Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  How Mary’s father had provided for his family through the last years of his living and the months of his dying then became clear. He had borrowed from every tradesman on Broad Street, and some in Charmouth and Uplyme.

  The first to come to the door was Mr. Dobson. The week after the funeral, he stood on the doorstone and told Molly that he’d been lending Richard money, quite a lot of money, in all eighteen pounds, six shillings, tuppence. Not that he was trying to collect. He simply wanted her to know of his regard for Richard and the lengths he’d been prepared to go to see Richard comfortable, although he had seven children himself and his youngest babe not thriving. Eighteen pounds, Mary thought in wonder. But he was just the first. Some had chits of paper with Richard’s signature on them. One man came from Axminster riding on an ass with a boy walking behind to whip it. Men and women – the laundress at the Monmouth Inn alleged a debt of ten shillings. And they found they believed her. There had always been coin in the tin box, even when their store of curiosities was long gone. A bit of money, like the bit of flour in the widow’s flour barrel in the Bible, that never got to be more but was never used up. It was always there, and they’d spent it as they had to. Like children, they’d never asked.

  The Widow Anning, Molly was now. Every morning, she washed carefully and pinned up her plaits and dressed herself in her Sabbath dress. In the face of their creditors, she was curiously composed. She received them in the workshop and called Mary in to help her, to write the sums down. She thanked them for coming to tell her, as though it were only the lack of this piece of information that had prevented their being paid in full. Mary had never attended to her face before, the oblong face with its long nose and her large, pale mouth. She was a stranger to Mary, an agent sent from the Overseer of the Parish Poor to manage things.

  Mary used her father’s account book, opened to a new page. She entered a line for Henry Jefferd, joiner, for her father’s coffin. And for James Jessup, stationer – the account book itself had apparently never been paid for. She kept two pages, the way her father had, although for a different purpose.

  There were more. Three or four letters were brought to the door but went undelivered because it cost thruppence to receive a letter.

  They’d surely have been sent to the workhouse, but by God’s grace it had burned down. Instead, they were accorded outdoor relief by the parish, by applying to a table set up on Fridays in the churchyard. Poor relief of three shillings a week. Again Molly seemed to know the proper demeanour. When she went to collect the poor relief, she pulled her shawl up over her head, she kept her eyes cast down and declined to greet her neighbours, who paid the Poor Rate as hard as their own lot was, who lived within their means, who had not called such misfortune down upon themselves. When the poor relief was spent (as it was by Tuesday of each week), Mary went to the Williamses’ shop three times a day because one spoonful of tea was all she could bring herself to ask for on credit. She kept her eyes down as well, so that May Williams would not be ashamed if she had to refuse her.

  Mary reckoned the debt at 120 pounds, most of it over her father’s signature. Mary asked Joseph to verify the sums, but he would not. He said it might as well be 1,000 pounds as 120, because neither sum would ever be paid. Harry Tupper was in the Cockmoile for a debt of 15 pounds. He’d been imprisoned as a prod to his three idle sons. Would it occur to someone that the Annings might benefit by Joseph Anning being moved next door to the Cockmoile?

  They would need to become a different sort of family. They stood in the workshop (not Lizzie, she was in bed) and it seemed to Mary that they had met to decide what they would become. They looked first at Richard’s tools lying along the workbench.

  “If I was a boy, he would have taught me,” Mary said, and saw pain blow across Joseph’s face, for he had never taught Joseph. She did not repent saying it. For he would have, and why lie?

  “When my father died,” said Molly, as though she had not heard, “my oldest brother had to go out to tell the bees. He had to knock on each of the hives until a buzzing started up within. Then, after the funeral, we brought cake out to the bees. We sewed a hood of crepe for each hive. Without it, the bees would have swarmed, they’d have gone out to seek him.” She stood straight and tall and calm, Percival no longer hanging from her.

  “I told Armstrong I’d not be back,” said Joseph. “I’m going to sea.”

  “You will never go to sea while I draw breath,” said Molly. “You will go to Armstrong, as you have been.”

  “I’ll go to the shore at first low tide,” said Mary. “I’ll look for the crocodile Mr. Buckland wants.”

  “No,” said Molly, rounding on her. “You will not go collecting. You will not die on the cliffs as your father did. You will stay and help me at home.” What she would do at home Mary did not ask, for there was no answer. When Molly was a girl, all the girls and women sat in their doorways and made lace, but the lace had gone north to the steam mills.

  Molly turned back to the workbench and ran her hand over the tool box. “I’ll offer the planer to Henry Jefferd,” she said. “It’s not worth one pound let alone eight, but if he has any sense, he’ll settle for it. He’s in dire need of a new one. That coffin were a dishonour to the trade.”

  One hundred and twenty pounds. It was a fortune to have associated with their name. Mary could not comprehend it. She had tried to understand her father, but she had failed. She thought of a day they had walked up to Ware Manor Farm to buy eggs. Richard had lifted Lizzie to his shoulders and she was drooping, she lay over his head. “Sit up,” he said. “You make yourself heavy.” He was singing as he walked up the path where a huge sycamore leaned, Mary trotting along behind. When they came up on the sycamore, he was still carrying Lizzie a-pisty-poll and he did not slow his pace. He gripped Lizzie by her bare ankles and strode on with springy step. The tree was pruned for passersby, but Lizzie sat high and free on Father’s shoulders, she rode innocently towards the lowest limb with her hands in Father’s hair (he is only playing the fool, thought Mary as Lizzie rode towards the limb), and Mary screamed “Watch!” and he ducked just at the last moment, and the branch skimmed over Lizzie’s bonnet. He staggered a little getting his footing, and Lizzie’s laugh rang out, and he tipped her like a package to the ground, where she recovered herself and ran ahead of him up the path. And Father kept on walking with jaunty step, kept on with his song without missing a single word.

  He had imagined himself a man to whom rules did not apply. He had imagined himself a man who could carry the weight of a fortune. He had put off their disgrace until he would not be there to witness it.

  NINE

  onths pass and spring drapes itself over Bristol, and still his mother does not send for him. Mornings he reads for a couple of hours (he’s read through Clement’s books and started into Alger’s) and then he sketches and paints. The birds from the hearth lie in a box on the desk. It’s a sturdy casket with fitted joins the maid found, MELTON TEAS stencilled in black on the side. The skeletons are arranged in two rows. They’re dressed in aromatic shreds of tea: tea-coloured bones, smelling of tea. Rescued from the hearth, they continue their passage towards dust, drying and loosening, their joints unhinging at the slightest touch. In his palm, Henry holds a weightless, intricate basketry of bones. It’s a dunnock. He knows it by its tiny beak, and because it’s written up in a folio in Alger’s drawing room: Prunella modularis. He’ll do a line drawing in India ink, and then a sepia wash.

  Mornings he reads and draws and afternoons he walks. He walks down to the new floating harbour, and admires the marvel of ships sailing right into the city. Boys his age swing from ropes, intent on their trade. He aches with all he doesn’t know. He wanders around the old friary and looks down at the gleaming mud of the Avon at low tide, and then he sets off for Clifton Wood, one lane delivering him to the next. New growth clamours around him, reproaching him with immateriality. He walks with eyes lowered, deflecting the glare of light and the raucous bird-song. Pinks
and yellows assault him from gardens on either side – he doesn’t know their names. I’ll be away from here soon, he thinks. I’ll go to the Continent. When this war is over, when I come into Halse Hall. An image from his reading lifts itself in his mind: I’ll climb Mont Blanc. He sees himself towering at the peak, substantial against the barren snow. I’ll join the Royal Society, he resolves, I’ll deliver a paper on glaciation. He walks until he’s hungry and then takes a straight trajectory back to town, blundering through gardens and scrambling over walls. He pictures them sending dogs out after him, savouring the confusion when they corner him, a gentleman caught tramping, heedless of boundaries.

  One day, as he returns at dusk, a man and woman stroll towards him. As they pass he turns, and just as they vanish into darkness, he catches a glimpse of the man’s hand creeping up to the nape of the girl’s neck, sees the intention in the hand. Then there’s no shutting it off. He falls into it, he’s forced into speculation regarding each house he passes, where and how often it is happening behind dark windows. In the attic chamber of a townhouse, or in the loft of the carriage house. A telling nimbus hangs over the carriage house, of smoke and shrouded torchlight. It is the high attic windows that stir him most, the maids’ quarters, where you could go straight in, as you can with the low-born, you just say what you want.

  St. Nicholas Street is full of ladies crowding into teashops, coming out of the milliner’s. In the sunshine, girls wear gowns of a thin, limp fabric cut low over the breasts. Surely a girl donning this sort of dress understands its language? Finding yourself fortuitously alone with her, you could take her at her word, nudge the gown off. It would slip like the dust cloth from a statue, fall to a pool of white at her feet. He can see a cage of narrow ribs, but he can’t get the whole picture, the way these small breasts are fixed to the chest, for example. Or the contour of the abdomen. In Jamaica, naked or almost-naked women squatted on flat stones at the stream, scrubbing their laundry, waded into the water with light splintering brilliantly between them. Perhaps they wore aprons like the woman he saw on Piccadilly; he can’t remember.

  Back in his room, he picks up a charcoal. It’s the Hottentot Venus he draws: her torso, the great breasts hanging like gourds. He pins it to the wall behind his desk. It is quite good. In the tent of his bed curtains, he lies in his underwear in a litter of drawings and books. Twined bodies float on the walls of the tent, a frank alphabet of legs and torsos. He’ll paint them in India ink, the whole series, and leave his folio in the dining room. His uncle (with his sagging bolster of a belly that has never known love) will pick up the pages and puzzle over what Henry has drawn, as over an oriental script. Or Sullivan, standing baffled at the sideboard on old legs like wooden stilts, or the Scottish housekeeper, Mrs. Witherspoon, frowning, or the thin maid with the cast to her eye, passing indifferently by.

  None of them will have an inkling. It’s in him, Henry, that the energy of the house hums. He’s an unlikely champion of love, with his way of talking that makes young ladies smile with private amusement and dart away to the buffet table, and the hints of Uncle Alger he sometimes sees in the looking glass – the long upper lip, the tufted eyebrows. He stands up, pushes the bed curtains aside, feels his new height and the bulk of his shoulders. Outside, rain has started up. An underground current runs below the houses of Bristol and it’s bubbled to the surface in him. This is the purpose of his banishment. It will happen here, he thinks while rain patters on the window. In Bristol, he thinks, and the scrolled letters float across the window, glowing with erotic light.

  Eventually, the force of his desire produces her. It plants her in the overgrown garden of the Irish captain next door. It’s laundry day and unusually windy, and Mrs. Witherspoon’s gaunt little helper has hung their washing on a clothesline. Between flapping sheets and linen napkins and the long, writhing legs of his own underwear, he spies a girl. She’s standing facing him. She wears a white cap over a haze of apricot-coloured hair. White napkins and their shadows dance over her face. Watching her between the waving towels is like trying to read the meaning of a flag show at Marlow. She’s looking straight at him, a square of something held breast-high in front of her. She’s signalling, part of the flag show. Then the wind flips a napkin right over and he sees it’s an easel she has before her. She’s not looking at him at all, she’s painting with studious attention some object he can’t see. He watches her through the fluttering laundry until noon. Then Captain Whyte’s butler comes out and speaks to her and she goes in, leaving her easel for the butler to carry.

  The next morning, the laundry’s gone and from under the ragged fringe of thatch protruding over the casement, he has an unimpeded view. She has somewhat repositioned herself; she’s turned to a three-quarter perspective. She wears a soft gown of pale rose with an orange sash tied under her breasts – a bold combination. Her subject is propped on a ladder-backed chair. A lacquered tray, perhaps, or it may be someone else’s painting, a copy exercise set by her painting master. She has a long neck and a fine, pert-featured face. His mind flips through a catalogue of thin, faun-coloured animals. Fauns, of course. But she’s livelier: quick, intent, squirrel-like. She never looks up to the tangled garden or the birds jousting in the vines on the wall. Except once, when she glances around, lifts her cap from her head, and smooths her hair before resettling the cap. She smiles constantly: it seems her subject amuses her.

  He takes up his folio and turns the pages, past the shaded diagrams of sea mortars, past the drawing of the tendoned earth (a turnip with its roots grown round it), past the frail bones of the birds. He finds a blank page, where he sets about sketching her in pencil. He works quickly. This is an angle he likes; it presents a charming, inescapable line of brow and cheek and chin. He can’t see lashes from this distance, but he draws them in. They will be pale but thick. Her eyes will be drawn from the same pale palette as her hair and gown: green, ideally. Who could she be? He doesn’t know Captain Whyte’s household. He’ll persuade Alger to present his card tomorrow. He’ll accompany Alger on a morning visit, wearing his green waistcoat. In London just briefly in the fall, he’ll say to the young lady. Amusing exhibitions on Piccadilly. These are tactics – but to what end? To portray himself as a young man with prospects, of course. And if he’s successful, then – well, then: he sees himself ensconced in Captain Whyte’s drawing room, handing dowagers in to tea, dozing at the whist table. The supporting player in endless rehearsals for a life of tedious domesticity. He falls back onto the bed and lets the folio slide to the floor.

  That’s the folly of beginning with tactics and not with object. He sits back up on the bed and watches her bend gracefully over her easel. The object is clear. How to attain it? He’d need to arouse in her a corresponding hunger. Is that so preposterous? Animals mate, the female is persuaded – and without the artifice of billets-doux and flowers. Of course, a young lady is not of the animal kingdom. Although a young man is. Man is a beast, made in the image of God though he may be. Curious that the human male and the human female should be so different, when in the majority of species the sexes are almost indistinguishable. Two modest, brown creatures, scurrying together into earthen tunnels, drawn wordlessly into the dark. Cruelly, his mind produces his own mother, one day on a secluded bench in the park at Hammersmith, breaking apart from Mr. Ridd when she saw Henry on the path (her hair come undone under her hat, her breast flushed raspberry, her bright eyes darting in every direction but his).

  When next he sees the young lady in the garden, he puts on his hat and walks quickly down Pennyworth Lane in the opposite direction to Captain Whyte’s house. This tactic is a feint. Pennyworth Lane curves around a woods, and narrows into a path, and wanders back through the woods until it ends near where it began, behind Alger’s and Captain Whyte’s gardens. He hurries along the dwindling path, almost running. Sooner than he expects, he sees her framed by greenery, cut off at mid-thigh by the garden wall. He stops and watches. She has her back to him now and he can see her canvas. A
pale bulb rises from the lower margin. It seems she’s painting a cabbage.

  Henry reaches into his pocket. A sixpence, that’s all he has. He throws it in her direction. It’s too small, she’s not disturbed. He crouches and finds a toadstool, uproots it and tosses it. Then a shell, an oyster shell dropped incongruously by the path. This time his aim is better; the shell lands almost on her foot.

  She turns and looks curiously in his direction. She’s facing the sun: she can’t see him. There is a gate at the back of her uncle’s garden that’s been left open and can’t be closed; it’s been stitched to the earth by the brambles growing up it. She passes through the opening, holding her skirts, and comes lightly down the path. In little white slippers, she trips along the path – that’s what they say for this way of walking, so feminine, so consciously feminine even now, when she thinks herself alone. Then she sees him and she stops. “Oh!” she says, wrinkling up her eyes. “What are you doing in my uncle’s garden?”

  He’s still crouching. “Pardon me,” he says. “I’ve disturbed you. Although I’m not, strictly speaking, in your uncle’s garden.” He stands up. Her eyes are, as he hoped, unusual: truly green, at least in the green light of the woods. Light and shadow dapple her face and throat and bosom, her bosom nakedly white in patches of light above her flimsy gown. He has her in the woods now and he is without a further tactic.

  “I’m watching the birds,” he says. “The dunnock. People call them hedge sparrows. But the bill of a dunnock is much finer than a sparrow’s. Prunella modularis, I believe is the formal nomenclature.”

  She gives a little laugh. “You paint birds?” she asks. She has seen him through the window after all! She glances to either side. “But there are no birds here.”