The Seance
JOHN HARWOOD
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Part One: Constance Langton’s Narrative
Part Two: John Montague’s Narrative
Part Three: Eleanor Unwin’s Narrative
Part Four: Nell Wraxford’s Journal
Part Five: John Montague’s Narrative
Part Six: Constance Langton’s Narrative Continued
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Epub ISBN 9781409001188
Published by Vintage 2009
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Copyright © John Harwood 2008
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape
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FOR ROBIN
THE SÉANCE
John Harwood grew up in Hobart and studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Tasmania and Cambridge. He has published biography, political journalism, satire and poetry. His first novel,
The Ghost Writer
, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2004.
ALSO BY JOHN HARWOOD
The Ghost Writer
To manifest a spirit, take twenty yards of fine silk veiling, at least two yards wide and very gauzy. Wash carefully, and rinse seven times. Prepare a solution of one jar Balmain’s Luminous Paint; half a pint of Demar Varnish, one pint odourless benzine and fifty drops lavender oil. Work thoroughly through the fabric while it is still damp, and then allow to dry for three days. Then wash with naphtha soap until all the odour is gone and the fabric is perfectly soft and pliable. In a darkened room, the fabric will appear as a soft, luminous vapour.
Revelations of a Spirit Medium
(1891)
1889
f my sister Alma had lived, I should never have begun the séances. She died of scarlatina, soon after her second birthday, when I was five years old. I remember only fragments from the time before she died: Mama dancing Alma on her knee, and singing as she would never do again; reading my primer aloud to Mama while she rocked Alma’s cradle with her foot; walking beside Annie our nurse while she pushed the perambulator past the Foundling Hospital with me holding on to the frame. I remember coming home after one of those walks and being allowed to nurse Alma by the drawing-room fire, feeling the heat of the flames on my cheek as I held her. I remember too – though perhaps I was only told of it – lying in a cot and shivering, looking up at a window which seemed very small and far away, and hearing the sound of weeping, muffled as if through thick cotton wool.
I do not know how long my own illness lasted, but it seems, in memory, as if I woke to find the house shrouded in darkness, and my
mother changed beyond recognition. She kept to her room for many months, during which I was allowed only brief visits. The blinds were always drawn; often she seemed scarcely aware of my presence. And when at last she began to sit up, and then to emerge from her room – stooped like an old woman, her hair thin and lank – she remained sunk in lightless misery. Sometimes she would send for me, and then seem not to know why I had appeared, as if the wrong person had answered the summons. Whatever I ventured to say to her would be met with the same lifeless indifference, and if I sat in silence, I would feel the weight of her grief pressing upon me until I feared I would suffocate.
I wish I could say that my father grieved too; but if he did, I saw no sign of it. His manner with Mama was always polite and solicitous, very like that of Dr Warburton, who would call from time to time and go away shaking his head. Papa was never ill, or cross, or out of sorts, and would no more have raised his voice than appear in public without waxing the points of his moustache. Sometimes in the mornings, after Annie had given me my bread and milk, I would creep downstairs and watch Papa and Mama through a crack in the dining-room door. ‘I trust you are feeling a little better today, my dear?’ Papa would ask, and Mama would rouse herself wearily and say that yes, she supposed that she was, and then he would read
The Times
until it was time for him to set off for the British Museum, where he worked each day upon his book. Most evenings he dined out; on Sundays, when the Museum was closed, he worked in his study. He did not go to church because he was busy with his work, and Mama could not go because she was not well enough, and so each Sunday Annie and I went to St George’s by ourselves.
Annie explained that Mama was grieving because God had taken Alma to heaven, which I thought very cruel of Him; but then if Alma was happy, and would never be ill again, and we would all be together again one day, why was Mama so dreadfully distressed? Because she loved Alma so dearly, Annie replied, and could not bear to be parted from her; but when the time of mourning was over, Mama would recover her spirits.
In the meantime, all we could do was accompany Mama, once she was able to leave the house, to the only place she ever visited, the burial ground near the Foundling Hospital, and arrange fresh flowers on Alma’s grave. I wondered why God had left Alma’s body here, and taken only her spirit; and whether He was looking after Mama’s spirits until she recovered them, but Annie declined to answer these questions, saying that I would understand when I was older.
She had dark brown hair, pulled back very tightly, and dark eyes, and a soft way of speaking; I thought her very pretty, though she insisted she was not. Annie had grown up in a village in Somerset, where her father was a stonemason, and had four brothers and three sisters; five more children had died when they were still very young. I had assumed, when she first told me this, that her mother must have been even more grief-stricken than mine. But no, said Annie, there had been no time for mourning; her mother had been too busy looking after the rest of them. And no, they had not had a nurse; they had been far too poor for that. Things were much better now, though, because three of her brothers had gone for soldiers, and her two elder sisters were in service like herself, and they were all (except for one of the brothers, who had fallen into bad company) sending money home to their mother.
Whenever the weather was fine, Annie and I would go out for a walk in the afternoon. Our house was in Holborn, and on these walks we would sometimes pause at the Foundling Hospital to watch the foundling girls at play in their white pinafores and brown serge gowns. It looked as grand as a palace with its avenue of lamps, and more windows than you could count, and a statue of an angel before the entrance. The foundlings, Annie told me (she had a friend in service who had grown up here), had been brought here as infants by their mothers, who were too poor, or too ill to care for them. And yes, it was very sad for their mothers to have to give them up, but the foundlings had a much better life at the Hospital. The infants were all sent to good homes in the country
until they were five or six years old, and then brought back to the Hospital for their schooling. They had meat for their dinner three days a week, and roast beef on Sundays, and when they were old enough, the boys would be sent for soldiers, and the girls for ladies’ maids.
I wanted to know all about the mothers who had given their babies up for foundlings; after all, Annie’s mother had been very poor, but she had kept them all at home. Annie seemed reluctant to answer, but eventually she told me that most of the foundlings were here because their fathers had run away and left their mothers alone.
‘So if Papa were to run away,’ I asked, ‘would I be sent for a foundling?’
‘Of course not, my child,’ said Annie, ‘your Papa’s not going to run away, and you’ve got me to look after you. And besides, you’re too old for a foundling.’
Later that afternoon, while we were standing beneath the angel, watching the foundling boys playing in their part of the grounds, she told me the story of her friend Sara, whose mother had given her up to the Hospital because her father had run away before she was even born. Sara had kept her mother’s name, which was Baker, but could remember nothing of her, whereas she had grown very fond of her nurse, a Mrs Garrett, in Wiltshire, and had cried very much when the time came for her to return to the Hospital for her schooling. Mr and Mrs Garrett would dearly have liked to keep Sara, because all of their own children had died, but they were very poor, and the Hospital wouldn’t have paid them to look after Sara once she was old enough for schooling. And yes, the nurses in the country were sometimes allowed to keep the children for their own, but only if they could prove to the Hospital that they had enough money to care for them properly; just as the mothers who had had to give up their children could come and get them back if their fortunes took a turn for the better.