The Falling Thread Read online

  ‘We shan’t be long,’ Caraway promised, before talking with gravity about the new duties his father had recently given to him. They entered a high-ceilinged room with what looked like an altar table at one end where a dozen men were gathered. Charles assumed these must be the commercial travellers over whom Caraway now had responsibility. Above the table was a leaded glass dome that cast a harsh light on the men’s faces, some raw and blotched, others yellow and wan.

  ‘Here to collect their samples,’ Caraway explained.

  A parcel, the size of a hay bale, had been sliced open: a ragged gash down its front and from inside batches of napkins and cloths had been laid along the table.

  ‘My office is over there,’ Caraway said, ‘in the south transept, and Father’s is up there in the High Place. All alone in his apse and sacristy.’

  As Caraway approached the men their chatter diminished.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Caraway said after giving a short speech on the quality of the new goods, ‘I shall leave you to Mrs Ketley who will introduce the latest lines.’

  A woman in black, a mass of dry hair pinned above her head, stood, knotting and unknotting her hands as if they were pieces of a puzzle that would not mesh. Charles watched Caraway’s smile dissolve as he walked back towards him.

  ‘Apes to a man,’ Caraway whispered. In the stairway he paused, leaning his large frame against the cool of the green-and-white mosaic tiles. ‘Now, apes, trained apes, selling Father’s goods. There’s an idea I must raise with him.’

  The pair retreated to the Turk’s Head, a short walk from the office. The bar was crowded. At the far end was a macaw in a brass cage. It moved crabwise along its perch, rocking and dipping its head. Caraway pushed his way to the front of the bar, pulling Charles behind him.

  ‘Two pints of Empress,’ Caraway said. As the girl set down the glasses of porter, the colour of wet earth, he lit a cheroot, scrutinising the tip. He took a playbill from his pocket and smoothed it out across the bar. He ran a finger down the list of troupes performing that month.

  ‘They’ll be the end of me, Charlie,’ he said, glancing from the playbill, ‘but I just adore those jolies-petites and their fancy dancing.’

  Charles laughed half-heartedly.

  ‘Laugh, Charlie,’ he continued, ‘but I have it on good authority these girls are told to seek out Hewlett Caraway on arrival in Manchester.’

  The brass pumps caught his reflection, offering it back warped and in triplicate. When the girl looked over Caraway gave a wide grin.

  ‘Plate of mutton chops and a dozen oysters,’ he said emphatically.

  The Empress evened the mood of the two friends but by his fourth glass Caraway had grown maudlin.

  ‘So easily spoiled, Charlie, gifts each time I visit their lodgings. Best part of a pound just for a touch. Expensive business what with all the bonbons and trinketry. What Father would call a loss-making enterprise.’

  The head on Caraway’s Empress made Charles think of the scum that builds against an inlet or a harbour wall. He watched as Caraway sucked it away, wiping his lips then giving the tip of his nose a pinch.

  ‘Tell me, are you love-sick, Charlie, or simply lust-struck?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, while I’ve been busily trying to seduce cum oculis meis –’ he nodded to the barmaid – ‘you’re yet to return a single glance from her.’

  He hooked his arm around Charles’s neck and pulled him close.

  ‘Yes, I can smell it on you.’

  Charles pushed Caraway off and straightened his collar.

  ‘Some malmsey-nosed hedge-creeper.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Who is it this time, the gardener’s daughter? One of Mother’s maids?’ Caraway paused, reassessing the situation. ‘No, I have this wrong, don’t I?’

  He screwed up the playbill and tossed it at the barmaid’s feet.

  ‘She’s squatting in your head, this dollymop, and try as you may you cannot make her leave.’

  Charles hesitated and as soon as he did he knew it to be fatal. He looked at the caged macaw, the mechanical movement of its scarred and slate-blue beak.

  ‘For God’s sake, Caraway.’

  Caraway’s expression was beginning to slacken. He went to signal for more porter but Charles caught his arm.

  Yes, Hewlett Caraway was squarely to blame for Charles’s state this morning. He hoped he wasn’t coming down with something. He had worked too hard this summer not to return triumphant, better read than any of his peers, the apple of Piggot-Roche’s eye. He would steel himself – not sick, just the worse for all that porter. He pulled himself up in the bergère, breathing slowly. He heard the hansom come to a halt outside. The high sharp yapping of his mother’s dogs as they spilled from the cab, gravel flying from under their paws as they raced towards the front door. He could hear his sisters Eloise and Tabitha, their voices raised in shrill dispute:

  ‘That is not the case,’ Tabitha was saying. ‘That is simply not the case.’

  Could they really be back already? Had the weeks passed so quickly? He looked at the books from his college library, felt a pitiful sense of having failed to extract all that he needed.

  On the driveway his sisters ran to him, arms flung open, colliding with such force that Charles stumbled backwards. Hettie was gathering her things from inside the hansom she had travelled in with his sisters. She wore a grey three-cornered shawl that emphasised her paleness. She was carrying her music case. She walked past him and into the house.

  ‘Charles, have you been smoking?’ Tabitha asked, clinging to him, straining her neck as she leaned back from where she had taken a lungful of his coat.

  ‘Do you admire her shawl?’ Eloise asked, pointing towards Hettie. ‘We’ve been working on our own.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tabitha said, ‘with Berlin wool Mama sent for from Kendal.’

  At his mother’s instruction Cook laid on a large lunch: fish soup, from a French recipe, served in a big tureen and flavoured with cayenne and anchovy sauce; a plate of cold chicken, boiled eggs in a silver bowl, a salad of crinkly-leafed watercress, two freshly baked loaves. Eloise and Tabitha were taking turns telling stories from Windermere; about the steam launch; about the daughters of neighbours, and about the good match one of these daughters might some day make for Charles.

  ‘There is one young lady, Charles,’ Tabitha said. ‘Her engagement to the son of a farmer –’

  ‘No, that’s not true, he was –’

  ‘Do hush, Eloise – has been called off. She is twenty-six,’ Tabitha said, peeling the shell from a boiled egg, the shattered fragments clinging to the membrane; the air hung with sulphur.

  ‘An old bat with her nose always in a book we thought just perfect for you,’ said Eloise, stymieing her sister’s story as she reached across for another piece of cake.

  Charles’s mother set down a vase of flowers, cupping the heads until she was satisfied with how they fell. Dolly, the housemaid, came to the table to tell them Hettie was being sick.

  ‘Oh,’ Charles’s mother said as if she had just received terrible news. Then turned to Dolly more softly. ‘Send Susannah for Dr Calthorpe.’

  ‘Mama, must you call for Calthorpe? Give the poor man some peace. Remember when you had him over last for Father. I’m sure the poor girl’s malady will pass – calling the doctor seems extravagant given the circumstances.’

  *

  The undertaking had the air of a parlour game in which both participants had lost interest but continued to gratify their hosts. Dr Calthorpe had placed three chairs in the bay window, instructing Hettie to lie across the makeshift assemblage. Charles stood at the foot of the stairs, looking in through the part-open door, panic rising as the doctor placed his hand across Hettie’s abdomen, applying pressure in various positions as he looked out of the window. After the initial examination, Dr Calthorpe asked Dolly to bring him a bowl of boiled water. Eventually he emerged, wiping his hands
on a handkerchief, and suggested Charles and his parents join him in the dining room. Dr Calthorpe positioned himself at the head of the table. As he spoke he moved his hands as if dealing cards, as if the small party were seated for a game of canasta.

  ‘As I suspected,’ Dr Calthorpe said, ‘the girl is with child, although at a fairly early stage. Now, you will excuse my impertinence but I’ve spoken with her and she contends, having been with no others,’ he continued in his cloying, slipper-soft Edinburgh accent, ‘that young Charles here is the father.’ He glanced across the table at him. ‘Now, as I say, she is at a very early stage, so much might still go wrong.’

  Charles felt a prickling along his shins, his palms beginning to tingle. He imagined standing and bolting through the door. He felt he had it within his power to run for miles, until the river met the estuary, where his father had taken him when the plans for the Ship Canal were taking shape. He could swim until England was reduced to a line on the horizon. In the sea, sink to the bottom, his flesh picked apart by soft-mouthed creatures, as the tides moved above him.

  ‘Much might still go wrong,’ Dr Calthorpe repeated, lowering his head this time, tracing the outline of his face in the polished table with his thumb.

  His mother had grown pale. His father stood, offering his hand to Dr Calthorpe. When the three of them were alone, Charles’s father removed his pocket watch and set it on the table. His mother was working her thumbs inside a handkerchief. She toyed with it, then she pressed it with great force into her mouth.

  *

  ‘Has she been sick again?’ Tabitha asked.

  ‘Is she going to die?’ Eloise added gleefully.

  Charles’s sisters looked up at him with open, expectant faces. They were standing by the piano in matching day dresses. A stye was beginning to form on Eloise’s right eye, the pouch of skin tight and shining, lending her a drowsy, partially dazed look. Charles hushed the girls, batting the air with his hands. He steered them out of the drawing room into the hallway where he hoped Dolly or Susannah might find them and return them to their rooms. After Dr Calthorpe left, Charles’s mother and father had retreated: his mother to her bedroom, his father to his study. Charles had stood outside the study door listening to his father repeatedly clearing his throat.

  ‘Away with you,’ Charles said weakly to his sisters who were lingering in the hallway. He took a seat by the fire. His legs felt stiff, like a pair of wooden spoons. There was a book on the arm of the chair, his mother’s Waverley. He opened it on his lap, grateful to have a place to direct his attention. It had fallen open at the banquet scene. ‘The Baron ate like a famished soldier.’ Charles heard the words but they made no sense. He tried again,‘The Baron ate like a famished soldier,’ then a gap appeared, a numbness, no meaning.

  He saw Tabitha whispering to her sister, her hand pressed against Eloise’s cheek. A few seconds later Eloise was standing before him with the beginnings of a smile.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘it is only fair, Charles, that you tell us.’ She glanced to her sister, as she fought to contain her laughter. ‘Tabitha wants to know: is it you that has killed our new governess?’

  Eloise slapped her hand against her mouth, steadying herself on the armchair. Charles was suddenly on his feet. He slammed the book onto the floor, and struck the table with his flailing arm. A bowl of potpourri shattered as it hit the floor. The pages in the Waverley had come away from their binding. Eloise ran to Tabitha. Charles saw a look of bewilderment on their faces. He left the book where it had fallen by the shattered bowl, petals and barks releasing their fragrances. His sisters recoiled as he passed. Eloise sobbed. Tabitha held her, an arm around her back, glowering at Charles with all the spite she could muster.

  On reaching his bedroom he closed the door and locked it. He stood, eyes shut, fists at his side. He rocked back against the door, slammed his skull hard against it. It was after dark when Charles left his room. He walked to the kitchen and watched Cook plucking a hen. She brought a cleaver down across its neck, tossed its head into the mass of feathers in the basket below.

  ‘You’re welcome to take over,’ she said.

  The next day Charles was called to his father’s study. On the desk was a book on anatomy, torn from its wrapper. A line drawing of a foetus; soft limbs curled in on itself and, despite the elongated dome of the head, clearly visible as a human form. He did not invite Charles to sit.

  ‘We have never preached monasticism, nor even the strict avoidance of life’s spontaneous pleasures.’ His voice trailed off then and he seemed to lose his appetite for a sermon. ‘We have come to a decision.’ He looked down at the line drawing. ‘You accept that you are old enough to be accountable for your actions?’

  Charles nodded.

  ‘Then you will marry her. And go away for a year.’

  Charles tried not to betray any sign that the news affected him.

  ‘If we act with haste, the match might even be made public.’

  There were tears running down his father’s cheeks.

  *

  The doctor had tried to explain what was wrong. He was suggesting she be moved to a place where she could be better looked after. Hettie watched him as he spoke, his large head, the coating of dried skin on the shoulders of his jacket. Talking slowly as if to a child or an intelligent animal. It was his third visit in the space of a week. She nodded, then Mrs Wright said, ‘He means the infirmary.’ She felt another wave of nausea and bit down on her cheeks.

  Dolly helped her pack. It hadn’t taken very long.

  ‘I’ll take these down,’ Dolly said as if disappointed at how little she possessed.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  She looked around the room, the small window, the narrow bed. She felt light-headed and had to sit. Dolly came back and helped her downstairs. A cab was waiting. She wondered if someone might accompany her. But then who?

  She presented herself at the infirmary and waited for the doctor. He seemed altered here, less attentive. He led her along a ward to a place that was more like a stockroom or a large cupboard. ‘Someone will be along presently,’ he said. ‘There’s a receptacle should you need it.’ He gestured to an enamel kidney dish on the floor. She put her case down and lay, fully clothed, on the bed.

  She began to think about her father, the few times each year he took the cart track into the city. She had gone with him as a girl. From the moor she had seen the city for the first time, like the aftermath of some catastrophe; the massed chimneys, their low hanging smoke, the blues of the wet slate roofs. It was years before she left their village again. Setting off for school with her sisters each morning on the long walk. In summer the bog cotton, white heads trembling in the breeze. The schoolroom in the former piggery and the square piano with the broken cabinet and scuffed legs, donated by one of the reforming men.

  She knew as they gathered around the piano, the schoolmistress, the reforming men, that she was not as good as they willed her to be. Nonetheless at fifteen she had gone to Manchester to lodge with a musician at the Halle Orchestra, who had studied at the Vienna Conservatory. Her father signed a deed of release. She would keep house for a kitchen maid’s wage and a few hours’ tuition each week. They stuck to it for the first month, the musician impatient, distracted, once he gauged the limits of her ability. She feared she would be returned to the moor. Instead the musician offered her a Wahlurlaubstag, an afternoon every week ‘to spend as you please’, he said, looking up from the breakfast table.

  ‘If you are sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course, go.’

  *

  It was the year of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition. Everything imaginable manufactured, from ornate porcelains to the state umbrella of a West African king. She would pay a shilling every Thursday. So much of everything at the exhibition, so little back at the musician’s rooms. His life barely touched the place. He was away most of the week in London or touring. Very occasionally he would have guests, a Herr Vetter, a Herr Tenenbaum, a Mrs Smithem who
once came with a piece by Dvořák. He introduced her to them as his pupil. He might have said cook or housekeeper. He might have said kitchen maid. ‘A pupil,’ Mrs Smithem said, lightly clapping her fingertips. ‘You must have her play.’ And so she had, on the clicking, discoloured keys of the ancient Zumpe piano. Polite applause, then emphatic, guttural German, back and forth between the guests. Later an invitation to play for Mrs Smithem at her home, and, once she had proved herself pleasant and unobtrusive company, to come and instruct the Smithem children in some rudiments of the pianoforte. ‘You must be bored out of your wits,’ Mrs Smithem said, ‘alone in those rooms all week, it cannot be sanitary for a young lady.’

  First pupil, now lady. She was seventeen and felt like a commodity. It pleased her to be traded from household to household. She came with a provenance, a history that was irrevocably hers, the former pupil of a graduate of the Vienna Conservatory. How indelible it felt. Moving through the fashionable neighbourhoods, accruing renown at each address. Treated like a distant cousin by the families. She possessed these homes more intimately than their inhabitants.

  At the infirmary, they had given her a mug of watery cocoa and some wafer biscuits. Later a nurse had come and under the doctor’s instruction applied a liniment of morphia. There would be a purgative each morning, the doctor told her, and she would be restricted to her bed. ‘Think yourself lucky,’ he said, ‘I know of colleagues who until recently were applying leeches with a speculum.’ He let his gaze fall on her legs beneath the sheet, and briefly touched his top lip with his tongue. ‘The nurse here will be back in the morning to give your aperient.’

  The first night she had sensed the doctor at the foot of her bed. She had lain still, pretending to sleep. She felt his face close to hers, could smell eau de vie and the cardamom musk of his sweat. For a moment she was certain he was about to lean in and kiss her. In the morning, after administering the purgative, the nurse made a tent of her sheets with an outstretched arm. She felt the edge of the bedpan against her buttocks. ‘Up you get.’ She braced her hands against the bed frame, shoulders hunched. She felt clumsy and vulgar. The nurse pulled the bedpan from under her, glancing at the contents as she carried it from the room.