The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

  Charley moved into the guest room to help care for his Pater. Solid, bespectacled Charley was a married man now with three little girls of his own, and twenty men under him in the Post Office.

  But when she finished Theophrastus Such, George somehow gathered his remaining strength, hooked his walking stick to the bed post, pulled himself up, and limped over to the desk, where he wrote a note to Blackwood.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “I have to be sure about the typeface and the cover,” he said, as he’d always done with every one of her books. Then he sent off the manuscript to Edinburgh.

  “Could you send a boy over for Johnnie Cross?” he asked her. “I want to speak to him about the money.” Johnnie’s mother, Anna, was very ill, declining rapidly, and Johnnie was constantly at her bedside. Nonetheless, he came to them that afternoon.

  “Johnnie, dear boy!” George said when he saw Johnnie’s poor, wan, exhausted face. Johnnie, seeing him, was at a loss for words. “Yes, I am a pretty sight, aren’t I?” George said, his voice hoarse and cracking. “Even prettier than usual. Now, Nephew, I want to talk to you about business. I want you to look after Polly when I’m gone —”

  “Please,” Johnnie said. “This is too painful.”

  “I’m very serious. I want your solemn promise.” His expression was stern.

  “Of course,” Johnnie replied, his voice almost a whisper.

  “I can’t listen to this,” she said, and left the room. She waited outside in the hall, leaning against the wall, hearing the murmur of their voices inside. “Her money is in safe hands with you,” George was saying. “But I’d suggest continuing with the American securities for a while, the yield is so good …”

  Then George called out, “Polly, you can come back in now. We’re finished.” Johnnie had gotten up to leave, his face grave. “One more thing, Nephew,” George said from the depths of his pillows. “Take these cigars.” He indicated his cigar caddy by the bed. “Give them to Brother Willie. The best Cubans from Melbourne Hart. He’s the only good smoker among you. He’ll appreciate them.”

  Then he lay back, his eyes closing. As the night wore on, he slept. He didn’t wake in pain as he had before. She touched him, but he, who was always so quick to sense her every touch, if she even stirred beside him or cried out with a bad dream, didn’t respond. She climbed into the bed with him and put her arms around him and drew his birdlike body to her. He weighed nothing. She held him close, trying to keep him back, to infuse him with the warmth and life of her own flesh. But he didn’t know she was there anymore, didn’t even move his fingers to find her hand.

  Outside, the London sky darkened, evening here already. At a quarter to six, he took a sudden breath, there was a rattling in his throat. Then he was gone.

  Sometimes her sobs were uncontrollable. She refused to get dressed or to eat. She saw only Charley and the maid, Brett. Mrs. Dowling, the cook, brewed a special broth to tempt her, and Brett would bring it in to her. “Just a little bit, my lady, one sip,” she said. “You do need it for your strength.” But she couldn’t. Charley wrote the letters informing everyone about what had happened.

  Four days later, they buried him in the Dissenters’ section at Highgate. She couldn’t bear to go to the funeral. Charley went in her stead, and Trollope, and Johnnie Cross — though Anna was now near death. Spencer, who never attended funerals, came to this one for his best friend. When Charley returned from the funeral, he said that the Reverend Dr. Sadler had seemed quite apologetic when he suggested that perhaps there was such a thing as the immortality of the soul.

  She moved out of their bedroom to the spare room, and sat in her nightgown, hair uncombed, writing down her memories of him. “When I first met you at the Princess theater with Spencer you made me laugh … I fell in love with you … at the St. Katherine’s dock I thought you wouldn’t come. But you did, oh you did … That morning in Tenby when I told you my idea for my first story … without you, I would be nothing …”

  Downstairs, Charley and Brett kept the house together. As she manically scribbled down her memories of him, she was aware vaguely of the bell ringing at the gate, of people arriving to pay their respects. They told her that Johnnie Cross, Spencer, Barbara Bodichon, and total strangers had come, begging for news of her, but she ordered Charley and Brett not to let them in. Every now and then Brett appeared in the room, to make sure that she was still alive.

  Letters of condolence poured in. Turgenev wrote from his estate in Bougival in France that “All your friends, all learned Europe mourn with you.” Then came a letter from Isaac’s wife, Sarah: “My heart aches for you in your sad bereavement.” It was the first communication she’d had from either her or Isaac for twenty-six years. But nothing from Isaac himself. No sympathy from Isaac.

  Barbara wrote again begging to be allowed to see her. Barbara had supported her in everything. She was a force of nature, and wouldn’t be stopped. “I bless you for all your goodness to me,” Marian wrote to her. “But I am a bruised creature and shrink from even the tenderest touch.”

  Once more, Brett stood in front of her, tiny and mousy, in the blur of her black-and-white uniform. “Mr. Cross is here again to see you,” she said. “He’s very worried about you.”

  “Tell him, no thank you,” she said again. “I send my love, but I can’t see anyone now.”

  “Poor man, I feel so sorry for him, he so wanted to see you,” Brett said.

  After seven days, she was able to get dressed, and with Charley holding on to her arm, went downstairs for the first time. Stepping across the threshold of George’s study, she saw on his desk the pile of notes for his Problems of Life and Mind. He’d begged her to finish it for him. She couldn’t look at it now.

  All winter she lived in a dark cocoon, oblivious to anything but her own sorrow. On New Year’s Day, she braced herself and again went into his study. She sat down at the desk and stared at his notes.

  She knew his handwriting by heart, the letters formed in sweeping strokes, hard to decipher, that distinctive slant of the lines upward to the right. A masculine hand, not the perfectly formed letters of a dutiful schoolgirl like herself. She had looked at this writing for more than a quarter century, at the little notes he wrote to her, attached to other people’s letters: “Polly, what do you think? Can we do this?” about some invitation, or on a statement from Blackwood about royalties.

  For a second, it was as if she were again in daily intimacy with him, experiencing his very existence in front of her. Then, within seconds, the brief sensation of his being there with her flickered out. He’d vanished, the air was empty. The walls grew up around her again, the desk in front of her, the vacant room, big and shadowed in winter.

  The snow began, driving with blizzard force outside the window. Brett came to tell her that the pipes had frozen. The plumber was so busy with all the broken pipes in the other houses on the street that he couldn’t come till tomorrow. Brett knew she felt the cold terribly, and now, in this state, she felt it even more. Brett made a fire in every room of the house for her and brought her a blanket to put around her shoulders, then a pair of George’s silk socks.

  “Silk is very warm,” Brett said, as she pulled them over her feet.

  “My principal task in life is to keep you warm,” he had always said. And now he was doing it again.

  At the end of January, she saw the little drop of blood in her urine. She knew what would happen next, and terror seized her. Always, a few hours later, the pain came and exploded in her left side. “I’m going to fetch Sir James!” Charley said.

  She lay there on the bed begging God to make Sir James come soon.

  And then there he was, stooped and benign, standing over her with his hooded eyes and his keen, intelligent face.

  “What have we here, dear lady?”

  “I think I’m going to die,” she said.

  “Not yet. I promise you, you and I will grow old together. Just give me a moment.” She he
ard the words “another attack of renal colic,” and then glimpsed the wonderful hypodermic in his hand. He was pulling up the sleeve of her nightgown. “Don’t move,” he said. At last the longed-for prick of the needle, and almost immediately she was floating, the pain was dissipating.

  She slept, and when she awoke, Sir James was there and gave her more morphine.

  One day she woke up and the light in the room was different. The clock said four o’clock, but the sun was still out. It must be spring. The big elm branch outside the window had little green tips on it, buds to come.

  On the windowsill was a bowl of crocuses, brilliant white and purple flowers with golden throats.

  “What are those?” she asked Brett.

  “From Mr. Cross. He sent them when he heard you were ill.”

  “How kind,” she said. They were in a blue-and-white japonaise bowl with a delicate pattern of figures in kimonos and wispy trees on it.

  “There’s a note,” Brett said.

  “Could you read it?”

  “Dear Marian, You know I share your grief. George was my dearest friend and I do hope you’ll let me come and see you soon. He asked me to look after you. Until then, I hope these crocuses cheer you up. They’re a harbinger of spring. (If you look out the window you’ll see that they’ve already come up on the grass.) Meanwhile, I remain, Very Truly Yours, John Walter Cross.”

  She remembered Charley telling her that Anna Cross had died, only ten days after George. She’d been so selfish in her grief, she’d hardly paid attention to what Johnnie and his brothers and sisters must be suffering at the death of their mother.

  A day later, when she was stronger, propped up in bed with her writing board, she wrote to thank him. She couldn’t see him now, she said, but “Some time, if I live, I shall be able to see you — perhaps sooner than any one else.”

  She recovered, and went back to work on George’s manuscript. He was trying to carry forward Spencer’s efforts to forge a philosophy that would fuse science, the human mind, culture, and politics, all together. Usually, he was such a clear writer, a journalist who could make anything comprehensible to the intelligent reader — the life of Goethe, the principles of philosophy, marine biology. But as he tried to clarify these fundamental questions of metaphysics and verification, his sentences had grown tangled. She had no idea what he was trying to say: “The analogy between the growth of an organism and the growth of knowledge is further recognizable in the inevitable mixture of materials unfit for assimilation …” What on earth did he mean? She held the paper away from her. The glasses Dr. Liebreich had prescribed didn’t do much good. Her head was aching.

  The arrival of the proofs from Blackwood for Theophrastus Such interrupted her, but she paid no attention to them. She was too busy working on George’s Problems.

  She struggled on, crossing out and inserting words and phrases where he’d not completely made his point, consulting his other writings for clues as to what he intended. As she was immersed once more in the products of his mind, her suffering seemed to grow worse, as if a hard surface were pressing against her bruised heart.

  Outside the window the canal bank was now covered with daffodils. The fragrance of spring drifted in through the window. There was new leaf flesh on the trees. Beyond, on the water, a barge passed languidly by, the horse pulling it along the towpath, the man guiding it with his long pole.

  She couldn’t stand it anymore. She told Brett to summon the landau so she could go for a ride.

  Outside the house on the pavement, Abner, the coachman, was waiting. Noggin, the horse, was standing there patiently, all clean and white.

  “I’m very sorry about the Master, Madame,” Abner said, removing his cap, when she came down the steps.

  “Thank you, Abner. I deeply appreciate it.” She went up to Noggin and stroked his velvety black nose. “Hello, Noggin. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it?” The animal gave her a flicker of a glance with his big, dark eyes.

  Abner helped her up into the carriage. “Just drive,” she said, “anywhere. Where there’s green. Sunlight. I don’t care.”

  Noggin clop-clopped along the North Bank in the sunlight, past the white stucco mansions, the flowering bushes peeking out over the tops of the high walls. Strange new world.

  As they headed out toward Maida Vale it became more countrylike. There were little cottages and gardens, fresh green willows, lilacs blooming, their fragrance heavy in the air, the smell of the warmed loamy earth, the heat breaking down the old leaves and brush, and new cut grass, the full panoply of the English spring.

  She ordered Abner to stop so she could get out and walk, and she set out along the road by herself.

  As she went, a skylark lifted out of the field and, wings whirring, let out its complex trill of little syllables, the song of sunlight, and then it returned to the long grass where somewhere it had laid its nest. She spotted a flash of red and white in an oak tree, a woodpecker, and heard the dum-dum-dum of its drilling. A flock of yellow finches scattered through the air. She named the birds in her mind. The names of things. Words. Order in the universe, taking possession. Bringing things to life again. She’d escaped from prison. She raised her head to the sun and felt the warmth on her face. Delicious.

  In the next few days, as she continued to work on George’s Problems, she realized the best thing to do was just to put some of his thoughts into her own words. She wrote an introduction for the section called “The Affective States.” “A phenomenon may be accurately observed by us although we are incapable of explaining it.” There are mysteries that can never be fully understood — like death itself, its finality. We will never understand them because our minds don’t have the ability, we lack the cognition. There are phenomena the meaning of which we can only imagine. In the end, she knew, he accepted that. And she too.

  Chapter 19

  They were circling her like vultures. Word had gotten out that she was getting better. They wanted to borrow money from her. Bertie’s widow, Eliza, whom she was already supporting, wanted fifty pounds more. Bessie Parkes wanted a whole five hundred pounds — probably for some women’s cause of hers. Bessie was rich in her own right. Why did she want Marian’s money? The rich liked others to give money to their projects, it conferred stature and validity. But she’d already given money to Bessie and Barbara for their crusades, albeit not that much. The woman question was much more complicated than they made it out to be, and their noisy declarations unsettled her. She was frightened too that if she used her fame as a writer to proclaim on such subjects as women and marriage, it would draw the world’s attention to the irregularity of her marriage to George, and she couldn’t bear to be scrutinized and judged, to have the moral, and physical, condition of their relationship discussed.

  And as for Eliza, she and George had been giving her two hundred pounds a year since Bertie died. Eliza was always asking for more. What should Marian do? How much money did she and George actually have? Where was it all? She hadn’t been paying proper attention, she hadn’t cared as long as there was enough of it.

  Johnnie Cross would know what to do. She dashed off a note to him. “I am in dreadful need of your counsel,” she wrote, and signed it, “Your much worried Aunt.”

  He sent back an answer immediately. He’d be there tomorrow.

  The next day, before he was to arrive, she realized that he’d be the first outsider allowed into the house. There would be an introduction of beauty and youth into the dismal place.

  It was raining, a bitter London rain that always came and disappointed you just when you thought it was spring. She wondered if, given the weather, he’d still come.

  But she mustn’t be caught unawares in this disheveled state. After lunch, for the first time in weeks, she sat down at the dressing table and studied her face in the mirror. Since he’d died she’d avoided mirrors — the Jews always covered their mirrors when there was a death, an excellent custom.

  There was even
more gray in her auburn hair now, and strands of white too. His illness and death had made her hair turn white! There were new lines on her face, ridges down the sides of her mouth. Her eyes were close-set, dull, neither blue nor gray.

  She rubbed her cheeks to give them some color and pinned her hair in loops on either side of her face to make it seem fuller. For the first time since he’d died, she rubbed powder on her face to try to soften the lines.

  She put on her usual black silk dress with the lace collar, and the black mantilla over her head.

  Just before four, when he was to arrive, she positioned herself by the fireplace in the drawing room, in the shadows, as she always did. She heard the bell ring and the sound of voices. Brett announced him, and then there he stood in the doorway.

  He came toward her, tall and youthful. His face filled her vision. It was grave and worn after Anna’s death. His red hair was damp from the rain. He was dressed in a black mourning suit, perfectly draped on his frame, obviously newly made. “Marian, I’m so glad you’ve let me come,” he said softly, fervently, in his sweet, soft, Scottish-American tones.

  He reached out for her and pulled her gently to her feet and kissed her on the cheek. As he drew her to him, she could smell the fresh spring air on his skin. She felt the dampness of the rain on his suit against her face, the mass of his body.

  His blue eyes were shining with tears.

  “I’ve been so selfish,” she said. “I forgot about Anna. I’ve been so engrossed in my own troubles, I didn’t even write. I couldn’t say the words.”

  “Now I’m here to help you,” he said. “We’ll try to heal together. What can I do to help you?”

  “I suddenly realized I don’t know where our money is, or how much I even have, or how to get it!”