“Some Continentals don’t come here to teach, according to my cabbie,” Adam said, warming towards her. “Would it be in order for me to see the instructions Mr. Avery gave you concerning guardianship?”
“I see no reason why you should not,” she said, “they were very flattering.” Then, but anxiously, “You would return her when we begin school again in late January?” and he said he would, personally.
“Then go and make friends,” she said, “and I’ll instruct Sister Agatha to pack Deborah's bag. If she wants to go she shall, but you must ask her yourself, Mr. Swann.”
She went back into the hall, leaving him to return to the schoolroom. He stood for a moment on the threshold, looking across at the child now sitting on the window seat cradling the doll. The scene had a certain familiarity and suddenly he thought he recognised its parallel, the boy Scrooge revealed by the Ghost in the schoolroom scene, in the popular Christmas Carol, rescued and taken home on Christmas Eve. He said, frankly, “You hardly know me yet, Deborah, but the Reverend Mother was right, I’m a very old friend of your father. When he had to go abroad he asked me to be sure to look after you as long as he was away. I have a little girl younger than you, and a boy younger than her. We live in the country not far from here, and I’m sure they would both like you to visit for Christmas. The Reverend Mother says you may go if you wish. Would you like that?” He thought the child looked startled so he went on, “We have a Christmas tree and there are ponies to ride. After all, I am a sort of uncle and I think you might enjoy staying with us until school starts again, and all the other children come back. What do you think, Deborah?”
The child looked at him then without surprise but with a steadiness that he found disconcerting. Her expression indicated that she had already learned to make decisions and that most of them would be based on a sense of detachment inherited from her father. She said, primly, “What must I call you then? ‘Uncle’ something?” and he said, laughing, “Why, surely. Uncle Adam. And at home you’ll find Aunt Henrietta, Miss Phoebe, the governess, Stella, and Alexander. Will you come?”
“Yes,” she said, “if I could bring Angelica.”
“But the Reverend Mother told me you were the only little girl left here. Who is Angelica?”
“The doll,” she told him, “I have christened her Angelica. It suits her, does it not?”
Her gravity had a trick of levelling their ages. In a curious way she seemed older than himself or the Mother Superior, and more resigned, he reflected, than anyone she was likely to find at Tryst. He was suddenly conscious of the terrible complexity and unpredictability of human affairs, seeing the child before him as the end product of a casual encounter halfway across the world between a hard nut like Josh Avery and a shallow, pretty woman who could have had no clear idea of the kind of scrape she was getting into. And here was Deborah, the product of their joint folly, already more truly adult than either one of them, or that old fool of a colonel who had stood by and watched himself cuckolded.
His sympathy built a bridge between them and they were able to talk, first in English, then in French. He marked her perfect accent, reflecting that it might benefit his daughter who was already beginning to speak French like a Lowland Scot. He wondered how Henrietta, seven months pregnant, would get along with this solemn little thing, and whether she would be likely to regret her insistence that he paid the visit when he returned with the child in tow, but decided that, in her new role as chatelaine, she was likely to take Deborah in her stride.
Then Sister Agatha appeared carrying a tartan holdall containing Deborah's clothes, and Angelica was carefully re-wrapped whilst Sister Agatha, somehow managing to convey the impression that she was consigning a helpless child to heathen custody, disappeared again, to return with a blue, scarlet-lined cloak that he took to be the uniform of the convent.
They were in the hall when the Mother Superior emerged from her office to hand him a long envelope bearing a foreign postmark and broken seals.
“You may take Mr. Avery's letter,” she said, “but I would like it returned. It is my sole authorisation, you understand?” Then, to the child, “Be good, Deborah. We shall look forward to seeing you again in a month,” and as Deborah dropped her little Continental curtsey the nun stooped and embraced her and the gesture comforted Adam who saw it as proof that the Convent of the Holy Family was not as bleak an institution as its fabric and chilliness implied.
They went out into the forecourt where heavy flakes of snow were beginning to fall, and when the cab came out from under the trees he noted the unfriendly stare the cabby gave the nuns standing on the steps. It was, he thought, an indication of the man's built-in hostility towards Rome and all its works, and had its origin, no doubt, in an Englishman's ancestral memories of the fires in Smithfield. Then the cab was jolting towards the town and he glanced at Deborah who was looking out at the whirling snowflakes, for all the world like a prisoner being taken to or from her gaol, he was unable to decide which. The cab reeked of damp horsehair and inside, with both windows raised, he began to feel a curious affinity with the child, as though both of them had been arbitrarily isolated from everything familiar and left to seek solace in one another's society. Then, as the child turned her head, he saw tears glisten on the lashes of her serious eyes and before the first of them fell he reached out and enclosed her hand, finding, to his relief, that it was more responsive than when he had greeted her beside the crib. He said, “You mustn’t be scared, Deborah. We shall be good friends once you’ve stopped being shy,” and was gratified to see her force a smile, for somehow the effort she put into producing it at once enlarged him and integrated her into the pattern of his life, so that he saw her not as a stray he had acquired through force of circumstance, but as a link in a chain he and Avery had been forging over the years and would now, he supposed, secure the partnership whether he liked it or not. The fancy absorbed him all the way to the station so that they completed the journey in silence, her small hand in his, and it was not until they were in the train for Tonbridge that she spoke again, saying, “Where is my father spending his Christmas, Uncle Adam?” Her question reminded him of the letter the Mother Superior had given him, and he took it out, glancing at stamps and postmark. “Probably in a place called Liege, Deborah,” he said, “but I can’t be sure. He's a great traveller, is your father.” She responded with one of her solemn nods. “Yes, he is,” she said, “for he sends me presents sometimes from Switzerland and France. A brooch once, and one of those weathercocks where the lady comes out when it is fine and the gentleman if it is wet. I have it in my cubicle but Sister Agatha will have packed the brooch in the bag, I hope. I think my father might spend Christmas in Holland this year. Because of the Dutch doll he sent.”
“By God,” he thought, “she's sharp! I shall have to warn Henrietta and Phoebe, for she's not likely to take kindly to goo-goo talk and that's a fact!” and he said she was almost certainly right, and that her father must have moved on to Holland after posting the letter, for Liege was not very far from Holland and his letter was several days old.
Gradually, as the train whirled through the snowstorm, she began to relax, shedding her gravity little by little, but even so it was still very difficult to treat her as a child, and quite impossible to connect her with the giddy woman he remembered as her mother who had never, so far as he recalled, had a serious thought in her life. Instead, he found himself confiding in her and even telling her about his business, and was secretly astonished by her familiarity with counties and districts and the kind of activities carried on within their boundaries. He said, complimenting her, “You seem to know a great deal of geography. Is it your favourite subject at school?” and she even had to think hard about this, replying, after a judicious pause, “No, not really, Uncle Adam. I much prefer history but Sister Albertine, who teaches geography, is very good at explaining, whereas Sister Sophia, who teaches history, is not. That isn’t her fault, of course, for she only joined us a short time ago fro
m Pisa, and her English is not good. Pisa,” she added, as a kind of postscript, “is in Italy.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, infected by her pedantry, “It has a famous leaning tower, I believe.”
His response seemed to please her for she nodded eagerly, saying, “Yes indeed. It is one hundred and seventy nine feet in height, and sixteen-and-a-half feet out of the perpendicular. I should very much like to see it when I am grown up.”
He only just stopped himself exclaiming aloud, reflecting that Phoebe Fraser and that cabby could say what they liked about Papists but they had the edge on Protestants when it came to the art of educating children. It occurred to him then that although he had heard a good deal about why the tower leaned nobody had ever explained how it came to be there in the first place and this seemed a time to find out.
“Why was it built?” he asked, and she said it was once a bell-tower for the cathedral, and that he was not to worry about it falling down for it had stood just so for hundreds of years and was unlikely to collapse, steps having been taken to ensure that it did not.
By the time they had reached Bromley, collected the gig and driven across the silent countryside to Tryst, he had almost adjusted to her, but as they crested the drive uncertainty concerning their reception returned to him, and he was glad to hand her over to Lucy, the general maid, for a hot drink and a bowl of soup, while he sought out Henrietta, already rehearsing his statement of self-justification.
He found her toasting her toes in front of the drawing-room fire, tired but complacent after helping Phoebe to dress the tree and pack the children off to bed, and it was here, a little haltingly, that he told her precisely what had occurred, watching her closely as he did so for it occurred to him that she might see in his introduction of the child into the house some kind of threat to her own children. He need not have worried. Something of the old, feckless Henrietta showed in the twinkle in her eye as she said, “There's really no curing you, is there? You scooped me from Seddon Moor in much the same manner!” and she heaved herself up, saying, “Where is the little mite? I’ll go to her.”
He said, restraining her, “No, wait, Hetty. It's important to discuss this with Phoebe right away,” and her mouth tightened as she said, “Why? What has a thing like this to do with a governess?”
He understood then that she was jealous of her new authority and that there were still latent tensions about the house for which he had not made allowance. There was even a gleam in her eye that introduced a note of wariness into his voice as he said, “Because Phoebe is a strict Presbyterian, and Avery's daughter has been raised in the Roman Catholic faith. I know Lowland Scots. I wouldn’t put it past Phoebe to set about the child as she would upon a heathen, ripe for conversion.”
“You think that's likely?”
“It's entirely possible.”
“Then it's a matter for me, not you.” She waddled round him, a small, tubby, determined figure, endowed with a bantam-like air of displeasure, so that he said, with a laugh, “Sit down, Henrietta. Phoebe can see to her, and I’ll introduce you to one another when she's fed,” but as soon as he had said this he realised that he had miscalculated, for she stopped, pushed the half-opened door shut, and stood with her back to it. “I was right!” she said. “You don’t understand and it's really time you did.”
“You don’t approve of me bringing the child here without consulting you!” and she burst out, “Of course I do! It's not that at all! No one with a heart could have left her there and gone back when Christmas was over with another bribe wrapped in brown paper. I should have done exactly as you did but that isn’t the point, that isn’t the point at all, Adam!”
For the first time since the now historic confrontation at the George he was face to face with the fruits of the dramatic change that he, circumstances, and possibly that encounter with Miles Manaton, had wrought in her. He had accepted the fact that she had made great advances in the role of housekeeper, that her judgements were maturing with every day that passed, that she was no longer at the mercy of mood and impulse but he had not made nearly enough allowance for the injection of pride that had attended all those changes and the assumption of responsibilities she had consistently evaded over the last five years. He remembered the periods when she had been carrying Stella and Alexander, when she had sometimes been tetchy and sometimes pitiful, scuttling away from even trivial decisions and content to leave everything to him. Now all was changed, as though the night spent in his arms after that unlikely reunion had enabled her to break out of the shell of youth and take on an entirely new personality. And here it was confronting him, a woman intensely jealous of her rights and responsibilities, who found it humiliating to share them with anyone, even him. He understood this and marvelled at it, for it seemed to him something as elemental as birth or death, and brought him face to face with the realisation that he would never again see her as the laughing girl he had met on a moor, courted (if that was the word), and saddled with three children and this great barn of a house. That girl was a ghost and if there was a part of him that mourned her gaiety he had no one but himself and Edith Wadsworth to blame.
He said, coming to terms with the situation, “What is it you want, Henrietta? Not simply in respect of Avery's child, but from me. From all of us here?”
She had no difficulty in finding the answer. A year ago she would have floundered, an inarticulate child seeking to justify a stand dictated by instinct, but now words found their way to her with the same facility as she had acquired the apparatus of authority. She said, “That's easy to explain. What I want is to be seen as someone who matters. To be able and expected to decide things, all things, just as we agreed and just as you said you wanted.”
He gave this the contemplation it deserved. They had negotiated one impasse but here was another, entirely unforeseen one. Perhaps it was not so much a matter of what she wanted but what he preferred, the girl-wife of the first years of their association, or this indomitable little woman, who not only rejected patronage but saw the least trespass upon her preserves as a threat to her stewardship. He made up his mind on the spot. People, he supposed, had to expand and develop, and this was as true of a wife as it was of a business. Having encouraged growth why should he complain if the pace dazzled him? The real answer lay not in expediency but in humour that had always resided in their relationship. He had gone looking for an efficient deputy to manage his domestic life while he spent his nervous energy elsewhere, and by God he seemed to have found one capable of surprising him. He crossed the room and took her face between his hands, tilting it and studying it with amusement and affection. He said, gently, “You’re a very remarkable person, Henrietta. I must have reminded myself of it at least once a week ever since I winkled you out of that hut on the moor. But a man doesn’t really expect to rediscover his own wife when she's seven months gone with his third child, and that's what I seem to be doing at this moment. You were right to flare up in that way. How Deborah Avery is to be received here is your concern, not mine, or Phoebe's, or even Avery's, and I’ll not make that mistake again. Others maybe, for I can’t promise I can adapt to you without a wobble or two, but one thing you should know. From here on, as far as parish pump politics are concerned, I abdicate. Go out to that child and do what's best for her. I’d back you against a dozen governesses,” and he kissed her, reached over her shoulder, and opened the door on the hall.
She went out without another word and, watching her sail across the hall towards the kitchen quarters, another thought struck him concerning her singularity. She had never, in the course of three pregnancies, shown a flicker of embarrassment, and this despite the fact that her stature made concealment impossible the moment her figure began to thicken. He thought, as she disappeared, “She parades a pregnancy like that father of hers parades his power and moneybags,” and he reminded himself again how much the two had in common and that, to Henrietta, her womb was the equivalent of Sam's mill.
Safe in his study, that no one in
the house entered without an invitation, he ran his eye over Avery's letter, savouring the cool impudence of the man who went his own way in the certainty that others, endowed with a conscience, would pick up the pieces he left in his wake. “You can repose complete trust in Mr. Swann…he has my entire confidence…a man of strict integrity…noted for high principle…my daughter must be encouraged to defer to him as she would to me…” and so on, three whole pages of it, most of it blarney.
He put the letter aside and cocked his head, listening, with half an ear, to the tinkle of a carol trickling from one of his daughter's musical boxes that she collected as other children collect dolls and marbles. There was not much doubt in his mind that, from here on, Deborah Avery was virtually his child; his, and seemingly, Henrietta's too if he had drawn the right conclusions from that scene in the drawing-room just now. He wondered what she would make of the child, with her curious blend of stillness and amiability, sensitivity and self-containment, her solemn prattle about coal seams in Wales and towers in Pisa. Probably they would circle one another for a spell, taking one another's measure like a couple of gladiators, and then, no doubt, arrive at a compromise that would almost certainly involve him. For, sooner or later, everything seemed to revert to him and the older and busier he became the more numerous and complicated were the day-to-day problems he was set to solve. He thought back for a moment to the time when his problems had been few, and confined to a choice of two courses, to kill or be killed, to run out ahead in pursuit of glory and promotion, or to stay under cover and hope nobody would notice. That was all that was required of a man content to cut his swathe with a sword and all the Swanns of the past had sought in the way of a destiny. It was not that simple, however, when a man threw away his sword and taught himself to use more sophisticated tools. Before one realised as much every facet of life reflected alternatives and every personal relationship became infinitely complex, demanding all manner of shifts and adjustments. People moved in and stayed like the Keates, the Tybalts, and the Blubbs, and others, the Averys, the Ellen Michelmores, and the Miles Manatons, collided and bumped away out of sight and sound. Predictability he had once had and spurned, and only a fool would look for it in business or marriage, certainly not in marriage to a woman like Henrietta Rawlinson. The phrase “natural selection” returned to him and what else could have dictated that casual decision of his the day Sam Rawlinson came blustering into his father's house on Derwentwater, demanding the return of his daughter? Money hadn’t entered into it, for Sam had disowned her on the spot, or wisdom either, for Henrietta, at that particular time, and for a long time afterwards, had shown no evidence of possessing the sense she was born with. And yet, looking back on it all, he regretted nothing and told himself, as he refolded and resealed Avery's letter, that if he was beginning all over again there wasn’t a single short-cut he would take from the moment he opened his eyes outside Jhansi and saw cobras’ eyes reposing in a shattered casket.
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