The Lodger

by Louisa Treger

  Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It would be quiet in her room. She could sit by the fire and be quiet and think things over until Eve and Harriett came back with the parcels. She would have time to think about the journey and decide what she was going to say to the Fräulein.

  Her new Saratoga trunk stood solid and gleaming in the firelight. Tomorrow it would be taken away and she would be gone. The room would be altogether Harriett’s. It would never have its old look again. She evaded the thought and moved clumsily to the nearest window. The outline of the round bed and the shapes of the may-trees on either side of the bend of the drive were just visible.

  There was no escape for her thoughts in this direction. The sense of all she was leaving stirred uncontrollably as she stood looking down into the well-known garden.

  Out in the road beyond the invisible lime trees came the rumble of wheels. The gate creaked and the wheels crunched up the drive, slurring and stopping under the dining-room window.

  It was the Thursday afternoon piano organ, the one that was always in tune. It was early today.

  She paused and reread what she had written. It felt utterly right; finally, it was beginning to live and breathe in her hands.

  This way of writing might be the most real thing in life, coming closer than anything else, offering her another world to step into; an absolutely satisfying world that she could order and control as she wanted. Not diminishing her longing for Veronica, but enabling her to turn pain into something seen from the outside, abstract and interesting. Offering deliverance, if only for brief periods.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WASN’T writing, a nauseous weakness sucked at her greyly, persistently. It imbued her waking hours with a quality experienced in nightmares, where invisible forces fastened her legs to the ground and every step was like pulling through treacle.

  Getting through the day at work required a gigantic effort. She didn’t have the energy to run up and down stairs with heavy ledgers, or answer the dentists’ bell, or for the endless standing, or the paperwork. The task of cleaning used instruments seemed more repulsive than ever: she could hardly bring herself to handle the bloodstained serviettes, the extracted teeth looking like monstrous fangs in their bottles of spirit, or the forceps that made her feel queasy and faint.

  Mr. Badcock hadn’t said anything, but once or twice he’d looked at her with an unspoken question in his gentle grey eyes. He would be shocked and disgusted if he had the slightest inkling of what was happening in Dorothy’s life outside work.

  One afternoon, she left the surgery to find Bertie standing a little way down the street, waiting for her. He looked older; his skin was lined and seemed to sag on its bones, his face was bleached of color. His mustache sprouted untidily.

  “Are you mad taking such a risk?” she asked crossly, as she reached him.

  He looked deflated. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

  “You’ll be recognized. People will talk.”

  “They’re talking already,” he replied sourly.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Dorothy saw Mr. Badcock leave the practice: tall and dignified and preoccupied. He glanced around him, before putting on his hat and setting off in the other direction. Had he seen her locked in argument with her seedy and instantly recognizable lover?

  Without a word, Dorothy began to walk away from Bertie, toward home. He caught up with her and took her arm. She tried to ignore him, concentrating instead on the solid feeling of the pavement under her feet and the clipped sound her shoes made on it.

  They walked past a boy selling newspapers, an old woman with a crooked back, crouched beside an enormous basket of roses. Crowded hansoms and horse omnibuses rumbled past; the smell of horse assailed her nostrils pungently. The sky was a cold, even grey; the crisscross of telephone wires above her head seemed like the roof of a prison.

  “Let’s find a café,” Bertie entreated. “Don’t be angry. I’m hungry and tired, and I badly want the warm glow of being close to you.”

  “It’s always about what you want!” The words burst out of Dorothy, almost before she knew what she was saying. She realized they’d been pent up inside her for a long while. It was time to let everything out.

  She stopped walking and turned to face him; she was a little short of breath. “You’re utterly selfish,” she told him, her voice shaking with suppressed fury. “And you’re the most fickle man I’ve ever met. You’re incapable of lasting selfless love. You don’t love Jane fully, and you don’t love me … you don’t even love your writing, to which we all take second place. You don’t have enough love in your heart. That’s why you have these fluctuations and depressions—”

  “But does perfect love exist?” he interrupted. His eyes were flashing dangerously. “Do you love me perfectly, Dora, with your unbecoming jealousy, your unrelenting carping?”

  Dorothy couldn’t answer. Waves of nausea were beginning to sweep over her. She clamped one hand across her mouth. Not here, not in public. She’d be mortified and shamed beyond anything.

  Bertie was looking at her with concern. “You’re not with child, are you?” he asked in a softened tone.

  For a long moment, they stared at each other, as the true reason for her tiredness and sickness began to dawn on Dorothy.

  Fourteen

  Initially, Bertie was euphoric. The news gave him exactly the lift he had been in need of.

  “When I think about that tiny creature nestled inside you, within earshot of your heartbeat, I feel so blessed we’ve created it,” he told her, putting his arms around her.

  He was as mellow and tender as he had been in the beginning. His attitude to Dorothy had shifted—it was respectful, bordering on reverential. She was his Madonna with Child. Their physical relations had tailed off. Dorothy was relieved; she felt sick all the time, and her breasts were tender. She did not want to be touched by Bertie.

  But Bertie’s sweetness could not obliterate her growing fear and dismay. Was it not for the child she carried, she might have broken free of him once and for all. Now, they were irrevocably bound together.

  Every day brought a worse feeling of illness; her body was weak and nauseous and heavy. Every night, she tossed and turned in the breathless stuffy room. It was tormenting to be plagued by this terrible tiredness, but to find that sleep eluded her. Toward dawn, she would drop into an uneasy, nightmare-haunted doze.

  She had a recurring dream that she was watching a body drifting upstream. Bloated and waterlogged, its grey face gazed blindly upward toward a flat dull sky. It was cut off from the rest of humanity, endlessly journeying, beyond comfort or help. Dorothy knew the figure was herself, but she could not reach it, nor do anything to ease its plight.

  When she awoke, the moment of hope that her pregnancy had been a bad dream vanished in an instant, and chasms opened at her feet. Every secure item in her existence was under threat. Presently the unbearable day would begin again, the exhaustion of dragging herself through streets that were noisy and packed with unbreathable odors, the endless hours at work. There was nothing to turn to. Just this horrible sense of apprehension.

  Part of Dorothy’s misery was because Bertie didn’t appear to grasp the reality of their situation. She couldn’t rely on his blithe assurances that he would take care of everything. How was she going to carry on working and supporting herself? Even if she was well enough to work, her condition would soon begin to show. And what would Mrs. Baker say? There would be no more indulgent motherly clucking. She would probably turn Dorothy out of the house at once.

  The unthinkable happens in life: her mother’s death had taught her that. Dorothy faced ruin. She would bring financial and social disgrace on herself and on the rest of her family, just as her father had done. She couldn’t escape her family’s tainted legacy.

  Giving birth to a first child is
more dangerous than following the most hazardous trade: anything could go wrong. She’d heard enough stories about women who had died in childbirth.

  She felt submerged by the storm that was gathering for her.

  Through her misery and sickness, Dorothy had the strange feeling that her pregnancy fulfilled one of Bertie’s principles. She had become his breeding partner. “Attractive and healthy people should come together and have fine, sturdy children,” he declared. “They should have children and, meanwhile, prepare a world for them to live in.”

  In Bertie’s view, her “proper” status, the proper status of all women, was to breed. It was the supreme justification for her existence.

  He was engrossed in what she might become for him: the mother of his child. She was booked for maternity and following the formula he had prescribed: bucolic existence, baby, novel.

  “I’m so terribly tired, and I loathe feeling ill all the time,” she confessed one evening.

  Bertie was at once tender and solicitous. He insisted she put her feet up on the couch; he tucked a blanket around her legs, sat beside her and stroked her belly and told her she should rest more.

  “I’m frightened.”

  “Dora darling, you’re a healthy young woman, you’re perfectly constructed to give birth; it’s the most natural and joyous thing in the world. And just think what a splendid baby he or she will be, with our combined natures and characteristics … I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me. I feel exalted, fulfilled … I could dance a jig!”

  As he pulled her to her feet and whirled her clumsily about the room, Dorothy realized that he saw only a biological specimen. Of the intrinsic individual, he knew nothing, and he didn’t want to know.

  She still found him the most compelling and charming man she had ever met. But she began to sense a terrible emptiness behind his spellbinding words. Science and literature were the only things in the world that could get his full attention. There was nothing for Dorothy individually, nor for anyone else.

  More than ever, Dorothy longed for silent communion, understanding and peace—qualities that were lost with Bertie.

  * * *

  DOROTHY KNOCKED ON Veronica’s door. There was no answer. Dorothy patted her hair and passed her handkerchief once more over her burning face. Perhaps Veronica had gone out? Dorothy was about to walk away, when the door opened slowly and here was Veronica. Here was the shock of her loveliness as she stood, slender and pale, in a creased ice-blue kimono. She stared at Dorothy silently.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  Veronica pulled the door wide and Dorothy stepped into the room. It was untidier than ever. The bed was unmade, and a faint smell hung in the air, slightly sour.

  Veronica’s eyes were puzzled. Stricken. Dorothy felt a pang: Veronica, more precious than anyone in the world, was suffering because of her.

  “It’s good to see you…” she began.

  “Why have you been avoiding me?” Veronica burst out. “Why are you like this, so strange and distant?”

  Speech refused to come because words were beyond reach. Veronica’s nearness was heady and confusing; it brought back everything Dorothy had been trying to suppress.

  “I don’t understand why you left,” Veronica went on. “Is it Bertie; do you suffer from some false sense of loyalty to him? Do you think he doesn’t make love to his wife, whatever he may tell you otherwise?”

  There was silence.

  “Haven’t you thought about what it would be like, you and me together?” Dorothy asked, eventually. “Think about it; about what being lovers would really mean. We’d be forced into a life of continual secrecy; hiding how we feel about each other, being careful about every single thing we say in public. It would mean lying by omission, if not by actual words. We’d have to endure strange glances, knowing people were wondering about us, whispering behind our backs…”

  “I don’t care what anyone else thinks! I just want to be with you. I love you; can’t you see that? How can it be wrong?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I don’t want to live in fear and subterfuge. If we were found out, we’d be shunned, persecuted, called unnatural and perverted—”

  “I never thought you were a coward.”

  Dorothy flushed deeply and bit her lip. “I’m simply realistic enough to know that I can’t take on the whole world,” she said.

  She fell silent again, wondering what confusion of emotions Veronica must be reading in her face. For while everything she said was true, it was also true that nothing could compare with what Veronica had given her. Nothing could be more profound or marvelous than the time they spent together, intensely aware of each other, moved by every thought and every response of their bodies. But it was too late. If there had ever been a time for them as lovers, it had passed. The child she was carrying made it impossible.

  “I want to be your friend.” Dorothy spoke as though she was in a trance. “Anything more is … out of the question.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  Tell her. Tell her you are pregnant. Still, the words refused to come. “What have you been doing since I last saw you?” she found herself asking.

  Veronica sighed. “I’ve been working hard on the suffrage campaign,” she said tonelessly. “To tell you the truth, it’s a relief to have something to think about other than you. This week, I’ve handed out thousands of flyers, chalked announcements about meetings on pavements, and knocked on more doors than I can remember. We’ve been especially busy because in a few days the militants will be marching on the House of Commons.”

  “I’d forgotten about your march. Must you really take part? It’s going to get out of hand; you might get hurt.”

  “Don’t you know that the militant route is the only route to getting what we want? Peaceful means are absolutely useless. The mild suffragists have been asking for votes and having civilized processions for sixty years and more. They are refused time and again, and nothing changes.”

  Dorothy sighed. “Promise me, at least, that you’ll be careful.”

  “What do you care what happens to me?”

  “That’s unfair. You know I care.”

  “Show me.”

  Slowly and deliberately, Veronica laid a hand on Dorothy’s breast. Her spine arched as pleasure rippled from her breast, down through her belly and between her legs; there seemed to be an invisible thread connecting these places. She saw Veronica watching her helpless reaction, and she closed her eyes.

  “Let’s be sensible,” she pleaded, trying to ignore the way her blood was leaping, so hot and sweet and keen.

  Veronica replied with a kiss that unleashed a fiery torrent of longing. They sank to the floor. The way her body asserted its autonomy over her mind and drew her irresistibly toward Veronica suggested overwhelmingly that this was her true nature. She vowed to crush it to the death. Then all thought was blotted out by the deep delight coursing through her, and she gave herself over to it.

  * * *

  DOROTHY MOVED HELPLESSLY between Veronica and Bertie, trapped by confused feelings and the unborn baby. She was adrift: her life had lost direction, there was no order. She was being tested and found flawed and weak-willed. The messiness of her situation made her writhe. She saw it clearly, but she could not find a way out.

  Through her own agitation, Dorothy tried to impress on Bertie that he could not vacillate any longer. He needed to think about what he really wanted. Some sort of decision had to be reached.

  His first impulse was to run away with Dorothy. Together, they discussed the details of their escape. They would go to the South of France or Italy, and take a house on a sunlit hill by the sea, surrounded by olive groves and vineyards and weathered marble ruins. Dorothy would grow ripe and bronzed; in time, she would bear a sturdy, bronzed baby. Bertie would write the novel of his life. It was pleasurable to talk about, yet the conversation had the quality of children playing make-believe. They knew perfectly well he would never leave Jane. He couldn
’t do without her.

  They knew also that if the relationship with Dorothy came into the open, he would be shunned by society and would face losing everything.

  Certain measures would have to be taken to escape publicity. Dorothy’s family and Jane must be told, and their acquiescence secured. They talked of finding suitable lodgings for Dorothy by the sea, not too close to London, but near enough for Bertie to visit from his home.

  Dorothy imagined herself in a desolate house on a wintry and bleak coast. Utterly solitary, except for a sulky impertinent servant, who’d be only too well aware of the irregularity of Dorothy’s situation, and would take it out on her accordingly. Dorothy would be totally dependent on Bertie’s visits for company. Dependent on him for everything.

  She felt imprisoned. Stifled, petrified, trapped.

  * * *

  “HAVE YOU TOLD Jane?”

  Bertie nodded.

  “Well?”

  He sighed and raked his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. “She listened to me without saying anything, but I watched her get paler and paler. When I’d finished, she told me she wanted to think it over, and she went into her study and shut the door. She was in there for what seemed like eternity … When she came back, her eyes were swollen and red with crying. She sat beside me and gripped the sleeve of my jacket, holding on so tightly that when she let go, there were deep creases in the fabric.”

  “Oh no.” This was the reaction Dorothy had dreaded.

  “Yet her smile held a trace of its old warmth, as she said softly, ‘If it had to be anyone, I’d rather it was Dora.’”

  “She really said that?”

  “She did, she’s a remarkable woman … I forced myself to look her squarely in the eye. I said, ‘I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine the pain this must give you, and I’m the cause of it.’

  “Jane shrugged. ‘If it wasn’t Dora, it would be someone else. It’s the way you’re made, dear. I realized that a long time ago.’

  “But despite her reasonable words, her lips quivered, and I thought she was going to break down again. A few moments passed; I watched her force herself into composure. She asked me, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper, if I meant to go and live with you.”