Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (24 page)

I am writing to you concerning a young woman in my employ. Her name is Annie Phelan.

“I will miss Adeline,” says Annie, in the afternoon when the baby is to be returned to her rightful parents.

“Yes, so will I.” Isabelle unwinds the sheet from the small body and, when Adeline is naked, Isabelle wiggles the baby’s fat arms and legs until she makes what they have come to recognize as her sounds of profound happiness. “You are a perfect creature,” says Isabelle to the baby.

“A creature of the Lord,” says Annie.

“A creature of the bell-ringer,” says Isabelle. “You take her out to the father. I have said my goodbyes.”

Annie takes the baby and dresses her in the clothes of Adeline, instead of the swaddling sheet of the Lord.

“Here,” says Isabelle, when all is in order and Annie is about to leave the studio with the baby. “Take this to William.” She hands Annie a photograph. It’s the baby Jesus lying on the straw in the manger, with his mother leaning dutifully over him. The baby looks particularly holy as he is lying in a shaft of sunlight. “And this.” Isabelle drops the coins for Adeline’s hire into Annie’s cloak pocket. “With our thanks.”

At the end of the hire of Adeline, her father, William, has become a devotee of photography. He takes the coins. He studies the photograph with a sort of strained earnestness. “I have a cow,” he says. “If you’re wanting that.”

“Why would we be wanting a cow?” says Annie.

“Well, you’re after making a stable, are you not?” says William, pointing to the straw in the photograph. “Every good stable has at least one cow in it.”

“The boy will be fine,” says Annie. “Just the boy will be fine. We’ll be expecting him tomorrow morning. Thank you. Goodbye.” She says this last word more to Adeline than to the bell-ringer.

“Wait,” William calls after her. “What about a goat? Or a nice suckling pig? I could get you a good price on a pair of geese.”

The bell-ringer’s son is five years old. His name is Gus, a strong name for such a delicate boy.

“He’s never been a well lad,” says William apologetically, when he hands him over to Annie. “You mind her, now,” he says to Gus, and leaves abruptly. There are no affectionate farewells as there were with the baby Adeline. Annie already feels sorry for Gus. It’s clear his father hasn’t explained properly why he’s here and he looks afraid and confused. Isabelle won’t like it if he appears too timid.

“Are you hungry?” she asks him. “Would you like a bit of cake and some tea before we start?”

Gus nods his head and Annie takes him by the hand into the kitchen.

Isabelle is not happy this morning. It is a good idea to delay the walk to the glasshouse. She was crashing around there when Annie left her, trying to decide how to stage the child Jesus. “Boys,” she’d said, thinking of the difficulty of posing her cousin’s children. “Boys are always hard.”

Cook is in the kitchen making stock.

“Could I have a piece of seed cake and mug of tea for the boy,” says Annie. Things have not been the same between her and Cook in the fortnight since the dinner party. The friendliness between them has come apart in their hands. She swings Gus up onto the tabletop. He kicks his legs out, and back, looks around the kitchen with interest.

“Do you know what it is you’re doing here?” asks Annie.

The boy shakes his head.

“Do you have a voice in your head?”

He nods.

Annie smiles. “All right,” she says. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t wish.”

Cook slaps a plate of cake and a mug of tea down next to Gus. “There you are,” she says.

“Thank you,” says Annie. “Eat,” she says to the boy. “Then you and I will walk down the garden to Mrs. Dashell’s studio. It’s a house made entirely of glass. Have you ever seen one like that before?”

The boy, his mouth crammed with cake, shakes his head.

“You will be the boy you are,” says Annie. “And I will be your mother, and Mrs. Dashell will take photographs of us in different poses. Then we’ll have lunch. All right?”

“All right,” says Gus.

“Good,” says Annie, pleased that he seems to understand, even vaguely, his reason for being here.

Isabelle has regained none of her good temper by the time they get to the studio.

“What took you so long?” she says when they arrive. “I’ve been ready for ages.” She stares at the boy. “What’s your name, lad?”

“Gus, ma’am,” he says, in a thin, reedy voice.

Isabelle pulls Annie aside. “What’s the matter with him?” she asks. “He looks ill.”

“I think he’s just a litde shy,” says Annie.

“Nonsense. He’s frail. Look at him.”

They both stare at the boy. He backs up nervously and almost knocks over the camera.

“Just go over there and sit on the bench,” says Isabelle, after she has rushed forward and saved her teetering camera. She returns to Annie. “Perhaps we should get Adeline back,” she says.

“I thought you wanted a boy?”

“I do. But he just looks so…”

“Sensitive?” suggests Annie. “Sensitive to the wrongs of the world.” She likes the boy. It’s not his fault he doesn’t look the way Isabelle expected him to. “If he was sleeping, it would work better,” she says. “All children look more like that when they’re sleeping.”

Isabelle stares at Gus again, but his countenance isn’t changing, no matter how hard she wills it. In fact, he’s becoming more nervous and darting his head about like a startled animal. “It’s too bad you won’t age,” she says to Annie. “I could have a whole succession of boys, all ascending in age to a man Christ. But, at a certain point, you’ll stop looking like their mother and start looking like their lover. So now I’m stuck with a Christ who looks as if he’s dying of a wasting disease.”

“It will be fine,” says Annie. “Don’t worry.”

Isabelle photographs Annie and Gus in duplicate poses of those she used for Annie and Adeline. Gus, for all his physical faults, is very obedient. He understands what’s required of him, and he does it without a fuss. Christ lying on the straw with Mary kneeling over him. Christ splayed out across his mother’s lap. He sleeps in the scene on the straw. He has his eyes open when lying on Mary’s lap, for fear he’ll look dead if they’re closed.

The perfect temperament for going into service, thinks Annie. The passivity that Isabelle finds so annoying in him could one day get him hired into her household.

While Annie takes Gus off to the kitchen for lunch, Isabelle prints up one of the photographs she took this morning, to see how Gus really performed. She would rather do this than face luncheon in the house. Eldon, for the last week or more, has been having lunch brought to his library, saying he is too busy with work to spare the time to lunch formally. Isabelle has, in fact, barely seen her husband at all in the last litde while, and finds that, in some ways, it makes no difference to her. Still, she does not want to face the emptiness of a lonely lunch for one in the dining room, and prefers to have Cook bring her food out to the studio, where, invariably, it gets cold or she forgets to eat it.

Gus is surprisingly good as a young Jesus. His slightness, instead of making him look sickly, gives him a kind of grace. His eyes are soulful. He has a resolute chin.

“Good judgement, Mary,” says Isabelle, showing Annie the photograph of her holding Gus across her lap. “You were right about him.”

“You called me Mary,” says Annie.

“I want you to stay in character,” says Isabelle. “It’s easier for me to construct the scenes if you remain as the Madonna. I want you to wear the cloak every day. And from now on I will be calling you Mary.”

Mrs. Gilbey had said to Annie when she arrived at Portman Square, There are only Marys and Janes in this house. You will be a Mary.

“I don’t want to,” she says. The name shakes loose too many horrors in her.

“Please,” says Isabelle. “It’s just until this series is finished.” She pats Annie distractedly on the shoulder, and heads outside to print another photograph.

The next day Isabelle asks Annie to lock Gus in a cupboard. “I want to have him as an angel,” she says, “and that will give him a nice look of gentle despair.”

“A cupboard?” Annie looks at the pale boy standing patiently by the mound of straw that is the holy stable.

“I’ve done it before. It works beautifully,” says Isabelle.

“Well, I’m glad you never locked me in a cupboard.”

“I didn’t need to. That’s the joy of you, Mary. I never have to resort to my desperate tactics.”

Mary.
Every time Annie hears that name she flinches as though she’s been struck. “How long?” she asks. “How long is he supposed to be locked in a cupboard for?”

“Two hours.”

“Two hours,” repeats Annie doubtfully. She remembers the closet at Mrs. Gilbey’s. When she was young and locked in there at night it felt as if she would be trapped inside forever.

“Trust me. It works,” says Isabelle. “Gus!” She calls him over. “You go off with Mary to the house for a litde while.”

Annie steers Gus up the path. “Do you have a look of gentle despair?” she asks him.

“Pardon, miss?”

“Well,” says Annie. “We’re going to practise your look of gentle despair. Over here, where no one can watch us.” She pulls him off the path and round the side of the dew pond. “We’ll stay here until we get it right, and then we’ll go back to the studio and you’ll tell Mrs. Dashell that I locked you in a cupboard.”

“Why would you do that, miss?” asks Gus, in his tentative voice.

“Why, indeed,” says Annie.

Gus has a genuine look of gentle despair after an hour and ten minutes. It alternates with his look of profound boredom that is a result of his having to practise the look of gentle despair.

“Very nice,” says Isabelle approvingly, when they go back to the glasshouse to show her. “I hope you aren’t too upset with Mary for what she did.”

“What
you
did,” says Annie to Isabelle under her breath.

“No,” says Gus. Annie has promised him some cake and jam when the session is over today. He is now only thinking forward to that moment. Everything before that is simply getting there.

“I know, I know,” says Isabelle to Annie. She doesn’t like it when Annie is annoyed with her. Can’t she see that Isabelle needs to do these things to get the proper perspective to create? “Can’t you just give yourself over to the work of art?” she says.

“I
am
the work of art,” says Annie. She feels less afraid of Isabelle since the kiss, since that moment of feeling truly equal to her.

“On your lap or on the ground?” asks Gus, thinking only of his promised reward for this slow torture. Already he is forgetting his look of gentle despair. “I’m forgetting the look,” he says, with real despair on his face. What if he won’t get the cake now?

“Perfect,” says Isabelle, rushing to the camera. “Just stay as you are.”

Later, when Annie remembers this moment she will forget that she was angry with Isabelle for calling her Mary and for suggesting that she lock the boy in a cupboard. She will forget Gus’s boredom. She will even forget the strength and quality of the sun as it made a bow through the window wall of the glasshouse. She will call this moment back as happiness, and what she will remember of it, only, is kneeling on the straw with the soft weight of a child in her arms. “Look up at me,” Isabelle says. “As if you love me.”

“An angel is a good thing,” says Annie, carefully threading one of Gus’s small arms through the leather straps on the underside of the goose wing.

“It doesn’t mean I’m dead?”

“No, no.” Annie pats his shoulder, reassuringly. “It means you’re heavenly. A creature of the Lord. It’s not about being dead. It’s about being chosen to be special because you are full of kindness and mercy.” She kneels down in front of him and guides his other arm into the wing harness.

“I look big,” says Gus, peering over her shoulder into the looking-glass. With his outstretched winged arms he is as big as an eagle. Annie tightens the straps and then moves behind him. He stands with his arms stretched right out and they both look at the magnificence of this, of him, in the mirror.

They are in Eldon’s bedroom because the looking-glass there is large enough to show Gus his reflection with his wings spread. He had expressed reluctance at being an angel, and Annie has brought him indoors to show him how wonderful he would look as a creature of heaven.

“Do angels have clothes?” asks Gus, looking in the mirror at his loose blouse and short pants.

“Good question.” Could he just wear his blouse, like a nightshirt? Would they have to tailor a sheet to fit around him like a shift? He and Annie stare at each other in the mirror. “Why don’t I run out and ask the photographer,” she says. “You just stay where you are and admire yourself.”

“All right,” says Gus, perfectly happy to remain in attendance to his visually impressive bird self until she returns to him.

Annie walks out of Mr. Dashell’s bedroom, along the upstairs hall, and down the main stairs. At the bottom she turns left into the drawing room. Tess is there, sweeping out the hearth. They stare at each other as Annie crosses the room, opens the French doors onto the terrace, and goes outside.

Isabelle is not in the studio. The bench has been moved onto the carpet of straw so that the boy angel can kneel on the straw and rest his elbows on the bench, hands pressed together in prayer.

It’s a dull, cool day. The absence of sun makes the straw and the narrow bench look as if they really are inside a stable. Annie surveys the dark starkness of it. Perhaps the bell-ringer is right and they do need a cow or some sort of animal to fill out the scene. Without them, without Annie and Isabelle and Gus, the studio seems huge with loneliness. Funny that a photograph, which is a still thing like this room, depends so much on their living, moving selves.

Annie sits on the bench and tries to imagine how she looks from Isabelle’s usual position at the camera. She tilts her head up. She turns to the right. That’s your best side, Isabelle had said, although Annie, when she sees herself in a mirror, cannot deduce why this is.

After sitting on the bench for a while Annie goes to the camera, stands behind it, and tries to imagine herself sitting on the bench. She swings up the tiny brass cover and peers through the lens. The perspective of the lens shrinks the world to only what is directly in front of it—the straw, the stone bench. The side walls of the studio are no longer there. Nor the cold day beyond the glass. It is a small enough world, thinks Annie, that it can be easily controlled. That is something to want.