Chapter Fourteen 1898 #5
They found a table in one of the big sash windows. The air was lazy with summer warmth, and petals were dropping from the pink roses on the table.
‘I love this place,’ Hermione said. ‘It’s so out of the modern day. Can’t you just imagine Jane Austen sitting here to take tea, a century ago?’
‘I came here on my eighteenth birthday,’ Theo said. She’d just met Audrey, and Ralph had been merely her doctor. It felt like decades ago. ‘My uncle brought me, as a special treat.’
‘Your uncle? Not your parents?’
‘My father was long dead by then, and my mother rarely . . .’
She trailed into silence, because through the window she’d seen Ralph across the street.
There was another inn over there, a less reputable place more for drinking than high tea.
A man had opened the yard gates to one side, and was rolling barrels out into the street.
And there in the yard was her husband, holding the hands of a woman.
Theo shrank back in shock, fearful of discovery, before remembering that she was doing nothing wrong.
Ralph’s medical bag was by his feet, but their pose told Theo that this woman was not a patient.
Her clothes were respectable – too expensive for her to be an employee at the inn.
She wore a peacock feather in a small straw hat, and had rolls of chestnut hair at the nape of her neck.
Her face was feline, and she smiled up at Ralph, her expression both wry and helpless.
‘Theo?’ Hermione said. ‘What is it? Have you seen somebody you know?’
There was no way Theo could prevent Hermione seeing them too.
‘Oh . . .’ she said, when she did.
After a while Ralph kissed the woman’s mouth, and both of her hands, then checked the street before heading back towards the hospital, his medical bag swinging at his side.
‘Oh, Theo . . .’ Hermione looked horrified. ‘Did you . . . do you know that woman?’
Theo was wooden with shock. Humiliated. ‘No. Not at all. Do you?’
‘No . . . That is, she did look a little familiar. Perhaps I . . . I could find out for you . . . ?’
Theo shook her head, swallowing against a sudden hollowness inside.
Your purity, your virtue, Ralph had said when he proposed to her.
If you could only find it in your heart to love me then I would be a man born anew.
It had puzzled her at the time, but now she understood.
The blue gloves on his desk at the hospital – in the shock of everything she’d discovered afterwards, Theo had forgotten all about them.
And there were other things she’d noticed over the years, but attached no significance to: odd whiffs of perfume; the sudden giving of gifts; scratches on his shoulders one time, which he claimed had been made by a patient in a fit.
Yet his shirt hadn’t been marked at all.
Each small thing dropped neatly into place.
Ralph had been a rake, and now he was a faithless husband.
A man, like so many others, who kept a mistress – or perhaps a series of them.
When he’d suspected her of infidelity, he had been judging her by his own standards.
‘Well, I can’t—’ Hermione was aghast. ‘I mean, how simply terrible to see . . . to discover such a thing! I suppose there are many men who . . . But . . . Had you any idea?’
‘No. Though perhaps I ought to have had.’
Because, of course, she never had found it in her heart to love him.
‘Should we go home? Perhaps . . . Yes, shall we?’
‘Please don’t speak of this to anybody.’
‘My dear, I would never.’
So, that was the end of their afternoon.
For several days, Theo wasn’t sure what she thought about it.
She could hardly bring herself to look at Ralph, but he didn’t seem to notice.
In the end she decided it might be a good thing, if it fulfilled him in some way she could not – and had no wish to.
Yet she still resented it. The probability of people knowing about it, and laughing at her.
The way he did exactly as he pleased, but allowed her to do so very little. She said nothing, to anybody.
Theo missed Timothy Crudge intensely – his steady presence, his kindly outlook on the world. With Audrey’s help, in carefully hidden correspondence, they made a plan to meet up.
Ralph had been invited to speak at a medical conference in London, in early September. Since he did not care to visit Hallewell, Theo asked to spend the days he was away with her mother.
‘Of course, if you wish,’ he said. ‘I suppose she’d like to see Arthur. Though I’m not sure she likes the idea of being a grandmother.’
‘I think she likes it very much,’ Theo said.
Ralph grunted. ‘All women like babies – the female brain is susceptible to such primitive instincts. But grandmother has a whiff of Bath chairs and mothballs about it, don’t you think?’
Theo chose to say nothing about the primitive instincts of men.
In fact, she planned to go to Hallewell for only one day, and then return. Doubts plagued her at the thought of deceiving Ralph so completely, but his trip to London was too good an opportunity to miss. A rare pocket of freedom. Her anxiety grew as the time approached.
‘He won’t find out, miss,’ Audrey said. ‘He’ll be miles and miles away, and none of the servants would report on you – not any longer. They see how things are.’
Theo wasn’t so sure. Crudge planned to travel down on a train that would arrive just an hour after the one taking Ralph to London departed.
They would pass on the tracks – the idea made Theo’s knees ache with foreboding.
She couldn’t have him to stay; the chance was too great that a neighbour might mention it, quite innocently.
Ralph had persuaded Diana to the opinion that Crudge was unwholesome, so these days Hallewell House tended to be fully booked when he wrote to reserve a room there.
But there was a coaching inn at Sherborne Causeway that the old man had declared would suit him very well.
They would meet early on the second morning and spend the day together, with Audrey and Arthur too.
Something that Ralph had expressly forbidden.
Before their son was even born, Ralph had warned that he would not have him corrupted by exposure to the wrong sort.
Theo had known exactly who he’d meant. She’d hoped for Ralph to mellow once the baby was born, but instead he’d repeated his injunction all the more explicitly.
Arthur was not to be exposed to Timothy Crudge.
Hearing that gentle old soul spoken of in such terms made Theo’s face burn, but she was powerless to change Ralph’s mind. She knew better than to try.
She was jittery with nerves that morning, as they loaded themselves and a hearty picnic into a hired trap, beneath a sky full of wheeling swifts. Theo drove, and Audrey squeezed her hand as they set off.
‘It’ll be all right, miss,’ she said. ‘He’ll be so happy to meet Arthur.’
‘Yes.’ Theo exhaled. ‘Yes, he will.’
And he was, coming to meet them outside the inn with his whole face lighting up. Theo had barely finished hugging him before he wanted to hold the baby. His huge, gnarled hands dwarfed Arthur’s little body as he held him up and looked him in the eye.
‘Goodness me, what a fine chap!’ he said. ‘What a jolly fine chap you are, indeed!’
Arthur made a grab for Crudge’s whiskers, and Theo couldn’t help her eyes flooding. This ought not to be prohibited; it was very wrong that it was.
‘He’s the very best of chaps,’ she said.
Crudge’s face fell. ‘My dear Theo, don’t cry. Come – we shall have a wonderful day of it. I’ve brought an apple cake to add to the picnic – your favourite, Audrey. The landlady sells them for tuppence and claims they’re the best in Dorset.’
‘Well, we’ll see about that,’ Audrey said.
They headed south to Melbury Beacon, an ancient hill with a flawless view in every direction: across the Blackmore Vale and Cranborne Chase, and of Shaftesbury, scattered on its hilltop like a child’s building blocks.
They left the horse with an ostler and hiked to the top, where Theo turned in a wide circle, gazing at the scalloped escarpments and dark wooded gullies, the meadow grasses bleached by the long summer, and the patchwork of fields that chequered the valley into the far, far distance.
The breeze was warm, and bees were busy on the last flowers setting to seed.
‘Glorious,’ she breathed, meaning not only the view, but the sense of escape; of Tout Hill House being just a building, too small to see, rather than her whole life.
That one house; that one bed; that creeping feeling of danger she had all the time.
She took great lungfuls of air, wishing that the moment was not so irrevocably finite.
‘“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit”,’ Crudge said, quoting Shelley as he squinted up at a skylark.
Theo remembered another line from the poem: Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
How long it had been since she’d felt like that – since she could envisage something beyond or after her present situation.
But unbodied joy was a good description of what she felt for Arthur.
Her love for him seemed bigger and better than herself, with all her wrong choices, her cowardice, and her buried self.
‘Are you ready for the picnic? I’ve set it all out,’ Audrey said, unmoved by the view. Her opinion of the countryside was that it took an awfully long time to get anywhere. If there was an ants’ nest around to be sat upon accidentally, Audrey would be the one to do it.
‘I’m always ready for a picnic,’ Crudge said, before Theo could tell Audrey to wait, that it was only just noon, that she wasn’t to rush the day.