Arthur shakes his head sadly, as sadly as an actor in a tragedy. ‘Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be, I beg you, Louisa. This is not a punishment. You are going to be looked after by people who understand your problems and as soon as you’re strong enough you will come home again. Then you can spend as much time with our children as you like; once you are your old self.’
‘I don’t want to be my old self, Arthur. I will die if I have to go back to that.’
‘Louisa, listen to yourself; you’re hysterical, irrational. No, really, I cannot be expected to put up with this.’ He rises from the chair. At the door he turns with a look of deep reproach and leaves.
‘Your mama needs a rest,’ Jane tells my son who is weeping in her arms. Her voice is light and briskly cheerful. ‘She has had enough of naughty little boys and girls and needs to spend time on her own. And you, young man, must not be selfish and stop her.’
I am already in the car. I want to scream at her not to say these things to him but I sit there, saying nothing, doing nothing as the motor moves off. I see my small son waving and tears fall down his cheeks. Lillian is happy with her new doll and does not need either comforting or explanations. Why now? I’m sure she is saying to herself. Why should I want to understand them now?
I know from the smell of camphor that it’s time for another treatment and I steel myself for what is to come. There is no point in begging for them to let it be, to stop. The treatment is doing me good, so they say. And this is not a bad place. There are locks but they are seldom used. We are even allowed to stroll freely in the grounds, though if we are found outside the perimeters we will be locked up.
The feelings of panic and terror that the camphor induces before the blessed fit takes over are hard to bear, especially when you know what to expect. And I do know. I have been here for three months now. I have not been allowed to see my children in all this time. I tell Arthur and Sir Charles – I tell them all, the doctors and the nurses – that if only I could see my children I might not need any further treatment, but of course they won’t listen. When you are well no one notices you and when you are sick no one listens.
The door to my room opens and Sir Charles comes inside followed by two nurses. ‘Now, now, Mrs Blackstaff, let go of the bed and let us get started. You know it has to be.’
‘It’s for your own good,’ the young nurse says but she looks unhappy. Mostly the staff are kind.
I doze and in my sleepy state I think of them, of Georgie and Lillian, and how comfortable, how picture-perfect they looked having their tea with Jane Dale by the sitting-room fire. The curtains had not yet been drawn; it was only four o’clock but already it was getting dark. I used to dread the darkening evenings but lately they have become my friends. The doctors are surprised at how strong I am. But you have to be, to walk twelve miles in one night.
I am coming home. There they are, waiting at the door, my husband and my children; my family. I am crying as I step out of the car helped by the chauffeur. Jane Dale appears behind them on the front steps. She looks so young although we are almost of an age. She is wearing a soft green dress that clings to her tiny figure. Lydia is not there, nor Nanny. My mother-in-law departed this life while I was away. Arthur came to see me at the clinic to break the news in person. He did not visit often; it was not judged to be in my best interests, he said. But he did come to tell me about Lydia having passed away and about Nanny having left. When I cried he thought I wept over his mother and, more tenderly than he has spoken to me for a long time, he said that I must not upset myself, that she had had a ‘good innings’. But it was for Nanny I wept. She had been my ally.
My husband kisses me on the cheek, gingerly as if he is afraid I burn. ‘Welcome home, my dear.’
Lillian allows herself to be embraced before running off to play with the new puppy. Georgie refuses to come near me, clinging to Jane Dale’s arm. She is smiling, not at him, not at me, but to herself. I kneel in front of my son and put my arms out but he just fixes me with those eyes I love so well and refuses to leave Jane’s side. I look up and meet her gaze and I see the triumph before she turns away to arrange a more suitable expression. ‘Kiss your mama, Georgie, and say welcome home,’ she tells him but she keeps her hand on his shoulder.
I get to my feet. ‘It’s all right, Georgie. I can have my kiss later.’
‘He thinks I abandoned him on purpose,’ I say to Arthur once we are alone.
‘Of course he doesn’t.’
‘But I didn’t; I always watched over them.’
Arthur gives me a queer look. He really does think I am crazy, but I cannot tell him or my children that I had been there, in the garden after dark, looking up at their windows, catching a glimpse of a fair head or a dark one, or a small hand opening the curtain to look out long after the lights had been turned out. Nor can I tell him that, because of those night vigils and what I saw, the mere presence of Jane Dale makes me feel mad enough to satisfy even Sir Charles. But I don’t want to go back to the clinic. I want my children, and for that I need my husband and my sanity.
‘Georgie was a little difficult for the first few weeks of your absence. It didn’t help that he had a fever for a while. We did not want to worry you but we were concerned. He kept saying that he wanted to go out in the garden to find you. But he got well and he settled. Nanny did not have a good effect on him. But luckily we had our little Jane. No, the boy’s a little cross now, but he’ll forgive you.’
‘You say he settled, but I suspect he simply gave up.’ I take off my hat and run my fingers through my newly shorn looks. ‘Is Viola back?’
‘Viola is still on her travels. Please don’t give me cause for anxiety the moment you return.’ I heed the warning in his voice.
With me from the clinic comes a list of instructions as to what I should and should not do. I should have complete peace and rest. I should have plenty of fresh air. I should not be allowed to exert myself in any way nor must I be exposed to any undue excitement. I should occupy my time with gentle tasks like gardening and flower arranging. If I insisted on picking up the pencil or the brush, my work should be scrutinised daily for any signs of a disturbed mind. Some visitors would be allowed and, if the improvement in my mental state continued, excursions could be considered under supervision, and later on my own. The children should of course see their mother but they should be discouraged from forming too close a bond as the illness could return at any time.
It takes a week before Georgie will come near me. I had waited for him, forcing myself to be patient and to let him take his time. I was sitting in my parlour with Lillian on my knee, reading her a story from her red book of fairy tales. I knew that he listened outside every afternoon and the previous day he had come as far as the doorway. Then my patience was rewarded. I see him there, walking in, one finger in his mouth, keeping close to the walls as if crossing the room could be dangerous, and then, with a dash, he is at my side, pressing up close. ‘Oh Georgie,’ I tell him, ‘I love you so much.’
I garden and I walk. I play with my darling children, but, as yet, I see them only briefly before breakfast and again at teatime. Arthur assures me that if I continue to make progress I shall see them as much as I could possibly want. ‘You will be begging Jane to take them off your hands, you’ll see,’ he smiles. I look at him and I find it impossible to equate this affectionate if slightly distant man with my enemy of only months before. I thought the wounds inside me would never heal but I am beginning to think I might have been wrong.
Georgie sneaks into my room, making me laugh with his furtive little glances over the shoulder and his tiptoe walk. But I stop laughing when I hear that Jane has said he must not come to me without checking with her first or I might get ill and have to go away again. ‘You don’t want to make your mama ill, do you Georgie?’ He is puzzled; that’s how he puts it himself: puzzled. How could he make me ill just by being there? Especially when I am always so pleased to see him.
I hu
g him close and tell him that of course I shall not get ill from seeing my own lovely children. But when Jane comes looking for him I cannot contain my anger. I tell her that she is to stop feeding my children such nonsense. ‘I will not tolerate your constant undermining of my relationship with my family. In fact, Jane, I believe you are a most destructive force in my life.’ I surprise myself with my frankness, but my voice remains level, polite, conversational. I watch as Jane flees dissolved in noisy tears.
Arthur comes up to my room. I expect him to chide me for upsetting Jane. Instead he sits down beside me and takes my hand. His cheeks are flushed and there are tears in his eyes. ‘I did what I thought was best.’
‘What do you mean? When?’
‘The clinic. Sir Charles is one of the best in his field. You frightened me, Louisa. Your moods. For weeks you’re like a sleepwalker who no one, nothing, can wake. The next you are in the grip of some mania. And then your painting, this fantasy … of you and poor Viola. What was I to do? There were the children to consider.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
My husband kneels before me, burying his face in my lap. I feel his tears through the thin silk of my dress. I watch the sun set behind the large oaks, and with a sigh I raise my hand, pausing in the air before resting it on Arthur’s curly head.
Jane Dale has left. She is working as secretary to Donald Argyll and in her letters she tells us she is very happy in her new position and that she finds London ‘exhilarating’.
For my birthday Arthur gives me a pearl necklace. And there is something else. He looks awkward as he hands me the parcel. ‘She came here to see you before she left. I told her you were to have no visitors. She asked me to give you this. I’m afraid I waited, until now …’ I get to my feet and walk to my room. There I sit down by the window and unwrap my gift. It’s a silver cigarette case. I read the inscription: Forbes Forever.
I return to the drawing room for now but when everyone sleeps I go to my husband’s studio and pick out what I need. I work that night and every night for a fortnight, contenting myself with the electric light. Each morning, in the early hours, I clean the brushes and hide the palette, hoping he will not notice what is missing. Thankfully Arthur is a messy worker. I store the canvas at the back of the gun room.
When finally I’m done and the paint is dry, I wrap my picture and write her name on the parcel, care of her parents at Northbourne Manor. I ask Jenkins our gardener to deliver it. To this day I do not know if it reached her.
Nell Gordon: There exists in photography a vast grey area between legitimate documentation and voyeurism, between art and exploitation. This is where Grace Shield stepped with her prize-winning photographs of the very private experience of dying.
Grace had expected the house on the Cape to disappoint when she returned the following summer, for it to have shrunk unbecomingly and for the whitewashed walls not to be the soft chalky white of her memory but a shabby shade of undecided. And the view from the bedroom would surely turn out to have been workaday rather than sublime. But as she opened the back door with the big old key and walked inside, it was all as she had remembered, right down to the smell of beeswax and salt; only Pluto’s chewed wicker basket with his red and white crochet blanket was gone. She had known Pluto would not be there. Dylan Lennox had written to her in the mid-winter to tell her that the old pug’s heart had given out one cold morning on his favourite stretch of the sands and that he had buried him, wrapped in his favourite blanket, under the maple. In fact there had been five identical blankets, all made by Dylan’s mother, an expert craftswoman who had hoped for grandchildren and got a wheezy old pug instead. ‘Don’t tell him,’ Dylan had said at the time of their first stay in the cottage. ‘He thinks it’s always the same ones.’
Grace left her cases by the door and walked through the house, through the pale blue and moonshine-yellow sitting room out on to the wooden floorboards of the open porch, up the narrow wooden staircase to their bedroom. She sat down on the bed and stroked the worn patchwork quilt. Next she lay down, closing her eyes, smiling to herself as she imagined him there, next to her.
He called that evening and every evening but he could not say for sure when he would be able to join her or for how long. She moved through the next weeks in a restless way, never quite still, never really at peace. Most mornings she woke with a start in the middle of some dream she couldn’t quite catch and leapt out of bed eager to get the day under way, eager to work. She was not there just to sit waiting for her full-time love and part-time lover, she had things to do. But this restlessness was a problem. To get the shots she wanted, that she expected of herself, she needed to think deep and look hard. Instead her thoughts were all surface, insects skimming a pond, too light to reach the murky depths where the interesting stuff was to be found.
And something was up with Jefferson. She had seen him only three times since last summer. There had been a week in London in the autumn, a couple of days in Paris early in the new year and then four days in New York just before Easter. He had cancelled the trip to London planned for May, just two weeks before he was due to arrive, and his reason, pressures of work, had not convinced her. But she knew he still loved her; she trusted him absolutely.
‘No you don’t,’ Angelica had said at the time. She had rushed over with a box of Kleenex and a bottle of vodka. ‘You’re stupid, but not that stupid.’ Angelica was single again and from the way she talked you would have thought it the only way for her to live; unless you knew her well, that is. She poured them each a half tumbler of vodka. ‘Now come on, Grace; you don’t have to be brave with me.’
Grace had looked up at her with swollen cried-out eyes. ‘I’m not brave. I’m bawling my heart out.’ She wiped her face with the cuff of her sweater. ‘But not because I think he doesn’t love me. I’ve waited too long for him to waste time doubting. I’m sad, that’s all, sad not to see him. And I’m worried about him. The last time I saw him, over in New York, I was shocked at how thin he was. I couldn’t stop staring at him and then I felt even worse because he covered himself as if I had made him ashamed of his body. His body was beautiful; he was just too thin. He said it was stress, that’s all. Too much work, that kind of thing.’
‘Men shouldn’t be too thin. Then again, when they are it’s less of them to dislike.’
‘Aren’t those man-hating remarks rather passé?’ Grace said.
‘Mark my words,’ Angelica said, ‘the pashmina might come and go but hating men will never go out of fashion.’
Grace had looked at her. ‘In your working life you’re exemplary; hardworking and professional, but to your private life you bring the consistency of a schizophrenic.’
Grace kept asking Jefferson, over the phone, in her e-mails and in her letters, if he was sure he was well. If he should not see a doctor. If he had put on weight. When he phoned to cancel his visit to London the first thing she had asked was if he was sick. She had stood there, the receiver away from her ear, her hands clammy as he shouted down the line that her fussing was enough to make anyone feel ill. What was happening? Some things were a given; he never yelled at her, she never begged for his time or wept in his sight.
After that she knew to keep her concerns to herself while feeling further away from him than at any time since they had met again six years ago.
Mrs Shield could not understand why Grace had to go away a second summer. ‘What’s wrong with your own country? And Finn and the boys might visit. Than you’ll miss them.’
‘Finn might always visit but he never does. Anyway I like the States. I was born over there. It’s good to keep in touch with my roots.’
‘Roots, my foot,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘You’re hiding something.’
‘My roots.’
‘Don’t be silly, Grace. What is it?’
‘If I were hiding something, telling you about it would kind of defeat the object.’
‘Very well, Grace. Have it your way.’
‘Oh, Evie, th
at’s what I’m trying to do.’ Her expression softened. ‘I’ll phone and write lots, I promise.’
She had been in the house on the Cape now for two weeks and still she had not seen him. ‘So when is your husband due?’ Melissa asked again as they had coffee in the Walkers’ back yard with the Walkers’ bonny babies toddling about their feet.
‘Soon,’ Grace said, thinking she knew just how Jefferson had felt being nagged.
She walked alone for hours each evening along the beach where they had walked together. She had never shied away from the possibility of their affair ending, but she had never doubted that their love would last, until now.
She had just returned from one of those walks when the station wagon pulled up. At first she assumed it was some tourist needing a place to park but when the front door – the one no one ever used – rattled, she got up and walked round to see who it could be. By then the person calling had made their way to the back and next thing she heard steps like hail on the wooden floor. ‘I know you’re there. Just come on out and face me, you tart.’ It was a woman’s voice.
‘What the hell?’ Grace hurried towards the kitchen.
‘It’s Cherry McGraw. How many people d’ya know who call you a tart?’
‘Cherry.’ Grace faced her in the small hallway. Her heart was pounding but she kept her voice light. ‘Only you, as it happens.’ She reckoned Cherry was allowed the ‘tart’, assuming she had found out about Grace having an affair with her husband.
They stared at each other. Grace thought she would not have recognised her if she had passed her in the street. When last they met, Cherry had been a sunkissed dainty little thing, all soft curves and pert features. The Cherry glowering at Grace across the kitchen was baked to a terracotta brown; her body, once so neatly packed, looked loose and the delicate features had lost their definition as if painted on with too much water. Then again, Grace thought, I’m seeing her through jealous eyes.
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