A Marriage of Convenience (27 page)

When a striking débutante came up to them, Theresa was relieved and sat back glad of the diversion which Lambert’s efforts to extricate himself would provide. Perhaps he might not want to disappoint this particular young lady, whose dark eloquent eyes and flawless skin made her undeniably lovely. The girl’s dress, with its exquisitely worked pattern of birds and butterflies on the lace overskirt, was the most perfect creation she had seen that evening.
Strangely the girl ignored Lambert completely, and, to Theresa’s astonishment, stood motionless in front of her, gazing with a peculiar glitter of hostility in her eyes. Then she turned abruptly to Lambert.

‘Perhaps, sir, you’ll be kind enough to introduce me to the lady.’

Lambert got up with slightly elevated brows.

‘If I was acquainted with you, madam, I’d have no difficulty.’

‘Miss Lucas. Sir George Lucas is my uncle, so don’t trouble yourself about my suitability.’

Lambert looked at Theresa helplessly. She ended his uncertainty by holding out her hand.

‘How do you do, Miss Lucas. Theresa Barr. Miss Lucas, allow me to introduce Captain Lambert.’

‘I’d like to talk to you, Miss Barr.’

‘Mrs Barr,’ interposed Lambert.

‘Can you excuse us, sir?’ said Sophie sharply.

‘I’m not sure that I can.’

‘Are you under orders, captain? Don’t worry; Lord Ardmore’s an old friend. I’ll ask him to forgive you.’

‘I’m most obliged. He should be back soon.’

‘I’m quite happy to talk to you,’ said Theresa.

‘As you please,’ murmured Lambert, bowing ironically to her, before walking rapidly towards St Patrick’s Hall.

‘Gone to tell his master,’ said Sophie. ‘I’m the sad little country thing he might have married. Did you guess?’

She sat down next to Theresa on the small sofa. Though her voice had been controlled, Theresa saw Sophie’s hands trembling in her lap. She was gripping her white kid gloves so tightly round her fan that now and then her hands gave a little shudder. Theresa said softly:

‘If you think I had anything to do with …’

‘I don’t care whether you did or didn’t.’ Sophie hesitated, as if about to weep. ‘I’d have done anything for him. More than you could ever guess.’

‘If I was rich …’

‘So you talked about me,’ cried Sophie with sudden fury.

‘Lord Ardmore’s brother mentioned you.’

‘Lord Ardmore? Is that what you call him? A nice ring to it. Haven’t you some charming personal name for him?’

‘Don’t try to trade insults with me. If you’ve anything to say, say it.’

‘Very well. When men want to get rid of their mistresses, they buy them off. I’d like to buy you off, Mrs Barr.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not for sale.’

‘When he’s a beggar you may regret it.’

The girl’s pale angry face and arrogant voice had stung Theresa, but now, as if a glass shutter had slid down across her mind, she could not think how to respond. This innocent looking skim-milk miss was trying to corrupt her; without being able to help it, she laughed in Sophie’s face.

‘How much would you pay, Miss Lucas?’ she asked, doing her best not to laugh again. But once more the girl’s burning eyes reached her, killing her amusement, confusing her; so that she no longer knew whether she felt pity or anger. Sophie said rapidly:

‘Do you love him enough to be ready to …’ She broke off as she saw Clinton looking down at her.

‘Go on, Sophie,’ he said.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She covered her face with her gloved hands, dropping her fan; then she let out a long slow breath. ‘I don’t care, Clinton. I’d rather be hated than forgotten.’ In spite of herself, Theresa was moved by Sophie’s defiance. In the distance she could see Captain Lambert leaning elegantly against a column and thought she saw a sardonic smile. She felt Sophie’s hand on her arm. The girl said: ‘If he ever needed me, I wouldn’t try to stop him seeing you. That’s how much I love him … not for my sake but for his … to save his career, to help him to be the great man I know he could be with an unselfish woman’s support.’

‘All right, Sophie, you’ve said your piece.’ Clinton checked himself as if on the point of shouting at her. Theresa had never seen him as angry; and yet when he spoke his voice was soft and low. ‘Do you think fame and a million of money would please a man long if he had them only on condition he walked everywhere with a thorn in his shoe?’

Sophie made no reply but looked at him as though he had hit her across the face. She remained very still and Theresa was stunned to see not anger or self-pity on her face but a look of humility and undiminished adoration. A moment later she walked away towards the laughter and the music.

The sky tinged with orange, darkening to copper where scarves of freezing mist obscured the sun; and already the light dwindling to dusk among the nearer trees. From the carriage windows flocks of starlings seemed suddenly to dip into sight out of nowhere and vanish as mysteriously. Hedges made ghostly white by crystals of hoar frost slid gently past as the landau rolled on.

When Clinton had suggested to Theresa that they spend her last two days out of Dublin in the country, he had offered her no better reason than being sick of the town—his real intention being, she suspected, to give her no opportunity to run away at once if she decided to refuse him. An issue of such gravity would not be allowed to rest upon the outcome of a single skirmish. A few days earlier, Theresa knew that she would have raised difficulties; but her meeting with Sophie Lucas had produced a deep change in her. In spite of her real fears of a lasting break with Clinton, so sure had she been of his love for her that she had hardly given thought to the possibility of being supplanted soon afterwards by an actual rival. But the jealousy and determination in Sophie’s eyes had revealed more to Theresa than her own fierce possessiveness: to give up Clinton for his own sake appeared in a very different light, now that the alternatives open to him had become so starkly clear. The idea of this young girl taking her place burned Theresa with a depth of revulsion that blurred all her previous misgivings, making them seem as futile as a swimmer’s struggles against the currents of a river in full flood.

Since Clinton had decided to dispense with the services of a coachman and drive himself, Theresa had chosen to sit next to him on the box rather than enjoy the comparative warmth of the carriage’s interior. Though swathed in rugs, the cold still reached her as darkness fell, but she had no desire to leave his side. Around them in the dim wastes, she saw the dull red glow of hearth-fires through cabin windows, and once, etched black in a low doorway the motionless figure of a man. The sky above was jewelled with a multitude of stars, uncannily brilliant in the chill night air. Looking
up at them, while the carriage swayed gently under her, Theresa felt as if she were floating; their journey no longer earthbound but through the gliding panorama of the stars into realms of boundless space. She turned to Clinton as he gazed at her, and for a moment his eyes seemed to share the sky’s secret, penetrating far beneath the surface of her thoughts, ages down into her beyond the limits of her own life and birth.

‘Look at the stars,’ she whispered.

‘They make me think of death.’ He paused, sensing her
disappointment
. ‘I prefer the infinite in smaller doses … a grain of sand or a blade of grass.’

‘Do you feel no mystery?’

‘What you asked in your letter … Does my heart expand under the trees?’

‘Why be ironic? You love life.’

‘Too much to abandon reality for its shadow.’

Ahead of them, the carriage lamps cast pools of yellow light on the road. She touched his arm.

‘What is it in us feels pleasure? Our hands, eyes, ears? Don’t we know truth with our hearts as well as our minds? Love’s proof of that … proof of what can’t be seen or understood. I want more in you than I can touch.’

‘My soul?’

‘Why not? I’m not trying to prove God’s existence. While I can feel and see, I’ve no need to explain Him. When I think of leaving you, the pain’s no simple physical hurt, but a deeper wound … a bleeding of the spirit. Don’t you understand?’

‘Yes, and I love
you
for it; nothing else.’ He was silent a long time. ‘When people without hope or consolation can sit down and weigh scruples, still cling to some soiled rag of pride in defeat or facing death, I kneel to them. To thank God for their courage robs them and us.’ He twisted the reins in his hands and sighed. ‘Perhaps I’d do better to agree with you. But I need more in my own way than I can touch. I don’t want you to love some phantom of me. I want you to love me as I am …’ At the start of a steep hill he applied the brake and checked the horses. ‘I want to be loved for the worst in me as well as the best. You think I’m a sort of chivalrous savage … self-sacrificing to a fault. It’s not so. Whoever makes sacrifices wants something for them.’

Approaching a wood, he lifted a shot-gun from behind the dash.

‘Why are we travelling in darkness?’ she asked.

‘I had things to do in town. We’re too near the Curragh Camp to meet any Fenians.’ He patted the stock of the gun. ‘Better safe than sorry. In the south or west we’d have been tempting providence.’

‘Why no servants? I’ve never known you go anywhere without a valet.’

‘Don’t you like it better being alone?’

‘But you don’t care what they hear or know; you never did in the past. And leaving so late …’

‘I’m not going to murder you,’ he replied laughing. But though she asked him no further questions, he sensed that she was still dissatisfied. He was angry with himself for not having explained matters to her before they left. The trouble with waiting for inevitable moments to say certain things, was that these perfect occasions had a habit of slipping into the future; and since Father Maguire would be waiting for them the following day, there was precious little future left.

The best hotel in Portarlington displayed the usual Irish genius for dilapidation: armchairs leaking stuffing, candlesticks with only the faintest evidence of having once been plated, a peevish waiter flicking scraps of food from the dining tables with a dirty napkin. After a dinner of undercooked duck and disintegrating peas, they went up to their bedroom to escape the melancholy music of a piper in the bar and the thick turf smoke issuing from the kitchen. Since Theresa was still cold, Clinton sent for more logs and demanded a bath filled with water that was hot and not merely lukewarm.

When the last jugs had been brought up, he looked down at the square through a gap in the curtains. The roofs and pavements were rimed with frost, glinting in the starlight as if sprinkled with powdered glass. Behind him, a dented copper hip-bath steamed in front of the fire. He remained at the window for several minutes, and when he turned, Theresa was already almost naked. The unembarrassed way in which she loosened drawstrings and slipped off petticoats with a cheerful ease and absent-minded immodesty, roused him more powerfully than any conscious coquetry had ever done. She tested the water with a cautious foot and then let herself down into it with a luxurious sigh. The logs cracked and hissed, spurting out thin blue and green tongues of flame where the red heat reached veins of moist sap. The glisten of reflected firelight on her wet limbs and her lazy movements as she soaped herself, made Clinton’s skin tingle as though a warm wind was ruffling every light hair on his body. As she lay back, knees breaking the water’s surface, he tried to recall the expression on her face under the stars; another woman, another world. How much did he ever see? How much imagine? Out of a million movements of a face, only a few poor frozen images remained of so much subtlety. Never to be without her, always to have another morning and another day in which to store up more of her—only that would bring him peace.

He knelt down next to the bath, kissing her wet lips, drawing her arms around him, oblivious of the water slopping over the sides onto his waistcoat and trousers. Then with sudden restlessness he got up.

‘Don’t you think,’ he began hesitantly, ‘that there are certain cases when the choice is either giving up or not reasoning at all? Hasn’t that been true for us almost from the start?’ He kicked at a rucked up corner of a rug and swore quietly. ‘And that isn’t what I meant … more how I’d like things to be … how I feel …’ He broke off and came closer to her again. ‘I should have said it before, like a dozen other things … I can’t marry you openly. The reason’s money … I spent the morning writing down the whys and wherefors …’ He pulled an envelope from his pocket and ripped it open. ‘I was going to hand it to you, walk round for an hour or two and then ask if you’d marry me on my terms. It seemed quite logical until we came here.’

‘Marriage is marriage on any terms.’

‘If you can’t tell your daughter or your father?’

‘They’d keep any secret.’

‘I can’t accept that risk. I know you’ve lived with poverty; perhaps you despise me, but if you’d always lived in a certain way … They say it’s a virtue to know one’s limitations. I’d be a bad pauper and that’s the truth of it. To ruin myself would do you no service, married to me or not. The worst losses are things one takes for granted.’

‘I know how you’ve lived.’

She stood up and reached for the towel on the fender. As she wrapped it round her, he watched her in agonised suspense. Unable to bear her silence, he burst out:

‘I know how little a secret marriage holds for you … that people will think you no more than a mistress. Do you think I’m not ashamed to say I can’t acknowledge you? It cuts me to the heart … but what’s to be done? If I lose my uncle’s fortune, I’m ruined.’ He moved closer, his eyes pleading and yet burning with frustration. ‘I don’t exaggerate … if you want proof …’

She put on a flannel gown and met his gaze.

‘You’re selling your commission. What other proof should I need?’ She held out her hands, in a gesture of solemn appeal. ‘Is it so you can support me? Unless you tell me, I won’t answer you.’

‘I might have stayed another year.’

‘And with Esmond’s help?’ she insisted in a voice that shook.

‘All right,’ he cried in desperation, ‘I don’t deny it. I could have saved my career if I’d given you up. But think what I’m asking you.’ He paused and stared into the fire. ‘I ask you to deny your name in
public … my name. I bind you by a secret marriage and swear you to silence till my uncle dies. Should I make no sacrifice for you when I ask so much?’

She looked at him with misting eyes.

‘You owe
me
sacrifices?’ she faltered. ‘You deny yourself marriage to others who could have brought you riches … could have saved your career and ended all your worries …’

‘Your answer,’ he shouted, striding to her and grasping her shoulders. ‘I love you … can’t endure to be without you. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Yes, yes,’ she whispered, her voice throbbing between tears and joy. ‘What you’ve just said … Don’t you know why I was scared before? I thought you
would
marry me openly—would risk everything.’

‘Then marry me tomorrow,’ he blurted out, pressing her to him. ‘You wrote that marriage was impossible, wouldn’t answer me before … Do you think I’ll let you run off again?’

‘Tomorrow?’ she gasped in amazement. ‘How can we? What about banns?’

‘I’ve found a priest who’ll dispense with them.’

‘You did this before knowing my answer?’

‘I can’t lose you, Theresa. I wasn’t confident enough to be patient. I’ll never forget what I went through when you left Kilkreen. I didn’t presume on your answer.’ When she said nothing, but still looked at him in incredulity, he broke away from her impatiently. ‘Will you? What should I think if you refuse?’

‘I won’t refuse,’ she murmured. She kissed him gently and smiled. ‘Did you even buy a ring?’ He nodded and she started laughing. ‘You say you weren’t confident. Darling, you’re the most insufferably confident man I’ve ever met.’

‘Never with you.’

Later, when they were lying in bed after making love, he opened his eyes and saw that she was studying his face.

‘Do you mind being married by a papist priest?’

He smiled at her and shook his head.

‘I’m sure God’s above quibbling over a few differences in ceremonial.’

‘Please, Clinton.’

‘I don’t much care for the crossings and mutterings, but it doesn’t worry me.’ He closed his eyes. ‘You know in Scotland you can just read the marriage service in front of a witness and no priest need come into it. I believe we bind ourselves by our vows … the rest doesn’t matter to me.’

She seemed about to answer him, but instead laid her head on his
shoulder and was silent. The candle by the bed had started to gutter, but when it burned out neither of them moved to replace it. Moments later he heard her crying in the darkness.

‘What is it, love?’

‘I thought of you seeing a priest, not knowing what I’d say. Poor Clinton.’

‘Not now.’

‘I’ll be a good wife to you.’

‘I know. I’ve never felt surer of anything.’

‘And you’re happy, my love?’

‘Very.’

From somewhere behind the hotel came the faint cackle of geese and from further off the mournful howling of a dog. Between the curtains the stars shone with the same brittle and unearthly clarity.