‘Are you saved, brother?’
They would shout back, ‘God would have saved me long ago if he could be arsed.’ Or, ‘If I was saved, I wouldn’t be here, would I, silly cow.’
My grandfather had his immovable beliefs, and many disagreed with him. Most, even among the poor themselves, considered those beneath them to be wretched and thought that charity bred the wrong behaviour. Nonetheless, he was well loved and influential, whether he was breaking up fights, settling scores between rival shopkeepers, convincing an errant husband to return to his wife or helping a deserted woman avoid the workhouse and thereby keep her children.
‘You won’t marry an idiot man such as that, will you, Susannah? You wouldn’t break my heart, I hope? You’ll marry a scholar, a thinker, an educated man, will you not?’
I laughed. The idea of marrying seemed ridiculous and far away. From what I had seen, it didn’t look much fun.
I was eighteen and he was sixty-four when he cut his foot on broken glass. He was dead two weeks later from blood poisoning. How was it possible? I thought Almighty God a wicked fool for taking him. Taking him but leaving so many terrible men behind. Men that would set the world on fire from their deathbeds without a second thought. I was told by the vicar that the Lord took the best ones first; I think he meant to give me comfort. If God had asked me, I would have swapped my grandmother for him in a heartbeat. That might be wicked, but it was true.
I spent the next nine years alone with my grandmother. Her spirit faded faster than her body. She would become confused, forget things, and I would find her wandering around the house, lost and aimless. In her attempt to deny this, she tried to make our world so impossibly small that even we couldn’t fit inside it. If I was on an errand outside the house, she would sit in my grandfather’s chair and count until I came home. If I took too long, she would accuse me of running with boys from the village, and often she would call me Christabel. She became convinced the villagers were conspiring against her, even started an argument with another woman over a plant pot she accused her of stealing. I had walked past that plant pot in the poor woman’s garden for as many years as I could remember. People were sympathetic but kept their distance. It’s a cruel curse to have, even crueller to watch.
When I took too long to come back after one errand, she struck me about the face with the back of her hand and cut my lip, making it bleed. In the next breath she asked what I had done to make her strike me. A few days before the end, I found her foraging in the garden in the dead of night in her nightgown, the back door wide open and her skin like ice. As I walked her inside, she asked, ‘Whatever happened to that little bird you both found, Susannah?’
‘He flew away, Nanny, he flew away.’
‘Aw, I’m glad. That’s good, isn’t it?’
She died in the January of 1885 when I was twenty-seven. To say I was relieved would be an understatement.
7
Things improved between Thomas and me for a while, towards the end of July. Then, as we entered the first week of August, the absences started again, for at least three nights running. I no longer strained to stay awake to hear what time he did come in, so it was a surprise when he emerged for breakfast one morning.
I was pretending to read the newspaper, trying to embody righteous indignation, but I kept glancing up at him, waiting for him to look back at me, and it was then that I saw the scratches on his neck: two red lines, fresh, as if from a woman’s sharp nails. My stomach lurched. He sat there pushing his breakfast around as they taunted me. I blinked several times and waited for them to disappear, but they insisted on being real. Two months! We had been married for two bloody months!
Whenever I asked where he disappeared to of an evening, he replied that he was working, he was seeing private patients, he was dining with his peers, making important acquaintances… The list of seemingly plausible and reasonable excuses was without end. My first thought was to fly across the table and give him some scratches of my own. I didn’t. I blamed myself: I should be more grateful. I was nowhere near the most attractive nurse at the hospital, and yet he had picked me. So I sat there like a resentful idiot with my temperature veering up and down, just like my self-doubt. I’m surprised I didn’t whistle. Two months!
‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘how did you come by those scratches on your neck?’
He froze. It was as if every muscle in his body went rigid. He stopped chasing his devilled eggs around his plate and glared at me. I almost apologised. Thomas may have been blessed with long black lashes, but when he was angry his pale blue eyes turned cold as a fish’s and held you in a dead man’s stare.
‘What scratches?’ he said, then took a bite of toast and turned back to his breakfast. The sound of metal scraping against china filled the room again.
I couldn’t believe it. Here we were dancing about in a pantomime of manners and he sat there with another woman’s branding on him, expressing no shame or apology. I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was still finding the required
