by Molly Pohlig
20.
Whether Jacob had planned the setting or whether it was by mere luck, the tea room was dimly lit, and as he mentioned, there were not many people dining. As they were seated, Iseult felt anxiety careening about inside her, bouncing off her bones. Anxiety about her face, anxiety about an afternoon of conversation with Jacob, anxiety about having a public meal with a man. She tried to remember the last time she had eaten a meal with her father in a restaurant. Not since childhood. She was glad it was only teatime so she would not be required to consume multiple courses.
The waiter took up a blessed amount of time, and Iseult wanted to cry at how much he was acting as if she and Jacob were both normal people, and not, in reality, a silver man and a red-faced scarecrow. (She did not know how her hair looked, and even though there were several dainty mirrors scattered about the walls, she preferred to remain unenlightened.) Jacob ordered what Iseult thought was a ridiculous amount of food, but he seemed accustomed to it.
The waiter had to leave eventually, and silence fell. Iseult decided she had better say something sooner rather than later, because the longer she left it the less control she would have over what words came out.
“Mr. Vinke,” she said timidly. “Our housekeeper, Mrs. Pennington. She has been with my father since before I was born. And I … I would like…”
She had started out so well, but as usual, a few well-crafted and spoken sentences were the most she could muster. Her mouth felt dry, and the waiter had not yet arrived with the tea. Jacob smiled, as if this was just fine. “And you would like her to come and be our housekeeper, is that it?”
Iseult mutely nodded.
“Well, as long as your father has no objections, I don’t see whyever not. I should like you to have every comfort possible.” His smile was disarming. It was a very nice smile, once you got over the silver. Although you had to get over the silver each time you looked at him, Iseult found. “What else would make you feel that our house was to be your home?”
Iseult was unaccustomed to having questions directed toward her that were not either rhetorical (from Mr. Wince) or overly simple (from Mrs. Pennington).
He was being so kind that she was tempted to be suspicious, another feeling that she tried to quash. She tried to think. “I have a chair. It was my mother’s. Maybe I could bring that?”
Jacob opened his mouth and Iseult was seized by a fear that he would say no, so she kept talking, faster and faster.
“It’s very old and shabby and we could keep it somewhere that visitors would never see it. Although I don’t know if we will have visitors. I can keep it somewhere that you don’t have to see it, in a small room that only I go into. You never need look at it.”
Jacob laid his silver hand on hers. Iseult forced her muscles to swallow the flinch. “We shall put it in whatever room you prefer.”
The waiter arrived with a tray laden with an immense number of small dishes, which he began to transfer carefully to the table, necessitating the removal of Jacob’s hand and so enabling Iseult to relax. Everything looked immensely appetizing, and things weren’t going too badly. The waiter departed like a shadow, and Iseult felt emboldened.
“What will make the house feel like a home to you?” she asked, picking up a dainty fork with confidence. She did not always choose to have impeccable manners, but could have them when she chose to.
“Our home,” Jacob corrected her, and she was sure the red blotches on her cheeks were standing out in ever more furious relief. So as to avoid having to respond, Iseult shoveled a farcical amount of cake into her mouth. Jacob seemed content to continue. “I have a desk I am very fond of. It is heavy and cumbersome but I shan’t be parted from it, even if you despise it.”
Iseult thought how different the same words would have sounded in her father’s mouth. Mr. Wince had certainly never had such a jolly smile as Jacob currently wore. She wondered whether the inside of his mouth was silver as well, and tried to sweep the thought quickly into oblivion.
“Perhaps we could set your desk and my chair facing each other, and thus be set up to glower at each other from across the room.” Her words came out so smoothly and coquettishly (what!) that she could scarcely believe that she had said them.
“I think that is a wonderful idea,” Jacob said, and Iseult noticed that his manner of drinking his tea was altogether more agreeable than her father’s, with no noisy slurping or gulping. “Oh, I should tell you: I believe my parents have found a prospective house for us. I told them that no decision should be made until you have seen the property and approved.”
Iseult felt blank, and, after the unexpected confidence of the last few minutes, felt the old familiar plunge. She groped about inside herself for her mother, groping in the dark and finding nothing. “I’m sure…” She faltered. “I’m sure that whatever they have chosen will be agreeable.”
“Miss Wince.” Jacob set down a small tart. (Truth be told, it was a small tart that Iseult had had her eye on, and only one such tart had been brought. There were two people at the table; why not bring two of everything? Iseult disliked clashes between odd and even numbers. They required too much negotiation.) He put his hand on hers again. (This time her hand had a fork in it, and she felt her pulse lurch. Should she put the fork down? Etiquette dilemmas of this ilk had not been covered in school.)
“Iseult,” he said quietly. In a movement of sheer awkwardness, she dropped the fork, pulled her hand away, and pretend her nose needed scratching. Then she regretted it, because his face turned a darker silver than usual.
“Iseult,” he said again, more firmly. “I know that our beginnings have been … not exactly ideal. I know that our lives have not been ideal. But you should know that I intend this to be a real marriage. I want to know what you think about things, your preferences. I want us to be honest with one another. It might not be easy, but…”
When he wrinkled his nose in frustration, little white lines appeared, and Iseult wondered if that contrasting paleness was the color that his skin was supposed to be.
“Wouldn’t you like an ally in this world? God knows I’ve never had one, and I assume you haven’t either—”
“Where did you hear that?” Again, it was definitely not Beatrice speaking, but Iseult felt as surprised by her voice’s ferocity as if it had come from another room.
He looked uncomfortable and she felt sorry, but only for a moment.
“Where?” she demanded. “And what?”
“People say you are strange,” Jacob said, straightening in his chair and meeting her eye, but just barely. “Strange and willful and—”
“And what?” Iseult had somewhat unconsciously got hold of a plump strawberry and was on the verge of crushing it.
“And they say that you are out of your mind. I don’t think so, but—”
“Is it because of my mother?” Iseult was dimly aware that the strawberry was now a pulpy disaster in her fist.
“They say you think she is still with you. In you. Something like that. It’s just what people say.”
“It’s true,” she said simply. “Although not lately. She seems to have gone away. I made her angry.”
“How did you do that?”
She looked up at him. No one had ever responded to her talk about her mother with questions, or with interest.
“Sometimes I wish she would leave me alone to have my own thoughts,” she said, drawing a circle in her strawberried palm with her finger. “But then she does, and I realize that she thinks all my thoughts, speaks all my words, and I have nothing of my own to think or to say.”
She began to surreptitiously look about to see if there were any extra napkins to wipe her hands with, and wondered whether Jacob would break off the engagement or grit his teeth and go through with it.
“Is it like hearing another voice in the room?” he said.
Iseult looked up, startled. He was continuing to eat his tart, as if things were perfectly normal.
He looked at her expectantl
y, chewing, not looking as if he was going to change the subject.
“Well … no,” Iseult said, glad of the generous tablecloths in the tea shop, which allowed her to be fairly certain that no one could see her wipe her sticky hands on the underside. Still, she was suspicious of his motives. “Do you really want to know?”
He nodded.
“It’s her voice in my head.” She took a bite of cake, hoping that he would understand that it was now his turn to say something.
“Does it not just sound like your own voice? I hope this isn’t rude, but how would you know what her voice sounded like?” And then he put a large bite of sandwich in his mouth. Iseult felt her eyes narrow. She didn’t like it when someone used her own tricks against her.
“I know,” she said icily. “I may not have heard her voice for long, but surely, one has ears while still in their mother’s womb, doesn’t one?”
If Iseult had expected him to be unsettled by her frank use of the word “womb” (she had), then she was to be disappointed. He sipped his tea, and Iseult strained to catch any hint of a slurp so that she could be doubly disappointed.
“And what does her voice sound like?”
No one had ever asked her this, so she had never thought about it. Which annoyed her. But she was also at a loss for how to explain. “What does your own voice sound like?”
Jacob dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a napkin, Mr. Wince–like, and she hated him. “My voice? You can hear it, can’t you?”
She was beginning to fear that he was an idiot. “Not to me,” she said, scraping a curl of icing onto her fork, and licking it off as she would have done had she been alone. “How does your voice sound in your head? When you are not speaking aloud.”
She realized that this must sound confusing, but if he was too stupid to understand she was not going to explain further.
He tilted his head to one side. “I suppose there’s no real sound. It’s just there in my head, the thought.”
“And how do you know it’s you?”
“Well … I just do.”
“That’s how I know it’s my mother.”
Now he looked annoyed. “What sorts of things does she say? When she is speaking to you, that is.”
“Just … conversation.” She would have thought that would be obvious. “How does your mother talk to your sisters?”
He smirked. Iseult loathed smirkers. “She nags them, and she fusses over them, and she rages at them, and she tells them how beautiful and perfect they are.”
“It’s the same with my mother,” Iseult explained patiently, having told herself that her fiancé (shiver) had the mental competence of an infant in swaddling clothes, and that she would have to accustom herself to explaining things that didn’t need explaining if she was going to make herself understood.
“And so it’s different from the way your own voice sounds?” Fork scraping.
Iseult bit her tongue until she tasted salty blood.
“Of course,” she said, barely opening her mouth, trying to unclench her teeth. “Don’t you think you could recognize another voice in your head?”
Iseult had abandoned her cake and was gripping the sides of her chair in an attempt to steady her emotions, which were swinging like a pendulum, each swing wider than the last. She thought maybe he was all right; she didn’t find him too bad. She thought he was terribly nice; she disliked him. Perhaps marriage would be wonderful; she wished she could stab him with that scraping fork. The blood would look striking against that silver skin.
It took her a very long moment to realize that there was one other relationship in her life that included such wild swings of emotion, and the realization hit her with such force that she jumped in her seat.
Jacob either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it, polishing off one sandwich and casually selecting another. “That sounds reasonable. I suppose that one would be able to tell the difference.”
21.
Once the conversation left Beatrice, though, the rest of tea was uneventful, and Iseult would have been hard-pressed later to name the subjects they discussed. The banality of topics like preferred foods, books, and ways to spend a rainy day was calming. She was stuffed with rich food—that was certainly a contributing factor—but also, conversation with Jacob had been easy. It hadn’t been intellectually stimulating, but then Iseult would have been baffled by intellectually stimulating conversation. She had not been as comfortable as she was with Mrs. Pennington, but she perhaps could imagine reaching that level with him, someday in the future. She was not entirely relaxed, but she was nowhere near as on edge as she would have been with Mr. Wince. She was not even as on edge as she felt with Elspeth or her aunt and uncle. Taking his arm as they walked didn’t feel natural, exactly, but neither was it repellent. By the time Jacob had paid the bill and was escorting her home, Iseult felt a pleasantly hazy sense of calm.
They shook hands politely at the gate, and arranged to meet a few days hence. She slowly walked up the stairs to her front door, thinking.
* * *
i do not believe i shall ever love him, not the romantic love married people are meant to feel for one another. but i can imagine us being allies, as he said. even friends. someone to share a small joke with, just we two.
* * *
She banged the knocker, and after a wait, Mrs. Pennington opened the door before rushing off again, throwing over her shoulder a hasty explanation about something burning. Indeed, Iseult could smell a faint whiff of smoke coming from the kitchen.
One more thought occurred to her as she climbed the stairs to her room.
* * *
now that i have jacob, maybe i don’t need my mother anymore.
* * *
Iseult was flung off her feet. She had hardly reached the staircase’s small landing when she was propelled forward with such vehemence that her cheek collided with the wall before she could raise her hands to try to catch herself. She lay in a heap, too stunned to move or register any meaningful thought beyond the suspicion that fresh bruising would make her mottled cheeks look even worse.
“Everything all right? What’s all that thumping?”
Iseult’s brain felt rattled. Her palms had scraped along the surface of the carpet, and they felt raw and skinned.
She heard the scurry of Mrs. Pennington’s feet running from the kitchen. She tasted iron in her mouth where she’d bitten her cheek as she hit the wall. “N-nothing!” she shouted, clambering to her feet. She hadn’t counted on the wave of dizziness that sent her stumbling right back into the wall. “I’m fine! Stay downstairs!”
The scurrying paused, but the pause did not sound confident. “Are you sure? Did you drop something?”
Iseult scrunched her eyes tight, leaning against the wall, willing the room to stop spinning. “Yes, yes—I dropped a … book. I dropped a book. You can go back to the kitchen now; everything is all right.”
She held her breath until she heard a great sigh from below, and the footsteps began to move off, accompanied by grumbling under the housekeeper’s breath.
Iseult began to breathe, and the world began to still. She waited another long moment; then, heaving herself over to the banister and gripping its smoothness with both hands, she began to slowly, carefully, walk up the remaining stairs, like an unsteady toddler. One foot, two feet. One foot, two feet. Once she reached the top, she pressed her body against the wall and used it as a support on the way back to her room.
She locked the door behind her. A glance at the mirror hinted at the disaster her face was to become, but she couldn’t bear to look more closely. Her bed was farther away than she would have liked it to be, so she decided on her chair. At least it was raining. A step away from the wall, and another wave crashed in her brain, so she slid down to her hands and knees on the rug. She crawled halfway to the chair before stopping to gingerly touch her cheek. It was hot and sore and swelling fast, but the bleeding seemed to be only on the inside, so at least she needn’t worry about d
ripping on the rug. She crawled the rest of the way and pulled herself, shuddering, into her mother’s chair.
* * *
a girl never stops needing her mother
* * *
Iseult didn’t feel upset when she heard Beatrice’s voice, dripping with ice. She didn’t feel surprised or alarmed. She felt numb. She carefully leaned her head against the chair’s worn back. It still hurt, but she didn’t care. She stared out at the rain as Beatrice raged inside her.
* * *
ungrateful wretch! where would you have been all these years if not for me? at the mercy of your father, that’s where. if not for me, you’d not speak a single word all day, little mouse. little mealy mouse with no will of your own, no thoughts of your own, not a thought in your head that didn’t come from me first!
* * *
She kept going, on and on. Iseult didn’t interrupt, didn’t ask her to be quiet, didn’t say “I have a headache; please leave me be.” It wouldn’t have done any good. She couldn’t think about something else, couldn’t shove the voice into a small corner of her mind; she heard every cruel word with crystalline clarity. Beatrice’s verbal attack was much more vicious than the physical one had been, and even as Iseult could feel her cheek swelling, the words hurt more.
* * *
you are as spiteful as your father. you are as ugly inside as you are outside. such an ugly little thing you are and have always been. i rue the day i gave you life. i am glad that i died. they should have killed you i would have killed you had i lived little bitch little harlot you think you can just leave me. i am the only reason you have survived this long and now i know that you have always been using me. i am ashamed that i ever loved you you will never ever be rid of me i will never let you rest.