by Martha Lea
He looked down at his hands and saw the ruined Morpho butterfly wings spread as dull dust across his fingers. And he knew that Gwen was innocent—she did not know about Natalia. He was safe. He found the key to the writing slope and opened it up. There was the letter from Gwen’s maid lying on the top of his papers. He walked out onto the verandah on the opposite side of the house from Gwen and their child and Maria. He struck a match and set light to the letter, holding it by the corner so that it drooped down and the flames licked up the words. A mimic. He did not know whether Euphemia’s talents extended to mimicking others’ voices on paper, but as he could not be sure, he felt it was better to burn it. He had made a note of the date of Isobel’s death. He still felt lighter in the head when he reflected on the fact that he was now free of her. He dropped the charred paper to the floor of the verandah and stamped on its glowing fragments. No more recriminations, no more hysterics, nothing of that; even in his absence she had tried her damnedest to reel him in, through the pity of strangers. But she had failed. There was nothing more Isobel could do to him. She was silenced for all time.
Chapter XL
As the months went on, Gwen was submerged by the routine of feeding her baby. It would latch onto her breast with a mouth as wide as a cat fish and just as strong. It sucked the juice from her, and Gwen felt herself shrivelling. The clarity of the last two months before the birth left her; she was befuddled and dazed, propped up half conscious. She was either feeding the baby or being woken to feed the baby or falling asleep feeding the baby.
Her world had diminished to her breasts and whether or not the baby was sucking on them. It was so boring. It was everything she had not wanted or asked for. The initial euphoria of having survived it, of having this miraculous tiny human come from her intact and also alive, had evaporated. The momentary surge of warm feelings for Edward had receded, too, as quickly as they had come.
She looked at her drawing things in a state of listless exhaustion one afternoon. The baby was cradled in the crook of her arm; its head moist with her sweat, the bright fuzz which passed for hair, dark and slick against the skull. She caught sight of the fontanelle pulsating on the top. That thick membrane stretched over brain. Maria had told her to make sure it never dipped into the skull; if it did, she’d told her, the baby was not getting enough to drink and might die. This information both fascinated and distressed Gwen. She’d pass her fingers over the patch of soft head and hold her breath.
With one hand she pulled the things out of her bag to air them and to check for signs of mould or insect damage. She wiped over the surface of her books which had been treated with kerosene. It kept away some of the insects; others didn’t object to the stink and burrowed holes into her pages. Then there was the novel, still unread. She’d treated that as well, and now idly she checked for insect damage. She shook the book, knocked it on the surface of the workbench. The baby stirred and fell asleep again instantly, her eyes rolling glassily.
She opened the book wide, so that she could look along the hollow of the spine and knocked it down on the bench again. A single beetle fell out, something small and brown. Before, she would have caught it with a pooter and then trapped it in the live box for observation under the microscope. Now, she watched it, her naked eyes stinging with fatigue as the beetle trundled off and hid itself in a crack on the bench.
The book had creaked a greeting at her. The fanning sections had kissed the air, the open lower edges sucking in space. When she closed the book with a disregarding flick, the cover said fphphphf. Gwen no longer cared who had sent her a novel to read. She kept the book in good condition because that was what you did with books. And if she never read it, then someone, at some point, might want to; she would have been ashamed to own an unslit book which was falling to bits. Unslit books had once excited her beyond the limit she believed they ought. As a child she had loved slitting pages more than eating, or sleeping between fresh sheets. More than her paint-box, even. More than her sister, sometimes.
She had owned a paper knife made from a very thin piece of bone. She’d loved that instrument, too, until she’d overheard what it was really made of. Then, she had taken it to the kitchen and opened the range door. The smell of the burning slave’s rib had escaped into the room and she’d run away to be sick in the pantry.
Gwen doubted now that it had really been a human rib; much more likely, she thought, to have been a sliver of ivory, or something more prosaic like beef shinbone. The baby’s head lolled and slipped a bit in the pooling sweat. Gwen fingered the binding on the novel and stared some long minutes at the swirls of colour on the marbled paper.
Edward had bought her a letter knife of carved horn in New York. She hadn’t thought to take one with her. It pained her to think of the two of them; awkward strangers seeing the sights, buying trinkets.
Her scalp crawled, the beading sweat masquerading as a legion of lice, and she thought, Where did I put that letter knife? She didn’t think, I’m going to slip the knife in and hold the paper firm as I slit it through.
The letter knife was an awful-looking object; it had a pattern of roses, a sort of grim and mawkish posy on the handle and an attempt at a thorned stem along the spine. He’d bought her a pair of combs, as well, but she’d made a show of liking the plain ones. Edward had wanted to shower her with gifts: useless articles, or garish, horrible American hats. She’d needed gloves. All the time, it had been so obvious, she had thought. Perhaps gloves were too mundane. Too ordinary. Too intimate. Too much like a thing to buy for your wife. She couldn’t imagine wanting to wear gloves now.
She held the ugly letter knife in her palm. It wasn’t nice to handle. It was as if the person who’d carved it had never opened a letter with anything other than their fingers. Or never opened a letter at all.
Gwen laid the baby in the hammock. She slit the first page, and the last page. Her rule was, had been, that if the first page of the book was terrible, she was justified in skipping to the last, just to see how it ended. If the first page was any good, the last page would taunt her. But she had grown out of that kind of nonsense now. She slit the pages, one after another. Everything about the construction of the book screamed money: the calf, the extraordinary marbling, the thick, creamy pages of Dutch paper which behaved so beautifully under the knife, the green silk headbands, which seemed an odd choice of colour. Everything about the book made her want to read the first page.
Chapter XLI
Eternal Blazon
or
The Confessions of a Nondescript
Volume I.
I am, in all outward appearances, the antithesis of you. You know this; you know that I am not beautiful to look at. My body is not silken soft in the same way as yours, and it is not as pale as veal flesh, as wan and ghostly as mare’s milk. Have you ever wondered over the fact that your husband might want—need—to plunge himself with such force, such consummate desire, at a woman whose body is dark with hair. Whose face, bearded and defiant, stares out at you from the carte de visite you so unfortunately found amongst your husband’s possessions. My image is everywhere in certain circles. I am scattered on the dirtiest streets of the most unwholesome districts of this city. My face is hidden by respectable men, whilst their good, honest, faithful wives are awake, and then it is taken out to be slavered over in the darkest places, in the deepest part of night.
I am not sixteen any more, yet that image of me as I was then still circulates. As I cover my face with thick veils in public places, my image is there to be appropriated in any which way, by anyone who may choose to do so. I was sixteen. My voice had not thickened with regret; I knew nothing. I believed those who told me when I arrived in this dreary country that the paying public would not care what I looked like; that it was my voice they came to hear. I could not understand, on my first night at the Empire Theatre, why so many people who had paid good money to hear me perform my repertoire should be so noisy. I expected hushed silence. And that I did get: a hushed silence of a
we and repulsion. I managed that first night to sing despite the crowd. I never imagined that I would ever have to sing like that; to fold in on myself; to forge my voice into a steely thing. The liquid slipped away.
Will you let the tarnished liquid of your life slip away in your state of ignorance?
When the concert was over, on that horrible night, I was taken by a man to his shop. A man who had sat brooding over my countenance during the concert, his mind silently acting out the delicate, intricate manoeuvres his hands might make if only I would come away with him. The price surprised him. My “chaperone” allowed him a small discount, enough to pay a cab fare. I was taken out by a side entrance of the Empire Theatre, used only by the rat catchers and the night soil collectors. My chaperone, Mr Helson Blackwater, told me nothing. He avoided my gaze. He handed me over like a skinned rabbit at Smithfield’s, and wiped his hands on the tails of his coat.
He did not speak to me, this man who took me away to his shop. He sat opposite me and studied me in the dark interior of the cab as we jolted over the streets, the doors shut to the outside. The cab seats were not quite clean. The floor was grimy. There was a faint odour of vomit, and I put my shawl to my face, thinking I might not be able to control my stomach, though it was empty, as I had not eaten that day through nervousness and excitement.
He leaned forward as our bodies jarred on the cab seats and he touched my free hand. The heat from his fingers seared through our gloves; his hand closed around mine, pushing my knuckles against each other. He slipped over to sit beside me, and I tried to wrench my hand free.
“Do I hurt you?” he whispered. “I don’t mean to hurt you.” His voice was soft, his breath fragrant with caraway seed as he lowered the shawl away from my face. “I shall not ever do anything to cause you to hurt, my dear.”
But he still held tight to my hand, as though I might fall from the cab, as though he feared that someone bigger than he might jump up to the window of the cab and snatch me away into the horrid night air. I sparkled in his mind, Isobel. My knuckles ache with the memory of it.
The name of this man was Mr Abalone Wilson Tench. It was written in gold lettering above the door of his barbershop. It glinted in the sputtering gaslight, but I could not read it then. I could read and write only in Spanish when I was sixteen. I did not know that I was being led into an establishment that specialised in the removal of facial hair. Not at once. He lit a taper from a tinderbox, and proceeded to light a lamp and several candles.
I had till now imagined that the man was large only in my imagination, swelled by my own fright to a giant. His chest was wide, and his shoulders broad as a buffalo. I could see now that he had removed his coat and jacket his waist narrowed, like a dancer’s. His hands were finely shaped, the skin and fingernails well cared for. He took care not to burn himself or get soot on his hands. He clamped the stove door shut and opened the vent to get the fire raging and hot.
“You are wondering, my dear, what on this earth you might be doing in a barber’s place.” His voice barely rose above the guttering of the candles and the hiss of the wet coals inside the pot-bellied stove. “Well, I shall tell you in good time.”
He looked at me the way other men of his kind would come to look at me. Including, Isobel, your husband. It was a look of tenderness mixed with desire.
“I was sore angry at the way you were received this night, my dear. What animals live in this city. Rats, dogs. Horrible beasts.” He spoke my name. “Natalia.” Only once. He uttered it with such profound sensibility, his tongue lingering on the middle syllable.
“But I am forgetful of my manners, my dear,” he said. “I will provide you with refreshment, you must have a little something to drink. You must look after yourself. I see that your lips are dry. We must not let you become what they call de-hydrated. Do you know that word, my dear?” He did not pause to see whether I did. “To hydrate, my dear, is to wet something. And so it follows, or, ipso facto, as they say in those places what are higher than this, that to dehydrate is to become too dry.”
Though I felt ill with hunger, I could not face the thought of eating; but I needed something to occupy me. I drank the stuff he’d given me; it burned my throat and my nose. My eyes watered, but he did not notice my discomfort. I fought back the urge to cough.
“My dear,” he said to me, “are you comfortable enough? Have you want for anything more?” I shook my head. “Miss Jaspur,” he said, sounding perplexed, “if you do no more than shake your head I shall not know whether to assume that you have enjoyed an elegant sufficiency or rather if you are not yet fully satisfied.”
“I do not need anything more. I am very comfortable, thank you, sir.” Though if the truth be told I was far too hot. Under my bonnet I felt the tickle of perspiration begin to agitate my scalp and I longed to tear out my pins and ruffle my hair with my hands, shaking my head between my knees as I had been able to do every evening before this.
His face had become very grave in the flickering light. “You must know by now, Miss Jaspur, that I am a barber by trade. I cuts the hair of gentlemen, and I shaves their faces. It is my passion, this trade. I might have been other things, a different kind of man, but this trade called on me the way a man of the cloth is called upon by the Almighty. I don’t mean disrespect to them what’s holier than me and there is plenty of them. My dear, I wish to impress upon you that this is not just a thing that I do to earn my keep. It is my life. When I puts my hands on a gent’s head, when I lays my fingers against his cheek, all hot from my towels, I sometimes see great things. Sometimes the things I see ain’t so nice. Now, I don’t believe in no hokery-pokery. You must not get this wrong. I have thought hard about it for twenty years or more. A man gives himself away when he surrenders himself to the barber’s hands. He is, what you might call, vulnerable in a special way. He lets his soul speak to me. I see it, there, a flash in his eyes, here, in a twitch beside his nose. The way his hands fall onto his chest as he lays back in my chair. The rest is what you might call elicitation. I knows how to make the gents speak. They think I am simple. They think themselves safe. And mostly they are. But your Mister Blackwater, he come to me not two weeks ago. And all he gives me, my dear, it is pure gold. I takes my time; I go slow, careful. He’s telling me about a young lady. I gives his cheeks another, closer shaving. I works the soap up into a big, feathery lather, and then I hold his head.” Mr Tench made a shape in the air with his body and his arms, his hands held the absent head of my chaperone and I shivered to see it, Isobel. I shivered because I suddenly heard Blackwater speaking about me.
Mr Tench became solemn. “You must feel liberated, Miss Jaspur, my dear. Liberated. Your Mister Blackwater, and believe me he is of the blackest, foulest, murkiest water what ever flowed through this city. Blackwater, he thinks one thing of my paying for you, and well I know it to be another. You have your freedom, my dear. I will transform you. I will release you into a better life with my razor and my scissors.”
“I see structures. I have studied the human skeleton in great detail both living and defleshed, and bleached in the anatomist’s cauldron. And I see beauty hid behind your mask. If you will allow me, I will reveal you for the hidden beauty that you really are, my dear, my lovely, my precious, precious jewel.”
I heard Mr Tench move around lighting more candles, refreshing those that had almost burned to nothing. He brought out another lamp. Gradually, the room was filled with an amber hue; I could sense shadows slinking back to the furthest recesses of the shop, and I opened my eyes.
Mr Tench smiled at me in the mirror. His sleeves were folded back meticulously to his elbows. He wrapped my face deftly, gently, without saying a word. He then took up a razor, its handle made from a deep chestnut turtleshell, inlaid with delicate silverwork. He grasped the bottom end of the leather strop, as though he was restraining the beast the hide had come from and slowly began to whisk the opened blade up and down the length of the hide. He laid the honed razor carefully down on a clean cotton cloth
on the work shelf and walked the few paces across the room to the pot-bellied stove. He moved softly across the room, carrying out his preparations as though he was performing a religious rite. I felt myself being tipped back in the chair and discerned his breath again close by.
He worked quickly, finding the contours of my face, mapping the structure of my jaw through the round handle of the brush. Mr Tench curved around me, his hands splayed, making my skin taut as the blade moved over, guided by his instinct. In a very few minutes he had finished with my jaw and neck and was engaged in marking a new hairline on my forehead. He separated my eyebrows with one miniscule flick above the bridge of my nose. He rubbed something sweet-smelling into my skin.
“Almond oil,” he told me. “With something of my own. A little secret that I have been working on for just this moment.” He caressed my newly exposed face, my never seen cheeks, my until now hidden chin. He pulled himself closer to me pushing his belly against the top of my head so that I could feel the heat of his blood through my hair. I heard him sigh again and again. He moved around me fondling my face as though it was the first and last thing he might ever behold in this life. His hands on my face spoke of an aching desire I could not have imagined. I thought that he was done. But he was not finished in his work yet. He spoke to me, his voice cracked and strained. “I must let you up, my dear,” he breathed in a tiny breath and held it in his chest as if he felt a great pain. I was confronted by a strange girl in the mirror; a girl with pink cheeks, glistening with the sweet almond oil. Her eyes were wide and I watched them fill with tears. Quickly, Mr Tench wiped my eyes with a pocket handkerchief.