Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 9

  There’s a noise in the darkness of the kitchen. Someone coming in through the door, clumsily knocking into a pail and sending it skittering across the floor.

  “Ma’am, is that you?” says Annie, thinking that it’s Isabelle, back from the darkroom.

  “Annie?” says the voice. “It’s me.”

  Tess. She bumps her way over to the table, feels with her hands for Annie’s shape, and sits down heavily beside her. Annie can smell the sweet musky bloom of alcohol on her breath.

  “Can you see me?” says Tess. She’s looking right at Annie.

  “Yes.”

  “You see me. You saw me,” says Tess, swaying a litde on the bench.

  “I did,” says Annie. “I saw you.”

  “Don’t say anything. Because I could lose,” says Tess, swaying again. “My position.”

  Annie grabs Tess and holds her firmly by the arm. “You could lose your balance,” she says. “Come on. I’ll take you up to bed.” She loops Tess’s arm around her shoulder and stumbles her up the stairs to their room. Tess is asleep before she falls onto her bed. Annie removes Tess’s shoes and then pulls the covers snugly over her. It is cool upstairs. Annie sits down on the edge of Tess’s bed. A moth thrums against the night window. The soft thump of it hitting the glass, like the beat of someone’s heart heard with an ear against her chest. Are you alive? What she had asked Mrs. Gilbey as she lay there on the drawing-room floor. The answer was yes. The answer was no.

  Are you awake? thinks Isabelle, lying in the close darkness of her bedroom. Are you awake, Annie Phelan? Have I made these feelings happen? Are they mine, or will they disappear tomorrow when the sun pushes the image of Sappho out onto the coated paper?

  All day long Isabelle has been imagining Sappho. The fragmented lyrics, brief as roses. All day she has been thinking how it would be to be lover to both men and women. She had fallen easily into it, having Annie Phelan fetch her home, arranging the bath so she could look fully on a woman’s body again, without shame. And then, she had been the one who was Sappho. All night Isabelle had been trying to conjure an atmosphere, forgetting that there were character considerations. There was lover and loved. It should have been obvious to her who she was in this scenario. In that old scenario.

  Isabelle stretches her arms out from her body, feels the emptiness of her bed, the vastness of it. Has she made her own feelings happen? Has imagining Sappho made her become Sappho, even temporarily? These feelings she still has, the residue in her body, the trailing ends of desire, will they go with morning? Does she wish them gone?

  Ellen, do you ever think of me?

  And how much of this is due to her husband? How much to the fact that they no longer touch one another. It was not the first one that stopped this, or even the second. It was the third dead baby. It’s as though they are lined up on the mattress between her and Eldon, and when she puts her hand out she can’t reach him across their stiff, blue bodies. This is what has been made from her and Eldon’s love—a love that once seemed as fierce and bright as moving blood—three dead babies.

  Tonight, when Annie arranged her by the fire, tilting her head up gently, it was the first time in over a year that anyone had touched Isabelle in an intimate way, that anyone had touched her with feeling, with purpose. To be Sappho is tempting. To love a woman is never to have the product of that love be death. She would never have had to have held them in her arms, their blood-slick bodies, slippery as fish, having swum from their dark ocean out into a light that killed them.

  Annie can’t sleep. She lights a candle, descends the stairs, walks the familiar passage to Eldon’s library. She has travelled this route so often that she doesn’t really need a light to guide her. She could walk this, with confidence, through the thickest thicket of dark.

  Tonight, for the first time, Annie feels too restless to settle to reading. She runs her hands gently over the books on the shelves, each spine a soft flash under her fingertips. There are no words to calm her here. Not tonight.

  Annie leaves Eldon’s library without a book, walks the corridor back to the main part of the house. She goes to the room with the old prams and carriages and settles herself on the floor in her usual place. This room no longer seems sinister to her. When she first started coming in here she thought of it as the room of old baby things. Now she thinks of it only as the place she comes to read.

  Annie sits on the floor, pulls her knees up to her chin. The evening still flashes around her, like the tiny stings of light from fireflies. The bath. The camera. What is it Isabelle had said about that poet? A lover of both men and women. Annie thinks of Wilks and Tess out by the laundry wall. Then she thinks of herself and Isabelle, of Isabelle pushing her up against the bricks. How that might feel, to have Isabelle’s skin on her skin. The thought of this panics her. The thought of this makes her hold her breath. Makes her breathe.

  The next day Annie moves slowly through her work. She drags her body around as though it is a heavy sack, not something she lives inside, but something she must haul unwillingly through her day. By the afternoon she is woozy with exhaustion and pleads with Cook to allow her an hour to lie down. She says she isn’t feeling well. She isn’t.

  She sleeps hard and fast, waking to someone’s hand on her shoulder and her name spilling out into the room like a stone. The rattle of it in her ears moving her out of sleep.

  “Annie.” It is Isabelle there, by the side of her bed, shaking her awake. “Annie.”

  “What is it, ma’am?” Annie struggles up, makes it halfway to sitting, and then falls back against her pillow. She is crossing from sleep to the waking world and is still not sure she isn’t dreaming.

  Isabelle lays something on Annie’s chest. A photograph. Annie picks it up gingerly. The head of Isabelle as Sappho fills the paper. The face softens away from the eyes, sharp as stars.

  Isabelle sits on the edge of Annie’s bed and Annie shifts over to make room for her there.

  “There it is, Annie.”

  “Do you like it, ma’am?”

  “Do you?” Isabelle looks straight at her and Annie looks down at the photograph again. The bigness is right, and the softness. The look is sadder than she’d meant, but it is not wrong. She remembers last night, remembers her thoughts about Isabelle when she was sitting in the carriage room. Her skin flutters hot.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Art finds us out,” says Isabelle.

  Annie thinks she must be blushing.

  Isabelle puts her hand on Annie’s where it holds the photograph. “You have made something of me that has surprised me.” And it’s a bit too good, she thinks. That has surprised me also. She stands up, leaving the photograph in Annie’s hands. “Keep it. It’s yours.” She goes out of the room.

  Annie sits up in bed. She still feels disoriented from her brief nap. She looks at the photograph again. It does not look like the memory of Isabelle posing that she holds in her head. The firelight. The warmth of the room. And yet, there is something of last night there. Here. The way Isabelle looks out. The way she looks out at Annie, almost as if she loves her, almost as if she could.

  Annie’s dress is twisted from lying in bed. Her hair is falling from its pins. She had better tidy herself before she goes back downstairs. She swings herself out of bed, feet first. Before she stands up she puts the photograph of Isabelle under her pillow, underneath her neglected Bible. For safe keeping.

  What is holy to me now?

  Before Eldon takes the train home from London he does two things. He goes to a public house and drinks three glasses of whisky, and then he goes next door, to a place he has never before imagined going.

  Up the long, shabby flight of stairs from the street to the second floor. His breath catching in his throat from the effort. His sweaty hands out to press against the walls either side of him, to keep him on a straight ascent.

  The room is bright. Eldon blinks from the sunlight rushing the windows.

  “Whatever you desire,” says
the woman, and Eldon chooses an object from the curio cabinet in the corner of the room, stands with his hand covetously on the round slur of it.

  “Is this what you want?” asks the photographer, from behind the camera. He motions his assistant out of the way and she scuttles off to one side.

  Eldon feels the hard surface of the globe beneath his sweaty palm. The pack ice of the Arctic Circle burns against his fingers. “Yes,” he says. “This is what I want.”

  When Eldon bursts into his wife’s bedroom, Isabelle is sitting on her bed, head bent over something in her lap. She looks up, startled, when the door flaps back on its hinge, bangs against the wall.

  “Eldon,” she says, surprised to see him. He stands in the doorway, as though now that he has announced his entrance in such a dramatic fashion he doesn’t know what to do next. His suit is crumpled. His beard is unkempt. “What happened?”

  Eldon doesn’t move from the doorway.

  “What happened?” asks Isabelle again.

  “No,” he says.

  “No?”

  “No. Dunstan said no. No to my proposal. No to my map. No to me.”

  Isabelle stretches out her hands and Eldon comes over and sits on the bed beside her. She holds his hand. “Can you not go to another publisher?”

  All afternoon, travelling down from London, Eldon has thought of, and dispensed with, every possible avenue of redemption. “Not possible,” he says flatly. “My history is all with Dunstan. I don’t have the credibility with another publisher.” Eldon looks down at the blue patterned carpet, at his shoes floating there. “I thought, all this time, that he respected me, that my work on the atlas was important to him. But he doesn’t want to allow me a vision. He wants me to work for him. That is what he thinks I do.”

  Isabelle squeezes his hand.

  “There’s still the theme map,” says Eldon bitterly. “I could redeem my good name by pointing the way to rubies and emeralds in Africa.” He feels frustration climbing through his blood again. His wife’s hand in his is an irritation, not a comfort. He shakes it off, sees the photograph she has lying on her lap. “What is that?”

  Isabelle passes the photograph over without a word.

  “A self-portrait?” Eldon has never known his wife to photograph herself. She is always constructing some vignette, some allegorical scene. “This is something new.”

  “No,” says Isabelle. “It’s not a self-portrait.”

  Eldon looks closely at the photograph. It is Isabelle as he has never seen her. The expression in her eyes is so private it makes him want to turn away. If she hasn’t taken the photograph herself, then where is this look directed? “Who took this?” he says.

  “Annie Phelan,” says Isabelle. “Under my instruction, of course. Look how complex it is. My new technique is quite effective for portraiture. The life-size head. The focus only on the eyes—that’s one story. How the face and the background soften and disappear, are blurred to a kind of smokiness—that’s another story.”

  “Annie Phelan?” Eldon looks down at the photograph again, at his wife’s face full of gentle feeling. “The maid took this photograph?” Isabelle has never let him near the camera. Once, when he suggested he take some photographs of her, she refused, shrugged him off. She has never allowed him to see her in this way. And the few times she has photographed him, before he protested too often that he was too busy to be King Arthur or the North Wind, she had never looked at him with that much intensity. Eldon feels his body go cold, flash with heat, go cold again. When his meeting with Dunstan was failing, when he felt that he was losing his hold on the argument, slipping down the side of that cliff, he had remembered the story of Annie Phelan, the story she had told him on the afternoon they had walked out together. This had made him feel better, had strengthened him. Now the warm thoughts of her have been dissolved by this evidence of feeling between her and his wife. She had been his secret, and now he fears she belongs, as does everything else in this house, to Isabelle. All the disappointment he has held back from his meeting with Dunstan spills out now. He is reckless with feeling. “She’s a maid,” he says. “She should not be taking photographs. And especially not of you.”

  “Yes, well, you know I’ve never been good at that sort of thing,” says Isabelle, a litde guiltily. “Servants.” She and Ellen had been found out, had been discovered one evening walking down the lane by her father on his return from town. The next day Ellen and her mother had been sent away. There had not even been time to say goodbye. Isabelle hadn’t known it was happening until after it had happened.

  “I’m just not very strong on the whole servant business,” says Isabelle. “Sometimes I don’t have the heart for any of it.”

  “Grow up, Isabelle,” says Eldon harshly. “You are the mistress of this house. Act like it. Keep the maid in the position she belongs. Maids are maids.” He stands up, the photograph in his hand. “They are not artists. Or friends.” Methodically, and without looking at Isabelle once, he tears the photograph slowly into bits, tosses the torn photograph up into the air, and marches from the room.

  The pieces of photograph flutter down. Isabelle puts her hand out and a few land in her open palm. Like broken stars come to earth. Like snow falling from heaven, bright and turning in the shaft of window light, drifting down on wings of air. The breath that has left her body.

  Grace, Humility, Faith

  Eldon sees Annie Phelan from his library window. She is hurrying along the path from the glasshouse, back towards the kitchen. He raps on the glass, but she doesn’t hear him, doesn’t look up. He fumbles with the latch, flings the window open wide, and leans out over the sill.

  “Annie!” he calls. “Annie!”

  She looks up, startled, trying to locate the shout, tipping her head, like a bird, towards the sound.

  “Annie!” he calls again. “Over here.”

  She turns off the path, comes to stand near enough to hear him properly, his body arched over the window sill, anchored in the warm mustiness of his room, thrust forward into sunlight and the scent of roses.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Could you come in here a minute, please.” Eldon regains his dignity, heaves his body back into the room as though it is an empty net he has cast into the ocean and he is hauling it back in full of fish. He closes the window, stands by his map table, waiting for her small knock on the door. “Come in.”

  Annie is nervous to be in the library in daylight with Mr. Dashell. What if he has found her out? What if he knows that she has David Copperfield jammed under the mattress of the perambulator in the baby-carriage room?

  The first thing Annie notices, once she has become accustomed to the dull light after the brightness of the glasshouse and the outdoors, is how dusty the room is. The stacks of papers, like gills, opening and closing in the breeze from the door when she entered the room, breathing in and out, dust.

  “Yes, sir?” she says again. “Is there something you want me to do for you?” She is late getting back to the house, having helped Isabelle drape muslin from the roof of the studio all morning, and there is work she needs to help Cook with to get ready for dinner.

  “No, I don’t want you to do anything,” says Eldon. “I just thought you might like to see this.” He taps the topmost map on the table. “It’s a map of Ireland. Where you’re from,” he says, chiding himself silently for a fool as he says this. Of course she knows that’s where she’s from. “Have you ever seen a map of Ireland?”

  “No, sir.” Annie catches her breath. It flutters free.

  “Well, come here, then,” says Eldon.

  Annie stands beside him at the table. She has thought and dreamt so much about the road her parents worked on that she has only imagined Ireland in terms of that road. She looks down at the map and is surprised that Ireland is not long and thin, loping off the top of the page into distance. Instead the shape is squat and strong-looking, a little longer than it is wide, the coast chewed into bays and peninsulas by the Adantic Ocea
n, calmer and smoother on the side of the Irish Sea.

  “Here.” Eldon puts his finger down on the left-hand side of the map. “This is where you’re from. County Clare.”

  County Clare is coloured pink. It has a long bit of land trailing out into the ocean, and the rest of it is thicker, looks like a piece of paper that has been crumpled and tossed down onto the blue floor of the sea.

  Ennis Killaloe Kilkee Rineanna

  These are names that mean nothing to her now. But maybe one of them was where she lived. Annie puts her finger down, gently, on Kilkee and traces the jagged outline of the Loop Head.

  Eldon watches her. He understands this, it is what he does as well. How he has to touch something to make it real, to really see it. “It’s all right,” he says. “You won’t hurt it.” Annie’s hands aren’t black with photographic chemicals like Isabelle’s.

  “It’s so small,” says Annie, slowly dragging her finger around all the indentations on the Atlantic side of the county. She wants to feel the sharpness of the rocks in the coves, the stringy flags of seaweed hanging from the walls of the low-tide caves.

  “No,” says Eldon. “Stop.” He lightly touches her arm and she pauses her moving finger on a small nodule of land near Ennistown. “Each one of these litde bumps is a vast headland, where you could stand and look out over a sea that goes on and on, that opens before you and is endless, so that you are the smallest possible point in the landscape.” He lifts his hand from her arm and they both look up towards the window, as though beyond it is the flat blue of the Atlantic, stretching its fluid muscle across the garden. “Do you see?” says Eldon.

  “Yes, sir.” There is the bright blue flare of sky through the window. Surely, it is the same blue as the sea would be. A sea Annie has never seen.

  They look out across the sea. Eldon can almost hear the murmur of the surf, feel the rough hand of the wind in his hair.