The Season

by Charlotte Bingham

  Herbert had agreed with his doctor wholeheartedly and then, having shaken each other’s hands, and avoided the sadness in each other’s eyes, he had turned on his heel and instead of returning to his office he had made straight for his club in the centre of the city, and sent a note to Jane telling her he was called away for a couple of days on business to Bradford, after which he had taken a train to that same city, booked into an hotel near the station and started to drink.

  He had never, to his certain memory, been so drunk since May’s mother Ruby had died. He had been drunk then, but not as drunk as he had become after seeing his doctor and hearing about his Jane.

  But then he had taken the train back to York once more, and put up at his club, where he sobered up, and down, and pulled himself together in such a way that he swore, from that day onwards, he would never allow himself more than a glass of whisky after dinner. Never would he let Jane see the panic, the fear, that her imminent demise had brought about within him. With this resolution had to come, as he well knew, an unshakable decision not to allow himself more than a nightcap of whisky ‘before retiring’.

  Too much wine, one glass of porter too much, it did not matter, truly, what it was, but he was certain that if he became in any way intoxicated he would risk lowering his guard, and might, inadvertently, allow Jane to see what she must not know. Or, if he became morose from drink, she might just sense that he knew something that she did not. The problem was that they were so close that sometimes it seemed to him that she was able to read his thoughts, almost before he had thought them.

  ‘So, dinner as usual tonight? I mean at the usual hour, Herbert, my love?’

  ‘Why, yes, love, that would be everything I could wish, a quiet dinner for two, just you and I. I could not want for more.’

  But the truth was that he could want for more, and did. He wanted more and more, and never-ending, dinners and luncheons with his beloved, his darling Jane, opposite him.

  After all, it was for Jane that he had turned down the attentions of Daisy, the beautiful Countess of Evesham. That was something for which he had not been forgiven, quite naturally, by the Countess. And after all, no real man could have said, all that time ago, that the stunning Daisy clad only in a tea gown and silk stockings was not a temptation, and to say any different was so much hogie pogie.

  Herbert had not been tempted, not because he could not have been tempted, but solely and simply because he would not be tempted. Nothing would induce him to be unfaithful to his beloved Jane. She was the light of his life, and though he had loved his first love, Ruby, with all his heart, he could never have been tempted to marry her. Ruby and he had youth and adventure in common, they had a poor background in common, they had a wish to succeed in common, but they did not and never would have had marriage in mind, even though he had saved young Ruby from drowning when, as a young child, she fell into the river.

  I must just take each dinner and each luncheon, as they come. I must pretend to myself that there will be another million dinners and luncheons to come. Just as if my life with Jane was beginning and not, which is the truth, ending. That is what I must do.

  Jane stared across the table at Herbert. ‘What, still not fancying wine with your meal, our Herbert?’ she asked, her head once more on one side as he covered his wine glass with his hand.

  ‘No. It is since the influenza in the winter, I think. It right put me off my wines, and I want nothing more than my whisky before I retire, love.’

  Jane straightened up and laughed. ‘I don’t believe you, Herbert Forrester!’

  Herbert remembered to keep his eyes calm as he stared across the heavily embroidered luncheon cloth at his still pretty wife.

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because, quite simply, you did not have the influenza in the winter, Herbert. I did!’

  Herbert smiled. ‘I know you did, love, and ever since then you have suffered from your little cough and your breathlessness, but you see I had it too, when I had to go to Bradford that time, remember? It come on quite suddenly, and I was right poorly, I tell you. I did not want to worry you, since you yourself were below par, but I had two or three days of feeling quite unlike myself in Bradford, and when I came back somehow my taste buds could no longer support the idea of wine. That is what I think happened. I think the bout of influenza took away my liking for wine.’

  ‘Oh well, Herbert, never mind, eh? What is not missed is of no matter. I, on the other hand, have decided that I might feel better for a glass of red wine once or twice a day.’ She nodded towards her wine glass, but seeing Herbert’s anxiety as the maid filled up her wine glass she went on, ‘It’s all right. I checked with Dr Leonard, and he said there is nothing at all amiss with my taking a little fortifying red wine twice a day. In fact, he thinks it positively beneficial.’

  ‘In that case, I will be tempted to join you in a glass, and that way we can drink to each other twice a day, my own love!’

  Jane smiled delightedly. For when all was said and done there was no real pleasure in enjoying wine on one’s own. She nodded to one of the maids, who quickly took the wine round to Herbert’s side of the table.

  ‘Herbert.’ Jane raised her glass. ‘Let’s drink to each other, love. And to our future together, don’t you think, dearest?’

  Two raised glasses, two smiles, and one heart at least feeling as if it were sinking like a stone.

  As he raised his glass to drink her poor health, everything to do with Jane that he so loved seemed of a sudden to be a burden to poor Herbert. Her pretty ways, a burden. Her smile, her sweet smile, that too a sorrowful burden, at the thought of how few days there were to come during which he might enjoy it. Her clothes, always so bright and so crisp, seemed to mock the sad thoughts that would not go away. And then there was her unselfishness. This business of her taking up wine again was most probably because she thought he had given it up for her sake. It was all so beautiful, and so sad.

  ‘You never liked wine before, did you, Jane?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted, and then she frowned. ‘No, I never did, but I don’t know why, I do now. It makes me feel better, stronger even.’

  ‘That’s good, then.’

  ‘Yes. Something else we can share. Herbert. Not that we don’t share so much already.’

  ‘We’ve been lucky, haven’t we, Jane? We’ve hardly been apart, all our lives. What a thing that has been, our lives spent always so much together!’

  ‘And still so much more to which we can look forward, Herbert. So much more.’

  ‘That’s right, love. So much.’

  ‘And summer is here.’

  ‘Yes, love. Summer is here.’

  ‘And the birds are singing.’

  ‘Yes, love, the birds are singing.’

  ‘And I have a new dress from London, just arrived.’

  ‘Have you, love? I can’t wait to see it.’

  They smiled at each other, but just for a brief second, he could not have said why, Herbert had the idea that he glimpsed tears in Jane’s eyes.

  Aunt Tattie was waiting, quite eagerly, for Richard Ward to arrive in the garden. She did not know what to say to him. It was all so strange. A young man his age … well, he was forty, she supposed. Anyway, he was much younger than herself, and sending her a note on Portia’s London card with an invitation to meet her in the ballroom!

  Why should he wish to do such a thing? She thought he might have some burden, perhaps some new sorrow that he wished to tell her about when no-one else was about; or he might have something that he wished to give her quite privately, without Evans or someone seeing, some treasure that he wanted her to safeguard. Men did trust her, she had noticed that over the years. Even Lampard had trusted her, with so many secrets, far too many, that she had really rather he had not. But there, he was her brother, and when all was said and done a brother was a brother.

  She had found the note on her bedroom table, just after she and Portia had decided to swap rooms, because she foun
d it so very difficult to sleep in London, and her room overlooked the main street outside, and what with the windows open on a hot summer night and the sound of the carriages arriving and departing, and the street cries in the morning, there was always something to disturb her.

  Well, to cut a long story short, at all events she had truly had enough of not sleeping, London or no London. So Portia, such was her sweet nature, had suggested swapping rooms, and after they had duly rehung all their clothes in fresh wardrobes and the maids had damp-dusted and swept and all that, Aunt Tattie had found this card from Richard Ward hidden under her pillow.

  Of course she had not wanted to go to meet him, but she had thought it must be her duty to do so, and so she had taken herself off to the ballroom and then, the silly man, he had not turned up!

  Why, she had wondered, go to all the trouble of writing her a hastily scrawled note only to fail to materialise? She thought it must be all part of his poor condition. Her brother Lampard, suffering from the same condition, had been terribly hither and thither, and still was. He hardly knew the time of day, or the year or the month, he had grown so bad of late. Happily he had some devoted servants who took care of him night and day now, and so he was what her mother’s cook would call out of your hair, Miss Tradescant, thank goodness. And it was true that he was out of her hair now, but such could not be said for Richard Ward.

  As Aunt Tattie went over and over, again and again, the strange behaviour of her reluctant house guest, downstairs in the servants’ dining room Evie and Evans were looking at each other sombrely, in the true knowledge that they had both, as Evans put it succinctly, ‘made a hell of a hash of it, Miss Evie. But then we was not to know that the Vice Admiral would be such a gentleman, was we?’

  ‘No, that is true.’

  ‘And you was not to know that Miss Tradescant and Lady Childhays would, of a sudden, decide to swap their rooms, was you? We was not to know that you placed the note just where the wrong woman could take it up. And now here we are, back at the start of it all, and no better off if you ask me. What am I to tell my relative, that is what I would like to know? She is wanting to hear something she is, and she can’t be blamed, can she now? Not for wanting some news of retribution for the destruction of the social ease of this – er – protégée.’

  ‘Quite right, Mr Evans,’ Evie agreed. ‘I would feel the same in her position, wanting to know that something was going to happen by way of revenge, I would and all. It is only natural.’

  ‘That is what it is, Miss Evie, natural. Revenge is natural. You are kicked in the shins by someone, it’s only natural that you want to kick that person’s shins back. I know it’s not Biblical, that I will agree, but it is natural, really it is.’

  Slowly, oh so slowly, after this heartfelt statement from Mr Evans, a plan came into Evie’s mind, and it was a good one, of that she was suddenly quite sure. She turned to the valet.

  ‘There is one thing that has happened, Mr Evans, which we did not think of. I don’t exactly know why it has happened, but something has changed our Miss Phyllis, beyond anyone’s dreams. She is a different girl today than what she was a few days ago. Which leads me to think that we may well be still able to do something to retrieve this situation. If Miss Phyllis has turned over some sort of a leaf, we might induce her, of her own free will, to make amends to this poor young lady.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Evans, going to the window and looking upwards and out towards the garden, ‘look at the Admiral seated beside Miss Tradescant. That was not exactly what we intended, was it? Those two becoming intimate!’

  They both started to laugh, because really, when all was said and done, it was funny. Just one of the many small, amusing, or sometimes tragic dramas that played themselves out during the Season.

  ‘Do sit,’ Aunt Tattie commanded. As obedient as a spaniel or a lap dog the Vice Admiral sat down on the strangely shaped Arts and Crafts chair opposite her own strangely shaped bench. ‘Good. Now we can begin to talk. I can never talk when a man is towering above me. Tell me,’ went on Aunt Tattie, ‘do you think you might have something on your mind that you wish to tell me, young Richard Ward?’

  Richard shook his head. He had nothing on his mind except the idea, and it was an exciting one, that Portia had been eager and willing to meet him quite alone in the ballroom downstairs. It had never occurred to him, wreck of a man that he was, that Portia could still, after all this time, find him exciting, that she would want to meet him alone. He had thought of her so often when he was at sea, and after he was married – when he probably should not have thought of her at all – and now here they were in London, and Portia had sent him a little note urging him to meet her for some reason that he could only surmise.

  ‘I wish to tell you that coming here and being with you, in your house, with everyone that I once knew in my youth, has turned me round. Such kindness, such unheard-of kindness – I cannot tell you what it has meant to me.’

  Aunt Tattie’s grasp on the beads around her waist tightened, and tightened once more again, until she was almost cutting herself in two. She did not wish to boast, but she knew that what Richard Ward was saying was only the truth. She knew that she and Portia had been the instruments of his salvation in a perfectly practical manner, in a way that was not elucidated by the wretched Monsignor in his essays, in his roundabout, seventeen times around the bushes and cannot understand a word of it way.

  ‘So, that is why you wanted to meet me?’ Aunt Tattie’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘That is why I wanted to meet you,’ Richard agreed innocently. ‘To tell you that you, and Portia, have literally saved my life. That you have taken a drunken old tar and turned him round. And every day I have said those words you taught me, and every day, few of them though there have been, I have become better and better. You are kindness, you are thoughtfulness itself, and that is why I wanted so much to meet you again, to tell you that.’

  Aunt Tattie patted his hand. ‘Dear young Richard Ward. What a fine fellow you are once more!’ She stared into the handsome face, now substantially less florid, the eyes clear once more, the speech utterly coherent.

  Richard laughed. ‘Now you go too far, Aunt Tattie!’

  ‘Not that you were not always a fine fellow, but now, here, I see you as you were in the dear old days at Bannerwick, a fine, upstanding, honest fellow with such a passion for sailing and for boats, as to put everything else out of your mind. And Portia too, of course, she has never lost her passion for boats. Sailing halfway round the world with just the crew and her children for company. She did that, you know, after – after her poor husband was gathered.’

  ‘Poor man. To close his eyes for ever on Portia’s beautiful face, how terrible for him.’

  Richard said the words sincerely and without embarrassment, and for a while they were both silent, as people of different ages can be silent together, knowing that they understand each other across the generations, appreciating each other as other souls nearer in age sometimes cannot find the time or the will to do.

  ‘Of course. But to return to the present. You are better, that is all that matters. You are whole again, and likely to remain so. And, you know, Portia will be down in a minute, and we can take luncheon out here, in the garden. That will be amusing, I think. Always, indoors in London, halfway through the Season I begin to feel … shut in. Hemmed in, quite tired of the indoor life, don’t you agree?’

  At the mention of Portia’s name Aunt Tattie sensed Richard Ward growing worried and restless. He was certainly becoming tense, if the movement of his feet, the crossing and recrossing of his legs, was anything to go by.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again, ‘Portia will be down to join us any minute and we will be able to take luncheon outside. I have instructed the servants. And do not fret, there will be nothing in the food to bring on your former indisposition. Meanwhile, let us have some lemonade, ice cold and freshly made.’ She rang the small, silver, finely wrought eighteenth-century bell in front of her
and smiled encouragingly at Richard Ward.

  I will be here to see you through the next phase of your life, whatever it is, her smile told him, while at the same time her thoughts ran ahead to the idea that she would never bother to read essays on being good again. They made you feel too wicked. No, in future she would confine her ideas to doing. To do good was to follow your heart sincerely, and really, reading about how to go on was about as much good as reading a receipt in a cookery book, appreciating it to the full, and then failing to make the blessed dish.

  Upstairs Evie was facing her mistress, and, for her sins, telling an enormous lie. And what was worse Miss Phyllis was witnessing her doing it, and they were both wriggling and squirming in front of Lady Childhays’ honest gaze, while at the same time not looking to each other for help.

  ‘I was readin’ The Pickwick Papers to the Vice Admiral, my lady. It was nothing to do with Miss Phyllis here, bless her, not at all. It was me that was sneaking in and out and reading to him for all I was worth.’

  ‘You, Evie?’

  Portia did not believe a word of it. She knew, and all too well, that Phyllis had been up to something of late. She had been so good, so docile, so willing to do or say anything Portia had asked of her, that her mother had become convinced that she was ‘up to something’.

  For that reason her suspicions had alighted on the book. Supposing that Phyllis had been going in to see Richard Ward all alone? Supposing she had been reading to an unmarried man, a widower, herself unmarried? It would mean that her reputation was lost. It would mean that she was ruined. The bookmark told all. That and the fact that young Phyllis was now being such an angel.

  ‘Yes, my lady, it was me. I thought, and I am sorry if it was wrong, but I thought, and Mr Evans too, that it would do him good to listen to someone readin’ to him, and all that sort of thing. And seeing that it is such a very amusing book it seemed to me that it might buck him up, begging your pardon, my lady.’