The Parentations

by Kate Mayfield

  Seated in her car, she’s certain they will search the house as they always do whenever she’s out. They will not find the phials. A splinter of a smile crosses her face. Clovis drives away secure and undaunted by the letter’s news.

  She steers slowly through the portal of the Rotherhithe Tunnel. It’s like a claustrophobic carnival ride, this narrow road under the Thames, demanding the constant negotiation of oncoming vehicles that pass only inches away. She takes the sharp bend where it goes under the riverbed and presses the horn in frustration.

  She checks the time with a conceited smile, knowing that Finn has already begun to search his workroom. Five minutes later, when she pulls up to a single-storey warehouse on Copenhagen Place, she is just as confident that Willa and Rafe will be riffling through every inch of her office. Their predictability bores her.

  When Owen Mockett sees Clovis’s car on the security monitor he takes a deep breath and releases the gate. He stands by while she parks, and waits for her request for entry into the building. Once inside, she strides through the corridor with such supreme confidence that Mockett withers a bit inside. He dreads the sight of her, and yet he cannot look away. She doesn’t bother to press the second intercom, but instead waits until she hears the lock turn over – she knows he’s watching. She and Finn had argued bitterly about placing a security camera outside their house. She was for it but he insisted that it would attract attention and would look sorely out of place when no other house on their short street had one. She had allowed him this little victory.

  The lab is spotless. The lighting is low tonight, relegated to one corner of the room where Mockett’s most powerful microscope is set. A row of small, glass sample-jars topped with black thermoset caps sit on the work counter, pristinely labelled. Clovis chooses one, holds it up to the light and turns to Mockett, who stands near, worrying a coin in his trouser pocket.

  ‘Rafe’s?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nods.

  ‘Sometimes …’ Clovis slides into the chair at Mockett’s desk and places her elbows on top of his papers, steepling her hands.

  ‘Sometimes, Mockett, I think your passion to reach our goal is not as great as mine – as once it was.’

  ‘Oh it is, I assure you, it is. But, as you know, I need to stay on top of the cosmetics or we lose funding.’

  ‘Yes, so you remind me whenever you’ve made no progress. But I haven’t driven to Limehouse on a freezing night to talk about that. I’m here about the letter. I’m taking your extra phials. You can keep two for your own use and one for experimentation.’

  ‘One? But, what about the project? I won’t be able to continue much longer with only one phial.’

  ‘Yes,’ she snaps. ‘You will. Until production is back to normal. Prepare them, please.’

  Mockett stares at her. The first time Mockett saw Clovis Fowler he had been stunned by the image of her, the way her beauty commanded attention. It had been a blustery night; a strange tint of pink was cast against the grey, overcast sky, as though the heavens intended to complement her flaming hair. Mockett remembered the moment she turned her deep amber eyes on him, and how astonished he was by the way they perfectly matched the colour of her hair. She unsettled him then, as she does now.

  ‘Mockett.’

  The sheer threat she enforces with a single word from her sensuous mouth discomfits him. As much as he hates these encounters, he simply enjoys looking at her. Though she is as polished as any, there’s still a quality to her that looks as if she belongs in the wild, and he often thinks of her as she was then, when it all began. The way she drank everything in. How hungry she was for the city, how she never shrank from the people, whose customs were so foreign to her. She took quickly to the utterly unique life on the Thames and wholly inhabited this country and its ways. How proud she was to sweep into his place of business with a command of the language. How she held sway over his wife. She turned heads, customers nodded when she entered. He remembers too when she first began to change and sometimes wondered what he’d missed, how he didn’t see it coming. Then the baby arrived, and it was clear to him that its presence seemed to repulse her, until … How very long ago that was.

  ‘Owen, for God’s sake. Stop leering at me.’

  He flinches when she uses his given name.

  He carefully wraps nine phials with Styrofoam sheets and places them into bubble pouches, then into a velvet pocket.

  ‘Can I offer you something? A drink of some kind?’ He feels he has to ask.

  ‘No. I’ll be on my way.’ She flashes a smile lacking any genuineness and waits for him to open the door.

  ‘Less cosmetics, more science, Mockett.’

  ‘It’s only a matter of time, Clovis.’

  She stops abruptly at the door, and with her back to him says, ‘How ridiculous you sound.’

  He returns to the security screens to make certain that she’s seated in her car. Her legs swing into the front seat and then she pauses to look up at the camera. He recoils from it, forgetting for a moment that she can’t see him. He grabs his phone and waits for Finn to answer.

  ‘She’s on her way.’

  ‘Got it. Thanks, Owen.’

  Mockett leans back on his work counter for a moment. He thinks about what will happen the day Clovis discovers that he’s no longer keeping his agreement with her. Would it be so bad? She still needs me, he reasons.

  He sets the alarms and walks through the dark laboratory, then enters another section of the building in which he’d built a large flat. It makes him feel more secure to sleep on the premises. He opens the fridge, places his hands on a cold beer and mutters to himself that he’ll be sorry tomorrow. Her visit has left him anxious, so tonight, at this moment, he doesn’t care about tomorrow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Clovis arrives home to muffled stirrings: the faint purr of Willa’s sewing machine, Finn’s monotonous tinkering in his workroom. She pauses like an animal hunting in the dark. There is one missing – Rafe has left them again. The empty space in the house holds the residue of his presence.

  After the additional phials are hidden with the others in the wall, she changes into a pair of black cashmere lounge pants and a long, flowing silk shirt the colour of a steel smokestack. A pair of velvet slippers cushion her steps back downstairs to the kitchen, where she fills a crystal bowl with mineral water. Holding a white linen cloth under the bowl, she carries it into the sitting room.

  In the corner of the room, against the wall nearest the window, is a rare mahogany stand and oblong case. Clovis places the bowl of water on a short shelf built into the stand. Her movements are focused, as if she were performing a ritual. She steps to the other side of the room to retrieve a decorative box from a shelf, opens it and pours a small mound of a white substance into a small silver tray that rests beside the box. This tray she places beside the mineral water.

  Clovis grasps the thin brass handles positioned on the side of the wooden case and opens the lid. The glow from the flames in the fireplace bounces off the row of glass bowls that are encased in their coffin-like home. Thirty-seven bowls in diminishing sizes and fitted with cork through the bottoms, are attached to an iron rod. The bowls, which lie on their sides, fit inside one another, nesting without touching, their rims painted in candy-coloured shades of pale yellow, pinkish-red, green and blue. The glass armonica, one of only three originals that exist in Britain, is her treasure.

  She dampens her fingers in the bowl of water and then tips them into the tray of fine, silky chalk. Perched on a leather-cushioned stool, she steps on the foot treadle that turns the wheel attached to the rod. With her hands poised above the bowls, the pad of one of her middle fingers lightly rubs a glass rim. A clear, rich tone fills the room. Skilfully, she adds another tone that melds with the first, until gradually she builds a haunting melody. The melancholic music floats through the house, the instrument’s timbre wholly its own.

  Within minutes of hearing the first ethereal notes, Willa appears in the d
oorway of the sitting room in an ankle length white cotton nightgown. One hand grasps the doorframe, as if she’s unsure if she should cross its threshold. Broken chords rise from the armonica and Willa’s eyelids flutter then suddenly droop.

  Clovis moistens her fingers again and continues to play.

  ‘Sit down, Willa.’

  Willa obeys.

  Clovis, who has clearly dominated this strange instrument, plays languidly now, and in response Willa’s head falls to her chin, heavy and exhausted. Single notes in a pointed melody further mesmerize her until she slumps and her head lolls back.

  Barely touching a single bowl, Clovis creates a distant bell-like tone that drifts and fades, leaving only a faint vibration clinging in the air until the note eventually dies.

  Clovis pauses in the ensuing silence, then slowly swivels on the stool to face Willa.

  ‘Keep your eyes closed, Willa.’

  The girl seems peaceful sitting in her old fashioned gown, her tawny hair resting on her shoulders. She resembles a vintage doll, the perfection of her pouting mouth and black lashes is such that they appear painted on her face.

  Clovis places a chair directly in front of Willa and sits. After a moment of observation, she raises her hand and passes it over the crown of Willa’s head moving it over her face, and then follows with a downward movement over the front of her body. Using stroking gestures, she repeats this path over and over again remaining within a hair’s breadth of touching Willa’s body. Ten minutes pass before Clovis lowers her hand.

  ‘Willa, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  ‘How did you spend the evening?’

  ‘I searched the house, mistress. Me and Mr Fowler and Rafe did, mistress.’

  The young woman’s voice is less mature, with a cadence lacking its usual conversational delivery. Willa has reverted to a time long past, a time when she spoke with her head bowed, her eyes on the tips of her worn boots.

  ‘And did you find what you were searching for?’

  ‘No, mistress.’

  ‘Where did you look?’

  ‘There weren’t much time, mistress.’

  Clovis bristles. That’s no answer.

  ‘Willa?’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  ‘Where did you look?’

  ‘Most places we could think of, mistress. Mr Fowler, he searched his workroom, in a few pieces of the furniture, all he had time for. The young Mr Fowler, he looked in his room and in the kitchen. I looked in your working room, mistress.’

  Clovis pauses.

  ‘How did you enter my … working room, Willa?’ she asks.

  ‘Mr Fowler had a locksmith in, told him we lost all the keys, and had one made.’

  ‘How long has Mr Fowler had a key?’

  ‘About a month, mistress.’

  ‘Willa, when you hear the music again, you will wake, and you will not remember our conversation. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  Clovis positions herself on the stool, dampens her fingers, dips them into the chalk tray and begins the first notes of a more cheerful melody. Willa wakes to the tune of lilting phrases that resemble a child’s music box. She blinks, and then becomes aware that she sits on the sofa. A blush crawls up her face, for she realizes to what she has been subjected. A sickness fills her stomach for she has no idea what private matters she may have divulged. It has happened again.

  A creak in the floorboard announces Finn, who is leaning against the doorframe, his arms folded.

  ‘You may go now,’ Clovis tells Willa.

  Finn steps aside to allow Willa to pass, and the girl skims out with her head lowered, aching to get away. Quickly, and almost imperceptibly, she taps the edge of the doorframe three times before she retreats.

  What passes now between husband and wife is unspoken. Finn remains in the doorway watching Clovis as she closes the case of the armonica and gathers the water bowl and chalk tray. She moves towards him, and for one elongated moment Finn stands in her way. Their eyes meet, and he steps back, allowing her to pass. Her unctuous, rich perfume sweeps past him, her thick hair faintly brushes the side of his face. Weakened, he returns to his workroom where in the air of his odd collections and the snaking lines of furniture, he breathes deeply and returns to his senses.

  He walks further through the maze to the conservatory where a spit of heat prevents the glass from frosting in the small hours of the morning. Certain that it dries his soul, Finn despises the parching heat of the rattling radiator.

  He retrieves fresh linen from his most valuable French armoire. It is a soothing chore he performs in the conservatory, the unlikely home for his immense nineteenth-century opium bed. Willa always offers to change the linen, but she has enough to do, and he feels rather possessive of this one space that is solely his.

  From here he counts the stars of winter and marks the Synodic Cycle. He believes that trade and markets move in a circular direction rather than up and down. When the new moon reaches its waxing crescent he begins calculating his next big sale, and when the moon wanes, any transaction that is not complete must wait until it waxes again. He’s never lost a client using this method, though they are sometimes perplexed by his refusal to rush through an agreement on their behalf that would, in the end, handsomely line his pockets. He waits like a patient lover, following the lunar calendar for the right moment to woo, to approach, to fondle, to mount.

  On the nights when the moon passes through the earth’s umbral shadow he makes important decisions, like the one he made – he forgets what year it was, but quite a long time past – when he moved out of his marriage bed.

  A few years ago, when life and death were imperfectly balanced, he made another vital decision. It was the night of the longest lunar eclipse in more than a decade. On the 16th of June 2011, the shadow began to fall at nine o’clock in the evening. The moon passed very deeply into the darker umbra, making it an especially Cimmerian and long eclipse. The cloud coverage that evening obstructed the view, but Finn waited patiently until an hour later, when the clouds shifted for a few moments and there, like a wise counsellor over the conservatory roof, a blood-red moon burst into view. He had been filling his pipe, which he then let slip from his hand, the tobacco falling in flecks on his lap. His upward gaze swollen and fixed towards the crimson globe, he felt its magnetic pull, much in the same way he still feels the power of the Thames tide at London Bridge.

  On that midsummer night when the clouds once again curtained the remainder of the eclipse, his decision was resolute. He left the opium bed and stole upstairs, knocked gently on first Willa’s door, and then Rafe’s. He’d asked Rafe to sleep at home that night, certain that after such an auspicious event he would know how to advise them.

  They closed their doors quietly and stepped lightly across the landing and downstairs, following Finn to his workroom. Rafe guided Willa through the rows of furniture with a light hand on her back.

  Willa and Rafe waited silently that night while Finn paced up and down between a marble dining table and a stack of portmanteaus. Regardless of the sticky night air, Finn had closed the windows for complete privacy. Their faces were damp and shiny. For a moment he wavered. Is suicide really suicide when they’d lived this long? He struggled to find words that would appeal to whatever inkling of desire they had left in them to remain alive.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘We cannot do it. It’s not the right time. As long as there is any hope, we remain as we are.’

  Willa let out a sigh of weary relief, weary regret. And Rafe – Finn could never look at Rafe without a welling of remorse – Rafe seemed resigned and just nodded.

  They weren’t going to die on June the 16th, the night of the total lunar eclipse. Instead, Willa and Rafe would go back to their rooms and Finn would crawl back into his private house of a bed.

  Clovis had already returned to her bedroom by the time Rafe and Willa made their way back upstairs. She had been aware that the three
were coming to a decision that evening. It wasn’t the first time. Society always debated whether or not the act of suicide was cowardly or brave. Finn, Rafe and Willa were weak in her eyes. Their consideration of such an act was preposterous anyway, because they couldn’t achieve it without her, and she’d never give her consent. But it was amusing to watch them play with the idea. She took a drink of water from the carafe on her bedside table, opened the window, and climbed back into bed. Content with the results of her eavesdropping, she slept deeply and without dreams.

  Now Finn is stirred from his memory of that night by the sound of a few drunken men singing in the most appalling off-key fashion, a raucous ringing through Tooley Street. The streets leading to Tower Bridge are filled with the Christmas-party office throngs that spill onto the side streets at this time of year.

  December 17th – a night on which the moon is a slice of yellow in the sky, when all those in this house are still alive and each of their hearts thump with a power that is against every rule of the universe.

  CHAPTER SIX

  … Any such behaviour will instigate a review of your circumstances. This, again, is for your safety, and is necessary for Benedikt to perform his duties to the best of his ability.

  Please remember to maintain your letterbox to ensure safe delivery of future communication.

  It’s signed, as usual,

  Regards, S.

  Constance folds the letter and places it in the large writing slope that sits on her desk. The box is filled with letters, and the handwriting is that of the person they know only as ‘S’ – the man who seems to act as an overseer of some sort.

  ‘What in the world does this “S” person think we would do to hinder Benedikt? We’ve never even seen the man! Not really – just a glimpse of his coat-tails, or a peek at the top of his hat. He’s a phantom, for the love of God.’

  ‘You forget, sister. I’ve seen him.’ Constance motions for Verity to sit beside her in one of the two armchairs by the fire. ‘But only for a flicker of a moment, and I would not recognize him if he walked into this room.’