The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  Eustace took his hat off and shook the rain from it. He stepped inside.

  He found Julie early on. Or rather, he looked for her. He had gone a long time without such comforts.

  It was not that there had never been women, far from that. In the early years especially, when Mr Crowe had shown him Paris first, then Granada and Tangier, Buenos Aires and St Petersburg – in those days, it had gone unquestioned. He had approached them all – the garlanded parlourmaids, the silent duennas – with the same simple adoration. He had been young enough still to shed himself entirely before those creaking cots, to feel nothing but that unmeditated heat.

  Later, though, his duties had grown solitary. In those long years at the house, there had been time enough to keep company with the old dreams. In the end, there had been nothing else. It had been years.

  He had visited Mrs Fraser’s house twice before, and had told himself that he would not return. He was sickened by it, by how cold their skin was to the touch. A fire was kept lighted only in the room downstairs, the one they referred to as the salon. In the warren of bedrooms, there was softness without comfort. Satin cushions were piled on the raw sheets and draughts crept from every crack.

  She undid herself briskly, the girl who came to him first, and set impatiently about him with her fingers. Her knuckles were raw, as if she had scrubbed them with carbolic soap, and the flesh between her breasts was pale, stippled by the chill. He could hear a soft, clotted rattle when she breathed. Eustace pushed her hand away and excused himself. He had taken too much to drink, he said, and felt unwell.

  It was true enough. He was sickened, and yet the need persisted in him, a particular need that could not be met by the girls he had been shown. It was a matter of speaking frankly to Mrs Fraser, of setting out the special nature of the requirement. He stayed late at the Swan, on the night he went back. He had not made himself senseless, but he had drunk more than enough. When he spoke, at least, he did not listen in revulsion to his own voice. He imagined, afterwards, that he remembered how she had looked at him, as he spoke to her of certain preferences, as he wondered if there might be someone of quite that description. But he had avoided her eyes, for all the time that he talked. He had stared at his hat, which he had placed on his knees, or he had closed his eyes. With his eyes closed, it was easier to remember.

  Mrs Fraser rose and asked him if he would care for something while he waited. There was someone, she said, who might fit the bill, with a little attention to her hair, with certain other refinements. It was not uncommon, she assured him. Gentlemen often expressed a fondness for girls of a certain appearance, though most were not quite so particular in their requirements. There was someone he had known, perhaps, and he wished to be reminded of her. That too happened often enough, but he must take care not to mistake one thing for the other. The girl would come to him when she could, but he must not think of her as especially beholden to him. When he was not here, she would earn her keep as before.

  An hour passed, perhaps even longer. Eustace was drowsy from the whisky, and had dozed off when Mrs Fraser returned. She showed him to another room on an upper floor. He would find it more comfortable, perhaps. A fire had been set, since he seemed to feel the cold so keenly, but he would appreciate that such luxuries could hardly be provided at no cost.

  The room, when he entered, had been lit with candles. The gentler light, he supposed, was to maintain the illusion, to soften the infelicities of resemblance. Other comforts had been provided, and some effort had been made in the matter of clothing. A quilt of some kind had been found, and had been turned down as if by an attentive chambermaid. The gown was far less fine, of course, than the one he remembered, and the ribboned straw hat did not even approximate his description.

  But the girl herself – what Eustace felt was like the moment of dislocating levity when you are standing below decks and find that your ship is underway, when the permanence of the world is briefly suspended. She was not identical, of course. One girl could not be the miraculous twin of another, of a girl who was long dead and whose face, at last, he might remember less intimately than he could bear to admit.

  There was a consonance, certainly, in the line and set of the features; they had the affinity of cousins, if not of sisters, and her skin had the same peculiar quality of tenderness. But the eyes – the eyes transfixed him just as hers had done that first day on the water. They were charged with the same alertness, with the proximity of laughter. They were wide and soft-lashed, almost extravagantly lucent. Disbelievingly, he brushed her cheek with his fingertips.

  ‘Here now,’ she said. ‘You’ll have me going in a minute. I cry for nothing, I do.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Eustace. ‘You have seen many old fools like me, I suppose, with their lost loves. You must think us worse than the rest.’

  ‘I ain’t been here for long, but I’ve seen a lot worse than you. You must have loved her something awful.’

  ‘I loved her. Or I wanted to, but— something awful, yes. Something awful.’

  ‘What was her name, then? I suppose you’ll want to call me by her name.’

  Eustace could not say it, could not speak at all. He lowered himself slowly to the floor and laid his head in her lap.

  ‘Here now,’ she said again. ‘It can’t be as bad as all that. Hush now. Shall I tell you my name, then?’

  ‘Please,’ he said at last.

  ‘Julie,’ she said. ‘My name is Julie.’

  Eustace did not look for the thin man when he left the Swan. It was late, long after midnight, and he had taken more whisky than he had intended. He could not go to her, to Julie, until he had done as Mrs Fraser asked, so he had tried to put himself beyond the reach of even that longing. He had asked Viking for the bottle and had emptied it steadily, in even and pleasureless doses, but the peace he sought would not come to him. What he wanted could not be darkened by stupor.

  He walked to Mrs Fraser’s house; he could not make himself do otherwise. Even if he could not go in, she could not prevent him from passing the door. The house was on one of the better streets, not far from the guildhall. It was handsome and well kept, indistinguishable from the doctor’s surgery next door with its brass plaque and gleaming black railings.

  The light was on in the room at the top of the house. It was the smallest of the bedrooms, and was always given to the newest girl. She would be there – he could not help but imagine it – waiting or not waiting. No fire would be lit tonight, and it would be as cold as the other rooms had been. He gripped the railings and hung his head. He must not mistake one thing for the other.

  Eustace turned away from the silent house.

  Silk must be touched, above all. His mother had taught him this, and the lesson had stayed with him. There were other ways to tell the good from the bad, but touch was the most important. You looked for softness, of course, but softness of a quite particular kind. Even inferior silks were hardly rough to the touch, but the texture of the finest could not be mistaken. The surest way was to touch the fabric from beneath.

  ‘Lay it out, please,’ Eustace said.

  He had spent only three nights with Julie when he ordered the fabrics. Even in that time, they had talked for longer than he had with any woman he had known. She would tell him nothing of her own life – Mrs Fraser forbade it – but she asked him things that no one had. Was he kind to his little sister, before she went, or did he tease her? Had he tried to find his mam’s people, who sounded so fine? What did they wear in those days, young ladies going up to Covent Garden?

  The draper set the bolt on the counter and pulled a yard or so free. Eustace slid his left arm beneath it, choosing a place a few inches from the roll. Keeping his forearm straight, he raised it clear of the bench, so that the silk spilled from it evenly. Very gently, he ran the fingertips of his right hand along its underside, taking care to keep them flush with the weave, exerting only the faintest upward pressure.

  ‘You’ll find it’s top-drawer, sir,’ the d
raper said. ‘Siamese mulberry silk, just like you ordered. The chap we deal with in London, he got it in special.’

  You allowed it to pass freely over the pads of the fingers. Its movement must be frictionless and sinuous, the delicacy of the fibres unchanging even over great lengths. The most desirable silks were woven from a single, continuous strand, the unravelled interior of the silkworm’s cocoon. Such threads could be a thousand yards long, and without the slightest defect in their surfaces.

  ‘It is acceptable,’ Eustace said. ‘But barely.’

  ‘Acceptable? Sir, I’ll have you know—’

  ‘See here.’ Eustace turned the fabric over and held it to the light. ‘That unevenness in the way it reflects the light? The weave is imperfect, and there is some slight flossing. Here, do you see? And again here.’

  Julie had asked him about children too. He looked old enough to have had two or three, she said, but he needn’t tell her what they were called. He had made light of that, or tried to. Did he look old enough only for children, and not for grandchildren?

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ the draper said. ‘Know a lot about this sort of thing, do you?’

  Eustace regarded him in silence for a moment. ‘If my requirement for these items were not so urgent, I would send this back. As it is, it must be tolerated. How soon will I have the finished garments?’

  ‘Well, we are doing our best, sir, but it’s them old-fashioned designs. We had to get a dressmaker in who had the patterns from her mother’s time. Then there’s that lace you were so particular about, which ain’t come in yet from— where was it?’

  ‘Brussels. How long?’

  ‘Three weeks, sir, with a fair wind.’

  ‘You have a fortnight,’ Eustace said. ‘And I expect a discount of at least ten per cent on this silk.’

  She had laughed when he told her he would show her, when he said that the clothes would have suited her. She had laughed, but there was no unkindness in it. She would look like Lady Windermere, she said. Like Lady Windermere gone dotty, still getting done up the same way after all these years, going off to tea at the Ritz.

  He had not known that brightness either, when a woman laughs as you make love. It was like unclasping a locket to find that it held sunlight.

  Eustace found himself at the head of the coal quay, though he had wandered there with no particular destination in mind. He had been conscious of no intention, as he walked, other than a wish to be away from the better-lit streets, a wish to go unseen. The quay had fallen into dereliction when the trains came. No boats tied up there now, and by day it was entirely deserted. At night, it was no more welcoming. It was open to the water, the wind coming harsh and untempered from the North Sea. The streetlights were indifferently maintained, and what little light there was came from the doorways of abandoned warehouses, some without even their doors, that at night were put to other uses.

  Eustace kept close to the wall as he picked his way among the filthy cobbles. The rain had thickened now to a sleet that clawed at his face and neck. Even in this weather, there were those who offered their comforts unsheltered. One woman tottered towards him from the shadow of a blank doorway. A child watched her from the step, a tin cup in her frail fingers. The woman wore what had once been a fur coat, though it lacked an entire arm and was matted and filthy almost beyond recognition. She opened the coat to uncover a sodden nightgown, its bodice torn almost to her belly. From this gape, she plucked the famished skin of her breast, then grasped at his sleeve to tug him towards her.

  ‘Josie’s got something for you, darling. Come see what Josie’s got for you.’

  He spun free of her grip and hurried on, keeping himself well clear now of the alleys and doorways that he passed. The disused warehouses gave way, after a little distance, to a stretch of waste ground that was intermittently hidden by hoarding. In the glimpses that came to him through the gaps, Eustace saw scattered clutches of men, some gathered around rough bonfires. One such fire had been set beneath an archway that was the only standing remnant of a warehouse vault. Here, another gang had set dogs to fighting, and one man stood in silhouette at the periphery of the fray. He held his own beast on the taut radius of its leash, bawling in delight or disgust at the savagery closer to the fire.

  Beyond the waste ground stood a squat terrace of what might once have been shipping offices. Their lower windows were boarded up, but some of those above glowed dimly through the rough canvas that had been stretched in place of glass. Their doorways, like those of the warehouses, stood open to the quay. In the first of these, a heavyset man in a labourer’s jacket had taken hold of some unwanted patron. The smaller man squirmed from his grasp and leaned against the door jamb, where he vomited explosively against an interior wall. The doorman howled an obscenity and dragged him out onto the cobbles, where he kicked him until he no longer moved.

  The man standing guard at the next door slammed it shut when he saw Eustace approach. He had been made wary, perhaps, by the disturbance outside the neighbouring premises, or admitted men according to some code that Eustace could not guess at. He walked on, passing two houses that were entirely derelict, their doors boarded as well as their windows. Beyond these was the last lighted door of the terrace, a house that stood almost at the end of the quay itself.

  At this doorway, no one stood guard – no one, at least, who could be seen from outside. As he drew near it he caught sight of the child again, slipping from shadows and disappearing inside. It was her, he felt sure; it was the beggar girl he had seen huddled behind the old whore, though he could not fathom how she had crept past him unseen.

  Eustace approached the house cautiously, with no clear intention that he could name. He was deeply tired, he realised. It had worked at him, beneath the ebbing warmth of the whisky. It had carried half of him away. In the hallway – it seemed almost homely, in such a desolate place as this – a light bulb burned beneath a pinkish shade, and paper of an ancient floral pattern adhered in places to the walls. He leaned in and knocked on the open door. The courtesy was faintly absurd, but he was not inclined to provoke anyone by his presumption. He counted out a minute in silence, then knocked again.

  This time, when no one came, he crossed the threshold.

  Julie loved the boxes in which the clothes were packed. They were powder blue, and carefully secured with ribbons of ivory-coloured satin. Even these he had ordered specially, taking care that the colours complemented those of the items within.

  ‘Ain’t they just the most beautiful things?’ she said. ‘That’s real satin, that is, even on the little hatbox.’

  ‘I was afraid you might think all this a little off-putting.’

  ‘Well, you won’t catch me wearing them to the pictures. Still, though – do you think I could keep just the little one? The box, I mean. I wasn’t saying the clothes, because God only knows what they’re like.’

  ‘They were made for you,’ Eustace said.

  ‘She’ll kill me for asking,’ said Julie. ‘But the little one, I can hide that in the locker. She gives us a little locker, one each, even though she probably has the key.’

  ‘They are yours, all of them, if you care to keep them. They were made for you, though I’m sure it does me no good to confess such a thing. I cannot think how I must appear to you.’

  She looked up from the boxes and drew him towards her, narrowing her eyes as if in appraisal. Her fingertips climbed his back, making an accounting of its muscles. ‘You keep saying that. Maybe you don’t look as bad as you think,’ she said. ‘You scrub up all right, though you ain’t been looking after yourself.’

  Reaching his neck, she pulled his face towards hers. ‘And these suits of yours. Some of the girls don’t like all that, but I do. A man who looks serious, like he has an important job.’

  Eustace averted his face. ‘A man who has nothing now. A man who failed.’

  ‘Here now.’

  Julie took his chin between finger and thumb. She pressed herself to him, applying the so
ftness of her midsection until she found his heat, his shape. ‘Here now,’ she said again. ‘I have a job for you, and you ain’t failed at that yet.’

  When she kissed him, he no longer thought of the light on the river. What he felt was no longer old.

  He would go upstairs first. He had reasoned it out, or thought he had. It had worn him away, this weariness, had left him diminished. He was no longer sure of himself. He would climb the stairs first, though the upper part of the house was dark and soundless. The child was light on her feet; if he were to look in the lower rooms first, she might easily slip downstairs again, and out onto the quay. She would go back to the woman then, or to whatever brute had power over them both. She would be put to some use, given scant protection in return. He could not think of it.

  The stairs were skewed, and grew yielding and unsound as he neared the landing. The last step but one was missing entirely. He sought it with his foot and staggered, finding only a cold vacancy. He thrust his arm out for the post at the head of the banister, and for a time he could go no further. He grasped the post and closed his eyes, persuading himself of his own stillness.

  I am not myself.

  It was the damp, no doubt, that had rotted the timber. He had caught the odour when he came in, a fetor that thickened as he ascended. The lower rooms were lit, at least, and had not been entirely abandoned. They were used by squatters, perhaps, who set fires when they had the fuel. The rest of the house might have gone unwarmed for years.

  Eustace edged slowly along the unlit landing. He could give himself no reason for going on, knowing that half its floorboards might be rotten. He could not account for it. At the Estate, he had declared the tower unsafe for much less. He knew better, or he had once. He thought of himself, in his office near the kitchens, of the ordered desk, the polished orrery. The planets in their proper circuits.