I lay watching the light quicken into the day when the unspoken would be spoken and a waterfall of consequences would drown me. I listened to the noises of the waking household. Soon I would have to take my place in it, and endure all that would have to be endured.
PAPERING-OVER
Mr Macarthur was a fastidious sort of man and loathed the smell of lanoline and sheep shit. He especially loathed the silly noise that is the only utterance a poor sheep has at its disposal. Picked his way across Grandfather’s yard with his lip more than usually curled.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr Kingdon, my sin would soon be papered over, the words spoken, the ring lumpy on my finger. Mr Macarthur stood beside me, scraping at the mud on his boot. I knocked and called, again and again. But Grandfather had never had any truck with the papering-over of sins. Smoke rose out of the chimney, but he did not appear.
A SLIVER OF HOME
Mrs Kingdon had been a mother to me, had opened her home and her heart to me, and I had made a mockery of all her care. Yet she forgave me my betrayal. That thoroughly good woman spoke to my mother, who made over her small dower to me: not enough to live on, but my own. Then she found a girl from the village who was persuaded to become my maid.
– You will have need of someone with you, Mrs Kingdon said. When the dear babe arrives.
The dear babe! I blessed Mrs Kingdon then for her kindness, and I bless her memory now.
Anne was not yet fifteen, a tall skinny freckled ginger girl, timid and ignorant, but to take a sliver of Bridgerule with me, even a girl I barely knew, would be some comfort. She seemed to imagine it would be an adventure.
Mr Kingdon had not been able to look at me since the news had been broken to him, but in emulation of the merciful God whose vicar he was, he did not turn out the sinner under his roof. He pulled some string or other among his acquaintances that had the happy effect of securing Mr Macarthur a position with the 68th Regiment of Foot, soon to be sent to Gibraltar on garrison duty. Which served two purposes: to ensure that Ensign Macarthur would return to full pay and be in a position to support—no matter how frugally—a wife and child, and to get Mr and Mrs Macarthur far away from Bridgerule.
HAPPY EVENT
I was grateful for the pretence that it was a happy event, smiled till my jaw ached. Mr Macarthur did not pretend. Was severe and unsmiling, and made a deal of fuss about what would be written on the marriage paper. He must be John Macarthur, Esquire. Mr Kingdon flinched, blinked, was not sure, but Mr Macarthur would not yield and Mr Kingdon, poor fellow, only wanted the thing done with and the two of us gone out of his life. So there it is, and will last as long as the book in which it was inscribed: John Macarthur, Esquire.
The woman of metal, Elizabeth Veale, kept her chin high and her eyes fixed on Mr Kingdon as he read the words. I was calm, admired myself from a great distance for my calmness. But as the moment approached when I must say those two small words, my mouth became so dry that my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth, my throat closed, my lips grew numb.
No, I would not be mortified! Would not have people say, oh, she could not get the words out! So I sucked at my cheeks, forced my tongue around that glued-together mouth, dropped my chin, tried to think of a lemon, while Mr Kingdon steadily read through the vows.
I had rehearsed how I would say it. I do! Loud and sure, with not a scintilla of doubt. The start of a lifetime’s fiction: this is what I wanted. Thinking of a lemon came to my rescue, but it was a croak, squeezed thin, that sealed my destiny.
Mr Macarthur’s hands shook so much he had the greatest difficulty getting the ring on my finger. I could hear the breath coming hard through his nose, saw those trembling hands, and my own tremulousness left me. We were in this together, this stranger and I, as we had said, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, and his weakness gave me strength. He was that foreign creature, a man, who spoke the foreign language of power and assurance, but we came from the same country, where a person had to appear to be someone other than who they were. The question that would shape our marriage was: would we be able to speak to each other in that secret language we shared? Would he trust me, would I trust him, enough to show each other willingly what I could see, without him wishing me to see it, in the trembling of his hands?
That night, in the cold room at the barracks in Holsworthy, I tried, the lamp blown out and two strangers in the bed, a narrow enough one, but still there was a space between us. A horse whinnied from the stables, someone shouted, a word repeated, it sounded like Elephant! Elephant! Elephant! But who in the world would be out in the yard of Holsworthy Barracks at night shouting Elephant?
Across the space, Mr Macarthur lay still as a stone. He could not have died, not in the few minutes since he had snuffed the candle, rustled out of his clothes, and slid in on the other side of the bed. Could not be dead, but was as still as if dead.
– I have never understood before, when they say my heart was in my mouth, I said.
I felt I must be shouting, the words seemed so loud in that cube of darkness, but I could only go on.
– Today I saw what they meant—so much was my heart in my mouth that there was no room for the spit!
I remembered how his breath had come so hard, getting the ring on, and told myself, Begin as you mean to go on, or at least as you hope to. I fumbled through the bedclothes and found his hand, pressed the fingers.
– And you, I said with my best effort at a light tone, was your heart in your mouth too, Mr Macarthur?
He did not speak, did not press my hand in return, and I felt the cold shaft of a mistake that would now have to be retreated from. But at last there was a movement in the bed, as if he were turning towards me.
– Yes, he said. I have never.
He stopped, coughed to clear something blocking the words, laughed in a choked way.
– You see, I cannot get the words out to say what strange waters I feel myself in.
I would have felt warmer if he had got an ourselves into that sentence, but like me he had spent his life up to this day being myself. The idea that we, each of us separately, were now a thing called ourselves was, I supposed, equally new and alarming for both of us. Was I ready to be ourselves? I was happy enough to take his hand, to make a joke about spit, but how much, truly, did I wish or intend to be ourselves with this stranger?
We were a married couple, had got to that state because of doing what only married couples were permitted. Having done it when not permitted, it would be perverse not to repeat it now. But this time he offered no sighs and sweet words. And for me there was no glorious swelling of power. There was only the act itself, workmanlike, short and sharp.
Turned away afterwards from the body next to me, I wept. Bitter silent tears for the too-small pocketful of coins that I had squandered. For the road behind us that I’d travelled in fear and sadness, leaving everything I knew, everyone who knew me. Left in the deepest shame, made all the worse by false smiles, false joy, the falseness of the good wishes, the only sincerity the word on everyone’s lips: goodbye, goodbye, meaning and may we never see you again.
DRY TOAST
We had got away from Bridgerule in the nick of time, for within a few weeks of the wedding anyone could see that I was with child.
And miserably so. I had heard women speak of morning sickness, had seen Mrs Kingdon go through a time of waxy sallowness when she was carrying the Elizabeth who was my god-daughter. There were many mornings when, leaning over the basin, cold with nausea, I wept with regret and remorse. At those times I believed in hell as I’d never believed in heaven. But I struggled through many afternoons as well, and at night I lay unable to sleep, hungry yet sickened by food. Did this mean the child was sick too, dying as I felt I must be? That would be a nasty trick for life to inflict on me, after all that rosemary choked down.