After Such Kindness (19 page)

I’d forgotten that I’d taken my drawers off for Mr Jameson. It seems very peculiar, now as I look back – how I’d dared to do it, and what a strange request it had been. I know Mama would have been scandalized, but it seemed natural enough at the time and I wasn’t in any way embarrassed. I always felt safe with Mr Jameson. Yet all the same, I know he’s connected with the dark events that have slipped so completely from my mind. Perhaps Daisy will shed some light on them soon.

I turn the page, and to my surprise, there she is, smiling up at me – Daisy Baxter with her gypsy dress and shorn locks. The photograph is worn and battered, but I smile back, thinking how very young she is. It’s rather foolish of me to imagine such a child will have the answer to a problem like mine. I begin to think I’d do better to put my faith in the Harley Street man.

I close the book. But as I stretch forward to put it down, I catch my reflection in the looking-glass on my dressing table and, not for the first time, I’m shocked to see how different I look from what I expect to see. I’m well-dressed and my hair is elaborately curled, but I’m deathly pale and there are dark patches under my eyes. I’ve hardly slept since my wedding day. And I’ve become so thin that my rings slip off every time I wash my hands. I can’t go on living like this. If only I could remember what happened in those four years between the ages of eleven and fifteen that are such a mystery to me!

I’ve never dared speak of this queer hiatus to anyone, afraid I would be ridiculed, or worse. But the fact remains that I awoke, one summer afternoon to find, quite suddenly, that I had become someone else. At first, I was only aware that my heart was beating rather fast and I seemed to have recollections of some unpleasant encounter. So it was a relief to see the grass and the flower beds and realize I was, after all, sitting safely on the lawn in the vicarage garden. But at the same time it seemed as though the bushes were unaccountably bushier, and the trees taller. And my body felt strange – as if it had suddenly become a great deal heavier. I looked down, and to my surprise, there in my lap was a pair of gloved hands clasping an ivory fan. But the hands weren’t mine – they had elegant, long fingers and were altogether far too grown-up to belong to me. Yet they responded when I tried to move them and wiggled delicately inside their net gloves – gloves of the sort I’d coveted for a long time but had never been allowed to have. And I could see that my body was clothed in a very grown-up silk dress, and had, of all things, a bosom. It swelled out in a confident curve as I looked down, and it alarmed me in no small measure to think how – if it were mine – it could have grown so decidedly large while I was asleep. Then, as I tried to get up, I found my legs were encumbered by layers of long petticoats, and my waist was constricted painfully by something hard and rigid – undoubtedly a corset. It was the most curious thing ever, as if I had sloughed my old skin and suddenly become a different creature.

I looked about myself rather wildly, expecting to see my astonishment mirrored in the faces of others. But although there were over half a dozen people in the garden, nobody took the slightest notice of me, and everyone went on talking and handing around sandwiches and lemonade as coolly as if my metamorphosis were perfectly unremarkable.

Sitting next to me on the lawn was a slight young man, with a dark, serious face and glossy, straight, black hair. He was dressed in clerical black, but was wearing a straw hat with a green ribbon. ‘You’ve been asleep, Margaret,’ he said in a pleasant voice, tickling my neck with a blade of grass. ‘Have you been dreaming? You don't seem quite yourself.’

He was smiling at me in a familiar way, as if we were in the habit of sharing confidences, but I had no idea who he was or why he was calling me ‘Margaret’. Perhaps I had strayed into Margaret’s body? If so, I wanted to be out of it as soon as I could. I didn’t feel at all right in her silk dress and net gloves. I certainly didn’t feel right with her curving bosom and languid limbs. I wanted to be myself again. But who, exactly,
was
I? I started to panic. I'd thought I was a child called Daisy; in fact, I'd been certain of it. But now, every time I thought of her, the fainter she became in my mind. She seemed to be rapidly disappearing down a long dark tunnel, leaving this grown-up person in her place.

I stared at the young man. It was clear that he knew me well. And it was clear that the people sitting around us knew
him
, as they left us to our own devices and murmured away in their own conversations. My sisters were looking more than ever like twins in matching dresses, with large sun hats tied fetchingly under their chins. They were grown-up women now, and were paying attention in a very ladylike manner to two young clergymen who lounged on the lawn beside them. One of them I recognized as Papa’s curate, Mr Morton. He was very intimate with Christiana, laughing and smiling with her, and she was returning his smiles in quite a kind way instead of being haughty and sarcastic, as she usually was. Sarah was reading a poem aloud and I knew for sure it was in German, although I had no recollection of learning the language. And there was Mama, sitting on a folding chair, dispensing tea in her familiar way, but looking more anxious than I remembered her, with grey strands threading through her hair. And there in the distance was (surely) Benjy, nearly three foot tall, already breeched and running around in a sailor suit and throwing up the very same rubber ball which Nettie had given me. Running after him and calling out his name was a servant I didn’t recognize at all. But there was no Papa. And Mr Jameson was absent too.

I thought about making a declaration of my strange situation to the assembled company, but I felt too too ridiculous. What could I have said? And what would they have thought of me? I would undoubtedly be taken for a mad girl, or perhaps they would say – like this pleasant young man – that I was dreaming.

Indeed, the only explanation for all the strangeness around me was that I was still dreaming, and sooner or later, I’d wake up. To hasten the event, I closed my eyes tight and counted to ten. But when I opened them, everything was exactly as it had been before. In fact, it seemed even more real. I could hear the crickets in the grass and smell the roses in the rose beds, and see the long shadow of the cypress tree across the lawn. I could even see the intricate braiding on my sisters’ dresses as they rose to play croquet, and I could hear them laughing delightedly as they swept their great skirts around and clicked their mallets elegantly against the ball. ‘Good stroke!’ someone called out, and ‘Well done!’ Surely I was not imagining that? Then I felt a great thump as Benjy climbed onto my lap, his hot and heavy body crushing my frock and making moist stains on the silk as he wriggled about before leaping up again to chase a tabby cat I’d never seen before. Benjy was real too, smelling of sun and sweat and sugar. Even the pages of the novel lying next to me smelled of warm paper as they turned in the breeze and I stopped them with my unfamiliar hand in its unfamiliar net glove. All the time I was aware of the dark young man as he lay on the grass alongside me, attempting to draw me into conversation. As he spoke, he made a little garland of buttercups which he placed on my head. ‘Made with the best butter,’ he said with a laugh.

Hours and hours seemed to go by during which I said as little as possible. I smiled at the young man and drank the tea he offered, holding the china cup with my new, slender hands and daintily eating the sandwiches that were brought around, thinking – believing – hoping – that at any moment I would wake up and my everyday memories would return and rescue me. My whole head ached with the effort.

Then Mr Morton rose and said he had to get ready for Evensong, and the tea-party broke up. At which point, the young man with the straw hat took my hand very earnestly and said, ‘I’ve hardly had a word from you today, Margaret. Have I done something to offend?’ I hastened to reassure him, saying (in a grown-up voice that seemed quite foreign to me) that I’d foolishly given myself a headache through sleeping in the sun. ‘Take care not to do it again, then,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps use a parasol.’

Soon it was time for church, and I put on Margaret’s elegant hat, which was handed me by the new maid, and I walked across to St Cyprian’s with my mother and sisters, feeling strangely tall. I sat in the front pew where I had always sat, with Margaret’s silk dress taking up a great deal more room than I was accustomed to. And I listened, not to Papa’s thrilling tones, but to Mr Morton’s mumbled ones. And then I came home again. But Papa was still not there. And Mr Morton stayed to supper, sitting in Papa’s chair at the head of the table. And no one seemed to feel it at all out of the ordinary. After supper he read to us from the gospels, but didn’t explain why my father was not there to read to us himself. ‘Goodnight, Margaret dear,’ he mumbled, pressing my hands in blessing as I went up to bed.

The stairs were the same as I trod the thick patterned carpet to the first floor, and my room was the same, with its blue curtains and bedspread. But the person I saw in the looking-glass, with her grown-up hair and grown-up frock, was not at all the same; in fact, it shocked me to see that she bore a marked resemblance to my mother. And when I carefully took off her fine frock and her rather complicated underclothes, I found that the contours of her body were more like Nettie’s than mine. It was all so very perplexing and upsetting. But, for the moment, there was nothing to be done except put on the lace-trimmed nightgown that was folded on the bed, and attempt to go to sleep. Maybe in the morning, I thought, things would be different. I closed my eyes and prayed that God would have mercy and restore me to myself. Yet when I woke the next morning and looked at my shape under the bedclothes, I could see I still had Margaret’s long limbs and her fine bosom. What had happened to me was real and I would have to make the best of it. There seemed one course of action open to me.

So I got up and dressed in Margaret’s clothes and pinned up Margaret’s hair and went downstairs to live Margaret’s life. And I found that she was such a quiet figure in the household that her curious ignorance of what had happened the day before (or even at any time in the recent past) was unremarked upon; if, indeed, it was noticed. I discovered that she could play the piano almost as well as her sisters, and could draw and embroider and do all manner of things that Daisy had never attempted; but that above all she was renowned for always having her nose in a book. I learned from the servants that the dark man with the straw hat was called Robert Constantine and that he was a friend of Mr Morton's, destined to take Holy Orders himself; that Hannah had left two years before to be married to the haberdasher on the High, and now turned up at church in the very latest fashion, to the disgust of both my sisters; that Mrs McQueen had long ago given notice, which nobody regretted – and that pink-faced Jess had come instead. I learned that Christiana, now much graver and more subdued, was engaged to Mr Morton, who now seemed to be doing all Father’s work in the parish, and occupying his study. However, there was still no sign of Father himself, and I had such strange feelings when I thought of him that I even feared he might have died. But no one in the house wore mourning and there was no black drapery to be seen on any picture or looking-glass. So I kept my counsel, and waited, thinking he must soon return from whatever business had taken him away. I thought maybe the bishop had appointed him to an important committee to do with the conditions of the poor, and that he was away in London or even Manchester. But, all the time, I could not shake off the notion that he had been unwell and was convalescing somewhere. I was surer of this when Mama once or twice let slip a reference to ‘your poor papa’, and when I realized that Mr Morton prayed for father’s health and well-being at every service. But although there would be a murmur of sympathetic approval when his name was mentioned, no one asked directly after him. Even Mrs Carmichael was silent. I thought this strange, but I could not say that I wished to hasten his return. The household seemed calmer without him.

The real truth came out bit by bit. One day, when I was in the drawing room quietly enjoying that fact that I could now understand quite difficult books in French and German, Jess brought Mama a letter. She looked at it. ‘From the superintendent,’ she said, shortly. And suddenly I had a brief picture of white walls and wooden doors and a general sense of distress and clamour before the image disappeared just as quickly as it had come. I watched as Mama opened the letter, and read it to herself. ‘No better,’ she said, shaking her head. Then she began to sob. ‘Dear God, will it never end?’

Christiana went to her, and put her arm around her, but Sarah rose and ran from the room saying that it ‘wasn’t fair’ and ‘my life is blighted’. I could do nothing but sit like a stone, trying to make sense of it. If Papa was under the care of a superintendent, he must surely be in a hospital of some kind. A sanatorium, I reasoned. Somewhere a distance from Oxford – maybe near the sea. But why did we not visit him? For some reason it came into my head that he might be in isolation, like a leper, although I’d never heard of anyone having leprosy in England. All the same, notions of illness and fever now seemed to attach themselves more distinctly to my memories of him. I could picture bowls and jugs and towels and the spooning of medicine. Had I nursed him? Brought him food and drink? Even – it seemed unlikely – washed him? But when I tried to recall it more clearly, all that would come into my head was the fateful picnic, and Nettie’s dismissal, and the seemingly endless summer jaunts with John Jameson. If I thought of Papa’s face, I could only see that big brown oar in his study, and feel his warm breath as I sat with my cheek next to his.

I must have seemed the most unfeeling of girls as I affected an air of calm to hide the depths of my despair and ignorance. I desperately wanted to remember what had gone before, but I had no means of doing so. I couldn’t refer to Daisy’s journal to jog my memory, as I had no idea where she’d hidden it. All I could do was let each day help me to the next, as I pieced my life together and built up a picture of myself as the Margaret that everyone knew. I found that I enjoyed the many talks that I had with Robert Constantine, who came to the house nearly every day and was very attentive to me, although in his presence I felt stupidly childlike and naive. I warmed to him the more because I felt strangely separate from my mother and sisters, as if I’d done something to upset them. And when it finally became clear to me that Papa was not in a sanatorium at all, but an insane asylum, I could not get it out of my head that it was somehow my fault.