Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [56]
‘Are you displeased with me, sir?’
‘No, I am not displeased. Our natures are different in this respect. I would stop to look at something, take soundings, before my course was so far set. Now I see this business is screwed to such pitch that I could not oppose it without damage.’ He saw nothing on his son’s face to indicate any appreciation of this. The boy still stood braced there. ‘Come, sit down,’ he said. ‘Here, by me. You keep to your purposes, that is not so bad a thing. But you are young to be married. And the girl cannot be more than eighteen.’
‘She is not yet eighteen, sir.’
‘It is young,’ Kemp said slowly. Something had changed in his tone, now that surprise had faded, giving time for a glimpse of the implications. These expanded in his mind as he looked at the level-browed, intensely serious face close to his own. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘your mother was barely seventeen when we were married. I cannot spare you from the business,’ he added after a moment.
‘There would be no need,’ Erasmus said. The interview was not proceeding as expected – he was surprised to find his father so amenable – but this last objection he had anticipated. ‘The match would do good for us. The combination of the families would make a powerful force, with the town growing so fast.’
Kemp nodded, as if this thought had only now occurred to him. ‘That is so,’ he said. ‘The connection would be of benefit to both.’ With some appearance of effort he met his son’s eyes, so like his own. ‘It is what you want?’ he said.
‘I am set on her.’
Kemp was silent for a long moment, looking down. Then he raised a face grown suddenly haggard. ‘You have my consent,’ he said.
It took a further week for Erasmus to discover the right circumstances, poise and apparel for his interview with Sarah’s father. It was not nerve he had to summon – he had enough of that at his command – but humility, the readiness to demean himself, as he saw it, by stating his desires and seeming to petition for their legitimacy. He would have felt this whoever the man had been; he had felt it, to some degree, even with his father.
Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch – even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation. In this vulnerable state he experienced the burgeoning of the season like a man set on bruising himself. Never had he noted the symptoms of summer with such particularity. As he saw to the unloading of the pack-trains on the waterfront, or the weighing and recording of cotton bales in the yard behind the family warehouses, he heard the cuckoos calling from the market gardens of Wallasey across the water, all regret and all promise mingled in their notes. In the wood by the lake the bluebells came in swathes and the ash trees emerged from winter overnight, as it seemed, and were hung with reddish, plumy flowers.
He took particular care with his dress the evening of his visit: an immaculate exterior reduced the appearance of suing. He chose a suit of dark satin, short in the sleeve to show the plaited linen of his shirt cuffs, a white waistcoat and black, pointed-toed shoes in the latest fashion. He had powdered his hair lightly and tied it behind with a long black ribbon; and instead of the usual short hanger, he wore his best sword with the silver chasing on the hilt.
‘I love your daughter, sir,’ he heard himself saying, sitting bolt upright on his chair. ‘I want to marry her.’ It sounded angry, almost. He had been unable so far to see any reaction on the broad face before him or in the shrewd, deliberate brown eyes which regarded him now for some