Snow Angels (33 page)

Gil had copied his father’s way and had windows which overlooked the river. As the evening drew in, he would sit with his feet up on the desk and drink whisky. John would call in, and in the summer months when the sun stayed late they would watch the shadows fall across the river and they would talk.

On one such September evening, when the shadows were beginning to darken in the corners, they had spent an hour talking about politics when John said suddenly, ‘I hear your father’s house is up for sale.’

‘I gather, yes.’

‘And there is a buyer.’

‘Is there?’ Gil looked across the empty desk at him.

‘You know bloody damned fine there is, Gillan, it’s you.’

‘That’s just a guess.’

‘Playing cat and mouse with the old man, are you? Does he know it’s you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve done it through a third party? Do you want him to find out? You want him to see how badly he needs to sell, is that it? You can’t really want it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What are you going to do there? Remember your wonderful childhood?’

‘I don’t intend to live in it.’

‘What if there’s another buyer?’

Gil laughed.

‘Who the hell would want it?’

John considered his whisky glass.

‘Are you going to pull it down? It’s a nice site.’ John swilled the whisky around in his glass as though it was brandy. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘It was his goal, his main ambition, it was part of his dream. Your father clawed his way up the ladder. He did everything he had to do to get there. He even cast off his parents. Now you’re ruining him.’ Gil didn’t answer that. ‘What are you really going to do with it?’

‘Nothing. I’m going to do nothing.’

*

He had bought Bamburgh House not knowing and not caring whether his father knew who the buyer was. That winter, when he had a free day, he went out to the house.

Winter was never the best time for such outings, but he was pleased with it. There were no animals in the fields, the grass was long on the lawns and it had about it a neglected air. The front door had come open; someone had thrown stones at most of the windows so there was glass on the floors; the snow had blown inside. It was a bitterly cold day and Gil stood in the middle of the room which had been his father’s study and remembered the harsh words, the blows. He went upstairs to what had been Helen’s bedroom and thought of the nights they had spent there together, the only truly happy nights of his life.

He had debated with himself whether to pull the place down but in the end he decided that it would be a fitting monument to the Collingwood family to let it go to ruin slowly so that people would point from a distance, the grass would grow knee high around it and the birds would find a nesting place.

A bird – he couldn’t decide what kind, small and brown – flew into him on the stairs and Gil knocked out some more glass so that it would have plenty of room to get out. It found the exit
when he had gone downstairs. He watched it fly away in the direction of the quarry garden and a bitter wind moaned through the hall. Glass crunched under his feet. The window ledges were thick with dirt. The windows which had been left intact were; streaked with rain and, because there were no curtains, the grey winter light filtered into the hall where the Christmas tree used to stand.

There was one room he didn’t go into and that was his bedroom. As a child he could remember the morning sunlight twinkling in there because it faced east. Edward’s room had been comfortable; he had rugs and a fire and books, but William decided that Gil behaved so badly at home and at school that there would be no comfort. What might have been a refuge had been nothing better than a dungeon until the night Abby had spent with him. Gil went back to Jesmond, back to the servants who were polite and competent and to his shipyards where: everything was done as it should be and he didn’t want any of it. All he wanted was his child; it was such a relief to be able to go home to Matthew.

Abby couldn’t believe at first that Gil had bought his parents’ house. She knew how much he had always hated the place. Charlotte and William did not know about the sale until afterwards but, since they did not have another buyer, they would have been obliged to accept Gil’s offer, she thought, even if they had known that he was the purchaser. But she wondered whether William would have been prepared to endure the humiliation of knowing that his son had bought Bamburgh House. They would have waited a long time for another buyer, she thought.

They moved to Westoe and bought a house there. Although much smaller, it was a great deal prettier than Bamburgh House had been, but Charlotte and William hated it from the beginning since it reflected their reduced circumstances. They needed fewer servants and only one gardener and Robert reported that there was no saying how long they would be there. The depression deepened. William put the men on short time and finished many of them so that he would not have to pay them while times were hard. Abby tried to talk to Robert about helping them financially, but he said that he could not afford it. She didn’t argue. She privately thought that he considered it none of his concern, but she had heard talk that Gil bought houses and took people off the streets, that he set up facilities so that people at least had
hot food, drink and shelter, especially when the weather was cold, wet and windy which it so often was. It did him no good in the eyes of other shipbuilders. They despised philanthropy of any kind, thought that if the men were given that kind of help they would not work.

‘He’s soft,’ William said of his son. ‘He was always soft. Does he think he’s going to save the whole world?’

Robert laughed.

‘There’s nothing like a good hard winter to rid the streets of rubbish.’

Gil gave work to as many people as he could afford and helped a great many others. Henderson, Abby thought, would have approved. She could almost see her mother smiling. Abby went into Newcastle to help. She told no one and she didn’t see Gil because he was not doing the work personally, he had delegated it, but it was done and she was proud of it. She used what little money she had and what influence she had to get other people to give. She could not understand that they would not give up even one of their many comforts for the plight of those who were without food and shelter.

Abby sometimes passed Bamburgh House on her way to and from Newcastle and she only hoped that Charlotte had not seen the destruction that the winter weather and Gil’s neglect had wrought here. It was a deliberate act of destruction. How angry William must be, though he didn’t show it, how frustrated that his son could afford and would allow this monument to William’s ambition to fall slowly into ruin. Gil could not have thought of anything better to upset his father.

Charlotte rarely came out to the country to visit. She was so envious of the beautiful house which Robert and Abby owned. It had been, Abby admitted to herself, one of the reasons she had married Robert. She loved it in all its seasons, in all the different times of the day. Its mish-mash of styles betrayed the affection in which the family had held their home and there was one big comfort about it: Robert could not gamble it away; it was
entailed through the male line. Abby knew therefore how important it was that she should produce another child, but Robert was drunk or absented himself from home so often that this seemed unlikely. When he was there he did not come to her bed and Abby did not want him there.

She knew that they ought to have had other children, that it was not considered wise to bring up an only child and though she had been an only child herself, there had been many times when she had wished for family. When things had gone wrong, a sister or a brother might have been of some help. Especially since her father had died, she had nobody. Gil had always seemed like almost family; she had known him such a long time and he had been closer than anybody else in that respect, but that had gone too since her father had died. Gil had become the enemy. Abby thought she liked that least of all. Since Henderson had died, she had lost them both. There was no one to talk to who understood anything important. Sometimes it was all she could manage not to go to Jesmond and tell Gil she wanted to be friends, she needed him and she would have to remind herself of what he had done. Even now, she could not believe it.

Gradually the paintings, the furnishings, the horses, everything which could be sold, was, as Robert gambled more and more. Abby even tried to get him to stay at home. The day came when she went to her jewellery box to find nothing of value left in it. The presents which he had given her to commemorate their betrothal, their wedding, anniversaries, birthdays – sapphire and diamond earrings, diamond bracelet and necklace, half a dozen beautiful rings and even the emerald set which had belonged to his mother and been in the family for many years – it all went. Abby tried to talk to him, but she could hear her words and she had no new argument to give him. He had not listened to her before and there was no reason why he should do so now except that, she said, ‘Soon there’ll be nothing left. Then what will we do?’

He gave her a clearer look than he had given her in years.

‘I loved you,’ he said.

‘I loved you too.’

‘No.’ Robert shook his head. He was rather drunk. It was the middle of the afternoon and the shadows were stealing across the lawn beyond the drawing-room windows. It was Abby’s favourite kind of day in winter, cold and wet but if you were inside with a fire and plenty of food, you could rejoice in the cold weather.

‘You never loved me,’ he said sadly. ‘You always loved that bastard, Gillan Collingwood.’ And he got up and wandered from the room and closed the door with a tiny click.

He didn’t come back. Abby didn’t worry at first. She didn’t worry until the following day, because although he sometimes stayed out overnight it was rare that he stayed out for longer than that. She worried, too, for how lucid he had appeared, for how bitter he was. Therefore in the middle of the afternoon when a carriage pulled up outside the house, she got up in agitation. Two policemen were shown into the bareness of the drawing room and for once Abby did not think about the lack of good furniture, the marks on the walls where the paintings had been taken down, the silver that was gone, the ornaments. She was watching their faces and she knew before they said anything that the news was not good. They were very sorry – they weren’t sorry, it was just that they didn’t know what else to say – they were very sorry, there had been an accident. Mr Surtees had been shot. The truth was, Abby thought brutally, that her husband had taken a double-barrelled shotgun to himself, so there couldn’t have been much left of him. Still, he must have been recognisable. One of the many Surtees cousins had found him in their barn. Why, Abby thought idiotically, didn’t he do it in his own barn? They had concluded that he had fallen over and the gun had gone off. It was a ridiculous notion, but of course a Surtees could not have killed himself. His father had not drunk himself senseless and killed himself. The trouble was that it was the name of intelligent, honourable people and if he had killed himself then he had dirtied the name and there was no room for
that. Abby, like everybody else, would have to pretend that there had been an accident.

*

Abby blamed herself. She tried not to but it was difficult. She thought of all the things she might have done, of the help she could have given him, of the love she had withheld and he was right, at least he had been at the beginning. She did not love him and, although she no longer loved Gil, it had always been too late for her to love Robert, so many things had been in the way. They had been too unalike and yet people said that opposites attracted and they had been that.

She tried to shield Georgina from the knowledge of what had happened, but she had to tell her child that her father was dead. It would have been harder still to say that they were penniless and homeless, because that was what happened.

The family gathered in the house, even Charlotte, full of concern. It was Charlotte who said to her – no doubt there had been a family meeting at one of their houses and she had been nominated because she knew Abby so well – ‘You can’t stay here.’

Abby stared.

‘Not stay?’

‘The house is entailed and you have no place here. You have no son. It all belongs to Robert’s cousin, Gerard, and his wife and family will want to move in immediately. You’ll be able to stay for a few days until you find somewhere else, but no longer, you must realise that.’

‘I have nowhere to go.’

She thought that Charlotte might have cared sufficiently to say ‘but you must come and stay with us’, only she didn’t. Abby thought that in a way Charlotte was rather pleased at what had happened. Abby was worse off than she was, whereas of late she had had to watch Abby in the loveliest house in the county while she made do with a polite Victorian stone house in a village. It
did not suit Charlotte’s ideas of who went where. This was her triumphant moment. Abby had not borne a son and was to be turned out of doors like a stray cat.

Nobody offered her refuge and she had no money. There was nothing left. The stables were empty; the furniture was worthless. Robert, Abby thought grimly, had made sure that he cleaned them out before he shot himself. Had he not, just for a moment or two, considered if not his wife then at least his child? It seemed he had not. She did not recall a single instance when he had spoken to Georgina or asked for her company. The child shed no tears except for her mother’s distress and Abby was so angry with her dead husband that she could find no sorrow or any grief.

Abby could not believe that his family or his friends would not offer her some help, but they didn’t. They all came to the funeral and she was obliged to find food and drink in the house. The only good part of Abby’s day was when she noticed Gil had come to the funeral. That, she thought, was kind of him. People didn’t speak to him, but he seemed oblivious to that and although they had no conversation, she was aware of him in the church and afterwards at the house where he stood alone, not clutching a glass as some men might have done if they were left to their own company but standing quietly by the window as though he was waiting to see what would happen. Abby didn’t have to wait long. The cousin who was inheriting showed her no mercy.