‘—And I come to escape from the army of women intent on wearing holes in the carpet with their scurrying!’
I regarded him who came with such news—the birth of a child—but seemingly so uninterested in it, thinking: This is unusual in Harry. It would be more like Dickie to present such tidings in person.
Poor Dickie. I felt a small, familiar mourning for Dickie, the hero of my childhood. He had passed from teasing fondness of his little sister, years ago now, to share hearth and table with his wife, and to raise his children. There had been little contact between Dickie and me in recent years, not just because of our separate parenthoods but also because of Dickie’s shrinking embarrassment at his own repeated losses; at his shame, so increased by Gwendolyn’s uncomplicated scorn and the onus of her accompanying act of rescue. And, it must be said, his absence from my life was also the result of Mr Hadley’s treatment of my brother as somebody beneath his notice. Poor Dickie.
And yet, I very nearly smiled at the revival in these last days of my closeness with my favourite, though I did not, since it was not Dickie that now stood and preened before me.
What has Harry really come to say?
For a moment, it was as if I stood to one side and observed (as the ghost of myself) as Harry Broom laid claim to primacy of place by gesture, by the size of his voice, and by his representation of the hard and manly world that prevailed beyond this house and room. We ladies gazed up at him with our soft faces, seated, as we were, in this womanly room embroidered so prettily and curtained away from the world. The very vase on the small table, filled with what few roses and foliage could be found this time of year, gave emphasis to my domestic womanliness. I saw his assumption and it was both sharply delineated and foreign to me, I realized. It harkened back to that time—both a few days and a century ago, lord!— before my household and I had been so shaken up and had had to find its own new shape. Our own new shape. Before, indeed, I had sought to make my own connection with the outside world.
But I sank back, despite myself, into the so-recent habit of deference. It was with an almost physical sensation that I felt this deeply unwanted slide back into meekness, while all my authority fled away, save that of hostess.
I turned to Cissy, grey as a mouse in shadow behind the guest. ‘Sherry, I think, Cissy. The Oloroso. Sobriety will help you.’ Sobriety glanced at me. She rolled up her lacework and rose, shook out the folds of her skirt, dipped and murmured a good afternoon to Harry, and left with Cissy, closing the door behind her.
I watched as they left the room. And are we not also an army of women?
Some remnant of the person who rescued babies existed still within me, and stamped its feet in rebellion. At least, I saw myself in imagination thus, stamping my feet.
But this too faded almost immediately, in the face of Harry’s complete ignorance of any change whatsoever. In my imagination, I was a child who stamped her feet, and now stopped in awareness of her childishness. The past weeks faded and what had loomed large—the musts and must-nots— were no longer important, were paltry and short-lived, colourless and infinitely small. It was all sham, a farce, a pretending to be something it was not. An absurdity. Of no account.
‘And how are they?’ I said, of my sister-in-law and her own new baby. My voice was without resonance or weight, after the noise of Harry’s entry.
I am sulking like a child. Foolish woman.
I closed my eyes a moment over my internal disturbance and sought calm. So. Is my face now pleasant for him?
Harry had his thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat, where there was precious little room for them. He looked around the room—at its small landscapes on the wall, the portrait of Mama, the tables and sideboard, inlaid and brought to a glow with polish, the vases and doilies, the porcelain bowl of some antiquity and my own efforts at decoupage—as if at a marketable proposition. This habit, which had grown after his achievement of the chief partnership of Papa’s business, seemed more about behaving in a masterful manner than anything to do with knowledge of the value of things. For in this, he was merely Mr Hadley’s apprentice.
I looked at him and knew that Mr Hadley’s illness, his wandering in powerlessness and incoherence, gave Harry by contrast invisible inches to his stature.
My brother bent to peer at the sewing machine before adjusting his coat for sitting.
I sat, aware of every rustle, of the very pace of my breathing.
I waited for Harry to impart the real intention behind his visit. Why am I so very irritated? I was testy to my very fingertips. Why is this? I looked at him, benign with the purring confidence of a figure in the City. Because we have been remaking our world, and you have come to stamp upon it.
‘Who?’ Harry asked. ‘Ah. Sarah—sleeping, I fancy. It went on all night. The doctor seemed complacent, so she must be well enough.’ He nodded with something like a smile, in something like my direction.
‘And the baby?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, yes. Very small. Very red! Perfectly well, I’m told. Elizabeth, named for Sarah’s aunt.’
He leaned back in his chair and nodded toward the sewing machine. ‘That is new.’
I nodded.
‘Practical, I suppose, given the circumstances. Good girl. No change with George, I suppose?’
I shook my head, went to speak but found Cissy was back with the tray, on it two small crystal glasses and the decanter of sherry. When Cissy had laid the tray on the table, I poured the wine. I cleared my throat as I handed Harry his glass.
‘No change with Mr Hadley, and not likely to be any improvement, Harry.’ That was abrupt, perhaps. I softened my reply. ‘It is a matter of waiting, I’m afraid.’
‘As we thought; as we thought.’
His man, I could not help noticing of a sudden, has doused him with cologne. It will outlast his departure for hours.
I was still most annoyed, I realised. It was as if annoyance had struggled out from between laces that had bound it and now I, in turn, must struggle to gather it up and contain it once more. I clutched at it while my brother filled his chest and began to speak of family.
‘We were discussing your circumstances, Adelaide. We fancy these will be reduced somewhat after George has passed, is this right?’
I could see in my mind’s eye my family’s heads a-nodding; I could see Gwendolyn rapping the tablecloth with the ebony edges of her black-laced fan until there was silence enough for her considered pronouncement. All of the children would have been sent from the room, and the tea stewed until it was unpalatable in the great silver pot…since Gwendolyn always took a great length of time before pouring.
I no longer know how to speak to Harry. Too much has changed, and he does not even apprehend it.
I sat unmoving, very still with my glass in both hands and staring at the fluid in it, a thimbleful of deep gold that would slide down like syrup. The humiliation of my family’s conversation about my circumstances—no doubt put by Gwendolyn as ‘the problem of Adelaide’, or something like—hung in the room. In my mind, the whole tribe walked in a circle around me, peering, shaking bonneted heads, reaching to prod with gloved fingers.
I do not think I have ever liked sherry.
‘How went your interview with Doctor McGuiness? I have heard nothing from him.’ This I said, admittedly, with a flash of vindictiveness, which I banished immediately as being unworthy of me.
Harry’s glance was sharp. He had little appreciated our sending him forth to ‘speak’ with Mr Hadley’s medical man. ‘It was thought the prospect of mutiny by the respectable Doctor not worth the risk. As I suspect you foresaw.’
I think this is some sort of acknowledgement. I shall take it as such. ‘I may have done.’
‘You understand, of course, that Gwendolyn’s interest is always that the right thing be done, the proprieties observed and—’
‘“One does
as one ought”,’ I said.
‘Just so.’ Harry paused to glance at me once more, as if not certain of what he saw there. He sipped at his sherry. ‘This is the important part she plays, and we allow her this.’
I folded my hands in my lap.
‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘Gwendolyn proposes that we all set up a small annuity for you. And I am in agreement. Something can be drawn up, when the time comes, through George’s Mr Gordon, who will aid you in making an accounting to us.’
There must be no Brooms too obviously down-at-heel for show, I knew. I let out a long, slight breath, and sat for a moment more regarding my glass until I felt I could raise my eyes to Harry.
‘Monthly would be the thing, I expect, and special applications should there be a need for some major expenditure.’ Harry sipped, his attention trailing to our mother’s favourite seascape upon the wall, as he reached into his inside pocket. ‘Indeed, I have here a letter
from us both, Gwendolyn and me, that requests details of your expectations.’ He passed the envelope to me. I was slow to take it. ‘Another has been sent to Mr Gordon, who will await your direction.’
My mind emptied. I knew not what to say to this—neither yes nor no seemed possible. The one had me packed like last season’s fashion at the back of the wardrobe, forever, while the other would call down a wrath such as I had never experienced . . . How may I declare myself for neither? I asked myself, with very little hope that it was possible.
Chapter Twenty
Delay! I must delay! It was as if I struggled to keep closed my door while my whole family pressed against it on the other side.
Take three breaths…
I turned the letter over in my hand. ‘I will consider this,’ I said at last, and placed it unopened in my lap, and patted it as if I knew what I did. I hoped Harry could not see the tremor.
‘You will consider it?’ Harry had not expected this mode of reply, it was evident. He does not know if I have given him an answer, or none at all.
‘I will consider it.’ I managed a faint smile. ‘No doubt whatever is necessary at the time will be done.’
That I had said nothing at all, I realised, was in itself a screen for the many things I had hidden away. I hid my own plans away from my family as if they were a guilty secret, perhaps, but really—I confessed it to myself—because my family would express outrage and mockery. And my plans, my writings, and my venturing forth would be prised from my very foolish fingers, with myself helpless under the pall of an entire family’s ridicule to make any protest, helpless and reduced to a childishness even beyond that of my own Toby.
‘Just so, just so.’ Harry leaned forward to pat my arm, sat back and drained his glass. There continued an air about him of confusion; he could not quite believe what he had heard.
‘Well, thank them for their interest in my affairs,’ I said.
‘Indeed.’
The chair squeaked as Harry changed position suddenly, slapped his hand on his leg. He gave a chuckle and settled against the cushion, crossing a shin over the other knee.
‘Here is a tale for you, little sister. Fellow in the City told it me.’ His smile was very broad. ‘You are still an avid reader of Mr Collins, I see?’
Mr Collins’s book, the third volume, lay on my little table still, for I had yet to return it to the library. My reading, indeed, was a tacit secret among my family or, at least, among my brothers. Neither Harry nor Dickie, it was well understood, was likely to tell Gwendolyn
—who would then be forced to struggle with the notion of ‘ought’—and neither would have told Mr Hadley, it was certain. As a girl, I had never been without a book and would read novels, poetry, and any snippet of literary adventure that came my way. Mr Collins’s much earlier work, Basil—that so thrilled with notions of love at first sight and of betrayal—had distracted me mightily when I was as yet unmarried, and caused me to be teased for days on end by both Dickie and Harry.
Harry waited now for my reply; he was positively smirking, though I could not see why.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said.
‘My chap tells me there are tolerably well-known stories concerning Mr Collins and a certain Mrs Graves, though Mr Collins passes her off as his housekeeper, or sometimes as his secretary.’ Harry chuckled and fixed his eyes on me, his mouth pursed over his amusement, and his eyebrows raised. He had always looked so when passing on his gossip, some scurrilous scrap that would cause me to look away, perhaps to blush. It was so often about some person of whom I had spoken in admiration, for he evidently felt that the more foolish I felt, the more adorable I became.
I looked quickly away.
Harry had settled into his teasing by now, as into an old and comfortable habit. Yet it was a habit—this chaffing of his sister—that I now set at a distance, the further with every day that my life reshaped itself. I wished, with a sudden and violent passion, never to experience his teasing again.
‘These scribblers you spend so much time in reading are certainly a shady lot! You ladies must be on your guard for what goes on behind the pages!’ The skin about his eyes crinkled with amusement as he waited for my reaction. I looked a moment at my hands.
‘Come, sis, confess! You are shocked! See how you look away!’’
‘This is to gossip, Harry, while I have more serious matters to exercise my mind, as you yourself have just now pointed out.’
The heat flooded to my cheeks. I jerked to my feet with a whispered shiver from my skirt. Harry came to his feet too, confusion again on his face as if he had lost hold of some minor thing that he had brought with him. He looked at his empty glass, hesitated, and put it down on the table.
‘Please give my love to Sarah,’ I said.
‘Oh, indeed.’ He smoothed the gloves on his hands distractedly. I rang for Cissy.
There was a stirring on his face then, a half-formed realisation, a hesitance. ‘Oh, and I shall tell Gwendolyn that—’
‘That I shall consider your request.’
‘Oh. Oh yes.’
Sobriety bent over the lace, back in her seat after the front door closed behind Harry.
‘How was your brother at the news of our adventures?’
‘Heavens! I forgot to tell him!’
How am I so restless, unsteady even, as if I were excited? I pressed my hand to my chest. I am everywhere at once. I am befuddled. I thought of Harry’s face as his newly dignified—nay, proud and righteous—sister bade him such an undeniable farewell, coolly polite. Firm.
I smiled and took breath. ‘He came to demand an accounting of my finances.’ I exhaled. ‘I believe I had Cissy show my brother the door.’
Yet, over the next hour, I felt myself diminish as a balloon subsides for loss of gas. For Harry had left me with ghosts, after all, more even than the prospect of a dole, the meting-out of a tiny stipend at the pleasure of my siblings. No, there were also night creatures whose shape and smells I could not bring myself to face: Rossetti’s painted woman, over-ripe, luscious, perhaps bursting through the grey-brown carapace of the seemingly respectable housekeeper, Mrs Graves, coquetting as if she loved it; and Mr Collins, whose written words had whispered to me in both the dark of my girlhood cupboard and the shifting light of my climbing tree, degraded to a man of lust and perhaps forever lost to me as an avuncular conjurer of tales, the erstwhile comforter of the silent hours.
During my vigil in Mr Hadley’s room, I stared for so long at the painted woman that the lines grew indistinct and wavered in the near dark. After a while my eyes blurred, I blinked and, frowning, looked instead at Mr Hadley. And then away.
My writing journal—that I had begun to think was the repository for darker notions, darker thoughts, the secret gaseous puffings of my hidden confusions—lay in my writing box, and I pulled it out. Mr Rosetti’s shameless woman looked at me, and Mrs Charles, also, did brush throug
h my mind with cologne upon her skirts. I was thoughtful, thus, as I dipped my pen:
When I spoke of ladies and our community with each other, how came I to forget it is the sensual that divides us, often? How did I forget what tumult of loathing is left when the beast is about?
On Friday, the house waited for Toby. Although—whatever the pace Mr Brent set in his fetching of the boy—he would not arrive before late afternoon; by late morning his room was fresh, dusted, aired, and his bed newly crisp with the sheet turned down. Cook had stirred herself especially early for a trip to buy (and this not even a market day) cuts that were Toby’s favourites. On her return, hints of baking floated even to the second landing.
I stood in the open doorway to Toby’s room, the odours of cake and biscuit warm at my back. Within the room, everything stood child-sized. A few books of tales for boys still stood tipped against each other on shelves; there were his tin soldiers, his paints with the colours well-worn down. His paintbrushes. His rocking horse resting up against the wall, even though it had been two or three years since he had ridden it. Had Mr Hadley entered this room recently, he would surely have ordered it thrown out. Toby may do so himself, perhaps, but I hoped to keep, for at least a little time to come, this collection that told of a child’s twelve years of growing. I stood thus for many minutes, for at last I communed with this…this Tobyness…directly, and alone. That is, I stood there without the disapproving intercession of nurse or nanny, or the possessive disapproval of Mr Hadley—for perhaps the first time. I leaned against the doorjamb and wondered whether I may feel close to the life all this represented, or must know myself very far from it.
The room spoke of innocence, yet it seemed to me all the childish things in it turned to look at this woman, this mother, with contempt, all—in all innocence—unable to respect and therefore to love her. For Toby had shown no signs of love for me, his mother, since he had been a baby. I closed the door, smoothed the folds of my skirt, and descended the stairs.
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