Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  ‘But, Charles, it is all quite true. I did see those things. I wanted Tommy to know because some of these wonderful inventions may occur in his lifetime. He is to be a bridge to a glorious future, and I am happy for him -’

  ‘What kind of future have we now? How am I to support you and Tommy if you make me a figure of fun? You must never speak of these things again - not to me or to anyone else. The Golden Age is now, and we are fortunate to be alive. There is no need to look backwards or forwards. We must embrace the progress and innovations around us, for all of London is a great exhibition, and I intend to flourish here. Not to be exhibited as a great gaby who believes old Mother Shipton’s ridiculous phantasies.’

  Charles grows very long-winded when he is angry, and he is always angry now. I stopped crying and felt snappish in return. ‘I know what I have seen. However much you try to crush me with that moral flat-iron called common sense -’

  ‘They were dreams, my dear Nina.’ But I am not his dear any more and do not know what I am. ‘The delusions of an uneducated mind.’

  ‘Dreams do not last for three days.’

  ‘Do you taunt me with that? With those days when you were lost to me and lost to yourself in a moral quagmire I cannot bear to think of.’

  We stared at each other in silence, and he left the room.

  His face and voice were so hard and cold. Charles has always been my friend as well as my husband, and I cannot believe he has changed so much towards me. It is as if I stand in a room where open french windows invite me on to a balcony. I step forward, but instead of feeling safety beneath my feet I fall into darkness where I am alone and unloved.

  I disobey Charles and look backwards. I see him as a young man glowing with optimism and idealism as he smiles into my eyes. I think we were sitting in the parlour at my parents’ old house in Finsbury. Well, it does not matter where we were, for lovers make their own geography. We were engaged, and I was head over heels in love, for my life was settled and Charles would love me always.

  Nowadays there is a fashion for expensive weddings with dozens of guests and presents. My mother sewed a few nightdresses for me and gave me some linen and furniture. We simply read the banns and went to our local parish church one morning. I had a new brown silk dress and bonnet, which remained my best for a few years, and I carried a little bouquet of orange blossom. At home we had a simple breakfast for a few friends and relations - Charles had no relations, so I laughed and told him he could borrow mine.

  We had a wedding trip to Ramsgate. I had never stayed in an hotel before and thought it very grand and expensive - ten pounds for the week. But the real luxury was to be all alone with Charles and walk by the sea and stare at his wonderful face. At school the girls whispered about the horrid things men did to you after you married them, but I did not find anything Charles did horrid. Perhaps those books of anatomy had prepared me.

  We lived with my parents at first, and I enjoyed being busy around the house with Mama. We used to bake together and make wine, and friends used to come with work of a morning. We would all sit and sew together and chatter. Henrietta was still at home, as no man had appreciated her perfections, and she disapproved of my marriage. Once I tried to explain to her what it was to love, but she grew very chilly and remote, for there is no music in her soul.

  I was married and my story was over, and I was extremely happy. I expected Charles to be a doctor as Papa had been with a shabby practice that yielded more friendship than money. Papa’s patients were city merchants who were prosperous but not too alarmingly fashionable.

  After Bella was born Charles grew impatient with our quiet Finsbury ways. I had hoped that when Papa grew too old to work Charles would simply take his place, but he began to mutter about the West End and repeated his stories of Sir Astley’s exploits with more admiration in his voice each time. Papa called Sir Astley Cooper ‘Satan’s quack’, admitting his brilliance but doubting his honesty.

  Well, now we have risen. My dear parents died of cholera soon after we left Finsbury, and I feel very much alone here. Bella was my dear little companion, but with her death the joy has gone out of this house, and I cannot transfer my affections to Tommy, for he is such a difficult child. Charles wants me to live this caged-bird life. He says that to bake and bustle as I did in Finsbury would be to poach on the servants’ right to earn a living. When I am better he says I can do a little embroidery. Perhaps some watercolours of flowers and a little singing and piano playing. He does not like it when I question him too eagerly about his work. I often asked Papa about the details of his patients’ lives and deaths. But as a wife it seems my only duties are to pour out Charles’s tea at breakfast and brush his hat and help him put on his overcoat.

  I have a new duty. Charles has just sent Emmie with a curt note about the dinner. Perhaps I have tempted providence by gloating on my timeless solitude. Now the calendar looms over me again, and I have only three weeks to send out the invitations and worry about the menu. Oh, and I must see that the best china and glasses are pristine and order the flowers and the fruit.

  A hundred decisions jostle in my head. The most important guests must be invited first - but who are they? Charles will know. He has a Burke’s Peerage in his head. Shall we be old-fashioned and dine at three or fashionably at six? After dinner shall we have music and sandwiches or only tea? Shall we hold one dinner or two? If we have two we can use the leftovers from the first the following day when we can invite the less important guests. I must order enough excess food to fill all the dishes the first night that we shall not be thought mean. Should James pretend to be a butler or a footman? What must I wear? It is vulgar to be vain but unforgivable to look singular. I will have to have a new black silk made up to contrive to stay in mourning without looking a frump. Tomorrow morning Cook is coming to discuss the menu, and I have a pile of household books beside me from which I must concoct a dinner that will not shame us.

  I have been to many such dinners without enjoying any of them. The hostess enjoys them least of all, for she has run around for weeks in a state of exhaustion preparing for these shining hours. Her heart is in the kitchen in case her soufflé should not rise.

  All night I shall be in a state of nervous anxiety for fear that my guests’ conversation does not flow or my dress is not chic or my music does not please. Yet I must appear to be calm and enchanted to see these people I hardly know. After dinner we ladies must retire to the drawing-room and talk in low voices about illnesses and servants and children. No rattling gossip and laughter like at Finsbury Square, for in fashionable circles it is polite to complain and ill bred to express any enthusiasm or pleasure.

  Oh dear, this journal is becoming quite revolutionary. I shall have to put a padlock on my work-basket and bury it under the floorboards. Am I a very wicked wife? Since this is a secret journal I will confess to the floorboards that I do think of J. a great deal.

  Thinking about the terrors of the dinner party put me in a great panic so that I could no longer lie still in my bed. I got up and walked around my darkened room and felt how the walls press in on me. These walls must be my whole life now. I am a housewife. I am married to this house and to a man who no longer loves me. My heart was beating very fast, and my breath came in sharp needles as if the air was poison for me. For I have breathed another air, and my lungs need it now.

  And then I saw him. Through the dark walls I saw Jonathan at his desk in his garret above the stables. Just a few paces away as if the years that separate us were only a layer of gauze. I walked towards him - I was quite certain that I could pass through to him again. He looked up and saw me. He stood up and we stared at each other, and I held out my arms to him, and there was a moment when we could have conquered time.

  The door opened. The wrong door. Emmie barged in with a tray. ‘Miss Nina! Whatever are you doing out of bed, you wicked girl?’

  I was not even a sick woman but a sick child. Jonathan’s handsome face receded and shrank to the size of a farthing a
nd slid back inside my head. I cannot see him any longer, but how deeply I feel him.

  I don’t think there was any harm in what we did together. Henrietta always said I was a capricious little simpleton, and I am proving her right. When I was then I longed to return to my life here with Charles, and now I am now I crave the freedom and freshness of Jonathan’s utopia.

  Now the walls are solid again and the dinner party looms.

  I must put aside my illness and my mourning and my … accidents with time. I am afraid of making Charles any more angry than he already is. These mechanical forms of good breeding are important, for Charles’s career depends on them and I depend on him. So there is nothing for it but to make believe that our dinner on the 18th is a great military campaign I must fight and win.

  CHARLES

  ITHOUGHT NINA’S thunderbolt had done its worst, that my heart was shrivelled and charred and could feel no more pain. Yet as I passed her door just now tears came to my eyes, and I could not turn the handle and go in. The face that once gave me such joy is repugnant to me now. Where I used to see girlish innocence, coquetry and falsehood leer out at me. Unable to breathe the same air as Nina, I communicate with her by notes I give to Emma, who looks at me with pity. How much does she know? The servants’ impudent curiosity wounds me almost more than Nina’s … what? I have diagnosed so many illnesses yet know not how to label my wife’s disease, which is more in her mind than in her body. Mine is at best a science of guesswork.

  It is late at night. My patients have gone, and the household sleeps. I sit here alone in my study where I sleep now, alone, unable to join Nina in the bed where once we were so happy. Out of her wild letter and my own knowledge I search for answers to the riddle my wife has become.

  I must begin with the death of Bella. This sorrow drew us closer together and, I thought, opened our hearts to one another. When the order of nature is reversed and the parent witnesses the death of his child, who was entwined around my heart - I did not know the final parting would be such a pang. Our treasure seemed to suffer fearfully at the end. I never expected it to be such a life-embittering trial. I was thoroughly broken up, and Nina, who was a most affectionate mother, was half-crazed with grief. In the first days after Bella’s death my poor wife looked behind every door and into every corner, expecting to find her darling.

  As for her tale of imagining Bella’s ghost on the landing above my surgery - I blame myself for allowing Nina to read foolish novels full of ghosts and goblins and gibberish. Nina’s mother was a Papist, and it may be that her blood is tainted or, at least, that she is susceptible to unhealthy superstitions. Women, being little capable of reasoning, are feeble and timid and require protection. Somehow, she slipped out of our house and walked the streets alone. Nina has - or rather had - that ignorance of vice which one desires in a lady.

  Who knows what really happened to her? London is changing so fast that it seems like enchantment; buildings are torn down and vast new monsters erected; advertising is on every wall and van, and the streets are full of boys distributing advertising bills, some of them no doubt for shady enterprises. Just a few hundred yards from our house are the squalid courts behind Oxford Street where she may have fallen prey to some designing man.

  Nina may have become the victim of mesmerism or ether, which destroys the memory. Perhaps an electro-biologist abducted her for some sinister experiment, or perhaps she had a cataleptic dream. But a dream could not have lasted for three days. How those three lost days torture me.

  Electro-biologists have the power to banish susceptible females from their own minds. A few years back I was present at a performance at the Egyptian Hall by some Yankee professor. He plucked several young ladies from the audience and, using electric forces, induced the most suggestible to humiliate themselves, much to the amusement of the public. Nina’s sensibility, the delicate mind I so adored, would make her very responsive to such manipulations. The imaginative faculties, the nervous sensations and the muscular motions are not always under the control of the will. One young boy, in Northamptonshire, I believe, was driven temporarily insane by such an experience, although I seem to remember that it was mesmerism that restored his wits just as it destroyed them.

  Electro-nervous currents and animal magnetism have now been exploded by most respectable scientists, but perhaps this Jonathan was one of these itinerant mountebanks. Such fellows exploit women, somnambules as they are called, pathetic creatures who follow their masters around provincial mechanics’ institutes and assembly rooms where they perform like circus horses and obey their masters’ cruel whims with the devotion of a priestess. Such careers begin on stage and end in the workhouse.

  I am a tolerant man, but I would thrash the scoundrel if I could find him. He must still have some grip over my wife, for she refuses to tell me his full name or address. No doubt he has already exposed her degradations in some tuppenny chapbook that is circulating on the streets of London. What did he make her do? What secret experiments and obscenities have been performed upon my darling while she was in a trance? The magnetizer has unlimited power over the magnetized and may do anything, anything at all, with her … I cannot bear to think of those three days. Yet I cannot look at Nina without a thousand diabolical images - better that she had never awoken from her mesmeric state! I had rather be a widower than the husband of a debauched and degraded woman

  Out of the maze of Nina’s imagination I have extracted a few facts about this future where she claims to have been, where poverty and money and illness have been abolished, men and women dress alike in tatterdemalion attire, a talking box produces daguerreotypes, mechanical slaves perform all practical tasks and ascending carriages float up to the ceiling. My interrogation made her weep, made me feel a brute, and still I am none the wiser about what really happened. Her fancies have a whiff of the fairy-tale about them. If that were all I think I could ignore her as I ignore Tommy when he prattles of hobgoblins and sprites.

  But I cannot ignore or forget her depraved and unchaste behaviour with me. When first she returned it was very clear that she had coarsened, had been degraded below her rank. She transgressed the bounds of decency, and in my delight at seeing her again I did not at first suspect her.

  My upbringing was not a sheltered one. There was a girlery in the next house, and as a student I attended routs and balls where filthy harlots lured me on. I adored Nina, above all, for her very innocence, which separated her from the trumpery minxes I knew as a boy. Who is this Jonathan? When I demand where I can find him, to give him a thrashing, she points to the wall and says he is on the other side of it but has not yet been born.

  Criminal conversation may have taken place between them. I can hardly bear to think of it, but a woman can be taken by storm. This man must be a consummate coward and blackguard. He must have mesmerized her! It is as clear as any proposition in Euclid: she has been a false wife to a simple-hearted and trusting husband. He must have dragged her to his poisoned habitation and have stimulated her venereal appetite with alcohol or narcotics - my little Nina. I am sick and sorry. Like a wounded beast I long to creep into a hole quite alone.

  But I must be sociable to succeed. I need a wife beside me and cannot afford to divorce the one I have, however unsatisfactory she may be. Gentlemen are different; our peccadilloes are natural and harmless. When I was young I whored and caroused with the best of them, and if I were to disappear for a night or two even now it would be no great matter. But a lady who has been defiled must stink for ever of moral corruption. I must take care that no other nostrils but my own are assaulted.

  Remembering those wild parties when we were medical students, before we were let loose upon the public, reminds me of William Porter, the most debauched of us all when we were young and now the most successful. He has married a cousin of Lord Cavendish and flourishes just this side of quackery. It is many years since we have spoken, but I have invited them to dinner on the 18th, before the season ends and anybody who is anybody leaves Londo
n. I am tempted to confide in William, who was never fastidious about women and, to judge by the advertisements I see in the less exclusive newspapers, is even less so now. Porter’s Electrical Belt and Balm of Elysium, indeed - yet he has a house in Hanover Square and sends his sons to Eton, I hear.

  I hope Nina may call on his wife, become intimate with her and learn a little polish and ease. Such women are exquisitely poised, always elegant, hardly stirring a muscle except to embroider or attend a musical soirée or indulge in a little philanthropy. Or so I imagine Mrs Porter to be. Women like her run the social world from their morning-rooms, and their support is invaluable. I look forward to meeting her and hope she will be a calming influence on Nina. Her vivacity was all very well as a young girl, but now she is a matron I would like her to devote herself more to her domestic pursuits.

  No man ever prospered without the cooperation of his wife, and our household leaves much to be desired. As soon as Nina has recovered I will insist that she takes her housewifery seriously. Lucy and James treat her as if she were Tommy, and when I asked Cook if Mrs Sanderson had given her clear orders for the 18th she replied that she couldn’t understand the menu. Neither could I when she showed it to me. It consisted of an illegible scrawl with a caricature of a lady in evening dress emptying a soup tureen over the head of a gentleman. I sent Nina a very sharp note, reminding her that puerile humour belongs to the nursery, not the kitchen.

  My anxiety about our dinner is mounting. We have had acceptances from ten of the guests, and I have invited Arthur Meredith, a briefless barrister of my acquaintance, and his wife to make up our missing numbers. I worry that the extra flap in our mahogany dining-table will not be strong enough, that our crystal and cutlery will not shine, that our best dinner plates may have cracks in them from being carelessly washed. What is the correct precedence for us to go down to dinner? As a cousin of Lord Cavendish, does Mrs Porter go before or after Sir Percy, who is only a ‘bedside baronet’. Such a dinner requires weeks of preparation by perfect servants and a devoted wife, and I possess neither. Whole books are written to explain all this etiquette, but I have not time to read them. Really, it is monstrous that I should have to concern myself with such trivial yet vital details. Nina is …