Snow Angels (40 page)

Abby knew that Gil wanted to be friends with his son again, but the colour drained from his face.

‘Boarding school?’ Abby said, to fill the gap.

‘I could be on a proper cricket team and Harry English says they have great larks in the dorm after lights out. If I don’t go I
shall be left here for weeks and weeks and they’ll be coming back telling me all about it, and Harry’s brother, Timothy, is going.’

Gil said nothing.

‘When is Timothy going?’ Abby said.

‘Next autumn. Could we go and look at his school?’

Abby glanced across the table at Gil. She knew that Matthew would not appeal directly to Gil.

‘Grandma thinks it’s a good idea,’ Matthew urged.

‘Education is very important,’ Charlotte said. ‘William always thought so. Boarding school is good for boys. It makes them independent and strong.’

Gil let the silence empty and widen. Luckily the meal was over. Everyone left the table. Gil went into the little office and closed the door. Abby deliberately made herself not go after him. She had no place in there and if he had wanted conversation, she reasoned, he would not have gone in. She put the children to bed. She occupied Charlotte until it was late and then she went to bed. It was a thankless thing to do. Sleep did not arrive. She put on a dressing-gown and went back downstairs. Softly she opened the door of the office. He looked up.

‘Maybe we could go out and look at the house some time?’ she said.

Gil sat back in his chair.

‘Is it nearly finished?’ Abby said.

He stood up.

‘I’ve got the plans somewhere.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I didn’t think you were interested.’

‘Show me.’

He located rolled-up papers, which she had assumed were work, and spread them across the desk. Abby went and peered hard at the different drawings, the front of the house, the sides, the back.

‘It doesn’t look the same.’

‘It isn’t meant to.’

‘You took the columns away!’

‘They weren’t actually doing anything important, holding anything up, they were just … decorative.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

He smiled.

‘It makes it look entirely different,’ Abby said.

‘This is the inside. We’ve moved the kitchen and chopped up the hall here—’

‘I rather liked the hall. Has your mother seen these?’

‘No.’

‘Bathrooms!’ Abby said.

‘And proper heating. It was never warm.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

He rolled up the plans.

‘You don’t have to humour me,’ he said. ‘Matthew can go away to school if he wants to.’

‘That wasn’t why—’ Abby began and then stopped.

‘Maybe you should go to bed.’

Abby’s face went hot with temper but she controlled it.

‘I’d like to see the house.’

‘You’ll see it when it’s finished.’

‘Did you do all the designing alterations yourself?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did you pull down the bedroom where we slept the night, or the bedroom where you spent the nights with Helen, or with Rhoda? Do you seriously believe you can go back there and live after that?’

‘It’s all different,’ he said. ‘If you’d looked closely at the plans, the upstairs is altered beyond recognition.’

‘And you won’t remember?’

‘I’ve done all my remembering. I’m going to go back there and have it for mine now.’

‘Isn’t that what your father did?’

Gil didn’t answer that.

‘It was your idea,’ he said.

*

They moved in the middle of the summer which helped, she thought. It was one of the hardest things that Abby had done because the house in Jesmond had been sold. She felt like a deserter. The garden was full of all the flowers that her mother had loved and she was aware that once she left, she would not be able to come back again. It felt so cruel to leave this place that she loved and move to one that she despised. The last few days, while they were packing, she barely looked at Gil or spoke to him but every moment she was aware of what she was losing.

The children were so excited. They knew that they were moving to a big country house, that they could have ponies, that there would be lots of space, that they could choose their bedrooms and they could have big parties, Grandmother had said so. Abby was inclined to think that they would miss their friends, but she didn’t say that to them. She didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm. She kept busy, packing, making sure that everything went well. On the moving day she was too miserable to say goodbye to the place. When she reached the first sight of Bamburgh House, it was such a shock that she forgot she had hated it. It did look different; it looked welcoming. The huge pillars were gone and the front of the house was open to the light and the day. The long windows were filled with sunshine and it seemed to Abby that she could see Gil’s hand everywhere after that. Inside, where there had not been huge windows there were now, so that the house caught every bit of sunlight. The walls were no longer dark and dingy; the stairs which had been stone had been replaced with wood; the hall which had had huge stone pillars and stone walls had been altered, too. There were fireplaces and wooden floors and it was warm. Upstairs, there were bathrooms between the bedrooms with doors leading in on both sides and there again were more windows, but it was warm from the central heating and there were thick carpets.

It was barely furnished apart from that. Gil had done nothing other than basic alterations and the furniture they had brought with them disappeared into the huge spaces. Charlotte and
William had furnished every inch and nothing much was left but, with the evening light coming in through the drawing-room windows, Abby could imagine what it might look like. Abby thought Charlotte would want to begin at once making it as it had been, but when Abby tactfully suggested that she might like to help she looked horrified.

‘I did that once, I don’t want to have to do it again.’

Charlotte, Abby thought, had recovered quite remarkably. She looked well, happy, even thinner. She liked being with the children.

Abby began to furnish the house. She did it slowly and could not help being pleased with the results. There wasn’t much you could do with a library where the walls were oak panelled, indeed, she rather liked that room; but the dining-room she did in varying shades of yellow and when the morning sun came in and they had breakfast in there she was comfortable with what she had done.

The summer was here and she discovered the gardens and the various flowers that she knew her mother would have liked. She talked to the new gardeners, made plans for next year, read books; she thought that the one disadvantage about her father’s house was that you couldn’t make progress in the garden, as much had been done as could be, whereas here everything could be altered apart from the way that the quarry garden had its rocks and the various trees. Much of it was a wilderness and she was keen to begin again. She hadn’t realised she was talking so much about it until she noticed over dinner one night that Gil was not listening. He was the only one there, the others had all gone from the table when the meal was finished. She shut up and listened to the silence.

‘I didn’t mean to go on about it,’ she apologised.

‘No, no, it’s nice. Do you still miss the other house?’

‘Not much. Not as much as I did, not since I learned to bore you over the dinner table about the garden.’

‘It looks fine,’ he said, ‘so does this room.’

‘Do you think it does? I’m worried you won’t like things.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t say anything. I can’t ask you, either, because you aren’t here or you’re in the study working. I have to just go ahead and hope you don’t hate it.’

‘Why worry?’

‘Well, because you have taste.’

‘God preserve us, do I? Don’t tell anybody.’

*

Early that summer they went to look around various schools for Matthew. He was so enthusiastic. He ran around talking to people and asking about the sports teams and enthusing over the dormitories. It all looked wonderful, Abby thought, the huge and imposing buildings, the great stretches of green playing fields, the hundreds of boys all wearing the same clothes. Gil tried to talk him out of it, saying that there were perfectly good schools in Newcastle. Charlotte took the opposite view and Matthew was more inclined to listen to her these days.

‘Why doesn’t Dad want me to go?’ Matthew said wistfully to Abby one evening when they had come back from looking at a well-known school in Yorkshire.

‘Because he hated school,’ Abby said, on her knees weeding a border. She liked doing this, it made her feel better and she needed to feel better. Gil was working fourteen hours a day and was silent when he came home. She tried to make herself talk to him or, even better, go to him, but she was convinced that if she went to bed with him, Helen would somehow be there. There was an atmosphere in the house. She was convinced it was of her own making and sometimes she thought she heard the faint sounds of a piano when no one was playing.

‘But I’m not him,’ Matthew pointed out reasonably.

Abby sat back on her heels and looked at him through the sunlight.

‘He knows that and you may go if you wish. He hasn’t said that you can’t.’

‘I know that.’ Matthew dug his toe into the soil. ‘But he doesn’t want me to, does he?’

Abby couldn’t say that Gil felt he had lost his child, firstly to his mother and then to his parents’ hatred for him and now he was going to lose him physically to the kind of establishment which he despised.

‘If you’re happy there he won’t mind, and if you aren’t happy you don’t have to stay.’

‘Did he have to stay?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Why?’

‘Because your grandfather insisted and … he wasn’t very clever at school.’

‘But he is very clever,’ Matthew pointed out. Abby rather wished Gil had been there to hear the pride in his son’s voice.

‘It’s a different kind of cleverness.’

‘I’m good at cricket,’ Matthew said. Abby watched him go racing back up the garden path towards the house and thought that Matthew would probably do very well at boarding school. He would be the sort of boy who wouldn’t mind getting up for early morning cricket practice and he had a good memory for all those dreadful lessons. A great many men got through life with little more.

There was a part of Abby that became happy that summer. Georgina loved the country and Gil bought her a pony and taught her to ride. He spent more time with her daughter than he did with her, but Abby let him. She knew that he needed to be with the child. On Sundays when he was at home, he and Georgina went riding in the fine weather and she always declined the invitation. Abby couldn’t abide horses. She thought they were the stupidest animals on God’s earth, but Georgina adored her pony as only little girls can and Abby had to stop herself from objecting to the time she spent at the stables. She was
convinced that the grooms used bad language and said things to Georgina that they shouldn’t but the effect was that she turned into a lovely girl that summer and she had something she had never had before, a secure home with a man who came back, even if he was late. Abby could have forgiven Gil a lot for that. He was also a safe man, she thought, remembering Jos Allsop and Rhoda. Georgina could climb all over him, hug and kiss him, know that he would throw her into the air and catch her, tease her and that she would remember him later as the father to her child, when she was grown up. Abby remembered Henderson with such affection and it was important.

She knew also that Gil was taking comfort in the fact that Georgina was not going away. That autumn Matthew went to school. For days and days there had been arrangements to make, clothes to buy, the big trunk open in his bedroom. The maids named socks and packed pyjamas and then they all went by train to Matthew’s school in Yorkshire where his best friend was going too. He didn’t even mind leaving Gil and Abby; he ran off with Jonathan, not looking back. Abby thought she had never seen a boy so right for boarding school.

That night when they got home Gil prowled the house as though he was going out. He didn’t go, but Abby watched carefully. He eventually shut himself into the study and then, when it was very late, he went upstairs. Abby had gone to bed hours since, but she hadn’t slept so she got up, tied a dressing-gown tightly around her waist and knocked on the door. She couldn’t hear anything and hesitated, but when she opened the door he was standing by the fire as you might at an inn when you had just come in from the cold, fully dressed except for his jacket and holding a whisky glass in his hand. That made her hesitate again. Men and alcohol were such a dangerous combination. She had not forgotten what Robert was like after several drinks, insisting on going to bed with her, the whisky sour on his breath and his actions so uncaring, mechanical, cold.

‘At least close the door,’ he advised.

She came into the room and shut the door.

‘Are you thinking about Matthew?’

‘Leaving him there was like being ripped in half.’ It was not, Abby concluded, his first drink. She waited for maudlin reminiscences, for long drawn-out sentences, for a tirade on the horrors of public school, but nothing happened. Robert was too much in her mind. Drunk, he had said everything he thought. Drunk or sober, Gil did not, she surmised, say even a tenth of what he was thinking and he sifted it all first. This sentence had slipped past the whisky, but it was the only one.

‘He’ll like it,’ Abby said helpfully. ‘He’ll be on the cricket team in no time.’

‘It’s the wrong term,’ Gil said.

‘Oh. Yes. Rugby?’

Abby made herself cross the room to him but he didn’t encourage her, he didn’t even look or make conversation. It was rather like opening the door of an ice house and hoping for even a small blaze.

‘I thought you might have gone out,’ she said. ‘I thought to Newcastle to that dreadful Irishwoman’s establishment.’

‘She’s Scottish,’ he said.

‘I thought you might have.’

He said nothing. Gil might not have the hang of conversation, Abby thought, but he had definitely mastered the pause.