Chapter 14 Clara
CHAPTER 14? CLARA
England
The docks of Southampton appeared as an industrial-style Monet painting, blurry and clouded by fog. Iron pilings and stumps of moorings reached above the concrete wharf. Ships and sailboats, tugboats, and the long needle of steamships filled the waterways. Feathered smoke rose from striped stacks. This was not how I’d imagined England, this workaday port shrouded and hidden beneath the gray.
“Mama?” Wynnie snuggled close as we stood at the railing. “This isn’t… very pretty?”
“No,” I said. “I’d have to say you’re right, but this is only the port. The city of London itself is a jewel. We’ll get there.”
We’d adjusted to the languid time spent at sea, where there was no rush to be anywhere because we were carried along in the womb of the ship’s steel hull, in the simplicity of days I hadn’t experienced since summers with Mother as a very young child, when it felt like the world was waiting for me.
Wynnie and I read books from the immense library. We ate in a dining room swathed in chintz and made small talk with the other passengers, who seemed to loll about in a happy stupor. We learned to play table tennis and shuffleboard, laughing at our ineptitude. We listened rapt to the orchestra at dinner and slept more than we ever did at home, the lullaby of the sea a sedative. Often we’d stand at the edge of the promenade while Wynnie stared at the churning waters, willing a whale to appear. We didn’t talk about what we might or might not find when we arrived in England, or the possibility of my mother being in London—it was as if we’d made a silent pact between us to each wonder alone about her.
The ship glided toward the dock, and Finneas stood by Wynnie’s side. If we had sailed a few more days at sea, I’d call him a friend.
A blue-and-white tugboat guided us to the docks. The ocean liner serenely eased its way in, and I wondered how a hulk of iron this large could glide like a ballerina into such a small space. Men hustled on the dock, grabbing ropes; sailors scuttled to and fro on the starboard deck where we stood, and then all went still.
We’d arrived.
“It’s a sure pea-souper,” Finneas said.
“A what?” I shivered in the cold and brittle air. My scarf and gloves didn’t seem a match for the wind. I had not expected this weather.
He ran his hands through the air. “It’s a combination of fog and smoke.”
“Why pea soup?” Wynnie asked, placing her mittened hands in her coat pockets, ducking her chin into her woolen scarf.
“You’ll see,” he said. “The air turns a bit green.”
“Green air?” Wynnie asked. “Yuck.”
“Yes, sometimes it is.”
The horn blared our arrival, and Finneas bid us goodbye with our promises to visit him if we made it to Cumbria. I knew we wouldn’t go, but it was lovely to think so.
After disembarking, finding our way to a taxi, and bundling our valises and cases into the trunk of the vehicle, we were soon on a train for the two-hour journey to London.
After the train ride, we caught another taxi and wound our ways through streets shrouded in fog—lanterns flickering, people bustling past buildings and towering pinnacles, a ribbon of a river to our left—and then we stopped in front of a row of townhomes. “You’re here, ma’am. Would you like me to help you with your bags?”
“That would be lovely,” I told him.
Dad had arranged for this rental flat, and now here we were, dragging our cases down a long hallway painted a dreary industrial brown. At least we were on the ground floor: number seventeen. I opened the door, and was I expecting something different from what I saw? I must have been, because I smiled with relief. It wasn’t my favorite trait, to be sure, but the way a space and place felt and looked, the welcoming feeling of it all or not, affected me in a way that could set me on edge if it was too dreary.
We stood in an open space with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked over a city so veiled that the streetlights pricked the fog like stars at midday. Car headlights and gas lanterns struggled.
“It’s like we’re inside a milk bottle,” Wynnie said, and ran in a circle around the room. “It’s perfect.”
It was perfect. A large, high-ceilinged room surrounded by light-oak paneled walls and worn hardwood floors. A crystal chandelier hung from the center, and cream-colored furniture filled the room—a couch and two chairs. A rectangular wooden coffee table and a console with a battered TV, antennae pointing east and west. I took my valise from our cabbie. “Your city looks like an impressionist painting right now.”
He laughed. “You know, it is rumored Monet came here to practice painting the light in fog.”
“I believe it.”
I dug into my purse and pulled out some shillings. “Thank you for helping us.”
He bowed out and the door clicked shut. Wynnie walked to the window. “Let’s unpack,” I said to her back. “And then away straight to Mr. Jameson’s place in St. James’s Square. I mapped it out and we’ll grab a taxi.”
“Are you nervous, Mama?” Wynnie asked without turning around.
“I am.” I went to stand beside her.
“Sometimes we don’t really want what we wish for.”
“Wynnie, where did you hear something like that?”
“ The Middle Place ,” she said.
“Ah.” I exhaled. “Yes.”