The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

"Oh, dear," John said. "You really want to go on?"

  "If you'd rather not…"

  "I can imagine the rest, knowing Prendergast."

  She laughed then, harshly. "Oh, you cannot! I mean he told me. He made it very clear. He told me exactly. Every detail, every step, every move. Everything. And he spoke so-ooh! So drily. Like a—geometry book. No—a dancing master. Oh I don't know what he was like."

  "How terrible for you."

  "But it wasn't. Because, you see, I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. I thought he was—strange, of course. But you know how children accept almost anything that grownups tell them? And especially a dignified old clergyman like that. It seemed no more silly than—deportment classes or—physical exercises."

  A flesh-curdling thought began to seize John. "And—did you…did he…" He could not voice it.

  She laughed. "I would have. Truly, I was so ignorant, I would have. But he told me to think upon it and he would come back for an answer." She sighed the relief he felt. "He never came. I never saw him again. Do you know," she said in a brisker tone, "I believe now—knowing the ways of the world a great deal better—I believe he never intended to come back. I think his pleasure was merely to talk about it in that calm way to a completely ignorant young girl. I even think I was not the first. Nor the last."

  He thought that was very perceptive of her. "Poor old gentleman," he said.

  "Yes. That's all I feel about him now. But when I ran away from the orphanage, I was so nearly trapped again. In London that was. And in a place that would have made Prendergast's…arrangement seem almost pure."

  He stifled the urge to tell her again that he could imagine it—though, of course, he could. She was too intent upon confession.

  "The first man they—let into the room—well, I have often wondered about him. I cannot remember him at all, whether he was young or old or fat or thin or short or tall or anything. I must have been partly stupefied by something they gave me. I remember the madam though—a hard, pretty woman, still quite young. I'll tell you who she was like—Madame Corneille. Just like her."

  "I picture her exactly!"

  "Anyway, this man. I imagine he had dreamed of doing what he came to do for years before he tightened up his courage."

  "You knew by this time? You understood?"

  "Half. I had seen things in that place and heard the girls talking. But this man, when the moment arrived, I think it must all have—evaporated for him. And he saw himself left with a ridiculous, dead feeling, and a half-drugged, frightened, tearful, disgusted young girl. That's what I imagine. D'you know what he did to me? He combed my hair! For almost an hour that's all he did. Until I could talk sensibly. Then he asked me if I wanted to go from that place. And I thought he meant with him. I thought it was Prendergast again—the same offer. But, anyway, I said yes, because I thought I could escape from him easier than from madam. So he made me pretend I was in a dead faint. I had to chew soap to froth and so on. Then he ran out in a panic and said he was a doctor and thought I was dying. And she was so terrified she let him take me to—he said—the women's hospital. Or perhaps she thought she could always pretend to be a relative and come and claim me from the hospital. Anyway, the miracle worked."

  "It was a miracle."

  "It's like a moral ballad, isn't it! The man took me straight to the Tabard. I don't

  know what tale he told Tom—certainly not the true one. But there I stayed. First as scullery maid, then—when he found I was a vicar's daughter—Tom put me upstairs. Why can't I remember that man's face?"

  "Did he never come to the Tabard again?"

  "He may have. And I wouldn't have recognized him, you see. For a long time I thought of him as 'my saviour' and even—though it was blasphemy—as my Saviour. You know?"

  "That wouldn't be blasphemy, Sarah. To rescue girls in that situation would be His work." Struck by a thought he looked over the street, where the gaslights were being lighted. He moved to the seat by the window on that side. "Look there," he said, pointing to where the "gay" girls of Station Road shivered, stamped their feet, and walked morosely up and down beneath the flaring gas.

  She moved across and looked out too. He felt the sudden warmth of her nearness in the dark and withdrew. "How many of them lacked only the good fortune that saved you?"

  She shuddered and returned to her former seat. "I often think it."

  "Still. A tavern in Southwark is, many would say, only one step up from the place you were spirited from."

  "But a very important step, John. A girl couldn't close her eyes and ears to it, but she could keep herself pure. And then I fell in love with Tom, years before he even looked at me. And that made it easy. Oh, but wasn't he a marvellous man?"

  "He was. He was lucky too, in you. You were both lucky. I ought to light the carriage lamp."

  "Leave it a bit. Nora's a long time."

  He wondered why she had told him all this. "A long way from George Beador," he said.

  She sighed. In the light that shone feebly from over the street he saw her hands grip and rub one another. "Does it still happen to you, John, that you look back at yourself as you were six months ago and you think what an ignorant, innocent goose you were? How little of life you knew then and how wise you are now?"

  And he had to confess that it was years since he had had such notions.

  "It's like that all the time with me. All those years at the Tabard when I was so prudish. And then when I went to France with Tom last year I was still like that at first, until…He was so patient and gentle. And so I learned it is not always shameful and wicked. Does that sound brazen?"

  "Of course not." He sat tensely, guarding himself for one false word or gesture that might dry her up.

  "Remember, we were not married. Yet even in the depths of my soul, even when I faced God in church and took His Body and Blood at communion, I could feel no shame."

  He almost told her that he had once lived for a year with a girl he had married navvy-style, over the anvil, and had got her with child before she ran away from him. But caution checked him before he began to speak.

  "You still aren't shocked?" she asked.

  "Not at all. That kind of shock is really a sort of timidity."

  "I remember how it was to lie with Tom. And I still feel no shame. Those uxorial memories are very strong. Are they equally strong in everyone? We can never gauge that, can we?"

  "Do you really think marrying Beador would help?"

  "I would have no other reason for marrying him."

  "But do you really want to marry him?"

  A man was walking past the girls across the street, looking at and talking to them in turn; then he went off with one of them. Sarah drew an enormous breath, let it out, and said: "If you really ask me, I want it to be as easy for me as for that man over there. I will never fall in love again. So what am I to do with—those feelings? We call them 'uxorial,' but we both know what they are. Now I'm sure you are shocked."

  He knew exactly what she was offering him then; and he was fairly certain that she knew too. The moment was exciting and he wanted to prolong it—to think of himself as capable of taking up such an offer—though he knew that in the end he would have to decline it. The conventional response: If only there was some way I could help…rose to his throat and was half uttered before he realized its implication. He changed it to: "If only there was some way I could…illustrate it for you. What you say is not unnatural, not shocking, not even uncommon. The same longings overtake me when I am away from Nora for weeks. So how could I be shocked or surprised? And a few nights ago, in London, I did what that man over there just did."

  "Oh, John! I didn't mean you to…"

  "Wait! Listen to the whole story. I actually went with this girl to a little hotel. But just before we got there I realized how—tawdry it was going to be. Unlovely and tawdry." He laughed. "My one thought then was how not to hurt her feelings."

  The lamplighter came back and put on the lam
ps along their side as John spoke.

  "How like you," she said. "What did you do?"

  "I had some filberts in my pocket. I bit the shell of one and gave the kernel to her, and then bit another and pretended it had broken one of my teeth and I was in too much pain."

  The incident had actually happened two years ago but to say so would have diluted the force of the tale. "Suppose you suddenly had that feeling—tawdry— while you were walking up the aisle with George Beador. Or, even worse, afterward. Toothache would offer no escape then."

  She nodded glumly. It was cold comfort, all right. To change the mood he returned to the seat opposite her and, daringly, reached a hand across and squeezed her knee. And daringly he grinned a wicked grin as he said: "Find a discreet lover. You'd not be the first young widow to do such a thing."

  "John!" She kicked him in mock outrage.

  And that was the moment Nora chose to open the carriage door.

  Chapter 28

  Nora had been prepared for almost any response from John, except the one she got—or thought she had got. She knew it would wound his dignity that he had been forced to skulk abroad while she had saved the firm—never mind that she had done so in the most unbusinesslike and outrageous manner. She had prepared so many ways of telling him how accidental it had been, how only the thought that he was safe in France had made her bold enough. She even thought up ways in which—had he been at home—he might have managed the rescue more easily and with far greater certainty. Even more, she had been quite ready to apologize for the public exhibition she had made of herself, and to ask his forgiveness.

  So to catch him taking advantage of Sarah's desperation like that shocked her far too deeply to allow her to tax him with it directly. It was not that she lacked sympathy for Sarah; she had made that plain in her letter to John. She knew, from John's frequent and long absences, what it was to yearn to lie entangled with a man again. She knew how unendurable the lack of that fulfilment, and the lack of any prospect of it, must seem to poor Sarah. But the last thing she had expected was that John would take advantage of it, especially after so long an absence from her, and even more especially after the crisis they had endured and survived together these months past.

  She did not blame Sarah in the least. Had she not heard Sarah's cry of outrage the moment before she opened the carriage door and caught John in that position?

  She had passed it off at the time, saying, "That's right, Sarah! Keep him in his place!" Which was not the welcome she had prepared and longed to give.

  And even when they reached home and she and John were at last alone together, she could not forgo the homecoming she had dreamed of for so many weeks. So she continued to make light of what had happened in York.

  "Couldn't wait, eh?" she asked, grinning as she began to undo his shirt buttons.

  His bewilderment looked very genuine.

  "Our Sarah's proving a bit of a hot lot," she went on, thinking that to blame Sarah might ease his guilt. "A bit of a Fulham virgin, eh?"

  "She will be, unless she finds…well, someone."

  Nora eased his shirt off and began on her own dress and stays. He watched her, frank in his longing. "For God's sake," he said. "Who are we talking about?"

  She grinned. Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight. "Mistress Sarah," she whispered.

  She kissed him. Only their lips were yet in contact.

  His hands went to the buttons of her dress. Lifting his lips a thousandth of an inch from hers, he said, "Forgotten her."

  He felt the blood hammering at the pit of her neck, and among the tendons at the back of his skull. "No sleep tonight," he said at the corner of his lips.

  She undid his trousers and let them fall. "You dare try!" she said.

  A month of unslaked lust bound them, racing their hearts and shivering their breath. Sarah was truly forgotten. When Nora's dress fell to her knees he pulled her swiftly to him, trying to lift her off the ground. But she turned a little to one side. "Don't be hasty now. Savour it." And she turned for him to unlace her corset. And she went on turning, pressed to him, after she stepped from its loosened clutch.

  Her slim, nude body, warm in the candlelight, warm by the fire, turning and turning, now this way, now that, against him…the curve of her back…the firmness of her hips…her soft breasts…the grace of her neck and the beauty of her and of her face and the dark, desperate eyes, begging now, and entranced—these were the images of her he had only half captured in his years of days away from this house.

  "Nora!" It was hardly his own voice.

  He fell to his knees and buried his face upon her belly, his tongue into her navel. "Oh, love!" Her voice shivered down through the magic air around them; her fingernails were a cap of spikes upon his head. His tongue and lips and breathing rose up her body to her breasts, her neck, her shoulders, her ears, her stifling hair. And his grip tightened as he rose, bearing her aloft, and then, with infinite gentleness, lowering her, lowering, lowering, upon him.

  As the cry of her throat tore the air, and the warmth of her closed around him, not death itself could have held him back. Then she fell upon him, leaning out and abandoning herself to his grip, throwing both legs up until she was rammed to the hilt of him, and feeling that marvellous pulse as he squandered his month of continence into her, spending on and on.

  When the crackle of the flames, the creak of the floorboard, and the weight of their bodies returned, he lowered her to the carpet before the fire and sat himself beside her, leaning so that his face was only inches above hers. His eyes smiled; hers responded. "I can face anything if you're with me," he said.

  She closed her eyes then. "Nothing could take you from me or put aught between us."

  Neither of them had said anything like that to the other for years. Or needed to.

  He still had said nothing directly about her rescue of their fortune. He had written, of course—quite warmly. But he had said nothing, and his silence was beginning to hurt her.

  In the small hours he awoke, feeling ravenous; he slipped quietly from the bed, trying not to awaken her, and tiptoed from the room.

  He's hungry, she thought. It could hardly be…well, anything else. He often felt hungry when they had made such magnificent love. He often stole down to the kitchen when he felt like that. Of course he's hungry.

  But for the first time in their life together she rose, slipped on a dressing gown, and went down to join him.

  The kitchen clock whirred and struck three—that is, its hammer flailed the air three times, having been bent by Mrs. Jordan, the cook, so that it would fail to strike the chimes. The sound of chimes, she said, made the air stifling.

  John was not there, but the light of her candle showed the signs of his visit: the cut pie, the crumbs on the table, the pickle barrel, and the sticky wooden ladle beside it.

  On her way up the west stair, which led, it so happened, past Sarah's rooms, she saw a light in the business room across the courtyard in the east wing. She took no pains to be silent as she turned back and went that way. She did not want to catch them unawares again.

  He was alone—or as alone as the owner of a large enterprise can be when he has a case full of unanswered letters, of contracts awaiting perusal or signature, of complaints, of surveys, of claims, of excuses and explanations, of alarms and false alarms.

  He grinned apologetically when he saw her. "Eay love, did I waken thee? I tried being quiet."

  Ashamed now of her suspicions, she could only smile shyly.

  He was eating the last of the pie with gusto. He pointed at the pile of documents spread before him. "I think we've accidentally hit on one of the cardinal principles of business," he said. "Look!" He passed her a letter. "Tucker to me; Exeter, 28 December: Come at once, the world's falling apart. In eight pages." He gave her another letter. Tucker again; Exeter, 4 January: Come if you can but it's not so bad as it seemed." Another. "Tucker; 9 January: Ignore all previous letters. All is well." He laughed.

  "What's t
his cardinal principle?" she asked.

  "In difficult times the chief's job is to vanish. There's half a dozen similar cases there." He waved his hand over the correspondence. "Half a dozen cries for help that would have had me losing sleep and tearing out my hair. All solved."

  His tone was self-dismissive, but to her he seemed, obliquely, to be minimizing all that she had done. "Perhaps I should have joined you," she said.

  He winked. "It's only because you stayed—and did what you did—that I can make light of it." He reached out and took her hand.

  Suddenly she felt herself close to tears.

  "I can't go on and on telling you," he said. "But you know it. I owe everything to you now."

  The tears came then. She could not stop them. But she did not want to withdraw behind them; feeling every inch a fool, she kept her eyes on his as well as she could and smiled.