Wilson took sewing with her, remembering how soothing Mrs Browning had always found the sight of her stitching, the ins and outs of the needle she plied seeming to have a hypnotic effect. She settled herself near enough to the bed to be able at once to deal with any coughing fits, or the results of them, but not so near that her presence would be oppressive. The room was stifling hot, since outside the June temperature had soared to near 90 degrees in the shade, and almost dark because the shutters were closed against the glare, but she could see well enough. She hardly moved and did not speak unless spoken to but there was no constraint in her bearing. Instead, she felt curiously contented sitting there, as though all time was suspended and with it everything that plagued her. She looked forward to her time in the sickroom and was sorry to leave its peace. Sometimes, she was not needed because Miss Blagden had come and then she felt bereft and did not know what to do with herself. On impulse, she wrote to Lizzie Treherne one afternoon, not knowing why she should think of doing so when she had not penned a line to Lizzie in three years and had received nothing from her but only feeling the need to try to express and communicate something of what she felt to someone who had once cared as much about the poor suffering invalid. Once she had begun she found it difficult to stop, telling Lizzie:
— there is an attraction about old friends which dies hard Lizzie and makes me wish to see you again. I have no one I can call a friend as you were my friend and think back with astonishment to my early days in Florence when I never seemed to want for a companion and was famous for having made my own way in what society was available to me. But now I would be hard put to name a single woman of my acquaintance, English or Italian, with whom I pass more than the time of day. Such is the lot of women I fear, marriage and motherhood taking them away from their own sex if they have not family and friends from far back to hand. Now you may say Lizzie that my husband is my friend and ought to suffice in that respect but without embarrassment I tell you that in my case at least that is not so. Ferdinando is a good man but if I ever thought we shared the same interests and tastes upon which friendship thrives then I was blinded by love. I am blind no longer. All my husband thinks of is his country and the state of the movement towards unity. He is hardly more interested in his son than that and it grieves me sorely. The truth is Lizzie we have grown apart and I fear the fault if fault there is lies in me. He may still be the same man I married but I am not the same woman nor would I wish to be. Why, as I sit beside our old mistress who as I have just related is languid with her old complaint and think back to Wimpole Street I cannot believe I was ever as naive and trusting as history shows me to have been. Think of my ambition then Lizzie and what I was intent on making myself! Think how happy I vowed I should be with a husband and children to love! I could laugh if not more inclined to weep over those fond hopes. Now this sounds bitter Lizzie and you may shake your head in sorrow at my ingratitude when I seem to have been so blessed but believe me when I say this is no petty complaint against fate that I make. I am not satisfied with what I have become nor with how I have conducted myself and that is all there is to it yet if you were to ask me what I would have done otherwise I could hardly tell you.
Nor had she been able to tell Mrs Browning who, one afternoon, when she seemed rather better than she had been and was sitting up in a chair propped with pillows, looked at the sewing Wilson was doing and asked if she were not content with her little boy Pilade for whom she was making the blouse.
‘Content, ma’am? In what way?’
‘To have him, Wilson. To be a mother, to have a home and family as once you longed for.’
‘It is not quite what I longed for, I am not exactly content with it nor with myself.’
‘Yourself?’
‘What I have become.’
‘And what have you become that dissatisfies you?’
‘Dull, in myself. I go through each day in a dream, thinking is this all there is, work and very little else.’
‘Wilson, you shock me!’
‘I shock myself.’
‘Pilade is such a fine boy, with all his future ahead of him …’
‘And I with all mine behind.’
There had been a long pause while Mrs Browning stared at her, her expression a strange mixture of curiosity and bewilderment. Then she coughed and took a while to recover so that it was full half an hour, long after Wilson thought the subject forgotten, before she ventured, ‘You disturb me, dear, with this dullness of yours. It half terrifies me to find you regarding your life so little, if you mean what you seem to say. After all, you have made something of yourself, more than many a lady’s maid does, and have an interesting life when all is said and done, living as you do in Florence in these exciting times.’
‘The times are not exciting to me. That is the trouble – I find nothing exciting.’
‘And I am all excitement, or was, until this illness. There lies the difference between us and I cannot help but wonder why.’
‘You have your work, ma’am.’
‘Precious little of it, these days.’
‘And your husband.’
‘Ah yes, my husband. But you have your husband.’
‘Sometimes, and I hardly care when I do for that part of me is dead, I think.’
‘Love is dead?’
‘If love it was, something is dead in any case.’
‘You are very frank, dear.’
‘You taught me to be frank, ma’am.’
‘Did I?’
‘You did, as you taught me to hope and expect miracles with confidence and believe in myself.’
‘What a lot you lay at my door. I had never credited myself with such power, it is quite alarming. Was I cruel to impress all this upon you if, as you say, I did?’
‘I did not think so at the time.’
‘But you do now?’
‘I feel I have failed, that is all.’
Another pause, for a sustained bout of coughing this time, made Wilson regret she had ever responded as she had. She urged the invalid not to speak, to stay quite still and let her thoughts turn to some pleasant and soporific subject without delay. To help them do so she began to describe the new lodger who had arrived at her house the day before, but she had only begun on her account when she was interrupted and the previous conversation continued.
‘I cannot bear to think,’ Mrs Browning said, her voice very weak, ‘that you judge yourself a failure and I am to blame.’
‘Oh not to blame, ma’am, never to blame. Now I am all confused, I did not intend to say anything about blame. What I said was mere idle talk to amuse you.’
‘It was no such thing. Do not sweep it aside so. Half our lives we spend on inconsequential chatter and since I no longer have anything as generous as half of mine left I want no more of it. I respect your confession, Wilson, and am honoured it was made to me.’
‘Do not upset yourself, ma’am, that is what I fear.’
‘I am not upset. I am interested and will not have my interest turned aside. And concerned, dear, I am concerned as a friend and as a woman. It occurs to me there is something in what you say for all women of our age.’
‘Oh no, ma’am, not for you and those like you. You are quite content and happy with your lot.’
‘Only because of Robert and Pen who, as you yourself say, are not for you matched in your Ferdinando and Pilade.’
‘I love Pilade.’
‘But he does not, on your own admission, make you feel less dull, he does not, it seems, give you a joy that lightens your whole being and makes sense of your existence.’
‘No.’
‘Then that is how I am different and how others are more akin to you. If I did not have Robert and Pen where would I be? Dull, like you.’
‘You would have your poetry.’
‘But how happy, at this age, would that have kept me? We cannot know, but I suspect now that I should have been a sad creature, fit for very little.’
There was a silence
, full of awkwardness. Wilson felt uncomfortable and disturbed. She had not intended their chat to take this direction and found it hard to remember how it had. As ever, she was bested by Mrs Browning and never ended up saying what she meant. Nor could she understand why she had begun to speak as she had done. For the last fifteen years it seemed she had been forever blurting out thoughts best kept to herself, forever striving to make of her relationship with her mistress what she had ample evidence could not be made of it. Again and again she had been disappointed, hurt, even humiliated and still she had not learned her lesson. She sighed, and then, as Mrs Browning looked up at her, tried to explain the sigh with a reference to an aching back. Pen’s coming in at that moment successfully excused her from further explanation. First he went to his mother and kissed her and then he came to Wilson and kissed her too, hardly less enthusiastically but a good deal more energetically. Then he stood looking at his mother, his stare level and appraising.
How he had grown, and not just grown but changed beyond all imagination … Wilson had to remind herself of his age, twelve years and three months, before she could account for the transformation. He was no longer slim and girlish nor ever would be again. She saw that his shape was that of Mr Septimus, Mr George and Mr Octavius, which was to say broad in the shoulder and tending towards the heavy. He had none of the Barrett height, though, being no more than average for his age and she fancied he might not grow much taller than his father who was only five foot six or thereabouts. But what was most unexpected of all was the masculinity of him already, even before the years of real bodily change ahead. Did his mother see it, she wondered? Did she see that the long hair now looked absurd around the newly filled-out face, suddenly square and strong? Did she notice how the muscular legs were at a variance with the satin pantaloons and that the hands protruding from the lace cuffs were covered in cuts, which came from a determined indulgence in sport? It was impossible to tell. She treated him exactly the same, as her baby, her precious darling, her little one who could do no wrong. And he was as loving and demonstrative as ever, which was a relief to witness. There was no sign of any growing embarrassment, no turning aside of the head to avoid kisses. But all the same she knew Pen’s life was now very much outside his mother’s sphere and that he functioned in it as a different animal. His fencing, his riding, his love of company, especially female company, were all more important to him than the love of literature which was the mainspring of her life and which she had tried to nurture in him. Yet there was no breach between them – the bond seemed as close as ever.
‘Mama, are you better?’ the boy asked, gravely.
‘Indeed I am, Penini, a little better every day.’
‘Is Mama a little better every day, Lily?’
‘She has told you she is, Pen, and so she must be.’
‘But what do you say, Lily?
‘It hardly matters what I say …’
‘Oh indeed it does, Lily, because you are wise and you can judge as she cannot. Is that not so, Mama?’
‘I suppose it must be,’ said his mother, smiling slightly.
‘Is Mama better, Lily?’
‘A little.’
‘There you are,’ his mother said, ‘my very own opinion endorsed. Are you happy now?’
‘Not happy, Mama, not until you are truly well.’
Her eyes, Wilson saw, filled with tears but Pen had turned aside to pick a grape from the bedside-table and by the time he turned back his mother had her grief under control. He fed her the grape and then said he must be off to practise his music or Papa would be displeased.
It was very near time for Wilson to go. She began gathering up her sewing and folding it to put in her bag.
‘Wilson,’ Mrs Browning said, ‘what date is it?’
‘June 19th, ma’am.’
‘June 19th Nearly Midsummer’s Day. I always think of England on that day, of the green and the soft rain. I shall never see it again and never thought I cared until now.’
Wilson kept silent. She knew she must not burst into emphatic assurances that this was nonsense.
‘Midsummer’s Day,’ Mrs Browning repeated, drowsily, ‘and I have been ill some two weeks. Well, we must see an improvement soon, I expect, if just to satisfy Penini. Robert talks of doctors but I will have no more of them. Wilson, if he takes counsel with you, you must tell him all over again that you have seen it before and it is the old trouble.’
‘But it is not precisely,’ Wilson murmured.
‘What extra is there?’
‘Not extra, ma’am, but something missing.’
‘Missing? Good heavens, how can that be? I thought to have the usual full complement – cough, headache, languor, weakness, a pain at times in my side – now which is missing of my old adversaries, pray?’
‘The will, ma’am,’ Wilson said, very softly.
‘Oh now come, dear, you romance. I have as much will as I ever had, too much of it some might say. It is will which has kept me going and sometimes precious little else. Explain yourself, Wilson, or stand corrected.’
Wilson hesitated but was not put off. ‘I see it in your eyes, ma’am. There is a – a blankness there which was not there before.’ The word she had wished to use was ‘deadness’ but she had not been able to get it out.
‘It is the morphine,’ Mrs Browning said, ‘it makes me feel far away.’
Wilson did not argue. Perhaps it was even true. Certainly, she had noticed the doses of morphine were more frequent and stronger. But she knew a drug-induced vacancy and this was not it. She said goodbye for the day, but the invalid seemed already to have drifted off to sleep.
The next day she did not go to the Casa Guidi in the afternoon, since Miss Blagden had called and said she would be there, but went instead in the evening merely to enquire if there had been any change. Even at eight o’clock it was still fiercely hot, one of those cauldron days when the thought of the greenery and rain Mrs Browning had mentioned seemed utterly desirable. Doubtless Mr Browning would endeavour to remove his wife to Siena or Bagni di Lucca as soon as she was fit to travel but Wilson thought it unlikely she would be invited to make up the party. This was as well. She had not the energy to pack up and go, even for Pilade’s sake, and her house, most unusually for the time of year, was full. Arriving exhausted at the Casa Guidi she ducked into its shady entrance hall and was bracing herself for the climb up the stairs when Miss Blagden came down them. She seemed to rush the last few steps and clutched Wilson’s arm in a most agitated fashion. ‘Oh Wilson, dear,’ she gasped, ‘it was not at all my fault – she would have the window open and would sit near it and there was nothing I could do and now there is a soreness in the throat and Robert is anxious.’
‘A soreness in the throat need be nothing, Miss Blagden,’ Wilson said reassuringly. ‘Why, it may be a mere dryness we are all feeling today. So Mrs Browning was out of bed today, was sitting up?’
‘Yes, Robert insisted and carried her to the chair when I arrived.’
‘Well then, that is a good sign, that she was able to endure it.’
‘I do not know that she was. It was her husband who could no longer endure the wretchedness of seeing her in bed day after day.’
‘But it is better for her chest to be in a chair.’
‘So she was told. Oh, I hope this sore throat is nothing or I shall feel to blame.’
Wilson did not, after all, go up to the Brownings’ apartment, knowing she would learn nothing Miss Blagden had not already told her, but when she went along the next afternoon as usual, hating the dustiness of the hot streets, she was prepared to find the invalid not better but worse – as indeed she was. A cough had developed in the night and it was not of that intermittent sort to which they were all used, nor did it come in sudden fits, but was instead an almost permanent hacking, rasping affair which seemed to tear the sufferer’s poor wasted frame to pieces. Mr Browning was distraught. He seized on Wilson as soon as she came and hurried her into the bedroom where Annunciata,
smiling vacantly, was half-heartedly rubbing Mrs Browning’s back with one hand and holding a cloth in the other. Wilson moved swiftly. The invalid was all lop-sided on the pillows which were bunched up ineffectively somewhere in the region of her heaving shoulders and quite useless as a support. Nor were the pillows themselves much good, being huge, soft things. Whipping the sheet off, Wilson dragged the bolster into an upright position and then got Mr Browning to lift his wife so that this leaning post ran the whole length of her back. She could not keep herself upright but by forcing her backwards at a very slight angle they were able to maintain an almost perpendicular position. After only a few seconds the coughing quietened in severity, though it did not stop. Then Wilson took the water reposing on the table and was able to slip a little of it, teaspoon by teaspoon, through the cracked and swollen lips.
‘Thank God,’ Mr Browning said, and sank down on a chair, his head in his hands.
She stayed long after her usual time and left reluctantly, feeling frightened and even more frightened of showing it. Mr Browning had also stayed in the room all afternoon, his eyes never leaving his wife’s face. Nobody had spoken. Mrs Browning, who could not be asleep because of the coughing, nevertheless seemed not fully conscious. Her breathing was very heavy and Wilson thought, constantly bending over her to wipe her forehead, that there was a foul smell coming from her mouth. When she finally left, Mr Browning followed her out.
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