Mrs. Jarrett was annoyed at having to cope with this single member of the family. Everything was shrouded. The servants were all on board wages. Caspar’s presence, though only from late each night to early each morning, consumed a quite disproportionate amount of the household’s limited resources. And especially on Boxing Day, when there was traditionally a grand ball in the servants’ hall. So she was doubly annoyed when Caspar returned early with a strange bedstead and asked her to arrange for it to be put in his room in place of his present bed.
“What d’you think of it?” he asked her.
It was, she had to allow, a very handsome bed.
Then, suddenly, she didn’t mind his coming home early at all. It answered another of her problems—the ghastly-looking Coen girl, who would have ruined any ball. She could be put to looking after Master Caspar—and if any girl was safe with a young man, it was Coen! Serve him right, too, for interfering in the summer like that. He’d have to look at her awful disfigurement all supper. Anyway, she’d suspected the girl as the source of that monstrous article in the Companion, so it would serve her right to miss the ball. She made Coen carry the bed up and arrange it in Caspar’s room, crippled foot or no; there was no reason why anyone else should stir themselves.
Caspar, to loosen the knotted muscles of his back and shake the farmer’s whisky from the channels of his head, went for a long ride in the park and then back home for a hot bath. In the meantime his room had been transformed. Mary had not only seen to the bed, she had filched decorations from downstairs and decked out the whole room, even hanging little swags of tinfoil around the paraffin-oil lamps. A soft, warm light suffused every corner. Mrs. Jarrett came in and looked at it with a surprising approval. The prettier the room, she went away thinking, the more it’ll show her up.
Mary purloined a lot of edible delicacies from downstairs, too. She put them out while Caspar was behind the screens, taking his bath. His eyes went wide in greedy delight when he came out again and saw the table.
“I’ll never manage all that! You’d better pull up a chair and feed yourself, too, Mary.”
“Merciful hour, sir, I daren’t do that!”
“It’ll be all right if I say so.”
“No, sir. That Mrs. Jarrett, she’d only take it out on me after, so she would. I’ll empty your bath while you eat, and put coals on the fire.”
“You’ll do as you’re bloody well told!” Caspar laughed, making her grin at the naughtiness of it. “I’ve been alone all week and I’ve always liked talking to you. If you’re worried about Mrs. Jarrett, go and shut the door at the end of the passage. When it opens it squeals like a banshee; then she can’t surprise us.”
Mary went and closed the door. Then she sat down opposite him and ate with as much relish as he did, and she told him what a rumpus there’d been in the house after that article in the Companion, and how they’d questioned every servant one by one, and how the eyes nearly fell out of her when she saw it—wasn’t everything she’d told him in it! And she was sure Mrs. Jarrett suspected her. And declare to God she’d never help him again! But she laughed when she said it.
They soon finished off the wine that had been intended for him alone, so she went down for more. She came back with two bottles and a dish of chestnuts for roasting. The mood changed. Her mood changed. Before, all the while they had been eating, she had been guardedly effusive, remotely warm. A single squeal of the farther door would have been enough to freeze her back into the proper servant girl.
But now she moved about the room completely at her ease. She put a pan of nuts on the trivet, where they would roast without burning. Then she poured him a glass of wine, then one for herself. All the while she looked at him with an odd, knowing smile.
“Are they having fun down there?” he asked.
“Sure they think they are,” she said, and went to look at the chestnuts. “Soon be done. Wouldn’t you sit by the fire here and I’ll peel them for you?”
He picked up the wine bottle and turned toward the fireplace. “Ah, go on—quench that light,” she said, involuntarily raising a hand to her scars. He almost obeyed but then, feeling very bold, he walked straight to her. She watched him, half smiling, half fearful, until it was too late to back away. Gently he kissed the scarred half of her face as he had wanted to last summer. She stood rigid and shivering, as if it were an initiation.
“Why d’ye do that?” she asked. Her breath made his neck tingle.
“You’re a grand girl, Mary,” he said, not pulling back yet. “I know why Boy fell in love with you. I think I could love you a bit, too. I’m sure any man who got to know you well would do the same—and never even see those things.”
“God love you,” she said.
A chestnut exploded. Then he went and put out the light.
He sat on the chair, she between his knees in the firelight, peeling chestnuts and popping them hot between his lips with her sinuous fingers.
“You eat too,” he told her.
She ate a few, and she drank a lot of wine. “How is Boy?” she asked at last. It seemed natural for her head to fall dreamily to his lap.
Caspar chuckled grimly. “I barely see the fellow. It’s hard to explain. We live in the same house at the same school, and we hardly talk together. He’s the head boy, you see—the quare fella. I’m one of the bad boys.” It seemed natural for his fingers to steal in among her hair and begin caressing her scalp and neck. Girl skin was lovely.
She shivered and buried her face on his thigh. It was some time before he realized she was crying. Her voice fell between his legs and bounced back, strangely altered and remote, from the floor. “God, I love him. I love that fella. I think of him every night and I weep my heart out my eyes till the throat on me hurts like a lodged nail. And where’s the good of it!”
He squeezed her shoulder and said, “No good!”
Her weeping redoubled. “Aren’t I the one that knows it,” she said. “Wasn’t it me told him the same!”
Caspar was crying now, too—not having the faintest idea why. “Let me hold you,” he said. “I can’t bear you to feel so alone.”
She slid herself up into his lap, put her arms around his neck, and lay so still he thought she’d gone to sleep.
It was marvellous to want nothing of her—to feel this pity and to know it was pure pity, to feel protective and not to wonder would it pay well.
“Go on,” she said.
“What?”
“Anything you want.”
He was about to tell her how altruistic his sympathy was when she added, “You’d never know the good it is to me, feeling wanted.”
But when he began to caress her she said, “Will I stay the night?”
“D’you want to?”
“Do you really love me a bit?” she asked. She pulled away from him then, so that she could see his face by the firelight as he answered.
Only the pretty half of her showed. Damp with tears. The rest was black as ink. It changed her, subtly. She was just a pretty girl, not Mary; he knew he did not love either of them. Not this pretty girl. Not Mary. And, though he wanted her, and he wanted her company this night more than anything, he told her the truth.
She breathed an immense sigh of relief. “Then I’ll stay,” she said. Her smile was radiant.
He looked at her in bewilderment. “You mean if I had lied—if I had said I loved you, you wouldn’t have stayed?”
“I would not.” She was serious again.
“Why ever not?”
“Isn’t there enough pain already in it?” she said.
She stood up then and went to his now-cool bath, where she dipped a flannel and partly wrung it out. Then she came back to the fire and undressed—not provocatively but just as if he were not there. She held the flannel until it steamed in the heat of the fire, then she rubbed herself all over with it.
The sight of her hypnotized him. The delights he had dreamed of all these years, the joys he had so briefly sampled last summer in York…now…here…soon…all night! A terrifying congestion gripped his throat. She was gorgeous. A woman’s body is a glorious thing, he thought. He could not rightly grasp each passing second. Everything floated as in a dream.
She refilled her glass and came to sit on his lap, sharing it with him, sip for sip. When it was gone, she said, “Will I go to bed? This is fierce uncomfortable!”
He followed her, shedding everything on him between the chair and the bedside. But when they were in bed—his stupendous new bed—a strange coyness affected them both. They could kiss, clasp, explore each other with their hands and lips, he could lie on her, she on him, they could entwine their limbs about each other…but they both fought shy of that final penetration. Caspar thought it the oddest thing; but he could not speak of it. Their minds had become spectators of bodies that spoke in an urgent, direct, but silent language. And not the obvious animal language, either.
When he spent himself into space it was like that kind of tickling which hovers between the intensest pleasure and pain; he heard his throat chuckling in a suit for mercy. Forked high on his thigh, she said his name again and again and then achieved an ecstasy that filled him with astonishment and envy. It left her limp and bathed in sweat, broken in every joint.
Several times that night they stirred into semi-wakefulness and rediscovered all those preliminary delights while still fighting shy of the final consummation. He knew he felt closer to her then than he would if they had gone all the way.
Just after dawn he awoke to find her dressed and clearing out the ashes.
“Mary?” he said; the word fought for birth through thickets of phlegm.
“I’ll bring you your shaving water in a moment, sir,” she said.
“Mary!” This time it was stronger.
She turned and smiled at him. He was closer to loving her then than at any time. He patted the bed.
She swilled the ash from her hands in his bathwater and, wiping them on her pinny, came and sat beside him. He stroked her bare, damp arms and smiled up at her.
“Aren’t we mad, now,” she said, “to be making such a fuss of love.”
“Are we?”
“When liking’s so warm and love is such pain.”
“I don’t know.” He wanted to hear about love from her, to know not what love was like, but what her love was like.
“I’d sooner marry a man I liked than a man I loved,” was all she could say.
He gave her arms the slightest tug, but it was enough to pull her face down to his. He kissed her so softly they barely touched. “I like you, Mary. There’s no one else I feel so nice with as you.”
She laughed and stood up. “Yet!” she said and went back to the grate.
He wanted to ask her then if she would be his mistress. Not now, but when he had left school. He didn’t really want to join that herd of bachelors who swilled around Piccadilly and Soho, getting a taste for the wild oats they would then continue to sow after marriage. Even as he thought it, he realized that was not it, not with her. He wanted her in that way, of course—how could he deny it! But also he could talk to her. He realized with something of a shock that she was the only person he knew with whom he could talk. Even from Winnie he had to keep back some things; but with Mary, given time, he knew there was nothing they could not talk about.
Perhaps when he knew her a little better, he could ask her. The act of asking her would itself be something he could look forward to. And the idea that there might be someone in the world he could really talk to was very exciting.
Especially as it had nothing to do with love.
Chapter 33
Abercrombie’s card bore a printed address (or “direction,” as his mother always insisted on calling it) in Fitzroy Square. But this had been scratched out in ink and another address written below it: Basement, 6 Cleveland Street.
The move was small in geographical terms but half a world away in terms of social cachet, as Caspar saw the moment he entered Cleveland Street. It proved to be one of those hybrid London streets compounded out of the district that surrounded it. There were houses for artisans and tradesmen who served the West End. Rooms for the living-out servants, window cleaners, and knife grinders who made a living in Bloomsbury. Rooms for City clerks. Small shops. And the inevitable sprinkling of brothels.
Number six had no basement—at least, none that was visible from the front. It was a tobacconist and confectioner’s shop with a handsome bow window. Caspar went inside.
“Mrs. Abercrombie?” he asked the man behind the counter. “Does she live here?”
The man was very old. His head, disproportionately large, seemed to float in the gloom. Stray reflections of it moved in long, pale pencils of light on the sides of the glass jars around him, like ghost acolytes. He shook his head. “No,” he said solemnly.
“I was given this address.”
“She died last night.”
“Died!”
“Or over Christmas anyway. You can’t be sure, this cold.” It was the tone in which he had discussed the weather with customers for over seventy years.
“Oh, Lord!” Caspar said. His whole strategy depended on getting a free puff in the Companion; and now it was ruined.
“What’s it to you, young sir?” the man asked.
“Did she say anything…” Caspar began, and then had to fight a terrible impulse to laugh.
A joke had gone around Fiennes last term:
Asclepius [to Crito]: Where’s Socrates?
Crito [who has been weeping all night]: He’s dead! He swallowed poison last night.
Asclepius: Damn! Bother it! [Hoping against hope] I don’t suppose he said anything about that chicken he owes me?
Caspar hadn’t found it very funny—too far-fetched, he thought. Yet there he was, actually halfway through asking: “Did she say anything about an article for My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion?” when the memory of the joke hit him. Only a small attack of intense throat-clearing saved him.
The man was looking at him in bewilderment.
“The editor sent me around for her copy,” he explained. “It’s late.”
He could see the man disbelieved him, and Caspar knew why: Anyone who looked less like an office boy or printer’s devil would be hard to imagine.
He glanced down at his clothes and gave a light laugh. “Oh! My uncle is the editor. The office boy didn’t come in today. I’m just helping.”
The man shrugged then. What was it to him? Her rent was covered and the parish would bury her. “Go down and see,” he said, nodding toward the passage that led from the side of the shop into the back regions of the house. “They’re laying her out now.”
It was almost pitch black. He stumbled and groped his way toward the balustrade that guarded the downward flight of stairs, the only feature he had recognized in the brief sweep of light before the shop door had closed again behind him. The darkness accentuated the smells of tobacco and spice and twist and confections…and another smell, which at first he thought was the black odour of a damp basement. But as he descended the stairs he thought it might instead be the smell of death. Suddenly he had to fight a fear of going into that room.
He knocked at one door. Silence. A laugh came from behind another door. He knocked there.
“Wait, my darlin’!” a woman’s voice cried out. She laughed again.
He tapped at the third door. After a while a naked filthy child of about five opened it. Inside he glimpsed such a scene of degradation as he did not know existed. The floor was awash in excrement. There were perhaps a dozen people inside. He could not tell, for the only light and air came in where two bricks had been knocked out of the wall, high u
p near the ceiling. He pulled the door quickly shut and held his nose and mouth as he stumbled toward the only remaining door.
It was from this basement that the once-genteel Mrs. Abercrombie had told the world how lived My Lady Stevenson and the Duchess of Wherever and Viscountess Whatnot in their gilded palaces! He knocked at what had been her door.
“Yus?” a coarse female voice cried.
He waited out of respect.
“Yus!” The cry was petulant. He went in.
Mrs. Abercrombie, a pauper, was obviously due no very great respect. She lay, for the most part naked, on a dirty deal trestle that was not one of the room’s furnishings. In fact, the room had very few furnishings: a mattress and blankets on tea chests in the corner. A big box trunk, open and almost empty. It held a few items of patched and faded clothing, well rummaged about by the two drunken crones who were now sitting in a giggling stupor beside the corpse.
“If you come fer the writin’ desk, my lovely, you’re too bleedin’ late! ’E got ’is thievin’ ’ands on it.” She nodded at the ceiling.
He looked around the rest of the room and saw it was completely bare. At least Mrs. Abercrombie had had a window—all three square feet of a window. There was nothing in the way of paper. If there had been, it would have gone by now. The only hope was that it was in the writing desk, if she had written any copy at all.
He looked at her corpse; it was almost a skeleton already.
“She was starved,” he said, more to himself than to the women.
“Yus, but it wasn’t that what done for ’er,” one of them croaked.
“No,” the other cackled. She showed no teeth. “’Twas the cold, see.”
He began a silent prayer for her soul but the woman who had spoken first suddenly sprang up and whipped away the threadbare shift that half covered the corpse. “’Ere!” she cackled. “Want to see if she can still wink at yer?”
And, howling with helpless, drunken laughter, the two old hags tried in vain to pry apart those cold shanks of thighs, locked in rigor.
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