The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [259]
“All this is your doing. You seduced her. You are keeping her from me—”
“Be careful what you say,” said Prosper. “Be very careful.”
Benedict hit him. Not with a clenched fist, with a flat hand, very heavily, across the cheek, leaving fingermarks that looked flayed, and clay on the tips of the moustache.
Prosper ducked the second blow.
Imogen began to shake.
Prosper said, very formally, to Seraphita, “You must see, madam, that she is a woman grown, and may choose where she sleeps. I shall take her back to the inn until we are all calmer.”
“Philip—” said Seraphita. “Fetch Philip—”
Prosper Cain swept his ladies away. He had to support Imogen. Florence trailed behind them, treading with little stamps of her heels. Geraint, annoyed by the failure of his well-planned day, and anxious in some other dark place he did not wish to acknowledge, went back to Philip, and helped him to help Benedict, who appeared to be choking, into a pony-trap.
The Cain party had its own small breakfast room. Imogen did not appear the next morning. Florence and her father ate largely in silence. He said, once,
“We might go to Italy later this summer.”
“Never mind Italy,” said Florence, repressively, chewing toast. “What are you going to do now?”
“Do?”
“About Imogen Fludd.”
Prosper Cain took a long time to answer. Florence observed
“They are all impossible people, all of them.”
“Should you like to go for a drive this morning, perhaps.”
Florence said she was going out to walk with Griselda Wellwood, who was also in Rye. She said her father would be expected at the crafts camp. She went out.
After a time, Imogen appeared in the doorway, dressed in travelling clothes, carrying a small portmanteau. Prosper asked her to sit down and drink some tea, and eat some toast at least. She did sit down, rather heavily. He poured tea for her. There was a silence. “Where are you going?” asked Major Cain.
“I thought, to Geraint. He will have to help me. He is my brother, he is the right person.”
“He is a very young man, and he works long hours in a difficult place, and lives in a lodging-house. Much better stay here, and we will think about what is best, together, sensibly.”
Imogen sipped her tea. The tension in her usually calm face made it, Prosper thought, wild and beautiful.
“There are things you don’t know,” she said.
“The world is full of things I don’t know, and shan’t know. I know what I need to know when I am in a campaign, and I know what I need to know about how to run a museum department and buy gold and silver. I don’t know what I need to know about young women. I am not well equipped, as regards young women. But I am very good at not seeking to know what does not concern me. Often it is best to remain ignorant for ever of painful things. I have known several people who have brought themselves to confess this, or that, or to complain violently of this, or that, and have regretted it for the rest of their lives.”
He looked at her portmanteau.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I used to pack a suitcase, and form a project of running away. Sometimes the packing was enough. Sometimes I set out, and had to be brought back. Once I was away a whole night, and was savagely beaten, on my return, and then cuddled and kissed.”
“I am not a child, and I do know I must go.”
“I hope you will let me look after you.”
“You can’t. I see that, now. For every reason.”
“My dear,” said Prosper Cain, very stiffly, his back rigid, “I have not forgotten, and cannot forget, what you said to me in Clerkenwell.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Did you not? It has made me see what I myself feel. For my own part, I can think of no greater happiness than making you my wife. And giving me the right to look after you. I am much older than you are. I know that. So do you. But in some timeless place, I do believe, we see each other as equals, face to face. I don’t want to let you go. Perhaps I should, but I cannot. And will not.”
He looked at her, almost angrily.
She looked at him. Her large eyes were steady. She said