The Honeymoon (35 page)

As winter came on, his pain grew so intense that it became nearly impossible for him to work on his
Problems
. He would lie on the divan with his pen and notebook and try to write, and then a spasm of pain would overcome him. “If I can’t finish it,” he said, “will you?”

“Please, darling, don’t even say that,” she pleaded. “You’ll get better. You’ll finish it, you’ll see.”

“But,” he insisted, with rare seriousness, “if I can’t, do you promise?”

“Of course, I promise. But this is so unnecessary.”

He sank back on the divan and closed his eyes, reassured.

He began to stay mostly in bed, a shrunken figure amidst the pillows. Barbara Bodichon, with a rush of energy and kindness, came to replace her for a few hours, and read aloud to him from Victor Hugo. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but I’m too tired to listen.”

Charley moved into the guest room to help care for his Pater. Solid, bespectacled Charley was a married man now with three little girls of his own, and twenty men under him in the Post Office.

But when she finished
Theophrastus Such
, George somehow gathered his remaining strength, hooked his walking stick to the bed post, pulled himself up, and limped over to the desk, where he wrote a note to Blackwood.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I have to be sure about the typeface and the cover,” he said, as he’d always done with every one of her books. Then he sent off the manuscript to Edinburgh.

“Could you send a boy over for Johnnie Cross?” he asked her. “I want to speak to him about the money.” Johnnie’s mother, Anna, was very ill, declining rapidly, and Johnnie was constantly at her bedside. Nonetheless, he came to them that afternoon.

“Johnnie, dear boy!” George said when he saw Johnnie’s poor, wan, exhausted face. Johnnie, seeing him, was at a loss for words. “Yes, I am a pretty sight, aren’t I?” George said, his voice hoarse and cracking. “Even prettier than usual. Now, Nephew, I want to talk to you about business. I want you to look after Polly when I’m gone —”

“Please,” Johnnie said. “This is too painful.”

“I’m very serious. I want your solemn promise.” His expression was stern.

“Of course,” Johnnie replied, his voice almost a whisper.

“I can’t listen to this,” she said, and left the room. She waited outside in the hall, leaning against the wall, hearing the murmur of their voices inside. “Her money is in safe hands with you,” George was saying. “But I’d suggest continuing with the American securities for a while, the yield is so good …”

Then George called out, “Polly, you can come back in now. We’re finished.” Johnnie had gotten up to leave, his
face grave. “One more thing, Nephew,” George said from the depths of his pillows. “Take these cigars.” He indicated his cigar caddy by the bed. “Give them to Brother Willie. The best Cubans from Melbourne Hart. He’s the only good smoker among you. He’ll appreciate them.”

Then he lay back, his eyes closing. As the night wore on, he slept. He didn’t wake in pain as he had before. She touched him, but he, who was always so quick to sense her every touch, if she even stirred beside him or cried out with a bad dream, didn’t respond. She climbed into the bed with him and put her arms around him and drew his birdlike body to her. He weighed nothing. She held him close, trying to keep him back, to infuse him with the warmth and life of her own flesh. But he didn’t know she was there anymore, didn’t even move his fingers to find her hand.

Outside, the London sky darkened, evening here already. At a quarter to six, he took a sudden breath, there was a rattling in his throat. Then he was gone.

Sometimes her sobs were uncontrollable. She refused to get dressed or to eat. She saw only Charley and the maid, Brett. Mrs. Dowling, the cook, brewed a special broth to tempt her, and Brett would bring it in to her. “Just a little bit, my lady, one sip,” she said. “You do need it for your strength.” But she couldn’t. Charley wrote the letters informing everyone about what had happened.

Four days later, they buried him in the Dissenters’ section at Highgate. She couldn’t bear to go to the funeral. Charley went in her stead, and Trollope, and Johnnie Cross — though Anna was now near death. Spencer, who never attended funerals, came to this one for his best friend. When Charley returned from the funeral, he said that the
Reverend Dr. Sadler had seemed quite apologetic when he suggested that perhaps there was such a thing as the immortality of the soul.

She moved out of their bedroom to the spare room, and sat in her nightgown, hair uncombed, writing down her memories of him.
“When I first met you at the Princess theater with Spencer you made me laugh … I fell in love with you … at the St. Katherine’s dock I thought you wouldn’t come. But you did, oh you did … That morning in Tenby when I told you my idea for my first story … without you, I would be nothing …”

Downstairs, Charley and Brett kept the house together. As she manically scribbled down her memories of him, she was aware vaguely of the bell ringing at the gate, of people arriving to pay their respects. They told her that Johnnie Cross, Spencer, Barbara Bodichon, and total strangers had come, begging for news of her, but she ordered Charley and Brett not to let them in. Every now and then Brett appeared in the room, to make sure that she was still alive.

Letters of condolence poured in. Turgenev wrote from his estate in Bougival in France that
“All your friends, all learned Europe mourn with you.”
Then came a letter from Isaac’s wife, Sarah:
“My heart aches for you in your sad bereavement.”
It was the first communication she’d had from either her or Isaac for twenty-six years. But nothing from Isaac himself. No sympathy from Isaac.

Barbara wrote again begging to be allowed to see her. Barbara had supported her in everything. She was a force of nature, and wouldn’t be stopped.
“I bless you for all your goodness to me,”
Marian wrote to her.
“But I am a bruised creature and shrink from even the tenderest touch.”

Once more, Brett stood in front of her, tiny and mousy, in the blur of her black-and-white uniform. “Mr. Cross is here again to see you,” she said. “He’s very worried about you.”

“Tell him, no thank you,” she said again. “I send my love, but I can’t see anyone now.”

“Poor man, I feel so sorry for him, he so wanted to see you,” Brett said.

After seven days, she was able to get dressed, and with Charley holding on to her arm, went downstairs for the first time. Stepping across the threshold of George’s study, she saw on his desk the pile of notes for his
Problems of Life and Mind
. He’d begged her to finish it for him. She couldn’t look at it now.

All winter she lived in a dark cocoon, oblivious to anything but her own sorrow. On New Year’s Day, she braced herself and again went into his study. She sat down at the desk and stared at his notes.

She knew his handwriting by heart, the letters formed in sweeping strokes, hard to decipher, that distinctive slant of the lines upward to the right. A masculine hand, not the perfectly formed letters of a dutiful schoolgirl like herself. She had looked at this writing for more than a quarter century, at the little notes he wrote to her, attached to other people’s letters: “
Polly, what do you think? Can we do this
?” about some invitation, or on a statement from Blackwood about royalties.

For a second, it was as if she were again in daily intimacy with him, experiencing his very existence in front of her. Then, within seconds, the brief sensation of his being there with her flickered out. He’d vanished, the air was
empty. The walls grew up around her again, the desk in front of her, the vacant room, big and shadowed in winter.

The snow began, driving with blizzard force outside the window. Brett came to tell her that the pipes had frozen. The plumber was so busy with all the broken pipes in the other houses on the street that he couldn’t come till tomorrow. Brett knew she felt the cold terribly, and now, in this state, she felt it even more. Brett made a fire in every room of the house for her and brought her a blanket to put around her shoulders, then a pair of George’s silk socks.

“Silk is very warm,” Brett said, as she pulled them over her feet.

“My principal task in life is to keep you warm,” he had always said. And now he was doing it again.

At the end of January, she saw the little drop of blood in her urine. She knew what would happen next, and terror seized her. Always, a few hours later, the pain came and exploded in her left side. “I’m going to fetch Sir James!” Charley said.

She lay there on the bed begging God to make Sir James come soon.

And then there he was, stooped and benign, standing over her with his hooded eyes and his keen, intelligent face.

“What have we here, dear lady?”

“I think I’m going to die,” she said.

“Not yet. I promise you, you and I will grow old together. Just give me a moment.” She heard the words “another attack of renal colic,” and then glimpsed the wonderful
hypodermic in his hand. He was pulling up the sleeve of her nightgown. “Don’t move,” he said. At last the longed-for prick of the needle, and almost immediately she was floating, the pain was dissipating.

She slept, and when she awoke, Sir James was there and gave her more morphine.

One day she woke up and the light in the room was different. The clock said four o’clock, but the sun was still out. It must be spring. The big elm branch outside the window had little green tips on it, buds to come.

On the windowsill was a bowl of crocuses, brilliant white and purple flowers with golden throats.

“What are those?” she asked Brett.

“From Mr. Cross. He sent them when he heard you were ill.”

“How kind,” she said. They were in a blue-and-white japonaise bowl with a delicate pattern of figures in kimonos and wispy trees on it.

“There’s a note,” Brett said.

“Could you read it?”

“Dear Marian, You know I share your grief. George was my dearest friend and I do hope you’ll let me come and see you soon. He asked me to look after you. Until then, I hope these crocuses cheer you up. They’re a harbinger of spring. (If you look out the window you’ll see that they’ve already come up on the grass.) Meanwhile, I remain, Very Truly Yours, John Walter Cross.”

She remembered Charley telling her that Anna Cross had died, only ten days after George. She’d been so selfish in her grief, she’d hardly paid attention to what Johnnie
and his brothers and sisters must be suffering at the death of their mother.

A day later, when she was stronger, propped up in bed with her writing board, she wrote to thank him. She couldn’t see him now, she said, but
“Some time, if I live, I shall be able to see you — perhaps sooner than any one else.”

She recovered, and went back to work on George’s manuscript. He was trying to carry forward Spencer’s efforts to forge a philosophy that would fuse science, the human mind, culture, and politics, all together. Usually, he was such a clear writer, a journalist who could make anything comprehensible to the intelligent reader — the life of Goethe, the principles of philosophy, marine biology. But as he tried to clarify these fundamental questions of metaphysics and verification, his sentences had grown tangled. She had no idea what he was trying to say:
“The analogy between the growth of an organism and the growth of knowledge is further recognizable in the inevitable mixture of materials unfit for assimilation …”
What on earth did he mean? She held the paper away from her. The glasses Dr. Liebreich had prescribed didn’t do much good. Her head was aching.

The arrival of the proofs from Blackwood for
Theophrastus Such
interrupted her, but she paid no attention to them. She was too busy working on George’s
Problems
.

She struggled on, crossing out and inserting words and phrases where he’d not completely made his point, consulting his other writings for clues as to what he intended. As she was immersed once more in the products of his mind, her suffering seemed to grow worse, as if a hard surface were pressing against her bruised heart.