Rutherford Park (28 page)

Rain ran down his neck and under the collar of his coat; the bodies of those closest to him, smelling of wet clothes and beer and cheap cigarettes, were nauseating. The crowd began to joke among themselves, stamping their feet, hooting in imitation of trains. “Pick up thar feet, get up thar speed.” Then, “Here she comes,” he heard one man say. He elbowed his way to the front. “Watch who yer treading on,” growled one man.

And there she was, and Blackburn himself was walking alongside, freely swinging a flying helmet, laughing and talking to a newspaper reporter. He looked handsome, dark haired and square shouldered. As he came close, Harry stood abruptly in front of him. “Mr. Blackburn,” he said, and held out his hand.

Blackburn hesitated only a moment before responding.

“My name is Harry Cavendish. I want to fly.”

Blackburn smiled. The crowd pressed forward as the monoplane passed, and the words “The Blackburn Aeroplane Co., Leeds” wheeled by over Harry’s head, written on the tail. He wiped the rain from his eyes. “You’re flying to Leeds today.”

“I’m flying half-hourly, back and forth.” Blackburn was walking briskly; Harry almost ran to keep up with him, pushing away others who nudged him in the back. “Take me first.”

Blackburn stopped a moment and looked him up and down. “You’re in a fine rush.”

“I’m in the same rush as you,” Harry said. “Take me on the first leg to Leeds. And back again.”

Blackburn was smiling. “That’s not possible.”

“I’ve got my ticket.”

The pilot patted his arm. “Then wait in the queue, lad,” he told him. “My first passenger, bless her soul, is the honorable Lady Mayoress of Leeds.”

* * *

I
t was one in the afternoon before it was Harry’s turn.

The rain had stopped by then; the clouds had parted to show a watery sun. Blackburn had made several trips and, after the last, had stood by the plane, taking off his helmet and blotting at his neck with a scarf. Harry walked up to him, his ticket in his hand.

“Ah,” said Blackburn, “so here you are.”

“I’ve been waiting all my life,” Harry blurted out, and immediately cursed himself for sounding like such an awestruck boy. Blackburn merely smiled. “I was at Olympia in March,” Harry continued hurriedly. “I saw this plane then. I’ve followed you. I know you flew cross-country last year. I wanted to come to Harrogate and Wetherby.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Harry hesitated. “My father thinks it’s a waste of time. And I wasn’t in Yorkshire. I had to…I had to go away.”

Blackburn raised an ironic eyebrow. “It’s the future,” he replied simply. “Get up. We’ll go.”

Harry thought that his heart might stop beating altogether as he stepped into the passenger seat; it was lurching all over the place in his chest. And then the engine started and Blackburn tapped his shoulder. Harry put on the helmet that was given to him. It was too big; he pulled on the strap to tighten it. Suddenly they were rolling forward, bumping over the uneven ground of the field. He
knew that Blackburn had got his license in a Bristol Boxkite, and he couldn’t imagine anything less like it than the Type 1. As the grass blurred away and the wind rushed into his face, Harry thought that Blackburn must have felt as if he were sitting literally in one those old box kites that he used to play with as a child, for the pilot had no compartment. He merely sat among the canvas-and-wood frame just as if a dining chair had been randomly stapled onto an airborne tent. But this was so different; they were encapsulated, part of the machine. Harry looked to his left and right; the wings were extensions of his own arms. He felt a primeval surge of power, as if he himself had become superhuman and were about to step into the sky. He suddenly gripped the edge of the passenger compartment.

And then the ground slipped away. They were up, into an empty space without signs or roads. There was no containment; they were alone. Wind buffeted them, bouncing them gently; the strips of cloud tore past. Below him, Harry saw the show grounds in a series of squares with the oblong white dots of marquees; the trees and woods looked like small sponges on a lumpy green board. He saw the show ring and the lane on which he had stood as mere scribbles of white, and then far away he saw Bradford itself and the Pennines rising up, and the drift of smoke around the cotton mills, and then the plane banked and the city evaporated. For a second he was hurtling not only out of the familiar landscape but out of himself, unfettered and unrestricted. For the first time in months he felt the tension in his chest slacken and then fade completely, and he felt Emily’s grip on him—on the innermost part of him—disappear. She wasn’t up here in the clean air; she was down there on the ground, deep down in the river. She was under the soil somewhere—he had never found out where. He had never been told, and he had never known what happened to the child. He did not even know
whether it was alive or dead, and that thought had been the one that had driven him out into the long nights in London. He had had a child, but he had no idea whether it had lived for a day or a week or an hour. But up here he was alive, and what should have been guilt, the horrible sick guilt that always filled his throat, could no longer touch him. He was out of the reach of the memories.

He closed his eyes momentarily and felt the skimming engine and the vast sky holding him up. The nightmares couldn’t touch him now—he was too far up; he was moving too fast. The wind tore at him as the plane banked. He was soaring; he was rushing. A tingling sensation ran from his face and down his arms—vertigo, extreme, exhilarating. He yelled out, and looked back at Blackburn, and saw the older man smiling. Harry gave him a thumbs-up sign, laughing, and for the next twenty minutes that was all he did, yell and laugh and feel the vertigo racing around his system, taking his breath away.

* * *

J
ack Armitage walked down through the fine drifting drizzle towards Rutherford. It was midmorning, and Gray, the estate steward, had sent him back after they had walked the first fields by the village. The third cut of hay lay sodden on the ground; Gray had said that they would wait until the wind got up before collecting it. Better weather was forecast for later in the day, and Jack was to go and fetch Wenceslas back after midday with the wagon.

Jack sang to himself quietly as he walked. He didn’t know the name of the song, but one day last summer he had heard it coming incongruously over the wall of the orchard. It had been just before tea, and, coming around the side of the garden wall, he had seen Louisa sitting at a table with Charlotte and a gramophone player
on the white cloth between them. Louisa had been laughing and Charlotte, in a low voice, complaining at the music. Jack had been transfixed; it was late in the afternoon, and the sun had slanted across them. Louisa, turning the handle of the player, looked like an angel in a white dress with a broad yellow sash around her waist, and the straw hat heavy with wax flowers tipped back on her head. “You must listen,” she had been saying. “It’s very easy.”

“I shall never learn,” Charlotte had told her. “Ask Harry. Ask Mother. They’re better at all that.”

Louisa had suddenly looked up and caught sight of him, standing where he shouldn’t have been in the gateway through to the yard. “Jack!” she had called. “Come here!”

He had put a hand on his chest.

“Yes, you, Jack!” she said. “Don’t dawdle. Come here and dance.”

He had been struck dumb. He couldn’t dance, and it had seemed, at that moment, that he couldn’t move. He ought not to even to be looking at them. But Louisa did not care. She had stamped her foot just as impatiently as she had done as a child waiting to be handed up onto her pony. “Jack!”

He had walked over bashfully, dragging his feet, suddenly aware that he reeked of the stables. The music had begun again. Louisa was holding out her hand. “Do you know it?” she asked. “It’s Al Jolson, the American.”

“That I don’t,” he had mumbled.

She had put both hands then on her hips. “Really, you are as bad as Charlotte,” she had said. “Come here.”

“Nay, I must go to the yard.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d retorted. “I shall only want you a minute.” She had dragged him to her side by his wrist, and then put one hand in his and positioned the other on her waist. “It’s not ragtime,” she said. “It’s different. Slower. Listen.”

He heard the words crackle out of the speaker, but they seemed random to him. He kept looking at the hand on the soft cloth of her dress, and then down at his own outsize leather shoes with their thick brown laces. Above them, fruit hung in the canopy of the trees, green apples in a waving sea of green leaves. He allowed himself to be led around much as he would lead an unwilling horse, by a mixture of gentle pushing and cajoling words. She was nudging one of his feet with hers. “Step back,” she was saying. “Now forward. It’s only a waltz, Jack.” She had looked up at him, smiling, laughing. “Can’t you dance at all?”

That did it. He grasped her and set off under the trees with his own racing version of her leisurely waltz, swinging her around, clutching her tightly to him. She threw her head back and laughed all the louder, and in a few steps he was lifting her off the ground. The scent that she wore overwhelmed him; the fabric of the dress slithered in his fingers; as he let her down he found the sash in his hand, and suddenly she was standing still in front of him and he was holding the sash like a rein. She gazed at him steadily and then pirouetted so that the belt wound her in closer to him, and she tilted her face upwards. It was almost more than he could bear, because she was so close, and because she had that aura of innocence about her.

He remembered when they were both children, and Louisa had been taken over to the Stanningfields’ in Manchester, the family known to her ladyship who had the cotton mills; she had come back—she must have been eight or nine—and run into the stables still in her town clothes and said to him, “But you’ll never guess, Jack! There are tiny little houses all side by side, and some of the windows are stuck together with paper and the women stand in the doorways.” He had stopped what he was doing and asked who it was she was talking about now. “The people who live there,” she’d
replied, mouth open in mingled delight and horror. “The babies have no shoes. And they shout, even the children. The houses are tall.” She’d held up her hands over her head. “Ever so tall, like the drawings in Daddy’s book. The Dickens book—what is it?—oh,
Oliver Twist
, Jack. Just like that!” It had exercised a weird fascination over her for weeks, this vision of what life was really like in all its muck and poverty. Afterwards, she’d said that his lordship was furious that the Stanningfields had allowed it. But Ida Stanningfield had been going on some mission of mercy, some do-gooding tour of workers’ streets. “Imagine it,” Louisa had said to him. “Just imagine!”

She was still like that, a kind of refugee in a wide world; never believing anything could be bad, never understanding why a soul could be negative, polluted to its core; never reasoning why women stood miserably on doorsteps or babies crawled in the dirt. It made him fearful for her. He imagined her running out into London and soaking up everything it had to offer, like a drunk in a bar, drinking in everything put in front of her. She would never change. It made his heart ache.

Behind them that afternoon, the voice on the gramophone had murmured, “Someone handsome, someone true,” and Louisa sang the rest. “But I never thought of you.” He had abruptly released the sash; she took it from him and carefully retied it. She was humming the tune while he stood rooted to the spot. Sunlight was playing over her face, and Charlotte was peering inquiringly at them both over the pages of her book. The needle of the gramophone bounced on the edge of the disk, and Louisa turned away. He watched her, and she tilted her chin for a second so that he saw her profile and realized that she was still smiling. And then he had turned and gone away, out over the grass, out through the gate, along the path to the yard. And he had gone into the stable and seen Wenceslas there
half-asleep, and he had walked over to the great horse and buried his face in Wenceslas’s neck, his fists bunched at either side of his head. But the tune kept repeating itself:
But I never thought of you
. He knew that. He knew it only too well. She never thought of him.

* * *

H
e stopped now just beyond Gray’s house at the entrance to Rutherford. The line of beech trees was ahead of him, and at his back he could hear Gray’s two small children playing in their walled garden, and the gentle murmur of their mother’s voice. On either side the wall that edged the park led away, but to this side was the footpath that led eventually to the river. He followed it. The day was close, the sky low, as if the rain might start again. The house, a quarter of a mile away, was a rosy-colored toy in a great green expanse. He sang the song quietly to himself as he walked, and wondered when exactly Louisa would come back. She had been in London much longer than had been expected. There had been no chance at a repetition of last year in the orchard, for neither Charlotte nor Louisa had come home. There was only her ladyship and the American, and neither had gone out from the house much. The horses stood aimlessly in the stables most days, and the car immobile. Sometimes he would see Lady Cavendish and Mr. Gould walking in the gardens and sometimes in the park, but more often than not the house had remained shuttered, closed up as it had been during the Season in the spring, curtains drawn across windows. It was as if the whole place had gone to sleep until Lord William had come back with Harry.

At the thought of the son, Jack stopped. He remembered Harry’s voice in the car when he had driven them home: it had been both strident and defensive. Lord William had been saying something about Austria and Serbia, something about Paris. Jack had
caught Harry’s tone of dismissal more than his words. He didn’t seem to care for his father’s opinions.

Jack would have dearly loved to have stopped the car. He would have loved to wrench open the door and drag Harry out of his comfortable seat and throw him in the gutter and drive away. They had passed the village church, and Jack knew that Emily was buried there, close by a yew tree but with no marker and no stone. He would have liked to pull Harry straight through the churchyard gate and over the grass and held his face to the weeds growing over her grave. There was a broken body and a broken heart under there, and Harry was the man who had done all the breaking. Jack seethed as he listened to Harry’s voice, and he had gripped the steering wheel tighter as the miles passed. He had watched Harry get out at Rutherford and lope up the line of steps to the door. By all accounts, her ladyship had held out her arms to her son once he was inside; Jack wondered whether she had told him that he had a daughter.