Human Traces

  Thomas Midwinter went up to his bedroom and took up the book he was reading, Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott. He had chosen it from the library because of a single line of Scott’s poetry: ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west’. The last word suggested mists and freshness and romance – odd, he thought, when really the west was where the sun went down and the day ended. The word ‘young’ made Lochinvar easy for Thomas to identify with (he felt sorry for old people) yet also worryingly vulnerable; and some terrible, precarious hope was in that sighing‘O’. What Thomas loved most about the line, however, was the word ‘is’. In his grammar class the master had explained that this was an archaism, yet the two common letters sent shivers of delight through him.

  Quentin Durward, on the other hand, was drudgery. At that moment, Louis XI was being reconciled, slowly, with Charles the Bold at Péronne, while Quentin’s affairs had been left to drift. Thomas settled on the bed and pulled the candle closer to him. He was fairly certain that he had broken his left arm, but did not wish to intrude on the business of the day.

  After a while he closed his eyes, folded the book on his chest and gave in to the ache of his limbs. Often at such moments he heard his voice. It was that of a narcoleptic man who had spoken to him regularly since childhood. It was not like hearing his own thoughts, which invariably came in fully formed sentences as though uttered by himself, silently into his mind’s ear (the sound of thoughts was similar to the sound of reading, when, however rapidly his eye skimmed the lines, the words did form and resonate, albeit inaudibly). His voice, by contrast, could be heard, like Edgar’s voice or Sonia’s; it was outside him, not produced by the workings of his own brain but by some other being.

  Generally, it soothed him. It offered comments of an indifferent, sometimes inconsequential nature on what he was doing or thinking or proposing. It did not try to interfere with his life and he was not frightened of it. The voice was always slow and dream-weighted, as though its owner had drained off a bottle of laudanum before speaking. He heard it less and less often these days, but it had been for so long such an intimate part of his experience of living that he had never thought to question it; nor had he ever mentioned it to anyone.

  There was no voice in the dark December afternoon, no sound at all in Thomas’s bedroom or from outside, where the garden and the village lay beneath the muffling weight of snow. It was dark, dead winter, Saint Lucy’s day, and the sequence of Thomas’s thought broke up into single images, in whose hypnotic light he faded into sleep.

  There was a knocking at the door. It rose through his dream, where it was briefly incorporated as a hammer on an anvil, then awoke him. He stood up and crossed the floor.

  ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking,’ he thought, ‘I would thou couldst . . . Sonia!’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes. What’s going on?’

  ‘They have been in the study for almost two hours.’

  ‘And still no puff of smoke?’

  ‘Oh there’s plenty of smoke. It is like a London fog.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Come and sit on the bed.’

  ‘I had to show Mrs Prendergast round the house and then take her outside to look at the grounds. I saw that awful man Fisher swigging from a bottle in the kitchen garden. Luckily it was almost dark by then so I don’t think she saw. Are you all right, Thomas? You look pale.’

  ‘It’s my arm. I think it’s broken.’

  ‘Then we must take you to a doctor at once. Or I’ll send . . . I’ll send . . .’

  ‘Well, whom will you send? There’s no one to send any more, is there? Jenkins, I suppose. But listen, Sonia, it’s all right. I’ll get Edgar to take me when they’ve gone. I don’t want to distract them from their business.’

  Thomas put his good hand in his sister’s lap, where her own fingers were clasped together. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I do not love him.’

  ‘Really, Sonia. No one could expect that, not after two hours. Do you think you could marry him?’

  Sonia looked towards the door. ‘I think you should marry someone you love.’

  ‘That is a very modern idea, I think. A very English idea. No one on the Continent of Europe would consider marrying for anything but social position.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sonia. ‘But I am an English girl, Thomas, and I don’t live on the Continent of Europe.’

  Thomas was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘His hair is very—’

  ‘I know! But he’s losing it at quite a rate. Soon there won’t be any left.’

  ‘Yes. The silver lining. I like your dress, by the way. You look beautiful.’

  Sonia raised her eyes to her brother’s face doubtfully. ‘The Queen of Sheba?’ she said.

  ‘More lovely, much more.’

  She pulled some thread from the cover on the bed. ‘It’s easy for you,’ she said, ‘because you can have any profession you like. You can live where you want, you can marry the girl of your choice.’

  ‘Good Lord! If she’d have me. Anyway, I don’t know what profession I should follow. They all laugh when I say I’m interested in literature. And where would that take me? I suppose I could become a schoolmaster, teaching grammar in Lincoln, but . . . Oh dear.’

  ‘Why don’t you join the army? The Dragoons or the Hussars. You’d look handsome in that uniform.’

  ‘Yes, even I—’

  ‘Even you, Thomas.’

  ‘Stop it, Queenie, or I shall go downstairs and tell young Mr Prendergast that you still sleep with a doll and that I saw you kiss—’

  ‘Thomas!’

  ‘All right. But you are blushing.’

  ‘I know. But shall I marry Mr Prendergast? That’s what I want you to tell me.’

  ‘I am sixteen years old, Sonia.’

  ‘You have always been grown up for your age. Alas.’

  ‘Ow! My arm, my arm. You sat on my broken arm.’

  ‘Let us have a look at this arm, shall we? Hold it out for me. Now where is it supposed to be broken?’

  ‘Here. Just above the wrist.’

  ‘Can you move it like this?’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘And like this? Dearest, if it was broken, you could not move it at all. Do you know nothing about anatomy?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You are a hypochondriac, Thomas. And do you know why? Because you have never had a day of illness in your life. Not one.’

  ‘I had chicken pox.’

  ‘A handful of spots for half a day. And that is all, isn’t it? That is why you always fancy you are ill because you don’t really know what being ill feels like!’

  Sonia leaned forward on the bed and gently set Thomas’s unbroken arm back by his side. ‘You are fascinated by illness. You love those long medical words even if you don’t know what they mean. I heard you talking to Miss Brigstocke the other day about her scapula. She must have thought it was a kind of spoon for stirring soup.’

  ‘Like a spatula.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Thomas?’ Sonia stood up and walked over to the window; Thomas’s room was on the second floor and the lights of the window were half obscured by the stone parapet outside. ‘I am excited by this.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Thomas, don’t be silly. This is what you should do. You should study to become a doctor. You could go to the university. Father would be happy and you could do all your play-reading and suchlike in the evenings after you had done your medical classes. It is perfect for you. Then you could become a doctor or a surgeon anywhere you liked. In London, in Edinburgh, Paris – or on board a ship.’

  ‘I am not going to be a barber surgeon cutting off the midshipman’s leg. I want to—’

  ‘But I am right, aren’t I, Thomas? It is the perfect profession for you.’

  ‘And my qualification for it is that I am a hypochondriac.’

  ‘I think it is the ideal qualification. You have excellent health, which you will
need, and at the same time a fascination with the morbid. What more could you ask?’

  Thomas smiled at her but said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ said Sonia.

  ‘I have heard you say more foolish things.’

  Sonia folded her hands. ‘And now that I have decided your life’s course for you, it is your turn to help me with mine.’

  ‘Mr Prendergast?’

  Thomas sucked in his breath. He did not want Sonia to leave Torrington House because he would miss her; in the brief time he had known Richard Prendergast he had developed misgivings about him. He did not trust himself to advise his sister, however, because he knew little about such things; it all seemed so unpredictable to him, so lacking in pattern. All he could do was help her to elucidate her own thoughts.

  ‘You think a girl should marry only for love?’he said.

  ‘Not for love alone, but I think love must be there.’

  ‘And you do not love Mr Prendergast?’

  ‘Of course not. As you said, I barely know him. But Mother says that love will come.’

  ‘Love will come?’

  ‘Yes. She said it came to her after she was married to Father.’

  ‘I see. And did it stay?’

  ‘I did not ask.’

  Thomas could think of nothing more to say on the subject of love.

  ‘Would you like to live in London?’ he asked.

  ‘I . . . I think so. It might be noisy and dirty but we could always come back here when we were tired of it.’

  ‘Or to Nottingham. Should you not go and see his family’s house?’

  ‘I imagine Father will go and see it. Anyway, as long as there is still this house, I should not have to go there if I didn’t want to.’

  ‘I would miss you, Sonia.’

  ‘But you would come and stay in Mayfair. And from there you could walk to the theatre every night of the week.’

  Thomas smiled. ‘Yes. I suppose I could. But I think . . .’

  He was interrupted by the sound of his mother’s voice calling up the stairs.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Smoke?’ he said.

  Sonia licked her lips nervously. ‘Yes, perhaps smoke,’ she said.

  ‘Sonia, you do not have to make a decision straight away. Be gentle. Be calm.’

  He felt her fingers lightly drum his sleeve. ‘I know, Thomas, I know.’

  At midnight, long after the last carriage had left, when the supper things were washed and tidied back into their cupboards by the sleepy May, when Dido and Amelia had been brought in from their kennel on account of the cold and given an old blanket in front of the range, there were still three people awake in Torrington House.

  Sonia lay beneath her eiderdown, staring at the invisible ceiling. Her grandmother had told her when she was a child that it was the duty of a girl to do the bidding of her father. A woman’s life, she said, was full of rewards so long as she knew how to please her husband; and as to who that man should be, Sonia must rely on the wisdom and experience of her parents. What she should avoid at all costs was becoming unattached; she must not allow her selfishness – and she did have a little wilfulness, did she not – to remove her beyond the pale. If she was prepared to do as she was asked, then her life might be agreeable.

  She did not like Richard Prendergast; she did not dislike him: what she wanted was for her life to begin. She was bored at Torrington House with only domestic duties to attend to, helping out here and there. She wanted to bring pleasure to her parents, to act out wholeheartedly the part they chose for her and to collect her reward in the approval of their eyes. She was fairly certain she would grow to love Richard, because he was blessed, raised in her view merely by being the choice of her family. And even if there was no flame, no anguish, no joy when he came home at night, still she could relish the business of being a wife, buoyed by the knowledge that she brought comfort to him, and pride to her father.

  She turned onto her side. How, really, could she know? With what other man could a girl of eighteen compare Mr Richard Prendergast? If she were allowed a rehearsal, an experiment, then she might make a graver, more informed decision. Life, however, never felt like that to her; it felt like something that she improvised from day to day. Having the idea of duty deep inside her head, and having – by some chance of birth – a hopeful temperament, she was always, she admitted, more likely to say yes than no.

  Mr Midwinter stood in front of the fire in his study, his feet planted on the thin rug that covered the flags.

  Occasionally, he had such moments alone, when he could step aside from the demands of his family and his clients. They were not glorious or exciting, these minutes of solitude, but they enabled him to correct the weight of anxiety and disappointment that were the burden of his days. His wife irritated him and his children were not what he had hoped; they would make no fortunes or conquests, would not become the cynosure of the county or the land. On the other hand, they were alive; the firm of Chas Midwinter laboured on beneath his direction; the house stood, his stomach was full and the dogs slept.

  In the corner of the room were packages he had wrapped for Christmas, another duty discharged. He shifted, and felt the floor again through the leather soles of his boots.

  This Richard Prendergast was not the kind of man he liked, and the parents were somehow a disappointment; he had felt no elation when he stood opposite the father after lunch: it had been a little like looking at himself in a dim glass. He told Prendergast the sum that he had put aside to settle on Sonia when she married, an amount his business manager told him he could not, under any circumstances, exceed. After half an hour of bargaining, he had agreed to raise it ten per cent and they shook hands, each with satisfaction – Prendergast in the knowledge that he had secured a reluctant increase, Midwinter relieved that the sum was still lower than the figure he had actually resigned himself to losing.

  Thomas lay nursing his arm, cold and unhappy beneath his blankets. He had one year left of Sonia’s company before she would be removed to London by young Mr Prendergast after their wedding. Much of that year would in any event be spent by Thomas at his boarding school and he felt that the best part of his childhood had been brought to a sudden close by an opportunist family raid. It was not fair on him; nor could it really be fair on poor Sonia, he thought, to ask her to venture into a fragile future with this Prendergast, with her hopeful disposition their only real asset. Thomas knew little of the economics of marriage, but he could not help feeling that his sister had been sold too cheap.

  For himself, it was time to escape. Torrington without Sonia was unthinkable; he would stay there not a moment longer than was necessary to complete his education; and then . . . He would shock his parents with the brilliance of his plans; he would dazzle them and make them ponder, sadly, at what they themselves had overlooked. He would, like King Lear, do such things – what they were yet he knew not – but they should be the terrors of the earth.

  He clenched his good fist beneath the bedclothes. If they would not let him become a doctor of literature, then perhaps he should accept Sonia’s parting present – the bride’s gift to her bachelor – and become a doctor of medicine. Why not bring the labourer, science, to do the mule’s work in his greater project? Keats, after all, had been apprenticed to an apothecary and qualified as a surgeon.

  Thomas’s fretful ambitions, once they had blown and raged enough to keep him from sleeping, elicited from him a reluctant smile. Who would listen to an English boy, of no obvious abilities, invisible in the cold and silent countryside? How would they even know that he existed?

  III

  IN THE FOURTH year of her marriage, Sonia accompanied her husband to the recently built French resort of Deauville. Richard Prendergast told her it would be good for his business to be seen mingling with fashionable Parisians, strolling along the sea front and sitting down at the gaming tables of the Trouville casino at night. He assured Sonia that he would gamble only small sums and that when it came to card games
he had the luck of the devil. ‘Anyway,’ he said, taking her arm, ‘a change of air might help your . . .’ He gestured towards the area of her abdomen, then overcame his diffidence as a thought apparently came to him. ‘Fresh air,’ he said, ‘for a fresh heir.’

  They took rooms in a boarding house some way back from the front, therefore less expensive than the principal hotels. Sonia had disliked the seaside since being immersed as a child in the freezing waves of Yarmouth and felt her spirits subside as the summer months approached. How was she to make conversation with the spinster ladies and retired Parisian stockbrokers who would constitute the clientèle of the establishment? One day in April, as she was returning to her small house behind Curzon Street, she had an idea; she ran upstairs to the sitting room and pulled out a piece of paper.

  Dear Thomas,

  Thank you for your last letter. I am sorry you have been in trouble with the university authorities again. For heaven’s sake, do be careful or you will be sent down and then where will all your plans be?

  Now that is why I am writing to you, young man, as your chaperone and Guiding Light. You shall have your bachelorhood of science, your MB or whatever you may call it – provided you can keep away from the low company you have described at Emmanuel College and the taverns of Newmarket – but then what? Are you to practise in Lincoln like poor old Dr Meadowes with his pony and trap and his gouty foot? Or is to be the fashionable women of Mayfair with their imaginary maladies?

  Think hard, Thomas. You must be able to go where new discoveries are being made, where the great men of science are gathered together. You must learn to speak their language. I know you were taught German at school, but you need to speak French. You must be able to discourse as easily in Paris as inVienna. You must never – certainly not at this tender age – allow your horizon to be limited.

  To this effect, my dear brother, I have engaged a room for you in a lodging house in the French resort of Deauville this summer. There you will undergo an intensive course in the French language, of which I know you already have the rudiments. By the time you return to your Fenland rooms, you shall be trilingual!