by Sarah Waters
In all my wandering I seem to have reached the upper landing and I hear the soft murmurs of a scene taking place. I creep towards the door, partly cracked open, through which light and voices are spilling. Mary and Edmund are standing rather close together, only two feet between them, facing each other. They are rehearsing a scene from Lovers Vows, their eyes and burning cheeks bent to the pieces of paper in their hands. I know the scene. It is their scene. Edmund spoke his line then:
‘When two sympathetic hearts meet in the marriage state, matrimony may be called a happy life. When such a wedded pair finds thorns in their path, each will be eager, for the sake of the other, to tear them from the root. Patience and love will accompany them in their journey, while melancholy and discord they leave far behind—Hand in hand they pass on from morning till evening, through their summer’s day, till the night of age draws on, and the sleep of death overtakes the one. The other, weeping and mourning, yet looks forward to the bright region where he shall meet his still-surviving partner, among trees and flowers which themselves have planted, in fields of eternal verdure.’
There followed a moment of silence in which Mary did not seem able to speak. I could not wonder at this. The fervent, almost reverent tone in which Edmund spoke before his passion spent itself and sank his voice into a tremulous whisper had moved even me, the offstage observer peeping through a crack in the door. Mary managed to answer but her voice was strange to me when she spoke.
‘You may tell my father… I’ll marry.’
Their eyes, as if by some communion moved up from the paper and to each other.
‘This picture is pleasing; but I must beg you not to forget that there is another on the same subject. When convenience and fair appearance, joined to folly and ill humour, forge the fetters of matrimony, they gall with their weight the married pair. Discontented with each other – at variance in opinions – their mutual aversion increases with the years they live together. They contend most where they should most unite; torment, where they should most soothe. In this rugged way, choked with the weeds of suspicion, jealousy, anger, and hatred, they take their daily journey, till one of these also sleep in death. The other then lifts up his dejected head, and calls out in acclamations of joy – oh, liberty! Dear liberty!’
I started and moved away from them. I had stayed too long after all, it was rude to watch, and suppose Mary or Edmund happened to look up and see me spying through the door, how would that look? But why should I feel my cheeks burn, throbbing with some strange and violent heat, and why that tight clenching in my stomach? Why — it’s as if I had just been caught in the act of something shameful. Nothing had been said, they were only the worthless lines from a play; they were invented, unreal, and had no reason to make me press against the wall and gasp for breath. Dr Grant and I were not unhappy after all, he was not a bad husband or unkind. Really we rubbed along quite well together. He has his bursts of temper to be sure and at such moments I can sense, rather than see, Mary and Henry’s exchanged looks. Yet they do not take into account the whole picture. He has sense and is considerate for my comfort; when not disturbed by some culinary mishap he can be very pleasant company. There were times in the beginning when my gnawing miseries consumed me utterly… but they were all in the past. Now I have things to occupy me, to make me — no, not happy perhaps but content and, if not always content, if there are occasions when I still yearn for more, when long hours are spent awake burning and bristling in the night, I am always comfortable.
I wasn’t quite quick enough in moving away to miss a murmured ‘“I am in love”’ from Mary. Her character or her words? For I rather think poor Mary is in love, for all her fashionable airs that laughingly disclaim anything like affection she is as caught as Edmund. Hardly a night passes that she doesn’t burst into my room before we all settle down for bed; to talk over the day’s events, to spear the follies of those at the house upon her wit, but most of all to speak of Edmund. And when she doesn’t speak of him she speaks around him, as if all she thinks and says is framed around that sacred spot he occupies. She laughs and chatters and dazzles, pacing about my room in an almost manic frenzy of joy. She is alive and exulted with love. Her talk is all for Edmund and when we visit the house daily now her eyes are all for Edmund too.
Yet I have more to look forward to, real joys that quicken and breed with each passing day. To have a child of my own. I have only recently coerced Dr Grant to try for a baby and though there has been no joy yet, I feel a powerful certainty that tells me it shall be soon. For now there is a little girl in the village named Catherine, or Kitty as I call her. I go to her every few days and sit with her for a couple of hours, and when I hold her I think of the child I haven’t yet had. There is a pang in this. There must always be a pang. But there is delight too. Even the storms and rages of her tantrums become a pleasure as, in the moments after, while I soothe her on my knee, she clings to me with such passionate desperation. Could a lover do such, all fickle caresses and empty words? Can a few enchanted hours, hazy with love, eclipse this?
I’ve moved downstairs and can hear the voices of the others now, they have come. For a moment I imagine them as my avid audience watching my entrance, eager to see my great performance. But when I brush through the doorway they are clustered about in a circle only looking at each other. Still I move towards them gratefully, almost greedily, eager for their bright, light talk and the warmth of their company. A flicker of my eye spies Miss Price by the window, half obscured by the careful draping of the curtain. Mr Rushworth is with her, stuttering and stumbling over his lines. Yet for once Miss Price is not carefully attending to him; tirelessly listening, nodding and correcting his lines without a flicker of impatience as is her wont. Instead her gaze is absently contemplating something in the distance, replaying some scene of the past or of her own imagination. There is something stricken and almost fierce in her gaze that both calls to and answers me. For a moment we lock eyes and share a long, measured look. Yes there it is, there I am – but before I falter I turn away.
Mr Bertram’s voice swells over the other’s chatter briefly and I catch his words: ‘Come now, Yates, we all have our parts to play and you must play yours. No more of your sly evasions and—’
His words fall then and become lost among the general din; yet they continue to reverberate within me. Yes, Mr Bertram, we do all have our parts to play. For Mary, my Mary, there will be nothing but the centre stage, the sun of Edmund’s love upon her, she will burst and bask and revel in its glorious rays. I can feel its reflections even offstage. I imagine how it must feel and for a moment, imagining, can almost feel it too.
For me in the wings awaits a wilting darkness, but the mask will never slip. I will take my cue and not miss a line, no matter if no one is attending. Yet I will not shroud myself in misery, I may blaze with my own joys too. In the darkness I will search out my happiness for myself, uproot it before I wither. One must find their comforts and I will find mine. Somewhere. Everywhere. But now I really must be home in time for Dr Grant’s dinner.
My inspiration: I was inspired by the following passage in Mansfield Park, spoken by Mrs Grant: ‘There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.’
THE OXFAM DRESS
Penelope Randall
Kelsey, Lucy, Bex. And Charlie.
The problem was cash, or rather, the lack of it. Charlie didn’t have the means to Keep Up, so one day soon three beautiful friendships must end. A chunk of her world would vaporise and vanish. When this mood hit her Charlie pictured light sabres from Star Wars. Ker-pow. Just like that.
Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie. Charlie let them down, and not just with money. For one thing she enjoyed doing homework, and for another there was her hair. It was a) red and b) unstraightenable. Persistent offences for which she must
eventually pay the price.
She guessed this ought to bother her more than it did.
‘Charity shops are cool,’ she suggested one lunchtime, while they were sitting in Subway digesting the warm smells of mass-produced bread and too many fillings. They watched Bex growing bored with her salami and brie. She’d begun picking out olives and flicking them into a soggy heap on the table top.
Kelsey, newly-blonded and with a sufficient coating of fake tan to insulate her from most of life’s barbs, tapped her lip. ‘Why?’
‘Good places to buy from,’ Charlie said. Of them all, Kelsey had the most disposable cash; at their school wealth seemed to come in inverse proportion to brains. Charlie quietly hugged to herself the fact that none of the others knew what inverse proportion meant. Charlie was in the top maths set, with the nerdy girls who wanted to do it for A level.
‘Buying is like giving them a donation. And you end up with something you want. Maybe a bargain.’ She nibbled regretfully at an olive. It was always hopeless to mention how little you’d spent on something. Admiration, after all, went simply and directly in line with price.
As if to press home this obvious truth Bex wrinkled her nose. ‘Why would you want to?’ Bex’s teeth were tanked with wire, as if her opinions needed shoring up.
‘There’s this blue dress in Oxfam.’
Lucy’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. Lucy was tall and naturally golden and used to play tennis for the school before she got too cool for sport.
‘Josh passed his driving test!’
It was summer, GCSEs, and Year Eleven was drawing to an anxious and disorientating close. Charlie got up at seven-thirty every morning and did an hour’s revision before breakfast. The others lay in bed until lunchtime unless they had an exam, when they’d need time in front of the mirror with straighteners and lip gloss, texting each other about how little they knew. Panic was a competitive sport.
‘I don’t get it,’ Kelsey moaned as they left Subway. It took twelve-and-a-half minutes to walk to school. ‘LECDs. Tell me.’
‘LEDCs,’ Bex said. ‘Less Economically Developed Countries.’
‘Less than what?’
‘Than MEDCs. It’s on the front of the exam paper.’
‘So, they’re, like, poor.’
The girls rounded the corner by the post office and the school gates slid into view. Charlie read the latest from Lucy’s phone.
‘Josh is getting a car.’
Josh was big and dark and beautiful, with hair down to his shoulders and a bum in his rugby shorts that might have been carved from teak. During the winter they’d all taken to watching rugby on Thursday nights, parading their handwoven scarves and slouch boots along the touchline. They’d learned phrases like drop goal and forward pass. There was a bit of a frisson about walking into the boys’ school, from all the hormones that got mixed with the floor polish in the corridors. Little boys at the lockers gawped as they went past. Sometimes the teachers did too, but they never said anything, not if you’d come to watch sport. Boys’ schools encouraged that kind of thing.
‘He wants a Mini Cooper. One of those new ones.’
Josh was also Lucy’s unreachable stepbrother. He occupied a separate and unimaginable stratospheric orbit, coddled by other grey suits and yellow-striped sixth form ties, worn wide and loose and sexy. Kelsey, Lucy, Bex and Charlie picked out names to decorate their school planners in highlighter pens and Tipp-Ex. Ben, Josh, Grant, Callum. They sought information from Facebook but none of the boys added them as a friend.
Worse, the rugby season had ended months ago.
Eighty-four girls in damp white shirts huddled in the school foyer, clutching biros and rulers.
‘Hey. Megan looks scared.’ Kelsey nudged Bex.
‘Scared she’ll get less than ninety-nine percent.’
Charlie turned to glance at Megan, who sat behind her in maths and barely spoke. Megan had waist-length hair that no one remembered ever being cut. It was as greasy as chip fat and had a halo of split ends.
‘No time to shower when there’s LEDCs to learn,’ Bex murmured, but somehow loud enough for everyone to hear.
Charlie knew, because her mum talked to Megan’s mum – they lived on the same estate and had younger siblings who walked to the primary school two streets away – that Megan washed her hair sometimes twice a day, and took medication for her acne. The drugs she’d been prescribed were so dangerous you had to do a pregnancy test before they let you have them. Even if you’d never had a boyfriend.
She hadn’t mentioned any of this to Kelsey and Lucy and Bex.
From her corner Megan smiled at Charlie, the sort of woebegone little smile that made Charlie want to team up with Bex and squirt superglue into Megan’s ponytail. Although of course there were days when she thought of rallying Megan so that together they could gather all the Ugg boots and designer handbags and chuck them in Lost Property with the old gym shorts and rancid lunchboxes. Occasionally Megan walked to school with Charlie, but usually her dad gave her a lift so she didn’t have to walk anywhere with anyone. Charlie held up crossed fingers and grinned non-committally, jiggling her pens.
‘Don’t encourage her,’ Kelsey hissed.
Afterwards, numbed by Geography, they reeled into Starbucks. Bex and Lucy ordered iced cappuccinos. Charlie, who had to rely for cash on her Saturday job at the newsagent’s, leaned on the counter and read a message from her phone.
What did u think? Last q was murder r u @ kelsey’s?
Megan was the only person Charlie knew who used apostrophes in her texts. She flipped the Back button to hide the screen and watched Lucy rearranging her hair in a fresh cascade of glossy clichés. Vibrant. Glowing. Because She Was Worth It.
Sometimes Charlie managed to think of her own hair as pre-Raphaelite. Days like this it was just frizzy, and badly conditioned to boot.
‘There was this top in Monsoon,’ Bex began loudly. Charlie sighed.
‘Come with me to look at that dress?’ she said to Kelsey.
Charlie’s mum worked in the Oxfam shop on Wednesday afternoons and gave Charlie a lift home at the end of the day if she didn’t mind hanging around for an hour, helping with the stock. Today was Thursday.
As Kelsey crossed the threshold her face actually puckered, like she needed a pomander to stuff under her nose. It seemed to Charlie, annoyingly, that the clothes in the shop were thinner and more lifeless than usual. Granny garments, and not in the nice, retro, antique sense, like twenties lace or a real cloche hat. This stuff was more printed polyester and jersey knits in poisonous patterns. She hooked the blue dress off its rail.
She’d remembered it as silky, but now she saw that the fabric was cheap and stiff, its colour an electric ultramarine rather than the pale indigo she’d held in her head. Which was annoying because Charlie had a knack for recalling shades. She’d arrive at art lessons with colour schemes memorised and ready to put to paper. She got them right, too. Charlie was hoping to do Art for A level. They all wanted to, but in Bex’s and Kelsey’s and Lucy’s cases it was because there was nothing else they liked. And they thought Art was easy.
‘Well?’ Charlie draped the dress over her arm, knowing that Art was actually impossible. How could anyone look at something you’d created for an exam and give it a mark? A mere number? Kelsey shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’
‘I think,’ Charlie retaliated archly, ‘that I may as well buy it.’
Behind the cash desk were pictures of African people with goats and spice baskets and piles of woven blankets in sunburned colours. The assistant reached forward and Charlie noticed too late that it was Malcolm, the work-experience boy with the speech impediment, whose mouth didn’t ever seem to close properly. He always had a fine thread of drool running down the side of his chin. Malcolm used to be Special Needs and now Charlie’s mum supervised him at work. Sometimes he helped Charlie with the stock check. It took ages longer.
‘Pretty,’ Malcolm declared, running the fabric of th
e dress across his hand. ‘It’ll suit y—y—you.’ The expression on Kelsey’s face drilled loudly through the back of Charlie’s head.
‘Working Thursday this week, Malcolm?’ She pulled her shoulders into line. Vital not to show weakness.
‘Ei—Ei—Eileen’s off. She’s at a we—we—wedding.’
Charlie wrenched her purse from her blazer pocket.
‘It’s in I—I—Ireland.’
‘That’s nice.’ She realised now that the dress was dreadful, beyond any hope of resurrection through minor means such as a change of buttons or a new neck insert of cotton lace. Why had she ever imagined that might work?
‘Seven pounds p—p—please,’ said Malcolm. He was staring at Kelsey without apprehension. He carried on staring.
It struck Charlie like a giant paper dart soaked in cold water. He fancies her. The idea was so awful she thought the whole room might actually implode. They’d all be buried neck-deep in hideous garments and ethically-sourced chocolate bars.
Worse, any moment now poor Malcolm would be telling them about his newest computer game, or even the buses he’d spotted in his lunch hour. Charlie had a ten pound note in her hand, practically her entire remaining earnings from Saturday. She banged it down on the counter. ‘I don’t want the change.’ Then she bolted for the door, ushering Kelsey’s attention towards a poster in the window.
‘“Ten pounds buys three sacks of seeds for a poor farmer.”’