Snow Angels (43 page)

It was not relief that Gil felt, it was an overwhelming desire to thrash his child. As he took a step towards her Abby backed with the boy behind her. Gil got her by the arm.

‘Come out of the way,’ he said.

‘I will not!’

Matthew started to cry.

‘He’s just a little boy. You leave him alone!’ She started to fight with him as Gil reached for his son. She was crying, too, but her hands were clenched into fists. Even though she was small and slight, she got in the way quite effectively, but not sufficiently to make the difference in the end. He could have stopped her altogether by knocking her out of the way. It wouldn’t even have taken a great effort and Gil could feel the tremendous well of temper surging its way through him. He remembered it. He remembered how he had put the boy out of the second-storey window at school. He remembered throwing men down the stairs at the house in Hope Street. He remembered being in the study with his father and being called stupid and worthless and beaten until he couldn’t move. He remembered
being thrown into cold rooms and left there for days. And he remembered Helen smiling at him and lying to him and pretending that she cared about him when in fact she had only really cared about his brother. He wanted to break something, to see something bloody and down and destroyed.

Abby had backed as far as the stairs. There was nowhere for her to go now, with the child still behind her. She was fighting with him, but Gil had hold of Matthew and was pulling him out from behind her.

‘You won’t do it, you won’t!’ she declared, hanging on. ‘I won’t let you be William! You’re not, you’re not.’

He didn’t hit her. He released her while she was pushing from him and she fell, the stairs got in the way and he had Matthew to himself, not fighting or crying or protesting in any way. He remembered that too, that horrible resignation, the knowledge that if you cried you would be beaten until you stopped, the awful sick anticipation. The little boy’s face was grey-white, the tears had dried and his eyes were all one colour, black with fear, and huge. He was so small, so unable to do anything to stop an adult from punishing him. He was like a terrified rabbit that couldn’t move.

The hope for the future if he could learn enough and please sufficiently and contain all the evil feelings. He could be taught that approval and success were all that mattered, that if he was clever enough he could have a house like this and expensive carriages, all the stables full of horses and all the rooms filled with furniture. He could have servants and tables laden with food and a cellar full of wine and his pick of women. He could have the whole world admiring him, he could have everything.

Gil picked the child up and said, ‘I think you ought to go to bed, Matthew. You must be worn out,’ and he carried him up the stairs.

Abby fussed gently, put the child into bed and talked to him in a soft voice. Gil went back downstairs and into the study. As
he opened the door the snow had stopped, the sky had cleared and the sun appeared over the horizon and spilled all over the floor in a mighty surge of dazzling brilliance. There was nothing left to do but go to work, so he went. He wasn’t even tired. He spent the day going around the various shops and departments as he sometimes did just to keep everybody lively and all day the sun streamed in at the windows. The snow had gone from the streets and there was a special buzz about everything because it was Christmas Eve and the men would not be at work for the following two days. In the time before Henderson’s influence they had only Christmas Day, but Gil was a believer in holidays and gave them time off at Easter and in the summer and he paid them. He was well hated in the shipbuilding federation for his high wages and lenient ideas and good ships, he thought, smiling. They would have New Year’s Day, too, because a great many of these people were Scottish and a great many more felt more Scottish than English and would rather have gone to work on Christmas Day than New Year’s, so he accommodated everybody and gave them both. There would be a servants’ dance that evening at Bamburgh House and many of the servants would go home for a day or two. He and Abby, instead of having big parties as many people did, would have a quiet time, fetching and carrying for themselves. He pictured them eating in the kitchen and making free of the house as they couldn’t when other people were there. They could sit in their nightclothes by the fire if they wanted, he thought. He had planned all this. The plans were ruined. He thought of her falling awkwardly on the stairs, her defence of the child and of the fear in Matthew’s face.

He didn’t go home. He didn’t ever want to go home again. Staying at work was so easy by comparison. The problems could be solved, they were not people, unpredictable and complicated. When it was quiet in the evening he helped himself to whisky and grew used to the idea that Jos Allsop had not abducted or murdered his child. He heard John’s heavy footsteps outside his
office, so by the time the big man had reached him Gil had a glass ready half filled with golden liquid.

‘Get wrapped around that,’ he said.

‘Cheers,’ John said. ‘Got some good news.’

‘I could take some.’

‘Allsop. Found dead in the river this afternoon, belly up like a fish.’

‘I couldn’t be better pleased. Somebody did him in?’

‘Don’t know,’ John said, frowning and taking his favourite seat across the fire. ‘Rumour has it he fell in, drunk. Everything all right with you?’

‘Aye, everything’s fine.’

‘Want to go out?

‘Why not?’

They went to the pub and then they went to Mrs Fitzpa-trick’s. Gil was rather drunk when he got there and decided that all he wanted to do was go home. John laughed.

‘It’s all right for some people, they’ve got it on tap,’ he said.

By the time he reached home the drunkenness had worn off with the cold night air. He had expected the house to be in darkness, but it was lit like a Christmas tree. Then he remembered the servants’ dance. The hall was deserted. It was evidently over and quiet. People had gone to bed but Abby was there, wearing a very pretty, low-cut blue dress. She had a mark on her face. People would think he had hit her, Gil thought.

‘Just as well I didn’t save you the last waltz,’ she said.

‘I forgot.’

‘Of course. What could compete with the delights of the pub and the whorehouse?’ She turned away and would have walked away up the stairs, but he stopped her. He led her into the nearest room, which was the library. There had obviously been no fire in there for several hours, or possibly at all that day. Nobody went in there except him and on the day of a party people would be unlikely to need books. Abby stood against the door and didn’t look at him. Gil had been going to apologise, but
that was before he realised about the dance. He wanted to say to her that he hadn’t meant to hurt her, that he hadn’t intended to, that he hoped the mark on her face hadn’t caused her embarrassment, that he hoped the servants had not heard them fighting. It was a vain hope; they had made a lot of noise. Two people fighting like that would not have been ignored by even the least curious servants. Probably all that day there had been talk. Probably they thought he had knocked her over. Her face, to his mind, didn’t give enough evidence, it would have been a much bigger mark, but people didn’t care about that, they would believe what they chose to believe. He had fought with her and attempted to beat his child. For these things men were not forgiven. The servants’ dance, the way she thought he had deliberately stayed away, the drinking was true, the whore … he was starting to wish that he was safe in the arms of Chloe or Desirée or somebody who didn’t matter, whose name didn’t matter … these things had not been important on their own but they were the cap to it, rather like the top of a boiled egg was to some people the dearest part. He wanted to apologise to her but he couldn’t remember how.

She stood there and regarded the side of the bookshelf with rapt concentration.

‘It’s Christmas,’ he said.

Abby stared at the wood. Gil looked at her throat. The way that her dress scooped down like that, you couldn’t help noticing at close quarters what a pretty neck she had and the way that her shoulders were so soft and white and her breasts just hidden by the top of the dress would be … He wished again that he was back in Newcastle where it was simple, where nobody fought and argued and used the kind of language Abby did, where he could do what he wanted to do to her. All those girls had beautiful bodies because they were expensive. They were all, in fact, more beautiful and much younger than Abby was. He thought of the way she had protected his son against him. She would have fought until she couldn’t fight any more, not just
because of Matthew but because she well knew that he did not forgive himself his iniquities.

He put his hands on her waist and slid them around to the back of her dress. There he found the fastenings quite intricate and hidden so that they would not spoil the line of the expensive dress, but he knew these things, had been around women long enough to know how to undress them. That was one problem you didn’t have at Mrs Fitzpatrick’s: they were half undressed to begin with and because you paid, you didn’t have to undress them at all if you didn’t want to. They would slowly remove the clothing that they wore if you liked, but he liked to take their clothes off for them. He began to undo the fastenings now.

She tasted and smelled so wonderful to Gil that he wanted her like he had wanted nobody else. Her neck was long and slender and invited kisses all the way down the column of her throat and in the hollows of her shoulders. He could feel the dress loosening from her body, obligingly slipping so that the palms of his hands found the exquisite warmth of her breasts.

‘Will you stop it!’

It was only then that Gil realised she was trying to get away. He was not used to that. Nobody did that. He looked vaguely at her.

‘What?’

They were on the sofa. He hadn’t realised that either, hadn’t known that he had put her there, hadn’t felt or heard her protesting.

‘I’m not a whore!’

‘I know that.’ But she felt just as good as the girls at the whorehouse, better in fact, much better and, sitting up with her hair tumbled and the dress down to her waist and the angry fired look in her eyes, he was loathe to release her.

‘It didn’t stop you though, did it? It didn’t stop you before, outside?’

Abby was not crying but her voice was catching as though there was some constriction in her throat. He thought about
before, the snow falling and the soft ground and her body so warm against the cold air. He remembered his hands, wet from the snow, finding the heat of her body as it emerged from her clothes and the ecstasy of having her in the stillness. There was no other stillness in the world like that of falling snow. The whole world was stopped and silent and she was his, completely his like they would not be parted for all eternity.

‘You treated me like this then!’

‘No. No.’ Kissing her now, her body brushing against his shirt, his hands unable to prise themselves away from her. ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t. Please.’

She was off the sofa, pulling her dress up to where it was supposed to be. He couldn’t move, tried to be seconds back to where they had been when she was letting him kiss her, touch her. He would not acknowledge that there was a space between them and now the cold night was making its way between them. He knew what that was like, the icy, godforsaken hours of nobody and nothing. He had tried to steal beyond them with women, but he could not forget all those nights and weeks and months and years without Helen, all those days without her, knowing that he had not come from her and would not go back to her, all the time, all the people who meant nothing with their kind and unkind faces, all the ships going down the slipway had not eased the emptiness. Nothing eased it except this.

*

Abby was angry. Her mind was full of what had happened the previous night. She had never before had to fight with anyone and it had appalled her. When had Gil turned into his father and why had she not noticed it until then? William had been bad-tempered, autocratic, impossible and unforgiving, but she was not Charlotte. She would not stand by and let him beat his son. It was true that Gil didn’t hit her, but he caused the circumstances which made her fall and hurt herself and she still had to go on trying to stop him from taking Matthew from her. When
the fight was over she relived it, shaking, again and again. Even when Matthew was in bed, where Gil had safely put him, when there was no question of brutality, there had been the possibility and that was enough for her. They had put the child to bed in daylight and then he had actually gone to work. She couldn’t believe it. No apologies, no concern. He had left the house, left her to manage as best she could without sleep, his upset child, the staff dance, the Christmas arrangements. Then he had quite obviously stayed out, got drunk, had a woman and finally had nothing better to do than come home. And now … maybe there had been no woman. Even somebody young like Gil couldn’t have gone without sleep, working all day, got drunk, had a whore, come home and … put his mouth and hands on her like this. Abby felt nothing, just cold as though she had been left outside for too long. He was insensitive, like all men were. Robert had done this many times, it didn’t mean anything to him; but Gil was not like that, she knew he wasn’t, she couldn’t have cared so much about him if he had been.

She had begun to resist but he didn’t take any notice, pulling the dress down to her waist. He picked her up and carried her over to the sofa and there in the softness of the cushions he put her down. The bloody room was anything but warm and the books smelled like damp books did, sort of mouldy and as though they had never been outside in the fresh air. The whole room had an atmosphere that Abby hadn’t noticed before and didn’t like now. It was neglected, unwanted, turned aside, cold words on cold pages. The winter wind screamed around the house, making its way down the chimney and into the empty grate and the room was filled with bitter air.

*

She went. She left him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even say goodnight, as though he had done something unforgivable. The room was so cold, the shadows were so thick, the night was God and nobody could alter it. He made himself go upstairs. He
could go back to Chloe tomorrow or the next day and he was safe there. She was young and beautiful and obliging. She tasted good and smelled good and had breasts like apples, round and firm, and a bottom that was neat and high and a waist so slender that he could meet his fingertips around it. She had long blonde hair and bright blue eyes.