A Marriage of Convenience by Tim Jeal

wigs. His wife, who had once been pretty, still retained a girl’s silvery voice and manners to match, though now her face was slack and puffy and her figure as solid as her husband’s. Both husband and wife were subdued and sad. Though Clinton was titled, his father had made the family notorious in the county and the Danvers’s poverty was widely known. Sophie could have been expected to have made a better match. But neither parent had been able to stand against the tears and tantrums which had greeted their earlier opposition.
    Since Mr Lucas had an idea that people should not talk unless having something worthwhile to say, he said little, and what he did say was so marvellously to the point that further comment was usually superfluous. This, coupled with Mrs Lucas’s excessive politeness, which conveyed her resentment more plainly than open hostility would have done, made conversation a difficult matter. In fact Sophie’s arrival, which Clinton had dreaded, actually came as a relief. Mrs Lucas’s sudden remarks about the pleasantness of the day and the beauties of the garden, would have made her purpose obvious to a man possessing a fraction of Clinton’s intelligence. He smiled at Sophie.
    ‘A turn in the garden, Miss Lucas?’
    The gardens on the south side of Ammering Court were laid out in a series of wide stone-walled terraces connected by balustraded steps. The upper terrace was a long lawn geometrically patterned with clipped box hedges, but below were rose gardens, and less formal walks between homely borders of delphiniums, columbine, and foxgloves. Down such a walk, flanked on one side by a pergola heavy with honeysuckle and climbing roses, Clinton and Sophie walked together. Looking at the pale drawn face of the girl beside him with her black hair and expectant eyes, Clinton felt a dream-like sense of unreality. Around them the fragrant air and the gentle humming of bees.
    ‘How lucky you are to be able to walk here every day,’ he murmured.
    ‘Perhaps I’ll take root like that Latin lady who turned into a tree.’
    Clinton’s lips felt very dry and light tremors of agitation made his breathing uneven. Ask her now? Or at that corner by the rustic bench? Or wait till they reached the gate to the rose garden?
    ‘I’ve become the leading light of the Ladies’ Sick Visitation Committee.’
    ‘Which you think a worthless activity?’ he asked, recognising her ironic tone.
    ‘Little better than my music or my drawing.’
    ‘You draw very well.’
    ‘I have a lot of time to practise.’
    Though the tension and sadness in her voice reproached him, he still could not say the words. Her red merino blouse with its dark braiding suited her perfectly, complementing her mass of black hair and showing off her pearl-like complexion. Pretty hands, a mouth with soft inviting lips, and her delightfully serious way of listening to whatever was said to her, however trivial, all pleased Clinton. But the untouched youthfulness of her face woke nothing in him.
    He stared as though in a trance at some butterflies fluttering around a flowering buddleia. Ever since he had seen Markenfield through the shimmering haze, everything happening to him had seemed like some inexplicable nightmare. Could he really marry, change his whole life, solely to avoid selling a house which now seemed more remote than his own boyhood? Even the memories which had given it clearest form were ephemeral: fire buckets, torn wallpaper, the pumping house in the woods where he had kept a tame owl. His father had once said, if a man owns land, the land owns him, and Clinton had accepted this as a fact needing no proof. What was an aristocrat without his acres?
    And yet today, looking across the valley at his childhood home, he had found out something else, at first without realising that he had done so. Markenfield had always been a region in his mind, as well as a physical place. And in ownership of such a house, that inner vision of it, a kind of