Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  An irregular barking noise began to intrude on the scene. At first George thought it was a seal, but as he crossed from dream to waking, drawn away from the enigmatic figure on the shoreline just as their features began to coalesce into tantalising recognition, he realised it was someone coughing… Victoria.

  A drab dawn light was filtering through the curtains, and outside several seagulls cackled as though at some coarse and villainous joke. George sat up in bed, listening intently, but Victoria seemed to have recovered, and he was about to settle back onto the pillow when she began coughing again, a dry, abrasive sound which the seagulls mimicked, as though thoroughly entertained by the poor child’s distress.

  Throwing back the sheets, George stood up, unhooked his dressing gown from the back of the door and wrapped it around him. He stepped out onto the landing just as Emily emerged from her bedroom, a candle in a pewter holder in one hand, her other cupped around the flame to shield it.

  “Oh! I’m sorry, I was… I heard Victoria… ”

  “I’ll see to her,” Emily replied briskly. “Don’t concern yourself, George, she probably just needs a glass of water.”

  He hesitated. His sister-in-law’s conventional opinion regarding paternal involvement had always been a contentious subject between them, but he had no wish to delay whatever form of comfort was required for his daughter. “I think we have some linctus in the pantry, if you’d like me to fetch it.”

  Emily looked squarely up at him. In the candlelight, with her hair loose, George could plainly see a resemblance to her sister, which normally lay hidden beneath Emily’s shield of fastidiousness. He could only imagine how lively the Barnett household must have been when these two sharp-witted yet disparate girls were growing up.

  “George,” she said, lowering her voice to little more than a whisper, “I am Victoria’s governess. She will expect me to tend to her wellbeing. Anything else will simply confuse the child and place a burden of expectation on you which, by the nature of your… profession, you will at times be unable to fulfill. Let us avoid future disappointment by establishing a routine now that Victoria can understand and expect.” She paused. “You must be tired. I heard you come in just before midnight, let me attend to Victoria now and she can see you after breakfast. I hear there is a puppet show at the winter gardens that could provide you both with some entertainment.”

  He smiled. “Emily, as always there is an inescapable logic to your reprimand. Go on, see if the poor child has swallowed a feather. Have you mentioned the puppet show to Victoria yet?”

  She shook her head. “No, I only saw the poster yesterday. I thought it best to see if you were free to accompany her before I said anything.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” George observed.

  Victoria’s cough began again in earnest. Emily glanced in the direction of the girl’s bedroom, then turned back to George. “Any sacrifice I make is insignificant compared to that of my sister’s. We must both do our best to make sure that sacrifice was not made in vain. Please excuse me.”

  George nodded mutely, silenced by the reminder of Katherine’s death and the enduring guilt associated with it. Over the years his memories of that night had somehow become conflated with his confrontation with Zlatka, as though the two events had occurred on the same day. And despite correcting himself, despite the entries in his diary that showed, irrefutably, their separation, he could not dissociate the two. His mind, if not the calendar, saw a close correlation. Was he trying to transfer his own culpability into the preternaturally strong hands of the contortionist? In one respect she had prevented him from fully attending and engaging with Katherine’s death. After Doctor Zimmerman’s departure George had plucked up the courage to say farewell to his wife, had entered the front parlour, walked to the settee and gently lifted the sheet. These actions were in themselves quite banal, as though he were rousing Katherine from an afternoon snooze, but of course from this slumber there could be no awakening. He knelt, stroked her hair, wept, murmured tender apologies and fierce promises, and all the while Zlatka nestled at his back, her odour subverting the tang of ether, an unfaithful witness to this final act of penitence.

  George watched his sister-in-law cross the landing and enter Victoria’s bedroom, leaving him in a palpable darkness formed only partly by the night.

  There would be no puppet show.

  Victoria’s cough appeared to respond well to regular doses of the bitter-tasting linctus, but by lunchtime her temperature had risen markedly, and it was while rearranging her pillows that Emily first noticed the red blemishes on her niece’s neck, which stood out so vividly on the child’s pale skin. Victoria also began to complain of a sore throat and headaches, a combination of symptoms that Emily recognised from her childhood. Indeed, illness in all its forms was a familiar and reassuring landscape for Emily; plagued with ill-health for long periods as a child, she had come to almost welcome the next bout of infirmity, as its ensuing convalescence at least offered a little time with her mother. Sophia Barnett had married well and given her lawyer husband two children. This, she believed, was a more than adequate fulfillment of her marital obligations; she enlisted the services of a formidable Irish nanny to raise the children, leaving her free to pursue a pre-eminent position within Gloucester’s society. The only time any appreciable level of maternal instinct came to the surface was when one of the children became ill, and as Emily appeared more susceptible than her more sturdy sibling, it was she who received the majority of these audiences. A light kiss on the forehead was always the sign that Sophia was being called back to her natural milieu of dining room, salon or parlour. She would bend forward, her long pearl necklace brushing against the bedding with a gently percussive rattle, her perfume enveloping the child like the very essence of a sophisticated and utterly alien world. Even now Emily always associated the hazy days of recuperation with the rustle of pearls and smell of jasmine.

  ***

  When George returned from his constitutional walk along the promenade Emily was able to deliver her diagnosis with a physician’s confidence.

  “Victoria has scarlet fever,” she said without preamble.

  George, who was in the process of hanging his hat on a peg, froze. He turned to face Emily, who was standing on the second step of the stairs, looking down at him as though delivering some verdict of the court. “Are you sure? Have you called for a doctor?”

  “The doctor has been,” Emily reassured him, “and agreed completely with my diagnosis. He was all for taking her into a quarantined confinement, but I persuaded him that to move her would threaten a spread of the disease which could be better contained by strict isolation within the house. The only thing he added to my own diagnosis was a solution of nitrate of silver for Victoria’s throat ulcers.”

  “Ulcers? When I left this morning all she had was a slight fever!”

  Emily held up one hand as though to make a point. “George, George,” she whispered, “please moderate your tone, you’ll disturb her. What Victoria needs now more than anything is rest.”

  “That’s all very…” he began angrily, before lowering his voice but maintaining his vehemence. “That’s all very well, Emily, but how can she have declined so quickly? I need to see my daughter.”

  “And you will,” she replied, “but not yet. Victoria must be seen by me alone. The doctor was most insistent on this point. The disease is at its most contagious at the moment. Think of where you work, George. The theatre is hot and crowded, hundreds of people jammed in together. If you only passed on the disease to the front row we would have an epidemic on our hands within the week.”

  George closed his eyes and exhaled loudly through his nose. What Emily had said made perfect sense… everything Emily said always made perfect sense, and yet there was something terribly cold behind her logic. Her unwavering objectivity was at times quite terrifying.

  “You’re right, of course you’re right.” He laughed and shook his head. “I wish I had a pound for
every time I’ve said that to either you or your sister. I’d be a rich man.”

  “Katherine and I were brought up to think logically,” Emily explained. “Daddy always said that in a courtroom whoever maintained the most level of heads would win.”

  No matter the truth of the case, George thought. “I’m sure he must have been very proud of his girls, then.”

  “I believe he was.”

  How had this rigorous philosophy been applied equally to two girls with such differing results? It was true that Katherine had shared Emily’s analytical capacity, and indeed Emily appeared as capable of subtly winning every argument as her sister. What set them apart, George realised, was empathy. It had been Katherine’s ability to see the world through other people’s eyes — combined, it must be said, with the sensual way she would slowly brush her fringe to one side with the tips of her fingers — that had caused George to fall in love with her, and it was Emily’s detachment which he found so forbidding. Emily would never have been able to look out to sea from the resort’s promenade and conjure up a vision of the completed pier as a means of bolstering her husband’s self-confidence. The girders and rivets and planking were undoubtedly all there in her imagination, but what Emily lacked was the joy required to build it.

  “And how long will this quarantine last?”

  Emily stepped down into the hall and helped George off with his coat. “Usually not more than two or three days. I had scarlet fever as a child, so I cannot catch the disease again. What about you, George? Did you have it as a boy?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t recall… I don’t think so, I was quite a robust little specimen.”

  “There it is, then,” she said, shaking the creases out of his coat and releasing a hint of the shoreline’s astringency, which had inveigled itself into the material during his walk along the windy promenade. Her every bustling movement was a manifestation of the vindication which she so clearly felt. “I am the perfect nurse for Victoria, and if I stay in the house you can come and go without fear of spreading the disease.” Emily looked up at him with an expression of firm resolve. “We must be quite rigorous in all this, George, for everyone’s sake.”

  “Very well, then,” he said reluctantly, “I shall keep a safe distance until the worst is over.” What he did not say, because there was no way to voice such a thought without it sounding terribly hurtful, was his belief that Emily welcomed an opportunity for rigour in the same way that most people welcomed an opportunity to indulge in their own particular vice, be it alcohol, tobacco, fornication, or even the bawdy ramblings of a music hall comedian. There was something of the martyr in Emily, he realised, a secret longing for the sacrificial altar.

  The evening was as still as the day had been windy, with a soft amethyst sky swept clear of cloud. The sea was dark blue with a metallic sheen, its carborundum gloss set off by the single lantern of a shrimping boat. The two elements appeared ill-matched, as though the ocean was reflecting another sky or day entirely, but George had lived in the resort long enough to know how beguiling its light could be, particularly in the evening, when the whole town took on a dreamlike, ethereal air. He could hear the irregular splash of the fishermen’s oars carrying across the water, the rhythmic kiss of wave against shore. For a moment the only sounds in the world were those of the sea, a powdery dusk the only light.

  For a moment. And then the string of electric lanterns, recently installed the length of the pier, came on, creating pools of red, green and yellow light on the boards, closely followed by the first notes from the rococo steam organ outside the pavilion. The pier had reasserted its brash sovereignty, reducing nature to the role of scene-shifter. George glanced up at the lanterns. He disliked the harshness of electric light; it was cold and austere, like a manifestation of Emily. Gas and limelight left something to the imagination, but the pier’s owners had made clear their intention to convert the pavilion to electric within the year, so it would seem he had no choice but to become accustomed to its unforgiving nature at work, in much the same way as he had had to do with his sister-in-law at home.

  She would do her best for Victoria, though. He did not doubt that for a moment. George instinctively felt in his jacket pocket, found the pebble, and let his fingers trace the familiar curves and ridge. His touch was as tender as if he had been caressing Victoria’s face itself. Indeed, this simple stone somehow bridged the distance between father and daughter as completely and durably as the pier beneath his feet linked the theatre to the resort. Victoria’s choosing of it not only lifted the pebble from inanimate fraction of the beach’s whole to a symbol of love, dense with memories, it also opened a conduit through which George was able to assuage the guilt he still suffered over the terrible circumstances of Victoria’s birth. The stone’s weight in his pocket formed a sort of externalised conscience, reminding him that Katherine’s death had not been in vain.

  Bulbs attached to the pier pavilion, designed to emphasise its exotic outline, came on, as did the lamps inside its four domed towers, highlighting the red stained glass windows which glazed the tops of each one. With the darkening sky behind it the brilliance of the lights lent the theatre a fantastical air, like the fulfillment of Katherine’s vision from that day on the promenade.

  George smiled to himself. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ he said silently, astounded, almost frightened, by his wife’s prescience. ‘You knew what it would look like… that I would be here.’ How much of his success was down to that vision? Or had it been his destiny to walk along these planks, to perform above the waves, and Katherine had merely been granted the briefest of glimpses along an otherwise darkened, inescapable path?

  His performance that evening went well. The audience was enthusiastic, roaring ‘Up and down’ with a collective lewdness that gave George a huge amount of satisfaction, but it nevertheless came as no little relief when he could finally take his bow and return home, to be informed that Victoria was quiet and sleeping. Emily made him a glass of warm milk and brandy and ushered him off to bed, a condescension he allowed to pass without dispute through a combination of weariness and preoccupation with his daughter’s wellbeing. When he blew out his bedside candle George fully expected to suffer an unsettled night, but contrary to expectation he sank almost immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep, an ocean of forgetting.

  He woke with a start. The bedroom was a confusion of shadows, the window a slate grey rectangle. Morning was clearly still some way off. What, then, had woken him? George propped himself on one elbow and peered into the darkness, straining for any sound. The silence hummed in his ears. The more he listened, the more the silence perturbed him. Surely Victoria would have coughed at least once by now? Or if not Victoria, then Emily, either pottering through the house or tending to his daughter. Wouldn’t she have made some sort of noise? He counted to ten, twenty, and still there was nothing. Was it the deceitful quality of the silence that had snatched him from sleep? George’s scalp prickled. A thought, too terrible to countenance, burrowed into his mind. The silence was like a huge, remorseless hand, crushing him into his bed.

  Almost before his mind caught up with his body, George was out of bed, across the landing and into Victoria’s room. A small brass oil lamp, its flame turned down but providing a reassuring glow, stood on a chest of drawers to one side of the bed and illuminated Victoria’s tousled hair. George sank to his knees at the bedside and gently brushed the hair away from her face, but even before his fingers touched the cooling skin of her forehead he knew she was dead. Nine years ago he had knelt by the body of his wife and seen for himself the stillness, the way in which what was once a person, with all their complexities and contradictions, becomes in death something utterly simple, and now he saw it again. It was the second time George had been denied even the briefest of farewells, and the realisation of this tore him away from the world as irrevocably as if he had been cast adrift in the middle of an ocean.

  A high-pitched moan hummed in his throat with every breat
h, a sound that can be heard at moments of both ecstasy and devastation: the sigh of exquisite pleasure or absolute grief.

  “Oh, my poor cherry pie,” George whispered as he stroked her hair. “My poor cherry pie.”

  The injustice of Victoria’s death, fate’s snatching away in his absence of the only two people he had ever loved, fuelled a rage within George Parr so fierce that when he called out there was a restraint and calmness in his voice so sinister it frightened him.

  “Emily… Emily… ” He paused. “Emily?” He called out again, louder this time, but even with this slight increase in volume George sensed the promise of delirium, the uncontrollable babbling roar which churned within him, edging closer. “Emily,” he croaked.

  The bedroom door opened. Emily was still dressed, though her clothes were crumpled, and she held a dark green shawl closed with one fisted hand at her chest. When she saw the tableau before her it reminded Emily of a painting by Caravaggio, a lament of shadows, but her reading of it was instantaneous. There was something in her brother-in-law’s expression, however, that halted her in the doorway.

  “Oh, my poor child,” she said.

  George could not tell whether she was referring to him or his daughter. “Emily,” he began, his voice taut and horribly jaunty, “when did you last look in on Victoria?”

  “I… it must have been around midnight. I—”

  “And how,” he interrupted, “did she seem to you then?”

  “George, you—”

  “How did she seem to you then, Emily?”

  “She was tired, George, as was I.”

  A defensive note had crept into Emily’s voice, which caused George to doubt whether she was being entirely honest with him.