The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  ‘Sir,’ says the more ebullient of the labourers, most grave now, for he has had his ear pressed to the copper for hours, and heard the weird stirrings within, and felt the tug of something most unnatural, ‘what did we deliver you?’

  ‘’Tis of no concern to you.’

  ‘I judge that it is,’ he retorts, but his companion gives him a jab in the ribs.

  ‘No, no,’ he whispers. ‘Let us not enquire. Let us leave this place and never return.’

  ‘Call it contraband,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘Call it rum, if you wish.’

  ‘But still I should like to …’ The labourer peers over Mr Hancock’s shoulder. ‘I have not had a proper look.’ He moves forward, but Mr Hancock holds him at arm’s length and stares him down.

  ‘Go,’ he says. The first of the men is already pacing away. From up the hill comes the peaceful sound of the oxen cropping the long black grass.

  ‘Ah, now …’

  But Mr Hancock shakes his head, and they are away with many backward glances. The cart creaks into darkness, and Mr Hancock stands beneath the pillars of the folly until he judges himself to be most certainly alone; then he returns to the depths of the grotto beneath. The greenish ghost-light quivers up the walls; he takes out his knife and sets about cutting the canvas from the mouth of the vat. It comes away with a sigh that echoes around the curved metal walls and out into the chamber. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, the noise of the water is magnified most peculiar, and almost vocal; a tiny groan, as if a child there were stirring from sleep.

  He touches the cold belly, hears the slop of movement within.

  A loss is not a void.

  A loss is a presence all its own; a loss takes up space; a loss is born just as any other thing that lives.

  You think your arms empty, but I shall lie in them.

  I have outgrown all the room you gave me – no more swimming for me, no more flying in the deep. Gone are the days I flipped imminent head over budding heels, a nimble half-formed one, could have become many things – now I crouch, pinned in, held fast, deep underground with my limbs folded in, and my form is inescapable. You know what I am, and what I am not, but you will not look upon me.

  Nevertheless my streams, like fingers, find a way. Bury me deep, I shall seep to the surface. My stirrings are as earthquakes.

  In my quickening I shall stretch limbs, arch neck, test muscles. My hunched spine curves like an egg: I shall shoulder aside these foundations that pin me, in the end.

  I am here; I am here; you are not alone. Here I am; I am grief, the living child of your suffering. I am the grief that sits within you; I am the grief that sits between you.

  You will bury me but I shall rise up.

  You will not know me, but I shall make myself known to you.

  THIRTEEN

  Their removal to their great new house is sombre, for neither Mr nor Mrs Hancock is much inclined to optimism. Indeed, if their souls had found a way to communicate, they would have found them twinned in their sense of futility. He thinking, my ambitions are beyond me; she, it is all over. I am unmatched to the task he has set me. Then Bridget cannot accompany them since her mother will not have her so far distant, and the cat swipes and yowls and will not be entreated into a sack to take a place on the wagon. She whisks out of the yard door before she can be caught, and is away up the pear tree and over the wall.

  ‘She does not know we are not coming back,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘She has no idea that she will return here to find the doors locked and no warm fire or saucer of milk awaiting her.’

  ‘We never fed her milk but what she stole,’ says Sukie, ‘so that will cause her no dismay.’

  Angelica rubs his shoulder – ‘there will be other cats’ – but her husband does not care for other cats, only his own, who has unwittingly become a nomad, a friendless wanderer in the cold.

  ‘I never abandoned a thing in my life,’ he says.

  ‘Cats make their own way,’ Angelica tells him, but she, too, feels traitorous.

  When the time comes, the women approach Blackheath by carriage, which makes straining, creaking progress up the hill. Sukie sits bolt upright at the window, her eyes alert to everything. The houses grow sparser but handsomer, and the shady road is quiet save for a gang of red-coated young men who idle, laughing. Beyond the ditches on either side of the road is nodding, sun-touched wilderness, all figured with birdsong, and the trees tall and graceful above their bed of bluebells.

  ‘Is this where we are to live?’ asks Sukie, her palm on the glass. They rise up to the plateau: the grass is a broad sunny swish as far as the horizon, tipped with light. ‘And so where are we to buy our victuals? All our everyday needs?’ She has never lived but on a street before, with tailor and butcher and carpenter no more than a trot down trusty flagstones.

  ‘As if I know,’ says Angelica, who is curled on the seat with her forehead on the window. The heath looks to her as if it were reflected in the curve of a banker’s glass; its expanse magnified and the houses and trees that fringe it melting away small in the distance.

  ‘I shall make enquiries.’ Sukie takes out her pocketbook. ‘It may be that we must order up from Greenwich. That will be an expense.’

  ‘Hang the expense.’ Angelica closes her eyes. The carriage shakes her like a nursemaid.

  And now it is that they arrive at the entrance of their home, the narrow drive that curves modestly away from the road so that only the roof of the house might be seen by those strolling on the heath.

  ‘Oh!’ says Sukie, and her nose will press no closer against her window. ‘I see the expense was hanged some time back!’ She stares and stares. ‘And this is where we are to live? Oh, come now, Mrs Hancock, lift up your head. Look at it!’

  ‘I already saw it.’

  ‘Do not pretend this gives you no pleasure!’ For the house is as delightful as ever it was, from the symmetry of its windows, to the curve of its hillock, to the pretty Dutch gables of its outbuildings. ‘So well appointed! For I believe we have a dairy, look, dear! And a vegetable garden. Oh, why did you not tell me it would be so fine?’

  Indoors, it is as fine as fine, its floors all a-gleaming and the fat women and infants on the ceiling puffed up with pride. And there are sixteen leather fire buckets hung up in the back hall, and copper boilers pristine in the kitchen, and down below in the cold bowels of the house, a vaulted gallery of meat-hooks. There is a room for billiards and for sewing and for reading, and in all it looms over Angelica the most sumptuous of monsters. It will kill me, she thinks, and cannot bear to watch Sukie dash hither and thither, near-fevered with the work before her. Enquire as to gardener, she scribbles in her book. See to character of new maids; fumigate all the attics; send for wallpaper samples.

  To Angelica she cries, ‘Oh! Madam! Won’t this be fun?’ and does not mind that she has no reply. Her aunt only stands upon the shining floor with something like dismay writ all over her face, but Sukie vibrates with the thrill of it all, for this is no longer the straitened training she has known hitherto – the trifling management of closet and cupboard – but a situation of which she might call herself mistress, by any reasonable definition of the word. She will know the proper place of everything, and furthermore have the authority to move it about; nobody but she will dictate washing and cleaning, polishing and buffing. And when it comes to feeding the house, Sukie alone will ordain how many cutlets are to be ordered; will turn the grocer’s offerings over in her hands and decide their quality; will choose what fruits are enjoyed fresh and what bottled for a comfortable winter. She never was so unfettered in all her life, but at the same time she is greatly afraid. This is an entirely new sort of place, she observes, for a new manner of living. I must not appear superfluous to it, or they will send me away.

  ‘And so we shall inspect the gardens,’ she prattles on to Angelica, ‘and see what grows there, and what must yet be done. It will be a great economy to have our fruits and vegetables grown here. And I would like a clutch of chicke
ns to rear, and a—’

  ‘Have you ever raised livestock before?’ asks Angelica faintly. ‘Kept a kitchen garden?’

  ‘Details! Details! I have a book. I shall hire help in. And would you not like a little brood of speckled chicks? Think of them pecking about!’

  Angelica closes her eyes. ‘This is beyond me. I cannot think where to start.’

  ‘I can! Come with me to the kitchen, and we shall make up some great lists. A list of what we have, a list of what we do not, and a list of what we must do with it all once it is got.’ Sukie hops from foot to foot, her face flushed. ‘So much to do, Mrs Hancock! It will keep us eternally occupied, and we may do it just as we choose, and the men can say nothing but “thank ye”. I had better talk to my uncle, for you and I shall need to hire a full complement of staff to effect all the plans I have in mind.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Angelica abruptly. ‘I am tired. You will permit me rest awhile.’

  Upstairs she pauses on the landing, but Sukie follows behind, her face all knitted with anxiety. ‘Can you not let me be?’ demands Angelica.

  Sukie hesitates, and steels herself. ‘You need to tell him,’ she says. ‘If there is not to be a child, he must know.’

  Angelica says nothing. She closes her eyes; she cannot think what to do. I do not belong here, she thinks. If I were mistress of this house then this baby would not have been aborted. She was afraid of her narrowing world, but now without its safe enclosure she finds she is nobody. Angelica Neal is quite gone; Angelica Hancock is already hollow as a bleached shell. She places a hand to her brow. ‘He has not even noticed,’ she says. ‘He does not care; he asks nothing about it.’ I have lost everything.

  ‘Come, we are not two minutes inside the door,’ says Sukie, although she is fierce afraid to see such faltering in her aunt. ‘It will all change now we are here.’ She takes a little step forward. ‘Please.’

  But Angelica knits her brow, and shakes her head. A new wave of dejection seems to have settled upon her since arriving on the heath; now she feels most especially as if she were grasping at something quite impossible to seize upon. ‘Leave me be,’ she says.

  Alone on the landing, she remembers that she does not know where her bedroom might be. Many doors stand before her, all closed; she tries the first, and it is a library. The second a little music room, all pearl-coloured and glowing with the window shades drawn up: her eye passes over her own clavichord to the harp and viol and flute beyond, and her stomach tightens. He must mean me to learn to play them, she thinks, when I am not even equal to the task of ordering the kitchen.

  She opens doors until she discovers a bedroom – a small one, hung with yellow damask, good for a spinster visitor – and once within sits down on the bed quite numbed. She longs for the bare little kitchen at Union Street, where she could chop apples and peel carrots with innocent assiduity under the supervision of girls half her age. What a fool, she thinks, to imagine I had the measure of any domestic life. And what am I to do now? She finds herself at a peculiar impasse, the first perhaps in her life, and it is not caused by obstacles but by the lack of them.

  What now? she thinks. What now, what now? and knots her fingers and furrows her brow.

  Outside her window the heath lies flat to the horizon, its sky churning. The wind roils the clouds and the gorse bushes alike; each new day grows longer and hotter than its predecessor.

  FOURTEEN

  June 1786

  The summer grows hot and ripe, bleaching the grass of the heath to a perfect rustling sweep of gold, where grasshoppers creak incessantly to one another, but where few walk in the heat of the day. Now ought to be the time for ventures into London, or Greenwich, or out by boat to the country homes of friends, the long bright days being so unwelcoming to footpads. The Hancocks, however, go nowhere. Sukie busies herself with hiring a coterie of servants, from cook to lady’s maid to footman, who look her up and down with amused pity, and who smirk when she gives them their orders in her little thin voice. The promised dancing master comes too, and laments her slumped shoulders, her weak ankles. The French master decries her accent, the Latin master her ignorance, and in this great house she feels a coarse hick of a girl, good for nothing. Of all this she says nothing, but bites her lip, and smiles anon.

  Angelica, meanwhile, robbed of the tasks of an increasing wife – no cradle to send for, no tiny caps to trim – finds that her days roll on with terrifying futility. No longer are her moments diminishing; each dawn sees her no closer to any great event. She can anticipate neither the beginning of any new life nor the end of her own: she remains in genteel suspension, her time stretching inexorably before her. As for her husband, where is he? Off about his inscrutable business in the city, or at the faraway Mary-le-Bone site of his new houses. He is never to be found about the house, unless he is lingering at one of the back windows, staring without sight at some far-distant point. More often she sees him trudging up the hill from the place where the garden gives way to wilderness.

  Some assignation? she wonders, keeping her eyes closed on the blue-mooned night as he stumbles about the bedroom. Does he go to meet a lover? Has he found a secret way to Greenwich? but she hears no carriage on the drive, and no lantern light has crossed her window, and as he bends over the bed she detects no liquor on his breath, and no perfume on his stock. Where, then, does he take himself all night? She thinks of her other failures: the twist of Georgie’s face when he said – what was it he said? – ‘I am sick of you,’ and the dread shame of clutching Mrs Chappell’s ankles in her parlour all stripped bare. She hugs her arms about herself, and feels her body slacker and less seizable than it once was, which inspires desire in nobody who looks upon it, and cannot sustain the flickerings of any life but her own. Her closed eyelids burn with tears but she resolves to give her husband no hint that his presence has penetrated her sleep: not to flinch at the cold breeze that follows him into the room, or roll over to open her arms to him. She deepens her breathing and nestles closer into her bedclothes, but at her turned back she feels him lie still and wakeful for a good long time. She thinks, our bad luck began when we acquired this place. We have overreached ourselves, that is certain, but is there not some horrid miasma here? It taints her very lungs: some mornings it seems that all she breathes is grief.

  ‘Another note,’ says Sukie, ‘from our neighbours.’

  ‘We have no neighbours,’ says Angelica. She licks the end of her thread and squints to press it into her needle, for they are as ever about the business of housekeeping, and in the spirit of furious industry Sukie has devised a code. Each room of the house is assigned its own symbol, spined and hooked as a skeleton key, and with scarlet thread they stitch it upon every bit of cloth that might be carried off from its designated place. The laundry house has levelling tendencies, and without proper oversight might send the fine wool blanket from the library to lie upon the cook’s bed.

  ‘Certainly we do have neighbours,’ says Sukie. ‘Not three hundred yards away.’

  ‘We do not pass them in the street and they do not nuisance us through the walls,’ says Angelica, ‘therefore how can they be anything to us?’

  ‘Well, we are something to them,’ Sukie cajoles, ‘and grateful we should be for it.’

  ‘Perhaps you should. I daresay they have sons it will be worth your while to know, one day. But I …’ Her stitching is large and ugly, her fingers fumbling. I shall have to unpick those tonight, thinks Sukie. She lets no criticism pass her lips, but she feels as if she were stretched tight; scampering always just before her aunt to cheer her, protect her, encourage her. ‘I am not their sort,’ Angelica continues, frowning over her sorry work. ‘They would not have desired to look upon me before: they would have shielded their daughters’ eyes from me. And their sons’.’ She runs her finger with the needle and jerks back, spitting like a cat: a bead of blood swells there.

  ‘Not on the linen,’ cries Sukie. ‘We shall never get the mark out. I would rather you even blotted
it on your apron.’

  ‘I believe they come to stare.’ Angelica sucks the blood away and inspects as it bubbles up again. ‘I am a freak to them.’

  ‘You are the wife of a good man, and mistress of this house the same as any.’

  ‘They come only for curiosity. I will not have them.’

  ‘I have already invited them here,’ says Sukie. ‘For tea. Tomorrow. The ladies only, of course. That is the thing to do, you know, the right thing.’

  ‘Ugh! The ladies are worst of all! The only thing worse than the ladies would be their gentlemen.’

  ‘Hush, hush.’ Sukie suppresses her impatience. ‘Remember, you are Mrs Hancock now. Once the ladies have taken a look at us, there will be other invitations. You will like that, to be back in society.’

  ‘Not their society.’

  To distract her from her petulance, and remind her of her position, Sukie bullies her through the messuages of which she is mistress – the dairy, the brewhouse, the laundry – and out into the orchard, where the grasshoppers buzz in the grass, and leap like popped buttons at the women’s passing. The two maids hired from the village of Blackheath follow behind, hung about with baskets and coarse bags, and sharing the weight of the ladder between them as they teeter unwillingly on their pattens, picking their feet up high. The gnarled and reaching arms of the apple trees are all a-rustle, their leaves crisp and vivid and cool. Sukie stops to draw a bough down towards her and inspect the pale fruit growing there, the largest no bigger than a hen’s egg.

  ‘Look,’ she says, brushing a ladybird from the curled leaves.

  ‘T’was not for this I became a great lady,’ Angelica grumbles.

  ‘And when did you do that?’ Sukie lets the bough go, and it hurtles upward, setting all its neighbours a-swaying.

  ‘Nobody elevated as we have been must see to her own gardens.’