“Why not? Life isn’t ordinary. It is extraordinary. I’ve always believed that.”
“Truly, Wexton?”
“Of course. But then I don’t like the prosaic—never did. It’s why I write poetry, not prose.”
Having made this pronouncement, he settled himself in a chair by the fire. He lit one of Steenie’s aromatic cigarettes. He gave every appearance of an elderly man preparing for a pleasant midmorning doze.
I returned to Constance, my mother, and my father: a love triangle, at Winterscombe.
When I was a child, my father’s recovery was my favorite bedtime story. “Please,” I would say to my mother, “tell it to me again.” And she would: She would tell me about the caves, and her certainty that once she found the right one, she would also find Acland. She would tell me about the journey back to England, the long months in which Acland’s illness seemed incurable, and the night when, finally, he spoke. I knew what came next, of course—they married—and I knew what happened subsequently: They lived happily ever after, as people do in the best stories.
I can’t remember how old I was when I first realized that there was another part of this story, a part my mother left out.
Certainly, by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I understood that as far as the credit for my father’s recovery went, people were divided in their verdict.
Great Aunt Maud, for instance, definite in all things, was most definite in this, no half-shadings: My mother nursed my father back to health. She was Acland’s good angel, Maud would declare, and she brought him back from his underworld with the undramatic gifts of common sense, coddled eggs, fresh air, and serenity.
Wexton, too, a more reliable witness, supported Jane. He would bring out that Episcopalian word
grace
to bolster his argument. Steenie, on the other hand, was all for Constance. Constance, I learned, had also visited Acland on the day of his recovery: Constance, according to Steenie, was the dark angel who nipped in between my father and death. My uncle Steenie had had a classical education. In his—more lurid—version of events, Acland had already been rowed across the Styx; he shook hands with Hades. To spirit someone back from that place, Steenie claimed, required something a great deal more dramatic than common sense, or even love: It required daring, guile, bravado, and excess. All these qualities, Steenie argued, Constance possessed—in trumps.
“Make no mistake,” he would cry, on his second bottle of Bollinger. “Constance shocked him back to life. I don’t know how, but she did it!”
Steenie would wink when he said this. I disliked that wink—it made me nervous. Inevitably, I asked Constance to explain, and—equally inevitably—she never did. “Me—and a little black magic,” she would always say, then change the subject.
Her journals were less reticent. There in front of me, blow by blow as it were, were all the details of Constance’s resuscitation process. As with much of what she wrote, they had a dreamlike clarity. I think I believed them then; I think I believe them still. One thing is important: Constance and my mother saw Acland on the same day, within a few hours of each other. Dark angel or not, Constance was a fast operator. Two days after she wrote the entry in her journals that Wexton had just read, her chance came: Jane left Winterscombe to spend the day in London.
Two women; two accounts; two diaries on the table in front of me. My mother was good, also an innocent—and one of the penalties of innocence can be blindness. Before she left for London, Jane asked Constance to spend a little time with Acland in the course of the day. She did not like him left alone for long periods. She suggested Constance might read to him. She had believed Constance disliked sickrooms and expected reluctance.
But I misjudged her,
she wrote:
Constance can be kind. She agreed without hesitation.
Jane had two reasons for this visit to London: She was to see Jenna, and then, before catching her train back, she was to see Maud. The first of these visits was urgent: Jane was anxious for Jenna, who had lost her baby; Jenna, whose health was poor.
There was, however, another reason for this journey, although it was one she was reluctant to admit. It would be the first time she had left Acland’s side since she brought him back from Étaples, and she needed that day’s space; she hungered for it.
Acland’s condition was almost unchanged. His physical health might have improved—he ate, provided he was left alone to do so; he slept, after a fashion; he consented to be moved, from a bed to a wheelchair—but these were the limits of his cooperation. He still looked through, rather than at. He could not be cajoled, or tricked, into speech—although he screamed words that were recognizable when he had nightmares.
At this compromise, this half-life, Jane rebelled. She could feel the rebellion drumming away at the back of her mind when she boarded the London train. It churned with the revolution of the train’s wheels, a gathering and metallic momentum, more insistent with each mile that passed. Jane argued with herself. She reminded herself of all the appropriate medical and ethical points, one, two, three, four: It took time for a man’s mind to heal; it required patience, tenacity, perseverance, and faith. These it was her wish, and her duty, to provide. She looked out the window. Fields raced; hedges sped. She rebelled against such pieties. There it was, at the back of her mind. What Acland did was
wrong.
This she would not confront—yet. She would not deny it either. She would let it rest, there at the back of her mind, and as the day passed, she would travel toward it. By the end of the day, she might be ready for the confrontation. She believed this; it gave her an odd sense of freedom and exhilaration. She alighted at Paddington; she took a taxicab to Waterloo; she walked through mean streets, past the church where Jenna had been married, past the cemetery where her baby son was buried. Rebellion crept up on her. She lifted her face to the city sun. She thought,
close, close, close.
Six weeks after the birth of her baby, while Jane was still in France, Jenna, in need of money, had taken work. The job, although Jenna did not know that, had been procured for her by the lawyer Solomons, who had spoken to Montague Stern. Mrs. Tubbs was left to look after the child. A reluctant Jenna joined Florence Tubbs at Stern’s munitions works—a well-paid position, much sought-after. Jenna received twenty-four shillings a week; she packed shells.
This work had left its mark upon her. One of the chemicals used in the shells was tetrachloride. Handling it produced side effects in the women at the works, including dizziness and acute nausea. It also affected the skin, turning it a jaundiced color; the shell-packers, for this reason, were nicknamed “canaries.”
The Jenna who opened the door to Jane Conyngham that October morning was greatly changed: Poverty and grief had aged her; her youth had gone.
“Please.” She took Jane’s hand, then pulled a shawl about her shoulders. “I want to go straight there. I want you to see it. It’s so fine. I could never have … I’m grateful.”
She began to walk very fast, catching Jane by the arm and pulling her along beside her. She turned down first one side street and then another. They came to a lodge and a pair of tall iron gates. These Jenna leaned against before starting to walk once more, even faster this time, so Jane half-ran to keep up with her.
It was a large cemetery, one of the largest in South London, and it is there still. You could retrace the path Jenna took that day, even now: past the stone angels, the carved urns, the stone catafalques of the more prosperous dead, to the smaller, more closely packed tombstones of the poor.
Here, in a corner shaded by a yew, Jenna paused. There, up against the wall of the graveyard, overgrown with brambles and rank grass, was a line of small wooden crosses no more than eight inches high, some leaning at an angle, some bare of all inscription, some inked with initials and dates already fading from sun and rain. These, too, are still there, although they are very overgrown now, and most of the crosses have rotted. They were the paupers’ graves. Jenna looked at them with indignation.
“He was a lovely boy. I was proud of him. I didn’t want him lying there. I hate those graves. I couldn’t have rested, not if he’d gone there. The money you gave me—you see, look. It’s Welsh slate. It takes the carving well, the man told me.”
She turned and drew Jane back, beneath the yew. There was a small mound, newly turfed, a stone vase containing violets, and a tombstone of blue slate. It bore the name Edgar—no surname—and the dates of the baby’s birth and death. Beneath it was the inscription: MUCH LOVED AND MUCH MISSED BY HIS FATHER AND HIS MOTHER. REST IN PEACE.
The letters curled across the slate. A most violent anger and pity rose up in Jane’s mind. Money could do this much, she said to herself; money could do this little.
“I wish you’d seen him,” Jenna went on. “I understand. I know it wasn’t easy for you to come, and then, when he was ill, it was very quick. He was a fine baby—everyone said. He never cried. He’d grasp my finger—he could hold on so tight! And he’d smile. He knew it was me, when I came back from work. I’d take him in my arms, and … I think maybe he should have cried more. Babies do. Maybe I should’ve known, when he was so quiet. Maybe he wasn’t very strong, right from the first. He took his milk, though—he always took that, right up till the day before. And then we thought it was just a cold—just a cold, nothing serious. The house is damp, you see, and we couldn’t always get coal. Florrie ran for the doctor, but he was busy, and so I wrapped Edgar up in this shawl, and I ran with him down to the clinic. It’s only five streets away, and I ran as fast as could be, but it was raining, and it was getting dark. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have stayed in. And waited. But his mouth was blue. He couldn’t breathe. I don’t think he could breathe—so I thought I must. He still felt warm—when I reached the clinic, he still felt warm. But he’d gone. He must have gone then—when I was running. And I didn’t even know. I didn’t … I would have liked to … speak to him. Kiss him perhaps. Just one last time. I’m sorry. This helps—it does help. To know he’s here, with a proper stone, that it’s done right. I do thank you for that. It’s just … I’ll be all right again. In a moment. Yes. Yes. You’re very good.”
Jenna knelt. She bent her head. Her body shook as she wept. Jane remained standing. It had begun to rain, a fine drizzle from a sky pale as milk. The rain spotted the leather of her gloves. She looked down at these gloves, which were modest, plain, serviceable kid. One pair of these ordinary gloves cost two weeks of Jenna’s wages. Jane regarded them. They looked unjust.
After a while, with a sudden impatient gesture, she pulled the gloves off and screwed them into a ball. She threw them down into the long grass. She removed her hat also and threw that down too. She lifted her face and her hair to the rain; she took in deep breaths of the damp and sooty air. She thought of all her estates, of her houses, of her money, which lay in a bank, and her investments. Meaningless stupid things, as unneeded as those gloves.
With the rain on her face, and Jenna’s stooped figure at her feet, she listed one last time all the factors that had caused her to delay: convention, and her own timidity; Boy; then nursing; then, finally, Acland.
At this, the rebellion sensed upon the train came back to her. She ran to meet it; it flooded her mind with a light of the most brilliant intensity. She shook back her wet clipped hair and felt its assurance. Her hands trembled a little with the strength of the emotion welling up in her, and she pressed them tight together, so the knuckles showed white. She bent down and helped Jenna to her feet. She put her arm around her shoulders and walked back with her, more slowly this time, to the house.
She stayed with Jenna two hours; then, as promised, she crossed the river to see Maud. The time seemed to Jane both very slow and very fast. It was necessary to pass through it; she was also impatient to reach the event that lay on its other side.
My great-aunt Maud was fretful; deserted by several friends, including Lady Cunard, she was perhaps lonely.
“Do you know the latest thing?” she asked over tea, in a tone nicely balanced between disdain and outrage. “These paintings”—she waved her hands at the walls, at the pictures Constance had once found it so useful to admire—“they were a gift, and now it seems
she
would like them returned. Quick-smart. I have been sent, if you please, a list.”
This, from Maud—who was usually very careful of her own dignity, who considered it ill-bred to exhibit either pain or jealousy—was a major indiscretion. She perhaps regretted it almost at once, for having flapped the offending letter, she pushed it aside. To Maud’s great surprise, Jane did not change the subject, or exhibit tact. Instead she sprang to her feet, and in the most impassioned way she clasped her hands together and looked at Maud with flushed cheeks.
“Oh, but don’t you see?” she cried, in what seemed to Maud the most immoderate tones. “That’s exactly what you should do. Send them back. Send it all back—you would feel so much freer, so much better!”
“My dear. What a delightful notion. I could live like a gypsy. Of course.”
Maud—aware that if all Stern’s gifts were returned, as recommended, she would be without a roof over her head—poured tea and changed the subject. She found herself a little irritated with Jane, who was displaying a romanticism and an emotionalism that were most unexpected.
“You’ve been working too hard, my dear,” she said in a reproving way, when Jane took her leave. “Your eyes look very bright, and you are still quite flushed. Do you think you could have a fever?”
“No,” Jane replied, in a way Maud found peremptory. She took Maud’s hand and, smiling, pressed it against her forehead, which indeed felt cool.
“It was good of you to come, Jane. I’ll remember what you said …”
Maud felt quite at a loss. Her eye strayed to the cool brown lines of a Cezanne landscape, which hung close to the door. From certain angles it represented a place; from others, it took on an abstraction Maud had never liked. She thought about these paintings. She thought about Montague Stern, whom she missed greatly.