Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

She has often heard me sing. She has listened to him play, and must know there can be no match between us. But I have to obey her. Wolfi turns to me as I walk forward. Nannerl starts playing again, and under cover of her music Wolfi asks, ‘Have you a song?’

  My mind empties, and only one song is left. It comes from the ship which brought me to England. The captain stood me on a stool and taught me to sing it, line by line. Afterwards he clapped with his big hands and picked me up and swung me round and round. I did not understand then that he was going to sell me when we got to London.

  ‘Yes, I have a song,’ I say. Wolfi’s eyes sparkle. He nods towards the antechamber, and we slip out while Nannerl plays steadily. Wolfi sips his father’s wine, then says, ‘Sing it to me.’

  I sing it through, very softly so they won’t hear from the ballroom. Wolfi nods, and says, ‘I have it.’ He picks up his violin, and plays a few bars perfectly. ‘I like it,’ he says.

  When we stand in front of the audience I’m so nervous that my lady’s guests are a blur of silk and satin and sparkling jewels. I cannot fix on their faces, although I know they are chattering and laughing to each other. My tight uniform squeezes my breathing as Wolfi skips through the opening bars. I close my eyes so I won’t see the room, and start to sing:

  ‘’Twas Friday morn when we set sail,

  And we were not far from land,

  When the captain, he spied a fair mermaid,

  With a comb and a glass in her hand.

  Oh the ocean waves may roll,

  And the stormy winds may blow,

  While we poor sailor boys go skipping up aloft

  And the landlubbers lying down below, below, below,

  And the landlubbers lying down below …’

  There is dead silence, but I keep going. I daren’t open my eyes.

  ‘Then up spoke the cook of our gallant ship,

  And a greasy old cook was he,

  “I care more for my kettles and my pots,

  Than I do for the roaring of the sea …”’

  My voice is wobbling. They don’t like it. I open my eyes. Some ladies are making faces as they fan themselves. My lady stares straight ahead, hard and angry. My throat is dry and the notes stick while my song falls away in pieces.

  Only Wolfi doesn’t care. He plays on, wave after wave of music, right to the end of the song and then he rattles out a final drumbeat of notes. My lady rises from her seat and beckons me with one gloved finger.

  ‘A song more fit for the gutter than for my guests, Scipio. You had better go and assist in the supper room. Ask James for your duties.’

  Since that concert I have never entered my lady’s bedchamber. Once I said to Eliza, ‘Does she ever ask for me?’ but Eliza shook her head. I clean knives and polish silver. I sleep in a cubbyhole below stairs, with my purse deep in the straw of my pillow. James still says I could make a fine footman one day, but I don’t listen. He wants to make a pet of me, and he says what he thinks will please me.

  ‘You’ve a footman’s calves,’ he says, and I feel his hand on my leg, prodding my muscle. He wants me between his thighs, but I’ve learned my lesson. I keep my head down and polish knives until the skin on my fingers is raw.

  One hot day in July, Albert brings in a bill advertising a concert at the Swan and Harp in Cornhill.

  ‘It’s those blessed Prodigies of Nature again,’ he says, sarcastic. ‘Half a crown entry, they want.’

  An itch to go there seizes me. There won’t be any fine ladies in a tavern in Cornhill. I can go as well as anybody. But half a crown is a huge sum.

  I wonder why Wolfi and his sister are playing in a tavern now, instead of great ladies’ ballrooms. Perhaps they have grown too tall. Perhaps the ladies are tired of them.

  When the day comes, I go to my hiding place and weigh my purse in my hands. I run and beg Sarah for a little sweet almond oil. I rub it into my skin until the ashy grey has gone and then I rub it into my hair. I ask James if I can have a clean shirt. Does he really believe that I can become a footman one day?

  ‘Yes,’ says James, pleased, and he finds me a cambric shirt, and a pair of clean breeches. I dress myself and hang my purse around my neck. It is the easiest thing in the world to slip out of the area door, up the steps and away down the street. I walk fast, but not too fast. If anyone sees me they’ll think I’ve been sent on an errand.

  There is a thick crowd milling outside the Swan and Harp. I wriggle my way through, towards the front. These people would never be allowed near my lady’s doors, laughing and shouting and all with ready money in their hands. They push me in on their tide. The man on the door doesn’t even look at me; he just counts the coins I give him.

  Inside the tavern the air is thick with smoke and laughter, and pot-boys weave in and out, carrying jugs. In the centre a space has been cleared and a harpsichord stands ready. I find a seat at the side, in the shadows, and pay twopence for a glass of ginger shrub. My heart beats fast with excitement. Nobody here knows that I used to be my lady’s page. No one is going to shout at me, ‘What are you doing here, you lazy good-for-nothing? Get back to the scullery, there’s a box of knives to clean.’

  It is Wolfi who plays first. He has changed so much. He is much taller, and he’s so thin that I think he must have been ill. He isn’t wearing a fancy miniature man’s suit, but a handsome shirt and breeches. His hair is tied behind. He is still a boy but he doesn’t look like a Prodigy of Nature any more. Nannerl is there too, and it is announced that Wolfi will play first.

  Wolfi bows to the audience and they fall silent. My lady’s guests were never silent. Their chatter went on all the while, sharp as bits of glass. Wolfi plays better than ever. His father says he will play works of his own composition, and he plays a minuet and then a contredanse and some jigs that remind me of Biddy singing in the kitchen. People call out the names of their favourite songs and if he knows it he plays it straight off, but if he doesn’t he’ll ask them to sing a verse through, and then he has it. His father announces that he will play blindfold. The audience cheers as one of them is asked to come up and check that it is a true blindfold and now Wolfi is playing again, faster and faster, as if he has been wound up so tight that he will never be able to stop. They take the blindfold off and he stands and bows and the crowd stands up and shouts and whistles. Wolfi looks very tired.

  I forget about sitting back in the shadow. I am on my feet clapping, and that’s when Wolfi sees me. His face lights up and he gives me a little wave. When the cheering has died down he calls out: ‘Scipio!’

  I think of running away, but he looks so tired. He’s beckoning me eagerly. Nannerl gives me a small, shy smile. Their father is peering in my direction, but he doesn’t know me.

  ‘Scipio!’ calls Wolfi again, and I go forward.

  Wolfi beams and seizes my hand. ‘My friend will sing, and I will play,’ he announces. The crowd clap and cheer and wave their mugs. Wolfi picks up his violin and plays the first bars of my song. He remembers them perfectly. I clench my fists. The memory of my lady’s concert sweeps through me. I can’t do it. I can’t fail again. Wolfi stops, glances at me. He smiles but I can see he’s worried.

  Suddenly I make up my mind. This is not my lady’s concert. Wolfi likes my song, and he knows more than my lady. I stand as tall as I can, and look straight at the audience. Their faces are warm with the music they have heard and the drinks they have drunk. Wolfi draws his bow across the strings. We are off.

  By the third verse the tavern crowd is singing along with the chorus and clapping out the rhythm. An old man bawls ‘Way-O, Way-O’, as sailors do when they pull the ropes. The noise roars in my ears like the sea as we hit the last verse:

  ‘Then three times ’round went our gallant ship,

  And three times ’round went she,

  And the third time that she went around

  She sank to the bottom of the sea.’

  They shout and drum their mugs on the tables for more as we bow, and I see that Wolfi
is laughing as he laughed the first time I saw him, not silently this time but aloud as if this is what all the miracle of his music is meant for. But at the same time I am afraid of the faces. They are so hungry. If they don’t get what they want, they will turn. I think of the captain. He taught me each line patiently. He set me on a stool as he hunkered by me, and his face was inches from mine. I don’t think he hurt me. I don’t remember. He would not have wanted to spoil me. He sold me to my lady for a handsome sum.

  I don’t wait for the end of the concert. You can stay too long, and then people don’t want you any more. Once Nannerl starts playing, I smile at Wolfi, and give him a wave as I slip away. I check that my purse is still safe round my neck. There’s enough money in it for food and a bed until I get work. I’m not going to be a footman. I’m heading for the docks.

  The sea was grey in the portholes; I remember that. It churned around the ship and slopped all over the glass. I held tight to the sides of my bunk, for fear I’d be thrown out. I thought the sea would come in and fill the cabin. But I think there was a time when the sea was lazy, and a different colour. Blue, maybe.

  WRIT IN WATER

  THEY MADE HIM a plaster saint of poetry with his eyes turned up to heaven. But it wasn’t like that.

  Winter. Rome at last. The terrible voyage from England was done. We’d found lodgings and a doctor. All he had to do was to get well.

  By day the noise of the fountain was almost hidden. There were women selling chickens and fresh milk, children playing, pails clattering, the creak of wheels and the clop of horses’ hooves. We used to count the different sounds, and he always won. But at night the fountain played clearly. Bernini’s fountain, with its fantastic coils of marble and gushing water.

  ‘Our Roman water is pure, not like the filthy water in Napoli,’ said our landlady, with a toss of her head. Signora Angeletti was slippery with the truth, but she was right about the water. I made sure there was always a full pitcher by his bed. Fever made him thirsty.

  They’ve burned everything in our lodgings. The table we ate off, the bed he lay in. Even the shutters that I swung open at dawn so that he could gaze down the steps to the piazza and the life of a new day. They stripped our rooms. It’s the law here. The Roman authorities are terrified of consumption.

  ‘Please move aside, Signor Severn. We have our duty to perform.’

  But the ceiling remains, the one he lay under. They couldn’t take away those flowers he gazed at every day until he died. Sometimes he thought he was already in his grave, with flowers growing over him. He dreamed of water bubbling out of the earth, and violets in damp, sweet grass.

  ‘You should be painting, Severn! Here you are in Rome and you do not paint at all.’

  When we first came, when he was strong enough, he would sit in the winter sun and watch the artists in the piazza.

  ‘You have more talent than any of them, Severn.’

  I still have this little sketch of him: see. There were others but they’ve been lost. Maybe someone has taken them; I don’t know.

  When you draw something, you never forget it. It was night, and there was one candle burning. That was enough light to draw by. It was a still, mild night, even though it was only February. But spring comes early in Rome. It was the last night of his life.

  The flame of the candle barely moved. The fountain was loud. He was asleep, cast up on the pillow like a shipwrecked man. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat.

  I shall never forget that night. He’d tried to prepare me. Warn me.

  ‘Have you ever seen anyone die, Severn? I have. I nursed my brother Tom.’

  Sometimes, after a fit of coughing, he would lie so still that I thought he was already dead.

  ‘I must warn you, Severn, if you persist in nursing me you’ll see nothing of Rome but a sickbed and a sick man. Believe me, it’s better to give me the laudanum.’

  There was a full bottle of laudanum. I gave it to him drop by drop, as Dr Clarke ordered.

  ‘Give me all of it, Severn. You don’t understand what it is to die as I am going to die.’

  But how could I allow him to destroy his immortal soul? I did not trust myself. I gave the laudanum to Dr Clarke, for fear I’d weaken.

  He asked me to go to the cemetery. He wanted me to describe the place where he was to lie. I told him about the goats cropping the grass, the young shepherd guarding his flock, the daisies and violets that grew so thickly over the graves.

  ‘It’s very quiet,’ I told him. ‘You can hear the breeze blowing through the grass. There’s a pyramid which marks an ancient tomb.’

  He lay back and closed his eyes. After a while he asked me whose tomb it was.

  ‘I enquired,’ I told him. ‘His name was Caius Cestius, and he was a great man of the first century.’

  ‘A great man … A very rich man at least, my dear Severn, if he had a pyramid built for his tomb. Is it large?’

  ‘Large enough.’

  ‘Does it cast a shadow?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  His cough caught at him. I propped him with pillows.

  ‘You should not talk,’ I told him.

  He moved his head from side to side, restlessly. Then he said, ‘You must understand that I will not regain my health now, Severn. I have studied enough anatomy to know that.’

  We lived in our own world all those weeks. The next cup of broth, the next visit from Dr Clarke, the beating-up of pillows, the lighting of fires and measuring of medicines. Some days I hadn’t a moment to call my own. Some nights I did not undress.

  I was glad of it. He lay with the marble egg given to him by Miss Brawne in his hand. Women keep such an egg by them when they sew, to cool their fingers. He held that marble hour after hour, day after day. It soothed him as nothing else did. He wanted to know why he was still living, when everything was finished for him. This posthumous life, he called it.

  He was sorry after he said it. ‘My poor Severn, you have enough to do without listening to my misery.’

  We had a piano carried upstairs so that I could play for him. He loved Haydn.

  ‘Don’t you hear that they are the same, Severn: the piano, and the fountain? Listen. But what am I thinking of? You cannot listen to yourself play, any more than a blackbird can hear itself sing.’

  I was there as the days wore him down. His other friends, Dilke and Brown and Reynolds and the rest, they were far away in England. Now we fight over his memory like cats. But it was to me that he spoke. I wiped the sweat off his face and washed him and changed his linen. I told him about the sheep that roamed over the graves. He smiled. He never tired of the sheep, the goats, the shepherd boy and the violets. The next day he would ask again, as if he’d already forgotten. But I don’t think he forgot. Words were like notes of music to him. He liked to hear how they fell.

  ‘Sometimes I think I am already buried, with flowers growing over me,’ he said as he stared up at the ceiling where the painted flowers swarmed.

  Signora Angeletti became suspicious. She waylaid the doctor, asking what was wrong. Was it consumption? ‘I am a charitable woman, but I must think of my other lodgers.’

  I didn’t know the laws of Rome then. She feared that they would strip her rooms and burn everything. I suppose she was right, but she was compensated. She lost nothing.

  I heard the patter of Signora Angeletti’s voice from the mezzanine. We were in her hands. No other boarding house would take us now: he was too obviously ill.

  He understood Signora Angeletti very well. She gave us a bad dinner, not long after we came, and he threw it straight out of the window on to the steps. A crowd of urchins came from nowhere and scrabbled for it.

  ‘She won’t serve us such stuff again,’ he said, and he was right. She had given us rubbish, to see if we were willing to swallow it. I wished I had his firmness. I was nervous with Signora Angeletti, and she knew it. In those ways he was more worldly than I was.

  Yes, they made him a plaster saint of p
oetry, with his eyes turned up to heaven. They fight over his memory, shaping it this way and that. But I remember how he rocked with laughter when that dinner splattered on the marble steps!

  ‘My best plate!’ screamed Signora Angeletti.

  But he said, ‘If that plate is the best you have, signora, then I am very sorry for you.’

  After that the dinners were always hot and good.

  I’ve told the story of those months so many times that they hardly seem to belong to me. If I say that they were the high point of my life, you will misunderstand me. You may even accuse me of cruelty. A man lay dying, and I say it was the high point of my existence? How can I recall those months of agony and dwindling hope, except with a shudder?

  I remember the nights chiefly. We set the candles so that as one died, the next one would light from its burning thread. Once he said that there was a fairy lamplighter in the room. The flame would burn down until it seemed about to collapse on itself. He watched intently all the while. When the next sprang up and began to bloom, he would allow himself to close his eyes.

  When I was very tired the room seemed to sway and the noise of the fountain reminded me of our voyage from England. Sometimes I fell asleep for a few seconds and really believed that I felt the motion of the ship under me.

  I remember one incident which I have never written down, or spoken of even. I was in the small room which was intended for my studio. I thought of his words: You should be painting, Severn! Here you are in Rome and you do not paint at all.

  I was standing at the table, going through my sketchbook. It contained a few studies which I hoped might be worth further work. I had sketched the cemetery for him. The pyramid of Caius Cestius, with the young shepherd sitting on the grass. But I had never shown him the sketch. How can a man say to another: Look, here is the place where you will be buried. Just there, where that shepherd sits and dreams.

  I decided to be buried there too, beside him. My heart grew easier then. I felt no more estrangement from him.