There had been a special-shaped cloud that marked the destruction of the city. The mother of Pliny the Younger had noticed it at about one o’clock on the afternoon of that day in August, a cloud of unusual size and appearance hovering above Vesuvius in the shape of a mushroom or an umbrella pine tree, its trunk extending to a great height, opening out into branches at the top. Pliny the Elder had gone to investigate the strange formation, and had been amongst those killed.
The lines of gas-lamps were smaller and fainter as they stretched farther away across the places that had once been fields and orchards, and the snow whirled around in the pools of light. Once they had lived – or so it had seemed – far beyond the farthest north, then – for a while – on the half-shaped raw edge of things, the shanty-towned frontier; now they were being engulfed, their apartness forever ended. The open countryside had become rough-edged, muddy, unpicturesque, a desolate debris-scattered wildness with an air of utter abandonment, unsuspected so close to a huge city, with straggling farms and small accidental groupings down rutted roads, and the occasional houses of the rich, unused for most of the year, on the higher ground or looking out over rivers. There were still hills and trees, all that had been there before, rocky mounds, wooden shacks, grazing goats, like scenes from rural Montana. It was like the time when she and Charlotte had gone to see Grant’s Tomb a year or so earlier. Across the road from the shining new structure, the pillared Roman Pantheon, the empty fields had stretched away like something on the wrong side of a city, the outer edges where people came under cover of night to dump what they no longer wanted. Away from the Hudson and the swarming crowds of sightseers, amidst the rubbish-strewn lots, were the blank backs of billboards, ragged clumps of bare winter trees, a few scattered amateurishly half-demolished buildings, all waiting to be swept away. Amidst the fields and farms, isolated high-stooped row houses were being built here and there – with no discernible pattern – amongst raw earth, as if they were all that remained after some unforeseen cataclysm had swept everything else away. Sagging wooden palings gave a rural ambience to districts with metropolitan pretensions. Behind them, in ill-tended truck farms, sad-looking vegetables – most of them cabbages – were planted out like geometrical patterns in rows as stiff and straight-edged as the new streets. Their leaves were pale and limp, all the color faded out of them. They’d wither in the mouth like Dead Sea fruit, produce that no one would ever wish to eat. Roads petered out, led nowhere. Half-completed churches reared up in areas excavated so extensively for foundations that the roads seemed like bridges across the chasms of a wasteland, and the raised metal frameworks for the elevated railroads stretched out across wastelands of mud and desolate fields in the early twilight, to places where it seemed that there would never be anyone living.
She experienced the same sensation as she had that morning, that the featureless mounds of snow in the darkness between the lamps marked the buried ruins of a lost city, and not the site of a city that was yet to be built. The place where nothing had been built had become the place where something once was. The wooden signposts, the fenced-off sections, marked the areas claimed by archeologists, the places in which to dig. In its forum were the half-finished columns as left by the workman’s hand, – in its gardens the sacrificial tripod, – in its halls the chest of treasure, – in its baths the strigil, – in its theatres the counter of admission, – in its salons the furniture and the lamp, – in its cubicula the perfumes and the rouge of faded beauty, – and everywhere the bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life.
From these skeletons, from the condition and position of the bodies, the novel had been constructed, inventing names and lives for them: Burbo, Calenus, Diomed, Julia, Arbaces. When the dead had completely crumbled away, they left a space where they had once been amidst the solidified ashes. If plaster was poured into this space, like a cast being made for a statue, the faces and figures of those who had once been there were recreated. This was what Giuseppe Fiorelli had done at Pompeii. As she looked at Linnaeus’s painting of herself, the painting that bore her name, but in which she did not appear, she thought of this idea of a nothingness where a life had once been lived, where all that remained was what once had been around it.
She thought, most of all, of her writing materials – outside her family, Charlotte and Linnaeus were among the few people who knew (or “had known” in Linnaeus’s case: death demanded a whole new grammatical construction) that she wrote – the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin in the shape of a bundle of leather-bound books tied together by a strap. It was in here that she kept her ink and pens, her lists of titles.
The Shape of the Clouds.
The title had come to her that morning. It was one that she had to use. Late last night, and in the course of the day, what would be the first sentences had started to form in her head. She thought of it as being a story, but it might develop into something more. She felt the impulse, the weight, of something more substantial inside her. She waited until a sentence was perfect: then she could write it down, her scratching pen the only sound in the silent room. Once she had started, the words flowed, at least five hundred words a day. That was what she aimed to achieve every day.
She looked at the reflection of her face in the dark glass of the night-backed window, and smoothed her just-combed hair, hearing the voices of the maidens in The Mikado, preparing Pitti-Sing for her wedding day, dressing her hair, and painting her face and lips.
“Braid the raven hair –
Weave the supple tress –
Deck the maiden fair
In her loveliness –
Paint the pretty face –
Dye the coral lip –
Emphasize the grace
Of her ladyship!
Art and nature, thus allied,
Go to make a pretty bride.”
She looked at her face reflected in the dark glass, the reflection without braiding, without paint.
Supple.
Fair.
Loveliness.
Pretty.
Grace.
Pretty.
Six crosses in a row.
This raven had brought an unkindness.
Pitti-Sing’s voice sang the next part as a solo.
“Sit with downcast eye –
Let it brim with dew –
Try if you can cry –
We will do so, too.
When you’re summoned, start
Like a frightened roe –
Flutter, little heart,
Colour, come and go! …”
This she had managed.
She had cried.
She had started in fright when she was summoned.
Her heart had fluttered; her color had come and gone.
An unkindness of ravens.
A desert of lapwings. It stretched away before her, and there was no birdsong.
A tittering of magpies.
Titter! Titter!
The magpies sniggered about what they knew, as they flew across against the clouds.
One for sorrow.
Two for joy.
Three for a wedding.
Four for a death.
Five for silver.
Six for gold.
Seven for a secret never to be told.
A Secret Never to be Told.
A Sin without Pardon.
(Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.)
A child should always say what’s true.
Robert Louis Stevenson said this in “Whole Duty of Children,” the fifth poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses, just after “Young Night Thoughts.”
All night long, and every night,
When my mamma puts out the light,
I see the people marching by,
As plain as day, before my eye.
“Ihre Augen waren von Tränen getrübt.”
Her eyes were clouded with tears.
She knew that sentence
would come in useful.
“I, blinded with tears …”
The words came to her from far away and long ago.
“… Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs
As in a dream. Dimly I could descry
The stern black-bearded kings with wolvish eyes,
Waiting to see me die …”
31
She went across to the fireside, and pulled her warmed nightgown on over her head, then returned to her usual place standing at the window. She’d disordered her hair, and would need to brush it again. Her hairbrush was where she had left it, precisely aligned on the window ledge.
Intermittently, the moon emerged from behind the snow-filled clouds. It had still been daylight – however dark and wintry – when she, Charlotte, and Kate had waved goodbye to Ben, another version of the terra-cotta Macbeth figures. He’d said his goodbyes to Mama, alone in her bedroom, trying to understand what she was attempting to say to him. She’d held her hand to the side of his head, and wept. They had stood at the parlor window, waving their hands tiltingly in the way that children waved. It had been too cold to stand at the front door, a gray, dark day without shadows, and the snow had started again.
Charlotte and Linnaeus had been waiting for her in the moonlight when she had returned with Mama from her first stay in the Webster Nervine Asylum. She and Mama had left the boat – like people disembarking after a day’s pleasure cruise up the Hudson: voices across the water, laughter, fireworks – and Charlotte and her brother had come out of the shadows to greet them. They must have waited for a long time. Arm in arm, they had walked up the slope beneath the trees, and Charlotte had started them all singing, singing to the moon, the song from The Mikado. Alone on stage, dressed and painted for her wedding, Yum-Yum sang about the sun and the moon.
“… She borrows light
That, through the night,
Mankind may all acclaim her!
And, truth to tell,
She lights up well,
So I, for one, don’t blame her!
“Ah, pray make no mistake,
We are not shy;
We’re very wide awake,
The moon and I!”
She looked at the moon now.
When she looked at it, she tried to work out what it made her think, how she felt, wrinkling up her eyes as if she were staring into the brightness of a midday sun, waiting for an eclipse to begin. If she waited there long enough, if she waited there all night through, she might see the moon fade, and the morning star appear. When the moon was lost for a while, she looked at the reflection of her face in the dark glass.
“‘Yes, I am indeed beautiful!’” she said aloud, quoting Yum-Yum’s words. “‘Sometimes I sit and wonder, in my artless Japanese way, why it is that I am so much more attractive than anybody else in the whole world.’”
The moon appeared again, the moon that was so nearly a full moon. She should be in fine cackling form by Wednesday morning, when she began her journey to the Webster Nervine Asylum for her second stay there, her mind crammed – her eyes dazzled – with all the empty whiteness of full-moon lunacy.
La Lune! La Lune!
She was such a card!
A carriage would be waiting for her at the boat landing when she arrived at Poughkeepsie. It would drive along beside the edge of the river, and then up through the trees, through the open gate and into the grounds. Dressed all in white, she’d be driven through the whiteness of the snow, into the wordlessness and the silence that was waiting for her in the margins.
She’d enter the handsome hall.
They’d be there, smiling professionally – “Such a pleasure to see you again, Miss Pinkerton!” – as they angled the visitors’ book toward her, a regular guest checking into a sun-filled summer hotel, one to which she returned year after year to relive the memories of happier times, her luggage positioned on the floor at her side, at precisely the same angle as the visitors’ book on the desk.
She’d be directed up the left-hand staircase, and through an open door into what appeared to be a drawing room. A servant would lead the way – though she knew the way – carrying her bags for her.
The servant would lead her across the drawing room and open a concealed door that was disguised as a looking-glass, and they would walk through the looking-glass into the cold bare room beyond, dirty and cobwebbed, its nearer wall lined with the fake books.
The matron of the asylum would walk toward her, flanked by Allegra and Edith.
“Calm yourself,” her sisters would say, linking their arms in hers. “There is no wonder nor mystery in the matter: you were expected.”
The matron would pull at a gold chain that was hanging around her neck, and draw out an ivory whistle. She would blow upon it until she achieved the right key, the cue for the three of them to begin singing.
“Three little maids from school are we,
Pert as a school-girl well can be,
Filled to the brim with girlish glee,
Three little maids from school!
Everything is a source of fun …”
– At this point they would begin to chuckle –
“… Nobody’s safe, for we care for none!…”
– The chuckling would become louder, more discordant –
“… Life is a joke that’s just begun!…”
The chuckling would become loud laughter, uncontrolled, high-pitched, echoing around in the emptiness.
“Calm yourself,” the matron would say, laying a hand on her arm. There’d be no sign of Allegra and Edith – Allegra and Edith would never have been there – and Alice would continue singing all by herself.
“… Three little maids from school!
Three little maids who, all unwary,
Come from a ladies’ seminary,
Freed from its genius tutelary – …”
The matron would pull at the gold chain again, and draw out the ivory whistle. When she blew upon it, two men would come quietly into the room.
“… Three little maids from school!…”
One of the men began to speak to Alice.
“Be calm, my dear young lady; don’t agitate yourself. You have been sent here for your good; and that you may be cured …”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean?” Alice cried. “Are you mad?”
“No,” one of the men answered. “We are not …”
They and the matron drew closer toward her, reaching out.
It was for her own good.
To bed, to bed.
And not to read.
The books would not be real books.
And not to write.
There would be no pens, no paper.
To bed, to bed, to bed.
And not to think.
The mind would be emptied of all thought.
And not to talk.
The tongue, like the writing-hand, would be stilled.
To bed, to bed, to bed.
And not to sew.
No stitch-stitch-stitch.
No sharp-edged pens or needles.
Safest not to have them around.
Just sleeping.
Just dreaming.
She wouldn’t escape the dreams.
Drifting listlessly away.
Drifting.
Nothing else.
Because nothing else mattered.
Sometimes, when a full moon took her by surprise – looking up, seeing it through the skylight – she felt someone had climbed up on to the roof and was watching her.
What did she think about, looking up at the full moon?
“Dot. Dot. Dot,” she said.
The text was moving into silence. Out in the North Pole wastes of whiteness, where there were no more words, the characters struggled and died in those margins beyond the text, stifled by that silence.
Dot. Dot. Dot.
Sometimes – on rainy afternoons, on winter evenings – she had been tempted to read The Mystery of Edwin Dr
ood for the first time, the Dickens novel she had been saving as – this was how she sometimes felt it – the last book she would read. She had had Our Mutual Friend saved as well, but – with a sensation of luxurious abandon – she had read it when she returned from her first visit to the Webster Nervine Asylum. (Only one unread Dickens novel left!) The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the one she had chosen to save until last because, of course, it was the last one Dickens had written, the one he had left incomplete when he died. She had hovered around the book several times. There were only 155 pages in her edition.
It wouldn’t take long to read …
It wasn’t one of his better books …
She’d looked at Luke Fildes’s illustrations – twelve of them – telling herself that this wasn’t cheating, it didn’t count as reading, trying to decide what she could deduce about the novel from them. It was a place of darkness and deep shadows, figures lying dead or unconscious on beds in squalid rooms, fashionable young men leaning upon pianos or mantel-shelves, a girl cowering away from a man in an overgrown garden, a girl – the same girl? – nervously sitting in a boat with three men in the middle of a river. This last reminded her, though the girl was not doing the rowing, of Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend unwillingly guiding the boat for her father as he sought for corpses in the Thames.
Charlotte had bought her an edition of Charles Dickens – complete, except for A Tale of Two Cities – from a secondhand bookstore the previous year, and inside every book, on the first blank page, was written Edward Gwynne Lawrence. From his loving brothers Frank & Jack on his 21st Birthday. March 28th 1900. Charlotte had remembered her saying that she would have liked to own a uniform edition, instead of the oddly assorted volumes she had accumulated over the years. The pages had not been cut in any of the volumes, and she had spent a stormy day working through them with a letter-knife, sometimes pausing to study the illustrations or read passages as the wind beat at the windows. It was then that she’d looked at The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She had been going to leave the pages of this novel uncut, to keep her out, to leave the cutting until the reading, but she hadn’t been able to stop. After she’d looked at the illustrations, she’d looked at some of the headings at the top of right-hand pages – Mad Love, Rosa flees for Protection, A Preux Chevalier, The Thorn of Anxiety (it sounded quite promising) – and then she’d turned to the final page, The Last Addition to the Score, to see the final words that Dickens had written. She imagined him at his desk, thinking, writing a few words, pausing, writing a few words more, and then the pen falling from his fingers and rolling across the floor. Most of page 155 was blank, but – above the whiteness – there were a few lines of type.
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