One day Eliza leans in and whispers, although we are alone: Chloe is to be married. A gentleman from London, no less. ‘So, Ma’am, she is shortly to be Mrs Coulson, and it has all ended happily.’ If marrying were a guarantee of happiness … But I say nothing.
I lift the stinking camphor-soaked cotton. My eyes are red-rimmed and new. Alonso is not beside me. Where? The room is as it was, as it has always been. Brown and shining in the dawn, the beams above. The sounds of Rawblood are muted. Full day will come soon enough.
I think of Iris. Longing is in me like an arrow. Today is the day that I will look upon my daughter.
Someone has been digging beneath the cedar tree. Why should that make me sad?
The door is ajar. It is painted white. Painted blue ducks, blue umbrellas and blue seashells climb it in a riot, curling round the door handle. I picture Alonso’s face, puzzling over what Iris should have, what she will like. The door swings open, silent, well-oiled. No one will be woken by it. The care, the thought.
Morning sun falls on fresh white walls, varnished boards. Curtains flutter at the windows, the colour of a kingfisher’s back. A white and black mottled rocking horse gallops, legs thrown out, nostrils red and panic-wide. On the bright walls are flowers, tigers, horses. A white dresser is ranged with an audience of china animals: deer, dogs, cats, mice; they stare with cold clever eyes. A white cradle, fine as spun silk, stands shiny-new in the corner. Above it hangs a mirror, and knots of blue ribbons, and seashells, and a silver locket. They turn gently in the light.
Alonso stands over the cradle with Iris in his arms. They look at one another, my husband and my daughter, in fierce concentration. They have not seen me. His hair sticks up in white and black whorls on the back of his neck, the pouched lines of his face sewn up with sleep. She is a translucent glimpse between her new dark silken hair, dark lashes and the pale blue blanket. The flowers of her fists open and close gently in the air. My heart is full.
I go to them. At the slight sound of my feet on the boards Alonso looks up. I smile but he nods, serious.
‘It was finished yesterday,’ he says. His voice is a bare whisper. ‘I am pleased you came today.’ As if he had expected me for some time.
‘It is wonderful,’ I say, and I mean it.
He offers me the pale blue blanket, the dark scrub of hair just visible. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘She has gone back to sleep, I think.’
I take her. I look at my daughter. I look at her for some time.
I had thought her plump, but her face has a symmetry to it that is startlingly adult. Her eyelids are large and white. Dark lashes rest on snowy cheeks. She is different. She is different from the picture I had of her in my mind, and to anything I have ever seen …
That is not so. She is very like someone I have seen. There is a stirring within me, hot. I hold my daughter and I try to understand. ‘I feel—’ I say. ‘Alonso, I am not sure that I am well.’
‘Sit,’ he says, and I do, upon a white wicker bucket chair, piled high with cream and blue cushions. ‘Give her to me,’ he says.
‘No,’ I tell him. I hold her, I keep the perfect small face before me. Iris’s lids flutter, they open. I look into her eyes, her black, black eyes, and I see.
Dimly I hear Alonso say, ‘Blood, Meg, you are bleeding.’ I had thought I was healed but some treacherous fragile part of me has given way. It is impossible, but I feel the orange tautness, the familiar pain. Eclampsia, again? It shouldn’t be, can’t be, but the lights are flashing, pulsing in my skull. The blood comes frightening and fast.
It seems less important than the other unutterable, terrible thing. I have understood.
I had thought her gone, but it is not so. I look at my daughter and she looks back at me, pink and white skin glowing, dark eyes clear and wide and young. She puts a corner of blue blanket in her mouth and gives me a secret smile.
‘Alonso,’ I say. It doesn’t sound right. A rough and wet sound, like a great bird cawing. He does not hear. He is pressing a great wad of linen against me, against the blood. The red bubbles up around his hands.
There are tears on my cheeks. I hear a scratched and broken shrieking. It is mine. The tinny scent of blood is strong. Everything is darkening, turning burnt orange. The shrieking grows. Beneath it a smaller, thinner child’s cry. Iris and I weep. I look into her eyes and imagine them bereft of sense, filled with the darkness of aeons. I imagine her face older, corpse white, unwitting, mouth thin with suffering. I imagine shearing off the silky dark hair to the tender skull beneath, I picture it cruelly wounded, again and again, until it is covered with scars, like valley rims under awful moonlight. It will come to pass.
I must tell Alonso, I must tell him and we will prevent it, someone must prevent it, but my mouth has gone soft like wool and cannot be used. A long, rusty, useless noise emerges. ‘It is her,’ I say. ‘Her.’
The sound that comes from him is worse. He peers at the corners of the room, his eyes crazy. He looks everywhere but at Iris, wailing in my arms. He collapses at my feet, his head slumps on his arm. His white and black head, striped like a badger. His long hands slick with my blood.
Was there anything I could have done to turn it aside, anything? Had I not been so busy, so in love with all my secrets. I do not know. I do not understand.
‘This is a beautiful room,’ I say to him, though it doesn’t sound like words. ‘You have made it so beautiful for her.’ The white wicker chair, the blue and cream cushions – all are dark syrup red. A glossy pool covers the boards by my feet. As I watch it spreads gently, silently.
Charles, my pompous brother, is in my mind. I touched him in his death. Perhaps he will come to find me in mine … All the while I had thought I was forging my own path. It seems to me now that I have wandered blindly, tangled in old, old events, as if in brambles. Caught on their piercing thorns.
Time is short. I will Alonso to look at me. His shoulders shake, he presses his face into his sleeve. Please, I tell him with all my being, look up, look into my eyes. Look. His head is lowered. He does not look. In my lap Iris weeps, her hands reach towards my face. I can no longer move my limbs – they are bound with iron and dead. I cannot comfort her. This is the first, little one. The first of those awful sorrows which will befall you. I would do anything to make it otherwise.
With a great crack everything goes quiet and radiant orange. The silence is shocking. Before me is an orange silken ribbon, rippling, stretching into the distance, which will lead me – where? For a moment, tiny in my ear, is Alonso’s voice. He is weeping, calling for me. He is far away. I try to cling to the sound, to him. But the way ahead is smooth and easy and delightful. He fades. I flow. I follow the orange ribbon like a road. I go on and on, and it is cool to my bare feet.
Ways of Escape
1919
Frank is the only one to wake.
He starts up into soft light. The pre-op tent is amber, shadowed, the air sad and sulphurous. Breath and flesh. No one stirs. They lie in rows, neatly bandaged. For once, they are all asleep. Through the canvas wall the nauseous grinding of the gennie.
Between the rows of cots drifts a shape like a black candle flame. The figure stops by each sleeping man and bends, as if to kiss, or drink. His fingers come away gleaming: cigarette cases, coins. Frank watches. The thief comes towards him, organised and graceful.
When the man touches him Frank does nothing. He looks into the thief’s face, what he can see of it. A grey scarf covers the mouth and nose. Brown eyes hold his own. They narrow, creasing at the edges, warm. It’s as if the thief is smiling beneath his mask. But it could be disapproval.
The fingers move like anemones inside Frank’s jacket. They light on Frank’s father’s watch, his tobacco. They curl around the solitary coins in his pockets, the bundle of letters near his heart. They linger on the handwritten label which is sewn to his breast pocket, listing his injuries. The fingers stroke it.
‘I need it,’ Frank says. The thief hums tunefully. The label s
lips its moorings, vanishes into his hand.
‘Leave it,’ Frank says, but there’s no one there. The tent flap stirs in the breeze, lets in the night.
Far out in the dark French fields there comes a long, high note. It’s most likely a dog but for a moment it sounds like music.
Sister wakes him. ‘Time,’ she says. ‘Come, you.’ Her hands are hard and careful. She’s a farmer’s daughter.
The man lying next to Frank shudders. A broken silver chain dangles in his bandaged hands. Eyes the colour of fire peep through gummed-up lids. He wails. He makes inexplicable sounds like water going through a cistern.
‘Private Trevor,’ says Sister. ‘That’s not a song. As far as I know songs have words. Goodness.’
Private Trevor’s ululations come higher and higher until they fade. Then he says in a strong Welsh voice, ‘Took my wedding ring, the shit.’ The chain swings.
Sister says, ‘Everyone was had. Such a thing. Who would do it to the wounded?’ She is cool, offended; by the language, by the theft, or both.
‘My label’s gone,’ Frank says. He should say, now, that he saw the thief. But he doesn’t. All his attention is taken up with what’s shortly going to happen to him. He’s shaking.
Sister’s lip twitches, her eye flickers towards his leg, and Frank is ashamed of his stinking flesh.
‘You’re from London, Private Coulson,’ Sister says.
‘London,’ Frank says.
‘There you are then,’ she says. ‘Just think. Such a quick thing, and then you’re home. Back to London. With a nice girl waiting, most likely.’ Frank thinks of Madge. Her letters resting somewhere near the thief’s heart.
They come with stretchers. Frank is carried, swaying. He stares up into the blue morning. When canvas closes once more over his head he thinks he’ll die.
This tent is not like the other tent. This tent has many flat surfaces and edges. It smells of hot metal and sawing and blood.
The doctor says, ‘Be over before you know it, bombardier.’ The doctor’s eyes are black underneath them, as if he’s been in a punch-up. He wears a mask over his mouth.
Flat on the table, Frank breathes ether and swims. The doctor looms over him, a tired pink and yellow, eyes narrow. It looks like he’s smiling behind his mask. Or it’s exhaustion.
As the dark closes over, Frank realises that someone is beside him. It’s someone he knew long ago, or maybe someone he doesn’t know yet. He feels the warm track of their fingers as they trail across his cheek. When he licks his lips he can taste their tears.
In England Frank is taken to a madhouse. Earlswood Asylum was built for lunatic women, a nurse tells him. They are sealed tight in the west part of the building. They shan’t bother him. The nurse’s name is Lottie. She has smooth brown hair and a surprised expression. When she leans over to tuck in the sheets, her white bosom rests gently on his arm. The doctors and nurses work on both sides of Earlswood. These are the times. Everyone must do their part. ‘It’s a pain,’ Lottie says as she tucks, binding him tight to the uneven mattress. Frank is left alone in a room of iron beds and men. Days go by.
They wheel him out into the garden. He blinks in the light. The grass is green and young. When he reaches down, the silky blades rise to his hand, to his caress. The garden has flower beds. There are marigolds. Geraniums. Young trees are planted across the sward in hopeful shivering groves.
A long chain-link fence cuts the garden in half. Beyond the fence the earth is bare in patches as if the grass has been torn up by its roots. The ground is grey and naked. One tree remains in the corner, its lower branches broken, twisted. A scar cuts across its trunk, deep and troubling. A discarded shoe lies in a puddle. This is where the lunatic women go.
Frank sits in his bath chair in the sunshine amidst the flower beds. Presently, the women come out. They are clothed in tubes of grey fabric. They walk slack-jawed in endless circles. They gibber. They kneel and tear up handfuls of grass. Some eat the grass. He is surprised by their behaviour, which is entirely in keeping with the simplest expectations of lunacy.
Frank sees Lottie through the fence. She is stern, unlike herself.
A breathless blonde woman ambles over. She looks at Frank long and hard through the wire. Breath squeezes through her lungs. Then she throws her shift over her head. She hops, and shuffles her feet, her headless body long and pale. She presses herself against the fence then recoils from it elegantly, twirling.
‘Julia,’ someone calls.
Julia dances faster. She dances and throws herself against the wire until they take her away.
For the most part of most days Frank lies in a cot in the long room with the other men in the other cots. There’s some talk and the wireless, sometimes. Sometimes there are card games. Frank doesn’t talk or play cards. People are too detailed. He prefers the vast white ceiling. His phantom leg sends him frantic. It sings with phantom pain. There is not enough morphia anywhere, for anyone. Sometimes Lottie sits by him and knits. He’s quiet, she says, so she doesn’t drop stitches.
On Wednesdays the women visit. Sometimes old men come and little boys, not many. The sisters, wives, mothers, cousins come with stockings drawn on their legs and bright lips. Then the men sit up and everyone smokes and plays cards. They laugh. No one peels back the bedclothes to see what has been lost.
One Wednesday Madge comes. She tells Frank she can’t marry him, after all. He won’t expect it. There’s silence between them for a time. From other beds, other people’s talk. The summer air is thick with it.
‘I do feel it,’ Madge says. ‘I feel for you, Frank.’ Her large eyes are rimmed with wet.
‘Not at my best,’ Frank says. Words are worn down to nubs. He says, ‘Well then.’
‘Your leg?’ she says.
‘No.’ It is though. Tendrils of pain curl around his shins. Both of them.
Madge pats her eyes with a scrap of linen. Her eyelids large, blue-veined, powdered.
‘Daisy’s marrying,’ she says, ‘fancy.’
Madge’s sister. Small, thin, with a chin made for digging.
‘Fancy her getting married before me,’ says Madge.
The pain stirs again in Frank’s missing toes, brushes through his knee, up into his groin where it nests, feathery. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘needn’t be like that.’
He first kissed Madge outside Mayrick’s Music Hall. He thinks of slicked-back hair, and feet moving, slowly, one two, one two, hands meeting, grainy light, her face. Music and beer in his blood. Her hair. The scent of dusty evening streets. Breathing into each other’s mouths, not daring to move.
These things are there, but removed, as if seen through gauze.
‘I thought it best to bring them,’ Madge says. She means to put it down carefully but it slips. It lands on the bed with a soft shh in the blank place where his right leg should be. The paper is thin, curling at the edges. His letters.
‘I don’t have yours,’ Frank says. ‘We were robbed. At Dieppe.’ He thinks to tell her about the thief: the gentle hands, the dark eyes, his veiled mouth. Madge folds her handkerchief into neat squares. Her mouth narrows to a fine dark line. He doesn’t tell her.
Frank makes to take the letters. Perhaps there’s something of him in them, which he can recover. The twine comes apart in his hands. The letters spew over the bed. Over his lap, his leg, and the not-leg. Words. Madge reaches for them with a cross tsk, and her hand grazes the cotton sheet, gentle, as if touching flesh.
Pain furls and unfurls, floats on surfaces, reaches deep.
‘You’ll come again,’ Frank says to Madge. ‘To see me.’
Madge doesn’t say yes or no. She narrows her gaze as if affronted. He hopes she’ll come. Once, twice more, if only to prove herself kind.
The sun is hot wax, pouring down his face, his neck, rolling and dripping over his hands, his knee, his absent foot. It seems to Frank that he can hear the blades of grass stroking one another, the deep movement of beetles in the earth. He can smell the w
icker of the chair he sits in, the hot tar of the road beyond the high wall softening in the July heat. A bird whirs and scuffles in the tree behind him. The red of his eyelids.
Something ploughs through the air by his face, pounds the earth by his ear. Frank starts up. Sun floods his vision.
Behind the fence, the breathless woman is running. Up the garden, down, up. Her feet tattoo the bare earth. She falls, hitting the ground with a grunt. Her blue eyes are limpid with shock.
‘Julia,’ the voice calls, not unkind.
Julia shakes herself, leaps up, and runs. A silver cord of saliva dangles, flies from her mouth as she goes. Need shines in her face.
Frank closes his eyes. The warm earth turns.
He does not immediately recall where or when he is. The air is scented. The lawn stretches empty and living into the dusk. Shadows cluster under the spreading trees. The garden is garlanded, dark. Distant, from the house, comes clanging metal, far voices. He catches the vague scent of suet, which means cooking. White moths flicker in the fading light. The thin twist of a crescent moon.
Behind the fence there stands a figure. It is white against the dusk. The skin and hair are white, all white. It stares with white eyes. It is as still as though painted on the air.
Frank’s insides lurch. Fear comes like a bullet past his cheek. He makes to turn, to run, before he remembers: he is in a chair and in a hospital, the fence is not ringed with barbed wire, and he won’t run anywhere, not ever again. The ground heaves up and he is falling.
He’s caught by a thin strong arm. Lottie puffs, comforting in her crisp white. She pushes and manoeuvres him back into his safe enclosing wicker cage where he collapses, full of gratitude. Lottie and he breathe heavily like cattle resting. In the last of the light her small features are strange, still beneath her cap. Her skin smells clean with Pears soap.
‘Pay her no mind,’ Lottie says.
Behind the fence the girl is a pale spear. Her white arms hang straight. Her shift flutters about her white ankles. Her face is peaceful beneath the turban of white bandage. Her eyes are not after all white, but lashless and closed as if graven on her face.
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