Esther Bligh

by Diana Powell

  Still, she was right, wasn’t she, about what had happened with her beloved son – how he had been caught by the temptress? She read me the moment I walked through the door, as clearly as she read from that Book. Or so it seemed, as she rained curses down on me, damning me, scourging me with nothing but holy words. For that was her greatest pleasure – to follow the tales of the lost women, with whatever fate was brought down upon them from On High. Here was Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt. There was another, torn apart by dogs. Elsewhere, so many ‘smitten’ (how she and the Book liked that word!) by all manner of things – consumption, the sword, madness, blindness – on and on and on.

  ‘Mother’s such a kind woman. You will love her. She will love you.’

  Bitch. A word for her, not me. Bitch, witch, viper.

  Liar. A word for him.

  There were days when the bible followed me around the house, I was sure. I told him once, when I thought he couldn’t hear. He laughed.

  ‘It smells. Can’t smell it? It stinks of age and dried-up cow hide, and dirty clothes. But when it rains, it is worse. And it is always blee… always raining…’

  It was true. Smarting inside my nose whenever I passed it – as I had to, whenever I walked up or downstairs. Clinging like a London fog, so that I couldn’t escape it, so that I took it with me wherever I went.

  ‘It ain’t healthy.’

  He laughed again, stroked my hair, and told me it was the family bible, going back generations, that if I were to look inside the cover, I would see the names of his forefathers stretching back years. And my name should be added to it, if mother had not done it already, linked to his for all eternity by a small ‘m’ and the date of our marriage. And more, if we were blessed, if he should get better, as he was sure he was going to because he had prayed so hard for it, well, perhaps below our names, there would be another. ‘It is more than a bible,’ he said. ‘It is the history of our family.’

  Later, when she had gone, I burnt it.

  ‘I tore it, page by page,’ she said, watching for his eyes to drown in tears, ‘and dropped each one into the stove.’ Flare, crackle, melt. There were too many. Besides, perhaps there was more satisfaction in seeing a wodge of Kings, Deuteronomy, Leviticus go up in flames. ‘In Hell,’ she thought, ‘in Hell before me.’ She laughed at that. She laughed in front of him. Still, he did not cry. Still there was only pity.

  So many words dissolving in flame and smoke. All those names she had slung at me. Jezebel, harlot, whore. All gone. I didn’t know then that they would be said again, that I would see them written on fine paper, again and again and again. I didn’t understand the way of words – how they could live, even if they were not being said or read; how they could hurt. All I knew then was the pleasure I felt at destroying her precious bible. A proper revenge for the torment she’d inflicted on me.

  But all that was later. There were still months of that putrid Book to be endured before then. Months of her sneers and her sniping and smiting. Her stinking presence that I was desperate to escape. But how?

  ‘Where are the shops?’ I asked her one day, after I had been shut in that house for what seemed like months, though maybe was no more than two weeks – confined in that dreary prison, with its suffocating air, its bloodless occupants. Outside was no better, no lighter, with the shortest of days, the brunt of the freezing temperatures, and the constant downpours. Still, I thought by then that I must go out, I could stand it no longer. And this day, the rain was not quite a biblical deluge, the wind not fully a tempest sent by the merciful Lord. I would go out, and walk along the ‘front’ as they called it, and find the centre of this village or town or hellhole, whatever it was, and look around its shops, and sit in a tearoom, watch a film in the Hippodrome, perhaps, and chat to its inhabitants (who were so friendly, I had been told), and it would be a change. And perhaps I could breathe again.

  Her lips stretched into an even thinner line – straight, neither up nor down, like a razor cut. She raised one arm, the hand downwards, with the index finger tipped upwards ever so slightly, in some imitation of a pointing action. Left, I took it to mean. What else could it be, in truth, with the cliff wall rising on the right of the house, blocking out all light and air on that side, closing off any means of escape?

  I put on my hat of moiré and velvet, trimmed with red roses, my fur coat, decked with my red flouncing scarf, my shiny high-heels – all brand new, that he’d paid for just before we left, never asking what had happened to the money he had given me for my trousseau, as he called it, only a few weeks before. A chance to wear them, I thought. A chance for the village people to see what I was: Mrs Edmund Bligh, from the Big House.

  Mrs Edmund Bligh, clipping down the road, pulling her coat tighter around her, desperate to keep out the cold, the sluicing rain, desperate to breathe, to take at least one deep breath, to fill her lungs, to clean them of the fug of that airless house, but unable to, on account of that bloody wind. Jesus, that wind whipped against my cheeks, stinging, wet but different from the rivers drowning me. I ran my tongue across my lips, and tasted salt. The seawater was scudding above the wall, smashing against me. The sea, that was there, I knew, to my right, yet I could not see it, with my eyes half-closed by the spray, the mist, the gale.

  On I went, no jaunty saunter, or tight-heeled clip, now – no more than a sot’s stagger, a buffeting like I got as a kid when Selfridges started up, until I reached what must be the Square, the centre. Nothing but a single shop-front in the lower-floor of a house, with a sign saying ‘Post-office and general stores’ beneath some nonsense words. And even on this most foul of days, the gossiping shrews were gathered outside it, hat-brims overlapping, gloved hands cupping, clogs tapping – yes, I swear there were some dressed in clogs and flannel, Jesus! And their eyes lifted and stuck themselves to me as I blew towards them, then narrowed to dagger points.

  I smiled. I swear – again – that first time I smiled, smiled and nodded. I thought ‘I’ll try.’ What I was trying, I didn’t know, but nonetheless, I acknowledged their presence, as I edged past them to the door of the shop.

  And they spat at me. That was how it seemed. Their grating, tchhing words hurt my ears, they were spat out between twisting tongues, and sicking-up throats. And there it was again, when I got myself inside, hacked at me now by the post-mistress, real Lady Muck she was, from behind her counter, her lips and double-chins wobbling away. ‘Are they all mad?’ I wondered. Was this some kind of speaking in tongues, the kind of thing I heard about from the Black Book? And then I understood – or didn’t understand, would never understand what was scrabbling at my ears: Welsh. We were in Wales, of course, so this must be Welsh, like the words above the door. Something else he hadn’t told me – that his ‘friendly villagers’ spoke in a foreign tongue.

  ‘English,’ I said. ‘Mrs Edmund Bligh,’ I added.

  The woman began again. And still I could not understand her, even though I knew she now spoke in English. There were words that I could latch on to, but her voice went up and down, up and down, in an accent so thick that I could make out no more than one in five. And yet I knew the gist, I knew what she was doing. She was asking me the hows, whens and wheres about myself, and about Edmund, wanting, no doubt, to understand, more than anything, the ‘why?’, so that she could be superior and repeat it all to her little gang outside. I had known her type before. The buzzing queen bee the hive centred on. I had been stung by such before. I turned and fled.

  So this was my choice: to spend my days buried in that prison, guarded by the Mother Superior; or put myself at the mercy of the elements, and of the goggle-eyed, hissing inhabitants, torn between their desire to know every last morsel about me, and their determination to ignore my presence on their sacred earth.

  There were one or two days – a half a dozen at most – when daylight worried its way through the heavy drapes. More than light – sun. A fuzzy sun, true, its strength dimmed by the hulking shoulders of the mountains and the c
rooked arm of the cliff, but, still…

  I went out. I went out, not in my fancy coat and my high heels, but in clothes of his I found hanging in the hall. ‘Let them think what they like,’ I told myself. ‘They will think it, anyway. At least I will be warm.’

  I went out, and did not turn towards the Square, but walked straight ahead, then down some rugged steps, and down, onto treacherous pebbles that were determined, I was sure, to make me fall or twist my ankle. And then there was dun grit – or sand, as they called it – and then there was sea. A quiet sea for once, a line of lapping foam, rolling gently towards me, asking something of me.

  I had been on a beach only once before in my life. ‘A treat,’ my father said. A treat to have every cranny of my body grubbed and rubbed full of coarse grains, scraping my childish flesh, while he… I had thought I would never be in such a place again. And yet here I was, feet squelching in ooze like the banks of the Thames, lips splitting with salt, eyes watering in the sea-breeze. I sat down, my hand kneading the seeping shingle beside me. I hated it then, I hated it now. And I hated the sea most of all, that I could not enter it, for, of course, I could not swim! That one time before, when I had seen the blue water, I had run away from it, except it had followed me, and caught me, and licked me like an icy tongue, so that I screamed while my father stood and laughed. Then he picked me up and threw me in, and came after…

  ‘If I could swim, I could walk into the water and swim straight ahead to…’ Where? Where was I? I hardly knew, beyond ‘Wales’.

  ‘See,’ he said, as they sat in the railway carriage, moving deeper and deeper into darkness. He put the atlas on her lap, and led her finger around a sea-skirted outline. She watched her reflection smile and nod in the black window, as she listened to the tcktcktck of the train, keeping his words from her. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘wonderful’ over and over, but nothing else reached her. ‘Do you remember?’ she asked him, later. ‘Is that really as you see it? This forgotten backwater, this shit-hole? Did you really think I would love it? But then, you thought I loved you.’

  And where was that? Even if I had listened to his lectures, would I know what he meant? North, south, east, west – what were they to me? I had lived somewhere to the north of the city, as a child, and now I was west of it, I knew that much. But he had spoken of peninsulas and curving coastlines and mountains and valleys. Ireland – there had been mention of Ireland. Was that in front of me? Was that where I could swim to if I just went on and on and on? But what would be the good of that? A bog-sodden wilderness, with nothing but potatoes to eat and not enough of them, and trouble going on in it like a permanent Friday night down the Old Kent Road, a place where even more rain was said to fall.

  To the right of me was the cliff, and round from it were the mountains, stretching up and beyond. There was nothing that way. And the other way? Another headland, but somewhere around it was where we had come from. There was a town, though how many miles away I didn’t know. And there was a railway, connecting it to another town, and another and another, until surely, finally, it would reach some point of bleedin’ civilisation. That was the way I must go. If I could swim. Except I could not swim.

  It was all nonsense, of course. And as I sat there, the sun gave up its pathetic fight, with the clouds gathering all around it above the sea, spreading themselves around the cliff top, before they let loose their spit and tears on me again. And the sea was doing that thing it did of coming closer and closer. And it had changed from the lapping to the churning white froth, so that I had to struggle up from the mudsand, and falter my way back up to the road, and in to the house, soaked through my – his – clothes in no more than a few moments.

  And his mother opened the door to me, as if she had been watching me, and waiting, wearing that smirk on her face to show she was glad I was dripping and trembling, and that I had nowhere to go, except my poor little room. As if she had already beaten me – this cheap hussy she thought she had understood in that one look on my arrival. This Jezebel who with the help of her Lord she would defeat easily enough. But, no, she did not know me. And neither did she know the true foolishness of a weak man.

  There had been another word, snatching at me now and then, distantly caught, then dismissed as the creak of the boards, the sigh of the wind. ‘Esther, Esther.’ My name. And then, one day, passing through the hall as the doctor was leaving, when the door to the study could not be shut so swiftly, I heard it more clearly. Edmund was calling me. I looked at the doctor and smiled at him. I looked at his mother, and smiled at her. And pushed past both of them to go in.

  He lay there on a couch made up as a bed, in a room lined with books and cases and shelves of strange and not so strange objects. Stuffed birds and animals; rocks; bones. There was a large desk in front of the window, and a small table at his side, with a book and some paper on it. His work-room, his study. He wanted to know why I hadn’t visited him, and what had I been doing? I told him that I had been advised against it, that I had been told it was better not to excite him. I let him take what meaning he liked from that.

  ‘Well, you’re here now. Stay.’ So I did.

  I went every day then. He thought it devotion, while she knew it for cunning. Well, there was some of that, of course, but there was something else that neither of them considered – it was warm in there. The fire was kept burning in that grate, while the rest of the house was eaten away by creeping mildew and rot. I sat there on a chair placed by his head, and soaked up the warmth, as if I were trying to regain all the heat that had leeched out of me since I had moved to that place. There was more light, too. He needed it, he said, for his reading and his work, the little he could manage. His bed had been pulled around to face the window, overlooking the side of the garden away from the cliff, and the tallest of the trees. It was almost pleasant in there. Better, easily, than anywhere else in the house. So, better to sit there beside him and have to hold his hand now and again, and stroke his hair, and listen to his prattling on and on about things I knew nothing about, nor wanted to know anything – those books, creatures, stones and skulls. And on and on about the future, ‘our’ future, what we would be doing soon, as he was feeling so much better, it wouldn’t be long now. Those words again, those lies again. ‘Home,’ ‘heaven’, ‘blessed’. I nodded, I smiled. ‘Paradise.’

  Purgatory.

  Hell.

  Damnation.

  That night, Grace dreams of Esther Bligh. Except she doesn’t know who Esther Bligh is.

  A woman without a face, without clear form, who wanders through the shadows of a house – this house. Sometimes, she carries a child in her arms; sometimes, there is a man, too, who follows her around, calling ‘Esther, Esther!’ But Esther moves faster, faster, never allowing him to catch up with her, until she disappears.

  Sometimes, the figure in her nightmare is no more than a shroud.

  Then the words came, the letters breaking apart, some big, some small, tripping down the passageways of the house, behind the fleeing figure.

  L i a R. Thieffff. HArlot. W h O R e. WHORE! WHORE! WHORE!

  loud, so loud, so that Grace is woken: woken by the shout, and by a heat rising through her, a heat that she has not felt since coming to this perishing house. A heat she has not felt for years and years, and knew only a handful of times in her life, then buried along with her lost husband and her living self. Shame, shame!

  It is still the middle of the night. She fights to return to a sleep that wasn’t there, to be woken again at dawn, her mouth gaping for air as she tussles to push the pillow away from her face.

  ‘No, not that pillow. I burnt that pillow. Remember?’

  Of course, it isn’t that pillow; something that old would smell musty, and be blotched by mildew in the eternal damp of the house. Yes, the big old cupboards contain piles of linen, belonging to another age, just as the house itself belongs to another age, keeping its relics safe. But this isn’t one of them. Instead, it must have been bought for the short time when
the house was rented for a holiday season – she knows that from somewhere, she thinks.

  – But this bed, this room? Perhaps?

  – It made sense to come in here, didn’t it?

  – Later, perhaps, it will be needed for the guests. But for now, why should I not be in here? The best room – the best view, at the front facing the sea.

  – Catching the weather.

  – Well, yes, but still, the lightest—

  – Though still dingy, on account of the heavy furniture, the over-wrought patterned wallpaper—

  – True, but I can change that. I will change it. In time. For now—

  For now, she is in the four-poster bed in the main bedroom, the great bed for the husband and wife of the house.

  – Is that the real reason you chose it?

  As if she and John had come back here, as planned? John… John whose voice told her not to read the letter.

  – But you did. Why shouldn’t you, if you want?

  – ‘Burn it, Grace. Burn it!’ he said.

  – But you didn’t.

  – Come on. Do it now. It is foolishness, these thoughts, nightmares. What was the letter, after all? A wicked prank, perhaps, the writer being the sinner, the liar, bent on the torment of a fragile mind.

  – And even if true, those involved are long dead, surely. To ask the post-mistress is foolishness. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Better to forget all about it.

  – Get up, go downstairs, pick up the letter from where it lies. And the envelope – burn that, too.

  Of course, it is one of the days when the stove is out, not a single sickly ember struggling to stay alive inside. She will have to start afresh.

  – And today, there are no sticks in the basket; you will have to go outside to fetch some. And outside is wet, as usual.

  – Just put the letter in and light it with a match. The fire can come later.