by Diana Powell
She had looked back to the houses they had walked past. Tall, elegant houses, built in Victoria’s time for the retired sea-captains, perhaps. Each had a small, leafy garden – a perfect place to sit and watch the sea. A perfect place for children to play. She doesn’t know if she saw this one. Perhaps the trees hadn’t been cut then. Perhaps she had thought it too grand to imagine they could live here. Soon after, they went back to the guest house and made love again. The first of their family began there, she was sure.
She was right. There was a baby inside her, for a few weeks at least. Until the telegram arrived, telling her John was missing, presumed dead, and the grief that overwhelmed her took the child away from her, too.
‘I’m sorry.’
– Don’t cry. Finish with crying.
Crying killed the baby – the wracking of her body, day after day, week after week, tearing insides out, until the bleeding began, until it was certain. Until no more than a husk remained, shrouded in black, camouflaged in the deepest corners of his bequeathed house. Refusing entry to friends and family, the few that existed. A cousin of Daddy’s, not seen since his funeral, when she was five years old; Julia, who had been with her in St. Mary’s; one or two others she can hardly remember. She had never had a large social circle, preferring to stay at home with Mother. Soon, they stopped coming, leaving her to year after year after year, locked in silence.
‘I didn’t know you could hear silence. The way it followed me around the house, which gave me nothing. No creaking floorboards, no clanging pipes, no whistling draughts. And I would lie in bed, listening, thinking to hear my heart, if nothing else, and when there was still nothing, I would think ‘Good, I am dead’.’
‘Sssss, wwwhirrr, GGGrace. Hello.’
That is how it started, she remembers. Wisps of sound, then a word or two, her name, a greeting.
‘Grace, Grace. Listen to me, Grace. Shhh, ssss, here. No, I am here. Me, meee, meeee…’
Different voices clamouring, female, a man? A child, maybe? A muddled cacophony, then growing clearer.
‘We are all here.’
‘I laughed then.’ It was a strangled sound, an action her mouth, her throat, her breath – whatever was needed to make laughter – were so unused to, she choked almost.
‘Then I tried again, because I had heard you amongst them! And I was so happy, I wasn’t alone any more. And I will be happier still, here, soon. As soon as the weather changes, and I settle. As soon as I get this place sorted, and now, with the war ending, the place will pick up again, and I will open my little guest house…’
This was her plan. Or she thinks it was hers. It came to her, soon after she found the postcard. ‘I made enquiries, and discovered that one of the houses on the front was for sale. Right at the end, near the cliffs. The biggest, the best, just requiring a little work. It had been for sale for years, apparently, waiting for me. There was no need for me to view it. The whole village had been wonderful, as I remembered – not a poor property anywhere.’
‘Perfect!’ the sweet voice dripped honey in her ears.
‘Hopeless,’ someone else offered. ‘You’ll never sell while they are still fighting.’ But it turned out she didn’t have to. There was money she hadn’t known about, in an account she had never paid attention to. John was wealthier than she imagined. It was something she had never asked about in their short time together. Loving him was all that mattered. Soon the purchase was all arranged. Soon, somehow, she was here. All she needed now was the weather.
– I will go out. She sighs, watching the rain dashing along the front chased by the wind.
– You will get drenched.
– Better to stay in.
– Better…
– Yes, better, perhaps.
Whorebitchslut… Liar.
… ‘Liar!’ A tame word, a word I can dismiss easily enough. Who doesn’t lie?
‘LIAR!’ A word from childhood, childish, between sisters, to go with ‘fibber!’ ‘I’ll tell! Do that again, an’ I’ll tell on you. You little bitch.’
‘Tell, and nobody’ll believe you.’
‘If you tell, I’ll punish you more.’ Not my sister, not then.
Yes, everyone lies. Even he lied. The good man, my husband, Mr. Edmund Bligh.
Lied from the start, lied about this place, with his ‘beautiful’, and ‘heavenly’, and his talk of friendly villagers, and how I would love it. All lies.
It was dark when he brought me here from London to the nearest station, then a trap (yes, a trap!) to the front door. Midnight. So that, for a few hours, I didn’t know. True, it was November, the back-end of the year. London had its peasoupers, perhaps it was the same here. But when I looked through the windows the next morning, it was a different light, I knew straight away. I could see nothing, yet somehow I just knew what the mist hid. The grey sea, thrashing up the rocks, trying to get to the mountains behind. The rusting ore of the cliff, the veins of the surface, pooling at the bottom. No golden sand, after all. No blue waves, flecked with white, no gently rising heights, dotted with cotton wool sheep. Nothing beautiful, nothing bright and full of life. No picture postcard, at all! Back then I didn’t understand about the ore, didn’t have the words. I do now, for all the good it does me.
‘Did you plan it?’ she said, sitting beside him, as he lay, mouthing like the netted goby he fished from the rock pool. ‘The weather, when we came here?’ Her fingers kneaded the pillow in her hands. ‘Another pillow, to make you more comfortable,’ she told him. ‘It will help your breathing. One more, I think.’
And yes, just as I thought, it was the same day after day.
‘It will get better. November is always the worst month,’ he told me later. ‘Soon, the sunny winter days will come. Cold, yes, but bright.’
‘Colder than this?’ I asked. ‘Cold’ was part of the murk. A sodden chill, that draped itself over the house, then seeped in, like the words later, through the rattling window frames, the gaping chimneys, the stone of the walls. Inside, it would cloak my skin, then work its way through my pores to my very core, until I felt I would never be warm again.
‘We must have more fires,’ I said, through chattering teeth. ‘Throughout the house, to build up the heat.’
He looked at me, with those dog-eyes, that oh-so-slightly raised corner of his lip. Already I had come to know that look so well.
‘Mother,’ he whispered.
Ah, yes, mother. Another of his lies. Well, not so much a lie, perhaps, as a kind of secret – this ‘mother’ who had scarcely been mentioned whilst he was courting me, seducing me with the attractions of his wonderful home. Mother lived ‘there’, somewhere, a vague reference. ‘There’ so that I thought she had her own house, in another part of the village, close, perhaps, but not with us. Not that.
She opened the door to us that first night.
‘Still,’ I thought, ‘he’s sent word, and she’s just here to warm the house, to get it ready for us.’
But no. She lived there, had always lived there. It had been the house of her husband, until he died and the widow would remain. The reverend mother must remain. It was, after all, hers.
She stood there, all darkness too, dressed in black from head to foot, her widow’s weeds, though he’d told me his father had been dead for half his life-time. Was she mourning someone else, I wondered? (Her son, perhaps, that he had been lost to another, to me?) But no, it seemed she had dressed this way for all those mourning years. Different shades, maybe – jet, ebony, sable – but black, always black.
‘She’ll welcome me, at least,’ I thought. ‘For ’im, for show, if nothing else.’ But no, she drank him with her eyes, and wrapped her arms about him, while for me there was nothing but one swift up-and-down blink from head to toe, getting the measure of me. And that was that. She ushered him through another door, her on one side, a maid on the other, despite his walking well enough in some fashion when he was with me.
‘The study has been prepared,’ she told hi
m, then shut the heavy door in my face, leaving me to stand there alone, to look about and consider this place I must now call home.
Except I could hardly bleedin’ see it. It was lit less than the basements during the Zeppelin raids. There was a feeble oil-lamp, set within an alcove, its flickering sending shadows around the room like they were dancing. The floor was made of toe-numbing slate slabs, damp, that seemed to glue my thin soles to them. The walls were wooden – mahogany, he told me – panels, stretching to the upper ceiling above the stair-well, with prints of Old Testament scenes, all hell-fire and brimstone. ‘Is that where I am?’ I wondered, ‘In Hell, sent here for my sins?’ Maybe I’d simply missed the moment of my dying. But then I thought ‘No, it’s a life-sentence, not death.’ In a frozen, sunless, airless prison.
I was still standing there when the maid re-appeared, to show me to my room. She led me up the stairs, along a winding corridor, to a door at the back of the house. A room for one, surely no more than a servant’s quarters, with no fireplace, no furniture beyond a narrow bed, a wash-stand and bedside table; a cell within the prison. It is the room I keep to now, seeing it for something else, for sealed rooms can keep out, as well as in. Or used to.
I didn’t sleep that night, nor in many of the nights after, as I lay there, listening to the silence.
‘Where are the sounds?’ Another of my questions for ‘later’. He laughed. ‘Listen!’ he said. I strained my ears. But no, I could hear nothing. No rattle of passing buses and cars, no distant hum of factories, no rush of footsteps, no chattering and giggling snatched outside, no music drifting from the theatres and halls. No sounds of a living place, with living people in it.
‘The sea,’ he said. True, there was that endless back-and-fore whoosh, with the suck of pebbles following. Or, in rough weather, the crashing on the front.
‘The wind,’ he said. Yes, there was that, too. Whining, roaring, fussing, nagging at me constantly, like a grouchy mother.
‘The birds. Their song…’ Yes, I heard the hacking of the crows, broken now and then by some annoying trilling and chirruping, or by the cry of a gull, blown in. Caw, tweet, keeow.
‘Rooks,’ he said. ‘They are rooks, not crows. They have nested in the pine trees for generations, far longer than us. They talk to each other, like all the birds. Such a conversation – they hold a parliament, even! So many of them!’
‘Look,’ she told him, ‘Can you see? I have had the trees cut down. There will be no more rooks now. There will be no more noise now. But there will be more light, and wood for the fire. Wood for burning.’ There was so much to burn. There would be more, soon. So she was glad the rooks were gone, they had seen too much.
Noise, it was – just noise. I missed hearing the city in the beginning, so alien it all was to me. Just noise that didn’t belong to the real world, my world, the world of people, and busy-ness, and excitement, and go-getting. So that I dismissed it, and lay in that unreal silence, waiting.
There is a sound. One Grace used to know, but lost during the years of silence. The heavy give of the brass letter-box, the brief flight, the gentlest of landings. Post. But there was no-one to write to her. There had been no-one to write to her before, after they had all given up, stopping their efforts and entreaties to help her and rouse her from her pain.
–All the business of the house has been completed, there should be no further correspondence.
– Why dither? Just go and look.
A cream envelope lies face down on the mat.
‘Let it lie,’ John tells her as she bends to pick it up. ‘It isn’t for you.’
‘How do you know?’
– How does he know? Better to see. It can’t be left there, anyway. Pick it up, turn it over.
But John is right, it isn’t for her.
Mrs Esther Bligh.
The sinuous script in deepest black gives the name of someone else entirely. Mrs Esther Bligh. There is something familiar about it, a vague recollection just beyond her grasp. The address is the correct one, so the postman has not pushed the letter into the wrong box.
– Perhaps it is someone who lived here before.
‘But no-one has lived here for more than twenty years. It’s nothing to do with you, Grace. Nothing!’
She turns the envelope this way and that in the dim light of the hall window. It has a weight to it. The paper is of good quality. She traces the letters of the script.
– Feel the indentation of the nib, follow the flow of the ink, as it draws the letters up and around and back down, in perfect symmetry.
– Such beautiful handwriting. Calligraphy, almost, as they used to teach us in school, before the first war. I haven’t seen it since. It is as if the writing and the paper belong to a different age.
– Notice the post-mark. 1924. A letter from all that time ago, reaching here, now! Too intriguing to ignore.
–How could that happen? Where has it been all this time?
– Open it.
Her hand strays toward the flap, her nail flirts with the edge.
‘Leave it,’ John speaks again. ‘Forget about it. Just one of those errors in the postal system. Too long ago to need to put right.’
– Yet there may be a return address. Find the sender, notify them of what has happened. Or go to the post-office, and tell Mrs Evans about it, asking if she knows an Esther Bligh. A reason for a longer conversation than the usual one about the weather. A chance to discuss the history of the place, perhaps.
– Mrs Evans is eighty, at least, has lived here all her life. She will know, if there is anything to be known. She has been quite friendly, on the days I’ve ventured as far as the shop, though a little more than I would like.
– Natural enough in a small place. Do it… and wouldn’t it be better to have as much information about the sender before any enquiries?
Her nail pushes deeper under the flap.
‘No!’ His voice is raised now, hurting her head. ‘I told you to leave it!’
She had promised to love, honour and obey him. It was what she had always intended to do, throughout their blissful married life together. She would be the perfect wife, seeing to his every need, granting his every wish.
– But your marriage was a two-day honeymoon, and a week-long goodbye, before he was gone.
– Yes, he left you.
– All this time…
– Open it. Open it now!
And she does.
… thief… Spitting in her face.
……………whore. Gouging at her nerves.
…suffocated… pillow…
MURDERER! Clutching at her throat, stealing her breath, like the discarded widow’s collar.
‘Burn it,’ John yells. ‘Straight away!’
– NO!
She lays the poisonous words, pushed back into their smooth, heavy wrapper, down on the hall table.
How I long for that silence now. How I’d like to hear nothing but the sounds of nature, the wind, the sea, the birds – all those things I hated before. Instead, the words come at me, even in my tiny room, even though I have laid rugs over the splitting floor, rolled a blanket beneath the door, pushed bits of card into the ill-fitting frames. I leave the heavy shutters tightly fastened day and night, but still they come. Shouting at me, slapping at me, tearing at my ears, no matter how I clutch them with my clenched hands, clenched till my finger-nails cut my palms: but still I hear. Sometimes they are insects on my body, like the fleas in the old places, itching at my skin. They burrow into my flesh, so that I pull at it, ferreting deep, so that red lines score across me, and I bleed, but do not want to bleed, for they can enter now through my veins, and my heart is open to them. Inside me, outside me, everydamnwhere.
Liar… not such a bad word.
Slut. The streets of London are full of them.
Bitch… What woman isn’t one?
Whore… What man doesn’t buy one?
And…
Harlot. Jezebel. Fornicator. New words fo
r me then, yet meaning much the same. New words – or old… old, old, coming from the Bible, the big, black book that was chained to a heavy, dark pedestal on the first landing, in full view of the hall. Coming from his mother, reading from it morning, noon, and night, ringing out each word like a death-knell, impossible to ignore. She stood there, in her jet crêpe, her widow’s cap, her claws hooked over the edge of the book, her voice barking its way through any door or wall I hid behind. I knew she was talking to me, only me. Well, what other woman was there, apart from the toothless, gormless maid? No, I was the harlot, the sinner, the fallen woman. Delilah – one of her favourites. Lot’s wife, another… ‘Daughter of Sodom!’ ‘Spawn of the Devil.’ On, and on, and on, the stories of their sins. Sin – oh, how she loved that word! ‘SSSinnnn!’ Oh, how that word followed me more than any of the others. A slippery word, it could slither round doors or through key-holes. Not a hard word, like so many of them, not a word to hit you in the gut like a cheap Saturday night punch – a word, instead, to be slipped into your mouth, where it would choke you.
‘She knows,’ I thought. ‘She knows what I’ve done against the walls in the alleyways, on rusty springs in the cheap hotel rooms, what I have been doing for years, since I first learnt how it could make fools of men.’
‘Do you know what I have done?’ she said to him. ‘The things men have done to me, and begged me to do with them? Your beloved comrades, your noble ‘men’, worse than any? Shall I tell you?’ She bent closer to him.
Yet, how could she know? How could she know such things happened, when she had lived in this back-of-beyond all her life, been married once, and dried up since – just the one child, somewhere in between, surely by some fluke? And how could she know what I, Esther, had done? She’d not been there!
No, what she knew came from that Book, with its fancy words and names. A Book by men, for men, ruled by The One Man, who blames women for sin. Harlot. Jezebel. Abomination.