“Hey, you should put that in your book,” Mary said, with a smile of approval. Two couples St. John and I knew, the Comyns and the Nesbits, came over to say hello and get an eyeful. I introduced Mary to them as “a second cousin of St. John’s’,” which seemed to satisfy them, and they shook hands with her without any difficulty, though I was very worried that there would be. Mrs. Nesbit is the yelling kind, and alarming her in any way is a surefire route to notoriety. The Nesbits and the Comyns were as nosey as they could be in a few brief minutes, and Mary told them she’d just come out of finishing school in Boston. She was a fluent liar, and really warm with it, really personal. If I hadn’t seen her come to life before my very eyes I’d have believed her.
“You must come to dinner next week,” Mrs. Nesbit said, before they left the restaurant. And Mary said she’d absolutely adore to. I began to foresee a disgustingly sociable future, then tried to see the three of us out for the evening; Mary, St. John, and I, and that jarred me out of my speculation.
“Mary. . what was that about a book? What do you mean, my book?”
Mary poured us both more wine, fixed me with a suddenly keen gaze. “Aren’t you going to write one?”
I’d won a couple of prizes for essays and things at school, and a prize for a short story. But that was all so long ago. And it wasn’t hard to shine at that sort of thing at my school; no one really studied hard because it was so unnecessary when you were going to marry well. Even so, maybe I would try. It could well go the way of the watercolor paintings, and the clay pottery, and the botany. But there would be many lonely hours ahead for me, and I thought it would be good to give them purpose.
“Did you put something in my wine, Mary? I’m just wondering how I’m keeping my temper. You just swan in, take my husband with one hand and offer me a hobby with the other. . ”
Mary’s hand hovered over mine. “We’re going to be all right.” She flexed her fingers, closed her eyes ecstatically, and breathed in and out. It was embarrassing, and I told her to stop making herself conspicuous.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.
I had a lot of questions for her. Whether she and St. John could read each other’s thoughts, what her first memory was, things like that. The first thing she remembered was a shilling with King George of England’s head on it. It had been very well taken care of, polished and kept clean, and it shone in St. John’s dirty hand down where he crouched in the trench. He’d swapped something for it — she couldn’t remember what he’d swapped, but she knew he’d wanted the shilling because it was bright. She told me about the first job St. John took after the war. He’d been a bill collector, but he doesn’t say much about those times. It was fascinating listening to her.
“He was one of the best,” Mary said, wolfing steak down as if she’d heard there was going to be a shortage. “He hounded debtors door to door, plucking away the false names and new addresses they tried to hide behind. He developed a method. Firstly, he paid no visible attention to the poverty or misery of the people on his list. Secondly, once he caught up with them he’d only ever say one sentence, demanding what was owed. That was it, his method. He repeated that one sentence over and over without changing the formulation of it, until he was paid. You should have seen him, Mrs. Fox. He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he’d get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he’d just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts. His collection rate was outstanding. It doesn’t take much to horrify people who are already frightened.”
She frowned. “He was good at being a bill collector but it wasn’t good for him. For days at a time he hardly talked to anyone but me. And sometimes at the end of his workday he’d walk into walls and closed doors. He saw them up ahead but he just didn’t stop walking.”
I asked her about the first story he wrote, and she told me about the crummy boardinghouse he was living in back then, just a bed, a desk, a chair, and a few easels, which he placed open books on, to look at. Art monographs and cookbooks, poetry, a guide to etiquette, a dictionary, a Bible. He’d get back from work and walk from easel to easel, picking up fleeting impressions. Mary turned the pages for him. Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion — but in the MIND. Next: And what if excess of love / Bewildered them until they died? And: A woman is always consumed with jealousy over another woman’s beauty, and she loses all pleasure in what she has. . After that: Be careful that the cheese does not burn, and let it be equally melted. Then he’d spend the night bent over his notebook, writing in zigzags, his pace irregular.
She was very reluctant to answer my other questions, about the war, and I thought it must be because of terrible things he’d done, or because he’d been a coward. But she said it wasn’t that. “If I answered the questions you’re asking me,” she said, “you’d wish I hadn’t told you, because you wouldn’t know what to say. I think he worries that people sneer at him for coming back safe and sound, or think that he must have been taken captive and put to work tending enemy vegetable patches. But just trust me. Mr. Fox was decent in those times. He did what he could, and he was as decent and as brave as he could be.”
We changed the subject. Mary told me she had been doing some reading of her own. Hedda Gabler and The Three Musketeers, so far. “The women in these books are killers!” she said, her voice escalating with each word so that by the time she reached the last one the diners around us were looking around for the killers.
“Did you think they couldn’t be?” I told her about one of my favourite villainesses, a flame-haired woman named Lydia Gwilt, who died changing her ways.
“Of course she did,” Mary said, frowning. “This is worse than I thought. If you make the women wicked, then killing them off becomes a moral imperative.”
My first thought was, But they’re not real, and my second thought was, Under absolutely no circumstances can you say that; you’ll hurt her feelings. So I devised a title for the book I was going to write—Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters, and she cheered up at the assurance that everyone would survive.
She wanted to experience things; she had a list. She planned to attend a big band concert, and she planned to walk through a field of yellow rapeseed, and she planned to get an injection, and anything else I might recommend. She promised me she’d settle down soon, and I found myself telling her to take her time. Growing up, I was glad to be the only girl, with big brothers who teased me and acted with unerring instinct to keep the heartbreakers away from me. But it might have been nice to have had a little sister, and to have helped her out from time to time, with advice, and chaperoning, etc.
Mary said she was going to sleep in St. John’s lighthouse, on Cloud Island. I told her I wouldn’t hear of it, I wouldn’t sleep for thinking of her all alone in that weird old place. But she’d already stolen the keys from him, and she said she thought it was nice out there. She said she liked to look at the sea, that it made her sing. “The first time Charlotte Brontë saw the sea — she was about seventeen or eighteen, I think — she was utterly overcome. . ” she told me. She didn’t seem to notice she’d slipped into a British accent, and I didn’t point it out to her, I just listened. “. . After all those years on the moors. She’d imagined what the sea was like, over and over, of course — how could she not — but when she saw it, it was more than she’d imagined. Didn’t someone write that nothing’s greater than the imagination? I think that’s nonsense, don’t you?”