Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (20 page)

“No, of course not.” But Eldon does feel he has wanted some warning of her arrival. He carefully puts his glasses down on the nightstand by his bed and pulls himself higher up on the pillows to give his wife more room.

“You haven’t been in to see me for a long time,” says Isabelle. “Why not?”

“I’ve been busy,” says Eldon quickly.

“Reading?”

“No.” Eldon looks down at his book. “Yes.” He closes it and puts it on the nightstand next to his glasses. “Reading, and other things.”

“Ah,” says Isabelle. “Other things. Like telling my maid about the babies.” She looks hard at him. “Why would you do that? Is that not our private business?”

Eldon feels like a cornered animal. Annie Phelan. He’s been thinking of her. Reading this logbook of a whaling captain and thinking of their voyage over the frozen grounds of this house.

“You have no answer?” Isabelle is angrier than she thought she was. She is not sure if she is angry because Annie knows this about her, or because she suspects that if Eldon told Annie such a thing he has more of a relationship with her than Isabelle had supposed. “Why are you telling my maid such a confidence?”

“Your maid.” Eldon sees the flush on Isabelle’s face. “I thought she was
our
maid. Yes,” he says. “I did tell her about the babies. We were having a conversation.” He doesn’t mention the walk, or that Annie has been borrowing books from him. Or the brandy by the fire while they were recovering from freezing to death. “She was telling me about her family, how they all died in the famine, and I mentioned our children.” He has a sudden recollection of the last baby being hurried from the birthing room, the small covered bundle of it, taken from Isabelle before she’d even seen its face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Sometimes I cannot help but think what they might have been like. How our lives would have been different.” He means better, and Isabelle knows this. She knows, too, that Eldon’s regret for the dead children is for the selves they might have become. He has probably already imagined them as adults and misses the conversations they might have had with him.

Isabelle reaches behind her neck and undoes the clasp of her dress. She stands up and steps out of it. “Move over,” she says, and slips down beside her husband in the bed. His body is surprisingly cool. He slides down the pillows and they lie side by side. “You could touch me,” says Isabelle, but the moment she says it, half plea, half order, Eldon loses all inclination to do this.

The flame from the oil lamp beside the bed casts a moving shadow on the ceiling above them. It nods and dances, nods and dances. Isabelle waits for Eldon to move his hand the few inches it would take to touch her. He used to trace the contours of her body as though she was a shore, his hands the waves, the moving line, as though he could not help himself, the constant toppling joy he felt at finding himself where she was.

Eldon does not move. His body feels shipwrecked, heavy and immobile, grinding to bits on the rocks. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Is it anybody’s fault?” Isabelle rolls onto her side. “Look at me.” She puts a hand against his cheek, pushes it down so his face is next to hers, so his eyes stare into her own. “Is it mine?”

“No.”

“Is it?” Isabelle has never imagined conversations with her dead children, never saw them married or with children of their own. She has never even thought of them as children, really. Babies. They were babies. She made room for them. They took up space inside her and she gave them this space willingly. She felt them there and then they were gone before she could make room for them in other parts of her life, before she could know what she would feel for them when they were outside of her body, when they were not her.

“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.

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.

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, hunched 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.