‘Oh, sir – careful, sir,’ said Nurse Grimshaw, coming forward, and Cordelia raised a sudden anxious head.
‘I have handled children before,’ said Mr Ferguson. He peered closely at the baby’s tiny face, at its clenched fist and faint fluff of dark hair. ‘He shall have the same education as you, Brook: the Grammar School and Owens College. I disapprove of the public schools because they take a boy away from parental influence. And at Oxford they would turn him into a papist. The influence of the home is the most important thing in a child’s life, the example and teaching of his elders. I have spoken to Cordelia about it once, but we must have a more general understanding.’
‘Yes,’ said Brook. ‘Well, it’s a bit early to think of that yet.’
‘It’s never too early to begin a child’s education, to see that he has the right environment and leadership.’
‘When shall I bring your father?’ said Mrs Blake. ‘And the children are sure to want to come. Essie will be especially interested, what with her happy event due so soon. And you know what little Anne is like. And your Aunt Doris said I was to say …’
Mr Ferguson said: ‘The christening it would be agreeable to have on the twentieth, my birthday. Let me see, the Bishop is holding a confirmation on the twenty-first …’
Cordelia thought sleepily, lazily: There was that time at Easter when that woman said hadn’t she seen me somewhere before, and the time when I didn’t want to call at the inn at Northenden, and when I had to discharge that maid, Vera, and I thought she had guessed something. Well, I’ve done it all for my son; he’s legitimate; he’s safe. That’s all that matters. They don’t know. None of them know the dreadful never-ceasing aching loneliness. For a while it got better, not gone but bearable: three, four, six months and something adapts itself. Then had come his letter.
She knew it nearly all by heart.
I am going abroad for a few months [he had written], to see how I like it. But I should be grieved to go and leave things as they are between us … I lost my temper and said unforgivable things. I know how you must have felt and I hope you’ll be trying to understand. Yes, I was wild and wanted to kill you.
… Sometimes I wonder if you ever really meant to run away. Well – we shall see. In a year’s time I’ll come to call on you again. Be thinking of me sometimes, sweetheart, and try to forgive someone who was all at fault only in loving you too much.
She had tried so hard to harden herself, to forget him, to think that she was well rid of his attentions. But it would not work. A chemical, physical affinity existed between them and nothing could break it. Sometimes she felt herself to be torn between two opposing impulses. Stephen she loved but doubted; Brook she liked but did not love. This was an oversimplification but it came near the truth. Sometimes she felt not only that Stephen had let her down but that she had let him down. Her association with him had meant something to him, something more than that physical affinity, more than any other woman had to offer him. She had no peace of mind.
Tonight, in this pleasant backwater, she was detached for the first time from the old ache and wondered if the detachment would last.
But then she was detached from everything, impersonal, unconcerned. She stared about the room with placid eyes at the people discreetly moving and whispering in the dim sub-solar light. She had heard them talking of her son and his future. She did not mind. At present she was weak and relaxed and passively content. And tomorrow and next week would be the same.
But some time she would regain her strength, this lost, empty, lethargic contentment would go, and then these people, these amiable – or fairly amiable – grandparents, deciding whose nose he had and where he should be educated, would find they had another person to reckon with, one not naturally contentious but moved by powerful instinct to protect her own.
From where she lay she could just see the carving on the mantelpiece. She was glad her mother hadn’t noticed it. Brook had thought it a practical joke: when he found that it was really carved he had been as embarrassed as she. His chief concern was what the servants would think. She hadn’t dared to tell him she had lent Pridey a hundred pounds. That would really have convinced him she was going queer.
‘Mother,’ she said, touching her mother’s arm, ‘did you know Mr Slaney-Smith before I married Brook?’
Mrs Blake tucked in two wisps of hair, and three fell down. ‘Yes, dear, why d’you ask?’
‘It’s just occurred to me. He called to inquire just now. He’s always seemed – rather a general friend.’
Mrs Blake glanced across at the two men to make sure they were not listening. ‘Oh, yes, dear,’ she said in an undertone. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you now, you being a mother yourself. Ted and I knew each other before ever I met your father. We were quite sweethearts in our teens. On his twenty-first birthday – at his party actually – he proposed to me. Behind the curtains in the kitchen at the vicarage it was. You know, his father was the vicar of a church in Deansgate.’
‘No, I’d no idea. I didn’t know his father was–’
‘The one that had its spire taken down when you were a girl – I thought it desecration and no one knew why – there were the three boys, Charlie, who was drowned, Ted, and Frank, who does something in the Bridgewater Canal; Ted always had a bit of a fancy for me. But don’t talk now, dear. I’m sure you must be tired. Just be quiet and think about nothing.’
Instead she lay quite quiet and thought about last Tuesday, when Uncle Pridey and Mr Slaney-Smith had had a fine set-to. Mr Slaney-Smith was more quarrelsome than usual these days, and it had happened in the drawing-room before Mr Ferguson came home. Mr Slaney-Smith had begun it by saying: ‘Well, Tom, so I hear your scientific book is to be all the rage after all, what?’
Uncle Pridey had untwisted himself from his cello and looked down at the other man. ‘It’s to be published if that’s what you mean. Don’t suppose it will get its deserts. Can’t expect all the philistines to rejoice, you know.’
Mr Slaney-Smith had said: ‘ Oh, it’ll get its deserts. The public’s got a keen sense of humour.’ He winked at Cordelia, who tried not to see.
‘Donkeys can bray,’ Pridey said. ‘But they’re not the best judges of corn.’
Mr Slaney-Smith’s eyes bulged. ‘Well, no doubt they can tell the wheat from the chaff! What? Don’t deceive yourself, my dear fellow. The general mass of people are getting more scientific-minded every day. It’s harder to hoodwink them than you think.’
‘So I used to believe until this fellow Huxley came along and did it so effectively.’
Slaney-Smith stiffened. ‘Naturally everyone can’t expect to understand the most brilliant man of the century.’
‘Your Mr Huxley would have made a good barrister – rather on the shady side, you know – able to make a bad case sound good; but as a man of science …’ Pridey cracked his fingers in agitation. ‘As for Mr Darwin …’
‘Uncle Pridey,’ Cordelia had said. ‘I think–’
‘As for Mr Darwin, a distinguished botanist, no doubt, following a well-worn track–’
‘If you were not so ignorant of the common principles of science, what? The idle prattle of a silly old man–’
’ – a well-worn track,’ Uncle Pridey had said, cracking away, ‘trodden before by Wallace, Buffon, Lamarck. In a few years’ time another nine days’ wonder will have come, while the real men, the men who count–’
‘Such as yourself, no doubt.’
‘Not at all. I’m important only in a small way, but–’
‘This modesty is alarming. But then all great men undervalue themselves. We must see what we can do to persuade you out of your retirement when the book gets its proper welcome …’
Names and epithets had been flung across the room. Brook had arrived and together they had broken up the argument and steered Pridey, still talking excitedly, from the room. The old man had been thoroughly roused by Slaney-Smith’s sarcasms.
Cordelia thought: Heav
ens. If Mother had … Mr Slaney-Smith might have been my father; I might have been brought up like his children, creeping about the house when he’s at home, scientific: how strange. Then she thought: Heavens, what if other people do what I’ve done: what if I am his child! She glanced at her mother and saw how absurd it was.
‘What are you smiling at, dear?’
‘Nothing, Mother. Only I’m glad you chose Papa instead.’
Mrs Blake giggled, a faint girlish lisp, relic of a lost time before ever Cordelia was born. ‘So am I, dear. But I never really cared for Ted much that way. He always struck me as a bit too – well, methodical, even in those days.’ She looped up a loop of hair. ‘Don’t tell your father, dear. He’s inclined to be jealous, you know.’
She had never looked on her father that way. It came to her as in a sudden moment of understanding – long overdue, she instantly felt – that her father and mother did not look on themselves as old, and that the problems of today are only the problems of yesterday repeated. She felt curiously comforted and in a closer kinship with her mother than ever before. She might almost whisper to her: ‘Look, Mother, I have something to tell you …’
But she knew she would never get further than that. Their kinship would never extend into the realm of the impermissible. She had committed the unforgivable sin, and her mother would never begin to understand how she had come to do it. Whether or not she joined Stephen next year, or whether she remained faithful to Brook all the rest of her life, whatever happened, this part of her secret was a part she must never share.
Chapter Three
Autumn came and winter, and the Irwell was in flood. The Suez Canal was opened. Habits and Heredity in Mice, by Thomas Pride Ferguson, was published and created as much stir as Brook’s poems, which was nil. Spring followed late and another summer. The Prussians cut the French armies to pieces and advanced across Alsace singing, ‘Nun danket Alle Gott’, at appropriate intervals. Uncle Pridey muttered, ‘Horrible, horrible, the downfall of civilization!’ but Mr Ferguson said, not at all, and what else could one expect when one knew of the licentiousness of Paris?
Essie had a daughter and Mrs Blake a son. ‘A brother for Teddy,’ they put in the paper. Teddy was twenty-four. William Edward Forster introduced something called Board Schools, objects of grave suspicion, to be paid for out of the local rates; and a progressive railway company perfected a safety chain which hung outside the window and stopped the train if you pulled it hard enough, only you were not to do it just for fun.
Stephen stayed on in America.
And Ian, his son, laughed and cried and grew, and came to crawl on a rug and could pull himself up by a chair and had ten teeth and fine-growing curly brown hair and was pushed about in one of the new prams.
Postcards were invented; and four-fifths of all the steamships in the world were British. Agriculture was the most prosperous ever. And Von Moltke, who had begun the campaign so brilliantly, continued it by taking Seda, Metz, Châteaudun, two or three armies, and Napoleon the Third as makeweight. Parisians, it was reported, were eating maize, ground bones, and leopards out of the zoo. The Guardian, which was always humanitarian, made quite a fuss about it.
One day, when out shopping in the town, Cordelia met Mrs Slaney-Smith. Mrs Slaney-Smith looked more anxious and more furtive than usual, and after a few polite preliminaries, she began to ask Cordelia about Mr Slaney-Smith, how often he visited Grove Hall in a week. From that she suddenly overflowed into tears and confidences she could no longer suppress. Mr Slaney-Smith was out almost every night. Mr Slaney-Smith was not being honest with her. Mr Slaney-Smith was going with another woman. It had been developing for two years. She had no proof but she was convinced of it. Moisture blinking on her thin pale lashes, she assembled her facts: the letters he regularly received in a woman’s handwriting, the mounting debts, his coldness and preoccupation.
Embarrassed and distressed, Cordelia tried to comfort and reassure her. But Mrs Slaney-Smith was beyond that. During the rest of the day and well into the night Cordelia could not get the sound of Mrs Slaney-Smith’s voice out of her head, the shabby grey dress, the finger-tips, dusty white and wrinkled with constant washing, placed distressfully on her arm.
‘A hard life, Mrs Ferguson, all this time, these years. He has moods, you know, won’t speak to us for hours, for days. I used to say to him, ‘‘ Let me help you,’’ but he keeps me out, outside himself, as it were. He wrestles, I believe, inwardly, you know.’
‘Forgive me, Mrs Slaney-Smith, I don’t want to pry, but – has this sort of thing happened before?’
‘Well, sometimes now I wonder. I wonder if it’s all tied up, connected. I know of one time, a maid we had when our eldest was tiny; I caught them in the hall, you could tell by their expressions. But that was seventeen years ago and not serious. I’ve wondered since, going to those music halls, exposed to temptation. Is your husband a God-fearing man?’
‘… Yes, I think so.’
‘It makes a difference, say what you will, it makes a difference; this un-Godliness, it leaves one without a guide. It’s very, very sad, Mrs Ferguson, and all my poor children. The Grammar School won’t wait for their school bills!’
‘I wish you’d let me tell Brook, Mrs Slaney-Smith. I feel sure he would be willing to help you – that way – if I could explain …’
Mrs Slaney-Smith flicked a glance behind her. ‘I assure you, Mrs Ferguson, it was the very last thing I ever thought of, ever dreamed of. I feel quite ashamed of this outburst, I really do. But you’ve always been so kind. Please, please, don’t mention it again …’
Nevertheless in the weeks that followed Mrs Slaney-Smith was persuaded to accept a loan – on the understanding that Mr Ferguson should on no account be told.
Cordelia found herself occasionally visiting the dye works again, once deputizing when Brook was ill and Mr Ferguson away, once or twice going down with them for special purposes, to see the effect of the new coal-tar greens, to help during a rush period.
To her surprise she found herself accepted by the foremen; she was no longer a stranger or an interloper. Sometimes they even seemed to welcome her. She was a woman, but they had something in common ever since that November day.
This, too, was a period which saw the beginning of a tactical struggle between herself and Mr Ferguson over Ian. (The pram represented a victory for her, since it was his view that his grandson should not be pushed about for everybody to peer at.) Sometimes one triumphed, sometimes the other. There had not yet emerged a crisis on which neither found it possible to give way. An open rift occurred only once, when Cordelia came back late from shopping one day and found that Mr Ferguson had insisted on Ian’s having his meal with the family and then, when the child upset a glass of water, had rapped him across the knuckles with the flat blade of a table-knife. On this tearful scene she came, and there were angry words in front of the servants.
‘A baby of eighteen months!’ she said, struggling with overmastering indignation.
‘A child should never need to be disciplined after the age of two. I never had to touch any of mine after. By the time a child is two it should be necessary only for the parent to discipline himself.’
‘And do you think that way leads to affection between a child and its mother and father?’
‘I have not had cause to complain.’
‘My father never touched any of us,’ she said, ‘but I never remember disobeying him.’
‘Indeed,’ said Mr Ferguson, with the look he always reserved for her father.
‘And I’ve the greatest possible respect for him,’ she said stormily.
‘Respect for a parent,’ said Mr Ferguson, ‘is not a matter of virtue, it is a duty. I should naturally take it for granted that you respected your father. Where the upbringing of your own son is concerned it is understandable that a mother’s feelings should colour your judgment; and it is there that my advice and judgment must be of use to you. I have had a long experience of family life, yo
urs is only just beginning.’
How hard it was to measure words with him. Knuckle under or rebel: there was no middle way.
‘In future, Nurse Grimshaw,’ she said, ‘ Ian will have all his meals in the nursery.’
‘Yes, Mrs Ferguson.’
The tone of her voice left no doubt as to her choice. He looked at her, and for the first time for many months she met the full force of his glance.
‘I will talk it over with Brook,’ he said.
Chapter Four
Cordelia was at the piano when the men called. She was playing a few of the easier pieces among Brook’s music, the windows wide open looking upon the sunlit shrubbery, a bee buzzing against one of the panes, and Uncle Pridey sitting on the hearthrug making faces at his great-nephew.
This was a new occupation for the old man, and one which sometimes even kept him away from his mice. He showed all sorts of unusual talents in the entertainment of a small boy just past his second birthday. At the moment he had twisted his clenched bony fist in such a way that it looked like an old woman’s face, and had pushed two boot buttons in for eyes and draped a handkerchief round to look like a shawl. The tip of his thumb stuck out like a little red tongue, and Cordelia had stopped playing the piano to listen to her son’s laughter.
On the scene came Betty, who had followed Vera, who had followed Patty, who had married a bus-driver.
‘If you please, ma’am, two gentlemen to see Mr Thomas Ferguson.’
Uncle Pridey took the card with his free hand and screwed up his eyes at it. ‘Simon? Simon? Never heard of him. Must be a mistake. He can’t want me. Show them in. No, don’t you go, young woman, stay at your piano.’
He was still squatting beside Ian when two men entered, both in the conventional frock-coats and silk hats. Men of substance. The older and taller blinked round the room, said tentatively to Cordelia:
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