The Falling Thread Read online

  1905

  February

  A fluted note from the whistle, white sparks where wheels clashed at the tracks, the headlamps cutting cones through fog which had fallen early that morning.

  Tabitha caught her reflection in the windows of the lower deck. She felt herself stoop, instinctively, then worried about her hat – the cabochons of coral, the black velvet roses. It had seemed the most sober. A perfectly matronly twenty-five, Eloise had joked at breakfast, barely glancing from the sketch pad open on her lap. But something in her sister’s teasing had stuck. At the last meeting Tabitha had felt overdressed. She had been moved by her hosts’ seriousness, their lack of, what was it? Artifice.

  She had been walking for some time now. Past the stream of trams with their ghostly adverts for Oxo and Ogden’s Cigarettes, the noisy drays covered in waterlogged tarpaulins, their tired-looking nags. She had navigated from memory, away from the windows of drapery and plucked fowls, to this calmer district of banks and municipal offices.

  She took three paces back and glanced round the corner. Even that looked different from this angle. She was lost, she realised. She would have to retrace her steps. If she could fail in something as simple as changing trams she wondered what else she might offer the world. She felt a sharp tap on her shoulder, then the blood rising in her cheeks.

  ‘Tabitha, what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Charles, you gave me such a fright. I might ask you the same.’

  He was wearing his felt homburg with its deep blue grosgrain band. A beaver cloth coat, the buttons done up.

  ‘Lunch.’

  He placed a hand, which held a lit cigar, on his stomach, pushing it out for emphasis.

  ‘A fatty lamb shank at the Clarendon, to be precise, with a lacemaker from the East Midlands.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He was looking for an investor to help revive his father’s business.’

  ‘Did he have any success?’

  ‘He brought some samples which I thought he handled rather carelessly.’

  Charles inspected Tabitha, as if her state of dress might betray her direction of travel.

  ‘Some business with the Ladies’ Committee, I suppose?’

  His attention was drawn to a man in morning dress with a very hard paunch, making his way towards an oyster bar a few yards from where they stood.

  ‘They want to start paying you a salary, number of hours you give to them.’

  He took a puff on his cigar, peering at Tabitha over the pool of blue smoke which struggled to assert itself against the fog.

  ‘What time did Eloise return last night?’

  ‘Around nine. She was at a concert.’

  ‘Or so she says.’

  He ran a hand through his beard. It lent him a martial aspect, the look of some prince connected through cousinhood to the late Queen, a minor character in a portrait by Fildes, or so Tabitha and Eloise liked to joke. He had become a little heavier too, this past year.

  ‘And who was that I saw you with last night?’ he asked. ‘The young woman at the gate. Shawl, clogs, skin like tinned beef, wild mass of hair. How shall I put this – somewhat distressed-looking?’

  ‘Oh, that was Miss Kiernan.’ Then, gauging she had not quite satisfied her brother’s curiosity, ‘Eileen Kiernan – she teaches singing at the municipal school. I very much doubt she was wearing clogs.’

  ‘First I find you roaming the city alone, now I discover you are learning to sing. What next? Conducting the Halle?’

  ‘I was returning a pamphlet she had loaned to me.’

  Charles pondered this for a moment, inspecting his cigar as if his next quip were written on it.

  ‘“Paris à la Nuit”? “Views of the Danube”? No, something more edifying, I expect.’ He tapped a block of ash onto the pavement.

  ‘“Five Nights as a Tramp”, whose author, should you care to know, was Anonymous, styling herself simply A Lady. It proffered some quite startling particulars.’

  Charles took another puff on his cigar, narrowing his eyes as if Tabitha were very far away and he was struggling to make her out.

  ‘How she had slipped inside one institution carrying only soap, a towel, stockings and a shawl. And while there had consumed tea mixed with plasmon.’

  ‘Sounds rather cosy.’

  ‘Not cosy at all. Not in the slightest,’ she said, resorting to the telegraphed style she hoped Charles would take as a cue to desist.

  ‘This business with the Ladies’ Committee, I suppose it means you won’t be home for supper?’

  ‘I’m afraid there is a small chance I may not.’

  Despite his teasing Tabitha felt she could not leave her brother looking troubled.

  ‘Though I shall try my best.’

  The look, perhaps Tabitha alone could read, lifted from her brother’s face.

  ‘Rotten fog, isn’t it?’

  ‘Awful.’

  ‘Which way are you going?’ Charles asked. ‘I’ll escort you.’

  *

  Georges Verstraeten is the man I love. Eloise scrawled the words in charcoal across her sketchbook. She tore out the sheet, folded it and tucked it into her apron. It felt thrilling to have the words out like that, to think they might be seen by someone here at the School of Art. She had been harbouring the urge to write it all morning, all through the antique drawing class she oversaw – a dozen young ladies squinting at a cracked amphora, rendering it in variously warped perspectives. The drawing studio was empty now, its huge skylights lending an alloyed sense of brightness and gloom to the space below.

  On a new page Eloise began to draw Georges from memory. The ridge of his nose. The set of his chin. That dimple – the dimplette. His face, not delicate enough to be conventionally handsome, emerged in just four or five lines. She wondered if she could draw him with her eyes closed. She thought she probably could. They had shared only a few conversations since he arrived in Manchester. She could recall each almost word for word. He had been distracted initially, unsure of her status at the institution, giving her a blunt smile, which did not quite fit his sensual mouth. The second time they had spoken she had asked him about the Académie Colarossi, where he studied under Courtois. He seemed surprised. In conversation with others she had gleaned little bits of information, his father, something in the regional government in Charleroi.

  A noise came from behind the glass display cases at the far end of the studio. Eloise turned, leaning to cover the pages of her sketchbook. It was Alexander Broady, one the school’s technicians, a thin, friendly boy, the son of a Methodist minister, with wavy red hair and a sharp jag of Adam’s apple. He had clay-coloured eyes, a peculiar pattern of freckling across the bridge of his nose and down his throat. His hands, which he washed more than anyone Eloise had ever met, were red and dry around the nailbeds. He was holding a cane, a prop from one of the drawing classes. Eloise shut her sketchbook with an unintentionally sharp clap.

  ‘He’s just back from the continent, you know.’ Alexander pulled up two chairs, sitting on one, setting his heels proprietorially on the other. ‘Special dispensation from Glazier. Have you ever been to Paris?’

  ‘Once, with my brother, three years ago.’

  ‘Yes, you look the type. Luxembourg, that’s as far as I’ve been. Must cost a bob or two, Paris. Lives in some style, I should imagine, our Monsieur Verstraeten.’

  Georges’ rooms had been very warm. The smell of cold tea and tobacco cut through with something sharply spiced, a cologne or a pomander at Christmas time. Behind it the vegetative smell of wet plaster. The rooms were on the top floor of a long terrace, a few minutes’ walk from the tram stop. They gave the sense he had lived there for a long time. Although this of course could not be the case, as he had only moved to the city less than a year ago. He had been out painting. A set of oilskins lay piled by the door.

  ‘This city has the strangest light,’ Georges said, moving a canvas across the room. ‘I am painting always at the limit of my … authority,’ he said as if he knew it were not quite the right word but was unwilling to waste any longer searching for a better one. ‘I think of all my peers I have the most difficult task, redeeming a little beauty from all of this.’

  He flicked his brow towards the window and shook his head.

  ‘This morning I spend an hour at Number 8 Dock where I watched them unload a cargo of Australian wool. For what?’

  He shrugged at the canvas, its mauves and blues, its patterns of weak light; there was a note of accusation in his voice, as if Eloise had been complicit in bringing him to the city. She felt a need to compensate, to offer him something towards that store of beauty he prized. But whatever that might be she felt he would reject it. There was nothing she could do and that made him more compelling, more abjectly present in her thoughts. She watched as Georges peeled an orange, breaking the dimpled skin with his thumb, then placing the segments, still covered in spongy pith, one by one into his mouth without offering her any.

  ‘It is time to feed the tortoise,’ he said morosely, as he finished his last mouthful of orange. He gestured to the squat black-funnelled stove. ‘But really, look.’

  On the stove a metal plaque read ‘The Tortoise’ and promised ‘Slow But Sure Combustion’.

  ‘Every day, I must feed this infernal tortoise so my rooms here are habitable.’

  He turned and fixed his gaze squarely on Eloise.

  ‘So today I will paint you, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stepped towards her, serious and powerfully close, she could smell old sweat on his skin, tobacco smoke. He reached over and undid the bow in her hair, pulled it until it came loose, then folded the length of damp silk and set it on the table.

  ‘Better.’

  He led Eloise to a chair by the window.

  ‘Here, sit.’

  The seat was thin, she could feel the frame against her buttocks. She watched as Georges hung an apron over his neck and fastened it tightly at the waist.

  ‘Now we begin, yes?’

  She did not know what to say. She folded her hands across her lap and nodded.

  ‘Good.’

  She had hoped there might be more of an exchange before he began. Some instruction or direction. But there was none. Through the window she could see a coal barge moving along the canal. The wide boat cutting a wake through the stilled water. Georges brought over an easel, a triangle of plane wood, bolted to a cross-beam. It looked handmade, homemade. The wood flecked with cobalt blues and turquoises, colours of a warm south, places of pines and sea breezes, and Eloise could not say if these traces brightened his room or made the place sadder by summoning what was absent.

  Behind a thin partition, the end of a brass bedstead was visible. On the sideboard some brown bottles, all empty. A primitive-looking sink containing both cups and unwashed painting apparatus; jars of clouded water. On the shelf above were bird skulls. Tiny, fragile things bleached very white. Their long beaks like little Venetian doctors’ masks.

  After an hour of concentrated work Georges paused, then lit a briar pipe, studying his sketch then Eloise. He was troubled by one; Eloise could not tell which. She had begun to feel faint, from the fumes of the strong tobacco and the heat off the Tortoise, which he had twice broken from working to feed.

  ‘I think we are perhaps finished for the day,’ Georges said, addressing the sketch.

  He glanced across to her and offered the perfunctory smile.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to sit.’ He dipped his chin like a spoiled child drilled in good manners then began working his thumb at the metal surround of the pipe bowl which had begun to lift away.

  ‘You perhaps will return, next week. I might continue?’

  Working on the pipe seemed to bring him more satisfaction than anything in the last hour.

  ‘I’m sure that can be arranged.’

  ‘Very well,’ George said, passing the folded ribbon back to her. It had dried out in the hour she had sat for him. It felt brittle, much lighter than when he had taken it from her hair.

  ‘Yes, he does, or perhaps he doesn’t. So hard to tell, isn’t it?’ Eloise said to Alexander Broady.

  ‘Will you be auditioning for our Easter show?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one,’ said Eloise.

  ‘Even Glazier gets involved. Last year I played Feste.’

  He waited as if expecting Eloise to compliment him.

  ‘I think his soul is in hell, madonna!’ he exclaimed, standing and kicking away the chair his feet had been resting on. ‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate! And call upon my soul within the house!’

  He reached for the cane and raised it as he declaimed.

  ‘I never did work out what a pia mater was, let alone a weak one.’

  A short man in a buff-coloured coat leaned around the door at the far end of the studio.

  ‘Coming,’ Alexander called out.

  He affected to trip, only to recover himself and swing the cane around in his hand.

  *

  ‘Well, I believe that concludes our business for this week,’ Cecil Ruislip said, removing his spectacles. He was a slight man, with a sparse, neatly trimmed moustache. He looked as if the hour’s conversation had exacted a great toll.

  ‘Tell me, Cecil, how’s your wife?’ Charles pictured a plump woman he had met once in the palm court of the Midland Hotel. Cecil Ruislip simply nodded, then began putting documents into his briefcase, each batch bound in a lurid pink ribbon.

  ‘Do you have plans for the weekend?’ Charles leaned back, determined for once to draw Cecil Ruislip into a less formal exchange. He glanced to the courtyard below, a barrow of raw cotton was being pulled across the wet cobbles.

  ‘We are taking an apartment in Lytham St Annes.’

  ‘The crescent is picturesque, I hear, and there’s the windmill, of course, not to mention … ’ Charles hesitated. ‘ … the donkeys.’

  Cecil Ruislip put on his spectacles. He shook his head. The machines on the floor below moved into a higher gear as he retrieved his bowler from the horns of the hatstand, then raised his briefcase in a sort of sad salute before exiting the room.

  *

  In the drawer was a letter that had been posted to the office a week ago. Charles touched it then covered it over with a photograph. It had been taken several years ago by a man named Iddon who travelled up to Windermere from Blackpool with his Sanderson Tropical ½ Plate. Seated at its centre was his late mother in her widow’s weeds. Her two newest dogs at her feet, a pair of quick-tempered Pekinese pugs, Kreuger and Chun. On her left stood Charles, head angled, squinting slightly; next to him, Tabitha, uncomfortable in her dress; beside her, Eloise. On the chairs to the right of his mother were Claude, in a sailor suit, and Hettie, hands pressed on her lap as if being punished for something. This then was the family. The souls he was bound to; the houses whose upkeep he oversaw; the mills, the various investments the solicitor Cecil Ruislip reported on each week, the inherited dogs. The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello,’ Charles said, holding the earpiece an inch from his head, listening to the shrunken voice inside. ‘Very good, well, send him up.’

  Charles stood, looking down into the courtyard as a trolley of finished bales was wheeled from the building and onto a waiting wagon.

  ‘McDonald,’ he said, gesturing to the chair Cecil Ruislip had recently vacated.

  McDonald, a former subaltern in the Black Watch, took care of the day-to-day running of the businesses. Charles had asked him to accompany him to Zurich last year. McDonald had dressed for winter, not the stifling May heat that pursued them across the continent. It had become a running joke, McDonald carrying his greatcoat from place to place. The Tonhalle, its glass chandeliers, high ceilings full of ornate plasterwork, was a strange context for Mr Macara, the President of the British Federation of Master Cotton Spinners, to deliver his paper on ‘Organisation’. Charles thought it a bewilderingly open-ended term. Onstage Macara was accompanied by a Bavarian and a Frenchman named Motte. Bon Motte, Charles christened him. ‘You know Brahms played here,’ Charles whispered to McDonald, greatcoat like a blanket across his lap. ‘I’ve no idea who you’re talking about, sir,’ McDonald replied. ‘One of those chaps up there on the stage, is he?’

  That afternoon Charles instructed McDonald to go on to the conference without him. He had wandered around Zurich, looking at the Haus Mercatorium and the Bahnhofstrasse. It had been too hot and he had begun to regret travelling all this way. It was in the lobby of the hotel he first saw her. She was standing beside a palm, holding a rolled-up parasol. She was talking to a porter in a vague, hesitant German which the porter was struggling to understand.

  ‘Might I be of some assistance?’

  The woman turned and looked at Charles.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m having a rather difficult time explaining where exactly I would like our luggage taken. There’s been some confusion, you see, over the rooms.’

  The uniformed porter, blond with blotchy, roseate skin, stared on blankly.

  ‘I’ve come from Paris, my husband is here speaking at the conference over at the Tonhalle.’

  She paused to make sure Charles was taking all this in.

  ‘I’ve looked at the rooms and they won’t do. Now I’ve spoken with the concierge, who as it happens has very good English, and he has arranged to have us moved to a suite with a more picturesque aspect. However, this young man seems to require word from the concierge before he is willing to move our cases.’

  Charles glanced to the trunks a few paces away, enough for a theatre troupe.

  ‘And to compound the situation,’ the woman continued, ‘said concierge is now nowhere to be seen.’

  She looked suddenly very tired and exasperated. There were two children standing by the trunks, a boy of seven or eight and a girl a year or so older.

  ‘I fear my German is only a little better,’ Charles said, ‘but let me see if I can’t intercede.’

  He turned and instructed the porter to take the trunks directly to the suite as the lady had requested, pausing only to ask the number of the room. The porter picked up the smaller cases and made his way to the stairs, at which point, the concierge arrived with a glaring look and a formal bow for the woman with the rolled-up parasol.