The Whirlpool (4 page)

Just as she had done for the past two years, she was spending the morning working on accounts. But now she held the pen as easily as a teaspoon in her hand, and the scratch, scratch of the nib was as familiar as the sound of her own breathing. The dreams had subsided; Charles visiting her bedroom, now, only once or twice a month. It was as though he was forgetting her, she thought, rather irrationally, for, in truth, she was forgetting him. Not their time together but his physical actuality.
She could no longer bring his face clearly into her mind. As time went by, in fact, Maud found it more and more difficult to believe that she had ever been married at all, more and more difficult to believe that the pen she held in her hand had not always been her own.

Disaster had not disappeared, but it had diminished in size, had become, in a sense, manageable; no larger than the words one might use to describe it.

O
nce she had settled herself in the streetcar, Fleda knew it would only be fifteen minutes or so until she was there. In her basket she had the makings of high tea; muffins, blueberry jam, sweet fresh butter, some mild cheese and the tea itself – a good Ceylonese blend. Under her arm, near her heart, she cradled a copy of Swinburne’s
Poems and Ballads, The Ring and the Book
by Robert Browning, and Patmore’s
Angel in the House
. She had brought the books along in order to read them in a suitable setting; a setting that she hoped was about to cause the spiritual marriage of romance and domesticity in her life.

The wheels of the trolley clattered under the boards at her feet. The vehicle had been scrubbed and polished, as if to celebrate the advent of the blossom season, and light bounced from brass fittings, glowed in the warmth of the wood at the top of the seats, and shone through the windows from which the glass had been removed. It was possible, in this slow-moving car, to lean out from open rectangles in order to pick blossoms from the trees that bordered the route. But Fleda’s mind was in another location and she hardly noticed the lilacs, the cherry blossoms. An offensive man at the front of the car had twisted his thick torso at the waist so that he might eye her unashamedly while he breathed lungfuls of cigar smoke into
the open air of the car. To her left, a very young couple was giggling over a photograph of themselves in front of a very bad reproduction of the waterfall. The beginning of the massive summer invasion. Fleda’s thoughts turned to the whirlpool and an acre of land that rose from it. She was, at this moment, a woman on a streetcar with a whirlpool on her mind.

She was often, mentally, one or two steps ahead of her activities, her location. In the dark rooms that she had left behind in town she had anticipated the journey on the streetcar. Now, seated in the vehicle, she anticipated the arrival at her destination. After arrival, and a few brief moments of appreciation, anticipation would move swiftly into reflection. She kept a diary, and this, combined with her compulsive reading, had proved to be the perfect device for distancing synchronized response.

She checked her basket for this volume now, terrified for the moment that it might have been left behind. It was there, however, wedged between the muffins and the cheese. Relaxing, she turned at last to the window. The car had passed the city limits and was moving steadily down River Road into a rougher geography. If you avoided looking at the factories on the American side, you could almost believe you were in the wilderness. The tough old rocks of the escarpment were in evidence everywhere, varying in size from the jagged edges along the road to the cliffs that dropped down to the river. They poked, at times, through small patches of sumac or reared unexpectedly from clumps of long grass. The hill country of England, as Fleda imagined it, or gentle undulations of the Tuscan countryside, had nothing to do with this, nothing to do with this river side of the road. If she turned and looked through the windows on the opposite side of the car, however, she would see nothing but acres of rigidly planned, severely trimmed orchards. It was a geography of fierce opposites. Order on one side and, nearer the water, sublime geological chaos.

A cloud of cigar smoke passed between Fleda and the scenery and escaped from the open window. She stood, pulled the wire for the bell, and walked towards the door, feeling, as she adjusted her body to the rocking of the car, the man’s gaze at the back of her neck burning its way down her spine.

When the vehicle came to a halt Fleda stepped lightly to the ground and began, at once, to enter the woods in front of her. While she walked, she admired the carpet of trilliums that stretched out around her in all directions. The slow, quiet sound of the whirlpool began to reach her through the uniformly grey trunks of poplar and maple and ash which stood between her and the river. She dropped her belongings near the remains of an old dead fire, a relic of the previous summer’s final event, and moved to the spot where the land began to tilt sharply downwards, a drop of three hundred feet. And even though the June foliage had thickened in earnest, she could see it clearly: the giant whirlpool – a cumbersome, magnificent merry-go-round on which a few large logs were seemingly permanent passengers. The awkward, ceaseless motion of going nowhere, the peace of it seen from above. Fleda stared down at the water for a good ten minutes then, shaking her head as if to throw off a trance, she returned to the place where she had left her basket. She placed her notebook and pencil on top of the three books she had brought with her and began, methodically, to gather twigs to make a fire for the tea.

Soon she had constructed a small, lopsided, teepee-like structure out of the delicate dead branches which were to be found everywhere on the ground around her. Then, after pausing for a moment, she rearranged them into a square formation, into what her husband called the log cabin method of building a fire. A tiny house, a doll’s house; one that she would shortly have the pleasure of burning to the ground. She added some birch bark for a roof and, after a few frantic moments, when she believed she had forgotten her matches, she lit her
miniature home. Her kettle hung from a pole suspended between two sticks which were planted in the ground and had survived the winter wonderfully well, buried, as they must have been, in the deep snow. She filled the kettle with rain water which had collected in a barrel situated several yards to her right, returned it to the pole overtop the flaming cabin, and began to search for the teapot. A few wooden crates were arranged neatly near the spot where she stood and under the third she uncovered four spoons, a small frying pan, and an earthenware pot. The other two boxes protected plates, cups, saucers, knives, forks, a spatula and a flower vase, all clean and ready for use, just as she had left them in September. Satisfied that her equipment was intact, she settled herself into a chair that had been hewn from a large stump, and waited for her kettle to boil.

While she waited she thought, with great pleasure, of the books she had brought with her; especially of the Browning, which she already knew well enough to look forward to. The Patmore, a small white volume with an embossed gold title, David had given to her that morning in their rooms, knowing she would want something to read while she waited for him, and feeling the subject suitable to the season when the house would be built. Fleda reached for this now and, flipping past the title page, turned to a reproduction of a portrait of the poet’s wife by Rossetti. The Angel that had inhabited the House did not fare well under the harsh lines of the steel engraving, and Fleda secretly felt she looked more like a siren than an angel. She had constructed her own private, imaginary version of the woman’s appearance and decided to hold to that now, despite this other, more ordinary evidence.

Fleda was deeply interested in this book, interested in the poet’s perception of the perfect wife, his belief in matrimony as the heavenly ideal. Like a voyeur at the threshold of a fascinating window, her veins tingled with expectancy. By the time the tea was satisfactorily made, however, her mood had
abruptly changed. A robin had settled briefly at her feet and then, surprised at what he found there, had quickly taken his leave. Intermittent clouds had begun to mask the sun and a breeze had turned the leaves of the poplars back, changing them from green to silver. Fleda walked a second time to the bank and looked down, through the network of branches, to the whirlpool. She could see a pillar of smoke ascending from the beach far below. Boys, who should be in school, fishing probably, cooking their catch. For a moment or two she thought of descending the bank, but remembered the previous weeks of rain, the mud on the path, and the fact that her yellow skirt and white boots were relatively new.

She returned to the fire, which was blazing nicely, and reached for her notebook and pencil. Turning to a fresh page she smoothed the spine of the book with her palm and wrote the date: 7 June 1889. She looked around her solemnly for a few moments, then she began to write.

At this point, hearing horses, Fleda stopped writing. Her husband appeared at the end of the path that led to the road, mounted on a handsome stallion and looking proud and slightly pugnacious in his military attire. His face, however, carried an expression of warmth and tenderness, the object of which was his horse to whom he was speaking quietly. Behind him two of his men drove a wagon which carried a large canvas bundle and some lumber.

Fleda flung her notebook down to the ground and ran through the woods to greet them. She hadn’t noticed that, while she was writing, her kettle had once again boiled, steamed ferociously, and cooled. The little house underneath it was now nothing more than a pile of ash.