Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  They tilt up and down a bit, they rock, like, and that is how Rotha was on her feet, all those first years while her feet still carried her. Oh that my feet may always carry me, she cried out once. I didn’t fathom why, not then.

  Her ideas were like scraps of windblown fog or choppy bits of lakewater but William’s had to have beginnings and middles and endings. He took ideas from her but by the time he finished with them his were poems and hers were something apart. His were very easy to remember—I got to know a lot of them by heart—but hers you could never know by heart, you felt them the same as you’d be affected by a scrap of tune tumbling from a bird you had never heard before or had half-heard while you were dreaming. You certainly hoped you would hear it again. You hoped you might get to know that bird. But then you might go all your life without hearing it again. You might wonder if the tune really happened.

  And when I say I knew William’s poems by heart, I don’t mean I read them, I mean I heard them fall from his lips. He didn’t write them down, he said them, he muttered them, he was famous for muttering them everywhere he went, all along the terraces and in the fields and along the lake edge, everywhere. So I mean I heard them and yes they rhyme and—most of them, a lot of them, they rhyme—I mean I’m a—I can read, it’s not that I can’t, but—I think if you put the words to William’s poems down in front of me and I had to read them, I’d get a bit bogged down, you know. But when he said them, well, it’s like Shakespeare isn’t it—I mean you’ve got to hear it and then you figure out what’s going on.

  Well Rotha, she scribbled William’s poems down for him after he said them out loud. That’s how his got written down. If it wasn’t for Rotha I don’t know what would have happened to William’s poems. Moss would’ve drunk them all. So he was always chanting them out loud for her to write them down and if he got in a muddle she’d fix him right again. So I got to hear his poems over and over again. And anything I hear I’m pretty good at remembering. But Rotha and her words—well. After she scribbled his for him she wrote hers down an’ all. He was hardly going to write hers for her. Nobody was. And hers were nowt like his.

  Hers in Mary’s hat box, all Rotha’s own books—all her own lovely sayings. I mean, what she wrote about every step she took to the tarns, Nab Scar, Loughrigg Fell, all her travels, a lot farther afield than William.

  And she started letting me read her books—I could sit for hours if I had hours which I didn’t. I wished I had more time. But I had scraps of time between tasks and in those scraps I could sit reading her diaries to my heart’s content. They glowed up and you saw everything she had seen, you saw it all shimmering. The diaries lit up my own memory of every place she mentioned and it felt like the magic lantern show my mam’s cousin took me to at Manchester when we went there to try and get some money her brother owed us. We never got a farthing but the lantern show was better than gold for me—all that blazing light. Where did it come from? Light blazing from somewhere. That’s the feeling I got reading her diaries. Not the red one but the plain little dark-coloured ones.

  Last night I went to see the delphiniums. Most were not yet burst but two or three had burst out…

  …& they looked like blue dancing skirts kicked open & two little feet inside, wearing furry little lemon-coloured slippers…

  & at the graveyard I saw lupins with their pods out after the flower had gone, & I opened these, green glimmering through a skin of silver fur…& inside lay the “peas” just like Rose’s kittens, all in a line feeding on their mother pod…

  …& I noticed that the iris leaves bend over in the breeze & their bent top part has light shining full down on it but the base hides in shadow…

  Bits like that, with the lemon slippers, but other bits were crying like…

  All the rosetrees are now fullblown, though they do still have buds on them. They show every stage of the rose now. Their foliage is crowded with buds, one-petalled flowers, fullblown flowers, & the pollen-yellow hearts of flowers that have had all their petals blown off. The old-fashioned garden rose-tree has a white rose, a modest one, in bloom right at its edge. For the pink rose tree it looks as if the blooming has been excessive: the tree looks ravaged, used out, as if it were ravaged by the cloying blooming of too many roses. I think it looks as if the tree is sick. Sick of roses…

  So I read her diaries and Rotha said it was all right and I got pleasure out of it. But the second way I studied her diaries was not for my pleasure but was work William asked me to do.

  I mean William was not a bad man. He had every intention of being the world’s kindest brother. He had made a promise to be exactly that. A promise to himself and a promise to Rotha. And he kept that promise, sort of. He never left her destitute, did he. Not in the matter of money or a roof over her head.

  I can remember Rotha telling me it was all arranged between herself and William that he would inspect her diaries. In fact she wrote them for him when he was away and even for times when he was right there, for as I’ve told ye, his eyes were that bad and he couldn’t smell a thing and this got worse as he got older.

  And he told me himself, Dixon he says, it isn’t only my eyes and nose. People come to Rydal to glimpse the great poet and here I am unable to feel any of the youthful things I once felt. Those things have gone from me…But they have not gone from my sister.

  Aye, William was right there.

  No, Rotha never lost what her brother lost. She could grow older and older—ancient, it didn’t matter, she was the same. Her feet would betray her, aye! Though I am the one who found a way for her to ride the wild way of a sprightly wren. She flew on my little wheels! Aye, I made her the wheels once she was not able to walk. The little wagon. No matter what happened to her legs I would get Rotha outside and in her element. But I’ll come to that later. Anyhow she kept writing and never stopped.

  But in William’s mind her writing was not for herself. It was all for the sake of him and his poems.

  What I remember is one day William said, Dixon—you claim you are good with pointy little tools. He hands me a nib and he says, see how you make out with this. Rotha was out traipsing the fells that day and he brought me up to her bedroom and opened the box that had her diaries in it.

  He never opened her red diary, only the black ones and the blue ones. He had me read them out to him and copy bits for him into a notebook of his. Her handwriting was very hard for anyone to read even if they did not have William’s terrible eyesight. And writing things down with a pen, well he found that irritating.

  He considered pen work drudgery. Scratching, he called it. He hated scratching. It got in the way, between the idea and the poem. He wanted someone else do his scratching. Rotha had done it. At times his wife Mary had done it.

  Now it was my turn.

  I noticed early on he seemed to want to go upstairs only when Rotha was not present. She was out here in the garden or gone to the post office or flying over the fells. She was still fleet as a lark then. Later when she was not as well, William would bring me upstairs to read her books while she slept, which made me feel uneasy.

  I asked him, Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t we look in the books while Miss Wordsworth is awake? Perhaps she could help us decipher the penmanship and make our work go all the more quickly.

  And he said never mind that, Dixon. She’ll get caught up in the memories and we won’t be able to get her to turn the page. We’ll be here all day. And my sister cannot discern between a passage of literary value and a mere sweep of strong emotion. So let’s you and me just get on with it by ourselves.

  And I said to myself, Well William is the one paying my wages.

  He said he only wanted the perfect timeless things she had set down: the natural, floating things, not details between. The words he fished or made me gather and move from her world to his own were like pollen and nectar ye collect.

  We harvested his s
ister’s weightless and golden thoughts.

  He did not have anything like those in himself.

  He would wait as I read, and he held one hand up in the air like a clock hand ready to strike the moment I read something he wanted to clasp. There was a quality in the air whose name I can’t remember. There’s a word I can’t reach. One that sounds like church bells set to clang, but something binds them aslant in the tower.

  He’d say to me Dixon, see what my sister had to say on April the nineteenth.

  Went for a walk in the mild thin air, I read out. I had to be careful not to go too fast.

  Watch that you miss not a word, he’d say. Don’t run the words together. Don’t miss the ends off! Watched the black river with a frost-silvered willow hung low over the water, bent with the weight of the silver, one tip touching the river, dispersing some of the small, white froth-ovals floating on top—listened to the sounds of rain, river, lake—water gullying everywhere—saw three little birds…

  What sort of birds, William interrupted.

  I don’t know.

  Damn it does she not name the bloody birds?

  No, she just says—

  Never mind that page then. On to the next! What does it say?

  The next page, Sir, is about Mary not liking it when plates are stacked together for washing whilst food is still on them…

  Never mind any of that. Who cares about food squashed on plates! Get us back out of doors.

  Figurines on top of the larches—a witch riding a broom, Napoleon galloping on his horse—many of these figures seem to be riding fast—

  All right, that’s better! Go on.

  —Nothing in the woods is whiter than the snow of blackberry blossoms on the dark green leaves, & the leaves are dry as bones under the few raindrops that sit on them like tiny crystal balls—

  Keep going. Write that one down.

  —& water sparkles among the reeds, its voice a flute in the undersong of wind, thrush and reed—lights in the grass—& the lake glimmers through the lilac leaves—skeletons of the lilac flowers stand on the treetop, brittly swaying—a strong wind blew the lilac leaves so they became folded hearts—half-hearted, & it tore the skin off the lake revealing glittering silver blood—like ripped metal—the sound of the wind went hollowly around the hills like a soft-headed stick scribing a spiral on cymbals—

  Yes, write it down! We’ll have all that.

  Sir, Rotha is stirring. She looks as if she might awaken.

  No, he says, she’s had twelve drops.

  He meant the laudanum for her headache.

  Read on, he says, sounding impatient.

  I had tried their laudanum myself one day when they were all out. I was curious. I never drink a drop of alcohol because I have no interest in making a fool of myself like some fellows do, wandering over the roads in a chaotic fashion, saying things they shouldn’t say, telling all sorts of their own and other people’s secrets. I like to keep my private information to myself. But in the interest of understanding the little fam’ly I thought it wouldn’t hurt one day while they were all down at the lake to take a dozen drops of the medicine they each took at various times, to see what it did.

  The best way I can describe it is to say it sanded the edges of my worst hurts.

  It made me nearly forget the plight of my sister for a start. Imagine forgetting Penny. Who would want to take medicine like that over and over again? That makes you forget someone that dear. But then I couldn’t remember Waterloo in my usual way at all. Waterloo did not jab me behind the eyes to remember the dead or things I had done or times I had been terrified out of my mind. And that kind of numbing was something.

  Laudanum makes your worst sorrows hide behind soft young trees. After I tried it I knew better than to ever try it again for I saw at once why half of England was dependent on it, for it is stronger in far smaller amounts than gin. Takes the sting out of the worst details—it even stopped troubling me that Rotha had my mate Joe Bell’s tooth in her mouth. In fact, the laudanum told me that perhaps now whenever Rotha spoke her voice had a trickle of Joe’s in it; her voice remembered his. What an idea!

  Even after the laudanum wore off I did not forget the thoughts it gave me.

  William shouted, Dixon, keep reading, please!

  Wild roses on the path along the shore—some of them still folded like ballgowns. Wind makes a merciless hash of the soft-leafed ash tree…

  Is that all?

  That’s it for that page, Sir.

  What about the next?

  Mary is peeling potatoes—the sound a soft scridge scridge of the knife, the softer bubbling up of water in the pot, the creak of the kitchen chair as Wm shifts while reading the paper—& the knife, scridge scridge—a little like the snidge snidge of the razor-grinder’s horse eating grass yesterday—or

  Forget about peeling potatoes, he cried. Let’s mark down the snow of the blackberry blossoms though. And the half-hearted lilacs—was it folded hearts or half-hearts? What did she write?

  It was both, Sir—I copied it down for him.

  At first I had no way of predicting which of his sister’s words William would want to keep or leave alone. And bit by bit I grew able to tell. He did not want to hear about potatoes or their peel or their blossoms. Whereas for her, a potato flower was as important as any other.

  He never brought up the red diary and for a while it disappeared. But one afternoon I spied a corner of it sticking out from her blankets and I said, Sir, do you mind my asking about that red diary belonging to your sister? I nodded towards it casual like.

  No, he says. I do not mind at all. He did not sound put out or on the alert.

  So I says, Sir, might you like me to have just a peep inside it for you as we have not looked at that one before, as far as I remember?

  It is not an important document, he said.

  No, Sir?

  Not at all, he said. The red volume, unlike the others, contains not a fragment of literary merit.

  You cannot use it for your poems, Sir?

  The red diary is of no use to anybody at all. It is nothing but a record of my sister’s feelings.

  six

  her feelings!

  I think people show different sides of themselves depending on their company, and I might be flattering myself but I feel as if when she was with me, Rotha was clear as the pool under the kittenract where we went many times even after she lost her foot power and I became her trusted steed. She was clear about her feet. She knew something was happening. But before it happened she was not only clear but merry. She made up more and more of her own words. If an apple shrank and wrinkled she called it shrinkled. She called Cockermouth where she and William were born that Cockamoodle place. She was forever playful when it came to words, though she claimed not to have William’s talent for poetry. I did not think this true. I thought, on getting acquainted with her notebooks, that she had a wild streak no one could match. Certainly not her brother. She suited me down to the ground as a companion though of course I was only a servant.

  But I mean one servant can be entirely different from another servant, can’t they?

  It’s funny how two people looking at the same thing can see something different from each other, isn’t it. I’ve often thought that. You can take a walk with somebody and you can return home and the other one can flummox ye with the things they’ve noticed and you didn’t have a clue, and same the other way around. You can tell them something you would’ve thought plain as the nose on your face about what ye’d seen, whether it was a migrating duck off its course or a tree that needed pruning or even something as simple as the way some reeds are getting to overtake, you know, other plants that were wanted to proliferate. Anybody not interested in anything like that, they won’t even see it. It’s completely invisible!

  So I suppose it’s not really unusual that John C
arter, ye know him, the other servant who helps William with his secretarial work and the stamps and everything, but I mean he does a lot around the place as well and as ye know we don’t overlap so much as pass one another on our various rounds. He saw things very different from the way I saw them.

  Especially concerning Miss Wordsworth, which is what he never ceased to call Rotha even when she begged him to use her first name. She could not get a human response out of him.

  Though I have to watch it. My uncle Jim used to say lad, your da might be dead and gone but he’ll be in your blood and you’ll have to watch out you don’t turn out like him because sadly the man had massive trouble putting two an’ two together.

  I says what do you mean, Uncle Jim? I was only about six at the time.

  Well, he says, the conclusions your dad would draw from something were amiss, y’know, meaning they weren’t what anyone else’d ordinarily draw given the same evidence. Your da often used to get the wrong end of the staff. I mean he never suffered badly for this, now, he had a way of going easy over the ground and getting by. That’s what he did isn’t it? Tramped everywhere, who knows where he’d end up. One time he’d been away to Brighton. He come back and he says well there’s a lovely beach, not a grain of sand. They’ve taken all the sand away and dumped lovely smooth pebbles there instead! And I says they’ve done what? I’d been to Brighton. I’d seen that beach myself.

  He says to me Jim, he says, they’ve replaced every speck of sand with lovely round stones, all along the waterfront, and I says man you’re daft, how would they do that? An’ he says well, you know, an army of diggers must’ve come and carted every bit of sand away and replaced it with—I dunno where they got the stones but aren’t they lovely, all colours just like birds’ eggs. Speckled! And green veins in ’em an’ blue spots and red spots like blood!

  Lad, your father had a fantastic time exploring those stones and picking them up in ’es hands and enjoying them. I says you’re always jumpin’ to barmy conclusions. I says man Brighton is a stony beach and is now and forever has been and will forevermore be world without end amen, and it got that way by itself. But o’course nothing I could say would convince your old man of that. So all I mean, son, is be careful you don’t start thinking too much like your da.