by Louise Welsh
“We must discuss Hilary’s progress,” he said, his voice so burdened with meaning that she began to laugh at him.
“Indeed we must,” she agreed.
“Your necklace is the colour of your eyes.” He took it from her fingers and leaned forward, as if to kiss her. Hearing footsteps in the passage she moved sharply aside, the necklace broke and the beads scattered over the floor.
“Why is Hilary in the garden at this hour?” Mrs Wilson asked. Her husband and the governess were on their knees, gathering up the beads.
“Miss Chasty’s necklace broke,” her husband said. She had heard that submissive tone before: his voice lacked authority only when he was caught out in some infidelity.
“I was asking about Hilary. I have just seen him running in the shrubbery without a coat.”
“He was sent to his room for being impertinent to Miss Chasty.”
“Please fetch him at once,” Mrs Wilson told Florence. Her voice always gained in authority what her husband’s lacked.
Florence hurried from the room, still holding a handful of beads. She felt badly shaken – as if she had been brought to the edge of some experience which had then retreated beyond her grasp.
“He was told to stay in his room,” Mr Wilson said feebly.
“Why did her beads break?”
“She was fidgeting with them. I think she was nervous. I was making it rather apparent to her that I regarded Hilary’s insubordination as proof of too much leniency on her part.”
“I didn’t know that she had such a necklace. It is the showiest trash I have ever seen.”
“We cannot blame her for the cheapness of her trinkets. It is rather pathetic.”
“There is nothing pathetic about her. We will continue this in the morning-room and they can continue their lessons, which are, after all, her reason for being here.”
“Oh, they are gone,” said Hilary. His cheeks were pink from the cold outside.
“Why did you not stay in your bedroom as you were told?”
“I had nothing to do. I thought of my apology before I got there. It was: “I am sorry, dear girl, that I spoke too near the point’.”
“You could have spent longer and thought of a real apology.”
“Look how long Papa spent and he did not even think of a punishment, which is a much easier thing.”
Several times during the evening Mr Wilson said: “But you cannot dismiss a girl because her beads break.”
“There have been other things and will be more,” his wife replied.
So that there should not be more that evening, he did not move from the drawing-room where he sat watching her doing her wool-work. For the same reason, Florence left the schoolroom early. She went out and walked rather nervously in the park, feeling remorseful, astonished and upset.
“Did you mend your necklace?” Hilary asked her in the morning.
“I lost the beads.”
“But my poor girl, they must be somewhere.”
She thought: “There is no reason to suppose that I shall get back what I never had in the first place.”
“Have you got a headache?”
“Yes. Go on with your work, Hilary.”
“Is it from losing the beads?”
“No.”
“Have you a great deal of jewellery I have not seen yet?”
She did not answer and he went on: “You still have your brooch with your grandmother’s plaited hair in it. Was it cut off her head when she was dead.”
“Your work, Hilary.”
“I shudder to think of chopping it off a corpse. You could have some of my hair, now, while I am living.” He fingered it with admiration, regarded a sum aloofly and jotted down his answer. “Could I cut some of yours?” he asked, bringing his book to be corrected. He whistled softly, close to her, and the tendrils of hair round her ears were gently blown about.
“It is ungentlemanly to whistle,” she said.
“My sums are always right. It shows how I can chatter and subtract at the same time. Any governess would be annoyed by that. I suppose your brothers never whistle.”
“Never.”
“Are they to be clergymen like your father?”
“It is what we hope for one of them.”
“I am to be a famous judge. When you read about me, will you say: “And to think I might have been his wife if I had not been so self-willed’?”
“No, but I hope that I shall feel proud that once I taught you.”
“You sound doubtful.”
He took his book back to the table. “We are having a quiet morning,” he remarked. “No one has visited us. Poor Miss Chasty, it is a pity about the necklace,” he murmured, as he took up his pencil again.
Evenings were dangerous to her. “He said he would come,” she told herself, “and I allowed him to say so. On what compulsion did I?”
Fearfully, she spent her lonely hours out in the dark garden or in her cold and candle-lit bedroom. He was under his wife’s vigilance and Florence did not know that he dared not leave the drawing-room. But the vigilance relaxed, as it does; his carelessness returned and steady rain and bitter cold drove Florence to warm her chilblains at the schoolroom fire.
Her relationship with Mrs Wilson had changed. A wary hostility took the place of meekness, and when Mrs Wilson came to the schoolroom at tea-times, Florence stood up defiantly and cast a look round the room as if to say: “Find what you can. There is nothing here.” Mrs Wilson’s suspicious ways increased her rebelliousness. “I have done nothing wrong,” she told herself. But in her bedroom at night: “I have done nothing wrong,” she would think.
“They have quite deserted us,” Hilary said from time to time. “They have realised you are worth your weight in gold, dear girl; or perhaps I made it clear to my father that in this room he is an interloper.”
“Hilary!”
“You want to put yourself in the right in case that door opens suddenly as it has been doing lately. There, you see! Good-evening, Mamma. I was just saying that I had scarcely seen you all day.” He drew forward her chair and held the cushion behind her until she leaned back.
“I have been resting.”
“Are you ill, Mamma?”
“I have a headache.”
“I will stroke it for you, dear lady.”
He stood behind her chair and began to smooth her forehead. “Or shall I read to you?” he asked, soon tiring of his task, “Or play the musical-box?”
“No, nothing more, thank you.”
Mrs Wilson looked about her, at the teacups, then at Florence. Sometimes it seemed to her that her husband was right and that she was growing fanciful. The innocent appearance of the room lulled her and she closed her eyes for a while, rocking gently in her chair.
*
“I dozed off,” she said when she awoke. The table was cleared and Florence and Hilary sat playing chess, whispering so that they should not disturb her.
“It made a domestic scene for us,” said Hilary. “Often Miss Chasty and I feel that we are left too much in solitary bliss.”
The two women smiled and Mrs Wilson shook her head. “You have too old a head on your shoulders,” she said. “What will they say of you when you go to school?”
“What shall I say of them?” he asked bravely, but he lowered his eyes and kept them lowered. When his mother had gone, he asked Florence: “Did you go to school?”
“Yes.”
“Were you unhappy there?”
“No, I was homesick at first.”
“If I don’t like it, there will be no point in my staying,” he said hurriedly. “I can learn anywhere and I don’t particularly want the corners knocked off, as my father once spoke of it. I shouldn’t like to play cricket and all those childish games. Only to do boxing and draw blood,” he added, with sudden bravado. He laughed excitedly and clenched his fists.
“You would never be good at boxing if you lost your temper.”
“I suppose your brothers told
you that. They don’t sound very manly to me. They would be afraid of a good fight and the sight of blood, I daresay.”
“Yes, I daresay. It is bedtime.”
He was whipped up by the excitement he had created from his fears.
“Chess is a woman’s game,” he said and upset the board. He took the cushion from the rocking-chair and kicked it inexpertly across the room. “I should have thought the door would have opened then,” he said. “But as my father doesn’t appear to send me to my room, I will go there of my own accord. It wouldn’t have been a punishment at bedtime in any case. When I am a judge I shall be better at punishments than he is.”
When he had gone, Florence picked up the cushion and the chessboard. “I am no good at punishments either,” she thought. She tidied the room, made up the fire, then sat down in the rocking-chair, thinking of all the lonely schoolroom evenings of her future. She bent her head over her needlework – the beaded sachet for her mother’s birthday present. When she looked up she thought the lamp was smoking and she went to the table and turned down the wick. Then she noticed that the smoke was wreathing upwards from near the fireplace, forming rings which drifted towards the ceiling and were lost in a haze. She could hear a woman’s voice humming softly and the floorboards creaked as if someone were treading up and down the room impatiently.
She felt in herself a sense of burning impatience and anticipation and watching the door opening found herself thinking: “If it is not he, I cannot bear it.”
He closed the door quietly. “She has gone to bed,” he said in a lowered voice. “For days I dared not come. She has watched me every moment. At last, this evening, she gave way to a headache. Were you expecting me?”
“Yes.”
“And once I called you Miss Mouse! And you are still Miss Mouse when I see you about the garden, or at luncheon.”
“In this room I can be by myself. It belongs to us.”
“And not to Hilary as well – ever?” he asked her in amusement.
She gave him a quick and puzzled glance.
“Let no one intrude,” he said hastily. “It is our room, just as you say.”
She had turned the lamp too low and it began to splutter. “Firelight is good enough for us,” he said, putting the light out altogether.
When he kissed her, she felt an enormous sense of disappointment, almost as if he were the wrong person embracing her in the dark. His arch masterfulness merely bored her. “A long wait for so little,” she thought.
He, however, found her entirely seductive. She responded with a sensuous languor, unruffled and at ease like the most perfect hostess.
“Where did you practise this, Miss Mouse?” he asked her. But he did not wait for the reply, fancying that he heard a step on the landing. When his wife opened the door, he was trying desperately to light a taper at the fire. His hand was trembling, and when at last, in the terribly silent room, the flame crept up the spill it simply served to show up Florence’s disarray, which, like a sleep-walker, she had not noticed or put right.
*
She did not see Hilary again, except as a blurred little figure at the schoolroom window – blurred because of her tear-swollen eyes.
She was driven away in the carriage, although Mr Wilson had suggested the station-fly. “Let us keep her disgrace and her tearfulness to ourselves,” he begged, although he was exhausted by the repetitious burden of his wife’s grief.
“Her disgrace!”
“My mistake, I have said, was in not taking your accusations about her seriously. I see now that I was in some way bewitched – yes, bewitched, is what it was – acting against my judgment; nay, my very nature. I am astonished that anyone so seemingly meek could have cast such a spell upon me.”
*
Poor Florence turned her head aside as Williams, the coachman, came to fetch her little trunk and the basket-work holdall. Then she put on her cloak and prepared herself to go downstairs, fearful lest she should meet anyone on the way. Yet her thoughts were even more on her journey’s end; for what, she wondered, could she tell her father and how expect him to understand what she could not understand herself?
Her head was bent as she crossed the landing and she hurried past the schoolroom door. At the turn of the staircase she pressed back against the wall to allow someone to pass. She heard laughter and then up the stairs came a young woman and a little girl. The child was clinging to the woman’s arm and coaxing her, as sometimes Hilary had tried to coax Florence. “After lessons,” the woman said firmly, but gaily. She looked ahead, smiling to herself. Her clothes were unlike anything that Florence had ever seen. Later, when she tried to describe them to her mother, she could only remember the shortness of a tunic which scarcely covered the knees, a hat like a helmet drawn down over eyes intensely green and matching a long necklace of glass beads which swung on her flat bosom. As she came up the stairs and drew near to Florence, she was humming softly against the child’s pleading: silk rustled against her silken legs and all of the staircase, as Florence quickly descended, was full of fragrance.
In the darkness of the hall a man was watching the two go round the bend of the stairs. The woman must have looked back, for Florence saw him lift his hand in a secretive gesture of understanding.
“It is Hilary, not his father!” she thought. But the figure turned before she could be sure and went into the library.
Outside on the drive Williams was waiting with her luggage stowed away in the carriage. When she had settled herself, she looked up at the schoolroom window and saw Hilary standing there rather forlornly and she could almost imagine him saying: “My poor dear girl; so you were not good enough for me, after all?”
“When does the new governess arrive?” she asked Williams in a casual voice, that strove to conceal both pride and grief.
“There’s nothing fixed as far as I have heard,” he said.
They drove out into the lane.
“When will it be her time?” Florence wondered. “I am glad that I saw her before I left.”
“We are sorry to see you going, Miss.” He had heard that the maids were sorry, for she had given them no trouble.
“Thank you, Williams.”
As they went on towards the station, she leaned back and looked at the familiar places where she had walked with Hilary. “I know what I shall tell my father now,” she thought, and she felt peaceful and meek as though beginning to be convalescent after a long illness.
MEMORY OF A GIRL
Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) was born in Tacoma, Washington. His parents separated before his birth. As a teenager Brautigan spent two months in Oregon State Hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given electroshock therapy. He moved to San Francisco, met many of the Beat writers and embraced counter culture. Brautigan is best known for his novel, Trout Fishing in America. He said of death, ‘People wouldn’t take life seriously if they didn’t know it would turn dark on them.’ Richard Brautigan committed suicide.
I cannot look at the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company building without thinking of her breasts. The building is at Presidio and California Streets in San Francisco. It is a red brick, blue and glass building that looks like a minor philosophy plopped right down on the site of what was once one of California’s most famous cemeteries:
Laurel Hill Cemetery
1854–1946
Eleven United States Senators were buried there.
They, and everybody else were moved out years ago, but there are still some tall cypress trees standing beside the insurance company.
These trees once cast their shadows over graves. They were a part of daytime weeping and mourning, and night-time silence except for the wind.
I wonder if they ask themselves questions like: Where did everybody go who was dead? Where did they take them? And where are those who came here to visit them? Why were we left behind?
Perhaps these questions are too poetic. Maybe it would be best
just to say: There are four trees standing beside an insurance company out in California.
BLACK-WHITE
Tove Jansson
Author and visual artist, Tove Marika Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Finland. Her parents were the sculptor, Viktor Jansson, and the illustrator and designer, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson. Tove Jansson is best known for her creation of the Moomins, a family of trolls – tolerant creatures who love nature. Jansson turned to writing for adults in her fifties. Her lifelong partner was the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. In 2014 Jansson was honoured with a commemorative two euro coin marking the centenary of her birth.
His wife’s name was Stella, and she was an interior designer – Stella, his beautiful star. Sometimes he tried to sketch her face, which was always at rest, open and accessible, but he never succeeded. Her hands were white and strong and she wore no rings. She worked quickly and without hesitation.
They lived in a house that Stella had designed, an enormous openwork of glass and unpainted wood. The heavy planking had been chosen for its unusually attractive grain and fastened with large brass screws. There were no unnecessary objects to hide the structural materials. When dusk entered their rooms, it was met with low, veiled lighting, while the glass walls reflected the night but held it at a distance. They stepped out onto the terrace, and hidden spotlights came on in the bushes. The darkness crept away, and they stood side by side, throwing no shadows, and he thought, This is perfect. Nothing can change.
She never flirted. She looked straight at the person she was speaking to, and when she undressed at night, she did it almost absentmindedly. The house was like her, its eyes were wide open, and sometimes he worried that someone might look in on them from the darkness. But the garden was surrounded by a wall, and the gates were locked.
They often entertained. In the summer, they hung lanterns in the trees and Stella’s house resembled an illuminated seashell in the night. Happy people in strong colors moved within this picture in groups or in twos and threes, some of them inside the glass walls and some outside. It was a lovely pageant.