Chapter 22 #2
Her mouth twisted. “And then a merchant your father plays whist with hears it from a man in the City and tells him over port, and the whole of it comes down anyway. All of it for nothing.”
Diana sat very still on the cold flags.
So that is how.
So that is what “trust me” meant.
She had wondered how a man could ride out at ten in the morning and come back at four with a child who had refused to come. She had let herself imagine that he had reasoned with the woman. That he had appealed to something.
You did not persuade her. You found her throat and you put your hand on it.
And the strange thing, the thing that sat oddly in her chest, was that she could not make herself sorry. She thought of Arabella asleep upstairs with a wooden horse.
What am I to make of you? she thought.
“If I had not been dishonest,” Octavia was saying, “I should still be in a house in Bath at nine and thirty years old being pawed over by men with wet mouths for the price of a bottle of wine. That is the honest life that was on offer to me.”
“You are a horrible woman,” said Diana. “Do not play the injured innocent with me. It does not answer twice.”
“I do not deny it.” Octavia looked at her steadily. “I am horrible. I have never once pretended to myself that I am anything else. But you must understand, my choices have all of them been bad choices. I lie and I steal because the alternative was to live and die a pauper, and I found I would not.”
“Then why are you sitting on a kitchen floor?” Diana said. “You have lied and stolen quite enough. Four hundred and sixty pounds, I am told. Take it and go. Find another fool with a title and a soft heart and begin again. It is what you do.”
Octavia said nothing.
The fire ticked in the range.
“I love your father,” she said.
Diana turned her head.
She looked at the woman’s face. She knew exactly what she was looking for, because she had spent a year learning the tells.
The little shine at the back of the eye.
The flicker of the mouth held down. The awareness of an audience.
There was nothing. There was a swollen, exhausted, forty-year-old face with nobody behind it doing anything at all.
Diana cleared her throat.
“Why?” she said.
“Must there be a reason?” Octavia gave a wet laugh. “I do not know why. I have asked myself. I wake in the morning and I see him lying there and I breathe out, and it is—”
“He feels like home,” Diana completed.
Octavia’s head came round.
“Yes,” she said.
Her eyes filled again.
“There is a part of me that rests when he is in the room,” she said. “It has never rested anywhere else. Not once in my life.”
Diana looked down at her own hands.
“And what,” she said, “if he does not love you back?”
She had not meant to ask it. It was out before she had examined it, and it was not about her father at all, and she knew it the instant it left her mouth.
I love him. I know that I love him. I have known it since he put his hand at my waist in my uncle’s ballroom.
“He loves me,” said Octavia.
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because he is angry.”
Diana went still.
“A man who does not care is not angry,” Octavia said.
“He is pleasant. I have had two husbands who were pleasant to me every day of our marriages and would have watched me walk into the sea and gone back to their newspapers. Your father is going about this house shaking with it. He cannot look at me. He has not slept in eleven nights.” She wiped her face.
“You cannot be that angry about a person you do not want.”
And Diana cast her mind back.
Was he angry?
She turned it over and could not make it come out that way.
She had seen him angry, she had seen him take Octavia apart in a drawing room and flatten two women on a terrace.
What she had been given was none of that.
He had gone cold. He had stood up off the bed and become the man from the aisle.
He had spoken to her as he might have spoken to a tenant about a drainage ditch.
And then he had walked to the door and told her he would not be back that night, and there had been nothing in his voice whatever.
Not anger. Not one particle of it.
Nothing.
Her heart went down through the floor.
Then he did not care at all. He never did. He was kind to me because he is a man who keeps his word and he had given me his word.
She had to press her fingers hard into her palm to get her breath back.
Then she reached into her pocket and held out the twist of paper.
Octavia looked at it.
“It is from the little one,” said Diana. “She heard you crying through the floor. It is what she gives people to console them; it is the only thing she has that is hers to give.”
A tear fell down Octavia’s face. She took the sweet, and her hand shook, and she got the paper off it, put it in her mouth and sat there on the kitchen floor with her eyes shut.
Diana got up and shook out her skirts.
“Pull yourself together,” she said.
Octavia looked up.
“My father is a fickle, weak, easily-led man, and I have had three-and-twenty years to observe it. He will not be won back by a woman sitting on the flags in her stocking feet weeping into her hands.” Diana straightened her cuff.
“Go upstairs. Dress your hair. Put on the gray silk and come down to dinner and be charming, impossible, and half a step cleverer than everybody in the room. Go back to being what you were. That is what he fell in love with, God help him, and it is the only card in your hand.”
She turned and went toward the passage.
“Diana.”
She stopped. She did not turn round.
“I am sorry,” Octavia said. “For all of it. For every single thing.”
Diana stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame.
“I shall accept your apology,” she said, “when you are yourself again.”
And she went out.