Esther Bligh

by Diana Powell

  She starts to crumple the paper in her hand.

  – And yet… a shame to burn such beautiful writing; just as it is a shame that such beautiful writing was used to shape such venomous words. Perhaps you missed something. Last night, you gave it no more than a glance.

  Yes, it was true; she had barely taken in anything but the words that leapt from the page and hit her in the face, and wrenched her inside.

  – Read it more carefully. Perhaps it will look different then.

  She smooths out the paper, sits down by the dead fire and reads.

  ‘Dear Esther Bligh,’ that is how it begins – no address, no date. ‘Esther Bligh’, written as on the envelope in that enticing sinuous script, the letters curving and looping and curling, as if the writer was indulging their art. E. B.

  – Something familiar about those initials, that name. Something… something in this house, maybe. Go and look.

  – NO, not now. Keep reading now. Read what they have to say.

  – But who is ‘they’?

  – A woman, surely, from the hand, the style… the tone. But there is no signature, the only name on the letter is ‘Esther’.

  – You saw this last night, when the words lashed out at you, and you turned the single page. An anonymous letter, a poison pen letter.

  She knew of such things, just as she knew such words existed in lives other than hers. Lives far away from the tree-lined avenue where she lived, with its houses for retired solicitors and the widows of bank-managers, such as Mother. Houses with high, neatly-trimmed hedges to keep them safe and apart. The road ended at the entrance of a large park, separating it from the other side of town, the ‘wrong’ side – somewhere she was told she must never go.

  – Whore, bitch, harlot. Harsh words, scrabbling, scratching at your ears, just as they scored into the cream paper, leaving deep ruts of ink doused in black venom. BITCH.

  – Don’t read it, don’t see what comes next, what you saw last night, but tried to deny.

  – Liar, thief, slut. Not that. Not those words. They are nothing – no reason to ‘burn in Hell’, to ‘suffer every earthly punishment’ on account of those.

  – Read it, read what Esther has done.

  – A pillow, a pillow pressed to his face, as he lay in the marriage-bed.

  – There is something else, see, see it now.

  – A child, a dead child, no more than a baby.

  – Murderer. Worse than all the other words put together. The worst word of all.

  Words come with pictures. Not just lines and curves, forming letters, making words. The shadow of a girl, standing on a corner, red lips puckering towards her prey.

  A hand, a sleight of hand, slipped into a pocket.

  Arms holding a baby, and then the baby is dead.

  A pillow, the woman holding it, down, down.

  A match. She must get a match. She must do as John told her, and burn the letter.

  – I shouldn’t have read it. I should have listened to him. I wish I had never seen it, and read the words.

  – But you have, haven’t you?

  – There are the matches, and the stove is right there. Open it, put the paper in, set it alight, burn it. That’s all there is to do.

  – But—

  – There!

  The first doesn’t light, nor the second.

  – The damp, like everything here.

  Or a draught, from somewhere she cannot see.

  But the third flares, long enough to hold its yellow flame against the paper. A brown-lipped bite eats away at the pale edge, then fades, along with the stain.

  Another match, another flame – how many times? – the rust spreading, brown to black to nothingness. And then, finally, it catches properly, yellow turning to orange, to red, as it leaps and dances through the page.

  Warmth, a gasp of heat. She cannot lose what is so rare in this place, no matter where it comes from, so sits, with the stove door wide, reaching her hands to its source.

  The paper curls in on itself, then loses itself in a rush of flame. It is one page, and now that it has caught, it will be gone in a moment. And yet…

  A word. The worst of the words, again. She sees it, rising with the smoke, clinging to the grey wafts, as if desperate to hang on, as it meanders towards the black mouth of the flue.

  – It can’t be. There’s nothing, your imagination, again. Forget about it all. It’s gone, all gone.

  And now, yes, the flame and the smoke have given up, and all that is left is a mound of dove-grey flakes, so light that if she blows on them, she knows they will dissolve to nothingness. All gone, but for one word, still plain on its untarnished background. Murderer.

  Grace shrinks away from it, deeper into the sagging armchair. An unlikely chair for this cheerless, functional kitchen, full of tarnished cast-iron and stark wooden furniture.

  A step. A push. A flutter. A landing. The postman is there again. This early, while she is still sitting by the range, pushing the poker into the ash, mashing that last shred of poison to dust. Gone, all gone now; no more of this. Just a silly episode, a nonsense. Why is she bothered about it? She won’t be bothered about it! It is finished.

  She goes to the hall, to see what the post has brought today. An old envelope, addressed to Mrs Esther Bligh, the same as before, lying on the fraying rush mat, held together by the grime of the years.

  Mrs Esther Bligh, Mrs Esther Bligh, Mrs Esther Bligh. They come every day now, all the same. The same paper, the same writing, the same content – or much the same; a change in the detail here, a different choice of words there. Sometimes, a paragraph will digress into a specific story of Esther in this place. ‘Do you remember that day…?’ ‘I have never forgotten the time when…’

  – So the writer must be from here, and came across Esther in her daily life.

  She reads each letter as it comes, and dreams about Esther every night.

  ‘Don’t,’ John tells her again. ‘Burn them!’ he yells.

  But somehow she can’t help it. Each day she sees the letter there, and lifts it from the floor, her fingers toying at the sealed edge before his words arrive. Besides…

  – What if it is different this time? A new kind of letter, entirely, apologising for the others, saying there has been the most terrible mistake.

  – It has all been a mistake…

  – Perhaps.

  – Or perhaps this one will be signed, so that you know where it comes from. Better to open it, just in case.

  – Or…

  And soon John is quiet, along with all the other voices, except for the one – the sweet voice that told her to open the first letter, the voice that is now her constant companion. She thinks.

  – Read it. Read them all. Read the words. Whore, bitch, slut. Harlot, Jezebel, witch. Murderer…

  The word is purring almost, lingered over, the ‘mur’ murmured and stretched out, lovingly.

  – Not such a bad word, after all.

  On the third day, Grace catches the postman, waiting for him in the front-room window, then dashing out as he reaches the door. He stumbles backwards, tangling his bag in the hydrangea, before righting himself, and staring at her, scratching his head. ‘Beth ti…? Did you…?’ No more than a lad, saved from the war by his youth.

  ‘I am not Mrs. Esther Bligh, I am Grace Marlowe,’ she tells him. ‘There is some mistake. Can you not bring them any more? Please.’

  He tells her it is his job; he has to deliver to the specified address.

  ‘Just put them in the bin,’ he says. ‘Or burn them. Free paper for you!’

  ‘I…’ What can she tell him? That she has read them, and they said the most terrible things? Or that she could not burn them, after that first one, no matter how she tries. How it is as if something stays her hand, as she reaches the letter to the stove? About the voices, and this voice that stays with her, saying the words? About her nightmares, and the way the words…

  ‘I…’

  He is lo
oking at her strangely already, backing away down the path. She lets him go, and shuts the door.

  Ah.

  A… hush?

  Not silence – no, there is never that. But every now and then, it comes – a respite, a kind of pause, when the words are held at bay, still there, but distant. So that I can snatch a few scant hours of sleep, eat a bite (perhaps). Breathe. Yes, it happens, but never lasts long. Not any more. And the intervals get fewer and further between. But… still…

  There was a lull of sorts, then. A spell of calm, you might say. I would sneak past the talking tome (one of his words, that!), hands together, head bowed, ears shut. ‘Perhaps she will think I am penitent,’ I thought. Not in a month of Sundays… And I would slip into the study, and sit there with him, acting the doting wife.

  Sometimes, I would take my sewing with me. A skill with the needle was the only thing my mother gave me, and it had served me well enough until I realised there was an easier and more profitable trick. By some miracle, I had discovered a bundle of harlequin quilts in the back of the linen-cupboard, never used, never wanted by the matron of the house, who preferred to revel in funereal misery; they made me think of the halls, and the comics and play-actors, and the singers. So I worked to re-fashion them into splendid new outfits I told him would be suitable for my position as Mrs Edmund Bligh, in this oh-so-sociable place we lived in, whilst seeing in my mind Esther Thorpe sashaying down the Mall, as I clung to the belief I would get back there sometime. Somehow…

  And then, one morning, from nowhere, he announced that he would teach me to read! Shame that he should have done so! A cruel irony in it! For if he had not, if I had remained in my state of blissful ignorance, the letters that assault me would be no more than inky lines and curves on pieces of paper, a hotch-potch of squiggles like tiny jellied eels in front of my eyes. For that was ‘writing’ before he took me in hand.

  He knew, of course – had known almost from the day we had met, and had pitied me for it, and – another irony – it had improved me, rather than diminished me, in his eyes; improved me because he felt he could improve me.

  ‘Poor bird, poor, pretty bird,’ he had said to her. ‘Do you remember how you thought I should be pitied? Do you still think it now, knowing what I have done? What I am going to do?’ She raised the pillow towards him.

  At least he never asked me why, imagining some suffering on my part – illness, or forced employment at too young an age, rather than my own choice to bunk off school, in search of more pleasurable endeavour.

  And so it began. ‘You are so clever, so quick, it won’t take long.’ There were children’s books still on those shelves, his Royal Readers from childhood that his mother kept, in the same way as she kept everything. Clever, maybe, quick, maybe, but oh, so impatient, so bored, as he would take my finger in his hand, and lead it around those shapes, and sound each word out, mouthing them as if to an idiot, gazing at me with those devoted eyes, then praising my each and every success as if he were throwing a biscuit to a dog.

  ‘Warmth,’ I told myself. ‘Remember the warmth, that it is so much warmer in here than any other room in the house, except, maybe, the kitchen, where the company is the imbecile house-maid.’

  ‘His mother,’ I thought. ‘She won’t like it that he and I are brought closer by this. Or that I am becoming educated, and will soon be a more suited companion for him. Not an ignorant little street tramp now!’

  And it came to me, too, that perhaps it was not such a bad thing. I had managed so far without these skills (for the reading was to go hand in hand with writing, of which I had learnt nothing beyond signing my name), living on my wits and wiles, but there were times I had wished for them, thinking they would give me some advantage. And might that not hold true in the future, that future back in London, because I knew with so much certainty that the future could not be here?

  Fool – not him, then, but me.

  But not when it came to learning, it seemed. He was right. It was soon done. Once I applied myself, it was quick enough. A B C, in big, bold letters, A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat; then the children’s books put away, volumes one to six. Abc written closely, longer words, harder words; the Cat On The Tree, The Bird’s Song; ‘Good, good, good. My clever Esther, my sharp little bird!’ Then grammar, too, with Mr Alfred West and his ‘Elements of English’, with nouns, verbs, adjectives. Soon, the bible appeared on the table between us. Not the same giant volume that his mother read from, but a smaller one, with tiny script and flimsy pages. I could not believe that I was reading from the bible! The Good Book, the fount of all wisdom, her own favourite. And yet the verses he chose for me to recite were nothing like the burning coals she offered from her pulpit on the landing. Where were the wicked women, the hell-fire and eternal damnation? Instead, there was goodness and love and good deeds, Jesus saves, and all his little lambs.

  ‘The New Testament,’ he said. ‘The words are more familiar, easier, perhaps, to start with.’

  ‘To start with…’ As if I would be going on and on and on. And so it was! This book, that book, pointed at with his stick for me to fetch down, and peer into to.

  ‘Dip into,’ he liked to say. ‘Today, we shall dip into the Macaulay, Esther.’ Or ‘why not try a little of the Shakespeare this afternoon? I am sure you will enjoy it. And later, the Wordsworth, or the Tennyson.’

  For, apparently, from reading and writing came knowledge. This was the next thing – that I must know, learn about the things he knew about, so that we could be as one. Or some such shit.

  ‘I am opening the world for you, Esther,’ he said, as I bent my head over his Britannica or the Gibbon. Or his Gould’s ‘Birds of Asia’, or his Audubon, or Hooker’s ‘Flora of the British Isles’, or India, or wherever. These were his favourites – books about animals, plants, birds. Nature. ‘My subject,’ he said, ‘that I studied in Oxford.’

  ‘Look!’ Oh, the first of so many ‘looks!’ Look at this picture – a bird; look at that picture – a flower; look at that… the inside of something, a diagram close up, that I did not understand, I had no wish to understand. ‘Do you see?/See how/Look closely…’ No, I didn’t see, but I pretended, as I always pretended back then, needing to be sure of him, feigning interest, just as I had feigned interest in him.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘Yes, it is wonderful!’

  Picture after picture, word after word after word, book after book.

  ‘Look!’

  There were books, even, that he had written! He was an expert in the study of some tiny plant or other, so had made a book of it, as well as one on general natural observation.

  ‘Strange, how you never saw the truth in me, you, who were so clever in seeing the world around you. Strange, how you didn’t see this coming.’ The pillow moving closer…

  And so it went on: the education of Esther Bligh. Day after day after day…

  There were moments when I was left in peace, when he could finally talk no longer, and he would apologise for his weakness, and lay his head upon the pillow … Not that pillow, of course not that pillow…and close his eyes. He would sleep then, if it could be called sleep, just as the peace I had was hardly quiet. Soon, he would start to tremble and shudder, then toss and turn. With sweat on his brow, his fingers would grab at the edge of the coverlet, and the moaning would begin. A baby’s grizzling to start, then, perhaps, the names of men he had seen die. ‘No, no, no, not Jonny, or Lawrence’, or whoever. ‘The blood, the mud, the gas, can’t breathe, can’t breathe.’

  Bleedin’ hell. I would watch him then, and think how pathetic he was. I would watch him, and think perhaps he would yet snuff it, like those men. This place would be mine, and I would throw the old cow from here, with her bible tumbling after, laughing as she went. Then I would sell the house and take all his money and go back to the city, go wherever I wanted and… Then the moans would turn to a scream and he would wake himself up, and smile, and take my hand, and tell me that for me, because
of me, he would soon be better.

  Before long, his body was stronger, his sleeps were calmer. Sometimes, then, I would move away from my place by his bed, and go and sit close by the hearth. I would reach my hands out towards the fire, twisting them this way and that, twisting one shoulder, then the other, nearer to the heat, trying to feel that warmth on every part of me so that the ice would go from my veins, from my bones, from my soul, if I had one of those. I would watch the flames, the yellows, the orange, the reds – blue and purple, even, frolicking over the coals, up, down, back and fore, like a music-hall closing number. Such colour, such brightness, so different from the gloaming all around me. Perhaps I dozed myself, then, and saw a figure in a dress of rainbow colours, dancing, twirling round and round, pirouetting in the centre of the hall, a blade of light beamed upon her, the men around her like bees to honey… And then I would hear him sigh, and I would rush back to my place.

  ‘Esther, my Esther.’

  ‘I am here, Edmund. I am here. Always.’

  Liar.

  Bitch.

  And a fool.

  She is here, somewhere, Grace is sure. Esther Bligh, E.B. E.B.

  – There are signs, somewhere, I am sure. I have seen… something.

  But not here, on the first landing, where she finds herself sitting after the postman’s visit, the latest letter open on her lap. A peaceful spot, where a small chair is conveniently placed in a narrow recess. She looks away from the words, looks through the side-window. There is nothing for her to see, with the glass sluiced by rain on the outside and stained from age within. Still, she knows what is there – a narrow slice of sky and wall, bordered by the cliff. It was where she had sat with John, but she still can’t remember seeing this place. It hadn’t mattered, then.

  Her breath steams the glass in front of her, fogging it even more. The letter falls to the ground, as she hugs herself, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. Sometimes, the cold is good to her, stopping her thinking of anything else. And there is something soothing about the rhythmic up/down, up/down, and the feeling of someone holding her tight. She will stay here for a while, for the rest of the day perhaps. Quiet, alone.