I seek my drawers, my dress. Perhaps I shall keep the chemise the woman gave me. It is a pretty one. The lace at the hem taps at my bottom in gentle reminders. My clothes lie in the bathroom as Millie placed them. No voices sound to challenge. The drooping silence leaves no gap to speak. I descend with no caution whatever for I am become myself again. The front door stands wide-there Millie stands. She wears her bonnet in a ragged tilt. Her shawl is frayed. I espy now her poverty, the meanness of her dress. Her pose is one of the desolation I would feel were it not for her own.
“They've all gone, Miss. There's all such comings and goings here.”
“What will you do, Millie?”
Have I seen her before? The faces of servants merge in my memory-betray their anonymity. Their faces are the faces of winter Sunday mornings, hoarfrost invisible upon their fingers, the tips of their noses.
“Find a place, Miss, where they might have me.”
She curtseys, smiles, a wan, small, broken smile. I observe her in her going. Born to activities, domestic bustlings, she subsides as does a wobbling top when the boys have dropped the whip and it dies in its revolving dance.
The evening air comes easy to my brow. A man leans against the railings opposite-a blown leaf of summer. He regards me with the sombre mien of one who has already stripped and mounted me, married me and divorced. The road is too wide for his coming.
“Julian!”
I make to call out, though I know not where. My hand falters on the iron railing that descends with the steps. Those few passers-by who glance at me no doubt think me waiting for a carriage.
Who is Julian? I close my eyes, retracing memories like stepping stones across a river, sought in moonlight.
“Can I help you, Miss? You looks uncertain.”
I have gazed too long into the sky. In its pale blue is neither plentitude nor vacuum. I look down. A constable regards me quizzically.
The sky is in his eyes-a coloured mirror that reflects me not.
CHAPTER THREE
The breeze curls through my eyes, making me blink. Was there another path I could have taken in my years? My wanderings were ever circumspect. Eyes watched me from among the green leaves growing; the laurels whispered of summers that I had not known, of the long grass that grows around the boles of trees where the gardener has not swung his scythe.
There was a gate from the garden that I never passed through. I could see it sometimes in my swing's high swinging, between the elms that brushed the feathered clouds. I asked father what was there.
“A bull,” he said, “you must not go there.”
“She does not want a bull,” my aunt said, and laughed. She was my maternal aunt. I believe she often held secrets from my mother. My paternal aunt looked at her from her garden chair and said, “We must not be coarse. There must ever be delicacy. See how prettily her white-shod ankles twinkle when she moves.”
I did not then doubt their rectitude. One evening, unseen and unregarded, I ventured to the gate. My chin brushed the rusted iron bar of its wide striding, but I saw nothing. Only the forlorn sadness of grass that waits for dawn.
“Your ways are given,” I was told, “do not question them.”
The hedges about the garden stood as barriers to my being, but I felt no resentment. I had no desires from my eighteenth year, the year of my blooming, to go beyond-only to rediscover my discoveries, for the toys of my Measures were then utterly new to me. The dark inter-woven branches and twigs of the hedges fascinated me. I could forgive them what they hid. I knew their innocence, their intertwining. The interventions and manoeuvres of others were ever hazards that faced me.
“Shall you, then, go upstairs again?” my mother would occasionally ask after supper.
“It is but for reading,” I would say.
“You may read down here. What are you reading?”
“A book,” I would answer, for I kept several ever by my bed. The answer appeared to satisfy her. Our reprises were ever mundane.
“She will come down again, will you not?” one of my aunts would say comfortably, for of occasion it was my penance to do so and not to wriggle as I sat. My palms moistening, I would ascend, trailing a haze upon the polished bannister. In my room then I would wait but for a few minutes until I was attended upon. The closing of the doors downstairs was ever seen to.
Should I not have cried out in the wild wind's wailing- sought succour in my grandmother's shawl? The pigeons cooed from the roof in their grey mantles. None could speak for me save myself. I uttered not words at first but incoherencies. After the lemonade in the garden, the busy bustling of skirts, a startlement of starlings from the trees, then came the evenings of languor and douleur. The shapely stemming of my legs pleased and was praised. The tightness of my garters, ruched and resetted as now they were allowed to be, flattered the swelling of my thighs, my orb made naked by revering hands.
I knew the nuances of my fate. At night when the gas lamps outside fluttered and flirted with the dark, I who had first sought oblivion in my bubbling cries, my sobs pelleting like raindrops on my pillow, I knew the benedictions of ensuing silence, broken only by whispers, compliances.
There were miracles to be known. Coaxed, cozzened, and commanded in my postures, a breeze cried for me and curled around the corners of the house, telling the ivy and the moss. Sometimes the smell of loam from the household plants on my windowsill came to my nostrils, obscure, unsought, but ever now remembered. I entered red-hot castles in the fire and hid myself. There watching then I watched, as if myself and yet another. Eyes stared at me from sepia likenesses, framed by silver on which the firelight glinted. Only the snapping of the strap broke the silence of the unforgiven, urging the surging of my hips, back-forth, back-forth until fulfilment came.
On Sundays, the family assembled in the drawing room that yet was but a neighbouring world to the otherness of worlds above, father would read from the works of Browning, Southey, Keats, or Shelley. Through words I learned with the wild, high geese to fly, though all was solid and arranged in our outward demeanours. My mother understood less of the words than I, for she heard not the silences between the words where lie the small plains of thought and introspection.
We were not as others in their modulated trailings to chapel and to church.
“If there be wailings, let them be within,” my father said.
“And if there be supplications?” my paternal aunt asked.
“Let them be satisfied, fulfilled. In our fulfilment is our homecoming. Let the fire warm the surfaces and the interior will glow.”
My mother would complain then of one and all speaking in riddles. My aunts both said however that it was plain for all to see and that philosophising should begin between the sheets and not between the pews. It was then that I began to doubt their rectitude, being well appraised in that moment by their eyes. My mother said she understood not at all unless it were a matter of praying in bed.
“They who pray receive. Unto them who suffer is given,” my paternal aunt said. I had not prayed nor had I sought to. I drank my port quietly. Messengers of fire ran through my veins. I curled my toes and waited for the night, my Turkish slippers neatly crossed. My thighs kissed and parted, exuding secrets.
The constable has gone. Perhaps he thought me austere. I descend the steps and turn. Like a speck of dust poor Millie floats somewhere among the meaner habitations. Devoid of wings, she seeks her own salvation. I, winged and angelic, return to the sea's fringe. Its vastness even so terrifies me. I prefer the enclosures of space- the locked door and the clock that chimes for tea, the twitter of a bird that knows the safety of a cage. I have read Milton: surely I shall not offend the gods? There is a private luxury in being oneself or being locked to another when the bottom shimmers still with heat, in knowing one's knowing, obtaining one's obtainings, ankles misted, twisted in the sheet, small feet to large, the aloneness at midnight in the aftermath.
Perhaps I know now where Julian is, although I wish I did not. The framework of his house etches itself in my
