The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  There had been no physical violence, no public humiliation, no tangible insult with which his father or mine could grapple. He was not, after all, keeping a mistress in style and leaving me to starve. Nor did he flaunt himself and his women in local places of entertainment as Mr. Rawnsley had been known to do. He had never subjected me to any unnatural form of lust, nor infected me with any form of disease. He ‘pleased himself’, as Cullingford put it, rather too often, but so did plenty of others, and although it was all very regrettable no one would really have thanked me for making a fuss.

  I did not make a fuss, for my own and for my father’s sake. I had chosen to marry a difficult man and those who had warned me against him—Mrs. Agbrigg the chief among them—had been right. I had believed in his love and it had not lasted. And I preferred to suffer the lack of it than make any attempt to force him or shame him into some feeble pretence.

  The love and the need, then, were both over, but the marriage would last for the rest of our lives. The shell remained. I could leave it empty or I could fill it with venom, but either way I became obsessed with my determination to keep that shell intact. No one must know. And when I realized the impossibility of this—since the women who received Gervase’s attentions knew, and their friends, and their maids—I once again adopted the shameful device of pretending not to care.

  What did not trouble me need trouble no one else—I had learned that on the night of the Listonby ball and had lost my baby—and I became an expert at the indulgent smile, implying, ‘Heavens! of course men are made that way, the poor darlings. What can it signify?’; expert too at the unruffled greeting, making no more and no less of the suspected mistress, the current fancy, than of anyone else, introducing Gervase’s name into my conversation no more and no less than I had always done and keeping myself busy—busy—busy, so that it could be said ‘Dear Grace, she is so occupied with her organizing and her entertaining that it is hardly surprising she does not notice—’, or ‘Grace Barforth—good heavens! of course she notices. What of it? She has that mansion to live in, hasn’t she, and what does she care for the man so long as she can have the spending of his money?’ And if the rumours climbed the hill to Fieldhead, then I knew that Mrs. Agbrigg—who could not be eager to share her home with me either—would have the good sense and the skill to keep them from my father.

  Naturally I suffered—naturally and abominably—for these decisions which sound so cool were not taken coolly, and although logic was certainly employed I was often obliged to wring it out of myself through layers of heartache. There were times when I ordered the carriage to go to Fieldhead and could not complete the journey, telling my coachman to take me anywhere, out of the city streets and the prosperous suburbs to a country lane where no one knew me or pitied me or thought I had got as much as I deserved; where no kind soul was anxious to tell me—in case I didn’t already know it—that my husband had been in dubious company in Manchester last Friday night; where I was not obliged to be bright and busy and brittle, but could indulge myself with silence.

  There were times when my own suppressed emotions threatened to break free and the urge to throw myself weeping against Gervase’s lean, fastidious chest—or to put a knife into it—became almost too great to resist. I resisted it. My nature was constructed and moulded in such a way that I could do no other than resist, although these urges, turning inward, caused me much solitary grieving and bitterness.

  There was jealousy too—how could there not have been?—of women I barely knew, acquaintances of the Chards who, visiting Listonby for a Friday-to-Monday might never come again; and of women I did not know at all, strangers from Bradford and Leeds and the Theatre Royal who briefly aroused not so much his appetite, since he was not prone to enormous sexual hungers, but his curiosity, the need of a man who does not know what he is searching for to try everything. And although logically it was wrong to hate these women, since it was Gervase, not they, who was doing me harm, I could not always be logical. There were times when I murdered them all, quite horribly, in my imagination and was sickened afterwards by the violence I had done only to myself.

  But all this took place, as I have said, little by little, and on my return from Galton that autumn of my miscarriage, Venetia’s affairs appeared more urgent than mine. She had had her period of mourning, her period of humbleness and gratitude. She had endured fear and shame and a kind of despairing lethargy. She had regained her physical strength and with it a portion of her self-esteem. What now? And because she had not found the answer, because she suspected there was no answer—and because the role of good, obedient, contrite little girl no longer sufficed—she grew subject to abrupt swings of mood that winter, troughs of despair and peaks of nervous elation which made her as unpredictable and often as difficult as Gervase.

  ‘Grace, I absolutely must do something. I really don’t want to waste another day. There must be something—something important—that has to be done?’

  But none of the activities I discovered or invented for my own diversion could hold her attention for long, her initial frenzy of enthusiasm soon giving way to a shrug, a sigh, a sudden drooping of her spirits.

  ‘Oh lord!—what’s the use of it? What is it really good for?’

  And the dinner-party invitations I had asked her to write would not be finished, the recipes of a famous French chef I had found in a borrowed magazine would remain uncopied, the flowers she had been arranging with a flair I did not myself possess would be left half done and wilting.

  ‘What’s the good of it? When I die will they put on my tombstone that I wrote an excellent copper-plate and could arrange a very pretty vase of carnations? Why trouble to be alive for that?’

  And one day, after an hour of restless silence, she startled me badly by saying without any warning, ‘I wonder if it would be possible to discover what has become of Charles Heron?’

  ‘Possible, I suppose. But it could hardly be wise.’

  She gave a short, rueful laugh, and jumping to her feet began pacing up and down the room, picking up small objects as she passed and setting them down again.

  ‘There is no need for you to look so sour, Grace. I am not in the least in love with him now, you know.’

  ‘Then why should you care what has happened to him?’

  ‘Because—’ she paused, shrugged her fine-boned shoulders, her pointed face taking on a dreaming, very disturbing quality as her eyes became focused on the past. ‘Because—oh, yes—because to tell you the truth I believe I am in love with—yes—with myself as I was in those days.’

  And because it had been a bad day for me, because Gervase had done me some small, stinging injury and she resembled him, I said tartly, ‘You would do better to fall in love with Gideon.’

  She came to a halt, not angrily but rather as if the mere sound of his name acted as a brake, or a weight which slowed her down.

  ‘How very tidy that would be.’

  ‘Venetia, I am sorry to have mentioned it, but since I have, then—really—I would be very glad if you could grow to love him.’

  ‘Do you know, Grace—so would I. Very glad indeed.’

  ‘Then, surely—?’

  ‘What? You think wanting is half-way there?’

  ‘Yes. I do think so.’

  ‘Then you are quite wrong.’

  She moved again, just a step or two, almost sedately, with a composure and a certainty I had not seen in her before.

  ‘Gideon would have to want it too,’ she said. ‘And he does not.’

  ‘Oh Venetia—surely? He must.’

  ‘There is no must about it. You should know quite well, Grace, that one does not tell Gideon what he must do. He doesn’t want me to love him. He wants me to be his wife.’

  ‘I should have thought the two might easily go together.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Not in our case. And, of course, the sad thing is that perhaps I could love him if he would allow it. I realize now that love is not so very exclusive
as I thought. It simply exists in the body and one needs to release it. One even needs to feel loyalty and devotion and sacrifice—to go on crusade a little—at least I do. I suppose there are dozens—hundreds—of men I could love and be faithful unto death should I happen to meet them, so why not Gideon?’

  ‘Yes—why not?’

  ‘Because it is not what he wants. Does Dominic want Blanche to love him? I doubt if it has even crossed his mind and never will so long as she is in his bed when he desires her and at the head of his table when it suits him or flatters him or is to his advantage to have other men desire her. Gideon would like the same from me—exactly that—and no, it is not too much, don’t you see? The terrible thing is that it is not enough. If he’d ask something more of me—something real and that I could see the sense of—then I’d try. I’d respond to the challenge of him, because after all he’s good to look at and the very circumstances of our marriage are a challenge in themselves. It would be magnificent to make something lovely and lasting out of our appalling start, to get to know each other and forgive each other, and then to be friends, and lovers. Just think of the range of emotion one would need for all that.’

  ‘You have the range, Venetia.’

  She smiled, her eyes twinkling with a rueful humour, laughing not without affection at herself.

  ‘I know. It’s the one thing about myself that I’m sure of and that rather pleases me. I’d be very good at nursing him through some near-fatal illness, you know, and if he lost his money I’d manage to be brave about it. If there should ever be a riot at the mill I’d be more inclined to stand by him than not. And should he ever be disgraced and sent to prison I’d be rather splendid about waiting for him and doing my utmost to clear his name—can’t you just imagine it? I don’t even require quite so much drama as that. I’d be perfectly willing just to rejoice with him whenever he scored a triumph, or help him to overcome his disappointments if he’d just let me know what his triumphs and his disappointments are. But I have no talent for sitting about the dining-room in a lowcut dress so his colleagues can see what a lucky fellow he is, and wearing his jewels so they’ll all know he’s doing well at the mill. And as for the other thing—as for the desire—well, I don’t mind it now as I used to, but one can hardly build one’s life around it—at least, I can’t.’

  ‘Venetia, are you really sure?’

  ‘About Gideon? Of course I am. Wives are for drawing-rooms and bedrooms, my dear, and by that reckoning I rate very low. After all, I suppose a wife can only measure her success by the effect she has on her husband, which definitely places me among the failures. It’s women like Blanche, I find, who do best. She knows what’s expected of her. She even likes what’s expected of her. She understands the rules and knows how to get her way without breaking a single one of them. She was a silly girl, I always thought, but she’s a clever woman. And I suppose I’m the ninny now.’

  But she was not always so humble, nor so inclined to measure herself on the yardstick of Gideon’s estimation, the docility to which she had accustomed him giving way quite often now to bursts of nonchalance, amusement, and the beginnings of defiance.

  ‘Lord, Gideon, does it matter whether we go or not? It is only to Miss Mandelbaum’s.’

  ‘Miss Mandelbaum’s brother, Mr. Jacob Mandelbaum, is a wool merchant—as you may know—who does a great deal of business with me.’

  ‘The Mandelbaums have always done business with us, of course I know. Is that a reason to spend this lovely evening listening to Rebecca Mandelbaum thumping her piano?’

  ‘Your father may think so.’

  ‘I daresay. But I see he does not feel obliged to go himself.’

  ‘Why should he?’ Gideon said with a tight, sarcastic smile. ‘He has me to do it for him. If Gervase should ever be available, perhaps I might be excused. But until then you will have to accompany me.’

  ‘Take Grace. She understands about Mozart.’

  ‘You will not be required to understand Mozart, Venetia, merely to behave as if you do.’

  ‘Oh, I see. In that case you had better take Blanche.’

  They went together to Miss Mandelbaum’s recital, returning in a state of mutual irritation which quickly, as Gideon slammed down his hat and gloves on the hall table, flared into their first open quarrel. Neither, it seemed, had appreciated a note of the music, Gideon being more concerned in making the acquaintance of a gentleman from Hamburg who had some importance in the wool trade and of a merchant banker from Berlin, instinctively obeying the rules his mother had taught him that these personal contacts, if carefully nourished, were often worth their weight in gold.

  ‘May I present you to my wife,’ he had said, but his wife, instead of assuming a graceful pose and allowing herself to be looked at, as Blanche would have done, or of asking a few safe if uninspired questions about the German landscape which might have been my solution, ignored these worthy gentlemen altogether, devoting herself entirely to the praise of Miss Mandelbaum’s performance, her enthusiasm increasing in proportion to the guilt she felt at not having really listened to it.

  ‘Miss Mandelbaum, I have heard nothing better on the concert stage.’

  ‘My dear, as a girl that is where I longed to be.’

  ‘Then why did you not—?’

  ‘Oh, naturally, my parents would not allow it.’

  ‘What nonsense. You should have defied them, you know—for your art’s sake.’

  ‘Oh no, dear. That would have been impossible.’

  ‘Not a bit of it. We must stand up for ourselves, Miss Mandelbaum, indeed we must. Miss Tighe would say the same.’

  And Venetia, in a spirit part mischief and part genuine compassion for these wasted talents, began to urge a considerably startled Miss Mandelbaum to abandon her gentle, comfortable life in Cullingford and to adopt the vagabond and—Venetia insisted—thrilling status of an artiste.

  ‘Just think how gloriously free! Goodness, it makes me wish I had learned the piano myself, or at least the violin.’

  The two foreign gentlemen may well have been amused. Their wives were not. Venetia—it was abundantly clear—would not be remembered kindly in the commercial circles of Hamburg and Berlin, and neither Frau Grassmann nor Frau Goldsmith would be likely to resist the temptation of conveying the poor impression she had created to their numerous cousins in every business centre of Europe.

  Gideon, who had been with the firm of Nicholas Barforth for over four years now, was by no means content either with his progress or with his lot. He was determined, as his mother the Duchess of South Erin would have been determined, to carve out for himself an international reputation and take his place eventually among Europe’s industrial élite. Far from assisting him, Venetia by her frivolous behaviour had antagonized two well-established members of that élite, thus casting doubt on the sound judgement of the man who had married her.

  ‘Lord!’ she now declared. ‘What a pair they were, those two foreign women—one of them like a dressed up stick and the other with a moustache—you can believe me, Grace—beneath her ringlets.’

  ‘Mrs. Goldsmith,’ said Gideon coldly, ‘is an extremely intelligent woman. She speaks five or six languages fluently, I believe.’

  ‘And what is the use of that if she has nothing interesting to say?’

  ‘Venetia, did it not occur to you that Goldsmith could be very useful to me?’

  ‘No,’ she said very clearly, looking directly up at him. ‘It did not. I am not accustomed to judging people by their usefulness, nor by the profit I might expect to make from their acquaintance.’

  ‘Then you are very naive.’

  ‘Naive? Or honest—don’t you think so?’

  ‘Naive. Or stupid—that might come a little nearer.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, making the sound insolent, provocative, and then swiftly repenting. ‘Heavens, Gideon, and just what damage have I done? This is not Listonby or Mayfair or South Erin, you know, where everything depends on being invited t
o dinner by the right people and having the right calling-cards on one’s hall table. This is Cullingford. If you have something to sell and your price is right and the other person wants it, or needs it, then he buys. It can make no difference whether or not I am on good terms with his wife.’

  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.