by Janet Ellis
The soldier skulks outside, his eyes on the ground. I touch his arm gently and when his eyes meet mine he looks so sad and tired I fear he is not long for this life. All the sleep and all the good food in the world could not restore him. He is heart-sick and broken.
‘I’ll take my leave, Anne,’ he says, pushing a hand to his head and screwing his beret in place.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want him here, not now, not with the prospect of Fub all to myself, but he deserves some generosity. ‘Will you find a bed tonight?’ I ask.
‘Shall I share yours?’ he says, but when he sees this makes me flinch, he shakes his head. ‘When you lie on your pillow tonight, don’t have any thoughts about me or where I rest. I’ll hold you to our bargain at some other time.’ He smiles, still kind. ‘But, Sir –’ This to Fub, who is with us now, ‘a nip of gin might make the hard ground more of a feather bed.’ He holds one hand out and uncurls his fingers to reveal his palm.
Fub feels in his pocket and brings out a coin. You probably don’t have much to spare, I think, but when Fub catches my eye and winks, I realise he is paying the man off and thus out of our company. I want to cheer aloud at the pleasure of knowing this. I am excited to be complicit. Never mind his fastening Bet’s buttons or my enduring Titus’ teasing. I know that we must part when we reach our destination, but I am full of anticipation simply for our walking side by side.
‘Farewell, then, you two.’ The Scotsman waves his fist at us, closed tightly over the money, then raises it to his temple in salute.
You two! That was his benediction. He joined us like a strange priest in a swift union. Anyone seeing us for the next little while will think us a pair, then. For the second time that day, I will walk with a man I do not know.
Fub points the way and we set off together and I am so excited that, if our journey were a thousand miles long, I swear I’d have the energy for it. I wish that it was, I wish that we could walk on and on through days and across great spaces together.
Chapter 7
‘Did he call you Anne?’ Fub has been watching me. I nod. ‘Do you wish to take the longer or the shorter route home then, Anne?’ He has said my name. I wish it had more syllables to keep it in his mouth for longer.
‘The longer.’ I answer too quickly; I cannot help myself. ‘I have no need to be home for a while.’ His expression is one of amused curiosity. ‘They are not expecting me back till nightfall. We dine late.’ I had better not carry on trying to make all this sound convincing, for the more I say, the more false it sounds.
‘The longer,’ he repeats. ‘Miss Anne Jaccob wishes the longer route.’
For a while, we walk without speaking. I glance at him from time to time, taking in as much of him as I can before he sees me. Several times our eyes meet as I do this, so I imagine he must be stealing looks at me, too. He has a bouncing gait, as if he has just been given good news and wants to share it. The sheer pleasure of being by his side makes me feel as if I am on the verge of laughing aloud. We share the world about us. We see everything together, the same light meets our eyes. If rain fell, we would both get wet.
‘Why do they call you Fub?’ I ask, wishing I could link my arm through his.
‘I could not say my name when I was a little boy. Or so I’m told. I thought they’d christened me Fub as I never heard anyone call me anything else.’
The image of him as a small boy is unbearably moving. ‘What is your real name, then?’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say. You might start using it, then I’d not recognise myself.’
‘You are Fub to me,’ I say, glad he can’t see me reddening, because I am thinking of a circumstance where I might say his name with pleasure and it is a fully intimate one. ‘It suits you, for no one shares it, do they?’
‘Whereas many are called ‘‘Frederick’’, I expect. You think I am one of a kind, do you?’
‘You are,’ I reply.
‘So are you, too,’ he says quickly.
The silence that follows is busy with our thoughts. Then I remember his hand on Bet’s costume, her giggle. ‘Who is she to you?’ I say with as much innocence as I can manage.
‘Who?’
‘Bet.’ I say it with a little shudder.
‘Bet? You ask “Who is Bet to me?” She is my mother’s cousin.’
I hadn’t thought of Fub with a family.
‘Titus offered me apprenticeship.’
‘Where is your family?’
‘Somerset.’ He kicks at a stone on the road. ‘Do you know it?’ He looks slyly at me, daring me to say I do.
‘I do not. Is it fine?’
‘Very fine. Full of fine things. But not ‘‘fine’’ enough to keep me there. No ‘‘fine’’ work except breaking my back on a farm for tuppence a year and freezing all winter waiting for crops to grow. No ‘‘fine’’ girls, but those who fetch milk and are simple as the cows they tend.’
‘Do you want only fine girls, then? Have you known many others, to judge them by?’ This is a dangerous question. Too late, I have asked it. I do not want to think of him with any woman but me and I do not want his thoughts dwelling there, either.
No answer. I bite my lip, considering what else to ask. He finds the stone again with his foot and sends it further along the path. ‘I do not know exactly where I am.’ As if I had been blindfolded till now, I cannot recognise the street we have reached.
‘That way,’ he points down a side street, ‘that way is to the river.’ I imagine the broad sweep of it, the deep dark water. ‘My uncle has a boat there,’ he says.
‘Titus?’ It must be a mighty boat to keep him afloat.
‘No, not Titus. He’s not my only uncle!’
‘Do your family sprinkle themselves all over London?’
‘As much as your family spreads their money round it.’
‘I don’t care for my family’s money.’ I shrug my shoulders, to show how no load of wealth rests there, weighing me down.
‘You can say that easily as you’ve never been without it.’ He is serious. I look quickly at him but he is not angry with me, only patient, like a parent with a child slow at their lessons. ‘Anne, don’t talk of money. It will divide us quicker than a fault in the earth.’
‘We must not be divided.’
‘We must not.’
We sound playful. We are not playing.
‘Tell me about your day, Anne.’
‘You know about most of my day, I think.’
‘Not today!’ he laughs. ‘I don’t suppose you spend every day strolling along with old soldiers in tartan rags and kissing eggs. No, your most ordinary day. Where do you wake? Which way does your bed face?’
‘It is a small, narrow bed.’ I have to think hard to describe my room to him. It is so familiar to me that I don’t see it any more. ‘Away from the window, which faces east. Yellow curtains hang there. On the wall opposite there is a little sampler I made as a child.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says: Honour thy father and thy mother.’
‘And do you?’
I wait a moment, then: ‘I do not.’
‘My parents have to fend without my honour, too,’ Fub says. ‘I think they’d rather I gave them one hundred pounds than that.’
‘Are they good people?’
‘Sturdy, God-fearing, causing no sorrow. Is that good?’
‘It’ll do. Do they enjoy good health?’
‘My father shakes off illness like a dog, he chucks it out of him and carries on. My mother has a cough all the time as would empty churches, but she doesn’t complain. What wakes you, then?’
‘These days, the baby. With its crying.’
‘Ah, the baby. A boy?’
‘A girl.’
‘Your little sister.’ He glances at me, to see how I respond. I am
silent. ‘What sort of baby is she?’
‘Dull. Sleeps or cries. I don’t know.’
‘Pink nails and fat thumbs?’
‘As babies have.’
‘Smelling sweet as vanilla?’
‘I expect so, I do not know.’
‘Do you not tend to her, then?’
‘No, I do not. She takes up the place where my little brother should be. He was the sweetest boy who only made everything happy in the house. And my father is angry that she was born a girl, so his mood has darkened worse than ever. And she has taken my mother from me, too; where once we sat together, or visited, or sewed, now she is pale and wretched, with hardly the strength to say my name, let alone ask how I do. And all the while, this infant leeches the very heart from her, and its every need must be answered with all speed, its every appetite quenched. I do not tend to her. I don’t even want her near me.’
‘Do you hate her?’
‘Yes!’ I did not know it until I said it, but at once I know it is true. I hardly dare look at Fub. Surely he begins to be shocked – repulsed, even – by my coldness. He looks at me with an expression I can’t read, but it is not disgust.
‘Well!’ he says, giving great force to the word. ‘I know one thing: if you can hate with such passion, Anne, then you can love with great passion, too.’ The look he gives me does not remind me of love. I think he cannot decide whether to consume or caress me.
As we round a corner there is a smell of roast meat and a woman shouts ‘Hot!’ and ‘Fresh!’
‘Are you hungry?’ Fub says, and I am. He buys two pies, almost too hot to hold, and we stand near a wall to shelter from the throng and eat them without being jostled. If one of the passing carriages held someone I knew, they would see me with a pie to my mouth and a boy by my side. Although I think I do not care if they did, I turn my back to the road.
‘Come here, you careless child, you have spilled gravy.’ Fub puts his thumb to one side of my mouth and wipes across it, then he puts it in his mouth and licks it clean. Everything inside me is focussed at the very point of the triangle between my legs, urgent as an itch that needs scratching and heavy as lead. I want to put my hand there, to put Fub’s hand there. I fear I will dissolve. I am like glass; surely he can see to the very centre of me. He takes my arm.
I once saw an aerial display in a circus. A girl climbed a tall ladder to a small bar under long ropes and dangled from it as she swung in wide sweeps of the marquee. When her partner let go of his swing, she too released her grip on her own, then dived, dizzyingly high above the ground, in a perfect arc to reach the other. For a moment, she was in the air, free, flying. And standing with Fub, his arm through mine, I am suspended, exhilarated, not heeding how far I might fall.
‘You have a good shiny pelt,’ Fub says. ‘And dog’s eyes.’ He laughs, seeing my startled expression. ‘I am unpractised in flattery, I’m just saying what I see. I like the look of you and you remind me of a proper hound that looks at me nicely.’
‘Just say “I like the look of you”.’ I don’t look at him when I speak.
‘I like the look of you. I like your brown hair and your yellow eyes. I like the height of you and your small hands. There is a proper space in your face for your features and they’re all of an even size.’
‘You can leave aside describing me as an animal, then,’ I say, my voice sounding higher than usual. ‘Besides, it’s getting late and don’t all women look the same in the dark?’
‘I would know you,’ he says and I shiver, although I am warm. ‘Nightfall or not, if I get you home too late I can whistle for your father Jaccob’s business.’ He lets my arm go, but I can still feel the warmth and pressure of his fingers. He stops suddenly, listens for a moment then turns round sharply. ‘Oy!’ he says.
There’s a small boy on the path behind us. I cannot see the child clearly as, although he is close, he is crouching down. He scuttles away. There is no one else about.
‘Little spy!’ Fub says after him. ‘I’ll leave you here. I don’t go to the front door.’
The house looms up, ready to divide us. We hold back a while near the gate. How shall we part? How can we?
‘So,’ Fub reaches to a little bush on the path, picking at the leaves, keeping his hands busy. ‘You will be the next Levener apprentice, then? You will come and see what we do?’ He shreds the blooms as if it matters that he does it very carefully and with no hurry, letting the tiny neat pieces fall to the ground, one by one.
‘I will come.’ I watch his fingers and the scattering pieces. I do not want to meet his eyes. ‘I need some more lessons from you if I am to learn how to manage a household.’ My voice is high and bright; I am spinning out these matters to keep him here. I do not want to say the words that will set him free.
‘Come tomorrow, if you will.’ Fub is trying to sound at ease, but he’s not looking at me either.
‘If I can,’ I say. Tomorrow? I will have to look for another reason to leave home. ‘If I can,’ I say again.
He picks a little flower from the bush. ‘Here.’ He holds it out to me. Then, because I do not take it at once, takes my hand and opens my fingers, curling them over it.
He does not say goodbye, but turns on his heel and walks off with that jaunty step of his. I wait, but there is no backward glance.
Too late, I remember the note, the church, the real purpose of my setting out. Leaving the house this morning seems a lifetime away. I am surprised that I still wear the same clothes. I am very tired.
The little flower in my hand wilts already.
Part Two
‘I am two fools, I know
For loving and saying so’
John Donne, The Triple Fool
Chapter 8
Pushing the front door wide, I can see straight into my father’s study. That door is, unusually, ajar. My father is bent over his desk, examining some book laid open there. Next to him, but with his back to me, is the figure of another man. A silvery tail of hair, caught with a velvet ribbon, winds down his back. He wears a purple frock coat of some soft stuff, pale brown britches and little black shoes with large buckles and he is talking in a low tone while my father listens. As the door closes behind me, my father lifts his eyes and, on seeing me, smiles. This is most strange. I suspect he must be about to reprimand me and therefore he smiles with pleasure at the promise of my punishment, but instead he says ‘Anne!’ sounding very jolly, as though he were really pleased to see me.
He taps the other fellow lightly on the shoulder and he looks up, then at me. He is holding the book my father studied and as I get nearer I can see the pages have no words, but instead are covered with bright shapes and colours. He closes it and secures it under one arm.
‘Anne!’ Again my father speaks with beaming pleasure. Perhaps he is full of wine. ‘This is Simeon Onions!’
The man turns and bows low, he even sweeps one arm across his body, a full courtly gesture. A lock of hair, as pale as the rest, falls over one eye and he winds it back off his face with long thin fingers. The gesture is youthful, even a little girlish, though his dark eyes – as brown as pitch – do not smile and his face is gaunt. His skin is pale, ash white with grey craters in the hollow of his cheeks. It is like looking at the surface of the full moon. Underneath his eyes, his bones protrude sharply. From one sleeve there falls a kerchief of crisp lace, and he pulls this free and mops his brow in a dainty feint of exertion. Onions. I seem to know his name, but I am sure we have never met before. I can dimly hear it in my head, said in another’s voice. A man’s voice. It is a memory I cannot quite pin down.
Onions turns fully towards me until he faces me square on. His black gaze is steady, unhesitant. He seems to be confirming something to himself, examining me thoroughly and taking his time. There might be no one else in the room. When he addresses me, I try not to flinch.
‘Ah, your father spoke
to me of your gentle beauty, your graceful demeanour, your noble carriage. But he failed to do you justice!’
I am taken aback – not by his wittering, that washes over me easily – but because the sound of him does not match the sight. I expected him to simper in a high falsetto but instead he has a rich baritone voice. He enunciates carefully and rather too loudly, as if he declaims from a written page to a crowded hall and wants to be heard at the very back of it.
‘How Venus must weep to know such a creature exists!’ He uses his free hand to make sweeping motions in the air as he speaks; he would probably like to give the book to one of us to leave both hands free. ‘Aphrodite must declare herself ugly in comparison! Thomas—’ He turns to my father, who has been listening to all this with a daft grin fixed to his face. ‘Thomas, I know your wife to be a beauteous woman, and you are fine featured, but still how remarkable and how fortunate that you have produced such a vision.’ His oration over, he dabs his handkerchief at his forehead again.
I wait for my father to send him packing, or at least to grunt his displeasure at this copious flood of nonsense. He does neither. He takes the book from Onions and holds it out to me.
‘Simeon is something of an artist.’ Onions simpers at this, looks to the floor and mutters ‘Too kind, too kind.’ Even with this little aside he clips the words neatly and sends them out into the world very separate from each other. My father opens the book to reveal some hectic yellow blossom.
‘He is decorating our drawing room, ready for when your mother joins us again. I want the house fully ordered when she comes down.’ When was this decided? All the papers and hangings and curtains in the house date from my parents’ marriage. They are so aged and worn as to be invisible and that has suited us all very well. Long ago, she held swatches up for him to agree to, or he bought furniture she had chosen, but they are different people now. They have long since forfeited any interest in their surroundings or made any joint decisions, let alone any as frivolous as these.
