Strange Music (3 page)

I am naked beneath Papa's accusing gaze. All is undone. My relationship with Papa, with the great-grandmama I never knew. Gone.

A vivid sky of dazzling silence casts shards of ochre light which invade this space I already know too well. Gilt-edged scrolls on red-cushioned chair backs glint amber; the family griffin crest glows gold; the sofa's elegant claw feet shine sharply, waiting to pounce. Never has fear gripped me more firmly. An undefinable fear. I am inside a glass bowl surrounded by distorted bulging serpent-like furniture. Loneliness gnaws at my stomach like hunger as I reach across the bedside-table for my writing-case.

A sentence resounds in my head:
Ba, pull yourself together. Climb down from the bed, do away with the chair, and walk along the cobbled street!

Crow once supported me to the door. She steadied me each time I stumbled, and when it became evident I could not walk alone, she wept into my hair, hiding her face. That was so many days ago I can barely remember. Opium colours my life here. Dresses my world in radiant crimson. Yet I want to cross this vast desert unaided, I want to walk once more.

Now, if I can practise sitting myself up, then spend time swinging my legs over the side of the bed until my toes reach the floor, I can begin the process of hobbling, or crawling should it come to that, to the door.

For a while I stare into the fire. The acrid odour of burning coal snags in the back of my throat. Flames can change their character, making extravagant shapes, but the wild forms into which they bloom only wither, fading to feebly glowing embers.

Even the carpet is hard and hostile. I find the courage to stand up. I am groping, unstable at the window-sill. Someone is watching me – not through the window, for one cannot see up into here from the street. Torrents of sound gush in my ears like water flooding from sluice-gates. I turn my head – am thumped on one cheek – feel warmth on my face, and open my eyes towards the hearth, which holds the blackness of a grave. I must have fallen. I lie, unable to move, and the dark figure that haunted my thoughts disappears.

Footsteps approach. ‘Ba, are you all right?' Henrietta's voice.

A biting wind dashes up stairs, awakening me fully to the perplexing view of Crow's and Henrietta's green and red slippered feet advancing across the spread of carpet weave expansive as the blue heaving sea.

‘She must have attempted walking,' Henrietta is saying.

Once more I feel faint. In my dream I see the woman again – a dark shape flitting across the doorway, down the staircase where the wind whistles, and out into the hall. She is standing at the door to her life beneath the black pavilion of sky; branches sway like waving arms. She launches into the blustery night. Ebony ringlets swirl round her head, stream across her face. The fire lights easily. She is burning a house of memories. Flames, like some great beast, shoot through a bedroom similar to mine at Wimpole Street; a blazing heat consumes the chaise-longue, the armchair; drawers crowned with a coronal of shelves to carry her books. She moves past sheets of crimson merino paper. Smoke streams round the window where a box full of deep soil is fixed. The scarlet-runners, geraniums and nasturtiums are charred tentacles about a great ragged ivy root with trailing branches so long and wide the tops fasten to a window of the higher storey, whilst the lower feelers cover all the panes; her face; arms; legs. Ivy tendrils mesh with her wild matted hair.

As Crow and Henrietta peel me from the floor, the admonition resounds again:
Ba, pull yourself together. Climb down from the bed, do away with the chair, and walk along the cobbled street!

When Bro came to my bedside at his usual hour this morning worry was written across his face. ‘Crow, Henrietta and I find ourselves faced with a deuce of a dilemma: either we lie to Papa and hide the fact that you not only stood but are walking, or we live in blatant denial of who you are.'

‘This act of which you speak entailed such appalling suffering it would be preferable to be dead,' I return. My thoughts are in harmony on this matter. But I long for contentment and a sense of peace without a draught of that dusky-brown drug. In my cloudless state of mind, I have discovered I think not less clearly, as I had feared, but with
more
precision. I have entered into what Papa and Henrietta call my ‘rebellious state'.

Seating himself in the armchair, Bro stretches out a closed hand. ‘Is this what you were looking for?' His hand opens gently, as though protecting flower heads. The locket and chain make a small silver mound on the opened flat of his palm. ‘Henrietta found it beneath you by the fire-place.' Bro's words come soberly, ‘You must try to live your life less cast down by the weight of sadness.'

He folds his fingers back over the locket and leans forward, talking with greater intensity. ‘When I was in Jamaica, the number of Africans on the estates given to committing suicide had greatly reduced. The governor allowed them to air their grievances. In the newspapers I read of thousands of ordinary folk rallying in London's streets against the apprenticeship system. One churchwarden was reported as saying the traffic in human bodies and blood had injured the perpetrators as much as their victims, and was a disgrace to the religion they professed to preach, and to our nation – in fact, all those concerned had been plunged into an abyss of iniquity.' He pauses, clears his throat, and shows his sense of contrition by turning his eyes to the floor. ‘Papa wrote to me of what you and Arabel did. Why do you fight Papa? Why do you fight your illness when what you need is rest?'

I think back to the churchwarden, an ardent emancipationist closely linked with the Society of Friends, and his merry band of children with their peaches-and-cream complexions of the moors. His enthusiasm was contagious.

The chapel door had flown open. Papa burst in. He bristled. His face a ghastly white. Needless to say, he heard that Arabel and I had volunteered to sign a petition to end the apprenticeship system on West Indian estates.

‘Did your ancestors work for you to throw their achievements back in my face?' Papa demanded, quite on fire. To the warden he exclaimed, ‘We won't need your help eating dinner tonight!' With Arabel and I, protesting, in tow, he marched through the arched doorway, proceeded along the road to the gateway of Belle Vue, our rented home, went straight to the dining-room, knocked back his gin aperitif, snatched the ham we were all to have eaten for dinner from the table, charged along the grassy path running behind the house, and threw the ham to the neighbour's dogs. After Papa blew that meeting apart he demanded we attend a different chapel and wrote banning the warden from Belle Vue.

Like a great wave despair rolled up, ballooned within my heart and burst. How the apprentices must have prayed for freedom's cool breeze, prayed to do whatever they pleased. A furnace of guilt smouldered within me. Sour hatred permeated through those Belle Vue walls which were more frail than even I have become – I feared the entire house would collapse under the weight of the atmosphere. Arabel scowled and moaned. I hid my emotions. But that night Arabel and I did not eat – we shared in the apprentices' suffering. Papa got no pleasure out of that whipping. Yet his expression of desolation purged my sense of injury. I determined never to cross him so again.

I say to Bro, ‘I don't want to fight Papa. I'm scared inside. Afraid of who I am.'

‘We mustn't fight him, Ba. There's more to this than you know. News reached Papa from the West Indies last year,' Bro says, ‘news Papa has kept from me, news which gives cause for much more grief. Papa was advised that Sam is swayed by very bad influences and in conflict with church ministers, overseers, attorneys, even the Chief Justice of Jamaica, Sir Joshua Rowe, for hosting parties which have become notorious across the island.'

A few years ago, sweet Sam proudly announced in a letter to Papa that he was serving as an ensign in the St. James and St. Elizabeth Militia. Mention in our uncle's will of his approval of Sam's ‘general conduct' implied that incidents concerning Sam had recently occurred which were not favourable. This was a great worry and brought tears to my eyes. Bro has now confirmed our uncle was alluding to some disgraceful behaviour. Yet Sam's rise in rank and the overall tone of the will persuaded our dear, ever-forgiving father to pay expenses Sam ran up on an American voyage. We none of us have been certain of Sam's whereabouts since March last when Papa wrote to Sam that he didn't know whether he was still in Jamaica, or preparing to leave, or determined to remain. Needless to say Papa, Bro and I are worried sick.

Double the usual opium dose tonight has not relaxed me in the least and leaves me wondering whether I should take less, or more. Slanted up against piles of cushions and pillows, taunted by screaming gulls, I am unable to find comfort and unable to sleep. I am troubled by a dream I had last night in which all the passengers of a West Indies vessel, except two rescued by Bro, were drowned. I fear I have dreamt this before – that makes my heart tremble and I fear it is a portent of something terrible. Sweetest Sam, I pray the angels in heaven are watching over you.

The woman in the mirror has returned. I hadn't seen her for days but have felt her presence outside the door. I've been aware of her moving about my midnight candle and amongst shadows clipped by dawn. I've sensed her creeping into my thoughts, smelt her in lavender-scented sheets. Tonight she stands in shadows on the far side of the room.

She is superstitious. I can tell because the way she stares at me is the way people gaze into a crystal ball, deeply, as I examine my own reflection in the mirror Crow holds before me now.

I have tried to talk to the woman but I can't speak when I cry. Crow comforts me like a child in her arms. The other woman cries too. But not in the same manner as I. She does not weep.

Then this small-boned woman with thick ebony ringlets, moving smoothly past the window drapes in a dress of magenta-coloured velvet veiled in black lace, vanishes into the wintry wind.

Am I possessed by fever, or drowsy from over-intoxication? I swelter yet am shivering, bound by sheets sodden with perspiration.

Whirling before me now is a wheel made of my brothers' and sisters' faces: Sette, Occy – noisy, smiling, fit and fair, they seem to be teasing me; eyes half closed, lazy Daisy's dozy grin lurches towards me fast and smooth; Sam's witty smile; Bro's features come with a glow bright as a halo; absorbed, angled forward, Henrietta's face peers at me, eager with her fondness of music; Arabel's face, shaped and focused as though for sketching a rural scene; Henry's frowning heavy brow; shy, tongue-tied Stormie. Mama's face escapes me. It is barely thinkable that that good-bye at Hope End was to be our last. Mama died without me. Georgie's face is almost the image of Papa's, although Papa's expression is not peaceful but fixed with horror and pain. Rushing by the faces blur and re-emerge as poets: Homer, Wordsworth, Keats . . .
Milton's eyes strike piercing-dim: The shapes of suns and stars did swim Like clouds from them, and granted him God for sole vision . . . And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men
 . . . Features I know grow violently vivid then fade then protrude and merge into family again. Moving on and on the wheel splits open; inside is the face I know as well as my own, shrinking back on itself – tear-streaked; torn and dark, caged like a bird – a poet's, fragmented, in exile from herself.

From far away words come to me, my family seem to be calling or is it the poets' voices stretching faint across a bitter-sweet sea? Each night since Papa's departure as I fall asleep I long for waves of calmness. Waking, I find I am still crying for Papa, then, seeing a blue sea mist rise as the dawn sky slowly changes, am left wondering how he could have left me.

The effects of the losses poor Papa has undergone are taking their toll – dear Mama's death; the loss of his own mother two years later, a severe blow of which he remains unable to speak; financial losses and difficulties on the sugar estates which caused the mortgagees to foreclose; the shame of selling our Hope End home; the loss of his own good health when he was struck down by cholera; then the death of his only brother in Jamaica almost twelve months ago. Sometimes when Papa looks at me with those kindly fierce penetrating eyes my stomach turns to jelly, and I cannot meet his gaze.

And I am becoming so distraught that I can barely
think
of Papa. The stark blueness of these November skies simply heightens the awfulness of his departure.

Though the wind howls, and I am plagued by sounds of crashing waves on rocks below the casement, though I do not know how to reconcile my turmoil, I do still long for peace . . .
all my favourite passages in the Holy Scriptures are those which express and promise peace . . . in the midst of thoughts and feelings given to be too turbulent
.

The sea, sadness, death, roll into one hell which envelops me. I cannot believe I will live much more. And I fear that if much more goes wrong I shall go mad! – Such thoughts are, to Papa, but phantoms of the mind. Yet from a play of thoughts and words what is not becomes reality. No, I am
not
mad. I am cut off from the world. Maddeningly.

Bro comes to sit with me at his usual hour. I read Arabel's letter to him – dear Georgie has promised to visit – good news is here at last. Arabel says all Georgie is waiting for is Sam's return.

‘Sam ignored Papa's directions for a cargo of West Indian rum to be thirty per cent proof,' Bro explains. ‘Consequently, Papa is subject to pay very high taxes on the large shipment.'

‘Is Sam not due to dock in London by the end of this month?' I ask. ‘That could be any day.'