Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [189]
‘It would have been a way for us.’ There was an attempt now, in spite of her distress, at the angry sarcasm she kept for quarrels. ‘He would not take favours,’ she said. ‘Oh no, not Erasmus Kemp. This was not a favour, either – my father knows your worth. You did not think of me, not for one moment.’
‘A way?’ He could not understand what she meant. ‘I would take favours,’ he said, with a sudden passionate intensity. ‘I would take any means to restore his good name. When I asked him, when I told him my feelings and asked his permission to marry, and he consented, he said that he and I were different, that we had different characters. He said he would stop to look at something but I would keep on with it until it had grown so that it couldn’t be changed or touched. But it wasn’t true, we are the same.’ He raised one arm in a stiff gesture of emphasis. ‘He let this grow until he couldn’t touch it anywhere. It wasn’t possible for him to disentangle one thing from another. So the ship came to stand for everything.’
‘I have been mistaken,’ he heard her say in low tones. ‘I supposed you would fight to keep me – for the hope of not losing me. I thought it would be something to keep your heart up in this terrible time, if you knew that I didn’t give you up, in spite of every thing, that I would wait …’ She paused, then said in a tone of wonder almost, ‘You have not thought of me at all.’
‘I am not the same as I was,’ he said. ‘We cannot marry now, it is over. I have lost everything.’
At this she came quickly towards him, placed her hands on his rigid shoulders, looked up into his face. ‘Not everything,’ she said. ‘Not everything.’ But she faltered at the set cast of his features, the bright, abstracted stare. He was not seeing her.
‘I don’t want to be thought different from him,’ he said. ‘There is something else I remember him saying.’ He had made no move to take her in his arms or touch her in any way, and after a moment she turned aside from him.
Feeling the touch withdrawn, watching her move away, his loss was bitter to him. He had felt for that moment all the essence of promise in her, the warmth of her hands on him, the uncertain tenderness of her breath, the wide, undefended look of her eyes. Her words were brave but he knew she was wrong, she was deceiving herself, he had lost everything. He said, ‘He told me he should never have gone into cotton. He began in sugar, you know.’
He was silent for some moments. He did not know what to talk about. There was nothing to say. She was part now of the debts and losses, part of the restitution he had to make – he was making a start with her. ‘I intend to put that right,’ he said. ‘I intend to go into sugar.’
‘You will do as you please,’ she said. ‘Nothing anyone else says will make a farthing of difference to you, I know that well, everyone knows it.’ This calling of the world to witness was something she did often in argument; but her voice quivered now with the first real pain she had ever had to deal with alone. ‘When you first began coming, when you looked at me so, I did not find you agreeable at all, I thought you overbearing and farouche, and everybody thought it too. Then you ruined the whole play and you knew that I so much wanted to be in it, and I thought that it meant you cared more for me than you cared about pleasing me, and this was different from the other young men that talked to me. I know now that I was a fool to think it – it was pleasing yourself that you were set on.’
He did not know how to answer her, nor why she was reviving past complaints when there was only this overwhelming present of his poverty. It was as if she was speaking in a language he was not fully familiar with. ‘It is a simple matter enough,’ he said. ‘Your father has forbidden the match. I cannot go against him. I have been left without a penny. I have nothing to offer you.’
‘No, Erasmus,’ she said, and her voice was clear and unfaltering now. ‘That is not the reason.’ Once more, for