Laura

CHAPTER NINE

“Miss! It's Sutcliffe, Miss!”

I am pursued anew. Close upon Trafalgar Square a carriage draws up alongside my own. An arm waves, a face appears. I perceive it to be his.

In the alarm of my flight I had abandoned my things. His hand flourishes my bonnet. The hubs of our carriage wheels graunch together. High words and low words are exchanged between the cabbies. The face of Sutcliffe's driver bears the expression of a man to whom excitement has come late in life. Mine is put out because he has not been allowed to pursue his leisurely course nor indeed to fulfill a promising journey. With successive jolts I am brought to descend near Charing Cross. Sutcliffe bears forth my cloak, my bonnet, my reticule.

“I had luck upon it, Miss. You got into a cab so quickly I thought I was done for in finding you. We nearly lost you close upon the park. Might you pay my cabby, Miss, for I came without money.”

The carriages stand fore and aft in line then as do hearses. I bring myself to dispense a few shillings to both from my recovered purse. The interval, in a sense has pleased me for I was minded not to return yet to my hotel. Donning my cloak and bonnet, I-proceed along the Strand to a coffee house.

Sutcliffe follows at a nervous distance treading no doubt precisely in my footsteps. The door to the coffee house quivers and shakes upon my entrance. It is not too common a place. A potboy of sorts serves one and all. The evident proprietor in a suit greasy with sorrow regards me with appropriate awe. Sutcliffe hesitates, scrapes back a chair upon the sawdust floors and seats himself with an air of deference opposite me.

“Who are you?” My voice is distant.

“Sutcliffe, Miss. Bred out of a house in Hackney. Come into service at twelve as a scullery lad.”

“You know your name but you do not know who you are. Perhaps in that we are all at fault.” I observe his twitchings. He would act now upon a flick of my fingers. I remark his physique more closely now. Perhaps once he fell at Crecy, under the sword of a French knight.

“How did she know of me?”

“Your sister, Miss? She has ever talked of you. A maid cleaned your room-your boudoir, that is to say-regular.”

“And others? Others in the house?”

I order coffee for myself but not for him. He has taken upon himself the impertinence of sitting with me without permission. A cup and saucer is nevertheless placed for him. It shall remain empty.

“There is them at nights, but I never see them. I has my own room in the basement. I hear them moving about at nights, in their rooms upstairs. She takes things up herself. I hear them but I don't hear their words. When you ran off she went up crying to them and a door was slammed. She has asked me of occasion to whip her.

“Do you like doing it?” Indifference flecks my tones. “Do not prevaricate, Sutcliffe, or she may hear the telling of it.”

“You can't, Miss, if I dares say so. There is never any going back. There is the going in and the going out. They are different.”

I prevent myself from asking what I would ask. I would misphrase, display ineptitudes. Standing as a butler stands, he has regained of a sudden his feet as if appreciating his temerity. I bid him be reseated.

“I don't mind taking the strap to her, Miss. It's the crop she wants sometimes, asks for-but I wont. Fair cruel the crop is, fit for horses only. I told her that if she likes to wear breeches…”

“It does not matter.”

He has avoided my question-the question I have not put, though plain enough it moves within my eyes. Perhaps there is no answer, or the answer is the question. It comes upon me now that I am perhaps the question, though in this I see no deliverance. I would have father tell me all again, for his tellings were all couched differently and each wended a separate path whose meeting point I cannot find. The coffee is hot. I shake my head a little and put it down.

“You have to suffer the scorching, Miss.” His voice is fatherly.

“Is that what you say when you are strapping her?”

My lip curls but I feel no contempt nor displeasure. An excitement rather. I am gone beyond myself in so speaking. This Laura is one who has slipped a little from within me, is envelope to my letter, letter to my envelope. The coffee burns my throat as surely as leather to bottom. Subdued, I drink.

“She told me the first time what to do, Miss. When we came upon you. If ever we did. You was to go upstairs afterwards. She said that you would go if you were told-that you always did. I would not have had the seeing of you again.”

“Would such have disturbed you? Have you known evil, Sutcliffe?”

“I have known confusions, Miss, but no evil. Miss Elizabeth now-I knew she had a lostness about her. I have been five years with her and never knew a day that she didn't have me out with her, looking for you. You or your cousin. Charlotte she called her. You have to forgive my impertinence, Miss, in taking upon your person as I did, but she instructed it, said it would calm you first then bring you on to heat and that as you thereafter desired I might have the pleasure of both your persons until you was sent up.”

“Which is not evil, you think?”

“Oh no, Miss. I was taught early that a woman has to be put to it sometimes. Not always, not too regular, for it kills their spirit too much then. I mean not every day or night, that is, for they lie abed and will do no nothing else. A woman should go quiet in her ways and receive what she is to receive without fuss or hindrance. When I was seventeen I had then a fair prodder on me and my mother saw to it that I was put to her sister, who was younger than she and had a fair piety. She struggled a bit the first time but was held and so I got the conquering of her. She had lovely smooth limbs on her and a bottom round and full. I never took her but that way and so she got her dosage once a week. If there was recalcitrance-a word she taught me later when she was mollified to it-then my mother put the strap to her first while I held ready. There was no remorse of it in the end and she would come to me when bidden, whether light or dark in the house, but never more often than I've said. It was a discipline upon us, my mother said, and not an evil for she would not have evil in the house.”

“If I were to return there now-to Elizabeth's house, I mean, Sutcliffe.”

“We cannot, Miss. She told me ever that if she were left alone in there, then the door would not open again. The day I arrived, the first day, there was a maid upon the threshold who was being dismissed. She stood upon the threshold exactly. Nor one of us could move a step until I stood with her, under the lintel, and we passed without and within at the same moment. It was a strangeness, that. Miss Elizabeth held her arms until I was secure within. The maid was crying, I remember, and said she had been whipped awful but would forgive your sister if she could stay. There was no reply upon that and she was put out while I gained the entrance.”

I had learned at last the identity of Charlotte-if she had one. I in my passing perhaps have none and am mirage even to myself. There was a shipwreck once, close upon Hastings, of which my father spoke and read aloud from The Times. Though I listened to him not much on that occasion, for he was addressing my mother and my aunts, I remember a vision coming upon me of any who survived the wreck and came from it speaking perhaps in foreign tongues, syllabic sounds, their attire not as ours, and having smells upon their bodies that would have come from the sea and their native habitations. I thought then of the things they had been forced to abandon, but more importantly their small possessions, which at the last would slip and slide into the waves and there forever float, dip, dive, and sometimes on the seabed rest as if they were waiting to become themselves again.

Looking upon Sutcliffe, I-wonder if we are as those who come from the wreck or whether we are the possessions, severed and falling yet ever borne by the sea, here and there or elsewhere. I would ask him but I think he is close only to those questions with which he has lived and that he has no reaching out to others but only receiving as he received once in some dark and dusty room the pale orb of his aunt in her quiescence.

“Then we must go about our ways, Sutcliffe. Have you money? I must reward you for your diligence in finding me.”

Even as I speak I do not wish to speak and yet I do not want him in this moment gone.

“I have a couple of bob in my pocket, Miss. Enough to bide me until I find a place.”

“Such as you have returned to me is worth more than that.”

There is stillness and desire. I find neither here. When I was first brought unto desire, I knew the stillness, the applications of quiet, broken only by such murmurings of instructions to me as were requisite. I seek such stillness now and yet, were I to come upon it, would wish to escape it. When the trees beyond the house and in the grounds stood quiet in their unknowing and the strap would drop, then I received the long, thick piston's steady urging-on, my sheened globe rolling to the pulsing thrusts that kept my cheeks asunder for the sperm.

“Elizabeth never held me before.”

My voice comes sudden upon me and to him.

“There were holdings before, Miss, seizings and holdings, but never of you that I heard of. She said you would come willing to it and ever had.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Sutcliffe?”

“I have had no experience of them, Miss, but has heard of a few who have. Terrible sights and wailings in the night, they say. I wouldn't as near go into a graveyard at night, not for a sovereign I wouldn't.”

“Ghosts are intangible, are they not? They have no bodily substance, no solidity.”

“Anyone as is solid couldn't be a ghost, Miss. What brought you to think of such a thing? Besides which, they wouldn't come here and not in the daylight, neither. They comes only in old houses where they have lived and died. They come to wail their passing, or to give warnings some say. Is it that you don't like sleeping alone, Miss?”

His question is hopeful but ill advised. Upon the closest of observation his eyes are smaller than I had thought. He is perhaps a loafer and an opportunist. I delve into my purse and give him a sovereign. He accepts it with a mumbling of thanks, which falls ill beside his earlier loquacity, and then is gone. Outside, as I suspected to find him, he lurks upon the footway as one who knows not which direction to take. Having no hesitation upon the matter, this way, that way, here or there or gone, I make my way to Kingsway and pause at a bookshop. There is a sense of dark within that attracts me. The stock is well arranged upon shelves grown long too old for their tasks in their slow-yielding dips and bends.

My glancings are cursory. I seek comfort merely in the silent presence of the books. Such bindings as are ribbed I touched with my fingertips. Dip and rise. Rise and glide.

“You may come within, Madam, if you wish.”

At the sounding of a voice, I turn. A brown door panelled with frosted glass over which a green curtain hangs stands open. A man of middle years, nor tall nor short, nor slim nor fat, removes his pince-nez to survey me. His glance is one of approbation. A twittering of sparrows comes unexpectedly from beyond, perhaps through some window open in the further room. I do not speak, nor do I return his gaze but let my own fall all about. A wooden tray holds maps, their edges curled as if they would sleep yet are hesitant to do so beneath the eyes of watchers.

“Some of my customers like to read here, within. Or to write. I do not mind the writing. Do you wish to write? There is a desk in waiting.”

“Do all write who come here?”

“Some do and some do not. If the whim takes them, I have had them write sonnets and essays here, but not all can spell. That is the sadness of it. Some scribble and splotch upon the paper. I have known them dig the nibs into the paper like claws.”

“It is a resting place between places?”

“There are such. You have the tongue for such things-the apprehensions. Are you from afar? You have not the London accent.”

He has stepped beyond, the floorboard creaking. In their brownness is ever a complaining. I skirt a trough of cheaper volumes such as housemaids read and enter where the green curtain stirs upon the frosted glass. The room within is long and narrow. It gives, as I thought, upon a window at the further end, where stand a small nonentity of trees, a larch, a willow, and an unknown. A wall beyond the small garden prevents their escape. They can neither come within nor steal back to their kind. Engravings for which I have no taste subdue the bright pink covering of the walls. An escritoire holds-still and small-paper, ink, and pen, upon it.

“Would you read? What would you read?”

He enters, closing the door upon us. To my left, facing the window, is perceived a staircase half hidden by an alcove.

“There is a room beyond-a living room. A room for living.”

His voice still speaks, but yet is tentative. The paper, pen and ink await me-menacing with unfulfilments.

Father said to me once, “Write down everything you think, upon the quick thinking of it-the first things you think,” and so I wrote. Beneath his gaze I wrote, “flowers and trees and birds and horses and fences, hedges and doves, quick in their coming.”

Father looked at it and said, “No, that is not what you think, not what you think at all. It is not the innerness of what you think. Write deeper what you think. Write of what is beyond the paper and the ink, between the pen nib and the paper's gap, there capture what you think,

Nel' mezzo del camin di nostra vita

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

Che la dirita via era smarita.

“You comprehend?”

“ Vita is life. Is it of life?”

I stare at the writing as if it would speak to me. Thus have I seen others read who take as long to absorb a sentence as I a novel.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest and the way was lost.”

He has translated. The sadness of the words pours upon me as water upon rocks. It is the beginning of Dante's great poem, I am told, but the words need no identification. They come from the hollows of eternity. Perhaps we have all written them in different forms, but lacked the music and the orchestrations, the deft pavane of syllables well placed, not put upon by meanings other than their own. Listening to my silence, he reads the words now in Italian. They dance and ring upon my mind as if padded hammers were playing upon thin bars of metal such as, when placed side by side, are called a xylophone. Oscura. I would make myself thin and small, make myself unto the stalk of a leaf, and wriggle like a tadpole through the “o” to find the sad dark of which the poet wrote.

His eyes regard me as I stand alone. “It is best that we go in now.”

“Very well.”

The door by the staircase-the door previously hidden from my view-is opened unto me. I enter a drawing room of smallish aspect by my standards, yet neat and clean. Laying down a book too small for comfort, a woman rises, firm of body in her rising, brown of dress and brown of eyes. Her hair has a steely glint that somehow comforts. I take her age to be as his. Her skin is smooth, untrodden yet by crows.

“She may have tea. There is no reason that she should not have tea. Did you find a reason, Thomas? No? It is as I suspected. Very well.”

He bows as might a servant and is gone. A chair is indicated to me. I am weighed up, found to be alive, of good presence. I remove my bonnet and replace the long pin slowly. I have been by the sea, flown where the seagulls fly, spoken with mariners, and hidden in my depths. Father nibbled my bare toes once, as might a fish. There were cockles to be had in Brighton. I must return there. It is shown by the shape of the horizon. I have learned much yet am ever too much contained within myself, trapped in arteries, enclosed in flesh, my hands belonging and yet not belonging to my being.

“Are you frivolous, inactive? Do you become inert?”

She has come to the heart of the matter, I think, though whether in the first part of her question or the second, I do not know.

“I think not, Madam.” I am careful to answer her softly. The windows of her eyes are veiled. I know the razor of her thoughts-the cutting edge of her mind.

“Have you been in private service?”

“I prefer private service. It is received and given, is it not?”

The tea is brought-a kettle permanent, no doubt, upon a hob. A cousin of mine, one elderly, untried, untrodden, was given to such eccentricities in winter, whether one drank or not. In summer she would fill the kettle with flowers, even to several protruding through the spout, for she said that the kettle would become sad if it felt that it were not in use. Upon killing a fly she would say a small prayer for her salvation, believing that the fly was a messenger of the devil who had been sent in some way or other to tempt her. How dried she looked-her skin withered. Upon my confessing to my aunt what had passed on my road to perdition, she said that I might have become such had I not been put to the probing of the bubbling manstalk, which she said had enriched my skin, caused it to become creamy and silky to the touch, and soothed with ardent boldness the hemisphere of my bottom.

“Upon the lowering of your drawers, Laura, you were brought to fruition.” So my aunt counselled me, and upon breathe, understand, and yet perhaps have no comprehension of. Let incomprehension be your understanding.”

I remained silent for I did not wish him to know how dull my mind lay in those moments. I sat silent at my writing desk while he, standing at my back, loosed my hairpins one by one with his fingers, fumbling and delving as one might for trinkets lost in grass until my hair was loose and cascaded in its brownness to my shoulders. Then, reaching across my back, he drew towards me a slender blue vase wherein that morning had been placed a single rose and bent my face until I had absorbed its scent, the silent message of its being. Then he pulled back my head so that tears started of a sudden in my eyes and, from beneath the paper I had been writing on, drew out a sheet upon which earlier he had written in French.

“Les vices de l'homme contiennent la preuve…de son gout de l'infinie…C'est dans cette depravation du sens de l'infini que git, selon moi, la raison de tous les exces coupables.”

“Do you understand, Laura?” father asked. “The words are Baudelaire's, but the sense of them is yours-the sense within you.”

I am slow in reading foreign tongues, having some understanding of French and but a smattering of Spanish. I sniffed at the words as a hound does in picking up its quarry. I followed them at a lope and trod across the riverbeds of dots.

“Oui, je comprends, Papa,” I said at last.

Perhaps he felt I had not and felt sorry for me and so translated slowly and aloud: “Man's vices contain the proof of his inclination towards the infinite. In my view, this depravation of the sense of the infinite contains the reason for his culpable excesses.” So having translated, father murmured to me that I might perhaps then write and left me.

Half an hour later when he returned to my room the paper lay blank still for my mind had turned about and about and yet I could find nothing to say. Indeed it was as if my head were inhabited by thousands of tiny beings all reaching their hands towards me and imploring me to remember their names, yet such was the clamour that I could hear none. I trembled that father would pick the paper up and turn it over in trust of finding some esoteric phrase beneath, yet he but lifted it, gazed long at it, and returned it precisely to its place.

“In this emptiness, this pool of white, this sheet unmarked by hand or pen, you have expressed yourself better, Laura, than Baudelaire, for he was forced to words, the production of symbols, a conglomeration of letters wherewith to form words, the pinings of thought and the pinings of expression.”

“You wished me, though, to write, father.” I rose and leaned to him, sought solace in his comforting.

“You have written in your mind, have you not? As if upon glass, as though upon the wind. In silence all things suffice and flourish.” Then, laying his mouth upon my own in a certain way that he sometimes did so that our breaths flowed together but without pressure of our lips, I remained thus for a small eternity, inhaling his being and he mine, though the two met and converged and were somewhere without, perhaps in a rustling of the curtains or the waiting of a bee's sting.

“I shall write something for you. Would you prefer that?” The unknown thus asks. His beard and moustache have a feminine neatness.

As is my custom often, I answer not, but step beyond within the room that is at once a room and a wide passageway. Thus finding the path to the desk left clear, he seats himself and writes in scratch-scratch fashion on the waiting sheet.

I do not look. It is better not to look. The irritant, tingling expectations of surprise are ever there. He concludes quickly, would have me bend over him to see, but I wait upright for the paper to be handed to me. It is in Italian-a language I do not comprehend: my attempting to excuse myself by saying that the leather stung, she had laughed and asked, “How else would you have been brought to it? It is not always needful, my dear, now that you have been led to fulfilment. You may offer yourself freely of occasion. Look to your postures and the tightness of your garters. Straddle your legs, thrust ever boldly out. So will you come to pride and not to downfall. Receive in silence unless you are bidden to speak.”

A tinkling of cups and saucers, indrawing of breaths. The husband, if such he is, has seated himself with a tentativeness given to those who know not whether to stay or leave. Upon a pianola stand several portraits rudely framed in wood. The likenesses are of none known to me. One frame lies facedown as if placed so by design, for it does not have a tottered look but has a waiting to be lifted, raised, revealed.

It irritates, as might a broken flower set in a vase of blooms immaculate. Measuring my movements, I rise and move between their chairs to raise and turn the frame about. It is larger than the rest-a silverpoint. Its lines are delicate and finely etched, producing shades of grey and gloom and light. Beside a woodland ride a girl kneels on a bed of leaves, her hands placed forward in a doglike pose, her skirts upraised and bottom pale revealed. I mark the bulbing of her breasts, the angled placing of her hands, the lack of strain within her arms, the passive waiting of her attitude.

Beside her on the hoof-marked path another, older, sits upon a stallion whose penis stems down longer than my arm. Her hair is tumbled and she wears but a chemise too short to sit upon her stocking tops, as if from bed at daybreak drawn, there led, and there ordained to wait. Bereft in turn of drawers, her bottom perches on the saddle's rim as might an apple on a plate. Set with the stallion's quarters to one's view, she gazes far along the narrowing ride. Its gloom and emptiness presage yet a coming. Her eyes hold an anxiety that I fain would soothe.

The woman rises. Her hand rests light but questing on my shoulder.

“Have you been ridden? Ridden in your riding?”

“There are pleasures and displeasures.” I turn my eyes to hers. Her eyes do not hurt as some eyes hurt, yet there are no threads between us, or I catch at none. “I will purchase it.” I clutch it tighter as though it might be snatched from me-as might a child who steals her sister's doll.

“There is no need. No need to purchase. There are ever others. Do you collect such? We have more upstairs?”

The door invites my leaving. I would that she had not spoken of others.

“There is wine upstairs. You may see more etchings there. Come. Come in your coming, come.”

“They will be wrapped. Wrapped for me?”

It is not what I mean to say at all.