by Vanessa Tait
But men said plenty of things they did not mean!
The talk in Oxford irresistibly chimed with the conversation Mary had been having with herself. Every book she had ever read told her that gossip like this was never brought up just to disappear without a trace.
She would have to wait and see what Mr Dodgson wanted to do, where he wanted to live. He had not even proposed yet! Oh, where would it be, how would he do it? In the schoolroom, or down by the river, his knee pressed into the mud? Perhaps he would invite her to a garden, with roses in it, and sit her on a bench and take her hand and press it to his lips and look into her eyes with his own fevered orbs and . . .
Her orbs were fevered too. She must rest. But rest was impossible! She must, though, if she were to see Mr Dodgson tomorrow. She might see him – she might see him tomorrow! But how could she sleep, with her heart pounding in her ears?
She took up her book again and tried to read, but could not. Sleep would come later, or not at all. It made no difference now.
The only wedding Mary had previously attended was that of her classmate, Amelia. Amelia smelled of Parma violets; her skin was smooth, pale and plump. On a sunny day the sun shone straight through Amelia’s pale hair on to the white scalp beneath. Her flesh was soft; it swayed beneath her upper arms and sat in self-satisfied rolls underneath her chin. If it were pressed too hard it would retain the divot, like a pillow.
Her way of clasping her hands together in front of her bosom was plump and self-contained. Her voice was high and tonally designed to soothe men’s ears.
When she was eighteen, the suitors came. She encouraged them all and read their letters out loud to Mary, smiling, showing her small, sharp teeth. Sometimes she tore up a letter in front of her and let the pieces drop in the waste-paper basket.
She told Mary how one man might meet another in the hall as they came and went – when she spoke of this, her usually pale face grew flushed, but there was no sign of embarrassment in her features.
After eight months Amelia became engaged to a wealthy gentleman farmer who lived just outside Oxford. During this time Mary saw them drive by in his fine carriage, with a chaperone, close but not yet touching. Once she saw them stepping into a large house together in Summertown.
She watched the couple come back down the aisle: the beautiful bride, the handsome groom, walking on a snowfield of petals. Mary’s mother, who had accompanied her, pressed a handkerchief to her eyes ostentatiously. Mary herself had smiled until her mouth was a crack that held up her face. As her old friend went by she looked in at her face, suddenly revealed by her thrown-back veil. But Amelia only glanced sideways at her husband through half-shut eyes; she had passed through to somewhere, it seemed, that could not be reached by unmarried people.
At the wedding breakfast Mary had wandered into the hallway of the house, where three cakes were lined up on a table, under a bough of heavy jasmine. The smaller two cakes represented the bride and groom, the dark one for the groom, the pale one for the bride. But the largest was decorated with elaborate orange scrolls and Amelia and her mother were busy dividing it into pieces so that while the front of it still presented a glittering facade, the back was a crumbling slope of dark devastation. The slices had been boxed up and tied with yellow ribbon, ready to give to the guests on their departure; each box contained a trinket.
The ring for marriage within a year;
The penny for wealth, my dear;
The thimble for an old maid or bachelor born;
The button for sweethearts all forlorn.
Amelia had handed Mary a box with a smile that prohibited intimacy. When Mary got home and unwrapped her box, she found a thimble.
It was hard to see how Amelia could have engineered it.
Soon Mary must write to her old friend with her news – although not now: Mr Dodgson had not proposed yet, but as soon as he did, she would write. Not boastfully, though she would mention that Mr Dodgson was a tutor at Christ Church, and that would sound much better than a farmer, no matter how rich. But it would not be the first thing she said, or the second even. The first thing would be to invite Amelia to her wedding, a simple yet elegant affair, attended by everyone important in Oxford.
A long veil attached to a coronet of orange blossoms, a long train; she had always thought that would be the thing. Short white kid gloves, silk stockings embroidered up the front. White – or cream? Silk slippers with a red bow at the instep.
But she would need to get new handkerchiefs with new initials! MD. A good name. Mary Dodgson spoke of the wife of a rector in a leafy parish, in Gloucestershire perhaps. A teapot on the table, a beech tree outside with leaves rustling, flagstones in the hall worn away at the edges . . .
But the housemaid was calling out her name, her old name.
‘Miss Prickett!’
Mary squeezed her eyes shut. Rosa could not want her for anything urgent.
Miss Prickett!
Her name inserted itself in front of the image of the rectory, and the flagstones dissipated through the edges of her mind.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s someone here for you,’ shouted the maid, not bothering to come up.
A visitor: could it be – so quickly? She was not ready. She rushed to the looking glass. ‘Who is it?’ she said. Her voice was shrill.
‘Mr Wilton.’
Mr Wilton!
His presence now, here, was as unwelcome as a sea lion’s . . . Mary saw him lumbering up the stairs, freshly slicked. If she could put him off – but he must have heard the housemaid calling to her. He would be inside by now, and taking off his gloves.
She pushed a piece of hair behind her ear and looked in the mirror. She was surprised to see that she looked the same as she always had, with a faint air of worry or disapproval clinging to her lips.
Behind her the door opened.
‘Miss Prickett?’ Mr Wilton said her name as if he could not be sure she was there, even though she was right in front of him. She turned. He seemed to hold his weight on just one foot, as if her look had frozen him. He held his smartest hat below his navel; the fingers of both hands drummed on the brim as if he were playing a difficult piece on two silent flutes.
Now that he was here, even though he had sent no warning, Mary must offer him tea, if for no other reason than to give him a teacup to stop his invisible orchestra.
But when the tea was brought, Mr Wilton would not touch it, would not sit down. He would not talk on his favourite subjects: the new Indian silks, the tweed mills of Argyll, or anything else he usually liked to discourse on at such length. He only answered Mary’s enquiries in the briefest way, until at last she fell silent.
He walked to the other end of the room and chewed on his lip.
‘Is there something wrong, Mr Wilton?’
‘No – I mean yes. Well.’ He stopped chewing and sucked in breath through his teeth.
‘Is it your parents? Your health?’
‘No! Nothing like that.’
He went over to the window and put his back to her. Mary stared at the silk of his jacket, the dark grey gleam, the horizontal rifts in it between his shoulders.
Why was he acting so strangely? And why would he inflict his mood on her, now, when she was such an unwilling participant?
‘I see that I have started now, so I must continue.’
Behind the shadow of his beard his skin was inflamed.
Mary, looking at him, had a premonition, a shock high in her breast, and rushed to open the windows. ‘It is warm in here. These windows always stick but I usually can open them. Today they are particularly difficult.’ The words rushed out of her in an attempt to keep him from talking. But he was beside her now, fumbling with the fastener, reaching his arm across hers, pressing down on it. Mary could see where the edge of his collar had rubbed at his neck, a red, raw line.
He caught hold of her arm. She must have looked frightened, because he dropped it again, although he did not step back.
&
nbsp; ‘You must know what I have come here for.’
‘I don’t!’ She clung on to the last hope that she might be wrong.
Mr Wilton looked at her, waiting for some sign. When he found none, he continued.
‘I have come here for some months now and have grown very fond of you – fonder than I was before.’ He swallowed. ‘Oh, Mary! I am not good with words. You know that. I cannot speak around the thing. I must say it plainly. I was hoping . . . that is to say, I am hoping, that you would do me the honour of agreeing to be my wife.’
A chaffinch hopped up the trunk of a tree, pecking at the bark as it went. It must have babies to feed.
A month ago, nothing. Now two proposals at once.
Mary felt laughter rising up, as inexorably as oxygen finding its way to the surface. It would be disastrous to greet Mr Wilton’s proposal with an attack of laughter. Somehow that made the thing more funny. And when the laughter came bursting out of her mouth, Mr Wilton looked astonished, as if his chest had been struck a violent blow.
She covered her mouth with her hand, tried to push the laughter back down into her stomach. She must stop! But her mouth operated on its own: gaping, noisy. Out of the corner of one eye squeezed a tear, as hard earned as sweat.
Mr Wilton took hold of her arm and started to shake it. ‘Mary! Stop laughing!’
But she could not.
‘Stop it!’ He put his palm on her breastbone, his thumb and forefinger making a U around the base of her neck. Still bubbles tightened in Mary’s chest and rose remorselessly to the surface. Her laugh was high and constricted and sounded unlike anything she had ever uttered.
‘Stop it, I said!’ His hand had the effect on her neck of a stopper being pushed into a bottle.
Now a feeling of something else, more angular. Fear.
She gripped his wrist tightly with both of her own hands and took a step back.
‘Mr Wilton! Please – I am sorry. I don’t know – please forgive me. I didn’t mean to laugh. I don’t know what happened.’
Mr Wilton let his grip slacken.
‘I thank you for your proposal. I am flattered, really. But I cannot marry you.’ She forced his hand away and it fell down by his side.
‘Cannot? Cannot?’
‘I cannot marry you.’
Mr Wilton had been so clearly expecting another answer that his face still showed some trace of gladness. ‘But you . . . You took my gifts. You welcomed my visits. I thought you welcomed me.’
‘I did welcome you. Your visits. But I cannot marry you.’ Mary pushed herself away from the window and walked into the centre of the room. ‘I will admit it – I thought perhaps I could once. But not now. I do not possess the feelings towards you that a wife ought to possess for a husband – and that is all.’
Mr Wilton’s face was a riot of conflicting colours and directions. ‘The feelings that you gave every sign of having not two weeks ago. What has changed?’
‘Nothing has changed! Or – everything has changed. I have changed, Mr Wilton, not you. It is my fault.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I am sorry. I do not know what else to say.’
Mr Wilton stared into her face, his lips open and wet with spittle. She could smell his breath, the smell that had come up from the inside of him: red and sweet.
Then he took a step back with a grunt and turned on his heel. Mary watched his clothes creasing and uncreasing as he made his way heavily to the door, his hands hanging down at his sides like pink hams.
That was unfortunate, thought Mary later that night. Unfor tunate timing. Or perhaps, how fortunate! If Mr Wilton had proposed two weeks ago, she might have been inclined to accept him. Then she would be bound to him until the end of the world, or the end of her world, whichever came sooner.
She tried to turn her thoughts back to Mr Dodgson. But she could not recapture the rectory or its flagstones. She could only see the confusion and distress on Mr Wilton’s face.
Chapter 21
Shortly afterwards, Mr Dodgson sent Mary a note asking to see her alone. She waited for him up in the schoolroom, her heart battering in her ribcage.
She stood at the window, seeing nothing. She walked to the door, and back again. Movement eased the pounding a little but her limbs were too weak to walk. She sat down again but it was worse than before; her heart threatened to choke her.
This moment, and this moment, and this moment.
The future was rubbed into a white glare. She could not imagine the shape it might take. She would be completely different in it, she knew that much. As different as an ape to a human – she would not recognize the form she would take.
It was inconceivable that the trees still stood, that Bultitude still strode across the lawn, that Dinah still lazed in the shade.
While she . . .
She!
Would he get down on one knee? He would clasp her to him – the texture of his jacket, his hair, seen from above. His face, bare and open and honest. He had once said, in so many words, that they thought alike, and they did. If she was not as linguistic as him – no matter! Their morality was the same.
A knock, at last, downstairs. But she was not ready! Her heart, again. Pale motes of midges jangled about over the lawn.
Mary shivered. She could hear his footsteps approaching, muffled as they walked up the carpet on the main staircase, then striking on the wood as they moved up on to the smaller staircase that led to the schoolroom, and her, her black bustle sticking back into the room, her shoulders tensed, her face set.
Escape, if she could hide somewhere from this appalling footfall!
She let the door be pushed open before she turned round.
‘Mr Dodgson!’
‘Miss Prickett. How kind of you to see me.’
Mary didn’t know how to respond. ‘Shall I call for tea?’
‘Oh no, no thank you.’
Mary was desperate for tea. Her tongue felt too big for the inside of her mouth; it stuck to the roof of it.
But tea, tea would not suit the solemnity of the occasion. Still, Mary kept envisaging the pot with its jocular sides and its pattern of pale blue dancing ladies, and wishing it might be brought to them.
‘It is chilly for the time of year,’ said Mr Dodgson.
‘Yes. I had to wear my shawl when I went out,’ said Mary. She wondered how the words came out so ordinarily. She noticed everything about him: his hair, long but contained; his soft jowls; his lips, which today seemed to blend with the rest of his face.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘The cows were lying down,’ said Mary. ‘In the fields as I went by. That signifies rain, I think. Or is it the other way round?’
‘The other way round?’
‘That it will rain if they are standing up. And the sun will shine if they lie down.’ She smiled, the insides of her lips catching on her teeth, to stem the flow of words. But as soon as she pulled out her smile, her jaw felt too tight.
She might break. She longed to be back upstairs in the safety of her room.
‘Cows are you-you-usually to be found standing up and it you-you-sually rains,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘The probability is thus on the side of standing up.’
‘Yes!’ Mary forced out a laugh. Too loud, it rattled off the glass. She had lost the sense of their conversation.
Mr Dodgson had sat down on the arm of a chair. The sun picked out the tiny white hairs that clung to his black jacket and black waistcoat and black bow tie. Hairs that belonged to what? A hairy white caterpillar, a whole legion of them, in every house but hidden from sight. Crawling over Mr Dodgson’s jackets in the darkness of his cupboard. Mary’s heart kept on, banging against its confines.
‘My uncle has a farm near Binsley.’ She thought of the cows there, lying down on their broad brown sides.
‘Ah, Binsley. The site of the treacle well.’
‘The treacle well.’ ‘Does its water have healing powers?’ Mary peered again into the damp mossy
cool, looking for the black water. She had always imagined it smoothing thickly over boils and lesions. ‘They say so.’ ‘St Frideswide, the site of her first miracle, is that correct?’ She wanted him. She wanted to be away from him, sitting on the edge of the treacle well with a peaceful heart. ‘Yes.’ Mr Dodgson got up. ‘The reason I have come here, Miss
Prickett, is a particular one.’ Mary’s heart resumed its pounding, an unforgiving horse. ‘I wondered if I could ask . . .’ and did he pause here for a moment? The space between the words was long enough for Mary to teeter on the edge of nothing, to float . . . ‘. . . for your help in getting the girls to come on a boat ride with me?’ Now he seemed to be talking so fast that she couldn’t follow. ‘If I applied to Mrs Liddell myself she may well think of a reason why we could not go, what with, what with . . .’ He smiled. ‘Well, you know everything, Miss Prickett! But a boat ride at this time of year, up to Godstow perhaps, would be the perfect way to spend an afternoon. Don’t you agree?’
A boat ride . . . That seemed to be what he was asking. ‘Yes.’ Mary swallowed. ‘What did you need my help for?’ ‘If you could mention it to Mrs Liddell, I would be most grateful.’ She smiled, waiting. ‘I will, of course. It’s unnecessary perhaps.’ Perhaps he had more to say. Perhaps this was the preamble to the question she hoped for. But he was getting up from his chair, moving towards the door. He was thanking her, saying he did not want to take up any more of her time.
My time? she wanted to say to him. You take it all up. Without you I have no time at all.
But he had gone. He would see her in a few days, he said.
Mary turned back to the window and pressed her forehead against the glass. His black figure came into view and walked diagonally up the pane until it disappeared from sight.
Chapter 22
In the end, Mary had no need to ask Mrs Liddell anything. The matter came up of its own accord, at breakfast.
The remains of a kipper lay crumbled in a pool of egg yolk on Mary’s plate; the spine she had pushed to the side but the tail end kept intruding, finding its way into the pool of juice that ex truded from her tomatoes, in a way that seemed insurmountable.