“Didn’t I? I’m sure I was always at you to m-mediate between me and Kitty. She always seemed to get her way in the end, though, so I went about in a perpetual state of resentment, m-moaning how everything always went against me. Don’t you remember how Papa called me the Perpetual M-moaner?”
“Oh, yes.” Alfred loved nicknames. We all had several.
“He shortened it to the P.M., of course. And he’d run up the stairs and rush in through the schoolroom door, calling out, Is the P.M. ready to answer questions in the House? And I’d try to hide so he wouldn’t make fun of me again. But he always knew where I was, and he’d find me and make me stand on a chair and ask me questions about per capita income and annual expenditure and whether we should send an expeditionary force up the Zambezi River to Darkest Africa. And everybody else would laugh their silly heads off and I’d want to kill him.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“No.” He thinks carefully. “I expect it was one of those times when you weren’t—well, up to the hugger-mugger of family life. Papa was always at his worst when you weren’t there to keep him calm.”
“Was he?” I’m taken aback. “Was he really?”
“Well, you know how he was—one minute we’d be having the time of our lives, larking about and dressing up, or listening to him read to us, doing all the voices and faces—but the next minute one of us would do something to displease him and he’d pull up short and get that distant, disappointed look on his face. And I used to feel quite sick with wanting to please him, but not knowing how to. I’d have to come upstairs and lie on the couch with you and let you stroke my eyelids—” He stops, a catch in his throat.
Carrie gives him a quick look. “We had resolved not to talk about Mr. Gibson today,” she says to me, gently. “But I see that is too much to ask.”
At this point, Wilson comes in bearing a tray so loaded that I wonder how she has got it up the stairs. She stands still in the doorway: “I’ll need That There Box moved before I can get in with This Here Crockery.”
Alfie jumps up to push the box nearer to the wall so that Wilson can pass through and put her burden on the table. He staggers a little: “Good Grief, what’s in here, Mother? It weighs a ton!”
“Mementos, I told you. Sissy and I picked them out.”
“Ah, yes. Oh, M-master’s collar!” He picks it up and admires it. “That poor dog! What fun we had with him! You know, I think our happiest times were in Channon Street.”
“Yes.” I think of that tall house; all those flights of stairs, Alice lying in that third-floor bedroom, the Scotch doctor, Alfred on his knees. “But it was sad, too. Your aunt Alice died there hardly a year after we moved in.”
“But that was before I was born, Mama!”
“Yes, of course it was. It’s so easy to forget that. But your father and I could never forget. We always felt her spirit about the place.”
“And yet no one really talks about her.”
“Well, as you say, it was a long time ago.” I think of the dress and the book and the secret key—and think that to Alfred it might have been only the day before. “She had a sweet and lovely nature,” I say.
“Like you, then.”
“Oh, Alfie! I only wish that were true.” If I had been “sweet” as Alice was instead of “weak” as I appeared to him, perhaps Alfred would have indeed loved me better.
“It is true. You see, you are not even cross with me after all I have done—or not done.” Alfie starts to hand around the sandwiches while Wilson stands with a teapot in each hand. Carrie pours a little milk into a cup for Lucy and I notice how lovingly she helps her drink it. I see Wilson watching, too, although she affects to be absorbed with the double teapots. In the end, no one has China tea, and Wilson has a look that means “I told you so.” She cuts the cakes into grudging slices and retires.
“Wilson’s very fond of you,” observes Carrie, dipping small pieces of Madeira cake into her tea and giving them to Lucy, one at a time. “Has she been with you long?”
“Oh, yes. She came with the apartment, so to speak. She was here on the doorstep the day I arrived. So that’s ten years, and she has always been most satisfactory—except for a tendency to order me about!” I laugh, and Carrie and Alfie laugh, too.
“Yes, Kitty told us.” Alfie moves Lucy to his own knee. A lump rises in my throat as I see how gently he speaks to her. I can see he loves the look and feel and scent of Lucy, exactly as Alfred loved the look and feel and scent of our own little girls—and how, when the others grew pettish and contradictory, Ada remained his special angel. He never seemed to tire of being with her, even when her breath came so harsh and slow it was hard to hear what she said. He’d tell her the story of the princess and the pea, and pretend to put a pea beneath her mattress and ask her if she could feel it. I think I can, Papa, she’d say. And he’d say: That shows you are a real princess, my love. Although I never had any doubt.
But Lucy is made of sterner stuff; she wriggles and pokes her finger at her father’s face, and he sets her down again, holding her by the hem of her dress.
“You see Kitty often?” I have heard nothing from her today and I fear Augustus’s troubles have come to a head.
“Not exactly often, but that we see her at all is largely due to the efforts of my remarkable wife!” Alfie puts his hand on her knee again, and Carrie smiles. The smile lights up her face and makes her plain features quite pretty.
“I have done very little—and nothing at all remarkable. Alfie always exaggerates my skills.”
“M-my love, if you knew what internecine strife there has been in this family, you would not say such things so lightly! It’s your efforts alone that have brought Kitty back into the fold!”
“Well, a stranger can sometimes see what others cannot. It was obvious as soon as I met her that Kitty longed to be reconciled to her father—and that he equally longed to see her. That I was able to bring them together—however briefly and belatedly—was a joy to me.” Carrie jumps up and rescues Lucy, who has jammed herself behind the sofa and is writhing like a conger eel.
“She speaks as if it were a simple matter of brokerage!” exclaims Alfie, admiringly. “But you know the personalities involved, don’t you, Mama? You know what a superhuman effort it must have taken to make those two agree even to meet!”
“Yes, indeed. Indeed.” I think of Alfred’s furious letter about Kitty’s engagement; I think of Kitty’s delight in inflaming him further by her marriage. The brokerage required would indeed not have been simple. I cannot help wondering if Carrie’s skills could ever have extended to our own estrangement, but I put away the thought. Instead, I wonder who she reminds me of as she walks about the room, neat, bright, and dark eyed, leading her child by the hand, showing her the clock in its glass dome, the stuffed owl, the old dog collar from the box. And then it comes to me: Lottie, of course, Lottie the peacemaker. I look again at Carrie’s open face, her cordial air, and how the very space around her seems to give off peace and good nature. And wisdom too, I think. I have noted how my son has looked for her opinion so often throughout our conversation; and how readily she smiles to encourage him, and nods to confirm her agreement with what he has said. It occurs to me that Alfred never once looked to me for confirmation of anything. If we were in company, he would refer to me often—sometimes affectionately, more often jokingly—but he never sought my views. I don’t know what I’d have said if he had … been flustered, no doubt, at the unexpectedness of it all, thus confirming his opinion on my so-called weakness of mind.
Alfie bites into a potted-meat sandwich. “It was Sissy who was the sticking point, you know. Kitty was always uncivil to her—well, downright rude in fact. It was most unfair considering all she had done. And Papa wouldn’t stand for it.” Alfie starts agitating his watch chain again and I recognize with a start that it is Alfred’s watch. I can’t help wondering with a pang if the curl of chestnut hair is still there inside the case.
Carrie adds
, “But it wasn’t Sissy who was to blame for the divisions, Mrs. Gibson. I regret to say that it was Alfie’s father who was most at fault. He’d made the children choose their allegiance as if they were troops drawn up for battle. There was no room for compromise.”
“Oh, that is no surprise,” I say. “Alfred never compromised. He drove the hardest bargains in the world. Indeed, his publisher once told me that if my husband had not been such a towering genius, he would have told him to take his books to the Devil and see if he could get as good terms there.”
Carrie continues: “Oh, I knew how adamant he was; and I knew how disagreeable he became if criticized. But he was making everyone wretched and I really could not be silent. I told him that his children needed both parents, that the unnatural divisions had already caused too much guilt and unhappiness.” She has taken Lucy upon her lap and is rocking her quietly. I am taken aback by her words. I think that Carrie has been braver than many a man in speaking so to Alfred.
“What did he say to that?”
“He seemed perturbed. He said he had never intended there to be any such divisions; that he had never set them up, that he had merely hoped his children would be grateful for all the care they had been given, and that he would never be the one to stand in their way if they wished to seek succor with their mother.”
“That’s what he told you then, my love.” Alfie smiles ruefully. “He didn’t want to appear an out-and-out villain to you. But when we were younger he’d made it clear there was a price to pay. He said that any of us could go with Mama if we wished. ‘Step forward,’ he said, ‘and your bags will be packed. But do not expect to enter this house again while I live.’”
Did he really say that? How cruel he could be at times! But I feel a little tug of jealousy that they all fell so easily to his side of the line. “And none of you stepped forward? None of you wanted to join me?”
Alfie shifts in his chair. “It was not so simple, you know. With him and Sissy there in the house, and you gone and—”
“I understand, Alfie. You were young. You deserved the sort of life that you’d always had, that your father—and Sissy—could give you. Right at the center of things, with all the pleasures and excitements of a great man’s house.”
Alfie reddens. “You make us sound so selfish. But Sissy took us aside and explained that you and he had come to a good arrangement. And to be honest, Mama, I wondered whether you would really have wanted us with you.” He catches my astonished eye and adds quickly, “Well, you seemed to find us children so exhausting. You went off to Leamington for all those months as if you didn’t care about us at all!”
I stare at him. “It was not a seaside holiday, Alfie; I was ill. And as for not caring about you—I wrote to you all. I wrote every week.” Surely that is right. I cannot have imagined that. I can see myself sitting in my little cell of a room, tears trickling down my face as I pushed the pen across the paper.
“Oh, yes! Little notes about people you’d met and played cards with, and at the end a glib little sentence telling me to ‘be good and work hard.’ I was all on my own, Mama. Many a night in the dorm I’d sob myself to sleep, thinking you didn’t care.”
I feel as though a lead weight has smashed right into my heart. “Oh, Alfie! If only you knew how much I thought about you all! But I tried not to let you know how wretched I was feeling. I tried to be cheerful. Your father would always urge me to be cheerful. Try to look on the bright side, he’d say. So I’d think of amusing things that had happened—Colonel Jibbins losing the wheel off his Bath chair—or the way Mrs. Badger’s front curls were a different color from her back hair.”
“That’s the sort of thing he would have written, blast him! But I didn’t want entertaining; I wanted you to say you were coming back. And when you didn’t come—well, it truly seemed as though what Papa was saying was true.”
“What was he saying?”
The watch chain is twisting again: “Oh, you know—that you were more comfortable away from us all, enjoying yourself playing cards with half-pay officers and genteel widow-women.”
How subtle Alfred was! Taking the truth and making it a lie. Yet how true it must have seemed to my children at the time, as I connived so innocently in my own banishment. No wonder they seemed indifferent when I returned. “Oh, Alfie,” I burst out. “I was never comfortable away from you. Some nights I couldn’t sleep for thinking about you all. Now you are a father, Alfie, you will know what it is to love your children, to have them always in your thoughts, to expect them to be always there somewhere behind you or in the next room, connected by a silken cord, so that one tug brings you running. I decided several times that I must go home so I could see your dear faces and hold you in my arms. But your father insisted it was my duty to make myself completely well; and that I must stay at the spa until my lassitude had quite gone and I had roses in my cheeks again. So I stayed. And gradually I began to feel different. Not only less tired, although the air and the waters seemed to agree with me, but more—how can I say it?—more myself, somehow. More the person I might have been if I had simply followed my own inclinations every day. Of course, I had no responsibilities, and could read silly novels, play cards, or tell an anecdote without fearing I would make a hash of it because your father was standing over me eager to tell it better. In fact—this may surprise you, Alfie—I discovered I had quite a skill as a raconteuse. I found myself fêted, just as Papa and I had been in America all that time ago. People crowded around me, and even quite young gentlemen were eager to offer me their arm. I confess it was a pleasant sensation, to be regarded as interesting company. Perhaps that is why I wrote about it so much in my letters, and why, for a moment, I forgot what it was to be a mother. Which was wrong, of course.”
“It is not wrong to wish to be yourself.” Carrie is looking at me with such an understanding smile. “I confess that even with this little one, I feel not quite the person I once was. If I’d had eight Lucies, I would appreciate even more the chance to have a little time to myself. After all, men have such time. They do not become dissolved into parenthood the way we do.”
I cannot help laughing. What a good expression! “All the same,” I tell Alfie, “I would never have willingly given you up. You believe that, don’t you?”
“Then why did you? Was it to please Papa? Regardless of our feelings?”
There is such pain behind his eyes that I am devastated all over again. He thinks I am to blame. Yet how can everything be my fault? “Don’t you remember?” I burst out. “Do you really not remember all that happened?”
“I had it all at secondhand. He wrote, of course. He said that your presence was causing so many quarrels in the house that it was impeding his work. …”
“Yes, he always said that. Although you of all people should know that no living person could ever come between him and his work, let alone a poor ill wretch of a wife!”
“Well, your state of health was the other thing. He said all the noise and confusion of our house was delaying your recovery. He said it was better for you to go and be cared for elsewhere.”
“Be cared for! He makes me sound feeble minded.”
Alfie shifts a little more. “Yes, Mama. I do believe he implied your m-mind was not quite right. And to tell you the truth, it seemed possible.” He looks at Carrie as if for help, and she nods encouragingly. “Lou said you’d been quite—strange—sometimes, like Old Mrs. Pottomy, talking to the ghost of the Lord Chancellor on the stairs. I thought you’d get over it, though. You’d got over it when Georgie and Fanny were born. I thought you’d write, or come to see me at school. I imagined you stepping down from the carriage with a plum cake and a kiss. But the weeks and months passed, and you never did.”
“I’d agreed not to see you. He said I would be too ‘excessive,’ too ‘uncontrolled.’ But he said you could write to me if you wished.”
“I did write.” Alfie puts his hand to his eyes. “I wrote hundreds of letters.”
I look at h
im, aghast. “I never got a single one!”
“No,” he says quickly. “I never posted them. I told myself that if you’d cared about me, you’d come, no matter what. And I didn’t want to go on crying night after night. Fellows rag you for it. So I let you go, Mama; I put you away in a nice neat drawer and turned the key. I stopped thinking about you. It was only when I met Carrie, and even more when we had this little one, that I knew what a dreadful thing I’d done.”
“So why has it taken you until now to come and see me?”
“I was too ashamed. All those years …” The watch chain is twitching madly. “But I should have known your nature better than to think you would hold a grudge.”
Alfie remembers me kindly. And I note that he has not spoken of Miss Ricketts. No one speaks directly of Miss Ricketts, except Kitty. “Well,” I say, “all that is past now. But you must take care that Carrie does not become so dissolved in motherhood that she becomes unfit to do anything else.”
Alfie puts his arm around her. “Indeed not! We have already hit on a splendid plan. Dear old Bessie has come to the rescue; she comes each week to perambulate Lucy, so that Carrie can take up her pen. She wheels her around for fierce rides whatever the weather, ‘to get rid of them cobwebs.’ And when she gets back, she unwraps her like a parcel, puts her next to a roaring fire as if she needs browning, and feeds her warm milk and bread-and-butter so she falls asleep in an instant, like Mrs. P.’s Last!”
We all laugh.
“And you know, Mama, she’s full of tales of the old times. I caught her telling Lucy all about Papa—‘the cleverest man that ever was!’—and about the slap-up Christmas party, when the children from the Foundling Hospital came and had tea with us, and how their little eyes widened when they saw all the food. And how they all clustered round Papa with their mouths open while he read aloud that bit where Edward Cleverly meets Will Tanner on the Old Kent Road and gives him his lovely moist pudding done up in a clean white cloth in exchange for his moldy pie with its hard-to-bite outside and hard-to-see inside. And how they laughed and clapped when he dressed up as Abanazar and did his magic, with smoke and glitter everywhere. Of course,” he says, “Lucy is too young to understand—”
Girl in a Blue Dress Page 32
