Snow Angels (31 page)

‘What more is there? The business, the house with everything in it—’

‘You can have anything that you want from it, that was just an oversight—’

‘You didn’t even tell me. You could have, surely you could have. Why didn’t you refuse when my father suggested that—’

‘He didn’t suggest it,’ Gil said, finally looking at her, though with caution. ‘He went to Mr Brampton and did it.’

‘But you must have been there, when the partnership was set

Gil didn’t answer that.

‘So legally everything is yours. Morally it belongs to me and if you have an ounce of decency in you you will give me what is mine.’ She looked at him and Gil met her eyes.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You have known about this for a long time, haven’t you?’

The trouble was, Abby reflected, that Gil never had been any good with words. He couldn’t talk his way out of anything. Words were no use to him. Drawings now, he could do that. His genius was for shipbuilding but he was a seriously flawed person and inadequate.

‘Everything comes down to numbers with you,’ she said. ‘It didn’t matter that while you were – while you were screwing me on the floor—’ he flinched over that, Abby noted’—you were in fact the person who was about to steal my inheritance. You weren’t even man enough to tell me!’

Gil wasn’t looking at her any more. Abby was reminded unbearably of the boy he had been, silent, unapproachable, not asking her to dance, not talking to her, eyes downcast. She could see his eyelashes. And the anger and the feeling that she would weep if she didn’t do something made her go over and hit him. She smacked him hard across the mouth with an open palm. Afterwards she wished a thousand times that she hadn’t. The
sound echoed around the room like a shot, it was such a clear clean noise. Gil didn’t react at all and Abby knew that intimacy with physical violence did that to you. It reminded her of the night that they had spent together so long ago and she had thought he was dead. He had been knocked across rooms and beaten beyond endurance many times. This was nothing. He just stood and waited to see if she was going to do it again.

‘You let me give myself to you knowing that you were going to inherit almost everything,’ she said through her teeth.

‘What did you want your father to do, let your husband waste everything?’ Gil’s eyes fired.

‘He could have left it to me. The law does give women rights.’

‘Like shite it does! Nothing is tipped in your favour. A decent lawyer could get it all from under you in days. Then what would happen?’

‘I’m not a child!’

‘Abby, I would rather it hadn’t been left like this—’

‘Of course you would. What would you want with a house and two shipyards?’

‘Your father was concerned about you. He wanted to secure it.’

‘He’s certainly done that. Did you talk him into it?’

‘That’s not worthy of you.’

‘So, you screwed me on the floor and all the time you were stealing what was mine. And even after you had me, you didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t know. And as for the rest, you wanted me to.’

‘Well, it couldn’t have been very good because I don’t remember wanting you to do it again. In fact I distinctly remember leaving. Do you remember that?’

All he said was, ‘Don’t.’

‘You haven’t changed at all. You’re devious and cowardly and I wish I hadn’t gone to you. Do you know what I discovered? That you think every woman is Helen. I imagine
you called Rhoda “Helen” in bed or at least thought of her that way.’

‘Do you have to throw that at me? You couldn’t run the shipyards without me and that’s all that’s important. Your father wanted it to be the best and it is. How long do you think it would go on like that without me? Or did you think that I would work with Robert telling me what to do?’

‘I thought it would go on as it is.’

‘You think I’d do this for a wage? You mistake me for somebody else.’

‘I think I have,’ Abby said and, with as much dignity as she could, she walked out of the room, out of the house. All she wanted to do was get away, whereas in another sense it was the last thing she wanted. She wanted to be there with her father and even possibly with her mother. She wanted the past, the time when everything had seemed to be in front of her, when nothing had gone wrong. It was hard to think of Gil as an interloper and a thief as well as everything else.

Robert talked. She would have said nothing, but he told everybody that Gil had taken his wife’s inheritance so that people were shocked afresh at Gil’s behaviour and no doubt, Abby thought with some satisfaction, it would destroy what social life he had carefully managed to build up. After that day she couldn’t bear to go past the house so she kept away from that part of the city when she came into Newcastle, but she missed her father more and more.

The following week the ship was launched. Gil provided extra money for the men and a big feast for their families, which was what Henderson had wanted, but it was a subdued affair because of Henderson’s death. Local dignitaries stayed away. Edwina was there with John, but she was very quiet, and Gil surmised that he had seen the last of her dinner parties. People who did come complained about the bitter cold of the day, but Gil felt nothing. He watched the big ship slide down into the water and all he could think was that Henderson had been
robbed of his triumph and that people thought he had cheated the old man. He went home, had tea with Matthew and put the child to bed. A little later, when he was sitting by the fire, Kate came in and hovered.

‘Can I have a word?’

‘Certainly.’

‘I’m getting married. Jack McArthur.’ Jack was a plater at the yard, Gil knew him well.

‘We’ll have to find a good house for you.’

‘We’re leaving. Jack has been offered a job on the Clyde.’

Gil gave her his congratulations. Later still, Mrs Wilkins came in. Gil knew, though this lady had said nothing, that once Henderson was dead she would not stay. She thoroughly disapproved of him, though she had not even by a look given him to think she disliked him, but he understood. They would both think Abby should have everything. She was the daughter, he was an outsider and much, much worse.

‘I don’t want to stay here without Kate and I’ve worked long enough. I have a sister in Alnwick. I’m going there.’

Gil wished her well. He was about to lock the doors when somebody banged on the front door. When he opened it, John Marlowe stood there.

‘Thought you might like to go out,’ he said.

The pubs were shut so Gil had no idea what he meant. John didn’t drink or gamble to excess and he couldn’t take Gil anywhere respectable because nobody would want him there. He went without asking because John had done a great deal for him but when the carriage stopped and they got out and went inside the building, he realised where he was. The hall of the house was brilliantly lit and gaudy. A beautiful woman dressed in a blue satin dress came along the hall towards them, smiling. Her shoulders rose creamily and bare.

‘Mr Marlowe, how are you?’ she said.

Gil wanted to go home. He would have said so had the man been anybody but John. John introduced them. He was obviously
a valued client. Very soon Gil found himself in a bedroom with a blonde-haired girl who was prepared to do anything for him, so she said. Gil couldn’t afford to offend John Marlowe, so very reluctantly he went to bed with her. To his surprise nothing devastating happened. The roof didn’t fall in, somebody didn’t haul him out of there complaining that he was doing wrong, but something went cold in Gil’s head, it was the only way he could think to work out what he felt. He didn’t care who she was or how she had got to here or what might occur afterwards. She was an object to be enjoyed. He had her and then he drank some wine and then he had her again and then he went home. He didn’t even offer to pay; he presumed that John paid. He went home and slept well.

Abby dreamed about her parents. She dreamed of being a child and of the happy times. When she awoke she was miserable. She could no longer take refuge in her father’s house. People were right: Gil had not cared for Henderson; he had played the old man like a fish and taken everything from him. It was proof enough, they said, that he did not come to the churchyard or attend the funeral tea, and that he had gone to work that day and that he had launched the ship just as he intended a few days later. Charlotte wept bitter tears as she stood in front of Abby’s drawing-room fire. Gil was never to redeem himself. She had seen Matthew at Toby and Henrietta’s wedding that summer and William would not let her acknowledge the child.

‘Edward is obviously not going to marry again. Indeed, I don’t know what he does. William complains that he is not at work, that he is often absent. Sometimes he doesn’t come home at night, so whatever women he does see are not respectable. Was ever a woman so cursed in her children?’ Charlotte turned a wet, red face on Abby. ‘William says we must sell the house.’

‘Sell it?’

‘We cannot keep it up. He had that house built for me.’

If Abby had been frank she would have said that Bamburgh House was a small loss, having never liked it, but it was Charlotte and William’s monument to their success and she knew how
much it meant to them. But how would they sell it? Nobody of any taste or discernment would buy it.

‘William says there is a house in Westoe which would do very well.’

‘Westoe Village is pretty,’ Abby said, thinking of all the elegant Victorian houses in the little village just outside Newcastle. Some of them had big stone walls and behind them big gardens. ‘It would be very convenient,’ she said.

Charlotte was upset at the loss of prestige as much as the loss of the house, Abby thought. It was a very big house for just the two of them. Perhaps at one time they had expected to found a dynasty; now they had no one. But they would not think of it like that. This was a matter of pride and Charlotte’s pride was almost all gone. Abby privately thought that if Charlotte could learn to hate Gil, it might help. William obviously did and so did she. The loss of her father was all caught up with the feelings that she had for Gil. She had not realised, either, that she needed to have the house to go to. It had been somewhere to get away from her life in the country, from the husband who was rarely at home and the child she hardly saw.

Charlotte had grown very fat and when Abby did see William he looked like an old man, tired, disappointed and angry, but she had not thought things in such a way that the big house would have to be sold. She knew how she had felt when Robert had lost the London house. It had changed things, their place in society, their friendships and relations between them. When she looked back, Abby could see that her husband had been proud and confident. Now he stayed away a lot and came home drunk or penniless. Abby felt that she had no one and began to take her child away from the upstairs of the house, where she seemed like a prisoner. There were lessons in the mornings, so Abby insisted that in the afternoons she should see Georgina. This meant leaving the house because if she did not, Nanny would interfere and people would arrive and take up her time. They didn’t do much. They went shopping or out to tea,
but it was Abby’s only pleasure. Going into Newcastle was a mixed pleasure because it had been the city of her childhood, but in a way she saw herself and her mother doing just such things and for the first time she enjoyed her daughter’s company. She refused Robert’s wanting to go abroad as they had done so often in the past. He went by himself and she was glad of the respite, because he did not allow mourning. When people died, Robert’s reaction was to ignore them. Since Henderson’s death he had not mentioned her father, nor would he permit the wearing of black. It seemed to Abby that Robert was pretending that nobody ever died, most especially nobody who mattered. Somewhere inside him his parents lived, she thought, because he could not bear that he should lose anyone.

If there had been anything decent about Gil at all, Abby thought, she would have gone back to the house, if only to talk to somebody about her father. She found herself outside in the street across the road several times and she was afraid. She didn’t know how she had got there, only that she couldn’t leave. She remembered Gil saying that she could have anything she wanted from the house and the truth was that many of her personal possessions were still there. She wanted them; she wanted something to remember her father by, but she could not make herself go there either when he was not there or when he was. She had heard that Kate and Mrs Wilkins had left, so the new servants would not know her sufficiently to let her past the doors. They certainly wouldn’t allow her to take anything from the house and Abby wanted not to see Gil again.

*

Gil had chosen new servants from out of the area, chosen them for their backgrounds and ability. He paid them well and expected high standards. The house was always perfect. Meals were on the table at exactly the right moment; cupboards and drawers were orderly; his clothes were put out daily, washed and starched and ironed. Everything was in its place just, in a way, as
it had been before, only more so. He had altered nothing. The house was just as it would have been and daily he expected to find Henderson there. His not being there was, in Gil’s mind, a long, long corridor where Henderson was just out of sight, just out of enough distance so that Gil could not wave at him.

He went to work except on Sunday afternoons. He came back at teatime every day so that he could spend some time with Matthew, but when the boy went to bed Gil worked. One day the spring after Henderson had died – it was late March and it should not have been warm but it was – the sun was pouring in through his office windows. Usually he would have ignored it and gone on working, the outside world did not intrude here, but for some reason he couldn’t stand it any longer and he left the office and went home.

It was a Saturday afternoon, that would be his excuse. The men weren’t there. Some of the office staff were, especially, he thought smiling grimly, those who expected to be noticed. The air beyond the shipyard was soft, springlike, so he went home early. When he opened the front door he could hear laughter and when he opened the sitting-room door, Hannah, the general maid and Matthew were playing some kind of game, hands crossed, spinning round and round in the middle of the room. She didn’t see Gil at first, or hear the door.