‘Do you feel excited, every time you get a new commission, every time you look at something like this, that you can rescue?’
He went past her and gave the panelling of the pulpit a professional pat or two.
‘Not as much as I did.’
‘Because of still wanting to be a doctor?’
‘I think that’s too generous an interpretation.’
Elizabeth slid her hands back and forth along the pew back. It was slippery with varnish, ugly in so elegant a place.
‘Tom.’
He didn’t turn from the pulpit.
‘Yes?’
‘I can’t marry you.’
He leaned forward and put his forehead against the pulpit, one hand still resting against the panelling.
‘You know why,’ Elizabeth said.
There was a long, complicated silence and then Tom said, indistinctly, ‘I warned you about Dale.’
Elizabeth brought her hands together on the pew back and stared down at them for a moment. Then she looked up at Tom.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did. You told me not to offer my house to her. You warned me that she might try to overwhelm me, to overwhelm us. But—’ She paused and then she said, very softly, ‘You never warned me that you’d do nothing to stop her.’
Very slowly, Tom took his head and his hand away from the pulpit and turned round to face her.
‘I love you,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘I didn’t know,’ Tom said. ‘I never dared to hope that I could love anyone as much again. But I have. I do. I love you, I think, more than I’ve ever loved any woman.’
Elizabeth said sadly, ‘I believe you—’
‘But Dale—’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘No. Not Dale. There isn’t anything more to say about Dale. You know about Dale, Tom. You know.’
He moved forward a little and knelt up in the pew one away but facing her.
‘What about Rufus?’
Elizabeth shut her eyes.
‘Don’t—’
‘You’ll break his heart—’
‘And mine.’
‘How can you?’ Tom shouted suddenly. ‘How can you let this single aspect get to you so?’
‘It isn’t a single aspect,’ Elizabeth said steadily. ‘It’s fundamental. It colours everything and you know it. It colours and it will colour the future.’
‘And you blame me?’
She glanced at him.
‘I think I understand something of your position, but I also think nobody can change things but you.’
He leaned towards her, over the back of the pew. His face was eager.
‘I will change things!’
‘How?’
‘We’ll move, we’ll do what you wanted, another house, another city, a baby even, we’ll start again, we’ll put distance, physical distance, between ourselves and the past—’
Elizabeth shook her head. She said unsteadily, ‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can’t – shed the past just by moving. It comes with you. You only deal with things if you face them, challenge them, reconcile yourself to them—’
‘Then I will!’ Tom cried. He put his arms out to her. ‘I will! I’ll do anything!’
‘Tom,’ Elizabeth said.
‘What?’
‘There’s another thing.’
He dropped his arms.
‘Yes?’
She came slowly around the pew she had been leaning on until she was only a foot from him. He didn’t try and touch her. Then she put out both hands and held his face and lent forward and kissed him quietly on the mouth.
‘It’s too late,’ she said.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Just talk to me,’ Elizabeth said.
She was lying on the broken-springed sofa with her eyes closed. Duncan got up to move the widow curtain a little, in order to shade her face from the afternoon sun.
‘What about?’
‘Anything,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Anything. I just need to hear you, to hear you saying things.’
Duncan looked down at her.
‘I don’t think you slept much last night. I’m afraid that bed is hardly comfortable.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t sleep anywhere. At the moment I couldn’t sleep on twenty goose feather mattresses.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Oh Dad—’
‘My dear one.’
She put a hand up to him.
‘What did I do wrong?’
He took her hand and wedged himself on to the edge of the sofa beside her.
‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘I must have—’
He folded her hand in both his.
‘No. Nothing wrong. You may have done things out of innocence or lack of experience, but not things you should blame yourself for.’
Elizabeth looked away from him, out of the large paned window – shining clean after Shane’s ministrations – at the high bright early summer sky.
‘I certainly didn’t know about Dale.’
‘No.’
‘He’s afraid of her,’ Elizabeth said. She turned her face towards Duncan. ‘Can you imagine that? He’s her father and he’s afraid of her. Or, at least, he’s afraid of what will happen if he stands up to her. He thinks that if he confronts her with her own destructiveness he will, in turn, destroy her. He said to me, “I can’t risk breaking her mind. She’s my daughter.” So, he’s trapped. Or, maybe, he believes he’s trapped. Whichever,’ Elizabeth said with a flash of bitterness, ‘she’s won.’
Very gently, Duncan unfolded Elizabeth’s hand from his own and gave it back to her.
‘Do you know, I don’t think it’s just Dale. Or just Dale’s temperament. I don’t think that’s the sole reason.’
‘Oh?’
He sighed. He took his reading spectacles out of the breast pocket of his elderly checked shirt and began to rub his thumbs thoughtfully around the curve of the lenses.
‘I think it’s maybe the myth of the stepmother, too. Unseen forces, driving her, affecting you, affecting Tom, everyone.’
Elizabeth turned on her side, putting her hand under her cheek.
‘Tell me.’
‘There must be something behind the wicked stepmother story,’ Duncan said. ‘There must be some basic fear or need that makes the portrayal of stepmothers down the ages so universally unkind. I suppose there are the obvious factors that make whole swathes of society unwilling even to countenance them, because of the connotations of failure associated with divorce, because, maybe, second wives are seen as second best and somehow also a challenge to the myth of the happy family. But I think there’s still something deeper.’
Elizabeth waited. Duncan put his spectacles on, took them off again, and replaced them in his shirt pocket. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
‘I grew up,’ he said, ‘believing my childhood to be happy. I believed, and was encouraged to believe, that your grandmother was an excellent mother, an admirable woman, that the comforting rituals of my life which I so loved were somehow because of her, of her influence. It was only when I was much older that I saw it wasn’t so, that my mother, who loved society and was bored by both children and domesticity, had left my upbringing almost entirely to Nanny Moffat. You remember Nanny Moffat? Now, Nanny Moffat was indeed excellent and admirable.’
‘She had a furry chin,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Which in no way detracted from her excellence. But when I realized this, when I saw that the happy stability of my childhood was actually due to Nanny Moffat and not to your grandmother, my mother, I was terribly thrown. I remember it clearly. We were on holiday, on the Norfolk Broads. I suppose I was about fourteen, fifteen perhaps. Not a child any more. I had accompanied my father to Stiffkey church – he was passionate about churches – and I was sitting on the grass in the churchyard while he looked at inscriptions on the tombstones, and I suddenly found myself thinking that my mother had allowed me, even encouraged me, all these years to believe in and rely upon maternal qualities in her that simply didn’t exist. I can feel the moment now, sitting there in the damp grass among the tombstones, simply shattered by a sense of the deepest betrayal.’