Snow Angels (32 page)

Gil hadn’t seen anything much of this girl except her obedient demeanour and the way that she cleaned and polished the house to a high shine. Gil had kept the new servants in their place; he didn’t want intimacy of any kind. He didn’t want to regret their leaving when they went as he had regretted and resented Kate and Mrs Wilkins. For several months the house had been like the office, well run, almost military. He blamed the old servants for going, even though he knew there was no reason why they should not have done and they had been right to go; but they had taken from him the last vestiges of his life with Henderson. Day by day he carried with him the stone of Henderson’s death and the way that Abby had left him. He
had known what she would do and say; he had known that they would quarrel and she would hate him, but the knowing of it before it had happened had made things worse in a way because there was nothing he could do to stop it. Her love had counted for nothing in the end. He didn’t care that Robert was going pretty much to the devil; in some ways he was glad. Henderson had foreseen all that and planned carefully. Gil missed him every minute, he missed the old servants and he felt betrayed because they had been part of the family and had left his son just as though he didn’t matter. Matthew had cried a lot because things had changed so much and Gil had thought he was the only adult in his child’s life, but it was strange how things moved on. His child had obviously developed a close relationship with this girl from Yorkshire.

They spun round faster and faster, giggling and shouting, until they were obliged to let go. Then they collapsed into a heap on the thickly rugged floor, helpless, out of breath, triumphant. In those moments Gil remembered what youth was meant to be like.

Her cap had come off, the pins loosened. It reminded Gil uncomfortably of the girls he paid for on Saturday nights. Hannah was no different, it was just that she had been luckier and he held her fate in his hands just the same. He paid her well to clean his house. His sense of justice would not let him take anyone’s labour for less than he thought they deserved. His servants were higher paid than anybody he knew. John Marlowe laughed and called it indulgence, but Gil knew well by now that money meant independence and it was more important than anything. This girl had no independence from him yet. If he chose, he could put her on the street and then she would end up, if she was lucky, pretending to some man that she enjoyed being put down and laid for money.

And then she saw him. She blushed crimson. She had pretty brown hair and deep blue eyes and she was breathing very quickly, partly from the exertion but partly now from shock and
fear, he knew. Gil hadn’t realised until then that she was afraid of him. He was never rude to his servants, he never made difficult demands, so he thought. It was his power over her that she feared. She retrieved her cap as she got up and stood there in front of him like a condemned prisoner, lowering her eyes and handling her cap nervously.

‘So,’ Gil said lightly, ‘what about some tea?’ and he smiled at her.

She looked up, bit her lip and was for a second Abby, biting her lip to bleeding on the rug in the study. Her colour came back to normal. She said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and scuttled out.

‘You frightened her,’ Matthew observed.

‘What am I, an ogre?’

Out of breath Matthew flung himself onto the sofa.

‘Yes,’ he said.

*

It was the following day that Abby went to the house. She made herself. She wanted so much to see the place and to have something belonging to her father and, although she dreaded going, she could not not go any longer. She tried to shield herself against Gil before she got there, to think that probably she would see Matthew, which would make it easier, and that she only had to speak a few words to Gil. She could envisage what it would be like. He would be working because he always worked. She would not remember what they had done in that little room and he would most likely be frigidly polite. He might let her collect her things and take something of her father’s and it would be formal, not as bad as she thought it was going to be. She would get through it. She had to.

She knocked hard on the door and was surprised to find it opening immediately as a small boy ran at her.

‘Aunty Abby!’ he said in obvious delight and hugged her. ‘You never come to see us and now I’m going out.’ He indicated several small boys on the pavement whom she hadn’t noticed,
and an adult, presumably somebody’s father, armed with a cricket bat and a ball and cricket stumps. ‘We’re going to the park. Will you still be here later on?’

‘I will try.’

‘You’ll be staying for tea. I’ll be back.’ And with that he waved and ran off, shouting behind him, ‘Daddy’s in the sitting-room. Go in. Hannah’s half day.’

Abby went into the gloom of the hall, except that it wasn’t gloomy because the spring sunshine poured in through the stained glass of the inner door. She stood there expecting any second to hear her father’s voice. There was the faint smell of Sunday dinner, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. She paused by the little office but, since Matthew had said Gil was in the sitting-room, she made her way there. He hadn’t lied. Gil was in the sitting-room. He was asleep. He was lying on the sofa. The fire burned softly in the grate and through the windows the garden was full of daffodils and other spring flowers in small cream, blue and red clumps beyond the lawn.

He didn’t wake up even when she moved around the room. It was exactly as it had been, her father’s chair in its usual place. She thought of the reading of the will, the last time she had been in here, her anger, Gil’s stubbornness and the way that she had hit him. She could not reconcile any of it to the young man who was asleep on the sofa. He looked so harmless, lying on his side, obviously very tired. His waistcoat and trousers were dark, his shirt was white and his eyelashes were so … He opened his eyes and the impression disappeared. His gaze was cool like tap water. He sat up slowly. Abby glanced at the door.

‘Matthew let me in,’ she said. ‘I know I have no right to come here.’ Abby had rehearsed this, but she hadn’t counted on her throat being so dry that she couldn’t get the words out, ‘—but—’

He got up. Abby wished he hadn’t. He was much bigger than she. She knew very well that he could dominate a room just by his presence. He didn’t, but he could if he chose. She had known businessmen all her life and she could imagine him in the
boardroom, saying nothing and reducing other people to blancmange.

‘You can come here as often as you like, though it hadn’t occurred to me that you might want to.’

‘You said … that I could take something. My things are here and … some things which I think my father would have wanted me to have.’

‘Help yourself,’ Gil said.

Even getting out of the room was difficult. It seemed to Abby to take a long time because he was watching her, or at least she thought he was watching her. She closed the door with a slight bang, not out of temper but because her hands were sweating. How could he manage to be so predatory without doing anything, she thought in irritation. It was because you didn’t know what he was thinking or what he would do to further his ambition and she was well aware that he would do anything to get what he wanted while all the time looking so civilised. It was a veneer, nothing more.

She went upstairs to what had been her own room and, to her surprise, it was exactly as she had left it. It was clean; everything was dusted and polished, but the things she had left here were undisturbed. It looked as though she had gone away for a while and would be back. There were books on the bedside table. Some of them had been her mother’s. One of them was open and she picked it up. It was open at the very page where she had left it. Her combs and hairbrushes were on the dressing-table. She had not taken those because Robert had insisted on buying her more expensive ones. Her old wooden jewellery box was there and a brooch that her mother had given her as a child, two silver owls with emerald eyes. At least, she had thought at the time that they were emeralds and her mother did not tell her otherwise and spoil the dream. There were various wooden bangles, a silver chain with a cross her parents had given her on her first communion and a silver ring with a pink stone which her parents had brought back from Cornwall. It was like being a
child again. There was a jar of cream and in the top drawer, pins and some papers. She closed the drawer. And then a thought occurred to her and she could not resist it. She left the room and stole across the landing towards her father’s bedroom. When she opened the door she was so shocked that she couldn’t move. Nothing had been touched.

She opened the wardrobe and there were all Henderson’s suits, his shirts, his ties, his shoes. She even thought she could smell the cigars he sometimes smoked. The bed was made up and she thought at any moment he would walk in and her heart would piece back together again. The view from the window was of the tennis court. She remembered him picking her up when she was little and standing her on the window ledge to watch her mother playing tennis down below with a friend.

Feeling rather like Goldilocks now, she went into the room next door which was where Gil slept. For some reason, she was not a bit surprised to see that it was empty. She thought at first that he must have moved into another room, it was so bare, and then she thought of his room at home. It was completely cleared of any mess or any sign of possession. There was no book; there was no evidence of anyone’s stay; it was like an unoccupied hotel bedroom. Only when she opened the wardrobe were Gil’s clothes to be seen and it was so neat that it frightened her. Nothing was an inch out of place. It was symmetrical; everything lined up; it was mathematical in its precision.

‘Find anything interesting?’ he said from the doorway. Abby spun round and looked at him. He looked so enquiring but friendly. She held his eyes steadily.

‘Why do you keep my father’s things?’

‘You can have them if you want them,’ Gil said.

‘You’ve kept the house exactly as it was when he was alive and this is … this is—’

‘My bedroom,’ Gil said. ‘I don’t remember you having any particular inclination to be in here before.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘About what? There’s nothing to see.’

‘So I observed,’ Abby said and went past him to stave off any more questions.

In the end Abby took very little, some books which had been her mother’s before they were hers, some cufflinks which were not valuable and had been left on her father’s dressing-table, the little silver owl brooch. She sat upstairs in her father’s room and stayed, dry-eyed, thinking of him there. She hadn’t realised how long she was until Matthew burst in.

‘You are still here! I hoped you would be. Come downstairs. Daddy says the tea is ready and there is chocolate cake.’

Abby tried to say that she wasn’t staying, but the boy’s face fell.

‘You must stay! I haven’t seen you in ever so long.’

Abby went. Her idea of fun was not eating chocolate cake with Gil, but Matthew chattered all the way through tea, eating rapidly and talking at the same time, so that Abby thought nobody had ever told him to do one thing at once. Even though being there was difficult, it was worth it for Matthew’s shining face and boyish talk. She thought that he was very advanced for four. The children she knew of that age clung around their mothers and didn’t talk. Matthew didn’t stop talking and knew a great deal about cricket. He seemed so happy she could not help but think that if Gil had got nothing right in his life but this, he certainly seemed to have got the hang of parenting. Obviously his son had never been beaten or shouted at or made to feel at all unwanted. When he had finished his tea, Matthew went back outside to play with his friends. Abby waited until the door was closed and then she said, ‘He’s a very nice little boy.’

‘You can never tell. Presumably I was a very nice little boy.’

‘You hated cricket.’

‘Team games,’ Gil said scornfully.

‘Isn’t Reed’s Yard a team?’

‘No, it’s a dictatorship.’

She almost smiled.

‘I thought you’d have had the gates repainted.’

‘Why?’

‘It isn’t Reed’s any more.’

‘Abby—’

‘No, don’t,’ she said quickly.

‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

‘You were going to plead your case and it’s not something you’re any good at so you might as well save your breath.’ She got up. ‘I only stayed because of Matthew.’

‘If you want to come back—’

‘I don’t. You may keep my father’s belongings but there’s nothing left of him here, I can see that. I shan’t come again. Goodbye.’

Abby chose to go back past the gates of the yards, but the first just said ‘Reed’s’ on it as it always had and the newer yard said ‘Reed’s Yard No 2’ as though it was some poor relation and not the biggest shipyard on the Tyne. She could not help being glad that Gil left that at least as it was. Her father would have been pleased about it, his name still there.

*

John Marlowe had in some ways taken Henderson’s place in that he had become a friend. It was a strange kind of friendship. Gil was not invited to his home and John didn’t come to his house. Often John was away. He had other houses and he went away on business frequently. Sometimes Gil was away, so there were long periods when they didn’t see one another. On Saturday nights, however, if they were both in Newcastle they went out to dinner and for a few drinks. Then they went to the high class brothel to which John had introduced Gil.

Sometimes John called in at Gil’s office unannounced. He knew that Gil would go home early, have tea and spend some time with his son, but that invariably he went back to the office. John usually turned up late in the evening and Gil would talk over their work with him as he had done with Henderson. He
would call unannounced, timing his visits well when everyone had gone home. Gil imagined that this was deliberate. Although they were business acquaintances, it would have done John no good to have cultivated Gil as a friend. In the office they could talk undisturbed. When they went out, they went to obscure places. It was almost, Gil thought with humour, like having an affair with a married woman. Nobody must know; it was furtive and secretive and had about it an air of intimacy which he liked. John Marlowe’s mind was always full of new ideas.