Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  Annie wanders through the strange, unfolding rooms, each one like a pause in a long, rambling story, a place to draw breath before continuing on. The dark furniture, the lavish velvet drapes, the paintings and rugs all seem vaguely sinful compared to Portman Square.

  At the very back of the house, in one of the farthest rooms, Annie finds a collection of baby equipment—carriages, cradles, a trunk full of clothes, a rocking horse. She puts her hand on one of the carriage hoods. The carriage sways in great, squeaky wheezes. When she takes her hand away her flesh is coated with dust. No one has spoken to her of children. She has seen no evidence of them in the house. Why is there this room full of dusty prams and moth-eaten receiving blankets? It feels to Annie as though she has been the only living thing in this room for years and years. She pokes at a doll lying tangled with other dolls in a box on top of a steamer trunk. The doll’s eyes snap open and Annie jumps. The eyes flick closed again.

  Annie is unlikely ever to have children of her own. She is unlikely, if she remains in service, even to marry. Sometimes it is possible for a maid to take a male servant in the same household as a husband. Annie thinks of Wilks, of the leg poking out from behind the potting shed. She shakes the leg of the doll again and the eyes fall open and stare at her, unblinking, blue as a morning sky.

  The rest of the house is not as sinister. Rooms for dining. Rooms for receiving visitors. To the right of the sitting room where Annie first met Mrs. Dashell is a long hallway, a wing that, like everything else, seems to have been built on as a kind of rash afterthought. Annie wanders down the hallway, hands out to touch the cool walls on either side of her. At the end of the passage a door is ajar. Annie pushes it slowly open, enough to peer inside. Books are layered from floor to ceiling. The density of them like strata in a glacial bluff. Annie has never seen so many books in one place. The small library in the reverend’s house in Portman Square was no match for this one. Near the end of her time in London, Annie was afraid that she’d have to start again in the reverend’s library, start back at the beginning, at the first book she’d borrowed from him.

  There is no one in this forbidden library and Annie pushes the door completely open and enters. A huge oak table piled up with sheets of paper dominates the centre of the room. There’s a desk near one set of bookshelves, and a free-standing globe, almost as tall as Annie, beside the desk. But it is the books Annie is interested in. She stands in front of the shelves, greedily reading the titles of these volumes she has mostly never seen, or heard of before. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The Last Days of Pompeii.

  At Mrs. Gilbey’s, reading was Annie’s secret. Mrs. Gilbey wanted Annie to be literate, wanted the convenience of a maid who understood written instruction, but she would not have appreciated Annie’s feverish passion for words, would not have tolerated passion of any sort within her household. Annie’s reading at Mrs. Gilbey’s was always done with the same bursts of clandestine intensity that one would use to pursue an illicit encounter. Hiding a book in a cupboard and reading phrases in between changing the bed linen. Putting a book, open, inside the large silver tureen so that she could read and polish the silver at the same time. Luckily the reverend supported her romance with reading and kept her supplied with books from his personal library. But they were largely books on religious matters, or at least with religious leanings. There was not the range that there was here, in Mr. Dashell’s library. Annie runs her hands lightly over the soft leather spines of the books. All those words, just waiting for her.

  “Never mind what I told you,” says Cook, when Annie appears back in the kitchen. “I need you to take these to the Lady. She’s in the glasshouse. Down the garden.” Cook thrusts two goose wings at Annie. The feathered wings are fully extended, and very stiff. They have crude leather hoops sewn onto the underside of them, two on each wing.

  On the path in the garden that leads to the glasshouse, Annie meets Eldon Dashell. He is tall and thin, with a straggly reddish beard and glasses. Hurrying towards the house, looking down at the pattern of stones and grass between his feet, he doesn’t see Annie until he is almost upon her.

  “Excuse me.”

  He looks up, delicately sidesteps her, sees her armload of wings and then her face. “Angels,” he says. “You must be the new maid.”

  “Annie Phelan, sir,” says Annie, bowing her head. She has said her name so often this day that it is finally starting to feel as though it does belong to her.

  “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Annie Phelan.” Eldon bows his head as well, and smiles. “But don’t let me hold you up. The genius doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” He nods his head again. “Good day.” And then he continues walking the path to the house.

  Annie stands outside the henhouse. Through the glass she can see the murky shape of Isabelle, floating around like a dark, underwater bird.

  Angel

  Over the grey, stone wall the apple trees make a puzzle of the sky.

  Where does God go to if he can’t stay here?

  When Annie enters the glasshouse she sees a large wooden box on stick legs at the far end. Isabelle is in front of the box, bending over a small child lying on a bench. The bench is covered in black cloth and black cloth is also hung from the ceiling to create a curtain against the end wall. Another child stands listlessly off to one side of the box. He is naked. The child lying on the bench has a white sheet draped over him.

  “Ma’am,” says Annie, but no one hears her. She advances into the room. Sunlight makes bright flowers on the stone floor. She can hear muffled birdsong from outside. “Ma’am,” she says again, and this time Isabelle turns around.

  “Thank God,” she says, with such relief in her voice that Annie looks behind her to make sure that there isn’t someone else in the room whom Isabelle is addressing.

  Isabelle takes the goose wings from Annie and gives them to the standing, naked boy. “Now, Tobias, put these on. Quickly, please.” The boy looks at the wings scornfully and slowly starts to thread an arm through the leather straps.

  “They’re on loan,” says Isabelle to Annie. “My cousin’s children. Silly little beggars,” she says, under her breath, just loud enough for Annie to hear. “There.” She looks at Annie in triumph. “I’ve made you smile. I didn’t think you knew how. Oh, Tobias, pick it up.” The standing, naked child has dropped one of the wings and is fumbling around trying to grab ahold of it with his feathery arm. Isabelle goes to help him. Annie watches them. The Lady doesn’t seem so fearsome here. Her movements are tamer. The light flooding through the glass roof softens the whole scene. Annie feels almost as if she could cup her hands around it and contain it safely there, the gentle push of its heart against her fingers. Beat, it doesn’t beat, it drops. It falls to earth, slowly, like a word after it’s been said.

  Dearly beloved

  “Now, Tobias, come and lean over Alfred and look mournful.” Isabelle moves behind the box on sticks and looks through a hole in it. The standing, naked boy obediently moves closer to his brother and slumps over Alfred.

  “You don’t need to smother him,” cautions Isabelle.

  Tobias looks at her with contempt in his eyes. “I am the Angel of Death,” he says.

  “But Alfred is already dead,” says Isabelle. “You don’t need to kill him again. You are only supposed to guide him out of his mortal self.”

  “His what?” says Tobias. Alfred’s arm suddenly drops over the side of the bench and hits the floor.

  “Oh, wake him up.” Isabelle steps back from the box and rubs her forehead. “Infidels,” she says to Annie. “Disaster.”

  Annie notices, again, the blackness of Isabelle’s hands. “Silver nitrate,” says Isabelle. “It dyes them black. Permanently.” She waves them under Annie’s nose. “Blacker than yours after cleaning the grates, aren’t they?” Annie feels she is being challenged somehow, that there is something cruel in Isabelle’s voice. She looks away, looks at the scene coming undone on the bench.

  “Ma’am, w
hy do you have an angel and yet you don’t have prayers?”

  “Ah.” Isabelle glances briefly over at Tobias and Alfred, who are wrestling. “Stop that,” she says to them. “Symbolism,” she says to Annie. “Religious symbols stand for moral values. The symbols are still useful, even if the religion is not.”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “You don’t understand?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Come here.” Isabelle leads Annie over to the box. “Look.” She slides the cover from the small hole in the wood and makes Annie look through it. “See. The Angel of Death is helping the dead boy out of this life. He is a passage between this world and the idea of another world. He is a sense of possibility. A looking up. A wonderment. An angel does not just belong to God. It is a feeling in us. A striving.” Isabelle’s voice is airy, lifts with her excitement at what she is saying. “When I have made this photograph, I want it to be that feeling of looking up. When I show it to people, that’s what I want them to feel—the possibilities that could exist beyond this life.” She pauses, puts her hand lightly on Annie’s shoulder. “Do you see?” she says.

  Isabelle has sent Tobias and Alfred home in a fly with Wilks. Back to their mother’s house in Tunbridge Wells. She sits on the bench with the black cloth behind her, poking stray feathers back into the goose wings. Tobias and Alfred. They are not obedient enough because they know her, feel they can play when they come here instead of work, don’t understand what it is she is doing. Trying to do, thinks Isabelle, threading the bone of a feather through the weave of the wing. What I am trying to do. It is so frustrating. Her ideas are sound, she is sure of that. What is it that happens between her idea and the finished result? What goes wrong? It is as though the moment she sets up a scene it starts to leak away. The image in her head burns brighter, is true. When she looks through the viewfinder of the camera, she sees her image coming undone, trailing threads of smoke, disappearing. How to make it stay. What will hold it until she is able to render it completely?

  Isabelle looks up at the lens of the camera. It is supposed to see what she sees, that is the point. It is supposed to be her eyes.

  The afternoon light is beautiful now. It slants into the henhouse, all current and moving lines. The air swims with light. That is the half of it, thinks Isabelle, bending over the white feathers. Light. The rest is shape and shadow. Intent. The raised arm that curves up out of the frame is the heart leaping forward, is the moment before arrival and the quickening of anticipation.

  Isabelle puts the wings aside and walks over to the wall of the henhouse. There are still boards against the glass and bits of straw wedged in the steel supports from when the hens were there. Now they have eggs delivered from the farm down the road instead. The branches of the trees through the glass, the trees in the orchard, look like lacing pulling together a corset of sky. Apples. That’s what the painters do. Mounds of apples and lemons. A blue jug of wine. Still life. Isabelle puts her hand up to the glass. Now she is a tree against the sky.

  The budding apples are higher up the trees than she’d expected. The fallen ones from last year still on the ground, a brown, pulpy mass. Wilks probably hasn’t been down here in ages. There isn’t a single ladder or climbing aid anywhere. Isabelle manages to haul herself up onto a low branch of one tree and stretching up high into the boughs she is able to get to the apples. They are small, but she finds a nice, round, red one, and another with a couple of leaves still attached to the stem. But what to do with them? She can’t throw them out of the tree as they might break or bruise when they hit the ground. Isabelle stands in the apple tree, holding the two apples, her feet on one branch, her body angled into the trunk of the tree. There are twigs probing her, and the bark is rough against her cheek. All around there is the soft hum of bees and the warm smell of last year’s apples running to earth.

  Isabelle puts the apples down the front of her dress. It is a slow, cautious walk back to the studio to unload her cargo on the black bench. The apples are warm from having been next to her skin. She curls a white sheet around them and goes to look through the camera lens. What she sees are apples. A mound of apples with a white sheet coiled around them. The fold in the sheet as it holds the shapes of them is pleasing, but the apples themselves are just apples. They aren’t hopeful or faithless or awakening from a feverish dream in which they have glimpsed the afterlife. They are apples only, round and red, flecked with sun. What is so beautiful about apples? What human truth could rise out of this pile of fruit?

  Isabelle leans her forehead against the wooden box of the camera. The sullen apples squat on the black cloth. Nothing moves. Still life.

  “Beautiful!”

  Isabelle turns to see Robert Hill in the doorway of the henhouse. He strides across the floor towards the apples on the bench, waving his arms as though he is conducting an orchestra. “Lovely composition! Look how the sun rolls off the fruit.”

  Isabelle instandy feels guilty for doubting her apples. If Robert Hill, acclaimed painter and peer of the realm, thinks her composition lovely, then what right has she to complain? “Do you approve of the suggestiveness of the drapery?” she asks her neighbour, trying, really trying, to believe in the apples, but they still stare balefully at her from their seat on the bench, like so many red, angry eyes.

  “Oh, wholeheartedly. I most definitely approve.” Robert Hill moves behind the apples and bends to tuck the sheet a little closer to the form. “But I think it could benefit from a little shaping.” He fusses with the sheet and Isabelle watches him. The sunlight runs through his white beard like water. His long fingers stroke the folds of the sheet to his bidding.

  Time, she thinks. Time persuading Beauty to decay.

  Robert Hill would not agree to be her subject. He is famous, would consider it demeaning to sit for a portrait. And for all his bluff encouragement, he does not take Isabelle seriously. He does not believe her to be an artist. She is a woman. And she is a photographer. Women do not have the proper souls to be artists, and photographers are only useful to produce a likeness of something. A photograph cannot be a work of art. A year ago, when Isabelle first started taking photographs, she would argue with Robert Hill about his strict opinions on the subjects of women and photography. She had expected greater tolerance from a respected artist. Now, although she still admires his work, she no longer heeds his words. “I was attempting something new,” she says. The apples don’t glare at her quite so strongly after she has said this. “I’m not sure that I’ve succeeded.”

  “Oh, my dear. Beyond your dreams.” Robert Hill waves his arms again over the pile of fruit as though he’s offering a blessing upon it. “This is so much more worthy of you than those odd scenes. This is”—he searches for the correct words, doesn’t have to look far—“so much more, domestic.” He looks right at Isabelle, his eyes cold and watery.

  There are days when Isabelle will parry with Robert, deflect his blows with a casual comment or a laugh. Today she can’t find the strength to counter him. “Eldon’s in the library,” she says instead. “I’m sure he’s expecting you.”

  *

  “It is good to see that Isabelle has finally succumbed to more suitable subjects,” says Robert, seated in Eldon’s most comfortable chair, the black leather wing chair by the library window.

  Eldon is standing over a long table, looking down at large sheets of paper. “Angels,” he says. “The ascension of the spirit.”

  “No, no. Apples.”

  “What?” Eldon looks up.

  “Still life.” Robert pushes the word “life” off his tongue so that it stretches out into the room, and then snaps shut. “That is much more appropriate for a Lady than live models.”

  “I wouldn’t get too jubilant.” Eldon knows his wife, knows that she doesn’t think much of photographing the static world. “I’m sure it’s just a temporary setback in her pursuit of artistic excellence.”

  “Artistic excellence,” says Robert drily. “Ah, but you believe
women have souls and that public education will bring about social reform. And that social reform is desirable.”

  “Yes, well, my utilitarian ideals have not helped me much lately.” Eldon taps the topmost sheet of paper. “A theme map. Dunstan wants me to make a theme map. All the work I’ve done on the atlases. This was to be my vision. A map of the world. My map of the world. And instead they want me to show mineral deposits and native trees. They think that maps are starting to repeat themselves, that there is nothing left to show of the world. Nothing new.” Eldon looks at the map in front of him, the carefully delineated boundaries between the countries, the blue of the oceans. How can Dunstan think that all has been shown that is worth showing when the top of the map is still thick with white space? Not much detail. The descriptor of Arctic Icy Ocean looping through its empty rooms.

  Robert is half bored by Eldon’s indignation. He turns to the bright world outside the window and sees Annie Phelan walking tentatively past the rose bushes.

  “Who is that?”

  Eldon sighs, looks up at Robert and then out the window. “The new maid,” he says.

  “Lovely.” Robert presses his hands together in excitement. “She looks lost.”

  “She probably is.”

  “She needs saving,” says Robert. “We should save her.”

  Eldon looks down at the map again. “All she needs,” he says. “All any of them need, is a proper education.”

  Robert knows what comes next, the long speech about the benefits of education for the lower orders. “Oh, please,” he says. He runs a finger over his thin lips as Annie trails from view. “Spare me.”

  The road is hard earth. It twists ahead of Annie. It twists out of sight behind her. The bit she stands on is cracked from the heat of the summer sun. All around her the air swims with dust from the pickaxes swinging into the hard rind of road, swinging clear. The arc of the bodies as they heave the axes through the air looks like a kind of dance.