I was quite at sea now and I could see from the way Alec was frowning that he was even more lost than I.
‘Her proposal?’ I said, and in repeating the word at last a faint idea began to stir in me.
‘I am very sorry about what happened but it did happen and there is an end to our plans and nothing to be done about it.’ Lady Lawson sat back in her chair.
All of a sudden it was clear to me. I had been unable to account for Lady Lawson’s presence that day of the jubilee and I had certainly failed to see why the policeman who had grilled us all in the back offices at the store had leaned so heavily on the oldest Lawson son – what was his name? – Roger. And throughout the whole affair I had been lost as to why the Hepburn boy was not welcomed as a suitor for the Aitkens’ heiress, why Mary Aitken felt she had scope to despise him so. Now, I saw that Mary Aitken had her sights set on a greater prize. Now, sagging wallpaper and threadbare rugs before my eyes, I knew the nature of the understanding between the mother of one and the grandmother of the other. Mary Aitken’s aspirations had reached as high as this and impoverished Lady Lawson had stooped that low – rank given and a load of roof tiles got, along with a roll of banknotes to pay a man to fit them. And the police had guessed or had heard about the trading of the Lawson name for the Aitken money and asked themselves what the boy – one of the parcels of goods in the transaction – might do to break the deal.
‘Roger was supposed to marry Mirren,’ I said.
Never in Lady Lawson’s long life of decorum must she have had to reach so deep inside herself to summon the light smile and airy wave of a hand that she bestowed upon us now. She shook as she did so.
‘He was,’ she said. ‘Are you shocked, Mrs Gilver? My late husband would have been horrified.’
‘But – forgive me, Lady Lawson.’ Alec was speaking now, sliding forward in his seat and staring at her. ‘What proposal of Mary Aitken’s were you refusing just now? What new proposal, I mean. Now that poor Mirren is gone.’
‘I thought she sent you here to press it upon me,’ Lady Lawson said.
‘Press what?’ said Alec. ‘The girl’s dead.’
‘She asked me this morning,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘and I was shaken to my core. She wanted Roger to say he hadn’t thought much of the idea and that he probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. She wants my son to accuse himself – in the eyes of the world – of breach of promise and – in the eyes of God – of ending the poor girl’s life.’ She sat back in her chair as though exhausted. ‘I was not brought up to games of intrigue and I have no skill at them.’ She sighed and there was a tuneful note in it which turned the sigh into a snatch of song. She had been brought up to games of flirtation, I thought to myself, and she was a master of them.
‘Why would she think you’d go along with it?’ I said.
‘Well, the absolute plain bald fact of the matter,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘was that Roger wasn’t terribly keen. And who could blame my poor boy? What man would want to marry such a shrinking, quaking girl? If she had smiled and batted her eyes a little he’d have been pleased enough to put her on his arm and show her off to people, department store or no.’ Alec was looking quite revolted, but not me; I knew of old what underlay the wan and flowery surface of women like Lady Lawson and it was always pretty steely, every time. ‘A courtship, a marriage, a son of his own, a bit of help for his brothers and then a pleasant life filled with his choice of pleasant things. It wasn’t much to ask of him, was it? No more than we all owe our parents and our family name.’ By now, Alec was far beyond revolted, a little sick in fact, and I hid my smiles.
‘So Mary only wants Roger to be honest really,’ I said. Lady Lawson sat bolt upright in her chair.
‘Not a bit of it,’ she said. ‘Mirren Aitken didn’t kill herself because Roger let her down. Oh, he groaned and grumbled, but he would have gone through with it in the end.’
‘Even still,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you rather have him known as a heartbreaker than as…’ She waited, giving me no choice but to go on: ‘… as a man a girl would kill herself to escape from?’
At this Lady Lawson burst out in an incoherent stream of denial, but then just as suddenly she stopped again. ‘I never thought of it that way,’ she said. ‘Oh my goodness, you’re right. But it’s nonsense. Everyone knows Mirren wanted to marry the Hepburn boy and Mary wouldn’t let her. No one will believe that her heart broke because of poor Roger. Oh, my poor boy! He’ll be a laughing stock. What was it you said? A man a girl would kill herself to escape from? Poor Roger! Oh, I’m a such a silly woman to have got mixed up in the grubby business in the first place.’
‘Why did you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Alec.
‘Well…’ Lady Lawson, I assumed, was seeking a euphemism for ‘hard cash’. I thought I would help her by suggesting something even worse, which she could vigorously deny.
‘She wasn’t in a position to put any pressure on you, was she?’
‘Hardly!’ said Lady Lawson. ‘It’s I who know more than I ever wanted to about her, not she me.’ This was interesting and both Alec and I tried to look alert but not so vulturous that we scared her. ‘Mary Aitken has been my personal dressmaker since I was a girl. She knows all my numbers off by heart, carries them in her head, isn’t that touching? We come from the same village, you know, on the other side of the river.’ She waved a hand towards the windows, indicating the Forth, Edinburghshire and the Border country. ‘My mother gave her work when she was trying to eke out her wages from her first job in town and stuck with her when she went to Aitkens’ and so Mary stuck with my mother and me when she married and here we both are. My patronage of her has slowly become hers of me over the years until we found ourselves at the point when she could feel bold enough to look up, with a mouthful of pins, and put such a notion to me, woman to woman, like some kind of business dealing.’ Lady Lawson blinked her pretty eyes very slowly two or three times to show us how overwhelming the thought of business dealings was to a flower of femininity such as she.
‘But – once again, forgive me, Lady Lawson,’ I said, ‘but Mary makes no secret of her humble beginnings. Why should you call all that “knowing more than you want to”?’
‘It’s not her beginnings, Mrs Gilver,’ Lady Lawson said. ‘It was her route out of them. Such scheming, such naked ambition – most unseemly. She snared poor Mr Aitken like a rabbit in a trap, you know. And he wasn’t the first one she had set her sights on either.’
‘Dear me,’ I said, thinking I could easily believe it of Mary.
‘And then marrying off Abigail to her cousin that way? Too dreadful. I couldn’t understand it. There was no reason for it. Abby was a lively pretty girl and could have had her pick of the young men. She had a fortune, you know.’
‘It certainly does seem a little… careless,’ I said.
‘And then so scrupulous about a match with the Hepburn boy for Mirren.’ Lady Lawson lowered her voice. ‘You know about the Hepburn girls, I suppose?’ Alec’s shoes squeaked as he writhed in discomfort.
‘A little. You think that was Mary’s objection? I thought it was business rivalry.’
‘Oh well, yes, that too. She certainly resented them. But if she ever got on to the subject of the sisters she was quite frightening. And to think I was going to marry my son into such a family. Cousin marriage, and suicide, and spite so bitter that it twisted her up into knots sometimes. What kind of mother must I be? Oh, my poor boy.’
And so on and so forth for quite some time, while Alec and I sat squirming. When at last she ran out of exclamations, or perhaps breath, she left us with a faint allusion to a headache and an ethereal farewell. We stayed behind in the little sitting room, puffed out a few good breaths between us and reviewed the interview.