A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  Turned away afterwards from the body next to me, I wept. Bitter silent tears for the too-small pocketful of coins that I had squandered. For the road behind us that I’d travelled in fear and sadness, leaving everything I knew, everyone who knew me. Left in the deepest shame, made all the worse by false smiles, false joy, the falseness of the good wishes, the only sincerity the word on everyone’s lips: goodbye, goodbye, meaning and may we never see you again.

  PART TWO

  DRY TOAST

  We had got away from Bridgerule in the nick of time, for within a few weeks of the wedding anyone could see that I was with child.

  And miserably so. I had heard women speak of morning sickness, had seen Mrs Kingdon go through a time of waxy sallowness when she was carrying the Elizabeth who was my god-daughter. There were many mornings when, leaning over the basin, cold with nausea, I wept with regret and remorse. At those times I believed in hell as I’d never believed in heaven. But I struggled through many afternoons as well, and at night I lay unable to sleep, hungry yet sickened by food. Did this mean the child was sick too, dying as I felt I must be? That would be a nasty trick for life to inflict on me, after all that rosemary choked down.

  The four or five months I had to get through before the child would be born seemed an eternity stretching in front of me. The birth itself I could not begin to imagine. Mrs Kingdon had never got as far as explaining anything of what to expect in childbed. I suppose she felt that when the time came would be soon enough, and we had not asked, being in no hurry to find out. Of course we knew it would hurt, but how exactly? Like a broken leg? We knew women died, but how precisely? Quickly, or by inches? And by what miracle could an entire baby squeeze out from that small place?

  Anne was the eldest of eleven, she told me, which was good to hear as it meant she must know what I did not: how to care for a baby. Her father was a labourer who had been employed from time to time by my father. She could not read, nor write beyond an uncertain version of her own name, and was an awkward clumsy girl, and frankly I dismissed her as a person of not much account.

  I hoped she was discreet. She had her own place in the servants’ quarters, but still there was not much she did not know about the way Mr and Mrs Macarthur got on with each other. Or how they had come to be Mr and Mrs Macarthur. All Bridgerule knew that, I was sure. So I held my head up and was perhaps cooler with Anne than necessary, perhaps playing the lady more than came naturally.

  Until the day she appeared with her hair singed on one side and a glossy red ear.

  – Why Anne, I said, whatever have you done?

  – There was a moth flew in my ear, madam, she said. Driving me dilly with moving around in there, so I held a candle up, thinking, you know, it would be drawn to the light?

  She looked at me sideways, biting her lip, afraid I would scold I suppose, but at the picture of this solemn girl holding a candle up to her ear I laughed for the first time in many weeks.

  – Oh you clever silly girl, I said.

  Gave her some salve to put on the ear and blessed Mrs Kingdon, who had chosen so well as to find a girl whose unpromising exterior concealed a certain eccentric practicality.

  I was not far from Bridgerule and Bridie, but as the new Mr and Mrs Macarthur had spun away from the church in the borrowed gig, I knew that a shutter was coming down between me and that world. Bridie and I exchanged notes now and then. On both sides, though, was the reserve that came from knowing they might be read by everyone in the vicarage parlour. Oh, how much I missed our whispered conversations in the high bed we had shared! On paper our friendship was reduced to description of life at a barracks on my side, and mild news of our mutual acquaintances on hers.

  There was the wife of a Captain Spencer whose quarters at the Holsworthy Barracks were large enough for two or three ladies to take tea together, and these few women became my society. Mrs Spencer was a pretty little woman, but bony and trembling like a whippet, as if her husband—so corpulent that he had to walk back on his heels to accommodate his belly—had sucked the flesh out of her. Her friend Mrs Borthwick, wife to Captain Borthwick, was an assured, well-put-together older woman, with a habit of tweaking her mouth up at the corners, a conscious appearance of cheer that overlaid I knew not what real feelings.

  They were tea-party acquaintances, not true friends. A barracks was not a village. Nothing went deep, nothing had a past or a future. Still, they were good to me, ignorant girl that I was. Dry toast for the morning sickness, they said. Dry toast, and tea with plenty of sugar. I nibbled the toast, drank the tea. The sickness did not abate, not by any fraction, but I was comforted that there were people in the world who cared enough to try to help me.

  SOMETHING SOFT

  Which Mr Macarthur did not. I overheard him boasting to others about his clever wife, who wrote such a fine letter, and had read Sir Thomas Browne and Livy—in translation, naturally. But he never spoke warmly to me and never gave anything of himself. There was no more of the hand on the heart, no more of the mimicry that he had courted me with. All that was gone. It had been useful, but was not useful any longer.

  Oh, he was courteous, never shouted and certainly never struck me. In that I knew I should count my blessings. But he was a husband of mechanical courtesies. He listened when I addressed him, but without interest, as if I were some stranger he did not need to get to know. Spoke in reply, but carelessly, with indifference. He did not dislike me or blame me for the situation we were in. Only, he was blind to me as a person.

  Would I have preferred the raised voice, the raised hand? Of course not. But I had not known that a person could be so lonely, sharing a few square yards of space with another soul.

  I longed for something soft from him, even something harsh if that was the only way for us to draw close to each other. From the beginning I had promised myself never to plead with him. I would not make myself pitiable. Poor pale, skinny, unhappy woman, indeed I was pitiable. But what can be gained by begging if what you need is not given freely?

  Still, one morning the words came out of my mouth.

  – Mr Macarthur, I said, can you never give me any soft word?

  I heard the anger, and the note of pleading that I despised.

  He turned from the fireplace, startled, and looked straight at me, and I thought, I should have spoken my feelings earlier. He can hear me, he will respond.

  – My beloved wife, he said. An affection like mine must have displayed itself in so many unequivocal substantive acts that professions of it would be absurd!

  He was smiling into the air, admiring what he was constructing.

  – That I am grateful and delighted with your conduct it is needless for me to say, he said, rattling it off as if he had rehearsed. The consciousness you must feel of how impossible it is that such exemplary goodness can have failed to produce that effect, must convince you I am so, more certainly than any assurance that can be given.

  My spirit curdled at these elaborations, that gave his wife what she had asked for, while at the same time withholding it. I ask for bread and you give me a stone. I knew now what that meant. It was not just that you could not eat what you had been given. It was that the thing you were given resembled what you needed, could be thought to stand in for it, and that was crueller in its teasing than a plain refusal.

  I was too proud to ask, ever again, for a soft word from him.

  ANIMAL SPIRITS

  Mr Macarthur was an importunate husband with an excess of animal spirits that meant every night the tickle of him fingering me, and then all that followed. And in the morning too, because Mr Macarthur liked a waking embrace. And, for that matter, an embrace in the middle of the day if circumstances allowed.

  For me the act was no more pleasant than it might have been for those ewes in the field. It was not the act itself. From the nights Bridie and I had shared, I knew what a gasping delight that could be. What sapped it of any pleasure with Mr Macarthur was not to do with the way our various bodily parts came toget
her. The block to delight was the feeling that I, Elizabeth Veale as I still thought of myself, was no more significant to my husband than the choice of ewe was to the ram. It was nothing to do with Elizabeth Veale that set the bed creaking. It was some hunger in him, that had to be sated again and again. I was nothing more than the means for that fleeting satisfaction.

  But those affections were his conjugal right, and Mr Macarthur never failed to exercise any right he was entitled to. As a wife, with nowhere to go beyond wifedom, I was no more than a tenant in my body. If the landlord came to the door, I was obliged to let him in.

  Other women became invalids, and the relentless morning sickness made it no lie. But days on a sofa are dull indeed, and I could not bear to spend my life watching the stripe of sunlight from the window creep across the floor, waiting for night. In any case, Mr Macarthur was not much discouraged by my faint-voiced murmurings about a headache.

  – Let me rub camphor into your temples, he would say. A guaranteed cure.

  He would get up and by the light of the lamp would sit on the side of the bed, rubbing the dreadful stuff into my forehead in a perfunctory way before turning his attention to parts further south.

  There were occasions, now and then, when the business was very much worse than other nights, pain and humiliation beyond bearing. I cried out against it, there could be no mistaking the word no! But at such moments Mr Macarthur became as deaf as any mad dog. In the morning I could not look at him, a husband who had inflicted such a thing on his wife.

  THE USE OF NUMBERS

  Mrs Spencer seemed over-tightened, as if about to snap, and one day among the teacups she did indeed snap.

  – Men are such beasts, she blurted, and put her cup into the saucer so hard I thought it would crack.

  Her features were creased up into a grimace that for a second made her dainty head into a screaming skull. No one said anything, there was only a tiny movement of the corner of Mrs Borthwick’s mouth. As the silence extended itself, I imagined that each of us was privately viewing the way in which our particular man was a beast in the darkness of the marriage bed.

  Then Mrs Spencer put her hand around the teapot and declared it warm enough for another cup, rang for more milk, and the afternoon resumed. She handed me my fresh cup of tea: dainty, smiling, and had I imagined the words she had said, or misconstrued what she meant by them?

  As Mrs Borthwick and I walked back to our quarters, neither of us mentioned Mrs Spencer’s outburst. We had never talked of the parts of our lives that went on behind closed doors. But now Mrs Borthwick spoke of her husband George in such a way as to let me understand that she found no pleasure in the conjugal bed. Pacing beside me as sedately as a nun, she went further. There was a gentleman, it seemed. A gentleman not her husband. With whom she was able to take a considerable degree of pleasure.

  – Yes, my dear Mrs Macarthur, she said. I hope you are not too shocked.

  Gave me a quick sideways look.

  – Naturally I am obliged to see dear George. Every month seems prudent.

  Prudent? I wondered, then in a spurt of understanding saw what she meant. I looked sideways at her but she was so impassively handsome and poised that I thought I must be wrong.

  – Oh yes, she said. I find, my dear, that it helps to have some rhyme or what-have-you to say over, just in your mind. I have one or two things that work particularly well.

  She sang out suddenly in a fine strong contralto: Girls and boys, come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day.

  – I can recommend it, Mrs Macarthur, she said, for those particular times. Counting is also a great comfort. With dear George I have never needed to go beyond forty-five.

  A bird lived somewhere outside our windows and many was the dawn that I lay still, listening to it sing, a short snatch of tune, over and over. Dah dah, di di di, da da! A lovely song. But there was no variation. I pictured the bird perched among the dark leaves, its feathers ruffling in the breaths of pre-dawn wind, trapped in that one sad utterance. Dah dah, di di di, da da! It might have had everything to say of what it was like to be alive in the hour before the sun rose and life began again. But it had only that one phrase. I imagined the bird weeping in frustration, opening its beak to let out all it knew, and hearing again that parody of what it had in its heart.

  AMBITION

  Mr Macarthur was a man on the make. Ambition propelled everything he did. For myself, nowhere would be home and Gibraltar was no worse than anywhere else, so I was prepared for a life in that place. But the prospect of marching around the ramparts of Gibraltar was failure to my husband. Only a dunce would meekly go where the regiment sent him. Unless a war broke out, there was no hope of advancement in the 68th, for there were already too many junior officers in the regiment, whose only hope of promotion was for a sickly season among their superiors. He chafed against the narrowness of his prospects and was full of plans to burst out of them.

  He would sell his commission—it would be worth four hundred pounds! Sell it and set up at the Bar! He had read all the books, knew the law as well as any lawyer. He would set himself up, and word would get about, and in no time men would be clamouring for John Macarthur to represent them!

  He paced up and down the room, laying it all out before me. The embers fell against each other, a flare of light across his features, the pockmarks standing out very rough in that brightness, and his eyes avid with the conviction of his glorious future.

  – John Macarthur of Lincoln’s Inn, he said, does that not have a ring to it?

  – Why yes, I said. A splendid ring.

  Unworldly country woman though I was, I doubted if it could be so easy, but did not want to dash cold water on his certainty. Let the world do that, rather than his wife. And perhaps it was possible after all. I allowed myself to think for the space of a minute how much more agreeable Lincoln’s Inn would be than Gibraltar.

  But within a week no more was said about Lincoln’s Inn. Now it was that he would speak to a gentleman his father knew, who would find him a post at the Office of Ordnance in Portsmouth—oh, it would be a plum position, it would be the best thing in the world!

  – But the Bar, Mr Macarthur?

  I did not intend to needle him, it was that my life was locked in with his.

  – Oh, do not keep me to every syllable I have ever uttered, he said. Your understanding is superior, wife, but your knowledge of the world does not equip you to instruct me.

  – Mr Macarthur, by no means am I instructing you, I said. Only, since our destinies are joined, to learn what mine might be!

  – I thank you for reminding me, he said. Indeed, it is our joined destinies—he put a little mocking weight on the words—that I am straining every fibre to ameliorate!

  Stared me down, watching me try to pick apart what had just happened: something had been simple, and had in the space of half a minute’s exchange become snarled beyond untangling.

  A FLECK OF TRUTH

  Grandiose schemes were as necessary to Mr Macarthur as food and drink. Each scheme remade the world in the light of his conviction. He was remade, too, into a more glorious version of himself, so the two John Macarthurs ran side by side like a pair of well-matched carriage horses: similar but not the same, close but never quite touching.

  He would speak to his brother, who had been school chums with Evan Nepean, who was now an important government official. He would speak to a cousin of a close friend of Sir Joseph Banks, who would give him a position of secretary to someone in the House of Lords. He would write to a fellow he had met through Captain Moriarty, to write to this fellow’s brother-in-law, who was now high up at the Palace.

  The Palace! I let out a sound that could only be described as a snort, that I had to change into a cough smothered in my handkerchief, but Mr Macarthur noticed nothing.

  The first need, though, was to sell his commission, and it seemed that the obtuse, narrow-minded, hidebound men who made those decisions would not agree to that. Their view
was that they had not given Ensign Macarthur a post on active service and full pay in order for him to fund his leaving of that service.

  So it was still Holsworthy Barracks, a hotbed of intrigue and animosity and shifting allegiances between the officers: too many men with not enough to do except resent how their lives were slipping away. Backbiting, rumour, insults and ill will everywhere.

  Through the other servants Anne often heard of the gossip before I did, and I learned that if I feigned disbelief she would be piqued to tell me more. At the start she was fearful and wide-eyed at what she heard, but after a few weeks she had seen enough dramas ebb and flow to enjoy them as if they were a play, put on by the officers for the entertainment of their servants.

  I pretended more indifference than I felt, for I knew most of her stories were likely to be true. Knew, too, that Mr Macarthur had a finger in every one of those nasty little pies. He was frequently the one to compose some outraged letter full of legal Latin on behalf of an aggrieved fellow officer. What he liked best of all were the times when he could come up with some ingenious interpretation to turn an unassailable argument on its head. Oh, how he loved a loophole!

  He took a special pleasure in what he called the long game. A quick victory was no victory at all. It took a special kind of cleverness—exactly his own kind of cleverness, as a matter of fact—to set up some movement seemingly harmless, then another equally innocent, and set them to grinding together so that the victim was eaten alive without quite knowing what had happened.

  I heard Mr Macarthur boast one night that he had never yet failed in ruining a man who had become obnoxious to him. The laugh he gave, having delivered himself of this, was a bray of triumph.