A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  The well-placed invention was his best weapon, all the more effective for the fact that it always had a fleck or two of the truth that gave a texture of plausibility to the whole. I felt for his enemies, helpless before his slanders. The victim might at last get wind of what was being said about him, but by then the story would have streamed out into the world. Protest as he might, that first story would always be the one believed.

  Mr Macarthur could never be caught out. Mrs Borthwick one day was interested in the date of our marriage, and exactly when the baby was due. That pair of dates put side by side might have made for an awkwardness, but he had a gentleman’s answer, so smooth as to erase doubt.

  – Oh, we were eager, he said, and chuckled indulgently. It was accepted that we had an informal understanding—we stood godparents to a friend’s child, you know. And, well, our fondness for each other got the better of us. Did it not, my dear?

  – Indeed, I said, and tried to smile. Indeed it did, sir.

  There was that fleck of truth. Yes, I was godmother to Elizabeth Kingdon. The fiction—that he was therefore her godfather—followed seamlessly, a reasonable enough assumption. Who would ever bother to check? Even if some searcher of the future went looking for proof, he or she would find no piece of paper to confirm or deny it. Only this one, where I am writing the truth for you to know.

  DUELS

  Always, every week it seemed, there was the grand drama of a duel. If any of the officers’ pistols had hit their marks, His Majesty’s forces would have been sadly depleted. But strangely, no one, to my knowledge, ever came to actual grief in any of the duels.

  Mrs Borthwick, whose George had evidently fought a duel or two, explained that the job of the seconds was to see to it that no one was killed. Together, watching each other, they loaded both pistols in exactly the same way, so that they misfired or fired wide. Their duty was to see fairness prevail, not to oversee death. It was enough, in the dawn of the duelling day, for a satisfying report to fill the ground and startle the birds out of the trees, and for a satisfying cloud of smoke to drift away across the grass. The noise and the smoke and the smell, and the important bustling about of everyone, the seconds with their measuring tape, the surgeon with his bag—all that satisfied pride and assuaged insult. No wound was necessary, certainly no corpse.

  Like the other officers, Mr Macarthur was never without outrage at some grievance or insult, and blazed up at the smallest infringement of what he saw as his entitlement. There was a complicated set of boundaries that put a gentleman apart from others, and Mr Macarthur patrolled them with an eye and ear for the slightest deviation.

  He stormed into our quarters one afternoon, his neck flushed in angry blotches, the muscle in his jaw shifting under the skin like a hidden creature bulging and flattening.

  – I will demand satisfaction, he cried, and went to the shelf where his duelling pistols lay in their wine-coloured velvet.

  I knew now that a duel did not necessarily mean death. Still, I hated the look of the pistols, feared the idea of a hot ball of lead hurtling itself towards the helpless flesh of a human being.

  – But Mr Macarthur, what is at stake here? What did he do, exactly? Surely there will be no need for pistols!

  It transpired that Mr Macarthur had agreed to act as second for Lieutenant Selby in his duel against Lieutenant Bannerman. But when everyone had arrived at the ground, it was discovered that Lieutenant Bannerman’s second was a person called Baker, and Baker was not a gentleman.

  – I told Bannerman, I will not be insulted, Mr Macarthur said. What was the fool thinking, to pair me with such a fellow as this Baker?

  – But sir, can that possibly be worth dying for?

  Dying! That roused my husband.

  – My dear, he said, you insult me to imagine I would be the one dying. That is the least likely outcome in the world!

  – I am sure you are a good shot, sir, I answered, enraged by his smugness. But this Bannerman may be a better one! Do you wish to leave me a widow?

  – Oh, my dear wife, he said. Never fear! It so happens that my pistols have certain idiosyncrasies, and can only be safely loaded by someone familiar with them. Namely, myself.

  His eyes shone with satisfaction.

  – My dear, he crowed, it would become you to have more faith in your husband!

  I was filled with weariness. Mr Macarthur would always have some trick up his sleeve—with his trusting opponents on the duelling ground, with his wife—to make sure he came out on top.

  – Oh, then, so much for the man of honour, I said.

  I wanted to hurt him, thought that might hit home. But he did not seem to hear me, and left the room with the case of pistols in his hand.

  I came to see that the particular grievance was of no importance. His status as a gentleman—yes, that was important to him. Of that he was so unsure that he needed to test it continually, to the death if necessary. I had heard a whisper that, before his entry into Fish’s regiment, he had been apprenticed to a corset maker. The barracks were full of nasty rumours and I did not quite believe this one. Still, it stuck in my mind. If true, it would explain that desperate need.

  But his anxiety ran deeper than snobbery. He went seeking insult because it was only in opposition to another that he could have faith in who he was. He needed to pin his conviction of his value on that flimsy idea of honour because he knew of nowhere else to pin it.

  And I? Where did I pin my sense of worth? I could not say, yet I recognised an obstinate nub of something in myself that gave me the right to be the person I was. In the eyes of the world I had so little, and yet in that conviction of my own worth I had more than my husband, for all his cunning.

  A SAD CASE

  He had been sent away to school at seven, he told me. I had heard enough from Bridie’s brothers to guess how the strong held sway in those institutions, made the lives of the weak a misery. A boy would quickly learn how to become one of the bullies.

  He was at school when his mother died. No one had told him she was ill. His father continued to write the weekly letter, to which he replied with reports of cricket and how his Greek was coming along. She died, and he was not told, not until he went home for the holidays. His father said it was best that way. What was the point in disturbing him? Could he have cured his mother if he’d been there? Brought her back from the dead if he’d gone to the funeral?

  I had thought myself a sad case. But I had been permitted to grieve for my father, and I knew my grandfather loved me. My friendship with Bridie had been true and deep, and the Kingdons had opened their lives to me. My husband had had no one, and that must be why some central part of him, some steady sense of who he was, had years ago gone like a mouse to hide away in its hole. But he could never admit the pain. He had to transmute suffering into a blade, to punish the world that made him suffer.

  THE BLACK GLOOM

  There were the mad enthusiasms, the wild schemes. But from those fevers he could plunge in a half-hour into a melancholy so deep he could not be persuaded to get out of bed. His face became frightening: staring and gaunt, wooden as a mask. There was no reaching him. Everything was hopeless, he whispered. He was worthless. His life a barren waste. You might try to jolly him out of the black gloom, but it was as if you were too far away to be heard.

  How many wives learn, as I did, how to test the air in a room? To check the tilt of her husband’s head, the set of his feet, his grip on a spoon, his fist beside the plate? To feel in an instant whether it was an hour of sunshine or shadow? The weather in those rooms was as changeable as Devon in May.

  A FLAT SHINING BEETLE

  Mrs Borthwick—poised, humorous, shrewd, handsome as a fine horse—might be a model of how a woman could manage her life to her satisfaction, but I saw no way to go from where I was now to such a place. Still, I was too proud to admit, other than in my private thoughts, what a disaster I had got myself into. I cultivated a glassy surface that deflected the smallest approach to a sympathe
tic enquiry. The pain of being unloved was pushed off to a distance where it could not touch. I became like those flat shining beetles that live in the heart of a rotten log, a creature of no dimension, able to disappear into the narrowest of cracks.

  A PRIVATE COMPANION

  The pains came on me as we were making our way to Chatham Barracks, from whence we would sail to Gibraltar. We did not get anywhere close to Chatham, though, before it was obvious that the child was on its way, and we fetched up in some disarray at a poor inn on the wrong side of Bath.

  I had begun to weep when the pains started, because with the first sharp pang I was obliged to believe what I had until then not truly believed, that there was no going back. Started weeping and did not stop. All the years of squashing down the tears, of being cheerful and obliging, saying only what was unexceptional, and the strange months of being married to a husband I could not reach—all that pressed-down sorrow came up like a bolus into my throat.

  Anne knew a little more than I did of childbirth, but she was only a girl, and as the pains began to come fast and strong, I saw she was as frightened as I was. There was no midwife to be had for a woman only that day arrived in the city, so the companion of my childbed was the innkeeper’s wife.

  There was nothing gentle about her. Had no patience, she made clear, for a woman who had not taken care to plan what was upon her. But she knew what she was about, and was with me as I traversed a terrible landscape of pain and fear and chaos. Time was suspended, time did not pass, time could only be measured by the respites between the brutal grasping of some merciless fist in my body. The respite—six breaths between, then three, then one—were the times when I was given back myself, to feel air coming in and out of my chest, feel the water Anne offered me cool in my mouth, know that the world went on, time was passing in the usual way. But each reprieve was only to tease. The grip returned, distant at first and then roaring over me and through me and around me, sucking air and time away and flinging me into an eternity of the unbearable. Then the pains joined together end to end and there was no reprieve, only a flailing about in a black gnashing place that did not care a fig about me, wanted only to gripe and grip me until no person was left, no human, just a screaming animal.

  The voice of the innkeeper’s wife was the rope that kept me bound to life, with me in the hard place I was grinding my way through, but she was not in the pain with me. That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person—even a loved person, and I was not loved—was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.

  The child the woman put into my arms was nothing like the plump pink babes I had seen, sweet tidy parcels being handed around a room full of smiling people. He was a dreadful little monkey, with legs like twigs and purple hands and a big round belly. He seemed to be on the point of expiring, his mouth opening and closing but only the smallest whimper emerging.

  The innkeeper’s wife took him away and I lay washed up on the bed as flat and limp as some dead thing fished out of the sea. It was I suppose the worst of all the hours of my life. That squalid inn, that sickly child, and Anne pushing water at me, crumbling bread in milk that I did not want. Poor girl, she meant kindly but she was no use to me, her face the face of a stranger. I knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone. I wept again, storming and sobbing, it seemed the flood would never stop. Woe is me, oh poor me, woe is me.

  The woman came back with the baby washed and wrapped, tucked him beside me and sat with her beefy arms crossed over her chest and her small shrewd eyes watching me with no great warmth. I saw that she knew what had happened to my life, knew the whole sad commonplace story without being told.

  – Mrs Macarthur, she said at last over my sobs, and I thought she might lean towards me and take my hand, perhaps come out with a few cheering platitudes.

  I felt myself get ready to cry harder, because I was sure my plight was beyond the reach of any platitudes. But her rock-like face did not soften and she did not offer any comfort.

  – Only a fool could not see what you have got yourself into, Mrs Macarthur, she said.

  She spoke in a mild way, like a person explaining to another how you might get from Bridgerule to the Red Post Inn. Paused for a good look at me, hair wet with tears bedraggled all over my cheeks. The horrible clinging hair was part of the misery that I wanted to drown in. I let it cling rather than push it away.

  – How it strikes you, yes, that’s as plain as a pikestaff, she said. And I will not say what another might, But at least you have your sweet boy, because he is a sad little scrap. Could as well die as live, to be frank.

  I wondered if she was the Devil come to taunt me.

  – You are a stranger to me so I can speak plain, she said. I will say this, as one who has laid out many a corpse. Here in this pickle is where you are and there is no one on this earth can help you out of it.

  I braced myself for some pious thing about God’s mysterious ways.

  – And no one not on this earth either, to my mind, she said. She knew what I was thinking. No matter a body wear out their knees trying.

  When she laughed it was a startling thing. Her face broke into its separate features, nose, big coarse cheeks, mouth.

  – As for you, lass, you have a parcel of years to go, she said. Spend them wallowing with sorrow if you please, as you are now, waiting for a better thing that will never come. There is no one in this wide world to stop you, if that is the choice you make.

  She stood, rolled down her sleeves, buttoned them as if finished with me.

  – There is just this, though, lass, that I can tell you, she said. Which is, life is long. It has more corners than you can count. A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.

  When she was gone, taking Anne with her, I wept harder at her hard words, and the way she had not tried to comfort me. I lay with my misery, the greedy tears pouring out of my eyes, dripping from my chin. Nothing changed, no one came. Only the quiet room, the child silent against me, and myself listening to my own gulps and gasps.

  I could have gone on crying for ever, might have died in the extravagance of so much despair, but after a time there were simply no more tears. One last great dry sob turned into a hiccough. Then it was over.

  The child stirred feebly, let out a faint mew, turned his head towards me, jerked his tiny fist. We were in this, both of us, together. Here was this sad ugly scrap of life, that could do nothing but let out that thin cry, twitch that fist no bigger than a walnut, turn his head blindly: and something in me went out to him. I picked him up, his vague eyes seemed to meet mine, his mouth made a movement, and I understood that, if he were to live, it could only be because I made it so. Poor feeble unlovely creature as he was, I could do no other than love him.

  SECRET KNOWLEDGE

  By the time that stranger my husband came back to the room, smelling of cigar and rum, I was sitting up against the pillows with the child in my arms. Anne had brought water and a cloth and a clean nightdress, had gently washed my face and tied back my hair.

  – My dear, he said, and for once the endearment seemed to have feeling.

  But he could not meet my eye. Was in some way afraid of me, I understood. I had come through pain and fear, had like every woman in childbed been within a hand’s brush of death. I had proved myself stronger than life had ever asked him to be. Had come back knowing something that would never be known to him. It was secret knowledge, secret because it could not be told, only lived through.

  He looked at the child, pushed back the wrapper to see his face.

  – Well, he said, and it was easy to hear that, like me, he had expected a chubby rosy cherub, not this wizened creature. Put a finger to the child’s pale cheek as if to check he was alive. The baby’s head turned, the blue-veined eyelids flickered.

  – My son, he said, uncertain, but doing
his best to match the little thing in front of him with the proud words. Glanced at me for an instant, as if at a bright light.

  – Edward, perhaps, he said. Edward Macarthur, that has a fine ring, do you not agree?

  He was finding his way back to his familiar world, where he could take circumstances by the bridle and lead them where he wished.

  Before the birth I had given some consideration to names. If a girl, she would be Jane, in honour of good Mrs Kingdon, and if a boy I wanted Richard for my father, or perhaps John for my grandfather.

  – I thought Richard, I said. For my father. So perhaps Edward Richard.

  I spoke gently, kindly. I had been sunk in terror and returned safe. I had met myself and hoped not to lose myself again. I could be magnanimous towards this man who had not been given those privileges.

  I had long ago folded myself up small and put myself away. That had served me well enough. But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person. But between a person folded up small and a person too quick to believe herself safe in unfolding, there was the speck that was what was left when you took everything else away. She was here with me now, would always be with me. She would not turn to the wall and waste her life groaning at her fate. She would carry that precious speck of self on into the future.

  INTRUSION

  I hoped that Edward would begin to flourish once we were installed in the barracks at Chatham, but he remained a sickly child, undersized, gaunt, whimpering in my arms. Anne and I came to know each other in the long nights and days of taking turn and turn about trying to comfort him. We tried sitting him up and lying him down, nursing him and burping him, swaddling him tight and leaving him unwrapped. In the end Anne made a kind of hammock for him from a shawl, tying him tight against me, and her clever contrivance gave us all some respite.