“Have I done enough?”
“No, miss. You keep eating them.”
“I love fresh peas. I don’t know why we bother cooking them.”
Nelly was sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas awkwardly with one hand and popping many of them into her mouth while Jane smeared suet on a leg of lamb she was preparing for the oven.
“I imagine Mr. Dickens likes his lamb a little pink?”
“I have no idea.” Nelly paused, puzzled by her own answer. “Is that an odd thing not to know?”
“No matter, miss. I’ll cook it nice and rare so that if he’s late, it won’t be overcooked.”
“And if he’s early?”
“Well, then he will just have to wait a bit.”
“Maybe if you overcooked it and turned the peas to mush, he would take me to a nice restaurant in the city.”
“Or maybe he will just send another one of his baskets.” Jane laughed. Nelly liked her new servant’s boldness. In the theatre, the Ternans had grown up with a merry band of actors, managers and dressers who did not make large distinctions between the classes. Nelly felt a rather familiar camaraderie with Jane.
“Maybe he will. And,” she added a little bitterly, “I will just stay home in Slough.”
“Slough must be dull for you after Paris, miss.”
“I don’t mean to disparage your home, Jane, but everything is dull after Paris.” There was a little pause and then, as though to soften the thought, Nelly added, “I didn’t live in Paris that long, though. Mainly I lived in the countryside in France and I didn’t like that much either.”
“They all speak French, I imagine.”
“That didn’t bother me. I knew some French and it improved while I was there. I just felt homesick, that was all. I missed my sisters.”
“You were lonely, miss.”
“Yes. I was. Do you like dogs, Jane?”
“Oh yes, miss. I love dogs.”
“Good. That’s settled then. I am going to get a dog.”
“What kind of dog were you thinking, miss? My father has a lovely bulldog. People think they are fighters but he’s the sweetest creature. Of course, you’d want something smaller.”
“Why something smaller?”
“Well, with your hand, miss. You wouldn’t want a big dog tugging at the lead.”
“No. I suppose not. I’ll get a small dog.”
Nelly’s right hand had not healed properly since the railway accident. Charles had made an appointment for her with a surgeon in London, who said she had severed a nerve and that she would probably never regain full use of it. Jane was under instructions never to let her lift anything for herself, although Nelly wondered if this was not a case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. She suspected she had done the real damage after the accident, tugging at Charles’s bag with her cut hand, thereby saving several chapters of Our Mutual Friend but permanently injuring herself. She could not fully close her palm now. Pincer movements were difficult, so it was sometimes hard for her to pick up an egg without breaking it or to retrieve a dropped earring; fine work that required both hands, such as sewing, was impossible and her handwriting was still a bit wobbly, but she could just manage the piano and was determined not to lose that. A little music, if she were alone in the evening, was a comfort to her. Other things, like combing her hair or shelling peas, she was learning to do with her left. Charles, meanwhile, had taken to referring to her as the patient and routinely sent over baskets of delicacies as though she were convalescing.
Three hours later, Nelly and Charles were sitting at the table both poking listlessly at their food in a lengthening silence. The lamb was dry and only edible if covered with lashings of gravy while the roast potatoes, appealingly crispy an hour previously, had gone soft. Charles had arrived late and flustered because he had missed his usual train; by then the meat had sat so long in the oven it was all but ruined and Nelly had eaten enough raw peas she really did not feel like much dinner.
“Did you finish number seventeen?” she asked finally, after searching about for some topic of conversation.
“No.” He poked at his food with his fork but didn’t eat. “I can’t find my way to it.”
“Don’t you need it ready by tomorrow? I was going to read it through tonight.”
“Yes. Well, I’ll be late.” He gave up on the food, pushing aside his plate, and slumping back in his chair.
“Doesn’t the printer—”
“Damn the printer.”
She made no reply but rose from her chair, gathered up their plates and approached the door that separated the parlour where they ate from the kitchen behind it. She had to balance the plates against her body with her right arm to turn the knob with her left; it was an awkward business and took her a moment but Charles did not look up from the table. She put the plates down and scraped their uneaten food into the scrap bucket, trying to hide the lamb under the vegetable peelings so as not to give offence to Jane. She transferred the plates into the sink, where the servant, who had left the meal in the oven and retired to her room before Charles arrived, would wash them the next day. There was a bowl of stewed fruit and a pitcher of custard waiting on the kitchen table, so she stuck her head back into the dining room. Charles had still not moved and was staring blankly at the floor.
“Will you have some fruit and custard?”
He did not reply at first but looked up when she repeated herself.
“No. No, thank you.”
“You haven’t had much to eat.”
He examined his shoe and then knocked it against the table leg but said nothing.
“Would you not like something else to eat?”
He kept staring at the floor.
“Charles…” Her voice held a small note of warning.
“Oh.” He looked up finally. “Umm. I’ll have some cheese.”
When she returned with the block of cheddar Jane had left in the pantry, he was now leant over the table, shifting bits of cutlery to and fro. He cut a slab of cheese for himself and turned to her.
“I’m not good company tonight.”
She did not try to contradict him.
“No one can be expected to be good company every night of his life.”
“No, but I wasn’t good company last week either, as I recall.”
“No, you weren’t.” He had been equally morose on both occasions he had visited the week before, but she had felt more energetic herself and had teased him out of his mood those nights, entertaining him at the piano. Tonight, she waited; she was annoyed by his behaviour and refused to be the one who threw him a lifeline and pulled him out of the water yet again. She had seen his dark moods before, in the years on Mornington Crescent when he despaired over the future of his sons, lamented his daughter Katey’s hasty marriage, worried over a particular chapter or railed against a publisher, but they had grown markedly worse in recent months. For a moment she felt nothing but recalcitrant and bloody minded, her own anger washing over her. They sat there for a bit before she relented.
“Do you still dwell on the accident?” she asked.
He nodded and swallowed as though choking down emotion before he could speak.
“The noises. I hear those appalling noises…I think I will be fine; I get to Paddington, all chipper. I sit in my carriage saying last week’s fuss was an aberration; there is nothing to it, little more than a quarter of an hour. Half an hour and I will be in your arms; what is a quarter-hour’s journey in exchange for an evening of bliss?”
He smiled at her winningly but she made no response to the flowery compliment; their dinner had hardly seemed blissful.
“And then…” she prompted him.
“And then the whistle blows, the train starts to move. At first we shunt our way slowly out of London and that’s all right, but when we gather speed I can feel the fear rising in me. And when the carriage shakes or leans around a bend, my memories take over. I hear the screeching, and the people crying…”
“Yes. It was horrible,” Nelly said with almost perfunctory sympathy. “I found my trip to town to see the doctor quite difficult.”
“Afterwards, it makes it difficult to write,” he continued. “It crowds out the stories. It is as though my brain is still too busy with it to invent other dramas.”
“I don’t forget it either,” she replied without malice, turning over her right hand to show her scarred palm.
“No. No, of course you don’t, my dear.” He reached for her hand, but she had withdrawn it under the table.
She felt the accident had become for them a convenient fiction. Of course, it had happened and it had been horrific, traumatizing and unforgettable. Yes, it was now difficult to even make the twenty-minute ride into Paddington. She knew that he went to and from the city in a state of high anxiety; the occasional time she took the train, she sat there clutching the arm of the seat and starting at the slightest lurch or unusual sound. She knew she was in trouble if she started to see a swath of blue silk in her mind’s eye; she would hang on with her eyes closed, breathing deeply and just waiting until it was over. She preferred her mother and sisters to come and see her in her new home at Slough rather than going to them: Maria was married now and living with her husband in Oxford, but Nelly had yet to visit them there. Still, it was not the memory of the accident that was the cause of silences between her and Charles, and she doubted it was the accident that made it difficult for him to write. It was the memory of the moments afterwards that afflicted them, whether they said so or not. He had failed her, and she supposed that he knew it, and she supposed that he also knew she found it difficult to forgive. They did not speak of any of this but let the accident stand as a kind of code for the trap in which they found themselves.
“I’m sorry, my dear. Let’s have some music. That will cheer us both.”
She dutifully took her place at the piano and sang for him for a bit, an Italian aria or two that Fanny used to sing, the English folk songs that he preferred. Gradually, once again, his humour returned to him and he began to entertain her with tales from the magazine office, where a sub-editor had mislaid proofs and found them again under a colleague’s bacon sandwich, and from Gad’s Hill, where the gardener had severed a water pipe and created a gusher in the middle of the lawn, mundane disasters all told for the greatest comic effect. She laughed despite herself but when he took her hand and swung her arm in his old way, saying teasingly, “Shall we to bed, milady?” she dropped her hand away.
“I think I will stay down here and read for a bit.”
“Nelly…”
“The light is better here. I want to finish my book.”
“But you were supposed to proofread for me tonight.”
“You said you hadn’t finished number seventeen.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said grudgingly. “I just meant, well, you can’t have been planning to read your book…”
“No. I wasn’t but now I want to.”
He stood there staring at her for a long moment; she looked unblinkingly back with no visible emotion, standing there as apparently unmoved as she had stood a few months before on the embankment at Staplehurst.
“I am sorry,” he said finally. “I am truly sorry.”