It was a good start; for so busy and important a man as John Fielden to spare him a whole hour on this festive evening was an achievement that would not go unmarked and unreported. But that, too, was a worry. What would Prendergast do when the news reached his ears? Prendergast could have helped him much more than he had. His failure to do so could only be explained away as a kind of caution—waiting to see how Stevenson turned out. If it now turned out that Stevenson was openly reaching above Prendergast's head, the cleric might start presenting one or two bills. It was time to consider whether or not to advance his visit to London, to Bolitho & Chambers, despite the dangers of such a course.
Then, emboldened by his success with Fielden, he made a stupid blunder. He went in search of Squire Redmayne and tried, with little finesse, to bring the conversation around to the possibility of doing some contracting work. It was widely said that Redmayne had ambitions to build another factory out at Millwood, to the east of Todmorden. At first, the squire seemed unwilling to believe that Stevenson was being serious, but then when the truth was apparent, he turned beetroot with rage and, rather than send John from his house on this of all evenings, turned his back upon him and refused to speak further.
Chastened, John went back to the large hall in search of the others, who had left him and Fielden fairly early. He found Nora standing, watching Walter and Arabella dancing the quadrille. "Come on!" she said as soon as she saw him.
"Can you?" he asked as they took the floor.
"I can do the lancers and it's very like," she said. "Arabella taught me. And that young ensign's taught me the waltz except the band can't do three-four, they keep getting into six-eight."
"You have been busy!"
They started to dance and Nora showed no hesitation.
"I've learned a lot," she said, her eyes shining.
"So have I," he told her. And, swallowing his chagrin, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the fun.
Later there were games, mainly for the younger people—fool plough, hoodman blind, hot cockles, steal the loaf, and shoe the wild mare. The youngsters, too, made good use of the mistletoe bough—as did Walter, though, by the time he had plucked enough courage to include Nora, the last of the berries had been picked and he had to hop around the room on one foot by way of forfeit.
Then uncle Redmayne, remembering John's singing of Christmas is Come out in the entrance hall, asked him to sing it for the company. John took little persuading and his mellow baritone stilled the entire room as he sang:
Now Christmas is come Let us beat on the drum
And draw all the neighbours together.
And when they are here
Let us all make such cheer
As will drive off the wind and the weather…
And so on, through the half-dozen verses. Nora was, of course, as proud of him as a hen with one chick. The band claimed they were "blawd an' scraped dry" and left their little stand. But the entertainment continued. One of the daughters of the house recited Southey's Holly Tree, whose uplifting final stanzas, comparing the holly's modesty to the speaker's own virtuous ambitions, came oddly from one whose behaviour had, only moments earlier, been so wildly hoydenish.
Then the young ensign recited Thomas Campbell's Men of England.
Not a whig heart there that did not beat a little faster; nor a whig head that was not held a little higher as that stirring panegyric to English Liberty unfolded.
The cheers were so great that he had to repeat it before they would let him go. Then another young man recited Wordsworth's A Perfect Woman, not so much to the company as at one of the young girls.
"Say, he's going it a bit," Walter muttered when the man reached the line about "steps of virgin liberty." The girl clearly thought so too, to judge by the way she turned from the man and stood presenting him with the shoulder farthest from the fire.
The company, wanting more of this sort of fun, cheered him even more tumultuously than they had the ensign; but the young man, being something of an opportunist—"apprenticed to a Rochdale solicitor," a neighbour told John—and having noticed how well the ensign's patriotic jingle had done, capped it with Cowper's Boadicea.
The oracular promise of the druids to the doomed British queen—that the Roman Empire would crumble and that a greater British one would arise— stirred everyone there. And the final insult, hurled proudly from her dying lips at the advancing Romans:
Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heaven awards the vengeance due;
Empire is on us bestowed,
Shame and ruin wait for you.
…was for most of them the climax of the evening—despite the many pretty, comic, and tragic recitations that followed. Looking at the glow of pride that lighted up the eyes of every listener—especially of the young folk—Nora became aware of the existence of an England she had never known: an England of the spirit. England to her had been a motley collection of houses, streets, mills, fields, highways, and hills. A place that stretched beyond sight and ken. But here, to these young people, growing in an age of boundless progress and opportunity, it was something so much grander—an idea, an ideal. And as that ideal seized her, she filled with this pride she had never sensed before, feeling a new kinship with all the unknown people of Kent and Cornwall and Dorset and Oxford and all the places that until now had been, quite simply, "foreign parts."
To be English was something stupendous; but even more, it was to be young in England at such a time and to know that as one grew, England's greatness would grow in step. She wished that someone else would speak more patriotic verse; and she was obviously not alone in this desire, for when the band returned, the first song that everyone demanded, once someone had suggested it, was "Rule Britannia."
Unfortunately, she did not know the words, but those of the second verse:
The nations not so blest as thee
Must in their turn to tyrants fall,
Whilst thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
…so moved her that she would have been unable to continue even if she had.
When the last stirring strains of the chorus died away, Sweeney came deferentially in to say that the car driver was now waiting and had three other calls to make, so if they didn't go with him now, they'd be past midnight for getting home.
As they took their leave, Redmayne coldly thanked John for his adroit coupling of tact and manliness in dealing with his son Richard.
Walter, remembering Bess and still, despite Nora's interference, eager for adroit coupling of a different sort, led the way out—into a world dismayingly bathed in brilliant moonshine.
"I think it's snowed," Arabella said. But the powdering was so thin they had a job deciding whether it really was snow or just a trick of the moonlight. Walter found himself seated between John and Arabella, forced almost knee to knee and eye to eye with little Bess—who did not once turn her eyes to his. He comforted himself with the thought that at least there'd be no unseemly scrabbling in frostbitten outhouses tonight. And there was always Arabella.
Arabella lay in bed, later that night, listening to the way Walter washed and shed his clothes. She had become especially tuned to these things—his breathing, his pauses, his scratching, even the way he folded his inexpressibles—and she knew that tonight he was going to assert his rights on her. It did not weary or depress her; she was now past all that. Much as one might look out on a gray day and, seeing an approaching shower, say "I hope it will soon be over" without meaning it deeply or even thinking much more about it, she heard these telltale sounds and automatically thought I hope it'll soon be over. At least Walter no longer seemed to want any active response from her; in fact, quite the reverse, for if she so much as moved to get in a more comfortable position or just responded to one of his passionate kisses—and he knew she had no objection to kissing, in moderation—or if she even breathed noticeably, he would stop in annoyance, just as he would if she interrupted with a question when
he read to her from the papers. He would stop and freeze, as if gathering together something she had shattered, and then, often with a heavy sigh, would begin again.
She lay supine, seeking a position that would have to remain comfortable for ten or fifteen minutes, and waited.
Walter, having tried in the months past to provoke a response from Arabella, with steadily diminishing success, had accommodated himself to her indifference in the only way possible:
He had made it part of the act. Indeed, he had made it the point of the act. The moment the light was blown out, he lay still beside her and imagined a scene in which a beautiful and outwardly healthy, young girl was despaired of by doctor, nurse, father, mother, and quite often, for good measure, by a faithful dog, too. The girl expired—she was never Arabella, of course, but was blonde, auburn, honey gold, red, russet, brown, black…everything by turns, and anything from a well developed fourteen to a sweet sixteen years old. One by one, her tearful family and attendants left and then he, concealed nearby throughout these touching scenes of bereavement and farewell, would emerge, steal across the room to lock the door, and walk luxuriously back to the bed; every step of the way he savoured the uninterrupted and unprotested intimacies that were about to ensue.
Slowly, tenderly, gloatingly, he would lay aside the sheet that shrouded her glorious, still warm body, raise the nightdress in which she had just expired, and explore every virgin, unprotesting inch, with hands, with fingers, with fingertips, with fingernails, with eyes, with lips, with tongue, with teeth, with breath. He would twine her arms in great silken ropes and hang her from the tester of the bed…drape her over furniture…put her kneeling…arch her backwards… impale her on his tree of life and waltz her into his delirium…And then, then, taking her to the bed, he would lay her on her back—and this was the moment when Arabella entered the drama, and he, her.
It was not very satisfactory. He knew that. It was squeezing out the best of a dull show. But tonight Arabella spoiled it for him. He had barely begun when she coughed and whispered, "I hate to interrupt you, dearest, but can you not be a little calmer about it? I'm sure the Stevensons next door can hear every one of your grunts and cries."
"Not the night for it, eh?" he said goodnaturedly, and pulling away, kissed her, and seemingly fell at once into a soundless sleep. To him, the sacrifice was small compared with any loss of her affection and goodwill.
About five minutes, earlier Nora had nudged John, then just getting into bed, and said: "You'll never believe it—listen!" They did; and there was no mistaking the noise. "Talk about 'born with a horn'!" John said.
She slipped her hand out from under the sheets to lift his shirt. "Here?" he asked.
"If you're quick, they'll never know."
He pulled a face. "Let's save it. Night after next we'll be alone at Rough Stones. Save it, eh?"
"Oh you poor old fellow!" she said.
Which was how she got her way with him.
Fully two hours later, Arabella turned in her sleep and fitfully woke. Next morning, she was no longer sure that she had not dreamed it. For, in that halfwaking state, she could have sworn she saw Walter, sleeping against the wall.
What she had not seen was the tumbler that he pressed—indeed almost mashed—between his ear and the wall. Nor did she see the excitement in his eye. For, through the agency of that empty glass, he could magnify every idle breath into a passionate flutter, every chance creak of the bedframe into a fourquarters thrust, and every sleeping sigh into a moan of ecstasy.
And there, alone, in the chill of his bedroom, in that sleeping house, in the small hours of a Christmas morning, while fine drifts of snow fell all around, Walter lent his lonely ear to his illusions and finished, alone, the solo drama Arabella had let him start, alone.
Two days later, the first chance he got, he took the train to Manchester to report the splendid progress out at Summit.
After lunch, he went to one of the big-number houses over in Salford, chose their most innocent-looking little bobtail, and took her upstairs.
"What do you usually ask, Polly?" he inquired.
"A pound, sir, for I curtail nothing," she smiled.
"Well, listen, sweet, here's what I want. I want you to make me feel you're my bride. A young virgin, you see—yet eager once she gets warmed to it. A young bride."
Polly nodded eagerly, but he knew she would have made the same response whatever he had asked.
"You do that—make me believe it—and there's two pounds for you. Pretend this is the first night of our honeymoon. Remember—be chaste. Be modest."
Again she flashed that eager, uncomprehending smile-of-all-nations at him.
But though her greed was great her wit would not stretch; her idea of chastity was to be slowly—instead of quickly—lascivious and then to burst into a most unconvincing whimper the moment his shots fell between wind and water.
In fact, the charade was not as grisly as he had at first feared. Her acting was so atrocious that there was something quite appealing, indeed stimulating, about it. He even toyed briefly with the notion of returning regularly and subjecting her to increasingly impossible demands—read her the story of Dantë and Beatrice and get her to play Beatrice while he had her—or she could do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet…
Even she knew how bad she'd been and was pleased enough with the extra three bob he gave her—"for trying your best" as he said with that nice little smile of his; he was quite a nice young fellow, really, she thought before she forgot him altogether.
On the train home, he looked out at the snowclad but already sullied landscape and decided it hadn't been such a bad year, all things considered. Thank God he had Stevenson in charge at Summit, and doing it so well there was no problem keeping inside the budget. If it finished on time and within the negotiated price, he'd become an engineer to note. And that couldn't be bad.
Arabella must surely start to carry soon, and that would relieve him of the depressing sense of waste that assailed him every time he went to sleep beside her without first having used her. Apart, of course, from the positive side—the joys of being a father and so on.
And his rise in salary would make it easier to slip away to Manchester two or three times a week. You could get quite a good girl for less than five bob.
All in all it was a good year, a good beginning. Things were getting sorted out and settled down, everything in its proper compartment.
Chapter 33
After the excitements of the Hall the previous evening, Christmas Day passed very quietly. Nora wore her new day dress, an afternoonified version of the modest costumes she habitually wore. For it, she laced in to only twenty-three inches and put on two fewer petticoats. It was a full-skirted dress in tartan wool—dark green and blue with fine red and yellow lines. She wore the bodice open over a sleeved chemisette buttoned up to the base of her neck. The frills at the neckline fell in such a way as to make her shoulders seem weaker and more sloping than they really were—an effect enhanced by the broad, frilly bands of braid that trimmed the bodice and skirt en tablier.
Arabella wore the dress in which she went away from her wedding breakfast, with the addition of a flounce at knee-height and some new trimming to suggest—falsely—that it opened down the front.
Except for their more sober shirts and more everyday shoes, the men had on the same costumes they had worn the previous evening.
After a light breakfast of porridge, ham, herrings in oatmeal, baked rolls, and Christmas ale, they set off on an invigorating walk of a mile or so, around Dobroyd hill and above the new railway station, to Christ Church.
Several inches of snow had fallen overnight and the two girls had to hold their skirts slightly lifted at the front to avoid ploughing it into ridges that would have buckled their skirts and petticoats under them and sent them tumbling. With all the factories silent and only the faintest wisps of smoke ascending from the banked-down fires, the Vale of Todmorden had returned to its ancient rural calm
. A light breeze carried away the sulphurous outpourings of several hundred domestic chimneys before it could blot out the opposite hills; occasionally it would waft to them the ghostly bleat of sheep that were no more than dark specks on the distant moorland.
Low cloud drifted above them, dark enough in places to threaten more snow. But far away, over toward Oldham and Manchester, hung a brighter light that might have been sunshine. The soot and smoke from those distant chimneys lent a murky amber tone to the clouds now overhead, for everyone who could afford a Christmas dinner (and many who could not) would be cooking it at that moment. The yellowed light that scattered through this canopy seemed to muffle sound as well as sight and to make the Vale close in upon itself, becoming at once more remote and intimate.
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