The Butcher's Hook

by Janet Ellis

  After that I could not wait, on waking each day, to go to him. I propped pillows behind his back before he could sit alone, to show him more of the world. I made sounds in his ear until he could copy them. I held his arms as he sat on my lap and clapped them together to hear him laugh as his pudgy palms met. I was moved to tears by the beauty of the place where his neck joined his back. I marvelled at the unworldly softness of his skin. I curled the immature tresses of his downy hair till they stood from his head like a halo. ‘Where is Anne?’ I played peekaboo with him, hiding my face behind a scarf. ‘Am!’ he said confidently when I reappeared. I crouched in front of him to encourage his steps and applauded even when he toppled. I will not catalogue all his achievements but you can be sure they followed the path of any such infant. He learnt steadily and rejected or accepted what he needed to build him. He was probably no cleverer and no more beautiful than others. I have seen wrists as plump and heard sounds as sweetly gurgling since. But he filled me as completely and lightly as feathers in a quilt.

  If my mother seldom vouchsafed a confidence or asked me my thoughts, I forgave her for this boy was more than reparation.

  I could not imagine the world would ever change and indeed, on the day that it did, the sun rose as always, in mocking imitation of a better morning.

  My father stood outside the nursery like a guard and put his hand across to prevent me passing. ‘The doctor comes,’ he said, keeping his eyes to the floor.

  Panic laid cold hands on my skin as if I stood there naked. I had hardly enough wind in me to speak. ‘What is wrong?’ I whispered.

  ‘A fever. Your mother found him ailing,’ he said, still looking away.

  ‘Did he not cry out?’ I said. If my brother had spoken ‘Am!’ in his quietest voice, I would have heard him and scampered to his side.

  ‘He was very brave and waited till she came,’ my father said. I thought this elision of illness and courage very stupid. When he was well, I would teach him to fear every sniffle.

  ‘Let me past,’ I pushed at my father’s barring arm.

  ‘There may be a contagion,’ he hissed, but he let me win the contest.

  The room within was muted with fear. My mother sat by his bed and Jane was pressing a flannel in a basin. I could hardly focus on him when I looked to see. His eyes were closed but when I called his name, he opened them to reveal a glassy stare.

  ‘He sees angels already,’ said Jane. I struck her hard on the arm. She winced, but did not make a sound. My fingers were still sore with the blow when I put them to his forehead. It was ridiculously hot.

  ‘Where is the doctor?’ I said, not taking my hand away though I hated what I felt.

  ‘He comes, he is sent for,’ my mother said, her voice high with anxiety.

  The doctor’s arrival caused the curtains to flutter and the candle flame to shake, but I stayed immobile as a statue. He bent over him and rubbed at his chest and put a tincture under his tongue, but my brother slipped further from my desperate arms.

  ‘He sleeps,’ the doctor pronounced, though there was no discernible change in him. ‘You should rest, too,’ he turned to my mother. She shut her eyes at once, as though he hypnotised her with this instruction.

  Jane led her from the room. ‘Tell us if . . .’ she left her sentence unfinished, but the words she didn’t say reverberated as if she had shouted them.

  The doctor began to unscrew yet another vial of liquid. ‘Leave!’ I said to him. He did not question the command. His very obedience demonstrated what little more he could do. When we were alone, I began to speak to my brother but my voice trembled and I stopped. I did not want him to hear me falter and then feel afraid. His breathing was so shallow I could not see any movement in the bedding. I put a fingertip to his nose. If I pinched his nostrils even lightly together, he would fade like a shadow exposed to light. His suffering would cease. His eyes snapped open and he read my intent. I snatched my hand away. I began to make promises to the empty air if he could live. Before I could even say Amen, his last breath failed to reach his tiny heart.

  I would not leave his side. Though my mother begged and my father admonished, while the doctor left me medicine and Jane brought food that I did not touch, I stayed. It was not until the vicar arrived, kissing his jewellery and making signs that I got to my feet. He blessed the small body, muttering of heaven and pure souls. He wrapped him in a linen shroud that would cling more diligently than his clothes ever did, for he wriggled and kicked in life. My mother and father knelt with clasped hands and closed eyes to pray to their God, but I only watched a man tend a corpse.

  The day after he was buried, although I lay with a pillow to my head to muffle my thoughts of him in the earth, I could not help but hear my mother and father raise their voices to each other.

  ‘There is still love.’ My mother was pleading. She sounded like a little girl. ‘There will be other children.’

  ‘I wanted my son,’ my father said. I hugged the pillow tighter but his words leaked in.

  ‘And we still have Anne. We still have each other,’ the child-woman said. ‘You still have me.’

  He roared his answer. I would never be deaf to it. ‘You are not enough!’ And again, ‘You are not enough.’

  Chapter 2

  Her ordeal almost over (‘Stop clattering and spattering, woman!’), Jane collects up the plates and leaves the room.

  The clock has an echo within the case, and every tick-k-k tock-k-k reverberates in the room. Perhaps I shall count the minutes as the clock chops the silence about. My father tugs the napkin free from his neck, wipes around his mouth strenuously with it then bares his teeth to rub his gums. I hope he will not turn his gaze to me. I must neither catch his eye nor seem to evade him. There might be some topic he wants to address and he will sermonise and lecture till he is done, without interruption. He will not take too long about it, at least: he always tires swiftly both of his own voice and my face.

  It was not ever thus. When I was a child of perhaps ten or so years, he seemed suddenly to find me diverting. I was a bright little thing, eager to ask questions and learn facts. ‘Listen to her recite!’ he would say to my mother, and I would entertain them both with a song, or recitation, even some Latin, that my father had put in my head. My father’s old friend Dr Edwards stayed with us a while during this brief period of my father’s affection and, being a scholar and seeing my appetite, he persuaded my father to let me sit at lessons with him.

  * * *

  Ah, Dr Edwards. If I had thought the world an amazing place before now, with Dr Edwards to guide me I understood, vividly and for the first time, what you might carry in your head about the things you could see. The people he told me of and the strange words he knew!

  ‘My friend Onions has told me about a delicious Zoffany,’ he said one day, laughing with me at the strange conjunction of names but then describing a painting so clearly to me that I could imagine I smelled the paint.

  He unlocked the secret code of the Latin I’d chanted in ignorance, to reveal its meaning. ‘Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,’ he recited, sliding a little Catullus onto my lap. ‘Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred. See how he declares himself.’

  He taught me the names of plants. He showed me maps of foreign lands and spoke to me in their tongues. He read me the plays of William Shakespeare, he took all the parts himself and played each enchantingly well. Even at the piano he excelled and we sang together – I was uninhibited then – and it made us laugh to harmonise and warble.

  Dr Edwards’ eyes were rheumy and dim; he was rather alarmingly whiskered and (though I was not offended by it, for I loved him) he was even a little unpalatable to be near: he carried a great deal of his luncheon in his beard and often it was not even the luncheon of the day, but of several days before. His coarse coat scratched him at the collar, where he rubbed his neck raw, and although his two front teeth top and bo
ttom were sturdy, their fellows were absent or black. But he was handsome to me, as he was the key to learning, the gatekeeper of the wider world. He visited only once weekly, but in the days between I pored over the books that he left, I memorised every word he ordered and more besides. If he had told me to learn all Shakespeare’s works, I’d have attempted it for certain – but he was a reasonable man, and only asked what I could properly do.

  And so we sat, side by side, on a hard settle (my father not lending us his study, we had no desk and were forced to make a schoolroom out of a scarcely used anteroom) and to each of my questions Dr Edwards had a reply. ‘Why does a caterpillar move as it does?’ ‘Why should it make a cocoon?’ ‘Tell me about the sizes of the moon.’ ‘Explain to me how the sun shines!’ I had so many questions, it was as if everything I’d wondered at had been held tightly wound in my head and now it unspooled, to my teacher’s obvious delight, and he proffered his learning with a lightness I still miss.

  ‘What does London look like?’ I said. ‘I can only see a little way in front of us from my window.’

  He reached into his bag for a book, but then stayed his hand. ‘A practical demonstration,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Come.’

  We had to step round Jane, she was on the floor in the hall cutting a large spread of moreen in two. She and Dr Edwards pretended to be in a kind of dance as he passed her, joining their red hands together. She came just to his waist in height as she was on her knees and so could only sway to and fro.

  Dr Edwards left the house at a brisk pace. I had not been out in the streets with him before and he seemed to forget that I did not know the way. He did not always remember that I was with him, either. He kept up a constant dialogue aloud with himself as we went, punctuated by wheezes and coughs. ‘Must not pass on the left hand side here, Huggins might see me through the window and it would be: “Where’s the money? A debt is a debt.’’ He’s stuck with those words now, isn’t he, till I pay up and free him. Which I shall not. Eh, Huggins? Ah, no, NOT that way, no, Sir, no, Marylebone Gardens are out of bounds. Too much temptation and not enough pleasure after. Old Davenport, isn’t that where he fell? Righted quickly but still limping. Though I swear I’ve seen him dip down on both legs forgetting which was lame. Number 21! I could eat that sweet stuff she served there at every meal. What was her name? She told me how many eggs but I cannot recall much else. What was she called? Ten eggs. Ten!’

  I wasn’t listening, I was more concerned with avoiding collision with the other pedestrians. I tried to observe where we walked, too, but what with Dr Edwards hastening and chuntering and the crowded streets, I only caught brief glimpses of doorways and railings and the beginnings of flights of stairs whose ends I could not see.

  When we came to open ground, with a high hill before us, Dr Edwards appeared to notice me as if for the first time. ‘Anne! Here we are.’ It was a scrubby place, dotted with some ramshackle cottages and lacklustre vegetation. ‘We shall not linger,’ Dr Edwards said, seeing that I was puzzled about why we had gone there at all. He breathed in with relish, as though the atmosphere had markedly improved in quality. ‘Fresh air!’ he declared. I could still smell the fumes and vapours as before, but I agreed to humour him, inhaling deeply through my open mouth. ‘Take some lungs full, you will need plenty for the climb.’ I knew, as did he, that you could not store air inside you but that you must repeat and replenish your breath every moment. I hoped the exertion of our walk had not knocked all knowledge from his body. He reassured me by taking up our lesson as we proceeded, pointing out flowers and trees. He tested me on the names of blooms I’d hitherto seen only in illustration and hurrahed when I was correct. His words came with more difficulty as we ascended and by the time we neared the top any botany was beyond him. It was an effort for me to climb, too, my head was bent over with concentration. There were little rocks and hillocks on the path and I didn’t want to stumble.

  We stood facing each other on the summit, panting and blinking. Wiping away tears of effort, Dr Edwards put his hands heavily on my shoulders. ‘Close your eyes,’ he instructed. He propelled me round to face away from him. ‘Open,’ he said, still breathing hard close to my ear and spattering me with hot air.

  In front of me, precise as a tapestry, was a spectacular, great, open spread of fields and distant buildings. The river snaked and looped, careless of what had to be built around and over it. The sky above us seemed wider here than when we stood on the ground, as though we needed a greater space above us to marvel at the panorama below. At first Dr Edwards pointed out landmarks that I was familiar with and then proceeded to indicate places as foreign to me as were any abroad. I began to make sense of the living geography he illustrated.

  ‘And there you live,’ Dr Edwards pointed to the right. The houses were too far away to be distinct, but I could imagine the neat rows and the ordered streets. From our viewpoint, the trees and green spaces held sway, mocking any attempt to restrain them. They could easily overpower the man-made landscape if they chose, forcing roots through the floorboards and sending thorny brambles to reclaim the alleyways.

  The vast sky and the high hill should have made me feel closer to heaven than earth, but lately I had begun to have doubts about the Almighty. I was winded by the huge responsibility of God’s tasks. He seemed to punish or reward indiscriminately, presumably as he was overwhelmed by the magnitude of His responsibilities. How could He keep His all-seeing eye on all of us at once, for instance, even from this most convenient spot? If He had watched Dr Edwards and me walking here just now, how could He have minded my mother and father, too? And Jane was often out of sight in the kitchen. Did He really trust her to be alone?

  ‘Dr Edwards,’ I said, noticing that his jacket was torn at the pocket where he had caught it on some errant branch, ‘where is God and how can He be everywhere? I am not sure,’ I said, regarding the chaos of human creation below us, ‘that He is anywhere at all.’

  Dr Edwards puffed out his cheeks. This forewarned me that his answer would either be lengthy or obscure. When he divulged a simple fact, he jumped on it like a boy into a river. ‘Well, I do not think He is up there,’ he pointed over his head. ‘Or in any building.’ We could both see St Paul’s, which seemed to stand for all churches. ‘It is pleasant to attend a place of worship, though. And some of the language in the Bible is very fine. But who knows what awaits us after all this is done? In this world we, not an invisible deity, are the architects of our lives.’ He waited to see what I would say, bouncing his fingers against his lips. I said nothing.

  ‘I doubt, too,’ he went on, ‘that we are created innocent and become filled up with desires and vices, evils that we can avoid only by devotion to prayer.’ He lowered his voice as though we were overheard. ‘To my mind, we carry all that we need to survive, indeed to live well, in our heads and our hearts from birth. We must decide our own paths accordingly and individually. There is precious little other instruction available.’

  ‘Who cares for us, then?’ I said, thinking of my nightly petitions on behalf of my whole family to this effect.

  ‘Each for the other. Or not,’ he replied. He watched me weigh up this new idea. ‘You should continue to attend services,’ he said brightly, ‘I find one can use the time for a great deal of inspiring private thought and examination.’ Dr Edwards’ hair spiralled in the wind that buffeted us from all directions. The scudding clouds behind his head made it seem as if he was falling towards me. I thought that if God had manifested beside him then, they might be taken for twins.

  I stretched my hand out in front of me and pinched my fingers together where my house stood, as though I was a giant who could destroy the building with one squeeze. I raised my hand and imagined my family tumbling against the walls as I lifted it up, making them cling fearfully to the furniture and slide, helpless, across the floors. I set it back down gently. I felt tender towards the household then, a sentiment I have since found impossibl
e to summon.

  ‘When your father and I first went to Castle Street, there was only brown earth. We watched it grow brick by brick.’ He glanced at me. ‘I expect you imagine us looking then much as we do now.’ It was true, I could only picture them both overseeing the work and examining plans together as the portly and broad-shouldered men that I saw each day. ‘We were young,’ he said. Try as I might, I could not shrink their bellies or lighten their steps in my mind’s eye. On the way home, Dr Edwards seemed melancholy, as though he had only recently exchanged coats with his younger self and wanted his youthful one back.

  We didn’t speak of the Almighty again. I was satisfied that Dr Edwards had drawn our discussion to a proper conclusion. But now that we had touched so easily on this grave subject, surely any other question I raised could be as swiftly and simply answered.

  * * *

  One day I asked him about the differences in a man and woman’s body – I had been regarding myself carefully of late, gazing down at my body and feeling all of its shapes with my hands and fingers. I’d only the briefest acquaintance with the form of a man and mostly, I confess, from paintings. I remember one most vividly; it hung on the wall at my aunt’s house. It was a depiction of a saint: naked, doubtless persecuted, carrying a large wooden cross, his body bent over away from the painter. This back view showed a round behind and a long back studded with bones. The buttocks were large and taut, the painter had gilded everything with the fierce rays of a high bright sun and this light burnished his flesh as the figure strained. Looking at this image stirred something in me that could not be explained, and I felt on the cusp of some great revelation. Dr Edwards, with his kindly gaze and great learning, must be the person to help.

  I described the scene to him as best I could – the angle of the man’s body, his muscles engorged as he gripped and grappled with his burden.

  ‘Why did the sainted man have such a wideness to him?’ I asked. Dr Edwards smiled, he pawed at his neck and the skin there stretched under his nails. ‘It seems to me that a woman could not be made that way, that she must be narrow.’ I continued in this sorry fashion; I did not have the words to find out properly what I wanted to know.