and presently she said, yes, that was very well, but what about babies? People really
could not keep having babies right and left. Of course not, we said: did she really think that babies were inevitable? Yes, said she: that was what she had always understood. So we told her, and I must say Clarissa was amazingly well-informed; though she did say that trusting to the moon – to the calendar – alone was not absolutely safe.’
‘Dear Clarissa. I believe I saw her riding this morning, a great way off.’
‘Yes. She is a very tolerable horsewoman now. She took the children out at break of day: they have little Connemara ponies, very sweet mannered. Oh, Stephen, I must show you my Arabs. . . but there is one thing that worries me
Throw me my drawers, will you? Sophie breakfasts at nine, and she is sure to ask us. And it is that we might just possibly have overdone things – that she might have taken me literally, Sophie does tend to take things literally. But anyhow he joins his regiment in Madras next week, so . .
‘Stephen, dear, how very splendid you look!’ cried Sophie, embracing him.
‘Ain’t I the beauty of the world?’ said he, spreading the arms of his fine new coat and advancing one leg of his satin breeches. ‘Lewd seamen belonging to other ships took to calling “Old do’ Any old do’?” like rag-pickers when I was
• rowed by, and it did so grieve the poor Bellonas, from the captain to the humblest ship’s boy, not a week from the Marine Society’s depot. So I have turned myself out like a peacock in all his glory or like a whole band or screeching of peacocks While he was talking in this airy, somewhat disconcerted manner, his grave eye told him that the beauty of the world in fact stood there before him, tall, straight,
and in the very height of her charming bloom.
A hand plucked his coat: turning and looking down he saw pink Brigid beaming up, with the promise of as much beauty and even more ‘Dear dear Papa’ she said ‘how very, very happy I am to see you. I have breeches for riding, do you see, and I would not lose a minute changing them. May I sit next to you?’
Charlotte and Fanny came and made their bobs, looking
•
stupid and awkward. George bade him welcome with an
•
open happy smile very like his father’s. Stephen kissed his old friend Clarissa and with Brigid on his other side he sat down by Sophie. ‘You have not just come back from Bellona?’ she asked.
‘Not at all. I have been in London and elsewhere this age.’
‘When did you last see Jack?’
‘No memory for dates have I, but it was a great while since.’
‘He had not had any letters from me?’
‘He had not. We all complained most bitterly of the want of post. Yet apart from that he was looking well and cheerful
– extremely busy with his patrolling and working up the ship’s company. I hope to see him even better in a day or two’s time, when I rejoin. I hear he has taken a splendid prize.’
‘We had so hoped you would stay for Christmas,’ she cried.
‘No, my dear honey. I only paused in my flight to see you all. At eleven o’clock a postchaise from Dorchester is coming to take me to Torbay by way of a village whose name escapes me.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Diana. ‘I shall drive you down as I drove you down before, but this time in our own coach. Sophie, forgive me: I must have the horses readied and put on some decent clothes.’ She vanished.
‘Oh I shall come, I shall come, I shall come on the box!’ cried Brigid, bouncing as she sat.
‘No you shall not, my dear,’ said Stephen. ‘Never in life.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Sophie. ‘There is the dancing-master and Miss Hay.’
‘I shall ask Mama,’ said Brigid: and at the door, ‘I shall certainly go.’
Never in life, he had said, and no gentle wheedling in Irish, no tears would move him: added to this there was the monstrous injustice that Padeen, the great traitor, was going, standing up behind in a fine livery Coat. And with Diana gone Sophie was obliged to say,
‘Dear Brigid, how sad it would be if your father’s last sight of you was tears and an angry, slobbered face. Run away and put yourself in order, brush your hair and find a new handkerchief. Stephen, I am just going to scribble a couple of lines to Jack. Please will you give them to him, with my dear, dear love?’
She hurried away to her desk, a little satinwood bonheur du jour that had belonged to Jack’s mother, and after some
‘I am very certain that I should,’ he replied; and after a decent pause, ‘Please may I beg you to relieve my mind?’
‘Of course you may, dear Stephen,’ she said, with an affectionate sideways glance: and much, much louder, ‘Norman, you God-damned bastard, bear out, bear out d’ye hear me?’
Norman heard both her emphatic voice and the crack of her whip not six inches from his ear, and at once ceased boring into his neighbour, an irritating trick he often displayed early in a run.
‘I say this because Brigid is a shatter-brained little creature, as quick as a trout: she was once off my saddle-bow and into a pile of filth one day on the common – soft filth
– although I had a hand on her shoulder: she had seen a baby rabbit. So in pure compliment to me, swear and promise and pledge yourself never to let her on to the box of a coach, so tall and the road so hard; purely and simply in compliment to me and my superstitions.’
‘Very well, my dear,’ she said in the kindest way, ‘and here is my hand upon it’ – patting him quickly.
Now they were on the flat, a broad road with woodland on the left and not a soul upon it: the horses were suppled and warm, eager to run. She encouraged them, leaning forward, calling them by name, whistling, wheeoo, wheeoo, wheeoo, and the smooth coach fairly raced along for two blissful miles before she reined in, laughing, at the foot of the next hill with a series of turns and a high-perched village.
‘This is what coaching should be,’ he said, when they were through and on the open, uncrowded road again. ‘The weather is perfect, and you, my dear, are the delicate whip of the world.’
On and on, the hedges flying past, and they baiting where they had baited before, navigating the devilish bridge and its corner at Maiden Oscott with an almost insolent ease; and they slept at the comfortable inn where they had slept last time.
Here, as the horses were being walked up and down, Stephen talked at length to Padeen about the small farm in
the County Clare that had so enraptured him when Stephen promised it as a reward for looking after Brigid and Clarissa in Spain, a rapture that had waxed and waned; it still retained a theoretical existence, but perhaps little more. From this conversation in the twilight, the longest they had had for a great while – a conversation full of the turns and evasions of an Irish person who wishes to say something delicately defined but who would like to do so without giving any hint of offence – Stephen came away with a variety of notions. Did Padeen feel that a wife was an absolutely necessary part of a farm, and did he dread marriage? Was he afraid of being unable to run the holding, having been so long away from the land? Had so many years of servitude done away with his independence?
As he sat on an ancient cane-bottomed chair in their chamber, mechanically arranging the horsehair curls of his wig, a wilder fancy came into his mind: was the poor soul consumed by a hopeless passion for Clarissa Oakes? Although it was not very, very much more remote from possibility than his own for Diana he shook his head and determined to say no more, other than suggesting a tenant to keep the land clean and in heart.
‘Are you never coming to bed?’ she called. ‘The candle is guttering dreadfully.’
The next day was a much shorter run and they did it in splendid time, the weather more perfectly late autumn than ever, the horses obviously enjoying themselves, except when Mangold cast a shoe and all hands stood in or about the nearest smithy, surrounded by smoke, the wheeze of the bellows, the flying sparks and the scent of his well-pared hoof.
Before noon they were on the Torquay strand, gazing out over the bay at the men-of-war: but this time there was no tedious to-and-froing, no mounting anxiety. They had not been there five minutes before Stephen, hearing the cry ‘Dr Maturin!’ looked round straight into the smiling face of Philip Aubrey, Jack’s much younger half-brother, now in charge of a boat belonging to the Swallow, an aviso bound