The four or five months I had to get through before the child would be born seemed an eternity stretching in front of me. The birth itself I could not begin to imagine. Mrs Kingdon had never got as far as explaining anything of what to expect in childbed. I suppose she felt that when the time came would be soon enough, and we had not asked, being in no hurry to find out. Of course we knew it would hurt, but how exactly? Like a broken leg? We knew women died, but how precisely? Quickly, or by inches? And by what miracle could an entire baby squeeze out from that small place?
Anne was the eldest of eleven, she told me, which was good to hear as it meant she must know what I did not: how to care for a baby. Her father was a labourer who had been employed from time to time by my father. She could not read, nor write beyond an uncertain version of her own name, and was an awkward clumsy girl, and frankly I dismissed her as a person of not much account.
I hoped she was discreet. She had her own place in the servants’ quarters, but still there was not much she did not know about the way Mr and Mrs Macarthur got on with each other. Or how they had come to be Mr and Mrs Macarthur. All Bridgerule knew that, I was sure. So I held my head up and was perhaps cooler with Anne than necessary, perhaps playing the lady more than came naturally.
Until the day she appeared with her hair singed on one side and a glossy red ear.
– Why Anne, I said, whatever have you done?
– There was a moth flew in my ear, madam, she said. Driving me dilly with moving around in there, so I held a candle up, thinking, you know, it would be drawn to the light?
She looked at me sideways, biting her lip, afraid I would scold I suppose, but at the picture of this solemn girl holding a candle up to her ear I laughed for the first time in many weeks.
– Oh you clever silly girl, I said.
Gave her some salve to put on the ear and blessed Mrs Kingdon, who had chosen so well as to find a girl whose unpromising exterior concealed a certain eccentric practicality.
I was not far from Bridgerule and Bridie, but as the new Mr and Mrs Macarthur had spun away from the church in the borrowed gig, I knew that a shutter was coming down between me and that world. Bridie and I exchanged notes now and then. On both sides, though, was the reserve that came from knowing they might be read by everyone in the vicarage parlour. Oh, how much I missed our whispered conversations in the high bed we had shared! On paper our friendship was reduced to description of life at a barracks on my side, and mild news of our mutual acquaintances on hers.
There was the wife of a Captain Spencer whose quarters at the Holsworthy Barracks were large enough for two or three ladies to take tea together, and these few women became my society. Mrs Spencer was a pretty little woman, but bony and trembling like a whippet, as if her husband—so corpulent that he had to walk back on his heels to accommodate his belly—had sucked the flesh out of her. Her friend Mrs Borthwick, wife to Captain Borthwick, was an assured, well-put-together older woman, with a habit of tweaking her mouth up at the corners, a conscious appearance of cheer that overlaid I knew not what real feelings.
They were tea-party acquaintances, not true friends. A barracks was not a village. Nothing went deep, nothing had a past or a future. Still, they were good to me, ignorant girl that I was. Dry toast for the morning sickness, they said. Dry toast, and tea with plenty of sugar. I nibbled the toast, drank the tea. The sickness did not abate, not by any fraction, but I was comforted that there were people in the world who cared enough to try to help me.
SOMETHING SOFT
Which Mr Macarthur did not. I overheard him boasting to others about his clever wife, who wrote such a fine letter, and had read Sir Thomas Browne and Livy—in translation, naturally. But he never spoke warmly to me and never gave anything of himself. There was no more of the hand on the heart, no more of the mimicry that he had courted me with. All that was gone. It had been useful, but was not useful any longer.
Oh, he was courteous, never shouted and certainly never struck me. In that I knew I should count my blessings. But he was a husband of mechanical courtesies. He listened when I addressed him, but without interest, as if I were some stranger he did not need to get to know. Spoke in reply, but carelessly, with indifference. He did not dislike me or blame me for the situation we were in. Only, he was blind to me as a person.
Would I have preferred the raised voice, the raised hand? Of course not. But I had not known that a person could be so lonely, sharing a few square yards of space with another soul.
I longed for something soft from him, even something harsh if that was the only way for us to draw close to each other. From the beginning I had promised myself never to plead with him. I would not make myself pitiable. Poor pale, skinny, unhappy woman, indeed I was pitiable. But what can be gained by begging if what you need is not given freely?
Still, one morning the words came out of my mouth.
– Mr Macarthur, I said, can you never give me any soft word?
I heard the anger, and the note of pleading that I despised.
He turned from the fireplace, startled, and looked straight at me, and I thought, I should have spoken my feelings earlier. He can hear me, he will respond.
– My beloved wife, he said. An affection like mine must have displayed itself in so many unequivocal substantive acts that professions of it would be absurd!
He was smiling into the air, admiring what he was constructing.
– That I am grateful and delighted with your conduct it is needless for me to say, he said, rattling it off as if he had rehearsed. The consciousness you must feel of how impossible it is that such exemplary goodness can have failed to produce that effect, must convince you I am so, more certainly than any assurance that can be given.
My spirit curdled at these elaborations, that gave his wife what she had asked for, while at the same time withholding it. I ask for bread and you give me a stone. I knew now what that meant. It was not just that you could not eat what you had been given. It was that the thing you were given resembled what you needed, could be thought to stand in for it, and that was crueller in its teasing than a plain refusal.
I was too proud to ask, ever again, for a soft word from him.
ANIMAL SPIRITS
Mr Macarthur was an importunate husband with an excess of animal spirits that meant every night the tickle of him fingering me, and then all that followed. And in the morning too, because Mr Macarthur liked a waking embrace. And, for that matter, an embrace in the middle of the day if circumstances allowed.
For me the act was no more pleasant than it might have been for those ewes in the field. It was not the act itself. From the nights Bridie and I had shared, I knew what a gasping delight that could be. What sapped it of any pleasure with Mr Macarthur was not to do with the way our various bodily parts came together. The block to delight was the feeling that I, Elizabeth Veale as I still thought of myself, was no more significant to my husband than the choice of ewe was to the ram. It was nothing to do with Elizabeth Veale that set the bed creaking. It was some hunger in him, that had to be sated again and again. I was nothing more than the means for that fleeting satisfaction.
But those affections were his conjugal right, and Mr Macarthur never failed to exercise any right he was entitled to. As a wife, with nowhere to go beyond wifedom, I was no more than a tenant in my body. If the landlord came to the door, I was obliged to let him in.