I climb better than both of you!
But Miss Lamb and I speak to each other without saying anything out loud for ages.
I don’t care!
You would be worn out at the end of an hour, begging us to stop and have cake, and it is much better for us to explore in pure freedom and bring you the cake back in its own lemon-coloured box with a silver ribbon you can trim for your hair. And this might be our only day, for tomorrow we have to have very painful things done at Mr. Demergue’s and we will be convalescing. Don’t you care about our one day of freedom?
No and I don’t care one bit about my hair! Emma Isola buries her face in the urine-smelly animal and wails fit to crack the windows. I’m terrified that before I know it I’ll be left alone with this child. How am I supposed to look after her? Rotha’s the one I’m pledged to watch, and if she has her way she’ll be rampant down every crooked street and up staircases and down narrow hills, forever on and on in a maze of alleys unfolding ’til the lamps are lit and me unable to account for her whereabouts!
Very well, says Miss Lamb. Put the ferret in its cage and tell Bernice to dress you and we’ll take you and Dixon. He can carry our bags and mind you while Dorothy and I catch up on all we have to say to each other. Mind, you leave us alone and walk behind us and don’t interrupt or whinge, or you come straight home, Dixon will see to it. And for heaven’s sake bring a book to entertain yourself and Dixon instead of your whining to come home any time before dusk. My legs are tired! I’m thirsty! I’m bored! None of that. Do you hear? One word and you’re bound for home.
i don’t get dazzled very often but I got dazzled in London. I wish I could tell ye all that was said and done on our day traipsing through all the best parts—Rowland’s for face cream and Lock’s for a hat band and cherry wine at Rudd’s all very fancy I couldn’t believe it, imagine me in all those places!
I had to keep an eye on Rotha while at the same time never letting the child Emma out of my sight, for she wanted to pop down every alley and in every sweet-shop asking for this and that confit and never letting up about her magic glass that she wanted. And Rotha and Miss Lamb were heads-together talking the whole time and whatever they said got the two of them more and more excited until Rotha trembled as if lightning ran through her.
And if ye want to know all that happened in London, Rotha wrote her version in the red book and I’m soon going to read it to ye as I promised. I am.
For I’ve already read it and I can understand it in part, but I cannot explain it to ye in my own words. Rotha’s own words are that different from mine, they’re a kind of wilderness or foreign country, and you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t do a very good job reading them to ye out loud, they are too strange. Though I promise I’ll try. But I’ll tell ye, Rotha’s time in London with Mary Lamb started something up in her, it made her different. Or it sped up a change in her that’d been happening. And there was I saddled with the lass, Emma, and struggling to keep up with Rotha, the one I was supposed to mind. Ye can’t mind everyone or everything, for people have their own minds.
Certainly Emma Isola did have her own mind and as we were all about to leave the Arcade she says to me, They are leaving without getting me the magic glass they promised! Sure enough there’s Rotha’s and Miss Lamb’s heads together as one, going off into the street and what does the little fiend do but dig her nails in my wrist making my flesh white then purple and she won’t let go until I stop those two ahead and ask them about the glass.
All right Dixon, says Miss Lamb, Dorothy and I will nip in and get her the promised kaleidoscope but we are not taking her with us for she will make the matter last all day, turning this one and that one to test the colours.
There was a tea shop at the end of the Arcade with black-and-white tables and Miss Lamb told Emma to sit and read me the book she had brought while they went to get the thing.
Once they were gone off Emma Isola glares at me and grumbles, You don’t want a story at all, do you?
I felt as awkward as the back corners of a cow. I had no clue what to say so I says tell me the story of your last name, what is it again? Though I well remembered what her name was, it being so strange.
So she says it’s Isola.
I says is it really? I says that’s unusual for a name isn’t it?
Isola, she says with her serious face, means isolation, and isolation means—
I ken what isolation is, says I in a tone I hoped she wouldn’t find gruff though I must say I did not enjoy such a small person telling me what a word means. I says to her, it means lonely, but you’re only making that name up because they wouldn’t let you go to the magic glass shop with them. That can’t be a real name. I says this to her for a kind of taunt, for I figured she enjoyed having an argument. And now here you are lonely with me, I says, for I’m a stranger no doubt about it. But you don’t have to worry, I won’t make you read me a story or do anything you don’t feel like—and you don’t have to tell me your real name if you don’t want to.
No, she says! Emma Isola is my real name. She likes being in the right and me being in the wrong. She gets comfortable with that arrangement, and she says do you want me to read you The Tempest or The Taming of the Shrew?
I said aye, read me The Tempest if you can, but Shakespeare is a bit hard for one as young as you, is it not? I know it’s very hard even for me! I was secretly proud that she did not have to tell me Shakespeare had written the stories. I have a habit of paying attention to everything at Rydal, and that includes the bookshelves. But Little Miss Lonely had to argue with me on that an’ all.
No, she says, taking the book out of her pocket, The Tempest is one Miss Lamb wrote especially for children.
But look here lass, I says, you’re having me on again. That’s one of William Shakespeare’s plays. I might be only a servant of Miss Wordsworth but you needn’t make a mockery out of me. I do know a few things about books, having lived with the little family for so long.
No, she says, I’m not mocking you! Mary Lamb made Shakespeare’s book into a new book for children.
And she gets a look on her face I can only describe as honest and straight as a baby crow. And I like it. Strong and dark, like, ye know how young crows look—they are never without their glare that can seem a bit frightful even in the youngest bird. And she thrusts the book at me, See? she says. Tales from Shakespeare, it says on the front, by Charles Lamb. Only never mind it saying Charles Lamb, she says quick as anything. Mary Lamb wrote The Tempest. Only they put his name on the front and not hers. She writes all the time but nobody knows. Everybody thinks her brother writes it all. She licked her thumb and found the page quite professional like, as if she was my little teacher in our classroom, and I had to stifle a laugh for Emma Isola would have hated to be laughed at.
Be quiet! And she starts reading it out clear as a bell:
There was a certain island in the sea, the only inhabitants of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady. She came to this island so young, that she had no memory of having seen any other human face than her father’s. They lived in a cave—
See, she says? Easy as anything!
In a cave! I says.
Yes, she says, and wait ’til you hear about Prospero’s magic books, and Caliban and Ariel and the storm—and she reads me the whole thing and by heaven I do understand every word of it, full fathom five thy father lies, and where the bee sucks, there suck I, and the pitiful monster Caliban who is a servant like me and whose mam is enchanted but even more so than my mam, a witch, even. And something in Emma Isola’s voice makes me feel caught up in it in a wonderful manner. So by the time we’re done here’s Rotha and Miss Lamb back already with the magic glass. Here was I thinking it’d drag on worse than a day hoeing turnips in the sleet. She was a right lively lass, Emma Isola.
But she did not ooh or ah
over her magic glass for long. Took a look in it but was then back to her normal self which was like a bird on the lookout for some new pip or worm or shiny beetle. The one who took up looking in the glass—completely taken by it—was Rotha. The thing as I could make out had mirrors all down the insides, and coloured pieces of glass inside, and when you look through the tube and swivel the end towards the light, well, Rotha says, it is like looking through her wee botanical glass into a cowslip or bluebell or some other field enchantment, only in the kaleidoscope you aren’t seeing the real flower chambers ye lot know about.
No, she says, I’ve fallen in the world of a thousand blooms unknown to anything but the imagination!
Ye couldn’t drag it away from her, and in my mind that was a blessing, for the very next day was to be the day of Mr. Demergue going at her gums and teeth with his knife and pliers, and I knew that day would be a sore day for Rotha and for Mary Lamb and I was worried both would come back hurt—I’ve noticed many times that when a person goes under a knife or any big remedy that involves sawing bone, yes the body heals. If you’re lucky. But what nobody tells you is you come home stooped and battered with part of your spirit cut away, a bit you might never find again. Or if you get it back it can take years and you’ll have changed and the lost piece of you cannot catch up.
Rotha had put great hope in Mr. Demergue.
I’d heard my mam talk about getting her roof fixed with something like the same hope. When I get the roof properly done, Mam said, I’ll not have to worry no more. The damp’ll never get in!
It was as if damp had infected Mam’s own being and she hoped a new roof would not only make her house high and dry but would banish mould or mildew or damp from her legs and her whole body and from her spirit. And that is how Rotha and Miss Lamb talked about what it would be like once Mr. Demergue fixed their mouths.
When we arrived back at Russell Street from our day traipsing the streets, Miss Lamb gave Rotha a chamber with white curtains and ferns on the sill, and I was given a cot in a room that was tiny but clean.
I’ll recover while reading, says Rotha. I’ll look at Emma Isola’s kaleidoscope. I’ll meditate on leaf and shadow and half-light. I’ll write.
Bernice has covered your chair by the window in white, says Miss Lamb, and washed the curtains. You’ll be able to lie down and recall yourself, feel all your membranes and the organs they contain. Dixon will open the window to let air in and shift your pillows won’t you, James?
I’m good at fixing pillows, I says. For when I turn a pillow it is cool and sits under a person’s head in all the right ways.
Rotha shuddered like a child that has had its complaints heard.
You’ll convalesce in shade, says Miss Lamb, and see no lurid day nor eat food you have had to prepare yourself. James will look after us—won’t you, James—I can tell you are intelligent.
I hope I can be useful, ma’am, I says.
And, Rotha, says Miss Lamb, you will find rejuvenation and pass from the agony of lost youth into an older, exultant place.
only the next evening when the two came back from Demergue’s I saw nowt but despair.
The corners of Rotha’s mouth had dried blood-flecks—Demergue had not bothered to warm a cloth and bathe her face, which is what I did immediately after I led her to the bed. Miss Lamb had hardly more spark either as Bernice helped her upstairs. I would have liked at that moment to locate Demergue and remove his own teeth for him. The amount he had charged!
For the first couple of days I hardly knew what to do except bring Rotha broth I had Bernice simmer from lamb bones—I asked her to cook it ’til the gelatin was extracted and the broth glittered with marrowfat. For only bone repairs bone, and our jaw is the foundation of our talking. It’s the jaw that sets flight to our words, and her words were what Rotha needed to find. I was frightened she’d never utter another word with that butchered mouth.
And the pain!
But she says James, I’m used to pain. I have known pain all my born days.
I let her sup the bone broth from a spoon I held, and I did not ask her anything.
We were quiet.
She looked through Emma Isola’s kaleidoscope, or she opened her red diary and wrote. Penned in it the thoughts of her convalescence, this notebook I have here on the basket for ye now.
Aye, the diary was closer to her in London than I had ever seen it. She lay upon it like a hen protecting its one warm egg not yet devoured by the weasel.
5
After summer merrily
What can be more ordinary than my voice—wind through my branches, sap gurgling in my wood? Trees cover the earth, as common as stones! Inventors and poets scour their own minds for sparks of life, but Rotha perceived vitality in natural bodies. She knew life was a force no inventor can create, and even now her knowledge remains visible yet unseen, just as the word real indwells the word realm.
But invention! Progress! Machines to counterfeit myself, Sycamore, and other trees. Bee-sized apparitions to mimic bee work, humming and whirring ever faster, louder than Rotha’s undersong of wind in wood, of fluttering wing, of hue atremble in corolla.
Common life will become uncommon. The ordinary will slip underground from whence it once flourished. Not dead, you understand, but in waiting.
fifteen
i wish, james, that I was a fairy, Rotha says to me, then I’d light on a leaf in your wheelbarrow and off we’d go to the fields and flowers and I could commune with our bees whilst you do your weeding and hoeing.
For by this time she was troubled often by her legs being what she called heavy as marble. Immobile. Every three or four days, like.
So I said Miss D, I can arrange a way for you to get around. For by now I was used to arranging many things for her. Anything you care to name, James Dixon could take care of it.
This was later, as ye know. I mean after London and then after the other time she tried going away to dig in. The last time of all. Digging in, she called it. Off to Whitwick to help William’s son John set up his parsonage. And she lived with John alone, helped him write his talks, just like when she helped William with his poems at Dove Cottage. She was going to help John with his ideas. But the son’s ears were parched as the father’s! Give me the goblet of your skull and I will drink my fill. I saw her write that. John Wordsworth drank from her mind as his father William had done until she fell very ill and had to come home, agony of the bowels and paralysis of the leg. And once she was sixty the family hardly understood what was going on with her at all. This understanding fell to myself and I did not find it hard. I deciphered things the others could not decipher or were not able to think about.
Dig in! I’m always digging for home, she says, and they couldn’t understand it. You are home, said Mary and William. But I knew Rotha had no home.
What happened was I’d clean my barrow and haul Rotha to one spot one day and another the next. Always out of doors. And that’s when she started making the maps. We covered miles. It looked to the others as if we were only going around the terraces like, but it was much farther. We were like ye—we flew. We revelled in ye and your ways and we saw things ye see. We always had. Not as clear as ye see, mind. I’m not saying that.
And she says remember, James, just treat the terraces and the distance you drag me around the lake, treat those yards like many miles. Every yard being a few miles. We’re expanding space and time. We’re making the most.
And I didn’t know what she meant at first. Only that the terraces and the land outlying the house seemed to grow bigger in her mind than other people saw them.
Ye know what the terraces were to the Wordsworths when I first came to Rydal. Ye remember how I helped William build ’em, and they’d saunter, him and Rotha, up and down for hours, winding the miles. He wanted the ground carpeted all mossy or lined with stones and the two of them trod from one end to the other, him composing, mut
tering, thinking out loud, and she writing down anything he said. She tried writing verses but—she despaired of hers amounting to anything. I am not a poet, she said. No. A different kind of word-making was hers. Aye they both traipsed the terraces in the old days.
And they wound their way along, down, up again, down, up, down—thread like a thread being wound on a bobbin. A gold thread making words. And a silver thread. Sun and moon. Night and day they wound. Frost and sun. Gold and silver. Light, moon, sun, frost.
Wind.
Ah, they wound, those two. Long time ago now. Winding round they wound the paths of the terraces. Up one end, up to the extreme last bit with its gooseberry bush and the plant that has leaves smelling like lemons, up to there and then they turned—like a pair of dancers—like the wheels in the cuckoo clock that so enchanted William. Ever whirring and turning. Wound, winding, sound, sighing, singing, thinking, composing, making. Their winding words. The winding thread. The terraces were the bobbins and on ’em they wound their words. William’s in the poems everyone loves, Rotha’s in her secret cocoon.
But now he was never with her like that. He was hardly outdoors at all.
We started off with my wheelbarrow and me giving her the few giddy rides in it until William says that has to stop, that is unseemly, my sister in a barrow, please. So I says to him I’m sorry, it won’t happen again, but would it be all right, Sir, if I built her a proper little cart?
Now look here, he says, we can’t have my sister falling out of some contraption onto the ground. Her health! For he was very concerned about her bowels and her legs and her head and all the pain she felt, though whatever caused it was, he told me, a mystery.
I says Sir, you know me, I’ll make sure Miss Dorothy is in no danger, will you leave it to me? And by this time William himself was past sixty for he’s a year older than his sister, and he goes off and leaves my question hanging with neither a yes nor a no because he has a lot to do and his time is precious, so of course I maximize the situation and decide for everyone that the space between William’s yes and his no is my own special place for me and Rotha.
Undersong Page 17