Snow Angels (23 page)

When he opened his eyes he was in a very clean bed, in a great deal of pain, his head didn’t feel right and the people around him weren’t clear and he felt sick. There was nothing beyond the bed and from time to time things came and went at such a rate that his head spun round and he blacked out. There was nothing going on beyond the bed of any consequence. The pain filled his whole life because it wouldn’t stop and it made him sick. Only unconsciousness worked, and then not much. He wandered in and out of it and the dreams were all of finding Rhoda up on the moors, frozen. He found her there again and again, a hundred times and then a hundred times after that and each time it hurt more and each time she was dead anew and it was his fault. And he couldn’t die. He tried hard, but he didn’t seem to be able to. Then it occurred to him that perhaps for people who had done such unforgivably dreadful things, this was what death must be like, continual pain, nothing but pain and finding Rhoda dead for all eternity because he had done it with his stupidity. Helen and Rhoda had gone to heaven but he had killed them and he would stay here in hell, in pain, for ever and ever.

Robert came home. It was inconvenient. Abby’s monthly bleeding had not arrived and she was so excited by the idea that she didn’t want anything to interfere. She felt as though his coming home would bring it on. She would not be pregnant and she wanted that more than anything in the world. But Robert was repentant. The moment they were alone in the house in Jesmond, he pulled her to him urgently and apologised.

‘I’ve missed you and I’m sorry. I behaved like a bear … and worse. It isn’t that I love her or any of the others, it’s just that … that’s how I’ve always gone on, it’s how men do go on. I worried that something might have happened to you and I was angry and—’

Abby kissed him and held him close. She didn’t want to tell him that she thought she was pregnant until she was quite sure. The door opened and Matthew came in.

‘Who’s that?’ Robert asked.

‘This is Matthew,’ Abby said brightly. ‘Matthew, this is Robert. Do you remember him?’

‘Edward’s son? At least—’ Abby nipped his arm and he stopped until she had told Matthew to go to the kitchen for a biscuit.

‘You heard.’

‘I heard all right, even in London. What is the child doing here?’

‘We have Gil staying.’

‘What?’

‘Somebody knifed him.’

‘Pity he didn’t kill him,’ Robert said. ‘Why is he staying here?’

‘There was nowhere else.’

‘He shouldn’t be near decent people.’

Abby forebore to point out to her husband that he was in the habit of taking other men’s wives to bed, though not his brother’s of course. She wondered whether he would have done so.

‘You shouldn’t stay here where he is. And what about the female servants?’

‘We have two nurses. Nobody has to go near him.’

But she did. She didn’t tell Robert that either. She didn’t tell him about the way that Gil had cried out Rhoda’s name over and over when he went out of his senses. He had almost died. The doctor had said he was going to and she was pitiless, but her father had gone into the sitting-room and wept.

‘How can you still care?’ she demanded.

‘I can’t help it.’

It was difficult to resist, Abby acknowledged. Gil had lain in that bed looking about seventeen with his hair all over the pillow and his eyes wild, calling out again and again for the wife whose death he had caused. He didn’t speak Helen’s name. The nurse held his hand and soothed him. Abby slammed out of the room several times, only to come back. She made herself leave the house. The weather was bitterly cold and windy. The rain threw itself all over the bedroom window and often she would stand there by the light of one lamp and the fire looking out over the dark, freezing streets. She wanted to choke his young neck for the way he had murdered her regard for him. She let herself think about Rhoda for the first time. It made her so angry, the waste of it. She walked the streets for hours during those first days; once, she walked all the way to the river and cried. In the shipyard, she
knew, Collingwood’s were busy with the ship which he had fought for, designed and built. In a few months it would be finished. He had been so proud of it, so glad to please his father, she knew. Henderson reported that Edward was back at work, that his father was grateful, that William had been petty enough to amend the sign on the gate so that it read ‘Son’ and not ‘Sons’. Abby knew that she ought to have gone to see Charlotte, but with Gil in bed at home it hardly seemed right, and people were beginning to realise that he was there. When everyone found out, it would damage her father.

Gil started to get better. Abby didn’t go into the room any more after that. She didn’t want to speak to him. When they finally did come face to face she said, ‘The minute you can walk, I want you out of this house.’

‘It isn’t your house,’ Gil said flatly.

‘My father has his reputation to think about.’

‘Why don’t you go away, you make me tired?’

Abby’s temper flared, even though she knew he was right. He was still in bed and so white-faced and dull-eyed that she knew he couldn’t cope with this.

‘You ungrateful bastard, I brought you here.’

‘Nobody asked you to! And stop calling me names. You have a filthy mouth.’

‘I could call you a lot worse than that. I could call you things you deserve.’

Gil’s eyes wavered.

‘You don’t have to call me them, I know what I am,’ he said.

Abby hadn’t meant to go that far. She got herself out of the room and didn’t venture there again and, since Gil was too weak to come downstairs, they were both safe for a while. When he finally did get up there was nothing but pleasantries between them. Abby watched Henderson with Matthew and hugged to her the idea that soon she would be able to tell him he would have a grandchild of his own. He loved the little boy and was open with him. When Henderson came in from work, Matthew
would go to him straight away, sit on his lap by the fire in the evening and talk all kinds of nonsense. Henderson read him a bedtime story each night and there was often laughter from the kitchen when Matthew was in there. When Gil got better the child rarely left his side and in the afternoons, when Gil would lie on the sofa by the sitting-room fire, Matthew would lie with him and go to sleep.

Henderson rarely spoke to Gil, but Matthew sensed the tension and would go from one to the other if they were both in the room so that very often Henderson stayed in his study and worked during the evening. One evening he was gone only a few minutes before coming back into the sitting-room, thrusting some papers under Gil’s nose and saying, ‘You’ve been in there, haven’t you?’

‘Well, I—’

‘You’ve been into my study. You’ve altered these plans.’ He shook the papers at Gil.

‘Just here and there.’

‘How dare you?’

‘I … the – the figures weren’t right.’

‘They were perfect.’

‘No.’ Gil finally looked up. ‘They weren’t.’

‘How can you tell? You didn’t have the other papers or figures that go with it.’

Gil looked apologetic.

‘I just know. I can tell by the design, the shape of it and the – the other things. I didn’t mean anything, I just … could tell and … it doesn’t look right, you see, here and here.’ He pointed. ‘And you could alter it here and—’

Henderson cursed and walked out. Abby said nothing. Gil went to bed. A little later, when she thought he might have calmed down, she opened the study door.

‘May I come in?’

‘Everybody else has been in. Why not?’

Henderson rubbed his face with his hands in tiredness.

‘Has he spoiled it?’

‘Spoiled it?’ Henderson threw down his pen and laughed shortly. ‘It takes other men weeks to work out things like that. He can do it in half a day.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think he knows himself. I knew something was wrong with it, but I couldn’t see what. He only has to look at something. I wish I had a man with half that ability working for me. I could clean up. I could better Collingwood’s. He doesn’t do calculations like I do; he can see the answer. It’s God-given, that kind of ability. It’s a pity. I’ll lock the study door in future.’

In the bedroom and the sitting-room Abby found scraps of paper with figures and lines and drawings. She kept throwing them away and it was almost as if they came back in or reappeared. He scribbled and drew. Sometimes she thought he wasn’t even aware of it. Henderson started picking them up and taking them away into the study with him. Finally Abby took the pencils, pens and any paper she found and locked them away in the bureau. After that, Gil did nothing. He was not well enough to walk far so he couldn’t go out and he would sit with a book on his knee and stare out of the window for hours. Matthew had coloured pencils and soon there were little drawings on the daily newspapers and in the margins. Irritated, Abby grabbed a blue pencil out of Gil’s hand.

‘Will you stop doing that? Look at the mess you’re making! My father hasn’t read that yet. What are you, a child?’

‘I’ve got nothing to do.’

‘You’re not well enough to do anything. You can hardly walk.’

‘I can draw.’

‘You can’t. My father doesn’t want you to. It upsets him when you interfere with his work.’

‘Pictures?’

Abby bought him some drawing paper and some pencils
when she went shopping. His drawings were all ships. They were not calculations or designs, they were just ships, intricate beautiful ships, some of which she suspected were not built yet. Henderson tried not to take an interest but, since the drawings were everywhere, he ended up asking about them. From there, it was a very short space to how they were built, what they had inside, what made them work, what the future of shipbuilding was. Her father could not keep off his favourite subject, especially when he could discuss it with somebody who knew exactly what he was talking about.

And then Robert came home. Abby was torn. She wanted to go back to the country with her husband and repair her marriage and gloat over her possible pregnancy, but she didn’t want to leave her father with his apparently increasingly pleasing guest who was not well enough to leave but was well enough to carry on intricate conversations about shipbuilding. She had seen that light in her father’s eyes before. It was enthusiasm. Robert did not want to go and leave Gil there either, but when he suggested to Henderson that Gil had been there long enough, Henderson wouldn’t listen.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he demanded, standing before the study fire while they tried to talk to him. ‘I can hardly put him on to the street. He can’t work.’

‘You could give him some money and he could go and stay in a hotel or find a house.’

‘Give him some money? He’s not getting any of my money.’

‘It costs you to keep him here, doesn’t it? And that child must be eating you out of house and home.’

Mentioning Matthew was a mistake, Abby thought. Her father doted on him.

‘Children are cheap when they’re little,’ Henderson said with a parent’s authority.

‘Your father likes him,’ Robert told her afterwards.

‘Yes, I know. They talked about ships all day on Sunday.’

‘How boring.’

It wasn’t, that was the funny part, Abby thought. It wasn’t boring, not like when Robert and his friends recounted the day’s hunting. Perhaps it was just that in her home shipping and shipbuilding and politics and economics had always been discussed. Her mother was a business and political person, somehow, and over meals and over the fire and in the garden in the summer they had talked as Henderson and Gil did now and she found herself joining in and being listened to, having her views seriously considered such as did not happen in her world. She remembered her mother and father’s friends, who read and were well informed and came to dinner and talked over the important happenings of their world. That had all stopped when her mother died and she missed it. She kept forgetting who Gil was and what he had done. She wanted to be there because it was exciting. She longed for the evenings when her father would come home and they would sit around the dinner table and eat good food and drink wine and talk. The weather was foul even when spring came, but she was glad of that because there was nothing more satisfying than sitting around talking while rain poured down the windows. She even fantasised a little, ruefully, thinking that if she had accepted Gil’s proposal all that time ago, this would be their life now. She left Helen out of the equation of course, that would have spoiled the picture. She imagined Matthew as her child and that she and Gil could have lived here as man and wife with her father. It would have been perfect. She shook herself out of this. If she had married Gil, she would be dead by now. His love for Helen had been his weak point. She didn’t know if he loved her still, if he had ever loved or been kind to Rhoda. She kept having to remind herself that he was not really this polite, sophisticated person across the dinner table. He was wicked, evil, he had cost two women their lives. There was no way round that. What kind of man bedded his brother’s wife under the same roof as he lived with his own wife? Had he gone from one to another? She dismissed that. He was not capable of it, but then he was not really the person he seemed to be. He was
much too clever to let anybody see what he was really like. His survival depended on his ability to fool other people and her father was fooled and she had been close.

Robert didn’t stay at the house and she only stayed one more night while she gathered her luggage and her thoughts, but she went to Gil, in his room, when he went upstairs to bed. It was the only place she could be sure of privacy. She knocked on the door and he opened it and she followed him inside.

‘I want you to make me a promise,’ she said.

Gil didn’t look surprised.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘How can you know?’

‘You want me to leave.’

‘Yes. Will you do it?’

‘No.’

‘For my father’s sake?’ When he didn’t answer she said, ‘Then for me. I saved your life. You owe me that much.’