
this
time, in this pitiful, terrible, astounding moment, she could escape neither the grief nor the revelation of its source. For what she wanted now was neither her mother nor her son but her father Kieron Adeane, the enchanter of her girlhood, the seeker of rainbows, the sower of magical seeds which blossomed unfailingly into vivid, highly scented flowers of laughter; a garden of easily scattered but never-to-be forgotten fascinations. She did not forget them. Nor did she forget the hand he had held out to her only this morning, not asking her forgiveness so much as offering to take her riding all over again on his final rainbow, to make a princess of her as he had always promised, as she had always been to him in his blithe, butterfly-textured heart.