And then the rest of that time alone became momentous, memorable forever. We had perhaps gone four miles, had reached a small rise where trees were few and grassy hills rolled gently to the house, when the wind began a swooping, screaming assault upon us. The very colours of the day changed, darkened, smudged. The little wild flowers shivered and turned grey in the glowering light. The clouds burst free with an angry, sharp rain. We cried out, both in alarm and in exhilaration, as the elements flung at our faces and bodies. I saw her face, as she saw mine, each alive with the wild energies of life itself. We clutched each other beneath that muscular sky, and struggled, gripping our streaming shawls and pressing forward against our slapping, soaked skirts, all the way back to the house.
I glanced at my sleeve as I lowered my cup to its saucer. A loose thread. I will tell Sobriety when Mr Gordon is gone. I was, of course, distracting myself from the matter at hand. I looked up at the lawyer, then away.
‘Master Toby’s schooling and so on, both before and after Mr Hadley’s passing,’ Mr Gordon whispered on, ‘will be provided for, of course, through my own disbursement of the Hadley finances.’
Master Toby, treated as if he had no link to me; as he had been treated when I had known it to be my place to defer to his nurse, who took the new baby off to the nursery, and on occasion thereafter
presented him clean and wrapped, his eyes already dispassionate. Ripped by his birth though I was, no one considered I might have need of, indeed deserve, the love of my child. As it was, he grew further from me as I mended, until it seemed we were never to have more than a formal relationship. Certainly, there was no passion there for me, his mother, though I gazed deep in the search for trust, or love, for some pleasure at seeing me. And yet, there had been times when I had pleaded for him, at first, and been rebuffed, for the nurse knew what she did and I did not. Thereafter, I gazed upon my son and heard him as if muffled by distance. It was as if I were trapped in a glass box, my nose pressed to the surface, as I watched my son grow and had no hand in it.
How much, I wondered in the depths of my bruised heart, would he have been disturbed had it been me, and not his father, who lay in bed dying? I closed my eyes for a moment over humiliation and a great irritation, recognising loss—oh, that ever-lurking pain— And still that voice continued relentless. That uncanny voice, like paper.
I am unfair. Poor man.
His voice rustles like the paper that fills his life.
I had sat for the most part in silence, utterly unable to look at my husband’s legal man. My mind echoed with something like a wind, howling and empty of anything that could comfort or distract, even while I felt as if I were pattering here and there and everywhere in search of comfort and distraction. For I was, henceforth, to be a guest in my own house, this very house. The poor relation conscious of charity as she keeps to her shadowed corner, creeps upstairs, mumbles her food in silence. In this house on sufferance. I have lost my place, I thought, and then absurdly, Like a bookmark, and again, Fool! A bookmark? What am I thinking! My face was hot with the consciousness of being without a place. Like a very poor person.
Mr Gordon sipped at his tea, the tip of his nose dipping with the movement of his mouth.
Mouse, I thought.
‘After his passing,’ he went on, ‘there will be sufficient for you to live in modest circumstances, and your son naturally will take responsibility for your welfare when he reaches his majority. It would be advisable that you take, especially…’—His tongue flicked at his lips—‘…certain measures concerning the staff. We must remember that additional tax attends male domestics, for example.’
He paused and I bowed my head to indicate that I heeded him, though I was of a sudden conscious of Albert and Mr Brent about the house, unaware of this talk about them. ‘And during this period of Mr Hadley’s illness—’ He gave his rodent’s smile. ‘That is to say, before the major changes to general circumstances…’ He seemed to lean toward me. ‘I shall act in his stead, so that you need only apply to me for funds, the payment of accounts, and so on.’ His eyes were especially attentive, and I knew by the set of his smile that he meant himself to look kindly, wise, with the emphasis of a dozen crinkles and lines.
These men do set their smiles for the ladies, before they pass onto things of greater moment. I was well schooled to show no expression, and hoped I showed none.
Mr Gordon paused, perhaps for my reaction, though I hardly noticed the silence hovering. I had raised my own cup to my mouth as if I were indeed still attending closely to him, but now there was set up in my mind such a clamouring for him to be gone and take his witnessing presence with him that I had almost believed he must hear the shouting.
‘Please feel free to apply to me for anything you may need beyond the usual expenses. You will find me very understanding in this difficult time.’
Yes, yes, yes. Go. Leave me!
Lowering my cup, I placed one gloved hand over the other. Begone. ‘Thank you very much for your kindness, Mr Gordon. I will consider all this, naturally, and what our needs are. Thank you—’ And I rose so that he must rise too, gave him my hand, and rang for Cissy to see Mr Gordon to the door.
Go, go, go!
Chapter Eight
And so to Monday after the longest night of sleeplessness and dreams like hallucinations, and a waking barely less dreamlike. I spent, oh, hours through the day wandering, sometimes, but mainly sitting I hardly knew where. I was caught between fantasies of a rescue bringing a magical showering of wealth, and an intervening sharp awareness of reality, like the periodic slashings of a knife; the reality of a life sunk into muted, stagnant, genteel poverty.
I thought: I have lost my place. I was tired. I am always losing my place. My gaze sometimes settled into focus on some decorative piece—a vase, a painting, a polished side table—and I was vaguely puzzled to recognise the thing yet understand it to be foreign, or at least myself to be foreign to it. In any case, in any case, I thought and believed absolutely and dismally, this has never been my place. I have no place. I have had no place. A long beam of evening light reached across the room, touching the Turkey carpet with a patch of gold.
Mrs Staynes rustled through to light a lamp, not knowing how long I would spend unmoving on the settee in the drawing room and no doubt thinking (I knew this somehow, despite my own distraction) she would most likely not be required to light a fire. The circumstance was most unusual, however, and she could not be certain. This will vex her, I knew, seeing without seeing the eloquence of the older woman’s raised chin and the cross jounce of her skirt as she left the room. Behind her, the door clicked to sharply.
With evening the veiled light from the window faded to a washed violet. Little Cissy drew the curtains together with a clatter and turned up the gas at the wall-lamp, with a hesitation and a glance to where I sat. After all, the use of the lamp in this room, at this time of the day, was not customary.
Cissy left, and I sank with the eventual settling of all the flying nothings of my mind. Within a small clearing space in the fog, a faint voice said, Money. I must get money. Then suddenly there was a memory of running in a keen wind sprayed with brine when I was a child at the seaside, shrieking like the gulls with Ida beside me. For that wild excitement was back with me—for a moment, all bonds loosened—until I remembered both the heavy vulgarity of Mammon and that I had in any case no idea how to get it… Money!
I could scarcely tell whether my emotions were of excitement or simple terror.
I went down to dinner with chilled feet, shivering a little from having sat so long in the cold. I had headache, and my forehead was actually sore—extraordinary, I had felt it with my fingers—from the anxious stretch and pull of skin across it.
Cissy was able, at last, to run back up the stairs to turn down the lamp. I heard her thumping all the way up and then down.
Only much later, long after dinner, when
I put down the sewing—Bless this H . . . —that I had barely touched with my needle, and rose to climb the stairs to my bed, with Sobriety holding the lamp and our two shadows looming head by head before us, did I remember Mr Hadley, limp and dribbling alone in his room. Somebody must have sat with him all of this time. The thought twisted with a pang. Cissy perhaps had done so, poor child, or Albert—if Cook had expelled him from the kitchen, where he mainly spent his newly near-masterless time in sprawling at the table. I had not, for an entire day, held Mr Hadley up and fed him spoons of tasteless mash, nor heaved with Albert or one of the others while Cissy (poor Cissy) pulled away his ghastly messes.
Sobriety was talking to me, fingers working in quick twistings at my back, freeing the pearl buttons. Pearls, oh yes. I was for a moment bewildered by my dream of the night before, apparently asserting itself here. I blinked the notion away as a mere distraction from my most worrying and very real fiscal predicament. I fingered the adjective in my mind. Fiscal. I glanced up at the long mirror and in the dimness lit to the side by the lamp was Sobriety’s face behind me, eyes down, a paleness floating somehow, a small, oval, floating sadness even as her unfaltering fingers were busy with unbuttoning. I thought in my confusion: Does she know? How would she know? Confusion shook all logic. Was my tragedy, the deep humiliation of my tragedy, laid bare like this before I really knew it myself? I stared at Sobriety’s face; my own reflected figure wavered in the mirror like a stranger, inquisitive and out of place.
Sobriety said again, ‘I do need some time tomorrow. I am sure I shall not be long, I…’ Sobriety’s face was still intent on buttons. Such a pale face; so enclosed. Such a small person, such a small face. My thoughts were drawn away from myself. She hesitates. Whence comes this uncertainty? Should I sense the answer? Fingers had reached the end of the line of buttons; pushed the bodice forward so that I must hunch up my shoulders to aid the fall of the sleeves; fetched the bodice to lay it on the end of the bed; came back to begin at the laces, tugging loose, pulling. I stared at Sobriety’s face and it occurred to me: We have not spoken in so long.
‘What is it, Sobriety?’
‘Nothing, Ma’am. Nothing to concern yourself with. But it is something that needs doing tomorrow.’ As if I had raised an argument. ‘It cannot wait.’
Sobriety came to the front to loosen laces, head bent so that I stared at the top of her head, where the dark hair was drawn back, divided at the ruler-sharp parting.
‘Certainly, Sobriety. Of course,’ and then I repeated myself, awkward as ‘of course’ was spoken over the top of Sobriety’s whispered ‘thank you,’ and my skirt unbuttoned and pulled rustling over my head; and the whole of the undressing and the night-dressing, with the long slow passes of the brush through my hair and Sobriety’s folding as I pulled back the sheets and stepped into my bed, all of this done in silence and Sobriety’s face still inward, shut up and turned away.
Sobriety left my door ajar so that noise from Mr Hadley’s room would be heard during the night; though Albert lay on the divan set up there nightly and only Albert’s snoring could be heard. It was a nightly revelation of himself of which nobody spoke. I lay, eyes wide in the dark, hearing him begin. Sobriety was above—a suggestion of footsteps, preparations for sleep, the quiet closing of her door.
My thoughts were much too bright for sleep, bright and ringing with worry. I sent these thoughts to Mr Hadley’s room, where he lay in the dark, an insensible mass. So this is your will for me, is it? Is it? This Will is your declaration?
When I awoke next morning, slowly, I was aware only of the aching bloatedness of my woman’s monthly time. The dull heaviness swinging around again: loaded monthly female secret, messy, odorous; utterly pointless since the ripping catastrophe of Toby’s birth.
I rose, fixed into place with tapes an oblong of many-times folded cotton, before Sobriety came through to shake out petticoats for dressing. But as my maid tugged at corset laces and buttoned the close-fitting bodice, I did also think that later I might, perhaps, take myself back to my bed.
I am a pudding, I thought, a sickly pudding, and looked around at a room tedious with familiarity. Tossed bedclothes, tilted tall mirror, two fading and sagging armchairs from Mama’s sitting room, the flowered jug and basin upon the washstand, all flat, all drained of colour in the light of a dull morning.
Sobriety picked up the nightdress—she would take it to soak away the small patch of blood before it was given to the washerwoman—and said, ‘There won’t be anything else before I go out?’
Hands against the compressed suet of my waist, I said, ‘Oh. No, no. I shall see you later.’
This early, the flow is always heaviest. Without Sobriety to take charge with rinsing water and bucket, I took a small bundle wrapped against recognition in cleaner cloth, to burn at the back of Cook’s stove—with Cook herself turned away, stropping knives at the table. Albert was very jocular with someone outside the kitchen door. There was an insolence in his voice, it seemed to me, more evident now that this house was on its way to losing its head—that head lolling up there, insensible on the pillow.
I took myself to the sickroom and waited for Cissy to bring Mr Hadley’s milk-softened eggs to me for his morning feeding, conscious of a certain atonement for yesterday’s laxity and leaving the door ajar so that—I am such a child!—Mrs Staynes might notice that I did my duty. I did this with movements slow as porridge and, for a fleeting moment, a ghastly faintness and skin cold with pers-
piration. I spooned egg into his mouth, wiped away what escaped almost immediately from between his chapped lips, and thought again that even this was too solid for his capacity to swallow.
At the end of my efforts—even though the bowl was still half full—I sat up and for a moment closed my eyes. Less compressed, I felt my body relax a little. My face was cool now, rather than clammy. When Cissy came for the bowl, cloth, and spoon, I asked her to fetch the new edition of The Cornhill Magazine where it lay open at Mrs Oliphant’s article, somewhere—in the morning room, most likely.
Though I drew my shawl around me, I did not ask for a fire. I supposed this to be wasteful—time to be mindful of this. Lord!—and Mr Hadley seemed warm enough beneath his heaped blankets, propped in his bedjacket with another of my shawls about his shoulders and a shine of spittle soaking into a cloth under his chin.
Faintly from down in the street outside came occasionally the smart clip of horses drawing carts or carriages; from elsewhere in the house, Mrs Staynes’s voice gave some order; once, Cissy’s steps thumped unevenly on carpeted stairs, travelling upwards, I knew, with cloth and a tin of polish to rub at banisters on a slow step-by-step trip downward. Mr Hadley’s breath strained and whistled. A page scraped as I turned it. I had not read a word.
There was another voice, eventually, and I thought, Sobriety. I heard the kitchen door close behind my maid and the suggestion of a step upon the stairs.
My husband’s head had tipped to one side as if in sleep—I wondered: what difference can there be for him, between sleeping and waking?—and his breathing drew infinitely closer to a snore. I went to the bedroom door, already ajar, and put my head through.
Sobriety stood in mute stillness, while muffled sound floated from elsewhere in the house or from the street. A plate of cold cuts and a hunk of bread on a plate sat on a stair where she had, evidently, just placed it. She herself, one hand gripped at the banister, was bowed over with her back to me and her hand pressed at her waist, to the front.
I rustled from the sickroom across the landing, and down the two steps to Sobriety. I grasped her arm so that she might lean on me and picked up the plate with my other hand.
‘Sobriety, are you ill?’
‘Yes,’ Sobriety paused. ‘A little.’ Her face was pale, transparent as water, and damp; her eyes were very dark and nearly closed.
Slowly we climbed the stairs, stopping twice to huff in amusement when I,
both hands occupied, stepped on the hem I could not hold out of the way. We climbed from carpet to naked timber until we reached Sobriety’s chamber door and entered, crowding the tiny, low-ceilinged room with ourselves and the billow of our skirts.
Upon the little bed was the old quilt I had given her years before. I had never visited the room, of course, though I sometimes heard her move about at night or in the mornings. It gave a strange feeling—oddly as though my heart were short of breath—to know that this old familiar had lain here all this time. A hook had been screwed into the back of the door, from which hung Sobriety’s few dresses—once again, my own that had travelled up these few steep stairs to live again. At the foot of the bed there was a chest from the Jacobin uncle, very well-made, perhaps by himself—I recalled when it had come, while I had never seen it here in its place. Upon it stood the japanned box as the room’s only form of decoration, except for the tract in its plain frame on the wall facing the door that read, in Sobriety’s own careful hand:
When from the chambers of the east
His morning race begins,
He never tires, nor stops to rest,
But round the world he shines,
So, like the sun, would I fulfil
The duties of this day,
Begin my work betimes, and still
March on my heavenly day.
‘I will help you to bed,’ I said as if it were an announcement, and, ‘I will help you from your clothes.’ Although Sobriety began with, ‘No…’, I—as if I knew what I was about—placed the plate on the seat of the small chair by the small bed, squinted at the buttons at my maid’s back and began the unaccustomed labour of twisting them free. Through here? I was not certain, altogether. No. Yes. Ah.
Sobriety leaned against the wall until I had finished, slipped out of the dress, waited, pulling slowly at the hooks at the front of her stays while I fussed at draping the dress across the back of the chair (triumphant at my own competence). The petticoat had been patched a little since it had lain in my own chest, yet was of excellent cotton and wearing reasonably well. I untied the tape to release the hoops of the crinoline cage—and then I faltered to a stop.
What Empty Things Are These Page 6