I closed my eyes, exhausted but glad from my journey, and knew that I would not have wanted to exchange this for all the sensations and sense of tolerance, all the kindness known as motherly love, something I feel I often lacked as a child and teenager. Because the journey had brought me a vision of my surroundings. It brought me the peace that only a sense of the aesthetic can bring, giving me an everlasting vista of another world where I felt delight and joy. And in that world, I knew I would never be alone.
The young mother looks quickly up from the book when she realizes her husband is standing behind her in the kitchen doorway. Although he does not ask anything, she responds guiltily, slipping the book under a bunch of newspapers and brochures that have accumulated on the table.
The next few days, the paper stack lies on the table and continues to grow. For a while, a big, heavy case of beer stands on top of it. The woman had set it there because there was no other place for it once she had put two full shopping bags on the kitchen table on the Friday. The box stayed there into the evening, or until the husband realized that the weekend ale hadn’t made it into the refrigerator. By the time he stuffed the cans into the refrigerator, and took a lukewarm sip, the beer box had broken the spine of the small book at its open back; the wife had not taken the time to close it before shoving it under the newspapers a few days ago, because she did not want her husband to see she was nosing about in other people’s books. Not that he had any opinion on this or any interest in looking at the book. Indeed, the man had not even noticed what his wife was up to as he stood there in the doorway, and so now, as he stands with a collapsed, empty cardboard box of beer—he had finished putting it in the fridge—he takes the pile of papers out to the garbage. To where the recycling can, only recently allocated to the house’s inhabitants, doesn’t quite fit next to the trash can without blocking the kitchen window belonging to the people in the basement apartment.
The book’s discovery, and its obvious connection with the harbor incident, occupied the young mother’s thoughts a fair bit following the evening she read the text under the sketched portrait, but boredom at her workplace, difficulties with her marriage, and the struggle of raising two young children in rented accommodation, all that meant the book gradually disappears from her mind. Until one evening about a month later. She has a date with her girlfriends at a restaurant at the harbor, and when she reaches the place and five immaculate, fur-collared figures begin waving at her from the other side of the window, the scene of the story’s action is unavoidable. The notebook resurfaces in her mind. She stands stock still a moment, meaning to walk through the door into the restaurant, but stops and takes to her heels, headed away from the building. The fur collars look at each other; one of them is about to run after her, but the others deduce she must have forgotten something, even if her reaction in fact indicates something quite different.
After a few minutes, the woman is standing in her hallway. She’s standing in front of her husband, yelling. Shortly afterwards, they’re both out on the driveway by the recycling bin. They lie the barrel down and dump the contents on the ground, and are rooting in the pile that forms at their feet when the woman sets eyes on the book, staring wide open at the top of the heap; it had been lying there on the bottom ever since the man threw it, together with the magazines, into the empty bin a month back. And luckily the receptacle had not been emptied all that time because the people in the basement apartment had, in a fit of anger, pushed it away from their kitchen window and up beside the garage just before the scheduled trash collection, and it seemed that the refuse collectors had refused to walk down there to fetch it, perhaps not convinced it would be possible to recoup from the inhabitants the additional fee such a stroll would warrant.
Instead of placing the book on the kitchen table and returning to the wine bar at the harbor restaurant, the woman decides to return the book immediately. She will do it tonight. But by this time, the paper with the woman’s parents’ contact details has disappeared from the book. Probably, it fell out after being placed in the recycling bin where the newspaper with the death notice also probably is. To go and root in all this jetsam for such small pieces of paper, or to scroll through all the pages in a vague hunt for the announcement, seems unthinkable right now; they must find the information some another way. But it turns out that it isn’t possible to search death notices online, only obituaries. And the young couple doesn’t subscribe to the newspaper that publishes them. The young mother is forced to call her father and ask him for help, and though he helps out at once, asking nothing, he does end the call with his daughter by reprovingly using back at her the words she used at him about getting a subscription to this right-wing newspaper.
In the autumnal dusk, warm light pours from the beautifully-illuminated living room; the home resonates prosperity and history, awakening the sense of security of anyone who glances in, giving the sense that nothing bad has ever happened here. It’s the combination of artworks hanging on the walls that suggest this; old masters and emerging young artists in a chaotic but attractive jumble. The one bears witness to the intellectual health of people open to the new, the other that they have both feet on an established foundation. The image is perfected thanks to a slight digression in the foreground, on the window ledge: a small, porcelain goose girl, produced in Spain during the time of General Franco for the good housewives of this world.
The father comes to the door. He’s a slender, supple man with graying hair, with a gentle demeanor, though he looks exhausted. No doubt is. And it dawns on him when the messenger explains her errand and hands him the notebook, now closed again with its slender gold thread. The father pulls them gently. He opens the book and sees his daughter’s name written prominently in her own handwriting. He cannot come up with any words but conveys his thanks via a weak yet polite gesture as he closes the door.
Through the large window, the father can be seen walking into the living room. He extends toward the mother, who is sitting on the sofa, what he has in his hand. The mother examines the bound notebook, placing it up to her sense organs, like she’s trying to smell her only child’s last words. She loosens the thread and opens the book at the start, gently, and peeks in:
Meeting with Diana D. 30th of May at 14.00
May 25
Have I put my soul into some amateur’s hand? Someone who means to help me get rid of the past. Help me seize the moment. Some dabbler who claims our troubles disappear as soon as they turn into words on a page. Oh, I know all too well about moments and words on a page!
May 29th
OK. Find this guy. The Demolitionist, who lives in the place we hide our secret thoughts. Rips everything down and tears it all up. Write down his words and my reaction to his words and reflect on the extent to which I believe them myself and can approve of them.
I can’t find the guy. Could the man be a woman? The lady who at all times has the words, whether she’s talking or not. Irritating me with her constant presence. The one who gets to make all the decisions. In all ways in all places. An agent of strength thanks to her cunning, money and other privileges. Her presence is affected and hollow. Learned, but without insight. Her insecurity hidden behind a quiet voice, measured speech, lapping up the words of whomever she respects. Restless from attention-seeking and feelings of inferiority, all hidden under a safe, stable surface. So busy looking for beauty in every possible nook that she can’t perceive what lies beneath. Holding in her hand a gift from her little girl: the Bethlehem stable standing on a paper base covered with cotton puffs; setting it aside and lifting up her hands before she hugs the child. But on Christmas Eve, the fragile stable has disappeared. Gets found on the thirteenth day. In the trash under the sink. The lady who scowls but only for a moment, so no one notices except me, her little one, then smiles at the furry, wondrously soft pink slippers. On the instep, a bow; on the bow, gleaming gems. But what a shame! They’re not the right size! So the shoes go back into the box with the seal still on the soles, shiny
plastic film, so she can get the right size later. The right size from the shop where I, her child, took the bus with all the earnings from my summer job and a bill from Dad, in case. Shoe size on a little slip of paper in my sweater pocket. But “later” never comes to pass. The lady who stands behind me in the mirror and lets me see the indifference in her face while I adjust my top’s padded shoulders, the wide belt around my waist, the sweatband on my forehead, anxious and excited about the coming evening’s adventure. And when the fateful night is over, she has no comfort for her child, just some obscure wisdom I cannot process until many years later when the wound has long since healed. Her perceptions are sharp and unfailing, but her knowledge of beauty is not the sort that increases human generosity, because what should have opened up her world tamped it down, closed it off, carried her off into misanthropy, her refinement marked not by anything but a disapproval of other people’s perception and taste. In her narrow world, the world that fostered me, there was no room for diversity, only a few stereotypes. Chiefly aesthetes and philistines, types I defined myself by. The lady who takes all the decisions, with terrible consequences for her only child.
The mother looks up from the book as her husband places a teacup on the table in front of her. Out of consideration for her, he immediately sees himself out of the room, but had he not done so, he would have seen something he had not seen before: the totally expressionless face of his wife, called into being by the conflict of warring emotions. She’s dressed in a worn white T-shirt, without a bra. Gray hair down to her shoulders.
She sets down the book, looks straight ahead, steadies one hand against the couch and gently lifts herself up. She stands on both legs, in her furry slippers, pink and downy soft; on top of each instep is a little silk bow. On top of the bow, by the knot, a little glass stone. A gemstone. She stands motionless, goes nowhere. It’s as though the plastic film still on the beige soles underneath these old, unused slippers has stuck fast to the hand-woven wool beneath her feet. But it’s quite the opposite: when she finally manages to lift her feet off the floor she slips on the mat and tangles her foot in the cord that runs along the floor from the wall, causing a standing lamp behind her to fall and crash down on the table where her teacup is, right next to the notebook. The lampshade, a world-famous porcelain design, falls directly onto the cup, which tips over on the table; chamomile tea spills out, flowing across the table toward the notebook, which now lies automatically open at a new place, a place the weight of the beer crate set on it broke it open to, the last page, revealing its ink sketch of a woman with an outstretched hand. In her palm sits a miniature girl wrapping her arms firmly around the woman’s index finger. The woman’s hair traces her jawbone, falls across one cheek, casting into shade her lips and rounded nose, but the eye that looks into the little girl’s face is sharply drawn. From the corner of the eye over to the temple. The girl’s face is barely discernible, but she seems to be smiling. And once the tea has flooded over these dexterously-drawn lines, it trickles in the direction of the words below the drawing.
The husband comes running into the living room when he hears the crash and his wife’s scream. He bends down and attempts to help her to her feet but she pulls herself up quickly and fishes the wet notebook out of the tea. She shakes the book, in vain, roughly, causing the papers stored in the ripped pocket inside the cover to fall out. It’s too late to save this open spread given how much water the paper has drunk; her first reaction is to put the book on the table and wipe the pages with her flat palm. And, of course, that causes everything to wash away. The drawing takes on a different look and the writing, the story about a giant and a tiny girl—which played no small part in the fact that a young mother from another part of the town undertook to look for the notebook in the recycling bin earlier this evening—is barely readable anymore. And it’s like the mother knows what she’s just wiped away with this frenetic drying because she collapses down on the couch, leaning on her elbows and holding her face in her hands. The husband finishes cleaning the table, but when his wife takes her hands away from her face, he inquiringly holds out to her the things that fell from inside the notebook pocket: a white business card and a small paper sheet, bygone. The mother takes the white card, reads it, and rips it in two disapprovingly; when she unfolds the old piece of paper, she’s obviously very alarmed. She realizes immediately where it comes from, even though she can hardly read a single word as she holds the page right in front of her. The husband stands by her, totally rigid, until she commands him get her a magnifying glass.
After about an hour with the glass on the manuscript, the mother has managed to read enough words to understand what happened. Enough words to realize this sheet needs destroying:
The day 221
This day, after I was readi, I did eate my breakfast … Messanger from My Lord came to fetch my father … troble raisng the regiments … with Civill Warres between King & Parliament growing hotter … I had some talk wt my father and we took horses and rede into the Fields. After we Came back to house I myself went to my Lords house to have my hair cut round. Toward night I was in ye Chamber … my dutie as an Engliswan to enter into the sevice of my country upon consideration of my age … active body … rider … disgraise myself. Soon I set of with twentieth … assembled … troop of horses and to meet with my Captain … in the use of arms … capable of acting in case there should be occasion to make use of us.
The mother looks up. She acts like she’s unaffected by what she’s read, shrugging her shoulders at her husband. He doesn’t ask a thing; in all likelihood he probably would rather avoid some legal hearing about his dear daughter, either now or at any other time. This is something his wife will solve, he no doubt thinks; he says he’s going to bed, and heads up.
The mother is alone downstairs. Pacing the floor. She has the old page in her hand, possibly wondering if it’s better not to tear it in little pieces rather than burn it. But she does not. She opens the cupboard under the sink, reaches down into the trashcan, and puts the page down inside. Then she goes up to bed herself.
But of course, she cannot sleep. She knows she cannot live any amount of time with a hundreds-of-years old cultural artifact in the trash under her kitchen sink. However, the other option is not viable: return the page and cause her daughter to be named a thief and fraud; cancel the thesis’s publication. She could of course go to the library herself and restore it to its rightful place, but if and when the book comes out, there’s a good chance her child will be ridiculed far and wide in the scholarly world. She must find another way.
She gets up again. She dresses in a thin silk robe and walks barefoot down to the kitchen. She opens the sink cupboard, reaches into the bin, retrieves the manuscript page and places it on the kitchen table. Then she fetches her magnifying glass and puts it over the sheet, runs it down along the page and slowly moves it, little by little, back up again: to enter into the service of my country on consideration of my age … active body … rider … disgraise myself. Disgrace? What was the painter’s shame? The mother cannot answer this, because she cannot read the words that come before. But no manuscript specialist would be able to, either: only two letters of one of the words are readable; the rest, two, perhaps three words, are nothing but a blot. And, in fact, there’s a little blot within the word itself, between disg and ise. She puts the glass very slightly closer to the sheet and sees then that there is no indication that in the blot there’s an r or a. And though the text is written at a period before standardized writing rules, the wrong spelling of disgrace supports the possibility that an altogether different word has been written; in the blot, anything is possible, and maybe there’s only a single letter. U?
And now the mother claps a hand to her mouth and closes her eyes and stands still for quite some time. Then she walks into the living room and sits at an old desk that stands in a corner. She puts on her glasses and takes out a thick stack of paper: S. B. Diary of 1642 / 1643. She reads through the transcription, pores over eac
h entry of the diary in search of a clue. She is looking to confirm her suspicions.
Three hours later she stands up again. Stands in front of the shelves, looking for books. Returns to the writing desk and restarts the computer. She does all this with great assurance, like she doesn’t need to pause to ponder things, like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She gets back up at dawn. Takes a crisp plastic sheet out of the desk drawer and puts the manuscript, the diary page containing the testimony about day 221, gently inside it. She cleans the evidence away from the table top, reaches for a large brown envelope lying on the dining table, and takes another stack of paper from there. She puts it on the empty desktop. It’s a manuscript proof; judging from its thickness, it’s about 600 pages. Topmost on the front page is scrawled a short caption in red pen, but in the middle, printed, are the words:
Every Lovely Grace of His Face
S. B. Britain’s first professional
female artist
She flips through. Looks for a long time at the sentence that will be on the page between the flyleaf and the title page once the manuscript becomes a book. From there, she continues to the table of contents. The preface comes first. Preceding twelve sections. The mother takes a pen out of an old silver cup standing on the table. The red pen. But when it comes to touching it down at the bottom of the page, she notices a motion outside. In front of the balcony door. She looks, but there is no one there, so she continues where she left off. The number 13. Point, curve and then: S. B. Female Soldier in the English Civil War? It will just be a short chapter, although there is no lack of scholarly literature to frame this little paper sheet, this remarkable document that has endured a long, difficult journey. One that seems to have had no reason at all.
Sigrún Pálsdóttir completed a PhD in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford in 2001, after which she was a research fellow at the University of Iceland, and is the editor of Saga, the principal peer-reviewed journal for Icelandic history. Her previous titles include the historical biography Thora. A Bishop’s Daughter and Uncertain Seas, a story of a young couple and their three children who were killed when sailing from New York to Iceland aboard a ship torpedoed by a German submarine in 1944. Sigrún’s work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, Hagþenkir Prize, and DV Cultural Prize. Uncertain Seas was chosen the best biography in 2013 by booksellers in Iceland.
History. a Mess. Page 13