Two weeks hence.
Isaac Baker Brown’s door shuts behind them and Arthur takes his wife’s gloved hand as they step onto the footway and towards their carriage, slows his pace to match her stuttering gait. It is dreadfully chill and her hand in his feels inert, lifeless. He looks to her face for tears, but there are none. She looks dishevelled, though, the fall of her cloak crooked, her chignon mussed; the little hat skewed, its feather tatty.
It is a day of hard frost, and coal smoke shrouds the houses of Connaught Square, wraps itself around the naked trees in the centre garden. All is weighted by the leaden sky. The east wind drives a few drifting snowflakes against them.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Her voice is inert, too, her body stiff, like a wooden figurine whose parts are moved into awkward poses that it holds without volition.
He looks closely at her, his wife. Tries to imagine how she would seem to him if they were strangers, wonders what it is about her that has changed. She is no less beautiful than she was on the day they wed, but her slight figure and listless face carry a sense of tragedy, a feeling of separateness so different from her old joyful response to life. He would like to break through to the sadness beneath, warm her back to life, but he does not know how.
Euripides and Herodotus are stamping their shod hooves and gusting white from their nostrils. It was their little joke, his and Emmie’s, once upon a time: his Rugby School favourites; the fascination with all things ancient Greek. Hero and Euri, they used to nod to each other, like a secret language.
He helps Emily up into the carriage and makes the decision without her. “Marble Arch, Harry.” And at their driver’s nod: “Thank you.” He needs open air just now, and they need somewhere private to talk, if she is able. He waits for her complaint or refusal—“I must go home, Arthur, lie down”—but can see from the emptiness of her eyes that she has not even heard him give the order.
Once, they would have walked to Hyde Park from here, tossing their words and laughter back and forth, but it is too far for her now. Instead, she stands in the carriage, hands braced against its sides, her back curved, knees bent, her neck angled awkwardly. The carriage lurches into movement and Arthur rounds her waist with his hands, reading the reluctant assent in her eyes. As they jerk and bounce along, he tries to hold her steady, and the terrible and inevitable advance Baker Brown has painted for him—hysteria, epilepsy, idiocy … death—floods him, and the consultation returns to him in bits and pieces: a certain coarseness … enable procreation … moral duty … good wives. Then, before he can naysay them, he hears the words that so shocked him rising like shouts in his mind: unnatural practices! persistent excitation! your wife herself !
Your wife herself.
The separate bedchamber. Is there another reason she has shut her body away from him? Does she draw on her own troubled resources? Seek pleasure at her own hand? Senseless, surely, when she cannot tolerate his amorous attention, when she winces at his touch, even in the daylight, even when light and accidental. Ridiculous! But still the images form, make him want to push her away, even as he yearns to draw her down and onto his lap, wrap his arms about her body, a safeguard against all that might further injure her.
Two weeks hence.
Is this the right choice? Would it be better to return with her to Herdley, after all? Consult with Morrison and see who can take on his case load? Or find someone to be with her while he continues in the city? But what would that achieve, when rest at Hierde House has so far seen no improvement? And when she continues to turn from him, as if he is the enemy? Shut herself away, as much as she—
The wheels come up against the kerb, jarring them to a halt. She sways against him, then pulls herself away. He lifts the ermine muff, gently pushes her unresisting hands into its centre and steps ahead of her onto the footway, helping her down, noting the grimace of pain.
When he sees the hot-potato man near Marble Arch and when that familiar warming, starchy scent reaches him, his mouth rushes with juices. But the old queasiness has returned these last months and he never knows whether to starve it or feed it. Besides, it seems greedy—almost unseemly—to be scoffing food when he knows she will not. So he moves away from the hot-potato man, turns his back on the organ-grinder playing Mozart, and the Punch and Judy show just beginning—Punch’s red and yellow motley a touch of sunshine on this grim day—takes Emmie’s arm and walks slowly with her into Hyde Park, trying to forget how they once would shout at Punch’s wicked crimes, find themselves chuckling at his outrageous antics, talk afterwards about just which politician he was mocking this time.
Ten months with the worst of it. Only ten months, but it seems like months without measure when he remembers Emmie as she used to be, thinks of her here, in Hyde Park, riding along Rotten Row with Beatrice, her red-gold hair, netted in black, catching the light as they canter towards him. Or just over a year ago, skating with other pleasure-makers along the Long Water by torchlight, ignoring the board marked Dangerous, her dress hitched up to show her fancy Balmoral boots and scarlet petticoat—magenta, she ’d corrected him, eyebrow arched—her cheeks and lips flushed with cold and excitement. She ’d called him onto the ice on the evening that comes to him, travelled backwards holding his hands to secure him, the poorer skater, then once he was sound on his blades she ’d flown off, skates hissing, under the Serpentine Bridge and round the snake’s curve, red ribbons streaming from under her Scotch cap, those “follow-me-lads” testing him, teasing him, drawing him on. And then later that same night—how it hurts to remember—he had placed her above him and they ’d rocked and swayed to the same rhythm, and afterwards curved into each other like a blessing.
The sky is turning pink and the air sharp, like glass: a real snowfall can’t be far away. On the path ahead a rook stabs at something with its dagger beak, scrapes at it, muscular neck working, then flies off to the west, its beak clamped on the unknown treasure. To its rookery, no doubt; to confer with the rest of the parliament there.
He guides her to a space just off the path, a wooden bench where they can sit a little way removed from other walkers. He takes off his overcoat and folds it into a cushion, but she shakes her head, leans against the side of the bench and closes her eyes.
Perhaps … but, no, they must talk.
“Did he speak with you about the operation?” he begins. “About what it entails?”
“Yes—I think so. He spoke of removing the cause of the irritation.”
He has watched her wrestle with many feelings—sadness, fear, anger, despair—but never seen her like this: so utterly devoid of emotion or animation. As if she has given up; as if she is already dead.
But they must continue. “And you feel that this is the right course?”
“I do not want an operation, but I want to be better, so if Father and you think it is the right thing to do, I cannot find it within me to refuse. I must trust you.” But her face is dreary as she speaks the words. “If it will take away the pain then I will go against all that tells me to not do it.”
For a moment, his heart leaps. “There is something that tells you not to do this?”
But she sighs and shakes her head. “My thoughts are no longer to be trusted.”
He plunges on. “And do you understand what he says has caused this?” Speaking the words quickly. “And why you may need to be watched closely afterwards?”
She turns her face to his and, for a moment, he sees her eyes flash. In anger? betrayal? She looks away and over the park.
“If you would think this of me, then you must go ahead and believe it,” she says dully.
He does not want this, he does not! But what is he to believe? What are they to do?
Oh, how he would like to turn her face to his again, say the words that are in his heart: “Emmie, Emmie, my love! Where have you gone? How can I return you to yourself? How can I return you to me?”
He shivers and stamps his numb feet. They must go home soon. He will ask Millie to warm Emmie’s bed and see if Mrs Fennell can whip them up a hot toddy. They will talk more tomorrow, this time in the comfort of their home.
A man and woman push a perambulator up the path. Closer they come, and closer. The man’s hair is silky brown under his top hat; the woman’s hair is golden, her attractive face rosy. Now, only yards away, they stop and lean over the little blue bundle in the perambulator, then debate something briefly, a little crossly, their faces worried and their eyes on the sky, their hands overlapping and plucking at blankets. Then they smile fondly at the baby and each other before hurrying up the path and out of sight.
“It could be us.” Her voice is desolate. “Oh, Arthur, why isn’t it us?”
His own tears spill and freeze on his cheek. He slides along the bench towards her, puts his arm around her waist and sighs as she leans into him, just as she used to. There is warmth under her clothing, beneath her crinoline, and he turns his face towards it, into it, feeling for who she is, seeking that place where they might meet within her, whispering, “It will be all right,” reassuring her, “It will be all right,” telling himself, surely, surely it will be all right.
After the appointment, the air had been thick with anger and uneasiness. The drive home as bad as their journey there – even worse, what with the throb and sting of intrusion and the lingering image of Duncan’s folded arms and unreadable face in that stark, white room. Then, at home, there’d been the blistering argument, both of them striding around the lounge room, flinging accusations, using the secrets they’d shared over the years – their own vulnerabilities offered as gifts, delivered with trust – as weapons. But finally, after nights spent at opposite ends of the house, days in taut silence, they’d come together and reached a truce, of sorts – for theirs, she observed, seemed to have become that kind of marriage.
So, the truce: she would continue to see Sasha alone; they would see Paul together and find out whether he could help them – help her? help him? – have sex again. And if she wanted to see Paul beyond that – beyond having sex, that is, Duncan had clarified – well, you can see him alone. Then he’d given a strange half-smile, her husband. It was understandable, the establishment of this deadline and Duncan’s territoriality, a kind of testing of her, she supposed, but the ticking of the clock made her mind rebel, made resentment towards him leak from her, even as they edged closer and closer to the goal, even as she continued to stretch and massage the area, rub oil in gently, think on it with kindness. And, yes, she had now fully recovered from the nerve block; yes, she was back to ‘the plateau’; yes, she could contemplate intercourse; yes, they were pretty much there. But where? And at what cost?
Still, she honoured the terms of the truce and so did he, visiting the physios through May and into June: she, Sasha; both of them, Paul. And Paul told her to trust herself and her body, told Duncan to attend to his wife’s body as it opened to him. And Sasha listened when Alice shared her fears and her hopes, urged her to be strong for her husband too. And Paul and Sasha both assured her, independently and with firm compassion, that she was ready.
So, when Duncan reached for her in the weeks that followed, she turned to him. Allowed him entry. The payment was a savage rawness later that night or over the next day, as if the lining between the inside and the outside of her was too thin. The rewards were caresses and loving looks, and the lifting of that constant, heavy, unspoken pressure. Duncan smiled at her again; doubt and guilt no longer pressed the words they spoke into flat pleasantries.
At what cost?
She sighed and rolled over on the sofa. Lifted the slender book from the coffee table, testing its weight in her hand, in her lap. On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females by I. Baker Brown. Such a slight heft for such an important-sounding title, for such dark contents. All those silent women, and that man pontificating about them, deciding, cutting, ‘curing’.
Men, and what they do to women’s bodies; these were things that would not have interested the old Alice. Sure, she’d considered gender relations and their imbalances, theorised about them too, but that’s exactly what it had been: abstract notions, ideas drifting in the air. And now? Now the subject gripped her, registering in every muscle, every tissue, every cell, and in all the entries to her body, finding its way back out again in moments of piercing recognition. It inveigled its way into her essays too, her research into hysteria confirming the lopsided history of what men did to women in the name of medicine, her own experience exposing breaches and faults in modern knowledge when it came to women – to their bodies, their sexuality.
And yet … and yet … the more she read and the more she wrote, the more dissatisfied she felt. It was something to do with the words that had burst into her mind during that anxious, angry drive to the appointment with Paul, the images that had come with them: pain that pierces your bones, that shoots through your thoughts, frightened birds taking flight. More, it was to do with that pressure and urgency – somewhere below her thoughts or somewhere within her body, in that strange geography of creativity – a story, no, a life, demanding to be written. Because she didn’t want to be in her head anymore, she knew now, didn’t want to write in that formal, academic way; she couldn’t, not anymore, not while this demand to make a life, to … discover a life, really – but whose life? whose life? – remained unfulfilled.
Whose life? It could only be a woman, couldn’t it?
Maybe someone back then, in that place and time she was beginning to know through reading, through research: England, the nineteenth century. And a lady felt right – yes, a gentlelady, all wealth and comfort, yet felled by pain.
How might such a woman make sense of this mystifying pain? What choices might a girl on the cusp of womanhood – or, more realistically in those times, her father – make? How might a man and a woman in love deal with it? She thought of the gentlewoman on her silk purse. The peach gown, the golden hair, the red rose in her hand, the expression on her face … and an answer to her silent query in the lover’s countenance: tenderness and desire. She imagined the woman, the man, drummed by pain out of desire, out of love. The impossibility of speaking the suffering and fear in those times – or was Victorian repression a stereotype? The taboo of marital lust a myth? She imagined the married couple like Ena’s grandparents: the woman, lashed to the post, taking the strikes of lust, fulfilling the duty of procreation. She pictured them like she and Duncan: stumbling along, knocking hard against each other as their solitary paths crisscrossed. Could it be any different?
Was there another way?
She stilled her racing mind, swept the flickering images and questions from it and brought herself to that quiet place again. Felt, over the slowing seconds, the slower minutes, the breath moving in … and out of her, the subtle sweep of blood through her body, its decelerating throb in her fingertips. Sensed that pressure, that coiled urgency that had been building for months, now rising, rising, and holding it … holding. And again, rising, rising, and then … thrusting up and into light – like a buoy, bursting to the surface of the ocean, like a deep-sea creature heaved from darkness into light.
And then, just like that, she saw him and felt the shock. A man! And it was almost frightening how quickly he rushed to her then, fully formed and garbed in tweed trousers, frockcoat, top hat, as if he’d been wandering alone in blankness, waiting for her to see him, or tapping the toe of his boot in the wings of her mind, listening for his cue –
Arthur. His name was Arthur.
Hair a soft, fine brown. Eyes dipping at their outer corners.
Arthur with his wife. She has that pain – her very own. They are suffering, both of them, and need to make a critical decision … Isaac Baker Brown! An operation?
Arthur a doctor. No … a lawyer? a politician?
Arthur a boy, sitting on a heavy oaken bench at his lessons. She felt him – the silk of his hair, the wriggle of his legs; she felt it – the softness of his cheek against her lips.
She wondered how she would begin his story.