Mr. Jameson handed back the letter.
“Is that all you have to say? A good letter!”
Mr. Jameson thought for a moment, then he answered, “He’s a changed man, by the sound of it.”
“People do change, you know.” Mrs. Jameson said. “We’ve all been thinking what a terrible thing this has been for Mrs. Manningham, but it’s been a terrible thing for Mr. Manningham, too.”
“There’s only one way you can find out, Mrs. Manningham, and that’s to go to London and see for yourself. Our prayers will go with you.”
It was true, but as she made her preparations, a tag from Virgil ran in her mind: “Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes. I fear Greeks, even bearing gifts.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
Mrs. Jameson was quite right. Jack was a changed man. He was on the platform at King’s Cross Station, waiting for her, already with a porter engaged to collect her trunks from the guard’s van. He was dressed more soberly than was his custom, a debonair fashion being his usual tone. Round the left arm of his coat he wore a three-inch black crêpe band. “For Baby!” he explained, when Bella asked why. He appeared shy, greeting her less like a husband than a strange male nurse, anxious to relieve her of all burdens, such as hand luggage.
Bella found herself regarding him with curious detachment as they waited for the porter. He was not the man to whom she had been so compulsively attracted in Hampstead. After all, they say that in the course of seven years every cell in the human body has been renewed. The Jack Manningham of 1888 was an older, heavier being, still handsome undeniably, but coarser-featured. His eyes which had used to boldly greet the world, had slunk back into their sockets and peered out like wary foxes from the cover of the overgrowth of his brows. His teeth, too, when he smiled, no longer flashed. They were his own, but decayed and discolored.
“The journey must have been fatiguing,” he observed, as they settled in the hansom cab. “Still, it will not be long now.” His voice was lighter in timbre than she had recollected it, and softer spoken. It had the sort of coaxing tone, she thought, one uses to reassure a pet that has escaped until one can get near enough to grab and put it back in its cage.
She looked at him. “I am not fatigued.”
“In that case, you are not well ,” he said with increased concern. “But never mind, you shall go straight to bed as soon as we arrive.”
“I am only ill in the way that you yourself are.” She could not have kept the chill from her voice, even if she had wanted to.
He tried to take her hand, but she removed it to the privacy of her muff. A curious exultation beat in her veins. She felt as if she were one of the Furies hunting Orestes.
He sighed and sat back against the stuffed horsehair while the ironshod hooves clattered and rang. “I had not realized . . .”
He waited for her to ask him what he had not realized, but, perhaps because every cell in her body had changed in their seven years of marriage, she had learned not to afford him that satisfaction.
And so they drove to Number 13 Angel Street without another word spoken between them. Jack was not a changed man, thought Bella: he had only altered.
Though Jack had of course a doorkey, he pulled the knob of the bell and set up a clanging which could be heard in the streets coming up the area steps. As the cabman unloaded the trunks, Bella stood on the curb to survey the street.
The terrace was built in the style which her father had described as Mincing Lane Palladian. A flight of five steps led up to twin front doors, separated from one another by cast-iron railings and a peeling pillar supporting a portico above, the underside of which needed reinforcement. Tall and narrow, five stories high, counting the basement, ornamented with a host of classical projections of painted stucco, the houses comprising the terrace presented the result of the middling businessman’s pretensions a quarter of a century before. The emptiness of Number 11 with its dirt-screened window-panes and the card in the window of Number 15 reading BED AND BREAKFAST confirmed Jack’s understatement in his letter that the house and neighborhood had known a more elegant period. Her heart sank. There were enough rooms to house a family of ten or more!
By now the front door was opened to reveal, standing with her hand on the knob, a woman with poached eyes in a plum-duff face, who was clearly Elizabeth. Behind her stood a pert-looking girl with a turned-up nose, red cheeks and saucy eyes.
Bella would have chosen neither of them, if she had been to Mrs. Weston’s. But she smiled and they curtsied, as she said, “You must be Elizabeth; and you are Nancy?”
The undermaid bobbed her head in agreement. But nobody, thought Bella, is as shy as all that. She felt an intuitive suspicion of the girl.
At that moment she heard Jack’s voice. “Come on, Nancy girl! Give the cabby a hand with the trunks!” And both the maids bustled out, eager to obey. He had only been their master for a few days, but he had already won their loyalty, as he always did, not by consideration but by his smiling assumption that they would willingly do anything which he wanted.
Once the cabby was paid off and the front door closed, he turned to the two maids. “You’ve already met Mrs. Manningham, I see,” he said. “I want you to be very considerate with her. She has been under great strain, physical and mental. She is much better now. And the last thing we want is a relapse.”
Bella looked at her husband in astonishment. He appeared to be as serious in what he was saying as were the two maids in their attention.
“You must excuse Mr. Manningham’s anxiety,” Bella said. “We have not seen one another for the last three months, as he was forced to come to London to consult his doctor. His fears on my behalf have colored his judgment. I am perfectly recovered.”
At this point, she felt her elbow gripped as between pincers. She looked up to see her husband smiling down at her. “Of course you are perfectly recovered, my dear,” he said, “only a little tired after the dong train journey.” He imperceptibly tightened the pincer-hold of his tarantula-like fingers.
Bella cried out with the pain, “Please!”
He relaxed the pressure but still held her. “There is no need to keep up pretenses in this house as there was with the Jamesons in York,” he said gently. “You’re home now.”
Bella was more terrified than she had ever been in her life. After years of shuttering off what was frightening, this time it seemed as if the shutter had closed leaving her on the wrong side. She looked down at her elbow. “Will you please let go of me?” she said, with quiet fury. “You have hurt me.”
“Of course, my dear,” he said, stepping back between her and the front door. “It was only that I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
She turned to the two maids. “Please take my hand-luggage up to my room. If the trunks are too heavy, Mr. Manningham, I am sure, will help you. He is very strong.” She turned and walked into what was obviously the dining room, judging from the long table covered in burgundy-red velvet edged with bobbles and a heavy mahogany sideboard, the front of which was carved with clusters of grapes and hanging pheasants. She walked to the windows and stood beside its centerpiece, an aspidistra in a Benares ware bowl standing upon a doric column of dark oak.
Outside it was already twilight and the lamplighter was making his rounds. Standing on the pavement on the opposite side of the street, there stood a short, stocky man, wearing a long overcoat and a thimble-shaped felt hat, which looked like a cross between a bowler and a topper. He seemed to pick her out in the shadow of the room, bent forward to look more closely, then, perhaps noticing that she was returning his scrutiny, he moved off down the street, turning once to take a final look. He was not, thought Bella, like a human being so much as a child’s drawing; a long rectangular body, a little rectangular hat, black-beetle feet, scarecrow arms.
She had been waiting for Jack to join her in the dining room. She now heard his footsteps from the room above. It was of course what she should have known. He was the opposite of the cent
urion’s servant. Told to go, he would come; to come, would go.
She looked round the room. There were vaunted gas brackets on the walls on either side of the chimney-breast with incandescent mantels. Above the table hung an elaborate device which must have been quite the latest in chandeliers many years ago.
When she went back into the hall, an impulse took her to the front door. There was a sliding latch which could be turned if the catch was unfastened. She slipped it back, but the door would not open. Lower down she saw the ward of the mortice lock.
The thought of being locked in together with her jailers filled her with such anger that she wanted to run up and protest. But of course that was what Jack had planned she should do.
Or was it?
Jack was so insensitive a man that possibly she was attributing to him a diabolical cunning which he possessed only in her imagination. That ridiculous scene before the maids, so shameful and humiliating, might be his clod-hopping effort at understanding. And she wasn’t, she realized, the easiest of women.
She went slowly up the stone stairs, covered, she noticed, with a Wilton carpeting which tomorrow should be taken up and sent to a steam laundry. How like a man to rent a house without insisting that this should have been done first!
She opened the high door at the head of the stairs. At first she could not see her husband. The room was so crowded with fussy furniture that all she noticed were the gaslights purring on the walls like bronchitic cats. Then she saw him, half hidden behind a desk near a window. He was poring over his precious notebooks, trying to put two and two together profitably enough to make the rest worth pocketing. He looked up and removed his steel spectacles. He said, “Ah!”
“Men!” she said.
“What do you mean, my dear? Amen?”
“I said ‘Men!’ It was you who said ‘Ah!’” She looked round the room very slowly with mounting incredulity. His taste when they married had been undeveloped but he had been an apt pupil. Was it conceivable that after seven years he had learned nothing? She took out of a monstrous Chinese vase a bunch of dry pampas grass and shook it over his desk. A shower of dust and soot descended.
He started up from his chair. “Bella!”
An imp prompted her to tickle his nose with the pampas. He smashed it aside with his hand. “Have you gone mad?”
She dropped the grass back in the vase. Then she went to the nearest window and lifted up a lace curtain dark gray with dirt. “I’m afraid that you have,” she said. “With our experience of furnished houses, I would have thought that you had learned better than this. ‘Curtains to be laundered or cleaned by the landlord, before occupation, by the tenant on departure.’ Surely even you know that by now.” She had never, or at least very seldom, played a “Great-aunt Annie” on Jack until now. It was the measure of her desperation.
She went over to an open bookcase, the shelves of which were decorated at the top with stamped morocco leather, faded and scuffed. She withdrew a copy of Gil Blas, opened it and then clapped together the covers, giving out a cloud of dust.
Jack snatched it from her hand and thrust it back in the bookcase. “That’s enough of that!” he said.
His face was suffused with blood, revealing a network of surface veins surprisingly delicate compared to the large pores of his skin. “I quite agree,” she answered, “if you mean ‘filth.’ ”
“I mean you.” The spittle of his venom sprinkled her face and hand. “Your crazy ‘touch me not’ coldness, the airs you give yourself! You don’t like this house, eh?”
Bella remembered Minty Jameson saying to her, “If he’s as bad as you think he is, my dear, you’re the only one who can save him. He’s your husband, remember. You married him for worse as well as better.”
She said “Do you?”
“Do I what?” Jack was confused, but his breath did not smell of alcohol.
“Like it? This house?”
There was something strange about his eyes, difficult to analyze. Bella wondered if he had stopped drinking, but was taking some drug. She knew nothing about the effects of drugs, had not even read de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater.
“This is our home,” he said. “It was a very fine house in its day.” He turned to her defiantly. “And it’s still good. It’s a big house. It’s bigger than that horrible house in Holly Place.”
Something which Dr. Patrick had told her about the tertiary stage of the horrible disease stirred in her mind. G.P.I., General Paralysis of the Insane. Could this be what was wrong with Jack?
“Jack,” she said, “Jack!”
“I like big rooms you can swing a cat in. What?”
“I should like to see your doctor.”
He grasped her by the shoulders. “You would? Do you want me to send Nancy round?”
“No! no!” She felt too exhausted and confused to be able to collect her thoughts for what must be a searching interview. “Sometime tomorrow. Morning or afternoon. There’s so much to do here, it doesn’t matter when.”
“And you’ll go up to bed now? You must be tired.”
She was tired, far more exhausted by the short time in this horrible house than by the long journey in the train. He tried to kiss her on the mouth, but she gave him the back of her hand. “Your bedroom is immediately above this room,” he said, “mine is through that door at the back of the house. I have put an inside bolt on your door, so that you can shut yourself in, if you are afraid.” There seemed a strange calm after his mental storm.
Bella’s bedroom was less museum-like than the drawing room. The furniture was older, belonging to an age which found grace in simplicity of lines and quality in good workmanship, solid joinery and smoothly running drawers. The furnishings were more recent: a cream and blue Indian carpet of good quality; lined cretonne curtains comparatively fresh, though the inner muslin curtains were as dirty as downstairs. There was a fresh brass bolt on the inside of the door, as Jack had told her; though why he should imagine she would want to lock herself in, she did not understand. The dressing table had twin side mirrors, an empire piece of an elegance which deserved better than the horrid lace runner on which stood her toilet articles, which had already been unpacked.
Bella’s heart rose. No one is a prisoner who does not try to escape, and here was a cell which might be made into a pleasant enough asylum. The brass bedstead had a mattress of horsehair with a feather-filled overlay. Beside the fireplace, in the grate of which a pleasant coal fire glowed, there was a bell handle, which she guessed was Copeland, a pretty knob inviting use. She pulled it down and then released it.
By the window there was an escritoire of rosewood, with four drawers on the right side. Here she could write to the Jamesons, who had come to take the place in her life of blood relations. Not people she would have chosen as friends; nevertheless, they shared secrets of her married life which she could never have confided to anyone. Only they could possibly understand what was happening, or might happen to her.
There was a tap on the door and she called, “Come in.”
Nancy opened the door, but she did not trouble to come right in—just stood, holding the knob in her right hand and with her left hand on her hip.
Bella was standing by the escritoire. “Close the door,” she said. “Come over here, Nancy.”
The girl closed the door with ill grace and slouched across the room.
“You’ll have to learn to hold yourself and move better than that,” Bella said. “I should have thought that was the first thing they would have taught in Bath.”
“Barf?” the girl asked, “Watcha mean, Barf?”
“Madam. You should call me ‘Madam’ and Mr. Manningham, ‘Sir.’ ”
“Ma’am.”
“I thought you began service in Bath with a Lady Somebody.”
The girl looked at her mistress as though she had gone out of her mind. Then suddenly she grinned and doubled up, laughing. “Lor, ’e diden say that, did ’e?” she said, when she recovered. “It wasn�
��t Barf. It was Cov’ntry. The Lady Godiva!”
“But Mrs. Weston’s?” Bella understood the girl’s behavior, the natural outcome of tavern training. “Mr. Manningham . . .”
“Oh, ’e seen me in Mrs. Weston’s, waitin’. I told ’er I wanted to better meself and he gives me the nod an’ says “You’ll do, girl. I’ll take you.”
“Very graphic,” Bella observed. “I can visualize every nuance. Well, if you want to better yourself, Nancy, you should not find that difficult, considering the room you have for self-improvement. With application anyone can learn to walk and talk correctly.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Not ‘ma’am.’ Madam.”
Nancy nodded.
“Say it. Madam.”
“Madam.”
“Now, put your shoulders back! Hold your head up! Take your hand off your hip. Your hips are part of your body, they wont fall off.” The girl, rather to Bella’s surprise, obeyed her commands, perhaps for the first time realizing that posture was within her own control. “Put out your hands!”
They were not bad hands, though red and coarsened, but she held them rigidly as if they were small frying pans.
Bella held out her own. “Try to copy me. Hold your fingers together and then separate the little finger without moving the rest.”
Nancy couldn’t, the fourth finger always parting company with the middle finger.
Bella showed her other exercises. “Think of your hands as a fine collection of muscles and nerves and joints, like a delicate machine which you can learn to use in lots of different ways. But it needs practice, Nancy.” She smiled. “You can learn, if you try hard. And if you try hard, I’ll help you.”
“Thank you,” Nancy said. “Madam.”
Bella told her that she had decided to have dinner in her bedroom. “Find out from Elizabeth what she can do and I will tell you what I shall have.”
Nancy went to the door, but Bella called her back. “This is what you did, Nancy,” Bella gave a shambling caricature of Nancy’s progress. “Do it again, head up, shoulders back. Feel yourself moving down to the tips of your toes.”
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