The Painted Bridge (21 page)

Miss Batt was in her green velvet chair, one hand fingering the edges of a new collar. Anna shifted a chair nearer to hers and Talitha Batt looked at her dully. Anna could feel an invisible “Do not trespass” notice. She wouldn’t ask about Batt’s time with her family. She threw herself down in the chair and rubbed her hands together. Smiled.

“Welcome back, Miss Batt. And a happy new year to you.” Anna got out the square of cambric and selected a skein of gray silk. “Will it ever stop, do you think?”

“Will what ever stop?”

“The downpour, Miss Batt. The rain.”

Batt lifted her shoulders minutely and lowered them again. Her movements were stiffer than ever, as if she operated under some increasing internal constriction.

“I daresay.”

“I do hope so. I’m anxious to get out for a walk.”

Miss Batt didn’t answer.

“I can’t say we had much of a festive season here,” Anna said. “Although Mrs. Makepeace did a bit of singing on Christmas Day. Quite a bit, actually; Mr. Abse had to intervene. They served up what they claimed was a goose and Mrs. Valentine set fire to the plum pudding.”

“Singing? Who was singing?”

Miss Batt looked at Anna, a haunted expression in her eyes, and clenched her sewing on her lap as if she would wring it out.

“Mrs. Makepeace,” Anna said, wondering how she had disturbed Miss Batt, wishing she could make her feel better. She parodied Mrs. Makepeace’s singing, trilled a couple of lines, “Oh, never leave me, Oh, don’t deceive me.” Stopped. “I cannot say that I am glad you’re back, Miss Batt. But you know I am most awfully pleased to see you.”

A tear made its way out of one eye and rolled down through the white powder on Miss Batt’s face as she shook her head slowly from side to side.

“Don’t, Mrs. Palmer. Please don’t say such things.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to distress you.”

Miss Batt didn’t answer.

“We could have a game of drafts, perhaps, if you would like a little
diversion. I suppose it is difficult to return. Forgive me if I was insensitive.”

“Pardon me?” said Miss Batt, her voice a whisper.

Miss Batt’s polished, navy shoes were gone; she wore the same blunt slippers on her feet as they all did, that could be worn on either foot, by anyone. Anna fixed her eyes on her sewing.

“Miss Batt, what has happened to you?”

“It is four years, Mrs. Palmer.”

Miss Batt’s voice was tremulous and Anna lowered her own.

“What do you mean?” she said, gently, looking up from the cloth and reaching for Miss Batt’s hand. “What is four years?”

“Four years since they brought me here. I decided then that I would tolerate it for four years. No less. And no more.”

“I see.”

Anna looked at Miss Batt, at the rows of photographs behind her on the wall. It was as if Miss Batt had returned as a black-and-white rendering of herself, flat and colorless, the life in her gone. Anna was close enough to her to hear her shallow breaths and catch the note of naphthalene that escaped from her clothes but she had the sense that Talitha Batt was far away, absent from all that surrounded her.

In a room on the first floor of a small house to the south of the river Thames, some miles from the Vicarage, Vincent Palmer sat on the end of a bed. He was dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt and the expression on his face as he dragged a gray sock over his naked left foot and secured it with a garter was one of absorbed concentration.

The room was dim and warmed by a small fire in the grate, the air he breathed imbued with a faded, female sweetness. Two sash windows were hidden behind lace hangings, further obscured by curtains that had long ago surrendered their designs to the sun. On the walls, theater posters had been stuck over wallpaper printed with exotic birds. The paper extended to the top of the walls and on over the ceiling as if the birds had long ago flown up there to roost and never left.

Vincent leaned toward the dressing table mirror and coaxed the ends of his moustache into their upward curl. Lately he had encountered white hairs in his moustache; the sight of them filled him with a disgust of a different order from that which he felt for the ones on his head.

“Why don’t you stay awhile?” came a voice from behind him. “You could see the boy, Vince. He’ll be awake soon.”

“Not possible,” he said, bringing his face in closer to the mirror, dragging down the corners of his mouth. He opened a small drawer and rummaged through its contents; hairpins, buttons, a desiccated rosebud from a bunch he had once presented her with, after a performance. “Don’t you have any tweezers?”

He peered harder, felt the strain in his eyes and gave up. He couldn’t see well enough to attempt the operation and there was no aggravation
like accidentally pulling out perfectly serviceable black hairs and then seeing the silver one lurking, resistant to capture. The edge of the mirror was draped with strings of beads—carnelian, cinnabar, lapis lazuli—all of them semiprecious. Poor Maud. He had the satisfaction at least of knowing he had done the right thing by her.

He stood up, knocked his shin against the leg of the dressing table and assumed the impenetrably cheerful smile that he found himself using more and more.

“
Tempus fugit
. I must return to my flock. Much though I would like to stay and breakfast with you. My dearest.”

Maud didn’t answer and he felt a surge of annoyance. Really, she became more and more tiresome. Christmas might be over but still he had very little opportunity for visiting her, as he had often explained.

“Time flies,” he repeated, picking up his hat and brushing dust off the rim.

“I know what it means,” came the voice. “Better than you do.”

“Please, Maud. Not that again. Do you have everything you need?”

She sat up in the bed and reached around to plump a flattened feather pillow behind her back.

“No, I don’t.”

Vincent looked at her in the mirror. Her hair stood out from her head and her face and breast were still flushed. He disliked seeing her in a state of dishevelment. Preferred to see her costumed, made-up, in character. It barely mattered as what. The role was the thing that released his desire, fueled his excitement.

Over her head, on the wall behind the bed, was the painting of her as Cleopatra—as she had been when he first saw her, on the stage. She wore a black wig and her skin was arsenic-whitened. Milk and jet. The poster displayed her silhouette as he had seen it at the Empire, the unruly swellings above and below the waist, the shape that had branded itself on his imagination.

“I’ve given you all that I can, for now.”

“It’s not only about our keep, Vincent. You never take me anywhere or see the boy. We never have any amusement. Just … this.”

“It was your own decision to return to London. I was against it as you well know. I can hardly be blamed for your disappointment.”

He smoothed his hair down over his ears and retrieved his gloves from the dressing table, knocking over a couple of scent bottles. He could hardly be blamed for that either, she had so many of them—all dusty-shouldered and half-empty. A sweet, musk-ridden smell seeped into the air. He felt an urgent desire to get away. The room had been thrilling to him once. He’d found it almost unbearably exotic. Now it felt suffocating and, harder to bear, pathetic.

He made for the door, past the little wardrobe stuffed with Maud’s feathers and furbelows and kicked the draft excluder out of the way.

“Duty calls. God bless you both.”

“Don’t you have any natural feelings?”

“I will look in on him, Maud. I was intending to do just that.”

He was almost at the nursery door when he remembered his cane. He was forced to go back for it, stooping to retrieve it from behind the door, blowing fluff off the handle. Maud didn’t say a word, just looked at him. Her face in its natural state looked positively ugly. He wondered why it had taken him so long to notice. Women did not age as well as men, generally. In temperament as well as in the flesh. Their weaker brains deteriorated rather than strengthened with the passing of the years.

“Good-bye, Maud.”

He took the stairs briskly, swung open the front door and emerged, banging the door behind him. Hurrying down the street, he felt more harried than when he arrived. That was the effect Maud had on him these days. He felt a moment of deep compassion for himself. Of course he had natural feelings.

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble,”
he muttered to himself, turning out of Sebastopol Street, reaching the main road. He stopped to reposition his hat in the reflection from the baker’s window.
“For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.”
He was far enough away to risk raising his face from the ground and looking about at will.
“She increaseth the transgressors among men.”

Not that Maud was a whore. She didn’t even work in the theater anymore. She said that he made her feel like a whore, coming and going, leaving the money on the dressing table the way he did. She had
actually used the word. It had offended him because if she was a harlot, then what did that make him? Wives, whores, women. They were inexplicable, troublesome, and all of them
lieth in wait as for a prey
. He had a picture of himself as healthy red meat, butchered, his internal organs laid bare and a crowd of winged harpies screaming and circling in the air overhead.

It wasn’t until he approached Shoreditch that he remembered he had forgotten to see the boy. Next time. Gabriel was still too young to benefit from the company of a man—barely speaking and prone to dribbles and leaks of all descriptions. Certainly, he was too immature to benefit from any religious instruction. But more often than not, when Vincent picked him up or tried to entertain him with a game of peekaboo, the child wept and shrieked for his mother.

Maud should not ask so much of him. He had too many people to look after and his flock came first. They had to come first, whatever the personal cost to himself. He supposed he could take Maud out for some entertainment, to one of the pleasure grounds she liked so much or perhaps a play. He had to keep her happy—he was always afraid she might arrive unannounced at All Hallows. A chap could turn away callers from his own front door but it was a different matter to bar entry to God’s house. He felt a shudder crawl down his back under his long coat.

At Curtain Road, he slowed his step. Stiffened his features in anticipation of encountering parishioners, demanding help in forms that he had no intention of providing. It was they, in truth, who should give to him. Their respect for him was God’s due. He nodded at a man rushing toward him, wringing his hands, sidestepped him and proceeded through the lych-gate, still afflicted with a sense of unease prompted by the idea of Maud appearing under the leaking roof of All Hallows. He would take her out soon.

*   *   *

Rain had given way for several days to a bitter cold. The grass in front of the house was white with frost, the weeds along the edge of the path stiff with crystals. Anna’s heart was thudding. It was the first time she had been able to get out since Christmas. But now the moment had arrived, she felt unprepared, despite all the rehearsals in her mind.

Lovely lingered on the step, looking up at the pewter sky. Anna avoided her eye as she pulled on her gloves. She tried to keep her voice normal.

“Let’s go, Lovely.”

“You sure it ain’t too cold, miss?”

Anna looked at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“For walking.”

“Oh. Yes. I’m sure.”

“My chilblains is terrible,” Lovely said, blowing on her fingers.

“Stay here then, if you like.”

“I’m duty bound to come with yer, miss.”

“All right. We won’t stay out long.”

Anna hugged her cloak around her and set off over the grass. The earth struck up hard against her feet and everything was hushed—the atmosphere, the light, the sounds. The birds were quiet and there was a smell like metal in the air, no shadow on the ground. She walked down over the grass, absorbing the strangeness of the morning, its peculiar deathly stillness, wondering why it made her feel afraid.

Arriving at the gate, she let herself into the field, and made her way along the narrow path, still visible even in the frost, passing a huddle of sheep with icicles dangling from their coats. Lovely followed behind, at a distance.

The lake was transformed into a white expanse of ice, solid and secretive-looking. Stilled. Anna picked her way down over the stiff tussocks of grass and onto the shore. Close up, the ice was not white but a translucent gray. The ends of the willow fronds were trapped, held in a drowning embrace.

She hesitated, standing by the side of the lake with her hands clamped under her armpits for warmth. The ice frightened her. It needn’t change anything, she told herself. There was no reason why it should. She picked up a twig and threw it out over the frozen surface, watched as it skittered to a halt in the middle. Beyond it, on the far side, the trees were still and patient, their branches jeweled. Waiting for her.