Bellman & Black (17 page)

He noted everything. He made lists and timetables in his calfskin notebook. He checked off every opening of bladder and bowel. Nothing happened in the sickroom without his making a record of it in his book.

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it. They struggled, shrank, agonized.

William scrutinized his notes for patterns, indicators of improvement. Tentatively he altered timings, dosages. Was there an improvement now? Was it too soon to judge?

When he wasn’t in the sickroom he was in and out of every room in the house. What things had belonged to Lucy? What toys had she played with? What blankets had she used? What cushion had she rested on?

“Burn it!”

They lit a great bonfire in the garden that never went out, for there was always something remembered that had to be burned. The boys’ clothes. Their books. Their mattresses. And what had he worn, when he kissed and cuddled them? Burn it! And Rose, what had she worn? Every room in the house was gone through, every cupboard and every drawer examined; this doll and this hat and this ribbon, “Burn it! Burn it all!”

In his sons’ bedroom he pulled boxes from under a bed. Buried beneath books and toys and balls, all the beloved junk of a boy’s life, a catapult. He hurled it from the bedroom window to the astounded gardener, stoking the flames outside.

“BURN IT!”

Shaking, he stood, hands on the window frame, getting his breath back. When he could breathe again, he went back to the sickroom, and took up his calfskin notebook.

First you had to watch. Only by watching could you understand. Only when you understood could you intervene. Sickness was a mechanism like any other. Close observation would always suffice to elucidate the workings. It was just a matter of time.

William went to bury Lucy. The service was short; it had to be: there were too many to be buried. The stranger in black bowed to him sympathetically, but William barely registered him. He went home to learn that his boys had died, within a few minutes of each other.

Rose, praying at their bedside, looked up at him with overbright eyes, a flush on her throat.

“My love,” he told her, “you are sick.”

“You had better fetch the scissors, then.”

She unpinned her hair. She drew the scissors out of their leather sheath and cut her hair. She threw it on the fire and went to bed.

A day later William left Rose in the care of Mrs. Lane to attend the funeral of his sons. It was a strange funeral. There were many dead. The service was not only for Paul and Phillip, but for others too, people William knew of, had heard of. All must be buried today, for tomorrow there would be more. The mourners were sparse: people were sick themselves, or nursing the sick, or afraid of contamination. The men who stood and sat and prayed—there was no singing, for there was no choir and no heart for song—mourned separately and apart, this one for his wife, that one for his brother, this other for his child. They offered each other no comfort, each needed what little he had for himself. Someone will be making a fortune out of black crepe, he reflected, dismally.

William lost himself in complicated calculations. What was the measurement for bereavement? How to count, weigh, evaluate grief? He had enjoyed good luck in the past, he was the first to admit it. He had not known it, but there was a price to pay. He was paying it now. Somewhere, he calculated, a fair-minded spirit of Justice, seeing that things were now—what? equal?—would start sending good luck again. A dark calculation worked itself out on the abacus in his heart: Lucy was lost, his two sons were lost. That made three. He still had a wife and a daughter. It did not seem unreasonable to expect to keep them. A sixty-forty split. It was a generous deal to the other party. Sixty-forty. Too good to refuse. There was a solace in numbers.

In the graveyard, William was not at all surprised to see the man in black. For all the curious depth of his funeral garb, he did not look like someone bereaved. He did not look as though his wife were agonizing
at home. He lacked the haggard air of a man who has spent days at the bedside of a dying child. Why had he come, then? Was it for William he was there? The man met William’s eyes with the intimacy of the very well acquainted. It was too much for William, who today had no strength to resist the man’s certainty. He nodded at him. The fellow returned his acknowledgment with an expression of intently sad solicitude.

Sixty-forty?

Know your opponent, that is the secret of successful negotiation. What if his negotiations came to nought? William felt the ground suddenly unstable beneath his feet.

When one thing fails, try another. There is always a way.

He took a breath. Recovered himself.

He returned to the sickbed, to the wrapping of cool cloths around Rose’s skull, the application of nitrate of silver, the spooning of broth, the warming footbaths, the mixing of aloes and salts with treacle . . . He was learning his way around this sickness. Observe. Understand. Intervene. He would find the way.

·  ·  ·

William did not go to bed during these times and he did not properly sleep. But sometimes at Rose’s bedside, between one spell of convulsions and the next, William drowsed lightly in his chair. Something broke into one such reverie and he looked about him for a clue. All was as it had been in the sickroom. There was no significant change.

Then he realized: the acrid smell was coming from the corridor. Elsewhere in the house someone was burning hair.

He rose in alarm and ran to Dora.

She stood in a white nightdress, by the fireside of her bedroom. A small, neat fire: she must have just lit it herself. She was slicing the blades through her long, dark hair and dropping the locks into the fire.

“Did it wake you?” she said. “It makes such a ghastly smell. Shall I lie down in my own room? Or would the boys’ room be more convenient? All the nursing things are there.”

He took the scissors from her hand. Her pretty face looked peculiar. Shorn on one side only, a red flush over her throat and neck. “There’s no need to cut it,” he said. “I can’t see that it makes any difference.”

“Oh. Well, I’ve started now. I may as well go on.”

He cut it for her, dropping the locks into the fire and weeping at the whiteness of her scalp. When he moved from the back to the side and was in front of her again, her gaze was steady. She smiled at him, a small, apologetic smile.

O
n the day of Rose’s funeral, William’s state of mind was not improved by the presence of the stranger. He was annoyed when the man stepped back courteously as he approached the church, and again afterward, on finding him outside, by the graveside. He was looking around, with all the pleasure of a satisfied picnicker on a summer afternoon.

As the vicar spoke the words that laid his wife to rest, the fellow made himself scarce, which was a relief, but then, when William was handed the trowel to cast the first earth onto the coffin, he caught sight of him again. Blow me if he hadn’t sidled up, next to Ned on the opposite side of the grave. What nerve! There he stood, surveying the scene as if it were nothing but a play, put on for his own entertainment. Harassment, that’s what it was!

William would have liked to confront the man, have it out with him, but today was not the day. He resolved to ignore it. But as if he knew what was in William’s thoughts, the fellow turned to look directly at William. He even nodded, in a plain, how-d’you-do sort of way and with a jerk of the head toward the gate seemed to indicate that he’d like to catch William later, have a word. William lifted the trowel and prepared to hurl the earth straight over the mouth of the grave and into the despicably agreeable face of the man in black. But the man slipped swiftly sideways, ducked out of view, and there was only Ned, looking alarmed.

William flicked the earth into the grave and walked quickly away.

That was that. He had buried his wife. He had buried three of his children. His task now was to go home and help his fourth and last child to die.

“She knows no one now,” Mrs. Lane told him at the door to the sickroom.

Nothing could now surprise him at the deathbed. All was as it had been before. He spoke to his child and observed that she appeared not to know him. Mrs. Lane pressed a cool cloth to Dora’s forehead from time to time; she no longer murmured the endearments that the girl could not hear. The minutes stretched out, and he measured the empty length of every long second that filed past him. Mrs. Lane prayed. He murmured Amen.

Neither of them suffered the hope that had burdened them the first times. There was still the habit of protest inside him, though it was much weakened. The remnant of the father he had once been still raged at the taking of his child, but he felt it as an empty mansion feels the anger of a fly against a window. Death had him in harness. He lumbered in his servitude.

As for Dora, it was quite normal that Bellman did not recognize the figure in the bed. Hair shorn, pale skin stretched tightly over the sharp bridge of her nose, sunken eyes: this child in the bed seemed quite unrelated to his curly-haired and pink-cheeked girl of a fortnight ago. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing was hoarse and painful. Already she more than half belonged to another realm.

Bellman was prepared. Each stage of this illness he recognized; each moment told him what the next would be. Minute by minute, hour after hour, he had stood like this, feet planted on the limewashed floors, watching his children die. He knew the process so well he could foresee each step of the descent. And now a great gasp, he predicted, and the moribund gave a great gasp. And now the start of the great convulsions, and the convulsions came. Death had him so well trained that he could have overseen the work in her place. He was himself a kind of conductor,
knowing all the movements, all the rhythms, the arpeggios, and the cadences of its melody.

Now, he assessed Dora and realized that the end was still a long way off. Ten hours. Twelve more likely.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Mrs. Lane suggested. “You look done in.”

He left the sickroom and went to his own bedroom. Rose’s dress was at the end of the bed, where she had left it after taking it off to die. It was made of sturdy stuff that held a bosomy shape even when she was not in it. When he reached for it, the fabric collapsed and Rose’s bosom exhaled its last breath. He turned his back. He could not sleep here. He could not sleep at all.

He went to the Red Lion.

·  ·  ·

Poll greeted him and poured a jug of cider without a reference to either the old days or the new one. He sat quietly and drank one glass after another. He drank methodically, expecting nothing from it. The cider obscured the sharper details of his grief, without denting the fearfulness of its bleakness.

At a certain point of drunkenness William understood a good many things that had evaded him previously. The world, the universe, God too, if there was one, were ranged against mankind. From this newly unveiled vantage point he saw that his old good fortune was a cruel joke: encourage a man to think he is lucky all the better to bring him down afterward. He realized his essential smallness, the vanity of his efforts to control his fate. He, William Bellman, master of the mill, was nothing. All these years he had believed in his own power, not once recognizing the presence of the vast rival who could crush him in a day, if it once chose to. His happiness and his success, which he had taken to be solid things, hewn out of his own effort and talent, had proved as fragile as a dandelion clock; all it took was for this unsuspected competitor to release his breath and the seedhead disappeared. Why, he wondered,
had he never known? He, who knew everything? What had kept him in ignorance all these years?

He drank. The clarity of his thinking on this new topic was dazzling to him, but his head dropped lower and lower until it rested on his arms on the table and eventually he snored.

Poll shook him awake. She heaved him to his feet and got him to the door. “Home, William Bellman. It is not a good place but it is the only place. Go there.”

Outside it was dark. He did not know whether it was cold, because the alcohol had isolated his body and filled it with an artificial trembling warmth. Stumbling in the dark he went. He did not know where he was going but put one foot in front of the other, because if he stayed still his agony would settle all the more heavily on him. All his adult life he had lived with a purpose. His every minute had been actively spent with some object in mind. Now he sought to know what his purpose was. There was nothing for him to do at home. All that could be done was being done. He was superfluous there. He was not wanted at the mill. His tragic presence cast a shadow over the hands. They feared him, because they feared what had happened to his family. Where then?

There was a part of Bellman’s mind that functioned automatically to solve problems. Whether it was habit, self-training, or just a characteristic he had been born with, he couldn’t say. It functioned so efficiently that he never needed to set it into action, for it was up and running the moment he wanted it. In fact, it was so fast that it often provided solutions before he’d even realized he had a problem. It ran like clockwork, ticking routinely in the back of his mind, while the front dealt with the immediate, the superficial, the mundane. This evening he observed that this engine in his mind was running through a number of options for dealing with a powerful rival.