Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

  Perhaps I have not got enough philosophy to believe it. I think that one death leads to another, like sickness. On that logic, any man may kill if he does it firmly enough. My mind sheers off from the thought of it. I see Lucie in a light dress with her summer wrap around her, stepping out of the boat. She thought that she was going to hear the nightingale. But without Diner I would never find her grave, and even if I did, how would it comfort those poor bones to see Diner wag at the end of a rope? And my child would be branded the child of a murderer. Surely Lucie would not ask for that.

  He is gone, I tell myself each morning. He will never come again. I hope that the boat drifted in the snowstorm and was rammed on to a mudbank. He had no coat, and if the cold had not already put him to sleep then he would have gone down into the dark without a soul to know it. I hope so.

  Will is watching me narrowly. He knows that these are more tears than I would ever shed for Charlotte Corday. He suspects that I have a secret and believes that one day he will get it out of me. He is very good with Thomas, far better than Augustus. He glances at me sideways sometimes, out of his light quick eyes, when he is playing with Thomas, and I know what I am meant to see. Even so, I can’t help smiling at the crow of laughter from Thomas.

  Will said to me one day, ‘Sometimes I have to wait a year or more to find the right line to end a poem. Sometimes it comes all in one breath.’

  ‘I would not have thought you were a patient man,’ I answered.

  ‘You are wrong. I know how to wait.’

  Now there is a rich slant of light outside the window. I stand, breathing shallowly. ‘I will go and see if there are any eggs,’ I say.

  ‘I will come with you, Lizzie,’ says Will, and Augustus gives us an approving look.

  We are rather too elegant for cottagers. Will was telling the truth when he said that there would be money. On the flagged floor there is a Turkey carpet, and we have lamps and copper pans that glisten in the firelight. Hannah says with her old dryness that we are very luxurious, but Will only laughs at her. It seems that Hannah likes to be laughed at: I would never have guessed it.

  He writes in a little room over the stairs. The walls are whitewashed and there is a deal chair and table, looking out over the garden and the hills beyond. ‘Will is up in his room,’ we say, and no one interrupts him.

  I share a room with Thomas. I do not want to be parted from him again, even by Philo. He snuffles in his cradle like a little pig, and then I can sleep. Philo has her slip of a room above the kitchen and she is content. The warm days pass quietly. Philo has learned to plant and tend the vegetable garden and milk the goat. We have an orchard of four apple trees and an old plum tree propped with wooden stakes. Will says that he intends to construct a bower, although what it will look like I cannot imagine.

  It is an idyll, I suppose.

  The roar and rumour of the city reach us sometimes. Augustus comes often, as he did today, tramping the thirty miles from Bristol and thinking nothing of it. He does not bring Caroline, although I would not mind her presence now. His face is creased with anxiety over our friends in France. These are dark days, he says, but the true spirit of the Revolution is steadfast and it will triumph.

  I think of how blood smells, and fear. They make much of Charlotte Corday’s composure, but I would not be composed. I would kick and spit and struggle to the last second. I would use my nails and teeth to cling to life. I would not willingly play a part in their theatre of death.

  Augustus paraphrases Shakespeare: ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, liberty.’

  The old woman was right. There is a child in my belly, lodged under my heart, dug in deep. At night it pounds me with fists and heels. I can see that Augustus is fearful for me. He cannot help thinking of my mother’s death. He said to me once, ‘You are made very like your mother, Lizzie. You must eat well, and rest. Do not exert yourself.’

  The balance of my body is changing. Sometimes I stagger when I get out of bed too quickly. I do not expect my weight to be where it is. My feet are swollen and there are thick blue veins on my breasts and belly.

  No one speaks about Diner. They know a little; not much. They know that he is ruined, has gone away and will not return. Perhaps he has sailed to the north of Scotland, as Will once meant to do. But I think not. Be truthful, Lizzie: I know not.

  Augustus says that the great terraces of Clifton stand arrested, as if the clock has stopped. It looks like the ruin of some ancient city. No one believes that the building will ever be completed. Builders and speculators are bankrupt, and there have been suicides. Diner is only one of many who have died or disappeared, and so he will be forgotten all the more quickly in the general wreck. It was a folly, Augustus says. They ought to have left the green fields to flourish, and not treated land and property as if it were a sure gateway to wealth. I think Augustus, in his heart, is satisfied by the ruin, even though he would not wish ill to anyone. He did not want to see those splendid terraces slung above the Gorge, triumphant, dominating. He saw nothing but greed in Diner’s vision.

  We do not see one another clearly, any of us. When Thomas is tired by his bold adventures across the floor he crawls to me and clings to my skirts. In spite of his weight I lift him on to my hip and hold him there. I bury my face in the nape of his neck and kiss the hollow. He twists to face me. He regards me solemnly, pats my cheeks with his soft hands, laughs when I shake my head like a bear and growl. Thomas has no fear. I promise him that all’s well and for now it is. I cannot promise more: I have learned better than that. I have so deceived myself. I have loved, with every fibre of my being, a man who lied to me from the instant that we met. A criminal: a murderer, I believe, although it will never be proved. His hands roused me to ecstasy in spite of what they had done before I knew him. I try not to think of Diner’s hands on my body, but I feel them still, just as I feel the movements of the child he has seeded in me.

  Will is a child, a boy. He jumps over the cabbage patch for sheer delight. He catches me in his arms and says, ‘Marry me, Lizzie!’ and I laugh and disengage myself. And yet when he goes up to his whitewashed cell he is another man. I would not dare to open the door and I am almost afraid of what he will bring down with him, on those pages crossed with his leaping handwriting.

  I will write my witness too. I want to write about Lucie, and how she died. I should like Augustus to understand what Diner was. He killed Lucie and sometimes I believe that he has killed me, too, but there must be something that can be salvaged from this wreck.

  I see our house rise again, even though sometimes I hated it. The vaults; the wide, beautiful floors; the lovely set of the windows and the curve of the banisters, rising up and up in rhythm. I see those things now, because Diner saw them. I cannot stop seeing them. I cannot pull Diner out of my life, like a thorn from my flesh. He is within me. There were times when I did not know the difference between his body and mine. He inhabits my dreams.

  I go too fast. I must learn to be patient. The baby pounds me, fists and heels. It is impatient too. I think: You would not be so eager, if you knew the world into which you are coming. But then my heart quickens and I am ashamed of fearing that I will not find in myself any love for this child. There must be love, even if it destroys us.

  I think I will see Mammie again, when this child is born. I long to press myself against her, and warm my icy feet on her thighs. Her heat will be mine and there will be no more division between us. She’ll stroke my hair back from my forehead. I’ll smell the ink on her hands.

  ‘My girl,’ she will say, and I’ll hear the sea-rush of her heart.

  Afterword

  As you go through Birdcage Walk you will see the gravestones deep in a tide of green. Some inscriptions are legible, others worn away. The undergrowth rustles with birds and squirrels. I have been walking through here since I was a girl and now I think of the inhabitants of those graves with fellow feeling. Once they were eagerly alive; once they were mourned. Now they have become
part of the endless silence which surrounds our brief lives.

  In this novel I am writing not only about a particular period of history but also about the ways in which the individual vanishes from historical record. This is something which has preoccupied me for many years. In my novel The Siege I wrote about a key historical event, the Siege of Leningrad, from the point of view of a small group of people, friends and family, trapped within the city. They lived through experiences which were at the most profound level a resistance to Hitler’s intention to tighten the vice around Leningrad until its population was utterly defeated, and they lived ‘from below’, without privilege, without power or any sense of control over these huge events. But at the same time their actions and their very survival transformed history by contributing to the endurance of the city and to the turning of the tide against invading German forces. In Exposure I wrote about the Cold War, spying and deception from the viewpoints both of the spy and of the family which is ripped apart by the fallout of his betrayals. The voices of those who are cheated, imprisoned, stripped of jobs and homes tell the story.

  In Birdcage Walk I was drawn to a period of great political upheaval and social change. It’s the time of the French Revolution, when the fear of popular uprising haunted monarchs and politicians throughout Europe. British radicals followed the progress of events in France with passionate enthusiasm, but in some cases, as the Revolution unfolded, doubt was already growing. Wordsworth might write that ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!’; however, very soon the streets of France were all too clearly full of complex and bloody rivalry, dissent and the growth of terror. Again, I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history.

  Julia Fawkes is a British writer, renowned in late-eighteenth-century radical circles. She writes with the confidence of one who knows that an eager readership is waiting for her. Her voice is original, persuasive and disturbing, for she is writing about equality, the rights of women and the poor, and about the damage to society caused by hereditary privilege.

  But the Prelude makes it clear that not one word of Julia’s writing survives. Her work has not been preserved and all that is left is speculation about who she was and what she might have written. Even within the novel itself, there is none of Julia’s writing apart from a fragment kept by her old friend Hannah, and shown to her daughter Lizzie. Julia’s flesh has long since dissolved into the earth.

  It seems to me that this was the common fate of so many of our ancestors, and as such it fascinates me. Only a very few people leave traces in history, or even bequeath family documents to their descendants. Most have no money to memorialise themselves, and lack even a gravestone to mark their existence. Women’s lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future? Through their existences, through their words and acts, their gestures, jokes, caresses, strength and courage – and through the harms they did as well – they changed the lives around them and formed the lives of their descendants. I wanted to show in the character of Lizzie Fawkes the profound influence of her mother Julia. It’s an influence which Lizzie resists, much as she loves her mother, but still it colours her life.

  The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel. While I finished and edited it I was already seriously ill, but not yet aware of this. I suppose that a writer’s creative self must have access to knowledge of which the conscious mind and the emotions are still ignorant, and that a novel written at such a time, under such a growing shadow, cannot help being full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm. I have rarely felt the existence of characters more clearly, or understood them more deeply – or enjoyed writing about them more. I loved writing about the minor characters: Augustus, with his blend of absurdity and integrity; Hannah, so deep in the habit of devotion that she must find a new object for it once she can no longer serve Julia; and the ridiculous Caroline Farquhar, who rides in her carriage accompanied by her maid to view the conditions of the workers.

  John Diner Tredevant is one of the most disturbing characters I have ever written. He is builder and destroyer at once, a clever and capable man, a man of vision defeated by a tide of events which he cannot control; and he is a murderer. I wanted to write about what murder does to the killer and how it destroys from within.

  Throughout the novel, the fear is that Lizzie Fawkes too will be destroyed. Even in an Afterword, it’s not for the author to say ‘what really happens’. What happens is what happens inside the reader’s imagination. But Lizzie – tough, observant, passionate but at times frighteningly innocent Lizzie – must change, harden and learn the way down to the underworld and back again if she is to survive.

  I want to end as I began, with Birdcage Walk itself. Time has taken away the church which was once attached to the graveyard: it was bombed to rubble in the Second World War. Rosebay willowherb grows so tall that the graves are all but hidden. No one lays flowers here; no one mourns. It is a beautiful place and also, on a winter night when rain thrashes down and light flickers through the cage of iron and lime branches, a place to make the living catch their breath, and hurry on.

  Helen Dunmore

  September 2016

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  Epub ISBN: 9781473535718

  Version 1.0

  Published by Hutchinson 2017

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  Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2017

  Cover photo © Timothy Jones / jonesmrjones.co.uk

  Helen Dunmore has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published by Hutchinson in 2017

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  ISBN 9780091959401