“Would she see me now, do you think?”
She hesitates, wipes her eyes, then pulls the bell. Mrs. Brooks comes in.
“Ask Miss Lou if she is well enough to see her mama.”
Mrs. Brooks smiles. “Certainly, Miss Millar.” She goes out.
“And the others?” I ask tentatively. “How are they?”
“Alfie and Carrie have a house out at Hampstead. The child, bless her, is a delight.” Her face breaks into a reflective smile, and I realize in this moment that she would have dearly loved to have infants of her own.
“Alfie has written to me,” I say cautiously.
She looks surprised.
“Yes. He is to bring Caroline to see me soon. And Lucy, too.”
“Ah, yes.” Clearly she did not know this. “Well, Alfie’s a dutiful boy. Not like Eddie. He’s out in town as usual, talking of setting up an outfitter’s shop or some such ridiculous nonsense. Can you imagine the son of Alfred Gibson—in trade?” I don’t think that’s so outlandish, but she rushes on: “Georgie, of course, is still bound for the Far East; we’ve informed the Admiralty, but there’s no word of him yet.”
I wonder what Georgie is like now. I remember only a mild, moon-faced, silent child whose shirt was always outside his trousers, and who drew ships with full rigging on every piece of paper he could find, his tongue following the line of the pencil. And who loved to lie in the hammock and stare at the sky as if already navigating by the stars.
“Fanny’s back at school. She objected—as she objects to everything—but we thought it best to keep her mind occupied. Kitty you’ve seen, naturally.”
I cannot postpone it any longer. “It’s about Kitty that I’ve called.”
She looks at me warily. “Oh, I see. I’ve had Augustus’s letters, scrounging as I’d expect. But he can’t have any money. The will has not been proved. There is much to do before any disbursements can be made. It will all take time.”
“You don’t understand. It is urgent, Sissy. Augustus is about to have the bailiffs in. He has lost everything.”
“Is that so? Have you seen any evidence of this state of affairs?” Now money is mentioned, she is becoming the sharp, organized Sissy once more.
“Evidence?”
“Yes. Bills, receipts, contracts, notes of hand …”
I redden. “Of course not. I accepted his word.”
“My dear Dodo, don’t you think it is too convenient for him to have such a crisis at the precise time when Alfred’s money becomes available?”
It occurs to me for the first time that I may have been duped. “In that case, why could he not wait? Why would he be standing on my doorstep every day in the hope I can do something for him? I don’t care a fig for him, but I care for Kitty. I don’t want to see her humiliated.”
“She should never have married that man.” (I am struck, not for the first time, how unmarried people are so prolific with marital advice.)
“Maybe not. But there is no changing it. And her fortunes go with his.”
The door clicks open, and the person who must be Louisa creeps in. I am shocked. She is well grown and buxom, but her eyes are dreadfully red, her hair is awry, and she has an expression of complete misery. “Hallo, Mama.” Her voice is as small and quiet as ever. Miss Mouse, he used to call her. Mademoiselle Mousepatch.
“Hallo, Lou. What changes, eh?! I see you’re a young woman grow’d.”
“Yes.” She looks at me listlessly. “Well, I suppose it’s been a long time.”
Yes. Too long. I don’t know her, and she doesn’t know me. I take courage: “I hope you’re not too grown-up to give your mama a kiss?”
She glances at Sissy, then presents her cheek at me. I kiss its smooth surface. She makes no attempt to return the compliment. Instead she draws back: “What brings you here?”
I daren’t mention Kitty, so I speak half the truth. “I need a little money, Lou. I am hoping Sissy will help. I’ve not been left as wealthy as the rest of you.”
She says nothing. Then, “Why are you in the study? I thought no one was supposed to come in here.”
“We were looking for something. A picture. But it’s not here.”
“Why don’t we all have some tea?” Sissy is suddenly as brisk as she used to be. “Let’s go in the morning room; it has a good blaze.”
And so we sit down, all three of us, in the little green room with all the mementos of our early days. Louisa is silent and lumpish and fiddles with the button on her dress for minutes at a time. I’m irritated by the way she doesn’t join in the conversation, the way she sits apart as if sunk in her own concerns. I wonder if that is how I appeared to our guests in the past. If so, I wouldn’t blame them forming a poor opinion of me.
“If you select the things you want, I shall ask Mercer to pack them in the box,” says Sissy, magnanimously. “On the other matter,” she says, meaningfully, “I shall consider it, but I need bills or letters to give to Mr. Golding. I cannot ask him to do anything without them.”
“I have thirty pounds, Mama. If you are short of money.” Louisa speaks from her corner near the fire.
A gush of warmth envelops me. She is not cold and indifferent after all. “What a kind offer!” I say. “But it is not necessary at present.”
“Very well.” She goes on staring at the fire. But she becomes more animated when I go around picking up ornaments and mementos for the box. She gets up and fingers them herself, recalling the anecdotes attached to each one, and laughs as she does so. “What fun we used to have when we were all together! Do you remember, Mama?”
“Yes,” I say, “I remember it clearly.”
I see on Sissy’s face a mixture of love and anxiety as she watches us together, and I realize that she fears she will lose her hold over the children now Alfred is not here to champion her, and that she will end a lonely spinster, all her work for nought. I have thought so badly of her over the years, but in truth, where would my children have been without her? Left to the less-than-tender mercies of some governess, or to the hands of some colonel’s lady paid by the calendar month to prime and polish? Poor Kitty would have died a thousand deaths rather than submit, and Lou would have withered to nothing. Sissy has kept my family together.
I should be grateful.
18
OF COURSE, IT WAS NOT GRATITUDE THAT I FELT WHEN I first returned from Leamington. Finding Sissy governing the house with a new authority while, at the same time, Alfred absented himself from my bed made me fear what I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge: something that was against the laws of both Man and God. When I first faced that dreadful locked door, it entered my mind unbidden. As I sank to my knees in front of Alfred, my whole body shuddered at the possibility. In the cold light of day, it was too horrible to contemplate. I told myself over and over again that I was wrong, and wicked, and that Alfred’s coolness to me was nothing to do with Sissy; it was simply connected to his travails with The Red House and, as soon as it was finished, he would regain his old spirits. I took comfort in that Alfred was by no means unkind; indeed, he would come into my bedroom and sit on the bed and make suggestions as to how I might employ my time, because we all need to keep busy, don’t we?
But he consulted me about nothing and slowly I realized that there was no duty that would be missed if I did not do it, no person who would be in distress if I were not there to comfort them. Sometimes I would be so much left to my own devices that I would even wonder if everyone else had mysteriously disappeared and I were the sole occupant of an empty house. Sometimes there’d be a burst of laughter and Alfred would come out of the smoking room or the dining room: What, you here, Dodo? as if I were the last person he expected to see. But more often his coat and his cane would be gone from the hall after breakfast, and would be still gone by the time I took myself to bed.
Left to myself for so much of the day, and wondering what had happened to all the people who had once thronged my life, I quickly realized that almost all my acqua
intances were in fact Alfred’s acquaintances, and that my access to them was largely through him. Our old friends the Evanses were now living in Florence, and although Mary wrote encouragingly, her letters were infrequent. Lottie was too busy nursing Tom to make visits and Tom himself was too ill to receive visitors, becoming alarmed if Lottie left him even for a minute, so I could not call on her without causing disquiet. And of course I could not go to Chiswick. My mother, now a widow, despairing that both her daughters were living with the man she reviled as a “vulgar showman,” had shut up the house and gone to reside in Coventry with Cousin George, whence she made it clear that any communication with her daughters should be of the briefest sort. Only O’Rourke came to see me for my own sake—but even he could not take up all the slack on my seemingly endless leisure.
“Why don’t you help Sissy?” Alfred said one day. “Bessie is taking a holiday; I am sure there will be things to do.” I agreed readily, hoping to please him and delighted at the prospect of making myself useful, but I found myself thwarted in subtle ways. When the children were not in the schoolroom, they were engaged in dancing lessons or fencing lessons—or were out on the lengthy walks essential to Sissy’s military regime. I had to make a particular arrangement with her if I were even to see Eddie or Georgie, and unless I patrolled the nursery passageway at six o’clock sharp, Fanny would be whisked off to bed before I could even kiss her good night. There was, alas, no dear Ada to sit with in the afternoons; Alfie was at Rugby and might as well have been on the moon; and Kitty seemed to be forever doing her best not to be found. So I developed habits which Alfred later referred to as “eccentric” when he brandished them in front of the whole world to show how idle and purposeless I had become. I generally got up late, often lunched alone, spent the afternoon dozing and reading on the chaise lounge, and retired to bed after supper for want of company. The Vanishing Lady he called me—or, less charitably, Dame Dawdle in a Dressing Gown.
I could no longer keep telling myself it was merely The Red House that was keeping Alfred away from me, although I knew the writing of it was giving him unusual anguish. He never ceased to complain that it was the damnedest, hardest, pickiest work I have ever done—and indeed it was as sad and melancholy as anything he had written. I’d read the monthly numbers as they came out, and had been moved and stricken by poor Arthur Grayling’s hopeless love for a woman of stone. Inevitably it crossed my mind that there might be some real-life counterpart to that woman, someone who occupied Alfred’s thoughts and feelings far more than I did. I noticed he worked less regularly now, taking to his desk in fits and starts, and sometimes getting up in the middle of writing, putting on his coat and going out with an excited and determined air, a fresh flower in his buttonhole.
“Is Papa in love again?” said Eddie one day, watching his father sunk in thought at the dinner table, his head in his hands. Alfred raised his head and looked at the boy with a strange expression, half-comical, half-despairing: “When was I not in love? I am always in love. The mildest of women can make mincemeat of me.” In that second I knew that something was afoot, and that, unlike his usual flirtations—which he enjoyed inflicting on us ad nauseam—he was being secretive about it. For the first time, I noticed that he wrote letters which he did not leave in the postbox by the front door, but put carefully into his pocket. However, look as I might among his papers and drawers, I never found a reply. Letters there were in abundance, but they were all from his admirers or his publishers. Once I came across a crumpled bill for a Spanish shawl that had certainly never graced my wardrobe, and another time I found an invoice for hothouse flowers that had never adorned any dining table at which I’d been present, but I told myself there was an innocent explanation—some theatrical requirement, some gallant gesture to a leading lady. But then came the delivery of a crate of pink champagne addressed to Miss Jenny Wren, which Alfred ordered hastily to be sent back, declaring that Granby and Porter were becoming careless and there was “no one of that name” in our house. I knew no one of that name either—if indeed it was a real name—and when I questioned Mrs. Brooks and John, they could not enlighten me. But it was so unusual for me to inquire about any domestic matter that it came to Alfred’s attention: “I hear that you have been making inquiries into the delivery of household items, Dodo. Is it not a little late to be starting down that road? Twenty years ago I should have welcomed such an interest, but now you are merely upsetting the very nicely arranged apple-cart.”
I said nothing. But when his friends grew loud over the port, I kept my ears open. It was not an easy task: so many ladies’ names were bandied about—so many correspondents, acquaintances, and contributors. But in among the anecdotes, the laughs and jokes, and the accounts of who had said what, there was one name he could not seem to keep from his lips: Wilhelmina Ricketts—the Thespian daughter he had written about so amusingly while I was at Leamington, but for whom he now appeared to harbor a considerable admiration. For one so young, she is exceptionally talented. And her Mama, too—an excellent creature.
I doubted the mama was the source of his interest. But if it were Miss Ricketts whom he had fastened on to, I was, in a curious way, relieved. Actresses had always been Alfred’s weakness. They shot across his horizon as brightly as comets, and as surely disappeared. Nevertheless, I took to reading the notices of the latest plays and discovered that, like my husband, the critics seemed to be lavish in their praise of the young lady’s talents. She was “transcendent,” “strong,” and “moving” in one play. And she was “charming,” “tantalizing,” and “seductive” in another. I should have liked to go to Drury Lane and see how she managed this singular feat, but Alfred no longer invited me to the theater, and there was no one else to take me.
I felt that letters were my only chance of finding out the truth. He kept his dressing room locked, but it was cleaned between nine and ten every day, and I knew that Mary-Ellen—amiable but still inclined to be sloppy—would one day leave it unsecured. Which in due course she did. And as soon as she had gone, singing fitfully about “Poor Molly Ryan” and catching her broom handle in the banister rails, I slipped in and closed the door, my heart palpitating. It looked strange then—the room that had once opened into mine, and through which I used to hear the low sound of his whistling as he shaved or dressed. It smelt of lavender, and the pungency of it almost stopped me in my tracks. But I had to be quick. I opened each drawer and took out all the contents, putting them back as carefully as I could, knowing the displacement of half an inch would be noticed. Nothing. Then I opened the hanging wardrobe and went through his pockets. Again nothing. Red faced, and fearing at any moment to be discovered, I dragged a small cane chair over to the wardrobe to reach the hollow space above, but as I mounted, the chair skidded under me, flinging my head sharply against the corner of the marble washstand as I toppled to the floor. The pain was agonizing. I lay there, unable to move; my vision blurred, my eyes blinded with flashes of light. Then I heard a sound—and suddenly there was Alfred’s angry face looking down on me. He was in his outdoor clothes and he made no attempt to help me up: “What do you think you are doing, Dorothea? Why are you in my bedroom, climbing on chairs?”
“Looking for something,” I said, lamely.
“What could you possibly be looking for in my room?” An iron voice.
“Forgotten now—my head hurts—I feel sick.” As I raised myself, I retched. He jumped back smartly, and suddenly there were more people—I saw their shoes and the sweep of skirts—and I was lifted up to a sitting position. Someone put a bowl in front of me, and someone else put vinegar-paper on my temple. Then I was taken to my own room and put to bed. Alfred had disappeared without a further word.
I was in bed for two days. Dr. Phelps said I was severely concussed and prescribed bed rest and soothing medicine three times a day. If Alfred came to see me, I do not remember, but on the third day, Mrs. Brooks brought up a letter from him. His handwriting was very clear and bold, as if the very look of the wor
ds were impressing on me the hardness and seriousness of the contents.
I shall not stoop to enquire as to the reason for your intrusion into my privacy; it is clear to me that you are suffering from delusions, and have been for some time. Your imagination is fevered; you nurture unreasonable fears, and fritter away your energies on fantasies and matters of no importance. I am sad to say, Dorothea, that you are—and always have been—prey to an excessive jealousy. And if that were not in itself a difficult enough burden to endure in the place of the mutual love and trust which a husband looks for in marriage, I have to watch while you make yourself miserable on account of it. We cannot go on in this fashion; we shall kill each other in spirit, if not in fact. We are no longer compatible. I venture to suggest that we would be happier apart.
I stared at those so unforgiving words. The black letters seemed to spring out at me like words on a newly cut gravestone. I could not believe he was in earnest. To indulge himself with an actress was one thing; separation was another. It was unthinkable. Impossible. I had to stop such absurd ideas. I pushed away the quilt and struggled to get up. Mrs. Brooks tried to urge me to remain horizontal, to rest my head. And indeed I had to gulp a glass of medicine to steady myself. “I must see my husband,” I kept repeating as I fumbled myself into my clothes. “I must speak to him. Is he in the house? I must send him a message. It’s urgent, urgent. Oh, dear Mrs. Brooks, I don’t know what to do! Help me dress! Help me dress!” I was beside myself. I admit it, and I think she was too overawed to do other than assist me.
I almost fell downstairs, and finding Alfred in his study, burst through the door. “Who is she?” I demanded.
He spoke without turning. “I see you are better, Dorothea, and back to your usual good spirits. Excellent! Now, may I ask, who is whom?”
“The woman you write to. The woman you give presents to. The woman you prefer to me. The woman who has made you wish to end our marriage.”
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