Confession (13 page)

‘I do not understand.’

‘No,’ she replied pursing her lips. ‘I doubt that you do. You and your sisters never think of yourselves as fortunate. But you are. You are strong-willed each of you, some might even say stubborn. I never had very much character. Do not mistake what I am saying, I can be as mulish as the next person but – ’ here she started picking at the edge of the counterpane, loosening threads. ‘But, well sometimes I wonder what life might have brought if your mother had not died. Certain things are expected of us. You are shocked I suppose? What I am saying is selfish. But the hopes of my youth did not encompass all this, being here, bringing the four of you up…’

‘You have done much good here – ’

‘But what good has it done me?’

I hesitated. Hearing Aunt speak in this fashion was like finding an icefield turning to water. On the surface she still looked herself, but what she said did not sound like her. All those years she had done her duty, reared us, run our father’s house, had she secretly been imagining a different life altogether? Did she view her situation as something diluted by necessity, dissolved to a thin residue of drudgery and decay?

Her black silk dress and white lace cap hung in the wardrobe.

‘Everything needs dusting,’ Emily’s voice came from behind. I had not heard her enter the room.

‘It was only cleaned last week – ’

‘I shall do it again tomorrow. The hearth needs sweeping – ’

‘That is Martha’s job surely?’ I said for that was why we had employed the child, but Emily said it helped stop her from dwelling upon Aunt’s death, keeping herself busy with the house.

‘Is father in his study?’

‘He has gone over to Keighly this morning,’ she said glancing through the darkened window.

‘And afterwards he is to go to Bradford – ’

‘The house is so different now.’ I picked up one of the church pamphlets that lay on the shelf and started flicking through its well-thumbed pages. ‘You and Anne were closer to her than I was, even so – ’ my voice trailed off. The truth of death is hard to articulate. The fact you will never see that person again yet still you see them everywhere. The fact that you will never hear their voice call out your name yet they constantly whisper things in your ear. Their dreams pursue you; their disappointments haunt you –

From downstairs the front doorbell rang.

Emily looked at me, ‘I am not going down,’ she said quietly.

I crept onto the dimly lit landing and peered over the banister. Tabby was walking across the hallway to open the door.

‘The Reverend is out,’ I heard her say.

A male voice replied. ‘But I have an appointment. May I wait?’

Moments later Tabby came upstairs.

‘It is the Reverend Bradley. Says he wants to speak with you.’

‘Not with me,’ Emily said.

‘Well, I shan’t talk to him by myself. You will have to come downstairs.’

‘Anne is here, is she not?’

Tabby shook her head and mumbled something inaudible under her breath. ‘He knows you are both at home,’ she said turning her stout little body around to go back down to the kitchen.

The Reverend Bradley was not a tall or striking man. He was the type of individual one could easily lose in a crowd. With thin, sandy-coloured hair and a pale, milky complexion it also seemed he might, at any moment, fade into the background yet his voice was loud and quite made up for any lack of physical presence.

‘It is good to see both of you back in England,’ he boomed. ‘We cannot have all our young ladies living abroad, it would not do, not at all, not at all.’

‘We have hardly been away that long,’ I said.

‘Nonetheless your father has missed you. How did you find Brussels? To your liking, I expect? Or perhaps not? Most likely the latter. Of course I have been abroad myself,’ said he launching himself into a long list of countries through which he had travelled. Indeed so impressive was this list, or so he opined, that he took the greatest of pains to enunciate each word so that his audience could fully appreciate the breadth of his knowledge, ‘It-aaaly,’ he boomed, ‘Germany, Switz-er-land, Frrr-aance, Spain, Egypt, the Greek islands, Turkey– ’

I glanced over at Emily but just as she had done when in the presence of the Reverend and Mrs Jenkins she sat with her back to us, her face turned to the wall.

‘In actual fact I enjoyed Brussels enormously,’ I said. ‘London too, what little I saw of it. The great dome of St Paul’s – ’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ interrupted our guest. ‘There are great sights to be seen in our fair capital. Brussels too I am sure, although I believe you were studying in a Catholic establishment,
were you not?’ Here the Reverend Bradley emphasized the word Catholic as though his tongue had been dipped in poison.

His gaze quite froze me.

I stuttered.

I said, ‘The Pensionat Heger was, as you say a Catholic establishment, but we were not forced to participate in any of the school’s religious activities. Emily and I attended the Protestant church – ’

‘Their practices were amusing to you no doubt?’

‘Amusing?’ I said. ‘You make it sound as if Catholics were a different race from us, Sir. I can assure you quite the opposite is true, they are quite the same as ourselves. They eat and drink and enjoy literature and music. They laugh and cry, celebrate the birth of their children, mourn the passing of their loved ones – ’

‘Quite so, quite so but – ’

‘Have you ever been in Brussels, Sir?’

‘Not in that particular city, no, however I am well acquainted with Catholic practices having travelled extensively throughout Europe. For instance – ’

Here the Revd Bradley began a long monologue illustrating his unparalleled and intimate knowledge of the True Faith. Knowledge that brooked the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the
Sacrosanctum Concilium
, however I hardly listened for I was in no mood to hear of these or any other Catholic complexities. Rather I wanted him to know about the apple trees in the Pensionnat Heger’s garden and how their blossom caught in my hair, of the long, cool corridors that ran through the interior of the school whose smell was a mixture of lavender and beeswax, of the bells of Ste Gudule ringing out across the city while skylarks scattered
across the rooftops in their hundreds of thousands like tiny stone arrowheads – in short I wanted to tell him about what mattered, I wanted to tell him the truth.

II

‘You seem anxious,’ father said after we had breakfasted the following morning, but his voice was not one of concern so much as irritation. He tapped his hand quietly on the mantelpiece in time to the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I heard you pacing your room last night.’

‘I could not sleep.’

‘Perhaps if you were more active during the daytime? I have some copying that needs doing - ’

‘I thought you were out today, Father?’ Emily interjected. She was trying to deflect his attention away from me – for yesterday, after the Revd Bradley had finally left us, father had made me read to him for three hours without rest while Emily and Anne sat in the next room writing. Not that the length of time I spent reading was in itself unappealing. It was the fact that none of the words made the slightest impression upon me.

‘Carry on,’ he had said if I paused even for a moment until finally I had to tell him I was tired.

‘You are too young to be tired. Still if you cannot continue – ’

‘It is my eyes, father – ’

‘Your eyes? It is
my
eyes that are weak – ’

‘Mine too – ’ I said although I might well have been a ghost for all the attention he paid me.

Now Emily helped Anne and Martha clear back the plates from the table while I gathered up
a pile of mending from the basket and when Emily and Anne had returned from the kitchen we all three settled down at the table to sew.

Emily, who sat with her back to the window, was illumined by a halo of pale grey light. I watched as she threaded a needle with black thread and afterwards smiled at Anne whose face lay in shadow. In the hallway the clock ticked heavily. I had forgotten how the sound dominated the house, how the fall of its cold metal workings could be heard in almost every room measuring time, moving us around as we rose in the mornings, made our beds, cleaned, cooked, read, ate. There wasn’t one moment of any given day that this flamed mahogany timepiece did not regulate.

‘Can you pass me the scissors?’ Anne asked tying a knot in the wool she was using.

‘When will you return to Thorp Green?’ I asked. Anne cut the yarn and said the Robinsons were expecting her back in two weeks.

‘They are good children,’ she added when Emily pulled a face. ‘It could be a worse situation.’

‘Have you thought any more about our school?’ Emily asked turning to me. I replied that I had not, despite Father telling us that Aunt had left each of her nieces some three-hundred pounds in her will which would be more than sufficient to set up a small teaching establishment.

‘Such an undertaking,’ I said, ‘I do not believe that we are ready yet – ’

Anne, sweet-natured child that she was, agreed, whilst Emily did not seem enthused either way.

I picked up a chemise from the basket. ‘We would need to find pupils and a suitable property – ’ I said none too inspired myself and so changing the subject asked if Anne might return to
us for the Christmas holidays but she did not seem to think this possible and so in the face of our general despondency Emily commanded that we all go through to father’s study where she sat down at the piano and for a short while played us some tunes.

It was later that day that Anne decided to walk the three miles to the lending library at Keighly. To my surprise Emily said she would prefer to stay at home. I retired upstairs to lie on my bed but a short while later heard my sister’s footsteps on the staircase after which the door swung open and Emily entered.

‘Put your boots on,’ she commanded. ‘We are going out for a walk.’

Downstairs Keeper & Flossie clattered along the passageway, their thick tails beating against the walls.

‘You should have gone out with Anne – ’ I protested because I did not want to get up, but Emily was insistent and moments later we were both trudging down Main Street towards the dank valley bottom, past Ebor and Bridgehouse Mills. At the junction we stopped by Hall Green Chapel then turned back on ourselves up the hill again past the Black Bull and White Lion.

In exasperation I said, ‘What are you doing?’ although I already knew. Emily was marking the boundaries, showing me where I belonged, what mattered most to the two of us, the stone trap of the cobblestones, the brick totems of our childhood. She scraped some mud from her skirt then continued past St Michael’s, past the Parsonage and out onto Oxenhope Moor. Rain came down in sheets. Trees and hedgerows dripped while the ground was cold as a side of raw beef.

‘Try and keep up,’ she shouted striding on ahead, but I could not walk anywhere near as fast
as my sister. My heart was not in it. Emily had exchanged books for boots; this was her literature, this land, these hills.

‘What are you thinking?” she shouted back by way of conversation but I did not answer and Emily did not to press me. We walked on in silence, occasionally pausing to pick a stone from our boots or rip brambles from our skirts as we brushed past them along the broken pathways and tracks. All the fruit had already been picked by the birds or collected by nimble fingers eager to put them into pies along with that season’s apples. The leaves on the bushes had been struck black with blight back in October according to Tabby who spoke as if the Devil had descended and done the work himself. ‘October blight, Ice at Night’ she’d mutter to anyone who cared to listen and that year everything was blasted – the grass, the gorse, the trees – if there was not a hoar frost in the mornings then hailstones big as men’s fists swept over the hills or rain slashed the moors. Yet for my sister this was nearer Heaven than Hell.

‘Can you hear it?’ she said.

‘Hear what?’

‘The music!’ she shouted stopping momentarily to tilt her head skywards.

I smiled. I told her I was glad she was content then we continued our climb upwards with the dogs forging ahead of us through the bracken. Up here I was struck how the wind smelt of sleet. It slapped against our faces, wet and raw. ‘Mist doth descend when it rains without end.’ That was another of Tabby’s sayings and when we reached the summit of the hill and stopped to look back down the valley sure enough a mist had gathered below us like a huge white sea under whose waves stood our house and the church, Father and Anne and the rest of the townspeople.

‘You’d never know there was a town down there at all!’ cried Emily visibly enchanted by the
idea. I made no reply and presently Emily put her hand out to touch my cheek.

‘You are not happy, are you?’ she said. ‘Ever since we have come home you have seemed so very – ’

‘I am not
un
happy – ’

‘But you are so quiet. It is not like you – ’

‘Like me – ’ I echoed for suddenly I felt bewildered as if I were wandering through some strange hinterland, lost in the truth of the lie I was living.

*

‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive,’ my father’s voice boomed out from the pulpit above us, solemn and dignified in this the first Sunday service he had taken since Aunt’s death.

Sitting in my usual corner seat at the far end of the family pew I drank in his words and also my surroundings, slaking a thirst I had not realized quite so viscious. Gone were the golden fixtures and fittings of the Chapelle Royale, gone the brocade and red velvet hassocks, the elaborate paintings, the glitter & glister of cut crystal and glass. Here in our small local church Simplicity ruled alongside her twin sister, Restraint. Whitewashed walls and dark wooden pews never looked more exquisite. Green baize seats and stone flag floors never more appropriate. Our small altar unlike the one back in Brussels did not dominate over our pulpit, quite the contrary for when I was a child father’s lecturn seemed as tall as the Tower of Babel, father himself as mighty as Giant Despond.