The Red Staircase. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ could put it like that.’ Patrick was fairly god-like himself, I thought, but I managed to restrain myself from saying so.

      ‘Well, I hope you’ll like army life, that’s all.’

      ‘Oh, of course I will. I’ve made up my mind to like it.’ Patrick Graham was an army officer, a gunner, serving with the Royal Artillery at Woolwich. Hardly the smartest of regiments, but one which suited Patrick, who was interested in machines and engines and not in riding horses. The Grahams – mother, grown-up son and young daughter – had moved to the village near Jordansjoy just before Patrick and I met and fell in love. Indeed, it was because his mother lived near the ancient, crumbling ancestral house of the Gowries that our hostess at the ball introduced us. I don’t think that Mrs Graham had reckoned on Jordansjoy giving her a daughter-in-law before her first Christmas in her new home.

      There were three of us at home. I was the eldest left, then Grizel and then young Alec. Robin, my elder brother, our pride, had gone to India with his regiment five years before. He was the bravest and the best of us all. And then he died, killed in a small incident in the border war with Afghanistan, a little encounter that no one ever heard of again. He died of injuries that better and prompter doctoring might have cured. I think it was then that the impulse towards medicine was aroused in me. Or did it have a deeper root? Sometimes I have thought that its beginnings go even further back, beyond conscious memory altogether. There are things I don’t admit even to myself.

      Jordansjoy has seen many tragedies in its hundreds of years of history, but Robin’s was one of the sharpest. The neighbours were tactful and left us alone, and we drew in on ourselves, perhaps more than we should have done, Grizel and I and Alec and old Tibby. Tibby must have a word all to herself, because there is no one like her and she has grown out of the soil of Scotland and her period in it. I said something like this to her once, and she said I made her sound like some great monument. She has been nurse, housekeeper and governess all rolled into one since our parents died. When Robin was killed she was our great support, unsentimental and forthright, quite devoid of selfpity, and not allowing us to repine either.

      ‘Forbye you’re young,’ she said stoutly. ‘With all your lives before you.’

      It is then that I had taken myself off to Edinburgh to study medicine at the university there. It was in my heart to persevere, but the money would not run to it in the end. So I stopped. But as with all human actions, there were many reasons for my starting in medicine and many for my giving up. I can see that now.

      ‘I hope you’ll like the army,’ repeated Grizel, as if I hadn’t already said that I intended to. ‘Tibby says that it will trim the rough corners off you.’

      ‘Always supposing I want them trimmed.’

      ‘Oh, she never said it was a good thing. She likes those rough corners and so do I. When you are sharp and speak your mind, and when you stick out for your own way, I like you for it and so does she. She just said it would happen, that’s all.’

      ‘It sounds a painful process,’ I observed. ‘However, I shall be in the way to find out next week when I visit Patrick in Woolwich to see the house he’s chosen for us to live in. I’m staying with his cousin, and from the sound of her she’s enough to trim anyone’s edges.’

      ‘A regular dragon? Ach, you’ll get the better of her. Trust you for it, Rose. Here, give me your hand. Let me tell your fortune.’

      ‘You’ve done it once this week,’ I said, reluctantly offering up my right hand. ‘Surely it can’t have changed.’

      Palmistry was Grizel’s new toy. In the crowded attics of Jordansjoy, among the dusty furniture and old travelling trunks (we had been searching for a reasonably smart set of bags for me, as a matter of fact), she had found an ancient book on fortune-telling; ‘The Book of Fate, formerly in the possession of Napoleon, Emperor of France,’ it was called. To the study of this book and the telling of our hands according to the rules laid down therein, Grizel was devoting most of her leisure, as well as a lot of time that should have been spent on other things. Or so Tibby said. Tibby called it necromancy and hinted that it was an abomination according to John Knox. I noticed that she listened with the rest of us, though.

      ‘You never know. We had a thunderstorm on Tuesday. Perhaps that was a portent of change. We hardly ever get thunderstorms here, so it must mean something.’ And she bent her head over my hand, busily tracing out the lines of head, heart and destiny.

      ‘I see a double tragedy, but great bravery,’ she announced with some triumph. ‘And a great love.’

      ‘Oh nonsense.’ I tried to pull my hand away, but she hung on.

      ‘And happiness,’ she said in tones of slight surprise, as well she might seeing what else she had predicted. Earlier she had foreseen disaster by fire for me. ‘And great possessions. Riches, in fact.’

      ‘I find that hard to believe.’

      ‘It is a bit of a staggerer,’ she said, dropping my hand. ‘Perhaps I got it wrong. It was rather hard to read. Your line wobbles a bit just there, owing to a blister you gave yourself with all that sewing on your travelling dress. But I seemed to see something extremely solid. Hard as a cannon-ball.’ She appeared to find satisfaction in this oracular judgement, for she closed my fingers over my palm as if this was the end of her forecasting for the day. ‘There, that’s enough. Aren’t you satisfied?’

      Of course, she had no psychic gifts, it was all a game, but some games with some players can deliver hard balls.

      In Woolwich the weather turned out to be hot and sultry; I was already tired by the long journey and now I felt, in addition, that my clothes were subtly wrong, too thick and clumsy. Thick silks and twills were out and soft chiffons were in, and no one had told me and I was aware of not looking my best. Perhaps Patrick thought so too, for he was bad-tempered and edgy. I bore this with fortitude, thinking that men are kittle cattle and need understanding. I behaved well, I think, and remained pleasant and good-humoured with him and made myself agreeable to my hostess, who was not a dragon at all but a woman of splintery charm and fly-away hair. And, of course, the owner of some of the prettiest and most fluttery chiffons I had ever seen. She told me they came from ‘Lucille’s’.

      I minded the more because Patrick always looked right. He was not elegant or richly dressed, he couldn’t afford to be, but he was natural and happy in his clothes. I don’t suppose he ever wore scent in his life, but there was always an aura of freshness about him. Eyes, hair, skin, were shining. And yet, he was so easy with it. There never was a less stiff fellow than my darling Patrick with his soft, deep voice. At my bitterest times I tried to catalogue these physical attributes, and hate them, but I never could. The truth is I loved him by them and for them and through them.

      Whether it was the heat or the fact that my clothes were wrong, I did not seem to be enjoying myself as I had expected. Woolwich was a restless place, with troops of soldiers always clattering through the streets. Patrick was preoccupied with his duties, not always free to be with me, although I felt he was doing his best. I was certainly seeing the workaday side of army life. And every so often the air was rent by the dull thud of artillery, as if we were under siege. I couldn’t always stop myself jumping, even though I knew they were only testing the guns.

      The main purpose of my visit to Woolwich was to see the house that Patrick had rented for us, and the morning after our arrival he took me to inspect it – one of an elegant terrace built in the middle of the last century when Woolwich first began to expand because of the demands of the army. I looked out through what was going to be our drawing-room window at the statue erected СКАЧАТЬ