Down in the kitchen everyone fell silent. I went on with my homework. Aunt Fanny walked into the scullery to tell Charlotte of the fiscal changes upstairs and consequent drop in her own weekly wage from eight shillings a week to seven. My gran, Gertie—“the silly one”—said only, “Oh, I was so lucky to have had a husband to look after this side of things for me for all those years.”
“Willy was hardly ever at home,” said Fanny. “There never was any money.”
“He always was away at the Pyramids or somewhere,” said Aunt Bea, “giving great parties ashore to half the Merchant Navy. They say there’s a William Helm silver cup presented annually for golf to this day—”
“It was Piraeus,” said Granny.
“Wasn’t it Antwerp?” said Fanny.
“Not for golf,” said Granny. “Not golf.” (She had her own story, but nobody listened.)
“There’s other Merchant Navy widows very comfortable in this town. Very comfortable indeed,” said Fanny. “There’s Mrs. Armitage. She’s got a daily maid and a cleaner for the rough and a nice house and a weekly hair appointment. And your wonderful Captain’s left you penniless. I don’t know why he ever married you. Or anybody. Or why ever you chose him.”
This was quite true. The Captain, as he was always called, hated life ashore. His one particular hell was to be without a ship on our family summer holiday in a rented cottage on the moors. He would be the only man, for we went there off-season at a third of the price. Photographs of us with panting dogs and the grinning Charlotte and Thermoses and sandwiches showed him sitting like a thundercloud and face of pastry-white, a hand on each knee and in his naval uniform. When the orange envelope came to order him to Middlesbrough dockyard, he would give the telegraph boy a ten-shilling note and we would all be on the doorstep to watch him go, with his little bag (packed by Granny), towards the perils of the deep. He would sing out goodbye and “It’s a man’s life, ladies” and—no backward glance (Granny with wet cheeks)—pass into a blessed forgetfulness of home.
My mother, Kathleen, the Captain’s eldest, left school at twelve though she had won the Latin prize and her brothers at private schools were always bottom of the class. After the Captain’s rather early death (not at sea but in Cardiff in a household unknown to us) it seemed kind to Granny to move back to the two sisters’ house next door, the house where she had been happy. She found consolation there, kindly and quiet, especially in the afternoons when everyone slept, the lodgers not coming home until their high teas, Mr. Shaw sometimes bringing in a bag of sweets for himself, or the Evening Gazette. For me there was a lovely certainty about these afternoons. The sixpence was always waiting. After high tea Miss Gowland got out her knitting and Mr. Shaw wrote his memoirs. The sixpence was the only money I had of my very own until my marriage. My grandfather was gone by then and was thus spared embarrassment.
After tea on Wednesdays I sometimes read to my great-aunts. Their eyesight was growing poor and there were no plans to find money for spectacles. The smelly maid, Charlotte, had tried to read to them—something easy like John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, but she had been allowed to go back to grinding the last of Sunday’s roast for shepherd’s pies after she had called it The Three Ostriches. Once or twice Great-Aunts Fanny and Bea tried reading aloud, something more dramatic, like poetry shouted to the skies—Fanny making an alarming Blind Pew in Treasure Island—but Granny and the rest of them disliked books about foreign places.
It had been a surprise to my grandmother to hear from another merchantman’s wife that a captain was allowed on a long voyage to take his wife and family with him. The Captain looked evasively at the ceiling but, to everyone’s surprise, off she went with him on his next trip. Yes, Granny said afterwards, there had been storms and the sailors had given her black looks because taking a woman on board was said to be unlucky and yes, one or two poor sailors had fallen overboard and oh dear, yes, she’d heard her boys beginning to swear like the crew. “There goes another bloody Dreadnought,” Bobby had sung endlessly from his bunk. When she had got up to tell him he mustn’t, the Captain had said, “Leave him be. All the swearing disappears once you’re home.” And it had been true and people should know how good the Captain could be with children.
Her sisters sniffed.
Granny was pure and without guile. When her sisters told her not to talk about her home life when at sea she said, “But I don’t have anything else to talk about.”
When I was about to go away to university in London, where I knew nobody, I was suddenly smitten with love for my grandmother. The Captain was long gone. Fanny and Beatrice were long gone too, and Charlotte, and some others much more precious still. I was leaving the cocoon alone and for the very first time, and it struck me how strange it must have been for a man like Captain Helm to be chained hand and foot by three old landladies and a host of people he had never heard of.
However had he and my granny met? I asked her once.
“Well, we were next-door neighbours. We were very lucky. We were all born, the three of us, in Fisherman’s Square and I’d better pass over what went on there,” said my grandmother. “Then old Lady Newcomen of Newcomen Hall took up religion and saw angels pointing and that, and she had Newcomen Terrace built for deserving working people. She built this great swathe of terrace rising up from the marshes where the old monks of Guisborough, long since, used to breed rabbits, then down to the sea. And she interviewed a big number of people round here and our own family got the chance of this house, and your grandfather’s family got the one next door and the two of us met—just us two children looking through iron railings. And I think we just liked each other’s faces.
“But, you know, Willy was shipped off as a cabin boy out East straight after we got privately engaged. To China. And it took three years, and there was no postcards nor telephone and he got shipwrecked off Malaysia or China or somewhere and because he was youngest they lifted him off first in the breeches-buoy and dropped him down in this heathen place by the China Sea where they eat dogs and cut heads off and he was right as rain and didn’t want to come back.”
“And when he did—did he remember? Did he remember you, Gran?”
“Yes, and I never thought anything of it and we stayed engaged. We’d been engaged since we were thirteen.”
“But they couldn’t marry yet,” said Aunt Fanny. “They were still just sixteen. They were only privately engaged between their two selves. It was years more before they went in the horse and trap to be married in Kirkleatham Church. He’d failed, you see, to get his captain’s ticket. He tried five times and he failed every time, and they went crying along the beach. Yes—the Captain cried on until Gertie said, ‘Willy, I’ll teach you,’ and do you know she had him word-perfect in no time, and next time, he passed. Your granny, it turned out, was no fool.”
“Was it wonderful, Granny?”
“Was what wonderful?” She looked wary.
“When he got his captain’s ticket.”
“No. I just made him get down to working at it. I think I surprised him.”
“And being married, was that wonderful? I mean, what Alice Bigley called ‘the life upstairs’?”
“Who is Alice Bigley?”
“A girl at school.”
“And she shouldn’t have known about that, still at school,” said Aunt Fanny.
“Some of us had special lessons with the vicar,” said I. Gran suddenly flushed red as roses. “I expect you had your own adventures, Gran?”
She gave us all a terrible glare but later she told me privately, “I had quite an adventure with Mr. Jackson, you know. He taught me netball. The nuns asked him to. You must never tell Fanny and Bea.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, he found I was very good at it, sports, I mean. He gave me a free private lesson on a Saturday afternoon. ‘Three o’clock now, Legs. Saturday afternoon,’ and I never answered but I always went. I used to wait on Yearby Bank behind the field-gate up there. ‘Legs’,
he used to call me. No nice men ever saw a girl’s legs then, you know. Until they were married. And not even then, sometimes. Sometimes they just cut a hole in their petticoat.”
“Ought you to be telling me this, Gran?”
“Yes. Of course. Nothing much happened. I did cut a hole in my petticoat once but I still don’t know why. Nobody noticed, not even Mr. Jackson, but he brought a bicycle sometimes and that was wonderful. It was called a penny-farthing. So tall! I had to be lifted up on it. Under my arms and dropped down on the saddle slowly and he gave me a push and away I flew and I used to scream and shout and catch flies in my open mouth and one day I came off in a field and . . .” A vague look and a silence followed.
“I’m terribly sorry, Granny—so very sorry,” and I tried to put my arms round her.
She looked amazed.
“You shouldn’t have married Grandad.”
Now she looked outraged. “But he was quite a catch, dear. He was a gentleman. I never was so sure of anything when we were in those next-door houses in Newcomen Terrace. Sometimes I think girls of that age know best and yet that’s when they are thought to be so silly. Your mother was born nine months from the wedding night and I was told I should have been embarrassed but I somehow never was. Just lost in joy.”
“But then off he went again and you couldn’t go with him?”
“Oh, it was all right. I sat saying my prayers whenever he was on the Russian run. That’s when he took to the whisky. And he got torpedoed, you know, in the Irish Sea. Three times, and then the OBE from the old King. But it only came by post, for some reason.”
“He lost his ship three times,” said Aunt Fanny from the shadows. “It sounds like carelessness to me.”
“I think of him still on the sands,” Gran said, “when I think how it’s still the same sands and the same sea. All those years, and not able to touch each other.”
I said, “Didn’t you even mind, Gran? There must have been someone else you could have married.”
“Oh, I was lucky, you know, to get anyone. I was what they called ‘an old bride’ of twenty-six. Of course I married him. Everyone needs to keep something private from their family.”
SINCE FIRST I SAW YOUR FACE
EMMA DONOGHUE
MY FELLOW BOARDERS AT Benson’s are mostly cure-seekers, come to Wiesbaden in search of lost health. Two consumptives, an anaemic, half a dozen digestive cases. Mr. Christopher Benson himself (withered legs, wheeled around by his valet) is the gentle lord of this house of invalids.
“No, I’m perfectly well, as it happens. It’s a natural pallor,” I tell his sister-in-law (nerves), who’s just arrived from Berkshire as September begins to cool.
“How convenient for you, Miss Hall,” says Mrs. Mary Benson with a tiny smile. “You could claim to be on the verge of fainting at any moment. In the middle of a dinner party, say, or an interminable tour of a gallery.”
I shake my head. “The former, perhaps, but in matters of art I’m tireless. For some years now I’ve been working on a study of the Madonna and Child motif in German painting and sculpture.”
This sister-in-law has witty eyebrows, I notice now, as they soar.
By the second day we’re Ellen and Minnie, because, as she points out, watering places are known for their delightful suspension of the rules of etiquette. Thirty-one, and not pretty by any measure: dumpy, snub-nosed, straight dark hair. But a lively conversationalist, despite her shattered health. Her clergyman husband is director of a Berkshire public school, and something of a scholar, preparing a monograph on St. Cyprian, a third-century Bishop of Carthage.
Minnie reports pressure on the sides and top of her head; trouble with appetite, sleep, memory; the ground seems to rise and fall beneath her. A devouring sort of lowness. A screwed-tightness, so that her shoulders ache as if she’s bearing an invisible yoke.
Having lodged so long at the Bensons’, I thought I’d no patience left for symptoms (the perennial topic in Wiesbaden). But somehow I keep listening to Minnie Benson.
Dr. Malcolm has prescribed her a complete reprieve from the whirl and clamour of modern life. Prayers by her bed at a quarter past eight; bathe; dress; breakfast; read; walk; rest; luncheon; tonics (cod liver oil, iron, quinine); sew; walk; rest; dine; a little music; to bed by ten, with a dose of chloral hydrate for sleep.
But it doesn’t sound to me as if it’s modern life that’s done the damage. Minnie’s given the headmaster six children in eleven years, and her health collapsed after the last.
“Small wonder,” I tell her. “The womb is our Waterloo.”
That makes her laugh. “Is that why you’ve never gone to war, Ellen?”
Spinsterhood has more than that to recommend it.
Over breakfast Minnie opens her children’s letters. They’re an accomplished, verbose crew, churning out a weekly magazine on their father’s sermon paper. “At our house,” she explains, “one must ask for the toast in rhyme.”
I smile, as if I find these family habits charming.
I can tell she’s touched that I’ve got the six children straight already. The elder boys, away at school: Martin, at eleven, in a fever of excitement about the Peruvian Indians; Arthur, her earnest favourite, who toils over his writing till the sweat breaks out in drops. The four youngers, at home with Minnie’s mother and their nurse: Nellie the bossy prankster; Maggie the shy one, whose stories pile catastrophe on catastrophe; little Fred, five, and (just eleven months) Hugh. Baby’s got two teeth now, and Fred’s still afraid of the tiger skins in the hall, says the letter Minnie reads aloud. We and Papa—(for Papa is not we), Maggie adds in parentheses—went out yesterday.
“How very . . . analytical, for seven,” I comment.
She passes the letter to Mr. Benson, as a specimen of his niece’s shockingly spidery hand.
“Who is Lady Abracadabra?” he wants to know.
“Occasionally I pretend to go to bed early, then come down as an Arabian princess, swathed in silks and flowers, with a pair of golden wings and a trumpet, and I lavish them with little gifts.” A reminiscent smile, as Minnie rubs her knee through the silk. “I tore a sinew last year playing Three Knights A-Riding.”
“Does my brother write often?” asks Mr. Benson.
She shakes her head. “Edward’s hours are so crammed with work. He does send the odd note with loving wishes and prayers for me to overcome my besetting sins.”
I say nothing, and sip lukewarm tea.
I’ve never had such a friendship. Like trumpets in the distance, when I wake up every morning.
More intimate details emerge, as we stroll under the lime trees. A chronically tender abdomen; pangs in the bosom as if Hugh were still a babe in arms instead of long weaned and staggering after their beloved nurse.
We discuss the strange, idle existence that is convalescence. “There’s nothing I can do except try my best to get well,” complains Minnie, “but Edward won’t believe I’m trying hard enough.”
Dr. Malcolm says she needs a holiday from her life. Only a prolonged separation from her bustling family will allow her nerves to regain some tone.
I think: Me. What she needs is me.
“Even before I fell ill, I was a failure as a wife,” Minnie volunteers. “I’m untidy and always late. I draw up schedules, then fall prey to spontaneity and read the children Dickens for hours on end while Fred strokes my hair. My accounts get in such a muddle, I have to borrow from my mother behind Edward’s back. He and I bicker, and I can’t obey as I should.”
“Reprehensible,” I say, in such a deep boom that she laughs into her hand.
My mornings are taken up with giving sketching lessons to Benson’s pupils, so Minnie sees a lot of the other boarders; there’s a Mrs. Mackenzie, for instance, a bore, but Minnie claims she has a good heart.
The afternoons are all ours. We read poetry to each other, or take long jaunts by carriage, squeezed together on the tiny seat. Our walks in the woods are leisurely, because Minnie stops for ev
ery bird, or interesting moss, or to practise her German on a passing farmer’s wife. I never say no to anything she proposes; I never tire.
In the evenings, in the little parlour, I play for the boarders. Minnie has a sweet alto that illness has done nothing to muddy. I teach her an old lyric from the Bard’s day.
Since first I saw your face I resolved
To honour and renown ye;
If now I be disdained I wish
My heart had never known ye.
She and I sit up well past ten, and I promise not to tell Dr. Malcolm.
“I like you exceedingly, Ellen,” Minnie whispers, her eyebrows mocking the schoolgirlish adverb. “I knew I would, the moment I set eyes on you. Your perfect, pearly features: like some Gothic angel floating over the toast rack.”
“Chalky, I’ve been called,” I say, summoning a chuckle. “Peaked, wan, ashen, whey-faced . . .”
On the stairs, each of us carrying her candle. “I have a secret dread,” Minnie whispers.
I freeze. Bend till my ear’s by her mouth.
“I may be . . . in that condition again.”
So the headmaster took advantage of her before he let her limp off to Germany. Couldn’t he allow her three years between births, at least? The woman can’t bear it, not this time. I press her plump fingers.
In a half-sob, she asks, “Is it wrong to pray that it should not be so?”
As the weather gets crisper, Minnie grows a little stronger every day. Her headaches are less violent and don’t last as long. I encourage her to try all the delicious German cheeses. She accuses herself of a weakness for luxury, but I’d call it the simplest acceptance of what each day offers. A soft chair, a book, an orange: why live at all if we can’t enjoy that much?