After Alice (14 page)

 

CHAPTER 34

L
ydia decided to sabotage Miss Armstrong's plan of waylaying Mr. Winter for another private walk. Lydia said, “Since Mrs. Brummidge insists I find Alice, I'll go look, and return with Alice
and
Siam. Mr. Winter will be
so
pleased.”

“I'll have your head for a doorstop if you don't bring Alice in,” swore Mrs. Brummidge. “I'd go hunt her myself did we not have Mr. Himself to dine.”

“I'll come with you, Lydia,” said Miss Armstrong promptly, as Lydia had gambled she would. Better Lydia should suffer the company of this sycophant than that the governess should prey upon Mr. Winter while Lydia was out-­of-­doors. Miss Armstrong continued. “Before the men finish their meal, let us put this hide-­and-­seek routine to an end. Those children are having us as fools, I fear. It is the age-­old gambit of the young against the adults. No doubt you played it in your time. I am certain I did.”

Lydia couldn't decide if she had ever engaged in such a campaign, and if so, whether or not she had finished. She was only aware of confusions, which might be the same thing. Resenting Mr. Winter his chivalry toward the governess, resenting Miss Armstrong's menacing solicitude about him. Lydia was also aware of a throb of guilt about Siam's hiding from her. Still, wherever Siam might be, it was his fault, not hers.
She
hadn't pocketed a game-­piece. And from a room more mausoleum than anything else. Lydia found herself becoming indignant all over again.

It's not easy to be half of anything. Half-­adult/half-­child is a state with no reliable signposts.

She left her soup half uneaten. She ignored the brown slices on the bread tray. She rose from the table. “If Siam isn't found soon, do you suppose Mr. Winter will send Mr. Darwin home on his own? So the American can stay here to search for his lost boy?”

“I believe Mr. Darwin's needs take precedence.” Miss Armstrong's air of propriety about Mr. Winter's obligations, thought Lydia, was nothing short of insolent. “Mr. Winter told me that the old scholar hasn't left his home in months. ­People come to him. Whenever he
does
venture up to London, he lets no one know, or he'd be bedeviled with invitations. Your father must be a very honored friend of Mr. Darwin's for the man to travel so. He is feeling the stress of this trip. Nothing would induce Mr. Winter to abandon him. Mr. Winter has his own petition to make of Mr. Darwin, you see.”

“The gentleman went around the world on the
Beagle,
and it took five bloody years,” intoned Mrs. Brummidge. “If he can't get from Oxford to London on his own, he needs to grow a new pair of flippers.” She made vaguely
arfing
noises under her breath for the next several minutes.

Lydia and Miss Armstrong went to the garden. Love-­in-­a-­mist, sweet sultan, bachelor's buttons. Hardy annuals. “The children are
not
in the house,” said Lydia. “I am sure of this. It's true, Alice can be silent as a corpse when she is in one of her dream games. I found her once lying under the bed staring up at the mattress ticking. I sensed her presence, there's no other word for it. She'd been there all day.”

“Which room?” asked Miss Armstrong.

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps not.”

In fact, the bed in question had been the bed that Mama had died in. Lydia had yanked Alice out by her elbow and by the hem of her skirt. Lydia had had to slap Alice, twice, to make her blink her eyes and notice where she was.

But though one child, an Alice-­like child, could pretend to marble, three together would give themselves away in whispers and giggles. The children must be underfoot, hiding somewhere obvious. It was a matter of thinking where to look. Of becoming like unto a child again. Of yielding to that paradox: that the least powerful among us are privileged with the greatest exposure to feeling. The greatest susceptibility to impression.

“When Ada has come to visit before, the children have played in the garden,” said Miss Armstrong, looking about. “Shall we leave no stone unturned?”

“They won't be under a stone,” said Lydia.

The property of the Croft consisted of a small orchard (four trees), a kitchen garden with a hen run, and a misshapen apron of grass across which Dinah sometimes stalked with stiff swiveling legs, and her kittens pounced, black and white against the green. The garden had been Mrs. Clowd's domain. Much flourished now that ought not to do: stands of weed, frotheries of vine that had not been cut back in the appropriate season. No shortage of blinds for hide-­and-­seek. In ten minutes Lydia and Miss Armstrong had made a thorough circuit, even peering into the chicken house. No stowaways could be found.

“We've
been
back and forth across the river path and the nearer meadows,” complained Miss Armstrong. “Does Alice often go far afield on her own?” She spoke with a minimum of disapproval, for which Lydia was grateful.

“Not very far. She's too young.”

“We all grow up.” This, a bulletin from the front, courtesy of the five or six years Miss Armstrong could claim against Lydia. Lydia despised her all over again. “On my way here after checking at the Vicarage, I called out to the Trillings' gardener, who was passing by in a rowboat. He hadn't seen the girls. I didn't ask him about Siam, but I suspect he'd have mentioned if he'd seen a displaced child of that variety. Are you
quite
certain the children aren't hiding in the Croft? You've examined all its crannies and particulars? You've been to the attics? Have you remembered the basements?”

“I've been all about, but not to the crawl space,” said Lydia. “It is too wet to keep anything there but spiders. In any case Pater minds the keys. No, Alice is not at home, Miss Armstrong; I've said that already. And I insist she wouldn't venture into town. She's given to silence and solitary play. She doesn't seek out company. She avoids it generally. And in among the colleges and the market there is nothing
but
company. Even in the long vac, when the streets are quieter than in term, there'd be too much fuss made over her.”

“I can't see that Alice deserves much fuss.”

“She's become a motherless child, Miss Armstrong. That type of creature calls forth a response from all, whether Alice requires it or not. Though she abhors the stickiness of sentiment. She's too brave for that.”

“Then there's nothing for it; Alice and Ada must have put their wicked heads together and decided to light out farther afield along the riverside than we've thought. If we find them, we'll find Siam in tow, I hope. He'll have caught up with them. They've had a good start and might have gone a distance. Shall we push on beyond the University Parks? It gives us something to do, anyway, while the men are finishing their meal.”

Miss Armstrong plunged forward across the fields to the river path. She was a land-­borne ship in full sail, the large violet and ivory oblongs upon her plaid skirting a semaphore of maidenly distress. The fabric billowed and luffed about her. Lydia had to grip her own skirts in her fists and run to keep up.

When they'd settled to a more sensible pace along the path, heading south, the governess said, “I've always approved of Ada's friendship with Alice. Ada Boyce is frail and speculative where Alice is decisive. I fret for what life will deliver unto poor Ada, with that distortion in her skeletal structure.”

“It has never seemed all that dreadful to me,” said Lydia.

“The appliances that she wears perform adequately. But no one will have a young woman with a stoop and a gimp. No one respectable. I think it quite fine of Alice to overlook Ada's shortcomings so nobly.” She glared this way and that, tendentiously. “We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others.”

About Miss Armstrong's opinions of Lydia's shortcomings, Lydia didn't enquire. They fell into a silence more companionable than either of them expected. Something about the lull of the long noontime pulled them along the riverbank without further negotiation. They angled along Longwall Street and crossed the High. At the Botanic Gardens Lydia lunged in and peered, walked until she had seen the whole outlay and listened for give-­away sounds of laughter, and then returned. The two of them then kept a brisk pace into Christ Church Meadows. Only when a bell sounded again marking some quarter hour—­Lydia had lost track of where in the day they were—­only then did they pull up and reconsider. Were they going to walk all the way to London?

“I suppose we must start back,” said Miss Armstrong. “But despite your protestations about Alice's meekness, let us go out to St. Aldate's and return through town. Perhaps the girls have emboldened each other to venture in that direction. Oh, Ada will get a good thrashing from her father if he ever catches wind of such impertinence! And
your
father will have to reconsider what is to be done about Alice. A convent school in France, perhaps.”

Lydia was about to say that she herself was perfectly competent to tend to Alice, but then she'd been the one to lose sight of her. So, meekly, Lydia allowed herself to be pulled along toward the bulk of Christ Church College, hulking as it did beyond the meadows like a great stone creature in repose, possibly in senescence.

As they neared the back of it, they saw a door swung ajar in a high garden wall. “Do you think the girls might have ventured there?” asked Lydia.

“The colleges are not open to children, and most especially not to girl children.”

“Alice is not one to notice prohibitions even when they're posted. We may as well have a quick look.” Before Miss Armstrong could squawk, Lydia darted forward. She put her head into a small pretty cloister of a space, the sort where an afternoon garden party with croquet and lemonade might be held. Foxgloves and larkspur poked and swayed in abundance. A serene male sort of calm obtained. Then Lydia saw a fellow in a corner by a ground-­floor window. Its lower sash was flung up. He was patting a contraption of some sort as if to tame it. He was looking at his pocket-­watch with some distress. He caught sight of Lydia. He said, “Oh, heaven provides! Miss, M-­miss, might I ask you to perform m-­me a small favor?”

“You may not go in there, Miss Lydia,” said Miss Armstrong, reaching the door in the wall.

“It's between t-­t-­terms and no one is about, and only for a m-­moment,” said the man. He was a student or a young fellow of some sort, agitated and twitchy. He made an arabesque in the air next to his equipment, which on closer inspection seemed to be a camera on legs. “I was set up to take a p-­portrait, you see, and my companion m-­must be detained. And the light is . . .” He mumbled. Had he said “delightful”?

“We were looking for my sister,” said Lydia, cordially enough.

“Come, whi-­which of you?—­It is to be a self-­p-­portrait, only I cannot release the shutter. H-­he was to do it and I cannot say where he has disappeared to.”

“Half the world has gone missing today,” said Miss Armstrong. She entered the garden as if stepping into a tepid footbath, gingerly.

“Show me,” said Lydia.

The young man beckoned to the black fabric arranged on an armature of wires. A portable cloth cave set up in the middle of midsummer luxuriance. “Miss Lydia, you don't dare,” said Miss Armstrong, but she was not Lydia's governess. Lydia did indeed dare. She ducked into the black tent with the stammering student. It was warm and close. The mechanics of the camera looked faintly menacing, as if intended for the use of a surgeon.

“You just look here, you see. I will call out when I am ready. You must press this b-­button all the way down, and stay qu-­quite still and do not jostle the delicate thing. All will-­will—­well, it just will,” he concluded. Lydia followed the instructions well enough. There was nothing thrilling about being in close quarters with him. He had all the electrical excitement of a suit of clothes upon a dressmaker's armature. She had somehow hoped for more.

There he went, out of the black envelope and across the lawn to the half-opened window. He perched himself against the frame, his buttocks slightly elevated on the stone sill, one leg gently uplifted. He might have been climbing into the window, or just perhaps leaving. In the square in which she peered, he looked tentative. Sweetly alert, and trembling. If he was after an expression of sobriety and scholarship, he was well wide of the mark. He looked as if he had just been slapped and perhaps had felt a rush of confused pleasure in the aftershock.

“If you w-­would be so kind,” he said, “just now.”

Huddled under the black cape, the misbegotten midnight, she saw him in the aperture, and pressed the button. A click and a whirr, and time seemed to stand still. He froze in his place, bland innocence masquerading as a young man. Perhaps into the room behind him someone had opened a door, for an imprecise glow briefly backlit a corner of the otherwise black glass. Against such correct rectitude it took the look of a hastening creature not intended to be caught by such a tool. The blur of a swift Siamese cat, perhaps, or an Angora rabbit.

 

CHAPTER 35

L
ydia waited. He was caught now, but unless he stayed still for a full minute the effect would be compromised. She wasn't to budge an inch for fear of jostling the box. The black tent was, for a moment, a shroud. She wondered if, for the dead, the life they had left behind seemed to them frozen the way this young scholar was frozen. The dead could no longer intervene, regardless of the need. But they could study, perhaps, the frozen past from which they'd been exiled. Look at the creases of the skin beside his eyes, the hesitant light in his face. Look at the creases in circumstance. Press up against everything that has happened exactly the way it had. Reconsider how forces actually work, and how one thing leads to another, until it is frozen, and all that is left is the intelligence of it, but not the living nub.

“Highly irregular,” said Miss Armstrong, when they were done. The scholar stammered and apologized and was grateful. “The colleges are not arranged so that young women might be entrapped in the garden,” said Miss Armstrong ferociously. She turned on the young man as if she thought he must be lying when he said he had not seen Ada or Alice or Siam. Then all at once it occurred to her that she, too, was trespassing upon precincts forbidden her. She pulled Lydia away.

Along St. Aldate's, Miss Armstrong pressed Lydia on what it had been like to be cloistered in the dark with that student, as if there was a secret to be learned about huddling under a cloth with a young man. Lydia demurred.