Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 6

  Annie can feel the warmth of the summer sun on her bare throat. The whispery voice of Isabelle beside her sounds like the wind in the tops of the trees outside of her window last night. She puts a hand out and lets the cold water of the stream spool through her open fingers. She can guess the rest of the story. “I drown myself,” she says.

  “Yes. You drown yourself.”

  “Am I always to be full of sorrow, ma’am?” Annie thinks back to Guinevere, to how it felt lying on the stone floor, clutching Arthur’s ankle. After that photograph, she had been shaky most of the day, as though she’d suffered a bad fright.

  Isabelle looks carefully at Annie. She is clever, this housemaid, certainly more observant than any of the others. “I know,” Isabelle says. “I know what you mean. They are tragedies, but they are also the stories we have, the ones available to us. And I like to work with the stories that people know.” She says this, and at the same time as she says it, she stops believing that it is true, that it has to be true. “Just because these women are tragic,” says Isabelle, “doesn’t mean that they aren’t strong.”

  “But how strong am I if I drown myself?” asks Annie. “If I drown myself at the first hint of trouble?”

  “It’s more than a hint of trouble,” says Isabelle. “It’s loving someone and having them completely ignore your love.” But Isabelle feels less convinced. She thinks of the stories she is drawn to, the heroines she has portrayed in her photographs—Guinevere, Beatrice. Is she attracted to these stories partially because she has seen them depicted so many times by male artists, by people like Robert Hill? Maybe, as a woman, she should resist these stories, not embrace them?

  “Ophelia,” says Annie.

  “Ophelia,” says Isabelle, standing up. She no longer wants Ophelia to drown. She wants her to not care a whit about Hamlet, not bother about his love. Why does she need to drown herself anyway? Why can’t she just love someone more appropriate?

  The sun has made runnels of light on the water, coming down from the green boughs above. There is a patch of light at Annie’s throat, like a word lying on her skin. The delicate line of collarbone looks as frail and solid as a bird’s wing.

  “What do you want me to do?” asks Annie.

  “Ophelia,” says Isabelle again. “Maybe you’re not going to drown yourself.”

  “But what about the spurned love?”

  “Well, maybe this time you’re just going to think about drowning yourself over Hamlet. Consider it.” Isabelle moves back to her camera, back to get perspective on Annie and the stream. “Besides, this stream isn’t really deep enough to drown in. You would have to make a tremendous effort to die here. I think we’ll just offer it up as a possibility.” Isabelle plucks a wild orchid from the stream bank, tucks it into the turned-down collar of Annie’s dress. The flower droops towards Annie’s throat. Something young and natural, considering defeat. “Put your hand in the water again.”

  Annie trails her hand in the stream, playing scales of watery notes with her fingers. She is glad that Isabelle has decided to let Ophelia live. Ophelia wouldn’t want to drown herself on such a fine sunny day, Annie is sure of that. No matter how much she loved Hamlet. And really, wouldn’t Ophelia have thoughts and feelings that had nothing to do with Hamlet at all? Annie tilts her head up to Isabelle. I am alive, she says to herself. She can feel the pulse of the water playing against her hand. I am alive, and I am everything.

  “Perfect,” says Isabelle, from behind the camera. “Don’t move.”

  *

  Eldon cannot stop thinking about Annie Phelan and the story she told him that afternoon when they walked out together. Her story seems more clear to him every day that passes. He remembers the angle of the sun on the fields, the sounds in the hedgerows. How when she started talking, telling him about her brothers and parents, the outside world thinned to nothing and all he could hear was her voice, all he could see was the road she described her parents working on. A famine road. Eldon has heard various stories of the Irish plight during the famine. The famine seems recent because there are still so many Irish people living in England. A lot of them brought the hunger sickness with them. Eldon has memories of walking with his father in London twenty years ago and seeing entire families huddled against brick walls, too sick to stand or talk, their hands out for money, their eyes dark and blank. He remembers seeing an Irish woman walking the streets with a basket. She was a “pure-finder,” collecting up dog excrement to sell to the tanyards. Poor wretch, said his father. That must be the only work she is able to get.

  And now, this summer, Eldon is reminded of the famine again because of the cattle plague that has descended on England. A mysterious swift-moving disease, the “rinderpest” has devastated the dairy herds. On almost every farm now there are massive graves dug for the carcasses. In Ireland, twenty years ago, Eldon knows there were similar mass graves for the victims of the famine. Often, at the side of these vast pits would be a coffin with a sliding bottom so that a body could be dropped into the pit by drawing out the bottom. The coffin could then be used again. The famine. The blight. Blight was such an inappropriate word for what had happened. Blight—a brief stumble into light. The right word would be heavy, drawn to earth, leeching down into darkness.

  Eldon has thought about the famine a great deal. The injustice of it. The way it is still being blamed on the Irish themselves. He has thought about it, but he has never imagined it so vividly as he did when Annie told him about the famine road. All of his life he has believed in connecting things, in filling in the spaces on the map. A connecting line is a bridge that makes two worlds accessible, whether it is just the joining of two villages or the joining of two huge continents with a transatlantic telegraph cable. It is a way over, a way through, a way for people to believe in something beyond the limits of their known world.

  Now Annie Phelan has drawn a line in his mind, each end of it falling away into nothingness. Her parents, the Phelans, used the last of their strength to build a road that would never carry the weight of horse and cart, never carry a man into town for supplies, a family to market. A hundred years from now that road will be invisible, will perhaps be a line in a forest where the vegetation does not grow as high as elsewhere. And to work on a road like that, surely it would make you die faster? The road would end where you ended and the road ending meant that you would die. The whole enterprise was a gesture of hopelessness.

  Eldon stands in his library, before his large oak table. There is a map spread out on it, but he is not seeing it. Over and over he sees the famine road. He feels the weight of the shovels, feels the futility in the bones of the men and women, the children. It would taste like metal on their tongues, he thinks, that futility.

  It is so much stronger, this discontinuous line, stronger than the careful, ordered lines on a map. It is a dash, a pencil skidding by accident across a fresh sheet of paper.

  Perhaps those early explorers were right to fill their maps equally with what they knew to be there and what they imagined to be there. All the sea monsters, the winds with angels’faces. Perhaps what can be imagined is somehow a stronger truth because it inhabits you, is you, becomes you. It happens from the inside out.

  Eldon does not want to show the mineral deposits of the world. He wants to go back, to include the imaginings of the early map-makers. Mountains like braided rope. The early compass roses with a holy cross marking the east, where the sun came up. He wants to combine the old ways of imagining the world with new ones. Even to have a system of measurement that was different from miles and nautical miles, something more humanly tangible than latitude and longitude. There was a map he saw once, made by French Jesuits in 1671. They had charted Lake Superior in Canada and used the canoe stroke as their unit of measure. Their map was not surpassed in accuracy for a hundred years. That is how distance is felt, the simple rhythmic act of pulling a paddle up, pushing it through water. Miles becoming a turn of the back, the ache in a forearm.

  Eldon think
s that he will travel up to London. He will go and see his publisher, Dunstan, and explain what he feels about his map of the world. Surely he can plead his case, can make Dunstan see that a less accurate map would, in fact, be the most accurate map he could make. He will offer examples, make a case for himself. There is the Apian map of the world, for one. Peter Apian’s world map of 1530 was unique because it was in the shape of a heart. It joined the inner and outer universes together. Who, standing before Apian’s heart-shaped map, could not believe that this was where he lived? Eldon, seeing it for the first time, was overwhelmed by its power. The world seemed both infinite and fragile. The boundless elliptical oceans. The blood stuttering in his chest.

  *

  Annie continues to borrow books from Eldon’s library. At night, creeping along the passageway with a candle. She is always careful to replace the previous volume before taking another from the shelf. She does not want to be caught, so she doesn’t leave the books in her bedroom in case Tess will find them there and she will have to explain herself. Lie, she will have to lie, and she does not want to do this. Instead she takes the books into the room with all the baby things, a room she is certain no one ever goes into. She sits on the floor, wedged in between the carriages and cradles, and reads. She leaves whatever book she is currently perusing stuffed under the straw mattress of the big perambulator. Sometimes she is able to sneak into the room during the day, when there is a break in her chores, but mostly she comes here at night. It is better to read than to try and sleep because sleep offers only the dream of her family on that road, the hollow achy feeling that follows upon waking.

  Annie has not tried to pattern her reading, or impose a certain kind of discipline on it. Mr. Dashell’s library is so much broader in range than the library of the reverend in Portman Square and Annie wants to take advantage of this. She wants to read as widely as she can.

  Sometimes the contents of the library sadden her. She thinks of their talk that afternoon on the road, how Mr. Dashell had confessed his desire to have been an explorer. All these books that explain something of the world, so that he could know what to expect when he journeyed out of England. A whole wall of words in readiness for a pursuit that never happened.

  Tonight, wedged down against the wheels of a carriage, Annie is reading Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. It is a large book, comes in four volumes. She has skimmed the first one and is now reading the second.

  She opens the book, the weight of it heavy as a stone across her knees. The candle on the floor beside her breathes in the dusty air in this room, breathes out as this sputter of flame. In all her reading Annie is not sure if she is stopping something or bringing something back. Reading blocks the dreams, but reading also gives words to that experience she was not old enough to remember, being on that road in Ireland. What is to be believed? Is the true story the story that is made or the story that is forgotten?

  Annie opens Samuel Johnson’s dictionary to the entry “heart.” “The chief part; the vital part; the vigorous or efficacious part.” And then further down the page it says, “The inner part of any thing.”

  Eldon is having a drink with Robert Hill at Robert’s London club. Tomorrow Eldon is to see Dunstan and he has been walking through the streets nervously rehearsing the imagined conversation. He is having a drink with Robert to practise his arguments.

  “Nonsense,” says Robert, sipping his brandy, his feet extended towards the fire which has been extravagantly lit on this dreary summer’s day. So far he has disagreed with everything that Eldon has proposed.

  “But it is,” says Eldon. “Can’t you see? It’s all the fault of Crystal Palace.”

  “Nonsense,” says Robert again. “Crystal Palace was a triumph.”

  “Well,” says Eldon, slightly hurt by his friend’s differing opinions. “I don’t see why something can’t be both a triumph and a disaster.”

  It was Eldon’s feeling that the Great Exhibition first held at Hyde Park in 1851, and repeated each year at Crystal Palace in south London, was responsible for Dunstan’s desire for a themed map of the world. “The commodities of the world became desirable to the average man and woman,” says Eldon. “Who, after seeing the finest Chinese silk, will not want some?”

  “It was just a market,” says Robert. “On a grander scale than usual.”

  “No.” Eldon will not be convinced otherwise. “It was something more. Many of those products were items never seen by Englishmen before, from places they had no knowledge of.” He remembers the beautiful iron-and-glass building, the rooms and rooms of furniture and jewellery, textiles, and sculpture—Turkish carpets, jade vases from the Orient, ornate Austrian bedsteads made of dark zebra wood. “It made the world seem small, Robert,” he says. “It made the world seem ours.”

  Robert Hill, who finds nothing wrong with this notion, wriggles his toes and swishes his brandy around the inside of his glass. He has exhibited paintings at Crystal Palace. He thinks of his art hanging in those magnificent sunlit rooms and experiences a rush of pleasure. “I do know that it is hard to perform work you have no interest in,” he says. It is all he can think of to say to Eldon that is sympathetic. His young friend is obviously in distress over his meeting with his publisher, but Robert is comfortable in his chair by the fire, comfortable drinking brandy and remembering his triumph at Crystal Palace. He cannot move far from that comfort to provide a different sort of comfort to his friend. What Eldon wants is always so moral and heightened with emotion, as though he constantly suffers from a kind of fever of the soul. Robert sighs. Why can’t Eldon just enjoy what is in the world?

  Eldon looks into the fire. It is not making him feel better, being here in Robert’s club. He would be better off striding down Cheapside, thinking up reasons to convince Dunstan that a map of the heart was a better idea than a map of gold mines. Eldon studies the fine profile of his friend. Robert’s wealth shows in his fine grooming, his shiny new leather boots, his baggy linen suit which is neat and well tailored. A dandy, thinks Eldon, unkindly. An aging dandy. He wishes he was talking this over with Isabelle. No. Eldon watches the flames shift and send a shower of sparks, like applause, into the air. He wishes that he was telling this to Annie Phelan.

  Eldon is with Robert Hill at the Royal Academy. Robert’s new show is being hung and he is flitting around the gallery, ordering people about who know perfectly well what they are doing.

  Eldon stays down at the calm end of the room, surveying the paintings already satisfactorily attached to their designated places on the wall. It has been a while since he has seen a body of his neighbour’s work and he realizes, again, both how brilliant and how offensive it is.

  Robert Hill depends upon a muse. The muse is invariably a young, good-looking woman. He finds her, paints her, beds her, and then rids himself of her. Sometimes he seeks to paint a particular young woman as an act of wooing her, hoping the attention she receives as his model will move her feelings towards him.

  The three paintings Eldon stands in front of show the history of one of Robert’s recent muses. In the first painting she is Helen of Troy, her bosom straining at the loose fabric of her dress, nipples visible through the organdie sheer. Her red hair is loose around her shoulders. Her gaze demurely lowered to the apple on the table before her. The apple is red and luscious, almost glows with indiscretion.

  In the second painting this model is now Medusa. She looks towards Eldon, a startled expression on her face, as if she can’t quite believe that Robert would really paint snakes in her hair, that he would want her to look crazed and monstrous, that this is how he has come to see her, as he tires of her attentions.

  Eldon looks at the snarl of reptilian flesh in the girl’s hair. The snakes look alive, Robert’s rendering is that good, his lines so clean and acute. It makes Eldon want to stand well back from the painting, in case one of them strikes out at him.

  In the third painting it is obvious that Robert has wearied of his muse, and has probably already, at the time of pain
ting the picture, moved on to another. In this painting the model is dead, floats beneath the surface of the water she has drowned in, her eyes shut tight, her face pallid as the moon. Ophelia. The faint colours of her dress are visible from where she lies, on her back, in the shallows. On the banks of the stream the vibrant colours of flowers mock her pale failure at life. Once she was as bright and necessary to the painter as they were. Now she is over. This dead heart. This unnecessary girl.

  Sappho

  Annie is having a late supper in the kitchen. She has been cleaning all day and is tired. She has swept, dusted, and tidied the bedrooms, the landings, and the sitting room. She has polished the drawing-room silver. She has cleaned the lavatory. Because Mr. Dashell is in London and Mrs. Dashell has gone out to supper, there has been no meal to help prepare and serve, and so Annie has worked right through, scrubbed the flags and swept out all the hearths. She is trying to make up for being neglectful of her duties when Mrs. Dashell has required her to model. She wants to show Tess that she will never have to take up any extra work on Annie’s behalf, but it is Tess’s afternoon off and she isn’t back yet, has not been witness to Annie’s industry.

  Annie sits at the kitchen table and eats her plate of cold chicken, potatoes, and carrots. Since the cattle have started dying they have been eating a lot of chicken. Annie rushes through her meal, not looking up from her plate until she is finished. It is warm in the kitchen. Cook is moving about, wiping down the range, putting water on for tea. She keeps stopping, freezing into position. A statue of Cook reaching up to the shelf above the range for the teapot. A statue of Cook setting the kettle on the burner. Annie watches Cook as she acts out, in a slow sort of mime, the process of making them tea.

  “You should leave soon,” says Cook, handing Annie a mug of tea and sitting down opposite with hers. “Mrs. Dashell said nine o’clock. She isn’t one to be kept waiting.”