The Rich Are with You Always (56 page)

  "No, no. The ladies should have at least one man to defend their honour. And who better? Look at them! On opposite walls like milkmaids and bumpkins at a harvest dance!"

  "What have we been condoning, John? All unawares!"

  "What? Orgies of paper and leather?"

  They giggled helplessly.

  "Where can she have got such an idea?" Sarah asked.

  "Oh, those
Ladies' Drawing Room Companion
things. They cram them full of rubbish like that."

  "Well, she's a tonic."

  He sighed, unable to laugh anymore. "I'll tell Nora. It'll brighten her up, I know."

Later, Sarah wondered what it was like to have a mind that saw the salacious possibilities of everything around it—a goat in every finger. What sort of connubial life did Arabella and Walter have?

  She was no longer ashamed that such questions could occur to her. It was a way of letting the fire consume itself, she said, whenever it struck her that she ought to feel guilty. The passions that Tom Cornelius had awakened would, she now realized, never slumber again. For good or ill, they were there, a fact of her history, and she had to come to terms with them.

  She could not go back in memory to that source, to her few precious nights with Tom. The pain of reliving any one of her moments with him was still strong. For material memories, she was reduced to the imagined shape of Sam, standing away from her in the dark making his little cries—and an even more imaginary Dey of Algiers, who was featured in a story called (for some reason) The Lustfu
l
Turk, which had once circulated among the kitchen maids at the Tabard.

  So she was not ashamed to picture Walter and Arabella, together, like that. Especially not Walter; there was something foxy, gluttonlike about his stocky little body, bearded grin, and glittering eye. She would do nothing about it, of course. Sam had been her first, and would be her last, foray into the world of real men. But it was comforting to think of the possibilities—out there. Ready.

Nora did not maintain the momentum of her recovery. For days she lingered in that half-world between silent, grateful consciousness and complete oblivion. She took some solid food but lived mostly on soup and milk. Often she was not awake above an hour a day. Dr. Hales came often and seemed pleased enough with her lack of progress.

  "She'll take months to be well over it," he said. "It was a very close thing. The surgery is healing wonderfully." He said they could send further word to Sam saying the crisis was over.

  The children came to see her every day too. If she was awake she would hear them recite or read to her, and she would tell them to be kind to Aunt Sarah.

  "Does it distress you to hear us play outside, Mama?" Winifred asked one day.

  "I haven't heard you at all," Nora said.

  "But would it if you did?" Young John added.

  Nora smiled and shook her head, and they left barely able to subdue their excitement, for tomorrow Uncle Walter had promised to bring aver his three oldest boys, Nicholas, Thomas, and Albert, and a big sled he had made from some old copper tubing.

  When the children had left, John and Nora were once more alone. The silence returned. They smiled at each other, like strangers.

  "How is the business?" she asked again.

  He laughed gently, more embarrassed than amused that she could ask no other question.

  "I remember nothing," she said. "It must have been worse for you."

  "I think I was in a kind of fever. The worst things that I…my worst fears seemed real. But real things, like the train and Thornton waiting and so on—they seemed to float. You know the way things look after you've banged your head? Immediately after? They were like that." He paused. "It was strange to hold onto one's fears as the only real things." He wanted her to know exactly what it had been like.

  "I remember nothing," she repeated.

  "That must be the anæsthesiant. What a wonderful thing."

"Only the feeling that you were there. I kept feeling that."

"You mean before I really came?"

"I don't remember."

  She looked out over the snow-shrouded park. "D'you know what? I'd love to be in a horse-drawn sleigh. All wrapped up in furs. Gliding over that snow."

  "Really?" he asked. "Would you like that?"

  His earnestness turned the idea from a pretty fancy to a request. She looked back at him, smiling. "I would. But of course it's out of the question."

  "Anything you want," he said. "Anything that's possible." She reached for his hand.

  "Strong grip," he told her. "You had a strong grip that night too. It was the only sign of hope for me."

  "It's not like you to despair."

  "I didn't exactly despair. I was angered."

  
"Angered!"

  "With meself. With us, to be honest. I thought of all the time we had wasted. Chasing business we'd no need for." He felt her hand stiffen. "Time we could have better spent in each other's company. Why do we do it? I sometimes think there's a sort of madness in us."

  He spoke to their linked hands but when she did not reply he was forced to look up. Her gaze was steady, her blank face watchful.

  He looked back at their hands. "Why don't we take our ease, eh? We could live this whole century out. We could live beyond any dreams we had when we got wed. And see the children off with a good competence."

  She smiled as mothers smile at the enthusiasms of children.

  He wanted to tell her that perhaps they had made their business a substitute for too much in their life. So that happiness at its success had sometimes stood in place of a deeper happiness—in fact, of the happiness he had felt slipping away when he feared she might die. But it was too hard to put all that into words or into exact words; and if he got it wrong, it might only cause her pain.

  In an odd way she expressed the same thought but gave it an opposite colour. "I'm more than content," she said. "Look at Walter Thornton and Arabella. They must spend ten times as many days together as we do—or, I won't say together but under one roof. Yet they remain strangers. In fact, think of all the people we know. There isn't one couple doesn't spend more time together than us. Yet even if we were four hundred miles apart, I'd say we get more out of being Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson than all of them get out of their…
arrangements
." She took her hand from his and smoothed down the counterpane. "No. I can't wait to get back into things."

  He looked glum.

  "Oh, John!" she chided. "You'd go mad in retirement."

  "I'd find things to do."

  "Build model cathedrals in fishbone. If that isn't madness."

  For a long time he looked out over the snow. She wondered if he had heard her. "So you don't think we make too much of it," he said at last.

  She closed her eyes, weary now. "We do what we have to. What we know. What we were put here to do." It was luxurious to sink down into sleep, so slowly.

  After another long pause he said, "I sometimes wonder if we've gained so very much."

  But all she heard was his voice; and all she felt was the comfort that he was still there.

  He stayed for the best part of the afternoon, watching her sleep, glad it was now such an easy sleep. Gradually, the sense of all that he had failed to say receded within him.

Walter trudged a path through the virgin snow between the rectory and Lamb Dell. There he joined the shepherds' path through the wood and along the lime avenue to Maran Hill. The boys scampered and snow-balled behind him and tried to steal rides on the sled. Walter pretended not to notice for a dozen or twenty paces; then he would either turn around and chase them in fury or, still pretending not to notice, he would drop of mock exhaustion and, when they crowded round shouting "Up, Neddy! Giddap!" he would grab the two nearest ankles and upend their owners in the snow. He was truly exhausted by the time they arrived. John and Sarah came out with Winifred, Young John, and Caspar, running with controlled excitement, reminding themselves with every step not to scream and whoop.

  The park was separated from the lower pasture and water meadow by a thorn hedge halfway down the hill. But John and two of the gardeners had been out that morning and not only cleared a twenty-foot gap, cutting the thorns back to ground level, but had packed it after with fresh snow. So now there was an uninterrupted downhill run for over half a mile.

  "Who will go first?" he asked, meaning himself or Walter.

  "Me, meee, meeee!" chorused six raucous throats.

  "You," Walter said. "I'm exhausted."

  So John set off on the test run, with six yelling, disappointed, happy children running in his wake, leaving Walter and Sarah stamping and cheering at the hillcrest.

  "I meant to finish making a pair of snowshoes from some old tennis racquets," he told Sarah. "That's why I'm worn out."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "I got discouraged, I suppose. Mrs. Thornton said nothing would induce her to walk anywhere but the road."

  "Oh, do finish them!" Sarah said. "I have never seen snowshoes and I would so love to try."

  He smiled and looked at her so long that she grew embarrassed. "Very well," he said at last. "I'll bring them tomorrow."

  "If they're as well made as that sled, I'll need not fear. Look how it has carried Mr. Stevenson."

  "
You
need not fear anyway," he said.

  This time it was she who almost stared him out. "No. I fancy I wouldn't," she said.

  When John came back with the sled, beetroot-faced and breathless, plagued with children, Walter tried to get Sarah to go down with him; but she avoided the move adroitly and, saying "Ladies first, children," took Winifred in front of her and, to a chorus of groans and boos, set off to follow John's tracks to the bottom.

  "Who's next? Who's next?" the five boys shouted in an agony of impatience.

  "All of you," Walter said, to loud cheers. "But the two eldest—you, Nicholas, and you, Thomas—go down and bring it back up for the ladies."

  "My granddad's gardener says that in America they call a sled a tar-bogging," Nicholas said.

  "That's stupid," Young John told him. "It's obviously a sled."

  Then Caspar said he was cold and Sarah had to take him back indoors.

That night, Nora asked John where consols stood. He laughed and patted her and said he had no idea. For the first time he saw her vexed.

  "You must tend to the business," she said. "If I fret because I feel it neglected, how can I ever mend?"

  And she made him go down and get the paper. "Consols are ninety-three and a quarter for money, ninety-three and three-eighths for time. Exchequer bills are six premium," he read.

  She sighed. "Two years ago, in forty-five, they were sixty-seven premium. One year ago, thirty-two premium. It looks as if we have until August or September."