by Sarah Moss
He stands as the ladies leave, one of those gentleman’s tricks learnt late. Ally’s gaze is dropped, demure. The coils of her hair have softened and a strand trails on the pale curve of her neck. Miss De Rivers draws back to allow Ally to precede her into the drawing room, where the flock of hummingbirds, the tiger-skin rug, and the moose’s head await them in the twilight. He cannot imagine what they will find to talk about.
Mr. De Rivers keeps silence, sipping the last of his Burgundy, until the door closes behind the women. The maid removes two plates, leaving the dessert to accompany the port which Mr. De Winter takes from the sideboard behind him.
‘Care for a cigar, Cavendish?’
Ally dislikes the smell. ‘I won’t, thank you. But another of these walnuts.’
De Rivers passes him the basket. ‘Grow them myself, you know. And I’ve a fine fig tree. Doesn’t fruit every year, mind.’
‘It is a very gentle climate. I find it hard, sometimes, to believe myself in England when I see the palm trees and jumping jacks.’
‘Ah. Not what you grew up with. Yorkshire, isn’t it?’ He pours port, generously. ‘Never been there. Right, Cavendish, shall we talk business?’
‘I thought you had something to say to me, Mr. De Rivers.’
He wants Tom to bring him silks from Japan. Kimonos, yes, those too, perhaps one for Miss De Rivers, but he has seen a particularly fine hanging in James Poldoon’s house, a mixture of applique and embroidery of a sort he believes to be previously unseen in Europe. Poldoon got his from a London dealer but he wants the real thing. Go to the workshops, young man. Watch the needles flash, see the dyes put on with your own eyes. Can’t be too hard, can it, to watch those Oriental girls at work? He’s heard a thing or two about Japanese women . . . Anyway, he’ll make it worth Tom’s while. Bring him something really fine, something to cover a whole wall and make Poldoon’s eyes pop, and Tom might be able to leave Ally on Florence Terrace instead of in that damp little cottage next time he goes to sea.
Tom swirls the port around his glass, centrifugal force working against gravity. The first movement tends to overthrow, the second to restore equilibrium. He had hoped to be back home within six months.
‘Do you know where these workshops are, Mr. De Rivers?’
Mr. De Rivers blows smoke. ‘That would be part of your business. There are doubtless guides. I believe there is a part of Osaka known as the textile district.’
‘My commission would be to find these places, place an order and oversee its fulfilment? I might not depart until your hangings were finished, and you would wish me to bring them with me in my own luggage on my return?’
De Rivers taps ash onto a plate. Later, the scullery maid will clean it, probably cursing the thoughtlessness of gentlemen who have never had to see a woman scrub. ‘Exactly the situation. And if you have an enterprising bone in your body, young man, you’ll bring all you can to sell on your own account.’
The port swirls the other way. ‘It is intended to be a brief trip. Mr. Penvenick cannot spare me long.’
‘Penvenick! Come, Tom, we are none of us irreplaceable. If Penvenick can do without you for six months I dare say he will contrive to get through a few more weeks. In any case, you have not asked me to name the sum.’
He puts the glass down and looks up. Enough, he thinks, enough. He owes this man no duty. ‘That, Mr. De Rivers, is because I am happily not in such a case that I must necessarily think of money before paying heed to my profession and indeed to my wife.’
De Rivers smiles. ‘You have a temper indeed, like your wife. I foresee interesting times in your house, Cavendish. Take the girl with you if you cannot do without her. It is not as if you were going to Africa, Japan is a civilised country. Especially if her comparison is the Truro Asylum.’
Of course he has thought of it. Penvenick himself suggested it. The additional expense would be negligible. He has even tried to convince himself that Ally might practice in Japan, where there are several settlements including European women whose need for medical care is doubtless at least as acute as that of their sisters at home, or that she might observe the Japanese care of the insane, for there must, presumably, be madmen there as here. There were women doctors in India for many years before it was possible to qualify and practice in Britain. Japan is not India. The fact remains that she cannot accompany him on a tour of lighthouses and would, then, be left alone in some colony of expatriates for many weeks. The fact remains that she is eagerly anticipating her work in the asylum. There are stars out over the water.
‘It is impossible. And I cannot think that Mr. Penvenick would allow me to do as you ask.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Tom.’
De Rivers puts down his glass and names his figure.
JACOB’S LADDER
The gulls are raucous. A ship’s horn sounds low, three times, from the harbour, probably the big steamer that came in two days ago signalling its departure. Ally, curled away from him, doesn’t stir. He watches the sheet move with her breathing. Her nightgown, which he unbuttoned sometime last night, has slipped over her shoulder. There is a pale mole he had not noticed before at the top of her shoulder blade. Perhaps everyone looks younger asleep than awake. She has tangled the sheet around her legs, her one bare calf shaded with gold fur in the morning sun, and left him with none. By the time he is accustomed to sharing his bed, he will be behind the guard-rail on a wooden berth, rocked by the waves. He has always slept well at sea.
The room is not much changed by Ally’s arrival. His two jackets now hang from the hook on the door, ousted from the mirrored wardrobe by her dresses. Her best shoes, too high for comfortable walking, lie under his chest of drawers, and the grey silk dress reclines as though faint in the hard-backed chair, but she will put them away this morning. Sunlight is strained by the striped curtain as it always was, and the counterpane his mother made for him when he first went to London is folded back over the foot-rail as it always was. He remembers Ally’s accounts of her father’s house, of the briar rose wallpaper her father designed especially for her and her sister May, the winter and summer curtains that changed the light and colours of the drawing room where the famous autumn wallpaper first hung. He has not seen the house, has not been invited, but even his mother recognised Alfred Moberley’s name. Oh, the bird curtains, she said. Mrs. Gummersall has them in the pink. Ally’s Uncle James’s house, where he met her, also had patterned papers and curtains, a profusion of lamps and soft chairs. Perhaps he should suggest that Ally redecorate the cottage, make it more like what she is used to. If he accepted De Rivers’ commission, there would be enough for that and more.
Careful not to disturb her, he slides from under the covers, steps over the creaking board by the door. He used sometimes to creep out of his mother’s house early on summer mornings, off to the river to fish or sometimes just for the pleasure of a secret outing, without the gaze of those who assume that a boy alone is up to no good. He has not had to move silently around this house before. Most of the garden is in the shade but there is sun on the roses at the gate and on the high brick wall between the cottage’s ope and the garden of number two. The basement kitchen is cool and dim, the flagged floor cold to his bare feet. It always used to feel dusty, until Ally came. He removes the whistle so it won’t wake Ally and sets the kettle to boil. She baked bread on Saturday, and there are eggs in the pantry and the special India smoked tea that was one of her Aunt Mary’s lesser wedding gifts, just a small token, she said, a little luxury for the first days of their married life. They have no tray but a baking dish will do the job; he will make breakfast in bed for his wife. For his bride. On the way up the stairs he pauses, balances the tray while he opens the front door and invites the day to come in.
The kitchen floor is washed, properly scrubbed as well as mopped. She has washed Tom’s clothes for the first time, watching his sleeves and the legs of his drawers swim and entwine the
mselves with her shifts and blouses. Please, Tom said, I did not marry a doctor to have her wring my shirts. It is beneath your dignity, he says. Send it out, Al. He has always done so. What, she said, so I can sit idle as a fine lady while some other woman toils? Can you imagine what Mamma would say? She has rinsed everything, but Tom has no mangle. It is a bright day. The neighbour’s housekeeper has given her some fixed wooden pegs, discarded now Mrs. Trevethan has at last persuaded her employer to let her buy the new ones with metal springs, and Ally has rigged a line between the holly tree and the fence. There is no reason why she should not sit down, even in the leaf-dappled garden, and re-read Professor Browne’s book about asylums. Housework is never exactly done, for one might always wash the curtains or dust something, but her new status as a wife must not be allowed to prevent her real work. Idleness, says Mamma’s voice in her mind, frittering away the afternoon in self-indulgence when there is misery and despair on your very doorstep. The voice has reason: there are back lanes in Falmouth as infernal as anywhere in Manchester, where Mamma labours day after day, month after month, teaching illiterate women to feed their children, clean their houses and wash their clothes for little thanks, showing despoiled girls and diseased prostitutes that there are still other ways for them to live. Here there are open sewers running down to the sea and malnourished children begging outside the baker’s shop. Women in limp finery greet the arrival of every ship and frequent the bars around the harbour. Ally could be working like Mamma to save bodies and souls this very minute instead of arranging cushions for herself on the stone steps beside the camellia. She could be soliciting subscribers for a reformatory for those women, or at the very least offering medical care to them and their children. She remembers her eighteen-year-old self telling the inmates of Mamma’s Home that when she qualified, she would attend women who had nowhere else to go, who could not pay doctors’ fees and so died with their children for lack of the most elementary care. And now, when so many of her acquaintance have given so much to help her, she devotes herself to the study of chimerical disorders of the mind, to the least respectable branch of medicine. From three hundred miles away, she can feel Mamma’s disappointment. May, for all her frivolity, for all her pleasure in dress and in pleasing Papa and his painter friends, took the better path. She opens the book.
The history of mental disease, writes Browne, reveals some awful truths. And one of these is that the mind may be trained to insanity, to destroy itself. It is the beginning of an essentially optimistic argument: if the mind may be led or pushed to insanity, if it is possible for a sane person to be driven mad, then the process must be reversible. There is no reason why anyone who has once been in full possession of his intellects should not be restored to that state. Browne commends ‘the well-regulated efforts, the virtuous contentment, the settled principles, of a highly educated mind.’ A seagull screams over Ally’s head. The leaves of the camellia are almost as dark as the holly’s prickles, and both gleam white in the sun. It is not her experience, not the experience of any woman she knows, that a highly educated mind brings either virtuous contentment or settled principles. A trained intelligence, she would go so far as to suggest, is likely to unsettle the virtuous contentment of its female possessor, and indeed the unsettling of contentment should be an object of women’s education. Browne, naturally enough, concerns himself with the masculine mind.
She reads on: ‘he who devotes himself to the care of the insane . . . must live among them; he must be their domestic associate; he ought to join in their pursuits and pastimes; he ought to engage them in conversation during the day, and listen to their soliloquies in the retirement of their cells; he must watch, analyze, grapple with insanity among the insane, and seek for his weapons of aggression in the constitution and dispositions of each individual, and not in general rules or universal specifics.’ Well, it is only in the discovery of general rules and universal specifics that the profession of the mad-doctor will come of age, but even so, she thinks, yes. Each mind has its own story, its own road to perdition, and perhaps that story, once imagined, can be retraced. The difficulty, as she and Browne well know, is to order asylums in such a way as to make this possible. The difficulty is to find space among the multiplying madnesses for a narrative of any kind. She finds herself rising to check that the laundry is drying, as if it might be doing anything else.
‘Will your great work wait while we take a walk, Dr. Moberley Cavendish?’ Her hands are gritty with flour and butter, her fingernails unpleasantly caked. Mamma considered pastry unwholesome, especially for young girls, and it was never made at home, but Tom likes it. And there will be no pies for him in Japan.
She tries to smile for him but her eyes fill. Here it is, the beginning of their last evening. From this moment, the minutes will slip away like stitches dropped from a knitting needle. Unravelling, irrecoverable.
‘If you are content to dine at a positively dissipated hour, Mr. Cavendish. The book says that pastry may profitably be left to rest in the pantry.’
He holds out his hand. ‘Did you not marry me in hopes of dissipated habits? Come, I have been pent in the office all day and there is a fine fresh wind off the sea.’
She sinks her hands in the basin of cold water, scratches the butter from under each nail, shakes them dry to save having to wash the towel. If she splashes her face too, he will see that she is upset.
‘Your apron?’
How could she care about an apron? She makes her mouth smile. ‘You don’t consider it suitable garb for an evening of gay abandon? Perhaps you are right.’
They take the high path, up the stone stairs from the cottage to Penwerris Terrace where there is another row of sea-captains’ houses. The sun is still high and the white stucco fronts are as bright as sheets drying in the sun. Seagulls on ridgepoles and chimneys announce Tom and Ally’s progress, the cries circling them from above, and below them the town curls around its slopes, poor people in grey stone at the bottom and rich in white paint at the top. Along here, ornate cast-iron fences restrain bushes of pink-starred fuchsia and tendrils of wisteria from which purple flowers drip like bunches of grapes. Through a window, she glimpses the autumn wallpaper which for a long time she thought Papa had made only for the drawing room at home.
‘Ally?’
She turns, startled. When he proposed marriage his voice did not sound so serious. Perhaps, at this very last moment, he is going to say it. Come too. I cannot bear to leave you. Whatever the cost to your career, come with me. I can’t, she would say. And yes. Yes.
‘I hope—’ He stops. ‘You know—Ally, I am sure the time will pass quickly once we are accustomed to it. At least we both knew from the beginning that this separation was to come. And you will have your work, it is not as if you will need to seek distraction. Letters take only a few weeks now, did you know that? We will perhaps re-read our letters in fifty years and remember—’ His hand tightens on hers. ‘Remember all of those years together.’
Her skirt swings over her shoes, over the paving stones, as each foot reaches forward. There are fewer minutes left now than when they left the house, than when they crossed the road. She should say something back, embellish his vignette of their old age.
There is nothing to say. They walk on, above the library and gallery now, and she follows him down the cobbled lane where the men outside the pub watch them pass. One says something about her and the others laugh. Her skirt, she thinks, her skirt made in London for a prosperous professional woman, is too narrow here. They will think it not decent. Or her hair is coming down, or has a seagull soiled her clothes? Tom is waiting at the bottom, his elbow crooked for her hand.
‘I’m sorry, Ally, I thought you were with me.’
She takes his arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am.’
For this evening, for this one night. The fresh wind he wanted soothes her face like a cold cloth.
‘We’ll go up the hill?’
They are heading as usual for Gyllingvase, where he likes to see the ships coming in from the Atlantic. Going blue water, she’s heard people say here, going far away, as if the coastal waters were not blue.
‘I can climb Jacob’s Ladder. It is possible in a skirt.’
The first time he brought her here was a hot afternoon and she remarked that climbing one hundred and twelve stone steps from the town square was an inelegant proceeding and that she liked to see the trees growing on the road up to the Observatory instead. But he enjoys Jacob’s Ladder partly because it is wholly unnecessary, an egregious feat of engineering like that of a small boy playing with wooden blocks.
‘Very well. We will ascend together.’
There are children playing marbles at the top, and as Ally and Tom reach the group a glass ball comes rolling, dropping, bouncing like a body over a cliff. She hears herself exclaim. It will smash, splinter into tiny shards and its heart of blue will be exposed and broken. The boys stand to watch. There are holes in their trousers and their bare feet are dirty, their hair long and unkempt. The smallest one’s mouth hangs open.
‘It’s too steep, don’t try to chase it,’ says Tom. ‘Here, this should buy you another. Whose is it?’
The child takes the penny but the marble has reached the bottom intact. Spheres, she remembers him saying, are the strongest shape. Joins and edges are always points of weakness.
They come over the brow of the hill to the villas of Florence Terrace, and at last see out over the Atlantic as well as up the estuary’s intimate curves. The grand estates, newer than the captains’ houses, spread down the hill to the sea, their velvet lawns embroidered with palm trees and flowering bushes. Beyond them are bath chairs and perambulators drawn as if by clockwork along the paved promenade, and beyond that, waves in dark blue and white leaping and reaching, and right at the edge, just where sea at last becomes sky, gathering and hurling themselves into the Manacles. It is a clear day, when you can see the Manacles. Her hand tightens on Tom’s sleeve, and suddenly her drowned sister is there in her mind, May’s legs bound by her twisting wet skirts and May’s hair floating out above her face as she sinks and her mouth opens, surprise or some final speech, I didn’t mean this or I love you or—