Distant Choices (51 page)

Her face, her
mask
of mature, perceptive, wholly adult amusement did not falter. ‘No, father. I think I have done him quite enough harm already.'

‘There is the child, of course …?' He was merely throwing a suggestion into the air.

Neatly she caught it. ‘Ah – yes. But I have done her no harm, have I, other than leave her in peace, which some people – Aunt Maud, for instance, and all our dear Mertons – must consider a positive benefit. If that is the only good thing I have done I wouldn't want to spoil it. Would I?'

As he had bowed with his empty, disdainful courtesy to Oriel, so now he bowed to Kate. ‘My dear, it is a very long time since I hazarded even a guess as to what you might want to do. And all I feel in any way entitled to ask now is if you know yourself. You are under no obligation, of course, to answer.'

She smiled beautifully, brilliantly, bestowing upon him a gala performance. ‘I'll answer gladly, father. So far as Francis is concerned what I would really like – what I feel to be only right and proper – is to find some means of setting him free.'

‘You mean divorce?'

‘I don't know. Quentin says it is atrociously expensive and only men can do it. So if Francis thinks it wrong to waste so much of the Kessler money which he sees – Quentin says – as really belonging to his daughter – which seems reasonable enough to me – then that will be the end of it. But one can feel free, you know, without getting a law passed to say so … I believe I do.'

‘You are not short of money yourself, then, Kate?'

Once more her brilliant, artful smile flashed out at him. ‘I eat. I pay my rent. I dress – rather well – sometimes I travel. Francis pays me a small allowance through Quentin – as much as he has been able to afford up to now. And, from time to time, I even
earn
– think of that. Not a fortune, of course. More of a pittance, in fact. But fun, sometimes, more or less. The Kesslers in Austria and Italy and France have helped, very kindly, to find me employment. Quentin put me in touch with them. But I think you know all this – don't you?'

‘Through our excellent Quentin? Some of it – yes. Enough to know you have not suffered from starvation.'

She did not ask him, although her clever, supple face conveyed the question with wit and sparkle, what he would have done about it if she had.

‘Quite so. May I ask if your thoughts of freedom are in any way due to your having met some other man you would like to marry?'

She nodded, one swordsman to another. ‘You may ask, father. And I expect you will be relieved to hear that no, I have not met some unscrupulous foreign adventurer who might turn up here any day now – or not a day later than my twenty-fifth birthday to grab what he can and then leave me coughing myself to death in a cheap lodging-house somewhere while he spends it on another woman …'

‘Yes,' he said calmly. ‘I am very relieved to hear that, Kate. Does it mean you are less romantic than you were?'

‘I believe so. It also means that my acquaintance with cheap lodging-houses – and I do have such an acquaintance – is not one I should care to repeat. It has made me cautious.'

‘And clever, I think.'

‘Possibly. Like you, father, perhaps.'

‘No – no. Your energy, my dear, your urgencies, the many things that drive you, exceed by far anything there has ever been in me. You are hungrier, Kate, than I am. So was your mother. And I am not speaking of bodily hunger. If you have found the right channel for your appetite then I wish you well, although I could not, at any time, have directed you.'

He looked at them both for a moment in a silence neither of them attempted to fill and then, glancing through the window, he said, as if he had caught sight of a clock in the distance, ‘I must be off now.'

They did not ask where, although his destination, on such a day, was hard to imagine.

‘You do know, of course,' he said from the doorway, ‘that you are sisters?'

‘Yes, father,' said Kate.

He glanced enquiringly at Oriel. ‘Yes,' she answered. ‘We
are
sisters. I am so glad.'

The door closed behind him.

‘Where can he be going?' she wondered. ‘It looks like rain out there.'

‘I don't know.' Kate was frowning. ‘How odd – that is the first conversation I have ever had with him. The first one in my twenty-five years. And if he were not my father what I would be thinking now is what an interesting man.'

Where was he going? A moment later they saw him, through the window, a heavy, caped greatcoat around his shoulders, walking in the direction of the orchard, bare now with January yet planted densely enough to provide a brief cover for anyone who did not wish to be seen, quite at once, from the house and called back again by Maud to bask in the pity of those ‘friends and neighbours' who, Maud having been generous with the sherry and the Madeira were beginning already to voice, if only in whispers, their grudges against Evangeline, and to take up all the misdemeanours of her past, real or invented, which
of course
they would never have dreamed of mentioning, except that now, perhaps, as things had turned out, it might make Matthew feel better to know.

Sitting on a pile of logs it amused him to wonder what those ‘friends'would make of it if he told them he knew already, had always known, and that now – without her – there was nothing he cared to know any longer, about anything.

It was as simple as that. Love did not even seem to be involved in it. Although he had fallen in love with her, in his season, he well remembered it. Madly in love, until he had grown, not tired of her, but used to her, occasionally enraged, often amused, but still bound to her as if – he understood it now – they had been members, he and she – he and she only – of a slightly different species to the rest.

Her daughter, beyond the pale hair and eyes, the cool grace, did not resemble her and even if she had he was too dry now, too withered, to inflict himself upon her. A young Evangeline would not have tolerated him in any case and he had no use whatsoever for the pity he knew himself quite clever enough to stir in the heart of
his
daughter, Oriel. While as for Kate, no pity there, why should there be? Amusement, perhaps, had he felt even faintly inclined for it. He did not.

Inclined for nothing, in fact, but to sit in the chill wind of a January afternoon beneath naked trees which would bear fruit six months from now, and again a year after that, bustling on from season to season with a sense of right and purpose he found intolerable. They knew their place in the world, these trees, like his daughters, one who was grieving now but would recover, one who was growing surprisingly strong and would probably – he feared – make a great deal of noise about it. He did not feel inclined to tolerate that either.

The truth was that it did not really interest him. as nothing else had interested him for a very long time that had not been recounted to him by Evangeline, the world outside himself, from which he preferred to keep his distance, being translated for him daily and exclusively by her. Evangeline, his window on the world, his salvation – how she would have laughed at that – his final source of whatever it was – he saw no point in trying to name it – which made it worth his while to separate one day from another.

They would all be the same now, those days, those years, without her. Identical. Tedious. Quite intolerable. And sitting there, in the cold wind, he grew angry with her, for a while, because she had failed to be eternal, had not even managed – at the very least – to live until he was gone.

He heard Maud call him from the house. His sister who still wanted so much, preparing now to devote herself entirely to him, in order to serve, as he well knew, her own best interests. Not that he blamed her. He was simply not inclined to put up with it. And Letty, demanding patience he did not possess. And Letty's children, from whom Evangeline had always screened him so effectively. He could not bring himself to care, had never cared, whether Susannah married her curate or not, whether Quentin remembered to visit his mother, whether or not Constantia had another baby for whom, if she did, he felt no wish whatsoever to prepare a future.

The word ‘future'itself deeply offended him.

‘Matthew – where are you? People are leaving and want to say goodbye – naturally …'

As it was right and proper, Maud's voice implied, that they should.

‘Here Maud,' he called, standing up and waving a cheerful hand. ‘Just coming …' She waved back – or did she beckon? – and then, the wind disturbing her neat hair and skirts, disappeared inside. Evangeline had never liked the wind either he thought as he took the pistol from his greatcoat pocket, looked at it for a while and then, realizing most accurately the havoc his death would cause, raised it to his head, smiled, and fired a shot.

A month later, on a sharp-textured February morning, Francis Ashington was considerably disconcerted to find Oriel alone in her Ullswater garden, a dark woollen shawl thrown gipsy-fashion around her shoulders, half a dozen kittens waltzing in time to the movement of her black skirts as she hurried through her acre of snowdrops and faint purple and gold hints of early crocus to meet him, her hands outstretched, her mouth smiling in a welcome that had a measure of surprise in it nevertheless.

He had come here by arrangement to meet Kate who, having so far avoided any discussion with him beyond the essential details of getting her father buried, had at last agreed to see him in private for an hour or two at Ullswater. She had expressed herself all eagerness to see Oriel's cottage. He was to be a guest at Lowther Castle. A simple matter, therefore, to walk over from Askham to Oriel's carefully nurtured acre of fellside, arriving in good time on the appointed morning to be told that Kate was not there.

‘Francis, I am so sorry, but she has gone back to France quite urgently – for several days, I think. Surely she must have let you know?'

Smiling, although he felt very, very far from pleased, he shook his head. And then, his sense of fair play reasserting itself, he smiled again, ruefully but with more warmth.

‘It occurs to me she may have done. I left Dessborough a day or so before I intended – ten days, in fact. And my housekeeper may not have remembered to send my letters on.'

Or known, in fact, just where to send them, since having told the good woman he was bound for Carlisle, he had only remained there overnight, spending the past ten days tramping the Roman Wall built by the Caesars in a time he could well imagine, to seal off their peaceful, profitable English colony from the marauding northern tribesmen they either could not, or did not think it worth their while to conquer. Ten days in which he had sought to exhaust himself, eating sparsely, drinking only natural running water, sleeping on the hard ground again as he had done so often in India, deliberately risking exposure to the biting North wind of the Picts and Scots, rushing towards him over those bare hillsides with the same snarling savagery, the same lethal intent to freeze his blood, or drink it, as the Scottish tribes had shown, year in year out, every fighting season, to the Romans.

How those Roman officers brought up in the sun and civilization of Italy, must have detested this barbaric northern posting. As British officers, in his day, had rarely seen cause for celebration on being sent to the North West Frontier of India. But he had survived that frontier in the same way, he supposed, that had he been a young Roman of good family doing his military service, he would have survived this one. Except that he would probably have fallen in love with some British girl who spoke only a few halting words of Latin or Greek, with a Druid for an uncle, a tribal chieftain for a father, her brothers in league with the Scots and ready to let them through the wall and cut
his
throat at the earliest opportunity.

Such a love, he felt – having come to terms long ago with his own restless nature – would have been an essential joyful torment in such a situation and he had still been contemplating it with wry amusement at the George in Penrith where he had gone to shave and scrub himself clean – having registered in a false name to avoid any explanations of his vagabond condition – before presenting himself to the civilized world again.

And now Kate's message to him cancelling their meeting was probably in Carlisle, she was in France, and he in a garden full of snowdrops above Lake Ullswater with a woman he had once very definitely wished to make his wife.

It would not do, of course.

‘Never mind,' he said. ‘I'll just stroll back to Askham – such a pleasant morning.' But the beautiful, desirable, enticingly solitary woman would not hear of it. Yes, she was alone but seemed neither surprised nor alarmed about it. Her husband, who had hurried home to claim her share of the Stangway inheritance, had gone abroad again. Her husband's son was away somewhere on a tour of her husband's construction sites. Her husband's daughters, who had indeed accompanied her to Ullswater, had been staying with friends for a day or two on the other side of the lake at Watermillock and would not be back until late that afternoon. Sometime after tea she rather expected. But what on earth did any of that matter?

‘Do please come in, Francis, or I shall feel quite insulted.' And bending his head slightly he entered a room fragrant with pot pourri and beeswax, a wooden floor black with age and gleaming with polish covered by fringed, floral rugs in subtle pinks and sharp apple greens, armchairs and footstools in the same colours drawn up to a log fire admiring its own reflection in the richly burnished copper of coal buckets and pokers, toasting fork and fender. Lamps, copper-based and pink-shaded, were burning to dispel the February gloom, one on a gate-legged table standing in a low alcove papered with a design of water-lilies, the other beside a sofa scattered with plump velvet cushions in rich colours, not one of them matching yet all of them in pleasant accord, while every available surface held its wide-brimmed china bowl – each one of a different design, a different colour, a different nation, all of them in harmony – into which she had crumpled the dried petals of roses and lavender, larkspur, jasmine, clove-scented pinks, lily of the valley, and bound them together with orris root to make her pot pourri.