The Painted Bridge A Novel

FOUR





In the parlor, Catherine lay on a chaise longue, her head resting against its buttoned back, her fingers supporting the book balanced on her chest. The book was bound in crimson linen, the pages roughly cut like the end of a loaf.

“Are you going to change, Catty? You can’t spend the whole day in a morning dress.”

“Why not?”

“Your father likes to see you looking pretty.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Emmeline Abse opened her mouth to protest but Catherine spoke first. “He never notices what I look like, Mother.”

Catherine turned a page and as her eyes traveled down it, her face took on a wistful look.

“‘Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep; / Ten nights and days, without the common face / Of any day or night …’” she read. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

“I’m sure it is, dear.” Emmeline held her own book at arm’s length.

“‘Moisten the celery with cream. Place a thin layer between slices of bread and butter and serve.’ I’ve always been fonder of cucumber in sandwiches, myself.” Poetry would not triumph over sustenance. She wouldn’t allow it. She stole a look at her daughter. “There’s a recipe here for custard tarts, darling, with grated nutmeg. You used to relish them.”

“I still do. I’d like one now.”

“I’ll get Cook to make you a batch tomorrow.”

“I won’t want them tomorrow.”

“Why ever not?”

Catherine groaned, laid the book face down on her chest and closed her eyes. Her white fingers set themselves first to stroking the horsehair upholstery then to plucking out strands.

“It’s too far off,” she said. “Look how many hours this day’s got left in it, Mother. How many minutes.”

Emmeline concentrated on preventing the frown in her mind from reaching her face. The room was warm, the wide wooden floorboards covered with worn Persian runners whose creams and rusts and plums glowed in the light from the lamps. Time had accelerated for her and she felt it most acutely in winter. It was half past three by the clock on the mantelpiece, which was reliably fifteen minutes slow. She glanced at the window, at the line of violet sky overlaid by a lace of black, silhouetted branches, and braced herself.

“There’s a whole section here on damsons,” she announced. “Damson cheese. Damson jelly. Damson wine.”

Catherine made a noise of disgust as she brought her own book parallel to her face.

“I hate damsons. Listen to this!

“‘She had lived we’ll say, / A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, / A quiet life, which was not life at all.’” Catherine closed her book with a soft, hollow slap. “Did you ever have an adventure, Mother? Before you were married?”

“Marriage is an adventure.”

“Not with Father it isn’t.”

“Catherine. It isn’t good for you.”

“I know …” Catherine swung her feet to the floor and jumped up. “Burying myself like this in books.”

She had an angular look; her bones were the fastest-growing part of her and her flesh struggled to keep pace with the hard fact of them. Her stockings were wrinkled around the ankles with one heel twisted to the front. She stood before Emmeline, looking down on her. Her complexion was so white most of the time that it could appear almost blue. But in a passion, as she was now, she turned crimson. Like a sheet of watercolor paper, thought Emmeline, flooded with rose madder.

“I’d die without books, Mother. Can’t you see that?”

Catherine turned and rushed from the room, stooping to pick up the poetry book, catching the claw-footed table with her own long foot as she passed, sending a glass case crashing to the floor.

Ringing the bell with short, emphatic swings of her wrist, Emmeline let the frown invade the whole of her face. She had paid too little attention to Catherine’s constitution when she was a small child. She’d loved sweet things. Milk and honey, crystallized pears, sugarplums. Emmeline had allowed her to carry on eating pap long after the age the boys had given it up. She hadn’t thought it mattered. Catherine had been like some edible delicacy herself, her breath like violets, her limbs marzipan. She used to sit beside her when she slept, wondering at her, inhaling her, raising a plump, cool fist to her lips for worship. It had spoiled her. She’d grown willful on love and sugar.

No sign of Hannah Smith. Emmeline maneuvered herself down to the floor, one knee at a time and felt the rough press of the rug against the palms of her hands. The glass dome had cracked. Close up, the flowers looked scarcely worthy of display, the petals melted out of shape, their pinks and apricots and mauves bleached almost white. It wasn’t right that wax flowers should fade. That was the point of immortelles. That they should remain beautiful.

She lifted the case onto Querios’s chair, hoisted herself back to her feet, and as she straightened up caught sight of a woman she half-recognized, in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair had begun to show silver strands not long after Catherine was born. This year, the two white streaks at the front had become broad stripes. A portent of things to come. On bad days, she thought she looked as if she’d been struck by lightning. On better ones, she tried to consider it distinguished.

Emmeline felt sometimes that something inside had faded with her hair, some quality of imagination that had once been vivid. At Catherine’s age, she too had been a dreamy girl, with a head full of longings for la belle France inspired by her brothers’ language tutor, Monsieur Pierre.

Replacing the flowers on the table, she turned the crack toward the wall, slowly rubbing off the fingerprints with her cuff. It made her uncomfortable, her own daughter thinking that she knew more of life than Emmeline did. And Catherine appeared determined to help herself to more of it even as she became increasingly contrary about what she ate. Emmeline was worried about her. She must talk to Querios.

She rang the bell again and added her own voice.

“Hannah Smith! Where are you?”