We did not promenade often in those days (and hardly at all since) and it was evident to me we had only done so then to add to Mr Hadley’s social advancement and to demonstrate the arrival of his heir. There were indeed those who bowed to Mr Hadley, simpered at me, and bent to look at the child. But before Toby’s arrival, when we had been on promenade, my husband had not been at all pleased that young men too frequently settled their eyes on me. It was a parade to mortify both man and wife.
Then had come the meeting with Mrs Charles and I had felt myself placed aside in my youth and my illness, which was somehow shameful. I had torn so during the birth and bled still, and must focus my mind even to stand without tottering, or to walk with some grace; I felt myself to be of no consequence. I knew my body would never quite be set to rights again. A puppy that can no longer breed, was what I told myself. I was young; I was silly; I was clumsy and had nothing to say.
Mr and Mrs Hadley soon ceased these Hyde Park perambulations, to our mutual relief. And, in any case, Mrs Charles was not always promenading.
Still, here is one who might grieve over George Hadley. I pressed my lips together over the thought. I had long known—with the knowledge gained from my careful observation of every glance between them—Mrs Charles’s relationship with Mr Hadley. I stilled, uncertain, my pen in my hand, and then: I will be honourable, and tell her.
I folded my notes into envelopes. I have been honourable, and I have been kind.
Glancing over at Mr Hadley, slumped where he had been propped there in the gloom, with his chest moving slow and shallow, I stared a moment and thought: Ah, husband, see how I am a child still with all of this, affrighted of everyone. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Even of my own son. I took a long breath and let it out. What I told him thus in my mind, I realised, was no more than the truth. Still—and here I passed a hand against a damp cheek—I may at least cause some delay.
I looked at the topmost note. It seemed doubtful they would all keep away. Delay, I knew, was the best I could hope for.
Then for a time, I read Mr Collins’s book—the second volume now, which Sobriety had fetched for me from Mr Mudie’s library, that excellent establishment. When I thought every now and then to look toward Mr Hadley, I saw how he sagged.
It is as if he is a sack with the stitching gone.
I must not think these things.
A cloth, soggy now from his incontinent dribbling, had been tucked around his neck and over the collar of his jacket. I took a deep breath to test the sensitivity of the bruise that pressed against my stays.
In Mr Collins’s distressing tale, Mr Hartright and Laura had been separated cruelly despite their love for one another. Laura was obliged to marry the odious Sir Percival Glyde, who had shut Ann (the woman in white) up in an asylum. Laura’s half-sister, Marian, was convinced there was evil about that vile and clever Sir Percival.
I turned a page of my book and felt a sudden fanfare through all of my nerves. A complex of sensations, I thought, like so many notes from so many instruments, like a band just arrived from far away, blaring with all its notes and all its instruments, a noise of sensations to overwhelm all else. These sensations had whispered ever since Mr Hadley fell insensible; they clamoured now, so loud and crowding. I sought to define them, searching through phrases and terms that might fit—Is this threat, as for Laura or Marian? A dark inkling? Terror? Perhaps a little terror. Constrained, yes, bound but more than that—desperate to dispel panic that existed, I felt, because I could not so define them.
And then I recognised rebellion and was surprised, and then was shocked as if I had been caught out once again, appalled. And thus began another jumble of reactions to…to…my rebellion—yes, my rebellion!—all marching through my blood like a brass band until I had to fill my lungs, as I had sat without breathing at all, apparently, for many minutes. I looked at that man lying in his bed.
There lay he who had raised his voice at the notion of women reading sensation, at this literature’s stirring of imagination among the weak, at the distraction from duty, at the wanton tempted away from their virtues . . .
A book, Mr George Hadley. A book, read by respectable people. And I find comfort in books.
How is this wrong?
Does not Mrs Charles read novels such as these? Or do you not feel the need to direct her thus?
I thought, as I had often thought before, how Mr Hadley was angriest when my mind lay furthest from his direction.
He pays me no mind, yet when I wander in my own garden of imaginings…
Yet there was guilt, still, at the reading of a novel, this novel—the cause of my chastisement, and my husband’s collapse during that chastisement. My guilt was palpable, tumerous, sitting next to the feeble voice that sought to justify myself, and next, again, to the Adelaide of my mind who stamped her childish feet, and then felt guilt for doing so…
I was recovered (though enervated somehow, as if I had exerted myself up a mountainside, though this was only the Montblanc of the mind) and ready to hold Mr Hadley’s head more or less erect when Mrs Staynes, pale as damp clay, arrived with Cook’s broths to spoon into his unresponsive mouth. These were concoctions we three, Cook and Mrs Staynes and I, had discussed together and experimented upon, with boilings and mashings and infusions and tales of family recipes and disasters. Silent and listening, as we women talked, the child Cissy had rubbed at silverware at the other end of the great table, while Sobriety pressed at lace with the iron, and tested for heat with a tiny tsst of spit at her finger.
I lost track of time, until a Thursday came and Cissy was at her weekly polishing of wood and brass throughout the house; I rustled past to the morning room to fetch a pen and paper or my book. I had left the sampler on the armchair, half-finished in its frame. My attempts at embroidery had always been half-hearted, taken up only because Mr Hadley’s sister, Mrs Edith Courtney, pressed upon me the virtue of framed mottoes—Bless this House, and Speak Not to Deceive, Listen Not to Betray were both hung upon the wall in Edith’s front hall; such improving thoughts to greet visitors. Now, I stopped to glance at my poor sampler, noticed my neat rose, uncertain, unfinished, declaring Bless this H… to the world.
My own meals were often taken at the small table that now stood by the window in Mr Hadley’s room. And then there were his meals, with me and sometimes Cissy, sometimes Mrs Staynes, our mouths compressed, wiping some moist mess into him. Scooping, wiping, pressing. In my mind was the chant: One is right to do this. This is what a wife does.
Yet hovering too, and plucking at my sleeve in imagination, was a contrariness that Mrs Ellis—that mistress of modern manners whose book was given to the young Adelaide as to all young girls—had insisted one must not consider:
“What shall I do to gratify myself—to be admired—or to vary the tenor of my existence?” are not the questions which a woman of right feelings asks on first awaking to the avocations of the day.
I wished with a guilty wail in the depths of my soul—which must be very dark indeed, surely—absolutely and fundamentally to vary the tenor of my existence.
Beneath Mr Hadley, Mrs Staynes had folded sheets into padding, and another around his loins, and these were changed every morning and afternoon and evening. We women bent with our faces averted from each other and from the stench (for he had lost all control of his bodily functions) and from the urge always to cringe from this now-cold evidence of human frailty and weakness, yet dogged in the face of it and barely aware of our mouths tugged down at their corners. Cissy reached beneath our arms, as we trembled from the effort of holding his flaccid, hanging weight, and fetched away the sodden cloths.
Visitors left their cards and did not stay. One of them had been Mrs Charles. I read the names and wrote short notes of thanks. Sometimes I looked idly through the lace curtains. An old cart in the street bore an ancient iron bed, bound and rattling, and an old man sat atop it, l
urching along in counterpoint, sometimes poking the tired nag that dragged them all. Two gentlemen walked fast along, swinging their walking canes. One of them checked his watch.
Later, it rained. The sound whispered from the world into the house, and every window looked onto streaming water that stirred the light when I inched back the lace to see. Drops spit and spattered and trickled down the glass in runnels that raced, joined, and zigzagged to the edge of the pane. In Mr Collins’s book, Marian clung, whipped by rain and wind, to the very narrow gutter, the better to spy on the plottings of his lordship, Sir Percival, and the Italian count.
I put my hand on the page lest I lose my place. The house stood silent and a little cold as the rain washed against its walls and windows. Into all the whispering and moaning of the weather, I mused to myself: Is all movement here, in the house, for me, slowed now? Slowed, until it ceases altogether? Do I follow George into stillness and silence?
Chapter Four
Ma’am.’ Both Mrs Staynes, my housekeeper, and Sobriety stood at attention in the doorway to my morning room. ‘Mr Hadley’s illness has caused…’ Mrs Staynes halted, apparently to think a moment how she should continue. ‘A disruption.’ She looked at me with such directness. ‘And, of course, we have all of us been in…disarray.’ Disarray. Indeed. ‘Yet I was thinking that everyone should be having your orders, so that everyone should know what is to be done.’
Mrs Staynes’s grey eyes were, with the passing of the years, ever more palely enfolded in skin as creased as transparent tissue. What she saw with them, I knew, was order threatened, the ritual that gave meaning put at risk. And so disarray was a very strong word for her to use. At first, I felt myself rebuked, and then understood the quaking in Mrs Staynes’s soul, though she stood so still and watchful. Here was the keeper of the house, anxious, for the house itself required decisions and its mistress must attend to them.
‘Oh. Oh, yes.’ Mrs Staynes and Sobriety waited very still while I flapped—felt, at least, that I was flapping—like some wounded bird unable to fly. This must happen now, I scolded myself, they are quite correct. I set my book down with its marker on the seat beside me and sat up the straighter.
I glanced at Mrs Staynes. Do you see? I am paying attention.
‘We must set about turning his mattresses, and think how this is to be done.’ A monthly task now rendered so difficult. So awkward.
At last, I thought, I am coherent!
Mrs Staynes nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. Still, I was thinking, as he is a big man—’
‘Oh, of course. Albert, for this, and there is Mr Brent, if needed. The horses can spare him.’
Mrs Staynes’s face approved; it was evident in the way her features settled, a relaxation not quite a smile, relief that still bore unsettled tension behind it. She did stare so! Sobriety smiled a little and I folded my hands. I had done my part. I drew breath and let it out.
‘And perhaps…’ How fluent I am becoming! ‘Perhaps we shall discuss what are our various duties toward Mr Hadley—’
‘Shall I call Cissy and Cook, then, madam?’
‘Yes, Mrs Staynes.’
‘I shall send my boy with medicines each Friday, although—’ Doctor McGuiness glanced at the tea cooling beside him. ‘Mr Hadley
will pass away eventually, Mrs Hadley, and it is best to be ready for the worst.’ He patted my hand. ‘Preparations must be made, my dear.’ His own hands were small; little fingers precisely articulated, nails pared into white half-moons.
I thought of a gull I had once seen at the seaside; the bird, very alone on a rock, leaned, almost staggering, into a shrieking wind, perhaps gasping with it, gasping as I did now. Dear God. He will die. George will die.
The doctor picked up his cup.
But I knew this. I wondered at my capacity still to startle so at what was very evident now. Mr Hadley would die. My husband was dying.
‘His affairs should be put in order—his legal man will see to that,’ Doctor McGuiness said, and smiled seriously, as an undertaker might, with a ponderous nod as his statement of sympathy; the skin at his eyes gathered and fanned, and yet he did not seem to look at me. He wore his disdain for women like a cloak, I fancied, cast over that which he wore to display the rest of his emotions, tastes, and distastes. I amused myself a moment by imagining his many cloaks, his wardrobe of attitudes and beliefs. I tipped my own head to the side a little before bowing it again.
I considered myself and Mr Hadley. I searched about for some sense of loss—for some reflection of the loneliness and rush of cold after the death of my mama; of that anguish, wilder and more chaotic than grief, when my papa had fallen from his horse, struck his head, and died. The breeze puffed at his thinning hair as his eyes stared sightless at the sky.
I had been surprised—deep in a still, quiet corner of my mind—that my grief for my father should be so powerful, as if I were shaken in the grip of a huge, choleric fist. So many hours spent clinging to Sobriety’s hand, my maid (truly my only friend) crooning to me as if I were a child, until I settled, finally, into a near-silent contemplation of everything—daily events and all the domestic comings and goings—as if I were at one remove, standing watchful, perhaps, on the other side of glass.
Much later, I watched Sobriety’s own slide into misery, herself sapped of joy after the cholera had taken her elder sister, her Hope. The loss of love can leave a person folded, packed into a tight, arms-wrapped parcel, rocking with the pain, the repetition of movement mesmerizing, almost liturgical. There was my Sobriety alone with all of this; for no matter how bright the sunshine casting its lace-
dappled light, or how crowded the room, it was as if she were
abandoned alone in a darkened place, steeped in grief left uncomforted by her family’s Methodism and its many dictates on sin, by the ungentleness of her father’s lay-preaching.
‘For Hope,’ Sobriety whispered through her weeping, ‘was not a sinner and had not deserved to be denied her life.’
‘Of course not, of course not.’ I held Sobriety and rocked with her. ‘Of course not.’
Unhearing, Sobriety twisted like a tortured thing between the memory of her father, that farmer, that thundering lay-preacher, and her uncle. The latter’s rare visits shone like relief, I gathered, when he would argue from the depths of his Jacobin zeal that men must believe in their rights, and that the real sin lay with a world based upon injustice and inherited power.
See them, I thought, leaning forward on their elbows at the table, silent with the frustration of their endless disputation, staring each with an equal, messianic gleam.
‘How did you get your name?’ I asked, curious, when Sobriety’s tumult at last began to quieten.
‘My mother,’ she said, ‘when expecting my birth, was inspired at one of my father’s sermons about the godliness of steadiness and self-discipline, as well as the denial of indulgence.’ Sobriety patted back a lock of hair that had come loose. ‘And my father approved her choice.’ Sobriety’s mother had thereupon felt her first pains and the baby arrived soon after to take up her name. ‘It was seen as a sign, that I should be named so.’ Sobriety’s smile was wan and tired, though she seemed to take some strength from the telling of family stories. Hope, she related, had been given the work of carrying the baby for her busy mother, singing to her, changing her soiled wrappings, and teaching the little girl as she grew the prayers that all Mullins children should know.
Before Hope’s sad removal from this world, Sobriety and I had spent comfortable hours together exchanging tales of family.
Parades of dour farmers and craftsmen; the uncle with his sailor’s rolling gait and well-fired Jacobinism; wives of a firm religion and one more given to soothsaying and cards (and condemned thereby for so casting away her grace in God’s eyes); all passed through my morning room like ghosts on an animated visitation. I could see, as if I had been there, the yellowing message
nailed to the smoked mantel in the dark farm kitchen: ‘The Lord God knows ALL.’ Sobriety
repeated the names of her sisters—Hope, Faith, Charity, Modesty, and Temperance (‘Has there not been a repetition there?’ I could not help but ask, but Sobriety looked away rather than return the smile)—as well as those of her brothers, Simon and Peter.
But Hope fell to the cholera, and Sobriety’s memories set themselves against each other and exhausted her so that, day after day with my arm around her, she would end with a whispered: ‘Hope did not deserve this. How can the world be without Hope?’ And I would kiss her forehead.
It was right, if odd, to say, ‘Hope will always be with you,’ to which Sobriety nodded her head several times and replied, ‘Yes, yes, yes. ’Tis so.’
Sobriety received long letters from home at this time, at first putting the homilies away, for she was too much in the midst of her grief to accept calls for acceptance. Still, eventually, she came occasionally to say that Hope had had a “holy dying” and was joined with the Lord, as her father had written to her; even though Sobriety spoke still as if she sat alone in shadow, too quiet and with her eyes cast down.
In my stolid Anglican way, I had until then dealt with the Methodist
outlandishness of Sobriety’s name by use of the usual appellation of “Mary.” My maid had, besides, been referred to thus in the original
letter of reference from her previous employer, Mrs Hayes, now long ago gone to India with her Colonel husband. But then it seemed to me, with the terrible tale of Hope’s dying now told, that Mary was no name for my maid and friend after all, and from that day I called Sobriety by her own name. Which—I confessed it to myself—best suited her in any case. My maid is a most sober person.
Mr Hadley, at this time of Sobriety’s greatest grief, was away a fortnight on business; off to Liverpool it had been. Perhaps it was to oversee the arrival of shipments from India (or so I thought, for he did not tell me much of his business except that he would be away). In any case, I had Sobriety into my morning room most evenings, and read to her sometimes, and sometimes Sobriety read to me. I watched Sobriety’s doughtiness stand up, despite her grief, and we learned to speak with each other as friends do.
What Empty Things Are These Page 3
