Friday's Girl Page 23

  ‘Very good, darling,’ she told him, after a small pause during which she studied the sketch, because it was very good. ‘Very good indeed.’

  Sheridan flung himself into the armchair in their bedroom and stared into the small coal fire, his face dark with inner frustration, with the effort of trying to suppress all his longing for the wonder of his own creations, for everything for which he had striven over the past years.

  He longed to paint not pompous old sea dogs, but the working people of Newbourne. He longed to perfect the struggle of their daily lives. The women’s faces etched with pain as they struggled with their fishing baskets across the sands and the stones, up the steep streets. The men’s faces worn from months spent at sea, their fishing hats somehow becoming part of their heads, left in place so long that on the rare occasions when they were removed from their foreheads, the latter appeared as white as the purest marble. He wanted to dip his paint-brushes in reality, not flattery.

  Celandine too was feeling despair, but not for the same reasons.

  She despaired because she knew that she faced day after day of just such behaviour as she was now witnessing. Day after day of Sheridan’s feeling that he was throwing his life away on worthless subjects just to keep their particular wolf from the door, a wolf that would not be baying perhaps – and the thought would keep recurring – if Sheridan had not married Celandine, if he had not taken on a wife.

  ‘I have an idea, Sherry.’ She knelt in front of him, trying to hold his attention.

  Reluctantly Sheridan stared into his wife’s eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have an idea. And I think it might work, if you will agree to it.’

  When she had finished outlining her plan Sheridan looked unimpressed, but since he did not turn it down straight away, and since she finally succeeded in making him smile, and even laugh, at the vaguely outrageous notion behind it, they were able to go down to dinner with the Napier Todds at Mrs Harvey’s house with hearts lightened by a future which now seemed a great deal more rosy at least to Celandine, if not to Sheridan.

  Happy as she was that Celandine was back from France, Edith could not help feeling shocked that she was prepared to go out to dinner so soon after her mother’s death. When the men finally left them alone to go for an evening walk, smoke cigarettes and drink small glasses of rough French brandy, Celandine, sensing her friend’s confusion, took it upon herself to try to explain her situation.

  ‘My mother as you know ceased all communication with me after – after she realised that Sheridan and I had fallen in love.’

  Edith nodded, but remained silent. She quite understood that it must have been a shock to Celandine’s poor mother; her own mother would have felt the same, had she lived.

  ‘Despite the fact that we married, and I sent her a letter with our new address, I never heard from her again. She did not care to write to me and congratulate me – which I understood at the time, feeling nothing but guilt, as a good daughter must. But then when I arrived in Paris – when I arrived in Paris it was to find that—’

  Celandine stopped, unable to continue as she remembered the dreadful scenes that had ensued when she arrived at the Paris apartment.

  ‘You must tell no one.’ She leaned forward and touched Edith on the arm. ‘Promise me, swear, you will tell no one what I am about to tell you?’

  ‘Of course. I have kept secrets before,’ Edith reassured her, remembering that young Becky had told her at least two, which she wished she had not, since they still haunted her. ‘But perhaps,’ she added hopefully, ‘you had rather not tell me. You know how it is. Sometimes it is better not to tell anyone rather than rake over past sorrows.’

  ‘You told me your secret—’

  ‘And I am very glad that I did. What a happy notion it was of yours to make Napier jealous that way. And what a happy outcome it has had!’

  Celandine hardly heard her, thinking only of her mother. Try as she might, she could not deny feeling ashamed of her. Indeed, she had found herself over the past days wishing, again and again, that she was somehow someone else’s daughter – Aunt Biddy’s, anyone’s, rather than her mother’s.

  ‘My mother died—’ She paused, and started again, after clearing her throat quite needlessly. ‘My mother died in childbirth, Edith.’

  Edith’s hand flew up to her pretty mouth to prevent any exclamation that might upset Celandine, while Celandine turned away, embarrassed both for herself and for her mother.

  ‘I know, it hardly seems possible, does it? But it seems that my mother was infatuated with a young man in Munich, a younger man who took advantage of her, and she, having ignored her pregnant state, finally died in childbirth, leaving a baby. A baby who will by now, God willing, be christened Dominique Benyon, but who is not a Benyon, not by any means. He is someone else’s boy, but what could I do? I have no idea of the identity of his father, and Marie, my mother’s maid, refuses to tell me. She had rather go to the guillotine, she said, than reveal the name of the father. Apparently she promised my mother, as she was dying, that she would say nothing. And you know Catholics: once they make an oath they keep it. I have always been given to understand their sense of sin is very deep.’

  ‘Yes,’ Edith agreed, remembering some of the Irish maids at the Stag and Crown. ‘Catholics are very convinced by sin, are they not? As I am by the devil,’ she added, remembering how some of the girls had ended up on the streets, earning a great deal of money that they faithfully sent home, but finally, all too often, paying a dreadful price for it.

  ‘Can you imagine how I feel now, in mourning for a mother who refused to forgive me, and yet died giving birth to an illegitimate baby? I am tortured by many thoughts, Edith, but most of all by one that will not go away.’

  Edith stared at her older, more sophisticated friend, realising suddenly that in some ways Celandine was perhaps more naïve than herself. Edith might have been innocent as to the mentality of painters, she might not have lived abroad, or read the essays of Ruskin, but she was all too aware of the exigencies of a woman’s lot. She felt she might not have been so shocked by a mother’s having an affair. Mothers lived. Mothers loved. Mothers died. However, she soon realised that she was mistaken, because within seconds she was being thoroughly shocked by Celandine’s next announcement.

  ‘You see, Edith, I do not think that this love affair of my mother’s . . . I do not think it was her first. From the look in Marie’s eyes, I think my mother might have had other affairs. I think that is why Agnes, my half-sister, treated my mother with such despite, doing as she wished whenever she wished, never bothering with my mother’s feelings, because she must have known what I did not, that Mother had been unfaithful to Father. That she had never been what Society calls a virtuous woman. That she had this weakness. I believe it is in revenge for this that Agnes has taken all Mother’s paintings, and left me only with the baby. My mother’s baby. I can only imagine how Agnes must be enjoying my plight, knowing that I will have to put the little fellow up for adoption. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I even think I can hear her laughing.’

  ‘Must you put the baby up for adoption?’ Edith stared at Celandine, surprised that she could even think of such a thing. ‘Could you not bring him to England? After all, there is nothing here to say that he is your mother’s child, surely? Only you would know, and Sheridan, perhaps.’

  Celandine shrugged her shoulders, trying to appear calm. ‘I haven’t even had the courage to tell Sherry yet, Edith. I have no idea how he will feel. Men feel so differently about these things. Of course I long to bring the baby here, but I must also be careful not to take him from his wet nurse before he has grown stronger. Imagine if I insisted on bringing him to England too early, and he died? Imagine if I tell Sherry and he refuses to let me bring him? It is perfectly possible, after all. I cannot tell you the confusion of my feelings, and if I seem heartless, believe me I do not feel it. I only seek not to do the easy thing, but the right thing.’

  There was a
small pause as Edith wondered at this statement, but then, seeing that there must be a certain truth to it, she nodded. ‘I see now just how intolerable your situation is,’ she conceded, feeling guilty that she herself had felt critical of Celandine’s seeming lack of feeling. ‘I know that babies should be breastfed for as long as possible – especially boy babies, Mrs George told me.’

  ‘I pray every night that some solution will occur to me, but none does.’

  The expression on Celandine’s face was one of utter misery, so it was with relief that they heard the men returning from their walk. Rising, they picked up their shawls and made to leave the garden, Celandine wishing that she had not confided in Edith yet feeling a certain relief at having done so.

  ‘I am so sorry you are leaving Cornwall,’ she said, kissing Edith goodbye. ‘But you will come back to us again soon? Before the summer is quite out, before the winter sets in?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Edith agreed, yet, for some reason that she could not name, not really believing it.

  As soon as Mrs George saw Edith coming towards her through the elegant double front doors she knew that her young mistress’s health had improved and she was on the road to recovery. Nevertheless, she was more than ever solicitous around her, for she had, as her house-keeper, a certain interest in Mrs Todd’s continuing not just well, but blooming.

  What she had not counted on, however, was that Napier would return to the usual routine of expecting his wife to pose for him in his studio.

  ‘Now, Mr Todd—’

  Napier had noticed that he was always ‘Mr Todd’ except on the few occasions when he was in Mrs George’s good books, when he became ‘Mr Napier’.

  ‘I don’t want you causing my poor little mistress another recurrence of her illness. She was as near to death a few weeks ago as I hope I’ll ever see her.’

  ‘And now she’s as bonny as the peaches in the peach house, and you know it, Mrs George.’

  ‘I’ll not have you putting her in that studio without proper heating and ventilation. The gas must go on, and both the fires be lit, despite its being a good temperature outside, even though it is already September.’

  ‘Anything you say, Mrs George, anything you say.’

  Mrs George frowned after Napier’s departing back. This was most unlike Mr Todd. Mr Todd was normally so caught up in his own ideas that he made a practice of laying down the law before he had even thought about what he was laying down the law about!

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Mrs George said out loud, and she shook her head and hurried off to instruct the maids to lay the fires for the following morning. ‘I’m sure I don’t, really I don’t. If I didn’t know him better I would say that Mr Napier has become what I would call civilised.’

  Edith on the other hand was actually looking forward to taking up her old pose. She was sure that it was all going to be different now that they had made love. She was so convinced of this that she could not wait to struggle into the once hated Grecian-style dress with its floppy sleeves.

  ‘Ah, and here’s my darling little harp,’ she murmured, settling herself on the gold seat against the velvet backdrop.

  In order to maintain her pose she had decided to bring with her into the studio all her memories of Cornwall. It would take her mind off the stillness that Napier demanded to think of the sound of the sea, of the patination and colour of the stones on the beach, of the hard-working fisherfolk, of the steep winding streets, of the whitewashed cottages, of the skies that seemed to hang over the sea as it tempted them to touch the top of its white waves, threatening to refuse, just once, to reflect them in its ever-changing colour. More than anything she was determined to be Napier’s inspiration, to be everything to him in his life and work, just as he was everything to her in every way.

  They began their new routine with great enjoyment, pursuing the cause of art in the studio, dining and making love in the evenings. It was a happy time, a time of learning, and appreciation, with Napier instructing Edith in poetry and even Ruskin’s essays – rather too many of those but she tried not to mind – so that she would be able to converse with him on equal terms at dinner.

  The atmosphere of the house changed, not just because of the Todds’ new and open fascination with each other, nor because of Mrs George’s hopeful expectation of a happy outcome to their lovemaking, but because Edith was, at last, able to claim a victory over the dining room.

  ‘Napier?’ She had chosen an exceptionally good time to ask him for something, since he had just made love to her. ‘Napier, I want to ask you something which I don’t think you will like, but which I find I must ask you.’

  Napier, stretched out half asleep on Edith’s side of the bed, looked at her out of lazy eyes. ‘Ask me, my darling. You know I will do anything for you at this moment.’

  Edith was brushing her long auburn hair in front of the mirror so that she could see Napier’s head of thick blond hair reflected in it.

  ‘Why do you think that the men, and their poor wives, want to eat with you?’

  Napier frowned. ‘Because like me they are artisans, they work with their hands, and they want to feel as one with each other under my roof, feasting together as the Anglo-Saxons did before a long day of toil.’

  Edith looked thoughtful, and then, deciding that honesty must be the best policy – something with which she knew Celandine would never agree – she put down her hairbrush and turned towards her husband.

  ‘Napier, I’m sorry to say this to you, but you are only thinking of yourself. The men, and their wives, do not I think you will find enjoy having to feast with you under your roof, as you so poetically put it. They would really rather be in their own homes, in their own cottages, with their children running about putting their sticky fingers over everything. They feel so . . . self-conscious here. They can hardly taste their food for thinking that they might have picked up the wrong knife or that Mrs George is going to give them something they don’t like!’

  Napier sat up, banging his head against the oak headboard. ‘How do you know all this, Edith?’ he asked, looking shocked.

  ‘Quite simply, because I asked them, Napier. I asked them why they all looked so gloomy during mealtimes, and they told me. It was as simple as that. They want you to free them, Napier. They don’t want to be the same as you, they just want to be themselves. By making them equal with you you are embarrassing them. They just want to make your furniture, the way you and Mr Ruskin have conceived that they should do it, joyously and beautifully, and then be allowed to be themselves.’

  Napier jumped, naked as he was, from the bed, and started to walk up and down, which was such a funny sight that Edith rushed to get his gown and hand it to him. She did not mind making him think a little about how much he might be imposing on others, but that did not mean that she wanted to laugh at him.

  ‘Edith,’ he said, frowning but nevertheless accepting the gown, ‘what you are saying is that by making the men and their families live with me on equal terms, I am in fact imposing on them? I can’t believe what you are saying is true.’

  ‘Why else do they look so miserable in the dining hall?’ Edith asked simply. ‘Have you not noticed that when they are outside making your furniture they are happy, they sing, they laugh, but when they come in here they have faces like a funeral, as if they are coming to church not to eat and be merry.’

  ‘Did they tell you this? Or did you observe it, truly? Because – because if they told you this themselves they might have thought you wanted them to say they were miserable, that is all. They might be merely trying to please you. Going along with you to be pleasant.’

  ‘Well, if I had told them what I thought, perhaps, but I have not expressed an opinion. Besides, you must have noticed yourself, Napier, surely? Or perhaps you haven’t? They all look as gloomy as coffin nails seated around your dining table, whereas once they leave the house and go to the workshops they start laughing and smiling once more, purely because they have been freed from having
to go along with your notion of equality. Try letting them eat at home in the bosom of their own families instead of forcing them to be part of your ideal, and you will soon see whether or not I am right.’

  Napier did as Edith advised and to his chagrin saw his workforce turning up after meals looking a great deal more cheery than when he had forced them, in the name of equality, to do as he wished. Mrs George was triumphant.

  ‘There is nothing so tiring as working for a man who spends the whole time insisting that he is not the master of the house; believe me, I know.’ The housekeeper gave her young mistress a look that was so appreciative, it might as well have been a victory medal.

  It was indeed a singular victory for Edith, but one that seemed to puzzle Napier, who turned it over and over in his mind, hardly able to leave the subject alone as he realised that Edith had been right and he had been wrong. He had finally, and reluctantly, to give in to the notion that equality had everything to do with freedom of choice and nothing whatever to do with imposing your notion of it on someone else.

  ‘If you had been French, my darling, there would have been no revolution,’ Napier assured her.

  Two curious side effects resulted from Edith’s suggestion. One was that the production of the furniture in the workshops actually went up, and the other was that Napier fell even more deeply in love with his wife.

  ‘I cannot paint you!’

  It was halfway through their normal working morning together, but Edith could not help noticing that Napier had hardly put a brush to the canvas. Now he threw one of his precious brushes – actually his most favoured – across the studio, and sighing mightily walked over to the fireplace to stare into the coal fire that was burning there, thanks to Mrs George and her solicitous eye for detail.

  ‘Have I done something wrong, Napier?’ Edith climbed down from her throne, and set her harp aside.

  ‘Yes. Yes. You have. You have done something dreadfully wrong.’