What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  No!

  I rested my hand on the slope of paper, stared at the clean steel of the nib with its wet tip of ink.

  I could not take in air as I listened to his breathing. I was intent on sound and its meaning, listening to Mr Hadley around and behind the tick of the clock, as if there were a small page of sound between the swing of the pendulum, to be read with a fine and concentrated scrutiny. Mr Hadley breathed on; he did not cough again.

  Does it sound as it did yesterday, today, half an hour ago?

  I was certain, at last, that his breathing sounded as it had done since his illness.

  I looked across at my husband. He stared, as ever, at a point an arm’s length before his face, his blue eyes innocent of knowledge or passion or power, even of this place and his position in it, his face collapsed in folds and no animation therein to give expression. Still, and unchanged. There was a trickle of saliva just beginning at the corner of his mouth, though Cissy had wiped there shortly before.

  My hand, I realized, was shaking, and I put the pen down. I was breathing again myself now, yet it came in gusts with the creasing of my own face, hot now, which I held in my two cool hands until everything calmed—my breathing, the moment of dry weeping, the tumult of panic.

  Forgive me.

  When all was steady within me, I pushed back the table, rose and went to his bedside. Perhaps the cough merely indicated thirst. I took up his glass and tipped a teaspoon of water between his lips, dabbing with the cloth at the thickened, whitish deposits moist in the creases at his mouth.

  I sat again, pulled the table to myself, took up my pen and dipped the nib in ink. I wrote:

  The great city is built upon lives in layers, and each life made up itself of layers, these lying in darkness, darker as each covering is pulled aside, like heavy curtains dirty with the dust and motes of generations…

  Part Three:

  In which Adelaide and Sobriety confront darkness and demons

  Chapter Eighteen

  . . . Suddenly a shadow flits, as someone runs for dear life away from us. In our eyes, this person may have done wrong. But if we have a soul, we might recognise that in some species of wrongdoing there is a wordless—and perhaps a little or very mad—reaching at happiness. How might, after all, the very wretched find joy? For happiness is something little understood down here, where all is lawless and without mercy. Here, happiness is a thing only ever glimpsed from afar, glowing from a warm-lit window illumining families and beloved babies, love and smiles. To us, this window forgets to tell the whole tale of disappointments and triumphs, of occasional quarrelling or affection. But from afar, all is perfect, happy, lit and glowing from within.

  Venturing forth in our carriage, as I so rarely do, I said to my companion that it was as if we were tourists in our own city. The noises grew of so many thousands of working lives, and strands of music laid upon each other until they had lost their melody and were like so many files rubbed against metal. The vast conduit that is the Thames reminded us with some force that Mr Bazelgette is now a-building his own mighty work, and that tourists such as ourselves might visit and wonder at it.

  And so we did, that windswept day, and also learned that the misery passed down through generations of the miserable can make its sad nest in the shelter provided by the great tunnel whose construction, in a testament to science and engineering ingenuity, is the very talk and marvel of our modern time…

  My pen continued for a time until my writing came to its finish. I wiped my nib, and read what I had written. It will suffice. Nay, it is quite good! Lord! What a relief I felt, so much that I stretched my arms out wide—as far as the seams might allow—as if I reached beyond myself. Which indeed I do.

  Mr Hadley lay against his pillows, the cloth beneath his chin and a shawl about his shoulders. Within it, he seemed smaller, somehow.

  In the street, Sobriety’s skirt bobbed, swung, bounced a little, purposeful and very busy. A short person will often look very busy, when walking. I gazed down from the window, arms tight folded, leaning against the curtain. A leaf, curled and dead, skittered to one side as Sobriety passed. Her shawl, not her very best but woollen and warm, was pulled tight around her shoulders, and her breath puffed in balls of mist from beneath her bonnet before she moved through and dispersed them into the air. I watched as she passed under the branches of the tree, where three or four brown leaves still clung, and then out of sight. When she had passed by, one of the leaves fell, slowly in arabesques, onto the space she had occupied.

  I counted to twenty, by which time the letter Sobriety held might have been posted, to lie for a short while in the dark before being collected to begin its journey to its publisher.

  Its publisher. There. It is done.

  I had chosen to send my written piece once again to The Cornhill Magazine, because it was very new and much spoken-of. Certainly, it had been spoken of by Mr Hadley, who had on occasion even argued out loud with it, as if it were a dissenting debater. Many new and interesting writers were published therein, some of whom were women. Women, I had to admit, who do not write of the weather. When Mr Hadley was away on business, I had settled happily to read episodes of Mr Thackeray’s “Framley Parsonage”, and thought he must be a fair-minded person to have been employed as editor of the magazine. Finding that this latest edition included a piece entitled “Unto This Last”, which was listed as Essay IV, or “Ad Valorum” under its general title, I searched about for and discovered the last three editions and settled to reading Essays I to III. I had not yet fathomed much of the argument, beyond that it was critical of what the author called the ‘political economy’, and I was intrigued as to who the author—given only as ‘anon’—could be.

  Altogether, what was most clear was that folk in journals did argue much and with each other in these pages, and that this perpetual argument represented so much of the country’s mind.

  There was risk, of course, in this public argumentation. Attention was attracted thereby; talk was, of course, engendered in parlours, and the writer (himself or herself) become at last a matter of discussion. I wonder if I do not take the risk—wilfully, even—of setting myself beyond the pale. I was struck, again or at least more distinctly, by the thought that I did so not just by writing so very publicly, but by seeking publication in The Cornhill Magazine itself.

  Yet Sobriety’s other errand for me was to purchase a simple writing book, a notebook, to serve as my own writing journal. In this I would hide notions meant to be private, or those I was not yet brave enough to declare in public, or ideas of which I was not yet entirely certain. It will be my thoughts’ hiding place, I decided.

  I watched the empty street. A dog entered my patch of pavement, thin and matted, with the bones of its pelvis evident and the skin there balding from illness or rubbing, but otherwise self-assured. Or perhaps this cur was so experienced with the world that it simply knew what to expect. The dog trotted from point to point, sniffed where it discovered emanations of significance, and moved on, its pelvis sawing up and down. The pavement was empty again, for the moment.

  Of a sudden, I was overcome by what I suppose was a kind of literary stage-fright. I brought the knuckles of one hand to my mouth and pressed. Lord. Perhaps I should have read it through just one more time. I let out a heavy breath. Sometimes anticipation is very like dread.

  I let the curtains drop back into place. The little table was set once again near the window, for the light and the dozen little distractions of the street, and held my coffee and folded journals. A letter,

  unopened as yet, rested upon the small pile, with Toby’s careful, childish loops on the envelope.

  At the other end of the room, where the light was dim, Mr Hadley lay shadowed, probably asleep. His eyes, at any rate, were closed.

  Lately, he had begun to emanate a light stench, which arose from the sores that bloomed on his back and legs where he l
ay against the bed. The doctor had sent his boy over with a salve, and this was applied daily, and the wounds checked closely, though there had been no sign of improvement so far as I could see.

  All was still after the energy that had been this morning’s complete change of bedding—a flurry that had become a controlled one, now that the household had converted to ritual all the needs of Mr Hadley as a comatose person. These rituals themselves were become enfolded within those of the house, and involved everyone save Cook and Mr Brent. While Albert held Mr Hadley in his arms, the domestic dance worked its concentrated way around Mr Hadley. There were turnings, removals, and replacements—of palliasse, overmattress, and underblanket, as well as the unfolding of well-starched sheets—and Mrs Staynes’ quick check (bent close as possible to the seams) for any sign of vermin. Finally, Mr Hadley was laid, long and loose, back down upon the bed and his arms tucked under the counterpane. This was followed by the settling, the patting-

  down, the carrying away of soiled piles, until the room was quiet and empty again, save for the regular dragging of his shallow breath and the meagre rise and fall of his chest, and the snapping of the fire in its hearth. Dust motes agitated for a while in a shaft of weak light from the window, until they, too, returned to a steady floating. Beyond the closed door, voices murmured across the landing as Mrs Staynes and Cissy heaved at another palliasse and overmattress, and changed the bedding in my room.

  I contemplated Toby’s letter, hesitated, and reached instead for The Illustrated London News. This I opened, tilted the whole with a rustle toward the light, and peered at the wearied, passionate faces; at the arms outstretched in praise of Garibaldi, hero, conqueror, disruptor, creator of a new world entering, in operatic triumph, the coastal harbour of Cape Di Europa, Naples. I lifted my head just a little as the front door downstairs thumped close behind a returning Sobriety, and then lowered my eyes again to the newspaper. Here was tumult and chaos that might speak itself in a foreign poetry, but never in these quiet streets of London. We were never so stirred, our blood not prone to flame. I could not imagine these near-operatic gestures here on Landsbury Street, where carts and carriages clip-clopped and creaked past our windows.

  This urgency is foreign to us. I turned to an engraving of the Battle of the Volturno, Garibaldi’s victory against the Bourbons. Such opera.

  It all brought to mind the time when I was a girl in my private cupboard under the stair, when I had come across Lord Byron’s The Siege of Corinth. The volume sat on a high shelf where, no doubt, it was hoped I would never venture—since civilised folk liked his poetry well enough but were bewildered at his sensual adventuring. I read it by candle, and remember still these lines:

  Many a vanished year and age,

  And tempest’s breath, and battle’s rage,

  Have swept o’er Corinth; yet she stands

  A fortress formed to Freedom’s hands.

  I let one page drop and reached for my cup. I looked for a long moment to where the brocades hung at the window, heavy and ready to be drawn against months of cold. The lace behind the weighty, figured material suggested light without struggle, with all sound filtered, calm and distant.

  In the shadowed room, one corner of Mr Hadley’s mirror, tilted in its polished mahogany stand, caught and reflected the light in a dulled gleam, like pewter. When he dies, I suppose we shall drape his mirror in black. I contemplated my husband. As well as all the other mirrors in the house; as if we cast a shroud over the household life. Should we?

  I shook my head to clear it, took a breath, and reached at last for Toby’s letter.

  Toby’s uprights spread across a very few lines. He had never chattered much to his mother, by spoken or by written word. He began ‘Dear Mama,’ and my mind could see the schoolmaster—cousin, surely, to a dark and angular stick insect whose illustration had appalled me once years ago—with hands clasped behind his back, bent over each boy in turn as they wrote at their desks. The schoolmaster would ensure, by this close scrutiny, the proper level of filial fondness:

  …I shall be home for three days of the Michaelmas holiday, beginning Friday, to visit and pay my respects to Papa. Phillip Miller’s Mama and Papa have kindly invited me to stay for the remainder of the holiday, and there was no time to enquire of you, so that I said I was certain you would be pleased for me to go, since things will be at sixes and sevens, as Papa needs so much care now…

  There was a break here—an overlarge space, as if Toby lifted his head to smile at his friend Phillip.

  They live in Richmond. Phillip has a pony he wishes me to see.

  I glanced again at the window, feeling humiliation and a whiff of outrage at the thought that Toby might make such arrangements without consultation with his mother, whereas he would never have presumed to do so without his father’s permission. Then I thought, Friday?

  Outside Mr Hadley’s bedroom door, Cissy thump-hopped down another tread of stair as she rubbed polish into the banister. Next would come the polishing of brassware, and doorknocker, as well as other sundry items and fixtures. These were Cissy’s Thursday duties.

  Friday is tomorrow! I had forgotten the Michaelmas holiday.

  I was uncertain as to whether to claim a hurt disappointment or an abiding relief that Toby would stay but a short time . . . regardless, other emotions shrilled with criticism of this unnatural mother.

  I had forgotten.

  How could I forget?

  I folded Toby’s letter and replaced it in its envelope. Rising from my chair, I opened the door and called through to Cissy about the airing of Toby’s room.

  By luncheon, the heavy hush of the dining room and the cold had joined to became one living thing, almost, and impossible to ignore. Fingers stiffened and there was a suggestion of frost with every breath. There was a palpable damp. I lifted the silver spoon to my mouth. The soup was already tepid in its shallow bowl. The rich carpet in this grand dining room was become a sponge subject to a subtle rot. It smelled thickly of a frosty yet foetid moisture, more and more pungent as the season progressed to chill. The fireplace—since it was hardly worth preparing a fire for the sake of luncheon—sat empty, its blacking innocent of comfort. The fire in this room had, in any case, always proved ineffective.

  Sobriety sat next to me at table, as had become the habit since Mr Hadley’s illness. She had not removed her shawl upon her return from the post, and was swathed in it as she, too, dipped her head toward her raised spoon.

  We would be a deal happier in the kitchen.

  I rolled my eyes at myself. How my standards fall!

  The meal was brief. Sobriety and I were quick afterward—almost running, with short, pattering steps—to the morning room, its own fire and its clean air. (How is one side of this house damper than the other? I wondered, my teeth clamped together against the chattering.) The morning room was somewhat transformed not just by haberdashery (now stacked folded on the windowsill) but also, and still, by its newest tenant, the sewing machine, which took up a deal of space. And, in the absence of any other notions as to where it might dwell, it seemed likely the machine would inhabit the room for some time. The footstool had been drawn up to this iron contraption as if the two were a pair. Once again, it was clear how awkward the disposal of this machine had proved—there was nowhere here where one was not obliged to find the space to walk around it.

  We two women went straight (but for the negotiating of the sewing machine) to the hearth and held white-gloved fingers to the flames there, each silent until the heat began to be felt and the relaxing of tension allowed for the unclenching of teeth. After some minutes, Sobriety sighed and began to unwind her shawl. She moved away and sat at her accustomed end of the settee, closing and moving aside the copy of The Englishwomen’s Domestic Magazine with its plates of the latest fashions. She tipped her head back, her eyes closed a moment, before lifting it to examine the lacework she intended to attach more
firmly to my engageante.

  I laughed. ‘I fancy we are not the privileged, when it is we who are forced to eat in such a torture chamber!’

  Sobriety might have answered but for the rapping of the knocker at that moment, and so she and I waited, instead, while Cissy thumped her way down to the front door, paused, and then walked more slowly, and with less noise (blessedly), to the morning room door. She knocked and said that my brother, Mr Broom—‘That is, Mr Harry Broom,’—was come to visit, as he stepped through himself and Cissy was obliged to move, sidestepping in her hurry, out of his way.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I announce the birth of my latest, a girl, this very morning!’ Harry filled the room with this—for the sweep of his arm was meant as drama and the flap of his frock coat, evidently, to be reminiscent of a pantomime magician. His waist was so expanded these days as to threaten the buttons of his waistcoat. It seemed the space where he stood was suddenly all his own, and filled with his presence over and above all else, where a moment ago it had been as benign—as calm, as enfolding—as home.

  I began to exclaim at the good news, as one does, though I knew (while I did not mention) that my sister-in-law must be reduced by this birth to an extreme fragility. This was her eighth lying-in and she had never been especially robust. For many years now, she had always seemed, by turns, swelling up or bearing a red-faced child wrapped in laces and shawls from settee to settee. Harry was, I often felt (perhaps unkindly) less interested in the diminution of his wife’s strength—nay, her very self!—than in keeping count of his children, particularly of his boys.

  Moving further into the room, Harry dropped his arm and wagged his head—as he had always done to his younger sister, and as he had also done, I recalled, to a succession of family puppies.