The Painted Bridge (42 page)

“Dearly beloved. All around us, in our streets and places of work, even in our own homes, we see examples of sinners. Brothers and sisters in Christ who have strayed from the path of righteousness. Consider Gehazi, who although he walked this earth almost two thousand years ago, was prey to the same temptations. …”

The protesting creak of the church door cut in on his words, heralding, no doubt, a further disturbance at the back. He stopped and let the silence that grew in the church speak for him, composing his face into a gargoyle frown, to make clear his displeasure. When the silence was once again complete, he continued.

“And the question that Gehazi raises for us today, the question that echoes down the generations, is thus …”

The latecomers had failed to understand his unspoken instruction. The rumpus at the back was growing and as he raised his eyes from his notes, two figures began to walk down the nave toward him. It was a pair of females. One all in red, the shape of an hourglass. The other tall and slender in a sea-green dress. They approached him like a couple
coming to make their vows—slowly, their backs straight, heads up, and their gait measured. Between them a small figure took light, skipping steps. It was his shrill voice that pierced the hush pervading All Hallows.

“Father!”

Vincent leaned on the pulpit, groped in his head for the right lines. Silence. Nothing. “Oh Lord,” he said to himself. “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

The pair had halted. Anna was standing by the Bishop, so close she risked stepping on the hem of his robes. What on earth was she doing here? Vincent frowned down at her and in the silence another voice came. It echoed off the stone walls, the cerulean glass in the high windows, the closed eyes of the saints. It was Maud’s stage voice, sweet and ringing, and it had in it a breaking sorrow that pierced him as surely as if a nail had been driven through his flesh.

“Vincent. Which one of us is your lawful wedded wife?”

He could not stop now. He would not stop. Not while the Bishop was in the congregation. The congregation, for the first time ever, were riveted, every last one of them alert and listening with not a whisper arising from the furthest corner of the church. Even the babies were quiet.

Vincent caught the Bishop’s eye and saw that his face was frighteningly, unnaturally composed, displayed no emotion whatsoever. The goodwill was entirely gone from it, Vincent noted.

How dare women try to create confusion in God’s house? Bringing sordid carnal matters under this sacred roof? Vincent lifted up his eyes to the Lord and, as a greater disturbance erupted, with cries of protest and calls of “shame,” the help he sought came to him. He felt his fists unclench and heard authority return to his voice, that authority that came from a greater power. With it came the words. Everything was there, in the Bible. All of human experience and all of human trouble. Old man Job had known it well.

“The days of affliction have taken hold upon me. My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest.”

Some of the parishioners were laughing, some jeering. One woman wept. Vincent looked down and saw the Bishop departing with Maud
and Anna, all three of their hems trailing on the stone floor and the boy skipping beside them.

Vincent raised his voice higher, lifted it to the rafters in joyful worship; God would hear him if man could not.

“I stood up and I cried in the congregation. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.”

The waves lapped delicately, coaxingly, beyond their toes. They soaked into the sand, made and remade their lacy trim. Louisa stooped, picked up a shell. It was pink and brown, shaped like a baby’s cradle with the cover drawn up. She added it to the collection in her palm, all of the same type, the same shade.

“Does it have to be so far away, Anna? I don’t know anyone who’s ever been to Liverpool.”

“I’ll come back and visit, Lou. Or you can come and see me at the sailors’ mission, when I get settled.”

“Why don’t you stay in London? Help me with the children? Blundell said he wouldn’t mind—now there’s no cause for embarrassment. He always knew there was something odd about Vincent.”

Anna sighed and drew the toe of her boot along the sand, picked up a chalk pebble.

“I’m not cut out for domestic life, Lou. I never was.”

“It’s not right that you should go alone.”

“I’m not going alone. A friend is coming with me.”

“You mean the housemaid?”

“She’s not a housemaid,” Anna said, raising her voice over the clamor of gulls nesting on the cliff behind them. “She was an attendant.”

Anna had on a new dress. It was made of velvet, thick and soft, sea green, with mother-of-pearl buttons up the bodice. It was the same as her old ones except that the lace collar was round instead of pointed. Louisa had insisted on having it made for her by her own dressmaker. The woman was working on another, in turquoise, for Anna to take
with her. Anna’s hair had grown long enough to frame her face, would soon be long enough to put up in her combs. People had started to look at her again, the way they always had, as if they’d had some slight shock.

The sound of the waves washed into her ears, washed through her. She turned over the pebble of chalk in her hand, felt its cool, damp certainty against her skin, its softness and its history. They’d come to lay Antony to rest. To say good-bye to him and speak his name to the sea breezes, let them carry him all over the world like the sailor he would surely have been.

*   *   *

Anna and Louisa had traveled to their childhood home by train from London, just the two of them, barely speaking as they steamed through the lines of little houses, through the fields of Kent, past hop fields and windmills and over the muddy expanse of the Medway, the carriage crowded out with families, luggage, boxes, dolls. It was May and England was in bloom, the apple trees decked with pink-and-white blossom, the hedgerows waving with foxgloves and honeysuckle. Anna and Louisa took a cab along the coast road from Dover, then asked the driver to wait in the lane.

The flint house was empty and further decayed even in the year since Anna had left. The roof beam was bowing, the glasshouse by the back door collapsed into the long grass. The lawn was covered in daisies and shreds of sacking still flapped in the breeze from the upper windows. They sat on the grass and shared a bottle of lemonade that Louisa produced from her bag.

“Shall we?” she said, getting to her feet.

“Yes,” Anna said. “Let’s go down to the water.”

They walked down the path to the beach, arm in arm. Neither of them had said his name. On the beach, they stood in silence, looking out at the chalk stack, the sea lapping gently around it. The tide was going out, the sand soaked and clean like a sheet of blank paper.

“It wasn’t my fault, Lou. That Antony drowned.”

“No one ever said it was your fault.” Louisa’s voice was subdued. “It was an accident.”

“Yes. It was an accident.”

Louisa took Anna’s arm as they walked along the shore, looking down at the shells and smooth, rounded pieces of green and brown glass that the tide had deposited on the sand.

“I wasn’t allowed to talk to you about it, Anastasia. No one was. Mother thought you were too young to remember. But you remembered better than anyone.”

Even over the tang of salt and grass, Anna could smell her sister’s carnation scent. It was strange that Louisa wore their mother’s scent. Louisa hadn’t altogether succeeded in leaving behind the past. Hadn’t altogether wanted to, perhaps.

They turned and walked back to the path cut through the chalk cliff, shook the sand from their skirts and walked back up to the top, to where the view was startling and endless, the horizons of Europe visible in the distance. With the breeze loud in their ears, they embraced, drawing the sea air deep into their selves, their skirts blowing in the wind.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” Louisa said, in the cab on the way back to the railway station. She gripped Anna’s hand with her small white one and wiped a tear from her eye. “I’ve never been much of a sister to you. Too busy with my own troubles, I suppose.”

“It’s not too late, Lou. We’ve got our lives ahead of us.”

“You’re going so far away.”

“We can write.”

“Yes,” Louisa said. “I’d like to get letters from you. To know about your life.”

“And I’d like to know about yours.”

Louisa reached into her pocket and drew out a small pearl-handled penknife.

“I want to give you this. Remember? Father gave us each one when you were quite small. Mother didn’t think we ought to have them.” Louisa laughed. “You can use it to open my letters to you. In Liverpool.”

*   *   *

The high wrought iron gates were propped open, the gatekeeper’s hut empty. Anna walked down the steep, banked drive under the tall trees, their branches edged with tender green buds. Lake House looked as if it had been notified of the change of season. Doors and windows were
flung open; sounds of sawing and hammering came from inside. A black cat sat on the porch, licking a paw.

Anna stopped at the studded front door and peered into the dim hall. The smoke-darkened oil paintings that once hung there were gone and she could hear the shrill, insistent cry of a newborn from somewhere inside. She wouldn’t knock on the door. She would make her own way down to the kitchen, find Lovely inside wherever she was. Lovely had wanted to meet her in London but Anna had been determined to come back to Lake House just once, as a free woman. To arrive when she chose and leave as she pleased. It was necessary.

She walked around the side of the house to the back, her feet crunching on the gravel in the still air. There was nobody to be seen inside Abse’s study. The high shelves were empty but the fox looked out unperturbed from inside his glass case, tail lifted.

Anna leaned against the warm brickwork of the house, felt the sun on her face and her blood running fast and free in her veins. Life was returning. Returning to the world and to her. The banks of the lake shimmered with cow parsley and bluebells. She walked down over the grass under the trees and on through the field. The lambs were large, butting at newly shorn ewes and gamboling with each other. She carried on down to the lake and breathed the muddy freshness of the water, trailed her fingers between the round pads of the waterlilies, then sat down on a log.

Farther along the shore, beyond the coppice, the white bridge looked as delicate and exquisite as ever, casting its daylight moons on the surface of the water. It seemed to offer two ways across—one over the water, through the air, and the other under the surface of the water, in its still reflection. Anna got to her feet and looked at the far bank, at the point where she had jumped off the bridge and landed among the primroses. She searched it with her eyes, saw nothing but the slope, the trees, the dance of new leaves under the sun.

It was time to get Martha and go. She held her skirts with one hand and climbed back up toward the house. Reaching the path, she turned to head for the front door then changed her mind and walked the other way. The gate wasn’t padlocked. She opened it and stepped into the walled garden, broke off a branch of white lilac, pressed her face
into its cool, damp fragrance. Among the blossom, on the air, she caught a drift of pipe tobacco.

Her feet were soundless as she walked along the narrow brick path edged with box. Lucas St. Clair was in the fernery, sweeping the floor. He threw down the broom and went into the dark cupboard. She watched as he wrapped bottles in cloths, stowed them in a case, bending and rising, his pipe between his teeth, his face appearing and disappearing through the amber glass.

As he emerged from the dark cupboard, Anna tapped on the fernery window. Lucas looked up, emerged from the cupboard and came to where she stood. He brought his face close to the glass and she could see his long whiskers and the startled expression on his face, see his lips shaping her name. Lucas hurried to open the door.

“It’s you,” he said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Hello, Dr. St. Clair.”

She brought up her hand to shade her eyes.

“They told me you’d gone,” he said.

“I have gone. I’ve come back for Martha Lovely.”

They stared at each other. The silence was sweet and empty. He looked down at the tripod he held in his hands, folded it and laid it on top of a wooden case standing by the door.

“I owe you an apology, Mrs. Palmer.”

“What for?”

“Something I thought was true, that I no longer believe.”

“I never saw the picture. The close-up one. I probably looked like a maniac.”

He frowned.

“No, you didn’t. You didn’t at all.”

Anna looked past him, into the fernery. The canvas background lay rolled up on a trestle; the stove was unlit. The carved chair had gone and the walls were dotted with the bright, unfolding skeletons of ferns.

“What are you doing here?”

“Packing up, Mrs. Palmer. Lake House is closing down. Abse lost his license and sold it to be turned into a school.”

“I know. Catherine visited me before she went abroad with her mother. I’ve been staying with my sister until I go north.”