A Dark Dividing (10 page)

And now I’m lying awake in the high, narrow bed in my own room and I can suddenly see that the nurses and the doctor, who were so emphatic about leaving me there on my own, had been more than half-hoping I would pick the cushion up and place it over the helpless little faces. Quick and clean and merciful. Except how could I
possibly
have murdered my babies? How could anyone?

Later
Have no idea yet how I am going to face Edward. All the recriminations: told you not to go racketing around Town all those months, told you to live quietly, even offered to rent a country house for a few weeks, but you always know best…

(Would Edward have wanted me to use that cushion tonight? If I believed that, I would have to leave him. But of course he would not have wanted it.)

But it’s not just Edward who has to be faced, there’s his mother as well, and oh God, how am I going to face Edward’s mother who never thought I was good enough to marry her son anyway, and who will now say, darkly, that she is not in the least bit surprised things have gone so disastrously wrong, what can you expect…

But I
will
cope and I
will
face Edward, and somehow I will face his mother as well.

4th January 1900
So. So after all, there is to be no coping, and there is no longer any need to worry about facing Edward, or even his mother.

They have died. My two beautiful scraps of humanity, Viola and Sorrel, who clung to one another so determinedly and who clung to my hands that night, have died.

They told me this morning, Dr Austin standing at the foot of my bed, Edward next to him, a nurse in attendance in case I succumbed to hysterics. Something about lungs not fully developed, something else about heart too weak to stand the strain.

It was Edward who said, Blessing in disguise. Of course it was.

But that was when I collapsed in floods of stupid helpless tears, and Edward had to be hustled out, red-faced and trying not to be angry at me for making a scene…

8th January
Edward suggests I stay away from funeral—everyone will understand, no one will expect it, and what if I start crying again, embarrassing for everyone, have I thought of that?

Yes, I have thought of it and I don’t care. Will be there if I have to be carried.

10th January
Day before funeral, and peculiar to be back at home. Curtains all closed at the front of the house, and Mrs Tigg alternating distractedly between emotional tearfulness and bustling culinary activity. ‘Oh, those blessed angels, madam, how can you bear it, but they say God takes the little children unto himself, and not for us to question—Now, I’ve ordered a nice ham to bake in time for the funeral, and what do you think about lobster salad as well?’

Maisie-the-daisie is round-eyed at the solemnity of everything, and scuttles out of the way if I enter a room. Mrs Tigg says she has taken up with the fishmonger’s boy, and fears the worst since he is a bit of a Lothario on the sly and Maisie a bit too easily impressed, if you know what I mean, madam.

We are going to have the baked ham and lobster for the wake (Maisie’s young man can deliver a couple of live ones on the morning), and Mrs Tigg will do a nice tureen of soup as well, since likely to be bitterly cold day, and you don’t want to catch your death of cold at the cemetery, madam, what with you not yet fully recovered from the birth.

Cannot help thinking that if I had been married to Floy we would have been helpless with grief in one another’s arms by now, and he would not have cared if I saw him cry, and perhaps he would have found something to read to me—some poem or sonnet or some fragment of philosophy that I might have clung to until I could drag my way back up into the light.

Question: Would it be easier to bear losing Viola and Sorrel with Floy at my side, and music and philosophy, and crying in his arms and all the rest, than with lobster salad and closed curtains, and Edward and his mother, and all the admonitions about, Please don’t make a scene at the church, Charlotte, and, I don’t think that outfit is really suitable for the service, do you?

Answer: No idea, but do know that Floy would not have cared if I had made fifty scenes at the church, in fact he would probably have joined in.

Am going to wear the black crêpe de chine with the bell-shaped skirt for the service. Very stylish, very
belle époque
. Edward can disapprove all he likes, and his mother can droop and drone over grave in her widow’s weeds and grisly mourning brooches until the Last Trump for all I care.

I will bid farewell to my babies with as much style as I can manage.

Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
12th January 1900

Twins’ funeral, and certainly the most dreadful day of my life.

Edward had not wanted me to go, of course, and his mother had not wanted me to go, either. Should I not be resting on my bed, especially since only twelve days since birth? Said I felt perfectly capable of attending my daughters’ funeral, and anyway, Chinese peasants in rice fields return to work within
hours
of giving birth. Was accused of having peculiar ideas and supporting socialism, in fact Edward’s mother would not be surprised to find I was an admirer of Keir Hardie and the Independent Labour Party, although in her view they will never amount to much.

Church was full, of course—mostly ghouls and snoopers as far as I could see—and Edward’s family out in gloomy force. His mother arrived late (suspect this was planned in order to create an effect), positively
enshrouded
in the weediest of black and exuding attar of roses. She walked sombrely to a seat, leaning heavily on ebony-tipped stick, clattering it on the marble floor as she went. (When did the old witch start using a walking stick? First time
I’ve
seen her with one.)

Edward had chosen the hymns—‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ and ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended’—and the vicar talked about the cruel taking of new lives, but pointed out that the ways of the Lord were mysterious and wonderful, which I thought unhelpful. Edward’s brother read a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson about the departed ones not being dead but only gone a few steps ahead, and waiting to meet their friends again face to face. Quite admire Stevenson, but found this monumentally inappropriate, given the circumstances.

Tiny coffin standing on flower-decked trestle at front of church.
Far
too elaborate, with brass handles and brass plate and polished mahogany, but of course it dominated the proceedings. I tried to hold on to that moment when the twins were only a few hours old, and when their tiny fingers curled around my finger—if I can keep that memory I can keep a little part of them with me for ever. But it was so difficult because I kept imagining them lying inside their coffin, still in that pitiful embrace. ‘In death they were not divided…’ That’s an uncomfortable quotation if ever there was one.

Wished Edward had consulted me about the funeral details, since would have preferred things very simple, with small posy of violas and wood sorrel on coffin instead of stupid pretentious hothouse lilies and white hyacinths. But I managed not to cry, which was one in the eye for Edward’s mother.

Followed the coffin down the aisle fairly composedly, with the organ playing Handel’s
Largo
and everyone walking after me. Edward v. solicitous, holding my arm, bending over to ask if I was all right every forty seconds, which was irritating.

And then, just as we were reaching the side door, which led out to the cemetery, and just as I was thinking, I’ve managed quite well, I haven’t broken down and at least nobody will be able to say I caused a scene, I caught sight of the man sitting at the back, in a corner of the church near to one of the soaring stone arches. He was not joining the exodus into the churchyard, and he was so quiet and still and so deeply in the shadow cast by the stone pillars that he ought to have been unobtrusive. He ought to have gone unnoticed, except that once I had seen him I found it impossible not to go on seeing him.

He looked like a tramp who had strayed into the church by mistake, or possibly an Irish tinker who had parked his gypsy caravan outside for a moment. He was watching me, and the deep shadow was suddenly pierced by a shaft of sunlight that came in through the stained-glass window above him. With the harlequin-patterned light on him the tramp-image vanished and he looked more like a cross between one of the early Christian ascetics and the villain of a melodrama.

But he was neither, of course, and he was certainly not a tramp. And so far from taking part in villainous romances he was more likely to write them, and while he knew, in theory, about asceticism, he had never, to my knowledge, practised it.

The darling of the Bloomsbury set. The much-fêted, frequently copied, endlessly envied young man whose admirers said his prose was written with a pen of iron, the point dipped in diamonds, but whose detractors held that his work contained no more merit than the erratic, flickering-candleglow emotion of a dream-clouded mind.

Whatever the truth about him, today he looked what he was. Man of letters, Oxford and Winchester. Lunatic, lover and poet. And the dreams were not erratic at all, any more than they were drug-induced: the dreams were always with him, as much a part of him as the shape of his eyes or the way his hair grew. And there had been a time when he had pulled me into those dreams with him and when I had wanted nothing more than to stay in his dreams.

He could never be unobtrusive, and he could never go unnoticed, no matter the company he was in.

Philip Fleury. Floy.

It simply had not occurred to me that he would walk into the church, and join in the service, as composedly as a curious cat, but it was what he had done.

I managed a half-nod of acknowledgement, and then we were outside, Handel’s music trickling after us, the rain that ought to have acted as background to the service starting in earnest at last, sliding relentlessly down from suddenly leaden skies, dripping from the trees and plunging the churchyard into a dark dismality, depressingly reminiscent of every elegy ever penned by every mournful romantic. The gravestones jutted up like jagged grey teeth, shiny with rain except the really old ones, which were weather-scarred and crusted with moss.

Tried to focus on the twins again, but all through the brief burial I was dreadfully aware of Floy standing a little way off beneath one of the old trees, his coat collar turned up, the rain misting his black hair.

Later
Extraordinary to discover the truth of the old adage that helping with someone else’s troubles takes your mind off your own.

The wake, which has just dispersed, was as dismal a gathering as any I ever attended, despite slightly overeager, goodwill-to-all-men that pervades any after-funeral assembly. Edward’s aunts clustered in corners, jet-beaded bonnets busily nodding, discussing suitable inscriptions for the gravestone. Someone was suggesting ‘Not dead but only sleepeth’, and when I said I could not imagine a grislier inscription for a gravestone they looked at me with shock, and then with a kind of tolerant pity. Poor Charlotte, the tragedy, you know. Would not be surprised if it had affected her mind.

Was just going along to scullery to make sure Mrs Tigg coping with things (lobster salad was being particularly well received), when heard Maisie in downstairs lavatory near back stairway, retching her poor little heart out.

It’s the fishmonger’s boy who’s the culprit, of course, and from the sound of it he never had any intention of marrying her. Poor little daisie, she gasped out the sorry tale between bouts of sickness and tearful apologies, and please not to tell anyone, mum, especially not the master, him being so particular.

To me, the saddest part of the whole thing is that the poor creature doesn’t even seem to have derived any pleasure from the act, in fact, am not even sure if she realizes exactly what caused the conception. Gather it happened one night after he saw her home from the Girls’ Friendly Society, and she succumbed to his blandishments up against the scullery wall (NB. v. unromantic for them both; virginity should always be given up in beautiful setting and after appropriate and not-too-vehement rebuffs, and
not
yielded messily and awkwardly within sound and scent of Mrs Tigg’s preparations for tomorrow’s Sunday roast beef).

But at least this has turned my thoughts in another direction, since am determined Maisie not going to be thrown out on to the streets by Edward spouting righteous Victorian rodomontade about, Never darken these doors again, and, Take your shame and leave my house, you strumpet. This is the twentieth century, for goodness’ sake, and Maisie-the-daisie not some rapacious Piccadilly street-walker, or even one of those saucy baggages who entertain parties of gentlemen in smoking rooms! Would not mind betting that Edward knows more about
those
ladies than he has ever let on! But the behaviour of his own household must be irreproachable, of course, and would not put it past him to summon up the smug moral rectitude of the eighties, and throw the daisie out into the storm.

So have told her not to worry, we will work something out, and have now decided that best plan will be for me to go on long visit to my family, and take the daisie with me. Edward has already said I ought to have a holiday, and why not go away for a few weeks—South of France or Kitzbühel very nice at this time of year, and Thos. Cook could make all the arrangements. But Shropshire and the Welsh Marches are very nice at any time of year—even now, with snow frosting the meadows and sharpening the leafless trees—and Weston Fferna sufficient of a backwater that even Edward’s mother cannot accuse me of
racketing
.

More to the point, there is a place just outside Weston Fferna called Mortmain House that acts as hospital and orphanage, and where girls in Maisie’s condition can have their babies discreetly and (I hope) without an atmosphere of disapproval, and can then leave child to be brought up by Mortmain Trust.

There are four or five months to the birth as far as I can make out, and it should be easy enough to find her some sort of temporary work in the area (large farming community there, so always glad of honest, hard-working girls for kitchens and dairies), and then explain to household on return to London that she has taken a new post in Shropshire. Quite understand that she will hate the idea of leaving child behind and entirely sympathize but cannot see that she has any other choice—she is much too young to pose as a widow, and (have to say it) not really sufficiently bright to lie convincingly about husband killed at Mafeking or Ladysmith. Not sure she would even know where Mafeking or Ladysmith are anyway.

So tomorrow morning I shall tell Edward that I am taking his advice, and am going to Weston Fferna for a few weeks, taking Maisie with me.

Question: Am I doing all this because by saving Maisie’s baby and giving Maisie some kind of new life, I believe I am in some way redressing the balance on what happened to Viola and Sorrel?

Answer: Yes, perhaps.

Conclusion: Does it matter, anyway?