The girl glanced at him, then at Rita, not with any particular sign of recognition, but as though she had never seen her before. Rita reminded herself that this had always been the case, even at the Vaughans’ where she had been a regular visitor.
As they walked, Armstrong pointed out things that might interest Rita or the child, and the girl looked where she was bid and in between times rested her head on the man’s broad shoulder and drew in her gaze, to contain herself in her own inner world again. Rita sensed that behind the farmer’s talk of the farm, his mind was turning over some private unhappiness, and took it to be the absence of his son. She did not make idle conversation, but walked along beside him until her quiet presence encouraged him to unburden himself.
‘A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.’
‘True enough.’
When Armstrong spoke again, it was to ask a question: ‘You do not have children, I think?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘May it come to you. I have known no happiness to compare with my wife and my children. Nothing means so much to me as my family. You will have guessed something, I suppose, of my story?’
‘I don’t like guessing. But I know what they say at the Swan, that your parents were a prince and a slave girl.’
‘That is fanciful, but there is a little truth in it. My father was a rich man, my mother a black servant. They lived in the same household when they were very young, not much more than children, and I was conceived out of love and ignorance. I suppose you could say I was lucky, my mother too. Most families would have thrown her out, but my father owned his part in it. He wanted, I believe, to marry her. Such a thing was impossible, of course. But the family was a compassionate one, and they did their best. My mother was cared for until I was born and weaned, then she was moved to another town and suitable work was found so that she could meet her needs respectably until she married – which a few years later she did, to a man of her kind. I was placed in a home for children who, for one reason or another, could not live with their families but had some money behind them, and later sent to school. A rather good one. Thus I was raised on the edge of two families, one rich and one poor, one black and one white, and was never at the heart of either. I grew up largely outside of family life. Most of my early memories are of school, but I knew both my parents. Twice a year my father would come and take me out of school for a day. Once I remember climbing up into the carriage where he was waiting for me and being very surprised to find another boy, rather smaller than me, already there. ‘What do you make of this little chap, then, Robert?’ my father said to me. ‘Shake hands with your brother!’ What a day that was! I remember a place – I have no idea where it was, to be honest – with grass lawns. I threw a ball endlessly to my brother and eventually he managed to catch it once or twice and how he danced for joy at that. I shall never forget it. Later on, while my father stood below to catch us if we should chance to fall, I showed him where to put his feet to get up into a tree. It was not a very big tree, but then he was not a very big boy. We were both of us too young to know what difference lay between us, but I started to realize it when we returned to school and I climbed down from the carriage and the two of them went off – together – to a place called home. I don’t know what happened after that. I never saw that boy again, though I know his name and that there were other brothers and sisters who followed him. Perhaps my father was not supposed to encourage us to know one another and was found out. Perhaps he just thought better of it. Whatever the reason, I never saw my brother again. I don’t suppose he even remembers me. I cannot even be sure he knows of my existence. So much for my father’s family.
‘I was not altogether a stranger in my mother’s house. I was allowed sometimes to make brief visits in the holidays. I have good memories of those times. Her home was full of talk and movement, laughter and love. She was as good a mother to me as she dared to be; more than once she put her arms around me and told me she loved me, though I was so unused to such treatment that my tongue tied in knots and I scarcely knew how to embrace her in return. Her husband was not an unkind man, either, though he was always telling my brothers and sisters to mind what they said in my presence. “Robert’s not used to your scallywaggery,” he used to say whenever the chatter grew too boisterous. I never wanted to come away from that house. I always thought that the next time I went would be the time I would be allowed to stay, and every departure was a disappointment. Eventually I noticed that with every visit I was less and less like my brothers and sisters, not more. There came a time when these holiday visits – already infrequent – stopped altogether. It was not a sudden end. There was no word to say it would not happen again. Just several holidays in a row when the visit didn’t happen and the dawning knowledge that it was over. The borderline between myself and my brothers and sisters had become a solid wall.
‘When I was seventeen my mother sent a message asking for me. She was dying. I went back to the house. It was much smaller than I remembered. I entered her bedchamber and the room was full of people. My brothers and sisters were already there, of course, sitting at the bedside, kneeling on the floor to be close to her. I could have asked to stand beside her and hold her hand for a moment, and if she had been in possession of her senses and known my presence I’m sure I would have, but it was too late for that. I stood just inside the door, while my siblings sat and knelt at the bedside, and when she had breathed her last one of my sisters remembered me and said that perhaps Robert would read – “for he do read so beautiful,” she said – so I read some verses from the Bible in my white man’s voice, and once that was done there seemed to be no reason to remain. I asked my stepfather on my way out whether I could help in any way and he said, “I can look after my children, thank you, Mr Armstrong.” He had always called me Robert before, but I suppose I was a man now, and he gave me that name instead, the name that came from nowhere, plucked from the blue, belonging to neither of my parents, but mine alone.
‘I attended her funeral. My own father came with me. He arranged that we would slip in quietly at the back and be gone before the other mourners turned to leave.’
Here Armstrong paused. A cat had emerged from the barn, and on seeing the farmer it trotted over, paused a yard and a half from the man to crouch on its haunches, and then leapt like a jack-out-of-the-box to land on his shoulder.
‘What a spectacle,’ said Rita, as the cat settled and rubbed its cheek against his jaw.
‘She is a quaint and affectionate creature,’ Armstrong said with a smile as they walked on, the cat balanced like a pirate’s parrot on her owner’s shoulder.
‘I did not belong, you see, Miss Sunday. In neither place. In neither heart. There we have it. I know what it is like to be on the outside. Don’t misunderstand me, this is not a complaint but an explanation, though I have been very prolix before getting to the point. Forgive me, these are things a man speaks of very infrequently and there is a certain – I don’t know quite what to call it … pleasure? Relief, at any rate, in unburdening oneself.’
Rita met his look and nodded.
‘My parents were good people, in their hearts, Miss Sunday. Both of them, I feel sure, loved me so far as they were permitted to. The fact is, they were not free to love me as they would have wished. My wealth separated me from my maternal siblings and my skin separated me from my brothers and sisters on the other side. I was no doubt a difficulty and an embarrassment to my stepmother and stepfather alike. Nonetheless, I am and have always been extraordinarily aware of my good fortune. Why, even before Bess I knew I was lucky.