by Lily Hammond
Her lips moved, and Clemency strained to hear what Libby said before walking down the steps to the path and away from the house, not looking back.
‘What did she say?’ Riley stood behind Clemency, drying her hands on her apron.
Clemency shook her head. ‘My life is a wasteland,’ she repeated.
There was silence between them for a minute, while Libby disappeared down the driveway out of sight and a heavy woodpigeon flew down to the trees with a loud swoosh of wings.
‘Well,’ Riley said, suddenly brisk. ‘She’s a dramatic one, for certain.’
But Clemency looked down into the morning, seeing in her mind Libby Armstrong walking down to the road, a case in each hand, her shoulders thrust back, spine stiff, face frozen.
‘I couldn’t have broken her heart, could I?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘Clemency, love. It wasn’t your heart that girl was really after.’
Clemency nodded slowly, but she’d heard what Libby had said – about loneliness – and wondered. Then shook her head. ‘She wasn’t in love with me.’
‘No. She wasn’t,’ Riley replied. ‘But I’ll tell you who is – your Eliza. Now what are you going to do about that?’
Clemency stood still in the doorway, but now she was looking out at the horizon, where water and land met sky and the sun kissed each with sweet buttercup lips. She turned and looked at Riley.
‘I might love her back,’ she said, the words falling from her mouth as golden as the sun.
‘You barely know her,’ Riley replied, although her words were mild, not reproving.
The morning air was fresh, salty. Clemency breathed it in. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But love doesn’t need knowing to spark.’ Her lips curved in a gentle smile. ‘It needs it to grow and be sustained, but you can, I think, fall in love at first glance, or scent, or touch.’ Her smile widened and she touched Riley’s shoulder that was plump and rounded under the sensible house dress. ‘So now, I shall learn Eliza, all about her.’
Clemency pushed open the door to what she was already thinking of as Eliza’s bedroom. It was directly across the hall from her own and was just as fine. All the rooms on the first floor were well-appointed, with adjoining dressing rooms. The third bedroom on this floor was empty again, and Clemency had glanced in as she’d walked past. Libby had left the bed neatly made.
‘Do you like this room?’ she asked, looking at Eliza. ‘You could have the other one now, if you prefer.’ She smiled. ‘I think it’s important for you to have your own space, even while we spend time together.’ It was a clumsy way of saying while they were sleeping together – an arrangement Clemency didn’t think would end anytime soon. Or at all, she mused, looking back at Eliza. Her mind and body both felt suddenly alive, filled with wildfire.
Eliza, who had touched a fingertip to the coloured mermaid in her window glass as she’d passed by, as though the mermaid were a talisman, stepped into the room and looked at it properly. She’d been too sick when she first arrived to notice it, and then she’d been too busy. With Clemency. She paused, looking at Clemency, realising what she’d just asked. And smiling. There would be no going to anywhere called Greymouth. Clemency wanted her to stay here. With her. Blinking back tears of love and gratitude, she touched her hand to her chest.
Clemency though, nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is your room. If you’ll stay.’ She knew there wasn’t anywhere else for Eliza to go – unless back to Ruth and Maxine’s, or to the job in Greymouth, if it wasn’t too late for that. She didn’t want Eliza to do either.
Besides, Ruth and Maxine would be too busy with their new baby. And they’d need Eliza’s room.
Eliza looked around, taking everything in almost one thing at a time. Inside her chest, her heart swelled with feeling. Clemency was asking her to stay. And giving her a room for her own. She’d thought her room at Ruth and Maxine’s was nice.
But this – there were no words inside her head for this one, just a giant electric hum as she tried to take it all in. Tears threatened at the corners of her eyes, and she jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
‘Hush,’ Clemency said, stepping over to her and placing a hand gently on Eliza’s back. ‘Everything is all right,’ she soothed.
Eliza dropped her hands, but shook her head, looking at the room Clemency said was hers. The reality of it shocked her, so that she felt it in her body, a numbness in her hands, a hotness behind the eyes. She had liked her little room she’d had when she lived with her mother, but it had been barely more than a cupboard, and they’d only had three rooms altogether and thought themselves well-off. She’d loved the room she’d had when they lived with her father on the farm, although it was almost as small as the later one. Eliza could barely fathom what had happened to her.
She turned her shining eyes to Clemency, pleading with her to understand, to tell her she wasn’t dreaming. What was this world she was now to live in?
Looking at Clemency steadied her, so that she could feel where she stood, so that she could breathe again. She smiled, and Clemency smiled back at her, and suddenly, just like that, everything was well.
‘It’s a lovely room,’ Clemency said, her voice low, warm. ‘It suits you.’
Eliza gazed at her for a moment longer, then, with a smile curling at her lips, she looked around at the room, longing to move around it, look at everything, touch everything.
Leaning forward, Clemency smiled at her. ‘Do we need to go get your things from your old bedroom at Ruth and Maxine’s?’
Eliza remembered her battered old suitcase, with her few items of clothes in it, and her mother’s handbag with the papers. All she had left was her mother’s wedding ring, now lying on top of the dressing table. She bit at her lip and frowned, wishing there was a way that she could tell Clemency what had happened to everything else. She shook her head. Pointed to the bruise on her side, shook her head again.
What had Clemency said about learning to talk to each other? With their hands? She wished they knew how to do that already.
Clemency frowned. She knew Eliza was trying to tell her something. ‘We don’t need to get your things from Ruth’s?’ she asked.
Eliza shook her head. No.
‘But Ruth said your clothes were still there.’
Eliza shook her head again. No. She mimed carrying a suitcase.
‘You had some of them with you?’
Eliza’ broke out in a relieved smile. Yes, she nodded. She had her suitcase. She’d left the few things Ruth had been kind enough to give her folded up still in the drawers. Not because she’d been ungrateful for them, but because she felt too guilty to take them.
Clemency looked around the room. ‘Do you have your suitcase here?’ She hadn’t seen it, but then Dot or Riley could have put it away in the wardrobe. Eliza herself was still wearing a nightdress and dressing gown – both of which Clemency recognised as her own, although she thought they looked far better on Eliza than on herself.
But Eliza shook her head again, furiously this time. Clemency had sat down on the side of the bed, which was still unmade from when they’d risen earlier, and Eliza reached out to touch her, to get her attention.
She mimed carrying the suitcase again, then made as though flinging it away, and turned to the side, pulling up her nightgown to display the livid bruise on her side.
Understanding dawned. ‘You lost it when that man accosted you,’ Clemency said.
Eliza let the soft cotton of the gown fall and nodded. Spread her hands to show they were empty. She had nothing, she told Clemency, then went to the dressing table and touched the gold ring. Nothing except for that.
‘Is that your mother’s?’ Clemency asked, knowing it couldn’t be anyone else’s.
Eliza nodded, picked up the thread and lifted over her head so that the ring nestled between her breasts again.
Clemency watched her, vowing to replace the thread with a fine gold chain to match the ring.
‘So, y
ou don’t have anything with you?’
No. A shake of the head.
Clemency digested this information for a moment. ‘You’ll have to wear something of mine, then,’ she said. ‘If we can find something that will fit you.’ She eyed Eliza’s figure. Eliza was shorter and much more shapely and well-endowed than Clemency herself was. The nightgown fit, but Clemency didn’t know what else would. ‘We need to go shopping, she said, half to herself.
Eliza stood looking at her.
‘I know,’ Clemency said, relieved. She really didn’t think any of her own skirts would fit over Eliza’s hips, bony as they were, and none of her dresses would fit around Eliza’s bust.
‘I’ll get Dot to go down to the shops here in the Port and pick you out an outfit. Then you can wear that, and we’ll go into the city and get you what you need.’ Which, Clemency realised, was everything, from underwear to shoes. Eliza really did have nothing. How did anyone in that position survive? she wondered.
Eliza looked at her, wide-eyed. Clemency would take her to get new clothes? It was like hearing something in a foreign language. Eliza laughed in disbelieving joy and leapt forward to grasp Clemency’s hands. She brought them to her lips and kissed them. Then stood back up and looked around, amazement dazing her. Her room, in the house living with the woman who had her heart. There was no one in the world, Eliza decided, more fortunate than she. With new eyes, she took in her surroundings.
There was a fireplace, with an embroidered screen of swans. On the mantle above it, a fine, etched silver carriage clock. It was no bigger than Eliza’s hand, and she picked it up, feeling the weight of it, and enjoying the graceful lines. She brought it over to Clemency to look at.
‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ Clemency agreed and pointed to the stylised design of sweeping lines and roses. ‘This sort of design is called Art Nouveau.’
It was very pretty, and Eliza looked at it, tracing a gentle finger around the glass of the clock face. She turned it for Clemency to look at and pointed to the hands and numbers.
Clemency glanced at her watch again. ‘It’s telling the right time,’ she said. ‘Nine-thirty.’ She looked from the clock to Eliza’s face. ‘Can you read the time?’ she asked.
Eliza shook her head and put the clock carefully back on the mantlepiece. She couldn’t read anything – but she could count. She nipped at her bottom lip. How to tell Clemency that? With a glance around the room, she held up one finger and smiled, then went to the dresser, picking up the silver dressing set that lay there.
Clemency watched her pounce on the items, then bring them back to the bed where she sat and laid them carefully out, one at a time. Then Eliza pointed to the hairbrush and held up one finger. Pointed to the comb, and another finger joined the first. When she pointed to the mirror, and held up a third finger, Clemency smiled in delight.
‘You can count,’ she said.
Eliza’s face beamed when she nodded.
‘That’s wonderful,’ Clemency said, and it was. ‘But you can’t read?’
Eliza shook her head and picked up the hairbrush. Its bristles were soft and thick. She wondered if she was allowed to use it, and held it up to Clemency, the question in the lift of her brow.
Clemency nodded straight away. ‘You can have those, if you want them. They’re just a spare set.’ She was more interested in other matters. ‘Eliza?’ she said. ‘Have you ever seen anyone about not being able to speak or read?’
With the hairbrush clutched against her breast, Eliza nodded. The dressing set was silver, and the pattern engraved on the back of the brush and mirror weren’t the same style as the clock – Eliza could tell that straight away – but they were pretty, nonetheless. She wanted to run the brush through her hair.
‘Did you see a doctor?’
Eliza pursed her lips, then replaced the brush and comb and mirror on the dressing table. She nodded, not wanting to think about it. She touched her throat and shrugged. It didn’t work. That was all there was too it. And she couldn’t read either. She didn’t know if that was because she couldn’t talk – her mother had seemed to think so but her teacher at the school she went to for a while when she was small hadn’t known why Eliza had never managed to learn to read and soon she’d given up trying to teach her. Eliza knew the teacher had decided she was just stupid, and soon after that, Eliza had stopped going to the little school, had stayed at the house instead, and milked the cows and learnt to sew.
She came back over to Clemency and stood in front of her, forehead wrinkled with worry. Was Clemency going to change her mind because she couldn’t tell the time or read books and papers? She could talk inside her head; there were lots of words as well as pictures inside her head; and she could count too. All the way to thirty.
She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t know that there were a lot of things in the world that she didn’t know.
She wished she could tell Clemency that.
Clemency looked at her, standing in front of her, beautiful with the sun shining in through the window behind her and lighting up her hair into a fiery halo. She looked at the delicate frown puckered between Eliza’s brows and knew she was asking for reassurance. Clemency took Eliza’s hands and brought them to her lips.
‘I don’t care,’ she told Eliza, kissing her fingers, ‘that you are unable to speak or read or tell the time.’ She smiled up at Eliza. ‘You are smart, you see so many things through those eyes of yours, and I think you always have.’ She tugged Eliza’s hands and with a surprised, soundless laugh, Eliza tumbled into her lap and Clemency held her there.
‘I’m going to teach you to take pictures,’ she whispered, breathing in the warm scent of Eliza’s body.
Eliza sat up and looked at her.
Clemency nodded. ‘I’ll show you everything about how to use a camera.’ She smiled. ‘I want to know what you see when you look around. I think it could be extraordinary.’
Eliza listened to the words coming out of Clemency’s mouth and her own dropped open and their meaning clarified. She was going to learn how to use a camera! She was going to take pictures!
Hadn’t she wanted to do just that?
She held onto Clemency with a fierceness born of the happiness that lit her up inside like a bonfire.
Clemency laughed and held her tightly, feeling the excitement that came with every new project.
Except this was more than just a new project. This was Eliza, a real person, and the knowledge filled Clemency with responsibility.
And something else too, that swelled inside her chest until it burst into fertile life – something that spread all throughout her until she was a haze of feeling, of the feeling that everything was terribly important, and terribly wonderful. She buried her face in Eliza’s breasts.
‘I want to know everything about you,’ she said, and her voice was fierce. ‘I want to know every cell of your body, and every part of your mind.’
Eliza heard the words and her heart leapt. She touched a hand to Clemency’s cheek and when Clemency lifted her face, she leaned down and kissed her, and nothing had ever tasted so sweet and so rich and so full of all the promises of the world.
Chapter Fifty-Three
They walked along the edges of the orchard garden, barefoot, the grass dry and springy under their soles. Eliza wore a new summer dress, the fabric soft and floaty, and she kept looking down at it, smoothing her hand over the skirt, then picking the fabric up in her hands, marvelling over how light it was. She loved the colour too – emerald green, and the skirt was long, whispering around her ankles as she walked.
She glanced at Clemency walking beside her, fingers tucked into the pockets of a flowing pair of trousers. She looked too, at Clemency’s bare feet, the long toes, the white skin against the green grass, the pearly nails. She noticed everything and slipped her arm through Clemency’s, breathing in the salt breeze and tipping her head to the lacy clouds above them in the blue sky. Nudging Clemency, she pointed at the sky un
til Clemency looked up, saw the fine blue expanse above them, frilled at the edges with clouds. When she looked back down, Eliza smiled and pointed to the blue of her eyes. Then at the sea below them, deep and gloriously green, and she pointed finally to Clemency’s eyes; the sea was deep and sparkling green like those.
Clemency grinned, catching on straight away, delighted. ‘We are perfectly paired,’ she said. ‘Blue sky, green sea.’ She pulled Eliza closer and they turned to look out over the harbour and out to where the horizon curved over the rim of the world.
Eliza leaned forward and tapped the camera Clemency had slung over her shoulder. Then spread her arms at the view.
Clemency shook her head and spread her arms wide too. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s too much. The view is too big. We must find a part of it that tells a story. And then we can take a photograph. She picked up the camera and pointed to a tree that stood on the side of the hill taking in the view, its great branches spreading out to test the sea breeze.
‘Stand under there,’ Clemency said and nodded when Eliza looked at her. ‘That’s right.’ She looked through the viewfinder. ‘Now, we’ve framed the scene with you and the tree. She focused on Eliza’s face and forgot all about the tree, the sky, the harbour beneath them. Instead, she watched the play of light and shadow on the heart-shaped face, moving a few steps until the fall of shadow was pleasing to her eye, and then she pressed the shutter button.
When she stood up, she remembered the lesson and beckoned Eliza over and turning her around to look back at the tree.
‘See how the trunk and branch frame the picture?’ She let the camera swing on its leather strap and put her arms around Eliza, holding her hands out, thumbs at right angles to create a frame to look through.
‘That’s what the picture is going to look like, the view in the space between my fingers. I’ll make some frames out of card for you, I think, and then you can use them to see how you can compose your photographs. This is what you need to learn even before you get behind a camera.’