When she bursts into the room not moments later, he is unprepared for her storm of misery. ‘Oh, I cannot bear it!’ she cries. ‘There will be visitors coming and I cannot think – I do not know how to speak to them at all. They will come to mock me, I am sure of it.’
‘Who would mock you?’ he asks. ‘These are people like us. You would do well to socialise with them; they are people of a finer water, as we ourselves are now. I have chose the most splendid woman in London, and I have put her in an entirely splendid house – what can they find to laugh at?’
‘Oh, as many things as there are inches of my body. You, sir, are perhaps their sort, or will shortly become so, but you have made a poor choice of wife. I can only hold you back.’
He thinks, for the first time, is she touched by the same thing as I am myself? This fascinating melancholy that draws me back and back – perhaps its miasma has infected her too?
She begins to weep. Her tears are fat as pearls. ‘Because I am so filled with apprehension,’ she says. ‘I see that I shall fail you in the tasks you ask of me; I shall disappoint you in multitude ways. I cannot cook or sew or brew; I am afraid I cannot appear pleasantly to our neighbours of this class and match their manners, for I have no education in them.’ She draws breath and seems to compose herself. ‘I am fearful afraid, sir.’
At this he feels he might break down weeping; this is the moment he should tell her of the mermaid, whose grief and largeness seems to seize him more each day. But he is afraid what will happen if he takes the cap off such a secret. ‘I am here,’ he says weakly. Then he reaches through the great fog to observe at last what is true: ‘I have neglected you,’ he says.
‘And I you.’ She looks up at him with the purest expression of grief he has ever seen in his life, so that he kneels down before her and puts his chin on her knees. She takes off his wig and strokes her hands across his stubbly head, which movement both soothes her and eases him. It is something like having his hair stroked by his mother, although he little remembers her; she explores the corners of his skull as it terminates behind his ears, and kneads her fingertips over his crown. If their joy has been spoilt, it is by his bringing the creature into it. He draws breath but cannot speak it. He remains there some minutes longer, submitting to her touch which he has not known for what seems a great long time.
‘I need to tell you something,’ she says presently.
‘What’s that?’
She speaks so quietly she might as well be only moving her lips, but he catches her words: ‘I lost the child.’
And ah! There it is. The feeling again of something snatched from his grip.
He feels a tickle on his cheek and looks up. A lock of her hair has slipped loose and wavers in the air between her face and his. His poor wife who has hitherto brisked about life is sad and fading already.
‘I have neglected you,’ he says.
‘No. No.’ The crease between her eyebrows never fades now. ‘What could you have done?’
He rises so his forehead is pressed against hers. ‘I could have helped you – that is something. I have been so absorbed in …’ but he cannot say it. Instead he embraces his wife, breathing in her scent of apple-leaves and house-dust. He hears the sharp snatch of her breath, the shudder of grief that runs through her. ‘There, there, my poor little pigeon. ’Tis all right.’ He pulls away to look into her blotchy swollen face. Her lips are wet and wobbly like a child’s.
‘You are not angry with me?’ she asks.
‘No. Not at all.’ How can he be? He feels nothing at all, only a dull vindication: of course this would happen. Of course no happiness could come to us. He cannot recall, in this moment of confirmation, the emotion of kindness, but he recalls its words and how they are used, and he reaches deeply for them now as he presses her hands in his. ‘This is a small sorrow sent to try us, that is all. Am I not your husband?’
‘You are. A good husband.’
‘There. And so I would never be angry with you for such a sad thing.’
She smiles damply and he thinks, she is not the woman I met. And he thinks, she can only get older henceforth; and the older one gets the narrower one’s opportunities for happiness become. And he thinks, so what will be next? Will he come in one day to find her laid out dead? He squeezes her fiercely to him for a moment.
‘I am relieved,’ she says with some surprise. ‘I do feel as if some weight has fallen from me. I could not tell you, but now that I have …’ She draws a deep quivering breath. ‘Yes, ’tis better.’ She stands, throws back her shoulders: she seems taller than she has in many months. ‘Perhaps I am more myself.’
He stares out of the window. He feels as if he were on a ship in the middle of a great ocean, too far from home to turn about, but so distant from the strange shore ahead that his craft will be buffeted apart by the waves before it reaches it.
‘Mr Hancock,’ she whispers.
And he turns and sees her, golden as a beacon.
SIXTEEN
Those visiting are the ladies of the Crawford family, their fortune forged in a pin factory. Mrs Crawford, a matron with a voice so loud that Sukie, taking air at the open library window, hears it quite clearly as she watches the party arrive – ‘Well, you would think they would have had it painted, would you not, for that is the first thing I always do on acquiring a new home’ – is accompanied by her daughter Mrs Flowerday, whose step is sprightly and whose curls bounce under her cape, and also Miss Crawford, a sister of the husband, narrow-shouldered and fidgeting. ‘Mama,’ says Mrs Flowerday, ‘now be kind – not everybody has your instinct, and particularly not this lady. She is from quite a different world.’ Miss Crawford says nothing, but then she is overburdened by some great unseasonable armful of rabbit fur and wool calamanco.
Sukie, still stung by Angelica’s earlier rebuke, is inclined to closet herself for the rest of the day. But if I have displeased her, she frets, she may want me here no longer. I must endeavour to do better. And thus she steels herself to play hostess, and leaves the room in sedate haste. On the landing she taps on Angelica’s door.
‘They are arrived,’ she says as the bell rings.
‘Hmm,’ from within.
‘You will come down, will you not?’ Oh, do not abandon me to these strangers’ scrutiny!
‘By and by.’
‘They are here now.’ A scuffle of whispers behind the door. ‘Have you Catty in there with you? I’ve been looking for her all day.’
‘She is helping me get ready,’ says Angelica crossly. ‘If you want me, and you want me decent, you will have to wait.’
The women’s voices are loud at the door; they are on the step.
‘I suppose I’ve no choice,’ sniffs Sukie. She puts her palm flat on the door, and adds in a softer tone, ‘Only do not leave me alone with them too long.’
The bell is jangling, and she scoots down the stairs as the footman crosses the atrium. ‘Give me time,’ she hisses to him. ‘Send for hot water.’
In the parlour, tarts and tea bowls are laid out, just as she oversaw them. The light is poor, but it collects itself within each bowl, to beam through the porcelain like so many bottle-caught glow-worms. Sukie has only a moment to arrange herself before the door opens and her visitors arrive in such a chaffing of cloth and clacking of shoes and clucking of voices that her thoughts desert her. She is kissed and inspected, and smiles most prettily, but the eyes of Mrs Crawford and her daughter are everywhere; they look from the tea bowls to the wallpaper to the bookcase with such goggling energy they risk snapping their necks.
Mrs Flowerday, a powdered young bride, takes her by the elbows to look her up and down. ‘And you are Miss Hancock?’ she says. ‘Not Mrs.’
‘I am Mr Hancock’s niece,’ she says. ‘Miss Lippard.’ Having so many elder sisters she is unused to the title, and furthermore does not know how much familiarity to extend to these women, so her own name leaves her lips as if it were a question: ‘Susanna?’ Her face feels hot. ‘Mrs Hancock will join us by and by.’