The Seance (2 page)

I was, I think, about six or seven years old when it first occurred to me that I too might have been a foundling. It would explain why we lived so close to the Hospital; we had lived in the country before Alma was born, though
I had only dim memories of that time, and Annie could not help, because she had come to us after we moved to London. Of course I might have been another sort of foundling; Annie had told me that there were other hospitals (and looked at me rather strangely when I asked if we might visit them). I had heard, too, of infants being left on doorsteps in baskets; I might have been one of those. Perhaps Mama had had other children who had died and never been spoken of; or else she had been barren, like Abraham’s wife Sarah, and had taken me in as a foundling and decided to keep me. And then the Lord had given her Alma . . . though that made it doubly hard to understand why, if He was a kind and loving God as Mr Halstead insisted in his sermons, He had taken her away again so soon. Had He done it to test Mama’s faith, as He had tested Job’s? ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord hath taken away,’ Job had said. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

I could not understand it, but nevertheless the suspicion took root and grew. It explained why Mama had loved Alma so much more than me, and why I was never any comfort to her, and even why, as I sometimes guiltily suspected, I did not love her as much as I ought to. Though I prayed constantly for her to be happy again, I dreaded being alone with her in the dark drawing-room where she passed her days. I would sit on the sofa beside her, picking at my work or pretending to read, feeling as if a leaden band was slowly tightening around my chest, repeating silently to myself, I am a foundling, she is not my mother; I am a foundling, she is not my mother, until I was allowed to leave; and then I would reproach myself bitterly for want of sympathy. Indeed everything I felt for my mother was compounded of guilt; even guilt at being alive at all, for I knew that she would far rather I had died and Alma had lived. But at least she had not given me back to the Hospital, and since she and Papa had evidently resolved not to tell me that I was a foundling, I knew it would be wrong to ask them.

I tried in all sorts of ways to approach the question with Annie, but somehow she never seemed to take the hint, and the more I tried to steer our talk towards foundlings, the more she seemed to veer away, until without anything being said we had ceased to pass the Hospital on our
walks: it was always ‘next week’ or ‘another day’. I once asked her whether she thought it was my fault Alma had died, and was frightened by the vehemence of her denial; she asked me quite fiercely who had put such an idea into my head. And what if Mama and Papa had not told her the truth about me? She would think me wicked for imagining such a thing; and besides, I was never quite certain how far I believed it myself.

So long as I had Annie, there was always something to look forward to each day. She had friends who were nurses who would bring their children to play in the square, and I would join in their games and run about, and laugh, and forget about being a foundling. But listening to their talk of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and cousins and grandmothers reminded me that I had never seen any of my own relations. As I grew older, I learned that Papa had a widowed sister in Cambridge, who did not visit because Mama was not well enough, and that Mama had a younger brother called Frederick, whom she had not seen for many years. I had no living grandparents, because Papa and Mama had been quite old when they married; Mama’s father had been ill for a long time, and she had had to stay at home and look after him until she was almost forty.

It never occurred to me that Annie and I would not continue thus indefinitely. But when I was eight years old, she took me into her own room and sat me down on her bed, and put her arms around me and told me that I would soon be going to Miss Hale’s day school, which was only a short walk from our house. She was trying to make it sound like a treat, but I could hear the sadness in her voice. And then she confessed that she was leaving us; Papa had decided that I had grown too old for a nurse, and that Violet the maid could look after me from now on. I did not like Violet, who was fat, and had cold hands, and smelt like washing which had been left too long in the basket. In vain I pleaded with Papa to let Annie stay; we could not afford to keep her, he said,
with Miss Hale’s fees to think of. I told him I did not want to go to school, and could learn everything I needed from books, and then Annie would not have to go; but that would not do either. If I stayed at home I would need a governess, which would be even more expensive; and no, Annie could not be my governess because she knew nothing of French, or history, or geography, or any of the things that I would learn at school.

Though I went to Miss Hale’s resolved to hate everything about it, I was unprepared for the sheer tedium of the classroom. My reading at home had never been supervised, for Annie knew nothing of books and could scarcely construe a primer. Papa kept his study locked, but not the library next door, a room no larger than a bedchamber, but to me a treasure-house to which I was tacitly admitted, so long as every volume was restored to its exact place before he came home. And so I was quite accustomed to reading books I scarcely understood, puzzling out the sounds and meanings of unfamiliar words with the help of Dr Johnson’s dictionary. Whereas at school everything had to be learned by rote, except for the endless sums in arithmetic, which I found pointless as well as baffling. And again, with the other girls in my form, I was acutely aware of my lack of brothers and sisters and relations; I had nothing to talk about but the books I was reading, and I soon discovered that a premature acquaintance with the works of Shelley and Byron was not something to boast of.

Yet for all the tedium, Miss Hale’s became a respite, of sorts, from the darkness which had engulfed my mother. Instead of tea with Annie in the nursery, I had now to join Mama at the dining-table and make effortful conversation – mostly a recital of what I had learned at school that day. And then we would sit silently in the drawing-room, Mama stitching mechanically or staring vacantly into the fire while I picked at my own work and listened to the heavy ticking of the mantel clock, counting the quarter-hours until I could escape to my bed in the attic, where I would read for as long as my candle lasted.

In my second year at Miss Hale’s I won a prize for recitation, a book of Greek myths with wonderful pictures. The stories I liked best were those of Theseus and Ariadne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and especially Persephone in the Underworld. Anything to do with the Underworld fascinated me – I used to imagine that it was just under the kitchen floor, and that I would find steps going down to it if I were only strong enough to lift up one of the flagstones. I had a seashell in which I could hear the sound of the sea, which had always comforted me; I would read my book and gaze at the pictures, listening to the sea, and make up my own stories of Persephone in Hades. Six pomegranate seeds did not seem very much of a sin; later I learned from Papa that it was really a story about the seasons, seeds waiting underground for spring to arrive – a clever man at Cambridge had said so – but this seemed so dull and trite, and left out everything interesting, Charon the ferryman and Cerberus with his three heads, and Hades with his helmet of invisibility, in which he could go about the upper world unseen. I asked Papa if the clever man thought the same about Eurydice, but apparently the clever man had not yet made up his mind.

Strangely, perhaps, the souls of the dead had no part in my Underworld. It was a mysterious place of tunnels and secrets, dark and sombre and yet somehow enthralling, in which I would be free to wander if only I could find the way in. I dreamed once of a cave in which I found an elaborately carved chest full of gold and silver and precious stones, from which light poured as you opened it, and this became part of my imagined underworld, together with its opposite, a plain wooden box which seemed empty at first, but as you watched, darkness began to well up like cold black mist and spill over the sides and across the rocky floor of the cave. There were the Plains of Asphodel, carpeted – or so I imagined them – with flowers of the richest purple, and when you were weary of tunnels you could ascend to the Elysian fields, where the sun always shines and music never ceases.

At home, however, my dead sister was always with us. Mama had made a shrine of Alma’s room, a small chamber opening off her own bedroom, keeping everything as if Alma might reappear at any moment: the sheet turned down, Alma’s favourite rag doll by the pillow, her nightgown laid out, a posy of flowers in a vase upon the dresser. The door was always open, but no one else was allowed across the threshold; Mama did all the dusting and polishing of it herself, which suited Violet well enough, for she was lazy and hated climbing stairs. Violet slept in the attic bedroom across the landing from mine; sometimes at night I would hear her grumbling and puffing on her way up to bed.

I wonder now why she stayed with us so long, for our house had so many stairs that you could scarcely go anywhere without climbing at least two flights. Apart from Violet, we had only Mrs Greaves the cook, who lived entirely in the basement. Mrs Greaves was a widow, grey-headed, stout and red-faced like Violet, but whereas Violet wobbled like a blancmange tied up in a cloth, Mrs Greaves was as round and solid as a barrel. Though the kitchen had only one grimy window into the area below the street, it was the brightest and warmest place in the house, for Mrs Greaves kept the gaslight turned as high as it would go, and in winter she would heap up the coals in the range until you could see the red glow pulsing through the cracks around the door. It was she who gave Violet her orders, which were carried out slowly and sullenly, but obeyed nonetheless. There was no laundry; the linen was sent out to a laundress.

Outside of Alma’s room, Mama took no more interest in the housekeeping than in anything else, and I suppose that Papa either did not know what gas and coals ought to cost, or did not care so long as his serene existence was not disturbed. Mrs Greaves slept in a little room behind the pantry, opening on to a dank, high-walled courtyard. The dining- and drawing-rooms were on the ground floor; and Papa had the first floor to himself, with the library at the front, his study in the middle, then his bedroom, and a bathroom on the landing, so that there was no necessity for him to ascend any higher; at least, I had never seen him do
so. Mama’s and Alma’s rooms were on the next floor up, along with the room that had been Annie’s, and above them the attics. My own little room faced eastward, and often on wintry Sunday afternoons, I would climb into bed for warmth and try to lose myself in the sea of slate and blackened brickwork stretching away towards the great dome of St Paul’s, thinking of all the lives going on behind those endless walls.