For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she nodded, reached her fingers down between the bones of her corset, and drew out nothing. She pressed her pinched fingers into Gascoigne’s hand; Gascoigne lifted his thumb, nodded, as if satisfied with the coins that had appeared there, and recorded the bail on the ledger. He dropped the coins audibly into his purse, and then moved on to the next prisoner.
This act of kindness, so unorthodox in George Shepard’s gaol-house, was not a terribly unusual one for Gascoigne. It was his pleasure to strike up friendships within the servile classes, with children, with beggars, with animals, with plain women and forgotten men. His courtesies were always extended to those who did not expect courtesy: when he encountered a man whose station was beneath him, he was never rude. To the higher classes, however, he held himself apart. He was not ungracious, but his manner was jaded and wistful, even unimpressed—a practice that, though not a strategy in any real sense, tended to win him a great deal of respect, and earn him a place among the inheritors of land and fortune, quite as if he had set out to end up there.
In this way Aubert Gascoigne, born out of wedlock to an English governess, raised in the attics of Parisian row-houses, clothed always in cast-offs, forever banished to the coal scuttle, by turns admonished and ignored, had risen, over time, to become a personage of limited but respectable means. He had escaped his past—and yet he could be called neither an ambitious man, nor an unduly lucky one.
In his person Gascoigne showed a curious amalgam of classes, high and low. He had cultivated his mind with the same grave discipline with which he now maintained his toilette—which is to say, according to a method that was sophisticated, but somewhat out of date. He held the kind of passion for books and learning that only comes when one has pursued an education on one’s very own—but it was a passion that, because its origins were both private and virtuous, tended towards piety and scorn. His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future, and profoundly regretful of the world’s decay. As a whole, he put one in mind of a well-preserved old gentleman (in fact he was only thirty-four) in a period of comfortable, but perceptible, decline—a decline of which he was well aware, and which either amused him or turned him melancholy, depending on his moods.
For Gascoigne was extraordinarily moody. The wave of compassion that had compelled him to lie on Anna’s behalf dissipated almost as soon as the whore was freed: it darkened to despair, a despair that his help might, after all, have been a vain one—misplaced, wrong, and worst of all, self-serving. Selfishness was Gascoigne’s deepest fear. He loathed all signs of it in himself, quite as a competitive man loathes all traces of weakness that might keep him from his selfish goal. This was a feature of his personality of which he was extraordinarily proud, however, and about which he loved to moralise; whenever the irrationality of all this became too evident to ignore, he would fall into a very selfish bout of irritation.
Anna had followed him out of the gaol-house; in the street he suggested, almost brusquely, that she come to his quarters, so as to explain herself in private. Meekly she acquiesced, and they walked on together, through the rain. Gascoigne no longer pitied her. His compassion, quick to flare, had given way to worry and self-doubt— for she was a failed suicide, after all; and, as the gaoler had warned him as he signed the form for Anna’s release, probably insane.
Now, two weeks later, in the Gridiron Hotel—with his arms about her, his hand splayed firmly in the hollow of her back, her forearms pressed against his chest, her breath dampening his collarbone—Gascoigne’s thoughts again turned to the possibility that perhaps she had tried, a second time, to end her life. But where was the bullet that ought to have lodged in her breastbone? Had she known that the gun would misfire in such a peculiar way, when she pointed the muzzle at her own throat, and pulled the hammer down? How could she have known it?
‘All men want their whores to be unhappy’—Anna herself had said that, the night she was released from gaol, after she followed him home to his quarters, and they took apart her gown at his kitchen table, with the rain beating down, and the paraffin lamp making soft the corners of the room. ‘All men want their whores to be unhappy’—and how had he responded? Something curt, most likely, something terse. And now she had shot herself, or tried to. Gascoigne held her for a long time after Pritchard closed the door, gripping her tight, inhaling the salty smell of her hair. The smell was a comfort: he had been many years at sea.
And he had been married. Agathe Gascoigne—Agathe Prideaux, as he had known her first. Elfin, quick- witted, teasing, and consumptive—a fact he had known when he made his proposal, but which had somehow seemed immaterial, surmountable; more a proof of her delicacy than a promise of ill tidings to come. But her lungs would not heal. They had travelled south, in pursuit of the climate cure, and she had died on the open ocean, somewhere off the Indian coast—horrible, that he did not know exactly where. Horrible, how her body had bent when it had struck the surface of the water—that slapping sound. She had made him promise not to order a coffin, nor to have one approximated, should she die before they reached their port of call. If it happened, she said, it would happen in the mariners’ way: sewn into a hammock with a double-backed seam. And because the hammock was hers, that bloom of scarlet, darkened now to brown—he’d knelt and kissed it, macabre though that was. After that, Gascoigne kept sailing. He stopped only when his money ran dry.
Anna was heavier than Agathe had been—more angular, more substantial; but then (he thought), perhaps the living always seem substantial to those whose thoughts are with the dead. He moved his hand across her back. With his fingers he traced the shape of her corset, the double seam of eyelets, laced with string.
After leaving the gaol-house they had detoured past the Magistrate’s Court, so that Gascoigne could leave his bail purse in the deposit box there, and file the bail notices, ready for the morning. Anna watched him perform these tasks patiently and without curiosity: she seemed to accept that Gascoigne had done her a great favour, and she was content to obey him, and keep silent, in return. Out of habit she did not walk beside him in the street, but followed him at a distance of several yards—so that Gascoigne could claim not to know her, if they encountered an arm of the law.
When they reached Gascoigne’s cottage (for he had a whole cottage to himself, though a small one; a one-roomed clapboard cabin, some hundred yards from the beach), Gascoigne directed Anna to wait beneath the awning of the porch while he split a log for kindling in the yard. He made short work of the log, feeling a little self-conscious with Anna’s dark eyes fixed upon him as he chopped. Before the heartwood could dampen in the rain, he gathered the splintered fragments in his arms and dashed back to the doorway, where Anna stood aside to let him pass.
‘It’s no palace,’ he said foolishly—though, by Hokitika standards, it was.
Anna made no comment as she passed under the lintel and into the dim fug of the cottage. Gascoigne dropped the kindling on the hearth and reached back to close the door. He lit the paraffin lamp, set it on the table, and knelt to build a fire—intensely aware, as he did so, of Anna’s silent appraisal of the room. It was sparsely furnished. His one fine piece of furniture was a wingback armchair, upholstered in a thick fabric of pink and yellow stripes: this had been a present to himself, upon first taking possession of the place, and it stood pride of place in the centre of the room. Gascoigne wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life. The narrow mattress, over which his blanket was folded thrice. The miniature of Agathe, hanging from a nail above the bedhead. The row of seashells along the window sill. The tin kettle on the range; his Bible, the pages mostly uncut except for Psalms and the epistles; the tartan biscuit tin, inside of which he kept his letters from his mother, his papers, and his pens. Beside his bed, the box of broken candles, the wax pieces held together by the string of their wicks.
‘You keep a clean house,’ was all she said.
‘I live alone.’ Gascoigne pointed with a stick to the trunk at the base of his bed. ‘Open that.’
She loosed the clasps, and heaved open the top. He directed her to a swatch of dark linen, which she lifted up, and Agathe’s dress slithered out over her knees—the black one, with the tatted collar, that he had so despised.
(‘People will think me an ascetic,’ she had said cheerfully, ‘but black is a sober colour; one ought to have a sober dress.’
It was to hide the bloodstains, the fine spray that peppered her cuffs; he knew it, but did not say so. He agreed, aloud, that one ought to have a sober dress.)
‘Put it on,’ Gascoigne said, watching as Anna smoothed the fabric over her knee. Agathe had been shorter; the hem would have to be let down. Even then, the whore would show three inches of her ankle, and maybe even the last hoop of her crinoline. It would be awful—but beggars could not be choosers, Gascoigne thought, and Anna was a beggar tonight. He turned back to the fire and shovelled ash.
It was the only dress of Agathe’s that Gascoigne still possessed. The others, packed in their camphor-
