As Adela’s mind and mood swung like the St Aidan’s weathercock, first one way then the other, her body was changing too. There was a waist where none had been before and budding bumps on her chest. A kind of cheerful determination was building up inside her. It couldn’t only be because she was warm and well fed, and the first crocuses of the year were showing, it was because her mother was gone and so her body as well as her soul was free. She was still looking forward to the Little Sisters of Bethany but perhaps not as much as she had been. Her mother had described the sin of vanity as looking at yourself in mirrors: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?
The answer was to have as few mirrors in the house as possible. In the Rectory there’d been just a square of one next to everyone’s ewer and basin for looking in when you washed your teeth. Adela had sometimes wondered if she would see Rumplestiltskin’s teeth and not her own if she looked, so she’d try and get them clean by rubbing with bicarbonate and finger alone, but it could be messy.
Adela, in her new naughtiness, could see her mother might well rather not look at herself for fear of what she would see, but what was true of the mother was not necessarily true of her daughter. She would find out: there was a large mirror over the fireplace in her room, mottled glass with an ornate gilt frame. If she climbed up on a chair and tilted the mirror towards her she could see the full length of her black-clothed self any time she liked.
First she bolted the door to make sure no one could come in. Ever since the strange episode at the funeral – when she had disgraced herself with hysterics, Ivy’s young man had cured her with a slap, and Frank had intervened and there had been a scuffle – Frank was always popping in and out, like some jack-in-the-box. It was not right. She was not a child any more, she was a grown woman. He should stop it. She needed a chaperone. She wanted to slap Frank to wipe the serious, soulful look off his face; the smile when his lips smiled but his eyes didn’t.
She climbed on the chair and by wedging a copy of Self-Help from the Palace library beneath the frame she found she could see very well.
At first she looked tentatively and shyly, then boldly and longer. Yes, she was right. She looked like Ruth the Moabite in the illustration in one of the children’s books at Sunday school. The corn was a strange orange shade but the image had been memorable. Ruth the Moabite, the beautiful widow, stranger in a strange land, weeping amongst the alien corn. To be orphaned was probably sadder and even more dramatic than being widowed. Yes, she was Ruth herself, bereaved, beautiful, tragic, brave.
But what if she took off all her clothes? She felt her mother’s shock, her father’s horror. She flinched before the shouting. ‘Are you stupid as well as plain?’
Have you ever thought, as the hearse goes by,
The worms are waiting for you and I . . .?
She positioned herself in front of the mirror so she could see the length of her body: she let her hair fall free from its tight bun. She took her clothes off, piece by piece, and dropped them on the floor. She did not look until they were all off.
She had nothing to compare it to, never having before seen a picture of a naked human body, male or female, let alone a real one. What she saw now was good: its planes and curves pleasing. Her breasts were bigger and more rounded than she had thought, not little peaky things at all. She was so pale, almost to the point of transparency. She was rather splodgy and freckled too, but that was the mottle of the old mirror. Her head was too big but that was the way the mirror was tilted. She liked the way her hair rippled almost to her waist. She like the way the bush of darker hair, where her legs joined, seemed to centre the whole.
She was no longer Ruth the Moabite; she was Burne-Jones’s Princess Sabra, thanking St George for rescuing her from the dragon. She’d seen the painting of the Princess Sabra in a catalogue left behind by mistake by the Church furnishers; she had admired the richness of the flowing fabric, marvelled at how an artist could make the flesh come to life. Her father had found her looking and removed the book. It was sacrilegious; the Church gone mad, fallen into eroticism and heresy. He had shouted. A bit of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. She, Adela, knew what it was to be rescued. Her own St George had flung her over his shoulder and rescued her from the flames.
Or perhaps she was Millais’s Portia? Ivy’s mother had a water-stained print on her kitchen wall. Beauty, strength and judgement, all at once: what one must aim for. She was shivering. Enough of all this. She must cover herself up. She removed Samuel Smiles and the mirror fell back into place with a puff of dust. She climbed down from the chair.
She quickly dressed again. White underskirts, black petticoats, high-buttoned black moiré dress, long black sleeves, little black laced boots. She scraped the golden hair back in the bun. But everything had changed. She was all these women. She was Ruth, sick for home, she was Sabra, the rescued, she was Portia the wise, but most of all she was Eve, who had succumbed and eaten the apple. She had an intimation of the pleasures of the flesh, and how they were at odds with the aspirations of the soul. You had to choose. She had chosen a life of devotion to God and to others, but perhaps she was wrong?
She was sitting on her chair, bent over the better to lace the row of buttons on her last shoe, when the door pushed open and there was Frank. She had thought she had locked the door, but now could see that the mediaeval lock was more theatre than actuality. You slammed the great bolt across, but there was no socket. The real lock was a tiny hook and eyelet, which she had failed to see.
Had he been watching her, like Rumpelstiltskin? It was silly to see him like a wicked dwarf; he was so obviously not, with his upright carriage, clear skin and the wide candid eyes. He had been training to be a missionary in Australia, bringing the word of God to a place of savages, typhoons, crocodiles, kangaroos and houses on stilts where termites gnawed. He was brave and good, Mrs Kennion said. Now he was bringing her a glass of cordial. He did not meet her eye.
‘Mrs Kennion asked me to bring you this, Miss Adela,’ he said, in his soft light voice. ‘It’s a lime cordial they make locally and it has health-giving properties.’
‘Thank you very much, Frank,’ she said, and he went away.
It was perfectly possible that he had come up to her room in all innocence, as was his wont, found the door ajar, seen it as an invitation, like Rumpelstiltskin peered at her naked form, and only when she was down from her chair and properly dressed again had let his presence be known. It was possible, but not probable. At least the incident would not be spoken of, any more than had the scuffle at the funeral. But Adela was left with a strange feeling of excitement and repulsion mixed; of more to come. She could see it was probably to do with ‘the curse’ she now had to endure and that Jenny and Mrs Kennion had described as the rubbish left behind when you didn’t have babies. The two were interlinked. If only there were someone to explain it to her, but there was not. The medical books were no help. They described the mechanics of the female menstrual cycle, but not how it made you feel. What it made her feel was naughty, defiant, and jumping up and down and making faces at other people.
The worms crawl in,
The worms crawl out,
They go in thin
And they come out stout . . .
Don’t think about it.