Awakening (20 page)

The double dream taints the day. Beatrice checks herself for blood. No blood. She calculates. How mortifying if she should bleed on the wedding night. This appears more than likely. Christian is fastidiously clean; one would not care to bring female mess and smells into his bed.

Throughout his young manhood, he kept himself pure for her. What if she lets him down?

An explosion of laughter, out of nowhere. And the Pentecosts are romping all round the house. Back to their old selves, up and down the stairs, hide-and-seek, blind man's buff. The last soft sand sifts through the hourglass with the appearance of a whirlpool. Surely time is speeding up? Or going back? Charlie Kyffin, Joss, Rose and Lily Peck, Mr Anwyl, Beatrice and Anna are all ten years old again. Piggy in the middle, Mr Anwyl leaps up to catch a flying cushion that jangles the chandelier.

Beatrice crashes upstairs and hides in her bedroom. In burst the others: ‘Found you!' They look round in wonderment at acres of crinoline, violet, cream, yellow and scarlet, frills and lace and ribbons not yet attached to any garment. ‘Oh that is so very Parisian, Miss Pentecost!' Rose and Lily marvel over the wedding dress with its flattened front and the drama of its billowing back portions.
Mais
it's so
belle!
The Peck girls address one another in pidgin French, the sacred language of fashion. Lifting the wedding gown by its shoulders, they hold it between them before the long mirror, a headless third party at whose reflection they gaze with critical reverence.

‘You're going to look a picture, Miss Pentecost,' says Rose. ‘I wish I were getting married.'

‘You will, I'm sure.'

‘But I want to marry
now
. Not in years and years.'

‘But then it would be all over, wouldn't it, Rose,' says Lily. ‘You'd have nothing left to look forward to.'

‘That's true.'

‘Well, there is the marriage itself,' Joss points out. ‘The new life and all that.' A life Joss has never seen fit to embark on.

‘Well, I suppose so. But that's the porridge, not the honey
.
'

The Peck girls study Beatrice with compassion. ‘Old,' their looks say. ‘Almost past it. You have a sprinkle of grey hairs, showing at the back where you couldn't reach to tweezer them out. We take note of it whenever you turn. Your skin is nothing like peaches and cream. It sags. But never mind.' Beatrice passes her hand over her hair.
Turning away, she glances out at the autumn garden. Wasps have devoured the sugars in the windfall pears, leaving behind brown shrivelled corpses and a smell between ferment and decay.

When the doorbell rings, there's much smoothing of garments.

‘Mr Ivor and Mr Thimbleby, Miss Pentecost,' calls Amy from halfway up the stairs. ‘Where'll I put them?'

Why must the girl stand yelling? Why can't she introduce visitors decently? Beatrice hopes they haven't heard the infantile games going on in Sarum House. She descends sedately and, opening the parlour door, sees Mr Thimbleby advancing with his hand held out – and her sister retreating, face white as flour. What's the matter
with her now?

Anna's hand goes up to her throat; she cringes. Half her face is lit by a strip of sunlight that makes her look one-eyed: an eye widened in terror. Is Anna about to be ill again? More hysterics? She is, isn't she? Can't you control yourself for five minutes? There's too much to do, too much to think about: and shouldn't Beatrice be the centre of attention in this prelude to her wedding?

Anna takes a further step backwards. She's now standing against the shadowy crimson of the curtains.

‘Joss,' she hisses to her brother. ‘
Don't let them.
'

‘Don't let them what, dear?'

Beatrice ignores Anna's little drama; greets the visitors. Thimbleby, eminent Congregationalist that he is, has turned his family home into a retreat for genteel female lunatics, run on modern, humanitarian lines: there are no barred windows, locked doors or physical restraints, just sustaining food, warm clothes, an intimate family home. So benign is the regime that Thimbleby can allow the best-behaved to mingle with his young family.

‘Have I alarmed your dear sister?' he whispers.

‘She's not quite herself today.'

Mr Thimbleby apologises for intruding at such an important time. Two inmates absconded in the night. May he and Mr Ivor look round for them in Miss Pentecost's grounds?

It has happened before, several times, and on one occasion a poor creature broke into the scullery of Sarum House and raided the pantry, going off with cherry tart and cheese. The Pentecost sisters sorrowed for her and hoped that the good food comforted the lost soul. Mr Thimbleby's inmates are rarely violent. They inflict wounds on themselves rather than on others, burning or cutting their own arms or faces. As Anna did when Lore died. They cannot be allowed access to matches or knives. Two by two, the least deranged are led through Chauntsey to Morning Service on the Sabbath. Beatrice, having shown the two men into the garden, returns to stand at the window; her sister has sunk down on a chair.

‘Poor creatures,' Beatrice says. ‘The temperature was below freezing in the night. What is it, Anna? I'm sure they're harmless. Oh look, he's found them.'

‘It's true, then … it wasn't a … pretext.' Anna heaves a trembling sigh.

‘Whatever do you mean?'

‘I thought you might have – invited them.'

‘Whyever would I do that?'

The women have fashioned a nest for themselves in a pile of straw and sacks, packing a quantity of it round them for warmth. They allow themselves to be shepherded down the lawn by Mr Ivor and Mr Thimbleby. Neither makes the least fuss. Perhaps it's a relief to have been found. Perhaps they only wished to taste the air of freedom. In the chill of the night they must have huddled to one another, fearful of the vast sky and the constellations. They hold hands, a woman in middle age and one somewhat younger, like mother and daughter, dressed in the same Quakerish grey; there's nothing to distinguish them from normal folk.

Afterwards Beatrice watches her sister examine the lunatics' nest; observing the shape left by the two bodies clasped in one another's arms. Anna seems calm. Can she have imagined that Mr Thimbleby had come for
her?

Five days remain and Mr Ritter is expected early tomorrow. The final preparations are hectic. The wedding breakfast has been ordered: salmon and perch, beef and pork, poultry, mince pies and cake, jellies. The trousseau is complete and can be admired by visitors. Beatrice rests her aching feet and, with the kind of pleasure the tongue takes in probing a rotten tooth that's temporarily quiescent, insists on sketching Anna with Mr Anwyl. She positions Anna on a dining chair, with Will just behind her, as if for a photograph. Beatrice laughs with affected gaiety; the models remain glum, like a morose married pair after a tiff, the most recent of many, to which they'll return after the session.

Will catches Beatrice on the stairs. She pulls away. He follows her into her room without permission. He snares her wrist. She wants him to. She wrenches away. There'll be a scorch mark where Will has ringed her wrist. She rubs it. Look what you've done. It's a trophy.

‘Please think again, Beatrice,' he says. ‘It can all be called off. Nothing is lost.'

‘I can't, Gwilym, I can't. And please don't …'

Round and round they wrangle. Someone passes by the door and pauses. Beatrice thinks of Papa. His spirit can rest now that she's settled for the suitor he appointed. Chaos has reigned since his death but in a few days order will be restored. Somehow this propels her towards Will, as if someone had shoved her in the small of the back.

Will's goodbye kisses taste of his tears and remain on her face, an invisible coating. Salt and saliva. She cannot bring herself to wash them off but cries them away into her pillow.

Four days before his wedding, the bridegroom, whose tour has resulted in scores of conversions, as if these were the days of the Wesleys and George Whitefield, hands Amy his elegant cloak and hat and says that, heretical as it may be to say so, he has no need to die to be in heaven. Then he collapses into a chair, exhausted, as well he might be. A writer in the
Baptist Times
, comparing Christian's preaching style with that of his great mentor, Henry Ward Beecher, has described Pastor Ritter in action – sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms, discharging rockets of poetry, his cloak flying around like that of a Byronic hero.

Later the household sleeps. The fire ebbs in the grate but the room remains baskingly warm. As Beatrice rests her side against Christian, it's so quiet that she hears the boards creak as the house settles. Fatigued, she half-drowses.

‘Are you sure, now, dearest? Quite certain? Has the Father sanctified our path? It would be no dishonour to change your mind even at this last moment. The door is open.' He folds his arms more strongly round her. ‘It is right to tell you that I have spoken to Mr Anwyl.'

Beatrice struggles to rise. ‘Why? What have you said, Christian?'

‘Now don't be alarmed,
Liebling.
I have always known that you have a special place in your heart for Mr Anwyl. And he for you. But Mr Anwyl himself explained that this was only a light-hearted friendship on both sides. His heart is given elsewhere.'

Crucifying thought. Beatrice cannot master herself. Fast breathing; racing heart. It was none of Christian's business to go checking up on her. No hope remains in the world, none, after her absurd tit-for-tat trifling with Will's affections. A few small motions of her tongue would release Beatrice from this marriage to a man respected but not, or not yet, adored – feared rather, with a childhood shrinking. The man who places you on his knee: fear him.
Beattie hates
;
Beattie loathes.

‘Mr Anwyl is bound in honour to my sister, Christian. And she to him. I hope and trust he'll do the right thing. He is a fallible man.'

‘We are all that.'

‘Yes, but – please, Christian – Mr Anwyl is not – chosen by Providence for me. I've always sensed this and now I know it – so may we close the subject?'

But can such a blemished creature really be a suitable husband for
Anna
? Beatrice has passed him on like the hand-me-downs of childhood, with their ingrained stains. Should one encourage Anna to bind herself for life to Will's invincible shallowness? – Anna, whose physical and mental frailty makes childbirth a threat to her balance, perhaps to her life. Beatrice, summoning courage, has questioned Dr Quarles about this. But the physician rules emphatically otherwise. He has spoken to a Salisbury colleague specialising in those delicate complaints peculiar to females. The two physicians will call and – he promises – tactfully reassure the Pentecost sisters.

*

Accordingly, three days before the marriage, Drs Quarles and Palfrey appear.

‘Celibacy,' remarks Dr Palfrey, no country physician but a gentleman of the world in a magenta silk waistcoat, ‘is, to be blunt, an unnatural condition. I speak as a medical man, Miss Pentecost and Miss Anna, a man of science.' He takes a sip of coffee; replaces the cup on the saucer with finicking care and allows his broaching of this delicate theme to sink in. Everything about Dr Palfrey from fob watch to shoe-leather looks suave and costly. ‘I shall go so far as to say that celibacy is inherently damaging. Irrespective of gender. What's bad for the gander is bad for the goose.'

Anna observes Dr Palfrey's ginger whiskers and considers what it might be like to have such a moustache, or any moustache at all. To sprout hair under your nose and prune and preen it before a mirror in the morning; to raise your hand in idle moments to twiddle its extremities.

‘And this is so, dear ladies, if one may put it thus, both biologically and theologically. Better, as the Apostle says, to marry than to burn.'

I am not burning, thinks Anna. Except with wrath. You unctuous old goat. Go away.

‘Now the organs of Woman,' Dr Palfrey continues, as if to the lowest form in the school, ‘are liable to distension by blood. Causing cramps, black moods, uncontrollable urges, so much so that the age of female puberty is known as the age of
miniature insanity
. Blockages are readily treated within marriage by the
beneficent
action of a
husband'
s attentions. Yet more curative will be the advent of what we might call
a glorious little creature
. But in the meantime, it would be as well, dear Miss Pentecost and Miss Anna, that you drink one or two glasses of good claret a day. Unless of course you practise Temperance?'

‘Oh no,' says Beatrice. ‘Well, we are temperate, of course. In its true sense. But we have not espoused the Temperance Movement. We allow ourselves medicinal alcohol. From time to time. What I really wanted to know, Dr Palfrey, is whether bearing children would be dangerous, should one be in less than perfect health?'

Anna wishes she could swallow the good claret now, this instant.
You
didn't by any chance invite these quacks, Beatrice, did you, without telling me? She knows that look on her sister's face: eyes wide and innocent, lips tensely pursed. Anna has slept little since the shock of Mr Thimbleby's arrival. The prophecy of Patience Elias has been ringing in her ears: ‘Mr Thimbleby is coming for you.' Why didn't she run away with Miriam and Baines while she had the chance? That day, sick with terror, she backed into the corner and beckoned Joss to her, Joss who would
never
so betray Anna. Gentle Joss. And he'll be here when the Ritters have left on their honeymoon. But would he fight off Ivor and Thimbleby if they came for her? She doesn't think so. And he seems so preoccupied these days: it's always Munby this and Munby that. And jaunts to London ‘on business'. Joss seems to exist in a bubble of private euphoria. In a crisis Joss would shake his head; he'd feebly remonstrate and passively surrender, in awe of Beatrice's relentless willpower. He'd retreat to the kitchen and, taking the cat on his knee, would turn his plump palms to and from the range.