by Lissa Evans
‘Ida’s reading The Merchant of Venice in her continuation class.’
‘I had to stand up and be that Shylock last week,’ said Ida. ‘I had to pretend the blackboard rubber was a knife.’
‘Very good. Now, Ida, could you help me find something?’ asked Mattie. ‘I’m looking for a notebook bound in red morocco. Foolscap. Though I think the spine may be cracked, so it might be difficult to spot on a shelf. It’s not in the study or the drawing room, so could you check the bedrooms while I look in the conservatory?’
She sped out again, clipping the kitchen door as she went so it smacked against the cupboard. There was a short, surprised pause.
‘What’s foolscap?’ asked Ida, standing.
‘It’s a reference to the size of the paper.’ The Flea gestured a dimension, and then stood frowning as Ida left the kitchen. There had been several occasions lately when she had witnessed Mattie missing a chance to educate or to quote or explain; her friend’s focus seemed to have narrowed, as if previously she had scanned the horizon with the naked eye and was now using a telescope.
Last week, she’d not responded to a call to supper, and The Flea had found her sitting in the darkened study, torch in hand, the lecture boxes on the desk in front of her.
‘I’m searching through the procession pictures,’ she’d said, tilting a slide so that a swathe of white-clad figures blossomed across the wall.
‘That’s Emily’s funeral.’
‘Yes. I’m almost certain that Venetia Campbell was one of the lily carriers. Do you remember if that were the case?’ She placed the slide on the desk and reached for another.
‘Mattie, you’re going to get them mixed up!’ The exclamation came out as a reprimand; The Flea took a breath. ‘I have a precise order for the slides; I sometimes wonder if you fully appreciate how difficult it is to keep up with your continual changes of topic.’
‘Then I shall try to be more careful,’ said Mattie, unoffended. She picked up the discarded slide, and slotted it back into place.
‘So are you coming for supper?’ asked The Flea.
‘A cold collation?’
‘Brawn and salad.’
‘In that case I may carry on here for a while. Now that I’ve started.’
The Flea had ended up eating alone, a book in front of her. She had checked the slides the day after, and discovered several out of place.
‘Found it!’ shouted Mattie. ‘Ida? I’ve found it.’
She heard a distant acknowledgement, and then the girl’s rapid footsteps coming down the stairs and heading back towards the kitchen.
The notebook had been hidden among piano music on the lowest shelf in the conservatory, tucked between ‘Folk Songs of Ireland’ and ‘White Lilacs: A Rhapsody’.
It was years since she had re-read its contents – or even thought of them – but lately she’d been having dreams of her childhood home, vivid and surreal; she had woken this morning from one in which Inez had walked into the nursery with fourteen-year-old Angus by her side; twins, separated by time. The image had clung to her for hours afterwards, muffling the present. Still kneeling beside the shelves, she opened the book. The black ink had dulled to brown, but the handwriting was firm and legible.
My first words were ‘I sha’n’t.’
She had written it at Angus’s bedside. The world had been at senseless war, the rooms around her filled with blinded, blunted youth, and her own fight, that single decent cause, that decade of fierce comradeship, had been thrown aside by the very people who’d initiated the struggle. She’d felt unable to look ahead; instead she had turned back.
My first words were ‘I sha’n’t’. This was according to my older brother, Stephen, and since, from an early age, he possessed the meticulous observational skills and rigorous honesty of a born scientist, there is no reason to doubt the memory. I will say on my behalf that the words were spoken as a correction rather than a defiance.
The occasion was a rural walk in search of blackberries; it was a cold day in early September, and the nursery-maid who was pushing my baby-carriage soon tired of the keen wind. ‘Master Stephen,’ she said (bear in mind that we are talking about that long-ago decade, the ’70s), ‘we can go and get blackberries tomorrow. If we stay out any longer, your sister will start crying.’
‘I sha’n’t,’ I said – the sentence was apparently spoken with great clarity and conviction. The expedition continued and I remained placid and tearless.
My words were prescient. Cold winds never did make me cry; nor bee stings, nor blisters, nor purulent tonsils, nor (as I grew older) scoldings, nor smackings, nor the forbidding of treats nor the cancellation of rewards. A familial physical strength (inherited from my father), together with the conviction of my own beliefs (at this point, limited to schoolroom affairs and the strained pursuit of ‘fairness’), always sustained me, like a splint on an injured limb. If I ever cried, I cried about other matters.
The writing had come easily; she had not had to delve for memories – the past had seemed to sit all around her, waiting to be plucked.
Stephen and I read constantly and indiscriminately, moving through the contents of our father’s small library like pigs in an orchard. There are children who believe that their own house is the world, but we were the opposite – we strained to look beyond the walls, and we peopled the dull, flat Bedfordshire countryside with imagined marvels.
Even our Sunday reading (which was required to be ‘improving’) could be searched for plums. Besides the Bible, and a child’s guide to the Psalms, there was a thrillingly bloody Lives of the Saints, a hymnal, stuffed with marvellous language (‘ the horned moon doth shine by night, mid her spangled sisters bright’), and a queasily virtuous collection of stories entitled Little Emmie and Her Dollie, in which Little Emmie explained to her toy why she should not procrastinate, dissemble, contradict, rage or covet, in such a way as to make that collection of vices appear peculiarly attractive. There was also a volume by Thomas Fuller. The title of this (Sermons) was not tempting, recalling the watery weekly homilies of the local parson, but the prose within was clear and vigorous. One could chew on its content, as on a mouthful of good steak. I loved one parable in particular:
The Sidonian servants agreed amongst themselves to choose him to be their king, who, that morning, should be the first to see the sun. Whilst all others were gazing on the east, one alone looked on the west. Some admired, more mocked him, as if he looked on the feet, there to find the eye of the face. But he first of all discovered the light of the sun shining on the tops of the houses.
God is seen sooner, easier, clearer in His operations than in His essence, best beheld by reflection in His creatures.
As a young girl, this story suggested to me a second meaning, beyond the religious. One of the servants had chosen to do the opposite of all the others, and that servant had been right. Like the thin vibration of a pane of glass chiming with the thrumming note of a piano, the action rang something within my heart.
In the mornings, we shared lessons with our governess, Miss Gibbons. In the afternoons, Stephen was tutored in science and mathematics by an elderly doctor of our family’s acquaintance, while I was instructed in more ladylike arts. Sitting with my mother in the drawing room, we awaited visitors; amidst the vividness of my childhood memories, these afternoons are a series of blank pages. Time crawled, as if treacle had been poured into the clock. Ladies came, they drank tea, discussed matters of dreadful blandness (servants figured largely) and then went away again. In that era of Mayhew, Nightingale, Bell and Burton, no wider issues or broader horizons were ever mentioned; there might have been no world beyond Bedford. I was encouraged to speak, but vehement opinions were frowned upon, nor was I allowed a book or a toy as a way of passing the time – my only permitted activity was sewing, for which I lacked the slightest talent. I remember my mother sadly examining a hemmed dishcloth, which sported a blood spot for every stitch.
I use the word ‘sadly’ without fac
etiousness – my poor mother was infused with sadness, though a badly sewn dishcloth hardly ranked beside the other tragedies of her life. Stephen was her second child; her first-born son had died of a fever and, in the years following my own appearance, she lost three more infants, all born prematurely. I was allowed to see one, a girl, who had lived just long enough to be christened. She lay in her basket, bonneted and beribboned, a pathetic waxen miniature. I never cared for dolls after that.
This, then, was my mother’s life: a drawing room and a series of little hopes, each quickly snatched away, each eroding her already weak constitution, and when, at last (many years later), my brother Angus was born, robust and blooming, she did not long survive the birth.
To Stephen and to me, she was kind, but distracted, as if perpetually listening for those other children, whose voices she would never hear. I wondered sometimes if she could quite see me, and I’d court her gentle protest by talking loudly or ‘galumphing’ around the room, just as a proof of my presence. It was difficult for me to believe that in her youth she had ridden and sailed; her spirit had dwindled, so that what Stephen and I saw was like a candle stub – a wisp of smoke, where once there had been a flame.
My father would generally return home very late in the evening, long after we children were asleep; he was a private banker who managed the money of some of Bedford’s more affluent inhabitants, and on his rare holidays, he seemed vaguely disconcerted by our presence, as if he had forgotten, in the interim, that he had any children.
‘And what have you learned this week?’ he would ask Stephen, snapping open his newspaper as he spoke, and nodding absently at the subsequent answers. ‘Mattie has learned things, too,’ Stephen would say, loyally. ‘She knows all the battles in the Wars of the Roses.’
But demonstrations of my knowledge were rarely requested, and we would soon drift away from the study, our departure unremarked. It was hard for either of us to please my father, not because he was harsh or exacting, but because he was one of those beings (surprisingly common) for whom infants are only poorly formed adults, creatures that require full growth before they are recognizable. He took no pleasure in childishness.
So my brother and I were left largely to our own devices, a family within a family, building our own traditions and enterprises, sui generis. We were the best of friends, the jolliest of companions – twin flints, striking sparks off each other, never lonely and never bored. It did not occur to me that this might ever change.
Then, when I was nine, and Stephen twelve, he was sent away to school.
The words began to judder and blur, and with a start, Mattie realized that her nose was almost touching the paper; the sun had shifted, leaving the conservatory in shade. She stood up, a noise like that of a pepper grinder emanating from both knees, and pulled the basket chair over to the French windows. The grass was in need of its first trim of the year; lady’s mantle frothed over the edge of the beds and the leaves of the spent daffodils were waiting to be looped and knotted. Small tasks were accumulating.
I don’t think that I fully believed that Stephen was leaving for school until the station dogcart disappeared from view and at that moment I felt as if my heart had been replaced with an anvil. I fell into a dark, flat mood that evened out all pleasures and sorrows; everything I saw, from a goldfinch to a firework, seemed filtered through the same grey lens. Stephen wrote to me but I had nothing to write in return; sorrow makes for dull prose.
I was told that Miss Gibbons would be leaving (it not being deemed economical to retain her for the sake of one pupil), and that henceforth I would be sharing lessons with two sisters who lived nearby, and whom I knew slightly from Sunday School. Both girls were younger than me and neither had the slightest interest in any subject beyond the colour of their hair ribbons. Our conversations contained as much mutual comprehension as those between an Alpine goatherd and a South Sea Islander and incomprehension quickly led to dislike. I, who had never quarrelled, became quick-tempered and defiant. I was set the same tasks as the sisters, but would finish my work long before them and then sit with my arms folded and my eyes shut, trying by sheer force of will to project myself elsewhere. I do not know where I stumbled across this idea – many years later, when I read the short stories of Mr H. G. Wells, I recognized the same fictive device – but I fancied that if I could picture another place strongly enough, then when I opened my eyes I might find myself there.
One day I was sitting thus, imagining the sea at Herne Bay – the water foaming over my bare feet as I paddled with Stephen, the cold sting of the wind, the sharp sands underfoot, the shock of one’s sole landing on the sliding dome of a jellyfish; all these sensations combining to give a feeling of the most spectacular vitality – and then I opened my eyes to see the little schoolroom and the somnolent faces of my fellow pupils. Something seemed to crack within me, and what emerged was the nearest to a waking vision that I have ever experienced. The world seemed to shrink, to tighten around me like a straitjacket, restricting my breathing, blackening my vision, and I ran from the room, through the sisters’ house and out into their orchard, flailing at the air.
It was Miss Pett who followed and caught me: Miss Pett, the girls’ governess, a woman I had scarcely considered until then. Dusty in appearance, spare of speech and lacking Miss Gibbons’ firm invigilation, she read when not instructing us, the book held close to her face.
She sat me down in the wooden summer house at the bottom of the garden and extracted my story in the manner of a dentist removing a tooth, before applying therapeutic wadding in the form of literature. ‘I believe that you are bored,’ she stated, adding, ‘Boredom corrodes the soul, and the will.’ Before this moment, I had chosen my reading at random; Miss Pett drew me up a list, the bulk of it the finest English prose and poetry, though with entertaining novels scattered like cherries among the good bread. A few of the books she owned, but the majority she borrowed from the public library; when I had read a volume, I would be required to memorize the first and last pages, and to write a summary of the contents. A tick would then be applied to the list and the next book substituted.
As a method of teaching it lacked variety, but it pummelled my intellect and meant that I dreamed no more during lessons.
The other half of the cure was effected by myself. I craved fresh air, as a sailor craves tobacco, and since, as a young lady, I was not permitted to roam alone, I dragged our bulky and placid collie from its place on the mat and walked it into sleek health, via every path that I had ever roamed with Stephen. And all this gave me subject matter for my letters to him, so that when he came home for the holidays we had no unfamiliarity to steer through, but could resume our conversation as if the gap of a few months had merely been a pause for breath.
And what of Miss Pett, who loosed me from that stifled nightmare, the interpretation of which scarcely requires the skills of Dr Freud? The truth is that I never knew anything about her; that first confidence did not lead to others and, after another year, she left for a position on the south coast, supposedly for her health’s sake; as a farewell present she left me a copy of Middlemarch (then quite recently published), inscribed with no more than her name, Sophia Pett. But I have no doubt that her job as tutor bored her, that she had a brain fit for greater things, that she was lonely, that she lived on very little and faced an old age of desperate penury, and that her prospects had been hobbled since birth as a consequence of her class, her background, her appearance and – most of all – her sex.
I know this because England was then awash with Miss Petts; women with the ability – and the desire – to achieve far more than their position allowed. Below her in social rank were the mill-girls and servants, condemned to menial and relentless labour, and above her were the wives and daughters of gentlemen, condemned to do precisely nothing at all. In a mighty industrial and scientific power, where every means was harnessed to the pursuit of progress, the brains of fully half the population were allowed to wither. It is hard to thin
k of a more terrible accusation to level against those in power.
‘You’ll strain your eyes,’ said The Flea, snapping on the light. ‘I’ve brought you tea and a scone.’
‘Thank you.’ Mattie straightened up; for a few seconds, the conservatory seemed less familiar to her than her childhood home.
‘So what’s in the notebook?’
‘My memoir.’
‘Your memoir?’ The Flea was astonished. ‘I had no idea!’
‘Started long ago and never completed.’
‘But why ever not?’
Mattie hesitated. ‘I found the task … counterproductive.’ She could remember the precise moment that she had stopped writing. Angus, propped up on pillows, had slipped sideways, and she had risen to help him and had seen, revealed by his disarranged pyjama jacket, the burn on his shoulder incurred by a childhood accident. She had written about that accident just days before, her recollection of it both detailed and panoramic, but now, she realized, now, she could recall it only from the single angle of her prose; in a moment of horrid clarity, she saw that each memory she had pinned to the page had become fixed and lifeless, the colours already fading. She was narrowing her past to a series of sepia vignettes, her brothers as footnotes to her own life.
‘Well, I think it’s a shame,’ said The Flea.
Mattie began to leaf ahead through the remaining pages. ‘It has occurred to me that I should see what I wrote about Angus when he was a child.’
‘Do you have a particular aim in mind?’
‘A direction, perhaps, rather than an aim. Inez is not easy to engage in conversation; to be frank, I have yet to ascertain where her interests lie.’
‘Well, you can hardly regale her with anecdotes about her real father!’
The Flea’s voice was shrill; Mattie looked up in surprise.
‘Obviously not. I’m merely wondering if I might find a resemblance beyond the visual. A connection. A chink in the wall through which I could whistle.’