Marley

by Jon Clinch

  The door at the end of the hall leads to his apartments. The parlor beyond it is plain, spare, and not terribly clean. Its walls empty, its curtains threadbare, it is the nakedly private dwelling place of an ascetic spirit unused to human visitation. There is in fact only one chair to be seen, a very small and uncomfortable-looking one at that, drawn up hard by the cold fireplace. On a little table beside it is a teacup, its bottom filmed over with residue, left there one night before the weather turned warm. To one side is a poky little kitchen, more jumbled and lived-in by the look of it, and another room opposite where he no doubt takes his rest.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “I don’t often receive visitors.”

  “Your apartments are just as I imagined they would be,” says Fan.

  He is still sly enough to know that she means it in a way that is kind but not complimentary.

  “Well,” she says. “Where did you hang it?”

  “Oh!” says Marley. “The painting! Of course! Turn around!”

  The windows all face to the west, and the last of the sun’s rays are streaming through them just now, piercing the thin weave of the threadbare curtains. The light falls upon the far wall, burnishing the rough plaster with a golden haze, and the burnishing applies equally to Marley’s hand-built frame and the painting within it. No museum could show it off to better advantage.

  “This was the only wall large enough,” he says, as if anything needs to be explained.

  Fan clasps her cloak to her throat. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh, Jacob.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you have captured me.”

  He has. And not just the Fan of this moment but the Fan of every moment she has lived. There is childish Fan in the play of light upon her smile, desirable Fan in the secrets promised by her eyes, independent Fan in the frankness of her gaze, widowed fan in the faint hollows of her cheeks. In the painting she seems to be of no particular age, and the effect is devastating. She steps away, toward the fireplace, putting a hand upon the back of the empty chair to steady herself. The chair, old and ill made, tilts a little at her touch, and she lowers herself down onto the seat instead.

  “I felt it was a fair likeness.”

  “Fair? It’s perfect. So perfect that it saddens me to look upon it.”

  “Why should it sadden you?”

  “Because you’ve caught the truth about me. About all of us. I look at once so hopeful and so doomed.”

  There is a lifetime in her sentiment. There are multiple lifetimes—not just her own but Harry Balfour’s and her mother’s and Ebenezer’s, too. Even young Fred’s, if the pattern established upon this earth for generation after generation holds.

  “Hopeful and doomed,” says Marley. “And here I mainly wanted to get the nose right.”

  Fan smiles, and her smile crumbles, and Marley comes to her side. He places a hand upon the chair and she places her hand upon his. “Poor dear,” he says. “It’s a painting. It’s not mankind.”

  But it is mankind, isn’t it? And her heart has been pierced through, hasn’t it? And old familiar, difficult, harmless, hurtful, greedy, inconsequential, generous, impossible, omnipresent, unknowable Jacob Marley is the one behind it. She weeps, and he produces a handkerchief. She sags, and he kneels to lift her up. They embrace, and the sun sets over the springtime city, and when he rises he does not light a candle in the darkened rooms. Not from miserliness, but from decency.

  1833

  Thirty-Six

  Scrooge orders Cratchit to write his sister, inviting her into the office for consultation upon a certain unsaid matter of import, but she makes no reply. How very unlike her, he thinks. Marley is surely to blame. No doubt he has hardened her heart against her brother’s influence. So he has Cratchit write her once more—and more urgently this time, with hints that the peril afoot goes well beyond financial matters—but the result is the same. What an embarrassment, to be ignored by his own sister! He is certain that Cratchit is watching the calendar and privately relishing his master’s humiliation, although nothing could be further from the truth. Bob has problems of his own.

  In the end, because the matter at hand is indeed of the utmost consequence, he visits her. It is a rare occasion. He hardly goes anywhere these days. His office and his bank and his pitiable rented rooms. The coffee shop where he takes his meals. Occasionally, when his partner is enduring one of his weaker days, Marley’s bedside for the transaction of some private business matter. How he hates to waste the time. How he resents the interruption of his work. How he despises the man for his weakness.

  * * *

  He finds his sister looking well enough, although she seems to have taken up Marley’s habit of lingering beneath the bed linens. His first impulse is to criticize her for it outright, but he holds his tongue. He has more sensitive sums to calculate, and he will touch on her lassitude in time.

  “You have ignored my messages,” he says, standing at the foot of her bed like doom, shoulders up and arms behind his back.

  She offers him a quizzical look. “Perhaps Mother failed to—”

  “Do not blame Mother.” He presents his hands, one envelope in each. “These were on the hall table. In plain sight. Unopened.”

  “Forgive me,” she says, for what else is there?

  Scrooge pockets the letters, sniffs, steadies himself. “I understand that you are still keeping his company.”

  “Whose company?”

  “Marley’s.”

  “Have you come here to forbid it? Are you now my father as well as my brother?”

  “Father or brother,” says Scrooge, “if I may not forbid your misbehavior, then I may yet discourage it. As I have done since the beginning.”

  “What is it to you? What is it to you at this late date?”

  “The man is a wretch. The notion of your associating with him makes my skin crawl.”

  “I care little for the condition of your skin.”

  “You have exposed our blessed mother to his society.”

  “Mother can look after herself in the little time she has left.”

  Scrooge clears his throat. “I have visited his apartments, Fan. I have set my eyes upon his painting of you. It is a vile thing.”

  “How could it be so?”

  “It is too—intimate.”

  “It is affectionate.”

  Scrooge scoffs. “You have been compromised, my dear.”

  “And you have been perverted.”

  “Oho! ‘Perverted,’ you say!”

  “By a life spent in solitude.”

  “Perversion would be Marley’s specialty.”

  Fan looks hurt, coughs, rubs her jaw. “Jacob cares for me, and he always has.”

  “Jacob desires you. The difference is significant.”

  “Either way, there is faithfulness in it.”

  “Bah. Jacob Marley is the most faithless man alive.”

  “That distinction would belong to you, Ebenezer.”

  He hesitates.

  She darkens. “You envy me, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You envy me his attentions.”

  Scrooge barks out a laugh. “His attentions! I would not give a shilling for his attentions!”

  “Nor would you give a shilling for Belle’s.”

  “You underestimate me, Fan.”

  “You overestimate yourself. I know you, brother. I know who you are and what you prize in this world.”

  “You have become cruel,” says Scrooge, “just like your friend. I came here only to save you.”

  “I am well past saving,” she says, coughing into a handkerchief already stained red. “And so are you, Ebenezer.”

  1836

  Thirty-Seven

  He awakens from dream into nightmare. The hand pressed upon his brow belongs not to his beloved but to his nurse. Her touch is chilly, but his beloved’s touch would be chillier still—cold and raw as the grave in which she has lain for some months now, while he
has only sickened further. Death seems bent on keeping its cold-hearted distance from Marley, and the notion that it came for her first is the purest punishment.

  The nurse is a giant of a woman and he is a trace of himself. He does not know her name or where she comes from or how long she has been in his employ. She is in truth more keeper than nurse, for she fixes his meals and cleans his rooms and bathes his withered ruin of a body. She lifts him soiled from his bed now, handling him as gently as a wolf handles a rabbit, and as he groans and gasps she strips both him and his bed down to the essentials. She does not seem to mind the smell. A cauldron of water laced with ammonia simmers upon the grate where a fire burns day and night supplying ash for the making of lye. It is forever laundry day in these rooms. The parlor, draped with linens hung to dry, might be either a sailmaker’s loft or the scene of a haunting.

  “You’re to have a visitor today,” says the nurse once he is dressed again and sitting up. “ ’Tis Christmas Eve, after all.”

  “What visitor?” The words whistle as they come from between his cracked lips. His mouth is sore and his teeth are entirely gone although God has granted him a toothache nonetheless.

  “Why, Mr. Scrooge, my dear.” She disappears out the door bearing the linens, and he does not watch her go because the effort required to turn his head is too great. That and the pain. His every joint and muscle is on fire.

  She returns in a few moments and he is surprised to see her because his brain is overwhelmed by the sensations inflicted upon it by his body. She brings tea, however, tea and laudanum, and the two compounds cheer him considerably. The tea is a comfort, the laudanum a necessity. It restores him.

  He is surprised again when Scrooge arrives. He cannot tell if minutes have passed or hours, for he is floating upon an opiate fog and time is nothing to him. Scrooge raps at the bedroom door as if to raise the dead.

  “Go in, go in,” says the nurse. “He’s decent.”

  “I shall be the judge of his decency,” says Scrooge.

  “Enter,” mumbles Marley, better late than never.

  “Toothache?” says Scrooge, emerging.

  “You could say.” His voice is muffled by the kerchief wrapped around his head and chin.

  “Does that headscarf help?” says Scrooge, drawing up a chair.

  “No. Nothing helps.”

  “Then remove it. It makes you look like a dead man.”

  “I am preparing for my fate.”

  “No,” says Scrooge, opening his case and drawing out a document. “This is how we prepare for your fate.” The document is Marley’s last will and testament, drawn up by a flesh-and-blood lawyer known to both of them and presented now to be signed and witnessed.

  “Fred is in it? As I insisted?”

  “Fred is in it.”

  Marley smiles, an alarming sight. “After all, he must have a living.”

  “He could earn a living, like the rest of us. It would do him good.”

  “He ought to have something to remember me by. Show me the page, will you?”

  Scrooge does.

  The words swim in his vision, and so he scans the paragraph for what he believes is an acceptable interval, pronounces the language satisfactory, and asks for the quill. Scrooge goes to fetch the nurse, and the remainder is accomplished in a moment. Once she has witnessed his signature and returned to her laundry, Marley fixes his partner with a dull eye.

  “Fred is the last of your family,” he says. “Why have you so little feeling for him?”

  “I have feeling enough,” says Scrooge. “Feeling enough to believe that hard work improves a man’s character. Feeling enough to know that a life of ease funded by another’s ill-gotten gains will serve a man poorly.”

  “We must agree to disagree,” says Marley.

  But Scrooge is not finished. “You are a fine one to ask about my lack of feeling for Fred,” he says. “You, who passed the French disease on to his mother.”

  “I cared for Fan.”

  “As did I.”

  “I had been so very well, Ebenezer. My condition. I didn’t know…”

  “Humbug. Everyone knows. The disease sleeps and then it awakens. It is a treacherous thing, and one not to be taken lightly.”

  “We cared for each other,” says Marley, who understands treachery.

  “Did you advise her? At the outset, I mean? Or even as you… went along?”

  “I believed that she knew.”

  “You believed,” hisses Scrooge. “Bah.”

  He thrusts the will into his case and removes from its depths another document, the record of some trumped-up transaction that he has found in the bowels of Marley’s office. “On the subject of belief,” he says, “I should like to present you with this.”

  Marley reaches for the document, grows dizzy, and asks Scrooge if he will do the reading on his behalf.

  “No need,” says Scrooge. “There is little here of import beyond the names of the solicitors who perpetrated this particular fraud.”

  “And those names would be?”

  “Sweedlepipe and Steerforth. Memorable appellations, don’t you think?”

  “Names to conjure with.”

  “Names not to be forgotten,” says Scrooge. “And for my part, I never have.”

  Marley is adrift. He requires either more laudanum or less. “I’m afraid I don’t…”

  “Sweedlepipe and Steerforth. Ridiculous names. Absurd names.” He stabs at the paper with a lean finger. “You used them here, just twelve years ago—but you first employed them at Professor Drabb’s. When we were boys.”

  Marley squeezes his eyes shut. “Drabb’s,” he says. “I remember.”

  “You’ve been taking advantage of me from the beginning. There was never an ounce of kindness in you. Never a trace of so-called feeling. And yet you accuse me.”

  “You wrong me, Ebenezer. I have possessed feeling. Perhaps not for you—at least not so often or as deeply as I should have—but most definitely for others.”

  Scrooge wrinkles his lip.

  “For your sister.”

  “Bah.”

  “For her son.”

  “Humbug.”

  Marley falters, his supply of defensive materials having run low.

  “Is that all, then, Jacob? Is that the sum of your so-called feeling?”

  Marley casts about in his mind for some truth upon which to hang his defense. “The plain fact,” he concludes, “is that regardless of feeling, you and I have always struggled for advantage. It is the way of the world.”

  Scrooge casts the telltale document into the grate. “Just so,” he says with satisfaction. “We have indeed struggled, you and I. We have struggled mightily. And in the end, I have claimed the victory.”

  “Only because I relented and left you to have your way.”

  “No,” says Scrooge. “It is far simpler than that. I am the victor because I shall live.”

  Marley makes no answer.

  Scrooge bends and takes up his case and fastens it tight. “And once you are in the grave I shall be your sole executor, your sole administrator, your sole assign, your sole residuary legatee, and—I have no doubt—your sole mourner.”

  “Not sole. Not sole. There is always Fred.”

  “Fred.” Scrooge repeats the name with a dry chuckle. “Fred, I’m afraid, will be quite busy looking after himself.”

  A dark light dawns upon Marley.

  “To deprive him of the privilege of toil would have been to ruin him,” says Scrooge.

  “But the will…” Marley turns in the bed, reaches out, spasms.

  “Did you fail to read it closely? I would have expected better of you.”

  “But my wishes, Ebenezer.”

  “There are wishes, and then there are wills.”

  “Then shall I leave nothing to the boy?”

  “A token. A token of your feeling, if you will. That is all.”

  “Have pity on him, Ebenezer.”

  “Pity is not
in my line of business, nor was it ever in yours.”

  Something flares in the back of Marley’s eyes, a smoldering trace of their old gleam. “How little you know me after all these years,” he says. “Why, I pity you at this very moment.” He gathers himself the slightest bit, straining in the bed as if he might yet make himself even a suggestion of the individual he used to be. “I pity you for loving money over men.”

  “Bah.”

  “I pity you for casting your nephew aside in order to gain a fortune you do not need.”

  “Humbug.”

  “You possess enough, Ebenezer.”

  “One might say so. But soon I shall possess everything. I shall take occupancy of these premises of yours, and I shall make a full inventory of the riches you have hidden here and elsewhere. I shall record every last farthing and ducat, marking it all down double-entered and cross-referenced in as many ledgers as may be required. In short, I shall devote myself as years go by to totaling up the sins of Jacob Marley. There will be justice in it, justice at last. For both of us.”

  “It’s too late for justice,” says Marley.

  “Perhaps,” says Scrooge, “but it is never too late for an accounting—and I shall have mine.”

  “May God have mercy upon your immortal soul,” says Jacob.

  * * *

  He drifts off as the church bell strikes God knows what. Some hour more than twelve, by the sound of it, and whether the whole world or only Jacob Marley has spun off into uncharted chronological territory on this Christmas morning he cannot say.

  Now that he considers it, the sound might be the clanging of a ship’s bell. Ships’ bells mark the watches, do they not? And how many watches are there? With how many hours to each? The questions ramify too quickly to ponder, but the sound of the bell as it rings out its last is surely not that which he has heard so often from the church steeple. It has a wilder clang to it, a weird and keening timbre that speaks of distance and movement and desperation.

  There are men here. No, not men—at least not all of them.