but william grew worried very soon after she told him of the London plan.
He says to me James, I wonder if you’ve noticed how my sister is lately and if you think she is fit to go to London at all. I mean, he says, you’re the one who’s been talking with her more than any of us since we came back from our travels abroad. Have you noticed anything about her speech that might be—he stopped, searching for a word.
I supplied words in my mind but decided to keep them there…vexed…wild…trapped.
—Discontinuous? William says.
Sir?
Fragmented, he says. Not properly strung together. Have you noticed anything like that?
I’m not so sure, Sir.
If I thought, James, that Dorothy—if she weren’t able to—it’s all bad enough with Miss Lamb’s own condition, for heaven’s sake. What do you think?
I thought of things Rotha had started to say to me, and I thought of things I had read in her red diary. Water that is not wet. Wrinkled water. Dry water! Sizzling leaves. What had she said? All that. She had told me about a tree being a woman diving head-first into the ground, its trunk her legs waving about in the sky…or had I read it in the diary? The thing is, I could somehow understand what she was getting at, in everything she said or wrote. It was wild but I didn’t mind it and I did not find it any worse than the wild glare her brother fixed on me now.
Was his nose getting longer than it had once been? How pale his face. Gaunt. Rotha wasn’t gaunt. She was plumper now. What had she called herself—a bun! Maybe the bun was worth mentioning to William. But I did not mention it. I didn’t want to tell on Rotha. It wasn’t herself thought she was a bun, as far as I could see. It was other people thinking it. Him. Her brother. Thinking of her as a stale auld…what had he said just now? Fragmented? Coming to bits. Falling into crumbs.
Well, Dixon?
No, Sir, I says. I don’t find that your sister is talking in a discontinuous way or a fragmented manner or anything like that. She seems herself, I says to him. Only, I says, there is one thing—
What is it?
And I said, because I was still trying to figure out a mystery, Sir, only she mentioned that—I don’t know quite how to say it, Sir, not meaning to give offense…
For heaven’s sake, Dixon…
Well, Sir, only she mentioned that Mary and Charles Lamb have a child together, and I did wonder, I mean—their being brother and sister—
Oh! He waved his hand broad and drapey. Never mind young Emma, he says. That’s right. Charles and Mary Lamb do have a little girl whom they have adopted. Emma Isola.
Oh I see, I says. That’s all right then. So Miss Dorothy was right—but, Sir, she said as well that—well I think she said you and she had a child as well, and I wondered if perhaps she—I mean my mam tells me sometimes women who have had no bairns sort of pine for them when they get a bit older like, and—
You mean you thought Dorothy had made up an entire child out of thin air and called it our own?
He started to laugh then, a bit cruel like, and I felt ashamed and foolish so I curled up like a snail in my shell and he looked at me and took pity on me and said, Dixon, we had a little boy called Basil, and yes we had intended to be his guardians for a long time, and he was with us a while. Little Basil Montague. Dorothy looked after him and taught him. But in the end, James, you’ll understand, we wanted our travels to continue. Germany, in particular. We wanted so much to succeed in our German travels when we were young.
I said, Sir, what happened to Basil?
And he says, In the end, Dixon, we sent him back to his family. You needn’t worry about my sister’s sanity on that subject, for Basil was like a son to us, and Emma Isola is indeed a daughter to Charles and Mary Lamb. And about London, James, if you’re sure you want to go with Dorothy, and if you keep an eye on her and watch for any decline in her spirit—here…
He wrote on a piece of paper and wrapped fifteen guineas in the paper and said the address on it was for more money if I needed it for the care of myself and his sister in London. He gave me a stout bag containing her medicine and said not to give her more than twenty drops at a time but make sure she swallowed at least ten if she suffered any agony or became clouded in her thinking or grew dark-willed or morose.
And for god’s sake, he says, do not let Mary Lamb drag her down with her into the mad zone. You know what I mean. That woman is like quicksand.
Yes Sir, I says, and I tried to leave the question mark off. Because he had said similar things to me before and I wasn’t sure what he meant that I should do.
fourteen
rotha was excited about seeing her friend Mary Lamb.
She brushed her hat and got her bag ready in no time with a great bottle of tea and extra chops in case it took us more than the usual time to reach the city. And I spied that in her bag with her letter paper she tucked her red diary. I packed my own bag with some enjoyment. I only have a small satchel, mind, but it was a thrill for me to shake the crumbs out and gather the fewest possible things for a journey.
When we got to London everything was made of the same colour as a big grey pigeon, all the stones and lintels and chimneys everywhere had all pigeon colours and pigeons were everywhere, with the odd purple and gold glint and lots of commotion, and the noise! And she got very excited before we even reached Covent Garden where Mary Lamb lived at number twenty Russell Street right across from the Drury Lane theatre with its big pillars and archways making me feel very small and countrified.
Miss, I says, will I find my own lodgings once you get settled away with Miss Lamb?
But she says no, James, and she catches my sleeve. Her hand is tiny but as strong as it always was. She suddenly struck me as a strong creature while here I was feeling lost in the big city of a London far grander than Manchester. Once in the Lambs’ house I felt even smaller for there were cavernous rooms and a smell of old books and mysterious scents I had not smelled at Rydal. Different and again old, like smells from a lost time. Ye know how when ye enter a new house you sniff all its scents at once like any wild creature must when it meets a new place. The rooms were shady and full of stuff. I wanted more light and I yearned to follow the lad cleaning our boots to ask him where I’d sleep instead of waiting for Rotha or Mary Lamb to tell me, for those two were so caught up in one another they forgot I was there, hanging about like an extra broom.
When my eyes got used to the shadows I saw the place was a shambles—and why was Mary Lamb not accompanied by her brother? I’d heard she needed Charles beside her at all times. But it turned out he had gone to see their editor about an essay he was trying to write on dreams and witches and fears in the night, then he was off to a prize fight and after that somewhere else. He could be gone for days.
I told myself not to stay surprised at Charles Lamb’s absence, for even if people claim one thing—such as you shouldn’t leave your sister alone lest she come to harm—you find gaps where their plans get forgotten and they hope it won’t matter. Real time is made up of more hours than they thought at first. They imagine they have all the time in the world. But then other hours they thought would be there get snatched away.
The state of the place!
It was as if a great windstorm had thrust its way through the windows and doors and left everything in eddies and heaps. Books, papers, cups, forks, knives and spoons lay tumbled all over the floor and the furniture, and some of the chairs were upside down. The curtains trailed over plants and chairs like someone had trailed a tablecloth behind them over the fields on the way to a storm-wrecked picnic. One of the upside-down chairs had a straitjacket thrown over one of its legs, and I remembered I had heard Charles Lamb often had to bundle his sister in just such a jacket and walk her down the street to the madhouse. Yet there was a feeling of excitement in the room as if we had come upon the middle of something thrilling going on. It was a colourful room and
a room without men if you didn’t count me, for Charles Lamb had left no trace of himself.
I tried sitting on a cushion that had cat hair all over it but as I sat I got half-frightened I was doing the wrong thing and I jumped back up as Rotha and Mary Lamb started in talking about their teeth. How finally Mr. Demergue could mercifully see them both, for Miss Lamb had decided to get hers done at the same time so she and Rotha would have the carnage seen to once and for all. I couldn’t understand the faith they put in Mr. Demergue or in the whole procedure.
I’ll have to have quite a few pulled out before he can put any false ones in, says Miss Lamb, but I don’t mind that one bit. In fact, I’m dying to have them out as their place in my mouth is a fetid swamp!
It will release me, says Rotha, from my torture of being between young and old. A nothing place.
Aye, says Miss Lamb. I well know that in-betwixt nowhere.
But surely you’re already out of that place, says Rotha. For Miss Lamb was ten years older.
That’s what you might think, says Mary Lamb. It’s what anyone’d think, looking at my silver hair or my fat middle which has got quite fetching over the last while, I am sure. And the two of them laugh about fat. But you don’t have to worry about that, says Miss Lamb, being thin as a key all your life!
That is changing, says Rotha. And no matter how like a key I am, I cannot open just any door. In this state that straddles young and old I can have no lover. Nor, unlike my brother, do I have a following of people fascinated by my wisdom.
Aye, says Miss Lamb. A woman between youth and age is treated like a half-stale loaf. Not tender enough to devour, not dry enough to be cast into a pudding. Perhaps there’s mould on her and she’ll be tossed out! Not fit to feed hens. But I warn you, my having ten years on you is no use. You might imagine a sixty-year-old woman as being held in high regard but you’d be mistaken. I am not listened to and I fear this will never change.
This silenced Rotha.
I could not help interrupting!
I says, Misses, may I say that my mam—a woman between the ages of your two selves—has told me that for a man to listen to her there has to be no one conscious left in the room, not even a housefly.
This got them laughing.
For if there is a housefly, I says, he will heed that fly before he heeds her. And Mam says it doesn’t matter how old or young you are.
Your mam has that right, says Mary Lamb.
But, I says, Mam also says a few men lack the caul over their brains and can hear what women say, and you have to watch who you speak to and not waste your breath with the deaf ones.
But James, Rotha says—how does your mother tell the difference between the caul-brained deaf and men who can hear?
Aye, says Miss Lamb—has your mam got eyes in the back of her head?
My mam’s second sight is elsewhere, I says.
I didn’t know if I should keep talking or was I saying too much. But the two glanced at me, waiting very eager like, so I went ahead—it is like a stone, I says. In Mam’s throat. And it has an eye that can see through her skin and into the head of any man speaking. Even a whole room full of men. And she can tell who is cauled and stupid or who has ears that can hear a woman.
Mary Lamb chortled very satisfied at this. But Rotha went quiet and her eyes looked like a pair of holes, and she says, William used to be like that…I felt in my throat, whenever I voiced anything—no matter how astonishing—my brother was never disbelieving. He never tried to dismiss me, and now—
Now? says Miss Lamb with a callous catch in her voice.
I was not sure whether I admired Mary Lamb or feared her.
I remembered what William had said about my not letting her draw Rotha into madness. Something lived in her tone as well as in her words. I was afraid it might leap out of Miss Lamb and into Rotha so that by the time Rotha’s teeth were fixed and we got back to Rydal, her brother might not recognize her and he would certainly blame me. For my mam says you have to watch who you spend time with because any kind of madness is a spirit that’ll jump out of one person and pounce right into the one next to them before they can do a thing about it. It’s not that the madness rubs off on you gradual like, it’s more like it makes a wily leap to inhabit two people instead of one. I wondered if Rotha was already catching the madness off Miss Lamb. I suddenly felt a tiny bit worried for my own sanity at number twenty Russell Street, to tell ye the truth!
Where is your little girl? says Rotha.
She is no longer really my little girl, says Miss Lamb. She is my brother Charles’s little girl when all is said and done. Charles’s very special little pet.
Then Miss Lamb shouts out in a bloodcurdling voice the name of the girl who William had assured me was real.
Emma!
The way she screamed it! I might have lived in the workhouse and my mam might have drunk a river of gin and struggled through a sea of troubles but I never heard the like of shrieking from one room to another in the house the way Miss Lamb summoned Emma.
And in comes a person who I can’t call a little girl, not really, with an animal in her arms that was neither cat nor dog. I couldn’t tell what it was but I caught a whiff off it and nearly choked for it smelled of piss. It couldn’t possibly have been the girl herself stinking like that. That much I knew or hoped. How old was she? Eleven or twelve? Not thirteen, surely? She was thin and sullen with hair like a torn nest yet womanly in some perilous way. Her pet animal was long and slinky and I could hardly take my eyes off it. I felt certain it could fly at me and sink its teeth in my throat. It had a body like an eel, muscled and tense. But no one mentioned it. They talked to the girl as if the horrible thing was not squirming in her arms. So I did my best to pretend I was not on the alert.
Something stole over Miss Lamb in the girl’s presence—Rotha had promised me that if anyone in the world had more sympathy than Miss Lamb, she had not met them. For Mary Lamb, says Rotha, is the essence of sympathy and understands me like no other. And I remembered what William had said: Mary Lamb had a fault, and the fault was that she was quicksand into which other people’s feelings sank. She couldn’t help it—she sucked in everyone else’s feelings until they were her own and she could never, in the end, contain all the feelings she’d swallowed. Which was why she went mad and had to be carted off until she came to her pure single self again, with one person’s feelings inside her instead of all the woes and shadows of her world. And I saw it. Before the girl Emma came in, Miss Lamb was a sheltered body of ground into which all the rain in the world might fall and bring forth untold blossoms. Her eyes held such a promise I nearly felt like telling her my own troubles.
But when Emma Isola entered the room something quick and dark and invisible strangled all that promise.
And the child in her turn looked very much as if she did not want to be there. In fact she kept her back to Miss Lamb and faced Rotha as if facing a warm hearth, with Miss Lamb a freezing blast at her back.
How are you, Pet? says Rotha.
Very well thank you, Miss Dorothy, says the child in a voice waxen as a lily.
How I wish, says Rotha, as if remembering something blown away and lost, I could have brought mine and William’s little boy Basil.
I knew that Emma’s meeting Basil was impossible given the years that had passed. According to William, he and Rotha had looked after Basil thirty years before! Yet Rotha says to Emma, you and Basil would have made fantastic playmates, then looks around her as if Basil would pop out if she looked sharp, for he was only playing a crafty game of hide-and-seek. I watched her eyes sharpen to needles, glancing all around the room that was so disorganized a small lad could hide in it pretty easily.
I’m dying to go outside, Rotha said and she started for the door. I tensed, being ready to keep an eye on her as William had charged me. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight, not in London. I battl
ed the feeling I had no say in the matter. I felt invisible. No one had shown me a cot or any place to put my bag and I had no idea what my place was supposed to be, unlike at Rydal where all was certain.
Wait! says Mary Lamb.
I can’t wait, Rotha says. We must be outside!
I know we must, says Miss Lamb, who hoists herself with some difficulty off her chair and stares at Emma Isola and then at me as if I hold a key.
And Emma, with her eyes welling up, says, Aren’t I coming?
No, you’re going to stay here with Mr. Dixon, says Miss Lamb to my consternation.
When I get concerned like that, over matters beyond my control, a boiling tide wants to poach my heart like an egg. I get paralyzed.
Show Mr. Dixon what a lovely reader you are, Miss Lamb says.
You promised to take me to the Arcade!
We’ll bring you an éclair from Gunter’s, says Miss Lamb.
I want to come!
I’ll fetch your doll from Mrs. Carruthers’s with its new clothes on. Mr. Dixon will look after you, won’t you, Dixon?
Miss, I—
He’ll slice you a tomato from the greenhouse…
No!
…and he’ll listen while you read him a story—
I don’t care about my stupid doll or its clothes! You promised I could have a magic glass! Mr. Dixon doesn’t want a story read to him. He’s only a stupid servant.
Oh, Emma, he’s not, not really, says Rotha. He loves having stories read to him, and your mother and I will bring you an éclair and we will not bother about the doll. But Miss Lamb and I are dying to go on a meander by ourselves—
He is only a servant! And he’s only a man! Look at him. He doesn’t even want to look after me. And I am the only girl in London without a magic glass!
Be kind, Emma, Rotha says. Miss Lamb and I need to catch up on everything we have missed in each other’s thoughts. Besides, whenever she and I ramble in the city we climb a great many steep lanes and stairs and—
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