Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

  Thomas was fast asleep and his warm damp heaviness pressed into me. He smelled of new bread, and salt, and milk. He anchored me. As long as I held him I could not float away into the darkness.

  After a while Diner stirred and said, as if continuing a conversation he had been having with me in the silence: ‘You would never think evil of me, would you, Lizzie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or be afraid of me?’

  A pause came, longer than I intended. The truth was that there were moments when I feared him. I had feared him tonight, when he seized my wrists and held them tight. It was not something I thought about or wished to feel: indeed, I tried not to think of it. But my body prickled and would not settle.

  ‘Of course I would never think evil of you,’ I said. I could not stop thinking of Lucie’s dress, and how she had ordered it, paid for it but gone to France without collecting it or leaving any message with Mrs Iles. And she had left her ring behind. She had twisted her ring on her finger, as I did now, and never thought that one day it would go to another woman.

  A little later we went up to Philo’s attic and Diner lifted the cradle from beside her bed without disturbing her. He carried it downstairs and set it up in the slip of a room that was to be our dressing room one day, when it was fitted out. There was no door, so I would be able to hear Thomas perfectly, but he would be out of sight. One day we would do this for our own baby, I thought, in spite of what Diner had said. I could have a child without growing haggard and losing my hair. I could have a child without dying. But Diner did not want a child. He would be jealous of any child from my body, even though it would be his own child too.

  ‘It’s only for tonight,’ said Diner. He caught me to him and held me in a grip that stilled me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘only for tonight,’ and I rubbed my face against his neck and felt his pulse jump under my lips.

  18

  Philo was not well enough to work for several days, and so I had a great deal to do. Thomas came everywhere with me as I went to market, cooked and did as much cleaning as I could. I washed Thomas’s linen, but there was no time for the rest.

  I was glad of the work. It stilled the rushing of my thoughts, and if Thomas would not settle in his cradle I tied him into my shawl and carried him with me. He was quite content then, and never cried. The thought of having to live without him frightened me. Diner would change his mind, I told myself again. Thomas would become ours, as he had already become mine. He would be the eldest of our children.

  When I went to bed I fell asleep almost at once. Diner was never home until very late. He would come in silently, while I was sleeping, and sometimes I would rouse later to hear him moving about. I think that he slept very little during those days. The less progress that could be made on the terrace, the more hours he spent at Grace’s Buildings. I no longer wondered what he was doing because I knew that he, like me, was busying himself furiously in order not to think about the fears that rose up as soon as we were still.

  One day as I hurried home in the winter gloom I saw our terrace without knowing it, in the way that sometimes you may see a dear friend in the street before recognising her, and discover features that familiarity blots out at once. My house stood among roofless ruins. The terrace was not rising to perfection. It was falling away. The scale of Diner’s dream came to me as if for the first time, and I saw the scale of the failure too. Who would buy here now? Who would look at this place and desire it?

  The news from France darkened. I thought of how Augustus and Hannah had greeted the early days of Revolution like children waking to a June morning of brilliant sunshine. It had not lasted. Clouds had come, a sharp wind and rain. Even Hannah, though she still approved of everything that was done, had lost her appetite for it. ‘None of us has ever lived through such times,’ she said, but not in triumph now. I thought I detected in her voice a certain apprehension, as if she did not know how to measure the forces that had now been unleashed. But the people could not be wrong. Their instincts would show them the true path from oppression to liberty.

  It was Will Forrest whom Hannah cared for now, when she was not thinking of Mammie. Perhaps the two of them were bound together in her mind and to cook for Will or wash his linen was not so very distinct from doing it for Mammie. To the rest of the living world around her she had become indifferent. A few days earlier I’d seen her walking slowly through the market, and she was not the Hannah I knew, but an old woman. Her lips were moving and her brow was knitted with anxiety, as if there was something she must remember and she could not, no matter how many times she repeated it. She did not notice me. My brisk, raw-boned, upright Hannah with her scoldings and her passions had vanished, and it felt as if a tree had fallen, letting in such a flood of sky that my eyes could not bear it. I hurried away without greeting her. When I reached the cheese stall I turned and she was staring after me. I didn’t think that she had recognised me, but a wash of shame made my skin burn in spite of the chill of the morning.

  By Thursday Philo was still weak but able to take care of Thomas again. I took him upstairs to her and turned to the neglected housework. Dust from the building came in everywhere, gritting underfoot. It was a bright morning, and the low winter sun shone in and showed up the dirt. Even though the house was new it seemed to breathe out dust through its pores every night, no matter how hard Philo or I had worked the day before.

  I rolled up my sleeves and wrapped myself in an apron. Augustus and Hannah said that I was getting thin but I had never felt stronger. It was good to act and not to think. I stoked up the range, filled the boiler and began to sweep. As soon as the water was hot I would scrub the scullery and kitchen floors.

  I was scouring the deal table with lye when there was a ring on the upstairs bell. I was not expecting any visitor. Perhaps, after all this time, it was another of those prospective purchasers who would never buy but liked to linger over their refusals? I was sick of them. It seemed that they did it to provoke us, and we were helpless to force them into action. I would ignore the bell. Besides, it would not help if a buyer found me scrubbing out my own kitchen. We must look prosperous and confident, never desperate to sell at all costs. Diner had impressed that upon me. The bell didn’t ring again, and so I crossed to the window to glimpse the caller leaving. The area window darkened, and before I could step back the figure of a middle-aged woman in a travelling cloak came down the steps. She was looking in. She had seen me. There was nothing for it: I wiped my hands on my apron and went to open the door.

  ‘Je cherche Monsieur Tredevant,’ she said, without any greeting to me. She took me for a servant, naturally enough, dressed as I was and with my hair bundled into an old cap.

  I recognised her language although she spoke too quick for me. I knew the word Monsieur. I scrabbled through my mind for the French which Hannah had struggled to teach me. ‘Il est …’ What was ‘out’ in French? I could not remember, so I waved at the distance beyond us. ‘Il est … out,’ I said.

  Her black eyes fixed me impatiently. Clearly she thought me a fool as well. ‘Je suis la marraine de Lucie, sa femme,’ she said.

  The name of Lucie went through me, but the rest of it meant nothing and I could not answer. The woman clicked her tongue in exasperation.

  ‘Your master wife. I am marraine,’ she said loudly, in the way one speaks to a foreigner. She pushed her face into mine and I became indignant. We were in England. It was for her to speak English. How should I know what she meant? I had never paid attention in Hannah’s French classes, and she had given up when I was thirteen. But by chance I seized upon the word I needed.

  ‘Lucie … morte,’ I said.

  She rolled her eyes at me in angry scorn. ‘Ah bon, vous parlez donc français,’ she said, as if I had been trying to deceive her, and off she rattled at top speed: ‘Bien sûr qu’elle est morte, c’est pour ça que je suis venue ici. Je suis de Bordeaux, et depuis très longtemps une amie de la famille Ribault, mais j’ai dû quitter la France. Oui
, j’ai dû quitter mon pays à cause de ces ordures qui haïssent les gens honnêtes. Bourgeoise! Moi, je suis propriétaire d’une petite chapellerie, ou bien je l’étais jusqu’à ce que ces diables aient rendu impossible le travail des gens honnêtes. Et si je suis bourgeoise, j’en suis fière. C’est la bourgeoisie qui soutient la société.’ She glared at me but I could not imagine why. Her words reminded me of the speeches that Augustus liked to make as he walked about the room, only in the case of this woman I could not grasp more than one word out of ten. ‘Je suis arrivée à Bath il y a quelques semaines, et tout à coup je me suis rendue compte que Bristol n’est pas trop loin de Bath. Et puisque le père de Lucie ne peut pas venir voir le tombeau de sa fille … Son pauvre père, il m’a dit plusieurs fois: Si jamais tu arrives en Angleterre, ma chère Armande, tu vas visiter le tombeau où repose notre mignonne. Tu vas y placer quelques fleurs. Et voilà ce que je vais faire!’

  She flung back her head at me in a sort of triumph. ‘Le tombeau!’ she almost shouted. ‘Le tombeau de Lucie! Il faut absolument que je le visite!’

  The language slipped past me and made no sense. Besides, I did not want to hear her. She was talking about Lucie. She was connected to Lucie, to Lucie’s family.

  She was sweating. There were beads of moisture on her upper lip and I smelled her emotion. I could not dismiss her: she was real. She was a middle-aged woman, heated and distressed. She had searched the streets of a strange city in a strange country, and she would not give up now.

  ‘You are a friend of Lucie,’ I said slowly, hoping that she would understand. She threw up her hands.

  ‘Lucie! Yaise! Lucie. Where …?’ and she broke into a furious pantomime, crossing her arms over her breast, closing her eyes then snapping them open again to glare at me. ‘Where?’

  How I wished that Diner would come. He would understand her perfectly. It seemed that this woman did not even know that Lucie was dead, if she was asking where she was. And yet of course she must know, since Lucie had died at home, in France. I must have misunderstood.

  I heard a sound from upstairs. A heavy door, closing. The front door. It must be Diner, because Philo would have come down the outside steps. It was Diner, as if my need of him had brought him home.

  ‘Wait!’ I said, and hurried to the kitchen stairs. I picked up my skirts, looked back at her, gestured again: ‘Wait!’ and ran to fetch him.

  He was in the hall, taking off his coat.

  ‘I am so glad you are back.’ I went behind him and helped to draw his arms out of the sleeves. He liked such attentions, and besides now he could not see my face. ‘There’s a woman downstairs, a strange woman. It is something about Lucie.’

  ‘Lucie!’

  ‘Yes. She is French, I think. She’s speaking French. You know how poorly I understand it.’

  ‘My God,’ he said, but quietly and as if to himself, and turned to face me. ‘She is looking for me, you say.’ His pupils contracted. He looked inwards, barely seeing me. I waited, but he said nothing more and did not move.

  ‘She’s waiting downstairs.’

  ‘She spoke to you? She asked you questions? What did you say?’

  ‘I am sorry. It was so stupid – I could not follow her. You know I don’t speak French; or only a very little. I was cleaning the kitchen. She thought I was a servant.’

  He had lost his colour. Even to hear Lucie’s name distressed him.

  ‘You had better go down,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to come up here.’

  ‘No.’ He reached for his coat again. ‘I will see her. I may have to go out again directly, Lizzie.’

  I went to the top of the kitchen stairs. I could hear them talking, her voice sharp and high, his deeper. I could make out enough to know that they were speaking French, and that I could not follow any of it. Their conversation sounded familiar, as if they knew each other. I pictured the woman, her black eyes snapping, the smell of her sweat, the dark shadow of hair on her upper lip.

  After what seemed a long time, I heard the area door open and close. I ran through to the drawing room and peered out of the window. I could see them making their way along the rough terrace that would one day be paved. They were close together. She was holding his arm and they were still talking. It seemed to me in that instant that he was disappearing from me forever, into his own past.

  An hour later, he was home again. I asked no questions, but for once he was expansive.

  ‘A strange business,’ he said, pulling off his boots. ‘She is a friend of Lucie’s family. I knew her, of course. She had a little millinery shop where Lucie first learned her craft. She is staying in Bath, but she intends to set up in London.’

  ‘Why did she come here? Does she want your help?’

  ‘No.’ He looked at me directly. ‘She wanted to see the place where Lucie lived. I suppose it is very natural.’

  ‘So you showed her?’ I realised that I did not even know myself where Diner had lived with Lucie.

  ‘Yes.’

  Everything was explained. It was sad, and unsurprising, yet I could hardly bear it. First Lucie’s dress, and now this.

  ‘I suppose if it had not been for the Revolution,’ I said, ‘she would never have come to England.’

  ‘A great many things would have been different. She has had to leave her home and now she must make a new life in London. I don’t doubt her capacity for it, but she will have neither the time nor the money to be visiting here. We shan’t see her again, Lizzie. Don’t let it trouble you.’

  ‘I wish I had paid more attention in Hannah’s French classes. I could barely understand a word she said.’

  ‘I should not care if I never heard another word of French,’ he said, and he came over to me and took me in his arms. I felt then what I had not seen: he was trembling slightly. His arms went round me and held me close. ‘It is you I love, Lizzie. Only you.’

  ‘But you were happy with Lucie,’ I said into his shoulder. I had never dared to say such a thing before and I had to force the words out of my tightened throat.

  ‘At first,’ he said. ‘We were not so well suited, as time went on. There, Lizzie. Does that satisfy you?’ He pushed me away from him to look down into my face.

  ‘She is dead,’ I said.

  ‘You are serious,’ he said, touching my cheek. ‘I like that in you. Lucie was always smiling.’

  ‘She was happy with you, I suppose.’

  ‘One may smile too often,’ he said, and then shook his head a little, pulling me to him so that I no longer saw his face.

  Later that day I took Thomas to see Hannah. He needed the air, and I wrapped him up against the cold. Mammie had always taken me out regardless of the weather. She believed a child should grow up stirring and hardy and that there was no difference in this respect between girls and boys. I would trot along beside her, holding her hand, while we walked for miles together. Mammie had no family to disapprove of her, and neither had I now. I would follow her pattern in bringing up Thomas.

  It did not do to think of her. I could feel the exact pressure of her fingers around mine, and feel the swish of her skirts. I could hear my own footsteps too, as my stout little boots clumped over the cobbles beside her.

  Ten times a day it stopped me like a bolt into my chest: that she was no longer here. That she would never be here. That I might walk and walk and yet I would never again come home to her. I had left her to marry Diner but I had never thought that she might leave me so soon. If I had known it, what would I have done? I did not want to think about it. She had brought me up to work and to walk freely and to know my own mind and now here I was in a world that wanted those qualities very little. Diner loved me but he kept half his life apart from me.

  Will Forrest was sitting on a stood beside Hannah, helping her to wind her wool.

  ‘I am knitting a coat for Thomas,’ she said. She looked more cheerful than I had seen her for a long time. The pair of them were cosy together, sitting by the fire. I wondered if Will would ever leav
e. He seemed a fixture here.

  ‘How is Augustus?’ I asked.

  ‘He has gone to Bath with Caroline Farquhar. He is to address a meeting there.’

  ‘Hannah,’ I said, ‘what does marraine mean in French?’

  ‘It means godmother. You should know that, Lizzie, if you had attended to your lessons at all.’

  Lucie’s godmother … Diner must have known that, and yet he’d called her a family friend. And that other word, the one she had repeated so vehemently: could I remember it correctly?

  ‘What about tombeau, Hannah? What does that mean?’

  ‘Your pronunciation has improved, I will say. Perhaps you should take up your study again.’

  ‘I am only repeating what someone said to me. What does it mean?’

  ‘Tomb. The words are very similar, Lizzie. If you think about it, you will be able to make them out.’

  I kept my voice as level as I could. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I expect I will.’

  She had been asking about Lucie’s tomb. Perhaps she wanted to tell Diner what they had done, what stone they had chosen, what words. More likely, she wanted him to pay for it. It was expensive to set up a stone, and perhaps they had chosen an elaborate memorial? Diner would not have wanted to tell me about it.

  ‘How long am I to stand here like a lay-figure?’ asked Will Forrest, holding out his hands with the skein of wool between them.

  ‘Have a little patience,’ chided Hannah, as if he had been her son. He was so very much at home. ‘And, Lizzie, please keep that child from dribbling over my wool.’

  Will’s eyes slid sideways to me and he pulled a comical face. Why should I think of Lucie, who was dead and gone? I would not.

  ‘I should like to read some of your poems,’ I said.

  ‘Should you really? People very often say that without meaning it, so I am on my guard. You are under no poetry-obligation to me, Miss Lizzie.’

  ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘As long as you do not get Augustus to read it aloud. I prefer to read to myself.’