Chapter Fourteen 1898 #3
‘Oh, but I couldn’t disagree more! I don’t think one should ever mistake silence for contentment, least of all from those who have been so long denied a voice they’ve likely forgotten how to speak.’
They argued back and forth without rancour until the dessert trolley arrived, and Toby was glad of the distraction.
Though never less than genial, Crudge was subdued, and Toby knew that he was the cause.
His disgust with himself was still churning, and got worse whenever he stopped talking.
So he talked and talked, and drank and drank – port after the wine, then brandy after that, so that by the time they were saying their goodnights the greater part of his mind was occupied with staying upright.
Bourton hailed a cab, and when Crudge offered his hand, Toby embraced him instead, because he was sorry, and ashamed.
You’re a coward, Toby Meriwether. The idea that he’d disappointed the old man was horrible.
Crudge patted his shoulders then gently disentangled himself, briefly holding Toby at arm’s length. His eyes were sad.
‘There now,’ he said. ‘Delightful to see you again, Toby, and to see you doing so well. I will look out for that pamphlet of yours! Do keep in touch. Here’s my card – I’ve a new pied-à-terre in Chelsea.’
Toby decided to walk home to sober himself up, and set off towards the river, where the reek of the mud was the final straw, and he threw up over the railings.
All that wonderful food, wasted. He tried to be tidy about it but managed to splatter his shoes; swiped at them with his handkerchief but couldn’t keep his balance, so gave up and wove onwards.
Trees, buildings and traffic all swam queasily around him.
The disgust came back even stronger. It made him angry.
Angry at Crudge, angry with himself for having asked about Theo, angry with Theo .
. . Theo, who was about to become a mother.
Theo, who had lost other babies before now.
How that must have saddened her – he registered the wound without feeling any pain.
Not yet. But he didn’t want to think about it, any more than he wanted to think of her with a babe in arms. Perhaps the proud husband standing by; slaps on the back from his chums; cigars all round.
The anger spread until dark blotches crowded his vision.
He’d meant to go home, but it turned out he was in Bedford Place.
Because he was angry with Cassandra too, lying up there with her disgusting husband – stinking of him between her legs, no doubt, when hours earlier she’d been his.
He knew she was only marking time with him.
When she got bored, she’d move on. Cast him off like a worn sock.
And how dare she – how dare she? There was only one word for a woman like that.
‘Trollop!’ he shouted, then regretted it at once. ‘Cassandra!’ he called instead. ‘Cassandra, come down!’
Was that what he wanted? Did he want her to choose him?
Take him in her beautiful arms and kiss him and stop him feeling so .
. . paltry? He didn’t know, but he shouted a few more times – ‘Please, Cassie!’ – staggered a bit, and grabbed a lamp-post for balance, until a window slid open and a head and shoulders appeared: Pridde, with his eyes bulging and his face lit a ghastly hue by the streetlight. Toby recoiled.
‘Who is that?’ Pridde bellowed. ‘Meriwether? You wretch!’
Toby had no idea how the man knew his name, but the fact that he did was faintly perturbing.
‘Mr Pridde! A good evening to you,’ he slurred. ‘I wonder if I might have a . . . quick . . . word with your wife?’
‘A word? I’ll give you a word! How dare you turn up here, whining and sniffing like a dog! The brazen, bare-faced cheek of it! I’ll teach you to make a spectacle on my doorstep, you worm!’
He ducked back inside and Toby thought he saw a brief struggle behind the drapes; he heard Cassandra’s voice, raised and beseeching. He laughed briefly, as a hindquarter of his brain advised him to move along.
‘I am a worm,’ he mumbled. ‘A worm on a hook.’
Cassandra appeared at the window, her hair hanging down in dark curtains. ‘Have you lost your mind?’ she hissed. ‘Go away! Go – he’ll kill you!’
‘But you’re so beautiful, Cassie . . .’
Seconds later, the front door was wrenched open and Pridde stormed out in his dressing gown, lips curled in a vulpine snarl.
He had a rifle in one hand, which he set against his shoulder and levelled at Toby.
That sensible corner of Toby’s mind sent a cold twinge down his spine to tell him he was in trouble, but it was far too late to make any kind of escape, so he laughed again, manically, swinging himself around to the other side of the lamp-post as a deafening retort split the air.
Arthur Ralph Seymour Anscombe had the most perfect face Theo had ever seen.
She could stare at it for hours at a time, while he slept or gazed about with his bleary indigo eyes.
Occasionally he frowned as though puzzled by something, but the nurse said it was most likely just wind.
The pearly finish of his eyelids, and miniature wisps of eyebrow; the deep-red pout of his lower lip; his crimson flush when he wailed, revealing his ridged, slippery gums.
Theo hadn’t wanted the nurse to stay on beyond the first week or so, but Ralph insisted she remain.
Arthur had got the hang of feeding very quickly.
He woke up several times a night and so did Theo – sometimes even before he started crying – so she got no more rest if he was along the hall in the nursery instead of beside her.
In the end, she took to keeping him in a basket on Ralph’s side of the mattress.
The nurse – who didn’t mind a bit – slept undisturbed in the nursery, and Ralph slept across the hall with scraps of gauze stuffed in his ears.
Theo’s arms soon felt empty without Arthur’s warm weight.
She loved the smell of him – sometimes sweet, sometimes feral.
He’d been conceived a full year after her last miscarriage, in the summer of ’96.
So early, that time, that there’d been no question of knowing whether it had been a boy or a girl.
No question of a name. Theo’s grief had been just the same, and it had not gone.
But her love for Arthur was its antidote, and made it more bearable.
For his part, Ralph seemed delighted with his son.
At first, in any case. He weighed him and measured him and kept a journal of his growth, and when he handled him it was with the intense circumspection of new fathers everywhere – in spite of his medical training.
He liked to watch as Theo rocked him to sleep, and if she looked up and caught his expression – tender, almost confused – he would rise and touch her face, and say something like: ‘My clever, clever girl.’
‘Perhaps he’ll be happier, now,’ Theo whispered to Audrey, when Ralph was out of the room.
Audrey’s reply was a weighted silence. She was smitten with the baby, and took every opportunity to cuddle him.
Ralph insisted that Arthur remain at home for the first three months of his life, and since the weather was glorious Theo took him into the garden every day, to lie on a blanket in the shade of an apple tree.
He was fascinated by the dappled light flickering through the leaves.
On those occasions, and in the still of the night while she fed him, Theo was perfectly content.
The feeling grew slowly after the terror of the pregnancy and birth – like seeds sown into barren ground.
But she didn’t know if or when she had ever felt as happy as she was in those moments.
Those times of unalloyed wonder were fleeting.
Tempering them were the five and a half years of her marriage to Ralph, and all the things she now understood about him.
That he did not like his judgement called into question, on any subject.
That his self-esteem was a fragile thing, to be nurtured at all costs, because when it was injured life could be unbearable.
That he cared deeply for his patients, but not entirely because they were people.
They represented a chance for medicine – for himself – to succeed.
Every injury, every illness, every tumour and case of sudden paralysis were skirmishes in his personal war against ignorance and death.
He worked himself hard, dosing himself with cocaine to stay awake for days at a time if necessary.
Then, when he came home with darting eyes and restless hands, he took Bayer’s heroin drops to relax.
The heroin was a new cure for toothache, menstrual cramps and hysteria.
Also for the easing of a troubled mind, so Ralph sometimes prescribed it for Theo as well.
If she was overwrought, and it caused her to disobey or to argue with him.
When he caught her writing to Timothy Crudge, or laughing with Audrey about something.
His nostrils always flared at the sight of them with their heads together, as though they could only be laughing at him.
‘Well? What’s the current conspiracy?’ he’d say, with a humourless smile.
Once he added later, in private: ‘You’re too tight with that dratted girl, Theo. It’s inappropriate.’
‘Ralph . . . Audrey is my friend—’
‘Well, she should not be! She is a servant in this house, and neither you nor she should forget it. Servants can be indiscreet if they are made too bold, and forget their station.’
‘But I trust Audrey with—’
‘Enough. Mind what I have said. If I believe she is getting above herself I will feel no compunction whatever in choosing a new maid for you, for my own peace of mind.’
Theo held her tongue.