Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [85]
‘Who appointed you?’ Sarah said with renewed energy. ‘How did you dare? You have ruined the play. We shall not be able to go on with it now. I believe you intended to do it from the start, because you could not shine.’ She paused, in search of further wounding phrases. ‘You are an exceeding bad actor,’ she said. ‘I am heartily sorry now that ever I asked you to be Ferdinand.’
Erasmus said, ‘I don’t care anything about the play. I only stayed in it for you.’
She made some incoherent exclamation at this and turned from him and began walking upwards again, Erasmus keeping by her side. And now the path they were following curved sharply and they passed into a fold between low hills, where there was suddenly no wind at all. Surprise at this brought them again to a stop.
‘You had no right to do it,’ she said. ‘I have a brother already who is watchful of me – too much so. Even if we had been engaged, you had no right, not without speaking of it first to me.’ But she had lost some vehemence, suffered an abatement of her anger, here in this sheltered place. ‘The reason you didn’t,’ she added in low tones, ‘speak of it to me, I mean, was that you knew I would tell you there was nothing in it. You meant to ruin our rehearsals.’ She looked at him and her eyes widened with an expression almost of awe. ‘You meant to do it,’ she said.
‘He made too free with you. He allowed himself liberties.’ He was blind to all other questions but this. He wanted her to understand that he was older, wiser, a better judge of what she should permit. Below this there was an intense wish that she should see and acknowledge her fault. If only she would do this, it would put him in the right – it was the very least she could do to repair the hurt she caused to him.
‘Liberties?’ Sarah’s voice sharpened. ‘Who is to be judge of that? Do you stand there and say that I have been too careless of myself?’
He hesitated on this and saw the girl’s chin rise and her eyes narrow slightly. She was more wilful, more defiant, than he had believed possible. ‘No, no,’ he said at last, ‘but you are innocent. A man like that –’
‘I found nothing to complain of in him,’ she said simply.
This bold, unfaltering statement of what lay unvoiced at the heart of his complaint against her dumbfounded Erasmus. He could only stand there looking at her, in this hushed enclave they had found.
‘He was perfectly polite,’ she said. ‘He often complimented me on my playing of Miranda.’ Her tone had changed, some note of provocation or challenge had come into it now.
‘Can you not see anything except in the terms of this playacting?’ Erasmus demanded.
She raised her brows at this in surprise real or assumed. ‘But all that you complain of happened in the rehearsals of a play.’
A sense of being caught in toils came to Erasmus. ‘There is a wider view,’ he said, but no words with which to enlarge on this came immediately to him.
He was looking aside, thinking how he could proceed, when he heard her say, ‘No, I found him quite agreeable. He is a handsome man, I think. He is famous in London among people of the theatre there.’
‘Famous as a parasite and poseur, I make no doubt,’ Erasmus said, forgetting everything in the immediate promptings of his jealousy. ‘He would be famous anywhere for those qualities.’ He paused a moment. He knew she had praised Adams only in order to wound him. He said with bitter accusation, ‘He touched you.’
There was too much force of feeling in this for the loneliness of the place, and he saw the consciousness of it reflected instantly