My dear friend smiles, and excuses himself to smoke outside. No one follows him. Perhaps because they were not asked. But still – Stewart, who eats cigars, who has a passion for them, runs a finger over the cut of the crystal in his glass. Whytehead, who sticks so religiously to my husband's side, has, it seems, finally become unglued. And it amazes me again, how we make way for other people's desire.
Even I am unmanned by it, until I say,
'You may go.'
She picks herself up and she walks, not towards the stateroom where my clothes need laying out for the night, but into the open air.
He is not my husband. Of course he is not. I must train my turn of phrase. The man who is not my husband comes back fifteen minutes later – I have counted it by the clock. His cigar is still lit, though now it is a stub that he chucks, unceremoniously, out the porthole window on the far side of the room.
'And why is it', I ask, 'that a man must come inside to fire the butt of his cigar through a window, when he has the whole vast river to throw it into, over the rail?' I say that he must have the satisfaction of the porthole, because men must always be throwing things; but more than that, they must be aiming them too – and the smaller the target, or in this case the hole, the better.
Everyone laughs. My friend looks at me with a new admiration. And I quite frankly meet his eye. It is as though we have done this thing together. And this makes me feel lonely and quite giddy, both at the same time.
Later, Francine comes to unlace me in the dark. I have fallen asleep in a chair, because to lie down seems to strangle the child, or strangle me, one or the other. So she whispers quite close to me and heaves me a little forward to get at the hooks and then the stays.
I groan a little. And, in my sleep-weakened state, all I can think of is the closeness of her belly to me and the hope that there is not a child in her too. I can smell him off her, and this makes me gag a little. Because in the bargain, whatever it was, there was nothing agreed about smell.
And then she has me undressed and under the bedclothes, free of my corset, and happy as a boiled egg, all peeled.
In the middle of the night, I stir and find he is not yet come to bed. It is some time before I remember why this might be, and when I do I am awake and raging. He must not sleep with her. These hours, I think, are meant to punish. And, if so, he will be punished in return. Because he has started the wrong game here. He has started a small game and I am hugely, wildly bored by the small game. I was not sure I wanted to play, but if needs must, then I will play big.
Such is my ambition, in the middle of the night.
I hear the darkness breathe and stir; an animal close to my ear. I never sleep alone. I had Francine crawl in with me in Paris, when there was no man in the bed (I can hardly call for her, now). Because there was always my sister and, when my sister bolted, there was any number of girls at Mme Hubert's. The first, the only, nights I spent alone were in that inn, when Mr Bennett brought me to Paris.
Or did not bring me to Paris. He was sick with something like grief – stiff with it, in the corner of the post we took. It was as though his back would not bend into the angle of the seat. He looked at me while I gazed out the window or played with the cards I had in a little walnut box; clever things – three children playing with their kites made up the three of hearts, I remember; though all the ones I turned were spades, with women weeping, and skeletons.
'Your fate,' I said, flicking them into Mr Bennett's poor lap – mostly to amuse the man who shared the post with us, a fat fellow with a glazed eye. Mr Bennett was, by that time, so maddened by the presence of men around me that it turned the ends of his fingers blue, and I hoped he would not die before we got to Paris, which is to say, before my fortune was made. I was fourteen. We passed though Orleans and I could smell Paris on the road. I could see the smoke of it ahead of us; there was a smudge of Paris on the clear blue sky.
We stopped a night in Artenay, and Mr Bennett, out of jealousy, I thought, locked me in my room. I do not know when he left. He may have stayed to take some supper. The innkeeper had instructions for me to stay where I was – the bill was already paid.
This I found out in the morning, after a night of horror. Then another. And a third. They left me like that, as you might lock up a dog; the better it will love the man who sets it free. I think about it still. I had money – quite a lot of money – in my trunk and variously hidden in my clothes. I was not, after the first night, locked in. And still I craved the rescuing knock. And then it came.
It was the fat man who took the post with us. His name was M. Raspail.
The baby turns. If it is a girl, I will drown it, that is all.
Not that there is anything so terrible about Raspail. He was protracted, endlessly so, in his pleasures, and very private – he would never, for example, let me witness the spasm, if there was one, which I sometimes doubt. But he was clever, and always turned my strength against me. And I am disgusted still, by the thought of his hands.
So, if it is a girl, I will drown it.
I do not believe in the baby any more. Stuck in me now like a ship in a bottle: it is too big. It will kill me on the way out. Either way, I do not think that I can love it, which is all to the good. My poor mother suffered from excessive love of her babies, so when she lost them her health went too. 'Wait,' she seems to say to me now. 'Do not love it when it is small. Do not love it when it suckles. Do not suckle it. Do not allow it by you until it is weaned, and then not for any length of time. You may start to love it when it toddles over to your skirts. You may love it a little more when it starts to talk. But you must not actually love it, until it walks away from you, into the wide world. Safe. Arrived. Alive.' Poor Mama. Poor Adelaide Schnock. So blonde and Saxon-stupid, offering
In the morning, I hear my dear friend try the door. There is a long silence when he finds that is locked. I wait for the sound of his receding footsteps or a shot fired on the lock; an axe through the walnut or the sound of running men. I wait for his pleading, or the sound of his body abjectly sliding down the wood. I feel his silence. I test it and match it with a silence of my own; longer, more indifferent.
I slide a stiletto blade through the keyhole. All the way through.
I will always sleep alone, now. I will fend off my ghosts how I may. And in this way he will never be able to walk away from me, he will only be able to approach my door.
I pull back the knife. He knocks. I open up the door and smile.
Later, I go out to my
I heard a woman say once that birth was like falling asleep – being just as simple and mysterious. Who could tell you what it is like to fall asleep? So when my baby draws his first breath I will know what some insomniac angel knows when it wakes for the first time. 'So that is what it is all about. So that is what we crave.'
I lie in my tent and lift the thin curtain and say, ' Milton,' and he runs to my side.
' Milton, I hear him shouting. Will you see what your Master wants?' The boy gives me a steady look and spits as he walks away. The whole world insults me, I think, and then I close my eyes and think no more.
Coffee
1
The carriage was an old-fashioned Spanish affair, high and closed, and the blackest thing you ever saw. Black as obsidian. It was the black of ten coats of lacquer, maybe more, and though a black coach wasn't in itself remarkable, this one unsettled the eye by being unrelieved by any other glint or colour – leathers, harness, bit, all so deep a black you might fall into it. The wheels, it was said, were made of iron, and you would swear the glass in the windows was black, if such a thing were possible – it looked as though she rode
