Distant Choices (10 page)

‘There. That's better.'

Not beautiful, perhaps. But, more distinctly than ever, could be heard that statement of identity.
Kate
. No other woman in the room tonight would look like her.

‘Kate …?'

But, staring at herself in Oriel's long mirror Kate did not move, wholly intent upon her own reflection, her slanting eyes black in the candlelight, her pointed, finely-carved face a warm bronze against the vivid contrast of scarlet and white, her head, with its high-crowned ebony hair that of a young and very fragile Egyptian Pharaoh, disturbingly neither entirely female nor male.

‘I think,' she said, as drowsily as a sleepwalker, ‘that I look – quite nice …'

‘Yes, Kate. You look quite nice.'

Dear little sister, ‘nice'is not the word for you. Nor ‘little'either, in your bold, bright scarlet. If we have created your illusion now – together – then I am happy for you. And happy for me, if I have found a real use for all my precious, drawing-room talents at last. Dear sister.

The words of her mind only, quickly suppressed as Kate swung around and caught her hands in a grip fierce enough to hurt.

‘Why?'

And her voice, like her hot, dry hands, seemed explosive with an emotion from which Oriel instantly retreated into the defence of laughter.

‘Good heavens, Kate, such a fuss about a few yards of satin …'

‘Why. Oriel?'

‘Whatever do you mean?'

‘I mean you never wore scarlet in your life – did you? I mean you didn't just
have
this sash and these firefly pins and ribbons lying in a drawer. I mean you went down to Hepplefield behind your mother's back …'

‘Kate – you really ought to know me better than that.
Me
– the very soul of obedience …'

‘… and bought them with your pin-money, which
means
you must have done without something yourself, since I know they don't give you much …'

‘Yes, indeed. Such a sacrifice.' Oriel's voice was light, her eyes deliberately teasing, although behind them she was well aware of the sting of tears. ‘I went without my dinner for a fortnight. Don't you see I am half-starved?'

But the starvation was in Kate, the fierce hunger for affection, a need frozen by her father, unnoticed perhaps by her mother, which came pouring out of her now like a hiss of anguish.

‘Don't
you
see, Oriel – don't you – that no one has ever taken trouble before …' And because she was on the very brink of saying ‘Oriel, I love you', Oriel smiled, shook her head, clicked her tongue and scuttled once again – as a matter of some urgency this time – into laughter.

‘What nonsense. Aunt Maud is always troubling you.'

‘I'll never forget this, Oriel. I never will.'

Dear little sister, little again now in your need to be loved. Very small in your fear that because these first giants in your life, your father – and mine – and his dry sister, have never loved you, that it means you are not fit to be loved at all. That because they have rejected you then the whole world must follow suit. I know. I understand. But – just the same – don't leave yourself so undefended, don't open yourself so wide at the first touch. Don't wear your heart on your sleeve like this – dear little sister – or somebody will surely break it. I know. Believe me. I understand.

‘What a goose you are, Kate,' she lightly said.

They went down to the drawing-room together, Oriel safely intact inside her fine, pale shell, Kate's crackling excitement converting itself into the entirely natural and wholesome glow of a young woman about to make an entrance and knowing she is looking her best. Kate. Not Eva Kessler's daughter, nor that awkward, ungrateful thorn in the side of ‘poor, long-suffering Maud'. But Kate Stangway, at ease in her own skin at last.

A revelation.

‘My word,' murmured Evangeline. ‘Busy little hands
have
been at work, I see. Kate dear – is it really you? Or one of those illusions we were speaking of?'

‘Very nice,' said Matthew Stangway going through the motions of looking them both over without seeing either, even when Kate stepped directly in front of him in her swirl of scarlet and snow-white and made him a low curtsey.

‘What is the matter?' he demanded sharply, not expecting, one felt, that it could be anything pleasant.

‘Just – good evening, father.'

Her voice was bright and perfectly steady, but she was really crying out to him ‘Look at me, father. Notice me.' Was she even asking him to love her? Oriel thought so.

‘Good evening, Kate,' he said.

She smiled, nodded, and moved on.

‘Good evening, Aunt Maud.' And this time the tilt of her high-piled, ebony and scarlet head was plainly enquiring ‘And what have
you
to say to me?'

‘Just remember what I told you,' snapped Maud; a token reprimand.

‘What was that, Aunt Maud?'

‘Not to disgrace yourself again by eating cheese. No lady ever does so in public. And no game either. It lingers on the breath.'

Once again Kate smiled, nodded, and moved on.

‘Hello, Aunt Letty.'

‘Oh – Kate.' Letty, in bunchy chiffon with lace frills and a great many lace-edged bows, gave a startled little jump, rather as if Kate had bitten her. ‘You have done your hair differently, dear, haven't you?'

‘I have, Aunt Letty. Don't you positively adore it?' Letty blinked, startled once more. ‘Yes – yes, dear. Indeed. Very nice. Very – well …' ‘Foreign' was the word she was searching for, ‘strange' the word which sprang into her mind. Followed by ‘odd', like Eva, who had had some foreign blood in her somewhere, one seemed to remember. ‘Is it not rather too
straight
, dear?' she murmured feebly, her own concept of beauty being the pretty pink and white of her own girlhood.

‘I am not the curly kind, Aunt Letty.'

‘Oh – I see –' Had Kate said something rude? Without at all knowing why, Letty felt sure she had. Ought she, perhaps, to issue a reprimand? Oh dear – how difficult it all was. But then, miraculously, as the door opened again to admit Quentin, her spirits lifted to a height where none of it – whatever it was – could possibly matter. ‘Quentin –
dearest
– we have been waiting for you.'

‘With bated breath,' murmured Evangeline.

‘Quite so,' said Kate and, carefully picking up her skirts she very deliberately moved her bold scarlet satin, her firefly studded head,
herself
, as far away from him as she possibly could.

Little sister, learn to bend, as I do. Learn to sway with every wind. Because what happens to winds? They blow themselves out, don't they? And then – if you're not brittle and broken – you can get up again. To sway with the next one. And the one after. Like me.

But as the guests began to arrive, Oriel's tasks were too many and various to allow her to keep watch on Kate. Mr Morgan de Hay, the railway engineer, taking it for granted during the half hour before the announcement of dinner that her attention belonged entirely to him. Miss Blake, he believed, would be most anxious to hear his views on industrial architecture? She heard them. ‘
Do
please go on,' she breathed, knowing there was every likelihood of it, her eyes wandering, without appearing to do so, to see if her mother needed help with Lord Merton who had turned out to be an unremarkable little man with the same, washed-out, well-bred greyhound look as Letty's husband, the Revd Rupert Saint-Charles. Except that his lordship, of course, was very rich and very powerful and had the added fascination of being thought somewhat too rakish and high-living to suit the taste of Queen Victoria's young, and rather pious, husband.

‘The girl was right as ninepence,' Oriel heard him braying to Evangeline –
‘the girl'
she assumed being England's reigning queen – ‘until she got herself mixed up with the Coburgs. Jolly little thing, she used to be, just like her royal uncles – God rest the scoundrels – until Albert the Good came along and turned the whole palace into something between a chapel and a nursery. Never go to court myself nowadays, Mrs Stangway, if I can help it …'

Unless, of course, the good Albert no longer cared to invite him?

He was telling the story of his little ‘set-to' with the Prince Consort for the fourth time when dinner was announced and, giving his puny arm to Evangeline, he looked up at her with weak-sighted admiration, reading clearly in her eyes – Oriel noticed – the message that he was not really the tedious, undersized man most people took him for, but a glowing young Adonis, eight feet tall at the least.

‘Shall we go in?'

It was the signal to take one's partners, Matthew giving his weary arm to Mrs Morgan de Hay who seemed also to be in a state of excitement about her husband's industrial expertise.

‘Oh – Kate?' said Quentin, detaching himself from the circle of railway directors with whom, in a serious tone, he had been discussing only the most serious of issues. Money, thought Oriel, and the strategy, the manipulations, the sheer cunning required to make it; and have his share of it too. And now he had remembered the girl he had long thought of as a financial foundation on which to build.

‘Kate – are you coming?'

She came, placed her hand on his immaculate sleeve, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her as if everything that animated them had been, most efficiently, snuffed out. Small again, abrupt and awkward, as she would be if she became Kate Saint-Charles.

They went in.

Taking her seat between the famous Mr de Hay and the apparently
in
famous Mr Garron Keith – if the rumours concerning his troublesome gangs of labourers were anything to go by – Oriel expected neither pain nor pleasure, Mr de Hay being no more self-important, finicky, fond of the sound of his own voice and dazzled by his own wit, than any of the other gentlemen she was used to meeting in ‘good society'. While Mr Keith, the contractor, although not really a gentleman at all, having risen, one heard, from the ranks of those same wild hordes of navvies, those vagabond labourers presently terrorizing the neighbourhood of Merton Ridge, had nevertheless behaved quite well so far, having made an adequate show, in the drawing-room, of listening to Susannah Saint-Charles' timid enthusiasms for her parish charities and the restoration fund for her father's church organ, subjects which – it had been clear at least to Oriel – could not possibly interest him.

A very large man, Mr Keith, both in his voice and in his dress, his evening clothes, she judged, having cost more than those of any other man at the table – including Lord Merton, who might well have inherited his along with his ancestral acres – not only in the amount of cloth needed to cover his exceedingly broad shoulders but in its quality, the lace-edged profusion of his shirt-frill and the diamond pin it flamboyantly sported, the jewels in his cuff-links, the weight of his gold watch chain and the various charms and medallions – also in massive gold – hanging from it. A display of jewellery, a
use
of it, in fact, as a deliberate announcement of wealth and status which she had seen before only in a gipsy, or – now that she came to think of it – in the burly, strapping navvymen one met nowadays making their way towards the site of the Merton Ridge Tunnel. Navvymen ‘on the tramp' someone had told her, coming on foot from their last employment, which may have been any hundred of miles away, sleeping rough in hedges and ditches, living off the land on what they could poach or beg or steal, yet arriving at Merton, nevertheless, shabbily resplendent in scarlet velveteen jackets, pale moleskin trousers, a jaunty cock's feather in every hat-band, a dangle of lucky charms in various shiny metals gleaming on the front of every checked or flowered or otherwise gaily patterned shirt.

And, like them, Mr Keith – beneath his costly black broadcloth and his fancy shirt-frill – seemed a man well able to endure extremes of heat and cold, whose shrewd brown eyes did not dazzle in the sun, whose head, with its tight chestnut curls, did not ache, nor worry overmuch – she decided – about anything beyond the amassing of his own fortune, the satisfaction of his own pleasures, the arranging of his public and private affairs so that
his
will – and his only – should be done.

Which – in all fairness she felt bound to admit – was an aim shared in full by Mr de Hay, by Matthew Stangway, by Quentin Saint-Charles, by all men, in a man's world, who saw every reason to have their way, and ample means of getting it.

The meal began, Susannah talking brightly of nothing at all as ‘etiquette'demanded, Mr Keith making non-committal grunts in her direction during the soup, while even through a liberal helping of salmon he allowed his official partner to talk
at
him without offering her any greater offence than silence. Yet here, it seemed, his good manners ended and, once his place had been heaped with more beef olives than Oriel believed the Stangway butler had ever before served to one person, his glass refilled with claret, he suddenly turned his back on Susannah's timid efforts to entertain him and said, loudly enough to startle Mr de Hay who was toying absently with a lobster cutlet, ‘And how do you pass your time, Miss Blake?'

She was startled too, but the words came automatically, rising at once from the store of correct social formulas she had learned to suit every occasion. ‘Very pleasantly, Mr Keith.' No more should have been necessary to remind him of one of Society's most essential and elegant commands. One did not indulge in general conversation at the dinner-table, her duty, therefore, being exclusively to Mr de Hay, Mr Keith's to the lady he had brought in with him.

Mr Keith did not care to be reminded.

‘So what pleases you, Miss Blake?'

‘A great many things.' She had made her voice rather cool, as cool, in fact – remembering her mother's warnings – as she dared. He took no notice. Nor did he seem aware, or did not wish to be aware, of Mr de Hay's stare of pained surprise, or the very evident alarm in Susannah who had undergone so strict a training in the rules of ‘etiquette'that she had not even imagined they could be broken.