God Is an Englishman (68 page)

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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 evi dent 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 ad ministered, 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 shame faced. “There I go again,” he said, “in spite of my good resolutions,” and when she asked him what these resolutions were he said, chuck ling, “I made up my mind to talk GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 361

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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 expand ing 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 al ready 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 GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 362

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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. Good ness 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 differ ent 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 dili gent 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 GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 363

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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 land ings. 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 in-vade 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 ele ment 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 commun ion, 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 meaning-ful 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 some how reassuring accompaniment to the muted roar of the city. She knew him well enough now to predict the exact pattern of his be haviour on these occasions, when he tended to act as though he had been deprived of her for months rather than days. He would lie sleep ing like that, his left arm flung across her breasts, until the peep of dawn, and the moment he stirred he would stretch, become aware of her GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 364

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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 move ments 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 know ledge 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 sep arate identity that was a contradiction of the man she knew inas much as it was overweening, arrogant, and aggressive, but not in a way she resented for, by then, the whole ecstatic process of dom ination 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 immeasur-able 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 un predictable.