Distant Choices (58 page)

‘Which Prime Minister?' murmured Oriel.

‘My dear – it hardly seems relevant. Can
you
tell one from the other?'

She shook her head. ‘No. I must admit to finding them tediously similar. You would surely grace the office, Quentin.'

This time he bowed to her. ‘Indeed. Which gives me cause not so much to regret Dora's little instabilities of character – hardly lunacy, Kate – as the sorry fact that she will not have me.'

‘Have you asked her?' Kate and Oriel spoke together.

‘Ladies – Good Heavens.' His expression of shock was, they both felt, quite masterly. ‘Do you imagine, had I done so, that I would be here to tell the tale? Lady Merton would have had me on a convict ship to Australia the morning after. Or, failing that, a few whispers in powerful ears about it suiting her if my legal career came to an end, and – well … Can one doubt it would have ended?'

They were all three laughing easily, companionably, thoroughly enjoying their own wit and one another's, when Susannah suddenly entered the room, her taut appearance taking Kate in particular so much by surprise that she said incautiously, ‘Oh hello, Susannah, we were just talking about foolish marriages …' A remark she realized to be unkind, unwise, probably downright foolish the moment she remembered that Mr Field, Susannah's recently released fiancé, had just announced the date of his marriage, in his own church, to that winsome, apparently very willing Dessborough maiden of just nineteen.

‘Indeed,' said Susannah looking straight at Oriel, it being against her principles either to see or hear or otherwise acknowledge Kate. ‘And you will be attending Mr Field's wedding, Oriel, I suppose.'

‘Yes, Susannah.' Oriel saw no reason to evade the issue. ‘Since he has been kind enough to invite me …'

‘Oh naturally – naturally …' Susannah was, quite simply and quite obviously, beside herself with rage. ‘How could he be other than very grateful to you, Oriel, for using your influence with your friend, the squire, to get him the living? And the wife, of course, which seems to go with it …'

‘Susannah,' said Oriel very firmly. ‘When you broke off your engagement to Mr Field I understood you wished it to be final. Was I mistaken?'

Had life at the vicarage, under Maud, proved more demanding than anticipated? If so, Oriel felt no compulsion to apologize. Nor Susannah, it seemed, to forgive.

‘I am ready to go now, Quentin,' she said to her brother. ‘And I feel it only right to tell you – face to face. Oriel – that I shall not be coming to this house again.'

‘Tell her why,' Kate snapped curtly.

‘Yes,' said Oriel, curt herself in the probable defence of Morag with whom Susannah had clearly quarrelled during the past half hour. ‘You'd better say why.'

‘Indeed I will. But to the proper person – to the head of this household …'

‘You'll leave my husband alone,' Oriel informed her, knowing she ought to have made this statement years ago. ‘Good Heavens, Susannah, you must know
something
about the situation he's in. And until he's resolved it you won't bother him –
I'm
telling you.'

Susannah ignored her. ‘We will have to be off, Quentin. You promised mamma you would call in for at least half an hour on the way back. And Aunt Maud has made a chocolate cake.'

‘Oh – absolutely …' he murmured, allowing her to leave the room and then, as Oriel turned abruptly in his direction, a hand flung out to detain him, he smiled at her, his fingers lightly pressing hers and then letting them go. ‘I know, Oriel. You want me to find out what is the matter with her, and restrain her from annoying your wounded giant. Naturally I shall do the best I can.'

Her wounded giant? Since his return to the Midlands she had spent only two days with him in a town she could not remember, the weather being dark, her attention, her energy, her ingenuity, wholly absorbed by her effort to recreate for him, at his giant demand, the moonlit, Lakeland night when she had first made love to him instead of pleasantly accepting the love he had made so often, so vigorously, to her. How was he now? Gigantic, she thought, as both Kate and Quentin had said. Fighting hard and hungry and winning, she believed, ready to take that Midland line in his own hands and wrestle it to completion.

Only a month to go now, he telegraphed to her. Then two weeks. Then –‘shockingly'it seemed rather than the much tamer ‘suddenly' – there he was, striding into the house late one afternoon, with no warning, no message of triumph to say ‘It‘s done. Wait for me with your hair down. Prepare yourself for Ullswater', and no air of celebration about him either as, throwing his hat and coat and gloves in the direction where somebody might well be waiting to catch them, he ignored completely the woman of his new, moonlit illusions and, freezing her exultant welcome in its tracks, growled out, harsh and loud, the single query, ‘Morag – where the hell is she?'

She came to the foot of the stairs, looking, it seemed to Oriel, like a thin column of ash in the precarious moment of disintegration.

‘Here, father.' And it was the toneless, hopeless answer one might give to an executioner.

‘Then get in
there
,' he said, his hand indicating his study with the ugly, jabbing motion of a hatchet.

‘Yes, father.' And she walked before him, her head bent low, so obviously expecting some part of herself to die that Oriel – had she dared – would have barred the way. She did not dare. Nor did Elspeth, appearing around the corner of the stairs, dare to do more than whisper, ‘What is it? What has she done? Oh Lord – Lord – I've seen him angry before. But not like that.'

‘She's quarrelled with Susannah,' Oriel whispered back. ‘That must be it. Susannah has told him something about her – made some complaint, I expect. Go on upstairs, Elspeth. I'll wait here – and see.'

‘Oh yes – I'll go – don't leave her.'

Elspeth, in her great terror, seemed to melt away, the last thing to disappear being her light voice, eerie with distance. ‘Poor Morag. Don't leave her. Oh Lord – how I hate that Susannah. How I wish …'

But what had Morag done to call forth such anger, to make him leave his Midland line two weeks before completion and stride into his home as if hunting down a mortal enemy? Waiting in the hall, her stomach churning with anxiety, Oriel could not imagine it, even when she heard the study door slam and Morag came running past her, one hand over her mouth, the other pressed to her stomach in the unmistakable pose of nausea.

The girl was going to be sick. ‘Morag …' But then, hearing the snarl that was Garron's voice first giving orders of some kind to the butler and then calling her name, she went into the study, suddenly a room where violence – she could feel it all around her – had been done, and let a moment pass for the good reason that she could think of no words safe enough to speak. A moment more. But then, because his hardness and brutality had such a pit of weariness underneath it, because he looked so like a man, it suddenly struck her, who, having averted one fatal disaster has been driven to something like desperation by another she said ‘Garron,' speaking his name almost as if he needed to be reminded, recalled from the terrible arena in which he seemed, so cruelly, to be struggling. And then, when he did not answer, she almost called out to him, knowing that this matter, at least, could have nothing to do with Morag. ‘Garron – how is the line going?'

‘All right,' he said, and what terrified her all over again was that he hardly seemed to care. ‘Finished near as dammit. They can manage without me now, so I thought I'd come …'

‘What is it with Morag?'

‘Later.' Standing by his desk he bent his head, two letters in his hand, his face closed, his jaw set in a line of cold authority. ‘We'll get to Morag later. I thought I'd come home to settle one or two matters outstanding …'

But his voice, somehow, did not –
could
not? – continue and, shocked into hasty speech herself, she caught sight of his greatcoat flung on the chair back and almost cried out swiftly, her nerve – for reasons which could not be obvious to him, since she could not have named them herself – clearly going.

‘Are you going out again …?'

‘I am. And the girls with me.'

‘Oh – am I –? May I know …?'

‘No. Not yet.'

‘Then …?'

‘
Listen
, first – will you …?'

‘Garron?'

‘Aye. You see these letters?'

And it was with pure horror, with an anguish unknown as yet but
there
, in every pore of her mind nevertheless, that she saw the two letters shake in his hand, saw the steel-hard determination with which he laid them down on the desk before him, and then, when the raw moment had passed, picked them up again without a tremor.

‘These letters …' And there was no tremor in his voice now, either, his face set in lines so rigid that it might have been the mask of – what? Harsh Justice? And its accompanying need for Punishment?

‘Letters?' And even though she had no reason – surely – for guilt or fear, she could hear both these alarmed voices whispering behind her own. Could he hear them too?

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Letters.'

‘Oh –?'

‘Sent to me at the site …' and she realized that although his eyes were fixed on her face he was not looking at her.

‘Sent by whom?'

‘By your friend Susannah.'

Friend? Never. Declared enemy by now, surely? But it was as she drew breath to tell him so, to laugh every Susannah of the world to facile scorn, that the screen upon his vision fell aside, exposing her to the full shock of emotions which her own civilized, so carefully trained nature had, until now, avoided. Pain – his pain – which overwhelmed her, his fury at suffering it, fear – yes,
fear
, she could not mistake it – at the violence such pain and fury might unleash within him unless now – absolutely now – he forced them back within the barriers he had erected around his own heart.

‘Garron …?'

‘Yes,' he said, as if finding it difficult even to acknowledge his own name. And then, blinking hard, ‘Yes, Oriel. Let's get it over with, shall we?'

‘I'm here, Garron.'

And it was the anxiety in her voice for him, the offer, all over again, of her support in his crisis – whatever it may turn out to be – that released a sharp, clearly painful laugh in his chest, which set free his voice again.

‘Aye. You're here. So it won't take long. And let me say now that I don't want it to take long, either. Two letters. You see them? One from Susannah herself. The other a copy of a letter Morag sent to her, three months ago, from your blessed Ullswater. Morag needing advice – doesn't it stand to reason? – as to what to do about … your adultery, Oriel. The railwayman's wife with the squire …? The lady with the gentleman – eh – as soon as her husband's common back was turned – eh? …'

‘No,' she called out, a cry from the heart, knowing what had been done to her; then ‘I don't understand'although in part she did; then ‘Garron – Garron – don't'because she could see it was crucifying him: crucifying her. Filling her mind and her vision with so many swift, disjointed images that she did not see the clenching of his fist until it crashed down on the desk top, scattering his papers and overturning the inkstand like a flow of darkening blood.

A flow, a damage to his carefully guarded, enormously valued property, of which it terrified her, all over again, that he took no notice.

‘Shut your mouth,' he snarled, his own mouth tight enough – surely – to break. ‘
Shut it
. And listen. I haven't long.'

And, his meaning seeping into her like a horrendous flood, she found herself nodding her head. ‘Yes, Garron – yes,' terrified of the violence only a few bare inches, a few fragile minutes away from her, yet wanting to save him from it too, aware – by instinct far more than reason – of the wild pain and grief he would himself endure should his fists smash into her the damage so far taken up by the soulless table. There would be her own pain, her own damage, too.

‘So listen, Oriel. And don't try to defend yourself – or talk your way out of it. I haven't time. There's no point to it, either. You don't think I'd take that bitch Susannah's word for it, do you? Or even Morag's – without making sure she knew what she was talking about? She knows. I've just had her here, standing in front of me – not liking it, but saying it just the same. Everything she saw the day she came back too early from Watermillock and hid in the garden until you'd walked away – arm-in-arm – You and your squire …'

Abruptly his eyes closed on a spasm she knew – somehow – to be part protection, part absolute need to keep his control, images that had once been potent pleasures, now bitterly erupting memories, flashing razor-sharp from his mind to hers. The Lakeland moon. The mattress full of sweet herbs. Her voice, from the windowseat, telling him that this was really their wedding night. His voice, later, warning her in the act of love,
God help you if you try to leave me now. And God help anybody else – man, woman or child – who tries to take you an inch away
. Susannah, who could be sacrificed to his rage with a good will, Francis who could take care of himself. And Morag, who had unburdened what she had seen as adultery to a woman who had used the information – for what? To root the faithless wife out of Garron's house and enter it herself? Oriel knew she could ponder Susannah's motives, and deal with them too, much later. Just as certainly as she knew that now, above all, she must protect Morag, the child who loved her father and who, this past month or two, had started to love his wife.

Morag, who had never realized her mistake about Oriel's supposed adultery, who had never even doubted that it had taken place, but had forgiven her instead.