Snow Angels (41 page)

‘Gil—’

‘No.’

Abby wished very much now that she had stayed in her room, because he turned around and looked at her and it was not the kind of look which you met happily.

‘You don’t know what I was going to say,’ Abby pointed out.

‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing you can say will make any difference so you might as well go to bed.’

Abby went.

Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between nightmares and life. Sometimes you think you’re going to wake up and then you realise that you aren’t asleep, that you won’t have the relief of waking up and knowing that everything is all right, that your mother is downstairs cooking eggs and your father is walking the dogs in the field and that there will be butter and honey and sunlight and it will be morning. So when Gil found himself on a boat for France, no, let’s be clear, he told himself, it’s a ship, it’s too bloody big to be a boat and the grandson of a boat builder, and the son of a shipbuilder, ought to know the difference to these things; he was on a ship without reason that he could think of, that was when he concluded comfortably that he was asleep and it was just a dream and whatever happened it didn’t matter because he would awaken, he just had to get through it.

It wasn’t a big ship; it wasn’t the kind of ship he built. He saw all the design faults, he saw all the repairs that needed doing. He thought that if he had had any choice, with his knowledge, he wouldn’t have got on the damned thing. Worst of all, it didn’t balance. Now that was all right as long as the weather was fair, but so often between England and France the weather was bad, but he was reasonably happy about the trip because his brother was there. Edward was actually smiling at him as he hadn’t smiled for a long time. Gil couldn’t think how long it was. He
was happy then. If Edward was smiling, there couldn’t be much wrong. Toby was there, too, and they were talking together and laughing and it was like it had been in Toby’s garden, at least he thought it was, when the flowers were out and the sun was hot and the wine was cool. They were all going to France, he had known that they were. They were going to build a new life there. The sea was calm like the pond in the park at home, the sunlight turned the water to silk, they sat on deck and drank wine. Toby described the house on the river with its orchard and its garden and its fields, where the hens scratched in the yard and the kittens played in the hay and the unfortunate rabbits sat in their hutch prior to being banged on the back of the neck, cooked and eaten. The dogs slept in the shade during the hot afternoons and friends came to call to take them off to five-course, three-hour lunches in tiny village restaurants. In the evenings the river played its own music and sometimes it rained hard and briefly and refreshed the trees so that the leaves looked polished.

Gil was looking forward to all this, but in a way he didn’t want the journey to end. He was tired; he wanted to stay for a little while until he became impatient of the calm sea and the warm air and the way that the ship moved slowly away from England toward the shores of France.

Then it was night time. They were still at sea and, as they sat outside, it seemed impossible, suddenly mist began to steal from the horizon towards them. It wasn’t a slow thing. One minute it was clear and the next the mist was coming towards them, silently moving over the surface of the sea until there was nothing in his vision beyond the ship itself. Soon the calm night was gone. The wind got up and, although the mist cleared slightly so that he could see the size of the waves that were beginning to chafe at the bows, it was as though the ship were held and constricted by that fog. It began to rain, which should have cleared the fog away but it didn’t and the rain and the waves got all mixed up so that there was water everywhere and the ship began to lurch.

At first he was down below deck. Each time the ship rolled he and everything else in the cabin slid all the way along to the opposite side and he would wait, suspended there on the floor with everything against him, pinned. There would be a few moments when the ship’s side was high out of the water and then the ship would roll the other way and he would slide all the way back across the floor to the other side and everything in the cabin would slide with him. Then he was on deck. He could see the water coming over the bows and he could see the size of the waves. They were so big and so wide that he couldn’t see anything above them or anything around them and the water swilled across the decks. Toby was there, smiling, so it couldn’t be that bad, and he went below and there was Edward.

‘What’s it like up there?’

‘It’s quite a storm, old boy,’ he said.

‘This isn’t fair, you know, Tobe, we are the men who make the ships, we shouldn’t have to put up with this.’

‘I wish there had been another way. I wish that I had been a bird and could have flown. I didn’t ever trust these blessed things.’

‘I wish we were in France.’

‘We will be soon. The storm can’t last much longer.’

He went back up on deck again and the ship rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled and the whole world turned into sea. There was nothing but water. There was no ship to be seen. Then it was cold and he was falling and there was a great wall of salt water.

It was just a dream. He was down below. Toby was up on deck and then he wasn’t and Gil knew that the house in France was just as much of a dream as this, that it had never existed and never would exist except in their imagination. It was the nightmare that was real, the storm and the fog and the ship rolling over. He was down below and he realised now that they would not get to France. Funny, but because it was a dream he didn’t really care. He could indulge himself. He could think to
himself that the world was well lost. He could think that their sons meant nothing to them now, that nothing mattered beyond the love between them. It had been everything. It had been the most important thing in both their lives, so if it should end here, it was right. They had given up everything for one another so it was fitting, comfortable. The October night was not cold and he remembered what he had heard about October storms. They should have thought of that before they set out, he acknowledged. Suddenly it was cold, it was frightening, it was that horrible helpless falling beyond the side of the cabin and he was shouting Toby’s name and somebody was screaming.

*

Gil woke up. He was in his bedroom at Bamburgh House, not the bedroom he had had as a child but the best room in the house. The October sunlight was pouring through the big wide windows where his father used to sleep, the bedroom he had claimed as his right. He turned over. The bed was soft and reassuring and the sheets were cool on his hot skin. He had thrown the bedcovers off at some time and only the sheet covered him. The curtains had been drawn back by the maid some time since and the windows were open as he preferred them. When he opened his eyes he saw the tray with the tea which she had left and had grown cold. It was late. It was, in fact, Sunday. Abby would have taken Georgina to church by now, so at least he did not have to meet her steady gaze over breakfast. He dismissed the dream. His brother had gone to France with Toby a year ago and, although he had heard nothing, had expected to hear nothing, he had no doubt that they were happy together, having cast off all their responsibilities. He got up, shaved, bathed, dressed and did all the other tedious morning things, then he went downstairs to meet the day.

Abby came back. Georgina reproached him because he had not got up early to go riding, but the day had clouded into rain so Gil could not even promise her that he would go later. He and
Abby sat by the fire having a drink before the big Sunday meal. Then a carriage pulled up outside and a man got out. They didn’t recognise him, but Gil did when he was announced, it was Mr Emory, Toby’s father. Gil hadn’t seen him since Toby and Henrietta’s wedding and he had aged. Gil wasn’t surprised.

He hadn’t been able to put the dream from his mind and now that he was confronted with somebody who would have mattered to it, Gil was most unhappy. He offered Mr Emory a drink and to sit down close by the fire. The man accepted whisky and a seat, but he didn’t look straight at Gil and after a minute or two, clutching his whisky tightly in his hand he said, ‘I have some grave news, Mr Collingwood. I have had a letter from France. There has been an accident.’

‘A shipping accident?’ Gil said, unable to stop himself.

Mr Emory looked keenly at him.

‘Only in a manner of speaking. It was a boat.’

A boat. It was just a boat. He had been wrong; it was just a dream. Only a boat.

‘My son and your brother … the boat capsized on the river near – near to their home. They are both dead.’

Mr Emory looked out of the window as though he could see something, whereas in fact the short autumn day was not offering much light any more even though it was not yet two o’clock. The weather was bad and the days were short.

‘All I wanted was a son. Every time we had a child … I was so proud of him.’

‘You have three grandsons,’ Abby said helpfully.

‘My son was disgraced before he died. We tried to tell people differently, that he was suffering from some disorder … He’s better dead.’

Gil was half out of his seat, words were on his lips, but Abby’s fingers closed hard around his arm as she said, looking straight at Mr Emory, ‘We were both very fond of him and we don’t judge.’

‘Your generation is extremely lax.’

‘I understand that every older generation thinks the same of every younger.’

‘In my day a man was a man and a woman was a woman and women did not argue.’

‘Insufferable prig!’ Abby shouted when he had gone.

She told the cook to give Georgina some dinner and explained to the little girl what had happened. Abby had discovered that if you told children the truth, it was surprising how well they reacted. Georgina remembered Edward only vaguely so she didn’t care about that, but she cared that Gil would be upset.

‘I thought he might like to go for a walk,’ Abby said.

‘He won’t want his dinner now,’ Georgina said, ‘and it’s a shame when it’s Sunday.’

Abby kissed her daughter and went back to the drawing-room. He was sitting as she had left him, staring into the fire. ‘Do you want to go out for some air?’

Gil glanced at the window. The day was dark and the mist had come down, rolling off the moortops just as it had in his dream across the water. It was starting to rain, lightly against the windowpane. He shook his head.

‘No.’

‘Another drink?’

‘That would be good.’

She poured him a large scotch. They sat there and drank too much. It didn’t take long; neither of them had had anything to eat since breakfast. The servants had enough sense not to come in and build up the fire. The level on the bottles went down steadily as Abby kept the glasses supplied and by the end of the afternoon he had fallen asleep in her arms. She kept him close and stroked his hair and thanked God for alcohol.

*

Mr Emory tried to insist that Toby’s body was brought home for burial in the family plot just as though nothing had
happened. Gil managed to frustrate this aim. It wasn’t difficult; the authorities didn’t want anything to do with it, so he went to France and made sure that the two young men were buried together as they would have wanted to be. He was glad that he had gone and done what he thought was right, if only because it made him feel better. The worst thing was that when he went to see the French lawyer about what was to be done with the house, he found that they had left the house to him.

‘No, no,’ Gil said, in the lawyer’s office, ‘Mr Emory has dependents.’

The lawyer frowned and he looked so much like Mr Brampton that Gil wondered if it was the same man in different guise.

‘Needy people?’

‘No, they’re very well off, rich—’

‘This has been left, as I understand it, to one or to the other if anything happened and then to you. It was their wish. We ought to respect the wishes of the dead. We are a long way from England, Mr Collingwood, in legal terms. Would Mr Emory’s family want the house?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘It is a very nice house.’

It was a very nice house beside a singing river. The smell of lemons and oranges came from the glass house attached and the curtains in all the bedrooms were white. Down the street in the square during the night there was the smell of baking. Gil knew because he stayed in the house where his brother and his brother’s lover had been happy. From the hills came the breeze, from the church the sound of a bell, in the square children played and sometimes just before he fell asleep he thought that he could hear the piano at Bamburgh House and see Helen’s slender fingers playing Mozart. He caught the colours of her dresses in the corners of the bedroom against the white walls, those dresses she had bought in Newcastle with him when Edward had gone duck shooting on the Solway and left her there. Sometimes she
had just left the room and there was the sound of her laughter down the garden paths and across the river. And in the distance two young men were rowing upstream and singing silly English songs and laughing and all the while the river flowed beyond the windows.

Matthew came home for Christmas, full of energy and stories about his new school and with the kind of glowing report that Abby felt sure Gil had never had. He had been top of the class in almost everything and regaled Georgina’s reluctant ears with boastful tales of his exploits and doings. Georgina complained to Abby that she wished Matthew would go back to school. Matthew went to Gil in the study one evening and asked if he could go to work with him. Gil was astonished and rather pleased.

‘You haven’t offered to take me,’ Matthew said. ‘Other boys’ fathers do.’

‘I didn’t realise you wanted to. I thought you might want to do something else when you get older.’

‘What?’

‘A doctor or a lawyer or … you aren’t very old yet.’

‘But that’s what we do, we’re shipbuilders. We’re the best shipbuilders on the Tyne.’

So he went to work with Gil, questioning everything, talking to the men, going around the various departments. Only when it was the end of the day and they were back in Gil’s office did Matthew say, ‘The shipyard gates don’t have our name on them like other people’s. Why don’t they?’