Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘No one could have known I placed the locket around her poor lifeless throat. You were such a striking child, Nancy. You need not question your power, now or in the future. You must simply relate what you see, or speak as the voices direct you.’

  He was right, she thought. What else was there to do?

  She felt exhausted, as if it was an age rather than a few hours since she had hurried up Essex Road to open the shop for that day’s business.

  ‘Yes. All right. Thank you.’

  He stood back again and studied her face. His cheeks were wet but he glowed with joy.

  ‘You have given me great happiness this evening. I’m sorry to have rebuffed you earlier. I shall be happy to work with you, my dear. I will teach you everything I know, and encourage your gifts to the very best of my ability.’

  She gratefully agreed to his proposals. To earn money was the important thing, and somehow she would manage to yoke the Uncanny with the pressures of performance. Lawrence Feather promised her that he would prepare her for her first public sitting as soon as possible.

  They shook hands on the agreement.

  Nancy stepped out into the city dusk and her tiredness lifted. It was a beautiful evening. Perhaps she would soon follow Feather into the ranks of professional mediums, and then she could make life at Waterloo Street more bearable for everyone. Her plans extended to the Palmyra too. As she hurried to join Lion the paving stones under her feet seemed to shift, as if they formed a vast grid on which she might perform her next moves. She skipped over the joins like an eight-year-old playing hopscotch.

  The pub in which she had agreed to meet Lion was called the Old Cinque Ports. She found the gaunt old place to the north of New Oxford Street. Under a tobacco-brown ceiling there was a long, curved bar of polished mahogany with a series of bevelled mirrors multiplying into infinity the reflections of a few morose drinkers. Lion was reading his newspaper next to a sign for ‘Worthington on Draught’. He looked up as she approached and his face split into a broad grin.

  ‘Here you are at last. I was ready to give you up for lost. What happened? Hang on a tick, let me get you a drink before you tell all.’

  He returned with two glasses.

  ‘Mr Feather was very kind in the end. He said he will teach me.’

  Lion pursed his lips in a low, soundless whistle.

  ‘I say. Madame Blavatsky.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Lion was so good-humoured and tolerant, but his re-sponse to everything was a joke or a tease. Nancy found it slightly irritating that he could never be serious. She took a sip of beer and licked her top lip to remove the froth.

  ‘Li, do you think I am peculiar?’

  ‘Eh? Of course not. I think you are completely divine. Kiss me?’

  He hadn’t probed any further about Ann’s brother. Lion simply noted what happened, made a connection between his godfather’s success in his field and Nancy’s unusual abilities, and cheerfully brought them together. He might as well have been introducing a strawberry picker to a jam maker. Of course I am peculiar, Nancy thought. What else did Martinmart‌inmartinmartin indicate, or a drowned woman’s locket, or the soaking girl who had recently made her appearance in Waterloo Street as if to reassure Nancy that she was still there?

  ‘I mean, you will certainly make your fortune mumbling to lost grannies, just like Lawrence does. In this harsh modern age we all have to make compromises, darling. Look at me. I have spent the whole day thinking up ways to persuade people to buy Goodenough’s tonic, which has quite probably got arsenic in it. “It Perks You Up” isn’t quite punchy enough, is it?’

  Nancy laughed in spite of herself.

  ‘How about “It Knocks You for Six”?’

  ‘Damn. I wish I’d thought of that.’ He clasped his hands and screwed his eyes shut. ‘Is anyone there? Speak, I say.’ He cracked open one eye and grinned at her. ‘See? Not a dicky. You could do my job but I’d be clueless at yours.’

  ‘It isn’t my job yet. And you’ll just have to keep on taking the tonic.’

  ‘Ha ha. I say, do you fancy the pictures? We’re in time for the last of Charlie Chaplin at the Empire. If you’re hungry we could pick up a bag of chips.’

  ‘Why not?’ In his avoidance of anything complicated, Lion was easy-going company. ‘Yes, please. That sounds lovely.’

  ‘Drink up then.’

  They made their way to the cinema, digging in turn into a newspaper cone of hot chips while they waited in the queue for tickets. Lion probed the corners for the last salty scraps before crumpling the empty bag.

  ‘Why not come back with me after the picture? If your ma is still at her sister’s?’

  Lion’s idea of economical living was a flat in a Georgian house just off Shepherd’s Market in Mayfair. It was an attic, perched over a series of rooms occupied by women who always greeted him with friendly enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, of course they are tarts,’ he had told her when asked about this. ‘But they don’t mind my gramophone and I don’t mind their visitors. A good arrangement, don’t you think?’

  Nancy thought this was funny. The flat was small and the neighbours were unusual, but it was fashionably bohemian and private and Mayfair was still Mayfair. Lion inhabited a different realm from Waterloo Street.

  ‘I must go home tonight.’

  He raked his curls with chip-greased fingers, but he didn’t bother to argue.

  ‘What a shame.’

  A couple strolled down the central avenue of a suburban park. They passed through a tunnel of plane trees with leaves browned by the previous night’s frost, the first of the approaching winter, before making a single circuit of the display of scarlet and lemon dahlias in the central flower-bed. The man seemed to be pleading with his companion, who kept her face averted.

  At the far end of the avenue they came to a twiggy arbour sheltering a bench. Pausing to look at the rustic shelter the woman said bitterly, ‘It’s not as pretty as the one we had in the old garden.’

  The man took the opportunity to slide his arm around her waist.

  ‘Let’s sit down anyway.’

  They settled themselves on the bench and the woman huddled inside her violet wool coat which was layered over an embroidered crimson skirt and woollen stockings. She made a patch of colour almost as bright as the municipal bedding. Breathing out as if she expected to see it clouding in the damp air, she sighed.

  ‘Look, this is what we have come to.’

  ‘The park?’

  ‘Cast out to a public bench. After all the years, after all we have done and all we have been through.’

  They were both remembering a long-ago walk in Hyde Park, and another day when they had taken a train journey to a quiet country churchyard. Even with these memories in common they were separated by antagonism. They fell into a sombre silence.

  The man said at length, ‘We do have a place to live. A home, with two of our children safely in it. We aren’t obliged to take refuge on a bench, or at least we only have to do so because I prefer not to discuss our private difficulties in front of Faith and Matthew.’

  ‘I miss our house. The house you sold from under my feet and our children’s.’

  This discussion was so dulled by repetition that neither of them could summon the energy to follow it through. Silence resumed while they watched a row of swallows assembling on a telegraph wire.

  ‘I suppose you have been to see Vassilis?’ Devil asked at last.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  At that he turned to look at her.

  ‘Is this the truth? Is it, Eliza?’

  ‘Yes. I won’t go to him any more.’

  He stared. ‘If you don’t take any more of that vile stuff I can manage everything else. I’ll get the theatre open again and I’ll buy you a house in Park Lane, if that’s what you want. The only thing I miss in the whole bloody world is you, and you’ve been gone far too long.’

  The words were painful for him to
utter, and hearing them caused her as much pain. A floodgate seemed to open in her. She leaned forward briefly and pressed her mouth to his.

  ‘I know. I am so sorry, Devil.’

  ‘My darling, I’ll help you. I’ll be with you every minute you need me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I should say it to you and Cornelius and Nancy as well. Especially Nancy. Thank God Arthur isn’t here.’

  ‘He will be. You don’t want to be this way for him, do you? Promise me now, you won’t see Vassilis again.’

  ‘I won’t. He doesn’t want me to take the medicine any more either.’

  ‘Say it, Eliza.’

  ‘I won’t see Vassilis again.’

  Her free hand curled inside the pocket of her purple coat where the brown bottle safely lay. The last time she visited him she had implored the doctor, alternately pleading and weeping in his dilapidated surgery, but Vassilis had flatly denied her need.

  ‘I am a doctor, Mrs Wix. You have got quite well and your situation no longer is critical. We must make another way to manage the discomfort from your condition. Let me give you the examination again next week.’

  But to Eliza a week might as well have been a decade.

  Her only hope had been to find another source of supply, and this she had been able to do by recognising on the street a frail-looking man she had seen twice before, each time seated in Vassilis’s waiting room. With the cunning of desperation she had followed this person to a shop selling prosthetic limbs made of tin or alarmingly pink ceramic material, and the harnesses of webbing and leather that attached the devices to damaged bodies.

  ‘Yes, miss?’ the man had asked from behind his wooden counter.

  She had mumbled her request, and submitted to the prurient scrutiny that followed.

  ‘You don’t look the type, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Is there a type?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, indeed there is.’

  He had looked her over even more baldly, pricing her shoes and her eccentric clothing and her emphatic but mostly valueless jewellery. At last he scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and thrust it at her.

  ‘Here. Don’t say who told you, and don’t come here again.’

  The place was down an alley, off a low street almost directly beneath the skeletal cranes of the docks. Eliza crept there and found a foetid room in which cats and small children scrabbled amongst debris on the bare floorboards, all of them ignored by a woman with blackened teeth who sold her what she needed without once looking her in the face. That suited Eliza well enough.

  The price was high. Eliza had only a tiny sum of money put away and it didn’t call for any elaborate calculations to work out that this would very soon be used up. She thought Faith might lend her some more, perhaps, when the time came.

  There was no point in worrying about it in any case. For now, she had what she needed.

  ‘Good girl. I’m proud of you,’ Devil whispered.

  She kissed her husband again to stop the unwelcome words. Then she stood up and wrapped her arms around herself.

  ‘Let’s walk back. Faith will be wondering where we are.’

  Devil grinned. ‘She will not. Your sister will be relieved that we are behaving like a married couple for a change.’

  They set off towards the gates. These had once been elaborate wrought ironwork, raised by public subscription to commemorate the Golden Jubilee, but the metal had been torn away and melted down to support the war effort. The iron hinges left behind bled rust into the stone gateposts and the replacement wooden gates had a ramshackle, splintery quality. An hour ago Devil would have regarded this as an emblem of the blighted and despairing condition of the city, even of the whole country, but Eliza’s promise had changed his view.

  His wife would come back to him, Arthur would soon be home, Cornelius would surely recover, given time. And Nancy had told him of her intriguing idea.

  He tipped his soft hat to a sharper angle and began to whistle a tune.

  Lawrence Feather kept his promise. Weeks turned into months as he painstakingly schooled Nancy in the Spiritualist principles. She read the books he handed down from the Gower Street bookcase, absorbing the high-flown theories derived from shakily conducted ‘experiments’ in Beyond. She attended dozens of seances, sitting thoughtfully at the back of hushed rooms as wildly differing messages flooded over from the other side. Florid rappings and ectoplasmic manifestations and hovering presences did not convince her at all – she knew those tricks of the illusionists’ trade too well – but a few of the spoken channels did. She noted that the most convincing and affecting performances were the simplest. The medium should be no more than a mouthpiece, working without distracting props or costume, offering a few words that could be taken as comfort or reassurance by those left behind. She judged that some of the connections at one or two of the seances – not all of them, by any means, but some – must be genuine. The belief lay within her, in her own experience, and as the conviction grew her confidence in what she was learning developed with it.

  Whatever his real powers might be, Mr Feather was the best performer of all of them. He had the ability to be still, to be a commanding presence without one histrionic gesture, and above all he knew how to look and listen. She noticed right away how he could take a question and turn it inside out to provide an answer. He could read a sitter’s clothes and facial expressions and the language of her gestures, and weave a dense narrative from these thin shreds. He was inventive and authoritative, and at the same time he could be kindly and reassuring. Almost invariably he was able to send his clients home in the belief that reunion with their loved one lay somewhere ahead. It’s not wrong, Nancy thought. Time’s coils mysteriously furled and looped around them all.

  They did not always get on well – Feather could be unctuous, and she prickled under his presumptions and the forced intimacy of their strange situation. He behaved properly enough, even though she had been afraid at the beginning that she would have to deal with kisses and fumblings. Probably she was protected from the man’s inclinations by her relationship with Lion. As the time passed she came to respect her mentor, although not to like him any better.

  Within a few more weeks, under Feather’s tutelage, she was conducting private sittings of her own. Although he was never again as explicit as he had been in their first conversation at Gower Street, the understanding remained clear. Sometimes, if the Uncanny forsook her, she would have to use her own voice. She must not be cruel or give pain – the objective should always be to comfort and console. Imagination, generalisation, tact and human sympathy were to be her tools.

  And the Uncanny did not often forsake her. She learned how to open herself to it, by neither resisting nor over-reaching. She began to gather a small reputation, until the day came when her tutor judged she was ready to hold her first public seance. Nancy immediately thought of the Palmyra stage, but quickly realised that the green-and-gold theatre was far too big, and the association with tongue-in-cheek music-hall magic too close. Lawrence Feather booked a hall. It was the very same one that Nancy had known before the war, from accompanying Lizzie and then Jinny to WSPU meetings. It was large enough to seat sixty or so people in reasonable comfort, but not too big for one inexperienced speaker to fill with a voice that might well falter.

  On the night of the seance she arrived an hour early, alone, at her own insistence. A thick smell of mackintoshes, damp woollen clothes and London fog seemed embedded in the walls. Nancy was shaking with nerves, but she was also buoyed up by excited anticipation. Almost all the tickets were sold. Devil and Eliza and her friends would be in the audience. Her parents were sceptical of the theory and suspicious of the set-up, but they were deeply interested in the commercial potential. Tonight, Nancy thought, perhaps she might even do something that would make her mother proud of her. She took a last look round the hall and retreated into the little room backstage to prepare.

  The seating was arranged in a hors
eshoe facing a single straight-backed chair. Devil and Eliza chose to sit at the back of one of the arms of the horseshoe, deliberately out of what would be Nancy’s line of sight. In the corresponding position across the room Devil spotted Nancy’s friend Jinny Main. He smiled when he caught her eye and she gave him a nod. With Jinny was a rounded, pretty girl whose red curls spiralled out from beneath her knitted cap, and a young man who looked vaguely familiar although for the moment Devil couldn’t place him. These three were clearly saving a place for a fourth who had not yet arrived.

  Silence gathered under the beams of the hall and spread until it held everyone in expectant stillness. There was a brief scramble as a last-minute arrival slipped into her seat beside Jinny Main. It was Lizzie Shaw. Eliza and Devil waved to her. Eliza slipped her hand into her husband’s and he squeezed her chill fingers.

  A minute later Lawrence Feather emerged from a door at the side of the hall. He spoke a few words of introduction, telling them that tonight’s spirit channel was gifted with the most startling talent he had ever encountered. He had developed her skill, personally working with her to enlarge her range. He was proud of his young protégée, he confided, pushing out his lips in his deprecating pout.

  ‘Zenobia Wix,’ he announced.

  He took his seat at the front centre of the horseshoe. To her family, waiting in the tense seconds before her appearance, it was as if Nancy was already not quite daughter or cousin, but something that was both less and more – a public property.

  Nancy came out and closed the door behind her. She crossed to the straight-backed chair and moved it a few inches to the left across the bare floorboards. Devil tried to exchange a knowing wink with Eliza, signalling no wires, no electrical contacts, but his wife stared straight ahead as if she were made of stone. She was very pale and even the tremor in her hands that had lately become habitual seemed to have frozen.

  Nancy sat down. She was wearing a plain grey dress they hadn’t seen her in before, black stockings and solid shoes. She had recently cut her hair short and her small head and slender neck were as fragile as a flower on its stalk.