by Maria McCann
Thus she swims through the night sky, her destination a distant belfry where the bell shines out bright as a guinea. Sophia keeps her eyes fixed on the belltower, assuring herself of its solidity, for she has begun to notice, passing from one roof to the next, the great height of the buildings beneath her. Between them lie chasms, dropping sheer to the depths where London, all mouths and teeth, lies buckling and heaving. How easy, to fall into it and be devoured. And now she realises with horror that the belfry is swaying, undermined from below. She cannot reach it in time and as she passes over a great black gulf she feels herself sucked down, down, the walls hurtling up on all sides as she falls. The bell calls tenderly to her, its faint metallic lowing snatched away by the wind.
She is startled awake, the bell still pleading in her ears even as the threaded roughness of the winter coverlet tells her she is in bed and her husband, having kicked open the chamber door, is cursing his boots.
Perhaps she really did hear chimes. There is a clock over the hearth; were she alone, she would rise and ascertain the hour but Edmund is moving restlessly about, muttering something Sophia is glad she cannot understand. She is lying with her face towards his side of the bed. With infinite care, so as to make no sound, she rolls over until she is facing the other way.
At last he finds the edge of the coverlet and pushes his way between the sheets, bringing with him an eloquent if unspoken account of his night’s adventures: the mingled stinks of punch, tobacco and burnt meat; the sourness of unwashed flesh and, most hateful of all, a sickly, clinging pomade.
His wife lies shamming sleep though she has never been more awake, almost afraid to breathe for fear of what she might suck into her lungs. Her thoughts come in a terrifying rush. Tobacco is nothing, though foul: even a man who does not indulge can pick it up on his clothing, merely from standing near. But the pomade, the pomade . . . if Edmund has been close enough for that, there can be little doubt of the rest. And now she remembers that vile, corrupting letter, the enticement to debauchery signed K. Hartry, testimony to the company Edmund has kept.
That the footsteps of vice are dogged by disease, and a wife’s health at the mercy of a foolish or selfish husband, Sophia first learnt as a child, from hearing talk amongst the servants. At that time, with a child’s innocence, she understood it to mean that a wife might become debilitated from constant quarrelling. Since then she has learnt more. Vice’s punishment is visited upon the innocent as well as the guilty: not even children are spared. Very possibly, her husband carries such castigation within him; or, if not infected today, he may be so tomorrow.
Edmund makes an incoherent sound, followed by a full-bodied snore. The self-discipline required for perfect stillness means that Sophia dare not sleep likewise; coming to after a momentary lapse, she is cold with fear but Edmund snores on.
Her hips ache. The night would seem interminable but for the church bells: half past five, quarter to six. It is Sophia’s habit to rise and be dressed by seven. She ought to get up, get away from him, but suppose he should catch hold of her? She cannot think how to proceed. Shortly after six, exhausted but still wakeful, she perceives a difference in Edmund’s breathing. Immediately afterwards, her husband stretches his legs. Sophia’s posture has never altered since he got into the bed, and now she feels his hand creep under her nightgown, pause on the curve of her hip, then walk crabwise, finger by finger, round the front of her body. Edmund pushes himself against her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. A sly, insinuating finger parts the flesh between her legs.
‘Not now, my dear.’ She attempts to pull his hand away, but his arm is stronger than hers. The finger stays where it is, and at the same time he slides his other hand around and beneath her in order to pinch at her breast.
She says more loudly, ‘Not now,’ but Edmund only murmurs into her hair, ‘Ah, don’t be coy, my dimbadell.’
At least, that is what it sounds like. Whatever it is, she has never heard the expression before and she thinks: Why, he has mistaken his bedfellow! Now he is putting a leg across hers, as if to turn her over. Sophia lies rigid with fear and disgust. In all the mortifications and cruelties of her married life, nothing has come close to this. Here in their bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, her criminally careless husband is proposing to ruin her health.
Edmund grips her tightly, giving a sudden heave and roll so that she is on top of him.
‘Ride a cock-horse,’ he mutters. ‘Come on, ride St George.’
He paws at her nightgown in order to get at her breasts. She moves awkwardly so as to block him but there is the thing, straining, eager to plant death in her womb.
‘No!’ Sophia cries, flinching away. Edmund says nothing, but catches hold of her wrists. There is a moment when she thinks she might escape, but when he begins to grasp her in earnest she realises that, even sitting astride him, she is not strong enough to resist.
She screws up her eyes, deafened by the hubbub inside her, Mama’s voice and the doctor’s, and the physical effort, a squeezing, a forcing through. Surely it is impossible – for some seconds she feels nothing – her body has refused to obey, or has it? She cannot tell – and then there is the shameful, wonderful rush of warmth. Edmund gasps as the urine spreads across his belly and onto the mattress on either side.
There is a silence. She is shaking so violently as to be almost glad of his restraining grasp. The thing has shrunk away.
Edmund releases her left wrist. He lays her hand down by his side, stroking it as if to pacify her.
‘Poor little Sophy.’
Sophia slumps with relief. ‘Forgive me,’ she babbles, ‘I couldn’t help ―’
The slap wrenches her head to one side. She hopes she did not cry out. She might perhaps have rolled off him, but he still holds her by the wrist. Her cheek stings as, wincing, she opens her eyes.
‘You couldn’t help it, eh?’
‘No ―’
‘I knew a girl took money for that.’
The room is too dark to see his face but it seems to Sophia that he derives pleasure from saying it here, to her. His voice is silky, as if he is smiling.
‘She never pissed on me. If she had, by God, I’d have taught her manners.’
Again a silence. Sophia’s left eye has begun to water. She wonders who this ‘girl’ might be: perhaps the person she noticed in the street.
‘You’ll be a pretty sight tonight and no mistake,’ says Edmund, brisk and unconcerned. ‘Now do as I told you.’
She makes as if to comply but flings herself to one side, so that she is no longer straddling him, and half slides, half falls down the edge of the bed. By the time Edmund has recovered from his surprise she is on her feet and about to escape onto the landing, but before she can haul open the door he is upon her and dragging her back. She refuses to let go of the doorknob: it comes away in her hand and both she and Edmund stagger backwards, through the door of her closet.
Sophia looks round desperately for something to cling to, and can find nothing better than the leg of the toilet table. Edmund gropes along the table-top, snatches up a pretty little tortoiseshell mirror that Mama gave her and throws it against the wall.
Sophia screams. ‘That was wicked, Edmund!’
‘Not at all, Madam. A man may do as he wishes with his own property. Even,’ he shakes her, ‘a stinking pisspot of a wife.’
Rage lends her courage. ‘Stinking? You stink of smoke and ―’
‘Hold your tongue ―’
‘― worse, out till five, I heard you ―’
He twists her fingers away from the table and wrenches her out of the closet. ‘I know what’ll settle you,’ he mutters, pushing her against the mattress. ‘I know you, of old.’
Once it has begun, her body remains inert throughout. She knew there would be no pleasure but nor is there any pain, nothing but a deathly numbness. This is how it must feel to drink off a bottle of poison: the flesh doomed, resigned, while the mind races. Is this the lethal moment a
fter which there is no cure? Or this? Is infection already at work? Feel the extent of my powers. More than once Edmund mutters, ‘Pisspot, bloody pisspot,’ as if to render the connection as humiliating as possible. He himself, for all his huffing and pushing, appears to find little delight in it – precious few of Mama’s voluptuous sensations – but at last he reaches the limits set by Nature.
‘Cold,’ he says, withdrawing his body from hers without any pretence of a caress. ‘A cold, dirty little bitch.’
Hearing what she supposes to be her cue to beg and plead, Sophia remains silent.
‘No man can be expected to sleep in a bog-house,’ says her husband. Sophia would like to shrug, but does not dare; instead, she pictures her face as a wax mask, expressionless and colourless, except, of course, where he has hit her.
‘I shall give orders for a new bed,’ Edmund goes on. ‘You may keep the old. Should I require your services, Madam, I advise you not to repeat that trick.’
He rises and begins to dress.
26
Fortunate starts awake. Was somebody shouting? Shouting and standing by his bed . . . He opens his eyes as little as possible, peeping between his eyelashes: before him is the familiar attic wall and the faint square of the window. After a while he raises himself on one elbow. He can just make out his soiled shirt and stockings lying over the chair and beneath them, keeping them company, his shoes.
Perhaps he himself called out in his sleep.
A bird frets on a nearby roof. In his village, at this time of morning, thousands of birds cry out together as the world is flooded with pink and green and gold. Creatures on every side, for many miles, pour their voices into a sea of song on which the village floats. If he was a grown man, he thinks, and had a woman, he would take her then, while that sea was rising.
Meanwhile there is Dog Eye and his pinched wife. Fortunate slides down into the bed again. Last night, fearful of her anger, he waited at the door until very late. He hoped that Dog Eye, who was out of the house, would return and dismiss him, but nobody came and Fortunate was shaking with fatigue by the time Eliza found him there. Eliza said the Mistress was in bed. She had made a mistake, and would not wish him to stay any longer. But Fortunate, though he went to his attic and lay down, was not so sure and half expected Mrs Dog Eye to rise from her bed and creep downstairs in order to catch him out.
There it is again: a cry, seemingly from under his bed. He rolls from under the sheet and kneels, ear to the ground. He already knows whom he expects to hear: below him lies the best bedroom, occupied by the master and mistress of the house.
It is the Wife who is crying, or rather uttering an indistinct string of sound varied by shouts and sobs. Now Dog Eye speaks, and Fortunate strains to catch the words. Something hard smashes against a wall. The Wife screams. Fortunate sits back on his heels.
A tapping: someone is outside his chamber. ‘Titus!’ a woman hisses. ‘Titus, are you awake?’
A streak of light can be seen along the bottom of the door. Straightening his nightgown, Fortunate goes to unfasten the latch. Outside stands Mrs Launey, frizzled grey hair escaping from her cap, and behind her Fan, holding a lamp. Only after greeting these two does he see Eliza, hovering at the back. The women file into the room. Fan sets down her lamp on the sill where it lights up Fortunate’s jerry, standing unconcealed next to the bed. Eliza nudges the jerry out of sight with her foot.
‘Listen out, then,’ urges Mrs Launey. The young women drop down as Fortunate himself did just a few minutes earlier, each pressing an ear to the floorboards, while the cook, who is plumper and appears, from her strange shape, not to have laced her stays, sits on Fortunate’s bed and lays a finger across her lips.
‘Ah!’ The women on the floor breathe in sharply, both together.
‘The brute!’ Eliza murmurs.
‘I reckon he’s milling her,’ says Fan.
‘Cursed if I’d let a man take his fists to me.’
‘When you marry,’ says the cook, ‘you’ll find you’ve precious little say in the matter.’
‘I wouldn’t provoke him, at any rate,’ retorts Eliza, straightening up. ‘She provokes. Went to bed last night and left Titus asleep in his shoes, ask Fan if you don’t believe me. If not for me he’d be standing yet.’
‘Why’d she do that?’
‘Forgot him.’
‘Not provocation, then,’ he hears Fan murmur. Eliza bends down again to the floor. Fortunate wonders if he will be able to get back into his warm bed but the cook shows no inclination to move so he puts on his coat over his nightgown. He has a pressing need to fart.
‘Well?’ asks the cook after a while.
The younger women exchange curious looks.
‘Well?’
Fan shakes her head. Again the maids settle down into listening. Fortunate clenches his buttocks.
‘I think they’re making up,’ Eliza says with a snigger.
‘Then you’ve no business to listen,’ says the cook, rising from the bed and pulling her by the arm.
‘I’m only making sure.’
Fan straightens herself. ‘It’s sure enough. You won’t tell, will you, Titus? You’d get us into terrible trouble.’
‘Yourself too,’ says the cook, puffing herself up and looking stern. ‘Yourself worst of all.’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ says Fortunate, wishing he had pretended to be asleep instead of opening the door.
‘I suppose I can take up the chocolate in a bit,’ Fan says to the cook.
‘When it’s made.’ Mrs Launey steers the younger women out of the room, one on each arm. ‘You, Titus, time you were up.’
When they are gone Fortunate looks sadly at his bed. The warmth will be gone from it now. He farts, washes his face and begins pulling on his uncomfortable clothes.
*
‘Your chocolate, Madam.’
Only a servant can smirk in quite that way. Only a servant would wish to, or would give off that precise air of mingled curiosity, pity and spite: it is Bath all over again. When Fan has gone, Sophia goes to the closet and pushes open the door. There lies the tortoiseshell mirror, its glass cracked and its handle broken off short. Even if repaired, it will never be the same: she will never be able to see it, now, without remembering this hateful scene. Nevertheless she takes up the mirror, cradling it in her hand, then raises it to the level of her face.
Having examined herself since rising, she already knows what awaits her. The left side of her face is swollen, her eyes crumpled and pink. The conviction rushes upon her that she has the face of a potato. In the whole of England, could there be found a plainer countenance? Useless, at moments such as these, to remind herself that Miss Beeston (now Mrs de Tronc) has a wasted arm, or Mrs Tench (née Balmayne) no ankles. These flaws are without importance, since both ladies are said to be loved and respected by their spouses. It is all the difference in the world.
Edmund is no such loving husband. He is dissolute and dishonest, piling up secrets of which the very imagination sickens her. Absurd to appeal for frankness, for integrity, between husband and wife: there will be more, always more, to uncover. Oh, to be back on the lake with him! How differently she would perceive his compliments and smiles!
Was there never a chance that things might have been otherwise? This thought is a torment to Sophia. Despite recent revelations, she remains, even now, unable to rid herself of a torturing doubt: had she been a more attaching female, sprightlier, given to piquant observations, endowed with beauty, blessed with perfect health, might she have charmed him into casting off his bad habits, and thus proved his redemptrix as well as her own? Many a bad man has been reclaimed by a good wife. Everybody says so. But Sophia has failed utterly and is more deficient, therefore, than either Mrs Tench or Mrs de Tronc. She is a mere vegetable, scarcely qualified to be one of the Sex.
If Mama were here . . . When Sophia was a girl, anxious beneath the scrutiny of gentlemen who might or might not declare themselves suitors, Mama would come to
her before each social ordeal and stroke her brow. ‘There,’ she would say, ‘perfect!’ and present the maid with sixpence ‘for arranging Miss Sophy’s hair so very becomingly’. If Mama were here now, she would perhaps take Sophia in her arms. ‘You have not your equal for miles around,’ she would say, ‘and Edmund knows it. Naturally your eyes are a little pink after a disagreement, with that sensitive skin! Who else has a complexion as delicate as yours?’
In the past, such maternal faith in her would have provided all the moral stiffening necessary, but Sophia, grateful as she will ever be for Mama’s tenderness, has begun to doubt her wisdom. Having been put upon her wits lately, she has taken to making independent observations and has discovered, among other things, that although ladies set great store by the refinement of the complexion, gentlemen are not much swayed by it. Mama it was, also, who always insisted the weakness would heal with time. In this, and in other matters – such as leaving Edmund in ignorance of his bride’s condition, while allowing the bride to believe otherwise – Sophia is forced to admit that Mama’s judgement has proved sadly at fault. As for how to proceed after purposely soiling the marital bed with one’s husband in it, such a question might perplex Mrs Delany herself.
The bedcurtains are drawn as if to conceal her sleeping spouse. Though Fan brought up two cups, as usual, Sophia observed that the maid avoided looking at the bed.
The girl knows.
Her chocolate is growing cold. She carries it with her to the window and stands looking down upon a street already full of hurrying people. I would change my lot with any one of you, thinks Sophia, and then reproaches herself: is she not fortunate, even now, compared with the twisted crone limping along on the far pavement? God places us in our stations and devises our trials, tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.
Edmund will have a new bed, well and good. Where does he intend to sleep until it is finished? With luck, pride will compel him to purchase one ready-made, and have it delivered directly. In the meantime, how is she to evade him? There is something perverse in his nature, something that recoils from her yet will not let her alone.
