‘I want to speak to you about this. A letter from Denmark.’
‘What? A fucking fortune then!’
‘No, Finn. Delivered by a boy, not a letter carrier. We did not pay for delivery.’
‘Denmark? Not Iceland?’
‘I do not know why it’s marked Copenhagen.’
‘Well. Go on then.’
‘It seems we are going to be parents.’
‘Not bloody likely.’
Finn wipes his fingers across the plate and sucks the crumbs from them. He considers himself to be somewhat of a pie aficionado. Carson had dipped into his good flour stores for this meaty pie; the secret lies in the lightness of the crust. He tastes the difference in the high quality shortening. Papery flakes fall as golden flecks on Finn’s shirt.
Clovis conceals her disgust at his carelessness. There’s a bit of lettuce on the floor and a ring of red wine on the tablecloth, as though he marks his territory, or must leave evidence.
‘Finn, I prefer that you not eat in the bedroom.’
‘You prefer? Another word you’ve picked up at those lectures of yours? I’ll eat where I like.’
‘I thought it would please you. I try to improve my English.’
Clovis waits for a response, but he eats and drinks and grows weary – weary of her. His wife’s beauty no longer interests him. There is no gown, no simple or complicated design that is capable of dimming her voluptuous body, yet he no longer has the addiction he once did for her. In this, most men would think him quite mad, or a sodomite, but a man, especially a man like Finn, does not like to be used, and the feeling in his tackle goes limp whenever he thinks of her trickery. So he dines in silence.
Clovis is nothing if not patient. Her chair near the window is comfortable enough and from her position she waits for the right moment to strike. She counts the number of times he fills his goblet. It will be soon.
Outside their bedroom window commerce is slowly beginning its daily march. The dustman’s ‘Dust-ho!’ followed by a sharp ring of his bell, brings Willa pattering down the stairs. Yesterday’s ashes swept from the fireplaces are ready for collection.
Clovis adjusts the shutter to allow a sliver of light to stream in while Finn continues to eat. She looks down at the milk pail being lowered from the milkmaid’s string where, having run back down to the basement kitchen, Willa unhooks it with her calloused fingers.
Clovis continues her vigil at the window. The smacking of his lips, she thinks, and the way he sucks his fingers – hateful.
When they first met, Finn told her he was a horologist. He had set sail from London in late March of 1828. On board, Dr Von Torben, an eminent geologist, three draughtsmen, two writers, several seamen and fishermen, an Icelandic interpreter, and an astronomer made forty men.
They reached Iceland three weeks later and the terrible and beautiful ruggedness that stretched out before them led them to believe that no humans could possibly inhabit the island. So gigantic was that first view of desolate nakedness that they forgot to be afraid. If the shore had not been covered with boats they might have despaired that the scenery held nothing for them but that nakedness.
Finn arrived on the island with his clocks: ships’ clocks, striking clocks, pendulum clocks, and a few pocket watches. The interpreter had insisted that this country’s people had no use for and no means of investing in a clock, and now he was proven correct. Icelanders mark the time in a completely different way according to their long hours of sunlight in the summer and their short dark days of winter. So Finn, ever resourceful, became the astronomer’s indispensable assistant.
That summer Clovis had returned to her father’s farm from the north where she’d spent two gruelling months assisting her aunt during the birth of her fifth child. She despised every moment of the clinging children, her needy aunt, the constant drudgery of the work, and the cold. God curse the cold! She thought she’d never be warm again. Near the dead lands of the southern coast they always speak of the beauty of the north, but she found nothing redeeming, nothing worthwhile and the journey was never-ending and unbearable.
She returned home to find two foreign men camped near their hut; they had traded with her father while she was away. What kind of man traded good boots and tools for the opportunity to look at the skies from a poor farmer’s scratch of land?
The one called Finn amused her with his vulgar tale that from the first time he saw her riding along the path by the meadow, with the white-capped mountains painted against her flying red hair, he became so stiff he thought he would have to relieve himself there and then. As she rode nearer and he saw that she was real and not an exquisite dream, the intimacy he had shared with her sister vanished like the steam of a hot boiling spring. And that was how he admitted what he had done while Clovis was away with her hands in baby shit and ignorant of his presence.
That was when he was drunk with just the thought of her.
But today, Clovis’s breasts rise without desire, and her lips part not from wanting, but because she is pulsing with an entirely new lease on life. Here it is in her hands in the form of an extraordinary letter. If Finn would only look at her, he would recognize ambition racing through her.
‘So go on then. Read it.’
The street below continues to wake as Clovis allows more light to filter in.
To my sister and her husband,
You will be surprised to hear from me. I am surprised that I write – I do so because I must. There is much I cannot tell you and you will have many questions. They will be answered at another time.
My husband is dead. He has met with a terrible accident.
