‘That is a mouthful, you villain. Give me one of those!’
‘Who’s for today’s news? News! News!’ he crows.
‘I say there, boy.’
‘How many, mum? Ten?’
She shuts the door on the pitiable child after she pays him, tips him, and feeds him from her own breakfast with a large brick of bread and a half-round of cheese, which he promptly carries away to his mother. The employees have not yet arrived and it is still too early for Owen to come down. Nora sparkles in this, her golden hour. Perched on top of a high stool she sips her scalding coffee. From a chain around her neck she opens her mother-of-pearl-encased reading glass. Yet another sign of her weakening body.
‘Now, let us see. Where are you?’ She peruses the pages. ‘There!’
Miracle at the Serpentine,it reads. The article recalls how three people, who by all rights should be dead, survived immersion into the Serpentine for longer than any would think possible. The trio rose from the icy water on an interminably cold March afternoon. The Fowler name is in print. A description of a tall, elderly lady with silvery-white hair is described as the Heroine of the Day.
‘“One of the sisters Fitzgerald. Clovis and Finn Fowler … Their son …”’ Nora’s voice builds as she reads aloud. ‘Owen!’
The queerest feeling rises in her. She is overcome by the sense that everything she once knew is no longer valid. With it, the oddest vulnerability crawls against her skin, something akin to what she always imagined madness to be and it portends a complete loss of control.
‘Owen!’
‘Nora? What is it?’
But Nora cannot answer. Her attention turns to the view of the street. She looks to the past, those years ago when the door was stubborn and stuck. The day Clovis Fowler and her pregnant belly taunted her until the sisters arrived and eclipsed the Fowler beauty. How Nora had savoured that moment. She recalls the atmosphere and how it was heavy with everyone, except her. That day mirrors her feelings now. Even the air can be pregnant, but she will never be, in any way. At last she turns to her husband’s inquisitive face, knowing that she has been excluded in this as well. No matter how hard she works, or how hard she loves, it is not to be.
Nora rises from the stool. As certain as she is that her world has turned upside down, she is equally certain that her darling Owen is lost to her unless she takes action. She hands him the paper, picks up her bowl of coffee and retreats upstairs.
Owen reads the story of the miracle and drops the paper on the floor where he stands.
‘Nora. Nora, dearest.’
He takes the stairs two at a time. She is found in their odd little parlour with its corner of windows that jut out onto the noisy Commercial Road. She studies her hands again; he often catches her at this. She turns them and strokes the faintly coloured spots. When she is aware of him, she places them in her lap. With a tilt of her head, she beckons him to sit with her.
‘Tell me everything,’ she says.
There have been difficult moments in their lives. The most bitter and lingering has always been that cruel absence in the cradle she insisted they purchase. Owen wonders if the circumstances were turned and she were to tell him the events that he now relays to her, if a cloud of disbelief might cross his mind. Would he be frightened of her, and for her?
He begins with the truth as he knows it and ends his story with hope. He tells her he seeks to replicate whatever strange and terrible essence the boy has running through his veins so that she too might join their number.
‘That, dearest Nora is how I spend each spare moment of every day. My work is for you. The Fowlers are under the impression that I work for them, to bottle a miracle. I work to discover this boy’s secret so that it may be shared with you.’
‘You say it is in his fever.’
Owen expects laughter, disbelief, or an attempt at a note of levity, but not this dispassionate, flat response.
‘It seems to be. You are the only one amongst us who never touched him while he was with fever.’
‘I remember that night well. And the sisters Fitzgerald?’
‘Yes. It would seem so.’
‘And you have no sleeping sickness. It is a result of your condition?’
He nods.
‘You know where the Fowlers make their home now. You have known all this time.’
Owen pauses. ‘I cannot …’ He changes his mind. ‘Yes.’
‘You will tell me where I may find Clovis Fowler.’ She is calm in her demand.
‘They are in a temporary situation across the river in Bermondsey.’
‘Bermondsey? Well. This news is almost as shocking as … as the other. They have fallen.’
‘They are far from destitute. They go where they are unknown, where people are occupied with survival.’
‘And where will we go, Owen? When our customers and the people of the Commercial Road begin to notice how well you look compared to your wife – and compare their own ageing faces. I daresay they already gossip. Dear God in heaven.’
‘It is the very reason I summon all my willpower to replicate this … this … thing.’ He pauses. ‘I am becoming a man of science and I will find a way to make all this right, Nora.’
She is not convinced.
The fourth week after Owen’s confession, Nora remains ragged and in bad temper. She awakes boiling with so much anger that she could bite a brick and crumble it with the power of her jaw. Before Owen awakens she is warm with coffee and buttered buns, dressed, and out the door. The note she leaves explains her absence as an opportunity not to be missed in the West End.
Ten minutes from the Surrey side of London Bridge, Nora’s fury has made her senseless. Forgoing a cab, she treads in unfamiliar territory. She feels no
