The Painted Bridge (12 page)

“I wish she would. I so long to see her.”

Anna was delaying what she had to do. She felt nervous. It was irrational, she told herself, to fear that Makepeace might inform Vincent whom she wrote to. She must hand over the letter without showing any anxiety. If Makepeace inquired, she would tell her that Maud Sulten was a former governess with whom she’d stayed friendly.

“Oh! I almost forgot, Mrs. Makepeace. I have another letter here.”

She pulled it out from her bodice and tossed it on the table. Maud Sulten’s name and address were written in a hand so careful and constrained Anna barely recognized it as her own. “I would like it posted immediately.”

“Very well.”

Makepeace’s buttons shivered and glittered as she took the envelope and unlocked the drawer on the other side of the table, placing the letter inside. She got up and went to the hearth.

“The wind is in the wrong direction,” she said, stabbing at the coals with unnecessary force, her rounded back turned to Anna. Fragments of ash fell through the grate into the cinders, floated out over the fender. She clattered the poker down on the hearth tiles and straightened up. “This Miss Sulten is a friend of yours?”

“Yes. A former governess. We correspond occasionally. Be sure to post it promptly, won’t you? I haven’t written to her for an age.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Palmer. I will deal with it immediately.”

Makepeace was looking at her again with an expression of malice that did not change as Anna thanked her and left.

*   *   *

Alone in the room, Frances Makepeace tipped back her head and poured the last drops of her cup of coffee down her throat. She enjoyed
those final drops, thick and sweet, almost syrup, as much as she enjoyed the initial stinging sip. Makepeace made coffee every morning in her housekeeper’s room, pushing the rug up against the door to keep the smell of it from seeping into the corridor. It made patients restive if they caught a whiff of it on the way to the treatment room. It could create hysteria in the susceptible—their longing for coffee.

She rinsed out the cup, dried it and replaced it on the mantelpiece. The cup and saucer were mismatched, oddly if inescapably paired. Like a husband and wife, she thought, bitterly. Her dislike of couples was extending beyond human beings to all paired things. She could tolerate items only in ones or threes. Not twos or fours. Like the animals, trooping into the ark.

Returning to her table, she got out the letter, adjusted her pince-nez and slit open the top of the envelope with a paper knife. It was an affectation of Mr. Abse’s to keep the ramblings of patients with the same care he would apply to legal documents or his own extensive and unnecessary records and logs. The ledgers he thought so much of were infested with weevils and decomposing from within. She dealt with patients’ correspondence in her own way, keeping back any she found of interest or that made complaints about herself. As Lizzie Button was in the habit of doing.

If she passed all the letters on to Abse as he’d instructed, the shelves in the study would have fallen from the walls by now with the weight of useless paperwork. She stood for a moment by the window contemplating the image of Lake House collapsing from the inside, falling in on itself with the weight of its own history like a vast failed cake.

The wind had changed again and the fire was showing signs of life. The coal sent up a mustard-colored stream of smoke, the back draft forcing wisps of it down the chimney. She put her handkerchief over her mouth and nose as she pulled out Mrs. Palmer’s letter from the envelope. “Dear Miss Sulten,” she murmured aloud. “You do not know me. You may not even know my name.”

She read the rest in silence, reached the end and remained motionless. She was back ten years and still married to Jack Makepeace. Back in all the fresh horror of his disappearance. She felt a sudden urge to weep as she clenched her fingers around the letter and then threw it
down on the floor. It settled lightly on the wide boards, immune to the violence of her gesture.

Makepeace permitted herself a rare moment of self-pity. She worked so hard at putting the past behind her, maintained a constant vigilance against its intrusion. It was unfair that it should ambush her like this. Picking up the poker again, she jabbed at the coals, trying to usher them toward the fireback and keep the smoke going up the chimney. Mrs. Palmer was disturbing everyone. She’d seduced Talitha with her pretended lack of guile. When she tried to warn Talitha that Palmer was a troublemaker if ever she’d seen one, Talitha just smiled.

“I like her, Fanny,” she said. “That’s all there is to it. Anyway, people do make trouble. Everyone does sooner or later.”

She was trying to wheedle her way into the Abse family. Makepeace had told Mrs. Abse that she’d seen Catherine talking with her. Emmeline Abse had frowned. Said she didn’t like the idea of her darling girl “tête-à-tête”—there was another one who gave herself airs and graces—with a patient.

The clatter of clogs approaching along the corridor grew louder. Makepeace flung down the poker, picked up the letter from the floor and shoved it to the back of the drawer. She tried with a shaking hand to fit the key into the tiny lock but couldn’t see clearly. Her eyes were stinging as if they had soap in them. It was the smoke, she told herself. The smoke.

Lovely made a spirited if unnecessary tap on the door.

“What is it?” Makepeace shouted. “And can’t you stop your blasted singing, woman?”

The air was filled with the scent of hyacinths; the winter sun threw a slanting rectangle over the dining table. Emmeline felt a sense of pleasure that they should be all together for breakfast, gathered round the table, even if Ben’s fingers were stained with ink and Catherine’s hair uncombed. Catherine had laid her knife across her book to keep the pages open and was picking at a piece of bread, giggling occasionally, taking sips from her water glass.

“Don’t read at the table, Catty. It’s bad manners.”

Catherine looked up and scowled at her.

“Does Father know that? Why don’t you remind him?”

Querios shook the pages of his newspaper into formation and folded it into one quarter of its size, smoothing and creasing it as if he might be able to subdue its contents at the same time.

“The place at Colney Hatch is in the news again. They’ve got more patients than they know what to do with and the whole system is crumbling under the weight of numbers. They didn’t think about that, did they? When they built their monster asylums and put the little men out of business.”

Emmeline looked at him along the length of the table, willing him to respond to her meaningful glance. He slapped down the paper and turned his attention to the plaice on his plate, scraping off the flesh on the top, lifting out its spine in one supple piece.

“Benny is here, Querios.”

“I know that, Emmeline.”

“He wants to speak to you.”

Querios sighed.

“Well, Benedict? Do your tribe of scallywags need my support?”

“The boys are doing well. They’re not scallyw-w-w-ags and if you intend to ridicule my p-p-petition, I will not m-m-make it.”

Benedict’s face contorted as if every last muscle was involved in the effort to get out the words. Emmeline felt her own face stiffen in sympathy. Ben’s stammer was worst at the table. But the table was the only place they ever saw each other all together, these days, with Querios working all hours and Ben out of the house so much.

“Until I have heard the plea,” Querios said pleasantly, “I don’t know whether I shall ridicule it or not.”

“We want to start a second school for g-g—young ladies, F-f-father. We have a room, in G-g—Golden Lane. We need benefactors.”

Emmeline braced herself for the answer, resting her elbows in the soft furrows of the tablecloth. She sometimes had a feeling that the trust she placed in Querios, had always placed in him, to know better than she did, to have a surer sense of what to do, was not justified. The idea gave her the same swimming sensation as a dream she’d had recently—where they all lived in France, in a house of papier-mâché, built on ground of blancmange. She was often in France in her dreams.

“It’s a marvelous thing, persuading others to be the instruments of your charity,” Querios said to Ben. “How you can call yourself a teacher looking like that, hair all over your face, I don’t know.”

“If you still had hair, Father, how would you wear it?”

Catherine’s voice was innocent.

“Catty, darling,” Emmeline interrupted. “Pass me the marmalade, would you?”

Querios didn’t seem to have noticed Catherine’s remark. He was in full flow, his fish forgotten.

“At your age, Benedict, I was working with my father. You might have the luxury of indulging your conscience with the poor but I am obliged to labor alone to keep your brothers in school as I dimly remember I once kept you in school.”

Emmeline listened with half an ear. She took a sip of China tea and felt the bite and smokiness assuage her sinking spirits. The truth was that Querios had feared Septimus Abse. Even in middle age he used to
become nauseous before an audience with the old man. But when Septimus died, Querios was lost. Grief-stricken. The ringing in his ears had begun that hard, cold spring. Could it be five years ago already?

If Benedict wanted to give his time to the ragged school movement, she had no objection. He would grow out of it soon enough. Querios had wanted to be a teacher himself when she first met him. He believed it was his vocation. Sometimes she thought that Querios felt reproached by Benedict, by his good heart and his desire to help people, and that his son reminded him of his own younger, better self.

She returned her empty cup to its saucer with a sharpness that caused the teaspoon to jump.

“You might consider my nerves,” she said. “It is distressing to see you quarreling over trivial matters.”

“We’re not quarreling, Em.”

“They’re not trivial, Ma.”

Emmeline looked down the table at Querios again.

“He’s not asking for very much, Q. Only a contribution.”

“A contribution, eh? That’s all any of us want.”

Emmeline felt a pulse in her temple begin to throb. He was getting more and more impossible lately, still refusing to talk to her about Catherine—sidestepping every conversation she tried to begin on the subject.

Catherine picked fragments of shell from the sides of a boiled egg.

“I’ll give you some books for the girls, Ben,” she said. “I think it’s an admirable idea to teach them to read and write.”

“Not r-r—read, Cath. They are going to learn to cook and s-sew.”

“Why not teach them to read? What are they meant to do in their leisure time?”

“They don’t have any l-l-l … Anyway, Cath, I’ve got a new book for you.”

“Oh, Ben, I love you. You are the best possible brother. What is it?”

Catherine jumped off her seat and ran to him as Ben finished off his third plate of mushrooms and, dropping his fork on the cloth, extracted a book from his pocket. She threw her arms round his neck, kissed him, and dashed out of the room with the volume, her feet pounding on the stairs.

Hannah stepped sideways through the door with an empty tray in her hands and began collecting plates. Querios rolled up his newspaper, stuck it into his pocket and pushed back his chair. Benedict folded another rasher of bacon into his mouth with his fingers and got up.

“Thank you, Hannah,” he said, as she took away his plate. “How are you this morning?”

Emmeline could never get used to Ben’s height. He’d outstripped her own five feet three inches when he was fourteen and now at over six feet he towered over Querios as well. He was tall and straight and handsome despite the old clothes he affected, his unkempt hair and the holes in the toes of his shoes. She felt a rush of pride and love for him. Gratitude too. It was such a simple matter to love sons. Catching hold of his hand as he passed, she pressed it against her cheek.

“Your father means well. I’ll talk to him later.”

“I know, Ma. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Ben? Do you think it’s a good idea, bringing Catherine all these books?”

“Yes, I do. She enjoys them. I’m off to school.”

And he went. They were all gone, before the longed-for togetherness had ever quite arrived. Emmeline felt sticky even though she hadn’t touched the marmalade in the end. She sat on, alone at the table, as the golden rectangle of sun narrowed and disappeared, dabbing at her mouth again with the square of damask. The hyacinths lolled against each other in the bowl as if overpowered by their own scent. She got up and went around the table, lifted the top of Catherine’s egg. It was untouched, the yolk hardened and opaque in its soft white collar.

*   *   *

Emmeline climbed the stairs toward Catherine’s room. She intended to ask what she meant to do with the day and suggest that they pay some morning calls. If they wanted any society, they had to go and find it. People didn’t like to visit Lake House. They feared being seen coming through the gates—feared the whispers about confined relatives, contaminated bloodlines and unmarriageable daughters. She’d felt the same herself the first time she came to meet Abse Senior and his wife. It was hard to shake off the feeling as the carriage passed through the
high gates that the air on the inside of the walls of Lake House was different air, the ground a far country. That she might not escape.