Paddington Green, page 20
And he seized his overcoat from the bench, took his hat in his hand and slammed out of the door with a violence that Abel did not know he had in him. Standing there in the dim passageway staring after him Abel felt the only stirring of respect for his third son that he could ever remember experiencing. But behind him Nancy stood slowly rubbing the glass she held against her apron and biting her tongue to keep back the words of scorn she ached to pile on the departed William. She had no respect for him at all, nor ever would have. Much as they would need help at Nellie’s in the difficult time she knew was to come, she for one felt they were well shot of William Lackland.
17
As William’s cab went rattling noisily through the sunny streets of Covent Garden on its way to St James’s—for he felt the need of the company of good friends at his club in a way that was almost like a hunger for food—he wanted to kick himself. To have let his anger get the better of him in such a way as to virtually tell the old man of his plan to override his authority had been a piece of self-indulgence which, he did not doubt, would cost him dear. But the sight of him standing there with that look of sureness on his cold closed face, with that cool handsomeness that his son had always admired and wanted for himself and been so hopelessly aware that he lacked, had been more than he could tolerate.
Now, remembering the conversation in detail, he moved pettishly in his seat and wondered what the deuce Rupert would have to say; enough, no doubt, to leave scars, for Rupert had a wicked tongue when he wanted to employ it to hurt, as William well knew. The telling of Rupert would be almost as disagreeable as remembering the telling of Abel.
He watched the streets go by the dusty little window; Long Acre and Leicester Fields, Lisle Street and Coventry Street and on through Regent’s Circus into Piccadilly; but he saw little. His mind was a turmoil, with thoughts of what he must do to further his designs about the future of the hospital, fears about his inevitable brush with Rupert, and his concern about how much longer he could continue, as they had agreed he should, to make medicines in the way he had been doing at Wapping. They had been lucky to avoid confrontation with his father before this, he told himself gloomily, for we have been at it for months now, and he’s no fool, bully and devil incarnate though he may be—
His father. Travelling through London’s streets on that unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in March he found himself trying to cast his memory back to other years, other conversations with his father; why had the two of them become so set against each other? Were other men on such uneasy terms with their Governors? Surely not! Surely this man was unique in being so harsh, so unapproachable, so altogether lacking in any of the usual fatherly virtues?
He had heard schoolfellows talk of their fathers in easy comfortable terms, making it clear that they spent time in their company that gave both parties pleasure; remembered old Sellars, his closest friend in his apprenticeship days, whose father had gone gaming with him, had taken him on his first visit to a brothel, and generally busied himself about his son’s worldly education; and tried to imagine Abel behaving so with himself or Rupert or the others. Had he ever done so with Jonah, the older brother William could only just remember, upon whom he had not set eyes for ten years or more?
But he could not put his mind to so impossible a task as to picture such scenes as his imaginings were trying to conjure up, and he abandoned the attempt. He must accept that, for whatever reason, his father was not his friend, nor ever had been. His harshness was a part of him like the colour of his eyes or the shape of his head and anything that happened now as the result of his sons’ unwillingness to tolerate any longer his heavy-handed rule was his own fault.
‘I wonder if he was so with Mamma.’ The thought came into William’s mind as his cab arrived at the portico of his club in St James’s but he pushed it aside immediately. Thinking of his Mamma was something he had long since trained himself not to do, just as he had long since given up visiting her in her silent room. There were some things no man should have to do, and thinking about and visiting a relation in her state was one of them.
By the time William was ensconced in the gaming room in his club, a glass of brandy at his side as he watched a needlesharp game of faro, the sun was beginning to lose some of its brilliance, for it was now past four in the afternoon, and evening was not far over the horizon. But the crowds in the park were as thick as they had been all day and the hurdygurdy men and the sellers of sweetmeats were plying a most satisfactory trade among the people of the poorer sort who had come to stroll along the shores of the Serpentine in the midst of their fashionable betters and to make audible remarks about the quality of their dresses.
Jonah, with Celia on one arm and Oliver hanging on to his other hand, was uneasy, feeling obscurely as though he belonged neither to the quality nor the others. At one time there would have been no question in his mind; he would have known himself undoubtedly to be one of the ton, a man of fashion fully entitled to take the centre of the pathway, probably driving his own elegant equipage along the wide paths to bow to and be bowed to by acquaintances that he might meet.
But that belonged to the old days, before his marriage, and he tried to see himself as he had been then in his extreme youth, and could not. How could he, when for so long he had worked in that tawdry, noisy, smoky establishment that he and Celia had created? It was because of the time he spent there that he no longer felt able to include himself among the people with whom he most wanted to belong; the comfortable men of stature and elegance and ability.
He was not one of the other sort either, he told himself, looking sideways at the parading women in their gaudy feathered hats and blowsy pinned-up gowns, the men in their flat billycock hats and shiny serge coats. Work cheek by jowl with them I may, but I am not such a one, I am not, nor ever will be. Nor shall the children. And his hand tightened on Oliver’s so that the child looked up at him, a little surprised, and then pulled his hand away and said, ‘Papa, may I not sail the boat here? I am sure it is a very good place.’
‘The Long Water will be better,’ Jonah said. ‘We will be there soon—’ And more pleasant, his mind added. About the shores of the Long Water the gawpers and shrill cockneys tended not to go, leaving the way clear for the quieter and more worthy people and their children. Oliver would be better there.
Celia, walking beside him with one hand holding her green plaid skirt above her neat black boots, and the other tucked into the curve of his elbow, was happier than she would have thought she could be. For days it had hung over her like a great thick fog; the sick dull anger, the blackness of her mood, the ever-simmering rage barely below the surface of her mind. All the time the vision of her had been lurking at the edge of her consciousness so that she had been sure that if she could but turn her head swiftly enough she would see her, standing there laughing and jeering and then ogling Jonah, and Jonah staring back and smiling and becking and nodding at her—
But then, in that white hot flash of rage that had woken her that morning from an uneasy dream, that had made her turn viciously on the bewildered half-asleep Jonah at her side, she had found salvation; in shrieking of her rage and hurt and fury, she had found the way to lose it, and she smiled a little at the shimmering black water beside which they were walking, and then lifted her chin and looked up at the sky with its now thinning but still spring-like blue tenderness.
She felt her spirits lift until it was as though she was in the clouds herself and floating up there full of joy and peace and comfort. She had been wrong, she had been wrong, and Jonah loved her and only her. She had been full of fears of nothing. Lilith was far away and could not harm her. No longer just at the edge of her vision, but far behind her, that was where Lilith was. And she tried to ignore the fact that the vision had not completely gone away and was as happy as she knew how to be.
The crowds were less now, as they approached the Long Water, and they could see the trees on the other side in Kensington Gardens lifting their naked branches, and just beginning to blush greenly with new buds, and elegantly dressed couples strolling among them, and Oliver pulled away from his father’s hand and ran for the bridge to gallop to the very middle and stand above the centre arch and stare down at the sluggishly moving water.
‘Papa!’ he cried, as Jonah and Celia came up to him. ‘Papa, it looks very deep! Is it so? Could my boat be lost here? Could my sailors drown here?’
Jonah stood beside him, resting his elbows on the parapet and staring down at the opaque water and his own and Oliver’s reflection in it. Beside him Celia too bent her head to look down, and for a moment the three of them surveyed their wrinkled moving faces as little breaths of wind sent eddies moving across the mirror surface.
‘Indeed, your sailors could drown here,’ Jonah said then, and smiled faintly at Oliver’s serious expression. ‘Real people have done so, you know! But I don’t think you need fear for your sailors or your boat today. It is not precisely rough, after all.’
Oliver stood on tiptoes again to look dubiously over the parapet at the water. ‘Well, not at present. But it might become so. Real people, Papa? Who?’
‘Oh, a lady drowned here that I know of. A poet’s wife, she was—’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘To be sure, this is a melancholy matter to discuss on so sunny an afternoon! We shall go and sail your boat and make sure your sailors come to no harm! Come along, and we will launch you and you shall be the admiral.’
‘What poet, Papa?’ Oliver, as dogged as always when in search of a new piece of information, tugged again on Jonah’s coat-tails and, with the unending patience he always displayed when dealing with his children, Jonah launched into an account of the poet Shelley, and how his wife Harriet had ended her own life by throwing herself into the Long Water, and Oliver listened and nodded and began to ask questions about what happened to people when they drowned.
Beside them Celia suddenly shivered, and pulled her green woollen mantle more snugly about her shoulders and said sharply, ‘I think you had best get on with your sailing, Oliver. It is not so warm as it was, and we must soon, I think, go in search of a hack on the Oxford Road and fetch your sister—’ Oliver nodded and ran to crouch at the edge of the water and, with great caution, pushed his small craft out on to the smooth surface.
‘I shall stay here, I think,’ Celia said and stopped at the foot of the bridge, ‘for the ground looks a little marshy there, and I abominate muddy boots. You go and play with him, if you wish—’
Jonah nodded and gave her hand a squeeze and turned to go. And then stopped and turned back to her and said impulsively, ‘I am so glad we took this walk, Celia. It is not often enough that we can enjoy these family pleasures. If Phoebe were with us, it would be quite complete, would it not? Perhaps, as the summer comes on and the weather improves we can make more time for ourselves and come here more often? You work so very hard, my dear, and I am sure it is this that so— that upsets your nerves, you know, and makes you anxious. You were not always so—so—’
‘So captious?’ she said harshly, and looked up at him, her mouth hardening, but at the sight of his squarely handsome face and the grey eyes so filled with affection for her she softened again and spoke more gently.
‘You may be right. I am sorry if I am sometimes—difficult. I do not wish to be so, indeed I do not. But the blackness comes upon me, you know, and I cannot always see beyond it, and I think and think, and the ideas go about my head in such a turmoil. It could be that I become fatigued, perhaps, but I know of no other way to do what must be done except completely. The work is there, and if I do not keep after people, naught is done as it should be and, well—’ she shrugged, ‘then I become more angered than ever. But I will try. If you wish me to—’
‘I do indeed wish you would,’ he said earnestly. ‘I will do all I can to ease the burden—if you will permit me. But you are a very determined person, Celia, are you not? You always were. You determined to wed me, and so you did and here I am—’ and he laughed.
She felt the chill move into her again. She had said she would wed him and so she had. Not for her the usual maidenly waiting to be wooed. She had set her cap at him, and he had succumbed. That was the way of it, and she could not deny it. But if only it had not been so! If only she could remember Jonah seeking her, wanting her, yearning for her as she had yearned for him! But it had not been that way! It had been Lilith for whom he had yearned and wanted and sought—
‘He is waiting for you,’ she said, her voice flat, and he peered at her for a moment and then nodded and went down the slope of the bridge to crouch beside his son and send the boat moving further out, with the aid of a stick Oliver had found at the water’s edge. And she turned and rested her arms upon the bridge and watched them; and tried not to brood further, feeling the thin afternoon sun slanting across her back, watching the water’s faint movement and the dancing reflections of the light in her search for peace and quietness in her mind.
And it did help her, that quiet time. The sounds of the Gardens receded into the back of her mind, and the glittering water she was staring at grew and grew until it seemed that all she could see was radiance and movement, with a faint green line that was the trees and grass at the edges of her vision. And she felt warm and comfortable, as though her body had melted away, leaving only her awareness there leaning on the stone bridge in the sunshine.
So, when the sound pulled her out of her reveries, it was almost shocking in its effect. The sound of a child shrieking, with shouted unintelligible words momentarily rising above the hubbub and then being overcome by an even more violent shriek, and she lifted her head and tried to clear her vision of the greenish blur that the light had left there, and stared in the direction of the sound.
Further along the bank, separated from the bridge by knots of people and children and boats and foreshortened by the distance were two women and a child. One, obviously a lady in a plum-coloured walking gown and most sumptuous furs, was standing with her hands held to her head in some distress, while the other, equally clearly a servant in her sombre black mantle and severely untrimmed bonnet, was holding a child who was kicking and thrashing about in a perfect paroxysm of temper. Beyond them, on the water, could be seen the probable cause of his rage—a large and very costly toy boat lying on its side shipping water and gradually disappearing from view; the kicking child raised its head and saw it sink deeper and wailed even more loudly, if that were possible.
Just below her Oliver stood up and tried to see what was happening, but could not and pulled on Jonah and cried, ‘Papa! What is the noise, Papa?’ And Jonah too stood up and lifted his chin to stare along the water’s bank to see if he could identify the source of the fuss.
Up on the bridge Celia blinked again, and her sight began to clear as she cupped her hands over her eyes to shade them, and now she could see beyond the little group that was attracting everyone’s attention another small party, this time made up of a man, a woman in blue, and two children, and one of the children, a boy with red hair, came running along the shore towards the shrieking child, and with the long stick he was holding in his hand leaned over and reached for the sinking boat. The stick, by some small miracle, managed to tuck its tip under one of the sails just before the vessel finally disappeared, the boy began to draw it back, with great care, and there was a splatter of applause and laughter from the watchers.
Almost at once the shrieking child stopped his hullabaloo and scrambled out of the restraining black arms that had been so grimly holding him, and in the sudden quietness Celia heard Oliver’s voice below her cry, ‘Why, Papa! Look, Papa, there is Phoebe! Is that not Phoebe? Is that my aunt? And Frederick? It must be—’ and he started to run along the edge of the water, slithering and sliding dangerously in the mud as he went twisting and turning among the people who stood between him and those he wanted to reach.
And at once, Jonah ran after him, calling back to Celia over his shoulder, ‘The foolish child—he’ll fall in the water—’ leaving her still standing there with her hand cupped over her eyes, staring along the shore and feeling a shock of coldness filling her as though the Long Water itself had started to rise with stunning speed to encircle first her legs and then her belly and her chest until the chill reached her throat and bade fair to choke her.
For not only had she recognized her daughter; she had also recognized the woman in black, now standing and pulling her skirts to rights, for the child had made unmerciful attacks upon her.
Hawks.
Hawks of the sour visage and even more sour temper. Hawks who had reared her and her sister and brother and treated them all so casually with what little energy she had left after tending the only person for whom she had any real feeling. And Celia felt her eyes move sideways as her gaze was drawn to that person, the woman in plum-coloured velvet by her side, who was now bending over the child and his recovered boat and saying something to the boy with red hair who was standing awkwardly next to her.
Lilith. Her mother. Lilith.
Even before Oliver and Jonah had reached the point halfway between herself and the two women, even before the woman in blue and her tall elegant companion had also converged on the group, Celia had turned and started to run across the bridge, back towards the Oxford Road, stumbling over the grass with her skirts held in both hands and totally unaware of the curious stares and occasional jeers that followed her. All she knew was that he had lied to her. Jonah had lied to her. He had told her that he had not taken Phoebe to Lilith, and he had lied to her. He had brought her here to mock her with his lies, to make her suffer and sink even more deeply under the cloud of the knowledge that he had lied to her for all these years. Lilith, Lilith, Lilith, was the only person he had ever cared for.
It was beginning to grow dark when William left his club to stand on the steps looking down into a St James’s vivid in the glow of its elegant new gaslight, pulling on his gloves while his handsome malacca cane was tucked under his arm and his glossy hat was set at an angle on his head. He felt jaunty, pleased with himself and with the brandy warm within his belly. It had helped to clear his thinking, that brandy, and he was grateful to it. He may have blown the gaff to his father, but it need not make any difference, his brandied thinking had told him. The old man could be stopped from selling the Wapping manufactory, one way or another. The first step was simply to make Wapping indispensable and that meant preventing Nellie’s buying its medicines from any other source. He must discover just where Conran planned to do his buying and move in ahead of him. However much some other establishment might be interested in doing business with Nellie’s, there were ways of persuading them not to. Or at least to hold off for a while. He was enough of a businessman, William told himself in satisfaction, to handle other businessmen. So, to Conran in the morning and then his father would see a thing or two!
