The Sleeping Sword (31 page)

He stood by the fire, on the centre of the hearthrug as her father often did, looking at her with a fine-drawn, entirely Chard disdain that seemed, despite its muted quality, to fill the room.

‘I am indebted to you,' he said, ‘for the information. But the world has grown somewhat larger, I fear, since your grandfather founded these mills—larger and faster and infinitely more complicated. Your grandfather had very little competition from other manufacturers—since there was no more than a handful of them able to compete—and he could sell undisturbed in any market he liked. The markets are still there, but the manufacturers have increased a hundredfold. And what is a man to do—Mr. Goldsmith, for example?—if he encounters a dozen, or a hundred manufacturers whose prices and whose delivery dates are equally convenient? I imagine he would turn to the manufacturer he knows best, whose character he judges to be sound—a manufacturer whose personal standards are high and whose wife can be trusted to behave. Don't you think he might do that? And one's horizons need not necessarily be bound by Cullingford—at least, mine need not.'

I saw her chin quiver very slightly, her eyes cast down as she murmured, ‘Does it matter? There is so much money already—more than one could ever spend. Why this fever for more of the same thing?
Why
?'

But her answer was the slam of the door as he strode from the room, his patience at an end, leaving her to bite her lip for a moment, half afraid of her defiance, for Gideon in his anger had looked more than ever like her father.

The Goldsmiths, the Grassmanns, Rebecca and Jacob Mandelbaum dined with us some days later, my efforts to convey the impression that Venetia was their hostess being defeated by Venetia herself who, as each course was brought in, made some remark of delighted but tell-tale surprise. Yet she made herself very pleasant to the shrill, Mrs. Goldsmith, sitting beside her in the drawing-room after the meal and listening with an almost mesmerized attentiveness—in fact the daze of a crushing boredom—to that lady's particular theories on the culinary and domestic arts, agreeing with eager nods of her auburn head each time Mrs. Goldsmith paused for breath or demanded ‘Is that not so?'

Miss Mandelbaum played and sang for us, Mr. Jacob Mandelbaum, a cultured and worldly man, talked music and landscape, and managed, with a fine discretion, to prevent his sister from asking me why my husband was not present, since it must have been clear from the odd number at my table that he had been expected.

The gentlemen from Hamburg and Berlin remained in the drawing-room for a very long time with Gideon, smoking cigars and discussing, almost with love, the intricacies of finance at an exalted level where money was not for spending but for manipulation, a world-wide chess game which Gideon, with the Barforth fortune behind him and his own fierce ambitions driving him towards the making of another, might one day be invited to play.

‘When you are next in Berlin—' Mr. Goldsmith said, taking Gideon's hand in both of his at parting.

‘You will find much in Hamburg to interest you,' said Mr. Grassmann.

‘Lord!' said Venetia when they were all safely gone. ‘Do tell me—am I not heroic?'

And meeting Gideon's cool eyes, the lift of his eyebrows that plainly said, ‘Heroic? Just barely adequate, I'd call it', I saw her own brows come together in a frown, her pointed face flush with a rare loss of temper.

‘All right,' she said, squaring her slight shoulders, her back very straight. ‘You have no need to tell me. I have not been heroic. I have simply been a hypocrite. Is that what you want from me?'

She had never allowed herself to be really angry with him before, had been too quick, if anything, to agree with his every opinion, to accommodate his least desire, but now, after a slight start of surprise, he merely sighed as one does when dealing with a troublesome child.

‘Venetia, must you be so enthusiastic?' And we were in no doubt that he had used the word in its Listonby and Mayfair sense of ‘brash', ‘melodramatic', ‘middle-class'.

‘Oh, don't play the squire with me, Gideon,' she told him, ‘although truly it is what you are.'

‘Is this necessary, Venetia?'

‘Indeed it is, for I wish to know if I have pleased you. I have spent the evening flattering a woman I dislike and who dislikes me, for the purpose—if I understand aright—of procuring you an invitation to her house in Berlin. Not because you care two straws for her or for her husband, but because he might be of
use
to you. Is that what I have been doing?'

‘Is it? I rather thought you had been giving a dinner-party, or that Grace had been giving one on your behalf. Why all this fuss, Venetia?'

‘Because I want to know if I have done well. Have you got your invitation? Is this what you want from me?'

And for what seemed to me a very long time, during which I longed to leave the room and frankly dared not desert her, he did not reply.

‘Ah well,' he said at last and taking a cigar lit it, inhaled with calm enjoyment, his attention apparently caught by the gracefully curving spiral of tobacco. But the silence was too much for Venetia—as he had intended—and taking a deep breath she raised herself on tiptoe, attempting, I suppose, to match his height and suddenly threw at him, ‘Damnation—yes, I mean
damnation!
Do you know, Gideon, I believe I would think better of you if you wanted to make love to that woman, if you found her desirable instead of just a stepping stone to her husband's good graces. Yes, if you desired her, I could understand it. You see—you wrinkle your nose at the thought of it, don't you, which means you don't like her either.'

‘It means I am appalled by your manners, or lack of them.'

‘No, it does not. It means I have made you look at her and admit she is an old harpy—for so she is. But I ask myself, does that matter to you: Would it matter if—' And I could hear on the tip of her tongue—as he could surely hear them—the words that must never be spoken: ‘If you had to make love to her, Gideon, to get what you want, would you go so far? Would it be no more and no less a hardship to you than making love to me?'

No one, of course, in the complexity of human relationships can ever be entirely right or wholly wrong. Gideon was a hard, ambitious man—qualities much valued in Cullingford who expected no more than he had been brought up to expect from a wife. He had seen his mother devote the whole of her formidable energies to creating at Listonby an atmosphere which attracted influential men like bees to clover; men, need it be said, who could be of service, not to Aunt Caroline herself, but to her husband and to her sons. He had seen Aunt Faith drop everything at the sight of a telegram from Uncle Blaize and, not caring what engagements she cancelled nor whom she offended, set off on the hundred or thousand-mile journey to join him. He had seen Mrs. Sheldon force herself, entirely against her nature, to make public speeches in her husband's praise, giving up her own friends and her own occupation as a landscape painter to devote herself to the humdrum work of the constituency in order that Thomas Sheldon M.P. might be at liberty to bask in the delights of Westminster. He knew that Mrs. Rawnsley, who was neither particularly kind nor particularly clever, would nevertheless defend in any drawing-room or at any tea-table the interests of Mr. Septimus Rawnsley, her not particularly faithful husband, and had sense enough to make herself very pleasant to all those who transacted their business through Rawnsley's Bank. And these ladies were not making sacrifices. They were simply doing what they
ought
to be doing. They were keeping their marriage vows.

In the beginning he had been surprisingly patient and even now, when patience was growing fragile at its borders, remained conscious of his responsibilities. He would, I believe, have been ready to give Venetia every conceivable luxury, would have enjoyed seeing her swathed in sables and dripping diamonds, not so much as evidence of his generosity but of the fact that he—the third son of a baronet—could afford them. He would have allowed her to travel too, as often as she had a mind, since he lacked the middle-class notion that husband and wife should never be apart. He would not have objected too strenuously had she acquired her mother's passion for the hunt, so long as she hunted with ‘decent'people and took care always to be well mounted and well dressed. He would have turned a blind or an indulgent eye to the occasional card-party, since useful acquaintances can be made at a fashionable whist-table, providing she took the trouble to wear an expensive gown and did not lose too much. She could have stayed in bed all morning, like Blanche, while he went to the mill to earn their daily portion of caviar and champagne, had he been able to rely on finding her, vivacious and hospitable, at his dinner-table at night.

But Gideon's ambitions, while not incomprehensible to Venetia, irritated her, increasing her feeling of alienation. She understood money and knew there was plenty of it. Why, then, should she devote her one, precarious, already blemished life to the task of making it grow? What concerned her was the
quality
of life, not its luxury. What she most desired was an intense and demanding relationship which would test her ingenuity and stretch her resources to the full, an emotional crusade requiring the investment of her whole heart. And she could see no similarity between these fierce longings and the driving force of Gideon's ambition which could not be content with the fortune his uncle and his wife had brought him, which goaded him into a crusade of his own.

Grand in his ideas, lavish in his tastes, it pleased his vanity—that touchiness of a younger son for whom no provision has been made—to consider the splendid Barforth mills as no more than a starting point. He had not been born a manufacturer. The rules of primogeniture had forced him to it and from the first he had determined to conduct himself with style, to lift himself by his own efforts from the confines of grubby, middle-class Cullingford to a plane where business was conducted by gentlemen. After all, it had been a Rothschild—a prince not of the blood but of commerce—who had enabled the British government to purchase its controlling interest in the Suez Canal, and although Gideon had no interest in politics himself, his brother Sir Dominic was soon to take his seat in the House of Commons behind the flamboyant Mr. Disraeli, and there was no reason why the Chards, if the game was played aright, should not attain influence in the land. Blanche would play her part in that game, Aunt Caroline would glory in it. But if Venetia could be brought to understand it at all, she would be very likely to enquire, ‘What's the good of it? What does it matter? It's not even
real
.'

She may well have been right. I did not set myself to judge, merely to perform, each day, the tasks I found to hand, the building of a facade which screened us all but which only Gideon seemed to appreciate.

‘That menu was exceedingly well chosen, Grace.'

‘Thank you, Gideon.'

‘Tell me—how did you get on with Frank Brewster's wife over coffee?'

‘Famously. She believes she will never survive the journey to New York next week.'

‘So they are going to New York, are they? Now why—I wonder—did Brewster forget to mention that?'

‘Well—they are staying with the Ellison-Turnbulls.'

‘Are they, by God? Thank you, Grace.'

And so it continued.

I became, that year and the year after, an obsessive housekeeper and hostess, a great compiler of lists and designer of domestic routines. I kept files in date order of my menus and my invitations, so that no dish was ever served to the same guests twice over. I kept files on the guests themselves, their gastronomic and personal preferences, the names of their children, their enemies and their friends. I made it my business to know which notable would be arriving in Cullingford, having found a reliable informant at the Station Hotel, and if Gideon wished to meet them I never failed to find the correct approach, or to make the impression he desired. It became a challenge, finally a compulsion, my pride in discovering the favourite wine of a total stranger, his wife's favourite flower, and having both in plentiful supply when they came to dine, outweighing by far its object.

My aims had reduced themselves perhaps—in fact, they were much reduced—but were altogether ‘in keeping'with my status, a perfect dinner-party, the organization of a charity ball at which I walked roughshod over any lady who dared to question my authority taking on the importance of the Balkan Crisis, not because I cared about charity balls but because this—unlike my relationship with Gervase—was a matter in which I could be certain of success. The reality of my marriage was a hollow sham. The illusion it created was still very widely admired. It was the illusion which, of necessity, counted.

I sat at my dinner-table one summer evening, enjoying the rose-scented air through the open windows, knowing that everything in this huge, ornate house that should be polished had been polished most thoroughly, that every item of linen requiring starch was starched to perfection, every inch of upholstery meticulously brushed. I knew my larder shelves were full, my drawers and cupboards scented with sweet herbs and lavender, my staff respectful and respectable, even the beds where the kitchenmaids slept supplied with good mattresses and warm blankets.

I was surrounded by order and efficiency, I was at the centre of a beehive of ongoing tasks which I knew would be well done. And if the running of this house was a small matter compared to the running of the Barforth and Agbrigg mills—to the affairs of the real world outside—then at least no one, I believed, could have done it better. I was making a constructive effort of my life—as some others were not—and whenever it troubled me that the effort was really very small, that Grace Agbrigg, surely, with her flair for mathematics and languages, had been capable of far more than this, it seemed wiser and safer to belittle that flair, to shrink my capabilities, to narrow myself down to fit the reality of my situation; and be content.