Chapter 16 #2
The lesson lasted two hours. My mother employed every technique she possessed.
She made me hold my breath until my eyes watered and then coached me through the transition from physical irritation to emotional display, teaching me to shape the involuntary welling of tears into the deliberate expression of grief.
She made me stare at a fixed point until my vision blurred and showed me how the blur could be mistaken for the unfocused gaze of someone overwhelmed by feeling.
She practised with me the physical mechanics of sobbing: the contraction of the diaphragm, the catch in the throat, the way the shoulders shake not from emotion but from the controlled expulsion of air.
She demonstrated each element separately and then combined them, and by the end of the two hours I could produce, on command, a sequence of tears, trembling, and audible distress that would, she assured me, convince any observer of the most profound and authentic sorrow.
She was right. I knew she was right because she was right about everything, or at least about everything that pertained to the management of other people's perceptions, and in the weeks that followed the lesson I tested my new skill with the kind of empirical rigour that would have pleased a scientist. I wept at the death of a neighbour's cat, a creature I had neither known nor cared about, and the neighbour, a stout woman named Mrs. Armitage, pressed my hand and told me I was a sensitive child and gave me a biscuit.
I produced tears during a school assembly when a younger girl was being chastised for some minor infraction, and the teacher, Miss Rigby, who had been about to assign me additional arithmetic as punishment for my own tardiness, relented and assigned me none.
I cried when the vicar came to tea and spoke about his recently deceased mother, and the vicar was so moved by my apparent empathy that he told my mother I was the most compassionate child in his parish.
My mother watched these experiments with the satisfaction of a craftsman observing the successful application of a newly learned technique.
She refined my performance over the following months and years, adding layers of complexity.
She taught me that tears were more effective when preceded by a period of visible restraint, the kind of restraint that suggests a desperate struggle against emotion, and that the struggle itself was more moving than the surrender.
She taught me that the lower lip must quiver before the eyes fill, not after, because the sequence implies that the emotion is overwhelming the body's defences in a specific and physiologically plausible order.
She taught me that the voice, when one finally speaks through tears, should be slightly hoarse and slightly breathless, as though the act of weeping has displaced the air from the lungs, and that the first words should be broken, fragmentary, incomplete, because a woman who has been weeping cannot yet form whole sentences.
By the time I was twelve, I could produce a performance of grief so convincing that it fooled physicians.
My mother tested this by having me weep during an appointment with Dr. Penrose, our family doctor, who examined me for nervous complaints and concluded that I was suffering from excessive sensibility and recommended a course of sea air and mild sedatives.
My mother accepted his recommendation with appropriate gratitude, declined the sedatives, and took me to the seaside, where I spent a week watching the waves and feeling nothing in particular about them.
It was during that week, walking on the shingle at Margate with the wind pulling at my hat and the grey Channel stretching away toward an invisible France, that my mother said something I have never forgotten, not because it was profound but because it was the most honest thing she ever said to me about the nature of what we were.
"You will never feel what other people feel," she said.
Her voice was flat, descriptive, stripped of the didactic authority she employed during lessons.
She was simply stating a fact, the way one states that the sky is blue or that water flows downhill.
"This is not a tragedy. This is not a deficiency.
It is a characteristic, like the colour of your eyes or the shape of your hands.
The world will tell you it is a defect, because the world is designed for people who feel, and people who feel are frightened by people who do not.
They will try to make you feel. They will use guilt and shame and the threat of ostracism, and they will tell you that something is wrong with you, that you are broken, that you need to be fixed.
You are not broken. You are different. And different, in a world of mediocrity, is power. "
She looked at me. The wind had blown her hair loose from its pins, and it streamed behind her like a banner, red-gold against the grey sky.
She was, at that moment, magnificent, in the way that predatory creatures are magnificent, beautiful and dangerous and utterly indifferent to the suffering of their prey.
"The trick, Cecilia, is not to feel. The trick is to make them believe that you do. Because when they believe you feel, they trust you. And when they trust you, you own them."
I was twelve years old. I understood her completely.
I understood her in a way that I have never understood anything since, because the lesson was not intellectual but visceral, written into my nervous system the way the fear of heights is written into the nervous system of someone who has fallen.
My mother was not teaching me to pretend.
She was teaching me to exist in the space between pretence and reality, the space where the performance is so perfect that the distinction ceases to matter.
And for twenty years, that space was sufficient.
I moved through the world with the confidence of someone who knows that every expression, every gesture, every word is a tool to be deployed or withheld according to the requirements of the moment.
I married three men, and I buried three men, and I mourned three men with performances of such virtuosity that I received letters of condolence from people who had never met me, who had read about my losses in the newspapers and been moved to pity by the sheer, evident authenticity of my grief.
And then Sebastian Aldric looked at me across a card table in St. James's, and I felt the machinery falter.
Not break. Cecilia Blackwood does not break.
But falter, the way a clock falters when the mechanism encounters a fragment of dust, a tiny intrusion in the works that does not stop the movement but introduces a hitch, a momentary irregularity that the trained ear can detect even when the untrained ear cannot.
I was thinking about this as I sat before my dressing table on the evening of the tenth of February, preparing for a dinner party at the home of Lord and Lady Harcourt.
Dorothea had laid out my clothes: a gown of deep plum silk, high-necked and long-sleeved, appropriate for a widow in the later stages of half-mourning.
The colour was calculated, as everything I wore was calculated.
Plum was dark enough to acknowledge loss but rich enough to suggest vitality, a balance that announced to the world that I was grieving but not prostrate, sorrowful but not destroyed.
It was the colour of a woman who had suffered and endured, and endurance, in the lexicon of Victorian womanhood, was the highest form of virtue.
I studied my reflection in the mirror as Dorothea pinned up my hair.
The mirror was a full-length glass in a gilded frame, positioned so that it caught the light from the gas lamps on either side of the dressing table, and it showed me what the world saw: a beautiful woman in her twenty-ninth year, with auburn hair arranged in an elaborate coil at the nape of her neck, grey eyes that reflected the lamplight with a depth that suggested wells of hidden feeling, a mouth that rested in a slight curve that could be read as either sadness or serenity depending on the observer's predisposition.
My skin was pale, unblemished, the skin of a woman who had never worried, never aged, never allowed the weather of experience to mark her face.
This was, of course, an illusion maintained by careful diet, regular exercise, and the application of cold cream each evening, but it was an illusion I had invested considerable effort in preserving, because beauty is power, and power is the only currency I recognise.
I practised a smile.
It was a small smile, the kind I employ when receiving compliments about the house or the garden, the kind that says thank you without committing to any deeper expression of pleasure.
The lips curved. The eyes softened. The chin tilted slightly, a fraction of an inch, just enough to suggest warmth without surrendering to it.
The smile was perfect. I had practised it ten thousand times, and each practice had refined it, stripped away the excess and left only the essential mechanism, the pure and efficient machinery of simulated pleasure.
I released the smile and watched my face return to its resting state. The transition was smooth, controlled, seamless. No residue. No lingering trace of expression to suggest that the smile had ever existed.