JUST NOW, THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK IS OPPRESSIVE. MY VISITOR is due at four, but at twenty past has not arrived. The waiting makes me jittery and heartsick and I can feel the “snakes” in my stomach start to writhe. Sometimes I wish that no one would visit me, or would arrive without announcing it beforehand; it would save my nerves a great deal of wear and tear.
All morning Nurse has been unable to suppress her curiosity, owing to all the misinformation she has been fed by her church Guild. “So she is the daughter of Mr. Darwin, Miss?”
“Daughter-in-law, Nurse. Before her marriage she was Sara Sedgwick, a good friend of mine in America. I have told you about her. In 1877 she married Mr. Darwin’s eldest son and moved to England.”
“Oh yes. Is the son very like the father?” Translation: Does the whole family have cloven hooves?
“I never met Mr. Charles Darwin. All I can tell you is that this Mr. Darwin has been rather bald since he was a young man.” Youngish. He was pushing forty when he married Sara.
Sara arrives at half past four with a dozen roses for me. She always brings flowers, either to save the trouble of finding something more original or because she views me as a hopeless invalid confined to a sickroom, needing a profusion of flowers.
“Well, Sara, you find me, as always, at my lifelong occupation of ‘improving.’ I’m afraid all the physicians of England have washed their hands of me.”
She smiles thinly, as if a real laugh would require a vitality beyond her powers, then spends about twenty minutes complaining of the difficulties of getting here. She looks unwell and I watch the familiar deadly “gone” look steal over her face minute by minute. It is like watching an eclipse of the sun, and an enormous lump wells up in my throat and I feel as if I might weep. But I must not. Nanny Ashburner Richards thinks Sara is a hypochondriac, but I think anyone who looks so ill must really be.
Nurse hovers nearby with a dust cloth, trying to mask her curiosity. The blue dusk deepens and the lamps are lit with a hiss. Sara has been complaining about her servants, how they over-starch the linens and her housekeeper pretends not to understand her English. I attempt to steer the conversation to national differences in hopes of injecting a little life into it. “Henry says the main desire in the British bosom is not to be left last with the host and hostess after an entertainment of any kind, so at a given moment there is a regular stampede.”
“Oh, Alice, I don’t think that is the rule at all.”
“He also says Englishwomen look entirely differently in Paris to what they do in London, not handsome at all, but big and clumsy.”
“I think Henry is a little inclined to overgeneralize national characteristics. I suppose it sells books, doesn’t it?”
Searching for something to ignite a real conversation, I try another gambit. “Can you imagine anything so inconceivably dreary as the existence led by royalty? How they must long to see a back.” At this the old Sara unexpectedly comes to life. She bursts out laughing and the light comes back to her eyes. I am reminded of the way she used to laugh in the old days, clutching her sides and pleading, “Please, Alice, promise not to say anything funny for the next five minutes.”
“Oh Alice!” she says now. “No one ever made me laugh like you. I’ll never forget your dramatic recitation of ‘The Angel in the House.’ That was possibly your finest hour, though there were so many it would be hard to say.”
“I’d nearly forgotten that.” It comes back to me now: A tableau vivant we did based on the saccharine painting hanging in the Misses Ashburners’ back parlor. Somewhere in most homes in those years there was a painting of “The Angel in the House,” playing the piano or darning socks while her little angels play companionably on the carpet and her lord and master smokes his pipe and reads the newspaper. For the tableau I’d garbed myself as the sainted woman in the painting while Bob played the part of my husband and, departing from the usual rules governing tableaux vivants, I recited a few lines of the cloying poem.
Lifting my eyes heavenward, I recite now, “Man must be pleased; but him to please is woman’s pleasure.”
Sara’s eyes tear up, and she dabs at the corners with her handkerchief. Unable to recall what comes next, I recite the only other lines I remember: She loves with love that cannot tire;/and when, ah woe, she loves alone,/Through passionate duty love springs higher,/As grass grows taller round a stone.
“I have never quite fathomed how love compares to grass growing up around a stone,” I say. “The whole poem is daft, isn’t it?”
Sara is gazing at me with infinite tenderness. “Very daft,” she says. “And the absurd notion that love springs from duty and that Home is so holy to our sex that we should never wish to set a foot outside the door. Oh, but Alice, I didn’t mean—” She blushes, evidently recalling that I never go out.
I brush this aside. “It’s all right, Sara. But what do you think the poet means by when she loves alone? Can it be that the husband has become weary of the poor drudge?”
Sara laughs merrily, and it is like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. “Ah well, who could blame him? Imagine living with a martyr like that; you’d almost have to be very wicked to balance things out.” As she says this, her upper lip curls in a way familiar to me from the days when she mocked the pieties of our youth. I am surprised by a memory of her hand up my skirt at Shady Hill as Charles Norton droned on about the ancient Greeks, the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. If we could fly back there, to reckless love, to youth and hopefulness, just for an hour. But no one can, of course.
The sun ducks back behind a cloudbank. Before long, Sara has launched into a tale about a luncheon with the Prince of Wales and some Princesses Royal, which she describes in some detail before becoming gloomily preoccupied with her horticultural problems. She mentions a book I haven’t read and tells me that Grace Norton is in England with Sally and Lily, who are young ladies now.
“I expect their father wants them to acquire English accents,” I say.
Sara shrugs. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.” I can’t help noting that a few English inflections have rubbed off on Sara herself, but I suppose she has a right to them, being English on her mother’s side.
Grace never calls on me, of course. Visits Henry often, sympathizing with him about the loathsome burden of an invalid sister. We are all so concerned, by all means don’t let your work suffer, et cetera. I must have some of Mrs. Piper’s occult powers because I can read Grace like a book, even from afar.
As for Sara, what happened to the young girl who dreamed of running away to live with the Bedouins, who drank absinthe, quoted Baudelaire, and sneered at all conformity? I was a fairly conventional young girl (though subversive in my mind) until Sara showed me other possibilities.
Something I had forgotten floats into my mind, something Sara said years ago, when she was visiting America with her new husband. Someone was asking about her honeymoon in Italy. She was speaking into her teacup and so faintly that you wondered if you’d misheard. I recall the word “disappointing.” Or maybe it was “discouraging.” I believed she was referring to the lack of amenities at their hotel, but now I wonder. Was the marriage unconsummated? Or consummated too brutally, as sometimes happens (I am told)? We only see the surfaces of people, even those closest to us; the rest is unspeakable mystery.