A Song Twice Over (76 page)

‘Is it thinking you are,' he said lightly, rejoicing in his freedom from caring, ‘of that old adage about the bad penny turning up again – and again …?'

‘Yes,' she was still very crisp and cool and imperial. ‘That's just what I might have been thinking.'

‘Is it any wonder? You're looking beautiful, Cara. And rich.'

‘I don't grumble.' She began to tell him why. ‘I took over the shop next door and then the two next door to that as they became vacant and as I could afford them. So now I have separate departments for hats, dresses, lingerie, perfumes, fancy goods. And separate saleswomen who are expert – or supposed to be – on the particular thing they sell. My workrooms are upstairs, of course, and an apartment for myself above them …'

A whole floor to herself, in fact, a rose-pink bedroom with lace bed-curtains and a pink marble bath-tub; a sitting-room in the pale pastel shades she loved not only because they pleased her eye but because they were impractical, less than hard-wearing, and she liked it to be seen she could afford them; a dining-parlour in traditional mahogany with apple-green Chinese rugs and apple-green silk walls. A kitchen down below with a cook-housekeeper in it. A little housemaid to carry the hot water for that precious rose-pink bath up three flights of stairs.

Had he now come to tell her she was unworthy of all that? To make her
feel
unworthy by looking at her, in the way he now had beneath all his light-hearted jauntiness, of an avenging angel? A stern, celestial judge weighing and measuring her with those keen eyes, that cold smile. When his smile had once been –
nothing
like this. An enchantment. Warm and wonderful, inviting her not to contrition but to folly, as magical in its way as her father's rainbows.

What had happened to change him?

‘So – as you see – I don't complain,' she ended.

‘I do see. If you were a man I'd be here to coax your vote out of you. I reckon this amount of property must qualify for it?'

‘It does. But since women don't vote – And I'm a woman …'

‘I see that too …'

Clearly, it seemed. And not liking the open appraisal of his glance, as if there had never been anything between them but
that
, she said quickly, ‘What are you doing here, then?'

He told her, briefly, that he had come directly from Ireland to stand once again as the Chartist candidate, information she already knew and in which her interest did not seem intense.

‘Politics …' she murmured, the shrug of her shoulders dismissing it as a game designed by men to be played among themselves with all the noise and fuss and disregard for the convenience of others as unruly children. Men who might call themselves ministers but would have their work cut out to make the profits she made, year in, year out, from her shop. No, she had no time for children's games. Nor their fantasies.

‘Politics.' The word had a bitter taste in her mouth, it seemed. A sour apple of a word she could do well without.

He smiled. ‘I know. You never cared for it. So tell me instead – how is your mother?'

‘In America,' she said flatly, throwing the words at him like a challenge. ‘Three years now. My father is in a good way of business in New York. I sent my boy over with them. I decided the change would do him good. And so it has. He writes to me very often – about all kinds of things …'

She had said too much and knew it, although the reason for her anguish escaped him. Eight years ago she had refused him because she could neither separate herself from her mother nor trust him with the care of her son. Now she had sent them off to the other side of the world without any backward glance that he could see. And it meant nothing to him. No hurt, no resentment, not the least pang of jealousy that she had done, presumably for another man, the very things she had denied him.

He felt nothing at all. He almost wished he did.

‘Yes – he writes and tells me about all manner of things he'd never get the chance to see here …'

She had to let him know, whether it mattered to him or not, that her contact with Liam had not been broken, that she was still present in his life, his mother, although in fact, his letters were infrequent and stilted, prompted, she knew, by Odette. Each one a thorn in her heart.

‘What things?' Daniel's eyes and her own were not in focus, no longer looking in the same direction. ‘What is there to be seen in New York these days but the starving Irish …?'

She tossed her head in irritation, having no intention – she really didn't know why – of telling him that she had already given some money to Father Francis, and
all
the calico she had bought from Miss Ernestine Baker, in a spirit of pure malice, when that good lady had finally liquidated her stock and closed her doors. She had even thought of taking in a couple of little Irish apprentices, orphan girls straight out of the bog that nobody wanted and giving them a chance, changing her mind only when her workwomen had started muttering and losing their heads about the Irish fever. And even now, if Father Francis could pick her out a likely child, she might just get her scrubbed and deloused and into the workroom before anybody had time to complain. But, for as long as Daniel sat there, smiling and carefree on the outside, judging her like that vengeful angel of the Lord within, she knew she could not tell him so.

‘There's no need to go to New York to see the starving Irish,' she said, issuing another challenge. ‘Only to the old navvy-camp at the top of St Jude's Hill.'

‘And have you been there, Cara?'

Folding her beautifully manicured hands she smiled at him. ‘No, I have not. And don't intend to. A fine thing for me to be going up there – to do
what
, I'd like to know? – and then coming back to start an epidemic in Market Square.'

‘A fine thing indeed.'

‘So I won't do it.'

‘Have I asked you?'

She was not sure of that. ‘What is it then, Daniel? Has Father Francis sent you round with his begging bowl?'

‘So he has.'

For a moment she felt relief, since money was easy enough. Very easy, these days. And then, because it always pained her to realize that the coins upon which she could now quite casually lay her hands were somehow no longer the same golden miracles as in the days when she had had to struggle hard for even one of them, she said tartly, ‘And if I gave you a hundred pounds how much good would it do?'

‘Not much.'

She was surprised he knew that.

‘A thousand pounds, then?'

He smiled at her, a covering of charm light as a gauze veil over the stern, dark countenance of blind justice, naked truth, a refusal any longer to compromise.

‘Oh – it might be of some help to a few of the squatters in those foul cellars at the top of St Jude's, Cara. Those who aren't already beyond help, that is. It might patch them up a little, so they can stagger on to the next disaster. It might put a better class of tramp on the roads, that's all. There's been no shortage of private charity. A million dollars has come in from America. And even England – Perfidious Albion herself – has raised upwards of five hundred thousand pounds.'

‘That has to go somewhere, Daniel.'

He shrugged. ‘Indeed. But when it has to be spread so thinly one hardly notices. Private charity can never provide a real solution, Cara. Only governments can do that. This tragedy should never have been allowed to happen. There was no need for it. Government could have prevented it. Government can make sure it never happens again. Any Government, with any famine, anywhere in the world. There
is
enough of everything to go around. There always has been. Only Governments can distribute it so that no man has to sit at the roadside – any roadside – dying of hunger and staring at a side of roast beef. Only governments can create conditions – if they want to – where nobody has to starve. The fact is they don't want to. I'm in the business of changing their attitudes. Father Françis is in the business of patching up, mending and making do. Which is why it's
his
begging bowl I'm bringing you, not mine.'

‘And what do you want me to put in it?'

‘Whatever makes
you
feel justified. Your vote, if you had one.'

‘So you can change the world with your People's Charter? Nobody is going to vote for you, Daniel.'

He shrugged again and smiled. ‘Not this time, perhaps. I'll just have to keep on trying. I'm young enough.'

But it was not true. The youth had gone out of him. She saw that and mourned it, her own youth having left her long ago. But, while she had retained her resilience, her sense of sap rising and renewing, there was something dry and brittle about Daniel, something so fine-drawn and tenuous, so likely to snap that she was suddenly very much afraid for him. Yet what help could she give? What help would he take from her now? Did he even trust her judgement which to him, she supposed, must seem self-centred and commercial. Ought she, perhaps, to send him to Gemma Gage?

Not yet.

‘What makes you certain,' she said, ‘that your Chartists would keep their promises if they ever did come to power? Nobody else does. How do you know they wouldn't turn grasping and greedy, like everybody else, once they got their hands on something worth grasping? And they'd find plenty of excuses, then, for putting off all these “better conditions” of yours and keeping everything for themselves. How do you know they wouldn't do that?'

‘I don't.'

‘Well
I
know.' She was suddenly furious. ‘Because that's what people do – that's what people
are
. Dog eat dog – except that dogs don't behave so badly …'

‘No,' he said very quietly. ‘They eat dead children on street corners – all over Ireland.'

Her fist smashed down hard and angry on her desk-top. ‘Don't tell me that. I don't want to know that. I made sure my own child wasn't there, didn't I, and that's as much as I could do, isn't it? – He could have starved a dozen times over before any of this started, but I wouldn't have it. I saw to it that he didn't …'

But she had lost him just the same. Not in the small, pine coffin which had so often haunted her, his famished little body just a handful of sparrow-bones tucked away inside it, but just as finally. She knew she would never see him again. She knew he did not want to see her.

‘Well, it's
safe
he is now,' she said flatly, knowing she must be grateful for it. ‘In America.'

‘Do you miss him very much, Cara?'

‘No.' In a way it was true. Or at least, not the child who had bitten her arm and kicked her shins and cowered away from her, crying for Odette. Not him. But Liam as he might have been – ought to have been – had her life really allowed her to have a son. Had she found the way to keep his body and soul together and be a mother to him at the same time. For
that
child her arms ached sometimes: and her heart.

‘No,' she said, very brisk and competent again. ‘I don't miss him. He's well. And I'm busy. Very busy.'

‘Yes. I see.'

She gave him the wide, dazzling, quite empty smile she reserved for her more troublesome customers, for her suppliers when they began to show signs of raising their prices, for the men she might find it convenient, from time to time, to fascinate.

‘And what about you, Daniel? What are you planning for yourself?'

And once more he matched her false brilliance with his own light veil of charm, that transparent, faintly contemptuous sketch of the blithe and carefree wanderer who, for so long, had been Daniel Carey.

‘Well – let's be thinking now – first I'm going to lose the election …'

‘Of course.'

‘And then, if it's a by-election I can be finding somewhere I may have a crack at losing that too.'

‘I'm sure you'll succeed – at losing, I mean.'

He made a slight bow. ‘Your confidence touches me deeply, Cara. And spurs me on.'

‘And then?'

‘The Dawn of Enlightenment – what else? The Age of the Charter. The Sacred Ballot Box. The lion and the lamb having dinner together in your grand new hotel over there. Or, if they're not precisely sitting at the same table, then at least a little more Liberty and Equality and Fraternity for hors-d'oeuvres – a little more Justice for dessert.'

‘It's all nonsense, Daniel. It won't happen.'

‘Oh – one has to use one's life for something, Cara.'

‘And are you asking me to what use I put mine?' She sounded dangerous.

‘No. I am not.'

‘Yes, you are.'

She stood up, regal and outraged, intending – so she thought – to dismiss him, but then, a tremor going through her, she cried out instead, ‘Don't do this to me, Daniel. Don't turn all this to dust and ashes for me. It's all I have. It's what I am. Don't do it.'

He stood up too, straight and taut as an arrow, the veil of charm slipping away from him and, with it, some of his recently acquired years, the air of weary timelessness, the weight of experience accumulated through long Ages far beyond the normal lifespan which made him so formidable. A clamp released, if only briefly, from his spirit, leaving him not quite the man who had loved her, but a man who understood her worth.

‘And if I did that, Cara, and it all fell about you in decay I know you'd just stamp your feet for a minute or two, in all that dust and ashes, and then set about building the whole thing up again. Wouldn't you?'

She gritted her teeth. ‘I would.'

‘I know. I think you've always had that kind of courage, Cara. I had to learn it. It didn't come naturally to me.'

‘That's because you were never hungry enough.'

‘I am now.'

Abruptly, like a thread snapping, the tension broke, unravelled, taking both the stern, dark angel and the brittle sophisticate with it so that, at last, it was Daniel and Cara who stood there. Smiling.