Authors: Caro Peacock
‘I’d never be a burden on Tom, you know that.’
‘I’ve not been as much of a father to you as I should. But I have tried to give you the important things in life. Your education has been better than most young women’s. You speak French and German adequately and your musical taste is excellent.’
‘That reminds me, I’ve broken another guitar string.’ I was uneasy at hearing myself praised.
‘And we’ve travelled together. You’ve seen the glaciers of Mont Blanc at sunrise and the Roman Forum by moonlight.’
I was wonderfully fortunate, I knew that. When I was back with my father it was easy to forget the other times, lonely and homesick in a cold French convent, or boarded out with a series of more or less resentful aunts or cousins. It was almost possible, though nowhere near as easy, to forget the glint of my brother’s handkerchief waving from the rail of the ship as it left Gravesend to carry him away to India, and the widening gap of dark water.
‘Couldn’t we just go on as we are?’ I asked. ‘Tom will come back one day and I can keep house for him and you. Do I really need a husband?’
He became serious again. ‘The wish of my heart is to see you married to a man you can love and respect who values and cares for you.’
I watched the steam packet go out again, arching sparks from its funnel and trailing a smell of coal dust. In three hours or so it would be in Calais, then perhaps bringing my father back with it. Around noon I felt weary from my early start and went back to my room. I took off my dress and shoes, loosened my stays and laid down on the bed. I must have dozed because I woke with a start, hearing the landlord’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, saying my name.
‘Miss Liberty Lane? Don’t know about the Liberty, but she called herself Miss Lane, at any rate. Give it me and I’ll take it in to her.’
As his heavy footsteps came upstairs I pulled my dress on and did up some essential buttons, heart
thumping because either this was a message from my father or my aunt had tracked me after all. But as soon as the landlord handed me the note – adding his own greasy thumb-print – I knew it had nothing to do with Chalke Bissett. The handwriting was strong and sprawling, a man’s hand. The folded paper was sealed with a plain blob of red wax, and a wedge-shaped impression that might have been made with the end of a penknife, entirely anonymous. I broke the seal and read: …
take the liberty of addressing you with
distressing
…
‘Bad news, miss?’
The landlord was still in the room, his eyes hot and greedy. I gripped the edge of the wash-stand, shaking my head. I think I was acting on instinct only, the way a hurt deer runs.
‘I must go to Calais. When’s the next boat?’
‘Was your father a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England?’
The clergyman was plump and faded, wisps of feathery brown-grey hair trailing from a bald pate, deep creases of skin round his forehead and jaw giving him a weary look. I’d traced the address on the card I’d been given at the morgue to a terraced house in a side street, with a tarnished brass plate by the door:
Rev
.
Adolphus Bateman, MA (Oxon)
. This representative of the Anglican Church in the port of Calais was at least living in Christian poverty, if not charity. His skin creases had drawn into a scowl when I’d stood on his doorstep and explained my need. The scowl was still there as we talked in his uncomfortable parlour under framed engravings of Christ Church College and
Christ
and the Woman Taken in Adultery
. He smelled of wet
woollen clothes and old mouse droppings, familiar to me from enforced evensongs in country churches with various aunts. It was a late autumn English smell and quite how he’d contrived to keep it with him on a fine June morning in Calais was a mystery.
‘Yes, he was.’
I supposed that, back in his schooldays, my father would have gone through the usual rituals. There was no need to tell this clergyman about his frequently expressed view that the poets talked more sense about heaven and hell than the preachers ever did.
‘Half past three,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I shall arrange the interment for half past three. The Protestant chapel is at the far side of the burial ground. The total cost will be five pounds, sixteen shillings and four pence.’ Apparently mistaking my expression, he added impatiently, ‘That is the standard charge. There are the bearers and the gravediggers to be paid, as well as my own small emolument. I assume you would wish me to make all the arrangements?’
‘Yes, please.’
I took my purse out of my reticule and counted the money on to the faded crochet mat in the middle of the table: five bright sovereigns, sixteen shillings, four penny pieces. It left the little purse as floppy as the udder of a newly milked goat. I’d had to sell a gold locket belonging to my mother and my grandmother’s silver watch to pay for my journey. It had been a nightmare
within a nightmare, going round the streets of Dover trying to find a jeweller to give anything like a fair price for them, with the steam packet whistling from the harbour for last passengers. In normal times I’d have cried bitterly at parting with them but, turned hard by grief and need, I’d bargained like an old dame at market. As I stowed the purse away the clergyman asked, with just a touch of sympathy in his voice, ‘Have you no male relatives?’
‘A younger brother. He is in Bombay with the East India Company.’
I had a suspicion he intended to pray over me, so moved hastily on to the other thing I needed.
‘You must know the English community in Calais well.’ (He did not look as if he knew anything well, but a little flattery never hurts.) ‘Can you tell me if there are any particular places where they gather.’
‘The better sort come to the Protestant Church on Sunday mornings. For the ladies, the Misses Besswell run a charity knitting circle on Wednesday afternoons and there are also a series of evening subscription concerts organised by …’
I let him run on. I could not imagine my father or his friends at any event known to the Reverend Bateman.
I left the house, filling my lungs with the better smells outside – seaweed and fish, fresh baked bread and coffee. This reminded me that I had eaten and drunk nothing since the message had arrived, back in Dover.
I was almost scared of doing either. That message had divided my life into before and after, like a guillotine blade coming down. Everything I did now – eating, drinking, sleeping – was taking me further away from the time when my father had been living. I still couldn’t think of eating, not even a crumb, but the smell of coffee was seductive. I followed it round the corner and on to a small quay. It wasn’t part of the larger harbour where the channel packet came and went, more of a local affair for the fishermen. There were nets spread out on the pebbles, an old man sitting on a boulder and mending one of them, his bent bare toes twined in the net to keep it stretched, needle flashing through the meshes like a tiny agile fish. The coffee shop was no more than a booth with a counter made of driftwood planks, a stove behind it and a small skinny woman with a coffee pot. She poured, watched me drink, poured again, making no attempt to hide her curiosity.
‘Madame is thirsty?’
Very thirsty, I told her. It was a pleasure to be speaking French again.
‘Madame has arrived from England?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘A pleasant crossing?’
‘Not so bad, thank you.’
The sea had been calm at least. I’d stood at the rail all the way, willing the packet faster towards Calais but dreading to arrive.
‘Is madame staying in Calais for long?’
‘Not long, I think. But my plans are uncertain. Tell me, where do the English mostly stay these days?’
She named a few hotels: Quillac’s, Dessin’s, the Lion d’Argent, the London. I thanked her and walked around the town for a while, trying to get my courage up, past the open-fronted shops with their gleaming piles of mackerel, sole, whiting, white and orange scallops arranged in fans, stalls piled high with plump white asparagus from the inland farms, bunches of bright red radishes. At last I adjusted my bonnet using a dark window pane as my mirror, took a deep breath and tried the first hotel.
‘Excuse me for troubling you, monsieur, but I am looking for my father. He may have arrived in Calais some time ago, but I am not sure where he intended to stay.’
After the first few attempts I was able to give a description of my father without any trembling in my voice.
‘His name is Thomas Jacques Lane. In France he probably uses Jacques. Forty-six years old, speaks excellent French. Tall, with dark curling hair, a profile of some distinction and good teeth.’
But the answers from the hotels, whether given kindly or off-handedly, were all the same. No, madame, no English gentleman of that description.
It was midday before I came to the last of the big hotels. It was the largest one, newly built, close to the pier and the landing stage for the steam packet, with
a busy stableyard. Carriages were coming and going all the time, some of them with coats of arms on the doors and footmen in livery riding behind. It was so far from being a place where my father might have stayed that I almost decided not to try, but in the end I went up the steps into a foyer that was all false marble columns and velvet curtains, like a theatrical set, crowded with fashionably dressed people arriving or leaving.
I queued at the desk behind an English gentleman disputing his account. Clearly he was the kind of person who, if he arrived at heaven’s gateway, would expect to find St Peter speaking English and minding his manners. He was working his way through a bill several pages long, bullying the poor clerk and treating matters of a few francs as if there were thousands at stake. I had plenty of time to study him from the back. He was tall and strongly made, his shoulders broad, the neck above his white linen cravat red and wide as a farm labourer’s. His hair was so black that I suspected it might owe something to the bottles of potions kept by Parisian barbers. He spoke and carried himself like a man accustomed to having an audience and I imagined him as some rural chairman of the bench, sentencing poachers or trade unionists to transportation.
After a while my attention wandered to a young man and woman standing by a pillar and arguing. She was about my age, and beautiful. Her red-gold hair was piled up, with a few curled ringlets hanging down, and a little
hat that could only have come from Paris perched on top of it. She wore a rose-pink satin mantle with a square collar edged in darker pink velvet, pale pink silk stockings and pink suede shoes, also Parisian. The man with her was several years older, elegantly but not foppishly dressed in grey and black. He was tall and dark haired with a handsome face and a confident, rather cynical air. They might have been taken for husband and wife, except for the strong family resemblance in their fine dark eyes and broad brows. Except, too, for the way they were carrying on their argument. When a husband and wife disagree in public they do it in a stiff and secretive way, whispers, glances and half-turned shoulders. Brothers and sisters are different. They have been arguing from the nursery onwards and are not embarrassed about it. Although I loved Tom more than anybody in the world except my father, it was the arguments I missed almost as much as all the more gentle things. So it went to my heart to see the way the beautiful young woman frowned at her brother and how he smiled, stretched out a grey-gloved hand and pulled none too gently at one of her ringlets. She batted the hand away. He laughed, said something that was no doubt patronising and elder-brotherly.
‘Stephen, come here.’
The man disputing his bill turned and called across the foyer. I’d been wrong to think his black hair might be dyed because his eyebrows, which joined in a single bar over dark and angry eyes, were just as black. His
head could have modelled in outline for one of the Roman emperors with its great wedge of a nose and square jaw, but his lips were thin and drawn inward like a man sucking on something sour. He was looking at the brother and sister. As he turned back to the desk I saw them give each other that rueful grimace children exchange when in trouble with parents, their argument instantly forgotten in the face of a shared opponent. It had been a father’s command, although there was no obvious likeness between the two men. I watched as Stephen crossed the foyer, obediently but none too quickly.
‘Did you really order two bottles of claret on Sunday?’
I heard the older man’s impatient question, saw the younger one bending over the bill, but nothing after that because, shamingly, my eyes had blurred with tears. That look between brother and sister had caused it. I felt suddenly and desperately how I needed Tom and how far away he was. I ran behind one of the pillars to hide myself and bent over gasping as if somebody had punched me in the stomach, hands to my face, rocking backwards and forwards to try to ease the pain.
‘Is … is there anything wrong?’
A soft English voice, with the hint of a lisp. Through my fingers I saw pink satin, smelled perfume of roses. A gentle hand came down on my shoulder.
‘Are you ill? Perhaps if you sat down …’
I stammered that I was all right really. Just a … a sudden headache. She was so soft and kind that I had
to fight the temptation to lean on her and cry all over her rose mantle.
‘Oh, you poor darling. I suffer such headaches too. I have some powders in my room, if you’d let me …’
I straightened up, found my handkerchief and mopped my face.
‘No, it’s quite all right, thank you. I have … I have friends waiting outside. I am grateful for …’
And I simply fled, through the foyer, down the steps and out to the street. I couldn’t risk her kindness. It would break me down entirely.
I walked around until I’d composed myself, then began inquiring at the lodging houses and smaller, less expensive hostelries in the side streets. There was a different spirit to this part of the town, away from where the rich foreigners stayed. The narrow streets were shadowed, shutters closed, eyes looking out at me through doors that opened just a slit and then shut in my face. People here did not care for questions because Calais had so many secrets. Forty years ago those streets would have sheltered cloaked and hooded aristocrats, trying to escape from the guillotine, paying with their last jewels for the secrecy of the same brown-faced men who now looked at me with wary old eyes. Not much more than twenty years ago, in the late wars with Napoleon, spies from both sides would have come and gone there, buying more secrecy from the men of middle years who now leered from behind counters. Their many-times-great
grandfathers had probably taken money from spies watching King Henry’s army before Agincourt. Whatever had happened to my father was only the latest in a long line of things that were never to be mentioned. A few people opened their doors and were polite, but always the answer was the same. They regretted, madame, that they had knowledge of no such man.
And yet my father must have stayed somewhere, or at the very least drunk wine or coffee somewhere. In his last letter, written from Paris, he’d said he expected to be collecting me from Chalke Bissett in a week. Allow two days for travelling from Paris to Calais, one day for crossing the Channel, the next to travel on to Chalke Bissett, that meant three days spare. Had he spent the time in Paris with his friends, or at Calais? Was it even true that he’d died on the Saturday, as I’d been told? How long had his body been lying in that terrible room? I was angry with myself for all the questions I had not asked and resolved to do better in future.
A clock struck two. There were roads straggling out of town with more lodging places along them, but they’d have to wait until later. I tried one more hostelry with the sign of a bottle over the door, was given the usual answer, and added another question: could they kindly give me directions to the burial ground? It was on the far side of the town. The sky was blue and the sun warm, seagulls crying, white sails in the Channel, all sizes from small scudding lighters to a great English
man-o’-war. My lavender dress and bonnet were hardly funeral wear but my other clothes were on the far side of the Channel. My father wouldn’t mind. Too little care for one’s appearance is an incivility to others: too much is an offence to one’s intelligence.
Reverend Bateman’s expression as he waited for me by the grey chapel in its grove of wind-bent tamarisks showed that my appearance was an offence to him.
‘Are there no other mourners?’
‘None,’ I said.
An ancient carriage stopped at the gates, rectangular and tar-painted like a box for carrying fish, drawn by two raw-boned bays. They had nodding black plumes between the ears, as was fitting, but the plumes must have done service for many funerals in the sea breeze because most of the feathers had worn away and they were stick-like, converting the bays into sad unicorns. Two men in black slid off the box and another two unfolded from inside. The coffin came towards us on their shoulders. The black cloth covering it was so thin and worn that even the slight breeze threatened to blow it away and the bearers had to fight to hold it down.