Wideacre Read online

  He knew what I meant. Mama glanced curiously from his face to mine.

  ‘Celia has many years ahead of her to learn to share Harry’s tastes,’ she said gently. ‘I am sure she will do her very best to please him and make him happy.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said in ready agreement. ‘I am sure she will make us all happy. She is such a sweet good girl; she will be a marvellous wife.’

  The thought of a lifetime with a ‘marvellous wife’ cast a shadow over Harry’s face. I took a gamble on Mama’s innocence and rose from my seat and walked to the head of the table. To Mama’s view from the foot I was prettily coaxing my dear brother, but he and I knew as I came near him the speed of his pulse was raised and, at my touch and at the smell of my warm perfumed skin, his breathing became faster. I kept my back to Mama and put my cheek against his face. I felt his skin grow hot under mine and I knew that my touch, the glimpse of my breasts at the top of my gown, were winning the battle for me against Harry’s weathercock feelings. There was never any need to argue with Harry. He was lost at the first reminder of pleasure.

  ‘Do take me with you, Harry,’ I pleaded, in a low coaxing tone. ‘I promise I will be good.’ Hidden from our mother, I breathed a kiss high on his cheek near his ear. He could stand no more and gently pushed me from him. I saw the muscles around his eyes were tense with self-control.

  ‘Of course, Beatrice,’ he said courteously. ‘If that is what Celia desires, I can think of no more agreeable arrangement. I shall write her a note and join you and Mama in the parlour for tea.’

  He got himself quickly out of the room to cool off and left me alone with Mama. She was peeling a peach and did not look at me. I slipped back into my seat and cut a few grapes from the fat cluster with a pair of delicate silver scissors.

  ‘Are you sure you should go?’ Mama asked evenly. She kept her eyes on her neat hands.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked idly. But my nerves were alert.

  She groped for a good reason and could not answer me at once.

  ‘Are you anxious at being left alone?’ I asked. ‘We shall not be gone very long.’

  ‘I do think it would be easier if you stayed,’ she concurred. ‘But I dare say I can manage for six or eight weeks. It is not Wideacre …’ She let the sentence hang, and I did not help her to complete it.

  ‘Perhaps they need time to be alone together …’ she started tentatively.

  ‘Whatever for?’ I said coolly, gambling on her belief in my virginal innocence. Gambling also on her own experience of marriage, which had not included courtship as a preliminary, nor a honeymoon as an introduction, but had been a business arrangement contracted for profit and concluded without emotion, except mutual dislike.

  ‘Perhaps you and Harry would do well to be apart …” she said, even more hesitantly.

  ‘Mama,’ I said challengingly with my brave courage high. ‘Whatever are you saying?’

  Her head jerked up at the strength in my voice and her pale eyes looked half frightened.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, almost whispering. ‘Nothing, child. Nothing. It is just that sometimes I am so afraid for you — for your extreme passions. First you adored your father to such a height of feeling, and then you transferred that affection to Harry. All the time you will do nothing but roam around Wideacre as if you were a ghost haunting the place. It frightens me to see you so obsessed with Wideacre, so constantly with Harry. I just want you to have a normal, ordinary girlhood.’

  I hesitated. ‘My girlhood is normal and ordinary, Mama,’ I said mildly. ‘It is not like yours because times are changing. But even more so because you were reared in town whereas I have had a country childhood. But I am no different from girls of my own age.’

  She remained uneasy, but she would never have the courage to look into the pictures she had of Harry and me, to see clearly what was taking place before her frightened half-shut eyes.

  ‘I dare say you are not …’ she said. ‘I cannot judge. We see so few young people. Your papa had little time for county society and we live so withdrawn … I can hardly judge.’

  ‘Don’t be distressed, Mama,’ I said soothingly, my voice warm with assumed affection. ‘I am not obsessed with Wideacre, for, see, I am leaving in mid-autumn, one of the loveliest seasons. I am not possessive of Harry for I am happy at his marriage and I am making close friends with Celia. There is nothing to fear.’

  Mama had neither wits sharp enough nor instincts true enough to filter truth from lies. In any case, if the truth of my relationship with Harry had stared her in the face she would have died rather than see it. So she swallowed her last slice of peach and gave me an apologetic smile.

  ‘I am foolish to worry so,’ she said. ‘But I do feel the responsibility of you and Harry heavily on me. Without your papa you two have only me to guide you and I am anxious that ours shall be a truly happy home.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ I said firmly. ‘And when Celia lives here with us all it will be even happier.’

  Mama rose to her feet and we walked together to the door. I opened it for her in a pretty gesture of courtesy and she paused to give me a gentle kiss on the cheek.

  ‘God bless you, my dear, and keep you safe,’ she said tenderly, and I knew she was reproaching herself for her lack of warmth towards me, and for the unease she felt when she saw me with my arms around my brother’s neck.

  ‘Thank you, Mama,’ I said, and the gratitude in my voice was not assumed. I was truly moved by her attempt to do her duty by me, and to love me into the bargain. She had hurt me, and her preference for Harry turned my heart to ice towards her. But I could recognize her honest, honourable attempt to care for Harry and me equally.

  ‘I’ll order tea,’ she said and left the room.

  She left me beside the dining table, turning over a conflict of feelings. If only life was as my mama perceived it, how simple it would be. If Harry and I had an easy, sinless working partnership, if Harry’s marriage was a real one of love, if my future could be a happy one in a new home with a loving husband — how easy it would be to live without sin. Then the door opened and Harry came in, his letter to Celia half finished in his hand.

  ‘Beatrice,’ he murmured. We faced each other at the foot of the polished table, our faces reflected in the dark wood. He had the face of an angel, and the shadowy reflection only made his clear-cut features more luminous. As I glanced down at the table I saw my own face, pale as a ghost with my white powdered hair piled on my head, regal as a queen. But my eyes were large and serious, and my mouth was sad. We appeared what we were: a weak boy and a proud and passionate young woman. But for that moment we could have halted the process we had, half consciously, started. I was filled with a sense of peace at my mother’s gentle blessing, at her humility and at her own confused quest for proper behaviour in a world where sin was in every corner of her house, half sensed, half understood, but secretly threatening. Watching her struggle to find the courage to confront the truth, her struggle to love me, I saw the pattern of another sort of life, one where people might choose renunciation rather than grabbing for pleasure. Where one might count the cost in moral terms, and decide it was too high. Where one might search for goodness rather than gratification.

  But the vision was a brief one.

  ‘I’ll come to your room tonight,’ said Harry urgently. Then he paused and glanced curiously at my face. ‘You do wish it?’

  I hesitated. The refusal was on my lips and I believe that the first refusal would have been the hardest. Then perhaps we could have left those two evil days behind us. But then I caught sight of the letter to Celia. The page was open and I could see the first words written in Harry’s boyish hand. ‘My good angel,’ it said. He called her his good angel even when he was hot with desire for me. And she would come into our house — my house — and be the angel of Wideacre while I would be married off and banished.

  Not only Harry but Celia, Mama and I were all trapped in the roles we had to play. A second’s hesitation from m