The Falling Thread Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Short stories

  The Burning Ground

  Poetry

  A Herring Famine

  In the Flesh

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 5, scene i

  To J&A

  CONTENTS

  1980

  August

  September

  December

  1905

  February

  April

  October

  1913

  July

  August

  November

  Acknowledgements

  The star shell burst, making clear the jagged shapes; scorched tree trunks, the ruined buildings along the Armentières—Wez Macquart road. There was a moment of quiet then the barrage started again, a Lewis gun stuttering further up the line.

  ‘For you, sir.’ The sergeant tossed the letter to him. ‘Should have been here last week but some hold-up with BAPO.’

  ‘Thanks, Maguire. This doesn’t seem to be lifting – you should find cover.’

  He pulled off his mitten with his teeth. He was shaking slightly. There was a rat crouched beside the sandbags on the flooded slats outside. It looked at him, blinking.

  Dear Lieut. Wright,

  Husband on leave from War Office so have come to Windermere. Your father showed us some photographs from camp and explained your squadron had been dismounted but others were stuck over in Ireland or making do with bicycles. We’ve sent a parcel we hope might be of use; shaving brush, razor, chocolate and some good (inexpensive) cigarettes. Aunt Eloise telegrammed to inform us …

  The blast sent a tin mug flying from the table as soil spilled from the boards of the dugout. He could feel the barrage moving closer. He stuffed the letter into his pocket.

  Last time Maguire had taken him by the shoulders and told him to count. If he got to a thousand he’d have made it.

  He shut his eyes beginning one, two, three …

  1890

  August

  He should have seen her by now. He had already idled over breakfast, the tails of his kippers hardening on his plate. He looked down at the newspaper, its report of Rhodes’s attack on Matabeleland. He imagined the piles of flyblown bodies festering in the sun, then glanced at how England might fare in the second test: big, druidic Grace still smarting from that golden duck. Yes, where was she?

  At the top of the house her bedroom door was open. On the dressing table a box covered in seashells, an upturned hairbrush. There was a faint indentation running the length of the bed. He closed his eyes and breathed the scent he recognised as hers. Nothing heavy or complex like the fragrances his mother wore with their base notes of opoponax and vanilla. This was similar to the smell that clings to cut lavender, a sour edge endowing it with something human. He leaned in just enough to decide the room was empty. Perhaps he would find her downstairs in the drawing room, at the piano. Of course, the piano.

  It was here, a month ago, he began to notice his sisters’ new governess, Miss Greenhalgh, bending to their questions; hands over theirs as she asked them to repeat a phrase. He might have recorded her species and genus, like the naturalist he believed himself to be. What would he have noted? Freckles – colour of honey or weak tea. Eyes – green with flecks of amber, disorderly, around the pupil. Lashes – thick across the upper lid, sparse on the lower. The smallish bosom. Age – twenty, twenty-two at most.

  Charles stood in a patch of sunlight by the piano, Jungennamen’s Exercises open on the rosewood stand. He tried to decipher a bar, humming as he scanned the room; Father’s ammonites lined along the mantelpiece, Mother’s music box with its blurry rendition of ‘The Blue Danube’. Miss Greenhalgh was not here. He would try the kitchen.

  Cook removed a lump of dough from the mixing bowl as she pushed the cat away with her shin. It staggered on the stone floor, letting out a dry, constricted miaow.

  She nodded at Charles as she began to work, pale wrists ploughing the yellowish dough. Besides her and the cat, the kitchen was empty.

  ‘Wish to go outside, do you, pussykin?’ Charles said. He opened the kitchen door and the cat poured itself through the gap.

  The garden was very bright after the kitchen. Charles stood waiting for the world to take shape: the high row of poplars, the wide lawn drained of colour for a moment then intensely present. He saw Miss Greenhalgh sitting at a folding wooden butler’s table. He inspected himself in the window. Acceptable, he thought. Perhaps the check of his trousers was a little loud, clearly bought at Pauldens and not in the capital. Still, his waistcoat was from London. Yes, he was acceptable.

  As he reached her table he felt the words come too quickly.

  ‘Miss Greenhalgh, shall we, I mean, well, would you care to take a stroll?’

  She looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  They walked along the gravel path beside the lawn, past the ageratum with its powder-blue flowers, the neatly tended nasturtiums. A bird was whipping a snail shell against the edge of the path, pecking at the glittering insides.

  ‘Turdus philomelos,’ Charles said, ‘the song thrush.’

  ‘We called them throstles.’ She paused, then said, ‘I suppose you know the name for everything, don’t you?’

  Charles felt a burning in his cheeks, his scrotum tightening faintly.

  ‘Mama gave me a book when I was young, offered me a small sum if I could learn a few. Animalia, Chordata, Aves. We have Linnaeus to thank … ’ He saw he was losing her. ‘But throstles is much better. Tell me, Miss Greenhalgh, have the girls shown you the wild garden?’

  She shook her head, then said, ‘Hettie, please.’

  At the far end of the lawn they paused beside an old glasshouse. The paint on the ironwork had begun to flake; grass flourished in the guttering.

  ‘Familiar?’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘Built to mirror the house. Well, that’s the story,’ he said, peering in at a bending column of flowerpots.

  ‘Wild garden’s this way.’

  Charles slid himself behind the back of the glasshouse.

  ‘Come through,’ he called out from the other side.

  The glasshouse gave on to a clearing: scrubby grass, a black circle from a bonfire, with a dense thicket running in a curve around it. There was a scythe and an old hand mower. Charles picked up a bamboo cane and began hacking at the weeds, tiny seed heads exploding. He felt the silence coagulate. Miss Greenhalgh stood a few yards away as if expecting to receive some formal instruction from him.

  ‘Well, you can say you’ve seen it now,’ he said eventually, setting down the bamboo cane and wiping his hands.

  They were back at the butler’s table in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘So why are you not with your family?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be travelling. To Engadine and the baths at St Moritz. But alas, I have been delayed.’ Charles exhaled theatrically. He talked about his growing frustration at the delay, and his travelling companion and school friend, Angus Bird.

  ‘And how long will you be with us for?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, that depends somewhat.’

  ‘Until they have mastered a sonata or two?’

  ‘Oh yes, at least that long I should think. Your mother sent word I’m to travel to join them in Windermere tomorrow.’

  ‘She has tired of the girls already,’ Charles said.

  Hettie smiled very softly.

  ‘Your sisters tell me you are studying at Cambridge.’

  He felt his carousel of anecdote engage: the oily vice master, the underfunded laboratories, the young lady over at Newnham who had obtained the top score in the Mathematical Tripos and the little swel
l of outrage and indignation this had caused.

  As Charles talked, his hand moved towards Hettie, thrown out to convey amusement at the story he was telling, until the tips of two fingers rested on the flesh below her thumb. A bee lurched from behind a spear of blue larkspur at the edge of the lawn. The pair watched as it zigzagged towards them, circling the table. Hettie narrowed her eyes, tried to shoo it, awkwardly, unnaturally, using only her free hand, the hand Charles was not touching.

  *

  In this light the scar looked even more livid, purple at its edges and puckered like the anus of a cat. Charles rebuked himself for the comparison. But he was certain that it was connected to, indeed the cause of, the new maid’s slurred speech. He had read a treatise on oral deformities and tried to recall the detail.

  ‘Thank you,’ Charles said, rising from the chair to take the letter. Susannah, he thought, he must remember to use her name. ‘Thank you, Susannah,’ he said with an emphasis that made her pause. Then she nodded, the glossy knot of her lip twitching. At Cambridge he had observed an electrical current pass through the leg of a frog on a dissection table; it came back to him now.

  Charles tore open the envelope. As he unfolded the note certain words swam up at him. There had been silence for days from Bird; they had already missed their planned date of departure. Charles learned Bird was returning early to Cambridge, an unforeseen condition of the exhibition he had been awarded. There would be no trip to the baths at St Moritz. No walking in Engadine among the alpine flowers and undulating grassland they had sat in his rooms talking of earnestly all last term. The letter assured Charles their trip was not cancelled, merely postponed. Bird had written to the owner of the guest house, who had promised them lodgings, if they wished, at Easter. Bird would cover any expenses incurred in preparing for the trip. Charles knew this could not be true. How could it be when he had subsidised Angus all last term at the Kestrel Club after they were elected members?

  ‘We’ll be off now.’

  Charles looked up. Cook and Susannah were standing a few feet away.

  ‘The band,’ Cook said.

  He stared at them blankly.

  ‘The Thornhill Temperance.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said without any conviction.

  ‘Your mother said before she left … ’

  ‘Of course.’

  Cook was wearing her own clothes, a heavy plaid skirt, a white blouse, a faded blue silk bonnet. Charles had never seen her without her apron. She looked younger. Susannah stood beside her, dressed much the same as before save a tatty length of ribbon in her hair like something snagged in a hedgerow.

  ‘Well,’ Charles said, trying to think of words to fill the widening silence, ‘I hope they acquit themselves creditably.’

  So this was to be his summer. The society of Cook and Susannah; the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences for stimulation. Or a train to Windermere, conversations with his father about the new steam launch, pendulum rods, pitman arms; suppers with the neighbours; Knowles the gardener rackety and bent double calling to take the young master out to engage in some ritualised mammalian killing; his sisters, the unceasing Tabitha and Eloise, who had recently elected him Authority on Everything, their own encyclopedia to be consulted at all times, no matter too small. Remaining here in Manchester would mean the Hare or the Turk’s Head with Caraway – pompous after two years of employment – perhaps a fitful correspondence with Bird. He looked up from the armchair to see Hettie collecting her music from the stand by the piano. He felt desire sluice through him, imagining her soft body under that soufflé of petticoats. He lifted Bird’s letter to the light.

  ‘You have a letter.’

  He pretended not to have heard her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘A letter. You have one, I see.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said gravely.

  ‘From your friend Bird?’

  ‘Alas.’

  ‘And the news is not good?’

  ‘No.’ Charles paused. ‘But a letter from Bird,’ he said, displaying his indefatigable spirit, ‘is never without consolations, no matter how dire the news.’

  Charles had risen from the armchair and was leaning on the mantelpiece where he lit a cigarette. He felt the rich smoke settle him. He blew onto the match, tossing it into the hearth.

  ‘In my room there are other letters you are sure to find amusing. When Bird sets his mind to it,’ he said, taking one of his father’s ammonites and holding it to the light, ‘he can move his reader from tears to laughter as quickly as any stage comic.’

  He studied her expression through the delicate skein of blue smoke.

  ‘You may see also how his signature has changed over the course of our correspondence, it now takes up a quarter of any letter’s final page, a remarkable extravagance when his frugality in all other matters is considered.’

  He had built the trap and now he baited it.

  ‘Perhaps I might show you some later?’

  *

  The lugworms had been found dead on the beach a few yards from the colony, ten miles to the north-east of Cape May on the New Jersey Coast, having perchance left their burrow in the endeavour to reach the water. The essay built on work Charles had seen by Stimpson. These were the cigar-shaped polychaete he had been charged with bettering his understanding of by his tutor Piggot-Roche. Slurry brown with a delicate green sheen, the colour of something a newborn baby might expel.

  The afternoon had so far been spent working in his father’s study on his essay on ‘Arenicola cristata and their Allies: salinity, embryology, span of life’. When he began to tire Charles had sketched a lugworm in the margin of his notebook, and beside it the cigar the creature was said to resemble. He had looked down at the scribblings, placed a cross beside the lugworm and tick beside the cigar. ‘Piggot-Roche be damned,’ he said as if it were a formal leave-taking required of him.

  It was four when Hettie came to his room. The clocks around the house were striking their final chimes. She hesitated at the door. Charles was lying on his bed, sending rings of smoke towards the ceiling, the Proceedings of the Academy open on the floor. Hettie looked around the room; the walls were crowded with watercolours, above the fireplace a vase of white roses, their petals beginning to brown.

  ‘So these letters then.’

  ‘The letters, yes, of course.’

  ‘You have a great number of pictures.’

  Charles turned from the trunk at the foot of the bed.

  ‘By a friend. This one,’ he said, pointing, ‘is based on a work by Sargent. Fumée d’Ambre Gris.’

  He wished for a moment the other members of the Kestrel Club could see him. He set down his cigar, glad be rid of it, and wiped his hands on his trousers.

  ‘And beside it, there, is an etching of the Ponte Vecchio. Bird and I visited last summer.’ He removed the etching from the picture rail and sat with it on his lap.

  He made no mention of the anxiety of the trip, Angus’s sickness, the panic they felt as strangers in the foreign city. He gestured for Hettie to come and sit with him. She paused, for what seemed a long time, then approached, the door swinging shut behind her. He was aware of the heat of her body as their shoulders touched, the etching balanced on his lap, their faces reflected in the glass. Moments later they heard Cook and Susannah return, laughter from downstairs, Cook imitating a trumpet.

  He set his finger on the first window of the building that ran along the bridge.

  ‘Allow me to introduce you,’ he said, tapping the glass. ‘Here lives Signor … Contandio –’ his tongue tripped over the consonants – ‘a sad and solemn fellow if ever I met one, and here the widowed sisters Donata and Trisola, great beauties in their day, would you believe?’

  The sun made prominent the down on her cheek. He leaned over and kissed her. It was unlike the others. The girl in Florence who tasted of tobacco, who took him back to the room above a macelleria, a few thin and iridescent cuts of meat in the window. The woman he had
visited with Caraway last winter, hitching up her skirt until it revealed the lower half of her wide white body, the crimped circlet of marks across her belly, who laughed as he withdrew, standing in his shirt tails, his look of shock.

  He kissed her again, felt her tongue dart back in response. He began to undress her, hurriedly, greedily, his fingers at the curve of her shoulders, her bare arms. She pulled him in towards her as the room shrank and enclosed them. The leisurely contralto of a blackbird on its perch in the garden growing louder and louder until it seemed to fill the entire room.

  September

  The crane fly drifted upwards, weightlessly trailing its wire-fine legs. When it gained the maximum height possible, near the pelmet, it proceeded to cast itself against the glass, determined to pass off into the sky evident yet unreachable beyond. It seemed a strange remnant of the summer: the insect hatching late, now rushing to devour whatever was left for it of the world. Charles watched its efforts from the button-back bergère in his father’s study, a shawl wrapped around his shoulders. He had made the room his own, colonising the space in the weeks after Hettie left for Windermere. An apple core lay browning beside a saucer of raisins.

  He was behind this morning, and every time he felt he had arrived at something close to clarity the thought seemed to escape him. He blamed Caraway squarely for his predicament: the headache, the waves of nausea, the abject lack of progress with his reading. He imagined the look of reproach on Piggot-Roche’s face, the tut-tutting from that prim little mouth.

  Yesterday Caraway had greeted him outside his father’s offices; a shining terracotta building opposite the Ottoman Bank. Charles was late, having stopped to buy a newspaper. A man had shot himself during the morning service at St Paul’s. Caraway was leaning against the massive doors, studded with knuckles of iron. He had run to fat since school; a recently cultivated moustache lent him an air of calculated melancholy.

  He seized Charles’s elbow and ushered him inside, up the narrow staircase, its iron banister worn smooth. Charles let his hand skim along it as they ascended.