He swings his long legs down from the window seat. “Well, Ma, to be frank, I’m in dire trouble. Kitty knows nothing of this and I ask you to keep it a secret, but I owe a deal of money and if I don’t pay it next week, I’ll lose my house and everything in it. Kitty and I (not to put too fine a point on it) will be paupers.”
I am horrified. “How have you managed to get in this state?”
“You know me, Ma. I’m a man who takes chances. Some I win, some I lose. Generally it evens out. Don’t look at me in that way! Have I ever come to you for money? No, and you know it damned well. But I had a bad loss recently. I’ve bills out all over town and the Jews are at me. We need Kitty’s legacy to sort things out. And the quickest way to get it is by Sissy handing it over. As he intended.”
“I think Alfred intended the opposite. He could see the way you lived—and he didn’t approve.”
“High-minded as always! Yet Yours Truly enjoyed it enough when we were out together. He’d back some old nag without any form and it would always come in. He was lucky at the tables, too—said he could see the wheel in his mind’s eye and willed the ball to fall in place.” He laughs and strokes his mustache. “I never lost a farthing when I followed his lead. By God, if he hadn’t gone cool on the whole thing, perhaps I wouldn’t be here now, groveling to you for a favor. A favor that’s in Kitty’s interest, too, I might add.”
“You know I would do anything for Kitty. But this is preposterous.”
“You stuck up for her against him. Can’t you do the same against Sissy? Are you more afraid of your little sister than of Alfred?”
“I was never afraid of Alfred.”
Augustus smiles, that inward, sneering smile: “Is that so?”
I color. “How dare you sneer! You know nothing!”
“Oh, come off your high horse! You let him do as he liked with you. Even let him turn you out of your own house and said thank you for the privilege! Kitty says as much.”
“Kitty talks wildly. She doesn’t understand. And yet she should know how it feels to be an abandoned wife. She loves you in spite of everything.”
He glares. “Has she ever complained about me?”
“No. She knows she has made her bed and she is too proud to do other than lie in it. Even if she has to lie there alone.”
He laughs. “You can hold your corner when you want to, I see. Well, if you won’t see Sissy, you won’t. But I hope you’ll remember that bold defiance of yours when Kitty hears the bailiffs at the door and sees the summonses put through the letter box.”
My blood runs cold. Bailiffs! Summonses! Everything Alfred worked to avoid all his life. He would truly hate me if he thought I would let Kitty suffer such indignities within days of his passing. “Very well,” I say hastily. “I shall try. I can do no more. But I doubt I’ll have any more success than you.”
He gets up and extends his hand. “Thank you, Ma. You won’t regret it. But will you be sure to go today? Time is precious.”
“Yes, today,” I say. Anything to make him go away.
“Then I’ll await your earliest conwenience.” He grins, picks up his hat, and goes out, whistling.
I am in a complete state of nerves. My breakfast is digesting badly and I can taste the eggs in my mouth. I hold on to the table edge and try to breathe slowly. How can I have agreed to see her? How can I face her condescension and triumph? I, who was so wronged, and she the perpetrator! What on earth will I say? But there is no time to compose a careful letter or to observe the niceties if I am to prevent the bailiffs banging on Kitty’s door. I shall have to take a chance that Sissy will be in, and that she will see the sister she so despises.
“Wilson, bring my cape and bonnet. I am going out!”
She appears at the door. “Out? Are you riding with Mr. O’Rourke again, in that there gig?”
“No.” My agitation makes me turn on the poor woman. “But if I were, I’m entitled to do so. If I wish to ride in gig—or on an elephant, come to that—I think I have the right.”
She flushes. “Beg pardon, madam. After all these, well, quiet times, I can’t get used to the commotion.”
I smile at her. She is a good soul. “I know you are only concerned for my welfare. But I need to go and see my sister.”
“Miss Millar? I thought—” She stops, not sure of what she is supposed to know.
“That we are not on speaking terms? Yes, you are right. But I have to see her all the same. It concerns Mrs. Norris.”
“Mr. Norris, you mean. It’s him as has put you up to it, I’ll be bound.”
“Never mind who’s put me up to it. I need a hansom cab as soon as you can get one. And a little something to settle my stomach.”
She gets me a glass of Dr. Phelps’s tonic and I find my bonnet and shawl, and my purse with a few shillings in it, and by the time Wilson is back with the cab, I am ready.
“Park Lane,” I tell the cabman. And we clatter off.
AS WE DRIVE, my stomach churns to think of meeting my sister again. My mind keeps going back to the time when I so unwisely left the whole household to her care. After my poor dear Ada’s death and the brief agony of Florence May, Dr. Phelps was of the opinion that Leamington Spa was the best place for me to recuperate. I didn’t want to go; I felt I should remain in London, and that Alfred was the best doctor I could ever have. He came and sat with me every morning and every night. He held my cold hands in his warm ones; he put his arm around me and read the comforting words of Our Lord. And when I was a little stronger, he read my favorite chapters from Miggs, which made me laugh so much that for a shameful moment or two I almost forgot our dear dead children’s faces.
But he could not spend all his time with me. He was struggling with the early Numbers of The Red House and editing Our Daily Lives, and due to start the casting of another play. His grief seemed to have been transmuted into a kind of frenetic activity, and I knew how it would drive him till he dropped with exhaustion. I tried to persuade him to come with me, to rest himself, but he would not: You know how I am, Dodo. God knows I wish it otherwise; that I could rest my mind and sail along in calm and healing seas. But I have to work; it is all I can do. Until the day I drop.
So, in a matter of weeks I found myself bundled off to the Midlands with my trunk in the luggage van, a hired nurse by my side, and a copy of James Bartram under my arm. “Captain Sissy will take command of the family ship,” Alfred said, as he handed me into a first-class carriage. “You need have no concerns.”
If I had been unhappy living under the same roof as my sister, the prospect of leaving her behind was infinitely worse. As I’d headed north through the flat Midlands landscape, blinds drawn against the flickering sunshine, Alfred’s last jocular words echoed in my mind: Cap’n Sissy will take command. Of course she would; it would be easy now I was not there.
I was in half a mind to get out at the next station and return to London, but I had only a single ticket and a half-crown in my purse, and my little nurse had nothing, so I let myself be carried on. Once at my lodgings, I wrote immediately saying I would only stay a week. A week will be ample, I wrote. But Alfred telegraphed DO NOT RETURN—ALL WELL. EXPECTING PRETTY WIFE AT END THREE MONTHS. YOURS TRULY.
In a strange way, I began to find the change soothing; and as the days went on and I grew stronger, there were many new things to engage my attention and fill the dreadful void in my heart. I tentatively began to go into society. I took the waters each day, rested or wrote letters in the afternoons, and in the evenings I attended soirées where I played cards with a wide variety of pleasant people who showed a considerable degree of interest towards the wife of Alfred Gibson. In return I was happy to furnish my audience with many an anecdote about our lives together. As the days went by, they began to ask me my opinion of matters, and were interested in what I had to say. Indeed for the first time I began to feel a person in my own right. The shock of Ada’s passing and the death of Florence May began, at last, to recede. My body felt renewed, and
I began to feel my heavy spirits lift. Before I realized it, I had been away for four and a half months.
Alfred had had no time to come and see me, but he’d written to me every day, short, cheerful notes. In one he told me that he was steaming ahead with rehearsals for the new play, and that he had assembled a wonderful company with excellent actors and actresses, down to the smallest servant with half a line. Yours Truly is in splendid form (as always!) as the eponymous Lord Royston, and I have the best of daughters—a charming young person of the name of Ricketts—who comes in a bargain package with her equally Thespian Mama, who is playing my unfortunate shrew of a wife!! I am cheered to hear my actual wife is recovering well—but I entreat you to stay in Leamington as long as you need to do so. Your sister is managing marvellously, as always. What would we do without her?
The name of Ricketts was of little interest to me; it was Sissy’s doings that absorbed my attention. Every letter contained further encomiums about her indispensability. As I had feared, she was using my absence to increase her sphere of influence, gaining Alfred’s admiration and affection more with every day, whereas I was like poor Isabella in her enchanted forest; no one could hear my voice.
And indeed, when I returned to Park House, it was Sissy who greeted me at the front door like a chatelaine, keys dangling from her waist, while John, more grim-faced than usual, humped my luggage up the stairs without a word. “Welcome back, dear Dodo!” she’d cooed. “You must be tired after your journey. Do you want to go straight to your room? I can have tea and sandwiches brought to you there.” She was oversweet with me, as if I had become a harmless person.
“Where are the children?” The house was strangely silent.
“Out walking with Bessie.”
“All of them?”
“Well, the little ones. And Lou is helping, as she always does. Such a dear, sweet girl!” She started to help me off with my pelisse. “Alfie’s still at Rugby, of course.”
“And Kitty?”
“She is about the place somewhere. It is impossible to keep an eye on her; she is as wrigglesome as an eel.”
“But why are they not here to greet me? Didn’t they know their mama was coming home?” I thought of how they all rushed to greet Alfred when he came back from every one of his travels.
“Well, Dodo, the truth is they are nicely settled these days, and Alfred agreed I shouldn’t tell them in case—well, in case arrangements had to change. It will be a nice surprise for them when we all sit down to supper together.”
I swallowed my disappointment and followed her up the stairs. “And where’s Alfred?”
She put her finger to her lips. “He mustn’t be interrupted.”
“He’s in the house?” I couldn’t believe he had not come to meet me.
“Sshh. He’s working.”
“I must see him.” I began to descend the stairs again.
She stepped in front of me. “No,” she said.
“What do you mean—no? He is my husband. Let me pass.”
She faltered. “Please, Dodo. He’s been having such difficulty with The Red House. He so hates to be disturbed. Please.” She gave me her sweetest smile, and I thought she looked even prettier than Alice. I thought of how Alfred had always written amid the hurly-burly of children and visitors, not locked away in silence. But in his letter, he’d admitted that The Red House was being drawn from him slowly and agonisingly, like a bad tooth. So I conceded. “Very well.”
I went with her to unpack my things. She’d put a vase of flowers on the bedside table and she was very amiable as she laid out my gowns and placed my undergarments in the drawers. But a cold feeling was spreading through my veins. Something was wrong.
When Alfred came out of his study at five o’clock, he looked at me rather distantly. Then he smiled and said he hoped I was quite recovered from the daily exertions of playing cards and drinking my own weight in water, and he put out his hand, as if to shake mine. For my part, I almost knocked him over with my embrace. “I have missed you so much!” I said joyfully. “Have you not missed me, too?”
He started slightly, before laughing and adding airily: “Oh, the old place has not been the same without you. We’ve been under iron discipline. Cap’n Sissy has seen to that. But we’ve got along by dint of taking in breaths and letting’em out again and walking with one foot in front of the other like we was reg’lar soljers!”
For a moment he seemed exactly his old self, and my heart was so full of love for him I could hardly let go of his hand, but kissed it over and over again. And when the children came home, he leapt up and lined them all up by age so they could come and greet me—which they duly did, saying politely that they hoped I was “feeling better.” Except for Kitty, who appeared from nowhere and was loud and sulky by turns; they seemed almost shy of me. As we sat around the supper table, even Alfred’s insistence that they “tell Mama” this or that largely went unheeded. Lou and Eddie seemed to ignore me as if I were a deaf or elderly aunt; and Georgie and Fanny stared at me with a kind of terrified curiosity as if I were some sort of infernal mechanism that might suddenly explode in their faces.
It was only when I retired that night that I realized what, in the confusion of unpacking, I had half-sensed but not fully observed: that Alfred’s lamp and books and favorite armchair had disappeared from our bedroom. And when I tried his dressing-room door, it was not only shut—which was unusual—but fast locked. I felt a dreadful sense of foreboding and dismay but I continued to rattle the doorknob, thinking that sooner or later it must open. Then I pushed against the door with my whole weight, but it seemed to stare back at me with an awful sense of brown-varnished triumph, as if I should have known better. I hastened out of the room in a state of agitation. Perhaps Alfred had been sleeping in the dressing room while I was away and Mrs. Brooks had neglected to return things to their normal state. It made no sense, but it was the only answer I could think of. As I began to descend the staircase, stepping on my hem in my haste, and almost stumbling headlong down the stairs, I met Alfred coming quietly up.
“Oh, Alfred!” I said, grasping his arm. “The door to the dressing room is locked! And your belongings are gone! What has been happening?”
“Calm yourself!” he said. “Everything is in order. My orders in fact. You need peace and quiet, and I’m a restless sleeper.” He smiled and patted my arm, as if the matter were of no great importance, as if it were no hardship to him to sleep apart from me after so many months. And when I saw his face so unperturbed and dispassionate, all the doubts that had been chafing at me since I first climbed those wretched steep steps to the front door began to burst in my head like an explosion of skyrockets.
“I don’t mind if you are the worst sleeper in the world!” I said, grasping his coat as he made as if to pass on. “I don’t need peace and quiet; not now! I need you with me; I need your arms around me!”
“Now, Dodo,” he said, removing my hands from his coat, “we both know what that can lead to. The last thing we want now is another infant. Be a good girl and do what I say.”
“We can be as brother and sister. There need be nothing further …” I grasped his coat again, aware that my voice was rising in my desperation.
“For Heaven’s sake, Dodo!” He looked around, embarrassed, as he tried to extricate himself from my grip. “You are making a ridiculous fuss. You will have the whole house wondering what is the matter with you.”
“I don’t care!” I fell to my knees, grasping first at his waist and then at his legs, and finally his ankles. “I don’t care if I disturb the whole house!” I clung at his trousers and wept onto his beautifully shiny boots.
I must have made a dreadful commotion because Sissy and Mrs. Brooks came running up the stairs in consternation. And he told them not to blame me; that I was overtired: “She needs some rest.” So they prised me away from him, and I felt the sharp tang of smelling salts as I was bundled back into my room. When I came to myself, Mrs. Brooks’s brisk hands were wash
ing my face and undressing me for bed.
“Come along, Mrs. Gibson,” she said as she helped me climb in. “You’re overwrought. It’s understandable—first night back home. Things will look better in the morning.” She tucked in the sheets, dimmed the lamp, and, after watching me for some time, went out.
I lay there alone in the cold, waiting for him—for the sound of the door opening, the weight and warmth of him as he slipped in beside me. That night and every other, I waited for him. But he never slept with me again.
Many women complain of the demands of the bedchamber, but bedtime was for me the only part of the day when I felt my husband was truly mine; when he did not belong to his friends, his readers, or the entire population of England. And although I had to admit he became less ardent as our marriage progressed, he was always as kind to me as on our wedding night—the night when I’d truly felt myself to be the happiest woman on earth.
On that first night, I’d been as ignorant as it was possible to be. Mama had told me to expect blood and pain, but had told me little else to the purpose, and as I waited for Alfred under the sheets, I tried to reconcile the anticipated ordeal with the pleasurable sensations of our courtship. Alfred could never hurt me, I told myself. Yet I could not altogether put from my mind the disconcerting stories of erstwhile model suitors who on the instant of bedding their brides had become transformed into veritable Bluebeards. So I’d looked at Alfred with apprehension as he drew back the bed curtains, his eyes sparkling and his color high. But, as so often, he seemed to know what I was thinking. “Now, Dodo dear, I do not mean to hurt you, and I shall try my very best not to. But I am a man, and we men are wretched clumsy creatures. So you must forgive me, or I shall never forgive myself.” But I had no need to forgive him. Indeed I may have cried out at the surprise and delight of it all. And afterward, when he lay back on the bolster with his hair more tangled than I had ever seen it, he laughed and said: “Well, Dodo! I confess I did not realize that young fillies were apt to show such enthusiasm at a first outing. I fear that you have not been ladylike. Not ladylike at all. And as a result we might have to do it all over again!” And all I could do was lie back against the pillows and smile, thinking that married life consisted only of such bliss.
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