Swords and Crowns and Rings (22 page)

But Cushie did not think of killing herself. In a frenzy of fury at herself, her parents, life itself, she rubbed her bloody hands along the wall, tore into her mother's room and dripped blood all over the lace counterpane carefully folded across the chair. She smeared blood on the mirror, opened the wardrobe, and bled over as many of her mother's dresses as she could reach.

Then all at once there was silence.

Mr Moy approached her timidly. Pity and disgust struggled in him. With blood all over her, she looked like some hapless, maltreated animal.

The girl said in a calm, genteel voice, ‘You won't let her get me, Daddy, will you?'

‘No, of course I won't. You're not well, you're overwrought. I'll take you to your bedroom.'

She seemed like a sleepwalker awakened, looking at the bloodied dresses with quavering cries.

‘I've done some dreadful things, and I don't know why. I don't know what came over me. Oh, Daddy, she'll kill me, and I deserve it!'

She felt boneless and alien in his arms as he laid her down. Her eyes were glazed, her blood-smeared face that of a lifeless child. With no trouble at all he got her to swallow some Veronal.

He sat beside the bed a long time, numb with consternation, and remembering irrelevant things, like Cushie's slippers when she was four. They were furry, and made her feet look like animals' paws.

His misery and bewilderment were so great that he could feel his very face changing, his cheeks falling into empty folds, the ligaments of his neck softening. He felt his mother's old worn face taking over his own. Something profound and inexplicable was taking place in his heart: pain, pain!

With difficulty he rose, went downstairs.

Mrs Moy had cleaned up the kitchen, sponged the blood from the walls and floor, got Olwyn back to bed.

‘Warm milk and a spoonful of brandy,' she said.

And she had done all this before the first neighbour had plucked up enough impudence to knock at the back door and ask was there anything wrong.

‘I said Dorothy had cut herself badly and had become hysterical,' she explained.

By some magic she had become firm. Her face was composed. She had risen to the occasion. But Mr Moy, bowed and trembling, sat down at the kitchen table, an iron band across his chest.

‘Are you sure, Belle...what you said?'

‘No; but I think she herself is sure.'

‘The Bank. If it ever gets out. A man in my position.'

‘It will not get out. Somehow we will work things so that it never gets out. I'll think of something.'

‘But what, what?'

‘You can take it for granted that what I shall say will be believed,' said his wife disdainfully.

‘But who?' he muttered. ‘Who could it be?' How could it happen at the Duchess of York? It's eighty guineas a term! And they watch the girls like hawks.'

His wife's silence made him falter.

‘You don't mean...you can't think...not the little fellow across the road?'

‘I fear so.'

‘But I never thought...I didn't think it was possible with such...I mean...' He hid his face. ‘How
could
she, our daughter, a refined, well-educated girl, a
lady?
Oh, God, then the child might...'

She thought he was going to break down, so she quickly brought him a glass of brandy. A dry competence had taken possession of her.

She accepted the crisis, and she would see it through, as her own mother, sentimental, bumbling, Victorian wifey-woman, should have seen through the ruinous infatuation of her daughter Belle.

She made herself speak quietly, soothingly. ‘Everything now depends upon our acting quickly. It may not be too late to have something done.'

‘But that could be dangerous, to Cushie, I mean.'

He saw her stiffen.

‘You mustn't be too hard on her,' he muttered. ‘She...she is so scared.'

She dropped a hand on her husband's beautiful black Celtic hair. ‘Nothing more for you to do, Bede. Go upstairs and try to sleep.'

They lay motionless, side by side in the bed. After a while Isobel leant over and dispassionately looked at her husband's face in the moonlight, greyed over like an old plaster cast. She rose and stood at the window.

Silence, Kingsland asleep, only the moon's polished face to gape at her. Controlled and still, she faced the crisis that was as great for her as it was for her daughter. This could be the end of what had been in the back of her mind since the funeral. It could be, but it would not be. When after nineteen years of exile she had entered her mother's drawing-room, and smelt once again heavy silks, cigars, wine,
eau-de-Portugal
, fondly cared-for flesh and hair, she had known that her opportunity had come.

She was determined to salvage something of her life, and she would do it, even burdened as she was with the ailing Olwyn and now the almost insupportable blow of Dorothy's idiot delinquency.

At her father's funeral Olwyn and Cushie had let her down, but she had carried off the reunion with her family like a princess. Her sisters, smart, prosperous, had been dismayed at her matured but untouched beauty; she had seen envy and consternation written all over their faces.

‘How could it be?' She could sense their thoughts. ‘Married to that person...no servants...living in that disagreeable little town.'

All except Australia, still sharp-chinned, pared in manner and personality; Australia with her abrupt ironic glance that perused her younger sister, understood, and discarded.

In spite of her present state of nervous exaltation, Isobel again felt the peevish astonishment she had experienced when her sister Australia, after an indifferent sentence or two, had turned away to have a long and apparently interested conversation with the blushing Cushie.

She turned her mind to Titus, a tall stranger with a gentle English voice, his clothes subtly different from those of the husbands who stood around the room with their sherry and their stuck-on expressions of gravity or grief. Titus was five years older than Isobel, and had once been married. His wife had died in a boating accident that had had a hushed air of suicide about it. He had no heirs.

Their eyes had met as though they were man and woman, not brother and sister. They had talked a little.

‘Are you going into Papa's business, Titus?'

‘No, dearest, my interests are quite other. I shall leave the newspaper business to my worthy cousins and brothers-in-law, and be content to draw my dividends from a safe distance.'

She felt dismay. ‘You're...you're returning to England, then?'

‘Indeed I am. I have been away from this country so long.' He smiled. ‘I no longer feel antipodean, if indeed I ever did.'

He took her hand, turned it over, looked at it curiously, returned it softly to her lap.

‘Why did you do that, Titus?'

‘Our hands are so alike—and so unlike the navvy hands of our dear sisters. I wonder why? Do you suppose that our beloved grandpapa, Joseph Jackaman, could have been the byblow of some London beau?'

‘Undoubtedly.' She smiled faintly.

Without preamble he said, ‘Come back to London with me, Belle, and be my chatelaine.'

She tried to laugh. ‘I, Titus? But you forget –'

He shook his head smilingly. ‘No, dearest, I remember. Bring the goslings with you, if you wish. Think what advantages for them, their colonial corners rubbed off, handsome marriages. I assure you that our sister Laetitia will do all she can for them. She is under certain obligations to me, is pretty, imprudent Tish.'

The fearful longing that swamped her at his words made tears come into her eyes. He surveyed them with ironic comprehension, and turning without haste to his mother, soft, weepy old puss sitting in her big chair with a sodden handkerchief clutched in her plump hand, said, ‘Poor sweet Isobel, so sad for her that she could not farewell dear Papa before Providence called him. Please comfort her, Mama.'

‘Oh, Mama!' said Isobel mechanically, and so was pressed to her elderly mother's duck-like keel, her cheek hard against the dry limestone-coloured hair, that a gush of daughterly emotion shook her.

‘I've missed you, Mama. Letters aren't enough, are they?'

‘Poor, poor James,' blubbered Clara. ‘He was so
angry
about dying. I'm sure it was no way to meet his Maker. Oh dear, and he did so grieve about you, Belle, my pet. Wasted, wasted, wasted. That's what he always said. And yet he could not bring himself to make the first step towards reconciliation; he was too proud. Oh, Belle, if only you had come home, thrown yourself on his parental affection...'

‘You forget, Mama, I am Papa's daughter. Stiff-necked, I fear.'

Clara smoothed her hair. ‘But it's all right, you know. In the will, I mean. And he has provided handsomely for the girlies, too. Dear James, so generous, so upright, never a harsh word to me all those years...' She dissolved again, and one of the other daughters, Adela, fortunately home from India at the time of her father's unexpected death, gave Isobel a vexed look and led her mother to her boudoir.

Isobel, behind a classic mask of courageously borne bereavement, accepted a cup of tea, sat in the bay window, bent her golden head under the small swathed black satin hat, softly answered the inquisitive questions of her sisters, their husbands, their fashionable offspring in their looped, belled, handkerchief-hemmed clothing, most of them not even in mourning.

What did she care for them? London. Wealth. Visiting my sister, Lady Broome...Cadogan Square. A French governess for Olwyn, the best doctors. Dorothy licked into shape in Switzerland perhaps. And Titus. At the thought of Titus something cloudy and enigmatic stirred. Fear, excitement, a sense of peril—whatever it was, she wanted it.

‘And I shall never come back,' she said to herself.

She did not want to lie down again beside her snoring husband, but there was nowhere else for her to rest. She lay there, staring into the moonlight.

There was no question of taking Cushie to either of Kings-land's doctors. Doctors could be trusted, nurses and receptionists perhaps not. Mrs Moy slipped away by train with her daughter to a northern town and, under cover of an alias, had Cushie examined.

The girl was unresisting. Her predicament seemed so insoluble that she could do nothing but lean on her mother. No matter how her mother raged at her, how condemnatory she was, there was no one else upon whom to lean. Humbly she accepted all that was done and said to her. She felt unsealed, her integrity gone, not because of Jackie, not because of her mother and father, the curt doctor, the superior nurse...but because something that was private and divine had been soiled.

‘I must tell Jackie,' she said with desperate boldness.

‘You will tell no one,' commanded the mother.

‘But Jackie will marry me. We could go away. He loves me,' cried the girl.

‘Stop that absurd whimpering, and never let me hear such a ridiculous suggestion again. You, the granddaughter of James Jackaman, married to a shopkeeper's brat, a penniless labourer, and a dwarf at that. And the ages of you both! Scarcely eighteen. Love! Don't you dare speak the word. There is a great deal more to love than behaving like an animal, let me tell you. Six months from now you will thank your father and me for what we are doing for you now.'

‘I want Jackie! I have to tell Jackie!'

‘Listen to me, Dorothy. You have done the worst thing any girl can do. There is nothing,
nothing
that is worse. If it ever became public, your father's professional life would be ruined, Olwyn and I would never be able to hold up our heads again.'

‘Why is it so bad, why?' blubbered Cushie. Her mother took no notice.

‘No one must know. No one. Are you listening? And if, through your stupidity, that creature or his parents ever get to know about this, then I am finished with you. I shall not lift a finger to help you. Do you understand me, Dorothy?'

Inexorably she kept on and on at Cushie until the girl's sobs became cries of terror.

‘I want your word of honour, your sacred word, that you will not communicate with the Hanna boy, or try to get a message to him in any way. You hear me, Dorothy?'

Tearfully, Cushie promised, for what else was there to do?

‘What will happen to me? I don't know anything about being like this.'

Mrs Moy had a pang of compassion for her shrinking, shuddering daughter, but she steeled herself. The girl had to be frightened into complete obedience.

‘Some parents would send such girls as you to special places, homes of correction, where your disgrace could be hidden and you would have no opportunity to corrupt others. Other families would cast you out on the street, disown you, and well you would deserve it.'

‘No, no, what would I do, where would I go? Mama, help me! I'm sorry; I didn't know it would all end like this.'

‘Your father is now in Sydney making arrangements, at great cost and anxiety to all of us, I can assure you. There are surgical treatments that can, if it is not too late, prevent such an unwanted thing happening. No, ask no questions. What right does your wickedness and vulgar irresponsibility give you to query anything your father and I decide?'

Cowed, unwell, utterly without resources, ignorant as a young animal, Cushie did as she was told, keeping to the house, speaking to no one. But she prayed for Jackie, and his return, his protection. Wild appeals, those prayers were, like messages thrust into a bottle and cast into the sea. And she prayed for forgiveness for the trouble she had brought upon her parents, for whatever she had done wrong.

What had she done wrong? It seemed to Cushie that it was not that she had made love with Jackie, but that she had become pregnant. But she hadn't expected that to happen. She hadn't meant to do wrong, if this was what was wrong.

She was not stupid, but her values were not those of the world in which she had been reared. What it believed romantic folly was something she could not change: the innocent opulence of her own ability to pity and love.