What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  ‘It might be so, and my thanks.’ My gabbling, I knew, was fed by simple anger borne on a less than simple panic. She means to take my very house from me! She means to fill it with her myrmidons and spies! She means—

  Slowing and inhaling (count to three), I made myself understood. ‘And yet we are fending for ourselves quite well.’ I could feel my eyes grow round—and I gripped my hands together to steady myself. My hands were damp.

  Surely, this is revolution!

  Chapter Six

  Glancing at Amanda, that model of grace and calm, I bade myself loosen my hands from their white-knuckled grip on each other.

  Gwendolyn’s chin rose fractionally. I imagined the temperature close about her fell by degrees. Harry leaned upon the chair’s back with one hand and placed the other upon his hip. Here for him was a situation bordering on the disturbing—Harry’s acquiescence in Gwendolyn’s control of family matters was predicated on an absence of disturbance. He would hold the domestic tiller, provided he need not actually steer; we all well understood it. His energies, in the main, would be spent on mastering his own vessel of business.

  There was a stir as they all adjusted and turned, the better to see what I did next. Even Bella’s eyes widened a very little, perhaps in surprise that there existed now a battle with her mother that was not her own. Having quelled the urge to titter, I felt myself, curiously, rising to meet them, in a manner of speaking, with my smile clenched. Sometimes, one is most charming when most pressed. I arranged my hands—one hand atop the other in my lap, rather as Gwendolyn herself was wont to do at points in a difficult conversation. Ladies are well trained for this.

  ‘And, of course, Mr Hadley’s Albert would very much object. Besides…’ I smiled around at my unblinking family. ‘With George abed, Albert has little else to do.’

  There was a silence. Into this came sounds from the front door: a knocking, a murmuring, the door closing, and someone—perhaps Mrs Staynes or Cissy—stepping back along the hall.

  My smile slid into a grimace so that my entire face was stiff with it. I was unable for the moment to tell fright from thrill. To allow Gwendolyn’s infiltration of this household was not to be countenanced (Not now! Not now! Not…ever!); neither was the possibility of outraging Doctor McGuiness by doubting his word. I had heard of an instance once, involving another family and another medical man, which had resulted in unseemly offence and public embarrassment. Undoubtedly, I knew, this would be the case here also, followed, quite possibly, by Doctor McGuiness’s flouncing out, leaving Gwendolyn’s choice in supreme command of the sickroom.

  She must not win in this, yet her absolute defeat must be avoided. My thoughts struggled now, almost feverish. Lord knew what Gwendolyn’s

  reaction might be were she to be utterly routed; yet I knew well enough how I might suffer were she absolutely to win. Either eventuality must be avoided. Else life would be made unendurable.

  I blinked a little over memories of Gwendolyn crossed. It had never been advisable to leave her, even as a girl, in humiliation; something must always be found in amelioration. Once, she had taken to her chamber for days, had accepted only soup on trays, while Mama and Harry whispered downstairs in order to seek to define exactly what had caused her righteous and long-lived indignation; else, of course, a convincing apology could not be made.

  ‘Though I am certain, now I think on it, that your medical man’s opinion might be most valuable.’

  I leaned forward a little, in the guise of Gwendolyn’s younger sister seeking help. Girlish, I tipped my head to the side. ‘It would be most kind if you would approach both men for me, for I should be so wary of giving offence.’ My smile (I had forced a softening here) remained to help bear the message. ‘You know how professional gentlemen do protect their empires.’

  ‘Oh yes, my poor Adelaide. Such a timid thing,’ Edith said. ‘And these such eminent gentlemen.’ I smiled so sweetly on my sister-

  in-law as to startle the older woman into a blush.

  All eyes turned now to Gwendolyn, who was still a moment and then adjusted a sleeve. She arranged her hands in her lap. She understands I leave the task of confrontation to her, if she must have it so. She knows she cannot have her way without confrontation, which may become a public spectacle. The clock chimed the hour and somewhere downstairs a door closed.

  Gwendolyn lifted her head, her cheeks pink with the perturbation evidently at work in her mind. She looked surprisingly like Dickie when most conscious of himself.

  Gwendolyn turned toward where Harry stood behind her, though this only fractionally, as dictated by dignity, and was thus able only to address the air around his elbow. ‘Perhaps you, Harry, would be our emissary.’

  ‘Do you intend I should approach the two doctors?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Harry. Perhaps it might best be done man to man.’

  He shifted a little where he stood. By now, all eyes had swung to him. ‘As you wish,’ he said, with a lack of emphasis that indicated his displeasure at being asked to steer Gwendolyn’s ship of morals. He drew out his watch again.

  ‘Oh, thank you both very much,’ I said. ‘I do not know how I could have managed it.’

  My relief gave wings to my performance. There was much I could do, after all, to settle Doctor McGuiness’s feathers now that the offence was not to be laid at my door. While it is true that I have never been fond of him, I could, I thought, offer sympathy in this and be absolutely sincere.

  Later, as I farewelled my family and poor Mrs Courtney, I glanced at the dish in the hallway. Mrs Charles had left another calling card.

  In my morning room after breakfast, I sat with the journals that were still delivered regularly. Daily, Mr Hadley ploughed through The London Times, and later all the various weeklies and monthlies—The Economist, The Illustrated London News, Lloyd’s Weekly, and The Cornhill

  Magazine (with whose opinions he disagreed more often than not). For his light relief, the Archaeological Journal arrived quarterly. I would have them continued, at least until a time when I might decide otherwise. I would see how they pleased me, though it must be said I looked sidelong and with some suspicion at the Archaeological

  Journal. I smoothed a page of The Economist. Indeed, I would read them. What a pile there was! I had never in the past read these journals much—save those parts Mr Hadley indicated I should peruse. Most often, he would read passages to me. For myself, I was permitted the fashion plates of The Follet and The Englishwoman’s Domestic

  Magazine, which came monthly and took up very little of my time when it did. I was reminded by it far too much of Mrs Ellis. Aside from its fashion plates, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine might well be discontinued. I would think on it.

  Perhaps I might ask my dear Amanda’s view on The Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times, which I had seen on her coffee table once.

  Else, without the news of what the world did described and discussed in these sundry periodicals, our planet’s achievements and crises would surely recede into a distant wordless murmur while I sat on here in cell-like exile, while the empty days repeated themselves without end.

  In any case, there was a certain encouragement in knowing the world carried on with such energy beyond my quiet door. I might find some way of going to meet it; it might sometimes come to me.

  It came to me that once, years ago, I had had a friend.

  She was Susan, Mrs Ford, whose husband was just then seeking entrée into Mr Hadley’s business circles. George twice shook me by the arms as we entered our drawing room after an evening out, because my friend was not graceful, had laughed out loud, had made a spectacle of herself and implicated me, his wife, in this.

  Then Mr and Mrs Ford were gone to Edinburgh where there were relatives, it was said, willing to ease their entry into the right circles. The episode of Susan Ford was over, slipped with her husband from Mr Hadley’s entourage.
/>
  I stretched my arms as wide as the sleeves would permit to open the pages, flicked and struggled with the folding and turning. It was time to take my turn with Mr Hadley and so I read to him for hours of empire and derring-do, of mystery and the desperate endeavours of the criminal classes. There were many histories that were shocking, and then (I discovered) pages and pages where there was nothing of interest at all.

  I glanced up and saw that the cloth under his chin needed changing. I replaced it with a dry cloth waiting by the bed, thinking, There is both more and less to your world, George, than you told me. And considered also that his reading of passages aloud had left, perhaps, one small memory behind of intimacy between man and wife.

  Having read to the end of matters of interest, I took some trouble to fold the journals, and caught through the window a man and a woman, both dressed in their shabby best a little like frayed parcels, engaged in conversation. The woman shook her head several times and he leaned in toward her, glanced around, leaned in again. The woman shook her head once more, most firmly, and the two parted.

  After luncheon, I sat at the window in my own room. There is such a busyness about things back here. The laneway at the rear of all the large houses was crowded with lurching carts, their ponies bowed down and hauling, their ragged tails limp. I watched a delivery of firewood, and a woman with one hand on her hip, swinging it just a little as she laughed with the man in his kerchief (evidently new, from its brightness) and his old hat, no longer quite black, and his shirt rolled back from thick arms with hair like fur.

  I flinched. My memory suddenly filled with the flesh of thick, unfriendly hands beneath the sheets and the heavy, heavy, whiskied, painful, too-large heaving, breaking into my childish body in this, my bed (without notice, never with any notice) until I fell pregnant at seventeen and was torn apart, this time by the baby, on this bed, here, to not quite die as my mother had died along with that last, too small, too weak Broom. Knowing, knowing even as I screamed at the overwhelming, ripping outrage that was this childbirth that my mother had, too, been outraged and had screamed unto her very death.

  On Sunday, Mr Gordon, Mr Hadley’s solicitor, followed up his note of the previous day and came to accompany me to church for, he assured me, he understood entirely how difficult it would have been for me to attend alone. Sobriety and I (for I was not, of course, alone) stood a moment while he bent his long, thin frame to close the door behind us, and I felt on my face a moist and smoky breeze, smelling of horses. My breath condensed in the air.

  Chapter Seven

  The boy and his father, the one big and white-haired and the other small and tousle-headed, were somehow exactly alike in frock coat and waistcoat: supping together, their spoons rising and falling, rising and falling as one. Their eyes were fixed upon me, who swivelled around them. Swinging around them, but, I realised, also moving away, and now I stood on a small patch of ground while water rose and fell all around me impossibly deep with waves of increasing height. Such dark, dark water.

  While they, those two, sat at their distance in the green light, staring, sat at their table with their spoons rising and falling.

  Then there was a tickling at my cheek and a heavy, thick and sweet scent as of perfume and powder; and I was a little afraid, for here was that woman, that bejewelled, befurred woman by Mr Rossetti climbing out of her painting and down from Mr Hadley’s wall and chuckling low into my ear with the fur tickling and cloying warm. I turned away, perplexed as to how I might run, seeing as my small island would lurch so beneath my feet. Then I realised there was a sound of clanking, and buckets, and decided this sound had been present for some time, however long that might be in a dream. It was indeed a sound of buckets—for Sobriety was mopping, which was odd, for Sobriety never mops—come from where that Rossetti woman had been but was apparently no more, even while I could still feel the fur insinuating sensuality upon my cheek.

  Sobriety mopped and cleaned, too busy to look up, or perhaps unwilling to meet my eyes, though I felt her attention and trusted it. Sobriety squeezed out water into her bucket until the water on the floor was all but gone. She propped the mop in the bucket and stepped in her most able, certain way to those two, Mr Hadley and Toby, their spoons poised now while they looked upon her—themselves now uncertain and their eyes wide. Sobriety pulled from her pocket such enormous pearls as I had never seen and cast them at father and son (Does she say they are swine?) so that the pearls bounced all about the table and some fell into the bowls.

  And then, while they were occupied in grasping at the pearls and shoving handfuls into their pockets, from under the table Sobriety pulled the large pieces of a box, which she constructed upon the floor and filled with the man and the boy, whom she folded, as unprotesting as a ventriloquist’s dolls. Sobriety packed them right away and stood to her small and tidy height, brushed her hands together and said, ‘There. I have put them back.’

  It had been a disturbed night with little sleep, and had left

  behind something like befuddlement, yet I was coming to a conclusion. And then another: that I was very much afraid of the first. The skin across my forehead felt both puckered and stretched with worry. Yet there was no way around it, for Mr Gordon the solicitor had come in to morning tea after the service yesterday and given his warning.

  ‘Madam, while Mr Hadley’s illness is of course distressing and a great strain upon the household, we can at least be grateful that it does give you time to make preparations for a changed life.’

  I looked at him. ‘A change. Yes, of course, things will be very changed once he is gone.’

  Mr Gordon had leaned over his cup and saucer so as not to scatter a crumb. He had nipped at his slice of fruitcake. His mouth pursed and relaxed in quick succession like a large mouse (a long, large mouse, I concluded, despite myself) before he swallowed. I wished that he would clear his throat, unseemly though that would be, and then I realised I had always wished that when he spoke. It was something in his voice.

  ‘It is not so much his absence I speak of, Mrs Hadley, as his Will.’

  Mr Gordon put his slice of cake down on its fragile plate and brushed his fingers together. With great deliberation (and apparently he needed me to know how great was his deliberation) he looked into my face. I was suddenly aware (grasping about in my mind, now in uncomfortable prescience, for somewhere else to settle than on the matter of Mr Hadley’s Will) of Mr Gordon’s stooping height even when seated, of his long, pale fingers, and how he used his black-coated thinness slowly in emphasis of words delivered carefully like parcels. Mr Gordon, unsmiling and crouching, without adornment and fanning his fingers, gazed at me with a look of deep pity at unavoidable Fate. It was as if he had brought this expression in his pocket and put it on especially. A run of cold fear coursed through me, as well as—and this startled me a little—a flash of anger. I did not think my face had changed, fortunately, and he did not seem to have noticed any lapse from a serene (and sad) composure. He licked his lips minutely.

  Mr Gordon laid his metaphorical parcels before me and I thought, idiotically: What empty things they are.

  ‘It is my melancholy duty to advise you, dear madam, that Mr Hadley’s passing will leave you with a small, very small, annuity only.’ The lawyer pursed his lips and drew his eyebrows together to indicate pity. ‘In my view, this will surely not be enough for the upkeep of the house as it is, with its full complement of servants, even though it is assumed in the Will that the house will be your domicile.’

  And who should go? My thoughts whispered in panic. And would I be the one to tell them? Should we close up rooms? What shall I wear?

  Mr Gordon tipped his head mournfully to one side. While I had no right to sell it, he continued, the house was to be maintained (but how?) until my son became of an age to be its owner.

  Bypassing me entirely, and resting with Mr Gordon as steward until Toby’s majority, would be the country seat
, as Mr Hadley had been pleased to call it, the edifice he knew would assure his future, for he had had great plans to make it so. It would labour, this imposing house, very hard toward this end. It was a vessel filled at intervals with parties of minor aristocrats who owed him favours, whose creaking, condescending wives I had often entertained for stiff-backed hours, days and weeks with piquet and parched conversation. The wives and their husbands sailed away at night to the vast and well-appointed rooms Mr Hadley had had carved and draped for them at enormous expense in the hope that this house and its interminable parties would lead to Mr Hadley’s reward in that larger, more powerful House.

  There had been a time, once, when Sobriety and I were there at the great house, that country seat, a day at least before Mr Hadley and the dragging armada of his guests were due. There was a rushing of servants about the place, and I had given what instructions I could think of—although these were few, for cook and housekeeper knew much more than I what was needed. I was eminently and evidently unnecessary to the running of that hubbub.

  Sobriety and I decided upon a walk, despite the dark clouds sagging very low, and we set off in bonnets and shawls, arm in arm. It was a moment I often recalled thereafter. There were we two young women of an age, utterly alone together in an empty terrain—I cannot recall our having been so before—before being plucked apart again when I must play the part of wife to my father’s contemporary and all of my husband’s contemporary acquaintances, stately and cold, champing and fusty.

  But first, there was Sobriety and the bright cold air.