What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  Child, child, child. I wiped away the tear that fell.

  After the interview the next day with the lawyer, Sobriety had said, ‘Poor Mr Gordon. He seemed hardly to recognise you.’ For I had been brittle—nay, abrupt—nay, contemptuous of small talk and parlour politeness. No, not even that, for I had not cared enough for his opinion even for contempt.

  With the briefest of greetings, I had said, ‘I want funds, Mr Gordon, for a small funeral and gravestone. No, no, of course I do not speak of Mr Hadley,’ for Mr Gordon paled and opened his mouth and eyes. ‘It is for a person to whom I feel I owe this much.’

  ‘Madam, does this person not have family who should—’

  ‘No, she does not.’

  He straightened his black-clad shoulders. ‘I cannot see why you should feel you need, madam. If this person has no means, if she is a pauper—’

  See him bobbing and pursing his mouth.

  ‘You did promise, Mr Gordon, that funds would be forthcoming when requested.’

  I was unsmiling and had lost for the moment all softness, was impatient with delicacy, and he was taken aback, it was evident, and lost the argument with no shot fired. For a moment, as we ladies left his office, Sobriety looked around and read pale distaste upon his face, his hand upon his breast as if he suffered from shock and sought to protect himself from further alarm.

  Sobriety later remarked to me, ‘I fancy you are now safe from him as suitor.’

  These vanities do flit about on the outskirts of life, a smile here, a demurral there. A present of a nosegay; the promise of a home. They do not matter. They do not matter. Who could think they did?

  Yet it was clear that Sobriety felt they did, for there were times when I glanced her way and caught the stillness of her face. I knew that Sobriety had packed away her secret, put it right away and would never refer to it more, for the sake of a home some day with Mr Broadford. I, at these times, would myself acquire a little of that stillness, for my own secret was kin to Sobriety’s.

  And then at other times I would regard Sobriety’s small and

  matter-of-fact face and know that nosegays bore no part in the little woman’s reasonings, and that it was fear, fear of a world that would leave innocents floundering in treacherous sand that led to her decision. Sobriety, both practical and fearful behind the secret that she carried, reached for the safety of rock.

  I looked at this woman who slipped, these days, from maid to friend. We each effect our own escapes, I thought, and unwillingly followed the thread that suggested that, in her transformation from minion, Sobriety also escaped from me. To return as my friend?

  I looked at George Hadley’s face, at this thinking about secrets. You had secrets, I am certain, terrible ones perhaps. We will never know what they were.

  My George, Mr Hadley. After all these years, I know less about what you have wrought out there in the world than I do about Mr F. I leaned forward and put my finger to my lips. And George, Mr Hadley, perhaps it is best I do not know all.

  It was drawing close to the end of my period of watching over him, and I took up several of my papers, today’s writing and some from days gone by, and folded them into an envelope. I contemplated this a moment, tapping my finger against the paper, and then opened it up, unfolded and looked through the sheets, took one from these and read it over again, pressing my lips together. Once I made to discard it, and then again, and then I folded it once more with the others and replaced them in the envelope. Once, as I enacted my nervousness, I did smile at myself.

  Then, with luncheon over—a simple haddock with a white sauce, had there in the kitchen while clanging, wiping, and the footsteps of busy women played beyond where Mrs Staynes held her self-

  imposed post next to me and Sobriety—I hurried into bonnet and shawl, crying, ‘Make haste, Sobriety! I must be there by three o’clock! Where is the envelope?’

  Sobriety had the envelope in her hand ready, since I had given it her but a minute before (for safekeeping lest sauce fall on it), and said, ‘Here it is. Not lost, do you see?’ And I thought once more to take a deep breath, as Mama had always advised. ‘Yes, yes. I do beg your pardon.’

  In the hallway, I stilled myself so that Sobriety might tie my ribbon at my chin. ‘Oh, Lord.’

  Then it was into the landau for a trip—a business trip!—into the city to the rooms of The Cornhill Magazine. It seemed a journey of inordinate length, though the traffic did flow smoothly. Three more times I opened the envelope and spread out my papers upon my knee, until my sheets were become creased and perhaps a little soiled. I put them back and set the envelope aside on the seat, to stare at the life in the streets. There was colour, there were smells and the coming and going of noise; it was all a jumble, and myself but one of the many pieces that made the busy whole. I could see the bonneted and hatted heads of those in other carriages, as they passed but an arm’s length away. These faces were a little grey, seemingly, there in their shadowed boxes. They turned sometimes toward the street, and sometimes bent away toward each other.

  Then Mr Brent pulled into Cornhill Street itself and stopped. The carriage lurched as Mr Brent descended to let down the steps, open the door and present a hand to help me down. My own hand shook, I knew, and I very nearly forgot to pick up the envelope where it lay on the seat.

  Mr Thackeray, when I was ushered into a room full of stacked papers and a desk that knew no order, seemed all angles, being tall and himself put together in haphazard fashion. I was surprised by his voice, which was high, and by his very first statement to me: ‘Madam! We had thought you were a parish curate!’

  I laughed at this, and shook his hand, relaxed suddenly from relief, even though a few minutes later there was a tremor still as I opened the envelope and drew forth the papers from it.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Days seemed taken up with dark shapes, with the hushed shiver of skirts in black. Two dresses were dyed; Cissy and Sobriety sat serious at the clattering machine for sewing, with ribbons and fringing, and Sobriety bent over a blackened bonnet with trimming and new netting. This busyness was a harbinger of that to come, when George’s passing would call out all of the mourning stuffs, that great fuss of brooding, heavy blacks, to be added to these small things now being made ready for service, folded and waiting in the sewing room that had been his study.

  ‘I shall spend more hours by Mr Hadley’s bedside, for he slips away, I think,’ I said to Mrs Staynes. ‘You will have much work between you in preparation.’

  The other women moved about the house; perhaps they glanced at me, I did not think of this until much later. They were made quiet by my very pallor, I suppose—I caught sight of this in a mirror in my darkened morning room, stared at my staring self as if at a stranger and thought somewhere in a still-wondering part of my mind that all would do well to be afraid of this face.

  For I am afraid of it myself, of what that face has seen.

  I saw there were dark patches beneath my eyes, for these last days I had not always slept well. I had wept for a short time, then.

  The occasional murmuring from behind doors or burring faintly from the kitchen was a sign that Sobriety had told the story, as I made my wordless way about the house, my hand a moment upon the banister, the boards creaking beneath the carpet. At mealtimes in the kitchen, I lifted the spoon to my lips and down again to the bowl. Mrs Staynes stood at attention to give orders, but there was that look about her of uncertainty, particularly in the tension lined upon her forehead, that had settled about her lately. All about her had changed and she had been powerless to arrest it, and George Hadley’s passing would set such change in place profoundly, perhaps permanently. I had begun to look away from the bewilderment that Mrs Staynes carried with her now from room to room and duty to changing duty.

  Sobriety undressed me in the evenings and brushed my hair. Once, I took the brush from Sobriety’s hand and held
her close, for I had been overcome that moment with a rushing fear. I felt in the first instance that this had been Sobriety’s story and the danger had been to Sobriety, and that I could not bear this; and then I felt that Sobriety would be gone from me soon enough, gone to her own home and Mr Broadford, with me left in the world without my own Sobriety there at all times, and I could not bear that either.

  Sobriety herself was checked a moment at this, evidently

  surprised. She returned the embrace and crooned as if to a fearful person (and that I am!), ‘No, no, I will not be gone far…’

  I sat now by Mr Hadley’s…George’s…bed and pinched the skin between my brows. There was a slight headache and also a confusion at all of those shapes during all of those past days: the slow clop of horses’ hooves and the small, very small group about the girl’s grave that merged somehow with the dour, unsmiling erectness of that other small group, my own family who had called me to be reckoned with. The one group that had stood quiet and bowed at the graveside, with faces so pale (surprising still—the Wests, both of them, and Edith. How came they there to the graveside, and why?), thinking on the vanished life of a young girl; and those others, that had sat amongst rich curtaining, polished mahoganies and china, with eyes sharpened and aimed at me, and with a fine wrath so refined and glinting emanating from Gwendolyn in all her dour bombazine and jet, as ever shivering and terrible in her displeasure.

  My family had seemed not quite as strangers, exactly, but at least as folk remembered from long ago. They were inhabitants of a place that I had left, somewhere remembered but dimly. The memory was of authority that threatened by the bat of an eye or the rap of a fan, and I expected to be affrighted once more as I entered by Gwendolyn’s great door. I wondered at this, that I had no sense that I must struggle against fear, that the fear itself was replaced by

  impatience—fancy, simple impatience!—to have done with this nonsense.

  I looked about me with, it must be said, a little trepidation (but not fear) at this small crowd of faces, milling about somewhat in Gwendolyn’s

  hall, for everyone had arrived at once. For everyone was summoned here—siblings, their wives, their children—to face down my rebellion. My rebellion! I thought, and this time my heart did beat the faster. Then, surveying the unsmiling party, I almost began to confuse them with the other, that pale and sombre group that had stood by that small, nameless grave. Bella, indeed, gave me a start as I stood thus with my mind drifting, for she was thin, so thin, like… For a moment,

  I had thought…but now my face was of a sudden cold and damp. And Bella, of course, was thin because she chose not to eat. I glanced at Gwendolyn, whose waking agony, everyone knew while none dared notice, was to plead with Bella to take food.

  Bella. Will she too die in her struggle to refuse food from Gwendolyn? She never eats! Would Gwendolyn permit her to visit her Aunt Adelaide? Would I be able to speak, in any case, to this girl, to advise her? And am I, in any case (I thought this with a spasm that made me draw sharp breath), one to advise young girls? Or anyone?

  I thought for a moment of Edith Courtney, certain that there had been no other recourse but to unmask the charlatan, Madame Drew, but uncertain that Edith was left at all the better for it… I sought to catch Bella’s eyes, and perhaps I did exchange a glance with the girl, yet I could not be sure of it.

  Gwendolyn’s maid stood by for my bonnet, but I hesitated, and then decided. ‘No, I shall not. I do not intend to stay long.’

  I looked at Gwendolyn’s face, now paled with offence. ‘I must not be long from George’s side. He is fading fast.’ I gave my sister a sad smile. ‘I shall sit with you all a few minutes, and then I must be gone.’

  With my every fibre pulled as tight as could be so that my very skin seemed to hum, I climbed up Gwendolyn’s stair and to her

  parlour, behind the sussurating crowd and directly behind Harry’s broad back. Dickie and Amanda’s brood came up behind me, hopping and nudging and whispering. I had forgot, perhaps because so much had occurred of late to separate me from this place and these people, that above the mantel Gwendolyn’s husband’s portrait loomed portentous, with its dark background of writhing trees—or perhaps

  figures, or drapery; I could never quite tell which—his face swimming pale with the consumption that eventually took him. He challenged forever every visitor’s entry, his eyes unrelenting and searching for frailty, such was the painter’s aim as directed by Gwendolyn. She is forever her John’s self-appointed lieutenant.

  I sat and looked about me with my smile fixed firm, while my

  sister’s servant brought the pot and tea things, and Gwendolyn began to pour with an irritation that rattled the cups because it was an awkwardness that all were to take refreshment except me, the subject of this very gathering.

  All around the walls, seventy paintings both small and large—though none so large as John’s portrait—jostled and leaned a little forward. Once, when Mr Hadley and I had felt obliged to visit, I had counted them all.

  I glanced across at Dickie and Amanda and smiled, most particularly because it was only they who were the more likely to smile in return. They each were quick to do so, and then glanced at Gwendolyn.

  I understood, but could not blame them for their timidity. Gwendolyn

  herself was deliberate and slow with the tea things, for slowness of movement was her habit and her virtue, and all watched as she poured and handed a cup to Amanda. The group sat straight, patient with the years of this ritual, but Gwendolyn chose then to stop a long moment, lowering the pot as she sought once more to reason with me.

  ‘I think you will find there is much to discuss, Adelaide. Please take off your bonnet and take tea.’

  With a hush of starch all in the room turned to witness my reply. Seventy depictions of trees and mountains, alien landscapes and Brooms of the past, leaned forward from the walls to witness my reply. I stilled the thrumming in my veins, breathed out long and gentle, and began.

  ‘Harry came to see me the other day, at your request—’

  ‘Oh yes, we were all most—’

  ‘And I have my answer for you now.’

  The clatter of teaspoons against cup and saucer, which had begun again in almost surreptitious manner, ceased. I saw that Harry had his tea almost to his mouth, but now looked at me from beneath his brows, with one raised in query.

  I turned to Gwendolyn. ‘I think I will manage my own affairs, dear sister, and so I do not feel it right to give you details of what these may be.’

  ‘Adelaide! You have not the experience! It is not done! You are not bred to—’

  ‘I will learn. And I have Mr Gordon’s help.’

  ‘I cannot agree. And we have other matters as well, that are most serious, to discuss—do you see why this will be no short conversation?’

  Here Gwendolyn remembered her duty and raised the pot once more. Conversation ceased while she poured and distributed cups and cake, and there was no sound but a clatter on the road outside, the ticking of the clock and the occasional whispered ‘thank you’. When finally all this came to an end, Gwendolyn put down the pot and set her shoulders and back straight, and turned to me.

  I, however, felt I must first make my answer. ‘I do not believe Mr Gordon is likely to discuss my business unless I permit it, and so that is the end of it.’

  ‘Reckless girl!’ Gwendolyn was loud, her modulated dignity undone for the moment. Those who held their cups flinched and then checked that nothing had been spilled.

  ‘There must be something seriously awry—’ Harry began, and Dickie and Amanda murmured to each other, and then to their children, since two of whom fidgeted and two, the older two, had realised the battle before them and its drift, and had begun to giggle. They settled to silence.

  ‘I have decided this. And of course, the question of my writing—‘

  ‘Indeed! Scandalous!’ Pink pat
ches were coming and going on Gwendolyn’s cheeks, and I recalled how my sister, and of course Dickie, had always been the two in the family who could not fudge their emotions, for these they wore always upon their faces. And I too, I had to admit, often shared this tendency. And now I saw tears begin in my sister’s eyes, and could hear them in her voice. My own eyes began to prick in response, and I was surprised at the pity that poured into my chest, even while I struggled against this and annoyance grew at the very thought. I knew that I picked up Gwendolyn’s ordered world and shook it, and the frustration to Gwendolyn was both physical and truly frightening. In Gwendolyn’s view, I had come to throw this world into the path of those whose business—as with Gwendolyn’s own—was to examine, take apart, comment upon every part and hold it up to ridicule, as a lesson to others who would stray.

  ‘Not scandalous, sister, no. Women write, and are respectable, and are paid—’

  ‘Paid!’

  ‘Yes.’ I let out a long sigh. ‘I have visited with Mr Thackeray of The Cornhill Magazine.’ I knew that here I boasted, and certainly knew that I sought to place myself beyond my family’s reach. See my bridges burning! ‘And we are agreed about what writing I might produce.’

  Gwendolyn stared.

  ‘I see there is a chasm between us.’

  ‘You have met with a publisher!’

  ‘Well, no, Mr Thackeray is the ed—’

  ‘You receive payment! This is worse than I thought!’