The Falling Thread Read online

  *

  The infirmary’s stonework was coarsened with soot, there were narrow columns in its portico, porthole windows in the dome. Charles and his mother mounted the pavement behind a row of cabs. His mother was wearing a fox-fur stole, beads of moisture trapped between the russet hairs. The smell made Charles think of the badger sett he saw flushed as a boy. He had seen braces of pheasant hung above the range, had watched his mother as she wept at the burial of one her lapdogs, a black-eyed schipperke, which had taken itself to a corner of the garden to expire. But the badger was the first creature he watched die. He credited the event with attracting him to the study of the Natural Sciences. In truth, he only remembered his fear for the terriers as they shot down into the dark, and his disgust as the twitching, wheezing half-killed animal was hauled above ground.

  The cabmen were gathered in a circle, the burr of their accents from the north of the city. ‘It never, it never is,’ one of them was saying. They were discussing a patch on the horse of the front-most cab. A cabman, hatless, hair thinning at his pale crown, broke from the group and worked his thumb into the horse’s hindquarter as if the mange were a fleck of paint that could be rubbed away. In the distance beyond the cabmen Charles saw Dr Calthorpe.

  ‘Mama,’ Charles said, in the voice of his younger self, the voice he felt shamed into using. His mother called out ‘Calthorpe’, as if summoning one of her dogs. Her words lost in the clamour of the afternoon. She called again, her voice shrill, almost operatic. Charles felt a prickling heat across the tops of his ears. The cabmen stopped their conversation. Dr Calthorpe turned on his heels, raising a hand like an umpire signalling a bye. ‘We shall have him report now, I think,’ Charles’s mother said.

  They walked across the courtyard of the infirmary, past two porters standing by a handcart covered in a grubby tarpaulin, and a nurse showing another objects on her chatelaine. As they entered the infirmary Dr Calthorpe nodded to a colleague, then escorted Charles and his mother towards the Men’s Amputation Ward.

  ‘The most direct route, but also, I dare say, fairly educational.’

  Dr Calthorpe brought them to a halt at the head of the ward. There were curtains open at the tall windows. A low moaning broken by fits of coughing. In the closest bed was a man in his twenties; standing he must have been over six feet tall. His cheeks were sunken, his hair prematurely white in patches. He scratched at the space where his right arm should be. Dr Calthorpe raised a finger in admonishment and the man slumped back against the iron bedhead.

  ‘Osteomyelitis,’ Dr Calthorpe said. ‘A simple procedure. A pity that we could not save more of the limb.’

  In the next bed along was an older man. He was unshaven, the waterlines of his eyes ringed pink. Dr Calthorpe turned to Charles.

  ‘Both legs amputated above the knee,’ he said as if pointing out a common plant in a hothouse. ‘Fell into an unfenced mule. As you may have observed at your father’s factories,’ Dr Calthorpe said, ‘the mills are kept humid to preserve the cotton. Our friend is near deaf from the machines and he also, it saddens me to say, suffers from fairly advanced byssinosis. And now this.’ He gazed at the space where the man’s legs should be, gesturing for Charles and his mother to move closer. The stumps were bound tightly in bandages, under a small linen tent. He lay staring across at the empty bed next to him. Charles watched the stumps twitch. At the end of the ward a nurse began drawing the curtains shut with a brass hook on a long wooden pole.

  ‘They must sleep each afternoon,’ Dr Calthorpe said, ‘else they will never mend.’

  As they left, Charles glanced back. He saw the tall man with the missing arm lighting a cigarette, then another man, and then another, until a dozen glowing orange points of light filled the artificial darkness.

  The room was windowless, not quite the private quarters Dr Calthorpe had assured them would be most efficacious to Hettie’s recovery, those constant fits of vomiting, hyperemesis gravidarum, he called it. There was a wardrobe, a mirror above the bed and a faded four-panel Oriental screen, with geishas by a pagoda. Hettie lay with a sheet pulled up over her.

  ‘My own rooms,’ Dr Calthorpe said, ‘are very close by.’

  He looked down at Hettie.

  ‘We shall wake her now, I think.’

  *

  Dr Calthorpe withdrew, his head bowed. Charles’s mother lingered inspecting herself in the mirror, adjusting her stole with the air of a woman who has dropped in at a department store to idle away an hour before an engagement.

  ‘Mama, please.’

  She called after Dr Calthorpe who was talking with the nurses outside. Charles dragged a wicker chair towards the bed. There was a thick crocheted blanket across the foot, a metal kidney dish on the floor.

  ‘Dr Calthorpe is looking after you, I trust?’

  Hettie closed her eyes and nodded, pushing herself up against the pillows.

  ‘He says you must stay hydrated.’

  Charles reached for the jug of water. He filled the glass to the brim then sipped away the excess. ‘Here, drink some.’

  She lifted her head to meet the rim of the glass. There was muffled laughter from the nurses outside.

  ‘Dr Calthorpe was kind enough to give us a tour of one of the wards … The girls ask after you. They continue to practise.’

  Hettie suddenly covered her mouth. Charles picked up the kidney dish from the floor, but she shook her head.

  ‘Perhaps you would like me to tell you of our plans?’

  She did not respond.

  Charles reached for the glass of water. He noticed a small mark where Hettie’s mouth had touched it, imprinting the edge with the contours of her lower lip.

  *

  The porter Dr Calthorpe arranged to show them out moved with an awkward, sloping gait as if he had damaged some part of his pelvis. Charles wondered if the man had once been a patient at the infirmary, the venereal section or the fever ward or perhaps an unknown wing reserved for some special infirmity bred here in the city.

  Along the corridor gas lamps hissed, the shadows of their fixtures thrown onto the sticky-looking flaxseed-coloured cellulose. A girl in a wicker-backed wheelchair was pushed past. Her hair was cut around a broad oval face, spittle drying at the corners of her mouth. The nurse pushing her smiled at the porter then at Charles’s mother who ignored her. They had been in the infirmary too long. They needed air, fresh air; even the smoke-laced, mizzle-drenched Manchester air would feel cleansing.

  Eventually the corridor gave onto a vestibule, the ornate ceiling-rose badged with flower heads, grapes, two cherubs with distended stomachs. The porter turned and pointed towards double doors, panes of smoked glass stencilled with a Latin motto, rain darkening the words. Charles thought of the glass plates he was shown in his first term at Cambridge. Images of misshapen and hydrocephalic skulls. Bird and Charles straining to see as the tutor commented briefly on each. And later that term the cabinet cards they passed among each other with their pictures of babies whose concave heads with massive craters and dips, the names of the photographers in gaudy cursive. One contemporary kept an ape foetus in a jar of formaldehyde, the vaguely humanoid head, long tail, one arm across its eyes as if shielding itself from the horrors of the world.

  ‘Sir.’

  The porter bowed then lingered as if in hope of receiving some reward for guiding them through the infirmary. Charles walked past him and held the door open for his mother. The air was cool on his nose and lips. He listened to the reassuring clamour of the city, cartwheels, hoof fall, the yelling and screeching of the hawkers and match girls.

  ‘Mama,’ Charles said, ‘this way.’

  Charles’s mother insisted on leaving the window open. He watched the rain falling on her skirt. She unscrewed a perfume bottle and tipped it to her wrist. The scent filled the interior like smoke; small stones thrown by the horse’s hooves struck the underside of the cab.

  They passed a row of warehouses, their bricks ochre and mole and dark heather, blurring
at the window of the hansom. The cab was forced to halt outside the largest one. Vast as a cathedral, as an ocean liner, a facade better suited to a grand hotel in some imperial capital than this enormous showroom for textiles.

  As they moved off, to escape the smallness of the silent cab, the air hung with a pungency Charles felt as a pressure behind his eyes, he thought of the city, all the labour in its wards: the calico manufacturers, coopers, cotton spinners, the coal and coke merchants, the importers of ebonite and earthenware, men who sold gauge glass and German silver, makers of hinges and screws, dynamos, driving rope. The hosts of clerks and cashiers, wire workers, wood carvers, spinners of worsted yarn. All living now in this smoke-racked city, lives indivisible from their labour; scraping, cutting, scratching, hammering at their meagre or immodest livings, for it seemed only to allow the two.

  Workers were passing through the high iron hoop of the gates of a lamp-wick factory, spilling onto the pavement.

  The cab slowed as a handcart piled with firewood was hauled out of a side street. It inched ahead of them. The men pulling ignored the cabman’s shouts for them to move aside. Tired of idling behind the handcart the cabman turned down Aytoun Street where a line of boys dressed like medieval friars were being led along by their master from the music school.

  Charles watched as the city faded, the architecture dwindling in scale and ambition until the buildings receded to tightly packed rows, gable ends painted with advertisements in wide white letters: ales, hardware, properties for hire. Still his mother remained silent. As they passed the park it began to hail. He watched the pedestrians with their black umbrellas taking shelter in the bandstand.

  When the cab arrived at the house he offered his hand to his mother. Clutching the umbrella, his movements were awkward as he engineered her descent from the folding steps. He paid the driver then unlatched the gate, and his mother without looking at him said:

  ‘I spoke with Dr Calthorpe about the child.’ She paused. ‘No damage he could detect has been done.’

  When no response was forthcoming she sniffed then turned sharply, calling out to her dogs who came haring down the path towards her.

  December

  The trunk was almost full. Charles lowered the lid to test the remaining capacity. One of the ribs had splintered. He ran his fingers along it until they snagged on the broken wood. Had it been like that since Florence? He pictured himself and Bird in a heat-bleached piazza. He saw a shadow grow then recede out on the landing.

  ‘Hello, Tabitha,’

  ‘Charles,’ Tabitha said, stepping into the space her shadow had occupied, hands behind her back. ‘Mama tells me you are going away.’

  ‘For a short while.’

  As Tabitha breathed there was a soft whistling around her nostrils.

  ‘It’s not our fault, is it?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  She seemed relieved and gave the closed-lipped smile of the habitually praised.

  ‘I thought you might want something to read.’

  She handed Charles the Waverley, the pages inexpertly glued back to the spine. When she next spoke there was a brittleness to her voice.

  ‘We shall see you again, shan’t we?’

  ‘Of course, in no time at all.’

  Her face brightened.

  ‘Eloise was awfully worried we should not. I shall tell her right away.’

  *

  The dining room rose sharply, hung suspended for a moment, then righted itself to the sound of crockery colliding and the muttering of blue-suited stewards.

  ‘I’m informed work is the purpose of your journey?’ said Mrs Davenport.

  ‘I intend to take up a position at a cotton brokerage,’ said Charles.

  He dropped a fragment of bread into his soup and watched it soften and bloat among the strips of carrot and turnip. It was dark at sea, wisps of puce-coloured cloud around the horizon. As the next wave crashed across the bow there was a flash in the far distance, a tinkling and rattling of tableware and chandeliers. Mr Davenport halted a salt cellar with his hand. Age seemed to have claimed his face but left his thick mop of blond hair unaltered since boyhood.

  ‘Wright, I am sure you will have seen Swain Gifford’s illustrations in Picturesque America. I was one of the original subscribers to the Appleton Edition. Richmond is captured in every detail imaginable, right down to what they term the perpetual requiem of the James River. Is that not a lovely phrase, Mrs Wright?

  Hettie nodded and smiled at Mr Davenport. Another big wave slammed at the bow; a moment of uneasy silence followed, then gradually the sound of spoons against the china bowls and muted conversation returned to the saloon.

  ‘Mr Hunnicutt, may I ask what took you to England?’ Charles said, looking to their quieter neighbour, avoiding the Davenports. Hunnicutt ignored Charles and supped noisily at his soup, his napkin in a speckled fan across his shirtfront.

  ‘Six months?’ Mrs Davenport asked. ‘You have been married for six months at the least I should imagine?’

  She gave a weak smile, blinking her briefly narrowed eyes.

  ‘Which would make it a spring wedding. Mrs Wright, you must tell me all. I hear lilies are the fashion in England.’

  There were flowers on the altar, a host of candles, tapers honeying above the bleached wax. The priest wore a faded cassock. He spoke in a weary staccato, as if he had read the passages several times already that day.

  ‘Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes instituted by God.’

  The church door whined at its hinges, a bar of light wavering down the middle, until whoever was at the threshold changed their mind. Hettie held a posy of winter jasmine, hellebore, aconite, plaited at the stems. Above them, a stained-glass Christ on the Cross, light through which hit the strands of hair oiled flat across the priest’s scalp. On a pew at the front Charles’s mother and father sat a few inches apart like strangers in a station waiting room. The priest read Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Charles felt his hot breath against their faces. A bird broke across the highest part of the nave through a gap in the flashing and out into the winter sky.

  When the service was over the priest led Charles’s father outside. Charles followed a few paces behind. Hoar frost along the pavement, on the sills of the windows, on the brick slopes, tiny crystals in the names cut into the tombstones. At the side of the church the priest pointed out a fallen gargoyle.

  ‘Work of vandals or perhaps some imperfection in the stone. I suspect we shall never know.’ He nudged a fragment with his boot. Charles’s father looked up at the broken face.

  ‘I’ll send a contribution.’

  The priest bowed, then made off along the frost-covered pavement, his cassock billowing. Charles watched the choir being led into the church. The choirmaster held the door open, touching each child lightly on the head. A robin landed on the lychgate, ruffled its feathers and terracotta bib into a puffed ball, an inch of earthworm writhing in its tiny, seed-shaped beak.

  Mrs Davenport’s eyes, fiercely bright, moved from Hettie to Charles.

  ‘I must confess, I did wonder, did I not,’ Mrs Davenport said, looking over to her husband, ‘why it was you chose to travel now. It was my understanding that most Englishmen wanted their heirs born on native soil. Yours, it seems, may be a Yankee.’

  On hearing the word Yankee, Hunnicutt, linings of his loosely pouched eyes the colour of cut watermelon, looked up from his soup, the spoon poised at his lips.

  ‘Why did you choose to travel now, Mr Wright?’ Mrs Davenport asked, acid this time. Charles stood and draped his napkin across the back of his chair.

  ‘I hope you will excuse us, Mr Hunnicutt.’

  Hunnicutt nodded at his soup and gave a little grunt like a rooting sow.

  ‘Come,’ Charles said to Hettie who slowly got to her feet, one hand on the swell of her stomach.

  ‘I hope I ha
ve not given offence?’ said Mrs Davenport.

  ‘This ship is the offender here,’ Mr Davenport pronounced from under his mop of boy’s hair. ‘Wright is simply a little green about the gills.’ He pointed at Charles with the pepperpot. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, happened to me many times as a young man.’

  ‘Your husband is correct.’

  ‘He is very wise,’ Mrs Davenport replied.

  *

  ‘And you are certain it will reach him?’

  ‘Dolly says so.’

  ‘How does Dolly know?’

  ‘Oh, Tab. She just knows.’

  ‘She might give it to Mama?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Eloise said, enjoying for once being the better-informed sister.

  ‘When the post arrived I asked if there was any news from our brother and Dolly said no and then I said we should like to write him a letter and asked if she knew where we could reach him and Dolly said of course we do, Cook and I are in regular contact, your brother writes near daily, give the letter to us and we shall get it to him in no time at all, shan’t we, Cook? And Cook who was folding napkins at the table nodded. And then Dolly said mind it shall cost you, I’m afraid, then she looked over at Cook and Cook gave a sort of smile and Dolly said a shilling and then Cook pinched her lips and looked a little crossly as though Dolly were being unkind and said no, no, no, an ha’penny. And Dolly said yes, I mean an ha’penny. Then before I could say anything Mama walked in carrying that horrid new dog of hers, the fur on its belly all wet, feet scratching away, and asked me what on earth I was doing in the kitchen. When I turned round Dolly had vanished and Cook was on her way to the cold store. That’s when I came up here to find you.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure … ’ Tabitha said.

  ‘And I have some more news,’ Eloise said, rather grandly. ‘Mama says he’ll be home in a few months, and that we are to be aunts.’