Distant Choices (66 page)

They walked through the wooden gate and along the brief path to the church porch, no larger than the entrance to a simple cottage, distinguished only by the one brave bell above it, no decoration within – although they did not go to look – beyond natural strength and solidity, wooden benches facing each other across clean, enduring stone, the House of a straightforward God for the meeting-together of His down-to-earth people.

‘Imagine,' he said. ‘If I'd gone into the church and you'd had a mother less ambitious than Evangeline – could we have been happy here, in a country-living like this, do you think?'

‘I think so, Quentin. Until you started wanting to be a bishop, that is.'

‘Yes.' He smiled at her. ‘Are you telling me that now I want to be a cabinet minister?'

She walked away from him once again and then, maintaining the distance, spoke across it. ‘I'm telling you we could have been happy here. I'm telling you we could have been happy anywhere, in spite of your mother and mine, if we'd had the sense to marry when we could. I'm telling you we were probably made for each other. Why not? I'm Matthew Stangway's daughter and you're his nephew. Why shouldn't we be alike? Why shouldn't we complement each other? I'm telling you we could have been
right
together, as well as happy. For ever after, as they say in the fairy tales. Or “until death us do part” as you'd say if you'd got to be a bishop.'

Crossing the distance of tufted, fellside grass, he took her by the shoulders. ‘What else are you telling me?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps …'

‘Yes,' his hands tightened. ‘I know.'

‘Perhaps that I have a husband. And you really want that appointment as a minister.'

‘Do you know how much,' he said, ‘how very much I wish I didn't?'

The tree stood just ahead of them offering shelter, concealment, its branches touching the ground to make the dark but living cavern where she had once accepted the proposal Garron had made with no intention of letting her get away with a refusal. She had not thought of him all day. She thought of him now, it seemed, only through mist, the distance from her side of the lake, from her side of life, to his seeming almost – regrettably not quite – eternal.

‘Will you go back to him?' Quentin said. ‘Your wounded giant? He must want you. I suppose he is only waiting until he can admit it.'

She realized she had been supposing this too. ‘I don't know, Quentin. Perhaps if you could sweep me off my feet and carry me away …?'

‘Instead of just thinking – like you – of all the reasons why I'd better not?'

They were standing quite far apart, a gnarled six inches of the tree trunk between them, and looking at her for a long moment of rapidly increasing communion, he said quietly, his eyes still on hers, ‘They have such grand emotions, some of them, don't they? Your wounded giant, for instance. What storms he can generate. And Kate, of course, controlling it better now but catching visible fire every now and then. Francis too. I sometimes think it easier for them than for those of us to whom love comes differently. Calmer. More thoughtful – maybe too thoughtful. But it is love just the same – my darling – isn't it?'

‘Yes,' she said, moving two short steps forward, as much as had ever been needed to cover the distance between them. ‘It is love, Quentin.'

And although it may only have entered the forefront of her mind a day ago, a week ago perhaps, she knew it had been living and growing in her heart for years. Not the passionate love of a stranger but the commitment, both natural and total, to a man who could be the other half of herself.

She lay awake on her herb-pillow for a long time that night, aware of Kate and Francis below her in the garden, their voices rising intermittently for what seemed several hours after midnight, aware even of the dog heavily patrolling the staircase, throwing himself down with a wheezing thud, every now and then, outside her bedroom door, guarding her, she supposed, from the man who remained downstairs, even though he was occupied with another woman, and from the man who had gone away immediately after bringing her down from Martindale but who – in that jealous canine opinion – might always come back again.

They had remained under the yew tree for perhaps half an hour, an act of physical communion too deep for mere sensuality which could be aroused, after all, by so many men, so many women, with whom one had no need to be in love; beginning when she had walked into his arms and ending, after an embrace any observer would have thought quite innocent, with a kiss to which her lips and her heart had opened with happy ease, as if to open herself to him had, through long years of serene loving, become wholly natural.

They had then walked back down the lower slope of Hallin Fell to the lake, darkening with autumn sunset, his arm around her as they bent beneath the willow trees and alders along the water's edge, emerging to the field path to her garden gate where he had left her, saying only that he would come again tomorrow.

She had gone inside, merely smiling at Kate and Francis as she passed them and, having directed the housemaid she had borrowed for the day from the Buck Inn as to the correct clearing away of the birthday luncheon, had taken her dog for a long ramble in the dark along stony paths of tufted grass and ever-present, suddenly emerging water over which she had leapt without need for thought or even too much vision, her mind still open to Quentin, as her arms had opened to him earlier in the yew tree cave of Martindale; as open as her whole body which even though he had never entered it, already knew him with all the impulses of a deep-rooted, tender, wholly welcoming desire.

A revelation she found disturbing mainly because it did not even surprise her as it should have done, her acquaintance with desire so far throughout her womanhood having been mild and good-mannered rather than urgent, troubling her at first by its very absence and then progressing – not far enough, she readily admitted – to a rational, pleasant, but rather less than essential part of marriage. She had never desired any man in his absence, had burned and then grieved far more emotionally than physically for Francis Ashington, had responded to Garron's caresses with no more than good-will and good hope to begin with, leading to sensual pleasures which she had found thrilling and moving from time to time, occasionally glorious, but never addictive. She had never refused her husband, even when the headache her mother had advised her to manufacture had been quite genuine. She had responded, sometimes with real enthusiasm, sometimes with a pretence motivated by affection – by an honest wish that he should have satisfaction even when she did not – to every one of his sexual moods and methods. Yet, on the morning of his every departure, she had put the need for such excitements away as easily as the many other domestic needs his presence created, not even a dream of erotic delight much less any waking languors or amorous imaginings disturbing her until he came home again.

Her desire had always been conditional, entirely dependent on the presence of a far more urgent male desire to direct and stimulate it. She had believed herself capable of nothing more extreme. But now, striding along the roots of Swarth Fell, leaping the puddles, neither the chill night air nor the stern exercise could still the longing at the pit of her stomach, the length and depth of her limbs for Quentin's hand and mouth upon them, a clamorous urgency for the splendours and sufferings – following fast upon each other, it seemed – of her suddenly released sensuality which she had never before understood.

She understood them now, sleep at first eluding her on her return to the cottage and then leading her, as she had known it would, into dreams of love's consummation, the delicate miracle of heart and mind and orgasm blending together as, in her, they had never yet blended, the elements of trust and honest liking, of fun and faith, the fierce heights of emotion and the surfaces of happy, everyday belonging entering her body as Quentin entered it repeatedly through the night, the seeds of all these diverse wonders flowing with his seed inside her and mingling there essentially; waking her early and reluctantly to a cool dawn, a grey hint of rain in the sky, her dog still whimpering outside her door, the cats to be let out and given their breakfast, vegetables to be scraped and cleaned for luncheon, fires – by the look of that steel-coloured sky – to be lit.

Yet these normally pressing everyday tasks failed to move her this morning, fading into the category of things to be left for later, things unlikely to tilt the earth on its axis in any case, compared to her need to lie back on her pillows, permitting no nonsensical leaping of her heart or the newly liberated pulse of her sensuality to distract her and think, clearly this time, even chastely if she could, about Quentin. An honest intention quickly defeated by the impression of his love covering her against the chill of this possibly difficult morning with a blanket as warm as fur and as fine and subtle as silk; as Quentin himself was both subtle and enduring. At every perilous or painful corner of her life he had stood beside her, discreetly, often at an acceptable social distance, but there, nevertheless, to support her at need, to show her, if only by hints or remarks she might have thought, at the time, to be merely ‘clever', which way it seemed best to go. On the morning of Kate's elopement she had turned to him by instinct, knowing – without knowing how she knew – that he would not let her down. He had guided her through the day of her mother's death and the days thereafter as no one else could have done, bringing Kate – with an effort she could well imagine – to her side. When her chaste, well-ordered life had collapsed under false accusation his name, his face, had been the only ones to enter her mind.

She had wanted to go to him then just as she did now, the wanting alarming her only because it still seemed so wholly natural, so right, and so inevitable that had he now opened her door she would have felt a familiar, unmixed joy, a sense of who else had a better right, or any right at all to enter her bedroom, although ten minutes or so later it was Kate who came in, wrapped in her exotic Oriental silk, her hair unbrushed, her feet bare, two mugs of cinnamon chocolate in her hands and no intention at all of allowing the dog to follow her.

‘Get out,' she said, her voice never gentle at seven o'clock of any morning. ‘You're a male. Go off and rape some poor pedigree greyhound somewhere.'

‘My word –' Oriel, at both her dog and her sister, was smiling. ‘What have
you
against well-brought-up young bitches this morning?'

‘No more than usual.' Sitting down on the edge of the bed, by no means carefully, she handed Oriel a mug with cream, pink-tipped roses painted all over it. ‘Breakfast, madame.'

‘My goodness – how kind.'

‘Not really. An act of sheer desperation, love. Brought on by the gruntings of that damned dog, and those cats scratching all over the place – including my door.'

Smiling, Oriel sipped her chocolate, finding it, as she politely murmured, not bad for Kate.

‘Thank you, kindly. I got your paper and sticks all ready laid out for the parlour fire too, which I thought very good of me. But just how to light it I'm not certain. One never had to, you see, in France and Italy. And in Germany I always stayed with the Kesslers who are so good to their servants that they have a great many. Thank goodness the kitchen fire kept going all night.'

Oriel raised her mug of hot chocolate in a solemn toast to Kate's domesticity. ‘You mean the fire under the stove, I expect.'

‘I do. Or you'd have been drinking cold milk, my girl, or spring water. Are you well this morning, Oriel? It seems to have come rather early for me.'

‘You stayed up late, I expect, doing – whatever seemed good to you.'

‘Ah yes.' Jumping to her feet, her own cup luckily half-empty, she crossed to the window-seat and, drawing her knees up to her chin, grinned companionably at the speculating Oriel. ‘Quite so, Mrs Keith. And should you be expecting to find Francis when you go downstairs trying to look as if he had just called in for breakfast, then I shall have to disappoint you.'

‘My dear Mrs Ashington,' murmured Oriel, ‘what could I possibly have to say if I did? Since he
is
your husband and this house – remember –
does
belong to him.'

‘Oh no – no, no,' Kate clicked her tongue and shook her head. ‘That's just the legality of it. And what can that mean to us? It's reality we're dealing with. And by that reckoning the house is yours and Francis and I are definitely not a married couple. If I'd shared a bed with him last night I'd have been feeling very much a mistress this morning, I can tell you.'

‘You didn't then?'

Her arms around her knees, her black and gold kimono slipping aside to reveal thin, amber legs with neat ankles, Kate rocked herself up and down for a moment in a blithe fit of laughter. ‘I did not. I sent him away. And I feel certain it never once entered his head to say, “I am your husband, my good woman. Take your clothes off at once …”‘

‘Kate – I hardly think he would.'

‘Oriel – you don't realize how coquettish I was down there, in the garden – until what must have been the middle of the night … Heavens, I set out to tempt him as far as I could and when I got there, to the point that comes just before commitment, I drew back exactly as if we'd just met and it was too soon. And he did the same, knowing better than to rush a woman he's just met, and being all whimsical and sweet and teasing about it. A very polished performance I thought. Just as if I'd been one of those London ladies who dash over to see him all the time from Merton Abbey. He's quite a flirt, isn't he? I suppose he always was. Although never with me.'

Finishing her chocolate Oriel put her cup down carefully on her bedside table and, smiling, shook her head. ‘Is it any wonder? You were eighteen and thought he was Adonis.'