Snow Angels (27 page)

‘I haven’t stolen anything. I pay them better.’

‘It’s about money, then.’

‘When is business about anything else?’

Abby determined to change the subject.

‘Working on Christmas night. I don’t know. You could offer me a glass of wine.’

He went off to the kitchen and came back with glasses and a bottle. It was not, Abby thought, tasting it, the kind of thing she was used to. It was very inferior, thin and white.

‘So,’ she said, waving her glass, ‘no parties? Is this what you do every night?’

‘Yes.’

‘My father often goes to bed early?’

‘Quite often.’

Here at the back of the house it was strangely silent. She had forgotten. There was nothing but the darkness of the garden and the softly falling snow. How strange that this was the town and so quiet, whereas in the country where they lived it was so noisy.

Gil’s conversation, Abby thought, was almost non-existent. He had no social graces nor needed any because he was asked nowhere, not even on Christmas night. She thought of all the socially adept men she knew who would entertain her, talk to her, make her laugh. They would have done more if she had just said the word. It was no secret that her marriage was difficult and that her husband had frequently bedded other women. It would have been little fault if she had gone to any one of the rich, handsome men she knew and they would have been glad.

Gil was not her social equal. He was nobody. He was, it was allowed, good in his field, but work was not the criterion by which men were judged in her world. Even their tailoring was more important. Their hunting prowess, their shooting ability and their bedroom manners mattered and not one of them would ever have sat here without a jacket, with ink-stained fingers and expected her to sit there with them, silent, drinking a not particularly good wine. He didn’t even look up much, but Abby knew him too well to think that this meant he was particularly concerned about any of these matters. The seeming vulnerability and his jacketless, tieless state, the confusion of the room, the quality of the wine, entertaining a lady in a scruffy little room with papers strewn on every surface and books on every chair – he had had to move some so that she could sit down – none of it
registered with him. He didn’t care about the silence between them or that she was not entertained.

Gil seemed so young, sitting there looking down into his wine, waiting for her to go away so that he could get on with his work. Nothing had touched him; none of the tragedy had brought lines to his face. He seemed years and years younger than Robert and his friends, though he had worked all of his life and they had not.

‘Are you worried about him?’

‘What?’

‘Your father,’ Gil said.

‘I’m afraid that he will die.’

‘I am looking after him. We come home early in the evening and have tea with Matthew and he doesn’t work after that.’

‘I’m sure you are.’

‘You think it’s all too much for him.’

‘Well, it is.’

Gil came to her and Abby was confused as she wasn’t with other men. He was so tall and his hair was black in the lamplight and so were his eyes.

‘You always blame me for everything.’

‘That’s not true!’ She looked up at him and wished she hadn’t. His eyes were guarded. He moved back slightly, as though he hadn’t meant to get that close.

‘It’s just that—’ Abby couldn’t get the words out ‘—having lost my mother I was hoping he would live to be old and … I’m afraid that if he goes on working too hard … I don’t want to talk about it, not even the possibility. This wine isn’t very good.’

‘I don’t know much about wine.’

Abby thought she should go home. He clearly didn’t want her there, interrupting his work. ‘I should go, you have a lot to do.’ She indicated the papers that were overflowing the desk. She was going to put down her half-full glass and managed to tip the contents down the front of her blouse. Luckily the blouse was
the same colour as the wine, more or less. She scrubbed at the mess with a handkerchief.

‘A wet cloth would help,’ Gil said.

‘I don’t want a wet cloth. It wasn’t much. I’d drunk nearly all the wretched stuff.’

And then she looked at him and he was very close. She could see the base of his throat where the top button of his shirt was undone. She reached out and touched his arm.

‘Gil—’

It was like the night they had spent together, Abby thought, and all those other times. He was the only person in the world who could reduce her to tears without doing anything. All those men that she knew and flirted with, men she called her friends, couldn’t have made her cry if they had broken her arms. And then he did what she had wanted him to do when it would have been all right for him to do it all those years ago. Now, when it was not permissible, when she was married and he was disgraced, when they didn’t even like one another, he took hold of her and put her against him and kissed her.

Abby had never before kissed a man she was not supposed to kiss, so she was not sure whether it was the illicit bit of it that she liked best or whether it was that she had waited such a long time. She knew at that moment why she hadn’t bothered with other men and presumably the illicit bit would have worked just the same. And all the hundreds of times that Robert had touched her, he had not kissed her like this. His kisses had been ungenerous somehow, impatient perhaps, or was she doing him a disservice with hindsight? Robert was a very experienced man with women; he knew all about kissing. Robert knew a great deal about everything when it came to this, but she saw with a frightening clarity that all the times when he had, did not make her his as even this single kiss made her Gil’s. She had always belonged to him, perhaps even before that freezing cold night in the bedroom. That had been Christmas too, almost to the day.

It wasn’t that he tried to seduce her; he didn’t. Any other man
having got that far would have had his hands on her in seconds, but Gil put his arms around her as though she was distressed and it was only then that Abby realised she was. All she had was her father and of late they had not got on. He didn’t care for Robert and Robert disliked him and that made it difficult. Gil didn’t even kiss her a second time; he held her in against him so that nothing could hurt her, with his arms between her and the rest of the world and she didn’t cry. It was as though he was used to her there; she was meant to be there. This was really what women wanted from men, Abby thought, comfort, a little protection, a place to go to be safe from time to time

*

The last person Gil had kissed like this had been Rhoda and the memories came back, the triumph of the launching when the ship’s hull was finished, that weekend which had been the best of his life only to turn into the worst, the way she had run, the looking for her and the greatest misery, finding her cold and still in the snow on the moors. This made him want to deny that she was dead, to pretend to himself that he had her back, that nothing had happened, that she was in his arms. He couldn’t do that. Perhaps he could have with another woman, but not with Abby. He cared for her too much to do that, fought with himself and won, remembering what had happened when he gave in to what he wanted. He drew away but she followed him, kissed him. She didn’t hold back at all. She got her hands up to his neck and touched his throat. Gil could smell the wine down the front of her blouse, the sweet and lemon scent of it. He could feel the way that her fingers slipped to the first button on his shirt. He was astonished that she should do such a thing. Abby hadn’t altered at all. She was still the bold girl who had gone upstairs to find him, turned the key in the lock, covered him in blankets and given him chocolate cake. She looked at him, smiled at him, put her hand into his hair in caress.

‘You could at least take off your hat,’ Gil said.

‘Shall I?’ She took out the hat pins as if she were doing tricks. She took the pins out of her hair, too, so that it swung down past her shoulders and she took off the jacket that she wore and started to undo the buttons on her blouse. He grabbed hold of her and she laughed. The smell of wine seemed to fill the whole room. The images of Rhoda faded. All he could remember was that he had wanted her when she was sixteen and all the nights when he had been alone and all the days and the evenings when he had done nothing but work. Months and months of not being able to touch anybody. Now he could. She didn’t stop him from unfastening the garments that hid the rest of her body from him and then he could touch her, put his mouth on her, draw her close to feel her skin against his skin.

*

Abby wondered if her father had ever drawn her mother down on to the rug in front of the fire in this room. It seemed doubly wrong to be doing this here. A man she was not married to, a man who had the kind of reputation which excluded him from society, was making love to her in her mother’s sewing room. The papers got in the way from time to time and fluttered about her. Some of them slid off the desk when Gil moved away from it and into her arms and his ink-stained fingers were slow and cool and a little uncertain. Not like Robert. Robert was always certain, but then Robert did not prize her except as the mother of a child as yet unborn. It would be funny, she thought, it would be so funny if she could have a child from this night. After all, Helen had done it. Helen had had his child, but that was not just from one night, that was something that went on for months and months, didn’t it? Abby did not believe that he was the kind of man who would bed his wife and another woman in the same house. Gil wasn’t made like that. He couldn’t have done it, she knew that he couldn’t. Yet he had, apparently. Robert would have. He had done it in France and any of his more decadent drunken friends might have done it merely as a pastime, but Gil
was not a drunk and he was not an idler. His eyes were clear and his mouth was sweet and he had not spent years swigging whisky and laying women and smoking foul-smelling cigars. He was also, Abby thought a little gleefully, the kind of man who had concentration. You could tell that from his work. He thought about one thing at once and gave it his entire attention and just now he was concentrating on her. She would have bet a thousand pounds that there was nothing going on in Gil’s mind which reached beyond the edge of the rug.

The firelight turned his skin to gold and put a halo around his shiny hair. All the times that Robert had made sexual advances to his wife meant nothing more to Abby than the papers that had fluttered to the floor. She felt sorry in several ways, because it all seemed so base and meaningless and so utterly pointless. She was angry with herself, too. It seemed to her that she could have and should have married Gil. She would have wrested him away from Helen and he would not have gone through all the hell that his life had been and she would never have lain under a man like a victim and endured the invasion of her body. Her life with Robert was nothing to do with anything that she had ever wanted, she could see that now.

He was being more and more careful, as though at any minute she was going to deny him. Slower and slower the kisses and caresses became, even though Abby had yielded her body long since. It was ironic, she thought savagely, that Robert did nothing but take her and that she was actually going to have to ask this man to.

‘For God’s sake!’ she said into his hair.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m dying here,’ she said with a little choke of laughter. ‘Please.’

‘I didn’t think you would.’

‘What the hell else do you think I’m doing here, bare on a bloody rug?’

‘You have a foul mouth for a woman.’

Abby got hold of his hair.

‘I love you. I love you and I want you. Now.’

He took her at her word. Abby closed her eyes and after that she couldn’t think at all or even want to. Her mind fought briefly. It was wrong. She was not married to him, but that only served to make it better. It was exquisite, nothing like the way that Robert came to her, but that was duty and obligation, it was all about contracts and commitments and the carrying on of names. It was not the act which was important it was the result, whereas this was purely pleasure. This was like chocolate and ice cream, chilled wine on a hot day, firelight on a winter’s evening. She could feel the fire, not near enough to burn, and the rug which was thick and the draught which came under the door because the fire had begun to die down and the logs gave off a sweet scent in the grate.

Outside she could hear the wind lifting the snow, but the house was silent. Robert was prone to whispering obscenities into her ears, but Gil didn’t even tell her that he loved her, as though speech had nothing to do with him. He said not a single word and there was no grunting or labouring. In the silence Abby bit her lip so hard that she could taste blood, as though there had been some kind of agreement that nothing should escape her lips beyond a sigh. There had been times when she had wondered at herself whether she felt any real passion at all. In the early days of her marriage, the intimacy had been sweet but it had not been like this. Robert had called her cold and she had thought the fault lay with her. Other women seemed to like him well enough. She had come to the conclusion that she was the kind of woman who preferred affection, but it was not so. She craved him like food after a long fasting and the more she had of him, the more she wanted. She only hoped that her body might turn out to belong to some other woman so that afterwards she would not have to go under a table and hide somewhere for embarrassment. Robert had not had this response from her; he had not been hers like this; she had not felt like his. She liked Gil better and better.
She felt so triumphant, so powerful, so wonderfully, screamingly alive. She felt as though she would never be alone again; he would belong to her for all time. There was nothing to go back to and no need. Everything was in the present.

*

Gil was only dimly aware of the room, the silence, but he could feel the forces around him trying to stop him. All the intelligence and all the guilt and responsibility had hounded him to here. He had kept away from women. He had thought he would never hold anybody again and the Puritan in his upbringing told him sternly that he was not entitled to, that he had committed too many grave wrongs. He could not free himself of Helen dying and of Rhoda up on the fells. He found himself entitled to nothing but his work and his child and, since it had been offered him, the friendship of the man he admired above all others. If Henderson knew what he was doing now … He was going to lose Henderson. The man was his only friend, he was not well and was gradually getting worse. He didn’t tell Abby that. He didn’t think he needed to, but he was all Gil had. At work, the men did as he told them. His business reputation meant that not only did they not question him, but neither did they feel themselves to be his equal and it was difficult to be friends with people who weren’t. All he had was his work and his child and Henderson and a third of the triangle was about to be lost for ever.