by Sarah Perry
‘But you feel rested, besides the walking and – well, the other business.’ She pursed her lips as if she’d tasted something sour. ‘I’ll know I’ve failed, if you don’t feel more peaceful now than when you came. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? And you know we’ve all been saying how well you look. Just get rid of that dreadful beard and you’d look a boy again!’ She took a yellowing sheet of newspaper from the top of the pile nearest her, and began to tear it into narrow even strips. ‘They were saying so, the girls. Just the other night.’
‘Oh yes, completely rested,’ said John, who’d never felt so drained of blood and good humour. ‘Completely rested. Very peaceful.’ He stirred the glue into glossy whorls, and taking courage from his sudden skill at dissembling said: ‘I must say, I’m especially looking forward to tomorrow.’
Always alert to changes of air, Hester shot him a look from under the thick grey curls on her forehead. ‘Thank you, I’ll take it now.’ He passed her the heavy pan. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘I thought you said – did you say tomorrow was your birthday? Might I get a glass of water?’ He went hurriedly to the sink. And did Eve say so too, he wondered, running the tap to draw cooler water, did she really say I’d look like a boy again – does she think of me when I’m away from her in other rooms? That his mind could wander so easily to her made John ashamed, and he let the flame on the stove come too close to his wrist. In the slot between the windowsill and the edge of the blind the lawn showed bright uninterrupted green: the solitary cloud had burned up.
At the table Hester dipped a torn strip of paper into the glue, and ran it between two tight fingers until a gobbet of paste dropped off. Then she took the wet paper and laid it over the blind white eyes in front of her, pressing it into the sockets with her thumbs.
‘Yes, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’ She shrugged expansively, and dipped another piece of paper. Some kind of actress, Eve had said, and John saw it now: she didn’t talk so much as deliver lines.
‘But I’m undecided – well, you can advise me, I’m sure! – about what to do. Things aren’t quite right, somehow. You know the feeling, John, that you might get shaken off your feet and fall over?’ Looking not in the least like a woman afraid of falling, she smoothed the wet paper on to the forehead in front of her.
It’s papier-mâché, thought John, like my nephews make. Must they all be so much like children? ‘What is it? What are you making?’
‘A mask. For tomorrow, if we go ahead, like dancers on a sinking ship.’
‘Nearer my God to thee,’ sang Elijah from the recess.
Hester picked up the glazed white head, turning it from side to side so that the shadows beneath its eyelids made it seem to slowly blink. ‘What would he tell me to do, I wonder, about this damn party tomorrow? He looks a wise old thing.’ Laying the head and shoulders down she said, ‘Well, perhaps we should go on with it. It might take his mind off things.’ John looked at the glistening strips of paper covering the blind face from eyes to chin. The mask would be too small to cover Hester’s coarser face, with its heavy pads of skin at the jowls and underneath her thick unplucked eyebrows.
It struck him that all the childish things they found to do – the mask and the packets opened in the garden, the long meals in the close hot dining room, the childish trips to the coast – were just a series of distractions, because they were terrified of what their idle hands might find to do. But all the same it was soothing to sit quietly, taking pleasure in having done as Eve had asked, watching Hester’s freckled hands dip over and over into the pan of glue and hearing behind him the slow turning of pages from where Elijah sat. However fierce the sun outside the kitchen was always cool: rivulets of condensation ran down the pale green walls, and the stone-flagged floor gave off a rising chill. John watched a daddy-long-legs creep across the floor, and instinctively drew in his feet with childish disgust. Out in the corridor a door was furtively opened, and after a pause – The wind through its branches is calling to me, sang Hester, and began to prise open a tin of black paint – footsteps receded upstairs. Perhaps it was Clare, and he was warmed by the thought, and by knowing that her feet would already be dirty, and that she would have in her pocket the cowries she’d found the day before. It might have been Walker, too, gone up to meet Eve in some small hot room he’d never seen; and at the thought John reached out with his foot and slowly pressed the daddy-long-legs into the cold stone. It left far larger and blacker a smear than its thin limbs ought to have done, and John turned back to the table.
The paper mask was almost complete, a thick grey layer of wet pulp through which columns of black type were still visible. Tilting his head, he made out what he could: revealed Martha Day, 61… strengthening in the east… suspended over allegations… then was arrested by a length of paper laid across the bridge of the nose perfectly horizontal so that it demanded to be read. The headline was truncated: FOUR FEARED DROWNE––, and accompanied by a photograph. Only a part of the picture remained, but it showed plainly a swollen river breaking its banks.
A dreadful thought began to gather from the corners of the room. He drew a thin breath in through a mouth dry as sand, and all the while Hester went on singing (With soft whispers laden…), dipping into the pan and carefully pasting on strip after strip until the flooding river was covered. The chill rising from the floor enveloped him and he shivered violently, looking away from the mask to the newspapers piled on the kitchen table. Pages had been neatly cut to remove whole articles or photographs, and in one or two places columns of type remained, so that he could see repeated over and over the same few phrases: drowned… lost at sea… feared lost… ‘Oh, no,’ said John, in a voice of childish dismay that he later regretted, because it committed him to a course of action from which he couldn’t turn back: ‘Oh, no…’
Hester looked up from her handful of soaking paper, and met his shocked gaze. It startled her: she began to scrabble with the pile of newspapers on the table, piling them on a chair out of sight. Her hands shook, and the papers fell on to the floor. She stooped to pick them up, but hurt her back, straightening with a groan and leaning against the table. The name EADWACER scored into the wood showed between her spread fingers, and she tried to cover that, too. If John had at first not quite believed what he saw – that it was she after all who’d been so foolish, and so spiteful, shoving scraps of paper into envelopes like a school bully – everything she did showed her guilt clear as a brand on her forehead.
John shook his head, and felt at first relief – there’d been fault here all along, and deceit, but it was not only his own. Then came a quiet fury as he pictured her sitting at the table at night, while everyone upstairs slept on stomachs full of the food she’d cooked, folding stories of drowning into envelopes she wrote on with her left hand. He imagined her leafing through the book concealed in its cabinet drawer, mouthing the unfamiliar names – Weland, Deor, Widsith – then finally Eadwacer, to be remembered, and written in the dust upstairs when the others were occupied elsewhere with their games.
We ought to be made to wear dunce’s caps, he thought, wiping at the salt sweat that had suddenly gathered in the hair at his temples, to’ve been so completely duped. Hester began wiping her hands on the dark blue dress where it pulled across her heavy thighs. She said, ‘No, no – it’s all right, it’s all right.’ They were the same soothing words she had used to pacify the distraught woman on the beach the day before, and he also stood, poised somewhere between pity and a rage that had begun to settle in a cold knot in his stomach. Then he remembered waiting by the reservoir while Alex prepared to swim out, and how white the young man’s back had been as he’d plunged into the water, and rage won. For a moment he couldn’t speak, and then he said, ‘But it isn’t all right, is it?’ Leaning towards her, he stabbed at the newspapers. ‘What have you done? Do you know what you have done?’
‘You don’t understand…’
‘There at least you’re right – I don’t.’ With effort he to
ok hold of his voice, which had lifted with anger to the opened window, and brought it down almost to a whisper; behind him Elijah had dropped the book, and resting his head against the curved wall was sleeping. ‘I don’t. And I don’t want to.’
‘Sit down, won’t you? Please sit down.’ The deep voice had changed to a hesitant pleading, and her fine dark eyes were enlarged with tears. John suddenly felt tired and rather sick.
He sat down. ‘It’s too late for all that. Haven’t you seen him, out there every night? He says he sees it, whenever he sleeps, everyone carried away by the water…’
Hester fretfully smoothed a strip of newspaper across the high bridge of the porcelain figure’s nose. She looked so like a chastened miserable child that he started to laugh, then remembering the preacher sleeping in his corner quietened, and traced the name cut into the table with an outstretched finger.
‘It’s so stupid, so spiteful,’ he said. ‘So like a child… But no – a child would be ashamed; might do it once, perhaps – but not over and over again…’ He stopped, seeing again the scene on the path through the marshes and Alex’s uncomprehending silence. ‘Yesterday when we came back from the sea, I saw you looking at Alex, and I thought: why does she look satisfied? What is she thinking that she could be smiling after all that’s happened? I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand now. Is it that you hate him? But how could you – how could anyone?’
The woman pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, heavily beaded with drops of sweat that stood on the skin without falling. It was so very like a well-rehearsed gesture of distress that John pushed on, determined to make her face things: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Aren’t you ashamed?’
‘Oh, I’ve been ashamed all along,’ she said, as though exasperated at such a foolish question. ‘But after a while you get used to the shame and it becomes part of who you are. It was sneaking and stupid, yes, you’re right – it was just like something someone like me would do.’ She put her head in her hands, her coarse grey hair falling forward to show a white neck far more frail and slender than he’d have thought. He was afraid she’d begin to cry, with heaving shoulders and ugly gulps for air, but her tears came silently so that he heard each separate drop landing on the table. He said gently, ‘I suppose it’s quite funny, really. I nearly laughed, when Eve told me about it, and showed me the letters. I thought: it might be some sort of joke. Nobody writes anonymous letters. This isn’t a novel.’
She gulped, and it might have been either misery or amusement. Then he said, ‘But I don’t understand why you did it. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand at all.’ She raised her head from her arms. Without the authority and warmth she applied to her face as carefully as powder, she appeared to him very young, and it brought a sudden reversal to his anger.
‘There’s nothing so wrong it can’t be put right,’ he said, remembering how the words would console Christopher like an arm across the shoulder. ‘And this’ll be an end to it all now.’ Hester picked up the phrenologist’s head and surveyed it, biting her bottom lip. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said frankly. ‘Everybody says so.’ John, unwillingly moved by this, coughed and said: ‘When did all this start?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember. I can never remember the times of things. It’s staying here that does it, I think – it might be fifty years ago for all I know. I might be young again. I might be as old as my grandmother.’ Setting the head down again she caught John’s look of censure and said, ‘All right. It started about six months ago, I suppose. Not just this… I’ve made him believe he does things, says things, and can’t remember… I even let him think he might have hurt that child – after all, perhaps he did.’
John shook his head, appalled: ‘You don’t believe it. You don’t, and no-one ever could…’ (Between Alex’s outstretched hands the brown moth flexed its wing.)
‘He was going to leave me!’ Gazing down at the table as though she could make out in the knots and whorls of the wood grain the image of his face she smiled, with the old slow-gathering beam of warmth. ‘He was getting better, every day he was here. Everything I did for him made him go a little further away, and I realised that soon I wouldn’t be hearing his voice in the hall, or coming up from the garden. Then one night I found him sleeping out by the reservoir, because he’d tired himself out from swimming, and I realised that as long he was just a little afraid, he’d need me. There’s no other reason. I’ve got nothing else to give – I can’t charm. I’ve never been admired. I was never that kind. People like me don’t find affection coming our way – we have to scrabble about for leftovers.’
‘I see,’ said John, and thought that he did – of course a childless woman alone in a house that smelt of damp and too much furniture polish would love a boy like Alex. He imagined her calling him ‘son’ with a slip of the tongue, and saying to her friends, ‘I couldn’t have loved him more if he’d been my own flesh and blood. Not if he were my own!’
But when he looked at her again, her head hanging low as she traced a shape on the table in front of her, her smile was secretive and coy as though she were thinking over a private pleasure. She was blushing, too, colour gathering at the base of her throat where the skin hung in a double fold under her chin, and spreading up to her forehead. In a moment of clarity that made the kitchen seem brightly lit he realised that this ageing woman, in a stained dress that always smelt a little of stale sweat, had fallen in love. He said gently, ‘I see.’
She lifted her head then, firing a black look at him between narrowed eyes, as if she realised what he’d seen on her face and was challenging him to say more. ‘I think I understand,’ he said, faltering a little, ‘I know what you’ve felt…’
‘Oh, what would you know,’ she said. ‘How could you possibly know?’ He began to nod – her scorn was familiar, and he knew what she meant: that he’d nothing behind his ribs but books in hard covers, and nothing in his veins but ink. But then she made a furious gesture towards him, and he realised with a burst of mirth that this was not what she meant. She’d mistaken him for the other sort, who needn’t scratch and scrabble for affection, but found it coming their way when they weren’t looking.
He was so thunderstruck by the idea that he slumped against the hard back of the kitchen chair, and listened with his eyes half-closed against the facets of hers.
‘What would you know about it? Do you think I don’t know what they think of me – old and ugly, with a face that could curdle milk! I dress like this’ – she plucked furiously at the old blue dress and he heard the small rending of a seam somewhere – ‘when upstairs in locked cupboards are clothes with flowers sewn on the breast, and I can’t even touch them because my hands are too rough and the fabric is too fine and it catches on my nails…’
The heavy lids of her eyes lowered, and she said, ‘I didn’t do all this because he’s young and I’m old. It’s because I’m ugly, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Every time I look at him I feel myself grow older and uglier, until I’ve dried up into nothing. And all the while he gets brighter and better and further away, and it’s so unfair, because I’m not stupid, I’m not unkind. They say you get the face you deserve, but I tell you John, I never earned my ugliness. All my life I’ve watched those women with faces they’re proud to show and bodies that deserve sunshine and I hate them, because they’re cut from the same cloth as him. And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don’t see me – I look out and see beauty and think I take part it in then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it… and I’ll never tell him, even though I don’t want anything in return, because what’s really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.’
John would have liked to say that it wasn’t true, but wanted desperately to repay her honesty with his own, and he saw as plainly as if the notebook
was on the table between them the words he’d written down: ugly is the only word that will do. They sat in silence for a long while, and then she said eagerly, half-reaching across the table towards him, ‘You can still help me, if you want to. It would be helping him, you see, most of all, and I know you’d do that if you could.’
‘What can I do?’
‘There’s more – only one – oh, God!’ She covered her face with her hands and almost laughing said, ‘I can’t stand to think of it, could I really have been so stupid? There’s one more and you must help me look out for it, get to it before he does, or one of the girls – they like to take him things: they go to his room and I hear them laughing together.’ Her lips compressed with envy and John, not knowing it, mimicked her, remembering how the boy had taken Eve’s hand, and with his thumb wiped dirt from the crease in her palm.
Then Hester stood and smoothed her dress with slow deliberate movements and said with her old authority: ‘It’s only eleven o’clock and the post never makes here till noon. Won’t you help me, John? I can’t stay there by the front door all morning, but they won’t notice you and what you’re doing. You can get to it, can’t you, before he sees it?’ She began to pull drying newspaper from the white head on the table, balling it up in her palms and tossing it deftly into the bin beside the sink.
Then, turning to him again, she said quietly, ‘You won’t understand this, a man like you – I can’t imagine you feeling anything you didn’t choose to feel, just when you chose to feel it – but you see I didn’t know when it started how far I would go.’
John stood up in his borrowed clothes, and accepting the hand she stretched out said, ‘Of course I’ll help. It’s an easy enough task, isn’t it? Even for a man like me.’ She smiled and gathered the newspapers on the table into a sheaf in her arms. ‘Thank you. How glad I am you came!’ she said, and went out with her arms full of torn newspaper.