Emma opened all the windows. The subtle smell of her mother that remained reminded her of her own. Sunlight cut the bed. She took off the counterpane and turned the mattress, tears falling on to the cloth that covered the springs. I didn’t kill you, she said. No one kills anyone. You don’t even kill yourself.
‘Will you bring Thomas’s crib in?’ Clara said from the doorway.
She turned. ‘Did I kill her?’
The fact that Clara knew who she meant proved that she might well have.
‘Of course not. Father’s a fool for hinting it.’
Emma dried her eyes. While they spread the sheets she said: ‘Audrey can take the crib into her room. Thomas will sleep there. I want to be alone at night.’
Emma knew, she said, that Percy did not like her. She had always felt his hostility, and having an illegitimate baby to their name did not improve matters. He had adored his wife, and had disliked Emma (who closely resembled her) for those faults of Rachel which he had never allowed himself to acknowledge in case they spoiled life between them. Like all people who cherished each other as if they were still children in the nursery, the relationship had only been tolerable when they were mindlessly happy. Percy had known this very well, and had done everything to keep it so. Ruses of brain-fever and nervous breakdown had not been too much to manage, Emma said, when they talked about it in Clara’s room.
They had tea brought up from the kitchen, and sat in armchairs by the window. ‘You imagine too much,’ Clara replied.
Emma’s hand shook when she poured the milk. ‘Anything I imagine is real. I didn’t think that for there not to have been some truth in it.’
‘I dare say there is, but it’s hardly fair to father. Not to mention mother.’ Clara was convinced. Emma’s sense of reality was reinforced by the tone of her voice, which Clara knew was not true of herself because she rarely pondered on such matters, or thought them important when she did. Emma’s speculations could also be outrageous. ‘I wonder what mother and father were like in bed together?’
‘I refuse to talk about it.’
‘Well, I wonder. There’s no harm in that.’
‘Much like anybody else, I suppose.’
Emma broke a piece of toast and passed half to Clara. ‘I find it disgusting to think about – in a way.’
Clara’s mouth was full. ‘Don’t, then.’
‘I try not to.’
Clara could not let the topic go so easily. ‘Is it hard to try not to?’
‘I think about it whether I try to or not. But I don’t mind. Maybe it’s good for me. Such thoughts never occurred to me before Thomas was born.’
Clara changed the subject because there seemed nothing more to be got from it. ‘Why do you always wear that Jewish star?’
She held it between her fingers. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Very attractive, I suppose.’
‘I can tell you don’t think so. Thomas will have it when he’s old enough.’
‘You mean men wear them?’
‘He can put it under his vest.’
‘Why do you want him to, especially?’
‘Mother gave it to him, that’s why. I’m also glad I had him circumcised. She wanted that, too.’
Clara wished they could be together without so much talk. ‘I don’t see that it matters, these days.’
‘It certainly does. Mother wanted him to be part of her line, not father’s. She was getting her sense back at the end. When he grows up he can be what he likes, but if he wants to be Jewish he can be. If I die, at least I’ll leave him with a choice, and you can’t give a child anything better. Anybody can have good health, good looks, and even a good job, but to have a choice to make – that’s special! Not that I’m sure which way he’ll go. It’ll be up to him.’
Clara, sighing, didn’t know what to say. Her hopes sounded so unnecessary. ‘You won’t die, silly. He’ll be what you want him to be. And he may not want anything to do with it.’
‘He will. I only wish mother had given me such a choice.’
Clara thought she had. ‘I jolly well don’t, speaking for myself. There’s enough to worry about, without that.’
‘You’re so plain and shallow. The more one has to worry about, the more chance there is to think other things.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
After a while Emma said: ‘Have you seen mother’s books?’
‘What books?’
‘You haven’t?’
‘Is that why you moved into her room? What a dreadful snooper!’ – a riposte for being called plain and shallow.
‘Her dresses are still there, so I suppose that when you looked you didn’t notice the lid that opens from the inside of the wardrobe. I found letters from father written before they were married, and some he’d sent from the asylum, as well as a few she’d written to him. She must have got them back for some reason, or he gave them to her for safe keeping. They were better than I expected. But there were also a few old books in Hebrew and German – which I’ll keep, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t. But will father?’
‘He won’t have to. Thomas will have them one day.’
‘This Jewish thing has gone to your head.’
Clara was sorry. She had spoken without thought, which one should never do with Emma, who looked anguished, not so much, as it turned out, for what had been said, but because: ‘I still can’t believe mother’s gone. It frightens me to think about her life. If only she’d come back for an hour, for me to say all I’d never said when she was alive. I didn’t tell her how much I loved her, and now it’s not possible.’ She shook her head. ‘Life under such conditions is hardly worth while.’
Clara was alert with disagreement. ‘You’re trying to make Thomas become what mother would have wanted him to be, because she felt guilty at having given up her Judaism.’
‘She never did. She was always Jewish.’
‘Oh, she wasn’t all that deliberate about it. One never is. But have it your way. You’re trying to get him back on to the “one true path” then. Is that it?’
Emma’s face expressed inner enlightenment. ‘Yes, you’re right. But there are many true paths. I only want him to be like me and mother. Different to you and father.’
Clara shook her head. ‘What rubbish.’
‘I want him to be civilized. He’ll find out what I mean when he makes his choice.’
Clara wanted to be alone. She had nothing else to say. There was a limit to the amount of talk she could put up with. ‘I’ll be glad to start the spring-cleaning tomorrow. We can do the drawing-room first, and that’ll take some work. The place hasn’t been cleaned for I don’t know how long.’
‘A few more days’ – Emma stood – ‘and it’s into town for me. I want to spring-clean my life, not this dreadful old house. I wouldn’t care if it fell down, as long as we weren’t in it,’ she laughed.
She had been glad to seek refuge here, Clara thought after Emma had gone to her room. If Emma was tied in all ways to the baby, she was harnessed into organizing the household, and for a while neither could go into town. The most they did was to go shopping or to the bank in Highgate village. Otherwise they kept to the house as if they had rented that also. The upstairs back windows looked south, and they could see the Houses of Parliament on a good day. The sun fitfully blessed the grey sprawl, as if they were on the outskirts of a strange city after two seasons in a distant wilderness. Clara reached to the fable for her journal and fountain pen, too weary to write yet too stimulated by the conversation with Emma to resist doing so.
The maid accepted Thomas as if he were her brother or son. She fed him, played with him, and daily pushed him in the pram to Waterlow Park or Parliament Hill, walking along the foliaged pathways and under trees turning to a heavier green as the year went on. In the rain she clipped the hood and canvas barrier into place, so that he was snug against the elements.
With much screaming he was weaned from the breast and put on t
o bottled milk. Audrey fed him, as well as cleaned him, put him to bed, and got him up in the morning. A new girl did odd tasks in her place and hurried about on errands, and Audrey was solely in charge of Thomas.
Clara looked at him. Emma was in town, and Audrey had not yet taken him out. He lay in his pram, eyes open and staring at her, so clean and calm, so innocent. She wondered how much he saw at six months old, how much he knew of what was going on around him. He was unwanted, and would have to take his chance in life. The choice Emma had so thoughtlessly lumbered him with would be no advantage. He would be better off knowing nothing, at least until a time when such problems no longer mattered. Maybe Emma wasn’t serious. In her life of going about town she would forget her ideas, one enthusiasm often being swept away by the onslaught of another.
He saw her properly, and smiled. She was sure he smiled. His lips moved, and his eyes sparkled on opening wide. He stared, as if wondering why he smiled. His thin dark hair already had that subtle sheen of red. She lifted a finger, as if telling him to be still because he had nothing to smile fulsomely about. He reached for her thumb. He made a noise of laughter, and she felt sorry for him, as well as pity for Emma. She knew a moment of grief for her mother, her father, and for herself – feelings she disliked intensely. She touched his warm cheek consolingly, then told herself not to be stupid, and walked upstairs to see why the maid was taking so long getting ready.
Her father, on his afternoon walk, made sure he went in the opposite direction to Audrey and Thomas. He did not have the physical strength to force his face towards the baby when he was anywhere near his perambulator. He passed him as if some form of contamination might leap across.
Since Rachel died he had turned his back on life, as if she had taken his spirit with her. His nerves were no good again, he said, not hiding the fact that he blamed Emma for her mother’s death. His face was a mask which prevented any sympathy breaking through. No one deserved it, his expression said. The hurt flesh around his grey eyes indicated that he had had enough of trying to understand. Such efforts hadn’t worked and never would. Emma told him there might still be something to live for.
‘Father,’ she said at dinner, on a rare evening when she stayed at home, ‘why don’t you get married again?’
The cook brought in a platter of lamb chops, and Clara dropped one before getting it to her place.
‘Careless,’ Percy said. ‘Grip it tight.’
They took food on to their plates, and Clara hoped that her sister would forget her unseemly question. Why must she make more trouble than was absolutely necessary? Or any trouble at all? It was too much to expect.
‘I asked,’ said Emma, whose place at table was to his left, ‘whether or not you might ever think of getting married again, father?’
‘Oh do stop,’ Clara called.
He looked up. ‘I loved your mother too much. Besides, I’m an old man.’
Emma laughed. ‘You’re not much more than sixty. And if you really did love mother you’d certainly want to marry again. It would be nice for you, and good for the rest of us.’
He was about to smile – Clara was sure of it – but changed his mind. She saw it happening, in his predictable, half-conscious yet deliberate way, all emotions mixed to create the effect he absolutely wanted. And who, she thought, is any different? But she longed to get out of such force-fields, which by their spreading torment robbed you of life’s enjoyment. Her ideal state was an existence, if she must pass hers with other people, of placid well-bred diplomacy. Otherwise, she would live alone.
‘One usually meets someone and falls in love before getting married.’ He spoke less severely. ‘I haven’t yet seen anyone who would be a likely prospect. A marriage of convenience, or one to suit my wayward daughter, isn’t the sort of thing I would care to indulge in.’
Emma persevered. ‘You might meet a pleasant young woman. There are plenty about.’
She wanted him – and Clara could see that he knew it – to marry only so that she could then accuse him of never having loved their mother. He’d had enough, however. ‘When you yourself get married, I could be in a better frame of mind to think about it.’
‘Does Clara have to get married, too?’
‘I’d rather go on with my dinner,’ he said, ‘than put up with your tyranny.’
‘I’ll never get married,’ Clara announced, feeling like a boulder before the floodwater.
‘I suppose we’re lucky mother didn’t feel that way,’ said Emma. ‘Or are we?’
Clara picked up the handbell and rang for cook to come and take their plates. ‘Perhaps she did.’
‘Though I suppose,’ went on Emma, ‘that she would quite like you to marry again.’
‘She would not,’ he said. ‘She is now in heaven, and she would be eternally distressed.’
He had thought himself safe behind the palisade of his last request. But he doesn’t know Emma. He can’t possibly know her, Clara thought, since he didn’t really know mother very well, either. Or so Emma believed. Perhaps she was right, having a sure knowledge of people’s weaknesses. But he torments her, so she’s only getting her own back. No, it feels much worse than that.
He stood, and threw his napkin on to the table. The cook moved around to lift his plate. He put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Clara asked cook to bring in the dessert, then said to Emma: ‘Why can’t you know when to stop?’
He sat down. ‘I must ask you never to mention that subject again, not in any way whatsoever. If you do I will find it impossible to be in the same house with you.’
‘You’re nothing but a male bully,’ Emma responded coolly. ‘You have no emotional latitude. This is a dead house, and you make it so. We all live under your conditions, right down to what we can think. But you aren’t going to tell me what I can and can’t say.’
Clara felt riven by fever, cast between freezing and boiling, one part horrified for her father, the other side of her saying to herself: ‘Good for you, Emma, tell him off as he deserves.’ She had to admit that in some respects their life had been better when they’d had a place of their own, in that their antagonisms didn’t spread.
‘I wasn’t trying to annoy you,’ Emma said. ‘You could easily have laughed at my suggestion, instead of creating such a tragic atmosphere.’
Their mother had only been dead a few months, and Clara reminded her that people generally needed a year to get over a loved one’s death, if they ever did. Emma may not have been malicious, but she was surely insensitive to go on about it when father didn’t want her to.
Percy folded his napkin neatly, put it into its ivory ring, and went to smoke a cigar in his study, where he kept a decanter of port and could sit at his desk and stare at the large leather-bordered blotter till he was roused by the need for more port or to relight his cigar; or he would, with the smouldering cigar between his fingers, cover sheets of paper with automatic scribble-writing, using his favourite Waterman fountain pen, till his fingers ached too intensely for him to go on, or until a length of ash scattered itself on the paper as a reminder that he must stop because there were other things in life, such as a further glass of port and another cigar. He didn’t notice Clara set a coffee tray on his desk.
‘I suppose,’ she said to Emma in the living-room, ‘that he’s happy, after his fashion.’
‘I hope so.’ Emma added that by talking frankly about his situation she was only helping to bring his thoughts into the open. That was what he found so intolerable. Well, it was understandable. She wouldn’t want hers to be forced out in such a way, in which case she wouldn’t worry him again. If he wanted to know what he was thinking he could discover for himself – or not, as the case may be. She was sorry, and would apologize in the morning.
Clara said she ought to, and that from now on she should ‘act her age’ when at table with father, to which Emma replied that she knew very well what her age was, and couldn’t do anything but act it. Her age was part of her. It was a wide age that sp
anned any number of years, and not a narrow segment of time in which every tight-laced emotion was predictable.
There must be some good in him, Emma went on, because that, presumably, had been similar to what he had loved in mother, and maybe what in the end he couldn’t stand about her, because after she had died he didn’t want any more of it in the house, at least not from one of his daughters.
‘You’re wrong about father,’ Clara said. ‘You probably remind him so much of mother that it’s doubly painful when you go on as you do.’
‘But mother was always quiet as a mouse.’
‘In the last twenty years she was,’ Clara replied, ‘but at the beginning she was very lively – at least by her own account.’
‘Till he crushed it out of her by self-indulgent fits of so-called insanity,’ Emma said.
‘He’d had them before he met her.’ It’s no use asking where it all began. Here we are, yet because we must put up with all the questions and upsets we ought to forget about them. But Clara knew that to do so would mean cutting away nine-tenths of thought and talk. Emma stood before the fireplace and looked at the oil-painting of John above the mantelpiece. She gazed for some minutes, as if passing on her reflections to the face that could never give off the same life she remembered from him.
‘Father used his illness to try and break her spirit.’ She turned to Clara. ‘But only John being killed did that. Where’s the moral in it all?’
‘I don’t know. Is there one?’
‘There must be.’
‘Hating father won’t help you to find it.’
‘Oh, I don’t really hate him, but I do wish he wouldn’t die on us every day now mother’s no longer here. He’s spitting on her memory. Don’t you see, Clara? I love them both, yet I’m trying to make sure we have a better life than she had. Her beginning with father was a terrible mistake for both of them, but mostly for her. He’s trying to reduce us to the same state she was in most of her life. And I don’t know how to stop him!’