Confession

by Klein, S. G.

  I closed the lid of my desk and went to stand by his side. The garden was dark except for a small pool of warm yellow light thrown by one of the lamps.

  ‘Look at this moth,’ he said pointing to a dusty little fellow who kept banging up against the glass. ‘Do you see how small he is? He cannot leave the light alone.’

  ‘He will have to when the lamps are turned out.’

  ‘I suppose he will,’ Monsieur Heger sighed putting his hand up to where the moth kept battering itself against the glass.

  ‘The moon is coming out,’ I observed.

  Up above us a large silver disk peeked out from behind a rack of dark clouds sending dusty rays across the pathways and flowerbeds turning the whole garden to ash.

  Part Two

  ENGLAND 1842

  I

  Martha placed a bowl on the kitchen table. For a girl of twelve she was strong and willing. She busied herself fetching ingredients from the shelves whilst Emily measured out a quantity of flour then proceeded to pour it from the scales into the bowl. Cubed pieces of butter floated like small yellow boats on a sea of iced water in a jug next to the bowl. These were drained then added to the flour.

  ‘Now Martha,’ instructed Emily, ‘Rub the fat in so that it makes large breadcrumbs please – ’

  Obligingly Martha rolled up her sleeves and set to her task whilst Emily untied a block of yeast from its paper.

  I was sitting in the corner reading although, every now and then, as the clock chimed in the hallway upstairs my eyes wandered around the room.

  Nothing had changed. Not the table nor the hearth, nor the white kitchen dresser with its wide in-built shelves and stack of six drawers underneath. On the top shelf stood a selection of bottles and jars; vinegar, cooking oil, mustard, jellies and jams most likely made by Aunt before she fell ill.

  Aunt B had died before we left Brussels. A letter had arrived the morning of our departure with the announcement. Consequently Emily and I had reached home only to find the house in deep mourning, our black dresses laid out on our beds like two shadows.

  Now Emily stood by the stove warming a pan of fresh milk, skimming the thick skin off the surface. Her face was flushed from the heat.

  ‘After we have made bread, we shall make a start on a lunch cake for Father,’ she said glancing over at me. ‘Are you going to help?’

  ‘It is far too small in here for the three of us baking – ’

  ‘It is far too small with one of us reading,’ replied she tersely. ‘You are very irritable this morning.’

  ‘Am I? – ’

  Martha, perhaps fearing an argument, scuttled through to the back kitchen and began banging pots.

  ‘Are you are ill?’ Emily said. ‘You might have caught a chill yesterday? It is damp out – ’

  ‘I am perfectly fine,’ I replied but even as I spoke the same heaviness descended upon me that I had experienced during the last few days at the Pensionat. It was not that I did not want to be back in Yorkshire. All had been calm and orderly on our return and Emily & I were received with a great deal of affection by both Anne and my father. To be surrounded by the people one loves is a blessing. To walk through rooms familiar to one since childhood, to touch the furniture and listen to the sounds of the house. But soon these things dissipated and I began to feel anxious and claustrophobic for it was as if I was being re-absorbed back into the building, into its very fabric, the bricks and mortar, the floorboards and walls, the clock ticking in the hallway and the endless rounds of domestic duties which were all pulling me inwards until I found it hard to breathe. One day I thought; I will wake to find my skin grafting itself to the wallpaper, my hair growing through the linen sheets, rooting itself to the building’s very foundations.

  Liberty means different things to different people. For Emily being allowed to return home meant freedom & independence. She could do as she pleased when she lived here, but for me the polar opposite was true. I was back where I had started, except now Aunt was dead.

  ‘She suffered,’ father said that first morning we arrived home. He was sat by the fire, gripping his walking stick, eyes to the flames. He had not asked how Emily or I had fared in Brussels. He had not asked about our journey back home. Not one enquiry. Emily had taken his hand to comfort him. ‘She was in agonies,’ he groaned.

  ‘We could not get here any faster father, but Anne says the Reverend Bradley made a good sermon?’

  ‘Did she?’ he had muttered. ‘Anne said that?’

  ‘And that she was buried close-by to mother,’ I added looking at Emily whose mane-like head rested on father’s shoulder. When our ship docked in London her mood had visibly brightened and with every jolt of our carriage it had brightened again.

  ‘I have a letter here father, from Monsieur Heger,’ I said thinking it might cheer him a little.

  ‘He wanted you to have it on our return.’

  ‘To what end?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow – ’

  ‘Yes, perhaps tomorrow,’ echoed Emily. ‘This is not the time for letters,’ she added slowly rising from her knees to throw another log on the fire. ‘Leave it for now. There will be plenty of time later on - ’ Her voice was steady and I knew she was right, but how much later – a day, a week, a month?

  Emily added butter and sugar to the hot milk, and the kitchen, which already smelt of yeast, now filled with a sweet, buttery smell.

  ‘That is a heavenly scent,’ I said.

  ‘Will you want the dried goods?’ asked Martha.

  ‘The fruit and a little salt. Fetch me a spoon while you are over there too, would you?’

  ‘There is not much left in the packet’ noted Martha placing the twist of dried fruit on the table. ‘ We will be needing more for next week – ’

  Emily nodded. ‘Anne will fetch it with the rest on Friday if you tell her.’

  ‘Is that Aunt’s recipe? – ’ I asked and Emily nodded.

  ‘You should go upstairs,’ she said. ‘ You will be much more comfortable there – ’

  ‘I am in the way – ’

  ‘Yes. We’ll go out later if you would like? For a walk?’

  ‘It is too cold for walking – ’

  ‘Then go on upstairs,’ she repeated, not unkindly, but there was no denying it was an order.

  It was barely four o’clock when I entered the parlour. A fire had been lit in the hearth but the heat it threw out was pitiful. I paced up and down to keep myself warm, groping in the early afternoon darkness for images of myself back in Brussels, the girl bent over her books, the student standing by the window staring out over the garden or sat debating some subject or other with her teacher. I could dip my hand down into that time as if I were fishing for memories but what good were these to me now, stranded as I was like a fish on the banks of some desultory Lethe. Soon any recollection of what had passed would vanish forever. Then it seemed to me how vain was the work of the historian who ever supposed he or she could piece together something as fragmented as a human life.

  Truth has no biographer. All historians can hope for is an approximation, the glimpse of a stone tossed into a river by a wilful young woman, but a glimpse only, not the whole, never the whole, rounded shape.

  The light was unclear in Aunt’s bedroom. Tabby had stripped the mattress of its sheets but she had not drawn the drapes so everything swam in shadows. The room was as I recalled, large with a good-sized window overlooking the garden – as children we had sat in it on many an afternoon being taught by Aunt how to mend our clothes, hem calico for our nightdresses and occasionally embroider some oddment of cloth with coloured silk. None of us appreciated this instruction or were particularly skilled at it, much to Aunt’s disappointment.

  Now her bed was stripped bare, a few ornaments sat on a chest of drawers next to a set of the Methodist Magazine. How in heaven, I thought, had she felt all those years previously when she first entered this room having left her own life in the West Country to
come and look after her sister’s children? The sacrifices it must have meant. The end of one life, the start of another filled with nothing but duty and obligation.

  ‘You always seem to know what you want to do next,’ Aunt had said to me once in a rare moment of intimacy.

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘No,’ she replied pursing her lips. ‘I doubt that you do. You and your sisters never think of yourselves as fortunate. But you are. You are strong-willed each of you, some might even say stubborn. I never had very much character. Do not mistake what I am saying, I can be as mulish as the next person but – ’ here she started picking at the edge of the counterpane, loosening threads. ‘But, well sometimes I wonder what life might have brought if your mother had not died. Certain things are expected of us. You are shocked I suppose? What I am saying is selfish. But the hopes of my youth did not encompass all this, being here, bringing the four of you up…’

  ‘You have done much good here – ’

  ‘But what good has it done me?’

  I hesitated. Hearing Aunt speak in this fashion was like finding an icefield turning to water. On the surface she still looked herself, but what she said did not sound like her. All those years she had done her duty, reared us, run our father’s house, had she secretly been imagining a different life altogether? Did she view her situation as something diluted by necessity, dissolved to a thin residue of drudgery and decay?

  Her black silk dress and white lace cap hung in the wardrobe.

  ‘Everything needs dusting,’ Emily’s voice came from behind. I had not heard her enter the room.

  ‘It was only cleaned last week – ’

  ‘I shall do it again tomorrow. The hearth needs sweeping – ’

  ‘That is Martha’s job surely?’ I said for that was why we had employed the child, but Emily said it helped stop her from dwelling upon Aunt’s death, keeping herself busy with the house.

  ‘Is father in his study?’

  ‘He has gone over to Keighly this morning,’ she said glancing through the darkened window.

  ‘And afterwards he is to go to Bradford – ’

  ‘The house is so different now.’ I picked up one of the church pamphlets that lay on the shelf and started flicking through its well-thumbed pages. ‘You and Anne were closer to her than I was, even so – ’ my voice trailed off. The truth of death is hard to articulate. The fact you will never see that person again yet still you see them everywhere. The fact that you will never hear their voice call out your name yet they constantly whisper things in your ear. Their dreams pursue you; their disappointments haunt you –

  From downstairs the front doorbell rang.

  Emily looked at me, ‘I am not going down,’ she said quietly.

  I crept onto the dimly lit landing and peered over the banister. Tabby was walking across the hallway to open the door.

  ‘The Reverend is out,’ I heard her say.

  A male voice replied. ‘But I have an appointment. May I wait?’

  Moments later Tabby came upstairs.

  ‘It is the Reverend Bradley. Says he wants to speak with you.’

  ‘Not with me,’ Emily said.

  ‘Well, I shan’t talk to him by myself. You will have to come downstairs.’

  ‘Anne is here, is she not?’

  Tabby shook her head and mumbled something inaudible under her breath. ‘He knows you are both at home,’ she said turning her stout little body around to go back down to the kitchen.

  The Reverend Bradley was not a tall or striking man. He was the type of individual one could easily lose in a crowd. With thin, sandy-coloured hair and a pale, milky complexion it also seemed he might, at any moment, fade into the background yet his voice was loud and quite made up for any lack of physical presence.

  ‘It is good to see both of you back in England,’ he boomed. ‘We cannot have all our young ladies living abroad, it would not do, not at all, not at all.’

  ‘We have hardly been away that long,’ I said.

  ‘Nonetheless your father has missed you. How did you find Brussels? To your liking, I expect? Or perhaps not? Most likely the latter. Of course I have been abroad myself,’ said he launching himself into a long list of countries through which he had travelled. Indeed so impressive was this list, or so he opined, that he took the greatest of pains to enunciate each word so that his audience could fully appreciate the breadth of his knowledge, ‘It-aaaly,’ he boomed, ‘Germany, Switz-er-land, Frrr-aance, Spain, Egypt, the Greek islands, Turkey– ’

  I glanced over at Emily but just as she had done when in the presence of the Reverend and Mrs Jenkins she sat with her back to us, her face turned to the wall.

  ‘In actual fact I enjoyed Brussels enormously,’ I said. ‘London too, what little I saw of it. The great dome of St Paul’s – ’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ interrupted our guest. ‘There are great sights to be seen in our fair capital. Brussels too I am sure, although I believe you were studying in a Catholic establishment, were you not?’ Here the Reverend Bradley emphasized the word Catholic as though his tongue had been dipped in poison.

  His gaze quite froze me.

  I stuttered.

  I said, ‘The Pensionat Heger was, as you say a Catholic establishment, but we were not forced to participate in any of the school’s religious activities. Emily and I attended the Protestant church – ’

  ‘Their practices were amusing to you no doubt?’

  ‘Amusing?’ I said. ‘You make it sound as if Catholics were a different race from us, Sir. I can assure you quite the opposite is true, they are quite the same as ourselves. They eat and drink and enjoy literature and music. They laugh and cry, celebrate the birth of their children, mourn the passing of their loved ones – ’

  ‘Quite so, quite so but – ’

  ‘Have you ever been in Brussels, Sir?’

  ‘Not in that particular city, no, however I am well acquainted with Catholic practices having travelled extensively throughout Europe. For instance – ’

  Here the Revd Bradley began a long monologue illustrating his unparalleled and intimate knowledge of the True Faith. Knowledge that brooked the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the Sacrosanctum Concilium, however I hardly listened for I was in no mood to hear of these or any other Catholic complexities. Rather I wanted him to know about the apple trees in the Pensionnat Heger’s garden and how their blossom caught in my hair, of the long, cool corridors that ran through the interior of the school whose smell was a mixture of lavender and beeswax, of the bells of Ste Gudule ringing out across the city while skylarks scattered across the rooftops in their hundreds of thousands like tiny stone arrowheads – in short I wanted to tell him about what mattered, I wanted to tell him the truth.

  II

  ‘You seem anxious,’ father said after we had breakfasted the following morning, but his voice was not one of concern so much as irritation. He tapped his hand quietly on the mantelpiece in time to the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I heard you pacing your room last night.’

  ‘I could not sleep.’

  ‘Perhaps if you were more active during the daytime? I have some copying that needs doing - ’

  ‘I thought you were out today, Father?’ Emily interjected. She was trying to deflect his attention away from me – for yesterday, after the Revd Bradley had finally left us, father had made me read to him for three hours without rest while Emily and Anne sat in the next room writing. Not that the length of time I spent reading was in itself unappealing. It was the fact that none of the words made the slightest impression upon me.

  ‘Carry on,’ he had said if I paused even for a moment until finally I had to tell him I was tired.

  ‘You are too young to be tired. Still if you cannot continue – ’

  ‘It is my eyes, father – ’

  ‘Your eyes? It is my eyes that are weak – ’

  ‘Mine too – ’ I said although I might well have been a ghost for all the attention he paid me.<
br />
  Now Emily helped Anne and Martha clear back the plates from the table while I gathered up a pile of mending from the basket and when Emily and Anne had returned from the kitchen we all three settled down at the table to sew.

  Emily, who sat with her back to the window, was illumined by a halo of pale grey light. I watched as she threaded a needle with black thread and afterwards smiled at Anne whose face lay in shadow. In the hallway the clock ticked heavily. I had forgotten how the sound dominated the house, how the fall of its cold metal workings could be heard in almost every room measuring time, moving us around as we rose in the mornings, made our beds, cleaned, cooked, read, ate. There wasn’t one moment of any given day that this flamed mahogany timepiece did not regulate.

  ‘Can you pass me the scissors?’ Anne asked tying a knot in the wool she was using.

  ‘When will you return to Thorp Green?’ I asked. Anne cut the yarn and said the Robinsons were expecting her back in two weeks.

  ‘They are good children,’ she added when Emily pulled a face. ‘It could be a worse situation.’

  ‘Have you thought any more about our school?’ Emily asked turning to me. I replied that I had not, despite Father telling us that Aunt had left each of her nieces some three-hundred pounds in her will which would be more than sufficient to set up a small teaching establishment.

  ‘Such an undertaking,’ I said, ‘I do not believe that we are ready yet – ’

  Anne, sweet-natured child that she was, agreed, whilst Emily did not seem enthused either way.

  I picked up a chemise from the basket. ‘We would need to find pupils and a suitable property – ’ I said none too inspired myself and so changing the subject asked if Anne might return to us for the Christmas holidays but she did not seem to think this possible and so in the face of our general despondency Emily commanded that we all go through to father’s study where she sat down at the piano and for a short while played us some tunes.

  It was later that day that Anne decided to walk the three miles to the lending library at Keighly. To my surprise Emily said she would prefer to stay at home. I retired upstairs to lie on my bed but a short while later heard my sister’s footsteps on the staircase after which the door swung open and Emily entered.