The boldest moment came—my memory is as clear as if someone had made an engraving of it—the afternoon before Midsummer Night. Mr Macarthur and Captain Moriarty had paid us a visit and we sat in the parlour arranging to meet the following afternoon to stroll down to the village, where the people would have their bonfire and dancing. We, of course, being gentlemen and ladies, would not dance by the light of the bonfire, would not grow rowdy as the village folk would, red in the face and shining with the freedom of Midsummer Night, when all rules were suspended. But we would marvel at the way the fire blazed and crackled, how wildly the sparks flew when Axtens the blacksmith threw on another great piece of wood, how everything familiar was made strange by the night. And mark how, in pairs, figures made obscure by the firelight slipped away together.
Our visitors were leaving, there was a bustle of departure: Mr Moriarty and Bridie on the gravel outside, Mrs Kingdon going down the steps to join them, Mr Kingdon upstairs fetching a book he had promised to lend Mr Macarthur, and myself just outside the front doorway. Mr Macarthur had lingered in the drawing room and when I looked back there he was, framed by the two doorways so that the hallway was a tube of empty air along which we looked at each other. The air between us, that narrow line of sight, joined us in a kind of intimacy. At one end of that tube was the young woman who wondered how it would be to feel a man between her legs, and at the other a young man whose gaze was full of a pressing urgency of attention.
We had but seconds, and he knew how to use them. He put his hand on his heart with a delicate movement, a caress of himself, fingers spread on his coat, and tilted his head questioningly, submissively, yearningly. How much a person can say by nothing more than a tilt of the head!
That picture—lasting a second, no longer—entirely disarmed canny Elizabeth Veale. As I would not for an instant have believed words, I believed that hand on heart and the whimsical appeal of that tilted head.
Then Mr Kingdon came down the stairs, Mrs Kingdon looked back towards me, Mr Macarthur put his hat on, and Miss Veale sailed out ahead of him down the steps and out into an afternoon that, all at once, seemed so lovely as to make my heart race.
TREMULOUS AND STRANGE
Midsummer Night, myself and Mr Macarthur. Mud thick around our boots as we walked down towards the field where the bonfire illuminated the trees in strange upside-down ways. Bridie and Captain Moriarty were ahead of us, not glancing back, and Mr and Mrs Kingdon were taking the longer way by the road. And there was Mr Macarthur’s strong hand, steadying me around my waist as I got over the stile, and his cheek close to mine.
– A particularly tricky stile, he said. I have heard of folk taking this stile much too lightly, Miss Veale, and regretting it—here, take my hand, I beg you!
Of course the stile was no better or worse than any other. Bridie and I had got over it without the slightest difficulty a hundred times. But I put my hand in his, and what with the darkness, and the unaccustomed and needless assistance, I somehow lost my balance, so that I briefly leaned, almost fell, against him. He did not let go of my hand, but led me along beside the hedge: not the quickest way towards the bonfire, in fact hardly a way to the bonfire at all, but I followed.
The darkness was full of rich complicated smells of vegetation under dew and shivers of breeze: underhand, low-to-the-ground, so different from day’s frank gusts. The night was like a creature that lay hidden until, when humans slept, it lived its private life, shifting and breathing in subtle currents of cool air now from this side, now that, whispering among the leaves and drawing me into its secrets.
COLOSSUS
It was curiosity, as much as anything, that made me let events take their course. Curiosity—and, of course, his flattery. Oh, his flattery. And my vanity, in believing.
– Sweet, he murmured. Sweet mouth!
I heard the catch in his voice, felt his fingers trembling as he touched my cheek, traced the shape of my lips.
– Oh, oh, he sighed into my ear, his breath hot. Ah my dear, so beguiling, my dear.
It was new, undreamt of, that I had reduced a man to this inarticulate yearning. Almost begging. It filled me with a sense of how powerful I must be, after all. I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.
– Sweet, sweet mouth, he whispered.
Not the words, but the tremble in the fingers: that was what made me lie back against the hedge. The stars, the crackle of the bonfire on the far side of the next field, its flickering hectic light through the hedge: all was tremulous and strange. But this was Midsummer Night and all was strange, all was allowed, everything was new and I was, you might say, drunk with delight in the power I was discovering myself to have. This, then, was what it was all about, the care they wrapped us in, the fear they made us feel, the never-quite-spoken thing that made it necessary for us to be so relentlessly protected. Not our fear of their power, but their fear of ours!
Now I could feel his whole body trembling as it pressed me down. There was a scuffling at the fabric between us, a wrenching-away, finally bare skin in the night air. Yes, I knew I was being assailed. Knew this was what I had been warned of. Had seen enough of those rams and dogs to know what was happening. I cannot claim that I did not know. But as surely as anything I had ever believed, I felt this to be my act, my decision, fully my own choice. How could there be any mistake? I was a colossus, a god. The feeble voices of warning faded, leaving nothing but a glory of certainty, a bliss that could not be wrong.
Just for such a very short time. Then he shifted away from me and stood up. There was a mighty shout from somewhere over there and the bleat of a puzzled woken sheep—and the event unspooled so that I saw what a lie it was. There was no more trembling, there were no more moans, no more sweet nothings about being beguiled. Only the anxiety I could hear in his voice, anxiety and coldness too.
– Get up, get up, Miss Veale, he said in a rasping whisper. Miss Veale!
I was no colossus after all. I was just Miss Veale, to be pulled to her feet with a cool steady hand under my arm, and to be led, like one of those sheep, beside the hedge to the stile. No tomfoolery at the stile this time, only his hand gripping mine with no motive but the need to get me over.
– Best go round the side, he said, as brisk as a gentleman ordering his carriage. Quickly now!
So we went scuttling along like rats in the shadow of the hedge and came out near the bonfire as if we’d always been there, and as separate as if we were strangers.
Well, I thought, waking up early next morning, Bridie innocently asleep beside me. Now I know. I kept saying the words in my mind, there was a grim satisfaction in them. Now I know. As if knowing was a way of getting back a trace of that huge powerful person I’d been for those short mad minutes behind the hedge. Now I know.
I see now, sixty years too late, that he had not expected me to yield. The seduction of Elizabeth Veale was one of those unattainable ambitions that no one would expect to achieve. I am familiar now with the satisfaction it gave him to fling himself at the impossible. It was the chase, not the prey, that he loved. Coming out from behind the hedge, his coldness was in part disappointment. The fox had delivered itself up to the hunter. Where was the triumph in that?
CAUGHT OUT
I’d heard things, the way you do, and I’m ashamed to say I tried them all. Hot baths, jumping down from high places, skipping till you got a stitch in your side. Rosemary, I’d heard, and there was plenty in the garden, and I was determined, cold with the need of it, my will forcing it down, but with the direst need in the world no one can swallow enough rosemary to effect what I longed to effect.
I ran full pelt up the muddy lane from the village, so fast I slipped, hands flat down in the mud. Got up, went on running past what I could bear, bu
t forced myself on, got to the top and wanted another hill. At the top of that bent muddy lane, where the church is—I can see it clearly in the eye of memory—the lane flattens, a straight level run all the way from the vicarage to Holsworthy. Now, if that dull lane, down which Mr Macarthur had strolled so many times, had only been a hill like the one I’d just run up, he might not have bothered. As it was, I stood looking along that lane in a hot sweaty pother, the stitch in my side a glorious hopeful pain. Surely no babe could stick to me after that!
There was no shame. There was simply a job to be done. Joan of Arc could not have had a steelier resolve.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
I could not find a way to tell Bridie. She was sad, though putting on a brave appearance: Captain Moriarty had not, after all, made her a proposal. He and Mr Macarthur still paid calls, but he had clearly drawn back from any consideration of Bridie as his wife. To reveal my own situation would engulf hers and make it seem by comparison trivial, which it was not. Besides, how could I explain that something as childish as curiosity, and another thing as unworthy as vanity, had lured me to this pass?
But among women, in the intimacy of a household, that particular secret has nowhere to hide for long.
Bridie and I sat side by side on the wall between the house and the church, looking out into the August night. I had a fan. Not that it was such a hot night, but Bridie knew, and I knew she knew, and I had the impulse to hide. Not out of remorse at the wickedness of what I had allowed to happen. Only humiliation, that I’d been such a fool. To have been warned all my life, to have been taught a truth about the world, and then to think I knew better.
I had not been forced, or only by my own folly and arrogance, that let me think I was in control of what was happening—and my sad ignorance of the ways of men and their flattery. Oh, the thrill of having a man reduced, or seem to be, the mighty man brought low!
Behind the fan my cheeks burned. It was rage that burned there, the rage of not having been able to take a single step beyond the permitted without being punished. Not one step! Not once!
Now, telling over this old story for you, I can see it plain, as I could not then. I ask you not to judge too harshly. I would like to take that young woman by the hand and say, You were not a fool. Or not only a fool. To stay always within the bounds laid down is to remain a child.
A flame had burned in me, to be bigger than those bounds. That should be no crime.
Bridie spoke all the words, around and around, gentle with me but distant, like a person safe on a ship calling out kindly to someone fallen overboard, beyond rescue. Then there was nothing more to say.
In that calm night, all her soft words said, her hand warm in mine, I recoiled from her pity. I had gone behind the hedge with eyes open. That night, with the world tilted irrevocably from one place to another, I decided: let no one pity me. As pride was the key to Mr Macarthur’s character, refusal to be pitied would be mine.
Now I lay awake beside her, knowing that this was the last night of our old lives. The dawn streaming towards me was the last dawn of my secret, the morning ahead the first morning of my future. What future? To be married to that moody stranger, both of our lives poisoned by regret? Or some other fate, one so far beyond my experience in genteel Bridgerule as to be unimaginable? What exactly would a girl do who had no family and no money, only a belly containing a bastard child?
I lay watching the light quicken into the day when the unspoken would be spoken and a waterfall of consequences would drown me. I listened to the noises of the waking household. Soon I would have to take my place in it, and endure all that would have to be endured.
PAPERING-OVER
Mr Macarthur was a fastidious sort of man and loathed the smell of lanoline and sheep shit. He especially loathed the silly noise that is the only utterance a poor sheep has at its disposal. Picked his way across Grandfather’s yard with his lip more than usually curled.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr Kingdon, my sin would soon be papered over, the words spoken, the ring lumpy on my finger. Mr Macarthur stood beside me, scraping at the mud on his boot. I knocked and called, again and again. But Grandfather had never had any truck with the papering-over of sins. Smoke rose out of the chimney, but he did not appear.
A SLIVER OF HOME
Mrs Kingdon had been a mother to me, had opened her home and her heart to me, and I had made a mockery of all her care. Yet she forgave me my betrayal. That thoroughly good woman spoke to my mother, who made over her small dower to me: not enough to live on, but my own. Then she found a girl from the village who was persuaded to become my maid.
– You will have need of someone with you, Mrs Kingdon said. When the dear babe arrives.
The dear babe! I blessed Mrs Kingdon then for her kindness, and I bless her memory now.
Anne was not yet fifteen, a tall skinny freckled ginger girl, timid and ignorant, but to take a sliver of Bridgerule with me, even a girl I barely knew, would be some comfort. She seemed to imagine it would be an adventure.
Mr Kingdon had not been able to look at me since the news had been broken to him, but in emulation of the merciful God whose vicar he was, he did not turn out the sinner under his roof. He pulled some string or other among his acquaintances that had the happy effect of securing Mr Macarthur a position with the 68th Regiment of Foot, soon to be sent to Gibraltar on garrison duty. Which served two purposes: to ensure that Ensign Macarthur would return to full pay and be in a position to support—no matter how frugally—a wife and child, and to get Mr and Mrs Macarthur far away from Bridgerule.
HAPPY EVENT
I was grateful for the pretence that it was a happy event, smiled till my jaw ached. Mr Macarthur did not pretend. Was severe and unsmiling, and made a deal of fuss about what would be written on the marriage paper. He must be John Macarthur, Esquire. Mr Kingdon flinched, blinked, was not sure, but Mr Macarthur would not yield and Mr Kingdon, poor fellow, only wanted the thing done with and the two of us gone out of his life. So there it is, and will last as long as the book in which it was inscribed: John Macarthur, Esquire.
The woman of metal, Elizabeth Veale, kept her chin high and her eyes fixed on Mr Kingdon as he read the words. I was calm, admired myself from a great distance for my calmness. But as the moment approached when I must say those two small words, my mouth became so dry that my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth, my throat closed, my lips grew numb.
No, I would not be mortified! Would not have people say, oh, she could not get the words out! So I sucked at my cheeks, forced my tongue around that glued-together mouth, dropped my chin, tried to think of a lemon, while Mr Kingdon steadily read through the vows.
I had rehearsed how I would say it. I do! Loud and sure, with not a scintilla of doubt. The start of a lifetime’s fiction: this is what I wanted. Thinking of a lemon came to my rescue, but it was a croak, squeezed thin, that sealed my destiny.
Mr Macarthur’s hands shook so much he had the greatest difficulty getting the ring on my finger. I could hear the breath coming hard through his nose, saw those trembling hands, and my own tremulousness left me. We were in this together, this stranger and I, as we had said, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, and his weakness gave me strength. He was that foreign creature, a man, who spoke the foreign language of power and assurance, but we came from the same country, where a person had to appear to be someone other than who they were. The question that would shape our marriage was: would we be able to speak to each other in that secret language we shared? Would he trust me, would I trust him, enough to show each other willingly what I could see, without him wishing me to see it, in the trembling of his hands?
That night, in the cold room at the barracks in Holsworthy, I tried, the lamp blown out and two strangers in the bed, a narrow enough one, but still there was a space between us. A horse whinnied from the stables, someone shouted, a word repeated, it sounded like Elephant! Elephant! Elephant! But who in the world would be out in the yard of Holsworthy
Barracks at night shouting Elephant?
Across the space, Mr Macarthur lay still as a stone. He could not have died, not in the few minutes since he had snuffed the candle, rustled out of his clothes, and slid in on the other side of the bed. Could not be dead, but was as still as if dead.
– I have never understood before, when they say my heart was in my mouth, I said.
I felt I must be shouting, the words seemed so loud in that cube of darkness, but I could only go on.
– Today I saw what they meant—so much was my heart in my mouth that there was no room for the spit!
I remembered how his breath had come so hard, getting the ring on, and told myself, Begin as you mean to go on, or at least as you hope to. I fumbled through the bedclothes and found his hand, pressed the fingers.
– And you, I said with my best effort at a light tone, was your heart in your mouth too, Mr Macarthur?
He did not speak, did not press my hand in return, and I felt the cold shaft of a mistake that would now have to be retreated from. But at last there was a movement in the bed, as if he were turning towards me.
– Yes, he said. I have never.
He stopped, coughed to clear something blocking the words, laughed in a choked way.
– You see, I cannot get the words out to say what strange waters I feel myself in.
I would have felt warmer if he had got an ourselves into that sentence, but like me he had spent his life up to this day being myself. The idea that we, each of us separately, were now a thing called ourselves was, I supposed, equally new and alarming for both of us. Was I ready to be ourselves? I was happy enough to take his hand, to make a joke about spit, but how much, truly, did I wish or intend to be ourselves with this stranger?
We were a married couple, had got to that state because of doing what only married couples were permitted. Having done it when not permitted, it would be perverse not to repeat it now. But this time he offered no sighs and sweet words. And for me there was no glorious swelling of power. There was only the act itself, workman-like, short and sharp.
A Room Made of Leaves Page 4