Anticipation

by Tanya Moir

  Just because Maggie found reason to suspect my great-aunt’s virtue, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the lover Babs took in the summer of 1832 was Anthony Boucher. (And whose was that late-night yearning for rough trade? My mother, back in 1981, ’82, ’83, supplied no such detail.)

  But my story isn’t impossible. It can’t be eliminated. When impossibilities are discarded, here it remains — just a hop, skip and jump from the truth. And if it’s just my imagination adding flesh to Babs’ bones, well, who better to knit her old skeleton back together again? Blood and muscle, heart and brain, I don’t have far to look for a template.

  Babs, the perfect example of Harding genes, every chromosome fully expressed from beginning to end, red head to tripping feet. It’s true, of course, that she herself did not pass on a single allele to me. Yet I find myself all too at home in her skull. It’s the same shape as mine — that much, at least, is a matter of record. And I swear I can feel her, sometimes. An echo behind my eyes as I shop for a new pair of jeans, drive my car into the office. My envious aunt. How well, I wonder, might we have walked in each other’s shoes?

  A flight of rosellas squawks across the lawn, and Ella starts and stares.

  As the early morning quiet reassembles itself, I see the grass is getting long again — my disobedient carpet of kikuyu refusing, despite the lateness of the season, to give up and lie low.

  We’ve taken to walking around the island twice a day now, Ella and I. Once in the evening, after Jake has gone, before I start making dinner. And this first-light circuit, when the grass is wet and the harbour damped down flat and the tuis knocking and wheezing like William Biggs before his first cigarette of the morning. A jacket over my pyjamas, a coffee in my hand, pohutukawa leaves sticking to my gumboots and the city soft across the water.

  Perhaps as a result, it’s beginning to feel a bit small. The island, I mean. I’m thinking of getting a new track cut in down at the high-tide line, a longer circuit through the mangroves. Maybe even a boardwalk. It’s something I could ask Jake to do, after he finishes the boatshed.

  And I’m going to have to find a gardener. I’ve managed by myself since Malcolm retired last year (or said he did, at least — I’ve noticed his van still parked around town). It seemed easier that way. But out here beyond the edges of the lawn, the order I imagine, sitting at my kitchen table, is snaking away under wreaths of convolvulus, outbreaks of dandelion and five-finger and necrophilic mushrooms.

  Perhaps I should let it go. All things revert to type, sooner or later. Creeper and fungus will have their day. I could let the island get on with expressing itself, let herons colonise the roof and old man’s beard pull down the orchard. No one would care but me.

  In the rhododendron walk, a heron is stabbing frogs. Ella growls. It feints at us with its dagger beak and flaps off into the Norfolk pine.

  Ella looks back at me. ‘Good dog,’ I say. A reflex.

  We stop at the top of the old boatshed steps, Ella disdaining the sticky, root-studded sweep of mud below. Together, we gaze at the gold-sand beach across the water.

  It isn’t real — the sand is dredged up from under the gulf somewhere, displaced scallop shells spread over the black ribs of the reef, the sour mud, like icing. Eventually it will all wash away. But for now you can’t tell the difference between the fake beach and the soft-fringed paradise it aspires to be, and you can’t help but admire it.

  Ella whines. ‘Next week,’ I lie.

  Back up at the house, she shivers and looks pointedly at the unlit fire.

  ‘It isn’t cold,’ I tell her.

  That’s where so many of us go wrong. The facile assumption of others’ care.

  I rinse the mosquitoes out of my coffee mug and turn the machine back on for another cup. It must be after eight — the sun is starting to angle in under the verandah. My watch is upstairs, but there’s no need to keep an eye on the time. It’s Saturday. No Jake.

  There are no clocks in my house. I can’t stand to hear minutes tick away. You might as well have some bloke in the corner with a cloak and a scythe, tap-tap-tapping a finger-bone on his watch. Just look at the time.

  The refrain of my childhood. Hurry up, Janine. We don’t have very long. Maggie was right about that, as it turned out. She needn’t have worried, though. We were always going to get there early.

  Back in November of 1832, my great-aunt Babs is also concerned at the passage of time. In her case, however, it’s the calendar, not the clock, that is proving irksome.

  Two months after the death of Anthony Boucher, Babs is late, and not fashionably so. Grossly, criminally, unforgivably late. As a scientist, she can hardly avoid the knowledge that her body is in a regrettable condition.

  What does she do now? I’m guessing, like Maggie before me, I admit. But surely Babs’ craniometric survey of East London can be put to good use? Surely she knows, already, the name of the very woman to whom she can turn?

  So I give you a Mrs Brawn (why not?), living not in the rookeries, with a cesspit handy to her yard, but at an admirable house in the Poultry, at which Babs is not in the least ashamed to call. They haven’t met before. But Mrs Brawn’s reputation precedes her. In a certain sector of Whitechapel — the music hall girls, in the main — her various skills are held in high esteem.

  Mrs Brawn, it is said, can fix anything. And it’s true. In Babs’ case, all that’s required is stoicism, a stiff maternity corset and a week or two at Mrs Brawn’s cousin’s country home in Kent.

  When the time comes, I’d like to imagine Babs travelling down as Jones, not so much for secrecy as comfort. The other passengers on the Dover mail wondering, behind their newspapers, how a man so young could have attained the girth of an honourable member past sixty. But my great-aunt is in no condition to climb down any fig tree. She would have no choice but to make the journey south as herself, more or less, white and faint and confined, jolting towards deliverance one pothole at a time.

  How could she not be glad to be rid of it, this millstone crushing her insides?

  And yet she won’t let go of it entirely.

  She has a pet name for her trouble. Rook. (It’s the name Babs will write on the cast she makes of a foundling boy’s skull, though for all but a month of his seven years he’s been christened Edgar. Little Edgar, my anchoring fact. He’ll pop up in the strangest of places.)

  They’re picky about whose babies they let into the Foundling Hospital these days. There’s an embarrassing interview to endure, an application procedure. But a respectable governess, seduced against her will, is always a hit with the board, and the actress hired by Mrs Brawn makes the petition prettily and well.

  Babs does have some part in the process. She sends the token to pin to little Rook’s gown. In return, she receives a registration ticket. Two means of knowing him, if she chooses, all the years of his life. A number too long to remember, and a brooch containing a lock of Anthony Boucher’s hair.

  She doesn’t need either, as it turns out.

  She knows him instantly. Among a yard full of children on visiting day, she can spot the shape of his skull, can sense the nearness of Boucher’s blood, the scent, sawdust-sweet, that filled her hormone-sharpened nostrils five years before and has never fully departed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks him, under a pale blue April sky.

  ‘Edgar.’

  And then there are the eyes.

  ‘What should you like to be, Edgar, when you grow up?’

  This half-breed of good and evil, with a cleric’s skull and a footpad’s gaze, roughly conceived and gently carried.

  ‘I want to go over the seas.’

  ‘Ah!’ Babs smiles. ‘A sailor!’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he says very seriously. ‘I want to save the Heathens.’

  ‘You want to be a missionary?’

  ‘He’ll do God proud,’ the nurse says, proprietary hands on my cousin’s bony shoulders. ‘Run along now, Edgar, there’s a good boy. Let the lady meet some othe
r children.’ (Suspicious, like me, of my great-aunt’s interest, she gives Babs a hard stare.)

  ‘Is he really destined for the church?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, madam. It won’t be decided for many a year.’ The nurse smiles. ‘But I do know he sings like a little angel.’

  ‘I wonder,’ says Babs. ‘I have a friend. A scientist. Perhaps he might offer a little advice on the children’s vocations.’

  Babs doesn’t go every month. Sometimes she has other engagements. There are lectures and concerts and dinners and, since Joshua’s death, battles with George over money and Fournier Street. Edgar can’t command all of her time.

  But as Mr Jones, she returns at least once a year, notebook and craniometer in hand, to chart his bones. The carapace of young Edgar’s thought, joints straining, finding its final shape under her hands. The curves of ossis occipitale and ossis frontalis. The delicate wings of the sphenoid bone. Love or research, who’s to say? Again, the two need not be mutually exclusive.

  As the years pass, Babs can no longer mistake the skull she sees emerging. The year Edgar turns fourteen, Anthony Boucher’s eyes stare out at her from her own head.

  And it’s on her advice — or rather, Jones’ — that the hospital decides to apprentice Edgar to a printer. An honourable trade, to be sure. One that offers a young man any number of opportunities. Heresy, sedition, pornography and pound notes.

  Babs watches and waits. For five years, Edgar sets the King James Bible, letter by letter, verse by verse. By the time he’s old enough to apply for missionary school, he knows the text in its entirety, from Leaving aside his unholy eyes, the Missionary Society can’t help but be impressed.

  His strange benefactor is at the East India Docks to see him off. Watching her great experiment set sail for Malacca, my great-aunt can’t help but feel a little cheated. But it’s nothing to her disappointment two years later, when news of Edgar reaches home at last.

  Babs’ interest in Edgar’s cranial bones, it turns out, is not unique. The day comes — soft-footed — a steaming, red-earthed jungle day, far over sleepy yellow seas, when a stranger, too, sees much in my cousin’s skull that surprises and delights him. Between the base of Edgar’s ossis occipitale and the top of his sweaty dog-collar, the stranger reads a bridge to the departed; notes, as poor lost Edgar turns, the dead man’s eyes. And with one practised blow, he takes all Babs’ work for himself. Removes it at the shoulders. Carrying away with him every promise and threat contained in Edgar’s curious head.

  Is this what pushes my great-aunt over the edge of the Regent’s Canal? The souveniring of twenty years’ work? Her unspeakable grief?

  Or is it something else? The shaking she can’t control. The painful tic in her eye. The dragging of her feet.

  Who does she hear, there on the towpath? That voice, now, inside her skull, bouncing around the caverns left by her shrinking cerebellum — is it reason? Conscience? Dr Gall? Or just the maddening chatter of Marguerite’s blood?

  The only thing I can say for certain is that it’s Edgar who pulls Babs down.

  When she pops up again — as corpses do — the bronze cast of my fifth cousin’s childhood skull is found tied to her wrist, and the authorities are quick to make up their minds. What else could she be but mad, this woman inside a man’s suit of clothes, bound to the model head of a child with what looks suspiciously like a rope of her own hair? Suicide by reason of insanity, so the court says. Which is surely reason enough, when everything else has been washed away.

  It’s a verdict important to my great-great-great-grandfather, George, since it means he inherits Fournier Street, along with everything in it. Its silver and marble and brass and Spode, its cushions and dolls and mahogany table. Everything except a white china phrenology bust, which Babs gave to her nephew, the surgeon, Harry, along with her notebooks, that night she called upon him in his rooms. The night before she died. A life’s work in twenty-five volumes, one for each year, bound in red half calf, which sweet Harry will keep until the end of his days, on the bookshelf right next to his own in the study at Montpelier Row.

  Of course, I can’t say if he read them all. Or if he did, what he made of the five-digit number written so neatly on the endpaper of 1833 — a man of such narrow experience could hardly have guessed at its meaning. But a century later, Miss Bickley’s trained eye will see it for what it is, and she’ll know how to follow where it goes — down the years to a baby, soon to be baptised Edgar, in the Foundling Hospital’s nursery. A lock of hair — dark, not red like Babs’ — pinned to his little gown, so that he can be told apart from his peers, just in case. If his mother should have a change of heart. If she should come to claim him.

  George, meanwhile, sells the house as soon as he can. Number 30 Fournier Street is no place, these days, for a family of good name.

  ‘I thought I might come over this afternoon,’ Jake says on Sunday morning. ‘Get a bit done while the weather holds. The forecast’s pretty rough for next week.’

  Phone in hand, I look out at the cloud boiling up to the west, behind the ranges.

  ‘Unless you’re busy,’ he adds.

  I can’t say that I am. ‘Okay.’

  It’s funny how some noises become part of silence, a day without them empty rather than quiet. Surf and hammering, wind and gulls. The slap of the swell on a tin dinghy. Bees in the lavender hedge, making the most of these last days of autumn.

  I like the way Jake never comes up to the house unless he’s been invited. The way he waves without looking, and gets on. I put another bottle of wine in the fridge and wonder if he has plans for the evening. Someone waiting for him somewhere. Worryingly, I find I prefer to think not. Though of course I can’t have — and surely don’t want — any reason to do so.

  Ella, returning from her joyful sprint to the jetty, scratches to be let in, then settles back down into her basket.

  At some point, April’s sales figures must put me to sleep, because the rain wakes us both, a surprise barrage hitting the roof with the force of artillery fire. Ella, confused, gives a half-hearted bark. I struggle out from under my laptop and run upstairs to shut the windows.

  From the turret, I can see Jake sheltering as best he can under the roof of the new boatshed. Behind him, brown waves smash over the jetty. He looks up at the house, and I wave at him to come inside.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, as I hand him a towel.

  I switch the lights on and look at my watch. Four o’clock. ‘Well.’ I take the wine glasses out. ‘I guess there’s nothing for it.’

  He hesitates, looking out at the furious sea. ‘I’d probably better get back, eh. While it’s light.’

  ‘You don’t want to go across in this.’ Sarah Biggs-like, I open the bottle and pour. ‘Haven’t you ever seen Coastwatch?’

  Jake looks from the wine to me in a hopeful sort of way, like the dog when she wants a thing she’s not sure I’m going to give her. I slide the glass across the bench to him. ‘There are plenty of spare beds here.’

  (It’s true. I went out and bought three — a queen and two singles — after Steve and Anna got stuck here for two days with their kids, and I had to give up my bed. I’m quite pleased at the prospect of one of them finally being used. Since that weekend, I’ve been more careful about the weather, and Steve and Anna haven’t come back.)

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive.’ I raise my glass to him. ‘I’ll never get another builder over here if you drown.’

  ‘I’ve been out in worse than this. I could make it back no worries.’ A pohutukawa branch tumbles across the lawn, and the beat of the rain on the roof shifts into double time. Jake swirls his chardonnay and smiles. ‘Probably get a bit wet, though.’

  I can’t help noticing that he doesn’t call anyone. Nobody waiting, then. No plans. What’s that to me? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Jake shivers. I should probably give him dry clothes, but I can’t think of anything that would fit him.

  ‘Throw your
T-shirt in the dryer if you want,’ I offer, rather ungenerously.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ he says, and before I have time to look away, whips it off as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to do in the middle of my kitchen. Which it is, probably. It’s not like I haven’t seen him take his shirt off before. Just not this close up. Close enough to touch. And I know that if I look down, follow the line of his abs, I’ll see his jeans are soaking too.

  ‘I’ll light the fire in a second,’ I say, taking the wet shirt from his hand and heading for the laundry. When I get back, he’s wrapped himself up in the towel, nice and safe, and taken his usual Friday night spot at the end of the table.

  We’ve sat here, a bottle between us, more often than I can count now. But it feels different this time, and not just because of Jake’s lack of shirt. Maybe it’s the darkness outside. Maybe it’s the staying. I’ve never let a man stay on the island before — a single, fuckable man, I mean. I don’t do that here.

  ‘Shall I open a bottle of red?’ I suggest briskly.

  Jake finishes his glass. ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Ella’s looking well,’ he offers, when I come back from the pantry. ‘She’s put on a bit of weight.’

  Lack of exercise, no doubt.

  He rubs her belly with his toe. ‘This is a great place for a dog.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m feeding her right.’

  ‘What’s she getting?’

  ‘Chicken, mainly.’ I hold up my finger as he starts to laugh. ‘It’s your fault — you dropped her off here without any food, so I had to use what I had in the freezer.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Now she won’t eat biscuits.’

  ‘She probably would if she was hungry enough.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I say in mock reprimand, ‘so would you, but it wouldn’t mean you enjoyed them.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been fussy.’