The Painted Bridge (32 page)

Anna looked up to see if anyone else was aware of it. If anyone else knew that separate lives, separate worlds, could occur side by side, could mingle in every moment like night and day rolled into one. They were not. Miss Little and Miss Todd gazed not at each other but at her. Violet sat across the table and grinned at her with toothless gums. Lizzie Button pressed her to eat a slice of bread, to build up her strength. Put a morsel into her mouth with her own fingers. Anna pushed it out with her tongue when Lizzie turned away. Only Talitha Batt understood. And she was gone, stepped into her other life. Her real life.

In bed in the darkness, Anna prayed to Him to let her die properly. To allow her to depart her empty body. She was nothing more than a body. An irregular heartbeat. A series of painfully drawn breaths. She was a shell on the shore, the living creature inside gone. One night as she lay listening to her own breathing the hollow feeling gave way to a sense of enormity. Of a world inside herself that stretched backward and forward, that was impermeable, invulnerable. She was whole, peerless. They could do nothing at all to her, not now and not ever.

She lay holding the rough edge of the top sheet in both hands, pulled it up over her face in the darkness. Her self was contained within. The whole past was inside her, perfectly preserved, laid out in strange and awkward shapes like the world on the globe. She could turn it in her mind, fast or slow. Still it. It was always there. Even in her dreams, her world was inside her. When she was vomiting her innards into the tin bowl, it was not the least disturbed. Marriage had not enabled her to leave it behind or to forget. Nothing ever had or ever would. She could not mislay anything in her mind. She kept everything, inside, recorded for all time on a globe that spun faster and faster, whole continents of time whipping past, oceans of love, forests of regret and rocky hopes, all blurred and run together.

*   *   *

It was the next morning that he came. Restored to life, his flesh white against the pale sand, his eyes round and brown. He sat with his legs
stretched out in front of him, festooning a sand castle with flags of weed, armoring its entrance with mussel shells. Anna could hear him breathing as he concentrated on sorting the shells, black and pink, large and small, whole and broken. The boy stood up, wandered into the shallows. His feet disappeared into the running waves. His hair blew in the wind and he laughed as the spray flew in the air, falling on him like rain. She watched as the water soaked his smock and the lace-edged waves rolled back, beckoning, sucking the ground from under him. That was her own voice, speaking to him. Calling his name. Anna heard herself laughing with delight and disbelief, and looked around.

The beach shifted, turned into a breakfast table. The rocks were loaves, the fish sprats, stranded on a platter. Button was watching her with eyes full of care. Anna looked around for the boy but he was gone. She heard herself calling his name. She was surprised.

“How do I know his name?” she asked.

Button shook her head. Her face dissolved, her teeth were made of chalk.

*   *   *

He came more and more. At the bottom of the cliff or the top, surrounded by flowers; sea lavender and tamarisk, samphire and saxifrage. The wind blew in his curling, fiery hair and carried away his voice. She strained to hear whether he laughed or screamed, whether it was he who cried out or the gulls gliding on the currents above. His voice and theirs mingled in the firmament. It was only above that anything was firm. That the stars were fixed in their proper places, ready to reappear each night.

There he was again, staring at the horizon. His chin pink with dribble. His legs planted in the sand. That lilt again. Running into the waves, not understanding what she understood, had always understood. His feet always wet. A governess voice. “Look at you, soaked through.” The voice was pleased, liked the daring, the darling, the not-listening wildness of the boy. His boots with their own tide running over the toes in white wavy lines. His pantaloons sodden, chafing on white thighs.

He was in the bath in front of the fire, splashing with his fists, his
little penis floating upward. In the morning before it grew light she heard him singing to himself. Long stretches of song like a skein of silk unraveling from his mouth. She listened from her dark bed, puzzling over the mystery of the roses, while he talked to companions unseen, in a language unknown.

Was it him she heard or was it the sea? Its persistent silent call, its hypnotic slush and splash, its irregular rhythm. Deceptive. Sly. She eavesdropped as it talked to itself, as it murmured and cursed and lamented. Its monologue echoed the one in her head, the wish sounds, the whispers, the sighings and drawings away, rushings toward and retreats. Sometimes, occasionally, the sea rejoiced.

Anna didn’t know anymore if she remembered or imagined him. She didn’t know where he came from or where he had gone. He was there. They lit fires between the rocks, threw pods of seaweed on the flames to hear them explode, shouted with fear and laughter. The next day, he was gone. Their fires, the charred sticks, the ash, the branched, burned strands of weed, washed away. The sea was its own night. It covered things over, forced forgetting. Erasure.

And now he came in ways not as shapely as memory. He came as a feeling, a feeling she would have missed if she hadn’t been expecting him. Waiting for him. He was present in the smell of boiled milk. The sight of a round-tipped spoon or a pair of canvas shoes on the cloakroom floor. He appeared in her dreams. She was in the flint house at a round table with him on the other side in a high chair. His ears were too big for his head and his limbs pliable and pale. Clumsy.

He came as absence. Silence, where his voice had been. A morning blankness. Her bed was a ship adrift on the oak floorboards, the sea creaking and shifting all around, the wind rattling the windows, howling in the chimney. The roses obscured. Their mother, weeping in the dark. Antony.

*   *   *

Anna rose from the bed and felt with her toes for the slippers. The insides were cold, the leather damp. The room, the house, was silent. As she had so many times before, she pulled the blanket around her and dragged the chair to the window, looking out at the gleam of mauve on
the horizon, the opalescent skies. The oak tree emerged from the dawn and waved to her, arms swaying above its fractured, anchored trunk. The bridge was there, still and waiting. Faithful.

She pressed her forehead against the glass as the birds began to sing. The loudness of their calls, the way they resounded in the air, made her think of spring.

The morning sun poured through the long, dusty windows, its abundance a reminder of grander, more expansive times. Vincent Palmer felt in his pocket and gripped the sovereigns between his fingers. He found the feel of money in his hands uniquely reassuring, despite the imperative not to
lay up treasures on earth.
He supposed money was the reason behind Abse’s letter.

The maid nodded at the only empty chair and left without a word, as uninviting from the back as from the front. Vincent dusted his handkerchief over the seat and arranged himself in an attitude of relaxed alertness, his silver-topped cane standing between his knees, moustache newly blackened with a comb-in Colombian preparation. It was the day after Ash Wednesday and in the interests of humility he hadn’t entirely erased the ashy cross from his forehead.

He wondered again why the fellow had written. If Abse intended to pronounce Anna cured, Vincent wouldn’t stand for it. Even if Anna was restored to rationality, which he doubted, he couldn’t risk returning her to the Vicarage before he had dealt with Maud, dispatched her and the boy back to Ireland. He would have to be firmer with Maud this time and make clear that it was to be a permanent move. There would be a better climate for the lad away from the noisome streets and morals of London. Unadulterated milk, bread, et cetera. He’d write, visit once a year if he could.

“‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,’” he said aloud, as the door opened. “‘But she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.’ Good morning.”

The entire household appeared to have lost the power of speech. Abse glanced at him as if his presence was no more than he expected and headed straight for his desk. Vincent didn’t rise from the chair. He had to maintain God’s dignity in his dealings with the world. He projected his voice across the acreage of frayed Persian rug.

“Bless you, Dr. Abse, for caring for the vulnerable on this earth. ‘The righteous shall flourish as a branch.’ How is my poor, dear wife?”

“It’s Mister. Not Doctor. I expected you before now, Reverend. Didn’t you get my message?”

“I received your note. I have been too occupied with the parish to travel out of London. I hope Mrs. Palmer is improving?”

Abse left his desk to stand in front of Vincent. His fists were clenching and reclenching and his hair, which he always wore coaxed up the sides of his head, was brushed downward. He looked older, Vincent noted with satisfaction.

“We run a quiet house, Reverend, for quiet patients. As I said in my letter, your wife will be better suited elsewhere.”

“What are you trying to say, sir?”

Abse began to mither on about mania and a regrettable chain of events. Something about his own daughter, a foolhardy escape. The instrument, what was more, of a fatal incident. A clock in a far corner suggested that it was four-twenty. It wasn’t later than ten. Vincent had departed early, intending to travel from Lake House straight to Sebastopol Street and discuss travel arrangements with Maud. She had written again to the Vicarage, the envelope reeking of violets.
As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.

Vincent used his pulpit voice to halt Abse midflow.

“I can hardly be blamed, sir, if an errant daughter takes it into her head to elope. I don’t want the inconvenience of finding another establishment. My wife needs correction for her disturbed ideas but she is not a drooling idiot like some of the ones I saw here on my first visit. She is, after all, Mrs. Vincent Palmer. It takes a great deal to anger me but you, sir, risk doing just that.”

“And I, Reverend, would be grateful if you’d settle your account with us,” Abse said. “And take your wife away with you today.”

Before the words were out of his mouth, the door burst open and
a pitiful creature entered the room. The face was battered, the skin scabbed. At the sight of the head, Vincent flinched. He had the impression of a convict, bound for Australia.

“Vincent. You have come at last.”

She came toward him and fell on her knees on the rug at his feet. He restrained himself with the greatest difficulty from using his cane to keep her at bay and looked around for Abse, who had left the room.

“I don’t ask to come back to the Vicarage, Vincent,” she said. “All I ask is that you get me out of this place. You can turn me onto the streets—I’ll go to one of my other sisters, I’ll find some employment somewhere. But don’t leave me here.”

Anna was rocking back and forth, begging him to have pity, making a display of herself. She prostrated herself in front of him.

“Vincent, please. I implore you.”

Vincent leapt off the chair, almost tripped on a curling rug, and retreated to the far end of the room, pressing his back against a row of soft, disintegrating spines. He seized the bell on the desk and began shouting for assistance. He’d made a mistake about Anna. He had thought her overwrought, nervy—but it was now apparent that she was disturbed to the point of mania. The mother could have let him know as much before she passed away, if she had chosen. The sisters must have been in on it too. Deceivers all. The muttered objections to her removal from certain of his parishioners, his household, were offensive.

Abse returned, licked one finger and began riffling through papers at his desk.

“There’s three months owing. Further amounts for the extra treatments. We are not a charity, Reverend.”

Vincent felt in his pocket. He gripped the coins between his fingers to prevent any telltale chinking.

“In my hurry to see my unfortunate wife, Dr. Abse, I find I have left the house without funds. I regret to say that I cannot remove Mrs. Palmer at present since I am unable to settle the bill.”

Anna wailed again and as she left the room, escorted by an attendant, looked at him for the first time. Amid the ruined flesh of her face, her eyes were clear, their curious blue-green shade more vivid
than he’d noticed since the first time he met her. An uncomfortable twinge of remorse, like heartburn, rippled through Vincent’s chest. He looked toward the heavens as he raised his hand in a gesture of farewell to her. He could not be expected to find words of comfort when she had distressed him so.

Alone with Abse again, Vincent felt his composure returning. He ran a finger along the stiff, smooth curves of his moustache and assured the chap that if further treatments were needed, he had no objection. It was more than he could stand, he said, to think of dear Anna lost to him in this way. Crueler than if she had died.