The Light of Evening (17 page)

I declined Holy Communion at the altar rails and on the way home your asking why, why, my young lady. I can still hear you and hear our feet on the grass, the high frosted spears of grass that rasped and your determining to chastise me.

As the weeks and months went by she began to write. Nothings or next to nothings. Nettles, hens laying out, or the cackle of geese and their glee at being allowed into the stubble and gorging themselves on the leavings of wheat and barley. Her mother came into everything she wrote and she remembered once in a guesthouse an unspoken covenant that passed between them. It was a guesthouse due to be opened and the owner, Cecilia, had asked them as a great favor to come so that she could rehearse her skills. In a newly papered parlor with gilt chairs, a pot of tea with a strainer, and a china slop bowl, Cissy, eager to serve, was practicing her etiquette, her
Sir
and her
Madam,
pressing on them scones and sandwiches and a fresh sponge cake, still warm and from which the raspberry jam oozed out of the two sandwiched halves, debating aloud how much she should charge for high teas.

At one point when Cissy ran to get some other dainty, they looked at the intricate crimson needlework of Christ with a motto embroidered on it in looped lettering and her mother asked her, like a good girl, to read the verse aloud
—
“Christ is the unseen guest at every table, the silent listener to every conversation”
—
 
her mother thereby inferring that she too would be the unseen guest and the silent listener to every conversation.

Scene Four

it was as though just beneath the surface something dangerous and unsettling lurked. She and Hermann did not mesh. What it wanted was for them to be more equal, not to be master and slave because already she was ceasing to be that slave, finding in the books she read not only riches but also rebellion and in some though as yet convoluted way, she knew she was being unfaithful to him and he saw it, sensed it. She had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask, a thousand hers revolting within herself and toward him. Yet coexisting with her flounder was the hope that one evening he would call her into his study and they would talk openly, talk of the things that had kept them apart and from their candor there would be born a real love, a lasting love that they had both envisaged.

The news of her pregnancy elated him. Upon hearing it he wrote in celebration on the several windowpanes. He would have a son. He cradled her and went around the room, marveling at the fact that he would be a father again; the theft and the treachery wreaked upon him would be undone. They drank Madeira wine and he said that one day he would take her to Madeira, all three would go to sunny Madeira, a triptych.

Once in her convent she had been given a holy picture of the Virgin, in a dimly lit interior, with a line of cypresses outside, beautifully symmetric and the Virgin herself emanating a har-

mony, realizing she was pregnant. She did not feel like that at all, she felt terror, but she could not tell him so. They sat, quiet, united, the wine sweet and viscous, an intimacy in what would become the most cherished moments of their history.

She wrote to her mother knowing she would not send it:

Dear Mother,

When my child is born, you may perhaps forgive me and we will be close again. Or is that wishful thinking. Between you and I, I am scared. Your labor pains have got mixed up with mine. God grant I don’t scream when the time comes. Hermann is most kind to me. In the evenings by the fire I see the nicer side of him, the side of him that you also would like. The way he listens and has a tender expression and perhaps everyone is tender at bottom but it gets buried. Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted. Yet his mother said his love of words had hardened his heart, had shut her out. There are mornings when I waken and see the sun coming through the curtains and I am not in my bedroom here by the lake with him, but in your bedroom, which was also mine. How it poured in and picked out the emblems and the tweeny birds perched on roses and rosebuds, so adroit and so mischievous on their background of cream cretonne. By the way, I don’t seem to be able to get the stains out of the linen tablecloths and napkins the way you could. Was it those Reckett’s cubes that you used that made everything snow white again with a tinge of blue.

And so it was that their thoughts conjoined. The blotched and rained-upon postmark of home. The letter in a pink envelope. Treasa, her mother’s friend, has gone to expense with the notepaper or maybe her mother has supplied it. A missive outlining the many months since she eloped, a mother’s tears and gnashing, a

father’s tears, an entire parish reeling from the shock, and moreover the blow to her poor mother’s heart, who had collapsed up in the yard but luckily was found by a passerby. After much prayer and deliberation her mother is proposing that they meet. A hotel in Limerick is suggested and two possible dates, one immediately and one in four weeks’ time. She thought it better to get it over, to look at last into her mother’s eyes and not flinch.

On the long train journey she put her fret to one side, immersed herself in the book she had brought. Not once did she look up from it to see the passing landscape, which she knew anyhow, suburbs, small allotments, wild ponies, cattle trampling in the ruins of fallen castles, wet fields, and bog land unyieldingly black. She was reading Virginia Woolf’s
The Common Reader,
was with Dean Swift in those splendid rooms in London, silver plate, a galaxy of guests, vivaciousness, the Dean leaving to go home and by the light of a wax candle to fill page after page, recounting it to Stella, who guessed his greatness, the handwriting illegible, since a bad scrawl ensured secrecy. The formidable Swift telling Stella the events of the day, the talk at dinner, conversing in nonsense language to her in the house in Moor Park, she on one side of the Irish Sea and he on the other, yet in no hurry to exchange the rarefied circles of London for the trout streams of County Meath, Stella thirty years his junior, living frugally with a chaperone, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, to whom he sometimes sent a gift of tobacco. Stella was privy to all his movements, the pamphlets he wrote, the Tories he harangued on behalf of the Irish, the twenty guineas he gave to a sick poet in a garret, the duchesses he scolded or befriended, and on and on, until one day Stella began to see traces of something less open, less confiding, in short the specter of a rival. Swift bridled. What was so wrong with visiting Mrs. Vanhomrigh, recently widowed, and her daughter Esther, why shouldn’t he have supper with them if he boarded nearby, what harm was there in leaving his gown or his periwig in their keeping, and who could accuse him

for joining in a game of whist? Yet in time Esther, who had not Stella’s reserve, nor Stella’s forbearance, threw down the gauntlet, writing in vehement tones, demanding to know the exact nature of her relationship with the Dean. Upon learning of it he went to Esther, flung her letter down, then rode off, leaving her, as she put it, with his killing killing looks, which were prophetic because soon she was dead and Stella left in the shallows.

From that it was to Dorothy Wordsworth and Brother William, Dorothy’s eye so acute, jotting down all that she saw to be of use to William, the raised ridge on the backs of sheep, a cow giving over eating, to stare at them, the sloe tree in blossom, the varnished beams of her bedroom that in the light of the fire looked like melted gems, Dorothy controlling and repressing her own impulses for the sake of William.

A moment of vindication when she read of Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti dressed in black at a tea party of Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, having to listen to banality, social nothings, suddenly standing up in the middle of that room, holding a green volume of her poems and saying to the frivolous group, “I am Christina Rossetti. ‘Bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death.’” Yes, she would be Christina Rossetti when she confronted her mother.

The train had stopped. There was no knowing how long. She got up and walked, or rather ran, down the short length of street to the hotel where her mother stood outside under an awning crestfallen, with a look of bewilderment, fearing she was not coming.

Her mother is kind, soft-spoken, a small drip like a tear on the end of her nose. She is also nervous, as Eleanora can tell by the strain in her voice, a timidity on account of all the reproaches, their pursuit of her, the assault on her husband, the insulting solicitors’ letters from one party to another, and the unfinished state of affairs. They order soup to start with, pea soup, followed by lamb cutlets and roast potatoes. While they wait, her mother

places her hand on the table and then gradually inches closer to Eleanora’s by way of saying, “I forgive you.” The soup is too salty, pickled with bacon, the cutlets somewhat greasy, in short she is unable to eat and her mother with an uncanny clairvoyance says in shock, “A baby.” The word seemed to hover in that constraining dining room with its smell of fried onions and gravy.

“You’re having a baby.” I m not sure.

“I’m sure.” Her mother seeing into her and to the child in her and she said yes, she was having a baby. She must now marry the man with the Rasputin features, the man Treasa had christened the anti-Christ.

A few days following her husband received a letter saying that considering recent and significant developments, the family was giving their consent to the marriage.

He resented being told what to do, but marry they did, the ceremony proving to be somewhat joyless, in the sacristy of a Catholic church, two workmen acting as witnesses. She wore a fawn crepe de Chine dress with a hidden pleat down the front and hidden zip fasteners that could be released as the child inside her kicked, making its presence known.

In the dark, a few nights before it was due to be born, a pearled, full moon shining in and along the bedroom floor, she confessed to her husband that she was afraid the child would be deformed because of her many macabre thoughts and the fact of its being conceived out of wedlock. He saw how inexperienced, how frightened she was and wiping her eyes said, “Now there are two children that I will have to take care of.”

Yet the birth was not so awful. It was as if something came free in her and though howling as the pain gripped and encircled her belly, she felt her body to be obeying some instinct older than her, older than her mother, older than time; she felt a freedom. The nurse coming at intervals, telling her to push, then going off to tend to another woman in labor, alone with it and

yet not alone, this tournament as it were between her and it and in the last ferocious half-hour her whole self seeming to be carried by it, then the great burst of water as the infant came hurtling into the world. A son, her son, their son, red and raw but sinuous as a wrestler and roaring its lungs out, a protest at being ejected into a cold, boundaryless world. His father chose its name and arranged for it to be circumcised. After the operation, two mornings later, it lay in its basket like a little snowman, a sheaf, pale, mute, chastened inside a white lace shawl and on a greeting card she wrote,
“In the bag of your napkin a berry, fresh from the morning’s blood and your tippet raw from the morning’s knife.”

She dressed him in new dresses and the pale blue matinee coats that her mother’s friends had sent her. Blue for a boy and pink for a girl. If she had another child it would be a girl, one of each, a little clan. At times he laughed and gurgled with a glee, then burped back the milk he had swallowed that was already solid and at other times there was a gravity to him, the little seer that knew, that comprehended, as though from the well of bygone memory. Then he was crawling, reaching for the gravel in the front drive, to put up his nose or pelt at the sight of strangers, whom he resented. Then he was talking. In his own world, in his own crib, gabbling away. The words myriad and full of fascination, sound and color, sense and non-sense, his smell so particular and so affectionate and the silk skin silkier than the sheerest flower. Her son and in some way her shield. His father too showered love on him, tossed him up in the air to catch him on the way down, his little arms the two branches going to her, going to his father, a candelabra bringing them together.

Her next child came into the world differently, stole in, no big breach of the waters, just finding his way through. Enormous navy-blue eyes, drinking in his surroundings. She thought he would be a girl but he wasn’t, he was a boy, and his brother poured the bath of water that was on the bedside over him, say-

ing
nice babbie, nice babbie,
while dispatching him to his end. In time they sparred. They sparred over the rocking horse and over the mashed blackberries and sugar that they loved, their hands and their mouths all purpled, two painted faces and two painted warriors. They enjoyed their battles but were also comrades. The day her elder son tripped over a hosepipe and split his forehead, her younger son attempting to mop the blood and called out
geth the dhoctor, geth the dhoctor.
He had a lisp.

The peace that she and her husband had made was tenuous. He knew that she wrote and tucked it away in folders and between blotting paper so as not to be discovered. But he found it, made notes on it, sometimes quite caustic notes
—
“There is no such thing as a blue road,”
he wrote with a red pen on one of the pages. He worked at night. A light in his window and a light in hers is what a traveler would chance on, two disparate lights signaling a divided house.