Rutherford Park (6 page)

He flung his arms wide on the bed, still in his clothes. He had not wanted Harrison or Hardy or Nash to attend to him. Let them
fuss over his father or the guests; he couldn’t stand their silent, obsequious presence. God, he was stifled. He truly felt as if the air were being squeezed out of him. For a moment, he wished for his Oxford room and the little fire where he made toast and sat smoking one cigarette after another; then he thought of the calling to dinners, the falsetto voices of the choir in chapel, and cringed.

Everything was too old. He thought that was the heart of his irritation: Oxford certainly, but Rutherford too, lying like some indolent pretty beast in the valley, too ancient and too delicate with its turrets and towers. He wanted something plain and square. A house like Armitage’s: small, plain and squat, next to the stables. He stared at the dim ceiling and wondered how the Armitages would celebrate Christmas; he would bet that it was very jolly and nice. He would give anything not to endure Christmas luncheon and dinner in his own house; his father thought it wise to corner him at every opportunity, to bring him into the library and lecture him about the tenants and the accounts. William had told him that he would take him to Blessington to look at the mills in the New Year. It was a ritual that William Cavendish performed—pointlessly, Harry thought—every six months: meetings with the mill manager. His father said that it was their duty to see where some of their income came from, and to appear at least to have an interest in it.

Harry supposed that Blessington actually had a reality about it, some sense of urgency, even if it seemed the mills’ primary purpose was to kill off the population as quickly as possible. On one hand, he admired the places that had been the source of his mother’s fortune; he liked the perpetual deafening noise of industry, the speed, the production of something, even if it were literally woven through with the sweaty imprint of hands and the air choked with wool fiber; but on the other, he despised himself for standing looking at the rolling, shunting looms in his silk-lapeled suit. He hated
the way the women looked at him, sidelong, as if he were another species. At the end of the day they went out in their crowds, arm in arm, under the street lamps, down the dirty sloping streets, while the siren wailed. The day was rigid in its shifts of hours; each person knew his place, had his or her name on the greasy slotting-in cards on the timing clock by the thumping double doors. He wasn’t of their world; he wasn’t one of the faces slipping away in great dry-eyed coughing drifts of humanity. He couldn’t ever be anonymous. He was the owner’s son or the seventh-generation Beckforth from some second or third wife two hundred years ago, carrying a cousin’s name. He had duties; he had a place. But he had nothing to do.

He got up and went to the window. When he was younger he used to go up on the roof and look out over the grounds and the hills, like a little god of privilege sitting among the Tudor chimneys, watching the harvest teams in the fields slowly turning crop to stubble, the carts swaying, the horses merely oblong blocks of color far below. There would be moments of freedom in the exalted open air. Now he never went there. He felt like the whole of his existence was dragging him down.

God, if only they would let him go. If only his father, not to put too fine a point on it, would let him go. Things were happening in the world: not just the aeroplanes, but automobiles. He would like to travel, see something of humanity. If only he could be let off this leash. One of the fellows at the university had said that he was going to America, and Harry’s own ancestors had routinely taken the grand tour. In fact, a great-uncle eighty years ago had been notorious for traveling around Europe, going to France and Portugal with choirboys, building up a giant collection of erotica. No one had stopped him; his mother had even encouraged it. His letters had been published; Harry had read them in the university library, and
discovered a man of doubtful associations and extraordinary taste—but he had been allowed to do it, which was the point. He’d taken off with his little scandalous retinue, and bought up culture by the ton. His name had been synonymous with everything hateful, and it was no use his own father rolling his eyes and pretending that it was nothing to do with their family, for it was. Harry let out a giant sigh. His life was peppered with such injustices. Suffocation appeared to be his due, his lot. It made him thoroughly sick.

He had only to look at his father’s study and the archive to see how much gadding about his own grandfather had undertaken. And yet all his father wanted him to do was sit in Oxford to no discernible purpose, and hang about London during the Season—as if that weren’t hell on earth, with all its gaudy finery and old dames prodding one with the tips of their umbrellas and saying what a fine young man one might be. God save him. He should like to see America; he should like never again to wear some stiff collar and stand about in society feeling an utter idiot, with mothers ogling him in the cause of their marriageable daughters.

The only thing that had made him truly alive in the past year was her. He would never have thought to let her go if the chaps at Oxford had not warned him against her: against getting too far involved, against what she might become. It had been their idea to give her the gold chain, although it broke him almost completely to see the terrible dismay in her face as she held the box. It had cost him dearly to walk away.

All last summer had been like a waking dream. The heat had brought the staff out, after lunch and before supper, to stand where they thought no one could see them: in the shade of the yard, letting the cold water of the pump run over their hands. He had crept up to her room one afternoon when he knew she wouldn’t be there, and found her underclothes in the scratched chest of drawers. He
had held them to his face while he leaned from the window and saw the edge of her shoulder in the yard, the curve of her face, her hands smoothing the cold water over her hair, taking off her cap. Just a blur of hand, cheek, neck while he buried his face in her clothes, and at the same time was terrified that someone would come up the stairs and find him there.

It had been the hottest summer for years: there had been a drought through June, July and August. The river had run down to a trickle, a thing that was almost unheard-of in the Dales. He had been there that Sunday when she came back from her mother’s. It was a twelve-mile walk: she had forbidden him to come with her, even part of the way.

“Someone might see,” she had said.

“Who is there to see?” he’d demanded.

All he could think of was getting her down in the soft rolling turf, in one of the many hollows on the moor side, down among gorse and heather and grass. She’d denied him; he kicked the day away walking around in the parkland.

But she had come back. The path dropped from the hill and down through the trees, and there was shelter in among the shrubs by the side of the river for half a mile. He had waited for her there. Even then, at five o’clock, it had been stiflingly hot. “Don’t you know you’re my life?” he had asked her. He had absolutely meant it at the time. She filled his mind, obsessed him. She had been carrying a little bag of cakes that her mother had made; he could smell the cinnamon on them. Even now the smell of cinnamon filled him with guilt and a kind of blind crawling need. She hadn’t replied. She had tried to get away. “Won’t you love me?” he’d asked. “Not at all, Emily?” His hand on her waist, her throat. Finally she had kissed him, and they had dropped to their knees in the shade of the trees.

Far away now, down in the house, he thought he heard doors closing. He listened: feet in the hallway, and then the muffled slam of the green baize door. Perhaps they had been putting out the fires in the downstairs rooms? He glanced out at the snow, and saw lights far down in the park; pushing open his window, he was met with an icy blast of air. Voices muffled by the snow could be faintly heard, the lights dipping and disappearing, dipping and disappearing. Someone was running out there in the dark.

* * *

A
melie was waiting for Octavia as she reached the yellow-and-white room. She stood by the dressing room and allowed the maid to unlace the gown and take off her shoes and stockings. She stepped out of the petticoats, sat down on the chair, and let the girl’s deft hands unroll her hair, putting the padding in the satin-lined box, unpinning it and letting it fall past her shoulders. Not a word was said; in the deep recesses of the room, over the slow-burning fire, the mantelpiece clock chimed the quarter hour.

It was Christmas Day.

Octavia sat there and stared at herself in the mirror.

She was thirty-nine years old this spring. She was twelve years younger than Helene de Montfort. She had expected rage, but felt only embarrassment—that, and disappointment. For all Helene’s reputation—and Octavia had learned, early on, the story of the elderly patron with his wonderful house at Bergerac, and later the accounts, related to Octavia second- or thirdhand over some hostess’s tea table, of Helene’s having been seen in the company of Jules Cheret, even that she had been the model in the Olympia posters—Octavia had always assumed that Helene was far fonder of seeming to be outrageous than actually capable of being so. She was, by her own admission, craving of the right company, and she could not
have been accepted as well as she was if all the rumors had been true. Helene was a tease—that was certain; she enjoyed shocking people. But as for whether she had a heart that could be won or broken—whether she was capable of some grand passion—that was another matter.

Octavia remembered one spring afternoon years ago when she and William had been in Paris for the Exposition when it had first opened in April 1900. They had taken afternoon tea at the Ceylon Pavilion—it was the place to be seen. They had met Helene there by arrangement, and she had made such an entrance, resplendent in a painted chiffon dress and wearing the most enormous hat. Octavia had felt quite the frump: an obviously English frump in an ocean of French fashion. Helene had talked that afternoon of the latest painters—of Maxim’s and the Moulin Rouge—as if she knew them, was one of their intimates, and Octavia remembered William almost brushing away her accounts. “So much silliness,” he had said afterwards.

“You don’t think Helene is rather superb?” she had asked him as they dressed for dinner. They had still been close then, friends; they talked together.

“Not at all,” he had replied. “She merely thinks she is superb. That is something quite different.”

Had he meant it, or was it a smoke screen? Had they been lovers then, these Beckforth descendants, sharing the same subtle faults, the same selfishness? Octavia lowered her eyes from her own reflection. She was still, despite the thirty-nine years, naïve, she told herself. Society was awash with
affaires de coeur
; it was an unspoken accommodation. She had heard the gossip, especially in town, of Lady So-and-So with her younger lover, and Lord So-and-So parading not one, but two mistresses in public. When
the old King had been alive, it was all the rage: country house parties had begun to have cards attached to the doors saying who slept within, so that lovers could find the appropriate room under the very noses of their husbands or wives. It was even said that at some houses, a bell was rung at six a.m. to allow the guests to return to their own bedrooms before the maids found them in the arms of their lovers. She and William had even seen it themselves. But they had never indulged. As far as she knew.

Amelie began to brush Octavia’s hair. Well, in this perhaps she had been as naïve as always. Was naïveté something that one might scrub from one’s soul? If so, she ought to find the precise way of achieving it, for it seemed to have blinded her. She wondered how many of her friends had seen Helene take William’s hand when her own back had been turned at some gathering or other. Had that happened? Had she been utterly fooled? Had he met Helene in London? He was often away; he would pay the usual afternoon visits in London. Had Helene been waiting for him somewhere, in some friend’s house? Surely they had not sunk to a hotel; and yet, without a hotel, which friend had turned a blind eye; which women knew among their endless train of acquaintances?

Octavia took a breath. Now her imagination was running away with her. She must not allow it. After all, what exactly had she seen? Helene demanding a kiss, William responding to it. It might have been only a moment; she had not stayed to see where it ended. Perhaps he had pushed her away; perhaps Helene had meant it as some sort of joke; it was exactly her kind of teasing humor. And what had he said to her? “I will not,” or, “I cannot,” or some such thing; he had been in the very act of denying Helene when she had pressed her face to his.

“Is there anything else, ma’am?” Amelie asked.

“No, nothing,” Octavia murmured.

Amelie was gone in a moment or two, but still Octavia stayed seated by the mirror. She ran over those moments on the stair again: the sight of Helene and William, and her own turning away towards the window. She had been sure that she had seen the maid that she had spoken to that morning walking out there in the snow, and yet when she had unwound the skirts that had tripped her, and looked again, there had been nothing. The shadow of the trees, and that was all. She rested her head on her hand on the elaborate dressing table; she really ought to go to bed.

There would be the usual Christmas gathering from the area tomorrow: it was a tradition that the house gave presents not only to the servants but to the estate workers, which encompassed the entire village. She doubted that, even in the deepest of snows, the locals would forgo their dinner laid out in the tithe barn and the theatricals that followed. Mrs. Jocelyn would be at her door before breakfast. She got to her feet.

* * *

I
t was pitch-black by the river, and the noise of the current was loud. There had been so much sleet and rain before the snow that the Wastleet was carrying far more water than usual.

Looking back at his father, Jack Armitage could see the older man running through the six or seven inches of snow, the lantern held high above his head, following the mark of her footprints. Far behind him, the lights of Rutherford were almost all out.