by Jane Healey
“She upset you,” he said when I argued against it, “and made your nightmares worse; this is your home and I won’t have someone living here who upsets you, my dove. Servants come and go but I only have one child.”
“But it wasn’t her fault,” I said.
“I’ve made my decision,” he said firmly, laying a hand on my shoulder. “And besides, she’s getting old, losing her wits. People like that, liars, can be dangerous.”
Martha was the furthest thing from dangerous, or a liar, and all this mess was because of one particular afternoon two months after my mother’s death, when she had been found wandering the house feverish and out of sorts.
She’s only caught a chill, I had said to one of the newer servants who gawped to see Martha scrambling along the corridor of the second floor, searching in the servants’ rooms, and then hurrying down to the floor below to search those rooms too, eyes wild and manner frantic.
“You need to rest,” I told Martha, as the servant ran to get the housekeeper.
But Martha tugged her arm from my grip and continued her search, grasping onto each doorframe in turn and pulling herself inside as if she were on a boat and had lost her footing, whipping her head from side to side.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, trying to soothe her as she had once soothed my mother.
“The blue room,” she replied. “Where has she put it?”
“The blue room,” I repeated, feeling my stomach hollow and a rush of blood to my head. “Do you mean the morning room?” I said. “That has duck-blue walls. Or the room where the tweeny sleeps?”
“No, the blue room,” she had said crossly, dashing into the next bedroom, shaking her head, cursing words under her breath that I had never before heard her say.
“What’s in the blue room?” I asked, thinking of my nightmares, of the walls with their pattern of blue swirls, of an eye staring at me from the fireplace as I tried to find my way out . . .
“Her daughter.”
My knees buckled as I followed her into one of the unused rooms that had been shrouded in dust sheets. “Whose daughter?”
“Heloise; her little daughter.” Even as she spoke, her hands scrabbled at the wall.
Me, she meant, I was the daughter, and Heloise my mother. “You have a fever, Martha, you need rest,” I said.
She scoffed and then, as if she had only just realized that I was standing there, she turned around, her mouth white. “Where have you put it?” she asked me.
“I don’t know what you mean. Please, Martha.”
She had dug her fingers into my arm so tightly it hurt. “Heloise,” she said, and I knew then that she thought I was my mother, the both of us dark, our faces so alike. “Where is the blue room, where is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not her. Please, Martha,” I begged.
“Lucy?” she asked then, finally.
“Yes, you’re ill, Martha, you need to rest.”
“You need to help her, you need to help Heloise, she’s in danger—” she said, and then she groaned, clutching her hot head, the frenzy leaching from her.
I dragged over a chair for her to sit in and she drooped forward.
“Why is she in danger?” I asked quickly, as I heard other footsteps run down the hall toward us, but she didn’t reply.
The housekeeper arrived at the door, bringing with her two maids, and Jenkins as well, as if the old laundress was a wild animal that needed rounding up.
Martha was duly led back to bed on the top floor, where the doctor gave her something to sleep off her fever. She was lucid the next day and remembered nothing of her frantic search, nor her words of warning, the ones I excused as confusion—perhaps willfully, not wanting a reminder of my mother’s fears, of her infamous woman in white—and which had in any case come too late.
My father said that Martha disturbed me, and it is true that I had some of my worst nightmares for a week after her episode—but they could be triggered by anything; they were always in the crucible of my mind, ready to boil, and was it not only a few months since my mother had died, was that not the reason why my cries woke the house?
And even if it were not the reason, it was wrong of my father to make Martha leave after just one afternoon of madness, when my mother and I had been mad in our own ways for many more afternoons than that.
* * *
I thought of her that evening, as I picked up the gowns Hetty and I had left in a pile on my floor—my mother’s dresses that were now mine. I thought of how careful Martha was when she cleaned them, each sequin and ruffle and silver thread immaculate.
I thought of how she had kept back the darkness for precious hours, of how she had protected me.
I thought of her looking at me as if I was someone else, her face creased in anguish, clutching my arms and crying, Where have you put her, Heloise, where is your daughter? and I saw that blue pattern swimming again before my eyes, felt the prickle of unease scramble up my spine.
Ten
It was the night of the ball and Lockwood had come alive. The floors of the corridors and ballroom had been buffed with beeswax polish until they gleamed, and the house itself was groaning under the weight of fresh flowers in monstrously large vases, while tables covered with thickly starched linen sported a dazzling array of delicate canapés—pastries, cakes, tiny sandwiches, fruits—and servants held silver trays crowded with crystal glasses of champagne. A butler and footman had been hired to give the impression that Lockwood still had a full complement of staff, and some extra help from the village had been pressed into service that night, along with two of the more presentable groundsmen, wearing white gloves to make their hardened hands suitable for indoor work. The only element missing from the age-old scene was lights along the drive, an impossibility under blackout.
The officers at the dance were tall, and also well-polished, their uniforms neat and manners confident; they walked through a room with the easy arrogance of the well-bred, and chattered away during dances, occasionally remembering that they were supposed to ask questions: Oh, I don’t suppose you like riding, do you? (it was surely not a coincidence that many of them reminded me of Thoroughbred horses) or Didn’t I meet you at Malcolm’s a few months ago? They made me nervous and I was cross with myself for that. I was not hunting for a husband here and I knew who I was and who I was not; I should not let them intimidate me. Perhaps it was the dress, which had felt so comfortable when I tried it on with Lucy but now felt like a costume that did not quite fit.
Lucy outshone all the women in attendance, of course, in her wine-red silk dress whose hem was slightly longer than fashionable, and with her neat white fox fur cape, and the diamond pins in her hair, which had grown out just enough to no longer look odd. Even the way it seemed like she had simply thrown on her outfit, as if she might say, This old thing with a shrug and really mean it, only added to her charm. She was certainly the most popular dance partner, whisked off her feet before she could even catch her breath, passed from officer to officer to local dignitary, with a polite smile and the occasional charming laugh as she circled the floor, skirts flowing around her legs like liquid. I was jealous of her, I could admit that, and it was not just the wealth, for I had grown up in comfortable surroundings too, nor was it her beauty; it was her ease that I envied the most, the way the ballroom looked like a backdrop in the play of her life.
Her father paused from his own busy dance card to cut in on a youth with curly blond hair, and as father and daughter circled the room, him murmuring to her with a smile, his hand light on her waist as her skirts spun out, you could tell he was proud of her, and feel the warmth of those watching such a happy scene.
“His mother and his wife in one blow,” a woman nearby murmured to her companion with a cluck of her tongue, “and on a Sunday drive on empty roads—it beggars belief. Thank goodness his daughter wasn’t in the car that evening. What a comfort she must be to him now, and looking so much like Heloise.”
“Yes, but his
mistresses are always blond, haven’t you noticed?” the companion answered archly as the woman told him to hush.
As I sipped my champagne and felt the fizz in my gullet, I felt a rising uneasiness at the scene before me. The military band was playing a very old song and the scene in the ballroom—men in uniform or tails and women in formal gowns—seemed little changed since the turn of the century (at least if one did not look closely enough to realize that the women were not wearing heavy corsets and silly hair, that there was slightly more flesh being flashed: a back, a smooth shoulder, a firm calf). There was no hint of war here—the uniforms seemed only a smart costume, there were no missing limbs or injured faces, no blood or destruction. It was the same everywhere in the country, I knew—we were waiting for war to start even though it had been declared more than a month ago, waiting for the bombs to fall. But the scene here felt too much as if we would always be waiting, that we were frozen in some kind of opulent tableau.
I made my way around the edge of the ballroom and out into the hall, stopping near the smoking room when I heard my name spoken in conversation.
“I don’t know,” a man was saying, before pausing to inhale on his cigarette. “If that’s the best the museum has to offer, the best the government can muster . . .” He laughed.
“Yes,” the man speaking with him agreed, “she’s an odd duck, terribly gauche. I asked her a polite question and she took it as an invitation to lecture me on the finer points of mammal classification.”
A lie, I thought, my face flushing with shame and embarrassment, lurking in the hollow behind a tall plant. That bore of a man had asked me himself what made a mammal a mammal, and I had answered him in three sentences at most.
“Yes, she certainly seems very intense. But these women in male professions are, aren’t they?”
More laughter, and I turned away swiftly, my cheeks hot and my throat tight, only to knock into someone striding past.
“Steady on there,” a man in tails said, putting out a hand to stop me from falling into him.
“Excuse me,” I said, mortified, and then when I got a better look at him, my breath hitched and a little shocked noise escaped my mouth. He was older than me by about ten years, solidly built, with dark hair and a reddish sheen to his five o’clock shadow, and I was utterly horrified to recognize him.
Then he looked up from readjusting his bow tie and the features of his face rearranged themselves into someone unfamiliar.
“I say, are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m quite fine, thank you,” I said, my voice high and strange, and hurried away along the corridor, ducking into the small bathroom and bolting the door firmly behind me. My hands slid against the mahogany door as I leaned against it and tried to get my breath back, my heart shivering with the aftereffects of a fight-or-flight response.
* * *
About six months before I came to Lockwood Manor, I had visited a private fossil collection near the coast as a representative of the museum, staying in a little hotel which I was ferried to and from by a local bus. It was at the hotel that I had met a man who had called himself Jeffrey, and who I had just mistaken the man in the hallway for.
Jeffrey and I had made polite conversation over breakfast, dinner, and tea in the lounge, and on our first meeting I had—oddly, and for a reason I could not have clearly articulated to myself—chosen to introduce myself by a different name, as Elizabeth Treadway, a name conjured unthinkingly from the ether. He was not wearing a wedding ring and his cheeks were rough with stubble at all hours as if his razor was not quite sharp enough. He smelled of good cologne and cigar smoke, and his clothes were of a fine quality. I did not recall his personality, beyond the fact that he reminded me rather of a cocker spaniel; the only important thing to me then was that he was inoffensive and quite clearly attracted to me.
I think I only decided on my last night that I was going to sleep with him. It was a strange decision that had bubbled up in me sitting there in the parlor without apparent forethought—and yet by giving the false name, was I thinking of it in some way from the very start? I would never see him again and I was tired of being a spinster and resentful that other women had experienced something that I still had not, since I was untouched in every pitiful sense of the word.
Decision made, I had sat too close to him in the parlor, acted awfully interested in whatever he was saying, and laid my hand on his arm a couple of times. When he had asked me why I was staying there, I made up an aunt I was visiting or some such. He said he was leaving tomorrow afternoon, and I expressed appropriate sadness.
I was telling him one of my favorite facts about male giraffes, and he was pretending to be interested, when he remarked that the drinks in the cabinet in the parlor were stale.
I brought some better whisky with me and it seems a shame to keep it all to myself, he had said.
Oh, really? I said, leaning closer.
It’s upstairs, in my room, he said, and paused.
I did not know how forthright I was supposed to be. Would you like a drink upstairs? he asked.
All right then, I replied, relieved that the parlor had stayed empty for our conversation.
He got up from the seat and I followed him out into the hall, where the grandfather clock was chiming the hour.
He put his hand on the small of my back as we came to the stairs.
After you, he said, and I felt the sensation of his eyes on my backside as I walked up. I felt powerful all of a sudden, and desirable. I was a film noir siren, I decided, trying to slip into a role. I would sleep with him once and then break his heart. In my mind’s eye my nails were long red talons, my heels were higher and my skirt tighter; my wit devastating.
It was awkward in the hall as he shuffled around me to lead us to his room, the both of us trying our best not to glance around like bad spies. He invited me in and I strolled forward as if I had done this a hundred times before. Inside myself, though, I felt a shiver of nerves.
He poured us two slim measures of whisky and drank his in one quick gulp. I sipped at mine and then he took the glass and with his hand on my chin, turned my face toward him. He kissed me, his stubble rasping over my skin. He clutched me to him, his arms squeezing my body against his, his desire for me strangely thrilling.
Shall we move to the bed? he whispered, as he fingered the buttons of my blouse.
Do you have a prophylactic? I asked, thinking it best to be direct: I might have been inexperienced but I was not naive, and I wanted no unexpected repercussions.
Oh, right, yes, he replied, and moved away to fumble in his suitcase.
While his back was turned I licked away the last of my lipstick, because I knew that it looked terrible half-done, and wiped the back of my hand across my damp upper lip. Should I remove my clothes or let him do it? I started to unbutton my blouse and he groaned at the sight and raced over to help me with it.
But all that power, that image of some arch villainess from the pictures, vanished with my clothes off, and I simply felt like a body. There were my breasts and there were his hands; here were my thighs, my hip bones digging into his sides, his breath panting by my ear; here was my head shifting up and down on the pillow as he thrust into me. It did not hurt, because I was not a prude who had reached the age of thirty without touching herself or finding her own pleasure. But he did not touch me where I wanted to be touched, and I did not move his hand for fear of seeming too enthusiastic. My arms rested loosely on his back, which was clammy and cold, like a slab of meat, and I had to remind myself to smooth a hand up and down it at intervals.
Was this what all the fuss was about? I thought resentfully about five minutes into the act. Then he squeezed my right hip tightly with his hand and I felt a fluttering in my belly and a rush of blood. He squeezed again and I caught my breath, thinking that I was approaching something close to the very start of pleasure. But then he finished with a groan, and lay on me, panting. I had the urge to brush his hair back from his forehead,
like he was a boy. He pulled out and shuffled over to lie beside me.
How would another woman act now? Was I supposed to share a cigarette, or say something about his performance? I should get back to my room, I said, suddenly desperate to be alone.
I put on my skirt and blouse hurriedly with my back to him, scrunching up my stockings in my hand because I did not want to waste time putting them on.
I did not remember what I said at the door, but probably something breezy and very unlike myself. Then I left, rushing down to my own room and locking the door behind me, leaning against it and breathing heavily. I had gone into it with eyes wide open, but now I could not help but feel cheap and used. I felt my eyes pool with tears, but ran a hand across my forehead until the urge to cry had passed. Then I ran a bath and washed myself briskly.
I felt a little calmer once the smell of his skin was gone and the warmth of the water had soaked into my limbs. I got out and dried myself with the thin hotel towel and then hung it back over the rail. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of my naked body in the bathroom mirror, and moved to regard myself more closely, twisting my torso to clutch at my hip with the opposite hand, squeezing it just as he had done, but feeling nothing. I felt the weight of a breast in my palm and then the softness of the skin underneath my arm. I went to get the chair from the other room and, standing on it under the light in front of the sink, I looked in the mirror at my hips and the curling hair between. I turned around and looked over my shoulder at my backside, at the mole that decorated the right cheek. I remembered discovering the mole during a particularly boring afternoon spent with a hand mirror while I tried to set my hair in curls that would stay; I remembered thinking that my future lover would press their finger on the mole, that it would excite them. But it had been too dark in his room to see it.
I stepped down from the chair and moved it back into the other room. It felt ridiculous to be naked while carrying a chair. Would this excite a man, to see me doing this, I wondered. I had learned from years of overhearing half-conversations in streets and bars that men were attracted to very odd things, not just breasts and backsides, but feet and noses and thick underarm hair and sneezes, the way a woman’s perfume reminded them of their childhood nurse, or the shade of downy upper lip hair.
