The Philosopher's Daughters

by Alison Booth

  Yet she would never be alone, not while she had Henry by her side. He needed her and she him. After drying her eyes on his handkerchief, she took his hand, that large comforting hand with its strong fingers. They watched the wharf and its waving figures recede, and that last spot of canary yellow vanished from sight.

  An hour later they were still on deck. Only the ship’s wake and Sarah’s memories remained to connect her with home. The light was fading and the sky to the west was patterned in swirls of pink and grey. The salty air began to feel damp as the evening quickened. A few seagulls flew alongside them, but their cries were all but drowned out by the throbbing of the ship’s engines.

  The SS Oceana was starting to rock and Sarah hoped she wouldn’t be seasick. Averting her eyes from the choppy Thames water, muddy brown and opaque, she focused on the horizon. A cool breeze had arisen but she didn’t want to go inside. Going inside would mark the termination of their departure and the start of the voyage, and she wasn’t yet ready for that.

  Despite Henry’s attempts to distract her, the image of her father and Harriet, standing side by side on the wharf, wouldn’t leave her. She was abandoning that stooped old man in the shabby black greatcoat. She was abandoning her only sister, that slender young woman wrapped in the yellow scarf and skeins of brightly coloured streamers. And she was leaving behind Aunt Charlotte, who had been almost a mother to her for so many years.

  It would be eighteen months to two years, Henry had said, and it seemed like an eternity to her now. Yet people did make the return journey from New South Wales. Henry had done it, and Henry had inherited money enough to pay for as many trips as they wanted, and more. Although she was nineteen now, she’d never before been on a long sea voyage; the furthest she’d been was crossing the Channel to Calais, when it had been so rough that she’d been seasick all the way there and back.

  ‘Look at the geese,’ Henry said.

  They were flying overhead, fifty or so, in a low V formation. Sarah watched them wheel along the estuary, following its curves as if they were using the river as a navigational aid, until finally they were out of sight.

  ‘Do you remember the day I proposed?’ Henry said.

  ‘Of course I do.’ Sarah couldn’t resist adding, ‘And the day after we had our first argument.’ She didn’t want to look at him, not when there was a harvest moon newly visible in the eastern sky, not when she was still blaming him for the separation from her family.

  ‘Was that an argument?’ he said. ‘I thought it was a discussion.’

  ‘Perhaps you need training so you’ll notice when I’m arguing with you and when we’re discussing.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve ever argued, Sarah, and I hope we never will.’

  ‘It was when you suggested going to Australia for our honeymoon.’

  ‘I thought you wanted this trip.’

  ‘I know I agreed, but right now I’m feeling sad about leaving Gower Street and my family.’

  ‘But didn’t you find living in Gower Street claustrophobic at times? Always together in that tall terrace house. It was a narrow life.’

  She felt his words relentlessly cutting into her. ‘You’re wrong, Henry. It wasn’t narrow.’

  Close to tears again, she twisted away to hide her face. ‘It’s true that we were educated at home. But that was so we wouldn’t be tainted by what Father calls “girls’ nonsense”.’ Her voice was nothing better than a croak and she coughed to clear her throat. She felt that she and Harriet had been lucky to be taught by tutors who were subject-experts and by their father too. He’d been a tough teacher, tolerating no lapses in logic. He’d insisted they learn to swim, and at one stage had thought that fencing would be good exercise for them until Aunt Charlotte had talked him out of it. And how proud he’d been when Sarah began to excel at the piano, and especially proud when Harriet had shown a flair for his subject, political economy, although her obsession with painting seemed to leave him unmoved.

  Now her hurt feelings morphed into anger and her cheeks began to burn. Her upbringing had been broad and she wouldn’t tolerate Henry’s criticism of it. She’d say nothing more until he apologised.

  At last, Henry spoke. ‘Please look at me, Sarah.’

  She turned when he put his hands on her shoulders. Gazing into his warm yellow-brown eyes, she felt her anger ebb away.

  ‘I’m sorry I was insensitive,’ he said. ‘Your family’s so different to mine.’ He pushed a strand of hair off her forehead and took her hand. ‘I know my parents love me but we’re not close. We don’t really know one another, even after all this time. So we don’t miss one another when we’re apart.’

  The steamer was pitching more as it moved away from the shelter of the land, and she tightened her grip on the ship’s rail and Henry’s hand. A flock of seagulls was wheeling so low overhead that their shrieking could be heard above the ship’s engines. Although the sun had sunk below the horizon, there was enough light remaining to see that the water appeared cleaner.

  The harvest moon continued its advance up the eastern sky, ripening visibly. By the time it had evolved into a glowing red disc, she found she was beginning to look forward to the future.

  Chapter 5

  Measuring Out Time

  Harriet stood in Sarah’s old bedroom in Gower Street. Not even a week had passed since Sarah’s departure but already it seemed like months. She watched raindrops lash at the windowpane and slide down the glass, soon to join the pool of grimy water on the sill. Idly she traced the path of one of the drops with her forefinger, and then another. If she concentrated hard on this task, she might forget the emptiness that she felt. The house was too silent; all she could hear was the clock in the hall, measuring out time. She breathed on the windowpane, watching it mist over, and with a handkerchief wiped away the smudge left by her fingertip. She continued polishing the entire pane until her handkerchief was black with soot. The end of an era, she thought as she folded up the handkerchief so that the dirty bits were hidden. Time to get on with her life.

  She ran downstairs to the drawing room and stood in front of her mother’s portrait, the painting that might almost have been of Sarah. But today she didn’t feel soothed by the picture: for the first time she noticed its failings. The paint was too flat. It wasn’t glowing as her memories of her mother glowed. And it was not how she remembered Sarah either. The composition was too static, too posed.

  She would paint her sister as she’d seen her on their last shopping trip in Argyll Street, when Sarah had paused for a moment under an awning, waiting for Harriet to catch up. Wearing her bright red coat, Sarah had seemed almost incandescent against the dull background of the wet afternoon. Drably dressed creatures flitted around her like moths around a beacon. At that moment Harriet had seen the street as if it was a revelation; the glistening of the raindrops and the stick figures of pedestrians huddled against the drizzle. Grey on grey, everything appeared at first drained of colour. Yet the almost infinite number of greys were not grey at all but built up from the refraction of many colours.

  She would try to construct this street on her canvas with colour upon colour, with small dabs of paint to create the appearance of flickering as the rain fell, drop after relentless drop; small splodges of paint that taken together would give an impression of a London street.

  After this, Harriet often spent the afternoons in Sarah’s room. She and Rose pushed the bed against the wall and brought down from the attic an old deal table that had been put there years ago. Harriet used this as a workbench and she set up her easel next to it. This was her first experience of having a studio of her own and it was no small consolation that it was Sarah’s space that she was using.

  Even with this distraction, Harriet thought several weeks later when she was painting in Sarah’s room, the house still seemed too quiet without her. Without her endless piano playing, the whistl
ing and singing and, most of all, her laughter. Harriet felt almost as if one of her senses had been turned off and she was left not quite whole.

  It was true that she had become aware of noises she had never noticed before: the rumble of carriages in the street, the shouting of hawkers, and the conversation of pedestrians wafting up to the second-floor window. Yet those are the sounds of silence, she thought, this is what emptiness sounds like.

  She put down her brush; she’d allowed her emotion to obscure her judgement of the quality of the light. She’d made the sky much too dark and flat; the pavement was too grey. And nowhere did the canvas hint at the shimmering of rain.

  She was at that stage when she couldn’t judge whether what she’d done was – accidentally, serendipitously – a brilliant impression of an autumn London street or was instead a flat, dull painting, the clumsy rendition of an amateur.

  She felt it was the latter. The trouble was she had no talent.

  After cleaning her brushes, she shrugged off her smock and threw it over a chair. She had to get away from her failure. In a few days’ time she would return to it. In a few days’ time she would be able to face the truth.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Why Not Think of Standing for Election as a Poor Law Guardian?’

  Harriet pulled her coat more closely around her. Although the afternoon was sunny, the breeze was cool. For the past few days she’d done nothing but help her father out with his papers and had barely found time to paint. Yet one couldn’t be cooped up inside all the time and her friend Violet was a wonderful walking companion, the only woman in Harriet’s acquaintance who walked at the same pace as her.

  She watched Violet slam the front door of her Islington house behind her, blocking out the shrieks of her small children, who were overjoyed at the prospect of being left with Violet’s husband and their nanny. Violet, who had a weakness for hats, adjusted her latest – a veiled confection of cherries perched on a flimsy-looking straw frame – before seizing Harriet’s arm. ‘It’s time you embarked on your own life instead of doing your father’s work,’ she said. ‘You could be writing your own articles, not checking his.’

  Harriet braced herself for one of Violet’s lectures. ‘He always acknowledges my contribution. Far more generously than I deserve.’ The two women marched at high speed around Thornhill Square towards the Caledonian Road. ‘And I’m learning so much from him. It’s like an apprenticeship.’

  ‘You’re his unpaid secretary. You’ve got your own life to live.’

  Harriet flushed with annoyance but decided to keep her peace.

  ‘Are you still painting?’ Violet released Harriet’s arm and strode ahead down a narrow, cobbled alleyway, raising her voice so that it reverberated off the high brick walls on either side.

  ‘Yes, but not seriously.’ Harriet didn’t know whether to give it up or to carry on, but she mustn’t tell Violet this, or reveal her doubts about her talent. Practical Violet would tolerate neither indecision nor introspection. ‘I paint when I feel like it and find the time.’ She glanced at her left shoe. Something that looked like orange rind had become attached to the toe. When they emerged from the alleyway, she kicked it into the gutter; she wished she could kick away her self-doubt like that. ‘Father isn’t demanding and I can’t paint for too long at any one time.’ She didn’t mention the conclusion she’d reached that morning: that her painting of Sarah in Argyll Street was the best she’d ever done. And that she was looking forward to finishing the picture that Charles had commissioned.

  As they walked towards Somers Town, the streets became grimier. They passed a group of small children playing with a rotten fish-head, using it as a ball. One of them picked it up to throw at a boy holding a stick of wood as a bat; he hit it high into the air and it just missed hitting Harriet. ‘Good stroke!’ she shouted. ‘Great style!’ The boy looked pleased and scampered around like a clown while the other children stared. Their feet were bare. Two little girls, identical twins, had pieces of red rag tying back their greasy fair hair. Thick yellow snot decorated their upper lips like small moustaches.

  ‘If you want to do some other work instead,’ Violet said, undeflected from her train of thought, ‘why not think of standing for election as a Poor Law Guardian?’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m much too young.’ Harriet really meant that she wasn’t cut out for it. Even Violet, ten years older than she, often found this work harrowing.

  ‘You’re twenty-two. And you’d have lots of backers. You’ve got all the right credentials.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll stand in a few years’ time. At the moment Father needs me and he’s likely to need me more as he gets older.’

  ‘Or less,’ said Violet. ‘Don’t sacrifice your life for your father.’

  ‘It’s no sacrifice. It’s what I want.’ Yet Harriet was no longer sure of this. Since Sarah had left, it seemed that some of her old certainties had gone as well.

  ‘There’s marriage too. What are you doing about that?’

  ‘I don’t want to marry. I’ve told you that before. Have you been talking to Aunt Charlotte?’

  ‘No,’ Violet said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of thinking up that question on my own.’

  ‘I don’t want safety and respectability.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Harriet decided not to tell Violet that she found most men physically repulsive. There’d been a couple of exceptions: that male model from the life drawing class, for instance. She could never have brought him home despite Father’s broad-mindedness. And she certainly wouldn’t want to marry a man like that: he had a beautiful body but no conversation. She would marry no one. She said, ‘I don’t want to lose my freedom.’

  ‘It’s easier to be free with the right man than it is to be single,’ Violet said.

  ‘I’m not so sure. Married women fritter away their time making life pleasant for men. I don’t think we evolved for that purpose alone.’

  Violet laughed, but Harriet was tired of her well-meaning advice. She added firmly, ‘We’re all different, Violet. You’re like a new convert. You want everyone to follow your beliefs.’

  ‘I’m interfering, I know. Why do you put up with me? You should cut me off. Do what you want.’ Violet seized Harriet’s arm again; she was domineering even when she was telling Harriet to stop her from being so. Harriet wasn’t sure if she was holding her elbow out of affection or because she wished metaphorically to propel her along the path of her life as she was literally propelling her along the street.

  ‘You’re advising me what to do now,’ she said, laughing. ‘And you’re steering me as if I were a boat.’

  Their route took them through more squalid streets, smelling of rubbish and sewage, and lined with shabby terrace houses; blank-faced tenements with unpainted window frames and sometimes no front door. Harriet peered through these yawning openings and saw ramshackle staircases, often stripped of banisters and balustrades: probably burned for firewood like the front doors. Those of the residents who didn’t look at them in open hostility begged instead; begged them for money, begged them to buy what they had to offer: everything of the best. Matches, pencils, useless pieces of scrap picked up from some rubbish heap or less useless objects stolen from the back of a delivery cart or lifted from someone’s pocket.

  ‘How can we run a country like this?’ Violet said, when they emerged into a wider street and were able to talk again.

  ‘That’s one of the things Father writes about,’ Harriet reminded Violet, in part to lessen the guilt that she often felt for having too much. ‘He has ideas about how to make things better.’

  ‘The pen is mightier than the sword and all that.’ Violet’s tone was dismissive. ‘I never get time to read and I can’t bear to sit still.’

  They walked over the iron pedestrian bridge spanning Regent’s Canal. It was a popular place for su
icides; only the previous week two bodies had been fished out of the water. Paupers who’d tied bricks around their necks and gone under, like unwanted cats or dogs. The canal water, as black as oil, was so viscous it looked almost solid. Once underneath that surface it would be hard for a body to rise again.

  At last they were at Regent’s Park and Harriet filled her lungs with the scent of recently mown grass. Crowds of people, drawn outdoors by the unusually sunny weather, thronged the paths; women in fine dresses and hats and even the occasional parasol; men in suits and tall hats; well-dressed, well-scrubbed children; all enjoying the almost carnival atmosphere induced by the rare coincidence of a blue sky with a Sunday in late October. And sauntering too; Harriet and Violet were forced to slow down to the leisurely pace that Harriet found exhausting. She saw a break in the crowd and accelerated, only to ram into the back of an elegantly dressed woman who had suddenly stopped in front of her. She felt her legs slam into the light timber frame of the woman’s bustle and rubbed at her thighs while both women apologised profusely.

  ‘Stupid fashion,’ Violet said once they were out of earshot. ‘But I suppose no more stupid than my hat.’ She patted at the cherries, as if to reassure herself that they were still there, before returning to her account of her work. They were still discussing this when they reached the Euston Square entrance to the Underground Railway where they were to part.

  ‘Do let me know if you change your mind about standing for the election,’ Violet said as they came to a halt. ‘It would be wonderful to work together.’ She tried to kiss Harriet but their hats were so wide brimmed that she succeeded merely in kissing the air.

  Harriet gave her a hug instead, and in so doing knocked her hat slightly awry. Its rakish angle suited her. A middle-aged man coming up the stairs, distracted by the sight of Violet’s lovely face, tripped on the top step and bumped into Harriet. Although he regretted it deeply, his words were addressed to Violet rather than to Harriet, as if she were one of Violet’s accessories like an umbrella or a pet poodle.