Paradise Walk

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Paradise Walk Page 6

by Mary Malloy


  “Because if he does, and you then come out with your own version of the work, he will look like a chump.”

  “I had a different word in mind, but yes. His book without this source will quickly be dismissed.” She smiled slyly. “He has asked me for it very politely, he has begged me for it, he has demanded it, he even tried to get me drunk. If he had not stolen it out of my purse to copy it on that first day I met him, I might have let him see it by now.”

  “Well, in my opinion he is a chump and this important work is better done by you.”

  As they returned to their working space in what Lizzie came to call Alison’s “den,” Lizzie asked her new friend about her own decision to stay at the University of Bath. “Why didn’t you move on to another institution where there was a real department in your field?”

  “Because I am so tied to this house,” Alison answered. “These days I know people who commute from Bath to both Oxford and Winchester, but forty years ago it just wasn’t done, and during the period when my father was so ill I never felt I could be far from home.” She poured them each a scotch and eased herself into her chair.

  For the next hour they drank liberally and talked openly. It was clear that whatever issues Alison had once had about trusting Lizzie were now resolved. She had not had a female confidante for decades and the conversation turned quickly from professional topics to personal ones.

  “How do you know George?” Lizzie asked curiously. This was something she had wanted to ask on her first visit, but Alison had been so stern then, and by the time she arrived at Hengemont, the gloom of Christmas had already descended and she couldn’t bear to ask George for more details about their friendship.

  “George Hatton and I were engaged in college.”

  This was news that took Lizzie completely by surprise. “Spinsterish” was how she would have defined Alison when she met her. The comparison to Miss Havisham was more apt than she thought, though Lizzie instantly gave herself a mental smack for even thinking such a thing.

  “I see the news surprises you,” Alison said, watching Lizzie’s face as she digested the information. “I was very much in love with George, and he with me.”

  “Why didn’t you marry?”

  “My family is Catholic and his parents objected,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Well, so did mine actually, but his put up the bigger stink about it.”

  “I thought we had done away with those prejudices.”

  Alison sat, her scotch in one hand, her cigarette dangling from the other, like an old-fashioned movie star and looked at Lizzie, who was beginning to wonder if she was an alcoholic.

  “The monarch still can’t marry a Catholic, but pretty much all other things are supposed to be equal now. In the fifties, however, there was still a lot of latent hostility.”

  “Do you know that I am related to George?”

  “He told me something about it, but I don’t know the details.”

  “His great-uncle got my great-grandmother pregnant,” Lizzie explained. “She was a servant in his house and he married her.”

  “Oh my good gracious!” Alison exclaimed. She set her cigarette in the ashtray and slapped the arm of her chair. “That must have shaken the foundations of Hengemont!”

  “His parents instantly had the marriage annulled and shipped her off to America by herself.”

  Alison seemed disappointed. “Well she had three disadvantages from their perspective, of which being Catholic was probably the least of them. I assume she was Irish, and she was a servant, and those would have been insurmountable barriers. Class and nationality still divide us.”

  When Lizzie told Alison that her great-grandfather had committed suicide after his wife was sent away, the old woman was clearly upset by the news.

  “The family learned nothing from that, did they?” she asked sadly. “George’s father treated me like the ultimate pariah, questioned my ethics, my parentage, and called me a whore, a gold digger and a Papist.”

  “He would have known about the suicide of his uncle. How could he separate you and George?” She didn’t want to add how disappointing George’s behavior was. How could he have allowed himself to be persuaded?

  Alison seemed to read her thoughts. “Don’t blame George, though he was weak. We were young and he simply didn’t see how he could separate himself from his family. Do you know he lost two brothers in the War?”

  Lizzie nodded. There was a memorial to them in the family church at Hengemont.

  “He thought it would kill his mother, and his sister was mentally ill and seemed really to rely upon him. I think he thought that they needed him more than I did.” She finished her drink and set the glass down with a clunk on the wood of the table. “He told me I was so strong and they were so weak.” She looked at Lizzie as if expecting her to say something.

  “What a load of crap,” Lizzie blurted; it was all she could think to say.

  “That’s what I thought. I didn’t speak to him for the next forty years.”

  Lizzie knew that George had married someone else and had three sons. She suspected that it must have been after he was widowed that he sought out a new friendship with Alison.

  “Was your family that different from his in terms of money and position?”

  “Not in terms of money, we had piles of it. My grandfather built a textile mill just as the woolen industry was taking off in England. But the Hattons are very proud of being able to trace their aristocratic lineage back a thousand years.”

  “If the Wife of Bath is your ancestress, you must have a family tree that goes back at least six hundred years.”

  “Don’t think my father didn’t fling that at George at the right moment. He grew up with the advantages of money and education and had adopted the manner of the aristocracy, though he didn’t have the titles. Even though he never would have let me marry George unless he converted, my rejection by the Hattons hit my father hard.”

  “Would you have considered converting?”

  “Never. And it’s not because I am such a strict believer in the doctrines of Catholicism. The Kent family stayed true to their beliefs through centuries of persecution. It would absolutely have killed my father and grandfather if I had even considered leaving the Church. Their faith defined them, as it did their ancestors back to the Reformation.”

  The conversation turned to textiles. Lizzie thought it was interesting that from the Wife of Bath almost to the present, cloth had been woven into the lives of the Kents.

  “Cloth and Catholicism,” she said, almost under her breath.

  Alison looked at her in disbelief. “That is exactly how my father described my family: cloth and Catholicism. He used to say as a joke that if he ever had a crest, that would be the motto.”

  “Well it is very apt.”

  “I can’t believe you said that. My grandmother actually wove him a fictional coat of arms with that motto on it. Let me get it.” She pushed herself up from the chair as she spoke and walked stiffly to an ancient closet.

  “I had it framed for my father at one point,” Alison explained, reaching into the back of the closet to pull the object out. “But we never found the wall space to hang it.”

  She returned to Lizzie and handed her a light frame with an intricate woven picture; there was no glass and the fabric was covered with dust. When she realized this, Alison took it back and tapped the frame several times against the back of Lizzie’s chair, then gently brushed at the image with the hem of her skirt. When she gave it back to Lizzie there was a recognizable coat of arms of a loom and a cross. A shuttle with a trailing thread was woven into the design, in the act of producing the motto.

  Lizzie left her chair to look at the weaving in the light of a pole lamp in the corner of the room. She tilted the shade until the light caught the still-vibrant colors.

  “This is woven?” she asked. “I would have thought it was needlepoint.”

  “My grandmother was an expert weaver,” Alison said.

 
; “That’s obvious,” Lizzie said. She was impressed not only with the exceptional quality of the work, but with the cleverness of the design. There were numerous visual puns, most of which must have referred to inside jokes that Lizzie didn’t understand. In each corner was a monogram.

  “This is my grandfather,” Alison said, pointing to the top left corner. “D. K. for Daniel Kent.” She moved her finger to the right and said “and this is my grandmother. She designed the M.K. signature for her work when she was known as Maggie Kerry, and was able to keep it when she married my grandfather and became the more formal Margaret Kent.” Her father’s monogram was in the lower left corner and in the bottom right was an A over a W. The A had a flat line at the top, in a style much older than the others.

  “Is this for your mother?” Lizzie asked.

  “Goodness no,” Alison said, taking the piece back and looking at it again. “I don’t think my mother was even in the picture when my grandmother made this. That is an homage to our Wife of Bath. That is how she signed her work.”

  “I thought her name was Alison Kent.”

  “It was, after she married Roger of Kent, whom she met on her pilgrimage. Prior to that she referred to herself as ‘Alison the Weaver,’ or simply ‘Alison Weaver,’ but she continued to use this monogram on her work.”

  “I love that!” Lizzie said enthusiastically. “I love that she had a signature that is still recognizable six hundred years later, and I love that your grandmother, also an expert weaver, used it to acknowledge her.”

  “She was an Irish immigrant,” Alison said. “Like your great-grandmother. She came here to work in my grandfather’s mill.”

  This was a story of interest to Lizzie and Alison was happy to share it. Her grandmother had been a remarkable woman, she said. Even as she stood all day at the loom her brilliance was recognizable. She had ideas about how to improve production and especially how to make the work more tolerable for the workers. She invented an ear covering to protect against the ferocious noise of the looms. She had ideas about carding and spinning as well as weaving, and thoughts on the orientation of the factory so that the stages of production were better connected through the plant. Day after day she marched up the wooden stairs from her loom to the office where Daniel Kent supervised his mill and told him her ideas. At first he rejected them outright. She was, after all, just an immigrant girl. But over time, as he considered them in unexpected moments, he found that almost every suggestion she made was worth adopting.

  He asked her if she would be his secretary, but she refused. She had ideas about design, and wanted to experiment with different ways to set up a loom to achieve them. At her request, he provided her with a loom and watched with fascination as she worked on it day after day and long into the night. He knew the mechanics of weaving, but not the art of it, until he learned it from her. As her ideas and designs were incorporated into the production in the mill, the quality of the woolens became known all over England and he became rich.

  “At this point in the story you are probably expecting the marriage and the happy ending,” Alison said. “But she was a canny one, was my granny. She once told me that when my grandfather first mentioned that he would like to make all her dreams come true, she told him that the thing she wanted most was a real education, at Oxford University no less.”

  “Did Oxford accept women when your grandmother was a young woman?”

  “There was a college there, St. Hugh’s that sought out poor but talented female scholars, and that is where she went. By that time, of course, my grandfather was pretty madly in love with her and went up to see her on weekends; he married her as soon as she finished her degree.”

  In this house, Alison explained, Maggie Kerry Kent became fascinated by the story of Alison the Weaver, and scoured the place for evidence of her. It was she who first recognized the monogram as a signature in scraps of textiles, and used it to identify other works by her medieval predecessor. There were a number of fragments of cloth, and several large rolls of medieval tapestry, all marked with the distinctive monogram.

  “Are they still in the house?” Lizzie asked, curious to see anything made by the woman who was the subject of their scrutiny.

  Alison shook her head. “Granny felt very strongly that other weavers could benefit by seeing the work. She gave all the fragmentary textiles to the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

  “And the rolls of tapestry?”

  “That is an interesting story,” Alison said. “She went over them very carefully and did some restoration of places where moths had gotten at the wool. When my grandmother died, my father and grandfather decided to donate them to St. Hugh’s College at Oxford in her memory and they were still hanging there when I went there.”

  Lizzie could not help interrupting to ask Alison about her own education, but her hostess very quickly returned to the story she thought was more important.

  “I paid to have them restored a few years ago and the conservators said that they are definitely Flemish from the turn of the fifteenth century, so though they bear the familiar monogram, they weren’t actually woven by our Wife of Bath.”

  “But they still have her signature?”

  “On each of the four panels.” Alison described the panels, each about four feet wide, which depicted towns and landscapes all over the south of England, populated by tiny people and animals. “The conservators thought the panels were meant to be stitched together to make a single continuous piece, and that is how it is hanging today.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Lizzie said.

  “I thought we might drive to Oxford either tomorrow or the next day,” Alison responded. “The best way to get to know our subject is to look at all the things that were of interest to her, and many of the towns that she describes in her journal are pictured on it.”

  The connection between a manuscript and an object was just the sort of thing Lizzie loved to explore and she quickly expressed her enthusiasm to see the tapestry as soon as possible. When they agreed to go the next day, Lizzie asked Alison why their weaver would have put her monogram signature on something she didn’t actually make.

  “The conservators thought that she might have drawn the original cartoons on which the weaving was based,” Alison explained. “She wasn’t a tapestry weaver, which we know from the fragments of her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but no one in England really wove tapestries at that time.”

  “So she commissioned another artist,” Lizzie said thoughtfully. “Fascinating.”

  It had been a long, interesting and productive evening of conversation. Lizzie was eager to move forward on the project, but she could feel her eyes drooping with exhaustion, and Alison looked tired as well.

  “What shall we call her?” Lizzie asked as she began to gather her things and prepare to go to her own room.

  “Who?” Alison asked.

  “Our Wife of Bath,” Lizzie answered. “I think we need to distinguish her from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, even if he based his character on her, and it is too confusing to call both you and her Alison, so I’d like to have another name by which we can know her.”

  They stood silently for a moment as each woman pondered this idea.

  “AW sounds too modern and too much like a restaurant,” Lizzie said, rejecting her own suggestion as soon as she made it.

  “How about ‘The Weaver?’” Alison suggested.

  “The Weaver,” Lizzie repeated, then repeated it again. “I like it, not only the sound of it, but the implication that her story will be woven as we work.”

  Alison looked pleased at the thought. “A name and a metaphor. How perfect!” She smiled at Lizzie and touched her softly on the arm. “Thank you, my dear. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you.”

  “And I with you.”

  Lizzie went off to her small bedroom and climbed into bed. Though she was physically exhausted, her mind continued to work and she could not resist pulling out the transcript Alison had made of
the Weaver’s journal. It was a different account of the Wife of Bath’s pilgrimage, similar to Chaucer’s in its general outline, but varying widely in the details. The Weaver was intelligent and well read, pious, but adventurous; she took advantage of the pilgrimage as a chance to travel. Recently widowed for the second time when she left on her pilgrimage, this Alison met a new husband on the road to Canterbury. The story moved through the English countryside and Lizzie finally fell asleep with her feet on the Pilgrim’s path.

  Chapter 8

  The day began with maps. Alison had cleared the desk in her father’s study and spread several maps across it. Lizzie found her there when she came downstairs. The most detailed were the Ordnance Survey maps, which had a scale of one kilometer to the inch and were perfectly designed for walkers—a map that was a yard across only showed twenty-some miles. Every road and house was illustrated, though the details that Alison immediately began to point out to Lizzie were the dotted lines that indicated the public footpaths.

  Lizzie needed a jolt of caffeine to set her up for a conversation like this so early in the morning, and having had none, thought Alison was talking about their trip to Oxford. It was only when she realized Lizzie’s confusion that Alison remembered her duties as hostess and offered to bring Lizzie coffee and toast.

  While Alison fetched the comestibles, Lizzie looked at the maps. In the course of tracing the Weaver’s pilgrimage, she would walk from one end to the other of more than a dozen maps, a daunting prospect. She took the road map of southern England from the folder Alison had given her the day before and compared scales to get her bearings. Each of the Ordnance Survey maps represented a small piece of the country map. She began to look closely at the first of them, which included Bath and the Mendip Hills. The concentric lines that indicated changes in altitude hit her forcefully. She had been picturing herself strolling along straight well-defined paths on a level landscape when, in fact, on the very first day she would have to go up and down some very steep hills.

 

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