Of course, though she does not know it, it is she who must be plump— she who will learn, in time, to sleep, to wake, to dress, to walk, to a pattern, to signals and bells.
She thinks she humours me. She thinks she pities me! She learns the ways of the house, not understanding that the habits and the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or like calf ... I have grown
used to thinking of myself as a sort of book. Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unread-ing eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh— Ain't you pale!' she says— but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.
I oughtn't to do it. I cannot help it. I am too compelled by her idea— her idea of me as a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare. No nightmares come, while she sleeps at my side; and so, I find ways to bring her to my bed, a second night and a third.— At last she comes, routinely. I think her wary, at first; but it is only the canopy and drapes that trouble her: she stands each time with a lifted candle, peering into the folds of cloth. 'Don't you think,' she says, 'of the moths and spiders that might be up there, miss, and waiting to drop?' She seizes a post, and shakes it; a single beetle falls, in a shower of dust.
Once grown used to that, however, she lies easily enough; and from the neat and comfortable way she holds her limbs, I think that she must be used to sleeping with someone; and wonder who.
'Do you have sisters, Sue?' I ask her once, perhaps a week after she has come. We are walking by the river.
'No, miss.'
'Brothers?'
'Not as I know of,' she says.
'And so you grew up— like me— quite alone?'
'Well, miss, not what you would call, alone . . . Say, with cousins all about.'
'Cousins. You mean, your aunt's children?'
'My aunt?' She looks blank.
'Your aunt, Mr Rivers's nurse.'
'Oh!' She blinks. 'Yes, miss. To be sure . . .'
She turns away, and her look grows vague. She is thinking of her home. I try to imagine it; and cannot. I try to imagine her cousins: rough boys and girls, sharp-faced like her, sharp-tongued, sharp- fingered— Her fingers are blunt, however; though her tongue— for sometimes, when putting the pins to my hair, or frowning over slithering laces, she shows it— her tongue has a point. I watch her sigh.
'Never mind,' I say— like any kindly mistress with an unhappy maid. 'Look, here is a barge. You may send your wishes with it. We shall both send wishes, to London.' To London, I think again, more darkly. Richard is there. I will be there, a month from 160
now. I say, 'The Thames will take them, even if the boat does not.'
She looks, however, not at the barge, but at me.
'The Thames?' she says. *
'The river,' I answer. 'This river, here.'
'This trifling bit of water, the Thames? Oh, no, miss.' She laughs, uncertainly. 'How can that be? The Thames is very wide'— she holds her hands far apart— 'and this is narrow. Do you see?'
I say, after a moment, that I have always supposed that rivers grow wider as they flow.
She shakes her head.
'This trifling bit of water?' she says again. 'Why, the water we have from our taps, at home, has more life to it than this.— There, miss! Look, there.' The barge has passed us. Its stern is marked in six- inch letters, ROTHERHITHE; but she is pointing, not to them, but to the wake of grease spreading out from the spluttering engine. 'See that?'
she says excitedly. 'That's how the Thames looks. That's how the Thames looks, every day of the year. Look at all those colours. A thousand colours ..."
She smiles. Smiling, she is almost handsome. Then the wake of grease grows thin, the water browns, her smile quite falls; and she looks like a thief again.
You must understand, I have determined to despise her. For how, otherwise, will I be able to do what I must do?— how else deceive and harm her? It is only that we are put so long together, in such seclusion. We are obliged to be intimate. And her notion of intimacy is not like Agnes's— not like Barbara's— not like any lady's maid's. She is too frank, too loose, too free. She yawns, she leans. She rubs at spots and grazes. She will sit picking over some old dry cut upon her knuckle, while I sew. Then, 'Got a pin, miss?' she will ask me; and when I give her a needle from my case she will spend ten minutes probing the skin of her hand with that. Then she will give the needle back to me.
But she will give it, taking care to keep the point from my soft fingers. 'Don't hurt yourself,' she will say— so simply, so kindly, I quite forget that she is only keeping me safe for Richard's sake. I think that she forgets it, too.
One day she takes my arm as we are walking. It is nothing to her; but I feel the shock of it, like a slap. Another time, after sitting, I complain that my feet are chilled: she kneels before me, unlaces my slippers, takes my feet in her hands and hold and chafes them— finally dips her head and carelessly breathes upon my toes. She begins to dress me as she pleases; makes little changes to my gowns, my hair, my rooms. She brings flowers: throws away the vases of curling leaves that have always stood on my drawing- room tables, and finds primroses in the hedges of my uncle's park to put in their place. 'Of course, you don't get the flowers that you get in London, in the country,' she says, as she sets them in the glass; 'but these are pretty enough, ain't they?'
She has Margaret bring extra coals for my fires, from Mr Way. Such a simple thing to do!— and yet no-one has thought to do it before, for my sake; even I have not thought to do it; and so I have gone cold, through seven winters. The heat makes the windows cloud. She likes to stand, then, and draw loops and hearts and spirals upon the glass.
One time she brings me back from my uncle's room and I find the luncheon-table 161
spread with playing-cards. My mother's cards, I suppose; for these are my mother's rooms, and filled with her things; and yet for a second it quite disconcerts me, to imagine my mother here— actually here— walking here, sitting here, setting out the coloured cards upon the cloth. My mother, unmarried, still sane— perhaps, idly leaning her cheek upon her knuckles— perhaps, sighing— and waiting, waiting . . .
I take up a card. It slides against my glove. But in Sue's hands, the deck is changed: she gathers and sorts it, shuffles and deals it, neatly and nimbly; and the golds and reds are vivid between her fingers, like so many jewels. She is astonished, of course, to learn I
cannot play; and at once makes me sit, so she may teach me. The games are things of chance and simple speculation, but she plays earnestly, almost greedily— tilting her head, narrowing her eye as she surveys her fan of cards. When I grow tired, she plays alone— or else, will stand the cards upon their ends and tilt their tips together, and from doing this many times will build a rising structure, a kind of pyramid of cards— always keeping back, for the top-most point, a king and a queen.
'Look here,' she says, when she has finished. 'Look here, miss. Do you see?' Then she will ease a card from the pyramid's foundation; and as the structure topples, she will laugh.
She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart— I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.
Finally I let her smooth a pointed tooth with a silver thimble.
'Let me look,' she says. She has seen me rubbing my cheek. 'Come to the light.'
I stand at the window, put back my head. Her hand is warm, her breath— with the yeast of beer upon it— warm also. She reaches, and feels about my gum.