I
N THE HOUSE
the light dies and the walls are scored three times by yellow headlamps as the cars depart. By the window upstairs someone stands, me perhaps, but there is no reflection and no breath on the glass. The window holds my eye for an age and then there is breath on the pane, small waves of it that fade and are wiped by a young girl’s hand, that appear once more as she breathes again, wipes again. She is young and alone in this huge room, looking beyond the breathing pane now to the gates and the fields beyond, the traces of haystacks in them as it is late summer. So I am beyond her and she is here, she is me, of course, and over the gap of years I am amazed by her patience, her presentness and her calm acceptance of the fact that she is observed. A tell-tale clatter downstairs presages tea and her mother will call her down soon, but for the moment she’s perfectly content, breathing on the pane, watching how the haystacks vanish in the mist of her breath and wiping it again to see them reappear. I am the figure she occasionally notices, her guardian angel or hidden sister. And tonight, when she is called down, she will make room for me beside her at tea.
“A plate for my friend,” she’ll say.
“And what is your friend’s name today?” her mother will ask.
“Emily,” she’ll say, or Susan, or Sarah, for the names change with her mood, and her moods can be mercurial.
There’ll be another at table tonight, she knows, tonight and many other nights, the stiff-backed woman with the vegetable breath who she knows already will gaze askance at her division of comestibles, her conversations with empty air.
But she forgets this worry as quickly as it came upon her. She has heard a sound, the scraping of the heavy front door off the limestone lintel, and she runs down, streaks from the stairs through the half-open door into his arms, knowing they will be open to greet her. He smells of fish, an odour that on anyone else would repel her, but not on him. He runs the shellfish plant down by the river’s mouth, came from England to do it, why she doesn’t know though she knows for some reason it’s important to him: that he moved from a country she’s never seen, that gave him his measured speech, to the one she lives in. And if she’s lucky, after tea with her mother, Mary Dagge and the stiff-backed newcomer, he’ll take her in the trap down to the river’s mouth. And after a last check through the warehouse of ice, ice that always seems burning to her, quietly burning in calm clouds of steam, they’ll sit by the low wall over the river and watch the salmon come in. And he’ll once more tell her the story of the river’s ghost.
She was observed, the next morning, by more eyes than were needed. She swung over the waters and could see herself swinging, from the high vantage point of an upstairs window. She didn’t like seeing herself in this way; all she wanted to see was the river arcing below her, the dunes with the red-roofed cottage and the sea eventually coming into view. So she stopped swinging then, played with her hessian doll, walking it from the chestnut tree to the walled garden and back again till she tired of that too. She knew all was observed in this tiny world of hers, as her doll was observed by her. But a pair of new eyes had intruded, those eyes that appeared and disappeared at the upper window as Miss Shawcross transferred her clothes from suitcase to cupboard, and this new observer, she felt, would take some getting used to.
“She is our governess now,” she informed Dolly, “and she will teach us things.”
“What things?” asked Dolly in that voice like a silken rustle.
“Oh you know,” murmured Nina as she walked, “all sorts of things, like how to sit straight at table and in what hand to hold the knife and fork.”
“She is the governess of eating, then?” asked Dolly.
“No, no,” said Nina who was alternately peeved and amused by Dolly’s obtuseness, “she’ll be the governess of drinking too, of reading and writing and I do believe, of sums.”
“What are sums?” asked Dolly prosaically, for Dolly was mostly prosaic.
“Sums,” said Nina, “sums. Well, sums are . . . Sums are sums.” And with that Nina walked into a shadow, bumped her forehead into a corseted stomach and found herself looking down at Isobel Shawcross’s laced leather boots.
Isobel Shawcross took her smaller hand as if she had a right to. She bent down with a rustle of crinoline, and the smell of porter had been reduced to a faint whiff of barley and distant vomit.
“You were talking, Nina,” she said.
“Was I?” the little one said. “How could I, since I’m here alone?”
“But I distinctly heard voices—”
The large hand held the small one tighter. It was ringless with brown spots and veins standing proud of the flesh.
“Perhaps you were talking to yourself?”
“Dolly, I was talking to Dolly.”
“No,” she said and began to walk her to the river, “you were talking to yourself, Nina, because Dolly cannot hear, cannot reply. And from now on there will be a penalty for talking to yourself.”
“What’s a penalty?” Nina asked, hoping that this woman with the mottled hands and the breath of vomit would somehow vanish.
“Somewhere between penance and punishment stands a penalty. And a penance comes in the form of prayer, a punishment in the form of bodily chastisement. So a penalty will come in the form of lessons. Learning. I am the mistress of your learning, and my first task will be this—to wean you from that world of imaginary things to the world of real ones. And each conversation with nothing in particular will be punished—or should I say penalised—with a lesson. And the lesson for today,” she said, “is that Dolly is inanimate, Dolly is lifeless, Dolly is made of ceramic and horsehair, and most pertinent of all, Dolly does not talk.”
“She talks to me,” said Nina.
“How? Does she whisper? Does she murmur? Does she moan? If you drop her in the river, does she call out for help?”
“No,” said Nina, “but I’d know she needed help if she—”
Miss Shawcross plucked Dolly from Nina’s arms then, and dangled her over the waters.
“Do we hear Dolly calling? For anything?”
Dolly returned Nina’s tearful gaze with a mute stare.
She let her drop then, and a cry rent the air. Not Dolly’s, but Nina’s. Dolly hit the water with a dull plop. She began to drift towards the chestnut tree, where one long branch stroked the waters like fingers.
“Dolly does cry,” Nina whispered, “ ‘cause I can hear her. She’s crying ‘cause she’s wet.”
“That’s you, Nina dear,” said Miss Shawcross.
And Nina howled, confirming that it was her after all. She howled with anguish and fury, at the hand that was gripping hers, pulling her back from Dolly’s sodden form. The more she pulled, the more the fingers tightened, the louder her howls became.
“Crying will get us nowhere, Nina.”
But Nina howled louder, because she wondered which would break first, her heart or her fingers. Her fingers, she decided, so she brought her teeth down to the mottled fingers crushing hers and bit, and somehow still managed to howl. She heard a gasp of pain, then twisted like an eel and darted below the swing, grabbed the rope and reached out for her charge, trapped in the water.
“Here Dolly,” she said.
Dolly stared back.
“No, don’t worry, I’m coming, I’m coming—”
And the waters shifted Dolly ever so slightly, free of the fingering branches, set her moving out in the current once more. Nina reached further. The rope slipped through her fingers and she saw the water rushing towards her.
She hit it, sank, thrashed in a world of green bubbles and saw Dolly floating cruciform above her. She reached up and grabbed her, brought her face to the surface for air and they both now cried as they sank again, and came up again, gasping.
And now Miss Shawcross was crying too.
Nina’s feet, though, for all the drama of her thrashing head, were placed firmly and safely on the largest root of the chestnut tree beneath the river. She suspected Dan knew this, when he ran down the long field with the gardening rake, stretched it out to her to pull her back in. She suspected Dolly knew, for her eyes and her ceramic smile seemed paradoxically peaceful, given the peril of their situation and the pitch of Nina’s screams. But she was certain Miss Shawcross didn’t know, for her cries, her distress, her regret, were heartbreaking to behold.
“My little one,” she cried. “My little one.”
She was carried from the river by Dan Turnbull, deposited in the arms of Mary Dagge by the house, wrapped in a white towel while the bath was poured, and when the soapy water eventually lapped around her, she lay and listened to the whispering of adults in the hall outside. She was aware she had won something in the war with Isobel Shawcross, governess, not the war itself, not a battle even, but perhaps the opening skirmish. And at tea that evening she wisely kept her bow-shaped mouth shut when she heard the incident recounted. She noticed the omission of certain crucial details, most notably the suspension of Dolly above the water, and gathered from this that the details themselves were wanting, in some code of behaviour as yet unknown to her that seemed to be the norm between governess and governed. She sat Dolly on the table beside her though, and conspicuously added to her plate whenever she felt it necessary.
“She’s hungry,” her father murmured, ruffling her hair, “and why wouldn’t she be, all that cold water.” And Nina nodded. They both were hungry, and why wouldn’t they be.
Nina slept beside her doll that night as she did every night, and made a list of the stratagems needed to maintain their presence in each other’s lives. Firstly, all conversations would be held in private, within earshot of nobody, neither Isobel Shawcross nor Mary Dagge nor Dan Turnbull. Not even, for that matter, her mother and father. The inclusion of her father gave her a pang of loss which she didn’t fully understand. She knew her father liked conversation, with and about anything, animate or non-animate, liked stories, such as the one about the lady of the river. But she also knew Miss Shawcross was paid by somebody, probably by him, and it was better to be safe than sorry. Secondly, all glances, glass eye to real, all hints of complicity, of a shared world, were to cease, in public at least. At this Dolly’s head fell forwards, ceramic head slumped on horsehair chest. But Nina was frighteningly insistent. The time would come, she said, when things would be as before; but until that time, in public, under the eyes of adults, and in particular under the eyes of her burping governess, Dolly would pretend to be made of ceramic and horsehair, and Nina would pretend that too.
Sleep came on then, the way sleep did, before she knew it and she dreamt, as she always did. She dreamt of Miss Shawcross on a seat by the bend in the river,
Magnal Questions
open on her lap, Nina herself swinging above her as she dutifully answered her ABCs. The waters were rising, gradually, beneath her and by the time she reached P and Q, they were around Miss Shawcross’s corseted waist. By the time she reached Z, Miss Shawcross was floating out towards Mornington while Nina still swung, but now over an expanse of unbroken azure. Dolly sat on a branch of the chestnut tree above her and developed a smile of satisfaction as Miss Shawcross’s spread-eagled form, like a monstrous, corseted doll itself, sank slowly beneath the bright waters to where they both knew the seaweed mingled its tendrils with the dead Boinn’s hair. And the satisfaction in Dolly’s smile was of the kind that knew it shouldn’t be there. Which is why it vanished when Nina turned towards her and said, to reprimand her, “Tut, Dolly, tut.”
She awoke to the scent of pollen, to the sight of her father bending towards her in the late spring sunshine, muttering till she woke, “What larks, pip.-
“Who is Pip?” she asked for the umpteenth time, and again, of course, he told her.
“Pip, who loved Estella, lived with Bob and Mrs. Bob and ate his vittles. Time to eat your vittles, Nina.”
She dressed, in the shafts of low sunlight that streamed through the window. And she padded down the corridor, through the wedges of bright that stood against the dark, down the staircase, against the huge streams of illuminated dust. Was there more sunlight then? So it seems, so it seems. And it seemed to Nina, in the battle between dark and bright, that the bright was for the moment winning. She clutched her mute doll between thumb and forefinger and when she entered the dining room, placed her hessian back against the wheaten-coloured pitcher that held the milk. Her father, already rising from the table, paused to kiss the whorl of hair at the top of her crown before he left.
There was silence, and the sound of decorous chewing from the other end of the table. Miss Shawcross sat there with Mary Dagge, a plate of Mary Dagge’s eggs in front of her. Egges, thought Nina, and rubbed her sleepy eyes.
“Keep your hands,” Miss Shawcross said, “to yourself. Keep your hands from yourself.”
Nina looked to her left, saw Mary Dagge rising, her eyes wide-open in an O of alarm.
“Like this?” said Nina, placing her wrists, like Miss Shawcross’s, on the deal table, her palms turned downwards. She watched as a plate was placed between them, with afluffyyellow souffle of scrambled eggs. Egges, she thought again and felt a longing for times past.
“Yes,” said Miss Shawcross.
“How do I eat then, Miss?” asked Nina.
“Without moving the elbows,” said Miss Shawcross, “with a knife and fork.”
Nina scooped
egg
on to her fork and her wrist moved upwards.
“You’re spooning,” said Miss Shawcross. “Don’t spoon.”
“How am I spooning?” asked Nina.
“It’s a fork, not a spoon. Use it as one.”
And Miss Shawcross demonstrated. The
egg
placed on the away curve of the fork with the help of the knife, lifted heaven-wards. Her mouth opened slightly, the fork entered, the mouth closed, chewed, barely.
Nina did likewise, imitating her perfectly. To her surprise, she enjoyed the act of imitation.
“And sit straight,” said Miss Shawcross.
“Straight,” said Nina. And again she imitated.
Nina found, through those next few sun-filled weeks, that there were lessons for every possible procedure in life, that for every act she had hitherto performed unthinkingly, there was a better, an infinitely superior version. She learnt to sit without crossing her legs, to walk without turning her feet outwards, not to speak without being spoken to, to keep her hands neither to nor from herself, to rise from her chair to a standing position with her back even straighter than Miss Shawcross’s. She learned not to be Nina, indeed, to be quite another person who needed a name, a name quite different from her own. She decided on Emily as a name for this other she was becoming, and though she enjoyed becoming Emily, enjoyed pretending to be her, enjoyed learning Emily’s prim habits, she knew in her heart of hearts that she hated her. Emily learnt her ABCs, learnt her Bible stories, learnt her two times tables, always sitting upright in the small cupboard-like room Miss Shawcross had chosen as their learning emporium, but Nina longed to sit open-legged on Dan Turnbull’s cart, longed to swing on the swing he built her with her dress blowing upwards in the wind, longed to pronounce eggs as egges. And Nina longed most of all to cross that curving rivulet and to join the two children who, lately, had come to sit on the other side observing her.