More Miracle Than Bird

by Alice Miller

  “I offered money,” Georgie said quietly, “because you generally charge for an audience with your daughter. I offered money, not a small amount, and you took it.”

  “Only to save you the embarrassment,” Effie Radcliffe said.

  “I wasn’t embarrassed.”

  Another gentleman, perhaps trying to defuse the conflict, said, “Your daughter must be a real marvel.”

  “She is the best in London,” Effie Radcliffe said, “just ask Mr. Yeats. Most people have been very respectful of her talent.”

  Mr. Poddle was nodding and scrawling notes in a small square notebook. What was it that made Georgie so angry with this awkward, fawning man, and this foolish, blustery woman? Why couldn’t she simply block them out and go and find people she thought sensible? For some reason Poddle particularly enraged her; she felt so furious with the weak words he spat from his pale lips, his round shapeless chin bobbing up and down, his fat-coated jaw like a misshapen glob of butter.

  Georgie looked to see what Willy was doing, but he’d disappeared again. No, there he was, by the window with Iseult, his body leaning towards hers, his hand resting very near hers.

  Why had she come? Why hadn’t she listened to Dorothy?

  “I have lived in that house for twenty years,” Effie Radcliffe was saying, “and never, ever, have I had a near-stranger just admit herself without invitation. The most dreadful manners.”

  “At least,” a familiar voice said, “it proves her talent.” It was Dr. Harkin, joining the circle, smiling broadly at Henry Poddle.

  “Except,” Georgie said, knowing that Harkin was baiting her, but unable to resist, “it doesn’t prove that at all.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Effie Radcliffe’s voice raised, and she stared at Georgie. “What are you trying to imply?”

  Dr. Harkin continued to smile, and Georgie tried not to look at the notebook still clutched in Henry Poddle’s hand.

  “Only that my turning up at the door doesn’t prove a thing,” Georgie said. “It merely suggests what I said at the time. That I wanted to speak with her.”

  “Are you questioning her talent?” Effie Radcliffe said. Someone was trying to take the woman’s arm, trying to calm her down, but she shook him off.

  “Your daughter is a clever young woman,” Georgie said. She paused. “But I’m not convinced she can channel anything aside from her own brain. She has a good brain. I am more interested in that, than in any ostensible talent. Increasingly I do not think she has any kind of channel to the spirit world. I find her rather a skilled manipulator.”

  Effie Radcliffe’s voice had leapt up a register. “You—insult—our integrity! You are—desecrating our livelihood!”

  “As I see it,” Georgie said calmly, “there is nothing to desecrate. I consider that you in particular have very little integrity to insult.”

  Effie Radcliffe looked as if she might hit her. It was only then that Georgie saw, just beyond the circle, that Nora Radcliffe was standing there, listening to every word. She was staring at Georgie with a look of complete astonishment. Dr. Harkin was standing not far from her, smiling. Effie Radcliffe’s face quickly eclipsed her view. “You are vicious! Simply vicious!” She reached up and Georgie felt something slap her across the cheek.

  “Ladies, please!” someone shouted. Georgie rushed her hands up to cover her face.

  “This is exactly why we should never give them the vote,” someone else called out. From nearby there was an odd shrieking noise.

  “What in God’s name was that?” someone said.

  “Why, it’s my boy soprano impression,” called Henry Poddle. “End of Miss Radcliffe’s career. The final notes.”

  FORTY

  When she opened her eyes, the world had shrunk to a bubble around her, a thick soap bubble she couldn’t see out of. Her cheek stung, and she kept her hand over her face. She walked over to the coat stand, and in the half-light she could just see, under the stand, the grotesque chair with the stuffing coming out of the arms, as if it were stuck in the process of vomiting parts of itself. A part of her wanted to crawl into that chair with the stuffing and not look up again until everyone had left. Someone was walking over to her, trying to talk to her, but Georgie quickly retrieved her ugly coat and hauled it around her shoulders, hiding inside it and making for the door. She glanced back a moment and thought she saw Willy hold up his hand as if to stop her. His expression was uncreased, innocent. Beside him, Iseult had her back to Georgie, her stance as casual as a dancer’s.

  Now she was rushing, down the stairs, out the door. As soon as she got outside she stopped just beyond the doorway and she waited to see if anyone might follow her.

  Outside, she had trouble breathing, urging herself not to cry. She thought of Lucy beating the rugs on a day with no wind, so that the dust clouds rose and hung heavy on the air. She thought of her own body powdered to dust.

  Why had she answered Harkin? He had wanted to humiliate her, and he wanted to destroy Nora Radcliffe, and he had very neatly managed both, with the help of the vile Poddle to write it up for whatever trivial gossip rag he wrote for. There was no doubt in her mind that a man like Poddle had not written a “literary profile” in his life.

  It was cold. She was close to where the hospital was, and to where the bombs had fallen, in Gray’s Inn and Kingsway, where still more might be falling, like tiny stars spraying across the city. She would have welcomed a bomb to gulp her down right now and stop her thoughts altogether. She thought she could smell rotten flesh, but it was probably just someone roasting meat in another building. She waited, watching her breath puff out in front of her.

  She heard someone behind her, and turned. But it was only a stranger, a woman coming down the steps and walking off into the night. She watched the woman pull her coat up around her ears, in a protective act. The woman glanced at her, and Georgie remembered the shocked look on Nora Radcliffe’s face, and Iseult Gonne’s back to her. Georgie pulled out a thin book from her purse and, under the darkened lights, squinted to try to read the words as she walked away from the house. She walked, not thinking where she would go. She kept reading as she walked, trying to coax the book into speaking to her, as if there were a person beside her, neither a man nor a woman, just a shape, calmly saying, Our lives are like trees in a forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other. . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground. She saw a cab but she did not hail it. She tried to think of roots—meeting under the ground, recognising one another, merging together—but instead imagined curled, tangled worms, trying to strangle one another, long hairs that could slice open skin. Her palms were damp, and her mind was bitter, and guilty, and all her own.

  FORTY-ONE

  She walked all the way to the station, and once she got there, she discovered there was no train for Sussex for nearly four hours. She walked back and forth along the platform in the dark, watching the dirty trains pull in and out, avoiding the gazes of the men who were on their own, who watched her closely. When one of them tried to speak to her, she uttered nonsensical syllables at him and turned away, as if she could not speak English. She sat and waited.

  She slept on the train, and when she got out at the station, she began the long walk to the house, following her mother’s instructions, looking out over the long glowing yellow fields with green peering out from under. When she arrived at the large white house with ivy dripping down its facade, she stood awhile out by the woodpile. Blood was tumbling in her head as she walked to the door.

  She knocked at the door and waited.

  Her mother opened the door and tried to embrace her. Georgie avoided her, walked slowly straight for the stairs, and shut herself into one of the rooms.

  FORTY-TWO

  When she got up, the house was empty, and Nelly had left a note for her outside her door:

  We have gone out to the Hendersons’ until late afternoon. Make yourself at home.

  She felt a mixture of anger at her mo
ther for leaving and relief to know that she had gone. She went downstairs and stood in the kitchen staring out. The woods ran right in front of the house. Outside, through the grid formed by the kitchen window—past the one drip of white paint frozen on the glass—it was almost completely fogged over; she could see only the thin slice of lawn just in front. Beyond was entirely white.

  She had organised for the maid to pick up a stack of vile gossip rags in order to find the one that Henry Poddle wrote for. She pieced through them slowly. Sure enough, there was a column, under the name GH Chest, which read as follows:

  Last night was last act for medium Nora Radcliffe, whose fraudulence was exposed by a Miss Georgiana Hyde-Lees. Miss H-L, who had arrived at the event resembling an overfed black crow, was doubly rewarded for her efforts with a nasty slap from the medium’s mother, and a painful jilting from her imagined betrothed, WB Yeats.

  All eyes are on WBY these days, who at 51 is feverishly chasing an alarmingly young girl-child, who must be no more than 20 and the daughter of his great love. Reverse-Oedipus? Has someone sent for Dr. Freud?

  She crumpled up the paper and threw it in the fire.

  An overfed black crow. It didn’t matter. People didn’t read this stuff, and when they did, they dismissed it. Still she felt the grittiness of shame, and each time she thought it might have lessened, she felt it shift and dig inside her, as if her body were a bag filled with sharp objects.

  The door was propped open, and Georgie stepped outside. The leaves were crunched brown, the air tinged with ice.

  Although she wore only slippers, she walked out towards the edge of the woods.

  She walked away from the houses. While the day was bright, the woods were much darker, as if she were entering a faery story. Under the trees it felt closer to evening.

  There were certain things she had not let herself think. The fact that her father had died, in a stranger’s home, on his own, his brain wiped clean: she had wanted to add to that story, to make some sense of it. She had accepted she wouldn’t speak to him again. He was gone. But on the other hand, when any spirit spoke to her, she was in a sense speaking to him; she was speaking to the same place he had gone to. The same place everyone would go when they were dead. When she imagined that man on that boat in Italy, she had proved this to herself, even if since then she had never found evidence of this name Dorlowicz. She was willing now to accept that this word was probably one she had made up, just as Willy had made up his daemon, just as Nora had made up Thomas. With that one scene, that one word, she’d proved to herself there was such a thing as a memory without a body.

  It occurred to her only now she hadn’t needed much to convince herself.

  And now the evidence was against her. The Order, invented. Nora Radcliffe and her stories. Shaking hands and mirror writing. That moment on the boat in Italy; why had the man’s Italian been at the exact same level as her own? Why had he not used grammatical structures she herself would never have used?

  It would appear there was no shared memory at all. That every soul was just a temporary, lonely anomaly.

  The trees were still, implacable, unconcerned with her mind’s flurries. What was the point of thinking any of it through?

  She didn’t want to die either. She didn’t want her thoughts and memories wiped, dissipated, dispensed as nameless atoms. She had thought she could speak to the dead, and this was proof they were all safe from oblivion. She had thought she could marry a famous poet, and they could speak to the dead together, and their lives would also be kept safe inside their studies and his verses—but this had been wilful ignorance, both believing in it and believing in him. Now she had seen the untruth of it all, she could not make herself unsee it.

  And she was ashamed. Dorothy and Nelly had known all along that all this was nonsense, and how cruelly she’d rejected them for their shallowness. How quickly she had let Nora Radcliffe take advantage of her. How stupid, how naive, how painfully she had been taken in, believing that Willy would marry her. How eagerly they had all praised her cleverness, and how clearly she had proved otherwise.

  She kept walking. Eventually the trees gave way to a small sliver of a lake, surrounded by a clearing. The water was shallow, and she noticed at the water’s edge a swan and her cygnet, foraging in the grass. The cygnet was making frantic, furtive gestures in the green, its beak spotted with mud. The young bird was not much smaller than a newborn human baby, but covered in soft down, like a teddy bear. Georgie stopped and watched. The bird straightened up, trying to use its wings—tiny, useless-looking triangles—to balance, and revealing its grass-covered chest. The mother stretched her neck casually, as if to yawn.

  Georgie stood and watched. The birds did not notice her. And if they had, what would it matter? She turned and went back to the house.

  FORTY-THREE

  When she returned, there was a letter waiting for her in the hallway. It announced a new meeting of the Order to be held that afternoon to assess the current situation, in the wake of the departure of Dr. Ernest Harkin. Georgie returned the letter to its envelope. She would not be going, but she was pleased to hear they had got rid of him. Her mother was waiting in the conservatory for her, with a magazine lying beside her and a tall glass of lemon juice in her hand. Georgie focused on the pale swirl inside the glass, the one stray pip at the bottom.

  “Darling. I’m so glad you saw sense.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You know I was silly enough to marry the man I fell for, and I spent twenty years suffering the consequences.”

  “I wouldn’t describe myself as ‘silly.’”

  “I didn’t say you were. But we all do silly things.”

  “I’m not sure I did.”

  “It’s all right to sometimes be wrong—”

  “I’m comfortable being wrong, when I am wrong.”

  “You don’t consider you were wrong, then, to fall for such a philanderer?”

  “He isn’t a philanderer.”

  “Ah.”

  “He was just confused about what he wanted.” She felt stuck, as if she had to argue her case but didn’t know how. All she knew was that she would not let Nelly near her, and any argument against her was better than none.

  “But you had the sense to change your mind.”

  “Not really.”

  “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  Georgie focused on the toe of her shoe. It was slightly scuffed, the black leather shaved down to brown. “I don’t know.”

  “I take it back, then,” Nelly said. “You haven’t seen sense at all. But I’m glad he’s out of the picture.”

  Georgie didn’t look up from her shoe. “Please don’t.”

  “Don’t what, darling?”

  “I wish sometimes you’d trust me to do the right thing. I’m not an idiot.”

  “I do trust you, darling. No one is saying you’re an idiot. But no one is right all the time.”

  “Not even you.”

  Nelly paused, and said calmly, “Not even me. Tomorrow Henry and I will go up to London for the day. Perhaps you might come with us and meet with Freddie at the Foreign Office?”

  “No.” Her panic rose. How could she tell her mother what she had done wrong, how she’d lied, how she’d no longer be considered for such a job? “I want to stay here. I have my own work to do.”

  “You can’t stay forever, Georgie.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  AUTUMN 1917

  It was sometime at the beginning of autumn that Georgie woke in the late afternoon, dressed, and went down to the kitchen. The enormous plane trees nodded to her out the window, their trunks grey and, in parts, scraped down to gold. A gardener was fussing out by the herb garden.

  Everyone was out. Nelly and Henry had gone up to London and would be back later that evening. Lucy had left to see her family for the afternoon and would be back in the evening to fix Georgie’s supper.

  Out past the garden, the next-door neighbour’s house seemed to be sprawl
ing especially to catch sun, its four grids of windows with their bright white sills alight. The wind was getting up, rumpling the trees. The gardener was slowly settling on his old knees in the garden, his hands encased in black gloves and his back to the wood.

  It wouldn’t be too bad to live alone. No one to try to change, no one to try to talk around. She had been able to imagine it before.

  But now she could hear someone knocking at the door. She frowned and walked back to the bedroom, and quickly got dressed.

  From the bedroom, she tugged back the curtain and checked out the window. The trees were shifting around like giant hands, grasping at air. While someone knocked on the door downstairs, under the trees, she could see another man, standing at the end of the path beside a car that was waiting at the curb. This man was all in black, not moving. She supposed he was the chauffeur.

  The other man, who had been knocking, had stepped away from the front door to glance up into the upstairs windows. He couldn’t see her. She didn’t wave.

  He was calling for her from outside the house. Georgie watched him for a moment longer—an officer. She had not recognised him at first; it was still strange to see him upright, moving forward so effortlessly. The car still waited by the curb like a crouched animal. She turned and took the stairs two at a time.

  “Hello.” Second Lieutenant Pike called to her from the doorway. He looked nervous, standing in the doorway, clutching his officer’s cap in both hands.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” Georgie said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed to speak with you. It’s important.”

  He stood stiffly, his cap in one hand. There was something about him that seemed very far away. His frame, not especially tall, fit neatly in the doorway’s frame, and he gazed over the empty trellises that climbed up the house’s brick facade. “Nice place,” he said.

  “It’s a summer house.”