She gives me a look of deep disdain: “Do you really expect it to be still up on the wall?”
How foolish. Of course, he would hardly have wanted me staring down at him these last ten years. “But where is it now?”
“I don’t know. I daresay we could find it for you, given time. You don’t need to come like a thief in the night.”
I am aware of Mrs. Brooks and Mercer hovering awkwardly in the background, Mercer with a tea chest in his arms. I take her arm, and feel how much she quivers and tenses at my touch. “Sissy,” I whisper. “I need to speak in private.”
She glances at the servants. “Put the box down, Mercer. You and Mrs. Brooks may leave us now.”
They go and shut the green baize door behind them.
She stands facing me. “Well? What is this all about? I hardly expected to see you again in this house. You are bold-faced, I must say.” She speaks as though she is the injured party.
“Am I? Well, to tell the truth, I never expected to come. I hate this house. And to be honest, Sissy, I can hardly summon much affection for you.”
“The sentiment is mutual, I assure you. After all those rumors you spread.”
I stare at her. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t pretend to be innocent!” She has gone quite crimson.
“I’m not pretending! Surely you can’t believe it was I who started those rumors? For Heaven’s sake, they injured me as much as you!”
She makes a gesture of disbelief, as if my protests are of no account. So I take her by her paper cuff. “I am speaking the truth, Sissy!”
She gives a short laugh. “The truth? Is that so? You hated me, Dodo. I could see it every day in your face, even when you sat in your quiet corner and looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“What did you expect? You came to our house on false pretences. You said it was for my sake, but it wasn’t. You always had your eye on other things: power, influence—and Alfred, of course. I was of no account. Once you had stepped over the threshold, you changed. You never talked to me as a sister, or stood up for me in any way. You usurped me, Sissy! Of course I hated you and wanted to see you humiliated. But never—never—at the price of Alfred’s reputation!”
She seems hardly to hear. “I had to be examined, you know. I had to be subjected to prying fingers!” She breathes heavily. “You cannot imagine the humiliation, the shame!”
She forgets that I’ve had eight children, and Dr. Phelps’s clumsy hands upon me every time. “Yes,” I say. “But surely you can’t believe it was I who made it necessary?”
She shrugs again. She won’t look me in the eye. And it occurs to me with absolute certainty that she has indeed believed all these years that I was the one who made those vile accusations against them both, and that I have spent the interim gloating about it. “Well,” she says peevishly, “someone wanted to ruin us. And you were always so spiteful to me, so underhand in complaining to Alfred—of course I thought it was you.”
Spiteful! Underhand! Is that how it appeared? I stare at her reddened complexion, her angry tears. She is undoubtedly in earnest. “But do you think I would have chosen to start a rumor that would ruin Alfred too? Incest, Sissy! Incest! He could never have held up his head again.”
“Don’t you think I know that? That was what was so unforgivable. That was what made him so beside himself; so determined to prove our innocence.” She pauses. “I didn’t see why we needed to prove it. I said that if he and I both knew we were without blame, what did it matter what the Public thought?”
“How little you knew him, Sissy, if you can say that!”
She holds her head in her hands; she knows it, of course; but she can’t abide to admit that she was bullied. He bullied everybody he was fond of in the end. I can see that now. “Don’t you see?” I say. “Don’t you see that you and I have both suffered to preserve Alfred’s unsullied reputation? Except I have suffered rather more than you, I think! One humiliating examination for you; but for me, public shame, loss of everything I loved, my whole world reduced to a few cramped rooms—and no chance to bury my husband, and mourn him as I should wish!”
She looks up. “You want me to be sorry for you? Well, I can’t be. Because you brought it all on yourself. You had everything, Dodo! His name, his children—and his affection. And you squandered it all! You gave the poor man nothing back! How else could he respond?”
That was Alfred’s much-rehearsed complaint: that I received without giving, that I broke his love with my indolence and indifference. And that I made his life a misery with my jealousy. And she—along with half the world—has chosen to believe that is the truth. Sometimes, turning it over and over in my mind, I’ve been foolish enough to believe it myself. But it’s not true, and I won’t let her say it. “I may have had faults, Sissy. I may have been far from the woman of his dreams, but Alfred was always at the forefront of my thoughts and I always—always—loved him.”
She colors. “You say that, Dodo. You speak up for yourself now, with high words. But while he lived, I never saw you make the slightest effort to please him.” She crosses her arms truculently.
I am incensed. “And how long did you live with us? Five years? Six? When I was at my most worn down, certainly. You weren’t there when I stayed up with him when he couldn’t sleep for the amount of work he had taken on and was at his wits’ end with fatigue. You weren’t there when I left my infant children so I could go with him on his travels. You weren’t there when I attended the most tedious of engagements week after week, where everyone wanted to talk to the Great Original, and no one wanted to talk to his wife. Don’t dare—don’t dare—say that I never tried to please him!”
She looks chastened for a moment. “Well, maybe you did at first. But you gave up, Dodo. It was crystal clear from the moment I stepped over the threshold that Alfred was bitterly unhappy. He covered it up, of course. He was jovial and kind and everything I had always known him to be. Yet I could see, under it all, how desperately lonely he was.”
I start to laugh, but she silences me with her look. “Yes,” she says levelly. “I never saw a man so lonely. If that surprises you, Dodo, consider why. Could it be that you were too preoccupied with yourself to notice? But I saw it straightaway, and it wrung my heart. Yet for all your indifference, how wonderfully he cared for you—always trying to find remedies to improve your health and outings that would interest you. But would you go? No. You seemed almost contrary in your determination to thwart him. Night after night I saw him come stumbling over the threshold, ravaged with exhaustion, to find … what? That you had already retired to bed or that you were dozing in the parlor over your sewing with a half-drunk cup of coffee at your side and the fire practically gone out. You know how much he loved a blaze with everyone gathered around. If I hadn’t been here, Dodo”—her voice falters, and I see she is near to tears—“If I hadn’t been here, the poor man would have been obliged to eat his toasted cheese alone in the kitchen, with no one to cheer him up when he was feeling all the terrible weight of his responsibilities.”
She is distorting the facts. My conduct, disheartening though it undoubtedly was, had never stopped Alfred enjoying himself. Indeed, I had often felt distressed by his undoubted ability to be happy without me. “When was he ever obliged to eat alone except by choice?” I counter. “The house was forever full of people—all his cronies making free with his generosity, new acquaintances dropping in every night, supper parties, games, charades …”
“Not every night, Dodo; we didn’t live in a circus. And anyway, has it occurred to you to ask why he felt the need to surround himself so comprehensively with other people? Has it never occurred to you that he was making up for a lack elsewhere? A lack at the very heart of his life?”
I feel the blood stinging my cheeks. I know Alfred always compensated for every lack in his life by an overabundance in another direction. If he couldn’t write, he’d walk till he was exhausted; if he couldn’t sleep, he’d get up
and write for hours. When he was his most unhappy, he’d be at his busiest. Maybe in grasping at every friendship that presented itself, at every pretty face that smiled at him, he was indeed making up for my failures as a wife. Maybe I am wrong and Sissy is right. Maybe Alfred was unhappy and I didn’t see it. But I cannot believe it was entirely my fault. “I did my best,” I say. “But even Alfred knew that childbearing made me ill.”
“Not so ill that you couldn’t entertain O’Rourke in the afternoons,” she says tartly. “You seemed to wake up then.”
The insinuation makes me gasp. I turn on her: “If I did ‘wake up’ then, as you put it, it was because Michael O’Rourke was the only person who seemed to care for my company in those days. He never minded if I was vague or forgetful, and he never made me feel that he’d prefer it if I was somebody entirely different. He was my true friend. More than you were, Sissy, with your busy ways. And more than Alfred was, much of the time.”
She snorts. “Are you saying Michael cared for you more than Alfred did?”
“You were the one who implied that, Sissy. But you know that Alfred could never forbear to make sarcastic remarks at my expense. He may have been full of the milk of human kindness when writing his novels, but he could be very hard in reality.”
“Well, he was embarrassed by you, Dodo. Good Heavens, we were all embarrassed by you—the children, who had no mother to rely on, the servants who never knew what you would take it into your head to do, and worst of all, our guests. You behaved as a madwoman, Dodo. Alfred was a Great Man. He needed a wife who could add honor to his name, who could understand his heart and mind.”
“One like you, you mean?”
She blushes brick-red. “That is not the point. But since you ask, why not? In all our years under the same roof, I never quarreled with him.”
It is true. They never had disagreements. She was clever; she weighed and measured Alfred, and fitted herself to his desires in a way I never did. I never set out to quarrel with him, of course, and cannot count the occasions on which I bit back words of complaint or censure even as they rose to my lips. But it is not always possible to hide one’s feelings, and my very love for him seemed to draw me into querulous demands that were out of my mouth before I knew, and jealous tempers that I despised even as I was in the midst of them. He accused me of having a limited mind; and wanting to limit him too: You would quench my light. You would silence my voice. You would claw me down to the commonplace. But to be commonplace is not a fault. The world needs commonplace people as much as it needs original people, and it is the worship of the commonplace people that made Alfred who he was. Sissy standing there so holier-than-thou has no right to set herself in judgment on me.
I turn: “Who is to say he would not have quarreled with you, Sissy, if you had been in my place? If you had given birth to eight children, and put two of them in their graves, you might not have found it so easy to stay trim and pretty, to wait up for him until two o’clock and wake again at six. To be always there at his beck and call with a ready smile and perfect obedience.”
There is silence. “Well,” she says slowly, “I am not you, and you are not me, and we shall never know how we would have fared in each other’s shoes. But I envy you for the chance you had. And I despise you for failing at it.”
“Despise me by all means. But don’t envy me. To know his love and then lose it is a terrible thing: total darkness when one has been used to the brightest of light.”
She is silent again. All I can hear is the sound of the brittle leaves skittering drily against the windowpane. And it seems as if all our wretched disagreements are swirling around too—anger, jealousy, pain, sorrow—even though the great center and cause of them is no more. We stare at each other; I see a tear seep slowly from beneath her eyelid and my own eyes moisten in response. I see her as the child I loved, the sister I once admired. “We should not have let our wish to serve Alfred drive such a wedge between us,” I say, seizing her reluctant hand and clasping it to my bosom. “We should have remembered all our happy hours in Chiswick; we should have bound ourselves together as true sisters. But I was jealous and you were proud. We hurt each other, and diminished each other with our differences. But we should not compound the loss. With Papa and Alice gone from us, and Mama hardly acknowledging us, let’s not waste time in regret.” I look at her most earnestly: “Will you be a true and loving sister to me once again?”
She is torn, I see. In spite of her pride, she is not an evil woman. Maybe the remembrance of the three of us playing in our Chiswick garden moves her at last. Maybe she even acknowledges the harm that has been done to me in which she has been complicit. But I do not ask her to apologize; I am conscious that I am here on sufferance, and have a favor to ask. I cannot let Kitty down; it is my chance to redeem myself and I must not make a mistake.
She shrugs her shoulders and I can hardly hear the words as she murmurs: “Let it rest, then, Dodo. I am content.”
I smile at her and nod. I am not sure how to go on. My hand drifts down distractedly and touches the surface of his desk, and I see her glance at it, as if she fears that I shall disturb the arrangement of papers and pens. I see that everything is as he liked it—neat, orderly, ready to hand. I slide my hand along the curving back of the chair and imagine his high-cut collar, his vivid necktie, and the springing mass of wavy hair as he bends his head over his work. “You’ve changed nothing,” I say.
“I couldn’t bear to.” She pauses, draws breath briskly. “And besides, Frank Lucas is coming to paint it. He said it was the kind of thing the public will clamor for: the desk, the chair, everything as it was. Everything but …” Her voice dies away. I can see her chin trembling. Then she turns and gives a desperate little laugh. “You know, sometimes I think I hear him at the door, that quick step of his coming across the floor, that voice calling out: I’ve a capital idea! The best ever!” Her voice trembles and, before I can think whether it is a good or bad thing, I put my arms round her. To my surprise, she lets me. I don’t think I have held her in this way since she was twelve and we mourned Alice together. She leans her head against me and groans: “Oh, how can I live, Dodo? However hard I work, however hard I scrub or polish or sweep or tidy, I can’t forget him. He seems to be in the very walls of this place. Every time the clock chimes two I look up, expecting him to appear for lunch, or again at five, to see him put on his coat to take a walk to town. But he’s not here and he doesn’t come and the whole place is so dead!”
“I know.” I have known that desolation only too well. I’ve been ten years without the touch of daylight, like mad Miss Winterman. Yet for Sissy it is all so fresh and raw.
She shakes her head: “I feel exactly like a widow.”
“Yes,” I say. “You have shared his life for a long time. But you must acknowledge that I was his wife by law and by promise, and I am his widow now.”
“But you have not seen him for ten years, Dodo; it cannot be the same.” She shakes her head wildly.
“No, it’s not the same. The difference between us is only that I am a good deal more used to it.”
She looks up at me and sets her chin firmly: “I shall never get used to it.”
“You will, Sissy. Or you will go mad. And I think you have too much sense for that.”
She shakes her head. “You think I am all good sense, do you? Oh, Dodo, how well do you really know me?”
I am taken aback by the pathos of her voice. “Well,” I say gently, “I knew the best of you once. And you knew the best of me. I taught you to sew and knit and read, remember?”
Her dull eyes brighten. “Oh, yes! That alphabet book! And that dreadful old S for snake, curled round the Tree of Knowledge with his tongue hanging out in a most lascivious manner!” She laughs. “And how you’d tell me the story with such grimaces and hisses that I would hide my face in the cushions!”
“Oh, Sissy, how good it is to hear you laugh! I thought that all those long-ago days meant nothing to you.”
She reddens. “On the contrary, they meant a great deal. You were my favorite sister, Dodo. I thought you’d be with us forever. You have no idea how much I suffered when you took yourself off to be married. And I was quite beside myself with jealousy when you called Alice to be your best companion—to be there with you and Alfred, playing (as I imagined) charades and games the livelong day! I begged Mama to let me go, too. Once I said I would lock myself in my room and eat nothing but bread and water until she changed her mind. But she said, ‘One has to be asked, Sissy. And you are in any case too young for such a harum-scarum household.’ That made me all the keener to be with you. Then Alice died and Mama and Papa were so grief-stricken that I knew I could not leave them. But every time you and Alfred visited, it seemed you brought with you such a wonderful sense of the greater world—of Art and Literature and Society—that my one hope was to be part of that world. I never came with the idea of ousting you, Dodo—how could you think that? But once I was with you, I could hardly sit on my hands and do nothing while all around me perished. There was so much to do. You were exhausted, Alfred was as busy as sin, and Bessie was all very well, but she had no authority. I did what I did because I had to, Dodo—and I did it in my own way. I knew it was not your way, and I do not expect gratitude—but my intention was always for the best.”
She looks at me sincerely. She believes it, I’m sure. But she was, and is, mistaken. “You did your best for Alfred and the children, perhaps. But not for me, Sissy; never for me.”
She shifts uneasily, and I release her from my embrace.
“And the children—why didn’t they write?”
She colors. “I never stopped them.”
She didn’t encourage them, though, I imagine. “How is Louisa, for example? Is she at home now?”
She avoids my look. “She is lying down. I’ve tried to send her away to the seaside—Sydney would have her at Dover—but the foolish girl won’t leave my side.”
Girl in a Blue Dress Page 24
