The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  But then he lands again, his backside coming down hard on the edge of a step in a burst of pain: he bounces off the wall and down the flight to land on a bare stone floor. The silence is extraordinary, as complete and as elemental as darkness, but he has seldom been more painfully certain of his own corporeality. After lying flat on his back for a few seconds at the foot of the staircase, he fumbles and staggers and creaks to his feet. Nothing broken, although he can feel the cloth of his breeches flapping around his right knee, and subterranean air cold on the raw skin beneath. His knuckles, too, are smarting, and when he brings them to his mouth they are sticky and taste of iron. He has heard of the agonies of hellfire, but never an eternity of grazes. Purgatory would be the likeliest place for skinned knees, but he does not believe in purgatory. If I were dead, he consoles himself, I would be more certain of it.

  The candle is no longer in his hand, and yet as he regains his bearings he finds he is able to see a little. A greenish glow illuminates the brick floor and the walls all encrusted with shells, arranged into the outlines of urns and lions, acanthus fronds and fish-tailed women. Such a peculiar light, though, like nothing he has ever seen. It emanates from somewhere to his left, maybe thirty feet away, and despite the pain sparking from his tailbone, he begins to move towards the archway from where it seems to him to leech out into the dark. He is at first afraid to leave the foot of the stairs, his route back to safety, but danger occurs when one walks into darkness, not away from it, and as he passes into the next chamber he finds it identically adorned, but lit just a little brighter. Light spills from the next archway. And so he goes on. It is startlingly silent under the ground, the sound of his footsteps not quite his own. The air is thick and heavy, but stirred by little currents of cold air. And on he goes.

  There are four chambers in all, with vaulted ceilings encrusted with some queer rugged rock, and shell-encrusted walls, and each is a fraction brighter than the last. In the final chamber he comes upon the source of the light: it flickers softly up the far wall, spreads and trembles across the floor. It expands across the darkness in little semicircular flutters, which grow out of one another, expand and fade.

  What can it be? It is almost beneath his feet now. The air about it is particularly cold.

  ‘God’s wounds!’ comes the voice of the agent, who has finally followed him down. ‘Do not fall in!’

  ‘Fall in?’

  ‘Fall into the pool. Don’t fall into the pool. Do you not see it?’

  ‘Oh. Of course I do. I do see the pool.’

  He perceives it clearly now: a black wedge of water dug into the black floor of the grotto, rippling with a very faint light all of its own, converging into stars that sway and shiver and then disperse.

  ‘What is this?’ demands Mr Hancock.

  ‘This is your folly,’ said the agent.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The agent’s expression is that of a conjuror whose favourite trick has fallen flat. ‘Your grotto,’ he explains. ‘A shell grotto. It comes with the house.’

  ‘This!’ Mr Hancock gestures to the pool, almost wordless in his confusion. ‘How is this done?’

  ‘I cannot say, sir. I am not an engineer.’

  ‘But …!’ His hand traces the weird flickering light up the wall. The agent shrugs.

  ‘I do not know. It is ingenious.’

  ‘What is it all for?’

  ‘It is not for anything.’

  ‘It has no function? There is no reason for it?’

  The agent sighs. ‘Mr Brierley was a person full of curiosity, and addicted to amusement and novelty,’ he explains slowly. Mr Hancock’s face is blank as a pudding. This ink-stained man, who demanded a yardstick so that he might measure the bedrooms, cannot perceive that sometimes a thing’s beauty is in its very uselessness; he utterly lacks the genteel instinct to own something simply for the pleasure of calling himself its owner. ‘Ask your wife, sir,’ says the agent. ‘Your wife will understand perfectly.’

  But Mr Hancock himself understands. His wife – yes, she is his. The house, aye, will shortly be so. The child he dreamed of, indeed may one day be flesh. But if this grotto is also to be his, he ought to take it as a very particular sign. A slow and wondering smile crosses his face as he realises that it has been vouchsafed for one reason and one reason alone: he is also due a mermaid.

  FOUR

  Deptford, at the foot of the hill and on the edge of the water, is not fresh and wind-tossed but chilly and damp, and in the Hancock house the cold lingers in the corners, seeping through the floorboards and collecting in empty rooms the way cobwebs will. Mrs Hancock has taken herself into the kitchen to keep warm, pulling a shawl around her shoulders and dragging her chair right up to the fire. She stretches her legs towards the warmth so that her honest camlet skirt rucks up around her calves; and her stockings, clean enough and only slightly darned, twitch with the contented wiggling of her toes. She is knitting a little piece of lace, nodding over her work with her lips pursed, and as she tips her head forward it might be observed that on the nape of her neck, between her plain lawn collar and her plain lawn cap, a few strands of golden hair drift in the updraught. Other than this, there is little to identify her as Dean Street’s brightest diamond, except for the startlingly poor quality of her knitting.

  Now, as Angelica sits by the fire she thinks, Eliza will be pleased to see what I have made of myself. Sensible Mrs Frost will approve of Angelica’s modest clothes and quiet industry. I am comfortable, she imagines telling her. I feel very much myself. For although she is the least self-conscious she has ever been in her life, Angelica has a feeling that her errant trajectory has at last converged with its intended course. Anybody observing her at this moment would immediately apprehend that she was once a rector’s daughter, or if not a rector’s daughter then the child of a gentleman farmer, or the better-regarded of a flourishing town’s two tailors, for while she is unwilling to cast her mind back to her origins, not one fibre of her body has forgotten them. She sits like the middling-class wife she was born to be, industrious even in repose, earnest and calm and scrubbed.

  ‘No need to change my dress,’ she says aloud to the girls, absorbed in the industry of the kitchen. ‘No need to stand on ceremony.’ She looks forward to leading Mrs Frost around her house: kitchen and parlour, counting-house and bedroom, over which she alone has oversight. How very neat it will all be, how Mrs Frost’s face will be wreathed in smiles. I knew you would do well, my dove. I knew you would come right.

  ‘Are the stairs swept?’ she asks Bridget. ‘Have you stoked up the fire in the parlour? I want it welcoming for our visitor. Go now! Go!’

  ‘And what am I to do?’ asks Sukie crossly. ‘I am a lady of this house too. If you have a fine visitor for tea, I ought to be included in the party.’

  Angelica hesitates. She is uncertain what to expect of her meeting with Mrs Frost; she does not want it overseen by Sukie’s bright eyes. ‘You will be bored.’

  ‘Pah! Pshaw! Bored! I know what you—’

  ‘You know nothing. I am an old lady now; I am no longer interesting. You should have met me five years ago.’

  ‘But what shall I write to my mother? If I cannot send her an interesting bulletin soon, I think she will come here herself.’

  ‘What notes have you so far?’

  ‘That you did not curry the last of the duck as you should have, but fed it to the cat by hand. Which was wasteful and indulgent. And also that when you scrubbed the linen press you did not change the papers that had lain on its shelves, but only put the old ones back after you were done—’

  ‘That is quite enough for one missive. Do not part with all your best gossip at once; keep her hungry for the next instalment.’

  ‘But may I not join you?’

  ‘No.’

  Sukie’s face darkens. She is an amenable creature, but since she was so nearly snatched back by her mother, she has displayed a certain nervousness, and is readier to see the necessa
ry compartmenting of their life together as a purposeful exclusion. ‘Next time,’ Angelica placates her, but she is already flouncing from the room.

  On the threshold she turns and draws breath, but her courage confounds her and she says nothing.

  ‘Sukie,’ says Angelica, ‘you are wanted here.’

  ‘Not by him.’

  ‘Aye, by Mr Hancock too.’

  ‘He has you now.’

  Angelica feels rather a pang. ‘He would be very grieved to hear you say that.’ She reaches out a hand. ‘Here, come sit with me. We shall talk on it.’

  Sukie shakes her head, and closes the door. As her steps recede up the staircase, Angelica drops her lace into her lap and turns her face to the fire. Trailing her fingers for the cat to butt up against, she feels so tired she can hardly move. She does not know yet that the brief, blunt but affectionate ministrations of her husband have put her in a particular condition. As yet, its flourishing is of no greater significance than the first shoot of club moss taking root on a stone wall, and although Angelica feels stout and sleepy and tight at the seams, it has not so far occurred to her to wonder why this might be.

  First she hears Mrs Frost – a loud and insistent rapping at the front door; the scamper of Bridget on the stairs – then she smells her. A great thick floral cloud wafts all the way through to Angelica in the kitchen, as if somebody has dropped a bottle of jasmine absolute, or dumped all the deadheads of Ranelagh on the hall floor.

  Perhaps it is not her. She never wore a scent. She never wore so much.

  ‘I am here to see your mistress,’ comes Mrs Frost’s clipped little voice.

  ‘Here I am,’ Angelica calls, stopping to pinch her cheeks in the mirror of the kettle, ‘here I am,’ but when she comes into the front hall she sees that the Mrs Frost who has arrived is not the Mrs Frost of her memory. She is painted and rouged, black and scarlet and white, and her silk skirt crackles lightning bright, and her voluminous fichu quivers and froths, and her puffed-up hair wafts lavender powder every which way. It tumbles and rolls like a snowstorm. Bridget sneezes.

  ‘Eliza,’ says Angelica. ‘As narrow a maypole as ever you were.’ She tries to stand back.

  Mrs Frost’s blowsy aura makes her large; the hallway is full of her as she cries out, ‘Ah! Is that little Angelica? Dear, I would not have known you.’

  Do not look at me that way, Angelica wants to snap. But she is so surprised – by Mrs Frost’s cold, appraising eyes, by her own sudden anger – that she says nothing.

  Mrs Frost looks about the hall. ‘Why is it so dark in here? Why all this brown paint?’

  ‘It is convenient.’

  ‘I know you, Angelica.’ She speaks playfully. ‘You love bright colours. You cannot be happy without a papered wall.’

  ‘What, and then to scrub the place every day? No, thank you kindly.’

  Mrs Frost stares at her as if appalled, as if she has said something indecent, which surprises Angelica for she had meant to flaunt her domestic good sense to her old friend’s wonder and approval. She lifts up her chin, feeling insolent as a schoolgirl. So I sweep my own house.

  ‘Bridget,’ she says, ‘we are going to my parlour. Boil some water for our tea. Come this way, Mrs Frost.’

  At the foot of the stairs, they pass the closed door of Mr Hancock’s office. Angelica no longer has any inclination to show it off to her friend, for what is there to show off? A comical old strongbox with black rivets; a jumble of papers and ribbons and broken sealing wax; the unsavoury possibility of abandoned beer bottles, reeking pipe dottle. Going up the stairs she clutches a hank of her skirt tight in each hand that she might climb faster; the wool is wadding in her damp palms, it will crease most certainly, but the fog of Mrs Frost chases behind her.

  On the landing they meet Sukie, taking her book upstairs.

  ‘And who is this?’ asks Mrs Frost. ‘You did not tell me there was a Miss Hancock, Angelica dear.’ Sukie wrinkles her nose.

  ‘My husband has no children. This is his niece, Miss Lippard.’

  ‘Ah, but I see the resemblance.’ Mrs Frost seizes Sukie’s hand. ‘Enchanted! And you are how old, my dear?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen!’ Mrs Frost repeats rapturously. ‘What an age to be!’ Angelica has never seen her so fawning, and yet that false ebullience is nevertheless familiar.

  ‘’Tis tolerable,’ says Sukie suspiciously. Angelica tries to convey with her eyes the message, she is not at all how I remembered her, but it is lost in the awkward air between them. Instead she tries speech.

  ‘We are going to take tea,’ she says to Sukie. ‘Will you join us?’

  ‘Oh!’ says Mrs Frost. ‘That would be delightful. I wish to discover everything about you.’

  Sukie regards Mrs Frost as if she were a mad dog. ‘Thank you, no,’ she says. ‘I am not at leisure to do any such thing.’

  ‘Of course you have a little time,’ pleads Angelica. ‘And as a lady of this house it’s only right you take your place at its tea table.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I do not,’ says Sukie, and whisks up the stairs. From a safe perch on the next landing, she stares at Mrs Frost, and mouths consternation at Angelica, who throws her a scowl in exchange and ushers their visitor into the parlour.

  This room, at least, is nothing at all to be ashamed of for she oversaw its decoration herself, in elegant colours she knows to be fashionable, with a painted floorcloth certainly a notch or two finer than those in certain of their old lodgings. There is nothing offensive about the place; perhaps this is why Mrs Frost is so offended. She makes a great show of balancing herself on her chair, tussling layers of skirt and petticoat first this way and then that way. ‘’Tis all right for you,’ she says, ‘in just a little plain dress. These chairs are not designed for great gowns.’

  ‘No,’ says Angelica pleasantly, ‘they are not. You are very grand, Eliza. I think the world is treating you well.’ She is studying her friend’s face. It is formidably painted – eyebrows, cheeks, lips – so there is not one vulnerable spot, not one inch of her skin left bare. I used to share a bed with this woman, Angelica thinks. She remembers the soft pale skin at the tops of her arms, just losing its firmness; the little creases at the corners of her mouth. The one whisker that grows from under her chin and which Angelica had to pluck for her.

  ‘London has been kind to me,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘I have brought you something to remember it by.’

  The parcel she hands over is tied up with red string and smells of orange blossom. Angelica presses her nose against it. Her eyes close; the corners of her lips twitch. ‘Millefruits,’ she whispers. She tugs the knots loose and the strings slither to the floor. Gold tissue paper crackles as it falls open: the sweetmeats inside are crisp and pale, emanating perfume and toasted sugar.

  ‘And bane bread here too,’ she squeaks, fossicking out a little golden sliver baked so hard as to almost be fired. She presses it to her lips for a second before slipping it between her strong back teeth. It cracks, sharp and clean, and she lets it soften a moment on her tongue. Crumbs of cinnamon and nutmeg melt away from shards of almond. ‘I used to eat these in bed.’ She is blushing with pleasure, bringing up her shoulders and wrinkling her still-pretty nose as if a lover is kissing her neck.

  ‘When did you last taste these things?’

  She wants me to say, not since my marriage. She wants me to tell her that I am sadder for it.

  ‘You forget how carefully Mr Hancock learned my tastes.’ She tries to recall her old heavy-lidded smile and fit it to her face. ‘You forget I know how to ask for things.’

  ‘You married him. He is no longer under any imperative to give you them.’

  ‘He gives because it pleases him.’ She nibbles again at her biscuit. Cinnamon and almonds between her teeth; the gust of rosewater and starch from Mrs Frost’s person. The ghost-Angelica, the Angelica she used to be, is standing right at her side. If she were to shuffle just a little this way she would be back
in her body again, looking out through her eyes.

  Bridget comes with the hot water.

  ‘Have you no sweet wine?’ Mrs Frost holds her biscuit but does not bite into it. ‘My teeth cost too much to risk in such a way.’

  Angelica no longer wants to sip Madeira with her friend. ‘There is only beer in the house,’ she says.

  ‘No!’

  ‘We find tea strong enough.’

  She waits for Bridget to leave before she takes out her bunch of keys. One key unlocks the cabinet where are kept the tea bowls and the tea caddy; another unlocks the caddy itself. Mrs Frost watches in amusement. ‘What a housewife you are.’

  ‘That is what I chose.’ She knows that the tea bowls, eggshell porcelain with pink roses and the mysterious glyphs of their Chinese artists, are a match for anything in the grandest houses: they ought to be, since Mr Hancock supplies them all. She need not be ashamed of the tea either. ‘This we receive direct from the quayside. Mr Hancock is intimate friends with a gentleman from the Company. What do you think of it?’

  They sip in silence. A brooch sparkles at Mrs Frost’s throat when she swallows, almost hidden by her necktie. The stones in it are good, not paste.