The Rich Are with You Always (59 page)

  They had the same room, with its French opulence, heavy curtains, and glowing fire; but this time there were only two candles, one at each side of the bed. "Make a change," he said.

  She was different too; much more equal to him, more daring, more demanding—to him more lascivious. This time he did not spin matters out so long, but the joy was sweeter and more intense for that. Afterward, she lay with her back to him, curled up upon his naked body, on the hearthrug, luxuriating in the heat from the coals.

  "Fallen Samson," she said, playing with him.

  "Samson?"

  "Well," she said archly, "he thrust apart the pillars of the temple."

  He chuckled. "You are very good," he said.

  "We are both very good—if you mean it like that. We know exactly what we want, and we will not allow complications."

  "You don't know how difficult it ought to be," he said, unconvinced. "I've known no other woman I feel so immediately at one with as you—it really is amazing."

  "Don't start nurturing romantic illusions," she warned. "Much as I love Samson here, I'd stop seeing you if I even suspected that was happening."

  He stroked her back and shoulders. "Do you not want me to tell you that though all women are nice before, few are even tolerable after?"

  She lay back on him and purred. "You can tell me
that
." After a pause she said, "How many befores and afters have there been?"

  He laughed a long time, until she began to feel isolated. As usual he did not notice. "I'm sorry," he said, mechanically, and still laughing. "I knew you would ask me that."

  "So you've worked out the answer."

  "No." He sighed his laughing to a halt. "I'd need to go back to Bristol to tell you exactly. But very roughly, very round-figurish, I'd say a hundred and eighty times a year—perhaps two hundred—for thirteen years. And before that—you mean with women, not solitary?"

"Yes. With the three hundred and eighteen."

  "Before that, before I was twenty, probably not more than two or three a month from when I was sixteen. Thirty a year for five years. That's a hundred and fifty plus two thousand six hundred. I make it two thousand seven hundred and fifty."

  She let out her breath in astonishment. "How many do you remember?"

  "They are all written down. When I read back I remember them all. Each one."

  "And the girls?"

  "I remember how they felt to me. Their bodies. And a lot of faces too, of course. But mostly their—where they were soft or bony or angular or tall or pneumatic, and mobile or still. That sort of thing."

  She longed to ask where she ranked in that monstrous galaxy but had too much pride. And he had too little sympathy to tell her without being prompted.

  "Did you enjoy them all?" she asked instead.

  He pondered that a long time. "There's only one I remember not enjoying. That was an unfinished one on a canal bank, among the reeds, with a girl who was a simpleton and a bit crippled. Mainly because she was kept tied to a chair most days. I didn't enjoy that because I was interrupted in the middle by another man who claimed he'd seen her first."

  Sarah clenched her jaw and eyes tight shut, trying not to laugh at the utter, gargantuan selfishness of this man. Yet even in the moment that it shocked her, she realized too that it was precisely the quality that made him right for her purposes. "So whose selfishness was top?"

  "Funny you should ask that," he went on. "Usually I have to—worship at the temple, let's say, at least four times a week, otherwise I get so—impossible. But since last week, just knowing this day was coming, and remembering the last one, I haven't even wanted to. So that shows, doesn't it."

  "Shows what?"

  "There must be something lacking in those other encounters."

  She giggled. "I imagined
I
was obsessed by thoughts of sexual congress. But I see I am still in the nursery."

  And then she told him how she was proposing to make one clear day a week in London, so that they could go on meeting. "And we cannot possibly spend twenty to twenty-five pounds a month on this room. We could rent a whole house for that. So you, Mr. Thornton dear, are to look for clean and decent furnished rooms, somewhere quiet and discreet and near the West End and off the paths your friends and mine might tread. And get two sets of keys made. We will share the rent, of course. And we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Carey. Silvia Carey and…Samson Carey."

He laughed. "It will deceive no one."

  "It will not have to. It is the form alone that matters. And one more thing. I insist that your…aides-memoire of these encounters of ours should not lie among two thousand seven hundred and fifty others. You are to leave them in our apartment."

  "At once, majesty! May I ask why?"

  She almost burst out laughing again; of course he needed to ask.

  "Because," she said, reaching for the first convenient lie, "if it so happens that you are delayed or unable to visit me—which must happen from time to time—I shall not then be entirely inconsolable."

  It pleased him inordinately to hear it.

The Lady Bear-pronounced-Bere was not at all as Sarah had imagined her—no kindly, distant lady bountiful but a tough, vicious harridan. She wanted it quite clear that she had no time for mere charitable intentions, that she suspected everyone who walked through the doors of prurient curiosity, that she ran the committee and was not particularly upset if no one liked her or what she did. And what extraordinary qualities did Mrs. Cornelius imagine she had to offer the Society?

  "Understanding," Sarah said without hesitation. And she was gratified to see that despite all the care her ladyship took to conceal it, the word and Sarah's pugnacity had pricked her curiosity. "You do not know," Sarah went on, "that when my father, who was vicar of Coldharbour in Cheshire, died, and my mother followed him soon after, I was left in dire peril of the fate from which we attempt"—she liked that
we—
"to rescue our girls in this Society." An imp of mischief prompted her to lean forward and ask, with intense seriousness: "Have you, Lady Bear, ever lain drugged and barely sensible while your undoing is bargained for upon the stair outside?"

  Lady Bear was too astonished to reply coherently, but the word "impertinence" and flecks of saliva escaped her moustachioed lips.

  "That," Sarah said dramatically, "is what I mean by
understanding
."

  Her ladyship was curious still, despite herself. "You?" she began.

  Sarah nodded. "I was rescued in the very nick of time. And taken and placed in virtuous and honest employment where"—her voice fell to its normal tones and she became sincere—"I had the fortune to attract the favourable notice of my employer, Mr. Cornelius."

  For the first time Lady Bear smiled. "And now you are…"

  "His widow," Sarah said quickly, now hating herself for using the story so, and disliking Lady Bear for having provoked it. What did she care whether she had Lady Bear's approval or not? She had only come here because of the Stevensons' letter. She could easily find some other charity with a weekly committee to suit her needs.

  But it was not going to be necessary. She had won Lady Bear's grudging approval and, on handing over the donation of four hundred pounds, won her place on the committee, which met every Thursday morning. The trust John had set up with Tom's money yielded eight hundred and fifty pounds a year, which was hers absolutely. And since John and Nora wouldn't take a penny for her keep, most of the twelve hundred it had yielded so far was still intact.

  "Come and see the Refuge out at Hornsey," Lady Bear said. "My carriage is outside."

  But Sarah explained she had business in town; would tomorrow be as convenient? After the committee meeting?

  "Of course, Mrs. Cornelius. I suppose you may have a reference? Since your parents and husband are all passed over? Please do not be offended; it is the commissioners of charity who insist."

  "Not at all. It is most proper. The only friend I remember from those days, a friend of my father's, was the Reverend Doctor Prendergast, who is now Bishop of Manchester. I'm sure he will speak for me. He will remember me as little Sarah Nevill. In fact"—the imp returned—"when you write to him, do say that it was something he told me at our last meeting which awakened me to the perils a girl may face and that has brought me to you, eager to help."

Each week her lust for Thornton grew stronger. Fear had gone completely. So had her simple, ignorant curiosity. The days that led up to each Wednesday and, later, each Thursday, were filled with bodily memories of him, of his hands on her hips and breasts, of his teeth and tongue down her back, of his priapic strength and his glinting, greedy eyes. She found it odd to like him so much, to like his sexual gluttony, his towering selfishness, his total insensitivity to anything that was not part of his finale or of the long and devious road toward it. How could she like these things so warmly, while the thought that anyone could love him made her almost bilious?

  If one could not answer that question, there was no point in framing lesser ones. So she asked no questions at all, but accepted the extraordinary things she was doing, the tissue of lies and fantasy she was weaving, as normal. And what made it normal was that she could face the thought of John and Nora being in bed (not now, of course, because Nora was still very poorly, but the memory of them, and the prospect)—she could accept it without envy or self-pity. Now she could admit that, for eighteen months, she had felt both those destructive emotions. And she was not now plagued with stupid, arrested-schoolgirl fantasies of lustful Turks. And she no longer went around feeling like a boiler at the point of bursting. Anything that removed such blemishes could not be utterly wrong. It could not even be very wrong. If Mr. Thornton were a Musselman, he and she and Mrs. Thornton would probably be very happy together.

In the first week of January 1847, Nora had healed well enough for Dr. Hales to take off the sandbag entirely. "But the fascia will take some time to knit thoroughly. So you must still treat yourself tenderly. No Valsalva's manoeuvre— d'you know what I mean?"

  Nora, thinking she did, blushed and agreed. The thought of
that
had, for once, not crossed her mind. But later she looked it up in the
Household Physician
and found that it meant no more than straining at stool, straining to cough, or to exhale vigorously. What a strange world doctors lived in, where one did not cough or sneeze but "performed Valsalva's manoeuvre."

  Soon she was allowed up briefly, each day, to walk around the room and sit in a padded chair by the fire and read. John usually stayed part of the mornings and went to London each afternoon and evening. He told her he was delighted at the way those to whom he had delegated parts of their business were coping. She had private doubts—because nothing in her experience ever went that smoothly—but she pretended to accept all he said.

  One thing that did please her was the way John now spoke about the wider world beyond their business. Before, he had always behaved as if railways were the prime force of the times; it mattered little what governments and factions and the Treasury planned, the railways, he said, would sweep everything before them. Human wishes were powerless before the greater might of steam and iron. But now he spoke more often of things people had said in Parliament—not in pity at their blindness but with respect for their wisdom. Lord George Bentinck told his friends he had consulted John on the drafting of the bill for the aid of Irish railways. And since railway legislation in general took up more than a quarter of parlimentary time, John was, one way and another, canvassed and consulted by an increasing number of people in both parties and at the Board of Trade.

  Near the end of January, he came back with the news that a new British Association had been formed for the relief of the distress in remote parishes of Ireland and Scotland. There had been serious riots in Scotland, where poor country folk were just as dependent on the potato as were the Irish and where the failure had been equally universal. In Ireland there had been disturbances and a flood of violent talk, but no rioting on any great scale. In fact, where the distress was worst—in the far west of Ireland—whole villages had been quietly dying without a word of protest or the throwing of a single stone. The snows of this winter lay in one unbroken shroud from Cape Clear, right across Ireland, England, Europe, and Russia…all the way to Siberia. It was the hardest winter, not just in memory, but in written record also. People who had half starved for a year and fully starved for another six months were dying in numbers that stirred even the most antipapist conscience. The new British Association was one response.