Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [102]
PART FIVE
TWENTY-FIVE
The departure of Adams and subsequent collapse of the rehearsals brought happier days for Erasmus. He became an accepted visitor at the Wolpert home. His handsome, glowering silences, the evident force of his attachment, had ended by disposing Sarah’s mother towards him, had even in some degree, if not softened the father’s heart, at any rate relaxed his severity. Wolpert did not like the young man any better for being in love with his daughter – rather the contrary. Strong-willed and proprietorial himself, he found these qualities difficult to stomach in another; and the saving irony which he was sometimes able to direct at himself was a quality his prospective son-in-law showed not a glimpse of. Moreover, with that perceptiveness he had for all concerning his daughter, Wolpert noted still the oppressive effect on her of the young man’s visits, the way he seemed to overshadow the girl, to work a reduction of brightness in her. Nevertheless, dimmed or not, she sought to be with him, she went running to meet him. It was clear to Wolpert that his daughter wanted Erasmus Kemp and he could no more refuse her this than anything else she had ever wanted that had been in his power to grant.
So without any official change in his position or status Erasmus was allowed to visit, to walk with Sarah and talk to her, alone sometimes for short periods, more often with someone in discreet attendance – generally an unmarried second cousin of Sarah’s mother, a Miss Purdy, who lived in the house.
His nature expanded with this sense of occupying a privileged position. He talked much and confidently about the future, their future, when they were married, and that of the city, which he saw as intimately connected. ‘Transport and the carriage trade,’ he would pronounce, with glowing eyes. They were words of love and promise, containing all that he meant to work for, all that he would offer her. ‘That is where the future lies. Money is flooding into Liverpool, more every day. The best use that money can be put to is extending the docks, cutting new canals, improving the roads so as to give better access to us from the interior of the country.’
The fervour sprang from a source not altogether pure: on his father’s instructions he had been buying up a good deal of the land bordering the approach roads to Liverpool; the value of this would increase dramatically with the sort of development he was hoping for. But his enthusiasm was due only partly to this. The idealism of his nature was roused by thoughts of material progress. He saw a beautiful and prosperous city rising. Liverpool would be the greatest port in the land, greater than London. She would take over the Atlantic trade. All the manufacturing wealth of Lancashire would flow through her. Wolpert, he knew, had interests in coal and in the Cheshire salt mines. Taken with the Kemp shipping and import business, it made a formidable combination.
The future he thus envisaged was a palace of marble and Sarah was queen of it, enclosed within, securely his own. About the present he could never feel this confidence. The present was curiously porous, it had no containment, things leaked away from him in all directions. Sarah’s affections were offered too widely: they extended beyond her family, to friends, servants, even her pets – there was no end to it. In the presence of others, among people who had knowledge of her out of his reach, he was never at ease. He took greater pains than ever with his person and his clothes and was agreed among Sarah’s acquaintance to be well favoured enough but disobliging and too proud.
One habit of hers, first noticed during the rehearsals for The Enchanted Isle, troubled him greatly and he was resolved to eradicate it as soon as he had acquired the authority of a husband. She had a luminous way of recounting, or confiding – he knew not what to call it – a way of commanding attention when talking in a group, by spacing