Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  I hear his footsteps descending and run to the window to watch him stride over the cobblestones to his awaiting kingdom. He does not look back at me, and I weep to think I might never see him again.

  My dress is still hanging from the low ceiling. When I first tried it on in Jay’s its blackness left dark stains all over my arms and shoulders. It has been dyed with the night sky and carries its darkness deep within. I want to wear it again and put my arms around it as if it were my partner in a waltz. I bury my face in its sour black folds. Jonathan complained of the smell and wanted to send it to the dry cleaners, but death cannot be cleaned.

  I look around for my corset but cannot see it anywhere. I am glad, for my body has grown soft and free, and I do not think I would be able to lace my own stays. Without my corset’s strict government my black bombazine cannot master my rebellious body. The tiny buttons attack my fingers, and my flesh peeps slyly through the gaps.

  In the long mirror in the bathroom I stare at myself for the last time. My hair falls wildly to my waist, and my eyes stare back at me boldly. I have lost my gloves and my feet are bare, but in between are respectable acres of rusty black. I twist my head over my shoulder to see if the holes between the buttons are unseemly but decide it does not matter as I have such a short distance to walk.

  You know the rest.

  Dear Charles

  I have seen the future and I wish I could show it to you. If we could hold hands and run together over that shining bridge I know you would be filled with hope and would understand why I have returned somewhat changed. Whatever the force that stole me away for those days, rest assured that it was more good than evil and that the message I bring you is one of hope and freedom. You are right about the March of Progress, and when I am stronger we will march there together.

  With so much love - you cannot know how much - from

  Your dear little Nina

  P.S. Please do not show this to Henrietta. She is inclined to be censorious, and I know she thinks me frivolous and worldly.

  CHARLES

  TODAY MY DARLING girl looks almost herself. I think the three days of her disappearance were the worst of my life. When Emma knocked on the door of my surgery on Monday morning and told me that madam had just returned I dropped my stethoscope, brusquely ushered out Lady Clarissa, who was lying on my consultation couch after yet another of her nervous fits, and rushed up the stairs two at a time to the drawing-room.

  My angel lay on the sofa beneath a tartan rug. Her eyes were shut and her wonderful dark hair spread all over the cushions. Tommy was already beside her, sitting on the floor with his arms around her neck. In the darkened room he looked so like Bella that for a moment I was afraid, as if I found myself watching a tableau vivant of the dead; then, of course, Reason came to my aid and I saw that my darling was breathing evenly, and Tommy turned to me with an expression of malice his sister’s sweet face would never have worn.

  So it was that when she opened those enchanting blue eyes Nina saw us gathered around her. All the servants had come to watch, for the household had been in a state of upheaval for three days. A paragraph had even appeared in that morning’s newspaper about the mysterious vanishing of a married lady from H— Street.

  Before she spoke I saw unease and sadness in those eyes I know so well. Almost as if she expected to look on other faces and scenes. I dismissed the servants and sent Tommy back to the nursery, where he went with a very bad grace, screaming and shouting.

  Alone with Nina, I locked the drawing-room door and kneeled at her dear little feet, which were bare and somewhat grubby. Her eyes were shut again, and her silky hair smelled of flowers. I caressed her, discovering that her t—s were quite bare beneath her rumpled dress. Despite her illness she seemed exceedingly, one might say excessively, pleased to see me. I was quite transported and forgot the waiting-room downstairs full of patients.

  ‘My own little wife.’

  ‘Dearest Charles.’

  ‘You must tell me where you have been.’

  She opened her lovely eyes, and tears came brimming out.

  ‘My poor little girl! Did I hurt you just now?’

  ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘You haven’t slept?

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You don’t remember where you have been these last three days?’

  Her only reply was more tears, and I felt like a brute. I was lying beside her on the sofa, stroking her brow. At moments the ten years between us seem an age. I was remembering the little maid I first saw in her father’s house, in that wholesome atmosphere so different from the one in which I grew up. I attached myself to her family, happy to assist her excellent father, and as the years passed I began to hope that some day my dear little Nina might become my wife. I could scarcely believe my happiness on our wedding day, and the following year Bella arrived as the sweet little outward sign of our union. Now that Nina’s parents and poor little Bella are dead Nina is my own property, and I feel my responsibility to cherish her. She is as fresh and pure as she was then - I have taken pains to keep her so - I know that she could walk through the vilest rookery and remain unsullied.

  ‘Perhaps some kind lady took you in?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sobbed.

  ‘When you are better we will go and thank her.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Now you mustn’t distress yourself. You must rest. Do you think you’ll be strong enough for the dinner on Thursday?’

  She groaned and shut her eyes, and I tiptoed out.

  As soon as I shut the door and stood on the landing my duties besieged me. Upstairs in the nursery I could hear Tommy howling, while downstairs impatient patients waited. I worried that I had offended Lady Clarissa and that some of these others would not return if I made them wait too long.

  By the time I had seen them all (gout and nerves, as usual; if it is true that medical men die of the diseases they have studied most, I have not much to look forward to), luncheon was cold. As I ate I wrote out notes to the twelve guests - all owed - I had invited for Thursday, apologizing that my wife is still prostrated with grief and so we will not be able to receive them. I sent for James to deliver the notes, and he was sulky, for his wages have not been paid this month. James is my medical assistant-cum-butler-cum-footman. As he has so many functions I generally refer to him as ‘the boy’, although in truth he is a somewhat senile boy, being at least sixty and found in the workhouse. I puzzled over his livery - two crossed shovels with a hook rampant. In the end I borrowed the coat of arms of some very respectable Sandersons, yeoman farmers in Norfolk. When James is delivering medicine to my patients he wears a natty pot-hat and a smart shell-jacket with silver buttons - at least it was smart three years ago. I cannot really afford him or indeed expensive dinners, but without them how am I to attract patients of family?

  I had to speak to James, Lucy and Emma to remind them not to gossip. The paragraph in the newspaper must have come from somewhere.

  ‘Mrs Sanderson has been visiting a friend.’

  James snorted and looked at Emma, who pursed her lips and sniffed. She was my wife’s nurse and knows rather too much about us all. As a baby, Tommy howled day and night and consumed as many nursemaids as he now consumes sugarplums, so Nina said, ‘We will have to send for Emmie, because the baby never has been born that Emma cannot manage.’

  So we did, and she has stayed, and indeed she does manage Tommy and all of us, but she is a great grumbletonian, and I fear she has no very high opinion of me. I often feel she has hired us as her family and finds Nina and Tommy quite satisfactory but would like to dismiss me. As for Lucy, our parlourmaid, she is a fat, red-faced girl who always looks untidy in her uniform, and her silence was pert. Henrietta passed her on when she reduced her household, and I would be happy to pass her back again, only Nina is fond of her. Together with Mrs Sturges the cook, who is more often than not drunk as a wheelbarrow on the cooking sherry, that is my household. It would be hard to find four more imperf
ect servants, but until I am able to pay them their back wages I must make do with them.

  When I am in my consulting-room I am another man. I know these West End patients (particularly the ladies) require genial conversation, and I supply it liberally. I must see at least three patients an hour, but I have trained myself not to look at my watch. I have built up quite a distinguished practice, and I know I have the ability to become a ‘bedside baronet’ like Sir Percy.

  I put up my brass plate here just after Tommy was born. I bought this practice from an old fellow who assured me it was worth a thousand a year, but I have yet to extract more than six hundred from it. We doctors are still considered parvenus by the other residents of Harley Street - retired ambassadors, admirals and generals. Of those few who deign to sample my professional services many have turned out to be neverpay villains. Each Christmas I send out the bills, and slow, dribbling payments come from patients who must not be offended. However, with hard work and foresight and a smoothly run household I have every confidence I can double my income. Even three hundred more would pay for the servants, the tradesmen, Tommy’s school, poor little Bella’s tombstone, our mourning clothes and a convalescent holiday for darling Nina.

  Mr Gladstone has just raised income tax to one shilling and fourpence in the pound - as if sevenpence were not extortionate enough - to pay for the Russian war. In The Thunderer I also read, with more pleasure, that Bunhill Fields is to be closed next year. I know too well that the London burial grounds are consecrated cesspools. They say we doctors bury our mistakes, but what about those we have dug up? The sooner they close it, close them all, the better.

  This house at least was a bargain. No one else wanted to take it, as it is full of leaks with bad drains. I have said nothing to Nina but fear that the miasma that spreads the filth beneath our houses and emanates from the rookery may have been the cause of darling Bella’s death. I know that poisoned air causes cholera and see no reason why it should not also produce scarlet fever. Odours of food and gas and worse pollute the waiting-room and surgery, for all my efforts to keep the rooms well aired.

  Enough complaints. My little helpmate has brought the spring back into my life, and in her gentle presence I can shelter from the cares of the world. My bright household fairy presides again over the pure values and sweet delights of our home.

  Damnation! James has just shown in the Hypochondriac. I never saw a healthier man in my life, but he is so convinced that he shall one day or another die suddenly (as we all must) that he has his name and residence written inside the crown of his hat so that people may know where to carry his body. I think he has studied as many medical texts as I have, and he loves to spend an hour a week merrily discussing his possible diseases. I will have to go down and give him his guinea’s worth.

  Fashionable couples, I am told, sleep in separate rooms as if their home were a hotel and they but travellers meeting in the corridor. I would not give up my hymeneal altar, not even for a knighthood. Last night as my Nina slept she cried out in distress, and trouble clouded her girlish brow. I held her tight and felt so happy that we were together again. Our little family is an empire of love, with myself as emperor and Nina as empress, the chief ornament of the fireside with her adorable dimples and cherry cheeks. I know she is incapable of trickery or falsehood. She has been everything to me: my virgin princess, plaything, companion, devoted mother of my children and domestic manager (although in the last she is somewhat wanting).

  Tomorrow I will soothe my little frightened dove and discover the truth of her mysterious disappearance. I am confident there will be some harmless explanation, for she is a delightfully simple girl. I remember when we were first married she made me some shirts - they were all crooked, but I have kept them out of love. My little girl is foolish but never vicious. I attribute her unhappy state to natural grief. Sorrow for our darling Bella has sapped her vitality and all but broken her spirit. Only time can heal that, but I can correct my child wife’s other weaknesses - her taste for tight stays, tea drinking and reading. Her father encouraged her enthusiasm for three-decker novels and sentimental poetry, but I won’t let her get any more books from Mudie’s. I have put her on a lowering diet with total abstinence from stimulants.

  This morning my little maiden woke in a gale of sobs and woe. I held her close and told her all was well, but she wailed of strange adventures and said I would not understand. I understand that she is weaving a little web of romance for herself and wish she could be satisfied with fireside virtues. I begged her to rest and tiptoed down here to my study where I study nothing more congenial than our household accounts.

  In two years I will be forty, at which age they say a man is either a fool or a physician. I am not a fool, but I haven’t achieved half of what I once aspired to. Compared with Sir Astley Cooper, my childhood hero and my father’s employer, if one can use such a genteel word to describe Pa’s fishing trips in the London cemeteries, I am a failure. Once, Pa told me, Sir Astley performed an operation on a West Indian millionaire who rewarded his physicians with three hundred guineas each. Sir Astley waited. The millionaire said, ‘But you, sir, shall have something better’, and flung his nightcap at Sir Astley, who, mightily offended, went home, where he found in the nightcap a draft for a thousand guineas!

  But where is my West Indian millionaire? And if he doesn’t appear soon, how am I to stay out of the debtors’ prison? We should save a great deal of money if we were to leave London, leave England altogether and go and live at Calais where I’m sure they have need of a good English doctor. I could sell this house and the lease and contents and my practice here. But London is my city, and I love it with all its expensive warts.

  A letter has just been pushed under the door. I recognize my angel’s handwriting, and my heart leaps as I remember the love notes we used to exchange when we were courting. I rush eagerly to the door and open it, hoping to embrace my little nymph. But there is only the rustle of her skirts disappearing up the stairs.

  NINA AT HOME

  INEITHER KNOW nor care what day this is. Time is no longer to be trusted. I suppose Charles must have read my letter by now. I told him the truth, the whole truth. Almost. My head feels like a ton-weight, but I need to write this other truth which I will hide in my workbasket. C. says I must rest and must not take any exercise or read or write. How jog-trotty and humdrum my life seems now. Back in the deadly hush of Harley Street where nothing ever happens I remember those days when so much did happen.

  From my window I can see the little girls flocking to the door of the Queen’s College. I hear they are to be quite scandalously well educated. They study mathematics and natural science and even Latin. I doubt if C. would have sent Bella to such a den of bluestockings, for he detests strong-minded women and says that higher education would make it difficult for a woman to conceive and bear a child. I suppose he must be right - yet Jonathan told me that in his London women may do any job that a man does. Lady lawyers and lady politicians and doctresses and even lady cabbies! I smile, yet my head is whirling for Jonathan and Charles cannot both be right. Somehow I must live with the conflicting truths of these two Londons.

  Back to the window where the world I must accept is framed. Many of these little girls are also the daughters of physicians, but how different their schooldays are from mine at the little dame-school around the corner from our house in Finsbury Square.

  A shabby schoolroom where fifty girls sat on forms and Miss Amelia lay on a couch with a work-table beside her. She was strict and very terrifying to a little girl of five who had only known a mother who petted her. I was expected to learn long lists of words and to do endless needlework. On my first day at school I rebelled and tried to run away home to Mama, who reluctantly returned me. I think she cried as much as I did, for my mother had a light and tender heart and hated to see a suffering creature - especially me.

  I spent a great deal of my education standing in a corner wearing a dunce’s cap made of brown paper. When my s
amplers still failed to please, Miss Amelia locked me in a dark closet. My boxed ears were a swollen wall that kept lessons out and my dreams and fancies sealed deep inside my head. It made matters worse that Henrietta, who loomed five vast years ahead of me, was a pattern girl. Her fingers flew over her needlework, and she led the school in prayers. Miss Amelia and Miss Jemima were great evangelists - all good works and bad temper.

  Henrietta’s acceptance of their dreary paradise seemed to me a great disloyalty to Mama, whom I would accompany on her furtive visits to St Peter’s Saffron Hill. There I would hold her hand and kneel in the fragrant darkness to cross myself before I lit a candle for Nonno Giuseppe. My grandfather was a political refugee from Naples who came to London during the Napoleonic Wars and set up as a plaster-image maker in Saffron Hill. I enjoyed these secret games that pleased my mama and shocked my sister.

  The only lessons I enjoyed were the extras - French and pianoforte and drawing. French reminded me of home and Mama’s cheerful babble of Italian. Music was always a joy, but drawing was my passion, although I managed to get bad marks even for that because I wanted to draw the stories I told myself, and Miss Amelia said that only flowers were a proper subject. At the beginning of each lesson she propped up a rose that gradually wilted beneath the gaze of fifty girls and the harsh criticism of Miss Amelia as she crept behind us to count each thorn and belittle our efforts. Smudged with tears and a dozen rubbings out, even a dewy rose soon looked like a battered lamp-post to be held up to the class as another example of my stupidity.

  I left my dame-school with a smattering of everything. Enough French to read novels and enough history to adore Joan of Arc and Mary Stuart and enough music to flaunt myself at evening parties. I finished my education in the Finsbury circulating library and in Papa’s study where I learned to draw from his great book of anatomy, which was bound in green leather and heavy as a tombstone. It revealed to me the mysterious world that Papa said was hidden inside us all. And do I have a skull like this? I would ask in wonder as I turned the musty pages. Henrietta said it was blasphemous to open up a body and look inside it as if it was a grandfather clock, but Papa said Heaven had no use for ignoramuses.