Flint and Roses (66 page)

‘Liam—good heavens! By the look of it you didn't win.

‘'Course I did, and there were
three
of them—two Hobhouses and a Rawnsley—that's why I look so beat. But I smashed them all right—Headmaster wouldn't have sent me home otherwise.'

‘And what do the Hobhouses look like?'

‘Not pretty. But they weren't pretty before.'

‘Neither are you.'

But in a way he was, a big-boned, lanky boy as black as any woodland gipsy, a heavy, overcrowded face lightened by the Adair smile, the whip of Adair insolence and humour that would make him one day a man as attractive and possibly as reckless as his father.

‘Liam—your coat's in ribbons. Did you get a thrashing today?'

‘'Course I did. The big Hobhouses came looking for me, after I'd smashed their brothers, so I smashed them too—or very nearly. Well, not
very
nearly, but it wasn't as easy as they thought it would be. And then when Mr. Blamires came to stop it, and I wouldn't stop—because whatever he says they weren't killing me—he gave me a flogging for good measure. So what I want to know is, can I stay for tea, because my dad's at home this afternoon, and if he catches me he'll give me another.'

And, understanding that three floggings in one day were more than enough for any man, I fed him, darned his coat, and, when he believed the coast would be clear, sent him home.

‘Liam—why do you fight so much?'

I don't know. It's what I do, that's all.'

I won't have him across my threshold,' Celia told me. ‘And my mother knows it. I'm sorry, but there are limits to what one can endure. I have enough with my own child to look after, and my own home to run. I hope you had them scour your kitchen floor with lime after he brought those frogs in—and how you can laugh about it, Faith, I'll never know. It would have made me ill.'

But so many things made Celia ill—so many things had always done so—that I paid little attention until my mother pointed out that she was indeed taking a turn for the worse.

‘My dear, she never goes out. She sits in that house and watches them polish it, and it can't be right. If I've invited her once I've invited her a hundred times, not just to Blenheim Lane but to teas and concerts and trips to Leeds, and there's always a reason, at the last moment, why it can't be done. She's not well, or Grace is not well or her housemaid has just given notice—she's had eight girls this year, Faith, and not one of them lasted a month. I declare, I go into her house feeling something a little less than my age and come out feeling a hundred. And Hannah, of course, is far from pleased about it, which is only to be expected since it is bound to effect Jonas, although she does no good at all by lecturing Celia so often and telling her she is letting him down. Of course she is letting him down—one is obliged to admit it—but there is no need to say so quite so often, and so strongly. If it did any good I might not object, but in fact it makes her worse. Well, I never expected to say it, but sometimes I feel sorry for Jonas. There are to be no more children, you know. Strictly between ourselves, Jonas consulted Dr. Blackstone and then told Celia that he could not risk her life again, so that is the end of it. Not that Celia will care about that, although I cannot answer for Jonas, since after all he is a man—'

But Celia, when I finally persuaded her to refer to the matter,
did
care, not for the end of her physical relationship with Jonas, which she had always found somewhat inexplicable in any case, but because any kind of domestic failure troubled her, reminding her too closely, perhaps, of a childhood where she had never been placed higher than third. Not only the sex act, it seemed, was difficult for Celia to understand, but life itself, the injustice of a world in which she had obeyed all the rules, and yet had not succeeded in making herself valued. She was the only one of my father's children who had not only obeyed his teaching but had believed in it, had pinned her faith and her heart's hope on the security it had offered. He had told her that, if she did certain things and avoided others she would be happy. She had done these things—had made herself a model housekeeper, a domestic angel, devoted herself entirely to hearth and home, had safeguarded her reputation, had never made herself conspicuous, had been innocent, dependent, respectable—yet somehow the formula had not worked. She was not happy, was listless, confused, uneasy. She had done nothing wrong. My father, should he return from the grave, could only approve of her, could only shudder at his, frivolous daughter Faith—who had even been scandalous, and got away with it, for a month or two—his strong-minded daughter Prudence, who had flaunted every one of his decrees, laughed in the face of his known intentions. Yet we were well and strong, and she was not. It was not fair.

‘Do spend a little more time with her, Faith dear,' my mother asked, and listening to her through those dreary afternoons when I, setting out to cheer her, came away with my own spirits depressed, I understood clearly that after the solitary triumph of her marriage—of beating every one of us, even Caroline, down the aisle—nothing else had lived up to her expectations.

‘It's this house that makes me ill,' she said. ‘It is far too small and dark—I can hardly see into the corners. If we could move to Cullingford Green, or right away to Patterswick—

But when Jonas suggested a number of houses she might like to view, her objections were enormous, the difficulties immense—the staff, the furniture, the problems of selling the house they already had—and although Jonas promised to see to everything himself the project was shelved.

‘If I could go to Scarborough for the summer it would put me right.'

But to exist in lodgings was unthinkable, a rented house full of hazards, for what would she do if nanny gave notice, what would she do in any case in a town where she had no friends; since she could never bring herself to speak to strangers?

‘If Jonas would not always be accepting invitations without asking me, and then looking so put out when I cannot manage it. I am not at all fond of eating in other people's houses as he very well knows, especially since one is obliged to ask them to dine here afterwards—and it worries me to owe hospitality all around.'

But when the invitations ceased she complained that her friends and her husband were neglecting her.

‘Oh, so you have come to see me, have you, Faith? Well, no one else has been near me for a week or more, and Jonas can think of nothing to do but spend his time playing schools with Prudence.'

‘She's not interested in anything, that's all,' Prudence said, her own interests legion, her vitality a blazing beacon.

‘She hasn't enough to do and doesn't want to do anything anyway. Why worry about it? We know dozens of women like Celia.'

And because it was true, and because she was indeed so very gloomy, I found myself easily distracted on the days I had intended to see her, very ready to drive on past her house and go somewhere else; and when I
did
pay a visit I managed not to linger too long.

I went now and then to Galton with Georgiana, for she knew of no reason why she and I should not be friends, and saw nothing to concern either of us in the growing tensions between Nicholas and Blaize.

‘I did not think it possible for anyone to quarrel with Blaize, but I see Nicky has managed it,' was her sole comment, showing no curiosity as to the nature of their conflict, assuming, as most people did, that it was financial rather than personal, Cullingford being very ready to understand why they should watch each, other—and their own backs—so keenly, since no Law Valley man is averse to stealing a march on another.

‘Never mind them, Faith,' she said. ‘It's a lovely day. Let's go and see my grandfather'; and, bundling her amber-haired Venetia into the carriage—my dainty Blanche usually managing to get more than her share of carriage-space, being careful, at a tender age, not to crumple her skirts—we would set off at the spanking, nervous pace with which Georgiana did everything. And more often than not Gervase would accompany us—far too often—since she would seize any opportunity she could to keep him away from school.

‘He hates it. He's not good at it. If Nicky had been willing to send him to a decent school, then it would have been different. What could Cullingford grammar school possibly have to teach him in any case? Heavens—a
grammar
school. He'll profit far more from half an hour's conversation with grandfather.'

And there was no doubt that the squire of Galton's example could do a child no harm, for when I had accustomed myself to the extreme formality of his manners I found that his company had a soothing quality, as if the very nobility of his spirit had somehow extended itself to form a barrier between Galton and a rude, money-grubbing world. He was, I felt, a man who may have been all his life autocratic and narrow of outlook, but never mean, a man who, with the barbarians at his gate, would have changed his coat for dinner, who would, even if his heart was breaking, offend no one by a display of unmannerly emotion. A fine and gallant gentleman, assisting his granddaughter from her carriage as if she were a duchess, shaking his great-grandson by the hand with the courtesy due to the heir apparent of a nation, rather than a few hundred acres of moorland.

‘How do you do, Master Gervase?'

‘How do you do, sir?' So that even young Gervase, who was tense and excitable, an odd child in many ways, who could chatter with the shrill persistence of a starling or sit for hours on end in an unnatural silence, relaxed in his atmosphere, obeying this august great-grandparent with a readiness he did not display elsewhere.

Yet who, indeed, would not have obeyed Mr. Gervase Clevedon?

‘Come,' he would say very quietly, and everyone within earshot immediately came. ‘We will go now,' and everyone would stand up and follow him. ‘We can't have this sort of thing, I'm afraid'; and, whatever it was, from village youths brawling in the market-place to the practice of diluting ale in the Galton taverns, one felt the evil would instantly cease.

He had no money, existing entirely on his rents, no coal deposits, no mineral deposits having been found on his land. It was well known that many of his tenants being elderly, he had not increased his rents for some considerable time. He would take no money from Georgiana—since a gentleman did not impose upon a lady, and he was concerned at the state of her marriage in any case—yet at his advanced age he continued to fulfil all the responsibilities to which his station had called him, sitting in Petty Sessions in his own home, a back, downstairs room being reserved for the purpose, to dispense justice in matters of drunkenness, common assault, falsifying of weights and measures, poaching and paternity. He rode considerable distances, in all weathers, to take his place on the Bench at Quarter Sessions, where more serious offenders would be committed to prison, to Australia, or to the gallows. He spent long, tedious hours in the saddle, busying himself about the affairs of his tenants—his people—making improvements he could not afford, since he believed it his duty to do so. He was, at all times, available to defend the interests of anyone who resided on his land, anyone who had ever eaten his bread and his salt, or whose father had eaten the bread of his father.

‘I love him,' Georgiana said, breathing deeply. ‘My Gervase will be just like him—don't you think so, Faith?'

Yet young Gervase had another grandparent, the shrewd, indestructible Sir Joel Barforth, a head taller, a stone or two heavier than Mr. Clevedon, who had set his own sons to work at an early age in his weaving sheds and his counting-houses, teaching them that, although the gentry may consider service to be its own reward, it was the business of a Law Valley man to buy when prices were cheap and sell when they were dear.

‘Aye,' he would say, looking down from a height which his grandson dearly found awe-inspiring. ‘His manners may be very pretty, I grant you, but can he do his sums?'

And Gervase, wild-eyed and unsteady as a colt, would turn for protection to his mother, who could not do her sums either, the pair of them more often than not ending in a fit of giggles under Sir Joel's grim eye.

My uncle was ill again that winter—nothing, he said, that he couldn't cope with—but he came north unexpectedly in the spring, several days ahead of Aunt Verity, and immediately there was trouble.

‘What the hell's this? What the devil's that?' was heard throughout every corner of Tarn Edge, Lawcroft and Low Cross, while his visit to the Law Valley Wool-combers, in which his financial interest was small, produced such a flare-up between him and Nicholas that the building itself seemed, threatened by the blast.

‘And what's this I hear about you sniffing around Nethercoats again? You'll overstretch yourself, my lad.

‘Aye—and a little bird whispered to me the other day that you'd been over to Horton End a time or two, going over Sam Barker's dyeworks as if you meant business. And, whatever you have to say to me about it. I'll say this to you.
I
don't want his bloody dyeworks, and
you
can't afford it.'

He cancelled out of hand a trip Blaize had been planning to Russia, refusing to listen to Blaize's explanation that, since war between the northern and southern states of America seemed quite likely, there was a growing need to explore new markets.

‘Bloody rubbish! War's good for the wool trade—always has been. You just fancy staking yourself to a night or two with a ballerina'—a remark repeated to me by Blaize himself, who found it amusing, although he made no comment as to its accuracy.

On the domestic front, too, nothing could please him. His house at Tarn Edge—the house he had built for Aunt Verity—was going to ruin in Georgiana's hands. The servants, with no one to care what they did, were doing nothing. His bedroom was cold, so was the food, the horses were better cared for than he. Where
was
the damn girl, riding around all day like a lunatic? Why did that boy of hers have to keep on staring at him like a scared rabbit? Why was his granddaughter allowed to make that caterwauling day in day out? Why was no one there to check her?