Poor woman.
Isadora looked at the Bishop. She tried to remember why she had married him and if they had both really been so different thirty years ago. She had wanted children, and it had not happened. He had been an honest young man with a good future ahead of him. He treated her with courtesy and respect. But what was it she had imagined she saw in him, his face, his hands that she should let him touch her, his speech that she was prepared to listen to him for the rest of her life? What were his dreams that she had wanted to share them?
If she had ever known, she had forgotten.
They were talking about politics now, rambling on and on, the strengths of this one, the weaknesses of that, how Home Rule for Ireland would be the beginning of the rot which would finally split the Empire, and with that stop the missionary effort to bring the light of Christian virtue to the rest of the world.
She looked around at them and wondered how many of the women were actually listening to the words. They were all dressed in full dinner gowns: puff-shouldered, tight-waisted, high-necked, as was the fashion. Surely at least some of them were staring at the white linen tablecloth, the plates, the cruet sets, the orderly bunches of glasshouse flowers, and seeing moonlight on breaking surf, tumultuous seas with white water racing in and curling under with a ceaseless roar, or the pale sands of some burning desert where horsemen moved black against the horizon, their robes billowing in the wind.
The plates were removed and a fresh course brought. She did not even look to see what it was.
How much of her life had she spent dreaming of somewhere else, even wishing she were there?
The Bishop had declined the course. He must have indigestion again, but it did not stop him from declaiming on the weaknesses, specifically the lack of religious faith, in the Liberal Party’s parliamentary candidate for Lambeth South. It seemed the unfortunate man’s wife met with his particular disfavor, although he admitted freely that so far as he was aware, he had never met her. But reports had it that she admired a most regrettable kind of person, some of those extraordinary Socialists who called themselves the Bloomsbury set, and had radical and absurd notions of reform.
“Isn’t Sidney Webb one of that group?” the archdeacon enquired with a twitch of distaste.
“Indeed he is, if not the leading member,” another man replied, hunching his shoulders a little. “He was the man who encouraged those wretched women to go on strike!”
“And the candidate for Lambeth South admires this?” the archdeacon’s wife asked incredulously. “But it is the beginning of civil disorder and complete chaos! He is inviting disaster.”
“Actually, I believe it was Mrs. Serracold who expressed the opinion,” the Bishop corrected. “But of course were he a man of substance and judgment he would not have permitted it.”
“Quite. Absolutely.” The archdeacon nodded with vigor.
Listening to them, seeing their faces, Isadora warmed to Mrs. Serracold instinctively, although she had never met her, either. If she had had a vote, she would have cast it for the woman’s husband, who apparently was standing for Lambeth South. It was no sillier reason than most men had for voting as they did. It was usually based upon whatever their fathers had done before them.
Now the Bishop was talking about the sanctity of women’s role as protectors of the home, keepers of a special place of peace and innocence where the men who fought the world’s battles could retreat to heal their souls and restore their minds, ready to rejoin the fray the following morning.
“You make us sound like a cross between a hot bath and a glass of warm milk,” she said into a moment’s silence while the archdeacon drew in his breath to answer.
The Bishop stared at her. “Excellently put, my dear,” he said. “Both cleansing and refreshing, a balm to the inner man and to the outer.”
How could he so misunderstand her? He had known her for more than a quarter of a century, and he thought she was agreeing with him! Did he not recognize sarcasm when he heard it? Or was he clever enough to turn it against her, disarm her by seeming to take it at face value?
She met his eyes across the table, almost hoping that he was mocking her. It would at least be a communication, an intelligence. But he was not. He looked back at her blankly, and turned to the archdeacon’s wife and began wittering on about memories of his blessed mother, who, as Isadora remembered her, had been actually quite fun, and certainly not the characterless creature he was painting with his words.
But how many people she knew tended not to see their parents as the rest of the world did, but rather as stereotypes of mother and father as they held them to be, good or bad? Perhaps she had not known her own parents so very well?
The women at the table said very little. It would be considered rude for them to speak across the men’s conversation, and they were not equipped to join in. They believed women to be good by nature—at least the best of them; the worst were at the very roots of damnation. There were not so many in between. But being good and knowing anything about goodness were not the same thing. It was for women to do it, and men to talk about it and, when necessary, to tell women how it should be done.
Since she was neither required nor permitted to contribute to the discussion, other than by a pleasant and interested expression, she allowed her mind to wander. Curious how many of her mental images involved faraway places, especially over the sea. She thought of the vast spaces of the ocean with a level horizon on every side, trying to imagine what it would feel like to have only a deck beneath your feet, constantly moving, the wind and sun on your face, to know that you must have in the tiny wholeness of that ship all that you needed to survive and to find your way across the trackless waste which could rise up in terrible storms to batter you, even to hold and crush you like a mighty hand. Or it could lie so still there was not enough breath across its face to fill your sails.
What lived beneath it? Beautiful things? Fearful things? Unimaginable things? And the only guidance was in the stars above, or of course the sun and a perfect clock, if you had the skill.
“. . . really have to speak to someone about it,” a woman in tan and tobacco-brown lace was saying. “We look to you, Bishop.”
“Of course, Mrs. Howarth.” He nodded sagely, touching his napkin to his lips. “Of course.”
Isadora averted her eyes. She did not want to be drawn into the conversation. Why didn’t they talk about the ocean? It was the ideal analogy of how alone each person is on the voyage of life, how you have to carry within you everything you need, and only by the understanding of the heavens could you ever know in which direction to steer.
Captain Cornwallis would have understood. Then she blushed at how easily his name had come to her mind, and with what a lurch of pleasure. She felt as if she were transparent. Had anyone else seen her face? Of course she and Cornwallis had never spoken of such things, not directly, but she knew he felt it more completely than any speech. He could say so much in a sentence or two, whereas these men around her were drowning the evening in words, and saying almost nothing.
The Bishop was still talking, and she looked at his complacent, unlistening face, and realized with a horror that rippled right through her, like insects crawling, that she actually disliked him. How long had she felt like that? Since meeting John Cornwallis, or before?
What had her whole life been, spent in the daily presence—she could not say company—of a man she did not even truly like, much less love? A duty? A discipline of the spirit? A waste?
What would it have been like if she could only have met Cornwallis thirty-one years ago?
She might not have loved him then, or he her. They had both been such different people, the lessons of time and loneliness unlearned. Anyway, it was pointless to think of it. No past can ever be undone.