“What of your mama all this time? Did she not advise you how dangerous that proceeding was?” But even as I say it, I think of Kitty and Augustus, and my own signal failure to advise my daughter when her virtue was under threat.
“Oh, you are so hard on Mama. But you have probably never known what it is to be poor, Mrs. Gibson. No doubt you have always had a home, and a husband—or father—who provided for you. Mama and I had nothing. We were only an inch away from destitution—from the streets, if you understand me. All our lives, we had prided ourselves that we were poor but honest—but you can be too poor, you know. It’s not noble; it’s demeaning. And now here was the most wonderful opportunity to raise ourselves out of the mire. Where would we ever find such another disinterested benefactor again? One so understanding, respectful, and respectable? One so universally renowned for his generosity and benevolence? Mama said she was sure that Alfred Gibson, of all people in the world, could be trusted: ‘After all, he says you remind him of his own daughter.’”
I wonder which daughter he had in mind. Miss Ricketts does not resemble Kitty or Lou in the slightest, and Fanny would have been only three. I can think of someone else, though.
“So, Mrs. Gibson, rightly or wrongly, we allowed him to pay off our debts and give our landlord a month’s rent in advance. I thought it would end there, though. I fondly imagined that now he had done us some good, his philanthropy would be satisfied. The play is over, I said to myself. He will go out of our lives. My mind can settle back into a calm state, and this strange sense of being possessed by him will fade.”
“But he did not go out of your lives.”
She puts her head in her hands. “No, it was quite the opposite. He began using his influence to secure better roles for us, and he’d call every single afternoon to tell us what he’d accomplished. He was always cheerful, always amusing, but he’d look around our lodgings, make a wry face, and say they were ‘rather slip-slop’ rooms, which did not reflect the genteel nature of the occupants. I told him that, on the contrary, they ideally suited our station in life. But he said that I was ‘too humble’ and needed to have aspirations to greatness if I were to succeed in my chosen profession. To be frank, I couldn’t see what a set of rooms had to do with aspirations to greatness, but they seemed inextricably connected in his mind. Then one day he came saying he’d found an apartment near the Strand which he thought much more suitable. ‘I have decided to make you a present of the rent until such time as you are rich and famous—which, I am sure, with your talents and my help, will not be long.’ I told him we could by no means accept anything more: ‘You have done much for us already. Pray do not concern yourself further.’ But he only smiled and said, ‘For Heaven’s sake, why? It’s a paltry sum! Less than I give to many other good causes—and this particular cause gives me much more pleasure! Will you deny me that? Will you not accept a gift in the true spirit of Christian generosity?’”
“And no doubt you found him impossible to deny once more?” I begin to see a pattern now.
She flushes. “You may not believe me, but I used to make such firm resolutions when I was away from him. You have no idea how firm I was going to be! But the moment I was in his company, I began to weaken. And when he said how much it hurt him to know that his little Jenny Wren thought ill of him; that I didn’t trust him, as if he were Jack Black himself—oh, Mrs. Gibson, it seemed so shoddy to suspect him of bad motives when he had never given the least inkling of them; when all he had done was to be kind and thoughtful about our future. So I let him help us again, determined that as soon as Mama and I could earn our keep, the arrangement would cease. I’ve always known how important it is for a young woman to stay respectable. The profession is not generally respected, Mrs. Gibson. We walk on a tightrope and it’s easy to fall from grace.”
“Indeed. It is a perilous profession.” And Alfred had clearly known the dangers when he discouraged Kitty from the Thespian life. He would have known that, with her thin skin and wayward temperament, Kitty would hardly survive in such a world. When I think what a wise little head Miss Ricketts had at seventeen, and what a child Kitty is still at twenty-seven, I can see why.
Miss Ricketts pours more tea in an agitated fashion. “But if I’d thought that by agreeing to this … rental arrangement … the matter would be settled, I was wrong. Every week there were gifts of groceries, coals, and wine. We protested, and sometimes sent them back—but they didn’t stop. Then other parcels began to come: cashmere shawls, ivory fans, kid gloves and, finally”—she holds up her wrist—“jewelry. And in spite of all Mama had promised to me, and although we had done nothing wrong—nothing wrong, I assure you, Mrs. Gibson—I realized we were indeed irrevocably compromised.” She sighs. “I believe it is a true saying that there is no gift without its obligation.”
“Especially between men and women. Especially between a rich man and a poorer woman. You cannot claim to have been ignorant of that.”
Her little chin goes up. “But all we had done was to maintain a mutual friendship. It was very hard to be judged on that.” She sits back a little. She frowns in the way that Eddie described. It is a rather charming frown. Her face is rather charming, too, now that I have watched it for a while. Her beauty is one of expression rather than feature, a casting down of the eyelid, a softening of the mouth. It is the actress’s gift.
“Go on,” I say. “Tell me more of this mutual friendship.”
“You are skeptical, I see, but his behavior at this time—even as a married man—could not be faulted. He would only call on us if Mama were there to chaperone me, and he always came so beautifully dressed, as if it were an honor to be with us. I remember how he’d sit and talk about all sorts of things—especially the Miscellany and the difficulties he was having with The Red House. He’d been struggling with it, you know, all the time he had been rehearsing the company, managing the performance, and appearing on stage himself.”
“Oh, he was never satisfied unless he had at least half a dozen things on the go.”
“Yes, I realize that now.” She smiles, and for a moment we share in a mutual acknowledgment of the habits we both knew so well. Then slowly her face changes. “He also talked about his children. He said how much he loved them, but that he did not think they loved him in return. ‘Children are so ungrateful,’ he said.”
I think of Eddie with his nose pressed to the window. I think of Lou, always ready to defend him; Kitty, who loved him like her own soul; and Alfie, who would have gone to the ends of the earth for a kind word. How can he not have realized? Did he not see how much they cared for him? And as for me, I hardly dare ask. Yet I am impelled to, now that I have embarked on this journey. I look Miss Ricketts full in the face: “And in all these conversations, did he not speak of his wife?”
She pauses, choosing her words. “He explained the tragedy that had come to you; that your little girl had sadly passed away and your new babe had only lived for an hour. And that you were in Leamington to rest and recuperate.”
“Was that all?”
She hesitates again. “He was very sad when he spoke of you, explaining that you shared his interests less and less. He said you were often too ill to accompany him to the places he loved, and that he was obliged to take his sister-in-law if ever there was a grand reception at the Mansion House or the chance to foot the light fantastic. ‘But a sister-in-law is no substitute for a wife.’”
So that’s how he presented me. A virtual invalid. A recluse. A woman who no longer shared anything with her husband—including, no doubt, her bed. Perhaps that is how he saw it, but it is not the whole truth. “He was not exactly lovelorn, Miss Ricketts. I was often in poor health, I admit, and not as lively a wife as I should have liked to be; but Alfred had a devoted family and more friends then any man alive. And if that were not enough, he had the adulation of his Public.”
“But it seemed—I beg your pardon—as if he needed something more. Some ideal companion he had not yet met.”
Some ideal companion he had not yet met. My blood chills in my veins as I hear the drumroll of his discontent once again, and recognize that under all his compulsive romancing and flirting, all his excessive hilarity, all the falling in and out of friendships, all the work, work, work, all the restless changes of his life—there was always the headlong quest for something that was forever beyond his grasp. I look at Miss Ricketts—so unremarkable and yet so surprising. And the old jealousy rises again. “And did you, at the age of seventeen, set out to be that ideal companion?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I never set out to be anything. I did my best to cheer him up, that’s all.”
She makes it sound so simple, as if no one else in the world had ever thought of it. “And don’t you think better people than you tried that very thing? Don’t you think I did?”
She does not reply.
“You may well be silent. You can have no idea how hard I worked to keep Alfred happy. And I succeeded for twenty years, Miss Ricketts, even though he was as difficult a man as ever set foot on God’s earth. But in that year—that year when you and he met in that wretched Romance—I was nearly out of my mind with grief. I had lost two children, Miss Ricketts. Are you surprised that I was in no fit state then to cheer him up?”
She is silent. A long time. Then, in a very low voice: “I am truly sorry.”
“Are you? Really, Miss Ricketts, you cannot be. Because you took advantage of my absence to steal him from me. It was the greatest mistake of my life, letting myself be sent away when he was struggling with the deepest of miseries and casting around for something to fill the void. Because all the time I was resting and hoping to come back more like the pretty girl he had once married, you were working away to destroy me.”
“I swear I did not ‘steal’ him from you, Mrs. Gibson! I would never have done such a thing! I knew he was not free, and I respected it. And I knew that if I were to protect my own position, I needed to keep separate from him. Every time I saw him, it was a kind of agony for me, rousing up feelings that I knew I must resist. But he always seemed to take such pleasure in our company that I could not tell him to stop. ‘You are so much nicer to me than my own family,’ he said. ‘Your rooms are so cozy and homely. Please don’t turn a poor harassed writer away.’”
“And you didn’t. Hardly the action of an honorable woman.”
“Maybe not. But it was the action of a friend. I didn’t know then that I was on the slippery slope to a life of deceit—to this life in fact.” She gestures at the walls and furnishings in a despairing kind of way, and I see her as poor Dora Meynell, on the slippery slope, scrabbling among the moving stones: Falling, falling, falling, until there is nowhere else to fall.
“Well,” I say, “public opinion will be heard. Did he not think of that when he condemned you to such a life?”
She gives a weak smile. “He said that as far as England was concerned, he was Public Opinion. I was the one who had to urge him to be discreet. ‘Don’t you think tradesmen talk? Don’t you think our landlord thinks he knows why Mama and I are here? Doesn’t everybody in Lord Royston who has seen us move from two dingy rooms to four splendid ones suspect you are at the heart of the matter? And what about your wife? Does she see and hear nothing?’”
“And what did he say to that?”
She pauses. I quail. Is what he said about me so bad that even she hesitates to say the words? “I would rather know. Please tell me,” I say firmly.
She looks down, twiddles the wretched bracelet again. “He implied you frequently didn’t know which hour of the day it was, and that you passed your life in a kind of haze. He said, ‘In the circumstances, I hardly think she notices where I am or what I do.’”
How cruel he could be. And, if he believed it, how mistaken. I turn on the hapless girl: “And when he chose to move himself out of our bedroom for the very first time in over twenty years of marriage, did he really think I didn’t notice something then? Or did he fail to tell you that?” She looks embarrassed. “Oh, he gave me some excuse, of course. He said he was restless because of The Red House, so I let myself believe that for a while. I even blamed my sister for coming between us. But to say I didn’t notice!” I eye her defiantly. “In four months, he never held a conversation with me that was more than a few words long; in four months, he never kissed me or took me in his arms. And he expected me not to notice!”
She is trembling a little. She seems confused and has lost her composure. “I cannot speak for him,” she says. “I can only speak for myself. And I swear I never set out to make you unhappy!”
“Never mind what you set out to do! It’s a new love that makes the old one grow cold. That is why he no longer wanted me. Not slow, fat old Dodo, when he could have sweet young flesh instead—”
“Flesh?” She rises, shaking her head vehemently. “You say you know him, Mrs. Gibson, but you judge him very badly if you can say that!”
“I judge him badly?” I am on my feet too. “How dare you say that to me! To his wife of twenty years who has toiled for him and borne children for him and seen two of them to their graves, who has stayed up with him night after night and encouraged him and comforted him through all his deepest sorrows!”
As we stand face to face I seem to tower over her. I grasp her small, thin arms and push them tight against her sides, feeling the birdlike bones beneath my fingers—so easily broken and crushed that they almost invite my violence. “What did you give him that was so precious, if not your own body?” I cry. “Why did he no longer wish to sleep with me, unless he had begun to sleep with you? How can you dare to tell me different?”
I have her tight in my grasp. My pulse is racing, my head thrumming. And suddenly I am shaking her. Her face advances, then retreats, her eyes wide with shock. A staccato cry escapes her lips. Serve her right, I think, shaking some more. Her hairpins shower over the floor and her long hair swirls wildly out. Her hapless voice comes in bursts: “Please, please, please.” Now she is fading from me: a pale blur, her earrings catching the light as they dance around her little neck. She bears a strong resemblance to Madame Brandt. No, it’s Miss Sarah Evans. And Sissy. It’s Alice now, and Little Amy. And Madeleine Fairbright and Lillian Dawnay. It’s Dora Meynell and poor Poll Lowton. Poll, poor thing, is dreadfully pale and has a livid bruise upon her forehead. Will you kill me, Jack? she pleads. Have you no mercy? But Jack’s going to kill her all the same; he’s going to smash her head against the parapet. He’s going to squeeze and shake her until she turns blue in his arms: Mercy? he’ll say. Jack Black don’t know the meanin’ of that pertickler word! And her head will go crashing against the stones, over and over and over and over. Until she is dead.
26
SUDDENLY I’M AWARE THAT MISS RICKETTS IS SHUDDERING and juddering in my grasp, her eyes shut, her head lolling on her delicate neck, her whole weight sagging in my arms. I am horrified: I let her go as if she is on fire, and she drops to the ground like so much ballast. I stand and look at her collapsed figure. What have I done? She is so still; I think I have killed her. I see myself shackled, and tried at the Bailey, going to the gallows like the most notorious of convicts. I am tempted to cast myself down beside her, lie full length on the round carpet and give up the ghost as well. But I cannot do it. I must summon help. I try to call out, to bring the mother running in her pinned-around apron—but my voice does not obey me. I try to move but I have not the strength to put one foot in front of another. I stare stupidly at the door. The mother must surely come; only a deaf creature could have withstood all that fearful racket. Suddenly Miss Ricketts moves her head. Moves it a little, like a bird that has been paralyzed with fright, but now lives precariously.
“Oh, Miss Ricketts!” I cry urgently, stooping over her small body. “You are alive! Please speak. Where are you injured? What can I do?” Her eyes flutter open; and she raises herself on her elbow, staring at me as if she does not know who I am. Then she sits and staggers to her feet. Her face is flushed, her hair awry, b
ut to my amazement, she seems unhurt. The pounding in my veins quietens a little. She puts her hand to her head, then rubs the top of her arms in a rueful manner.
“Oh, please forgive me!” I cry. “I am a jealous woman and something evil possessed me. But you seem unhurt. Oh, tell me that is the case!”
She shakes her head confusedly. “No, I am not hurt. A little bruised, perhaps.”
“I am so thankful.” And I am, because whatever she has done, she does not deserve such an attack; and the thought of the scandal that might arise has been filling me with horror. “You will say nothing of this, I hope? I can trust you in that? Not for my sake but for his? I swear I will leave this house the moment I have regained my breath—and never disturb you further. Your mama, I am sure, will see to you. …” I am sure Mrs. Ricketts will be here any moment and I do not wish to face her outrage. I am horrified with myself: such passion and such loss of temper: My wife the Murderess. Maybe Alfred knew me better than I thought.
I turn to go. My legs at last are obeying me. But to my surprise, Miss Ricketts grasps the skirt of my gown to prevent me. “No, no,” she says breathlessly. “Please stay. I should not have spoken to you as I did. I should not have accused you of not knowing your own husband.”
“Whatever you said, there is no reason for me to behave like a barbarian.” I cast another look at the door. Still the mother does not come. Is she so habituated to hearing nothing that her aural faculties no longer function?
“I am innocent of what you think, Mrs. Gibson,” Miss Ricketts says. “And even Alfred is not so much to blame as you suppose.”
Girl in a Blue Dress Page 38
