Joan Makes History (11 page)

I gave a great deal of consideration to pink during my long dull days, and to mauve, and spent hours contemplating the small grades of difference between these languid colours. With Betty, the gawky maid who was the best this colony could produce, beside me breathing loudly into the wardrobe, I spent long empty afternoons laying out garments, gloves, scarves, and ribbons on the bed and holding them up against my skin, sadly sallow in this heat, and with real rosewater in such short supply here, so far from the Old Country. Vapid hours passed while my palm smoothed the textures of muslin, of silk, of taffeta and cambric, until my skin was weary of so many fine distinctions, and my back ached from the boredom of it all.

The ennui of so many petticoats! The drudgery of dressing on those mornings, when skin and air smoothed and shaped each other, and it was wicked to interrupt that caress! Oh, the loathsome feel of silk, slimy and clinging, shiny and choking, and the pinch of the rotten shoes on my feet! I had often been told,
Lady Stoneman, what tiny feet you have!
People had exclaimed, and everyone had looked at my feet, and I had thought it was worth the pinching and squeezing to have everyone admire, although why my small bust should be a matter for tactful glances and
insincere consolations and my small feet a matter of envy was beyond me, if I made the mistake of considering the problem.

You do not believe that a lady of leisure, the wife of a governor, a woman with breeding shaping every movement and phoneme, could feel such disgust at silk and small feet. You think, perhaps, that being bred to a life of idle chat, it was what I enjoyed. It is true, yes, give me a horse and damper, or an army of unshaven men, and I would not have known what to do with such things. But that does not mean I did not know what I lacked, and did not dream of all my other destinies.

I was not born for this kind of small beer,
I whispered to myself as I pressed my forehead against the window and stared out at gardeners fingering their spades, pretending to dig zinnias.
I was born for more than this,
I whispered, and in the drone of a blowfly up near the ceiling, where the air hung stagnant with the dullness of everything, I allowed myself a dream or two of how my life might have been, had I not become the mere wife of a mere dull worthy governor of a bleak and cheerless bit of Empire, where pink and mauve did not matter and real rosewater was hard to come by.

I could have been—no, would have been—a woman of wit, captivating every heart, my salon the centre of all that was scintillating.
Oh, she is bold, she is perhaps a little too forward,
dull women would say, but they would envy me my purple ostrich feathers, my extraordinary afternoon dresses of outlandish but successful cut, and most of all they would envy me the brilliance that made all the fascinating men of the time stare and swoon and thrill to charm me. I would have had sonnets written to me, and it would be whispered that I had permitted one or two of the more ardent poets to hold my throat in their slender poets'
fingers and caress it till I was speechless. There would have been stories—and, oh, I would not have denied them—of poets driven wild by my bewitching charms, and bursting in through the french doors of my drawing room, their cloaks streaming out behind them in the hurricane of their passion, flinging themselves at my tiny slippered feet.
Joan, be mine,
they would pant, or words to that effect, but possibly a little more poetic—and I would smile my maddening smile down at them as they covered my ankles with kisses, and whether or not I permitted their kisses and their poetry to rise by degrees to higher points of my anatomy would always be a secret between them and me, and the envious gossips with their dull husbands could conjecture and hiss with malice, but would never know.

Husbands! Well, even I, Joan, would need one, I supposed, to give countenance to my salon, and pay the bills of my genius of a dressmaker, who could whip together a little silk and a little brocade and produce a masterpiece for my body.

Ralph was a good husband, and dutifully admired each new pink, every mauve, and was man enough to pretend to care whether my gloves exactly matched the tussore insert in my bodice, when in fact the poor man could not tell green from red. Yes,
Joanie, I believe you may have a point there,
he would say, and would cock his large bunlike head on one side when I pointed out the shade's difference between a lilac insert and a mauve glove laid across it. I had to love him, was forced almost against my will to love him for his goodness and the simplicity of his kind deceits, his desire to please. But my poor Ralph would never know the histories I lived on the hot afternoons, when he was busy getting irritable on the back of a horse, inspecting things, and supervising the erection of his fortress to repel the
Russians—histories in which he, poor doughlike man, had no part to play at all.

Could I perhaps have been another kind of Joan altogether, flat-chested on a prancing horse, speaking French as if born to it (well, I would have been born to it, in fact), leading men into battle behind me, and dying a glorious if dreadful fiery death in the end? I would have loved the flat-chested part (in fact I was already equipped for it) and I would have loved the prancing horse part, and the roaring men behind me, following me to death if need be. But what if the wood were green, in that last event, and my death were one of choking on smoke, my face not lifted serene among the flames, but spluttering and streaming, red and gasping, dying like that, slowly, in disarray? Perhaps it would not be worth the prancing and the roaring for that.

Late in the afternoons, when the shadows were finally starting to lengthen and the blowflies gave up for the day, Ralph would come home, sweaty and silent, with the furrows deep between his eyes.
Ah Joanie,
he would sigh, and lie back in his leather armchair.
Joanie.
He was a man of much feeling but few words, and I had learned over the several years of our marriage that when he said
Ah Joanie
in just that way, it meant he was glad to be home in his leather armchair, and glad to be with me, and I knew that if I came over and stood behind him, and smoothed those furrows on his forehead, he would close his eyes and smile his inward-looking private smile. Ralph was a better man than I deserved, though, because even as he smiled and I soothed, I was dreaming of leading armies or droves of inflamed poets.

I knew other women had their secret lives, too, and there were times, with the other ladies of quality in this colony, when we tittered over the tinkle of teacups in saucers, and from below
our fine eyebrows, and above our charming smiles and dimples, we would exchange a glance or two that said we knew, and shared, and were in the secret together.

They are so terribly INTREPID!
Mrs Beauman exclaimed in such a languid drawl it was droll enough to make us all laugh.
So frightfully MASTERFUL!
Mrs Beauman did not bother with petit point or tapestry-work while we sat over our tea and titters: Mrs Beauman reclined on my best brocade, taking her ease, and loved nothing better than to make us laugh at our menfolk.

My William,
she said in her droll weary way,
do you know, my William cares so much about things, he has been known to burst the buckles right off his shoes, caring so much.
Mrs Beauman arched her fine eyebrows and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but did not otherwise interfere with the plaster perfection of her face. Somehow Mrs Beauman, as well as having been endowed by capricious Nature with a large and shapely bust, also had the secret of resisting sallowness in this foul climate, and had some secret source of rosewater, I was sure. Mrs Beauman seemed to have no great need of consoling histories invented in the drone of afternoon flies. Somehow she was someone who was already not quite true to life, someone I found the slightest bit alarming as I watched her watching the world from her fine eyes. She made us laugh with the words that came from between her somewhat thin lips—I saw now that her lips were somewhat too thin, and pouted my own out fuller, in consolation. If Mrs Beauman made histories for herself, in the privacy of her chamber, surrounded by a boring bedful of her blues and greens—no feeble mauves for Mrs Beauman, I was sure—they would be far more outrageous, and more satisfying, than my puny ones.

There was something I wanted to say to these women,
something unspoken I would have liked to share with them, these three wives whose husbands were out in hot thankless scrub far away, rounding up wild gold miners shouting about democracy. To Mrs Henry Miles, Mrs Stanley Peeper, and Mrs William Beauman, I, the wife of the governor, had something to say, but I was finding it hard to put into words.
Well, they must have looked mighty foolish with that cannon,
I said at last, because what I wanted to say seemed to have something to do with the muscular straining of absurd whiskered men, who had taken a brass cannon on the backs of horses so they could have a proper battle. It was not that sort of thing, this affray in the middle of the bush with men armed with a few old flintlocks, but their husbands had hoped for a bit of glory from it.
Oh,
Mrs Miles said,
we could not have told them, though, could we? They would never have listened.
Mrs Peeper made the teacup rattle in its saucer, shrieking—I had wondered at times if Mrs Peeper was not a trifle vulgar—
Listen to us, love, never! And it was such a big cannon, and such a shiny one!
We all laughed, and even Mrs Beauman cracked her face enough to show a tooth or two, and then a silence came over us all, that Mrs Miles had to break, by saying in a way that sounded rather loud in the silence:
But you know, I would love to have been able to go with them, or just go.
Then she laughed her studied silly laugh, and put a pretty little hand up in front of her mouth, as if shocked at the words, and keeping in others like them. We all laughed with her, but we all knew then what we shared, and it was not an interest in mauves or pinks or rosewater.

Huge hail suddenly began to fall then into the dull afternoon, and we could forget our tittering and teacups, and under cover of the chaos of the hail we languid ladies could act and exclaim. We rushed to the window so our silks made a sighing draught,
and rustled against the panes, until Mrs Beauman suddenly cried out with such passion that the words caught in her throat, so that she had to stop and cough them clear and start again:
Oh, I want to feel them against me!
Mrs Beauman of the plaster perfection, Mrs Beauman of the practised arch of eyebrow was flushed, and her eyes, as a rule beautiful and languid, were now grown small and tight, as if anxious or desperate. She had become humid and swollen, as if her skin was too tight, watching the gigantic hail bounce on the lawn in that mad way.

She saw me watching as we stood there by the window, and met my eyes, and tried to laugh something like her usual deft belittling laugh, and said,
Oh, hail, it brings me out in a rash of passion, I must see it up close.
Although she was too finely bred to lead the way out to the verandah, she followed me so swiftly I felt pursued.

Out there I knew what she meant about a rash of passion. The air was cool and electric and the sound of the hail was like a crowd, the gigantic hailstones pouring down out of the sky and bouncing on the grass like living creatures. Already the lawn was grey with them and the air was full of their low unlikely roaring. I felt an obscure passion in my own chest, some longing for large action, something to match this outlandish performance of the heavens. I watched Mrs Beauman as she was drawn to the edge of the verandah, where the air was full of spray and the noise was something you wanted to join, and we watched, Mrs Peeper and Mrs Miles and I, as Mrs Beauman was drawn down the steps and out into the tumult until she was standing on the lawn, not like any languid wealthy wife now, but like someone mad, with her hair already streaking dark down her cheeks.
Mrs Beauman!
I heard Mrs Peeper exclaim beside me, but
it was not to call her back, but seemed rather as if she were reminding herself that this woman, in her green silk that was darkening in great streaks and blobs now, and starting to cling to her thighs, was the same Mrs Beauman we had known as the ornament of any drawing room. We watched the hail bouncing off the head and shoulders of this other Mrs Beauman, watched her hold out her hands so her cupped palms made the hail bounce, watched her turn around under the blast from the sky, so that we saw at one moment her face, pale and shining, and the next moment saw her dark silken back. The Mrs Beauman we knew, the Mrs Beauman of controlled laughs, of satire that made smaller souls laugh so loudly it was inelegant enough to raise the eyebrows of the servants: Mrs Beauman who was never seen to move a muscle of that perfect face except in the precise way she intended—this was Mrs Beauman, standing like a monk, clothed in concentration under a hail of hail.

I watched, and envied, and tried to make my feet follow her down to the edge of the verandah, down the steps, and out into that white noise, but I was afraid. How could I have imagined myself in charge of platoons of swarthy men, battlefields, prancing horses? I was not brave enough even to risk the sniggering of a few silly servants: I was afraid! I, Joan, fearful of a bit of frozen water and what a few minions might think! There was a chill that had nothing to do with the ice-filled air, but which was my own vision of myself not making history at all, but living out my life in pinks and mauves, hesitating forever on the edge of verandahs.

When the hail thinned suddenly and stopped, there was a silence which the three of us filled with laughing and exclaiming and the vague cheery crowings that the moment seemed to call
for. Mrs Beauman was cheerful, rueful, laughing too, for all the world as if she had merely been out walking and been taken by surprise by the storm.
Oh! Oh!
she kept crying,
Look at this, oh!
and shook out the drenched green skirt in a futile way, fanning it against her legs so we could hear wet silk and wet petticoats against her flesh.
Hail is so WET!
she exclaimed, being girlish now and pretending dismay, but her eyes were shining and her mouth lascivious from her debauch. We all laughed and bustled, and servants were called to run baths, and bring dry clothes, and it was all a cosy domestic matter of an amusing mishap, not a passion unsuitable and shocking in a lady of plaster perfection.