Distant Choices (5 page)

‘You are fortunate in your daughter,' the Gore Valley told Evangeline. ‘So accomplished – so very pleasant …' So beautiful too, although the Gore Valley, of course, was not given to making statements such as that.

‘Quite the pearl beyond price,' muttered Maud, very tight-lipped, deciding, since every jewel must surely have its flaw, to keep a sharp look-out for this one.

‘Such a comfort,' sighed Letty Saint-Charles, who found little in her own life to comfort her.

To which Evangeline nodded her elegant head and Oriel calmly smiled.

It was her defence against the world, that smile, whenever – as often happened – the world seemed to threaten her. An effective barrier, she had found, between her real self and the constant upheavals of her childhood which seemed to have taken place in removal-vans, post-chaises, and the domestic storms regularly created by Evangeline, with whom no maid or governess ever stayed for long, ‘Mrs Blake'being inclined to ask far too much for far too little wages, so that no matter how sorry one felt for ‘the child' one had really no alternative but to pack and go.

They had packed, therefore, all Oriel's nurses and nannies, one after the other, and taken their leave, sometimes without a word, sometimes with an unleashing of sentiment from which, in order not to recoil, she had hidden herself away behind her smile.

‘My poor child, what is to become of you?'

‘Oh – I am quite well, thank you, nanny.'

And then, having waved a fond farewell, there had been an equally warm welcome when, the next day or the day after, the new nanny – or, as she grew older, the new governess – came bustling through the door. Not always in the best of tempers.

‘I had expected your mother to be here to meet me.'

‘Yes. Of course.' She had learned, at a very young age, to protect her mother's reputation by lying to her mother's domestic staff. ‘And so she would have been had she not been called out so urgently. She asked me to apologize. I have put the kettle on.'

‘
What!
A child of your age playing so near the fire, with hot water. What are you thinking of?'

‘Why, nanny – of making you a cup of tea.'

And, as she spoke the gentle, soothing lies, Oriel – no stranger to fire and hot water at any age – would offer her smile as a token of her good intentions, a guarantee that she would brush her hair and her teeth each night, would keep her pinafores clean, would ask no awkward questions and – although this was not immediately understood – would answer none.

‘Will your mother be long, then?'

‘Oh – I'm afraid I can't say. She has gone to visit a friend who has been taken ill …' So that if Evangeline did not happen to return until very late that night, or not at all, there would be no need for further explanation.

Oriel the peace-maker, the smoother of sharp-edges and awkward corners, no trouble to anyone, who, when she outgrew her final governess, had set off without complaint in the company of strangers, on hazardous coach journeys which had taken her to the school in Carlisle, the school in Penzance, the school in Paris, the school in Florence. Returning in the summer holidays always to a different address. A new house, a new town, new furniture more often than not, always new servants. Sometimes to be greeted by her mother, but just as likely to find only an indifferent parlourmaid waiting to tell her that Evangeline had been called away. By Matthew Stangway, she had presumed, smiling at that too. And when she finally and quite suddenly admitted to herself that he was her father the shock had been so slight that she realized she had known it all along.

‘Mr Stangway is our special friend,' Evangeline had always told her. ‘Should we find ourselves in any little difficulty it is to him we should turn. So comforting.'

‘Yes, mamma.'

‘It is essential, you know, my love, that one should have a measure of gentlemanly protection. Women of our sort, after all, were not created to be self-reliant. And since your dear father is no longer here to be relied upon, then he would surely have wished us to be grateful to Mr Stangway …?'

‘Of course, mamma.'

No more had ever been said, maintaining a fiction which had become the natural fabric of Oriel's life, an essential part of the shell, glossy and smooth as pearl on the outside, somewhat sharper-textured within, which had, from a very young age, enclosed her. So that she had found nothing incongruous in the lectures her mother regularly gave her on the subjects of good conduct, virtue, and morality.

‘One must not only be good and clever, my love,' Evangeline told her, ‘one must be
seen
to be so. In fact, one must be seen to be a great deal better and a great deal brighter than anybody else. An earl's daughter, perhaps, can afford to be somewhat stupid or peevish or to have her little whims – can even afford a little misdemeanour every so often. But when one is not quite the daughter of an earl … Well then – one has to be very, very good sometimes – well nigh perfect, in fact, to be thought even good enough. One has to positively shine like a star – alas – if one wishes to be seen at all. One has to run rather fast, in fact, in order not to stand still, if one happens to lack – well – you know, darling – rank, and position, and bundles of money in the bank. Or the bank itself, of course, which would be even better.
Do
remember that.'

She had remembered.

‘And one more thing, my darling …' Evangeline's eyes had been cool and clear, her voice infinitely serene. ‘One must speak the truth, of course. Everybody knows that. Just as everybody knows there are some things of which one does not speak at all. A lady never tells her age, for instance, nor expresses any particular opinion about anything controversial. Not in public, at any rate, she does not. Therefore offending no one. Just as one offers no details of one's private life –
so
vulgar – and certainly never enquires such details of others. One keeps one's privacy strictly where it belongs – to oneself. It is not telling lies. Just good manners. You do see …?'

‘I see, mamma.'

She had remembered that too.

‘Mrs Blake is much afflicted with the migraine,' she had told a new and particularly sharp-eyed parlourmaid during those uneasy weeks after Eva Stangway's death when her bereaved husband had seemed in no haste to make firm promises about taking another bride.

‘My mother is most unwell,' she had told Matthew Stangway himself when he had called in answer to the third or fourth letter Evangeline had artfully penned him. And, leading him to the darkened bedchamber, the anguished bedside, she had left him to endure the reproaches of a woman who, while accusing him in fading tones of ruining her, had certainly made up her mind to ruin him should he fail to see the error of his ways.

‘You
are
going to marry me, Matthew?'

‘Am I, Evangeline?'

Oriel had tiptoed away, not caring to hear more, never doubting for a moment that her mother would prevail. And the next morning the migraine was gone, Evangeline weakened rather becomingly by pain but sitting up in bed to partake, quite heartily, of her tea and toast nevertheless.

‘Oriel darling, you will hardly believe it, but our dear, old Mr Stangway has asked me to think about being his wife …'

‘And shall you accept him, mamma?'

Evangeline, her eyes gleaming, her mouth lifting at its corners with her purring smile, had savoured the question at her leisure. As Oriel had known she would.

‘Ah well – who knows? We have been acquainted for so long and I suppose the poor man is lonely, now, in that positive palace of a house with his cranky old sister. Perhaps it would be a kindness.'

‘Very likely, mamma.'

‘Oh – do you think so? It would mean moving north, of course.'

‘We have moved so many times, mamma.'

‘Indeed. But only to pleasant places. Whereas Hepplefield …' She shuddered. ‘And I suppose it would have to be Hepplefield, to begin with. Such a grim, grey place, you cannot imagine. Full of grey-minded people too, who would feel obliged to burn me at the social stake if I dared to marry him before his first year of mourning is through. Thank goodness it is
he
who has suffered the bereavement, not
I
, since women are expected to mourn for so much longer. Two years in black and then another year in lavender. Quite horrid. So I fear we will have to put up with a small house in Hepplefield, my dear, for a while before the wedding. Quite ghastly. Although Mr Stangway's village of High Grange is rather delightful …'

Oriel had not found it so. Not really a village at all, in her eyes, with the dark smudge of industrial Hepplefield visibly looming in the distance and Low Grange Colliery only just hidden by a screen of low hills and wide-spreading chestnut trees. The sky, to the south, pierced by a growing line of factory chimneys and stained an unhealthy, sulphurous yellow by the smoke they generated so that even on days of sun and high white cloud to the north – beyond the grouse moors of Lord and Lady Merton – the direction of Hepplefield, would seem a foggy day.

‘Oh dear,' Evangeline had murmured. ‘But then – I suppose this is the price one pays for progress. And all that comes with it. But the garden is just as I remember it – thank heaven the wall is so very high. Only look at the peacocks on the lawn. And the house is lovely. Well – Oriel, darling – isn't it?'

Uncomfortable, Oriel thought, on the occasion of her first visit – some few weeks before her mother's wedding – when, in her best ice-blue silk with its watered-silk sash and ribbons, she had sat, a restrained guest, in her father's drawing-room, facing the hostility of his sisters; Miss Maud Stangway who, she quickly guessed, would have preferred death by torment to speaking one true word of welcome; and Mrs Saint-Charles, ‘Miss Letty'the servants still called her, who talked of nothing but the brilliance, the virtues, the golden prospects of her own eldest son.

A fussy, faded, fidgety little woman, Oriel had judged ‘Miss Letty', her flowered mousseline dress several shades too light for her and several sizes too big, her thin hair arranged, around her ageing countenance, in a brave attempt at the girlish ringlets of thirty years ago, her expression absent, not quite paying attention to anything one said to her until suddenly, her ears catching the sound they had been straining for, she clasped her hands ecstatically together and cried out, ‘Here is Quentin – my son.' As if he had been the sole purpose of their visit, the one, indeed the only person who could possibly be thought worth waiting for.

To his mother, Letty Saint-Charles, disappointed in her life and with little faith in her husband, her son Quentin was that person, her eyes very clearly seeing no one else from the moment he entered the room, her ears rejecting every voice but his, her mind aware of nothing but the impression he was creating. While even the sharp, shrewd eyes of his aunt, Miss Maud Stangway, were observed to be glowing with a satisfaction deep enough to merit the name of pride.

‘This is
Quentin
,' said Letty breathlessly, meaning ‘
My
Quentin. My hope for the future. My pride and joy.'

‘My first nephew,' said Maud, meaning just as clearly ‘The eldest male of the Stangway line, after Matthew who will not live forever. And after Letty's husband, who doesn't count. The
head
of the family, therefore, in due course, if I have
my
way.' And she had smiled, very far from pleasantly, first at Evangeline who had long passed her final hope of bearing a son, and then at Oriel, the girl-child it could not possibly be worth her brother Matthew's while to publicly acknowledge.

So this was Quentin.

Evangeline had offered a languid hand. ‘Delighted – charmed – dear Quentin.
So
like your father …'

‘Like Rupert? Oh no – I hardly think
that
…' cried Letty in anguish.

‘Possibly,' Maud said crisply. ‘But with the Stangway nature …'

‘Not the name, though,' murmured Evangeline so faintly, in such the barest whisper that, unless one particularly wished to do so, one had no need to hear.

‘How do you do, Mr Saint-Charles?' Oriel had quickly enquired, her voice expertly covering her mother's in case anyone
did
feel obliged to take up the challenge.

‘How do you do, Miss Blake.' The voice was neutral and restrained, the handclasp brief and no warmer than politeness demanded, the eyes clear-sighted, she felt no doubt, but of a colour too nondescript – or too subtle, perhaps – to be remembered. Not a handsome young man by any standards having, indeed, the same elongated, over-bred greyhound look as the Reverend Saint-Charles, his father, and the four or five of his brothers she had already met. Although, unlike them, he was immaculate in every detail of his dress, a ‘laundress's miracle'she knew Evangeline would call him, of starched white linen and dark-grey, vaguely clerical broadcloth.

Did he intend, perhaps, to replace his reverend and somewhat ineffective father at the vicarage? But his ardent mother soon dispelled any notion of that.

‘You will have heard,' she told Evangeline, ‘of his honours degree from Cambridge and of all the high opinions – truly golden opinions – his tutors had of him? Yes, I know Matthew will have told you all about it. And of the letters I had, from Cambridge, telling me how they expect great things of him in the future – in absolutely any direction he might choose to apply himself. Such a
true
scholar, they said. A real academic yet with a flair for such things as mathematics and business – which so rarely go together …'

‘Mother …' Had Quentin Saint-Charles, in his attempt to restrain his parent, noticed the amusement in Evangeline? Or did he, perhaps, feel a shade uncomfortable about accepting Letty's adoration in the presence of his brothers and sisters who, although sitting nearby, were as far removed from her attention as if they had been in Timbuctoo?