Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  “No,” says Eldon again, but this time weaker than the first, and neither of them is convinced by it.

  Isabelle gets out of the bed. The oil lamp flickers as regular as breathing. Her dress is a pool of fabric on the floor. She steps into it.

  “I didn’t mean to say anything,” says Eldon.

  Isabelle doesn’t turn around. He has drifted so quickly away from her and back to Annie Phelan. She notices this and hates it. “Keep away from Annie Phelan,” she says.

  “What?”

  Isabelle puts her hands behind her neck and fumbles the clasp of her dress into place. “I want you to stay away from her entirely.” She stares at him, still huddled down in the bed. “You are a weak and pathetic man, Eldon Dashell,” she says. “I can’t think why I married you.”

  Because you needed me once, he thinks, but that seems so far away now that to bring it up would be almost inconsequential, wouldn’t be a real reason at all. He says nothing.

  “Right,” says Isabelle. “Don’t let me interrupt.” She walks across the room, stops when she reaches the door. “Your reading,” she says derisively, opens the door, and is gone.

  Eldon has behaved badly, he knows this. He should have thought of something more reassuring to say to Isabelle. He should have touched her. But if he has to think first every time before he speaks to her or caresses her, then what does this mean? If intimacy is premeditated, can it still be genuine? Is it still wanted?

  Eldon, with relief, goes back to reading the diary of the whaling captain from 1840. He is reading it for details of the voyage of the whaling party, but he finds that the character of the captain is far more interesting than his cartographic concerns. The captain, sailing from Nova Scotia, kept the diary so he could share it with his new wife when he returned from sea. Indeed, the captain starts out by addressing his wife, as though each entry were a letter. Dear Alice. This soon stops as he becomes increasingly obsessed with finding whales. He starts complaining about his sailors, how some of them are pretending they have scurvy. He stops complaining after several of them jump overboard and commit suicide. Gradually his entries get shorter and shorter, until they are the briefest description of the weather and whale sightings.

  24 th—Cloudy. No whales.

  26th—Fresh breeze from the SW. Nothing like a whale.

  27th—Rain. I really would like to see a whale.

  29th—Rain. No whales.

  When the party finally does start to catch some whales, his entries change again. Now he dispenses with the weather entirely and concentrates only on the state of the whales.

  12th—Cut the whale.

  13th—Began boiling.

  The whales get scarce. He begins to write poems about killing whales, then sentimental poems from the dying whales’ point of view. He begins to address himself in the third person, and seems to have forgotten completely that he ever was possessed of such a thing as a wife.

  He circumnavigates the world twice.

  His fourth year at sea he decides to head for home. He stops referring to himself in the third person and gets a litde more optimistic.

  No whales yet, he now writes, after the line about the weather, keeping up this newfound joviality all the way home, back to a woman whom he had known for just two weeks before putting to sea.

  A woman who was still waiting for him.

  It’s a long way home to someone.

  Eldon tries to imagine what it would have been like to be that woman, what it would have been like to live in the shadow of waiting. How would you remember anything about the person returning to you? Physical presence matters. A body standing in your room. Someone there to defy your imaginings of them, to stop you making them up.

  Who would wait for him, he thinks, if he were gone a long, long time? Who would remember anything about him? What is there to remember? Eldon puts his book down. Can he find his way back to Isabelle? Does he even want to?

  Isabelle is awake the next morning when Annie comes with the hot water for washing. Often Isabelle is still asleep and Annie has to haul back the curtains dramatically and flood the room with light in order to wake her up. This morning Isabelle is sitting up in bed, not reading, just sitting there, wide awake, hands clasped together overtop of the sheet.

  “Good morning, Annie,” she says. Her voice is low, melodious with sorrow. When Annie gets nearer she sees that Isabelle has been crying.

  “Morning, ma’am.” She pours some water into the basin and sets the jug down beside it. Should she just leave? Should she ask what is wrong?

  “Why are you just standing there?”

  “No reason, ma’am.”

  “Well, light me a fire, then. It’s cold in here this morning. I’m cold,” says Isabelle.

  Annie welcomes the task, having something to do. She brushes out the ashes and coal dust with vigour. She banks the coal, lights the fire, all the time hearing the sniffles of Isabelle behind her. I won’t ask, I will just leave, she thinks. It is no business of mine. She collects her pan of ashes and makes to exit the room.

  “Don’t go,” says Isabelle, as Annie is crossing the floor. “I hate crying. Annie.”

  Annie turns and walks back to the bed, carrying the pan of ashes before her like a coveted prize, an offering.

  “What would you like me to do, ma’am?” she asks.

  “Make me stop crying,” says Isabelle. She rubs the back of her hand across her red eyes. “Can’t you do that?”

  Annie waves her hand with the dustpan in it and a small pillow of ash rises into the air, scatters and falls like fine, grey rain. “I order you to stop crying, ma’am,” she says. She carefully lays the dustpan down on top of the wash jug. “Did it work?”

  “No,” Isabelle says. She pulls the covers back and swings her legs over the side of the bed. “Perhaps I should be you.”

  “Me?”

  Isabelle stands up. “Everything would be easier if I were you,” she says.

  Hardly, thinks Annie, but she gives in to Isabelle’s wish. “Come here, then,” she says.

  Isabelle obediently follows Annie to the fireplace. Annie presses a cloth into Isabelle’s hand. “Dust the mantel,” she says. “And the paintings. And the various ornaments. And mind you put them back where they were, ma’am.”

  “It would be a bit more convincing if you didn’t say ‘ma’am,’” says Isabelle.

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Annie, and they both smile.

  Isabelle dusts the room while Annie pulls the curtains and strips the sheets from the bed. They work in silence, the only sounds being the small noise of vases being lifted and then lowered back into place, the whisper of the sheets being slipped from the mattress. Annie stops once, standing by the window, through which grey clouds roll out across the sky,and she watches Isabelle work. Mrs. Dashell is careful with the dusting. She is not hurrying in her usual way, or missing the dusting of certain things. She is methodical and thorough.

  “You would make a good servant,” says Annie.

  Isabelle looks up from the surface of her dressing table and sees Annie backlit by the window, the stormy morning light. “You,” she says. “Not just any servant, but you.”

  It has worked. She has stopped crying, has stopped thinking of Eldon and her visit to him last night, going over it in her mind, wishing it different, wishing him different. For a few moments she has thought only of dusting under the hand mirror and hairbrushes, replacing them exactly where they had been. That relief had felt like a gift.

  “There’s nothing like work, ma’am, to make you forget your troubles.” Annie says this and Isabelle immediately remembers her troubles again, thinks of Eldon and how he blames her for the dead babies, as though the fault is her body, her faulty body.

  Isabelle puts her dusting cloth down. She leans against the mantel, the coal fire warm through her nightdress. “Annie.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  Annie looks up. Isabelle seems about to cry again, hunc
hed against the mantel, too close to the fire. Out the window the storm rolls towards them. There’s the sound of thunder in the distance. “You’re too near to the fire, ma’am,” she says. “You should step aside.”

  Isabelle doesn’t move. “Don’t leave me,” she says again.

  “No. I won’t.”

  Isabelle moves away from the fireplace.

  The rain starts.

  *

  Isabelle photographs the Madonna through the rainy light of the afternoon. Posed against the glass wall of the studio, the grey rain coursing down outside, making streaks of smoky light inside the room. Long exposures. The Madonna leaning her head on the glass. On her knees, praying before the watery veil. Each pose adds an understanding to the overall concept of goodness and virtue, all that the Madonna represents and Annie personifies, as if each pose were a word in a sentence and the sentence, when revealed, would explain all the sorrow of life to Isabelle.

  It is amazing how cold it becomes in the glasshouse when there is no sun to cover it. There are draughts under the door and from between the panes of glass. The air is damp and stirs the cold about so that it coats everything inside the studio. Annie huddles into the cave of her cloak, glad, for once, of the heavy wool it’s made from.

  “That’s good,” says Isabelle. “Trepidation. A litde nervousness. The humility of servitude.”

  Annie knows better than to correct her. She burrows deeper into the folds of the cloak, into humility, thinks only of the hot cup of tea she will be able to have when this modelling session is over.

  When Cook comes into the studio Annie thinks that perhaps Cook has realized how damp and cold she must be, and has thoughtfully brought her a cup of tea out to the glasshouse. But Cook ignores Annie, slouched against the studio wall, instead goes directly to Isabelle.

  “Mrs. Dashell,” she says. “The letter you bade me watch out for has come.” She hands over a thick brown envelope.

  “Thank you, Gertie.” Isabelle takes the envelope, and then, as though she can’t bear to touch it, she puts it down on top of the camera. “Sorry you had to come all the way out here to deliver it to me.”

  “No trouble, ma’am. Glad to do it.”

  Annie notices how different Cook sounds when she talks to Isabelle. Her voice is light and giving, nothing shuts down inside it. Gertie. Annie has never heard Cook’s name spoken before.

  Cook leaves the studio without so much as a glance at Annie. She does not approve of the modelling, Annie knows this. A housemaid should only do the duties of a housemaid. Posing as the Madonna is not a suitable thing for a housemaid to do.

  “What is it?” asks Annie when Cook has gone. Isabelle is just staring at the letter on top of the camera, making no move to open the envelope.

  “You do it,” says Isabelle. “You open it. And don’t read it out. Just tell me what it says.”

  Annie takes the letter. It is heavy. There’s something inside it. She carefully slits along the top edge with her finger and tips the envelope. A round metal disc falls into her palm. She unfolds the letter and reads it over to herself. When she looks up, Isabelle is standing by the camera, one hand on the top of it. She has her eyes closed.

  Annie holds the medal out in her hand. It flashes bright even in the dull light of the studio. “Ma’am,” she says. “Look. It’s from the Dublin Exposition. Your photographs have won the gold medal.”

  Isabelle opens her eyes.

  Isabelle decides to have a party in order to celebrate her victory. A dinner party.

  “I will invite both those who have encouraged and those who have maligned me,” she says to Annie. “I will reward and punish, all with the same event.”

  They are in Isabelle’s bedroom, sifting through her closet, picking out dresses for Annie to try on. Isabelle has insisted that Annie attend the party as a guest, not as a servant. “After all,” she said, “it’s the photographs of you that won the prize. This is all because of you.” It is the series on the virtues that has taken the gold medal. Annie as Grace, as Humility, as Faith.

  “Try this on,” says Isabelle, hauling from the wardrobe the dress she wore to supper at the Hills’. “I think green would go nicely with your natural colouring.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. It’s so fancy. I might ruin it.”

  “How could you ruin it by wearing it?” Isabelle holds the dress in front of Annie. “You would do it an honour by wearing it. Here. Let me help you.” She puts the dress down, moves behind Annie, and unfastens her black dress. “And take off that infernal cap. I think they are the most ugly things imaginable.” She taps the white maid’s cap with her finger. “It really is your gold medal, you know. I will have you come to this party as the guest of honour. As a Lady.”

  Annie unpins her cap and hands it to Isabelle, who tosses it in the direction of a chair. Annie steps out of her uniform, struggles into the corset Isabelle proffers, and then carefully steps into the circle of the green dress. She stands motionless as Isabelle does up the hooks in the back and then steps round in front of Annie to assess her.

  “Lovely!” she says. “You look lovely.”

  Annie walks over to the looking-glass and surveys herself. She seems nothing like the self she used to be. A dress instead of a uniform. A colour instead of the washed-out lilac morning dress and the black afternoon dress. She doesn’t look like herself at all and it unsettles her a litde.

  Annie is still not sure how she feels about the photographs of her winning the medal at the Dublin Exposition. She finds it hard to imagine them as a public thing, they seemed so much to be something she and Mrs. Dashell did, something private just between themselves. Scores of people will have seen the photographs of her in Dublin. They will have walked right up to the images, studying her as though she were a specimen of a butterfly, pinned out on the wall with an explanatory label attached.

  “What if,” she says, “I can’t do things properly?”

  “What things?”

  Annie turns in front of the mirror to get a better look at the back of the dress and stumbles on the hem. “Walking,” she says. “And talking. Knowing what to say.”

  “You always know what to say.”

  “Well, how to say it, then.” Annie looks beseechingly at Isabelle. “I am scared to death at the thought of this.”

  Isabelle takes Annie’s hand. “Could you not have been me?” she asks. “If our lives were different, could I not have been you?” For this is what she has always believed about Ellen, that they were the same.

  No, thinks Annie. You could not have been me. Isabelle squeezes her hand and then drops it. Annie practises walking, over to the window and back again. The dress makes soft scratchy noises as she walks, like someone whispering to her. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.

  “Everything looks right on you,” says Isabelle, watching Annie move across the room, the dress gliding along with her. “You can be anyone.”

  At that moment Annie turns from the window. The sun,cast out from the clouds, hooks a finger into the room, creates a thin band of light for her to walk through. The room seems suspended in this light, floats here before her. She lifts her arm and twirls around in the sunlight. Isabelle’s laughter from across the room is warm and buoyant.

  I can be anyone.

  Annie walks up and down in the hallway outside Isabelle’s room in the green dress, to practise for the party. Isabelle has left for the studio, to print out the photographs she took yesterday of the Madonna.

  Annie walks up and down the hallway, turning hard at the end so that the dress spins out from her body. She enjoys the sound of it, the weight of it, the way it reaches out and then slithers down, heavy against her legs.

  Tess comes puffing up the stairs with an armload of clean linen.

  “Hello,” says Annie, performing one of her twirls for Tess’s benefit.

  “I heard there’s to be a party,” says Tess. She’s still panting a litde from her climb up the stairs. “I’ve always loved that dr
ess,” she says. She remembers how she had seen herself in that dress, being helped down from her carriage by Wilks. The casual wave of her hand as the driver is dismissed for the evening and she and Wilks walk up the front steps of the Hill house, to be announced to all at the party there. She slumps against the banister, the bundle of linen resting on her huge, pregnant stomach. “I would look such a fat cow in that dress,” she says.

  Annie turns again, slowly, and the dress sparkles in the sunlight, like a piece of glass underwater. The glittering green of it. “Don’t say that,” she says. “It could just as easily be you wearing this, going to the dinner.”

  Tess smiles sadly at Annie. “No,” she says. “It could never be me.” She hugs the linen tighter to her chest, brushes past Annie and continues on down the hall.

  A few days later Annie steps from the shadows of Isabelle’s room and begins her slow descent down the main staircase into the uncertain world of the dinner party. Isabelle, who has dressed Annie and done her hair, and who was supposed to wait and escort her downstairs, has instead flown on ahead and is lost down there somewhere amidst the tangle of guests in the front hall.

  Annie walks slowly in her borrowed dress. It is heavier than the thin cotton she is used to, makes her feel as though she is being dragged to earth. It is an effort to walk, to keep her head up and not worry about tripping over her hem. She is barely down the stairs and already she feels defeated.

  Cook, Wilks, and Tess have been hard at work all day, preparing the house for visitors. Annie had been undertaking the lengthy business of getting dressed as a Lady, all the time hearing footsteps up and down the staircase, the opening and closing of the kitchen door. This constant activity had made her feel guilty for not being able to help set the table or polish the silver.