Sleep, Pale Sister Read online

  The rhythm of the verses was cruel, but poetry nevertheless, compelling as the pagan lilt of the skipping-songs I sang in the street all those years ago, in the days before I married Mr Chester:

  The higher we jump

  The higher they’ll grow.

  Around and around and around we go.

  Remembering the song I felt suddenly sick at heart at the terrible remoteness of that lost time when Mother was well, and Father alive and we used to read poems together in the library of our old house, before Cranbourn Alley; a time when going to church was an occasion to celebrate, to sing and be happy. My hands clenched abruptly as the sick feeling intensified, and I bit down on my lip to quell my faintness. William, sitting to my left, gave me his rueful grin, but I kept my face lowered; Mr Chester would not like me to smile in church. Over the minister’s head the sunlight illuminated St Sebastian, shot with arrows.

  The higher we jump…

  St Sebastian’s face was cool and passive, like Henry’s.

  Suddenly I was falling, pinwheeling my arms in panic, my mouth open in a great silent O of terror…but I was falling upwards, towards the high vault of the church ceiling, and I could see the gilt paint and the scrollwork and the cold gleam of St Sebastian’s eyes…As my fall slowed I looked dizzily on to the bowed heads of the congregation, my terror giving way to awe and euphoria. How could I be here? Had I died and left my body without realizing it? Was I dreaming? I skipped and danced in the air, whooping as I spun around the bald head of the minister like an angel on the head of a pin. No-one heard me.

  Testing my new-found ability, I swooped invisibly over the tide of dark heads, realizing as I did so that my vision and hearing were sharper than ever before, each detail a miracle of precision. I could actually see the minister’s words mounting heavenwards like smoke from a factory chimney. I could see the gloom of the congregation, occasionally broken by the clear beam of a child’s inattention; looking closely I found that somehow I could see right into people; I could see their essence like sunlight through stained-glass. Behind a mask of flesh, an old woman with a sour face and a sharp tongue blossomed with a spectral radiance; a child radiated simple joy; a young, dark-haired woman was a terrifying pit of blackness and death. What I saw in the dark-haired woman chilled me, and I sped upwards as fast as I could.

  From the vault I inspected my own discarded body; pale little face lost in the dark hollow of my bonnet, lips white, eyelids closed and blue as bruises. I was inclined to feel contempt at myself; such a thin little slip of a thing. Better to watch Mr Chester with his stern, handsome face, or William, his fair hair hanging over his eyes.

  ‘Marta!’

  The voice rang out across the chapel; I looked curiously, but the rest of the congregation failed to react.

  ‘Marta!’ The call was peremptory this time, but the minister did not halt once in his delivery. Only I heard. Looking down, I could see nothing but bowed heads and crossed hands.

  At the very back of the chapel stood a woman, her face tilted upwards at an attentive angle. I had time to glimpse a face, a wealth of brassy curls beneath a frivolous gold hat, then I heard someone call my name.

  ‘Effie!’ William had turned towards my lifeless body and, perceiving me to be in a deep faint, was engaged in untying my bonnet-strings. Disembodied, I watched him with some amusement as he fumbled for smelling-salts in my purse. Dear William! So clumsy and sincere. So unlike his brother.

  Henry stood up too, causing a ripple of interest to run down the line of people sitting in the pew, his mouth set in a harsh line. He said nothing, but lifted me into a standing position and, followed by William, began to propel me down the aisle. A few people stared after the group, but others simply smiled indulgently at each other and returned their attention to the sermon. In Mrs Chester’s condition, after all, fainting was hardly abnormal.

  The higher we jump…

  I suddenly felt unaccountably dizzy; meeting the eyes of poor arrow-shot St Sebastian again I became aware of a sick, spinning sensation in the pit of my stomach, something like falling. Around and around and around…

  I realized what was happening and fought it vainly.

  ‘I don’t want to go back!’ my mind protested. ‘Don’t want to…’

  In the instant I fell I dimly remembered meeting the eyes of the woman in the gold hat. I saw her lips moving, mouthing the unfamiliar name ‘Marta’…Then there was blackness.

  Henry’s face glowered over me as his hands moved to loosen the fastenings of my bodice and, as I drifted between dream and consciousness, I had time to appreciate the purity of the clear planes of his face, the straight brows and appraising eyes, his hair rather darker than that of his brother and cropped severely short. William was hovering uncertainly in the background. As he saw my eyes open he jumped forwards with the smelling-salts.

  ‘Effie? Are you—’

  Henry turned on him in a cold fury. ‘Don’t stand there like a fool!’ he snapped. ‘Go and call a hack. Hurry up!’ William went, with a last glance over his shoulder at me. ‘That boy thinks far too much of you,’ added Henry. ‘And he shows it…’ He broke off. ‘Can you stand now?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is it the child?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It did not occur to me to tell him about my strangeness in the church; I knew from experience how much my ‘fanciful notions’ annoyed him.

  I tried to climb into the carriage; for an instant nausea overwhelmed me again and I almost fell. Henry put his arm around me, hoisting me easily in and up; but glancing sideways at his tense profile I guessed his disgust, his fear. In that instant I half realized that he was afraid of me, sensed the depth of his turmoil, but the intuition faded almost before I could comprehend it as I felt myself swoon again.

  3

  She lost our child, of course. Nursed by laudanum, she was sleeping when it was taken away by the midwife and sewn into the sheet. I never asked to see my son. I waited to learn that my wife would make a complete recovery before leaving for my studio to paint. Our house was in Highgate and I had deliberately chosen to rent a studio some miles away. It gave me the feeling of isolation I needed when I was working and the light was very clean and cold, monastery light, so that my paintings, sparsely hung against the bare white walls, shone like trapped butterflies beneath the glass. Here I was High Priest, with Effie as my handmaiden, her sweet face glancing out from bright canvasses and pale pastels and thick folders of brown vellum; my soul’s Effie, untouched by the curse of our heat and our flesh. That night—not for the first time—I slept in the studio on the little bed she had used for My Sister’s Sleep and Sleeping Beauty and, with the crisp linen sheets cool against my fevered skin, I was able at last to feel content.

  I returned at ten o’clock the next morning, learning from the servants that the doctor had left in the early hours. Tabby Gaunt, our housekeeper, had kept watch over Effie for most of the night, dosing her with laudanum and warm water. She looked up as I came into the sickroom, laying down the shirt she had been hemming. She looked tired and red-eyed, but her smile was open as a child’s as she rose hastily to her feet, straightening her cap over her unruly grey hair.

  ‘Young lady’s sleeping now, Mr Chester, sir,’ she whispered. ‘The doctor says she’s a little weak, but it isn’t the fever, thank the Lord. A few days in bed, he said.’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you, Tabby. You may bring some chocolate for Mrs Chester.’

  I turned towards the bed in which Effie lay. Her pale hair was unbound, spilling over the coverlet and the pillows, and her hand was at her cheek as she slept, like that of a little girl. I found it difficult to believe that she was eighteen and had just been delivered of her first baby. In spite of myself, I shuddered at the thought. Remembering the look of her, the feel of her pregnant flesh under her clothes as I touched her made me feel unclean, uneasy. Better by far to see her like this, in bed, one thin arm flung over her eyes, the tiny curve of her breasts (the word troubled me ev
en in thought, and I dismissed it angrily) almost invisible in the rapid rise and fall of her nightdress.

  Sudden tenderness overwhelmed me and I reached to touch her hair, chastely.

  ‘Effie?’

  She made a little sound as she began to struggle towards wakefulness. Her scent reached me, a poignant scent of talcum and fever and chocolate, like her childhood. Her eyes opened, focused sharply on mine, and she sat up abruptly, guiltily, like a schoolboy caught daydreaming in class.

  ‘I…Mr Chester!’

  I smiled. ‘It’s all right, my dear. Don’t move. You’re still weak. Tabby will bring you a warm drink presently.’

  Effie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered. ‘About fainting…in church, you know.’

  ‘It’s all right. Just sit back and be quiet. Here, I’ll sit beside you and hold you. Isn’t that better?’ I moved on to the bed, pushing a pillow into the small of Effie’s back. As I slipped my arm around her shoulders, I saw her face relax into a little dreamy smile. Still half-asleep, she murmured:

  ‘That’s nice, that’s very nice. Just like before…like before we were married.’ I stiffened involuntarily and, as the implication of what she had said penetrated her feverish thoughts, she jerked in panic.

  ‘The baby! Is the baby all right?’

  In spite of myself I pulled away: I could not bear to think of it.

  ‘Please, Henry, tell me! Please, Henry!’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ I snapped, leaping to my feet, then, with an effort at self-control, I forced my voice back into gentleness. ‘Try to understand, Effie. The child was sick. It couldn’t have lived. It was too small.’

  Effie’s voice rose uncontrollably, a high, wordless wailing. I took her hands, half pleading, half scolding.

  ‘You were too young to have a child! It was all wrong. It was a mistake. It was—’

  ‘No-oooo!’

  ‘Stop that noise!’

  ‘Noo-oh-ooh-oooh!’

  ‘Stop it!’ I shook her by the shoulders, and she raised her hands instinctively to her face, eyes wild and cheeks marbled from crying. For a moment I found her tears deeply erotic, and I turned away, flushing angrily.

  ‘It’s for the best, Effie,’ I said more gently. ‘Now we can go back to what we used to be, my dear. Don’t cry, Effie. It’s just that you’re too delicate to bear a child, that’s all. You’re too young. Here.’ Reaching for the laudanum bottle and the glass, I poured six careful drops into the water. ‘Drink this to calm your nerves.’

  Patiently, I held the glass as Effie drank, clinging to my arm and gulping tears and medicine in equal quantities. Little by little I felt her body relax against mine until she was quite subdued.

  ‘That’s my good girl. Isn’t that better?’

  Effie nodded sleepily and turned her head towards the crook of my arm. As she drifted once more in my arms I was momentarily aware of a sudden scent of jasmine—real or imagined? The impression was too fleeting to tell.

  The Nine of Swords

  4

  I was ill for several weeks; the wintry weather hindered my convalescence, for I caught a chill which confined me to my bed for some time after the premature birth of my child. I remember faces coming and going over me, with fixed grimaces of sympathy, but my heart was frozen inside me and, although I wanted to thank them for their concern, I could find no meaning in words. Tabby, who had been with me in Cranbourn Alley since I was a little girl, nursed me and shook her head over me and fed me thin broth as I lay in bed; my little maid, Em, brushed my hair and dressed me in pretty lace nightdresses and gossiped about her family and sisters in distant Yorkshire; Edwin the gardener sometimes sent a handful of early crocuses or daffodils from his precious beds with a gruff assurance that ‘they’d bring a bit of colour to the young lady’s cheeks’. But, in spite of their kindness, I could not bring myself to stir from my lethargy. I would sit by the fire with a thick shawl around my shoulders, sometimes working at my needlepoint, but more often simply staring into the fire.

  William, who might have roused me, had returned to Oxford where a junior fellowship awaited him, torn between pleasure at this acknowledgement of his years of study, and unease at leaving me in so low a state.

  Henry was all solicitude: for nearly a month I was permitted no visitors—no-one was to be allowed to distress me, he said—and he did not go to his studio once. Instead, he worked at home, making dozens of sketches of me, but I, who had once been enchanted by his work, cared nothing for it now. Once, I had loved the way he drew me, always emphasizing my eyes and the purity of my features, but now his art left me indifferent and I wondered that I had ever thought him talented.

  The pictures sickened me, spread out like trophies over every available surface of wall in every room; and worst of all, in the bedroom, The Little Beggar Girl, painted when I was only thirteen, haunted me like the ghost of myself. A London slum, reproduced in minutest detail, from the sweat on the pavements to the ‘blacks’ drifting down from the muddy sky. A scrawny cat sits sniffing a dead bird in a gutter. Next to it sits a dying child, barefoot and clad only in a shift, her long hair touching the stones around her. Her broken begging-bowl lies on the street, and a stray shaft of light plays on her uplifted face. The frame, designed by the artist, bears a stanza from his poem of the same title:

  Thou Innocent, untouch’d by worldly care,

  Defil’d not by the fleshly taint of Love,

  Surrender now these mortal limbs so fair

  Yet feeble; clad in radiance soar above.

  Among the lowliest of all wert thou

  And yet, to thee the hosts of Heaven bow

  Their humble heads; as by th’ Almighty’s side,

  Enthron’d in ecstasy, thou art His bride.

  Once I had been filled with admiration for the Mr Chester who could write real verses with so little effort. I had borne no criticism of him, had wept with frustration at the unkind words of Mr Ruskin on the occasion of his first exhibition. I could still vaguely remember the time when I had worshipped him, treasured every word he wrote to me, every sketch he discarded. I remembered my awed gratitude when he had offered to pay for my tutors, the leap of joy in my heart as I overheard my mother and Henry as they spoke together in the library. Aunt May had mistrusted the idea of my marriage to a man so much older than I. But my mother had been blinded by the thought of all the opportunities Mr Chester could give her daughter—and I, I was blinded by Mr Chester himself. At seventeen I had married him.

  Married him!

  I dug furiously at my needlepoint, tent-stitch one, cross-stitch two, suddenly bloated with hate and fury. The embroidery was half finished, the design an invention of Henry’s in rich, glowing colours: the Sleeping Beauty on her couch, all twined round with climbing roses. Even in its unfinished state, the face of the sleeping girl looked like mine.

  Cross-stitch one, tent-stitch two…I stabbed at the needlework, making no effort to stitch now, simply digging at the fabric in mounting rage, tearing at the delicate stitchery, the gold thread. All unaware, I was crying aloud, without tears, a hoarse, primitive sound which, at any other time, would have terrified me.

  ‘Why, Miss Effie!’ It was Tabby’s voice, shocked into improper address.

  Jolted out of my furious trance, I started and looked up. Tabby’s plump, good-natured face was twisted with distress.

  ‘Oh, what have you done? Your poor hands…and all your pretty ’broidery, too. Oh, ma’am!’

  I looked down in surprise and saw my hands bleeding from a dozen stab wounds. A bloody handprint branded the needlework, obliterating half of the sleeping girl’s face. I surrendered the spoiled tapestry and tried to smile.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said mildly, ‘how clumsy of me.’ Then, as Tabby began to say something, tears springing to her eyes, ‘No, Tabby, I am quite well, thank you. I will go to wash my hands.’

  ‘But ma’am, you’ll take a drop of laudanum, surely! The doctor—’

 
‘Tabby, if you would be so kind as to put away my sewing-things? I will not be needing them again today.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ said Tabby woodenly, but she did not move to obey the order until she had watched me stumble vaguely out of the room, fumbling at the doorknob with my bloody hands like a murdering sleepwalker.

  I was poorly for almost two months before the doctor at last pronounced me fit enough to receive visitors. Not that I saw many people; Mother came once to talk about her toilettes and to reassure me that I still had plenty of time to start a family, and Aunt May came twice to sit quietly with me, discussing commonplaces with a gentleness very far from her usual style. Dear Aunt May! If only she had known how much I longed to talk to her, but I knew that once I opened the floodgates I would have to tell her everything—things I was not even prepared to admit to myself—so I remained silent, pretending that I was happy and that this cold, meticulous house was home. Not that Aunt May was deceived for a moment, but for my sake she tried to hide her dislike for Henry, conversing in stiff, brittle phrases, her back very straight against the chair.

  Henry liked her as little as she did him, sourly commenting that her visits always seemed to leave me looking exhausted. She made a tart rejoinder to that comment. Triumphantly, Henry suggested that she should perhaps refrain from frequenting the house until she learned a more genteel conversational style; he would not have his wife subjected to this kind of talk. Aunt May was drawn into unguarded utterances and left beneath a cloud of recriminations. From my window I watched her leave, very small and grey beneath the cold sky, and I knew that Henry had his wish. I was his alone, for ever.