Human Traces Page 14

  ‘Tell me, what staff do you have here?’

  ‘Staff? A woman comes to clean the house. Sometimes.’

  ‘You have no carriage? What about a dress allowance?’

  ‘I make do. Since I seldom go out, I have no need for new clothes.’

  Mr Midwinter looked at his daughter. He had always been a little uneasy with her, unsure what girls or women wanted, but she had been a dependable source of order and good humour atTorrington. There had been awkward moments, it was true, but Sonia had provided something in the house that no one else could muster: a kind of poise. When he looked in her eyes now, she could not meet his gaze, but smiled and looked down at her lap; he saw with a pang of sadness that some light had been extinguished in her. He thought how much he missed having her in his house.

  ‘Richard will be back presently,’ said Sonia. ‘I thought perhaps you should go to his office, but he said he preferred to meet here. I think I shall go out and leave you to discuss the business. I have some small matters of my own to see to.’

  The interview with Richard Prendergast did not go at all as Mr Midwinter had foreseen.

  ‘Take a glass of sherry wine, will you?’ said Richard in a way that sounded more like an order than an offer. ‘We shall have some claret with dinner.’

  They were in the small morning room off the main hall on the ground floor. Richard had his foot on the low fender and an elbow on the mantelpiece; Mr Midwinter stood opposite, watching him.

  ‘I expect Sonia has told you where we stand,’ said Richard.

  ‘No. She expects the men to do the business. She merely passed on your request to see me.’

  ‘Yes, but not just business. Rather . . . The whole picture.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Well, let’s . . . Let’sdo business. Businessbefore . . . Business first, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘Very well. How much money do you want?’

  Richard outlined at length the difficulties he was facing, and ended by naming a sum that was almost twice what Mr Midwinter had allowed.

  ‘What guarantees would I have of seeing this money again?’

  ‘Guarantees?’

  ‘I believe it is normal to secure a guarantee before making a loan.’

  ‘Alas, there is little . . . material that I can offer. The house, as you know, is not mine. I have a handful of securities in a safe box at the bank but they are pledged already. I can certainly ask Jackman whether he would consider granting you some share in our company at a future date.’

  ‘The guarantee cannot be attached to the speculation,’ said Mr Midwinter. ‘That would defeat the purpose.’

  ‘Indeed. I suppose I had rather hoped that you would take a more, how shall I put it, familial attitude to the matter. It is money after all that could go to securing the future of your daughter.’

  They discussed the prospects of the business for a further twenty minutes. Mr Midwinter had no doubt that from a commercial point of view it was a waste of money; he might as well have written out a cheque and thrown it on the meagre fire between them. He was disinclined to continue with this young man in any event; there was something self-important yet pathetic in his manner; he was, in a phrase popular in the Midwinter warehouse, full of chaff. He had seemed a reasonable match for his daughter at the time, but the fortunes of Chas Midwinter & Sons had since improved, and these days Sonia could have hoped for something better. There were the girl’s own feelings to consider, however, and although he found it impossible to think that she might feel affection for this man, she did exhibit loyalty when she spoke about him.

  He sighed, and named a sum that was half of what Richard had asked for. ‘And in order to be what you call “familial”,’ he said, ‘I should allow the loan to run over a period of five years with no interest payable. At the end of that time you would repay it in full and it would be understood that you would make no further calls on me.’

  Mr Midwinter had expected his son-in-law to negotiate upwards or – knowing him – to take the matter personally and make a stand on his affronted dignity. To his surprise, Richard did neither, but stroked his chin and looked into the fire.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said at last, ‘if we are seeing this problem in the correct light. I appreciate your offer. It is not unreasonable in the circumstances. The provision for interest, or lack of it, is decidedly generous. I am concerned, however, by what you may gain from the arrangement.’

  ‘You are worried about my profit?’ Mr Midwinter was baffled.

  ‘Not merely,’ said Richard, ‘in a strictly financial sense. I rather wondered whether in return for investing a larger sum you might not ask for more from me.’

  Mr Midwinter opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. Surely Prendergast could not be suggesting . . . He thought again; this was a moment for extreme caution.

  ‘You mean . . .’ He opened his hands with an invitation to Richard to proceed.

  Richard coughed and drained his glass of Marsala, then paused, as though waiting for the wine to lend him eloquence. He licked his lips. ‘We always try in our business to look ahead, to think in periods of five years. Then where shall we be?’

  The debtors’ prison in your case, thought Mr Midwinter, but said nothing.

  ‘The circumstances in which I married your daughter have changed. As you know, she is infertile and in that respect has failed me as a wife. She is no longer young and—’

  ‘Sonia is not yet thirty years of age! She barely looks twenty. She has her life ahead of her.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Richard. ‘She may indeed have a life ahead of her. A different life from this one. Or she may not. I suppose that, embarrassing though it is, onerous though the choice may be, it rather depends on me.’

  Mr Midwinter looked at his son-in-law closely. ‘Are you suggesting—’

  ‘I am not suggesting anything. Nor am I trying to raise the figure I originally mentioned. Supposing, however, we were to view that sum as a loan more or less without strings.’

  ‘A gift, you mean. Or to be precise, a payment.’

  ‘It is probably not necessary to be precise about the term we use. In return, you would have your daughter back. As you say, she is still a young woman, and she has admirers.’

  ‘What would Sonia think of such an arrangement?’

  Richard sucked in the air over his lower teeth. ‘I think she might resist at first. But I imagine that she would find it difficult ultimately to prevail against the will of her father.’

  ‘And of her husband?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘I should require written assurances that you would never—’

  ‘I took the liberty of having my lawyer draw up some heads of agreement, which I think you will find answer all your anxieties. I have a copy of it in my pocket. Perhaps you would care to peruse it in your room and let me know your decision after dinner.’ Richard handed over the paper and took out a watch from his waistcoat. ‘We dine in half an hour.’

  As Richard left the room, Mr Midwinter found his mouth opening and closing. He had never felt so thoroughly outwitted in a business conversation; yet the resentment he felt was more than equalled by his pleasure at what seemed to him the advantageous terms of the deal that had been offered. As he took a cigar from the box on the table and walked over to look out of the window on to the traffic going down to Grosvenor Square, he wondered why, with skills like these, Richard Prendergast had not made more of his business.

  Three weeks later, at nine o’clock on a dry, cold evening, Thomas went quietly down the uncovered stone staircase and into Faverill’s vestibule at the foot of the West Tower. He was certain that this was the time that McLeish took supper in the kitchen, usually withTyson and MissWhitman, so the wards would be watched only by junior attendants, slumbering in their cubicles or staring ahead into the turbulent darkness.

  With the largest key on the ring, he unlocked the main doors into the corridor, then closed them gently behind
him. He carried a candle, whose flame he protected with his hand against the fetid draughts. It took him ten minutes of slow tunnelling, locking and unlocking, until eventually he arrived at the door of Daisy’s ward. He swallowed and licked his lips. This was an act of madness, and he hoped that Jacques would never discover it; suppose he were struck off the medical register as a result? I don’t care, he thought: I will practice in Bohemia with fake papers; I will continue my researches somehow; and what is the sane, the healthy life that we are trying to restore to the afflicted if it has no room for laughter and beer? He turned the key gently in the lock.

  Daisy was waiting in the shadows near the door, as they had agreed, while Thomas went to find Maud Illsley, the attendant, and distract her attention.

  She was sitting at the dining table, doing some needlework by candlelight; Thomas knew her to be timid, kind and unimaginative. She had worked in service until a year ago and saw her new duties as little more than tidying up and counting heads. She seemed surprised to see Thomas.

  ‘Just making sure everything is all right,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Doctor.’

  ‘Good, I like to look in occasionally. I pick a ward at random, just to have a sense of how the patients are resting. They seem very quiet tonight. Well done, Maud. I shall lock the door as I go.’

  Outside, Daisy was leaning into the darkness of the low corridor; she grabbed at Thomas’s arm as he emerged and he noticed that she was trembling.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She put her arms round him and squeezed. He saw then that she was not trembling, but laughing.

  ‘Come on. Follow close behind me. If anyone comes, though, remember what we said.’

  ‘We’re not together.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll find an excuse for your being out.’ That was the plan, though he had in fact not yet been able to think of any reason for a patient to be out of the locked ward at night.

  When they reached the end of the corridor, Thomas went ahead into the lit hallway and looked about before gesturing to Daisy to emerge. She ran out past him into the night while he locked the door back into the corridor.

  She took his arm again as they walked up through the grounds towards the laundry and the farm.

  ‘Are you good at climbing, Daisy? Are you acrobatic?’

  ‘I should say so. That’s how I used to make my living, remember? Doing cartwheels and that.’

  ‘Good. Because we’re going out over the brewery gate. I can’t use the main gate because Patterson’s on duty and he might recognise you. I thought of passing you off as my sister but I haven’t had a visitor signed in, so I can’t.’

  Thomas had reconnoitred the means of escape and had concluded that the high walls were impassable except at this spot. Although the asylum was almost self-sufficient, there were sometimes heavy goods from outside, such as bricks or sacks full of hops, that were delivered through a pair of bolted wooden doors let into the perimeter wall next to the brewery. There was an iron manger for the dray horse attached to the brickwork, which Thomas believed would give him a foothold from which he could step onto the nub of the thick upper bolt and thence lever himself onto the top of the gate.

  ‘I’ll go first, Daisy. You watch what I do and follow me. When you get to the top you must swing over and hang down off your hands because it’s too high to jump down.’

  Daisy put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. They walked across the cobbled courtyard, trying to make no noise, though the hobnails of Daisy’s boots clicked on the stones. The laundry cast a giant shadow in which the other brick workshops seemed shrunk, and deprived of their institutional grandeur – just buildings, idle and alone at night, thought Thomas, not mills where lives were ground out.

  After four years of scaling walls and gates in Cambridge at odd hours of the night, he did not find the brewery gates a difficult proposition. He squatted on top for a moment to whisper encouragement to Daisy, then dropped down on to the path outside. A minute later, she was with him. They walked for a mile, away from the town, until they came to a village in which, Daisy said, there was a friendly inn where she had once performed as a child. They picked out the lights, some way back from the main road, and went down the path to a side entrance. Thomas looked through the window in the glow of lamps on the tables and the fluttering firelight.

  ‘Try and keep your boots out of sight. Pull your skirt down over them when we sit at the table,’ he said, even though most of the men looked too inebriated to notice two strangers. They made their way over the stone flags to a corner, where Thomas sat Daisy down and brought some beer over from the bar. The landlord’s eyes took inThomas’s frock coat and white tie with more curiosity than Daisy’s shabby black dress.

  At the table, Thomas raised his glass and clinked it against Daisy’s. He noticed the reek of the ward on her clothes as she leaned in, but when he sat back against the wooden settle he saw that there were tears of exhilaration in her eyes.

  ‘Good health, Daisy. May we never be found out, and may your life take a turn for the better.’

  ‘Already has, Doctor.’

  ‘Good. Drink up, then. You’re almost as slow at drinking as my real sister. She takes an age to drink a glass of wine.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sonia.’

  ‘Is she married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me about her then. Talk to me, Doctor. You’ve no idea what it’s like in there, how much I’ve wanted someone just to talk to.’

  Thomas told her about Sonia and a little about Richard Prendergast. At her prompting, he described Torrington House and what they had done as children.

  ‘Sounds ever so grand. Sounds like where I used to be in service.’

  ‘Not really. It’s a lovely house, but it’s not grand. And they only have a cook and a maid to help. Though things have looked up, I believe, so maybe they have another pair of hands now.’

  He bought more beer and carried it back through the press. It was a Friday evening, and many of the customers had clearly just received their wages. They were in high spirits, which pleased Thomas because it meant they were not likely to pay much attention to him. One of them took out a fiddle and began to play, singing on his own at first, then with half a dozen others who gradually joined in.

  Daisy leaned back and closed her eyes. Thomas noticed that she had combed her hair and put a ribbon in it; but her skin was mealy, blotched with sores around the lips; her red-rimmed eyes were circled with black arcs of weariness and there were streaks of grime appearing over the high-buttoned collar of her dress. He looked at the skin stretched over her temples and followed it with his eye to the hairline; as he did so, he could not help but envisage the frontal bone beneath the dermis, the rippling of sulcus and gyrus over the folded cortex inside.

  Daisy, a little drunk from the beer, began to smile ecstatically, still with her eyes closed.

  Sonia was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring straight ahead. Her father and her husband had colluded to decide the future of her life, and it seemed that there was nothing she could do to stop them. After dinner, she had been called back to the dining room and told to sit down. Her father took the lead in explaining the agreement, though Richard made it clear that he concurred by nodding his head at intervals.

  ‘So,’ Mr Midwinter concluded. ‘I think it is a solution that suits everyone. Mr Prendergast shall have his investment and a chance to start a family, perhaps, with another wife. You can be free to do the things you enjoy, without the restrictions of economy and, who knows, you too may find another suitor, perhaps an older man, a widower with children of his own. Your mother and I can have our dear daughter back at the house, where there will always be plenty to occupy you.’

  ‘But I don’t want to,’ said Sonia. ‘This is my home, here. I have put so much work into it, the curtains, the decoration, silly things, I know, but . . . And Richard is my husband. I married him for better or worse and though it has
been in some ways worse than I foresaw, I am not in a position to abandon it. I cannot stop being who I am.’

  ‘Come, my dear,’ said Richard, ‘you cannot pretend that ours has been a marriage of romantic love or passion.’

  ‘I learned to become fond of you,’ said Sonia tightly. ‘Truly fond of you. I worked for you and with you. I took real pleasure in your occasional successes. And when you failed, I wept real tears for you.’

  The men eyed each other across the dining table, over the curling orange peel and the split walnut shells. Neither had suspected what they might unleash. Mr Midwinter thought she was being perverse in clinging to a man she clearly did not love, yet as he moved to sweep aside her objections, he was caught by a sudden memory of her as a child, a naked three year-old, dancing alone to imaginary music in the kitchen one summer day, and felt with a panicking lurch, that he had failed her.

  ‘My dear . . .’ Richard began.

  ‘Don’t call me that! How can I be dear to you if you can sell me off like this?’

  ‘I thought,’ said Richard gently, ‘that it would please you. I know that I have disappointed you as a husband, in more ways than perhaps your father suspects. I honestly and truly thought that you would welcome your liberation from . . . From me.’

  There was something becoming in the way he spoke which made Sonia for a moment blink and look down to her lap. ‘I do not know how I am supposed to proceed,’ she said. ‘It is as though you were taking my name from me and telling me that from now on I am to be called something else. It is not that I love you so dearly, Richard, I suppose. It is that loving you as much as I have been able to manage has defined the person that I am. That is who I have become.’

  Neither man was able to answer. Sonia looked from one to the other, and eventually spoke herself.

  ‘I suppose you will prevail. If a husband no longer wants to keep his wife, then that is the end of the matter. But I ask you both to reconsider this demeaning arrangement. I am happy to pretend that this conversation never took place. Discuss it between yourselves and tell me what you decide. If you want to agree that it never happened, I promise never to mention it or think of it again. If you still want to proceed, I will do as you wish. Meanwhile, I am going to visit my brother, who, I now see, is the only person I can trust, the only one who truly loved me.’