Swan River

by David Reynolds

  That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and

  hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed

  makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little,

  I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway

  a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my

  ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am

  paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead.

  But I must dare all …

  * * * * *

  My father had said that the story of his father was the story of his mother as well. Reading Sis’s 1888 diary and reflecting on what my father had written and told me, I began to see what he meant. And over the next few years, I saw that he was right: to make a form of sense of what happened to my grandfather, Tom Reynolds – and why he travelled to Swan River, Manitoba – Sis’s story was essential, and the most essential part of it occurred before she met my grandfather.

  * * * * *

  When she fell in love with Stanley, Sis had been her father’s housekeeper for nearly eight years. Her work was not physically arduous – she had the help of the two servants, Big Alice and Little Alice – but her responsibilities were considerable and her freedom limited. She was, as I had told Deborah, bossy, elegant and tough, but she was also deeply attached to her father – more attached than she would have been had her mother been alive – and she hated having a secret from him. She wanted him to know about her fondness for Stanley – she wouldn’t use the word ‘love’ to her father, not yet, anyway – but she dreaded telling him.

  In the years between her mother’s death and her discovery of Stanley, the only love Sis had felt had been for her father – he had not remarried; he revered the memory of his wife, and remained very close to her two sisters, who were frequent visitors to his home at 59 Norfolk Road, Dalston. He had been the constant beneficiary of Sis’s attention in that she cared about what he thought, considered how he felt, wanted him to be happy; she loved him, as far as she could see, in accordance with her Aunt Kate’s definition of the love that follows passion; though, of course, she had never felt passion for her father, never before felt the way she felt about Stanley.

  To tell her father that she cared about another man was embarrassing, but, worse than that, it seemed disloyal. But she had to tell him and wanted to tell him, and, indeed, wanted him and Stanley to meet. She discussed the matter with Kate, who offered to talk to ‘Old George’ (as – despite his being only forty-seven – the family referred to him, to distinguish him from ‘Young George’). Sis rejected this offer; she would tell him herself.

  She spoke to her father late one night in his room on the ground floor across the hall from the drawing room. As always, when he was at home in the evening, his room was a mass of flickering shadows and yellow candlelight, with ten or twelve lighted candles standing on a variety of surfaces. Old George had grown up in the 1840s, before gas lighting was cheaply available, and, although he permitted and used it in the rest of the house, he preferred candles, lots of them, in his own room. From about 9 pm, he would lie on his bed, a majestic chunk of rosewood, four feet wide with solid curved ends inlaid with ebony and mother of pearl. As my father said more than once, a lot can be learned about a man from his bed. Old George had bought this one in Paris soon after the death of his wife and it neatly reflected its owner who was strong, well-built, imposing and for the most part unpretentious. Propped up against several pillows, surrounded by newspapers, journals, books and pamphlets, he would read by the light of two three-stemmed candelabra, one to either side of him, but would break off to hold court with any friend or member of his family who cared to call.

  That evening, Sis told him that she had a friend she would like him to meet and that his name was Stanley Andrews. He grunted and smiled with his eyes and through his beard, and asked her why.

  She said, ‘Because I like him and I am hoping you will like him.’

  He went on smiling and told her to ask Stanley to dinner.

  An arrangement was made for 18 September, a Friday more than two weeks ahead. In the interim Sis took Young George to meet Stanley at the Britannia, her idea being that, though Ernest could be counted on to talk and be amusing at the all-important dinner, his elder brother, who was bookish and less outgoing, might be less shy if he knew their guest a little better. That evening seemed to go well. Young George was evidently impressed by Stanley’s knowledge of his personal obsession, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and afterwards proclaimed him to be ‘a splendid chap’.

  On 18 September, at around 7 pm, Sis looked out from the window of her first-floor bedroom and idly watched the lamplighter igniting the gas lamp opposite. It was a warm evening; Stanley was not due for another thirty minutes and he would probably be the polite fifteen minutes late. She had already spent almost an hour dressing and, with Little Alice’s help, arranging her hair. She wore a white silk dress, which she had bought at Owles and Beaumont in Oxford Street a week previously; it was cut low at the neck to show off her collar bones and, like all dresses that year, had a narrow bustle; the skirt lifted from the floor and swirled around her ankles as she walked.

  Sis was usually confident in her appearance. She knew that, at five feet six inches, she was a tall woman; she thought that her face was striking rather than beautiful, and believed that she could counter the strength of her prominent nose by bringing a mistiness into her grey eyes by defocusing them. That evening, before Stanley arrived, she danced around her room with pleasure; she could feel it physically. She wondered whether she was mad, but decided that she was in love although that was perhaps a form of madness. Other young women had told her that they were in love – and she had dismissed them as scatterbrained. Now she knew what they meant, but was certain that she felt it more deeply than any of them ever had.

  She sat down at the small bureau beside the fire and picked up her diary. There was already a lot in it about Stanley: how he spoke to her so intelligently, amusingly and graciously, while gazing directly into her eyes; how handsome he looked with his well-brushed, thick, blond hair, a lock of which often fell forwards over his right eye, so that he frequently had to smooth it back; how strong and beautiful his hands were; how he stroked her hair and put his arms around her; how he had kissed her, and how he had said, ‘I love you Sis,’ and how she hadn’t been able to reply but had merely leaned back with her hands on his shoulders and smiled, before pulling him close and returning the kiss.

  On a clean page she wrote the date and a few lines describing her preparations for the coming evening and her great concern that her father should like Stanley. Her brothers liked him, or had said that they did, but it was her father who mattered, who, although a self-proclaimed rationalist, an unbeliever, had taught her that it was important to act on your feelings, as long as no one else suffered as a result.

  Sometime before 7.30 Sis put away her diary, picked up her feathered tortoiseshell fan, the one that Stanley had admired the first night she met him, left her room, crossed the landing to her brother George’s room and entered, as was her habit, without knocking.

  George had not begun to dress for the evening, and his hair was untidy. He was sitting by the window in shirt sleeves and work trousers on a ladder-backed wooden chair designed by his father, reading a book; he had not bothered to light the gas mantles, two pairs of which projected from the walls. Outside, the sun was low behind a group of old trees at the end of the garden, survivors from the time, thirty years earlier, when Norfolk Road had been a high-hedged lane leading north from Dalston through fields and copses to Shacklewell. The garden was long and wide for a London garden, but was a mess because none of the Thompsons liked gardening and Old George wouldn’t pay anyone to look after it.

  Young George told his sister that she looked quite magnificent, and, because he usually said what he meant, she believe
d him; at nineteen, he was already the thoughtful, congenial man who, more than seventy years later, would instruct me to go to Swan River, Manitoba.

  Sis left her brother so that he could dress. He and his father and his brother were to wear smoking-jackets that evening. Sis, who loved formality, would have liked them to wear white tie and tails, but her father refused to wear this garb in his own house and would rarely wear it to go out. George and Ernest, as on all such occasions, would follow their father’s lead, as would Stanley who had been warned in advance of this minor eccentricity.

  Sis went downstairs and entered her father’s room. Dressed much like his son in the room above – he had discarded his frock coat, tie and boots on returning from his office – he was lying on his bed, sucking a pipe and reading The Times. He gazed with penetrating blue eyes at his daughter, told her she looked ‘glorious’ and teased her, saying that there must be something exceptional about her friend Stanley.

  Sis was embarrassed and went so far as to say that she was fond of Stanley, and implored her father to be nice to him. He kissed her forehead and promised that he would be.

  After she had gone, Old George dressed, in his own way, for the occasion: starched white shirt, beige trousers, black waistcoat into which, as always, he carefully fixed his gold chain with pocket watch and seals, a dark silk tie in which he scrupulously crafted a Derby knot. He then spent some minutes brushing his hair and beard, and adjusting his collar, tie, lapels, cuffs, waistcoat and pocket watch while staring into a mahogany-framed mirror shaped like the doorway of a Norman church.

  Sis walked down another, narrower, flight of stairs, leading to a dark corridor, at the end of which was the kitchen where a large window overlooked the garden. She wanted to check that all was well and that the Alices knew what they had to do. Little Alice, pretty and large-eyed, was the live-in servant. Until a year before, when Old George had decided to reduce his expenditure, Big Alice had lived in as well and the two of them had shared the small attic room across the landing from Ernest’s room, which Little Alice had since had all to herself. Big Alice, a large, red-faced thirty-year-old, continued to come in three days a week to cook and do laundry; in return for one shilling and sixpence she had readily agreed to help out on this special evening and to stay over.

  Little Alice, who was nineteen and had worked for the Thompsons for two years, told Sis the next day that the change of routine had made the day almost as much fun as her weekly day off. The three of them had spent all day preparing food, polishing glasses and cutlery, and carrying the dining table upstairs from the breakfast room to the drawing room, something that only ever happened at Christmas or for large family parties. Then there had been the carry-on about answering the door and announcing the guest. Sis, whom the Alices had to call ‘Miss Amelia’, usually got one of them to answer the door, though the three men tended to answer it themselves. No one had ever been announced before. Sis had made Little Alice practise saying ‘Doctor Stanley Andrews’; she had repeated the words at least ten times, getting louder each time and trying not to giggle, until the mistress had been satisfied.

  She had been flattered to be asked to help with Sis’s hair; this, too, had never happened before. She had pinned up the luscious brown locks, so that Sis’s ears and neck were revealed in what Alice knew, from secretly perusing her mistress’s magazines, was the style made fashionable by Miss Edna May.

  When the doorbell eventually rang it almost went all wrong. As Little Alice hurried up the narrow stairs from the kitchen, and before Sis could stop him, Young George strode the short distance from the drawing room to the front door, opened it and greeted the guest. Crossly, Sis told her brother to go back to the drawing room and that Alice would announce Stanley. George queried this, saying that surely they all knew who Stanley was, and was brusquely reminded that their father had never met him. George tramped back to the drawing room, grinning and shaking his head.

  Meanwhile, a presumably bemused Stanley had handed Alice his top hat and removed his overcoat. In deference to his host, he was dressed down in a double-breasted frock coat, winged collar and tie, and light grey trousers, the uniform that thousands of men wore to go to work. Sis stood on tiptoes to give him a quick kiss on the cheek and walked off to join her father and brothers.

  As instructed, Little Alice knocked loudly on the open door of the drawing room. ‘Doctor Stanley Andrews.’ She got it right.

  Stanley was warmly greeted by the three men. When offered a drink, he

  asked for a sherry, and then everyone except Ernest sat down. Young George sat beside Stanley on the red velvet sofa facing the fire; Old George sat in his usual wing-backed armchair next to them. Sis took what her father called the French armchair, an elegant, low-backed item, more comfortable than it looked, at the other end of the fireplace; Ernest, a dandy even when dressed down to please his father, remained languidly standing, beside Sis, with one arm on the mantelpiece. After desultory conversation about his journey – from the Borough to Dalston by hansom cab – Stanley commented on the room, which was high-ceilinged and well-proportioned, and its furniture.

  He knew that this was Old George’s passion, but it was a natural topic for a stranger to address; despite the less than fashionable location, the furniture in the room was tasteful and looked old and expensive. A Queen Anne mahogany sideboard and the sofa, on which Stanley and Young George were sitting, usually dominated, but on this occasion the dining table and chairs, which were in Adam style, took up the end of the room away from the fire. Old George knew and loved furniture – it was his business – and would not permit any object that he considered ugly anywhere in the house, even in the servant’s attic room.

  Other rooms contained furniture that had been designed by Old George, but here it was almost all antique, bought in London auction rooms and on travels to northern Europe. There were two exquisite exceptions. The piano had been made by a disciple of William Morris; it was five years old, built from English beech, with carvings of bunches of grapes and trailing vine leaves entwined with ivy. Above the white marble mantelpiece was a chimney glass, one of many designed by Old George and manufactured in Shoreditch by his employers. Huge and intricate, it filled the chimney breast and reached upwards to within a few inches of the picture rail; it was a symmetrical arrangement of mirrors – fourteen small rectangular ones of various sizes set in wood panels around a central upright mirror – painted in white enamel and including shelves, balustrades, carvings, and paintings of flowers and songbirds. It was a beautiful object and Stanley was quick to increase his admiration when Ernest casually indicated that it was the work of ‘the pater’.

  The walls were papered in a cream, maroon and gold regency-stripe, and this was covered with paintings and prints: two large oils of flowers between the windows; a dramatic painting of the harbour at Cork with stormy waves and sky on the facing wall; prints of showgirls from Paris alongside draughtsman-style drawings of wooden tables and chairs on the wall facing the fire – these were Old George’s own work, his designs for items which had been manufactured by the thousand, some of which had won prizes. A pastel portrait of Old George’s father hung over the sideboard. Miniatures, sepia photographs and daguerrotypes of family members, dead and alive, stood on most available surfaces and were hung low on either side of the fire.

  Sis’s tension rose when Stanley asked whether the dark-wood davenport which stood between the windows was made by Sheraton, and Old George explained politely, but at some length, that there was no furniture known to have been made by Sheraton; the item was Chippendale, though unlikely to have been made by the man himself. This led old George to deliver a short lecture on Chippendale. And the influence of Adam on this doyen of the furniture industry gave Stanley the opportunity to say how much he admired Adam’s masterwork, the Adelphi.

  Sis, silent and apprehensive at this stage, wondered whether Stanley had prepared for his evening’s ordeal by reading up on the great architects and furniture-makers of the previo
us century; later Stanley told her that he hadn’t, that any well-educated man knew about Adam and the rest. When Old George asked him about his job, he answered fully but modestly. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, recently promoted to registrar, which meant he was second in line in his department, deputy to a distinguished consultant, a medical knight. He described his work of setting bones, and improving the mobility of old people, polio victims and children with congenital disorders, adding in just enough anecdote. He took care not to dominate the conversation, listening attentively to Old George’s reminiscence of falling off a bus and breaking his arm and of how pleased he had been to receive £26 in compensation just for the brief inconvenience.

  Before they sat down to eat, Old George told Big Alice to bring up two bottles of his Gerwurztraminer; he had secretly put this in the wine-cooler earlier, replacing the cheaper stuff that Sis had bought the previous day. Sis squeezed his arm surreptitiously in gratitude and saw this generosity as a sign that her father was on her side. Rare, expensive and hard to find in London, it was his favourite wine and she knew that he had carried these bottles back himself from a recent trip to Antwerp.

  Little Alice exhausted herself carrying heavily-laden trays up and down the stairs to the kitchen while Big Alice waited at the table; many courses were served; a red wine followed the white; Ernest prattled about theatre and music hall; Young George talked about evolution and why people were getting taller.

  At first Sis barely joined in the conversation. She listened intently and kept a nervous watch on the intricate manoeuvres of Big Alice as she served shellfish soup, bread, wine, water, but as she drank the strange-tasting wine, listened to the men and saw her father smiling warmly at Stanley her unease began to disappear.