After Alice Read online

  She almost dozes. The degrees of difference between sleep and wakeful alertness are multiple. The closed book makes a papery mouth upon her hand.

  Now her thoughts jostle, like blossoms in a vase, blossoms that someone has cupped with her palms, to refresh; but has gone away again. The same flowers, the same thoughts, in nearly but not exactly the same arrangement as before.

  Instead of that Elizabethan rigmarole, Lydia’s mind stutters toward her own mid-­Victorian world. She is dimly aware of invisible systems and enterprises that hold her and all whom she knows. Categories. She doesn’t name them for she isn’t an encyclopaedist: Indeed, if she turned her full attention to this sidelong thought, it would evaporate. But we can guess, we can glean.

  The dramatis personae, first. Her father is a failed scholar. Mr. Clowd is cerebral and uncertain, groping in a world of shattered statues. Armless blind maidens, unmanned kouroi. Lydia suspects he suffers the temptation toward Rome, as this year he has dragged his family through the broken arches of dissolved monasteries. Yet he is at the same time a distant friend of Darwin, through the Thomas Huxley connection—­Huxley an outlier cousin of some sort. Lydia’s father worries over the scandalous notion of natural selection with appalled fascination. In politics he claims no allegiance; he has become inured to Whig and Tory alike. Lately he’s been known to stay up all night in the kitchen and bake himself a pie. Mrs. Brummidge was no end of startled when she found him one morning over the Kitchener range, floured to the elbows.

  Lydia is old enough to picture her father dispassionately, or so she thinks. The pockety skin afore his ears, where he makes a hopeless attempt to trim his own sideburns. The spectacles always askew because, it seems, one ear is higher than the other. He is tall and scant of hair except on his chin and cheeks. From a distance he has the appearance of a walking cucumber that has gone deliquescent in the middle. He has always been cheerful to his daughters if distracted of late.

  Darling Mama within her own moments. In Lydia’s dozing mind we must allow only present tenses; there is no backstory in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs.

  So: airs and portents for Mama. Scandals implied and denied in a single gesture involving the shoulder and the wrist. Mesmerism. An obscure form of what in a few decades will come to be known as aestheticism, though Mama’s skirmishes toward beauty involve ecstatic poetry and plumes of drying marsh grass. She adores Lydia, is baffled by Alice, and never lets on that she is aware the neighbors call the girls the Iceblock Sisters, for the hydrocephalic proportions of their skulls. What are we learning? That this family is a family of courtesies, and secrets. But so is every family. The girls have overheard the titters, the muttered phrases meant to redden their ears. They’ve pretended to believe their mother hasn’t heard them, too. They walk on, Mama in front with her hands folded, her daughters tottering along behind with their heads, like under-­set puddings, wobbling as if they might tumble.

  And Alice, ah, Alice. But Alice is largely missing from Lydia’s thoughts.

  Lydia has begun to dream of other networks of thought. They interpenetrate and interrupt, like great angled dials of diaphanous webbing. Faith and its horrors. The furtive lore of sex. The quirkish worlds of Andersen and Hoffmann and the unexpurgated Chaucer. It might as well be Puck, and Nick Bottom, and Oberon and Titania, and Hermia and Lysander: coordinates superimposed one upon the other, in this netherworld of not-­quite-­dream-­not-­yet-­waking . . . until Lydia is hooked homeward by the sound of a hawking voice.

  “Miss Lydia, I beg your pardon. I am disturbing your studies.”

  She had let down her guard; she opened her eyes. She regretted it at once. Again, that dreadful governess from the Vicar’s house, cantering along the path. In accord to the laws of propriety as they pertain to servants, Lydia allowed a cool, cerebral, “Miss Armstrong.”

  Miss Armstrong had to catch her breath before replying. Lydia was already forgetting her daydreams. She was aware of the bright stamp of sunlight on the sky behind the trees. And Miss Armstrong a grotesquerie, a foreshortened ogress looming overhead.

  Lydia sat up, thinking: It is like a tree, is it not, this business of position. I am like a squirrel in a tall tree. I have no squirrel words for how high the tree is or how to name my particular perch, but I know my relative position precisely. It is a good deal lower than Pater’s, because he is the paterfamilias. Pater is lower than Darwin. Darwin in all his genius idiosyncrasy is nonetheless lower than the Queen. I am, however, on a higher branch than Miss Armstrong, despite her superior years. We both recognize that.

  “How lucky for me, you’re awake. Where might Alice be?” asked Miss Armstrong.

  Ah, Alice, thought Lydia. Now, of children and their whereabouts, it is harder to speak. “Good morning, Miss Armstrong.”

  Lydia’s courtesy was cutting. Miss Armstrong flushed. “You must forgive me. I have forgotten my manners. Good morning, Miss Lydia. You are keeping well, I trust?”

  “You’re looking for Alice?” asked Lydia. Rudeness to a servant from another household was unbecoming; Lydia had lost a little of her ranking. She made up for it. “You’re out of breath, Miss Armstrong. Would you care to pause for a moment?” How careful, that for a moment.

  “I mustn’t interfere with your meditations.” She opened her palm upon her waist in a casual way. “In actual fact, I wasn’t really looking for Alice.”

  “Very wise,” said Lydia. “Alice isn’t easy to pin down. She was here a few moments ago. We’ve been sent out of the house. Perhaps to escape contagion by blasphemy. Pater has several visitors, one of them a certain Mr. Darwin.” She looked up to see if Miss Armstrong registered the name of Mr. Darwin. Miss Armstrong didn’t seem to appreciate the outrageous prestige of such a visitor.

  “Actually, it is our Ada I require,” said Miss Armstrong. “The new lord of the family is fussing this morning, so Ada and I were to pay a call on your household and contribute a token of esteem. A jar of Mrs. Boyce’s Seville marmalade. Ada left the Vicarage before I had found my gloves.”

  Lydia yawned.

  “But Ada isn’t generally allowed to wander the riverbanks alone, what with her—­” Miss Armstrong looked into the hems of both gloves, as if the acceptable description of Ada’s monstrousness were stitched thereupon. “Her condition,” she concluded.

  “Ada is able to move about quite well on her own,” observed Lydia.

  “Or so she thinks,” said Miss Armstrong darkly. As if Ada were an amputee who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that walking was out of the question. “At any rate, I tiptoed past you here on my way to the Croft. Your cook said that Ada hadn’t been seen there today, so perhaps she’d met up with Alice on the riverbank. And Alice would be with you, she said. So I’ve returned to find Alice, and I hope Ada with her.”

  Lydia looked about theatrically. “Alice is missing. Generally.”

  “That is unkind. Ada has her struggles, and Alice has hers. And so do you and I.”

  Lydia didn’t want to be part of a compound subject conjoined with Miss Armstrong. “I don’t know where Alice is. She was kicking last year’s chestnuts into the water a while ago but has run off. It’s true that Ada came by as I was reading, but I didn’t see in which direction she headed. I’m sure the girls met up, and are larking about.”

  “Ada doesn’t lark. It’s not in her nature. And she hasn’t the strength.”

  “Well, then,” said Lydia, shrugging.

  CHAPTER 8

  Who first, upon sensing the backward rush of memory said to signal the moment of death, was able to telegraph this apprehension to the family gathered around? Maybe the original gentleman descended from ape said the equivalent of “falling out of tree” to his common-­law ape wife, and she interpreted his words as “just as he left for the dusty world beyond, his whole life passed before his eyes. Then he hit the ground.” After all, falling out of the tree is the first and t
he last thing we do.

  And what might death seem like for those prior to language? Infants, say. Or for those incapable of memory, the simple folk known as God’s beloveds? What can the final moments be like for humans who are now beyond both language and memory, like certain great-­aunts in bonnets that went out of fashion a half-­century ago?

  For Ada, who was only a decade old, the memories came as illustrations in books. She saw first a dense and beautifully crisp illustration from that collection of Doré’s engravings for The Inferno: specifically, Plate 10 from Canto III, Charon supervising the embarkation of sinners in a boat on a dark lake. Unlike Ada, the sinners were magnificent human specimens, swollen into adult sensuousness with citrus-­round breasts, if female, and mathematically beautiful abdomens and buttocks, if male. Without complaint the damned must have worn their iron spines in childhood, to die with such correct posture. Still, it wasn’t the divine bodies of sinners that Ada now recalled, but the netherworld itself. Beyond the slopes of scree, Doré had limned a black sky pasted across with blacker, underground clouds. The landscape looked like certain sections of Cumberland she’d seen once on a family mission of mercy to an ailing great-­aunt near Coniston. (“No rest for the Vicar’d,” her father had muttered.) But Ada couldn’t figure out Doré’s sky under the earth, a sky that wasn’t a heaven. It must be a holy mystery, to borrow a phrase from Cook. Or a damned mystery.

  Twisting deep within the Lake Amniosis into which she had fallen, her mind flipped some page backward, to other illustrations she had seen. Because less pertinent, perhaps, to her effort of dying, they were less clearly apprehended. Some blotty woodcuts of The Rational Brutes; or Talking Animals, by Dorothy Kilner. The frontispiece from Goody Two-­Shoes, published once upon a time at John Newbery’s shop. Though it more often served the cause of mirth, that greasy volume had been passed down through her mother’s family for the instruction of several generations already. One might live out an uplifting, book-­length life if one was lucky. Or out-­live one, if one was luckier. (The Short Life and Inspiring Death of Ada Boyce: Presto to Finis, with Hand-­tinted Woodcuts for Instruction and Delight, etc.)

  The oldest picture Ada could recall was a representation of Noah’s Ark, on a page stained with oatmeal. Earlier than that she could not remember.

  Drifting underwater, Ada felt as if she must have missed the Ark, along with the unicorns and behemoths and centaurs and other failed species. She was doomed to extinction any minute now. In the picture as she recalled it, bearded Noah looked like her reverend father, making no effort to notice his daughter flailing beneath the waves. Her mother was below-­decks with her chin in an Old Testament chalice of madeira. There was no Cook on board the Ark as far as Ada knew; Ireland hadn’t been invented yet. She had a suspicion that Noah’s newborn infant son had trotted along on all fours and tripped up his big ungainly sister, making her sprawl and tumble overboard into the flood. Sororicide.

  Then, to her surprise, she broke through.

  But broke through what? It seemed, at least, to be the surface of the water. Perhaps more. As in the landscape by Doré, an impossible, outlandish sky lolled overhead with an unsettling suggestion of eternity.

  She was naked. But she suspected she hadn’t been made corporeally perfect in her plunge.

  “I say,” called a voice, “I do hope you’re not drowning.”

  She looked about for a boat, for Noah and his Ark, for Charon and his bark, anyone on duty. She saw no boat, but as she pivoted—­how much easier it was to move in water than on land!—­she discovered that she was close to a strand. A ­couple of peculiar-­looking creatures were making their way along the beach, from left to right. A Walrus walking hand in hand with a laborer of some sort. A difficult thing to accomplish, given that walruses sport nothing approximating a hand. Still, there was no other way to put it. The human had some obscure tools of his trade poking from a pocket in his laborer’s leather apron.

  Neither of them looked like Charon. Nor like Noah. Perhaps the human, who seemed to be a joiner, had learned shipbuilding from Noah, while the Walrus had survived the flood because, of course, walruses swim adequately enough.

  “I may be drowning,” she called.

  “Please don’t,” came a reply. They had stopped and were peering at her. The Walrus was speaking. “We just saw a sign that said DROWNING IS FORBIDDEN AND PUNISHABLE BY DEATH.”

  “The Queen is ruthless about misbehavior of that sort,” added his companion.

  “If one drowns, one can’t then be put to death,” said Ada. She polliwogged nearer the shore, keeping her bare shoulders submerged.

  “I don’t know why you say that. One can drown one’s sorrows in a flask of herring cordial, but the sorrows always return,” said the Walrus. “They don’t stay drowned. They can be put to death again happily enough.”

  He was a Walrus who looked as if he knew something considerable about sorrow. Then again, thought Ada, perhaps most walruses look like that.

  “Why is an oyster like a writing desk?” asked the tradesman.

  “Ah. My friend,” said the Walrus to Ada, “is a Carpenter, and he knows many useful things about writing desks. As we are just returning from a breakfast with oysters, perhaps he intends to write about it.” To the Carpenter, the Walrus said, “An excellent riddle, my dear man. The very wet child beyond may have an opinion on the matter.”

  “Why is an oyster like a writing desk?” called the Carpenter in a voice keyed to falsetto.

  Ada had found purchase with her feet now, so she could stop rotating her arms and knees. She said musingly, “Why is an oyster like a writing desk?”

  “That’s our riddle,” remarked the Walrus. “Don’t ask it back to us. You can ask us one of your own. If you have one.”

  “I’m pondering. Why is an oyster like a writing desk?” She reviewed the conversation they’d had. “I think I know. An oyster is like a writing desk because neither can be drowned.”

  “That’s the correct answer,” said the Walrus. He drooped his moustaches farther than usual. “You’re good.”

  “Do I get a prize?” asked Ada. “Where I come from, riddles are sometimes tests to prove the merit of the hero. If the hero guesses the answer correctly, very often a door is opened unto him.”

  “Well, if a hero comes along, we’ll open the door for him,” said the Walrus. “That’s your prize.”

  “And if there isn’t a door, I’ll build one,” said the Carpenter. “Do you have a riddle for us?”

  Ada only knew one riddle. “When is a door not a door?”

  The pair of beachcombers looked at each other from beneath whiskery eyebrows. The Walrus shrugged. “It is a dreadful mystery,” whispered the Carpenter. “No one can ever know the answer to that question. It is existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable.”

  “I know it, and I’ll tell you,” said Ada proudly. “A door is not a door when it is ajar.”

  “A jar of what?” asked the Walrus. “Jellyfish jam, I hope? Mackerel marmalade?”

  “No, ajar—­it’s a word that means open. Standing open.”

  The Carpenter slapped his palm against the Walrus’s upturned flipper, and they danced a bit of a quadrille, as well as they could without six partners.

  “Well, that settles that, then!” said the Carpenter. “Am I right or am I right?”

  “Is that another riddle?” asked Ada. “What do I get if I answer it correctly?”

  “A further chance to fail,” said the Carpenter. He stopped cavorting and the two of them began to trudge away. Oyster shells, the ones that had fallen from their pockets as they danced, cracked when trod upon. They made a sound like the splintering of fine porcelain.

  When the pair of ambassadors had passed from view, and Ada couldn’t see another creature about, she clambered out of the salt sea. The air was cool on her skin. Her clothes waited on the s
trand, dry and neatly folded. They showed no sign of damage. A sprig of seaweed was attractively arranged upon the top like a spray of rosemary. Ada dressed with little pain and an ease that approached the gymnastic. The sensation was so novel as to be nearly troubling. Once appropriately clothed, she walked along the sand in the direction from which her interlocutors had come. She didn’t care to encounter them again, at least not just yet. She wasn’t sure why. Her gait was still lopsided, but so was the world, so she kept on.

  CHAPTER 9

  It seemed there was nothing to be done but that Miss Armstrong must sit down. Lydia would be spared the essay analyzing Shakespeare’s comedy. Trying not to feel grateful to Miss Armstrong about that, Lydia made the briefest of nods. The gesture was an unconscious imitation of her mother’s, once upon a time.

  Lacking awkward crinolines, Miss Armstrong collapsed to the grass with a flump. Yes, Lydia thought: As the poet contends, God’s in His heaven—­All’s right with the world. The hillside’s dew-­pearled and slightly greasy. The governess’s skirts will be creased, quite probably stained, she noted with satisfaction. She allowed herself to say, “I’m certain Ada Boyce is lurching about somewhere.”

  “Oh, yes, well. Somewhere,” said Miss Armstrong dolorously, waving her arms. She looked alarmed. “I can hardly return to that—­that place—­with the news that I’ve lost track of her. I shall be let go if I am seen to have let her go.”

  “I expect you are referring to the Vicarage. How is Boykin Boyce getting on?”

  “Assessments differ, but in any case, the little prince is croupy. That means Cook is unpleasant, and Ada is unpleasant, and Mrs. Boyce is—­” She jumped over the treacherous gulf of that unspoken remark and landed on the other side. Which proved a still more perilous terrain. “And the Master of the house is my bête noire, Miss Lydia.” But Miss Armstrong hadn’t meant to utter those words. They’d been spoken from depths she believed to be beyond language. Knowing that she couldn’t easily retract them or make them mean other than what they seemed to suggest in mile-­high letters, she burst into tears.