Authors: Sarah Waters
I told him then that the money was for a charity, and would be used to purchase passages abroad for poor reformatory girls. He said—looking sour—that he thought that cause a most deserving one.
When I left him I took a hansom to Waterloo, to purchase tickets for the tidal train; and then I went to Victoria, to the Travellers’ Office. They gave me a passport for myself, and another for my companion. I told them her name was
Marian Erle
, and the secretary wrote it, seeing nothing strange in it!—only querying me over the spelling. I have been imagining since then all the offices I might visit and the lies I might tell in them. I have been wondering how many gentlemen it would be possible to fool, before they caught me.
But then, this morning, I stood at my window and saw the policeman making his patrol along the Walk. Mother has asked him to watch the house more carefully, now that I am here alone. He nodded to me, and my heart gave a jerk; when I told Selina of him to-day, however, she smiled. ‘Are you afraid?’ she said. ‘You mustn’t be afraid of that! When they find me gone, why should they think to look for me with you?’ She said it will be days and days, before they think of
that
.
16 January 1875
Mrs Wallace called to the house to-day. I told her I was busy with Pa’s letters, and that I hoped to be able to work on, undisturbed. If she comes again I will have Vigers tell her I am out. If she comes in five days’ time, of course, I shall be gone. Oh, how I long for it! I can do nothing, now, but long for it. Everything else is falling from me: I am drawing further and further away from this place, with every sweeping of the hand across the numbers on the pale face of the clock. Mother left me a little laudanum—I have taken it all, and bought more. It is very easy, after all, to walk into a druggist’s shop and buy a draught of it! I may do anything now. I may sit up all night if I care to, and sleep in the daylight. I remember a game, when we were children:
What will you do, when you are grown, and have a house of your own?—I’ll have a tower on the roof, and fire a cannon from it! I’ll eat nothing but liquorice! I’ll keep dogs in butlers’ jackets—I’ll let a mouse sleep on my pillow . . .
Now I have more freedom than I ever had at any time in my life, and I do only the things I always have. They were empty before, but Selina has given a meaning to them, I do them for her. I am waiting, for her—but,
waiting
, I think, is too poor a word for it. I am engaged with the substance of the minutes as they pass. I feel the surface of my flesh stir—it is like the surface of the sea that knows the moon is drawing near it. If I take up a book, I might as well never have seen a line of print before—books are filled, now, with messages aimed only at me. An hour ago, I found this:
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes . . .
It is as if every poet who ever wrote a line to his own love wrote secretly for me, and for Selina.
My
blood—even as I write this—
my
blood, my muscle and every fibre of me, is listening,
for her
. When I sleep, it is to dream of her. When shadows move across my eye, I know them now for shadows of
her
. My room is still, but never silent—I hear her heart, beating across the night in time to my own. My room is dark, but darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures—darkness like velvet, darkness like felt, darkness bristling as coir or prison wool.
The house is changed by me, becalmed. There might be a spell upon it! Like figures on a chiming clock, the servants go about their duties: setting fires to warm the empty rooms, drawing the drapes at night, and unclosing them next morning—there is no-one to gaze from the windows, but still the curtains are pulled. Cook sends me trays of food. I have said that she need not send me all the courses, that she might only send me soup, or fish, or chicken. But she cannot break herself of her old habits. The trays come, and I must send them guiltily back, the meat concealed beneath the turnip and potato, like a child’s. I have no appetite. I suppose her nephew eats it. I suppose they are all dining very well, down in the kitchen. I should like to go to them and say
Eat! Eat it all!
What does it matter to me what they take now?
Even Vigers keeps to her old hours, rising at six—as if she too could feel the clamour of the Millbank bell in wakeful veins—though I have told her that she mustn’t try to match my habits, and may stay in bed till seven. Once or twice she has come to my room and gazed strangely at me; last night she saw my untouched tray and said, ‘You must eat, miss! What would Mrs Prior say to me, if she saw how you let your meals go?’
But when I laughed to hear it, she smiled. She has a very plain smile, and yet her eyes are almost handsome. She does not trouble me. I have seen her looking curiously at the lock upon the velvet collar, when she thinks my eyes are turned away; but only once did she go so far as to ask me, Was it a mourning-band I wore for my father’s sake?
Sometimes I think my passion must infect her. Sometimes my dreams come so fiercely, I am sure she must catch the shape and colour of them in her own slumbers.
Sometimes I think that I could tell her all my plans, and she would only nod and look grave. I think that, if I asked her, she might even go with us . . .
But then, I think I will be jealous of the hands that touch Selina, even a maid’s hands. I went to-day to a great shop on Oxford Street, to walk among the rows of ready-made-up gowns, to buy her coats and hats, and shoes, and underthings. I hadn’t guessed how it would be, to do those things for her—to fashion a place for her in the ordinary world. I never saw in dyes and cuts and fabrics what Priscilla saw, and Mother, when I had to decide between them for myself; but, buying dresses for Selina, I grew light. Of course, I didn’t know her size—and yet, I found I did. I know her height, from the memory of her cheek against my jaw; and her slenderness, from the thought of our embraces. I chose, first, a plain wine-coloured travelling-gown. I thought, Well, that will do for now, and we shall buy her other things when we reach France. But as I held that dress, I saw another—a gown of pearl-grey cashmere, with an under-skirt of some thick kind of greenish silk. The green, I thought, would match her eyes. The cashmere would be warm enough, for an Italian winter.
I bought both dresses—and then another, a dress of white, with velvet trim, and a narrow, narrow waist. It is a dress to bring out all the girlishness they have subdued at Millbank.
Then, since she will not be able to wear a dress without a petticoat, I bought her petticoats, and also stays, and also chemises, and stockings of black. And, since stockings will be useless without shoes, I bought her shoes—black shoes; and buff-coloured boots; and slippers of white velvet, to match the girlish dress. I bought her hats—large hats with veils, to cover her poor hair until it grows again. I bought her a coat, and a mantle for the cashmere dress, and a dolman with a fringe of yellow silk, that will swing as she walks beside me in the Italian sun, and flash with light.
The clothes lie in my closet now, still in their boxes. Sometimes I go to them, and put my hand upon the card. I seem to hear the silk and cashmere breathing then. I seem to feel the slow pulse of the cloth.
Then I know that they are waiting, like me, for Selina to assume them—to make them quick, to make them real, to make them palpitate with lustre and with life.
19 January 1875
I have done everything, now, for the journey we will make together; but there was one more thing that I must do, to-day, for myself. I went to the Westminster Cemetery, and stayed an hour at Pa’s grave, thinking of him. It was the coldest day of the new year. When a funeral party came I heard their voices, very clear upon the thin, still January air; and as we stood, the first few flakes of winter snow began to fall, until at last my coat, and the coats of all the mourners, were dusted white. I once meant to take flowers with Pa, to the graves of Keats and Shelley, in Rome; to-day I put a wreath of holly on his own grave. The snow settled on it and hid the crimson berries—though the points upon the leaves stayed sharp as pins. I listened to the clergyman’s speech, then they started casting earth upon the coffin in the open grave. The earth was hard, and rattled like shot, and when the mourners heard it they gave a murmur, and a woman cried out. The coffin was a small one—I suppose, a child’s.
I had no sense at all that Pa was anywhere near me; but this, in itself, seemed a kind of blessing. I had gone to say good-bye to him. I think I will find him again, in Italy.
I went from the cemetery to the centre of the city, and then I walked from street to street, looking at all the things I shall not see again, perhaps for many years. I walked from two o’clock until half-past six.
Then I went to Millbank, for my last visit there.
I reached the gaol long after the suppers had been served and eaten and cleared away—a much later time than I have ever visited before. I found the women of Mrs Jelf’s wards at the last part of their labour. This is the kindest time of the day for them. When the evening bell is rung at seven, they put their work aside; the matron takes a woman from her cell and walks with her along the passages, collecting and counting all the pins and needles and blunt-edged scissors that have been used by the prisoners throughout the day. I stood and watched Mrs Jelf do this. She wore an apron of felt, to which she fixed the pins and needles; the scissors she put on a wire, like fish. At a quarter-to-eight the hammocks must be unfolded and tied up, and at eight o’clock the doors are fastened, and the gas shut off—until that time, however, the women may do just as they please. It was curious to see them—some reading letters, some learning their Bibles; one tipping water into a bowl, to wash with, another with her bonnet removed, and tying curls into her hair with a few poor lengths of wool saved from her day’s knitting. I have begun to feel myself a ghost, at Cheyne Walk; I might have been a ghost to-night, at Millbank. I walked the length of those two wards and the women hardly raised their eyes to me, and when I called to the ones I knew they came and curtseyed, but were distracted. They used to put aside their work for me, gladly enough; but their last, private hour of the day—well, I can see how it would be rather different to them, to surrender that.
I was not a ghost, of course, to Selina. She had seen me cross the mouth of her cell, and was waiting for me when I went back to her. Her face was very still and pale, but there was a pulse ticking fast beneath the shadow of her jaw—when I saw that, I felt my own heart kick.
It didn’t matter now, who knew how long I spent with her, who saw how near we stood. So we stood very close, and she spoke to me, in whispers, of how it will be tomorrow night.
She said, ‘You must sit and wait, and think of me. You must keep to your room, you must have a single candle by you, with its flame shielded. I shall come, some time before the light . . .’
She was so earnest, so grave, I began to be terribly afraid. I said, ‘
How
shall you do it? Oh, Selina, how can it be true? How shall you come to me, through the empty air?’
She looked at me and smiled, then reached and took my hand. She turned my fingers and eased back my glove, and held my wrist a little way before her mouth. She said, ‘What is there, between my mouth and your bare arm? But don’t you feel me, when I do this?’ Then she breathed upon my wrist, where the blood shows blue—she seemed to draw all the heat in me to that one spot, and I shivered.
‘Just so will I come to you, tomorrow night,’ she said.
I began to imagine then how it will be. I imagined her pulled long, like an arrow, like a hair, like the string upon a violin, like a thread inside a labyrinth, long and quivering and tight—so tight that, buffeted by rough shadows, she might break! When she saw me tremble she said that I must not be frightened—that if I was, it would make her journey all the harder. I had a sudden terror then of
that
—a terror of terror itself, which would tax and weary her, perhaps harm her, perhaps keep her from me. I said, What if I should spoil her powers, without meaning it? What if her powers should fail? I thought then of how it will be, if she does not come. I thought of how it will be, not for her, but for myself. I seemed suddenly to see myself as she has made me, I saw what I have become—I saw it, with a kind of horror.
I said, ‘If you don’t come, Selina, I shall die.’ She has told me as much herself, of course; but now I spoke so simply and so dully, she looked at me and her expression grew strange, her face became white and stretched and
bare
. She came to me and put her arms about me, and placed her face against my throat. ‘
My affinity
,’ she whispered. And though she stood very still, when she stepped from me at last my collar was wet with her tears.
There came the sound of Mrs Jelf, then, calling an end to leisure-time, and Selina passed her hand across her eyes, and turned from me. I curled my fingers about the bars of her gate, and stood and watched her fastening her hammock to the wall, shaking free her sheet and blankets, hitting the dust from her grey pillow. Her heart still beat as fiercely as my own, I know it, and her hands shook a little, as mine did; and yet she moved and worked tidily, as a doll might, tying knots in the bed-ropes, folding back the prison blanket to show a border of white. It was as if, having been neat for a year, she must be neat even to-night—be neat, perhaps, for ever.
I couldn’t bear to see her. I turned away, and caught the sound of women, all down the ward, engaged upon the same routine; and when I looked at her again she had her fingers on the buttons of her gown, and had unloosed it. ‘We must all be in our beds,’ she said, ‘before the gas is put off.’ She said it self-consciously, not looking at me—still, however, I didn’t call for Mrs Jelf. I said only, ‘Let me see you’—I had not known I was about to say it, and was startled by the sound of my own voice. She also blinked, and hesitated. Then she let the dress fall from her, and removed the under-skirt and the prison boots and then, after another hesitation, the bonnet, until she stood, shivering slightly, in her woollen stockings and her petticoat. She held herself stiffly, and kept her face turned from me—as if it hurt to have me gaze at her, yet she would suffer the pain of it, for my sake. Her collar-bones stood out like the delicate ivory keys of some queer instrument of music. Her arms were paler than her yellowed under-clothes, and veined, from wrist to elbow, with a gentle tracery of blue. Her hair—I had never seen her naked head—her hair hung flat to her ears, like a boy’s hair. It was the colour of gold when a breath has misted it.