A Winter's Child (39 page)

It was so very right that she could have wept tears of relief-and joy.

‘He matters to you then, this bloke of yours,' said Euan, ‘whoever he may be?'

She shrugged, would have liked to deny it. ‘No more than he ought to matter – at this stage.'

‘Does Kit know?'

‘Don't start that.'.

But did Kit know? He had promised her some free time after Christmas but when she had asked for the afternoon of the 29th until the evening of the 30th he had subjected her to a long, level scrutiny which had left her considerably ill-at-ease, and then had nodded quite curtly, warning her – with none of the easy generosity to which she had grown accustomed – that he could not spare her until after lunch. And on the morning of the 29th, when Mr Clarence sneezed twice behind the reception desk Kit, who would normally expect his staff to keep on their feet and
smile
through anything from a broken heart to pneumonia, sent him home and put Claire – who else could he trust? – in his place.

‘Can't risk an epidemic among the guests. Think of the size of the doctor's bills.'

‘Yes, Kit.'

She stood in the lobby, her stomach in hard knots, her eyes on the French porcelain clock heedlessly ticking away her chances of getting home in time to bathe and do her hair; in time just to change her clothes; just to pick up her bag; her chances of getting home at all.

Benedict had originally planned to take her out to lunch somewhere in the country, at a sufficiently discreet distance from Faxby, she supposed; and she had had to decline.

‘I can't get away until three o'clock.'

‘Can't you really?' He had taken no pains to hide his displeasure.

‘No – I'm sorry.' In personal matters she was often weak but where her status as a working woman was concerned – or her conscience – she could be firm.

‘Very well. But please be realistic about the time. If you tell me to meet you at three o'clock then I shall be there at three o'clock precisely. If there is any possibility that you cannot …?'

‘No, Benedict. Three o'clock I can easily manage.'

Lunch then, was unavoidably – although he clearly thought she could have avoided it – cancelled. They would go out to tea instead at a place he knew which might interest her, then Thornwick where, for the first time she was to spend the night. Interest her? Indeed it did. Where might a man like Benedict take a lady to tea? No conventional teashop, she was quite certain, but a converted abbey at the very least, some mysterious, faintly sinister hotel. She was childishly eager to know. Nor could she avoid just a whiff – and she felt she could allow herself that much – of excitement at the thought of waking up beside him on a clear morning with leisure to observe, to assess, hopefully to talk. It was not at all the same as the many other occasions when he had asked her to stay the night, simply to suit his own convenience. This was part of the gift she wished to bring him, no curtailment of her freedom but a holiday.

She knew he did not care about his birthday but she wanted to mark it, in her own mind, as a special occasion. She wanted to give him the lily bowl and her own self for a full day, a full night, for no other reason than the pleasure of giving. She knew how rich he was. She had good reason to know how powerful. She knew he could buy what he wanted, or take it or
get
it one way or another. Yet, increasingly, her instinct towards him was one of impulsive generosity. And on his birthday night she wanted to give him the lily bowl which had cost her hours of indecision and the equivalent of two months' wages and herself at his dinner table dressed to please his
Art Nouveau
tastes in dark, supple crushed velvet, his grape clusters of opals and amethysts in her ears; generous with her whole mind, her undivided attention, her good humour; generous with her body afterwards in his bed, giving herself freely and in double measure since he did not, or could not give himself at all.

It was not the first time in her life she had felt such liberality. She had given Jeremy as much as her limited experience had allowed in the time at their disposal. She had lavished the whole of her deep-rooted, female bounty upon Paul. To the five, half-remembered lovers between them she had given affection; had not loved, of course, but had cared. Why she should feel the same anxious caring for Benedict, who was neither young nor uncertain nor under sentence of death in battle as they had been, she could not tell. She was simply aware that she felt it and, that being the case, concluded that on his birthday night at least, he might just as well enjoy it.

Yet she knew she had calculated finely. The hotel was quiet. Luncheon, which began at noon, ought to be over by two o'clock. Plenty of time, in theory, to go home and change into her cherry red jumper suit, pack her treasured crushed velvet dress, her lovely earrings, her wicked black silk lingerie, the lily bowl,
arrange
herself, and be ready to stroll to the garden gate, as cool as a cucumber, on the stroke of three. In practice, there was Mr Clarence languishing in bed, Kit hard-eyed and cool, Amandine Keller, who rarely spoke above a whisper, suddenly rearing up and spitting venom at her husband, French venom at that, so that when she proceeded to have a fit of voluble French hysterics, Claire had to be called to restore order, hysteria in confined, culinary spaces being highly infectious: and at the same time to rescue from incineration an order of lamb chops. Lunch, therefore, was late. The dinner menus could not be completed because Aristide Keller, having discovered his meek little wife to be a snake in the grass, could not decide what his shattered sensibilities would permit him to cook. And Kit who would normally have dealt with the matter in his own cheerful, persuasive fashion, merely raised his shoulders and said, ‘Talk to him, Claire.'

She talked. It was half past two when she came back to the front desk to learn that the relief receptionist had not arrived. Had he even been sent for? Something in Kit's manner, and her own overwrought nerves, made her wonder.

‘You could hang on – I should have thought – for another ten minutes,' said Kit, sounding pleasant, looking like a man it would be unwise to cross. Ten minutes passed.

‘I'll go and find him. Don't leave the desk until I get back.' And entirely ignoring her startled exclamation he strode outside, purposeful, extremely angry, leaving her anchored by the responsibility of money, the lunch bills, the bills for last night's accommodation, the bar takings.

Nothing kept her there, of course, but her own conscience. It was sufficient. Irresponsible behaviour in another person – in Kit – did not excuse irresponsibility in herself. The whole discipline of her childhood had taught her that. And although something inside her was about to burst – she could feel it swelling inside her head, overheating towards explosion – Dorothy's daughter could not desert her post, the step-child of Edward Lyall to whom Money and Duty were both Divine could not leave those bar takings unguarded.

He came back a minute after three o'clock, alone.

‘I don't see how you can go, now.'

She walked out from behind the desk and faced him, deeply hurt by his hostility but not prepared to put up with it, no matter what, or who had caused it.

‘Are you ordering me to stay?'

‘Oh no.' Even in a fit of cold jealousy, something he had never felt before and was uncertain how to handle, he knew better than that. ‘But I might be asking you.'

What had Nola said to him? Enough, she supposed, to tell him that she had a lover. Could he possibly have discovered the rest for himself? She hoped not. She did not want him to know that it was Benedict, his former employer.

‘I'm sorry, Kit.'

‘But not sorry enough to stay and give me a hand. I'd make it up to you later.'

‘You can manage, Kit.'

‘That's hardly the point.'

‘No.' And her voice, to hide the proximity of tears, was very sharp. ‘The point is that I've been working here since you opened without a break, and without a complaint either. I asked you, well in advance, for this afternoon and tomorrow. You promised. I made my arrangements. And that's that. If you don't like it –'

‘All right,' he said, capitulating abruptly, totally, hearing the threat of resignation loud and clear. ‘All right. I can manage-enjoy yourself.'

It was ten minutes past three.

She ran out into the street, angry with Kit but horribly upset at being on bad terms with him, at losing even briefly his steady, cheerful support which she missed as acutely as the turning out of a light. And now, although he had probably ruined her day and her fingers still itched to slap him, a familiar uneasy brew of guilt and sadness was already stirring inside her. She knew he wanted her himself. Sometimes she thought it might be rather a good thing if he had her. What a tangle.

But what mattered now was getting to Benedict. No time even to go through the house and get her bag. She would have to run straight to the car and ask him to wait a moment longer, dash into the flat and back again, his impatience snapping at her heels, and spend the first half-hour apologizing. It had happened many times before. This afternoon she thought it a pity. The traffic, of course, was heavy and darting incautiously through it she misjudged the pace of a pair of heavy horses pulling a brewery wagon, stepped hastily out of its way and out of her shoe, her stockinged foot meeting, with revulsion, a slimy cobble, an inch or two of dirty water. That too had happened before. She reconnected wet shoe to wet foot and ran on, the hands of a giant grandfather clock beating time behind her forehead, a pain starting inside her chest, her face flushed, she supposed, her hair certainly a mess. Twenty minutes past three. The corner of Mannheim Terrace, thank God for that. His car in the alley. Her arm waving and then dropping, a dead weight, to her side as she watched him drive away.

‘Benedict!' She knew he could not hear her. But surely he had seen her running along the road, turning the corner. Surely. He must have done.

She went into her flat, thankful to meet no one on the way, and flinging herself down on the bed smashed her fists hard into the pillow, over and over again. It did no good. For perhaps ten minutes she was so shattered by the sheer size of her frustration, the bitterness of her disappointment, that she could do nothing more than suffer it, allowing it to engulf her and to some extent abate before her mind could function or her eyes could see. And what they first looked at was the lily bowl, beautifully wrapped in pale green paper, waiting serenely to be given.

She shed a few tears then, lit a cigarette, took off her stockings and dried her feet, and paced the floor for a moment or two, thinking it over. Why? He had seen her, she was almost sure of it. Why then, having waited for twenty minutes., had he driven away? Had it been simply to punish her? But that was illogical, emotional. It was not Benedict. She wanted to know the answer. She also wanted to go to Thornwick, to wear her crushed velvet dress and her lovely earrings, to enjoy the evening she had planned. Underneath the affront, the wounded pride, the conventional side of her nature which believed a woman should preserve her dignity at such times, should never make the first move nor any move at all for that matter, what counted was being there.

And there were trains to Thornwick.

Naturally – she had better not. Much better. Not that the journey itself troubled her. In France she had found her way to remoter places than Thornwick in far worse conditions, on roads pitted by shell-fire, walking alone, eight miles, ten miles, through landscapes of devastation, to meet Paul. If she could do that then getting to Thornwick was an easy matter and, once there, she could make some arrangements, no doubt, about the three miles or so of moorland track up to the farm. And what then? An exchange of barbed words, a cool dismissal? Very likely. She had no guarantee that he would even be there at all. But she had stopped believing in guarantees so long ago and so completely that they played no part whatsoever in her calculations. And this way, at least, she would have made the gesture, the effort, would have held out a hand. She hoped he would take it. She supposed he would not. But, when one stripped away the inessentials, it was the outstretched hand that counted.

She was fortunate at Faxby Station to find a train for Skipton just about to depart. It was her only piece of good luck. At Skipton she had to wait a full and extremely tedious hour for a connection, leaving her bag in the station but carrying the fragile lily bowl with her as she walked up and down the Main Street of the pleasant market town, held now in the state of suspended animation which falls between Christmas and New Year's Eve. She walked because it was slightly more bearable than sitting on a hard bench in the station yard, carrying her prettily wrapped gift in hands which soon grew numb, feeling the harsh dry cold like a knife between her shoulders, her red knitted suit and black wool coat no barrier at all to the wind which stung her and bit her as it spitefully chose. Yet as her discomfort increased, so her determination enlarged with it. It would be easier, of course, to go back. It might even be wiser to return to the Crown where she was needed than to press on to Thornwick where she was not. Yet, having endured ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour of this bitter wind, of these hard cobbles that were already silvering with frost, she could surely survive another ten, another twenty; could hardly, in any case, get much colder. So she imagined. But the little asthmatic train, when it finally came, was in no hurry, pottering here and there among apparently deserted villages, jerking to sudden halts which caused her anguished moments for the lily bowl, its wrapping crumpled now from all her frantic clutching. And ten minutes before Thornwick she heard, against the ill-fitting window, the persistent tapping of rain, soon thickening to snow.

The village was pitch dark, empty, its single street awash. Could anyone be found who might drive her at least part way to the farm? The publican could give her little information beyond his opinion that no sane person would be out on a night like this; an attitude she fully shared. And since it was not his custom to serve alcohol to unaccompanied women she thanked him kindly and went out again into the night. Was there a vicarage, she wondered, and a clergyman to take pity on her? But clergymen, she reminded herself, had a tendency to ask questions, draw conclusions, and to be acquainted with other clergymen who might, in their turn, be acquainted with Miriam. Better not. The blacksmith then? There was a light in the forge, used nowadays as much for the repair of motor vehicles as for the shoeing of horses, and picking her way through the litter of scrap metal in the yard, an old wagon wheel, a tangle of rusty harness, a brand-new petrol pump, she walked in and managed – as she had often done in France – to beg a mug of hot tea in this predominantly male atmosphere and eventually to come to an arrangement with a farmer who, when the sleet had somewhat abated, would be travelling roughly in her direction, leaving her with only the walled track to negotiate on foot.