Afterimage
Helen Humphreys
A Novel
for Mary Louise
International Acclaim for
Afterimage
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A
nnie Phelan hurries along the lane to the Dashell house. The coach from Tunbridge Wells let her off on the main road and she is to walk the last half mile by herself.
It is June. The narrow lane announces its summer inhabitants with Annie’s every step. A magpie! A bee! The dry clicks of insects busy in the hedgerow. It is so different from London. There, the clatter of people and carriages was constant, though sometimes, at night, when Annie was walking home from reading classes she would hear the soft, tumbly voice of a nightingale calling in the Square. In London, the horizon was stacked with buildings, and the air was rheumy with coal smoke. Here, the sky is huge and blue, uncluttered.
All the long journey down from London Annie has imagined this walk, has imagined that the lane to the house will be rutted and dusty, that the house will suddenly appear as she rounds a bend, that it will be magnificent and stately. Perhaps a little decrepit. Like Thornfield Hall, she had thought in the coach. She has recently finished
Jane Eyre,
again, and this is how she has imagined a country estate.
And just as she had imagined, the Dashell house becomes visible as Annie rounds a bend in the rutted, dusty lane. She stops walking. There it is, looking much more decrepit than magnificent. Huge and sprawling, but definitely neglected. The bushes out front are straggly and tall, block out some of
the downstairs windows with their green, swaying bulk. The stone on the upper storey is crumbly with age. A sign on the gatepost says Middle Road Farm. The last two words are obscured by brambles.
Annie stands there, in the lane, looking at the distant house, feeling apprehensive, wishing really that she could just keep walking down this lane, that the house would just keep appearing around every bend. She needs more time than this to arrive here fully. The moment she enters that house, sees the rooms, meets Mrs. Dashell, all her imaginings of this will stop and what is real will fill that space completely. In a few steps, in a few brief moments, this world will be exchanged for that one.
Cook has a crown of flowers in her hair. Eldon sees it when she leans over to serve him the vegetables.
The slick surface of the table looks watery in the weak window light, slopes away from him to Isabelle, at the other end, reading her book.
“Who are you this time?” he says to Cook.
She reddens. “Abundance, sir.”
“Abundance?”
Isabelle looks up from her book. “After the bountiful harvest,” she says helpfully.
Eldon bends his head over his plate of underdone turkey, which has been hacked from the bone in rough, stringy wedges. There’s the whicker of the clock being wound in the hall. A bract of vines at the window. The cut heads of roses float in a crystal bowl, one turning slowly in the whispery light, bumping against the others, turning like a compass disc towards the thought of
North.
*
Annie Phelan waits in the drawing room. In her hands she holds the newspaper with the advertisement in it, and the return letter from Isabelle, because she might need these to prove she should be here. In the Dashell house the red velvet curtains are drawn back and tied, fall in heavy, pleated braids to the floor on either side of the window. There are oil paintings on the walls, all portraits except for one over by the piano—cows in a field, hills in the background. The sun behind the hills has swept the grasses gold. On a side table by the door is a porcelain figurine of a naked man. Annie smoothes the front of her good lilac cotton morning dress, plucks at the stray threads of her plaid shawl. Her one shawl. In summers she cuts it through to a single layer. In autumn she sews it back together again.
The door to the drawing room crashes open and Isabelle swoops into the room, the flounces of her long dress brushing the porcelain figurine off the side table and onto the rug. She doesn’t bother to pick it up.
Annie Phelan bows her head.
“Oh, don’t do that,” says Isabelle irritably. “Sit down. You’ve come a long way. No need to stand.”
“I’m fine, ma’am.” Annie is used to the measured, careful movements of her former mistress. Mrs. Gilbey would never knock anything off a table. Annie eyes the naked figurine on the floor. It is lying face down on the rug. Should she go over and pick it up? The curve of its back looks like a small, white wing.
“Suit yourself.” Isabelle strides across the room to the window, strides back again. Her dress makes a breeze. Her tall body carving cleanly through the still air. Her quick movements unnerve Annie. She has not expected Mrs. Dashell to be as young as this—middle-thirties—and so full of energy. Her dark hair is pulled back, secured untidily in a knot with
what look to Annie like hat-pins. It is as though Mrs. Dashell has done her own hair, and done it by grasping it with one hand and stabbing it into submission with the other. “You’ve come from London?” Isabelle asks, as she strides back towards the window. “Remind me.”
“Yes, ma’am. Portman Square. I worked for a Mrs. Gilbey there.”
“And why did you leave her employ?”
“She died.”
Isabelle stops pacing, stands in front of Annie, and, for the first time, really looks at her. She sees a dark-haired, scared-looking girl of perhaps twenty, in a worn-out grey dress. Her skin still milky with youth. “I’m sorry,” she says. She feels exhausted by having to conduct this interview, each useless question she utters wrests precious strength from her body. “It’s just that I don’t like my day’s work to be interrupted.”
“But”—Annie waves her evidence of newspaper and letter—“you wanted me to come today. Now. After the noon meal.”
“Did I?” Isabelle glances out the window, where her real life is waiting for her return. “How can I be expected to remember what I wanted.” She turns back to Annie. “What’s your name?”
Annie has two names. In Mrs. Gilbey’s house she was called Mary, because Mrs. Gilbey always called her maid Mary, no matter what her given name had been. Those were the rules of Mrs. Gilbey’s household. Maids were called Mary. Cooks were called Jane. Annie almost forgot her other name, living with Mrs. Gilbey. Now she is trying it on again, something that used to fit but now feels strange to her.
“Annie,” she says.
“Annie what?”
“Annie Phelan.”
“Irish?”
Annie hesitates. In the newspaper she holds in her hand are hundreds of advertisements for servants of all types. Some of the notices ask for “No crinolines,” because the popular dress style takes up too much space in a room and interferes with a maid’s ability to light a fire and sweep out a hearth. Many of the ads specify “No Irish.”
“Yes and no,” she says finally.
“And what does that mean?” Isabelle feels impatience rising in her again. She doesn’t sound Irish at all. In fact, she speaks surprisingly well for a servant.
This is not like
Jane Eyre,
Annie thinks. When Jane first arrived at Thornfield Hall she was welcomed by Mrs. Fairfax in a very generous and hospitable way. Mrs. Fairfax wasn’t impatient and snappy. Mrs. Fairfax sat knitting by the fire, a cat curled contentedly at her feet. Jane was treated like a visitor. Jane was offered a sandwich.
“What?” says Isabelle again, waving her hand. Annie is shocked to see that her fingers are all stained a hideous black.
Annie closes her eyes for an instant and tries to pretend that the sharp features of Mrs. Dashell are really the soft, kind features of Mrs. Fairfax. “Born Irish. Raised English,” she says slowly. “My family died in the hunger. My parents. My brothers. I was given to the Cullens, who were making the passage over here. They took me because I was small enough to carry, but couldn’t keep me because they had children of their own. So they left me in a workhouse and Mrs. Gilbey took me from there when I was nine years old.” Annie takes a deep breath. It is the most she has said in days.
Isabelle watches Annie Phelan recount her brief life. There is something in her face that opens when she tells her story,
this story that Isabelle has heard so many times before, different versions from different Irish famine victims, but the same story. But what
is
different this time is the face of Annie Phelan as she tells her tale, how the expression shows the emotion so completely. Sadness, fear, shyness—it is all right there, all that feeling at once—and this is something Isabelle has perhaps never seen before. Or only once before, long ago, in another world entirely.
“My parents raised money to help the Irish Relief,” Isabelle says. “You have nothing to fear from me there.” She walks back over to the window. The noon light is high and harsh. Objects outside the room seem transparent. The tin pail on the flagstone path. The apple tree. “The position is housemaid,” says Isabelle. “I can pay you twenty-five pounds per annum, paid quarterly. It is what I pay the other servants. We have a cook, a laundry-maid, and a gardener. You may have an afternoon off every week and a Sunday off every month. You must make your own dresses or have them made, but we will pay for the material.” She pauses. The light is flattening the apple tree, she thinks. Stepping on it. “Can you read and write? I already have a cook who can’t, and the new laundry-maid seems stupid as a brick. Am I to be completely surrounded by imbeciles?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Annie says to Isabelle’s back. “No, ma’am. Yes I can read and write.” She almost mentions
Jane Eyre,
but stops herself. Perhaps Mrs. Dashell, like Mrs. Gilbey, doesn’t approve of novels.
“Oh,” says Isabelle. “I really can’t do this any more. Come here.” She beckons Annie over to the window. “Look,” she says, tapping the glass. “There’s Wilks, the gardener.”
Annie sees a leg poking out from behind a potting shed.
“He doesn’t do a stick of work,” says Isabelle. “He’s a
terrible gardener. Cuts the heads off all the flowers. Hides all day down by the cabbages. Nothing but trouble.” She sighs, a long drawn-out fluttering sigh. “I hired him because he has a gorgeous back. All sinew, and broad as this county.” She looks hard at Annie Phelan, the grey of her eyes, the slighdy down-turned mouth. If I hired you because you are beautiful, she thinks, would I be sorry?
Annie climbs the narrow stairs to her room at the top of the house. She has never slept up high before. At Mrs. Gilbey’s she slept in a narrow room off the kitchen, on a cot. The room was once a broom closet. In the early days, when there was a Jane, Annie would be up and in her morning dress by six a.m. to clean and blacken the kitchen range and grates. Later, when Mrs. Gilbey could no longer afford to keep both a Jane and a Mary, Annie would be up even earlier as she now had to take on all of Cook’s responsibilities, in addition to her own.
