‘A little early.’

  ‘I was stupid, I know.’

  ‘You didn’t trust me. Perhaps that wasn’t so stupid.’ A dart of unhappy fire sprang from the depth of his gold-flecked eyes; his face looked bruised and crumpled. She wanted to throw herself against his shoulder and weep.

  ‘I didn’t tell him, Clinton. How can you believe that? I don’t know how Louise found out. I think she or a maid opened Maguire’s reply. Louise wrote to father. He came here … I know he won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s already told Esmond … said you were kind enough to show him the certificate.’

  ‘I had no choice. He was threatening to make inquiries in Ireland unless I confirmed what Louise had said. For pity’s sake, what could I do?’

  ‘Never have broken your promise by writing to the priest in the first place.’

  ‘How was that breaking faith? He knew we were married and understood the need for secrecy.’ Her eyes were unflinching now. ‘Are you accusing me of putting Louise up to telling her grandfather?’

  ‘So he’d force me to acknowledge you?’ Clinton smiled with half-closed eyes. ‘I never thought that for a moment … though perhaps it’s his intention.’ He turned away and walked out into the yard.

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked, following him.

  ‘Do?’ he murmured abstractedly, aiming a kick at a bucket. ‘It makes no difference … couldn’t matter less.’ He laughed harshly. ‘To be honest, I rather hoped you had told him; it might have evened the score a bit. You look at me as if you’ve done something wrong … you. The irony, my God, the irony.’ She was looking at him with heartbreaking tenderness. He tried to concentrate his mind on what was to come: a few words, and no yielding to the insidious desire to justify or seek forgiveness. He thought: if only it were enough simply to tell her what was done in Ireland; but there was more to say; and though he longed to be done, his thoughts felt slow-footed groping things. She touched his hand, but he pulled it away as if burned. He said rapidly:

  ‘Nothing’s as it seems. I fancy it’s either … no. We say that man’s true steel, that one a coward … We change so much in and out of love that who can tell what we were and what we’ll become?’ He broke off as a maid came out of the creamery. Clinton took Theresa’s arm and walked with her into the kitchen garden; but there too, they were not alone. Two gardeners were at work planting spring cabbages. They went through the narrow gate into the orchard. Under one of the largest trees was a seat, hemmed about by forked stakes supporting the more heavily laden branches. As they sat down, she asked in a low voice: ‘Why did he refuse you? Why?’

  ‘I couldn’t meet his terms. It’s over.’

  ‘Is that all you’ll say?’

  ‘We can’t change his mind.’ A pigeon flapped overhead towards the house and he gazed after it with restless preoccupied eyes. ‘You recognised me when we met… The young officer with his heart on his sleeve.’

  ‘I always thought better of you than that. From the day you came to the theatre … from that first day.’

  ‘I’d rather forget …’ He fell silent, head bowed. At last he said: ‘It all used to be so simple. No regrets, no fears—life a race to be run and damn the hazards. Just keep on headlong, leaving caution to the cowards … to anyone ready to sell liberty to buy wealth and safety …’ The scathing bitterness of his voice shocked her. He drew in breath and said more gently: ‘And I was quite different. Even my beliefs weren’t like any other man’s … I took every kind of risk, lived from day to day, did enough for a dozen men … spent more than money. Perhaps I spent myself. And nothing, nothing on earth could ever bring me down. Such an old story.’ He dug his nails into a patch of lichen on the arm of the bench. She was about to speak but he turned away. ‘I thought the past powerless to touch me, until one fine day it overtook me and blocked the path ahead.’ He dropped his hands and faced her despairingly. ‘I’ve no faith in the future any more. Even the present’s an outpost I can’t hold. If things had happened sooner—the writs, imprisonment, the loss of hope after hope—I might have had the strength to go on believing in a new life. Now it’s no good. I can’t even pay what I promised to the court. I forged bills in London, might have been imprisoned for years. Perhaps I still will be. In any case I’ll be up before the commissioners before I can raise enough to save myself.’ His voice broke and he covered his face. ‘And all this faith in happiness … nothing but a last throw. An end, not a beginning.’ He dashed the moisture from his cheeks with the back of his hand. ‘Listen to me asking for pity already—Imagine six weeks, six months, and God knows how much of it in custody. I went through it before. I know what I can bear. I’d rather die than see you come to despise me … It’s over, Theresa. Over.’

  She was very still and he thought she was crying, but when he looked up, he sensed behind her stricken eyes the concentration of cold anger.

  ‘How would it help us to part?’

  He laid a firm hand on her arm, afraid that when he spoke she would tear herself away before he could finish.

  ‘The priest had no right to marry us. The law is …

  ‘The law?’ A scream came up into her throat but went no further. ‘We exchanged vows. Does any law change that? Do you take this woman? Do you take this man? We gave our consent … nothing can wipe that out.’ She broke from his grasp and struck his chest with clenched fists. ‘You said that vows spoken anywhere were binding …’

  ‘In Ireland the law doesn’t allow a Catholic priest to marry a Protestant and …’

  She uttered an hysterical little laugh.

  ‘The law doesn’t allow murder. Does that bring a corpse to life? A man’s murdered … a man’s married. Facts,’ she cried, ‘facts.’

  Paralysed with shame, he saw her face as if it were still not too late; all imagined. A fine summer evening like any other—an apron over a yellow dress, warm sunlight on the tower, wasps buzzing around windfalls. He knew that only the smallest searching for emotion would make him weep. He longed to say that all he had said had merely been leading to the suggestion of a second marriage in England. A month ago, he would have said just this and meant it, but now the odds had changed, and all his past efforts to deny the inevitable seemed to owe as much to vanity as to honour—a desperate desire to preserve her ideal picture of him, regardless of the ultimate cost to both of them.

  In the dappled shade, under the overhanging boughs, her eyes seemed feverishly bright. A thin shaft of sunlight fell on her shoulder and the soft curve of her breasts. The thought of losing her, started a pulse of pain under his skin, throbbing like a bird’s heart; and in all his body a striving for her, against all matters of time and circumstance. And was he her betrayer? Perhaps only a day or two till the bailiff returned. And then?

  ‘Can’t you see how it would be?’ he asked, tenderness breaking the rough edge of his voice. ‘Every penny you earned swallowed by my debts. While I did what? Drank, sold matches in the street? If all my creditors foreclose at once you know the end of that. How long could we survive that sort of life? In and out of debtors’ jails … resentment killing every other impulse. Would you have me drag you down into that pit with me?’

  Her long silence wrung him as her first outburst had not. She sighed and moved slightly; more puzzled than blackly despairing.

  ‘How can I choose? For better for worse, for richer for poorer … I knew what the words meant. Desert me, but I’ll still be your wife.’

  ‘If the priest denied it to your face …?’

  ‘I’d believe what I know.’ Her voice was hoarse but absolutely level. Her certainty made everything he had said seem unreal to him. She had rejected the basic premise from which everything should have sprung, leaving him as helpless as a man under a net. She said intently: ‘If I’d made marriage a condition for being with you, I could understand better; but I said it was impossible and in the same breath offered to be your mistress. Everything you did, you chose to do. And now you claim I’ll be to blame for what follows unless I agree to something that isn’t in my power. How can you claim it? How?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether you agree,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Look at me and tell me you’d go if I begged you to stay.’ A silence; he shook his head. ‘You can’t?’

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘Ask it and I’ll stay.’

  ‘Then you are asking me to agree.’ She twisted her lips in a parody of a smile, and moved closer, turning his face with her hand. ‘Tell me,’ she said in a whisper that shook his nerves by its strange tension, its mixture of ruthlessness and suffering. ‘Will the bridesmaids carry bouquets of snowdrops? How did you describe it?’ She paused, her eyes searching in his without mercy. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’ll go to that girl.’ She paused, waiting for confirmation or denial. He said nothing. She got up with a light shrug. ‘Did I ever tell you, she offered me money in Dublin? I can’t remember what you said to her.’ She shuddered as if suddenly cold, and then started towards the house. And the brief time he held her in view seemed to stretch endlessly, like a spasm of impossible pain. Everything that had been most important and luminous in his life, falling away into the widening gap: love, sorrow and every other desire, until he felt stripped to the bone. He got up and stood hunched and motionless. Without knowing why, he seized a bough of the tree and shook it with all his strength, sending apples raining down around him, unripe and green.

  ‘Over, over,’ he repeated dully, and the word kept rustling and echoing in the sound of his footsteps through the grass.

  In front of the house, he hesitated. There was nothing he could say; nothing else. He wanted to leave and never return. The gardens, the reds tone walls and mullioned windows, the views of the fells across the meadows flooded him with sadness. He walked away briskly in the direction of the stables. Inside, the familiar sweet ammoniac odour in his nostrils soothed him at first. He stood in the shadowy darkness, tears forming slowly. Later he laid his cheek against his favourite stallion’s neck, murmuring the horse’s name, blindly seeking comfort. When his feelings broke, he leant against the rough wall and wept with harsh gasping sobs, until it seemed to him that he had shed all the tears of the rest of his life.

  By the time Clinton returned to the house, the first misty stars were visible in the pale sky. He walked slowly, as though any jarring step might hurt him. But already a curious aching hollowness had absorbed his earlier pain. There could only be one moment of admission, one first discovery of betrayal, and, after it, the fact could never wound with the same violence; or so he told himself, as he climbed the stairs.

  She was in her dressing room, sitting writing at the small table by the window, her face pale amber in the candlelight. As he entered, her features seemed to tighten, the mouth narrowing, eyes thrown into wider relief. When he sat down, she left the table and walked round him, attentively but seeming at the same time to be contemplating something remote: the way a sculptor might look at a piece of his work done long ago. Had it not been for the baffled simplicity of her gaze, he would have suspected mockery. Passing behind him, she lightly touched his hair, letting her hand slip down the line of his cheek and come to rest on his shoulder.

  ‘I wish … wish you didn’t look the same. You aren’t, but you still look it.’ A reminiscent tenderness furred her voice, making him long to call to witness every mitigating circumstance, to say that he still loved her, but he averted his face and said nothing. She sat down next to him on the chesterfield. ‘I never trusted anyone as I trusted you … I knew that you lied about money to be kind to me. Perhaps it made you feel stronger to be facing things alone … I could understand that. But the other …’ She broke off and looked down at the signet ring on her finger. ‘Love’s very inconvenient … stopping for no reason when everything seems perfect for happiness, or going on when there’s no possible reason. Perhaps I ought to hate you; perhaps I will. But now … I don’t see why I should make anything easier for you. I could very easily stop you marrying that girl.’

  ‘And would we have a moment’s happiness if you did? Dodging the bailiffs from lodging house to lodging house. Wouldn’t the day come when you wished you’d …’

  ‘That I’d agreed to share you with a rich woman?’

  ‘Anything would be better than losing you entirely.’

  ‘Better for who?’ she whispered, brushing his cheek with her fingers, drawing him to her and then kissing his lips. With her head resting on his shoulder, she slipped a hand under his shirt. ‘She’s young, isn’t she, Clinton? How she’ll tremble in your arms … first joys … How do you think we’ll compare? Youth against experience. For a year or two we might be fairly matched.’ She moved away from him, and held up a candle to her face. ‘Look at the corners of my eyes … my neck. There, I lift my chin a little, smile, and who’d ever know this year, next year? Standing straight, a slight elevation of the arms when naked, my breasts won’t offend you … till you compare. Will you use the same endearments? Never on purpose, I’m sure, but you will in time. She’ll have your children … a son and heir. Perhaps she’ll buy back Markenfield for you. Esmond said you lacked imagination.’ She rose abruptly and went back to the table. ‘You’d better go before I decide I ought to keep you. I love you, but I haven’t the will to fight. I couldn’t endure your resentment for every misfortune. If you didn’t reproach me, it would be as bad. You speak of breaking vows … kept what you did from me—how can I hold you to an oath you broke even when you made it?’ She lifted her pen but paused after writing a few words. ‘Don’t look so sad. The theatre’s an excellent school for making last speeches. My real husband died beautifully. Put everything in order calmly, saw old friends, and only wept when they’d gone. So cruel we can’t buy things with love—long life, toys for a child … truth.’

  He made no answer, but watched woodenly as she went on writing. At last she looked up.

  ‘You must send me a written denial of our marriage, signed by the priest … with his reasons. If Miss Lucas is shown a copy, you may depend on my silence.’ She blotted the paper in front of her and stiffly held it out to him. ‘So there can be no mistake, I’ve written this down; also an address.’ Though her voice was firm and her courage unshaken, he sensed her overwhelming need to finish quickly. Knowing he should go at once, he could think of no parting words. She stood up, and as she passed him, he felt her hand against his coat. He wanted to tell her that he could not imagine surviving the waste of days to come. But what use were words now?

  After she had gone, searching in his pocket for a handkerchief, his fingers closed on the ring he had given her. He took it out and looking at first as if he would dash the little oval bloodstone against the wall, he paused and with a heavy sigh placed this dismal badge of defeat on his own hand.

  PART FOUR

  34

  On a wet and stormy October morning, when gusts of wind sent people scudding along the streets like paper figures, and turned umbrellas inside-out with spiteful unconcern, Theresa made her way to Deacon’s Place for the first time in several weeks. She was admitted by her father’s wizened maid-of-all-work, who for thirty years had mended costumes in the wardrobe at the Adelphi. In days of greater prosperity, the major had also employed out of kindness the arthritic old property man as his valet. The maid went up to knock on her master’s bedroom door, leaving Theresa amongst the debris of the previous night’s supper party: fragments of lobster shell, empty wine bottles, dirty plates. After a brief interval the old woman returned to tell Theresa her father would see her in his room.

  Dressed in a crumpled frockcoat put on over his nightgown, the major was shaving by the window; his bowl of steaming water increasing the foetid dampness of the room, beading the windowpanes with heavy drops of condensation. The bedclothes were flung back, revealing a sagging mattress. His white locks hitched behind his ears, her father ran his razor carefully down his cheek, following the line of his whiskers. In the grey light his skin looked pinched and sallow.

  ‘A good party?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Just the baron and Anderson.’ For as long as Theresa could remember, Baron von Merck, a penniless German émigré from the troubles of ’48, had been her father’s favourite butt and toady; while, for as many years, Ben Anderson, the once famous comedian, had loyally helped the major relive past triumphs.

  She caught his eye in the shaving mirror and recognised the mixture of baffled anger and sorrow she had grown so used to during the month she had spent with him after leaving Hathenshaw. There was nothing abstract about his bitterness; it was as thick and indigestible as slabs of Christmas cake; and though he clearly felt pity for her, his every mention of her abandonment was loaded with reproach that she should ever have let it happen.

  When he had finished shaving, Theresa began telling him about the progress of rehearsals for the play she was soon to open in. With an angry gesture he tossed his razor into the bowl and interrupted her.

  ‘Did you bring the letter?’

  Without replying, she reached under her cape and produced the document her father had been demanding ever since learning that Clinton had promised a letter of explanation from the priest. He took the envelope and went down to the sitting room with it. The page shook in his hand as he read.

  ‘Dear Lord Ardmore,’ the priest had written. ‘You ask me to state the precise nature of the ceremony performed by me between yourself and the lady you represented as joined to you by a previous contract. I understood that Lady Ardmore’s religious conscience was not satisfied by the earlier ceremony and wanted a Church blessing on it. Though I was doubtful about your own religious persuasion, I saw no reason for refusing to oblige you both, since the ceremony I was to perform was only to be the renewal of a consent already given. You will know that for this reason I dispensed with the reading of banns, inquiries about impediments and so forth. I confess I did not imagine the awkwardness of my position in the event of a baptism. I was therefore obliged to make it clear to her ladyship that the certificate I sent should not be used for any other purpose whatever. I trust if you think I have not been clear enough in any particular, you will not be hesitating to write.