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She knew very well that he had something important to say but was holding back until they had all but finished their meal and were unlikely to be interrupted by the ministrations of the bald, elderly waiter, who looked such a fixture of this great, galleried inn that Adam said had been doing business for three hundred years, and was a local landmark before Queen Elizabeth mounted the throne. Next door, he told her, was the even more famous Tabard, where pilgrims had assembled for their journeys to Canterbury, and not far away was the White Hart, where Mr. Charles Dickens met the original Sam Weller and made him famous all over the world in Pickwick Papers. Before the railways, he said, coaches ran from these courtyards to every part of the country, but because they were situated here, in the heart of the capital of the world, they had not suffered the decline that overtook their provincial counterparts. The cuisine was good, and the reputation for service and comfort jealously guarded, and even two disastrous fires had not succeeded in breaking their tradition, for the George (once known as the St. George) had been rebuilt on its original plan and its galleries, gay with a hundred window-boxes of geranium, lobelia, and nasturtium, were still the favourite haunt of city men who sat here discussing odysseys bound for Batavia, Peru, and the South Sea Islands. His familiarity with the city background impressed her in the way his fieldcraft had at their Pennine bivouacs during that long, pillion-ride across the fells. Somehow, she thought, one was the complement of the other, inasmuch as he seemed to find it so easy to adapt to wherever he happened to be and this, she was sure, was rare in a man, even one trained as a soldier, for what would a fop like Miles Manaton make of the world if he was stripped of his fine coat and red-striped trousers, and turned out to compete with hard-faced merchants? She was pondering this, savouring his superiority as it were, when the waiter suggested serving coffee on the lower tier of the gallery, where the gentleman might like to enjoy a cigar, but Adam said, a trifle sharply, she thought, “Serve it here. I’ll wait for my cigar,” and the old fellow shuffled away, leaving her with a qualm or two, for the dining-room was now almost empty and his preference for privacy surely implied he was about to come to the point and what point could that be if it wasn’t her ridiculous involvement with Miles?
He said, as the thought made her fidget, “Are you comfortable here?” which was his way of giving her a chance to excuse herself, in the way she had after that gigantic supper at Windermere the first night of their marriage, but she said, with forced brightness, “Oh, quite comfortable, dear. It was delicious. I do wish Mrs. Hitchens could make pastry as light as that,” and he replied, with terrifying directness, “I’m going to send Mrs. Hitchens packing the minute I get home. Along with most of the others.”
It was said in such magisterial contrast to his indulgent mood since he had greeted her in the tower that she gave a little gasp of dismay, saying, “Oh, Adam, you don’t mean to uproot us? We’re not leaving Tryst, are we?” and to her great relief he shook his head and said, “No, my dear, quite the contrary. I’ve just bought Tryst. That's what I’ve been doing all day.”
“Bought it? You mean it's ours? For always?”
“I think that depends.”
“On the money you make?”
“No, mostly on you. On whether you’re capable of running it as it should be run, without half-a-dozen ignorant women taking the reins out of your hands, and throwing you back on yourself whenever I’m away and unable to keep them to their jobs.”
She was not sure what to make of this. Did it imply that he numbered her among the idle, or was it an indirect reminder that she had recently made fools of them both? She said, carefully, “You mean I’ve been a failure because I’m too stupid to keep accounts and get into such muddles with the bills?” and he said no, he didn’t mean that; keeping accounts was not likely to come naturally to someone who had not been trained in the art of housekeeping, and was something that could easily be remedied, for she wasn’t in the least stupid, simply inclined to let herself be dominated by people like Ellen Michelmore and Mrs. Hitchens the cook, and even Evans, the parlourmaid, and the new governess, who couldn’t be trusted to govern a cat. She understood then what he was driving at and privately admitted that it was true. All the women about the house, and especially Ellen, had been at pains to impress upon her that the mistress of a place as large as Tryst lost caste if she participated in domestic chores, or even directed them save at a remove. She saw too that this decree was linked in his mind to the Manaton debacle, and the certainty of this terrified her. She was almost sure then that he was about to make direct reference to Miles’ attempt to convert a flirtation into a rape, and suddenly the shameful memory of Manaton's outrageous attempt to strip her made her shudder so that he jumped to the wrong conclusion. He growled, his face clouding, “You find the prospect of losing Ellen intolerable? You couldn’t face accepting full responsibility for the place? Not even if I found one reliable woman to replace four scrimshankers, with instructions to teach you everything she knew about running a house?”
She emerged from her panic, recognising in his tone and expression the indications of an obvious crossroads, not merely in their relationship as man and wife, but in her personal future within that relationship. Suddenly the alternatives were startlingly clear. She could throw herself at the opportunity he was offering, even at the risk of falling flat on her face, or she could withdraw from the brink and seek temporary shelter behind the skirts of women like Ellen, relying on his physical need of her to hold on to him until she got her second wind. And then she saw, possibly for the first time, how very frail these bonds were, and how easily they might be broken in favour of some other woman, maybe as young and pretty as herself but possessing, in addition, qualities that appealed to that other side of him, the side she had glimpsed back at the yard. Fear made her catch her breath but it also spurred her to make the leap. She said, throwing up her head, “Of course I could face it, and of course I realise I should have done it long since, from the moment I begged you to let us live at Tryst!” Then, gaining courage, “But I’m not the only one at fault, Adam! Goodness knows, I was green when we married, and you must have known it, but I’m not a fool and never was, and if I’m to make a fresh start then I’ll do it and like doing it, providing you show the patience you did at the beginning but have stopped showing me!”
He looked, she thought, first astonished, then relieved and finally, although she could not have sworn to it, shamefaced, as though she had probed a tender spot in him somewhere and this was fairly evident when he said, with a slow smile, “Well, good for you, Henrietta! That's the answer I hoped for and that's why I took the gamble, for the sum they’re asking for Tryst will account for every penny I’ve got, other than stock and premises. But I’ve an idea it’ll be worth it, for we could hardly continue this way without arriving at some kind of compromise. You’re right about my share of the blame. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say it's been six of one and half a dozen of the other, for until this moment I could never see you as anything but a romp between spells of hard work and worry, and I suppose you’ve adapted to that as we went along. Dammit, I don’t think I’ve ever thought otherwise of either you or the children—you as a bedmate, the children as diversions. That's what comes of marrying a girl thirteen years younger than oneself.” He leaned forward, pushing his wine glass to one side and she thought she had never seen him look so earnest. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming I want you to turn into a frump,” he went on, “or a houseproud old besom like my Aunt Charlotte. God forbid! In most ways I like you very well as you are, and I fancy I’ve told you that often enough. But owning Tryst is very different from renting it. It's the difference between a waggon and team that has cost you good money, and a cart and an old screw to pull it hired from a stable. That place needs more than love, care, and attention. It needs organising, and I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to do it, but you could if you had a mind to. It could be one of the finest houses in the country and the
best administered, providing you gave it the concentration a man has to give to his business in this day and age.”
He stopped suddenly, and again she thought he looked shamefaced. “There I go again,” he said, “in spite of my good resolutions,” and when she asked him what these resolutions were he said, chuckling, “I made up my mind to talk straight to you but not to bully you. What I’m trying to say amounts to no more than this. From here on we’re in partnership. You look to your side of the business, and I’ll look to mine. I won’t offer advice unless it's asked for and we don’t overlap, understand? Now I can move on to the other reason I brought you up here instead of coming on home.”
“Oh, you don’t have to instruct me in that,” she said, but he made an impatient gesture, saying, “I’m serious. I want to see if I can get it into your head that the word trade doesn’t necessarily smell of anything worse than sweat, that it doesn’t have to be practised the way your father and Goldthorpe and that chimney sweep practise it, that it can take on as much dignity as any other profession, and is sometimes a damned sight more honest than some I could name. You’re prejudiced against it because you saw how it was managed up north, and I suppose you’ll always look at it in terms of a mill, but I meet merchants of every kind, dealing in every product you could name, and by no means all of them are brutes or scoundrels. A few are even beginning to encourage their employees to stand upright, and walk on two legs. This country lives by trade and nothing but trade. It made its decision to do this long before you were born, and there's no turning back now. Without trade, and expanding trade at that, neither the Queen nor Lord Palmerston, nor any one of us could survive as anything better than peasants grubbing in the fields, and the sooner that principle is taught at our so-called gentlemen's schools the better it will be for every man-jack of us! That's my gospel and you don’t have to believe it or practise it. All I ask is for you to try and see it through my eyes and then set about dragging that establishment of yours into the nineteenth century.”
He paused, for want of breath she supposed, and his eye caught hers so that suddenly they both laughed, and he said, refilling her glass, “Let's drink a toast to it and to being together again in a way we never have been, notwithstanding our ‘proofs of affection’ as old Aunt Charlotte would say.”
She drank with him although it occurred to her that she had already had enough wine to make her reckless, but now that he seemed to have said all he had to say she did not feel reckless any more but somehow older and wiser than she had ever felt in her life and she supposed this was due to a number of things, to the challenge he had thrown down, to the fact that he had spoken his mind on a variety of subjects without even mentioning the one subject she would have thought uppermost in his mind but, above all, to a sense of having drawn almost level with him at a bound. She was not sure how this had been achieved but only that it had, and saw it as an exercise in magic, like the kiss that had awakened Sleeping Beauty from her trance. She could sit here looking across at him and realise that she was not seeing him as husband and provider, or the father of her children, but a friend able to invest her with something very rare among women of her generation, an equality that went far beyond kindness and trust, and this was something to be prized for itself, like the ring he had given her on the road to Ambleside. She loved him then in a way she had not been equipped to love him in the past, for the radiance she had mistaken for love was seen to be sugar-icing and underneath was the cake of comradeship to be eaten in the company of a human being as hard-pressed as herself.
It was not the time for temporising. She had courage but she was still short on confidence. She said, meeting his eye, “I understand what you want, Adam, and all I can promise is that I’ll try. Goodness knows, I should be telling a lie if I said I hadn’t enjoyed being your wife but…well…there was always something missing and now there isn’t. I wish I was clever enough to put it into words you could understand but I’m not. All I can say is it's going to be different from now,” and she reached across the table and put her hand in his, not caring in the least about the presence of the waiter, still propping his back against the panelling near the door, or one diligent gourmand, champing his way through his fifth course under the window.
It was almost dusk now and the city roar had dwindled to a hum. He said, with reluctance, “That fellow Manaton…he's still bothering you, isn’t he?” and when she said nothing to this, “Don’t let him, for he doesn’t bother me in the least. I think you’ll be able to laugh that off, given time. I have already. I’ve never had any doubts that you’re a one-man woman, my love, so don’t expect me to work myself into a blather about a bit of flirting that got out of hand.”
“That's all it ever was,” she said, earnestly, “you do believe that, Adam? Really believe it?”
“If I didn’t I can also assure you I wouldn’t have undertaken to come up with the sum of eleven thousand pounds for Tryst.”
The sum seemed to her astronomical. “Is that what they’re asking? Have you got such a sum?”
“No,” he said, “but I think I can raise it, or most of it. However, that's my concern. Would you like to sit out on the galleries now and watch the world go by?”
“Not in the least,” she said, “I want to send that poor waiter over there to his bed. I’m sure he’ll fall asleep standing if we don’t.”
“He’ll brighten up when he gets his tip,” he told her and rose, handing her out of her chair. The waiter stiffened and the gourmand paused in a ferocious attack on the savoury in order to pay them the compliment of an interested glance as they passed out and up the broad staircase into a maze of corridors and dark, wainscotted landings. The old, uneven floorboards squeaked and Henrietta thought, as she followed him through the warren, that the place must have listened in to innumerable conversations over the centuries but none more momentous than the confidences they had just exchanged across the table.
It did not surprise her that the new understanding between them should invade their physical relationship. She came to him gladly and gaily, and it seemed to her fitting that their embrace should be the very first they had shared as equals. Without sacrificing the gusto that attended his approach on these occasions, when they had been parted for a period, he introduced—or so it seemed to her—an element of tenderness that was new and exciting, so that her mind went back to the first time she had shared his bed, a lifetime ago it seemed, but the sense of discovery was there, as though they had consciously retraced their steps over the years to make a new and more equitable beginning. She remembered many things lying there in his arms, basking in his silent appraisal of her body and reminding him by caresses of her own, that she had profited from all the outspoken lessons he had given her in this constantly renewed experience. It crossed her mind that it was a pity this was such a private communion, for tonight, of all nights, she could have shared it with every woman in the world, and perhaps it was this that reminded her that she had a daughter who, one day in the years ahead, would introduce a shy young man into the house and exchange meaningful glances with him under the impression that they had made a discovery that they would be sure to think of as unique and that she, for her part, would be obliged to pretend it was, if only for modesty's sake. But there had been little enough modesty, thank God, about her involvement with the man beside her. In this sense their relationship had been far less complicated than in others, and she had no doubts at all that he found her excessively pleasing as a bedmate, more so now, perhaps, than in the earliest days of their association.
The reflection made her giggle and she lay very still for a moment listening to the familiar sound of his breathing, a close and somehow reassuring accompaniment to the muted roar of the city. She knew him well enough now to predict the exact pattern of his behaviour on these occasions, when he tended to act as though he had been deprived of her for months rather than days. He would lie sleeping like that, his left arm flung across her breasts, until the peep of dawn, and the moment he sti
rred he would stretch, become aware of her and draw her closer. Then, almost absently, he would fall to exploring her with his lips and hands, the one seeking her mouth and neck and hair, the other her breasts, back, and thighs. His movements were in leisurely contrast to the relative impatience he had shown the night before. He would go about it as though he was assessing what was his in the unhurried way she imagined he might take stock of inanimate possessions, his waggons, horses, and now, she supposed, Tryst and everything in it. His warm firm hands would play contentedly over her loins and buttocks, as though seeking an exact compromise between the assertion of mastery and an act of courtship, so that she found it very difficult to contemplate a more accomplished lover, or a man who possessed a surer, subtler knowledge of a woman's senses. Then, but still only half-awake, he would begin to praise her and it was always his words more than his touch that roused her to a pitch where she felt she could never absorb enough of him, her body opening and contracting to receive and seal that part of him that seemed to her, on the instant, to assume a separate identity that was a contradiction of the man she knew inasmuch as it was overweening, arrogant, and aggressive, but not in a way she resented for, by then, the whole ecstatic process of domination and submission was being repeated with her active assistance so that she rarely thought of a time when this compelling act had seemed to her something quite outside the range of human possibility. After that, invariably, she would sleep for another hour, perhaps two, but he, it seemed, had slept long enough, for when she opened her eyes again he was usually prowling about the room in shirt and breeches, with his lean, brown face masked in lather through which he would grin at her approvingly and make some jocular, half-boastful reference to the encounter, as though daylight had no power to abash him as it abashed her. Tonight, however, the room was not dark for light filtered through the curtains from the big courtyard lanterns, and she could turn in his loose embrace and study him, comparing him, to his immeasurable advantage, with all the other men she knew, married and unmarried. He always looked, she thought, very young when he was deeply asleep, as though the weight of his concerns added years to him as soon as he climbed out of bed and addressed himself to the business of the day, and his boyishness encouraged her to trace a frivolous pattern down his cheek with the tip of her finger. He talked and thought a great deal about England, and invariably projected himself as an Englishman, but looking down at him she remembered his father was given to saying that he was really only half an Englishman and that his mother had been a Basque, and Basques were, according to the Colonel, wild and unpredictable. Perhaps his mixed blood accounted for his eccentricities. She did not know any foreigners, but she assumed they would differ very much from punctilious, predictable men like his father, or aggressive, explosive men like Sam and timid, conscientious men like Tybalt, the clerk. Different or not he was all she had and all she wanted, the man who had enslaved her from the moment she took shelter in that moorland hut, as if to await his arrival. She loved everything about him; his originality, his strange tolerance and basic kindness, and his dynamic self-reliance that was, perhaps, the most singular thing about him, for although she would never wholly understand what he sought to create for himself any fool could recognise it as a deeply personalised goal. But that part of him was still private and would, she was sure, remain so, for she sensed that in a curious way he was very jealous of it and would never lift more than the corner of the curtain on it for her or his male intimates, awaiting, possibly, the arrival of a son before he was ready to share it with another. She meant to give him that son if she could but not Alexander; some other, less important son, whom he could mould in his own image and she did not think he would quarrel with this. He was a man of his word and Alex had been spoken for. Equality she now had and she meant to hold him strictly to the terms of their original bargain, made the day after Stella was born.
God is an Englishman Page 51
