The Widow's Confession (15 page)

Delphine and Julia were seated in a bathing machine: a contraption which resembled a slatted chalet on wheels, to be pulled by horse into the sea for the purposes of modest bathing. It was
evidently not the first time the machine had ventured into the water that day; the women’s feet were cold against the soaking wet carpet. Released from her corset, Delphine slumped
luxuriously against the side of the machine. She was dressed in a long-sleeved flannel shift, and her hair lay in a plait down her back.

The bathing machine began to move, drawn by the old carthorse who had eyed them emotionlessly at their arrival, jolting them this way and that. Julia, who had been so busy looking around at the
rather dirty interior as she knotted a scarf over her head, fell off the ledge she had been sitting on. This unlocked a wave of hilarity in Delphine, who laughed and laughed until she was crying,
and she also fell off the ledge.

Another wave of hilarity struck them as the machine came to a halt, and it was a minute or two before they fell silent.

There was the sound of water all around them – the plash of waves against wheels and the sides of the machine. Delphine would have thought they were afloat, if not for the heavy stillness
of the square room. They heard the creak of the modesty hood as the dipper – a large, strong woman who had not spoken since they paid her – let it down. Delphine jumped when there was a
thud against the door.

‘It’s the waves,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

She opened the door and peered out from beneath the modesty hood, a wave rising and striking her as she did so, and she cried out at its fierce coldness. The horse stood impassively, held by its
grim-faced attendant.

‘We can go out a little further on our own,’ said Delphine, feeling bold. ‘I do not see anyone on the cliffs watching us; surely we will be safe from gentlemen’s
eyes.’

They treated it carefully, the grey-blue, alive water, so powerful in its swell even this close to the shore, the sand dissolving beneath their feet as they walked, until they were in the water
up to their necks, encased by the cold of it.

‘I feel so vital, as if I can feel every nerve in my body,’ said Julia. But she could see that Delphine was unhappy; all the delight had faded from her face.

‘Is this how Amy Phelps felt?’ she said, and saw her cousin’s face fall. ‘I am sorry. I should learn to speak less. That was always my fault.’ And for a moment she
was in her mother’s drawing room, being reprimanded for an unladylike remark.

She felt Julia take her hand, and squeeze it. In the distance, she saw a little girl playing by the edge of the sea.

They walked back up the beach, dressed and wrapped in their cloaks. The locals were out in the good weather, the hovellers smoking their pipes on the pier, some laughing and
talking, others, like Solomon, bearing watchful, calm expressions. Some local girls were conversing with them. They looked strong and warm-fleshed; they were proud of any embellishments to their
dress, and talked and laughed loudly. It struck Delphine that they all looked as though they could defend themselves, and would not be shy to do so.

‘Is that Polly Gorsey?’ said Delphine. The girl was standing, talking to the men, laughing. ‘She is usually in the Albion, working.’ She watched the way in which the
sunlight caught in the girl’s coiled hair; the ideal silhouette of her figure beneath the elaborate dress she wore. Delphine wondered whether Polly had sewed all the little embellishments
herself, for it was not a plain dress, but one decorated with hand-worked cloth roses and ribbons. She also wondered how much of a struggle it was for Mr Gorsey to get his daughter to wear the
plain white apron over her clothes, and recalled how drab Polly had looked that first day she had seen her, when Mr Benedict’s carriage had nearly run her down.

Julia was resting when Martha marched into the cottage, carrying a basket of bread and milk and eggs. Delphine let her pass through the house, heard her stamping about in the
kitchen. It was only when she heard the crash of broken porcelain that Delphine went to see her.

‘I have to pay for that,’ she said, looking at the white fragments in Martha’s hands.

‘Sorry, madam,’ Martha said.

‘What is wrong?’ Delphine asked. ‘Are you over-tired? I fear you are working too hard, looking after us
and
Mr Hallam. We can hire someone else, you know. It might be
for the best.’

Martha turned away, flushing as she always did when embarrassed. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. Her large hands were trembling, and Delphine wondered if she might cry. There was
something so deeply moving about this big, strong girl, normally so proud, suddenly wishing to hide, that Delphine felt her throat tighten in a mirror of her distress.

‘It’s nothing really,’ she said gruffly, but her voice quivered. ‘Just some of the girls. I grew up with them. You think they would be past their tittle-tattling, but it
reminds me of being a little chick again, and all their spiteful words. Polly had the devil in her today, to speak to me so.’

Delphine waited, knowing that encouragement would not make her speak, but that silence might. She knew that Martha did not have the wherewithal of the girls on the pier: that tough shine, like
sea pebbles tossed against each other until the surface is smooth and hard.

‘It’s a boy, ma’am,’ she said eventually. ‘I would say he is my sweetheart, but he is not. He was at least my friend, I thought. I was foolish, very foolish. I am
not a girl who men favour. I could never be Polly, even if I tried, and I do not want to try. At least I shall never end up at the bottom of a chalk pit with some fool from the Ranelagh
Gardens.’

She dug her fingers into an onion skin, and peeled it.

‘I’ve seen those girls down by the harbour,’ said Delphine, not wondering at the reference to the latest deaths, for word travelled faster here than it did in London.
‘Did one of them take your beau? He is best forgotten, if so.’

‘I did not say he was mine,’ Martha said, without raising her voice. ‘And if I ever had a hope of him – well, it was long ago, at least a year or two – but I find
thoughts can get deep rooted sometimes, without you even noticing it. I told one of the girls in a weak moment, and now they use it to make fun of me. How I hate them.’ She stabbed the onion
with the knife.

‘Our supper will be ruined if you insist on hacking up the vegetables,’ Delphine said. ‘Come now, dear Martha. I see the sense in what you say. But this boy was not worth it
– you must believe me. Not worth it at all.’

‘He would not even look at me, at the pier,’ the girl said. Now she was slicing carefully, the tears from the onion pouring from her red eyes. ‘He let them say their insults to
me.’

‘Then he is a coward too,’ Delphine said, feeling hot anger rising in her. She remembered the icy restraint of her own mother, the serenity of her grandfather, and wondered if it was
her father who had given her anger, and the doubtful gift of forgetting restraint. It was Delphine’s turn to move away, but Martha had already seen her face. She put down her knife and wiped
her eyes on her arm.

‘Why, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Are you angry for me?’

Delphine half-turned back. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

The words seemed to break over the girl, and her face was illuminated with joy. ‘I am grateful,’ she said. ‘To have such a mistress! I could almost kiss your feet.’

‘It is unjust, that is all,’ said Delphine. ‘There will be a husband for you, Martha, a good and kind and truthful husband.’ She said it with a rush of fervour, though
she did not quite believe it. The local population was limited; the girls at the harbour would take whatever men there were. Although there were villas on the cliffs . . . villas with
menservants.

‘Would you like us to train you a little more?’ she asked. ‘You said you wished to learn to be fit for a larger household. Both my cousin and I have lived in such houses
– we could educate you in their ways.’

Martha had stopped preparing the food. She bit her lip. ‘It’s a great honour,’ she replied. ‘It’s very kind of you to offer such a thing. But I am not sure if I am
made for a big house. It seems to me that I should be always bowing and scraping, and I am not sure if I could, madam, whether my pride could take it. For I should want to be thanked – the
way you and Miss Julia, and Mr Hallam thank me – and I should want to go here and there when I pleased.’

‘You must think on it, then,’ Delphine said.

‘I used to think I would never wish to leave here,’ said Martha. ‘But now I think I would go to somewhere bigger – like London.’

‘There are certainly more men to choose from,’ said Delphine. Martha’s eyes widened, and Delphine sensed her disapproval, remembering her in her Sunday finery; the blank,
straight-backed respectability of her family.

‘What troubles you?’ she said. Martha looked down, and there was something about her mute censure that made Delphine say, ‘Answer me!’

‘Nothing,’ Martha said. ‘I do not wish to offend you, ma’am. My mother’s told me things are different in America.’

There was a prudishness in her face which enraged Delphine. She felt it, again: anger, too sudden and complete, as though a tight knot had been tied beneath her breastbone. ‘If you do not
wish for my help,’ she said, ‘you should stay quiet and do the cooking, as you are paid to do.’

Delphine left the room and ran upstairs, to her bedroom with its lantern turret. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, and Martha’s sudden disapproval had pressed on some sore
point and hurt her savagely. She sat down on her bed, unable to take any pleasure from the view.

She knew if she closed her eyes she would be surrounded by the darkness of a New York night, by the lights of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The taste of champagne was sour on her tongue. The
knowledge that her life was over struck through her like a physical pain, making her bow her head with it. But no, it was not then that you knew, she thought: it was the morning afterwards.
Breathe, she thought: only breathe. You must keep breathing. You must put one foot in front of the other. These memories are not real, now; they can no longer touch you.

She knew she would weather it, the terrible diffuse pain, the many strands of it. There were so many different details, so many different wounds, if you chose to remember them. She decided she
would not think on them – not now, not ever – aware that she had made the same decision many times before. She must only weather it, and by teatime she would be able to eat scones, and
talk of whether Mrs Quillian’s salon by the sea would ever be reconstructed. But in that moment, she was only angry. Later, it would frighten her: how much she had wanted to take hold of
Martha’s hair, and smash her head against the wall.

What I remember most of that summer – if I take the people away, as I often try to do – is the weather, the air, the colour and smell of the place. The
freshness of the air, so pure, so liquid as though it was a drug, made to knock you out each night at nine, made to make you sleep and forget. The smell of the salt wind, and the smell of the
seaweed, that deep, dense, rotting vegetation, that was somehow part of it all. How quickly the weather would change: from heavy heat to thunder and lightning; from clear blue sky to a sea mist so
dense it was best you should stay inside and not think of the ghosts of smugglers. We could hear the sea from Victory Cottage, hear the breaking of the waves, its roar and rush on stormy nights. It
was the taker of lives, that sea. But how I loved it; how I loved to catch sight of its broken waves from the lantern turret.

The first Delphine and Julia knew of the storm that came to the town several days later was the gathering wind, the casements rattling throughout Victory Cottage.

It was the kind of day that made a jacket and stock seem unbearable, the air was so dense with heat. Edmund decided that he would stay in his room and rest. He did not wish to be out in the
blistering heat nor fight the crowds who gathered near the house of Mr Dickens, nor even to speak with some of the old hovellers on the pier.

He slept. On waking, suddenly, he checked his pocket-watch; it was a quarter to six in the evening. Sitting up in bed, he became aware that the house was silent. The heat was still heavy and
thick in the air. He went to his window and drew back the drapes. The white sunlight of the day was gone, its harshness softened in the early evening, but the light was luminous in such a startling
way that it seemed unnatural, the sky more violet than grey.

At that moment he saw lightning shiver across the sky; it too had a violet tinge. Then the thunder came – low, primal, awakening fear in the depths of his belly.

He went downstairs. The house was empty – no Martha in the kitchen. He supposed she was seeing to the American ladies. From the drawing-room window he saw a faint glow from within the
church; Evening Prayer. He decided not to go, and fought the urge to pour himself a strong drink. Instead, he stood before the window and watched as it began to rain. Heavy, sheeting, so thick it
veiled everything: nothing could be seen from the window. Again the lightning came – a vein of light, ending in a scythe-like curve. The thunder was so loud that he felt it tremble through
him, and he had to pretend to himself that he was not afraid. Then, similar but different – came a second boom. He had been warned of it: the signal that there was a wreck on the Goodwin
Sands.

The heat of the day had been dispatched, cut through by the storm. He tried not to think of what was happening at sea. Instead, he made up the fire. As a bachelor, he had done it often. His
mother had taught him how to do so as a child, with the same quiet persistence she had applied to teaching him to read. She had filled his young life with so many similar lessons, anxious that he
should grasp the practicalities of living, as though she was afraid he would be alone in a room his whole life. She said once that she had learned early the habit of dependence, and that it was
something she had had to unlearn, under the influence of love. As he watched the fire beginning to catch light, he thought of his parents. So often, his thoughts rested on them now. I am an old
man, he thought, and I am falling in love, Father, as you promised – but not with the woman I
should
love.