by Alice Miller
“What was that about?” he said from the window.
“Telegram.”
His eyes lit up almost cruelly, and he stood up from his chair and held out his hand. She waited a moment, watching his face, which was so hopeful, so expectant, before she shook her head.
“It’s for me.” It had been redirected from Nelly’s address in Sussex, forwarded to Kensington, and forwarded again from there.
It was from the hospital. The return address said Mrs. Agnes Thwaite, 27 Berkeley Square. Georgie tore it open. The creamy paper was damp from the rain. It read:
LT PIKE KILLED IN ACTION.
She dropped it, and it floated, settling near Willy’s chair, but he did not stoop to pick it up. He didn’t notice it was there at all.
She stared at it. Pick it up, she thought. Pick it up.
Willy didn’t move.
Pick the damn thing up.
Willy turned around. “Did you say something?” His left arm was once more wrapped around his stomach.
Georgie walked over and bent down to pick up the bit of paper herself. She took her ugly coat from the hook, wrapped it around herself, and slipped the telegram into her pocket. She glanced back at the weak creature by the window. Husband.
“I’m going out.”
She didn’t wait for a reply, just let herself out. Her last glimpse of him was of his shoulders crushed together, like an old priest after the congregation’s gone, wrenching out another sermon.
FIFTY-TWO
The storm was as bad as the newspapers said. In the morning, they would see massive trees uprooted, wrenched out of the ground as if the soil had rejected them. For now, it was dark and the rain came thwacking down, slanting from what seemed like all directions. The wind shunted the trees and made them creak to the point of cracking.
She ran. The ground was soft, the trees sparse; she’d have to work to get herself lost. Branches cracked under her thin shoes. There was no way he’d follow her. He probably wouldn’t even notice she’d gone.
The bottom of her dress was already sludged with mud, the green soaked and spattered in brown. She would ruin it, but that no longer mattered. She checked behind her—she could still see the chimney of the hotel. Perhaps someone from under the ground would take pity on her, reach up and drag her under. Maybe someone would push her all the way down to hell, and she could ride the monster Geryon around its circles, clutch his rump, watch the rise and fall of his wings.
The wind was building, lifting, and as she slowed to a walk, the trees shuddered above her. She wanted to speak to a stranger. She wrapped her arms around herself. Behind her, the chimney of the hotel had gone. But you couldn’t get lost here; when she walked up this next rise, she’d see the hotel again behind her, and she didn’t need to see it to know he was there, sitting at the window above the heath, no doubt fixated on the words on his page, deaf to the wind playing outside the window. He didn’t care that she was out here; perhaps he wished she’d be crushed under a falling tree, so that the mistake of their marriage could vanish.
And Second Lieutenant Pike was gone. He would never turn up again at the house in Coleman’s Hatch, never walk along that path with her, not quite talking about the future. Thomas Pike with his feet all fixed. He’d once been engaged to a girl. That was the best of it, she supposed, one paltry moment with the rain falling, a glass of pink champagne in your hand, and your best shoes in the muddy grass. You never realised it was your best moment, until nothing after it quite compared, and then you were trampled into the mud yourself.
She tried to direct her thoughts, but her brain hated anywhere she tried to send it. The woman who ran the hotel squinting at her. Willy with his pretty poems and his audience of admirers. Iseult Gonne with her immaculate cheeks. Second Lieutenant Pike with his body gone.
Think of a stranger. Now the rain was tapping, slipping through the foliage, like an audience’s first trickle of applause. The ground’s surface was turning slick, and she stopped on the path.
She would leave him. It had been a mistake. She had to leave.
Georgie smoothed her dress with her hands and looked up through the dripping trees. She could leave. It would be all right. She could go back to her mother’s. As she watched her dress’s bodice dapple from pale to dark green, the sound of the rain grew louder, the clap of hundreds of thick, uneven drops as they met the heath—as if all through the auditorium, the audience members were rising from their seats, applauding, as the actress emerged for the curtain call, finally able to play herself.
FIFTY-THREE
When Georgie returned to the room, he was still seated by the window with his back to her. He heard the door and turned around, and all he could do was nod to her, and she didn’t nod back. Her ruined dress was dripping onto the floor; she lifted it a little—its wet, muddy weight—and dropped it again. She was pleased to see a puddle forming at her feet.
“You went out in that,” he said finally. She wasn’t sure if he meant the dress or the weather. He didn’t get up. He had put on his heavy coat inside to keep warm.
Why had she fallen in love with this man? Why had she married him? Had she always thought he could give her something he was never able to give? The rain was slashing the panes, and the brick seemed to be breathing, cold air slipping in the gaps around the windows. She thought of Saint Peter, with his mangled hand, making the sign of benediction. Surely that was what Harkin had meant: we can only do what we can; our bodies and our minds are not made for anything pure. That a blessing is a kind of contortion.
She would sleep here tonight and leave in the morning. She felt calmer now she had decided. All his actions proved that it was the right course. She walked into the lavatory, wrapped a towel around her dress, and returned to the room. She edged closer to the gas fire.
The second lot of brandy had arrived, and she poured herself a large glass. She had seen the proprietor at the door when she came in, and avoided her look—it would make a good story, Georgie knew, the famous poet and his too-young wife, already flailing on their first nights together. Worse than if they’d been married for fifty years already, she’d say. Seemed like they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. The story would be much improved when the gossip spread that they’d been divorced after only two days of marriage.
She was soaked through, but she could feel her body heat trying to leak into the wetness, to force her wet clothes to warm.
She sat herself at the table with a notebook—intended for the final version of her Pico translation—and shivering, she placed the little broken candle in front of her. Taking a flint, she lit the candle, leaning its thin frame in a candleholder so it stood on a slant, a tiny flicker of flame. She ripped a page from the book so the cream wax wouldn’t drip directly onto the table. She picked up a pen and began to write.
“I am writing too,” she said.
He didn’t look up from his paper. Why should he? Georgie wrote faster, scribbling off the edge of the paper. She ripped out a page, screwed it up, wrote another. Willy kept his eyes down, probably plotting out half-rhymes and stresses, probably tracing the lines of Iseult’s delicate collarbone, her huge eyes—
Georgie pressed so hard she tore the paper.
She ripped out this page too, and looked over at him. He didn’t seem to notice she was there.
“I feel like,” she said loudly, “we’ve lived through all this before. Don’t you?”
He looked over at her; he no longer concealed the fact that his eyes were wet with tears, the lines of his forehead all crumpled together. He seemed as if he were becoming less and less substantial, sitting there, as if he were growing into a ghost himself. He turned to face her, and spoke with his eyes lowered.
“I am worried,” he said, but she ignored him; she kept writing; she started a new page, writing fast. “I am worried I may have made—”
“Something is writing through me.” She ripped out another page, started a new one. She didn’t bother to shut her eyes. She was d
etermined to make him listen to her. Now he stood up and walked over to her. He peered over her shoulder, and her writing slowed, grew more concentrated as he approached.
With the pressure of her pen, she ripped the page again:
WHAT
YOU
HAVE DONE
“Who is it?” Willy said, staring at the paper. “Who is speaking?”
“I don’t know,” Georgie said.
IS RIGHT
FOR BOTH THE CAT
AND THE HARE
Willy was silent, standing over her and waiting for the words to form from Georgie’s pen. His body pressed in closer to hers as he leaned over, and he stared as her hand shifted across the paper:
YOU WILL
NEVER REGRET
NOR REPINE
He put one arm around her shoulders. “Who am I speaking to?” he said again.
THOMAS
“Thomas,” Willy said. “Thomas who?”
THOMAS OF DORLOWICZ
Georgie pressed the pen harder into the page. Behind her, bent over like an elderly man, the poet had started to stroke her hair. She felt his cheek against hers. He whispered, “George, my darling, darling girl. You will not believe this. You simply will not believe it.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Once she had stopped writing, it seemed as if a different man stood above her.
“Is he still there?” He was hovering over her, one hand clasping her shoulder. She shook her head and put down the pen.
“He’s gone.” She returned her hands to her lap and looked up at him.
He reached down and kissed her, and would not stop kissing her, and his hands travelled across her neck, her shoulders, her breasts.
“How did you do it?” he asked her, and she pretended she did not know what he was asking. She was exhausted, and glad to finally have someone else prepared to look after her. He took her hand and led her through to the bedroom, where he stood in front of her and, for a while, just stared at her. Georgie felt somehow outside herself, somehow operating both in this room with her poet husband and some miles off, as if she had deposited the book of her brain in a library, or into some other layer of the earth.
“May I?” He addressed her nervously. He gestured to her dress and she nodded. He unbuttoned the back of the green dress, gently, and peeled the wet silk from her body. She pulled his dry shirt over his head. He pressed his palm on her bare back and she turned around and kissed him, and her hands were all over his loose skin. She felt as if she were drifting back down into the room, like her split selves were coming together. He was disentangling the dress from her legs, and as she edged herself under the bedsheet, he slid in beside her and touched her, which he knew precisely how to do, just where his fingers should be, and just how they should move. It was a relief.
When it was done, she got up and brought the bottle of brandy and held it out to see if he would drink from the bottle. He drank, and she did too.
“It was like something I had lived through before,” he said. “It was so strange when you said it. It was exactly how I felt.”
FIFTY-FIVE
The next morning she woke up with a headache and Willy sleeping beside her. She got up. The rooms were quiet. Out on the table, the words from Thomas of Dorlowicz were still sitting there, looking decidedly worldly, in her own handwriting.
She wrapped herself in a dressing gown and let herself out the door quietly so as not to wake Willy. She had planned to go to the proprietor to enquire about breakfast, but when she got downstairs, she went to the external door instead and stepped outside for a moment. The wind was still blustering, unsure from which direction it was coming or going. Everywhere there was evidence of the storm: large uprooted trees, fat roots wrenched out of the earth, a chaos of mud and branches. One tree had fallen and broken the fence around the hotel garden, forcing the dirty white pickets to the ground. It reminded her of the tumble of bricks from the zeppelin raid near Gray’s Inn. She walked a few steps down the path. The wind was searing cold and strong, as if it were determined to clear everything away.
Back inside the hotel, she located the proprietor and ordered for tea to be brought to their rooms. The proprietor considered her, seeming disappointed by her calm delivery, her clear gaze. She was looking for signs that Georgie was rattled, but Georgie only stared back at her.
“Please leave the tea things outside the door,” she said. “I’d prefer you didn’t knock, as my husband is still sleeping.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” The woman was still watching her as Georgie took the stairs up two at a time and headed back to their rooms. When she entered the bedroom, Willy was sitting up with his eyes open.
“I worried you’d gone. Escaped me.”
“It’s a little late for that,” she said, smiling. She took off her robe and slipped back into bed beside him.
FIFTY-SIX
SUMMER 1918
Willy worried that it would be too bleak for Georgie to visit the tower over the winter. She had never been to Ireland, and still had seen Ballylee only in a photograph. But once the summer arrived, Georgie and Willy travelled to Galway, and because the tower wasn’t yet habitable, they stayed with Lady Gregory at Coole. Willy was clearly nervous about what Georgie would make of it. He had appointed an architect, William Alphonsus Scott, but he was not in the least reliable, and with all the materials that were still being tracked down—timber for the ceilings and floors, iron fittings for hearths and hinges, and a new roof to be arranged—the actual renovations had still not yet begun.
But Willy needn’t have worried. They arrived in the afternoon when the light was a deep yellow. They had passed many ruined towers on their way, all standing since medieval times, but it was Ballylee that seemed to Georgie unlike any of the others. It seemed sturdier somehow; it had a face, a dignity. A small cottage was attached. As you approached the tower, you crossed a short stone bridge, across a river whose banks were bright white with mayflower. And all this was theirs. A stares’ nest at the top of the tower was busy, the slim black birds swooping about on their own errands. Georgie stood beside Willy and stared up.
Eventually he took her hand and led the way inside.
When she first walked up the winding stair and saw the four floors of the tower, she was already filled with ideas of how they would furnish it. She decided that for the entire week they were in Galway, they must spend every day here, and stay until they lost the light. The tower was empty, the windows still clear of glass, all the walls and floor bare stone. The roof was only sparsely thatched, so if it rained, the rain would fall right through the roof and flood the bottom floor.
On the first night, she finally gave him the ring which Dulac had engraved. He spent a long time examining it before he slipped it on his finger, and promised he would never take it off.
During that week, it didn’t rain. Georgie and Willy sat together in the same window alcove as the wind blew right into the tower, and they looked down across the river and the trees, talking about how they’d furnish not just the tower but the adjoining cottage, and what poems he would write here, and which spirits they would speak to. Sometimes they walked outside, down over the bridge, and off into the trees, and on one particularly warm day, they went down to the river and dipped their feet in the water. Their week was filled with plans and imaginings.
On their last day at the tower, she summoned Thomas of Dorlowicz as it was getting dark. Georgie sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor and wrote in the notebook Willy had brought. The darkness was coming quickly, so it was difficult, particularly for Willy, to decipher what was written.
“Will you always come to us?” Willy said.
I WILL NOT ALWAYS BE NEEDED
“The two of us will manage on our own?”
NOT TWO
“Why not?”
THERE WILL BE AN HEIR
They had not thought to bring a candle, and as the darkness came, it seemed the darkest she had ever seen. Neither of them could read the page
s anymore. As Willy sat beside her on the stone floor, it seemed the air was alive, that so many stories were within their reach, that they were at last inside the anima mundi. It seemed they were surrounded by voices, neither dead nor alive, coming from the stone, from the blank windows, from the cottage and the bridge, each voice interrupting the others, all straining to be heard. Although they knew they would miss dinner at Coole and this would annoy Lady Gregory, Georgie spread out a blanket on the top floor of the tower, and painfully and awkwardly, but amidst much laughter, they made love on the stone floor.
FIFTY-SEVEN
They were both nervous about the pregnancy. It was her third after two miscarriages, and she struggled to believe this one would be any different. It was clear that Willy wanted to help her but he didn’t know how. She felt as if her body were being taken over by something out of her control. The spirits—Thomas had been joined by another spirit who went by the name of Ameritus—had promised Willy that the boy would be healthy. The spirits promised a perfect heir. But Georgie kept having nightmares. She was certain something was going to go wrong. In one nightmare, she went into labour and gave birth to nothing. In another, she realised her pregnancy was something she had invented, and she had to go to Willy and tell him that it had all been a lie.
They had moved to Oxford, to a house on Broad Street they had let because the tower still wasn’t ready. Every time they received another letter about Ballylee, Georgie snatched it up to read it. She had become obsessed with the tower’s progress, sure it was linked to her own state, sure that the tower’s renovations reflected the creature growing inside her. Scott, the architect, had fine ideas but was very slow, his updates were sporadic, and he was known to be a drunk. He engaged the local craftsmen, and had acquired wrought-iron hinges from the blacksmith at Liscannor village on the Clare coast, and beams and planks and old paving stones from Lord Gough’s disused mill, and it was his idea to use the mill wheel as a hearthstone. But although she waited, and although he’d promised, she had heard nothing from him on the final designs.