ladies. Miss Dace, Frank Mallett and Dobbin kept track of orders and dispatches—these were not numerous, but were increasing. Fludd disappeared from time to time, silently and without warning, in the old way, but Philip went on with the work, silently. The house was more like a house, and less like a wrecked barn, Prosper said to Olive Wellwood, with whom he went walking in the Marsh, occasionally, when they were visiting.
“Oh,” said Olive. “That’s Elsie. None of them could do anything without Elsie.”
Prosper said he had hardly noticed her, which pleased Olive at some subliminal level, since Elsie had recently become very pretty indeed, almost beautiful.
“She doesn’t try to be noticed,” said Olive, fairly. “She gets on with fixing things, so that they work. You know, Prosper”—they were on first-name terms now—“you know, I don’t think either of those two—Philip and Elsie—get paid a penny. I suspect she gets all her clothes from cast-offs or Patty Dace’s jumble sale stuff. I think Dobbin looks after
Prosper Cain was shocked. Olive went on.
“I notice—a woman will notice. Curtains are mended and things are polished—sideboards and spoons. There are bowls of wild flowers on the dresser. The sink is clean.”
“How old is that girl?”
“No one knows. She must be about twenty.”
“Do you think—with some arranged assistance—she could look after a group of students from the Royal College of Art? The poor souls are much harassed by the building works at the Museum—I had the possibly over-ambitious idea of a summer school in the outhouses and meadows of Purchase House—with tents to camp in, and camping for the ladies in the haylofts—and with great luck a few master classes from Benedict Fludd.”
“It
“Fludd is the attraction, and Fludd the major hazard,” said Cain.
Fludd was in rather a gleeful mood, having made some odd-shaped vessels with Black Widow spiders lurking in their depths, their spinnakers busy, their multitude of eyes glittering opal. He said “Why not, why not, let them all come, let them learn to see clearly and use their hands.”
They were having a business tea, and Frank and Dobbin were present. Dobbin asked, respectfully, if Fludd was sure he wouldn’t find a summer school—intrusive maybe, oppressive perhaps?
Fludd said “Don’t be daft. A bevy of lovely young ladies is just what we need around us—and some of them may even have an inkling of what it’s all about. I’ve been thinking of modelling women again. Let them come.”
“We must talk to Elsie,” said Frank, who was quite as aware as Olive was of the importance of Elsie.
“Elsie’ll do as she’s told. Elsie’s a good girl,” said Fludd.
No one asked Elsie what she thought or felt. Or, at least, with a youthful egoism which she had been forced entirely to conceal, Elsie believed no one asked or cared what she thought or felt. She had worked out her master plan from the moment of setting foot in Purchase House—or perhaps even earlier, in the dusty track across the Marsh, when she noticed that Philip was taken aback by her presence. She didn’t go quite as far as thinking he didn’t want her there, but she kept the possibility in mind. She saw something was missing in the house—a real woman, she told herself, looking at the three pale Fludd females. Elbow-grease, cunning, foresight, tirelessness. She had brought her mother’s fine camelhair brushes for Philip. And for herself she had kept her mother’s sewing-truss, with its needles and cottons and wools, and a pair of sharp scissors that had never been pawned. She would rather have had the brushes. She had been learning to decorate fine porcelain, when her mother collapsed, muttering Philip’s name. She thought she would use the needles and scissors as a weapon to make a space for herself. She made excellent soups, out of almost nothing, a hambone and a sheaf of peapods, slowly simmered. Scrag-end of Romney salt-marsh mutton, with onions and pearl barley. She was not, it should be said, naturally tidy or orderly or domestic. She wanted to go barefoot, and didn’t really care if her underwear was in holes. But in this situation she needed to be needed, she needed to become indispensable, and she made herself so. She learned—for herself, no one thought to teach her— the embroidery stitches, cross-stitch, petit point, and unpicked and reworked where Pomona had gone wrong. She worked out how to deal with Philip. She loved Philip, and believed he did not love her. He had room for only one passion, she thought, and it wasn’t his family. By all sorts of mute signs, and tactful withdrawals, she made it clear to him that she expected nothing, nothing from him, beyond not being sent away. He would have been shocked if she had said he did not love her, and she did not. And his mode of being was largely silent anyway. At first she asked Seraphita and Imogen if she might mend the bedspreads, or collect scraps to make a peg-rug, and they gave their sweet empty smiles, and said, by all means. So she turned to, and put sides to middle in old bed-sheets, and contrived storage systems, and found muslin to hang over jugs in hot weather. She moved around the house fast and invisibly—it was as though all the energy that drained from the three pale females had collected in her, like galvanism.
At night, very late, once she had installed an initial order that she could keep her hand and eye on, she crept into the pottery studio. She made, as she had told Dorothy, little pots. Fludd didn’t have porcelain clay, but she mixed kaolin with earthenware, and made it lighter, lit a lamp and painted intricate little designs on tiny cups and saucers and platters the size of pen trays. She had been starving when she came, with a bony body and lank, dusty hair. Adequately fed, intensely busy, she became, as Olive had noticed, pretty, or more. Her hair suddenly took to curling and became a luxuriant mass, which she kept down with a kind of gipsy-scarf. Her waist narrowed, and above it and below it she rounded out and found herself tempted to strut, or twirl, and resisted, for who was there to see her? The obvious person for her to desire—the only visible person—was Geraint. He had energy, like her, but mostly used it to get out and about on a bicycle, far from Purchase. And if she let her hair out, or made a new shirt from a roll of blotched blue cotton, he showed no sign of noticing.
There were people, besides Olive, who did notice. One night, as she was working on the little pots, she was surprised by Benedict Fludd, who strode in, wearing a rough cowled garment like a monk’s habit, in black. He was carrying a candle and his eyes glittered in the shadow above its flame.
Elsie gathered her little pots together like a hen with chickens. Fludd made a gesture like some kind of benison.
“Please continue. Don’t be alarmed. Will it trouble you if I draw you at work?”
“No,” said Elsie, stoutly, though her veins had stiffened. “Just keep working. There’s an interesting light from the lamp. I’ll use charcoal. You have a very interesting face, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” said Elsie, confused. Fludd laughed and began to draw.
He showed her what he had done, before they went back to their rooms. It was done with bold lines, and
