The following day, he came to the same place at the same time and she was already there. ‘Mr Armstrong,’ she began, ‘I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. You have finer words than me. Before I can say anything to you about what you said yesterday, there is something I must do. I will do it now, and when I have done it you might feel different about it all.’
He nodded.
She lowered her head, raised her fingers to her patch, and tugged it over the bridge of her nose until it covered her good eye and her other eye was revealed. Then she turned her right eye on him.
Armstrong examined Bessie’s eye. It seemed to quiver with a life of its own. The iris, off-centre, was the same blue as its twin on the surface, but contained undercurrents of darker shades beneath. The pupil, a familiar thing that one saw in every face, every day, was made strange in Bess’s face by its skew. Suddenly he was distracted from his staring by the realization that he was the one being examined. He felt himself dissected, naked under her gaze. Exposed to her focus, he suddenly remembered incidents of boyish shame. Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honourably than he would have wished. He remembered instances of ingratitude. He felt a pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again. He also felt relief that these small acts of neglect were all he had to regret in his life.
The moment did not last long. When she was done, Bessie lowered her head and readjusted the patch. She turned her everyday face back to him, and it was altered. There was surprise in it, and something else that warmed him and made his heart thrill. Her good eye softened, contained dawning affection, admiration even. It was the kind of sentiment that one day – could he bring himself to believe it? – might lead to love.
‘You are a good man, Mr Armstrong. I can tell. There is something you should know about me though.’ She spoke low and her voice was unsteady.
‘I know it.’
‘I don’t mean this.’ She indicated her patch.
‘Nor do I. Nor your limp either.’
She stared at him. ‘How do you know?’
‘The man works on my farm. I guessed.’
‘And you still wish to marry me?’
‘I do.’
‘But what if …?’
‘If there is a baby?’
She nodded, reddened and looked down in embarrassment.
‘Do not blush, Bess. No shame attaches to you in this. The shame lies on another’s shoulders. And if there is a child, then you and I will raise it and love it just as we will raise and love our own children.’
She lifted her face and met his steady gaze. ‘Then yes, Mr Armstrong. Yes, I will be your wife.’
They did not kiss and they did not touch. He simply asked her to let her father know that he would call on him later that day.
‘I will tell him.’
Armstrong visited Mr May and the marriage was agreed.
When the young man who had been troublesome at the farm and worse than troublesome to Bessie arrived at work the next morning with his usual swagger, Armstrong was waiting. He gave him the wages he was owed, and dismissed him. ‘If I ever hear of you within twelve miles of this place, it will be the worse for you,’ he told him, and his tone was so restrained that the young man looked up with astonishment to see whether he had heard right. But the look in Armstrong’s eye told him that every word was meant, and instead of the insolent answer he had in his mind to deliver, he was silent as he left, and his curses were under his breath.
The engagement was announced and the wedding followed soon after. People talked. They always do. The church was filled with the curious on the wedding day of the swarthy farmer and his deformed, pale bride. There was money there – oh, she had done well, in that respect – and with her blue eyes and blonde hair and trim figure he had, in that at least, done better than he could ever have expected. Yet the congratulations were tinged with the colour of pity and nobody envied the couple. There was a general feeling that it made sense for the two unmarriageables to have found each other, and every unmarried guest present felt a pang of relief: thank goodness they would not be obliged to make such devastating compromises in their own choices. Better a poor labourer than a landowner with a Negro mother; rather a rough laundry maid than a farmer’s daughter with a boss eye and a limp.
When Bessie’s stomach began to swell a few months after the marriage, it was a scandal. What kind of an infant would it be? A monster, surely. After children started calling out cruel names to Bessie in the street, she stopped going out beyond the extent of the farm. She waited her time nervously, but Armstrong talked soothingly to her. The sound of his voice comforted her, and when he placed his hands on her growing belly and said, ‘All will be well,’ she could not help but think it would.
The midwife who delivered the child went directly to her friends on leaving, and they passed the news rapidly to all others. What monster was it that had emerged from between the legs of boss-eyed Bessie, put there by her dark husband? Those who expected three eyes, woolly hair and shrivelled limbs were disappointed. The baby was normal. And not only that. ‘Beautiful!’ she rhapsodized. ‘Who’d have thought it? The loveliest baby I ever did see.’ And before long, the rest saw it too. Armstrong went on horseback here and there, and on his knee they all saw the child: light curls, a bonny complexion and a smile so charming you could not help but smile back.
‘Let us call him Robert,’ Armstrong said, ‘like me.’ And so he was christened, but because he was little they called him Robin, and as he grew they continued with Robin, for it was a way of telling father and son apart. And in time there were other children too, girls and boys, and all of them hale and happy. Some were dark and some less dark and some were almost fair, though none so fair as Robin.
Armstrong and Bessie were happy. They had made a happy family.
Photographing Amelia
TOWARDS THE BEGINNING of the last week of March came the day of the spring equinox. Light equalled dark; day and night were perfectly poised; even human affairs enjoyed a moment of balance. The river was high – it is the way of the river to be high at the equinoxes.
Vaughan woke first. It was late – they had slept through the birdsong, through the fading of the darkness – and light was waiting behind the curtains.
Next to him, Helena was still asleep, one arm flung above her head on the pillow. He kissed the tender flesh on the inside of her arm. Without opening her eyes, she smiled and shifted closer to his warmth. She was still naked from last night. These days they slipped from pleasure into sleep and from sleep into pleasure again. Under the bedclothes his hand found her ribcage, travelled the smooth curve to her waist, her hip. Her toes came to nudge his.
Afterwards, he said, ‘You go back to sleep for another hour if you want. I’ll give her breakfast.’ She nodded, smiling, and closed her eyes again. They were both capable now of sleeping lengthily, nine or ten hours at a stretch sometimes, making up for the years of insomnia. It was the child’s doing. She had mended their nights. She had mended their marriage too.
In the breakfast room, he and the child sat in companionable silence. When Helena was present she chatted constantly to the girl, but he did not attempt to talk to her or to gain her attention by any deliberate means. Instead he buttered her toast, spread the marmalade and sliced it into soldiers, while she watched, absorbed. She ate with concentration, in a self-contained reverie, until an over-generous blob of marmalade fell from the edge of the toast on to the tablecloth, and she glanced up to see whether he had seen it. Her eyes – which Helena called green and he called blue and that were gravely fathomless – met his, and he smiled at her, a small, kindly, undemanding smile. There came a slight, fleeting twitch of her mouth in return, and though it had happened a dozen times before, he still felt his heart lurch at it.