‘I have been feeling a little off-colour over the last few days.’
‘Really? What’s wrong? How fortunate that you have married a doctor. How can I be of service, Chapman?’
I had no eloquent way of broaching the delicate subject, so I plunged in and hoped my tongue would stumble across its own plan. ‘I think I may be… I have momentarily ceased to be unwell of late,’ I said, and hoped he understood.
His reaction was not what I expected. It sucked the air right out of his lungs, and his face dropped into a long grey tombstone. He kept blinking his eyelids as if he were a broken puppet.
‘Thomas?’ I prompted.
The silence went on so long, I bent forward and tried to take his hand, but he snatched it away before I could reach it, which made me jump.
‘Shit!’ he said, and slammed his palm down on the table.
He sat there with a vein throbbing in his forehead and his fists clenched and for a minute I thought he might throw something. I had never seen him like that before.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, in a voice as thin as reeds.
‘Nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Nothing. I need to think.’
He stood up and exited the room, leaving me at the table wondering how a whole day of careful planning had gone so wrong. I felt such a clumsy stranger. Whatever I did or said, it seemed I was cursed to make mistakes.
*
Thomas didn’t say it, but I could tell he blamed me, as if I had conjured up by witchcraft a working womb by which to ruin everything. Then, a few days later, when everything returned, I was in a rush to tell him how it had been a mistake, a miscalculation, the upset to my routine brought on by the disruption of my new circumstances. I thought he would be relieved, but instead he was angry all over again. Albeit not so explosively. This time, his immediate concern was what others would think.
‘But I’ve told people at the hospital I’m going to be a father. Dr Treives even congratulated me when he heard the news! How embarrassing. Well… we shall have to say there was an accident, that you fell down the stairs.’
‘I didn’t think for a moment you would tell anyone,’ I said. I had been under the impression that I could appeal to his reason, but one of the many lessons I would learn is that marriage is often a barren landscape, devoid of logic and reason. As it was in this case, it seemed.
‘This is just like you, Susannah!’ he shouted. ‘You are always so dramatic. In future, you should wait until you are sure before telling me such a thing. Why bother me with these female matters anyway? You know what everyone will think—’
I was entirely unprepared for what came next.
‘—that you are too old for me. People will laugh at us. Honestly, Susannah, so much fuss over nothing, all caused by your insatiable need for attention. I could really do without the… the chaos of your imagination.’
I was upset and started crying. He told me I was hysterical. This from the man who’d been upset I might be expecting and then upset that I wasn’t. We had been married a matter of weeks and I was already confused by his behaviour. But I would forgive him. In fact I would fawn over him, eager to do anything to make peace between us.
Dr Thomas Lancaster was six foot two and elegant, unlike so many tall men who are a mass of knees and elbows. He would glide into a room, shoulders back, as if he were about to dance with every woman in it. I was five foot nine in bare feet and had spent my entire life hunched over in an effort not to loom over other girls. He was twenty-five, five years younger than me, and I was extremely conscious of this. There had been glimpses of what you might call immaturity before our marriage, but flaws are an expensive habit and Thomas Lancaster could afford them.
I accepted the blows about my age and my imaginary dramatics, the jibes about my deficient grooming, the criticism of my education and lack of feminine instinct in all things, because when Thomas entered a space, everything was drawn to him; even the furniture turned inches. He had this way of making you feel like an exquisite thing, a rarity on earth, that it was you and not him who was mesmerising. When he left, he dragged that sense away with him. Without his attention, I was ordinary and dull again.
Everything was my fault, it had to be, and I would fix it. I’d had to learn how to be a nurse; I could learn how to be a wife. I had come to think of life as a ladder made of silk thread that floated on air, barely visible, and like a spider’s web only caught the light in places. I was pulling myself up rung by rung, and yet it would take just one badly placed foot and I would plummet all the way to the bottom, to the workhouse or worse. My world, when I met Thomas, had been without hope, and he had offered me an escape. That fact alone demanded some loyalty, did it not? I’d still be stuck at the hospital if he hadn’t picked me.
*
My mother was an unmarried girl of sixteen when she had me, and for the first few years of my childhood, until she died, she and I lived in Whitechapel in a single room on Dorset Street, within the fetid maze of dark alleyways and courts called the Nichol. This was one of several details about my past that I had declined to furnish Thomas with. As far as I was aware, I was the only person left alive who knew of my insalubrious start.
It would be fair to say that Whitechapel
