Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  I headed for my hut, praying Penny had waited and could come to the house now properly with me by her side to introduce her.

  But there was no sign of my sister.

  I went in the house and looked around. Rotha had gone upstairs—I saw the legless baby version of herself on the counter—and William was in his study and Mary off somewhere with the cat Rotha hated because it hunted birds. With that cat beside her Mary was in her own world. So there was no one I could ask had my sister Penny come to the door.

  I searched to see if Penny had crouched in some nook waiting for me, her brother, hiding like. Oh, I felt awful. But no. My sister wasn’t in the pantry and she was nowhere around the landing or in any of the rooms. So I went upstairs to Rotha’s room—Rotha lay on the bed—and I said, very quiet like, Miss, you don’t happen to have seen anyone come to the door around noon?

  Who do you mean? she says. Were we expecting someone?

  Miss, only I told my sister to wait until noon and I would be able to see her today…

  I thought you told us you had a brother, James.

  No. Miss. A sister. My sister Penny.

  I knew I had told her about Penny more than once and why she kept hearing brother though I said sister every time, I’ll never understand.

  You have a sister?

  Yes.

  She hasn’t got ginger hair?

  Penny, yes, Miss, she does. My mam called her Penny on account of it.

  Oh.

  Have you seen her?

  I only saw a young red-haired beggar at the back door. A ragged-looking lass. Are you saying, James, that this might have been a relative of yours?

  Eh, Miss D…I think…

  For I took her for a beggar and I pressed sixpence upon her and asked her to be off and then I shut the door.

  I see, Miss. Did she not ask for me?

  I don’t know what she said, James. I do not remember if words were coming out of her mouth or if her lips simply chattered with the cold. For my own part I was loath to leave the door open and let our heat out into the cold day, so I shut it rather quickly. I do remember that I thought she would’ve been a bonny lass if she’d only straighten her back, but she had that sunken look of girls who meet hopelessness in their youth and so look strangely old.

  I still held a branch of holly and Rotha noticed it, and she asked if I would lay it on her sill to cheer her as she rested before the evening’s feasting and merriment. And I fastened it for her on that sill where the same little wren and robin who had carolled me to sleep might come and visit Rotha. Their carols had come at the wrong time for Penny and I did not know how I could forgive the little birds for singing to me so sweetly in the woods, or myself for succumbing to their voices.

  Ye know I could’ve made the bones of what I need moneywise without this job.

  Moneywise I always made do. Going outside and not inside, that’s how I manage. And between me and Penny I was the one who no one could trap indoors for a minute let alone a day or a year or a life. But Penny, no. Dank. Deafening. Reeking. Damp. Years. No break for the privy. If the lasses weren’t wet enough from the splashing machines, they wet themselves! Whereas me, all along ye found me outside didn’t ye? Where scent fills the hay and feathers cling tight to the living birds and my own lungs swell pink and glittering and full of rose-sweet air.

  Outside!

  Aye, I had all my stolen bits of time—they add up here with the Wordsworths—time when nobody is looking over my shoulder! Even William says to me James, he says, I fear this place belongs to you more than it has ever belonged to us. And when did William ever lie down and fall asleep where the limbs meet the trunk on your sycamore? He’s too tall for a start. Whereas me, I’m small enough to fit right in them crooks, and a knot that looks hard to anyone who hasn’t tried it turns out to be a comfortable pillow for my head.

  The dreams I’ve had in your tree!

  But Penny, when did she ever know any sleep but pure exhaustion? I mean if William caught me dreaming on the job he’d count it as my conjuring some answer to a question he’d asked me. Can I grow ginger between the cabbages? He having read an article about it. Ginger grows sideways and needs little soil, according to the latest Royal Botanic expert. Do I bother William with the argument that it is far too cold in England for tropical plants? No! My whole tactic is this: find a way to do what the master would like done, and when it’s done congratulate him on his vision.

  And I do what he asks but the fantastic side is all the days and weeks and months of time on my own in the gardens or on errands or anywhere out-of-doors in a free man’s air. Free to think whatever I want! Every once in a blue moon William spies me on my own having a moment and he says Dixon, here you are in solitary splendour! A jealous look on his face if I’m not imagining it—for what wouldn’t he give to get in his punt and row off to Grasmere Island instead of trudging to the stamp office or having tea with all and sundry or going off to wring money out of his publishers—always on the hunt. When I count up my personal moments of solitary splendour they might easily outspan William’s, and for that I am glad to be here. But when I think of how I failed Penny I cannot be glad for long.

  Penny. She had to face the world. I couldn’t help it. Her brother. She was not her own. That is the point of the world now. To make us not our own.

  I was not fit. Because I didn’t find a way. A way out. A way of escape. A way of freedom. I didn’t find it for Penny. My sister. My sister Penny. The crowd here at Rydal did not care to help me free her.

  twelve

  penny must’ve been seventeen by the time Rotha turned her away that Christmas day. I saw a little sister in her but she saw herself as grown, though like all the lads and lasses ruined in the mills she had hardly grown an inch from the time she started. If anything she was shrunken or stooped so as to seem smaller than she had been. It galled her to be treated by me as a bairn, and I admit her face was grey as an old woman’s. She said I was barmy to try and lift her out of her situation. She herself thought it a better situation than I thought it. I’ve been doing all right, she says, for I have had an offer from an old man called Nahum Troake to be his servant and I think I will do it, so stop thinking you’re any better off than I am!

  What does Mr. Troake do for a living? I asked her. She said nothing and I felt bad. I wondered if the Wordsworths’ situation had rubbed off on me and made me seem as if I thought over-highly of myself. For there was no question that in the eyes of the world and in my own eyes I had risen higher than Penny had.

  And for all I knew maybe William was noticing likewise about himself and his own sister.

  I wished I could have warned William that a brother can look after his younger sister only so much and then she has her own way of wanting to look after herself. And no matter how sick or poorly or wretched she seems to that brother, if she wants to get up on her own feet and see through her own eyes the older brother cannot make her see through his.

  Could I have warned William? Or do I know these things only now myself, after the years that have gone by? Some things I don’t know and will never know and other things I know but I don’t know how or when I learned them!

  For instance I know now that after that Christmas Penny did go to the door of the man called Nahum Troake. It’s a hovel not a house, and it is in one of the worst parts of Manchester, and she says yes, Sir, I cannot go back to the factory because of my deformity, and I have no help from my brother so I have come to take your offer. And Penny has worked for Nahum Troake since that day, scrubbing his step and cooking his joint and I have been frightened to imagine what else. He is older than her by thirty years and once when I had a chance to ask her, Penny, is Nahum Troake at least a mild-tempered man?, she told me his temper is no better and no worse than that of any other fella making his living as part rat-catcher, part vagabond. But is he mostly kind to you? I said. She gave me no answer
and I have often tried to fathom the look on her face but its meaning I will never know.

  And here I was back at Rydal with the Wordsworths and it was them I had to mind, not my sister, and it was not easy. It took us all some time to get used to being there after we had all been away.

  It’s as if a house knows when you’ve gone, it knows you’ve abandoned it and it feels angry with you and it takes its own back against you. Ye feel this in the hives, don’t ye. Ye have to be homebodies for the home to take you in as a home should. Each space in house or hive has the spirit in it of whoever lives there and the space gets used to our spirits. And if we go away, our spirits in that house die away like wraiths and then blow away, and when we come back we have to start all over again breathing life into that home.

  And that is what I tried to do after the little family came back from Europe. We all worked hard but everyone had a frayed edge, irritated like, or singed somehow, too dry, and crying out from thirst in body and mind. Things didn’t feel right and I had no one to talk about it with. I mean John Carter was there keeping William’s paperwork up to date and the business affairs in order with the stamps and that, but John had no notion of feelings in the house.

  To him everything is made of stone or wood or paper or metal and nothing is made of tears or loneliness whereas I think loneliness is a thing like wood or grass, you can feel it as surely as you can feel a stone. And Rotha when she came back was like a stone separate from the others, and she was heavy and clammy and her legs often would not move, or she chose not to move them, according to Mary for one.

  Rotha was disappointed in herself after their voyage but that wasn’t it, I could tell that wasn’t everything.

  Mary, unusual for her, took me aside and asked me what I thought about some of Rotha’s health bits and bobs—what Mary called mysteries. William never wondered like that. He faced Rotha whatever way she happened to be with each—let’s say ailment, for want of a better word. He believed his sister. He accepted what she said and the words that she used for what was happening to her. I felt as if he knew all along why the things that were happening to her happened. And I think he did know back then. He still remembered. But for Mary it was different.

  It was as if Mary thought Rotha was covering something up, covering the truth up, by using the word weakness, for example. I mean Rotha often had pain, or she often had weakness. Sometimes she had both pain and weakness. But the weakness itself, Mary was very puzzled by that.

  She says, Why is it one day Dorothy can’t support herself on her two perfectly sensate legs, but no, she has to be…we have to carry her? Yet on another day she can walk quite well, or she can at least allow herself to be brought out to the terrace and stay in the sun for the good part of a day and eat a substantial dinner such as a duck leg and not one but three jam tarts. Two days apart!

  Now what’s going on with Dorothy today, Mary would say. Is it the pain or is it the weakness?

  She sounded very matter of fact but there was something else under the matter of factness. Pain Mary could forgive but weakness was another story. If I myself gave up every time I felt weak, she says, why I’d have been bedridden myself, years ago. One has to keep going!

  Rotha’s weakness was something Mary found very hard to understand and I suspect she found it hard to believe.

  Did I think Rotha was putting it on?

  Mary would ask me as if I knew.

  And I did know, and I do know.

  But some states are not easy to explain to a person missing a kind of sight. I’m not saying Mary was less sharp than the rest of the household. She was very sharp. I’m saying that as regards Rotha, specially over a word like weakness, Mary had trouble—she had to pin it down. She wanted to pin down something I knew did not want to be pinned.

  Rotha’s weakness wasn’t only in her body. It was not this muscle or that muscle giving out though sometimes it had that appearance.

  If I had to put it into words Mary might understand, though I don’t think she will, but if I had to try, what would I say?

  (Sigh)

  After that Christmas I had the luxury to think about this and to watch Rotha more than in the old days. For William was back in the thick of business talking with John Carter half the time and working the other half on articles, not poems but essays and revisions and that. And he says to me with a kind of desperate look on his face, Dixon, he says, it is one thing to go off on travels such as a Continental Tour, but it is another to come home again and have to re-enter the system of operations from which you extracted yourself to embark on those travels. System of operations is how he put it. I remember that. I remember thinking it sounded like the way the bosses had run things in Penny’s factory. All the chains and cogs and hooks and hammers in place.

  Which was the opposite of how things were going up in Rotha’s room. On her good days she had bits of paper flying everywhere, and her pen and notebooks open all over the place as she tried to write down her memories of the latest tour as well as revise her own Scottish Recollections, the book she had begun years before and worked on over and over again, hoping to publish it though William had told her no.

  But I was watching her.

  And I knew she was not right especially on the days when her legs gave out and she could do no more than lie in bed, and on those days I watched her and waited and I wanted to coax out of her what was going on but I knew the best way for that was to listen and wait and keep taking Little Miss Belle in and out to do her business. The dog nearly considered itself mine, for I talked to it more than anyone and Rotha did not find comfort in it as she had done before.

  Would Rotha have changed as much if I had not been apart from the little family while they went to Europe? I wondered often but I tried not to go too far down that road.

  My mam accused me of making myself out as far more important to the Wordsworths than I really was. She says I had a cheek that way even regarding my own fam’ly. Thought a bit too much of myself, like.

  And not long after that Christmas, on a Thursday in January when William and Mary were in Keswick, the dog became frightened to death because we had thunder and lightning that came close enough to shake the whole place, and dogs loathe that with all their hearts. They don’t know what to be doing with themselves, and Little Miss Belle hunkered down under the bed quivering with fright, like, and Rotha was not far behind her in the fear department. I was nearly as bad myself as it was a sky-blackening storm and each thunderclap felt like it had a mind to crack your sycamore and send it crashing through our roof. There was a closer crash right in the bedroom and I said don’t worry, Miss D, it’s only your cup and saucer tipped off your sill, and she says are you sure, James?

  And she is sick on the floor right then and she says James everything is swaying, is everything swaying?

  And for a minute I don’t know if things are swaying or not because the stench of the sick is great and branches are going mad against the window and Rotha is falling around as if the floor is heaving up and down and she cries out, Where is my brother?

  The way she cries it out is bloodcurdling in a way that makes me know it’s no good at all to tell her where William really is, which is in Keswick on notary affairs, for he told her that was where he was going and any rate it’s a good fifteen miles away so I says hang on, Dorothy—at that moment I call her by the name her brother calls her—I’ll clean the mess up, I says, and I’ll get lavender and we won’t open the window but we’ll lie you down on the bed until it passes—

  And that is what happens, only as I go to lower her on her bed she hauls me down on it with her and holds me tight, sobbing, William!

  Miss, I says, wanting to bring her back to herself, and to know I was me, like. James Dixon, not William, but—

  I feared you were lost to us all!

  And I ken she is somewhere else. She is grabbing on to me but she is sure she is grabbing on t
o her brother.

  Where are we?

  Little Miss Belle is whimpering under the bed fit to break your heart but there’s nowt I can do about her now except hum my trouble song and hope it calms everybody down.

  I start it low at first to make sure it won’t scare Rotha though like I told ye I’d calmed her with a song of mine before but that was a different song.

  There’s no tune to this one, like. It’s more of a rumble with a moaning song that has no words unless I am by myself, and then the words it has only I can hear and the trees or whatever animal or bird is about. But now all I do is the rumbling low part, so holding on to me lying there on the bed what she feels is like what you might feel if you were pressed down into the ground and you sensed a herd of horses rumbling in the distance.

  And she says please keep singing. Does she know yet it’s me she’s with?

  And I says, it’s not really singing, Miss, as much as it is a kind of old chant.

  And she says whatever it is, don’t stop.

  And it remains this way, her holding on to me and me doing my song with no words, until the thunder subsides. Once I think the cracks are fading off I wiggle away a bit to see if I can get out of Rotha’s hold, and she does, she lets me go.

  I’ll open the window an inch, I says, because the air was sucked out of the room and we could hardly breathe. When I opened it a wild cold breath rushed in and I felt very relieved. I could smell the lavender over the top of the sick, and the rainy smell came in and freshened the room and by and by Rotha rolled over and looked at me and knew I was me and not William. If there is one thing about Rotha it’s that she comes back to herself with a clear eye no matter where she has been in her mind.

  I was on our ship, she says.

  Ship, Miss?

  And she says yes, the ship we boarded to come home from Boulogne—William and myself and Mary—that storm!