Authors: Martha Lea
As the months went on, Gwen was submerged by the routine of feeding her baby. It would latch onto her breast with a mouth as wide as a cat fish and just as strong. It sucked
the juice from her, and Gwen felt herself shrivelling. The clarity of the last two months before the birth left her; she was befuddled and dazed, propped up half conscious. She was either feeding
the baby or being woken to feed the baby or falling asleep feeding the baby.
Her world had diminished to her breasts and whether or not the baby was sucking on them. It was so boring. It was everything she had not wanted or asked for. The initial euphoria of having
survived it, of having this miraculous tiny human come from her intact and also alive, had evaporated. The momentary surge of warm feelings for Edward had receded, too, as quickly as they had
come.
She looked at her drawing things in a state of listless exhaustion one afternoon. The baby was cradled in the crook of her arm; its head moist with her sweat, the bright fuzz which passed for
hair, dark and slick against the skull. She caught sight of the fontanelle pulsating on the top. That thick membrane stretched over brain. Maria had told her to make sure it never dipped into the
skull; if it did, she’d told her, the baby was not getting enough to drink and might die. This information both fascinated and distressed Gwen. She’d pass her fingers over the patch of
soft head and hold her breath.
With one hand she pulled the things out of her bag to air them and to check for signs of mould or insect damage. She wiped over the surface of her books which had been treated with kerosene. It
kept away some of the insects; others didn’t object to the stink and burrowed holes into her pages. Then there was the novel, still unread. She’d treated that as well, and now idly she
checked for insect damage. She shook the book, knocked it on the surface of the workbench. The baby stirred and fell asleep again instantly, her eyes rolling glassily.
She opened the book wide, so that she could look along the hollow of the spine and knocked it down on the bench again. A single beetle fell out, something small and brown. Before, she would have
caught it with a pooter and then trapped it in the live box for observation under the microscope. Now, she watched it, her naked eyes stinging with fatigue as the beetle trundled off and hid itself
in a crack on the bench.
The book had creaked a greeting at her. The fanning sections had kissed the air, the open lower edges sucking in space. When she closed the book with a disregarding flick, the cover said
fphphphf
. Gwen no longer cared who had sent her a novel to read. She kept the book in good condition because that was what you did with books. And if she never read it, then someone, at
some point, might want to; she would have been ashamed to own an unslit book which was falling to bits. Unslit books had once excited her beyond the limit she believed they ought. As a child she
had loved slitting pages more than eating, or sleeping between fresh sheets. More than her paint-box, even. More than her sister, sometimes.
She had owned a paper knife made from a very thin piece of bone. She’d loved that instrument, too, until she’d overheard what it was really made of. Then, she had taken it to the
kitchen and opened the range door. The smell of the burning slave’s rib had escaped into the room and she’d run away to be sick in the pantry.
Gwen doubted now that it had really been a human rib; much more likely, she thought, to have been a sliver of ivory, or something more prosaic like beef shinbone. The baby’s head lolled
and slipped a bit in the pooling sweat. Gwen fingered the binding on the novel and stared some long minutes at the swirls of colour on the marbled paper.
Edward had bought her a letter knife of carved horn in New York. She hadn’t thought to take one with her. It pained her to think of the two of them; awkward strangers seeing the sights,
buying trinkets.
Her scalp crawled, the beading sweat masquerading as a legion of lice, and she thought, Where did I put that letter knife? She didn’t think, I’m going to slip the knife in and hold
the paper firm as I slit it through.
The letter knife was an awful-looking object; it had a pattern of roses, a sort of grim and mawkish posy on the handle and an attempt at a thorned stem along the spine. He’d bought her a
pair of combs, as well, but she’d made a show of liking the plain ones. Edward had wanted to shower her with gifts: useless articles, or garish, horrible American hats. She’d needed
gloves. All the time, it had been so obvious, she had thought. Perhaps gloves were too mundane. Too ordinary. Too intimate. Too much like a thing to buy for your wife. She couldn’t imagine
wanting to wear gloves now.
She held the ugly letter knife in her palm. It wasn’t nice to handle. It was as if the person who’d carved it had never opened a letter with anything other than their fingers. Or
never opened a letter at all.
Gwen laid the baby in the hammock. She slit the first page, and the last page. Her rule was, had been, that if the first page of the book was terrible, she was justified in skipping to the last,
just to see how it ended. If the first page was any good, the last page would taunt her. But she had grown out of that kind of nonsense now. She slit the pages, one after another. Everything about
the construction of the book screamed money: the calf, the extraordinary marbling, the thick, creamy pages of Dutch paper which behaved so beautifully under the knife, the green silk headbands,
which seemed an odd choice of colour. Everything about the book made her want to read the first page.
Eternal Blazon
or
The Confessions of a Nondescript
Volume I.
I am, in all outward appearances, the antithesis of you. You know this; you know that I am not beautiful to look at. My body is not silken soft in the same way as yours, and it
is not as pale as veal flesh, as wan and ghostly as mare’s milk. Have you ever wondered over the fact that your husband might want—need—to plunge himself with such force, such
consummate desire, at a woman whose body is dark with hair. Whose face, bearded and defiant, stares out at you from the
carte de visite
you so unfortunately found amongst your
husband’s possessions. My image is everywhere in certain circles. I am scattered on the dirtiest streets of the most unwholesome districts of this city. My face is hidden by respectable men,
whilst their good, honest, faithful wives are awake, and then it is taken out to be slavered over in the darkest places, in the deepest part of night.
I am not sixteen any more, yet that image of me as I was then still circulates. As I cover my face with thick veils in public places, my image is there to be appropriated in any which way, by
anyone who may choose to do so. I was sixteen. My voice had not thickened with regret; I knew nothing. I believed those who told me when I arrived in this dreary country that the paying public
would not care what I looked like; that it was my voice they came to hear. I could not understand, on my first night at the Empire Theatre, why so many people who had paid good money to hear me
perform my repertoire should be so noisy. I expected hushed silence. And that I did get: a hushed silence of awe and repulsion. I managed that first night to sing despite the crowd. I never
imagined that I would ever have to sing like that; to fold in on myself; to forge my voice into a steely thing. The liquid slipped away.
Will you let the tarnished liquid of your life slip away in your state of ignorance?
When the concert was over, on that horrible night, I was taken by a man to his shop. A man who had sat brooding over my countenance during the concert, his mind silently acting
out the delicate, intricate manoeuvres his hands might make if only I would come away with him. The price surprised him. My “chaperone” allowed him a small discount, enough to pay a cab
fare. I was taken out by a side entrance of the Empire Theatre, used only by the rat catchers and the night soil collectors. My chaperone, Mr Helson Blackwater, told me nothing. He avoided my gaze.
He handed me over like a skinned rabbit at Smithfield’s, and wiped his hands on the tails of his coat.
He did not speak to me, this man who took me away to his shop. He sat opposite me and studied me in the dark interior of the cab as we jolted over the streets, the doors shut to the outside. The
cab seats were not quite clean. The floor was grimy. There was a faint odour of vomit, and I put my shawl to my face, thinking I might not be able to control my stomach, though it was empty, as I
had not eaten that day through nervousness and excitement.
He leaned forward as our bodies jarred on the cab seats and he touched my free hand. The heat from his fingers seared through our gloves; his hand closed around mine, pushing my knuckles against
each other. He slipped over to sit beside me, and I tried to wrench my hand free.
“Do I hurt you?” he whispered. “I don’t mean to hurt you.” His voice was soft, his breath fragrant with caraway seed as he lowered the shawl away from my face.
“I shall not ever do anything to cause you to hurt, my dear.”
But he still held tight to my hand, as though I might fall from the cab, as though he feared that someone bigger than he might jump up to the window of the cab and snatch me away into the horrid
night air. I sparkled in his mind, Isobel. My knuckles ache with the memory of it.
The name of this man was Mr Abalone Wilson Tench. It was written in gold lettering above the door of his barbershop. It glinted in the sputtering gaslight, but I could not read
it then. I could read and write only in Spanish when I was sixteen. I did not know that I was being led into an establishment that specialised in the removal of facial hair. Not at once. He lit a
taper from a tinderbox, and proceeded to light a lamp and several candles.
I had till now imagined that the man was large only in my imagination, swelled by my own fright to a giant. His chest was wide, and his shoulders broad as a buffalo. I could see now that he had
removed his coat and jacket his waist narrowed, like a dancer’s. His hands were finely shaped, the skin and fingernails well cared for. He took care not to burn himself or get soot on his
hands. He clamped the stove door shut and opened the vent to get the fire raging and hot.
“You are wondering, my dear, what on this earth you might be doing in a barber’s place.” His voice barely rose above the guttering of the candles and the hiss of the wet coals
inside the pot-bellied stove. “Well, I shall tell you in good time.”
He looked at me the way other men of his kind would come to look at me. Including, Isobel, your husband. It was a look of tenderness mixed with desire.
“I was sore angry at the way you were received this night, my dear. What animals live in this city. Rats, dogs. Horrible beasts.” He spoke my name. “Natalia.” Only once.
He uttered it with such profound sensibility, his tongue lingering on the middle syllable.
“But I am forgetful of my manners, my dear,” he said. “I will provide you with refreshment, you must have a little something to drink. You must look after yourself. I see that
your lips are dry. We must not let you become what they call de-hydrated. Do you know that word, my dear?” He did not pause to see whether I did. “To hydrate, my dear, is to wet
something. And so it follows, or,
ipso facto
, as they say in those places what are higher than this, that to dehydrate is to become too dry.”
Though I felt ill with hunger, I could not face the thought of eating; but I needed something to occupy me. I drank the stuff he’d given me; it burned my throat and my nose. My eyes
watered, but he did not notice my discomfort. I fought back the urge to cough.
“My dear,” he said to me, “are you comfortable enough? Have you want for anything more?” I shook my head. “Miss Jaspur,” he said, sounding perplexed,
“if you do no more than shake your head I shall not know whether to assume that you have enjoyed an elegant sufficiency or rather if you are not yet fully satisfied.”
“I do not need anything more. I am very comfortable, thank you, sir.” Though if the truth be told I was far too hot. Under my bonnet I felt the tickle of perspiration begin to
agitate my scalp and I longed to tear out my pins and ruffle my hair with my hands, shaking my head between my knees as I had been able to do every evening before this.
His face had become very grave in the flickering light. “You must know by now, Miss Jaspur, that I am a barber by trade. I cuts the hair of gentlemen, and I shaves their faces. It is my
passion, this trade. I might have been other things, a different kind of man, but this trade called on me the way a man of the cloth is called upon by the Almighty. I don’t mean disrespect to
them what’s holier than me and there is plenty of them. My dear, I wish to impress upon you that this is not just a thing that I do to earn my keep. It is my life. When I puts my hands on a
gent’s head, when I lays my fingers against his cheek, all hot from my towels, I sometimes see great things. Sometimes the things I see ain’t so nice. Now, I don’t believe in no
hokery-pokery. You must not get this wrong. I have thought hard about it for twenty years or more. A man gives himself away when he surrenders himself to the barber’s hands. He is, what you
might call, vulnerable in a special way. He lets his soul speak to me. I see it, there, a flash in his eyes, here, in a twitch beside his nose. The way his hands fall onto his chest as he lays back
in my chair. The rest is what you might call elicitation. I knows how to make the gents speak. They think I am simple. They think themselves safe. And mostly they are. But your Mister Blackwater,
he come to me not two weeks ago. And all he gives me, my dear, it is pure gold. I takes my time; I go slow, careful. He’s telling me about a young lady. I gives his cheeks another, closer
shaving. I works the soap up into a big, feathery lather, and then I hold his head.” Mr Tench made a shape in the air with his body and his arms, his hands held the absent head of my
chaperone and I shivered to see it, Isobel. I shivered because I suddenly heard Blackwater speaking about me.