‘Ah, now …’
But Mr Hancock shakes his head, and they are away with many backward glances. The cart creaks into darkness, and Mr Hancock stands beneath the pillars of the folly until he judges himself to be most certainly alone; then he returns to the depths of the grotto beneath. The greenish ghost-light quivers up the walls; he takes out his knife and sets about cutting the canvas from the mouth of the vat. It comes away with a sigh that echoes around the curved metal walls and out into the chamber. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, the noise of the water is magnified most peculiar, and almost vocal; a tiny groan, as if a child there were stirring from sleep.
He touches the cold belly, hears the slop of movement within.
A loss is not a void.
A loss is a presence all its own; a loss takes up space; a loss is born just as any other thing that lives.
You think your arms empty, but I shall lie in them.
I have outgrown all the room you gave me – no more swimming for me, no more flying in the deep. Gone are the days I flipped imminent head over budding heels, a nimble half-formed one, could have become many things – now I crouch, pinned in, held fast, deep underground with my limbs folded in, and my form is inescapable. You know what I am, and what I am not, but you will not look upon me.
Nevertheless my streams, like fingers, find a way. Bury me deep, I shall seep to the surface. My stirrings are as earthquakes.
In my quickening I shall stretch limbs, arch neck, test muscles. My hunched spine curves like an egg: I shall shoulder aside these foundations that pin me, in the end.
I am here; I am here; you are not alone. Here I am; I am grief, the living child of your suffering. I am the grief that sits within you; I am the grief that sits between you.
You will bury me but I shall rise up.
You will not know me, but I shall make myself known to you.
THIRTEEN
Their removal to their great new house is sombre, for neither Mr nor Mrs Hancock is much inclined to optimism. Indeed, if their souls had found a way to communicate, they would have found them twinned in their sense of futility. He thinking, my ambitions are beyond me; she, it is all over. I am unmatched to the task he has set me. Then Bridget cannot accompany them since her mother will not have her so far distant, and the cat swipes and yowls and will not be entreated into a sack to take a place on the wagon. She whisks out of the yard door before she can be caught, and is away up the pear tree and over the wall.
‘She does not know we are not coming back,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘She has no idea that she will return here to find the doors locked and no warm fire or saucer of milk awaiting her.’
‘We never fed her milk but what she stole,’ says Sukie, ‘so that will cause her no dismay.’
Angelica rubs his shoulder – ‘there will be other cats’ – but her husband does not care for other cats, only his own, who has unwittingly become a nomad, a friendless wanderer in the cold.
‘I never abandoned a thing in my life,’ he says.
‘Cats make their own way,’ Angelica tells him, but she, too, feels traitorous.
When the time comes, the women approach Blackheath by carriage, which makes straining, creaking progress up the hill. Sukie sits bolt upright at the window, her eyes alert to everything. The houses grow sparser but handsomer, and the shady road is quiet save for a gang of red-coated young men who idle, laughing. Beyond the ditches on either side of the road is nodding, sun-touched wilderness, all figured with birdsong, and the trees tall and graceful above their bed of bluebells.
‘Is this where we are to live?’ asks Sukie, her palm on the glass. They rise up to the plateau: the grass is a broad sunny swish as far as the horizon, tipped with light. ‘And so where are we to buy our victuals? All our everyday needs?’ She has never lived but on a street before, with tailor and butcher and carpenter no more than a trot down trusty flagstones.
‘As if I know,’ says Angelica, who is curled on the seat with her forehead on the window. The heath looks to her as if it were reflected in the curve of a banker’s glass; its expanse magnified and the houses and trees that fringe it melting away small in the distance.
‘I shall make enquiries.’ Sukie takes out her pocketbook. ‘It may be that we must order up from Greenwich. That will be an expense.’
‘Hang the expense.’ Angelica closes her eyes. The carriage shakes her like a nursemaid.
And now it is that they arrive at the entrance of their home, the narrow drive that curves modestly away from the road so that only the roof of the house might be seen by those strolling on the heath.
‘Oh!’ says Sukie, and her nose will press no closer against her window. ‘I see the expense was hanged some time back!’ She stares and stares. ‘And this is where we are to live? Oh, come now, Mrs Hancock, lift up your head. Look at it!’
‘I already saw it.’
‘Do not pretend this gives you no pleasure!’ For the house is as delightful as ever it was, from the symmetry of its windows, to the curve of its hillock, to the pretty Dutch gables of its outbuildings. ‘So well appointed! For I believe we have a dairy, look, dear! And a vegetable garden. Oh, why did you not tell me it would be so fine?’
Indoors, it is as fine as fine, its floors all a-gleaming and the fat women and infants on the ceiling puffed up with pride. And there are sixteen leather fire buckets hung up in the back hall, and copper boilers pristine in the kitchen, and down below in the cold bowels of the house, a vaulted gallery of meat-hooks. There is a room for billiards and for sewing and for reading, and in all it looms over Angelica the most sumptuous of monsters. It will kill me, she thinks, and cannot bear to watch Sukie dash hither and thither, near-fevered with the work before her. Enquire as to gardener, she scribbles in her book. See to character of new maids; fumigate all the attics; send for wallpaper samples.
To Angelica she cries, ‘Oh! Madam! Won’t this be fun?’ and does not mind that she has no reply. Her aunt only stands upon the shining floor with something like dismay writ all over her face, but Sukie vibrates with the thrill of it all, for this is no longer the straitened training she has known hitherto – the trifling management of closet and cupboard – but a situation of which she might call herself mistress, by any reasonable definition of the word. She will know the proper place of everything, and furthermore have the authority to move it about; nobody but she will dictate washing and cleaning, polishing and buffing. And when it comes to feeding the house, Sukie alone will ordain how many cutlets are to be ordered; will turn the grocer’s offerings over in her hands and decide their quality; will choose what fruits are enjoyed fresh and what bottled for a comfortable winter. She never was so unfettered in all her life, but at the same time she is greatly afraid. This is an entirely new sort of place, she observes, for a new manner of living. I must not appear superfluous to it, or they will send me away.
‘And so we shall inspect the gardens,’ she prattles on to Angelica, ‘and see what grows there, and what must yet be done. It will be a great economy to have our fruits and vegetables grown here. And I would like a clutch of chickens to rear, and a—’
‘Have you ever raised livestock before?’ asks Angelica faintly. ‘Kept a kitchen garden?’
‘Details! Details! I have a book. I shall hire help in. And would you not like a little brood of speckled chicks? Think of them pecking about!’