A Marriage of Convenience (14 page)

‘May I ask what I can expect?’

‘Indeed you may.’ Esmond inclined his head and then looked up abruptly. ‘Nothing … unless your expenditure remains at last year’s level for the next six months. If it does, I’ll accommodate you when the deposit’s exhausted. Perhaps you’d like this in writing?’

‘Your word will do very well, Esmond.’

‘You have it,’ replied Esmond curtly, leaning across the table to take his brother’s hand.

*

Leaving the room, Clinton realised very clearly the price he would now have to pay for any indiscretion on Theresa’s part. One thing was certain anyway—that little escapade would go no further. A kiss, he thought bitterly; only the touch of a woman’s lips. Enough perhaps to turn an adolescent’s head but hardly a cause for much repining to a man of the world. But self-mockery did not salve his pride, or the stinging resentment he felt. The wisest course would be to leave without another word to her. A coward’s exit: leaving her to think what she chose. He imagined himself penning a note begging her to forgive his ungentlemanly ‘insult’, and to forget an incident he now deplored. To hell with that too. She deserved an honest explanation and would get one.

Alone in the dining room Esmond imagined Clinton’s
amazement
were he ever to guess the real reason why he was being forced to wait six months for a loan. The plain answer was that before then Esmond did not expect to have any disposable money. In recent months Esmond’s difficulties with the Greek & Oriental
Navigation
Company had led him to investigate and reject a number of ways of breaking the trust. Then a sudden worsening in the shipping line’s position had unexpectedly thrown up a straightforward solution.

Before ever contemplating trust breaking, Esmond had thought of advising the trustees to buy Greek & Oriental stock on Clinton’s behalf. But at the time he had been doubtful whether such cautious men would agree to make a very large investment in a single company. Nothing short of £20,000 would make any appreciable difference to the shipping line’s depleted reserves.

A few days before coming to Ireland, Esmond had at last accepted that the line’s creditors would force the company to liquidate
unless
he publicly declared his support. Although understandably
reluctant to guarantee the line’s credit, Esmond had seen that this inescapable eventuality would at least give the trustees unlimited confidence in the Greek & Oriental. When they knew that his discount house was standing surety for the company, Esmond was certain that the trustees would finally overcome their prejudice against heavy investment in a single stock, and would act on his advice to convert the greater part of Clinton’s capital into Greek & Oriental shares. The company’s problems would continue but the purchase would provide two or three months invaluable respite.

At the end of a harrowing day, Esmond found it satisfying to reflect that when Clinton got his loan,
his
capital would have been largely responsible for his benefactor’s ability to lend to him. If Clinton left Kilkreen feeling that he had achieved what he had set out to, Esmond had no intention of denying him that pleasant delusion.

The following morning, wanting only to be done with his final interview with Theresa, Clinton was disappointed not to see her at breakfast. But he was comforted by the knowledge that Esmond and his mother would later be lunching at neighbouring Killaloe Park.

Not really expecting to find Theresa alone yet, he looked into the morning room. Esmond and his mother were there. Unable to retreat quickly enough, Clinton was obliged to obey his mother’s beckoning hand.

‘We were talking about marriage,’ she announced firmly, as if to anticipate any argument. Clinton nodded agreeably.

‘The one I didn’t make?’

‘Certainly not.’ Lady Ardmore eyed the door to see that it was closed. ‘I was thinking about Esmond.’

‘It’s not a subject I care to discuss with Clinton,’ remarked Esmond, shifting in his chair.

‘I second that,’ said Clinton, moving to the window and looking out at the heavy rain clouds. A few sparrows with puffed out feathers were hopping on the wet terrace steps. He heard his mother say calmly:

‘In some matters Clinton’s views are worth listening to.’

Esmond cast his eyes upward and turned to Clinton.

‘In spite of her experiences with father, our dear mother still seems to believe that women need horsewhipping to make them amenable.’

‘They respect firmness.’ Lady Ardmore rapped on the floor with her cane. ‘Do stop staring out of the window, Clinton.’ He faced her with reluctance. ‘Well, would
you
think much of your chances with a woman who thought she could twist you round her little finger?’

‘That would depend on whether she was right.’

‘Quite true,’ said Esmond. ‘The French have a saying:
on
recule
pour
mieux
sauter.
’

‘Trust the French to be such fools,’ snorted his mother. ‘Start reculing and you may not be able to stop; that’s my saying.’ She looked to Clinton for approval but he merely shrugged his shoulders. Esmond looked at him gratefully.

‘It’s no good, mother. Clinton’s not a model of decisiveness either. Take the way he dithered over the Lucas girl.’

‘Stuff,’ said Lady Ardmore. ‘The girl did the dithering there … letting him blow hot and cold instead of telling him to clear off unless.’ She sniffed loudly and sat back more comfortably in her chair. ‘Anyway I’ve just been reading about a far more resourceful lady. She married her footman, got bored with him and sent him packing. A lesson to the Miss Lucases of this world.’

‘But how much did she have to settle on the footman?’ asked Esmond, plainly relieved by the change of subject.

‘Not a farthing. That’s the whole point. Did either of you know it’s against the law here for a Catholic priest to marry a couple if one of them’s a Protestant?’ Esmond shook his head. ‘I’m not surprised you don’t. There can’t be more than a handful of priests in the country who’d sanction a mixed marriage, whatever the law might say.’

‘But if she was a Protestant,’ asked Esmond, ‘how did she get a priest to do the necessary?’

‘How do you think? By saying she was a Catholic, of course.’

‘Did the footman sue when she turned him out?’

‘Course he did. But when she told the court she’d been a Protestant all along, the judge ruled against the marriage.’

‘Must have been in the dark ages,’ laughed Esmond.

‘Only twenty years ago.’ She turned to Clinton, who had taken no apparent interest in what had been said. ‘Perhaps you can tell us something more amusing, Clinton?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Lady Ardmore smiled reflectively.

‘What about the time Sir John Markham found you in his wife’s room?’

‘Pure hearsay.’

‘Didn’t you tell him you’d come to investigate a smell of burning?’

‘I may have done.’

‘I heard you left the following day.’

Clinton looked back from the doorway.

‘I’d meant to. Just as I mean to leave here tomorrow … or maybe sooner. All good things come to an end.’

He bowed respectfully to her and left the room.

*

Shortly after eleven o’clock with his mother and Esmond safely on their way to Killaloe, Clinton sent a maid to tell Miss Simmonds that Lord Ardmore wished to see her in the Cedar Drawing Room.

As Theresa came in, he noticed with a familiar sinking of the heart that even in the brief interval since he had last seen her, she seemed changed to him. A difference in the light, he told himself without conviction, knowing the sensation too well to be deceived. Wasn’t it always like this? The nervous comparison of an ideal image with a real face? Her look was lightly challenging; the initiative all his. Moments before, he had known quite clearly what he would say, but already simply by her presence the context had shifted.

‘Because I leave tomorrow,’ he began awkwardly, ‘I had to see you to say how much I regret …’

‘What do you regret?’ she asked scarcely above a whisper.

‘My weakness.’

‘For encouraging a poor innocent and then overwhelming her with passion? How I struggled to save my virtue.’

‘Most women’s virtue comes down to cowardice or self-interest in the end.’

‘A consoling thought for all rejected men,’ she replied unsmiling.

‘It’s easy to make fun of a man who’s trying to be serious. What you choose to see as cynicism I intended as a compliment.’

She shivered slightly and hugged her astrakhan mantle more tightly round her.

‘Your mother should warn her guests to bring a sack of coal with them.’ She smiled. ‘I never want to see or smell another peat fire again. Do they have coal fires at your barracks?’

He moved towards her, his handsome face drawn and miserable.

‘Was it so little to you?’ he murmured. ‘Why are you acting with me?’

‘The best performances are often given to an audience of one.’

‘Tell me why you’re so angry?’

She tossed back her hair and looked at him with sadness devoid of all pretence.

‘Because I know what you’re going to say.’

‘Tell me.’

She walked across to the fireplace and picked up a poker which she tucked under her arm like a cutting-whip; then leaning back against the mantelpiece like some languid youth, she looked at him with a parody of male complacency.

‘Great personal respect … in any other circumstances goes without saying … but family considerations … heat of the moment don’t you know, acted like a perfect bloody fool … damned attractive woman, no denying it; pretty as a picture … no
intention of raising false hopes … but no hard feelings, eh? Better cut now instead of hurting anybody later. Damn near breaks my heart … or what’s left of it. Never forget you … treasured memory.’ She broke off and dropped the poker on the carpet, resuming not in her stage parody of a silly-ass cavalry officer, but in her ordinary voice. ‘Then exit both in opposite directions, with consciences as clear as summer skies.’

After a long silence he said stiffly:

‘I’m afraid I was vain enough to think that you cared a little for me.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘It must be a great relief to find yourself mistaken.’ For a few seconds she endured his reproachful eyes, then burst out: ‘Would it please you better if I wept … said we were cowards? That we’d spend our lives regretting what wouldn’t come again?’

‘Yes,’ he murmured at last, ‘I would like that better.’

Thinking him about to embrace her, the memory of their first kiss burned Theresa like a great thirst. She held out her hands to him, but he paced restlessly to the window.

‘This house … it’s like being at the bottom of a river.’

‘Let’s leave it for a while.’

He took her arm eagerly.

‘There’s a trap in the stables. Let’s hope the wheels stay on.’

Hurrying after him, Theresa no longer even remembered the resolution she had so lamentably failed to carry through.

Sitting perched next to Theresa in the high two-wheeler with the reins in his hands, Clinton relished their aloneness. The bare hills by their very isolation seemed to bring them closer; their smallness shared under the grey immensity of the sky. His eyes strayed from the curve of her cheek to a fold in the hills that repeated it, from the red ribbon of her hat to the scarlet rose hips in the hedges.

Through the sleeve of her coat, he could feel the shape of her arm linked through his; and there, resting just above the wrist, was her neat chamois leather glove. He stared with resigned astonishment at this very ordinary glove, as if unable to understand how it came to be placed on his arm, and then put his own hand over it. Again and again in her company he had an uncanny sense of the suspension of normal time and logic, as though he had arrived at a point ahead of where he expected to be. She smiled at him and said:

‘If from a glove you take the letter G,

Then glove is love, and that I send to thee.’

He laughed.

‘Am I supposed to reply in verse?’

‘Heavens no. A few months ago I was sent a glove with that message … by an elderly man called Page who used to drive me mad by coming to watch me every night in the same box. Poor man. If from Page you take the letter P, Then page is age, and that won’t do for me.’

‘You sent him that?’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t you if you’d thought of it?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘I sent the glove back too. I never keep anything, though with rings it’s tempting. I once had one that came with a note saying that if I wore it on my right hand during the first act, the sender would know that I’d meet him afterwards.’

‘So you wore it on the left?’

‘I changed it from hand to hand.’ She looked across the fields at some cows sheltering from the wind under the lee of a leafless hedge. ‘I can’t think why I told you that. I’m usually very kind. Pure nervousness.’

‘You nervous?’

‘If you only knew,’ she murmured; her words barely audible above the creak of the springs and the thud of the horse’s hoofs.

Had they not at that moment been approaching a man and a woman carrying bundles of hay on their backs, he would have stopped the trap and embraced her. Then a little later they passed a girl driving a dozen or so geese ahead of her towards the town of Clonmore.

‘Must be market day,’ said Clinton, as they came up with more people on the road: an old woman with a single pig and a bare-footed boy driving two heifers.

‘Could we go there?’ she asked.

‘It’s not much of a place.’

But her eagerness overcame his slight misgivings. There had been few reports of trouble in this part of Mayo.

At first when they reached the small town, Clinton was glad that they had come. Fairs, markets and local races were the only diversions, which brought a little life to places usually devoid of any interest. By the statue of O’Connell a juggler was performing, varying his act by breaking stones against his chest. Men stood in groups outside the doors of spirits and grocery shops, talking, laughing, arguing. In a number of pens in the centre of the square, sheep and cows were being bought and sold, the farmers prodding them with sticks and haggling with each other. The wind was thick with tobacco smoke and the smell of fresh dung. All around the edges of the square were carts and donkeys.

They left the horse and trap with a boy outside the one hotel in
the town and then set out on foot to look around. Very soon Theresa was disconcerted by the covert looks directed at them: a mixture of curiosity, deference and hostility. Though she was sure that Clinton was perfectly aware of these eddies of resentment, he seemed utterly indifferent to them, but talked to her as
unconcernedly
as if they were walking down Bond Street or St James’s. Though Clinton was wearing an old riding coat, its cut, and the sheen on his top boots, as well as the clearness of his complexion, made him look like a man from another planet, among this crowd of weather-worn faces and coats of frieze and corduroy. As though describing the habits of Africans, Clinton told her why the people sold their calves early instead of keeping them through the winter to get a better price in the spring. Because of the number of their own children, they often could not afford to spare enough milk to feed the new calves. He showed her blocks of the coarse bread made with Indian corn which they ate until the new crop of potatoes, and pointed out some women buying this corn in exchange for eggs.

‘But why,’ she asked, ‘don’t they eat the eggs themselves?’

‘For a week’s supply of eggs, they can buy enough corn to last three.’

‘How awful,’ she murmured, ‘not to be able to eat their own eggs.’

‘They should grow more corn,’ he replied with a brusqueness that shocked her a little, but then she was unaware that, since reaching the centre of the square, Clinton had sensed that they were being shadowed. Neither wanting to scare Theresa, nor let anyone else know he was alarmed, he assumed an air of indifference. But he stopped deliberately at the corn merchant’s window to be able to look back as if unsuspecting; and then he was no longer in any doubt. One of the men, as he had at first guessed, was McMahon; and from the way his companions were walking, it was clear that they were drunk. To avenge his recent loss of face, McMahon would very likely have been spreading rumours about a new campaign of evictions.

Being reasonably sure that McMahon and his cronies were still the only people in the square to know his identity, Clinton was determined to leave before they shared their knowledge with many others. To get back to the trap without being seen would involve doubling behind the stalls on the far side of the square and running; and though this might take McMahon by surprise, it would undoubtedly attract other attention. Without telling Theresa that anything was wrong, Clinton suggested that they should be getting back. Then taking her by the arm, he walked straight towards the
small group of pursuers. With a few yards dividing them, McMahon suddenly knelt down and shouted:

‘Down on your knees, boys, when his lordship passes.’

Without turning his head to see whether the rest had followed McMahon’s inflammatory example, Clinton walked past, tightening his hold on Theresa’s arm.