I sent the maid to bed and went upstairs myself, for it was my intention at least to look as if I had been sleeping peacefully when Robin returned. But my senses were too sharpened, too raw, for any kind of rest, my ears magnifying the sound of every creaking board, every rustle and scurry both indoors and out, every movement of leaf and root and nightbird beyond my window.
I heard the last train from Bradeswick come snorting up the hill, allowed the half-hour it would take for Robin to walk through the village and across the meadow and then, when the time to hear his footsteps approaching down the lane had come and passed away, I no longer pretended to sleep but banged my fists into my pillow and then my head and howled, as dismal and desperate as a lost, if still somewhat irritable, sheep.
Obviously he had stayed in town and why should I be surprised about that? The party would be far from over and why should he leave it to catch an inconveniently early train home to a wife whose attitude he considered unreasonable. He had gone as a matter of principle. Now he was probably enjoying himself. In a very neat but very painful nutshell, that was that. Had I gone with him, I might be enjoying myself too.
Alys, I supposed, would have spent the night at Aireville Terrace, an arrangement of which even her mother could not question the propriety. Robin would have found a room at the hotel, gone to his office, or simply sat up all night drinking and smoking those nervous cigarettes. Men did these things. It was all quite normal, reasonable, there was no need to be alarmed. I was not alarmed. Suddenly – oh God – I was terrified, heartbroken, drenched in a cold sweat of panic and self-condemnation. What had I unleashed upon myself? I had parted from him in anger, having given him a gala performance of the most unattractive side of my nature, and by allowing him to leave me in that frame of mind, I had made a gift of him to Alys or any other woman who had the wit to recognize his need for consolation – as I would have recognized it – and the will to supply it.
What a fool I was. What more could I desire than I already had? Nothing, except that it might continue, except that I might keep it intact. I had never learned the unique pleasure of asking pardon but I knew the moment had come for me to try. ‘Please forgive me.’ Surely that was all I needed to say? And he would forgive me gladly for he took no pleasure in storm and tempest, as I often did, but was a man for calm weather. Just let him come home to me safe and whole and willing to listen and I would be everything he wanted, for I had sense enough to know that the time for dazzling and overwhelming could not last for ever. Perhaps a relationship – like everything else – had need for change, movement, growth, in order to endure, and in that case the direction in which we must travel was to a level of quieter harmony, more suited to his nature, no doubt, than to mine, but to which I must adapt; since he could not so easily adapt to me. I was the stronger, I had always known that, and strength conveyed responsibilities upon its possessor. I knew that too. And therefore I, not Robin, must take the lead. I must give him tranquillity as well as adoration, friendship as well as passion, peace of mind as well as physical sensation. I must.
As the night drew to its close everything began to seem so very clear, I watched the light change from grey to rose-pearl, saw a cool, empty sky flush suddenly with the new morning and, lying there alone and presumably forsaken, I felt a fresh source of strength just beginning to stir inside me. But I had always been strong. Now I would be wise. My intentions had always been of the best. Now I would carry them out with more gentleness, more finesse. Now I would always remember to ask myself what he wanted, rather than what I wanted him to have. Just let him come and I would give my whole mind to loving him. Forgive me, Robin.
He came, striding up the lane in his evening clothes, at ten o’clock of a bright Sunday morning, considerably startling my reverend uncle’s church parade, letting the garden gate slam shut to warn me, I supposed, to give me time to compose myself perhaps, or to pick up the hatchet – verbal or otherwise – which he would be expecting me to throw at him.
He was here. Safe. Grinning ruefully, boyishly, with a shade of real embarrassment since his scarlet sash and pleated evening shirt would already be the talk of Clarrow Fell. But he was home. I had known he would come. Of course I had. He was home. Thank God. Forgive me, Robin.
‘Where the devil have you been all night?’ I snarled at him through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve been frantic, that’s all, frantic …’
‘Well – perhaps I ought to be glad of that.’
‘Glad? Ashamed you mean – thoroughly …’
‘No – no. Glad. You wouldn’t have been frantic unless you were worried. You wouldn’t have worried unless you cared. It follows, therefore, that you do care and I am fully entitled to be glad. That’s logic, my dear, as they taught it to me at Hexingham.’
I picked up something from the table, I didn’t know what, something hard and smooth that I would probably grieve for afterwards when I had thrown it at him and broken it, and held it at the ready.
‘Please don’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve really been punished enough. It was no joke, I can tell you, walking up from the station past Clarrow in its Sunday best. Lord – if you had seen their faces! I thought the best way to play it was like Dottie Potterton – as if I was quite sure anybody must know it was the very latest Mayfair thing to wear a dinner-jacket in the village street at ten o’clock in the morning. Not that I fooled them, I suppose.’
‘Don’t try to make me laugh.’
‘I rather thought it might be my only hope of salvation.’
‘Don’t count on it.’
But I had already replaced whatever it was I had clenched in my hand. He was home, not particularly contrite but not hostile either, hoping he would get away with it, I supposed, without too much trouble. Well – we would see about that. And remembering that rose-pearl sky of early morning and all my good intentions, I bent my head to hide a smile.
‘Ah – what’s this?’ he said, the English schoolboy-gentleman again who had always charmed me. ‘There’s a chance, then, that you might forgive me …?’
‘Possibly. Possibly not.’
‘Well – while you’re thinking it over – is there at least a chance of breakfast? I don’t mean to be a nuisance but I think I am about to die of starvation or very nearly.’
‘Didn’t they feed you – in town?’
‘Oh, sumptuously. But that was last night, you know – yesterday. And although I do seem to remember something called breakfast about five o’clock this morning, it was mostly champagne – and so long ago. A plate of bacon and eggs and sausages would probably save my life, Olivia. And mushrooms …! There can’t be much wrong with a world that grows mushrooms you know. That’s what I think at any rate.’
And since there was really no point in arguing with a man who had breakfasted on champagne, I sent the girl running up to Clarrow for new bread and fresh-picked mushrooms, gave instructions for hot water and towels and clean linen to be put in his room and realizing that I had eaten nothing myself since tea-time yesterday set two plates at the table.
It had been, of course, a splendid party, the whole dining room of the Station Hotel taken over for the night, masses of white roses and pink carnations everywhere, glorious hothouse blooms, Robin told me, his horticulturist’s eye still glowing, a fortune in themselves strewn casually by Max de Haan at Victorine’s feet.
‘I had no idea he was so fond of her, Olivia.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘Oh well – one assumes he has his reasons. But those roses! Every one had its own face, you know what I mean. I sorted out a few of the best ones to bring home for you but – well – you know how it is. I wonder where they are now? Pity.’
The meal too had been magnificent, served at small tables set with pink and white lace cloths and decorated with all the sophisticated frivolity of moss garlands, tulle frills, pyramids of golden apricots and dark, dusty plums, silver-gilt candlesticks with apricot silk shades, the refinements of London and Paris brought by Max de Haan to Station Square. Certainly Robin had seen nothing like it before in Bradeswick. It had put our wedding breakfast to shame, there was no doubt about that. I believed him.
They had eaten turbot and grouse and black Beluga caviar. Crayfish in Chablis. Beef in red wine. Hothouse peaches and nectarines and those exotic bananas Max imported from Madeira along with his wines and his basket-work furniture. Well, of course he was an importer of tropical fruit and cane chairs and the Lord knew what besides. Didn’t I know that? Of course I did. What else, I wondered sweetly? White slaves, perhaps?
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Robin with an air of perfect innocence. ‘Lovely black ones, I rather imagine – all polished ebony skin and gold bangles. Very fetching.’
Quite so.
There had even been a wedding-cake, a real extravaganza three tiers high, covered with lovers’knots in pink and white satin ribbon and tiny posies of pink carnations done up in frills of silver lace. A marvel, in fact, which no one could imagine how Max had managed to get done in time.
‘Money,’ I said, as blunt now as Victorine. For what else could Max de Haan possibly have to offer?
Indeed yes. Money, in almost visible piles of gold all over the Station Hotel. An aura of it hanging like a golden net above the petals of those perfect roses and the bloom of those exotic, out-of-season fruits; fronds of ivy that could have been garlands of ten pound notes around every candlestick, huge, important cigars that announced their own value, tiny crystal scent sprays for the ladies, each one containing a French perfume everyone had heard of and knew to be unobtainable in Bradeswick. An indication, one supposed, that Max was in the perfume-importing business too. There had been a river of sparkling, gold-flecked champagne on which my mother had floated – Robin knew no other word for it – a spray of orchids appearing to serve as the entire bodice of her dress, the skirt trailing behind her in yards of lace and fluted chiffon, her bare shoulders rather startling in the mother of the bride, her waist a mere nineteen inches, as everyone now knew, since Mr Septimus Cross, the Banker, who could be frisky in his cups, had called for a tape and measured it. Nineteen inches!
‘Like mine,’ I said tartly and her bosom – also like mine – was twenty inches more, the perfect hour-glass shape of high fashion. I sincerely hoped Mr Cross had not taken it into his head to measure that!
‘Lord no, for Mr Greenlaw took it very much amiss and for a moment we thought it would be pistols at dawn until Max suggested they might care to have a go at battering each other with balance sheets and calmed them down rather. Your mother was very flattered and assumes she could be Mrs Samuel Greenlaw any day of the week now.’
‘Not if his daughters-in-law can put a stop to it. And if she goes on like this then they soon will.’
‘Which would be a pity, since she gives those two old boys something to live for.’
And how had the bridegroom – the progressive Dr Rexford – reacted to this dinner for a couple of dozen people, the cost of which would have kept the inmates of Bradeswick Workhouse in nourishing broths and meat puddings for a twelve-month? Stiffly at first, Robin thought. But whatever one happened to think of Andrew Rexford’s politics or his moral values, no one could accuse him of being small-minded, and having agreed to accept the evening as a gift from Max, he had done so with quite a bit of grace and dignity. Presumably, Robin supposed, he was shrewd enough to know that there would have been no way in the world of persuading Max to give the money to the Workhouse instead. And therefore, since it was bound to be squandered anyway, why not on Victorine?
After all, no one expects the groom to pay for his own wedding reception.
And Victorine? Radiant, declared Robin. A cream silk dress with a high ruffled neck and floppy lace sleeves, a brown velvet sash that made her waist look not quite nineteen inches, perhaps, but smaller than one had supposed, her hair very neat and very glossy, done up in a single coil at the nape of her neck and parted in the middle. She had stood very erect, her head held high, her cheeks flushed with pleasure, the centre of attention for perhaps the first time in her life, Robin wondered, and enjoying it hugely. Madelon, too, had been enchanted, dreaming no doubt of herself in the same situation with some Prince Charming who, at the moment, was wearing Ivor Naseby’s face. Alys had been intrigued and captivated by the sheer audacity of Max’s extravagance. Not condoning it, of course, – since she too would have preferred those meat puddings for the workhouse – but admiring its style.
While my mother had passed from a state of rapture to one of bliss and back to rapture again, knowing that the Nasebys and the Pottertons and the rest, although they had not been present, would hear all about it and, being quite capable of adding up the cost, would be bound to conclude that Lavinia Blackwood and her daughters were not easily to be disregarded. For no accusations of irregular or furtive behaviour could be made against Victorine after this, no speculations as to whether she was really married at all or that, if so, she was ashamed of it, when her union had been announced so splendidly.
And then, when the older gentlemen and ladies like Miss Frances Grey who only cared to be excessive in moderation had departed, leaving, it seemed, only my sisters, my new brother-in-law, my mother, Robin and Alys, there had been a genuine, quite incredible cascade of champagne, the kind of thing one might expect King Teddy to do for Mrs Keppel or Lillie Langtry or Sarah Bernhardt, but which had caught even my mother by surprise in Bradeswick, for Victorine.
Suddenly, when everything had seemed to be coming to an end, Max had called for wide-brimmed champagne glasses filled with sliced peaches and grapes and strawberries. No – Robin had no idea where Max had obtained strawberries at this season. Presumably he imported them too, packed in ice, from the South of France and, piling the glasses up, one row on top of another, into a fragile, beautiful, incredibly precarious pyramid, Max – with an arm they all thought incredibly steady considering the amount of claret and brandy he had drunk – had poured a continuous stream of champagne into the topmost glass, letting it spill over in a truly glamorous cascade until every other glass was full.
That had been breakfast, the grandest of grand finales, although Max had declared that one needed a warmer climate to do the job properly, a garden full of little nooks and crannies to stroll about in afterwards or an Italian lake where one could swim preferably among water-lilies and presumably naked. Robin had heard all about Max when he had been at Hexingham and evidently he had lived up to his reputation. Good luck to him, thought Robin.
‘But you do see, Olivia darling, that although champagne and fruit salad are all very well, there’s no substance to it. As breakfasts go I don’t think it’s likely to replace bacon and eggs – and mushrooms.’
‘I suppose you’ll want to sleep now for the rest of the morning?’
‘And for a bit of the afternoon too, I shouldn’t wonder. I haven’t felt quite so debauched since Cambridge.’
‘What did Amyas think of this cascade of champagne?’
‘Amyas? Was he there? Yes, of course he was. That’s the trouble with Amyas, he just appears and disappears and one never notices – which suits him, of course, because for some reason or other, I’m quite sure he doesn’t want to be seen. Funny chap, Amyas. Yes, he came and paid his respects to the bride, said everything that was right and proper, ate his dinner and went away. And until you mentioned him just now I’d forgotten he was there at all. If I’d been asked to supply a list of guests for the newspapers – or for the police – I don’t think I’d have included him. He left early because of Max, I suppose. I’d love to know just what there is between those two. So would Alys.’
‘Is there something between them?’
‘Lord yes – something very deep and twisted. Alys and I have often wondered. But Amyas would never tell. We could never even find out just where he came from. We looked in all the family Bibles and read all the family letters we could find in Clarrow attic – oh yes, piles of them, all bundled up in ribbon just as letters ought to be, you’d love them – but we never even found a clue. Obviously he has to be a member of the family by some back road or other – somebody’s love-child, – but we could never quite fit him in. We decided at one point that the Squire must be his father and Alys still rather clings to that. But I have my doubts. The Squire’s lady certainly didn’t think so.’
‘You mean my grandmother?’
‘Yes – so I do. She was a very adoring, very jealous wife, yet she was always kind to Amyas as I’m quite certain she couldn’t have been if she had so much as suspected the Squire. And Lady Olivia would have done more than suspect, she’d have known. You have her name too – odd that I never realized …’
What? Was it this unknown grandmother, then; who had given first to her son and then to me our possessive, passionate, troublesome nature? A tantalizing thought, worth exploring in a quieter moment, when my mind was less preoccupied with the sorry task of counting how many times Robin, within the last few minutes, had mentioned Alys.
And, as always, I felt compelled to mention her myself.
‘Did Alys go home with my mother?’
‘Yes – and in style. Max drove them in his Daimler. Aunt Sibylla will be very miffed about it.’
‘She won’t mind.’
‘You don’t know her. Alys was supposed to go home on the last train with Amyas. She even went to find her hat and gloves – which with Alys is always an uncertain undertaking, I grant you – but then Max said his little piece about caged birds and how the only thing that stopped her from opening the door was her conscience – you remember? He dared her to stay, in fact, and she did.’
‘Aunt Sibylla won’t mind.’
Take care, I thought. Talk about Victorine and Andrew Rexford or Max. Don’t pick and pry into his feelings for Alys. Don’t goad him. He has affection for her, you know that. Don’t ask him to count it out for you, or analyse it, or compare it. Because it may be more than you can cope with, or more than he’d realized. Whatever it is, he has it in control, dormant. Let it sleep.
He stirred uneasily, a vague, uncomfortable image entering his mind.
‘Why do you say that, Olivia?’
And wisdom was entirely overwhelmed by my destructive, irresistible compulsion to find out, to test him, to know.
‘Because if Alys is with my mother today, there is every likelihood that she is also with Max. He will probably call this afternoon in his Daimler, and take them for a spin. Aunt Sibylla will be only too delighted.’
‘I am sorry, Olivia. I don’t follow you.’
But he did. I had deliberately presented him with the picture of Alys with another man. He had not liked it. Therefore – therefore? And as my carefully constructed world began, once more, to decay and crumble, my warm hearth to choke with cold ashes, panic to strike me, I said flatly, ‘Because Max is rich and Alys is single. Need I say more?’
‘Not really.’
But of course I had to. ‘It would be a very good thing for her.’
He got up, pushed aside his plate, wanting to end it before it had really begun, by walking away. And knowing quite well that I should let him go, I nevertheless persisted.
‘Well it would be good for her, you must admit. Don’t you admit?’
He sighed. ‘Olivia, the only thing Max de Haan has to recommend him as a husband – as you well know – is money. Alys would not marry for money.’
‘Aunt Sibylla would.’
‘We are talking of Alys.’
‘We are talking of a girl whose mother is desperate to get her married. And, after all, the fastest way out of Clarrow vicarage is a husband.’
‘If Alys had thought so, then she could have married long ago.’
‘Guy, you mean?’
‘Yes. I know he asked her.’
‘Did you ask her?’
Why – oh why – oh why, had I said that? Take it back at once. But one cannot retrieve the spoken word, one can only attempt to throw a screen of other words around it and leave it lying there, painfully visible.
‘Never mind about that, Robin.’
‘I shan’t. I didn’t even hear it.’
And then, hesitating at the foot of the stairs, on his way to bed and the sleep he visibly required, he said with some apology and gentleness, knowing, I suppose, how much it hurt me, ‘Olivia, one really can’t talk about these things, you know. One doesn’t, darling – that’s all. You do see that?’
Yes. A gentleman did not discuss his dealings – past or present with a lady. A true gentleman, that is, like Robin or my grandfather or – yes, quite definitely – Amyas. Emil Junot, of course, and Jean François and Max would have told me anything I desired to know, graphically, with relish and colour and great enjoyment. I would do well to remember that.
We spent a pleasant afternoon walking on Clarrow moor, purple September again among the heather, a smoky sky with the sun low and hazy along the horizon, leaves not yet on the turn but something in the air promising a fine, deep gold autumn.
‘This is the time of year I love most,’ said Robin, inhaling the scent and taste of the changing seasons.
‘You said that in April when the buds came and in June with the roses. You said it last December when you saw the first frost.’
‘Did I? How fickle I am.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not really, Olivia.’
And it was possible now to smile, to take the hand he held out to me and walk home leaning contentedly against his shoulder. A mood of ease and indolence had been created which carried us through dinner, no crayfish in Chablis, as I was quick to mention, but roast beef brought over in a hot dish from the main house, potatoes, cabbages and turnips from Clarrow home farm, Yorkshire puddings as light and crisp as only Mrs Timmins could make them.
‘You know, Olivia, you are getting just as ready to back a Clarrow carrot against the rest of the world as Aunt Sibylla.’
Narrow, did he mean? He was smiling, teasing, evidently enjoying his plain English – Clarrow – food, but nevertheless, the comparison annoyed me slightly. Could I possibly have become so insular, so ridiculous?
The beef was replaced by an enormous treacle sponge, a deep custard tart fragrant with nutmeg and vanilla, a pint of thick custard sauce. ‘Now that,’ said Robin, ‘is exactly what I like.’
I was reassured instantly, my humour swinging far too quickly from dark to light, and I smiled at him fondly, watching him eat with an almost gloating satisfaction, leaning across the table the moment his plate was empty to give him more.
‘Am I a goose, by any chance, that you are fattening for Christmas?’
‘I just enjoy your enjoyment.’
‘All my enjoyments?’
‘Are you thinking of one in particular?’
‘Of course I am. And I was rather hoping – well – an early night? Shall we?’ We did. So early that even our little maid by no means famous for her quick wits noticed the implications and turned quite pink. And for an hour I gave my body, my inner being, my love unsullied by the flaws and fears of my daytime self, love that came pure and whole and direct and was given exactly as love ought to be, for no other reason than the pleasure of the giving.
I gave my body and would have given it again immediately, feeling, as I often did lately that I had not given enough, that there was still something inside me, something else, something more, some other level of sensation or emotion, I wasn’t sure – but something. Yet for Robin the experience had been complete, exhausting, quite harrowing one might have thought by the groans and the perspiration and his helplessness afterwards, the precious moment of his collapse into my arms, breathless and defenceless and absolutely mine, pressing tight against me as if, having enjoyed me to the full, he needed to be comforted for it.
‘They told us at school it was wrong you see,’ he said, laughing into my shoulder. ‘And every nanny I ever had said the same.’
‘They were telling you lies.’
‘They were keeping us under control. They had most of us thinking we’d go to the devil, or lose our hearing, if we so much as cast a sidelong glance at a female. Not that it worked with everybody. Certainly not with Max if one can credit even half, the tales they tell of him at Hexingham.’
I did not want Max de Haan’s name spoken here in my bedroom, not ever and particularly not now in these fragile moments after making love.
‘I don’t want to talk about Max,’ I said, and then, because my resentment of him had been simmering all day, proceeded to do so at some length and most unwisely.
‘I suppose you know that he gave that ridiculous party on purpose to annoy me? That wouldn’t be his only reason, of course, because he’s as tricky as a box of monkeys, but that was one of them – mark my words.’
The delicately woven magic which had held us close together began to unravel, as always, much too soon and I sat bolt upright, furious again with Victorine in the first place for stabbing me in the back and then with Max for turning his own golden knife in my wound. For what else had it been but that? Why had he staged this spectacular extravaganza for Victorine, of whom he had never taken the slightest notice, when on hearing of my own wedding, he had simply thrown a bracelet and a pair of earrings at me with his curt permission to sell them whenever I should need to repair the roof of Clarrow Fell.
I knew.
‘Why?’ said Robin, running his hand the length of my back, not yet caring. ‘Why should Max want to annoy you?’
Yes I knew. It was crystal clear to me but strangely difficult to explain to someone as clean and straightforward as Robin.
‘Because of Clarrow. He comes here every now and then like a carrion crow to see if my grandfather is any nearer to the grave. And last night was to remind me that when the time comes he has the money – and all the popularity and the power it gives him.’
It had been a challenge, in fact, flung down with flamboyance and swagger but in great earnest nonetheless. He had the money. I would have the house. Could I keep it? Or would he find a way to persuade me or force me to sell? That was the game.
Robin sighed and the hand which had been stroking my spine grew still.
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice so neutral, so careful, that I knew he had been waiting for some propitious moment to speak and probably dreading it, ‘He did say something about Clarrow this morning when he drove me to the station. He put his cards on the table, in fact, and made me a very decent offer.’
‘Made you an offer!’ I was incredulous. How dare he? He had absolutely no right!
‘Well, I am your husband, you know …’
‘Dear God – the arrogance of that man.’
‘Darling, not really. You must understand …’
‘Oh no, I don’t have to do anything. Not where the manor is concerned.’
‘Olivia – darling – stop clenching your teeth and growling and listen. It’s not at all unusual that he should make his offer to me. Until twenty years ago a married woman had no property of her own. Everything she had or inherited belonged, by law, to her husband. Twenty years ago Clarrow Fell would have been legally mine, not yours, darling, and I could have sold it or knocked it down without even asking your consent. And even though nowadays the law does allow you to inherit the estate in your own right, old attitudes die hard and most men find it very difficult to approach a woman on a matter of business. That’s what I do all day, darling, at Lawker & Lane – handle the business affairs of ladies who don’t find it ladylike to handle their own. Even Frances Grey looks down her nose at her investments as if the mice had been at them. So Max was quite correct in talking to me.’
‘All right. I don’t care, since he wasted his time anyway …’
And unable to endure the sudden silence, the thread of shocked suspicion it had aroused in me, I said quickly, hoping as I had never hoped for anything in my life before, that I was right, ‘You refused him, of course, and told him there would be no point in troubling you again.’
What a question? A simple statement of fact? Or had I voiced a terrible doubt?
He got up, and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down, his face in shadow.
‘Are you cold, Olivia?’
Oddly, I was, or must be since I had shivered, although the night outside our window was soft and warm.
‘Not really.’
And I waited, clasping my hands around my knees, naked and silent as if a moment of final judgment had come.
‘I’ve thought about it, Olivia,’ he said, his voice slow and heavy, each word a great burden on his tongue. ‘There have been whole days together when I’ve thought of nothing else. And my answer to the problem is always the same. Olivia – I have to tell you …’
Don’t, I silently cried out. Not yet. Let’s wait a while. Let’s hope the Squire goes on living until we’re older, steadier – until we’re ready.
‘I’m not prepared to give my life to this estate, Olivia. For your sake I’d like to. But I can’t. Darling – do you hear me?’
I heard, and drawing up my knees close to my chest, hugging them with fierce arms, I hid my face in the arc of my body, curling myself like a child in the womb, the position one assumes – it seemed – when face to face with the one conflict which cannot be resolved. So, I believe, I would have felt had I been asked to choose between the life of one dearly loved child and another, both equally precious. How could I sacrifice either one without tearing away one half of myself? Cruel, impossible choices. I could not choose. And so I took the only escape route open to me and refused to believe him. It was a mood, no more, and would pass. Just a mood, brought on by that damnable cascade of champagne, that false allure of Max de Haan’s riches in which I had so little faith, his aura of exciting foreign places which, so very often, turned out to be dangerous, too, and hard. It was a mood. It had to be.
‘Olivia, we never discussed it before we were married, as we ought to have done. And I know how much I’m to blame. I knew you had mistaken me for the ideal country gentleman – as you saw him – and I let you go on thinking that because – well – it was what attracted you.’
‘That’s all right, Robin.’ Carefully now, but very quickly, I must choose the words to tell him how easily I could forgive him for that most forgivable of deceptions. He had shown me the side of himself most likely to please me because he had wanted to please me. I had done the same. I understood. But he gave me no opportunity to speak, feeling a great need to say everything he had to say as fast as he could, while he could.
‘But I’m not really like that, darling. And isn’t it time now you looked at me and saw me as I am, not as you’ve imagined me …?’
How dreadful. That was all my mind seemed capable of holding, a sensation of absolute, impenetrable dread. I had been afraid of losing his love. But was he now saying to me something far worse – that he believed I did not know him and therefore my love could not really exist? How dreadful! How wounding. And since Robin did not inflict wounds lightly – did not, in fact, inflict them at all if it could possibly be avoided – I knew how long the need had been simmering inside him, how vital it was, how real.
‘Olivia, I didn’t choose to come to Clarrow Fell in the first place. It was just be most convenient address to send me. And I came back, after Cambridge, because my room and board were still available and because I’m – lazy if you like – a bit too much inclined to think tomorrow will do. But I never intended to stay. And certainly – absolutely certainly – I never meant to get stuck with Lawker & Lane.’
And swiftly, with drowning hands, I clutched the straw he seemed to offer me.
‘Then leave them. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘And do what? Ride to hounds five days a week all winter like the Pottertons? Meddle with the tenants’private affairs like Aunt Sibylla? Or try to do what the Squire does and make an idiot of myself over it – because I don’t believe in what he does.’
‘Robin!’
‘Olivia, I am so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry and how conscious I am of letting you down. But I have to tell you – don’t I? – because without honesty I don’t see how one can live easy. The world is such a big place, Olivia, and I have seen so little of it. I’ve been to Bradeswick and Cambridge and to India …’
Where had I heard this before? Alys crying out, ‘I have been to Bridlington and Scarborough and once all the way to Eastbourne, how am I to bear it?’
‘There’s so much I’ve never seen, Olivia, so many other ways of life I’ve never experienced, never even had a glimpse of … And one of those ways must be right not just for me, darling, but for us. Clarrow isn’t right for me. It’s too narrow and too demanding. I’d have to give it my whole mind. Every scrap of energy I have – and every penny. There’d be no time for anything else and I can’t just limit myself in that fashion. I’ve tried – very hard – to make myself believe I could. But what it boils down to is that I’ve only one life to lead, Olivia, and it just can’t be here – it just can’t be.’
Yes, he had tried very hard indeed. I accepted that. I heard, too, the hint of tears in his voice, felt the strain of his nerves, knew how much it was costing him to hurt me.
‘Olivia, do you love me?’
‘Of course I do.’ It was a cry of anguish.
‘Then be my wife.’
‘But I am.’
‘No. Be my wife. Live in the house I provide wherever I provide it. Don’t weigh me down with five hundred years of tradition that I spent the biggest part of my life trying to get away from.’
‘You don’t mean it. Not really.’
I couldn’t allow him to mean it. And as he watched the enormity of my distress – as once again I curled myself into that primitive, foetal attitude of helplessness – I felt his resolution waver. It takes a great deal of courage, after all, to hurt a woman one cares for and Robin had told me often enough that he was not brave.
‘I mean it, darling. But I don’t expect us to reach any decisions tonight. I just want you to know how I feel, that’s all. So you’ll know …’
I flung my arms around him, my mouth fastening upon his to stop the words, my body desperate for reassurance, as greedy for comfort as a frightened child, yet at the same time wanting to dominate, to make him desire me, to fill his mind with straightforward lust, if I could do nothing else to counteract its dangerous philosophy, to make something tremendous so that I could keep them both. And still it would not suffice. It was not enough to be the passive recipient of love-making, the patient, female earth waiting to be ploughed and fertilized. I must now be the initiator, the aggressor, and so I took him, pinned him beneath me, lifted him to a groaning, quivering summit of joy that caused him to cry out as if I had stabbed him to the heart. And then he lay in my arms again, laughing weakly, his forehead beaded with sweat, a trace of moisture along his eyelids to which I put my mouth.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I think you’ve just taken my virginity.’
‘I love you, Robin.’
‘Well, I should hope so, having ravished me in such glorious Amazon fashion. Not that I’m complaining, don’t think that. I’ll lie still and promise not to scream should you care to do it again.’
‘I might.’
‘Please do. You really have conquered me, you know.’
Yes. And we would heal the breach between us in our own separate ways. Robin would poke gentle fun at it. I would refuse to acknowledge there was a breach at all. Everything – with effort and persistence, with my love and his passion – would go well.
Yet when I woke an hour or two before dawn, my sleep penetrated by an uneasy physical awareness of night dangers, prowlers, spectres, something wrong, it was to find myself alone, Robin at first only a deeper shadow among shadows, sitting by the window looking out, looking away, a tautness in the air around him warning that I must make no sound. I lay alone in my bed feigning sleep and watched him, the centre of a slow whirlpool of misery, its ripples lapping outwards towards me and then drawn back again, by a visible effort of will, into the mind and body from which they came. In the morning he would turn a smiling face towards me. I would turn my smiling face to him. But now, at the very bleakest hour of night, he was suffering – as Hexingham had taught him a gentleman should – in silence and alone. And knowing myself to be the cause of it, accepting that the remedy was in my hands, I shuddered and closed my eyes.
Open the cage door, Max had told Alys. All that holds you is your conscience. And if the day ever came when I had nothing but Robin’s decency, his integrity, his guilt with which to keep him at Clarrow, could I do it? Could I employ his own good qualities against him?
Dear God, let me find some other solution. Let me be different. Yet I wore the nature heredity and circumstance had blended between them and forced upon me. I was my mother’s daughter and, like all her children, bore the scars of loving her; Madelon with her cough, Victorine who found security in flour and sugar, Luc in his magpie hoarding of shiny, durable things; where else had I acquired my own destructive need to possess the things I loved, the man I loved, my need to bind him because I dare not allow him the freedom he needed to love me?
I did not think, lying there in the dark, that I could feel greater misery. Yet I had still some way to travel before the truth, which as truth often seems to be, was simple, cruel, easily visible. I had mistaken him, not for Guy, but for the image I had created of my stranger brother, and certainly, even in the days when I had dazzled his vision, filled his mind, so urgently aroused his senses, he had always needed Alys.