Snow Angels (5 page)

He had thought to go on from there, that he would prove to people he was good enough to marry Abby Reed. Suddenly she would see that he was clever too and she would love him. They would have a house in town and he would spend the rest of his life in Mr Philips’ office and that house. He would not have a hideous Greek mansion and a wife like his mother, who wore gloves even in bed. He had thought, after being at boarding school, that he would want to sleep alone for the rest of his life, but a night spent alongside Abby had buried that notion. He would marry Abby and live in town. She would run the house and they would have children and he would be kind to them. He would not ignore them or beat them or send them away to school. He would read stories to them and at night he would sleep in a big bed with Abby, who was warm and soft and would belong to nobody else.

But his mother had been busy finding a husband for Abby. His parents liked her, there was even that about it. He could have pleased them. She was Henderson’s only child; there could be no objection. And when Henderson saw that Gil could do these great designs and such good work, he would be glad too. But his mother had taken Abby to Hexham to visit her family and she had met Robert Surtees and there was no help for it.

Robert was coming to the betrothal party. Charlotte had been clever. Gil allowed himself five minutes to think about being in bed with Abby. He gave himself five minutes a day. He lay back in the warm grass and closed his eyes. He would be able to surprise Abby. Maybe it was not too late. He had learned to waltz so that he could ask her to dance. It had been a long trail. Even making the decision to learn and then following it through had been difficult. He had stood on the pavement outside the dancing school in the narrow street of Pink Lane in Newcastle’s centre and hesitated. The door was open, but it was the upstairs room; he had to climb the stairs before him. That was the hardest part. Once upstairs, the middle-aged lady was alone but for the gentleman who played the piano and she had been kind and patient.

‘I want to learn to waltz,’ Gil said.

‘Of course you do,’ she said, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. So he learned, thinking of himself and Abby.

The betrothal day came, hot and dry, the last day of June. Light streamed in, denying the darkness even a slender hold, and from early day everybody was busy. His mother went back and forwards with lists and all the servants moved faster than usual. Gil had not thought that his brother’s betrothal would have any effect on him. Why should it? But he was aware that Robert Surtees was coming here to see Abby. From somewhere he would find the courage to ask her to dance with him.

The afternoon was hot. The flowers which had been brought into the ballroom were watered so that they would not wilt. As many doors and windows were opened as could be to catch the tiny breeze that fluttered a little way among the garden paths. Early guests walked in the shade of the quarry gardens, where it seemed the rhododendrons had burst into special splendour, their flowers as big as his hands.

His mother sat outside on the terrace and dispensed tea and angel cake and smiles. His father accompanied various ladies with parasols into the rose garden. Abby came in the early
evening with her father and Rhoda and Robert Surtees at the same time. Robert ignored Gil, but spoke at length to Edward and Toby, who had come some time earlier with his family. Gil decided that it wouldn’t take much effort for him to hate Robert, standing there speaking in refined tones, talking about Cambridge and how much better it was than Oxford, teasing the other two, glancing now and then at Abby and smiling at her. Rhoda didn’t have much to say, it seemed to Gil, and she was much thinner than the last time he had seen her.

Gil didn’t want to be with any of these people, he didn’t understand why. Suddenly, anywhere else in the world would have done. It was as though there was an electric charge in the air. Red butterflies clung to nettles in the stableyard as Gil walked down to talk to the horses and rub their velvet noses. In the evening sunshine, fluttering as though they had been caught and pinned, the butterflies were so still that he could see the tiny black spots on their wings.

Throughout the early evening, people arrived. The musicians played. The dancing began, but Helen Harrison did not arrive. Gil saw the anxious look invade his brother’s face. Eight o’clock came and went. Half past eight and still they were not there. Then, before nine o’clock, while it was daylight and only the coolness and the long shadows foretold of night, a carriage came up the drive and stopped in front of the house.

His parents were outside at the bottom of the steps and so was Edward. Gil didn’t want to go forward but, almost as though the house itself propelled him, he went and stood in the doorway. It was a defence. He felt as if marauders had made their way through the gates and up the drive and were about to storm the house. They could have been sixteenth-century Border Reivers on an October raid, screaming and yelling, the horses’ hooves dull in the night as they rode in to steal everything they could carry off.

Two ordinary people stood beside the carriage, but there was nothing ordinary about the young woman who turned towards
him. Gil had never seen anybody like her. Her hair was the brightest shade of yellow. Her face was pink and cream and her eyes were a cool, dark-blue liquid. He could already imagine what her mouth would taste like: strawberries and pepper. Her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. He thought of her hair loose, of how long it was, past her waist, and of her breasts bared for his mouth and hands. Gil tried to back away from the shocking images, but he couldn’t. He had never felt like this about any woman in his life. He knew from that very moment that it was not the first time they had met. He recognised her. Helen Harrison was meant to be his; it had been written, ordained. He could smell the softness of her skin; he knew how she turned in her sleep. He could see her belly rounded with their child. He could hear her distant laughter as she ran away from him in game down a path that led to a rose garden. She didn’t move or speak, though her eyes held his. Gil felt like somebody who had been struggling endlessly upstream until he was exhausted. His arms and legs were leaden with tiredness and the water was pulling him down. Her gaze didn’t flicker, even when Edward came to introduce them and, as she moved towards him Gil gave up the fight. He went down for the last time and the waters closed over his head.

Rhoda hadn’t danced with anybody all evening and Abby felt disloyal as she polkaed and waltzed. Her mother had once told her that dancing was the only respectable way to get close to a man outside marriage and it was certainly easier than staying near Robert Surtees. She regretted, in some ways, having agreed to go to Hexham with Charlotte. She liked him well enough but no more than she liked several other young men, except that he was handsome and rich, and those were not, she kept telling herself, good reasons for liking anybody. Her father had already noticed Robert watching her and had talked about how smitten Robert was. He called her his sly puss. Abby had brushed him off. All she really wanted was to be with Gil, yet well into the middle of the evening they had not spoken, except in greeting. Most of the time she couldn’t see him, the crush of people was so great.

The evening was warm and Rhoda was disinclined to dance, so they went walking outside and here, finally, Rhoda talked to her about Jos Allsop.

‘He comes into my bedroom in the mornings, he and my mother, and they laugh and joke and he tickles me as though I was seven. Sometimes when my mother oversleeps, because often she’s up most of the night with that brat, he comes alone, getting on to my bed and … I’m in my nightgown. He tells me how pretty I’ve become and during the day he spends a great deal of
time with me. He touches me whenever he can. I’m afraid of him. I feel as though he’s the spider and I’m the fly.’

They walked back through the quarry gardens to the house and were in time to see Helen Harrison arrive. They stood at a distance.

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Rhoda said, but it was Gil’s reaction that Abby saw. He had not looked at her like that, nor at any girl that she had ever seen. Abby was wearing what she had thought was a pretty dress, but when she saw Helen’s she felt shabby and provincial. It was pale yellow spotted muslin with a tiny blue-and-yellow iris pattern. It was fashionable and shrieked to her of Paris, sophistication, society, adventure and involvement. Helen probably knew all the right people. Her life seemed dull to her. She caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror and saw her defects, the too-long nose, the ordinary brown hair, her thin figure, her square, capable hands. Abby could have wept.

Helen and Edward danced but, afterwards, Helen did what no girl Abby knew would have dared. She walked all the way across the room towards Gil Collingwood and quite obviously asked him to dance with her. Nobody did so except in a ladies’ excuse me and Gil had always managed to absent himself upon such occasions. To Abby’s dismay, Gil took the girl lightly into his arms as the music started and they began to waltz. He had lied. He did dance. Their steps matched perfectly and there were not now so many people, somehow, because Abby could watch them. Some woman beside her said to her friend, ‘Don’t they make a lovely couple?’ And they did, much more so than Edward and Helen. Gil, tall and dark and Helen, slight and fair, waltzed elegantly about the room.

Abby thought of all the times when Gil could have danced with her and hadn’t, but he had known Helen Harrison barely an hour before dancing with her and he was talking to her quite comfortably by the look of things. Abby was angry, jealous, resentful, all things which she had not been before. She hated Gil in those moments when he had his arms around Helen Harrison
and was moving her so confidently about the floor and she was looking up into his eyes.

*

‘Did you go to Oxford?’ Helen said. ‘I met you there, surely.’

‘No.’

‘Then where did we meet?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you go to Cambridge? I have an aunt there—’

‘I didn’t go to university.’

‘My father says that education is the waste of a good childhood.’

‘Wasn’t he educated?’

‘Yes, I think that’s why he says it.’

‘My father had little education and thinks the opposite.’

They didn’t talk any more. They didn’t need to. Gil had danced with no one other than his dancing teacher, but it felt as though he had danced with Helen dozens of times. It seemed as if he could almost remember it. She entranced him. Her eyes sparkled and she was soft and light in his arms. And at the back of his mind, he knew the place that they had met before. The walls were white and so was the bed. It was afternoon and they were inside because of the heat. The houses were white and so was the sunlight and outside fruit grew on the trees, oranges and lemons hanging there such as they never could in England. It was quiet. The floor of the room was bare wooden boards and there was not even a breeze to disturb the thin white curtains at the windows.

*

Abby went outside. Her feelings were all mixed up and tumbled as though she were an egg timer and somebody had turned her upside down. She told herself it didn’t matter that Gil had fallen in love with his brother’s betrothed, that he had not shown any preference for anybody before. She wondered why apparently nobody but she had noticed. Was it because she knew him so
well? Yet she didn’t. They had exchanged barely a dozen words in the past six months. She meant nothing to him and now he must mean nothing to her. She gave a little shiver in the warm night. No good could come of his regard for Edward’s bride to be. Perhaps it was just a momentary thing, passing.

‘Miss Reed?’

She was standing on the lawn in front of the house. She turned around. Robert Surtees, handsome and smiling, was standing behind her.

‘I hope nothing’s wrong.’

‘It was too hot inside.’

‘Would you like to take a walk around the garden?’ he said and offered his arm. He spoke so kindly that Abby liked to hear him and tried to say the right thing back. He made her feel easier. It was late, but the night was not dark. A star peeped through here and there.

‘Helen Harrison is very beautiful,’ Abby said, unable to stop thinking about her.

‘She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,’ he agreed. ‘We’ve met on several occasions. I can’t think why she’s throwing herself away on Edward Collingwood. She could have had a title. She could have married old money and an old name. She took London by storm and now look at her.’

‘What’s wrong with Edward?’

‘Forgive me, the Collingwoods are common.’

‘Charlotte married one.’

He smiled just a little.

‘There are people who have not forgiven her. The woman is vulgar.’

‘She’s very kind.’

‘She introduced us. I’m thankful for that,’ he said.

*

Gil knew that, having danced with Helen, he should have danced with other young women. He looked for Abby, but couldn’t see
her and then spotted Rhoda Carlisle standing alone. She refused. Gil was relieved. He had done his duty and could now go off to think about what had happened. He went into an empty room away from the noise of the party. Beyond the window, in the gardens he could see Abby with Robert. The night was finally beginning to steal past the trees, but he could see clearly in the fading light that they were close together as they walked back across the lawns towards the house.

*

Gil’s only hope was that Helen would go home. During the next few days he did everything he could to avoid her. He stayed at work, but for once work had lost its attraction. He could not put Helen from his mind. She remained at the house. Each evening after Edward came home they would read together and walk in the garden. Charlotte took her visiting to all their friends. In the morning at weekends she would go riding with Edward. In church on Sundays, Gil could hear her sweet voice. Gil wished that she would go away. He wanted to be with her so much he was sure it must have looked obvious, but he could tell that nobody noticed anything different.