Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  “She was beyond help,” Doctor Zimmerman explained, his voice suddenly quiet, professional and detached. He drank the rest of his whisky in one convulsive gulp. “Your wife had lost so much blood by the time I got here that she was barely conscious. The child was showing an abnormal presentation and time was of the essence, which I conveyed to your wife directly.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, and so did she. Mrs Parr showed a quite remarkable clarity of thought, considering the pain she was in. She told me to attend to the baby, and I was left in no doubt as to her insistence that I follow these instructions to whatever conclusion they might bring. Her last words were for me to do whatever I deemed fit.”

  George felt his daughter shift slightly. He placed one outstretched hand on her back. “She said that?”

  “Indeed she did,” the doctor confirmed. “I’ve heard nothing braver, not even on the battlefield.” He looked George squarely in the eye. “Believe me, Mr Parr, if I could have saved them both I would have.”

  George could see the sincerity in the man’s bloodshot brown eyes. He nodded, but could not speak.

  Doctor Zimmerman took a deep breath. “So, the decision was made.” He sighed, perhaps reliving this pivotal moment. “I administered ether, and Mrs Parr summoned the last of her strength for the rigours of childbirth. There was a risk of suffocation to the infant, so there was no time to be lost. The Good Lord must have intervened, however, because events moved quickly and without further complication, but the effort proved too much for your wife. She died soon after hearing her daughter’s first cries.”

  “Did she know she was fit and well?”

  “I told her so, Mr Parr. They were my last words to her, and she acknowledged them.”

  George pressed his daughter tighter to him, hoping against hope that her fierce proximity would be enough to quell the waves of conflicting emotion that threatened to overwhelm him. The fury remained, a simmering undercurrent dictating the tempo of every other thought and feeling. Fury at himself for his absence, for not being able to help, or say goodbye. Fury towards the doctor, who had experienced moments of intimacy with Katherine that should rightfully have been his. Fury towards God, for allowing death to poison his daughter’s birth. And fury at the perverse governance of fate, which, having finally consented to bestow success in his professional life, then reduced it to ashes by forever associating it with the guilt and pain of his greatest personal tragedy.

  Doctor Zimmerman stood up. “Bring the child to see me in a week, sooner if she shows any bleeding or fever. And you will need to enlist the services of a wet nurse.”

  George nodded, too overwhelmed by the evening’s events to form a coherent response. He followed the doctor out of the bedroom and down the stairs, a descent which he now knew was bringing him closer to Katherine’s body. He stared at the door to the front room, hoping against hope that the doctor had been wrong and that a drained, pale but animated Katherine would appear in the doorway and demand to know why she had been abandoned by everyone.

  Doctor Zimmerman retrieved his top hat from the coat rack.

  “Do you have any milk in the house?”

  George replied whilst keeping his gaze firmly on the door. “I don’t know. I’ll ask Edie.”

  “Well, it isn’t ideal, but the child will need something to sustain her until a wet nurse can start.”

  “Of course.” The door remained resolutely closed, inert and familiar. In one respect nothing but a piece of wood, in another the portal to a colder, less certain world. “Your fee! I must owe you something for your work.”

  The doctor held up one hand. “Such work as I did should not be associated with commerce, Mr Parr.”

  “But my daughter—”

  “If it will make you feel better, bring a bottle of whisky when you come to see me.”

  George reached for the doorknob, but Doctor Zimmerman stayed his hand. George looked up, into the doctor’s eyes, and was so moved by the expression of concern he saw in them that his own began to fill with tears.

  “Allow yourself a night of grief and anger, Mr Parr,” he counselled, “but that is all. In the morning, a clarity of purpose will be essential, not only for you but also for your child. You are not the first husband to lose their wife in such circumstances, and you are luckier than many, believe me, to have your daughter in recompense. I have seen stout-hearted men lose all grip on their senses after losing a wife and child in childbirth.”

  George, though shocked by the doctor’s astringent medical opinion, nevertheless saw the sense in it. “I bow to your greater experience in these matters.”

  “Excellent.” He picked up his tatty leather bag and allowed the door to be opened for him. “My prescription for you, Mr Parr, is to let your maid feed the child while you pour yourself a large measure of something very strong, then all of you must try to rest. I shall arrange for an undertaker to call first thing in the morning… I know one who has not yet reduced his craft to the level of pantomime.”

  “Thank you, doctor. For everything.”

  “You are most welcome.” Doctor Zimmerman was halfway out of the door when he stopped and looked back. “Had you and your wife decided on a name for the child, by the way?”

  “Victoria,” George replied. “She will be christened Victoria Katherine.”

  The Pebble

  Seagulls chattered and squabbled along the shoreline, picking through the drying seaweed and flotsam with a kind of brutal merriment, as though there was an equal pleasure to be had in the hunt, that plunging of beak into skelpy mass and perhaps uncovering a small crab, as there was in its eating. If there was one thing George hated about living in the resort it was the seagulls. He was not fooled by the purity of their colouring; theirs was a dissembling white, a cloak of purity and innocence thrown over what was in reality a far darker creature, either as recompense by God or the cruel humour of Nature. One had only to look into a seagull’s eye to know this. There is nothing more wicked or soulless than a seagull’s eye.

  “Papa! Papa! Come and see!”

  George looked away from the gulls and saw Victoria waving furiously in his direction. Her long blonde hair, curlier than her mother’s, but with the same waywardness, the same tendency to break free of whatever attempt at formality was placed upon it, flared outwards in the breeze. Katherine’s sister Emily, who had plaited and pinned Victoria’s hair that morning, would doubtless have something to say about the appearance of her niece on their return, but George always felt that a certain amount of dishevelment better suited his daughter’s whimsical nature. Victoria was certainly something of a free spirit, but whether this was as a result of the circumstances of her birth and upbringing, George’s unusual leniency as a father, or simply an inherent trait, he did not know. His preference was to see Victoria’s character as a variation of her mother’s independent mind, and his greatest sadness was knowing how wonderfully Katherine would have nurtured and challenged her daughter. For all his earnest attempts to provide the love and support of two parents, George often sensed Victoria’s need for a more feminine perspective. His sister-in-law Emily, Katherine’s elder by nearly six years, a childless widow at the time of Victoria’s birth, had offered to become a sort of governess-cum-housekeeper for them, a proposal which had seemed both generous and mutually beneficial at the time, but she lacked her younger sister’s empathy, if not her intelligence. As well-read and politically-aware as Emily undoubtedly was, she seemed to be irritated by life, as though nothing quite conformed to the standards she expected of it, an irritation which manifested itself in a thousand ways, from the remorseless way she brushed Victoria’s hair after her bath to the constant disputes with shopkeepers, coal merchants, railway porters… in fact, with practically everyone she met. Emily also disapproved of George’s music hall work, which she had once described as ‘acting the buffoon for a gathering of navvies and harlots’. Even now, with top billing at the newly-opened Pavilion Theatre on the pier, George was left i
n no doubt as to his sister-in-law’s opinion, though she was at least sensitive enough not to bring up the subject in Victoria’s presence. It was plain to see how the child worshipped her father, and Emily had no wish to undermine their relationship, which seemed to her to be the most pleasing legacy of her sister’s perplexing love for this bawdy showman. She was, then, briskly efficient in her duties, brilliantly able to communicate her disapproval of George’s decisions whilst maintaining a polite deference, and completely hopeless as a source of emotional support for Victoria, mainly, it has to be said, because Emily did not recognise the concept. Father and daughter were, therefore, bound closely together not only by their enduring sense of loss, but also because there was no one else available to provide the warmth and indulgence that their somewhat brittle characters required.

  George made his way over the loose round pebbles that formed the upper section of the beach to the broad stretch of damp sand where his daughter was waiting.

  “What is it?” George enquired as he approached.

  “Something strange,” she replied, poking the object with the toe of her boot.

  George looked down and saw a gelatinous pouch lying tangled in seaweed, its slightly curving sides narrowing to darker ribbons. He seemed to recall it being the egg case of some marine creature, though he could not bring to mind exactly what sort. He did, however, know its more colloquial term. “Oh, Victoria, you are a lucky girl! You’ve found a mermaid’s purse.”

  She wrinkled her nose in an expression of profound scepticism.

  “A mermaid’s purse? Are you sure, Papa?”

  “Am I sure?” He said, feigning righteous indignation. “Of course I’m sure, young lady! Do you see those ribbons there? They are to tie it to her wrist so that she won’t lose it while she’s swimming. It must have come undone somehow, unless a crab pickpocket stole it while she wasn’t looking.”

  Victoria was always charmed by her father’s flights of fancy, even though there was enough of her mother in her for Victoria to search for the logic in whimsy. “What sort of money do they use?”

  “Money?” George replied, warming to his theme. “Oh, they don’t use money, at least not like ours. No, no, mermaids use shells, tiny little spiral shells for pennies, round ones for shillings and spiky ones for pounds.”

  “But what do they buy?”

  “Lots of things,” George stalled. Building his answer, creating a fantasy which was also rooted in a framework of logic, was, he realised, very similar to being on stage and reacting to a shouted comment or recent event. In both instances there was a need to impose discipline on his imagination in order to maintain a thread of believability, without which the audience, or Victoria, would find it difficult to truly relocate themselves to this new world. “They’re still girls, after all,” he continued, “they like the same things as you do, Victoria. Some nice seaweed ribbons for their hair, pearl necklaces and earrings… special mermaid flutes made out of coral.”

  “They play music?”

  “Oh yes.” George knelt down beside his daughter and put one arm round her waist. He knew that to the crowds of people both on the promenade and the pier such a display of affection would be regarded as distasteful, even vulgar, but he didn’t care. Years of establishment vitriol and obstruction regarding his act had turned Georgie Parr into something of an iconoclast, always ready to prick the bubbles of pomposity that rose to the surface so frequently in polite society. His audiences, drawn from the vast body of a Victorian proletariat who were more occupied with day-to-day survival than the finer points of social mores, saw George as their spokesman, a mouthpiece for the millions without any real voice. In every performance he could be relied upon to produce at least one caustic comment on some topical subject, and had incorporated several of the more long-lived of scandals into his ‘Corporal’s Song’, which utilised his ‘up and down’ catchphrase in its chorus. Any degree of censure over his manifestation of paternal love, then, was hardly likely to trouble him.

  “Yes,” he repeated, “mermaids love to play music. Their flutes make the sweetest sound you’ll ever hear… unless you happen to be a sailor, of course.”

  Victoria wriggled round in her father’s one-armed embrace so that she could look squarely at him. “Why don’t sailors like the mermaid’s music, Papa?”

  “Because it lures them to their doom, my little plum duff and custard. The mermaids are always on the lookout for new men to play with them under the waves, so they sit on rocks, combing their beautiful long hair, until a ship happens by, and then they play their flutes, so sweetly the sailors can’t resist. Crash! go the ships onto the rocks, and the sailors tumble into the sea, to drown quite happily with the mermaids dancing about them.”

  A small vertical frown line appeared between Victoria’s eyebrows, and for that moment she looked so much like Katherine that George felt his eyes fill with tears. “Well that isn’t very nice of them, is it, Papa? The poor sailors only wanted to listen to the music.”

  He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “They don’t mind. They had a spell put on them.”

  “But they still drowned!”

  George grimaced. His seemingly harmless flight of fancy had taken on an altogether more sombre tone because, foolishly, he had not taken Victoria’s empathetic nature into account. And yet, performer that he was, George did not want to break the spell, to explain to his daughter the more prosaic reality of the egg case, carried in by an indifferent tide once its usefulness had been exhausted.

  “Well, perhaps they would have drowned anyway and the mermaids make it better.” He paused, then continued more briskly, “Anyway, I’m not going on a ship, am I? We’re safe and sound here.”

  Victoria pointed to the pier further along the beach. “That’s like a ship, Papa, and you are on the pier.”

  “It can’t set sail, though, cherry pie. It will always stay right where it is.”

  “Mmm…” She seemed somewhat mollified by her father’s reassurances, but then she reached down and picked up a pebble, which she offered up to him. “Keep this safe, Papa. It’s a magic stone that will protect you from the mermaids.”

  George held out his hand and gave a small bow as Victoria placed the pebble in his palm. “Why, thank you, my lady.” He raised his hand to eye level to inspect his gift. Longer than it was broad, the pebble sat comfortably in the hollow between the pad of his thumb and the base of his little finger, a smooth and tactile object that carried its weight with an elegant understatement. Formed from a dark grey stone that he could not name, the pebble’s only variance from uniformity was a vein of quartz, which looped part way around the broader end, standing slightly proud of the pebble’s surface because of its greater resistance to erosion. George waggled his hand up and down, as though assessing the pebble’s heft, its puissance. A minute ago he would have trodden on it like any other element of the beach and not given it another thought, yet now, following its selection by Victoria, this simple stone had indeed become magical. He tossed it in the air, caught it, and dropped the pebble into his coat pocket.

  “There, I’m protected! Come on, young lady, time to go home.”

  That evening, George went on stage with the pebble in his jacket pocket and gave his most controlled, well-timed performance in years, at times coming close to the ferment of his seminal act at the Collins’ Music Hall. The perfect weight of the stone, always sensed yet never uncomfortable or a distraction, had an almost hypnotic effect, acting as both a focus and a comfort. It was as though, contained within the pebble’s reassuring presence, there was also something of his daughter, a possession strong enough to mean that when he slipped his hand into his pocket and grasped the pebble directly it was like holding hands with her. Fortunately this mediated union seemed free of the embarrassment and constraints that George would have felt if Victoria had actually been in the theatre listening to his act. The pebble’s neutrality granted him permission to become Georgie Parr more unconditionally than ever before. Indeed, af
ter his final bow and exit, with the prolonged applause and cheers still resonating around the pier’s Pavilion Theatre, George headed back to his dressing room with the oddest sensation of having been somehow absent; that the Camden Clown was a third party, a doppelgänger whose lascivious tastes were as disturbing to George as they were to those sections of society who still fought to have his act banned.

  Sitting at his dressing table, illuminated by gas lamps on either side of the mirror, George toyed with the pebble and studied his reflection. The hair at his temples was almost wholly grey now, as were his sideburns, but at least his moustache and goatee retained the dark brown of his younger days. He was becoming slightly jowly, with bags under his eyes, a decline exaggerated by the gaslight and stage makeup, but a decline nevertheless. He was now forty-three years old, an age by which a man should have made his mark on the world. Georgie Parr had achieved a certain notoriety, but what of George Parr? What would he be remembered for when his feet were not supported by the boards of a stage?

  An Ocean of Forgetting

  In his dream George was standing in a small boat, which rocked gently on the mirror-flat surface of a dark ocean. He could just make out the shoreline, a featureless smudge of pale sand broken only by a solitary figure who appeared to be looking in his direction. A tiny ripple running across the water caused the boat to rock more vigorously; George glanced down to regain his balance, and when he looked up again he found he was holding a thin rope which connected him to the figure on the beach. He knew, in that certitude of dreams, that something terrible was behind him, further out to sea, and his only means of evading this monster was to pull on the rope and haul himself and the boat back to land. George also knew that his survival depended on the figure at the rope’s far end keeping hold of it to provide an anchor point, but they were too far away to either recognise or communicate with. He began to haul on the rope, sensing that the threat behind him was getting closer. The figure remained impassive, inert, arms outstretched towards the boat. Surely they would tire of such a pose before he reached shallow water? Why did they not find something else to tie the rope to? Could they not see what danger he was in?