by Janet Todd
It was he who suggested she acquire new clothes now they were in a city. He didn’t choose them as another man had done, or lovingly finger the feminine material, but he took her where the young maid at their inn knew there were clothes bespoke for someone else and not collected. She could have them quickly altered to fit her. He paid for what she wanted.
Back at the inn the same maid helped her make her short hair passably like a modern woman’s.
Then, dressed in new light jacket and skirt, her turquois-coloured one beyond cleaning or repair after serving as pillow and sunshade during the long weary miles, her hair surmounted by a clean trim cap, she was ready to visit Caroline and – watch the ‘dying scene’.
The phrase came unbidden to her befuddled mind. What could be happening? She could no longer distinguish fictive from real, life from a play, or indeed waking from dreaming.
One thing had taken hold in her mind. Aksel Stamer had come for Caroline. Why else had he grown gentler to her now they were in Paris?
She’d worked some of it out. He’d heard the name Ann St Clair in Palazzo Grimani when he – for it was he – stood too close as she picked up the letter from ‘A Friend’. Ever after in Venice he’d been haunting her, ready for the moment to make himself known. On the journey he’d looked at her papers, some with her unmarried name. He must have used this name to acquire – somehow – the right documents for France. Her head ached and she could think no further.
She must go to Caroline and see what Aksel Stamer made of her – and she of him.
He was with her as she walked the last paces to the address in Le Marais given by the ‘Friend’. He too had bought new clothes and looked smart in contrasting coloured waistcoat and jacket and new linen. He was as at home in this urban place as thoroughly as he’d been in his worn leather jacket on the sand dunes and in the woods of Sardinia.
It was a street on its way down, hotels turned into modest if not quite impoverished apartments.
They arrived at the right number. The shutters were closed on the first floor, green shutters with flaking paint. It was the kind of detail Ann saw while failing to take in the whole.
She swayed: was the idea of seeing Caroline after all these years so very moving? She was surprised. Aksel Stamer gave her his arm to steady her. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘it need not be frightening. You are a brave woman.’
She had a pocket dangling from her belt. He raised it and put in it a fat pouch. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘I will leave you now. You are home, or nearly home. God bless you.’
She didn’t at once understand his words. Then they struck her. Struck her a blow on her face. As shocking as the fist she so well remembered.
‘You . . . you are going? What will become of me?’
‘Don’t become, Ann, just be.’ He kissed her lightly on the cheek, turned and left, walking briskly back down the street.
She was so surprised she had to steady herself against the door, the dizziness, the sick feeling expanding. Sweat was falling from her brow although the day was cool. She put her hand to her face and touched it, almost expecting to find a bruise beginning. She felt only heat and damp.
The kind delicate kiss, the pouch of money, the departure before he’d seen Caroline, before she’d shown her gratitude, before they could talk about everything, above all his going, his going. What could it all mean?
She pulled herself together as far as she could and tried to stop swaying. Then she jerked an iron ring by the door. A bell clanged deep inside.
Silence.
At last she heard footsteps.
She waited.
An old woman with careworn brown complexion and deep-set eyes came to the door. Her neat cap was laced and clean white, so good for a maid. Ann was about to introduce herself when the woman spoke without greeting or smile.
‘So you are come, Mademoiselle. At last. She has been waiting long.’
Caroline was alive then and attended, it seemed, by a very creditable if discourteous servant.
The pounding in her head increased and again she had to steady herself against the wall as she mounted the stairs. Her hesitation made the maid look back at her. Did the woman assume she was upset? She’d crossed all of Europe for this moment. Perhaps she was.
‘Bien,’ said the maid. ‘Follow.’
They mounted one flight, passed the room with the closed green shutters, and went on up the second flight to a bedchamber.
It was dimly lit: pink curtains covered the windows towards the street and kept out the sun. Framed sketches of flowers and ferns were on the wall. The kind of thing Caroline used to draw in Putney while sitting on cushions and being waited on by Martha.
The room smelled of decay, of bodily effluent, not too intense but not quite masked by a scent of some kind of flower, lilies she thought, with perhaps lavender in the mix. It conjured up the lily and lavender and rose from another era. That body. Odour was a strong mnemonic.
The bed was large and whatever was in it lay to one side, its outlines softened by the white coverlet. A woman, a corpse? Not the latter for there was loud, hitched breathing coming from it. There was hardly any flesh to see between a frilled white cap and high tied collar. No sign of that false red hair Caroline used to wear.
One arm lay outside the coverlet on the bed with the sleeve pulled up. Had it clutched at the bedclothes or the face, crumpling the sleeve as it did so? It must have gone limp and been left unattended.
On the table were phials and gallipots. Accoutrements and signs of the dying person? Everything said so; yet Ann would not believe for, if this were her mother, she would not die. The mantelpiece in the Putney house had been cluttered with medicine bottles, very pretty with their coloured mixtures young Ann used to think, but smelly too. Concoctions for a weak heart and delicate nerves. Sometimes they were frightening for they grew things inside as if living creatures were trying to escape. Away in her bedchamber she’d imagine the dangling limbs easing out the cork, floating free, massing and slithering up the stairs – but by then she’d let out a scream and Caroline would shout, ‘Quiet, girl, I must have my sleep.’
‘Your daughter,’ said the servant to the thing in the bed, ‘your daughter has come.’ She retreated, leaving Ann in the room.
She felt so strange, so dizzy, she simply couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. She gazed at the body. Slowly it became an old, old woman.
It was not, could not be, Caroline. Yet the medicines, so common from her childhood days, and the servant’s words, declared it surely was. Her heart staggered. She was hot. A white flame zigzagged round her head. Was she about to faint? She bit her lip and crushed her nails into her palms.
The woman was so much older than she’d ever imagined. How old was she? Caroline had been an elderly mother but this person was extreme, old enough for the flesh to be decaying before death. It sagged from the shrivelled arm like the tattered remnant of a flag on a wooden pole. The hand was ridged and splotched.
Time is short, said Caroline. But of course she said nothing of the sort. Too pithy.
I doubt it, replied Ann. Did she speak? Was either of them talking?
The lips were dry, her own lips. Had she said anything? It is too much of a coincidence, my being here and you dying.
What was the matter with her? With them both? No one had spoken at all.
‘Caroline?’ she said, her voice sounding hoarse and distant.
The face twitched and eyes opened just a little under the frilled cap, no longer dirty green but yellow. They slowly closed again.
She had no wish for memories and yet they came. The last time with Caroline, the real one, not this thing. ‘You are hard,’ she’d said.
Ann saw the scrawny old hand lift up from the coverlet and tug at the rolled cream ribbon at the neck of the nightgown. Her mother’s hands had always been veined – but she’d never imagined them turning into these tortured claws.
The mouth from the bed opened and a phlegmy, gurgling sound emerged
from layers of thickened liquid. No word came.
Then there was Robert hanging and twisting in this sombre room against the polished wooden bed and little table with its spindly curved legs. Ann shook her head to expel the sight. She was here, in this place without him. It smelled of effluent and the sickly lily; that was all that laid one scene over the other.
She looked again at the face, then the hand. Dying, yes. Perhaps after all. And if so, if this were indeed the dying scene, it would be long. There was no hurry.
A glass jar was descending over her, cutting her off from everything without: this woman, if woman she still was, and this suffocating room. The sides reflected herself. She swung in the jar with that familiar body which was this body too. Swung in it like the foetus in the Conte’s studio in Palazzo Savelli, twisting slowly in its pickling element – or the trapped and growing thing in Caroline’s medicine bottles. All of them both living and yet too dead to struggle out.
Was all this confused emotion just to fend off a dying woman? She litanised to herself, A mother is dying, my mother is dying.
The stern maid came in and removed thick strands of sputum from Caroline’s chin. They had glistened even in the dim pink light but till now Ann hadn’t noticed.
It was the epitome of old age, its horror and disintegration – or rather its failure to disintegrate fast enough so that the living need not see it and could go on their way in ignorance. Why was the thing still alive? Ann felt only the horror of decay, no pity.
The yellow eyes opened again, stayed open this time, seeing or unseeing? Ann couldn’t know.
She should lean over and kiss the wizened cheek like a daughter, like girls did in her stories when faced with the dying stepmother they must forgive on the final page. But she couldn’t do it.
‘Caroline, I have come. I have come from Venice.’
The mouth moved a little. But not to say words. Instead it gasped. Did it want water? But she couldn’t see how such a body could swallow. Indeed she didn’t really believe in any live thing under the white coverlet, for, though the mouth and eyes moved, and once the hand, everything else was still. If those eyes hadn’t opened and the rasping sound weren’t emerging from the mouth, she would have thought all of it now quite dead.
Then the claw hand clutched at the sheet.
The servant was in the room, pushing Ann aside. She moistened a piece of cotton with vinegar and held it to the lips, then withdrew it so that they glimmered like thin pieces of lard. There was more thick liquid too, so the body could still create. The eyes swivelled towards Ann, then returned and closed.
The servant left the room as quietly as she’d come. Or perhaps she waited in the shadows, ready to help her mistress since the daughter could or would not. Ann didn’t turn her aching head to see.
There was silence again as she stood, victim to such oscillating feelings from hate of this thing, to a new painful compassion for all crumbling bodies; from relief that her own unsatisfactory self, though ageing, was not like this, to horror that she too would be there, that she too would and could become such a foul thing. It was not her flesh; it would be her flesh.
Was she as self-obsessed as Caroline that such thoughts swam into her head? She had no urge to weep but a great one to howl at such desolation. There was no Robert for her to humour, no Aksel Stamer to protect her. Only herself and her future alone in a stuffy room turning slowly from Ann into Caroline.
The eyes were now more human, and, yes, she saw they were becoming Caroline’s, just a tinge of murky green in the yellow. But the room was pinkly hazily dim, she may have imagined it.
With the partial recognition came all the old emotions.
She stared at her mother. What would she say? Would she speak of Gilbert, now in this slow, extreme moment? Surely, for so much of their life had been around this man, his memory, his legacy – it was his money and his spirit that had kept them going all those years in Putney, so unhappily conjoined.
Ann would stop her if she started to speak his words again: she couldn’t bear that.
‘Gilbert, my father,’ she said.
A flaccid snort, then a low, tremulous whisper: ‘You’re no child of his.’
She was too surprised to respond. What could the woman mean? It was an absurd confession made for effect. Had she imagined it? Was it a line from one of her novels?
‘Then whose, then what?’ she said.
There was no reply. It was obviously a lie. There was no more reason for truth on a deathbed than anywhere else.
Why would there be? Caroline didn’t believe in a last judgement; there was no crucifix in the room, she’d not changed. Why give a lie to a life by confounding it with a final truth?
She wished she could speak to Aksel Stamer. But he’d gone, defeated perhaps by what he feared to see of Caroline. His long travels thwarted at the end.
Her head was thumping and banging and her knees and ankles growing weak. A result of all that walking on Sardinian sand dunes, the one ankle never quite right despite his kindness. She steadied herself on a bedpost.
The breath from the bed grew noisy again. If there were to be confessions, she wanted to mention Robert, for surely she’d killed him in one way or another. She’d run right across Europe to avoid his avengers. Caroline would like to hear that.
The thin slippery lips moved. Was there to be a surprise, a forgiveness, an absolution, even a benediction? Ann swallowed her revulsion and put her ear closer to the face, keeping her eyes averted.
She could make out nothing of the words at first. But Caroline was trying to express something.
‘What are you saying?’
The lips moved and a thin sound emerged through the phlegm.
With difficulty she made out some syllables.
‘Did you see her?’ whispered the voice.
Ann was puzzled. She was sure this was what had been said.
But why? She moved away, then held her breath. Sweat was pouring from her forehead, running into her eyebrows; yet it could not be so very hot in the room. There was only a low fire gently hissing in the grate.
She brought her ear closer again. ‘Who? Who do you mean, Caroline? Mother?’ She used the word after some hesitation. She was assuredly her child. Then she waited.
‘The Princess in Venice? Did you see her?’
A momentary eagerness entered the yellow eyes as Ann raised her head to look, then the thin lids came down.
She pulled back, wiped the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve and stumbled out of the bedchamber.
By the time she reached the rooms that Aksel Stamer had taken for her and himself she was swaying, sweat was streaming from her face, down her neck and from under her arms along her sides and between her breasts.
He was not there. He had said goodbye. And yet, she’d hoped.
Robert James or Aksel Stamer: for so long she’d thought of one or the other, always pulled along or pulling, that now being alone was impossible to grasp. She sat on the bed, and let herself collapse into sobs.
She cried on and was still crying as her head fell on to the pillow and the room turned itself on to its side. Her tongue was growing large and furry in her mouth, filling her head and blacking out her eyes and nose. She could hardly breathe or see or hear. The sides of the glass jar had contracted and were pressing on her temples.
The fever – for she knew it for what it was now – had been approaching for a while. It was not new; she accepted its thirst, hot headache, pulsation and near delirium. Perhaps it came from the many biting insects in Sardinia or southern France, a malaria from the swamps, a kind of typhus, a disease of the foul water, perhaps from the detritus of all her life.
She had no power to think further. Darkness was coming over her and she was burning into it.
28
Tentatively Ann opened her eyes. They felt sticky and raw. For some minutes she tried to think where she could be and what had happened. She’d been in and out of consciousness for some time, that much
she knew, but how was she in this particular room in unfamiliar clothes? They felt damp, almost wet, beneath her.
A young servant girl came into the bedchamber. She seemed familiar. She saw Ann had woken at last. She’d hardly moved but her eyes flickered.
‘You are so weak, Madame,’ said the maid in slow French.
Ann found it hard to grasp what she was saying. Yet the language and her presence brought with it some sense of place.
With sense came anxiety. How long had she been here, in this bed? Who had been caring for her? Even more insistently as consciousness flooded in: what was this care costing? She recollected the pouch of money Aksel Stamer had given her but had no idea how much it contained, how far it would stretch – or where it was.
The young girl saw her unease. ‘You have been ill these three days,’ she said. Ann could still not quite comprehend her words and didn’t reply.
‘You are hungry, yes?’
‘No, no,’ she said, rousing herself and finding her lips could speak, though the sound she made resonated in her head more than in the room. Where were her purse, her things?
‘Did the man . . .’ she began.
‘Your brother, Madame?’
‘What?’
‘Your brother, Madame. He left money for lodging however long you are here, it is enough, all paid.’
Of course. Aksel Stamer was her brother.
‘He is gone?’
‘But yes, before you came back. He had to go for business. He explained.’
‘Explained?’
‘He had to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘You are weak, Madame,’ said the young woman primly. ‘Rest and we will give you some gruel. The doctor says once you were sleeping all would be good. He sees such fevers often. They go in five or six days, maybe a week, then weakness. You have been lucky.’
‘Days?’
But the maid was leaving the room.
Ann closed her eyes and dozed. She heard a voice speaking distinctly. Whose? Why were there so many men in the bedchamber when she wanted only Sarah?
