After Alice Read online

  Lydia didn’t claw for the slip of handkerchief she kept in her pocket. Miss Armstrong would have her own. Sure enough, here it came, useful for blotting the nasal symphonics and the patting of eyelashes gone gluey in a monsoon of feeling sufficient to dampen all Rangoon. “Miss Armstrong. If you please.”

  That was all that was needed. Miss Armstrong regained her bearings as if she’d been arrested by a constable and brought before a magistrate under charges of public incoherence.

  “My, my. I don’t know what came over me, Miss Lydia. Perhaps the crying of Baby Boyce has become infectious. He’s a right little runtling, he is.”

  Lydia, having caught the thread, was inclined to pull it. “Tell me about your Reverend Everard Boyce,” she said. “I’ve hardly been introduced.” The your was salt salt salt.

  “I’m sure I don’t gossip.” Despite the testimony, Miss Armstrong looked entirely unsure.

  “From a distance, the good Reverend Boyce cuts a fine figure.”

  “Oh, well, if it is figures you want, take up skating on ice.” Miss Armstrong, proud of the riposte, straightened her spine.

  “Is it true that Mrs. Boyce repaired to her chamber after the happy event and that she refuses to emerge?”

  “From whom would you have heard such calumny? Yes, it’s true.”

  “Which must put a certain pressure upon the rest of the household.”

  “I am happy to say clockwork could not run more smoothly than at the Boyce establishment.”

  “But the poor Vicar. I hope he isn’t deprived of his wife’s affections.”

  “You scandalize me, Miss Lydia.”

  “It was not I who burst into tears at his name.”

  Miss Armstrong cast her head away. The angle suggested she had avian forebears. When she relaxed and returned to glance at Miss Lydia, she said, “You are a wicked child, to tempt me toward an allowance of intimacy you’ve no intention of returning. My respect for my employer is unbounded, and exactly appropriate to my station and to his. I shall thank you not to return to the subject.”

  Lydia plucked at some grass and petted it as if it were the forelock of a Tennyson-­besotted youth lying in her lap. The tone she employed was languorous. “I have known unrequited love.”

  Miss Armstrong was stronger than that. “I suspect there are few girls of your affectionate nature who couldn’t say the same. Miss Lydia, I am loath to return to the Bickerage—­the Vicarage for the reasons given. I must find Miss Ada. But your home is in a state, your servants busy with the guests who have come to call on your father. Your Mrs. Brummidge said there was a child in the house but it wasn’t Ada.”

  “I don’t know who that might be. Perhaps the kitchen maid’s sister has come to observe how to do no housework.”

  “Do you think there’s any possibility Ada could be lurking about the Croft in the hopes of engaging that visiting child in play? Ada is lonely, you understand. And your sister can be fickle about including Ada in the romps of childhood.”

  Lydia felt a rare moment of guilt. “Ada shouldn’t consider herself singled out for snubbing. Our little Alice often lives in her own world.”

  “She’s not alone in that practice.” Miss Armstrong rose and smoothed her skirts as best she could. Yes, grass stains a-­plenty, but they didn’t fill Lydia with the glee she’d anticipated. “If you have no recommendation on where I might find either of them, Alice or Ada, I shall continue to look on my own. But if Ada should come by, would you ask her to wait with you until I return? I shall be sure to pass by on my way home.”

  “I may not still be here.”

  “I wouldn’t hold you here on my account.” She gazed along the riverbank in the direction of the University Parks, Christ Church Meadows, and beyond that Iffley, Bourne­mouth, Majorca, Patagonia. “I suppose it’s possible that, giddy in her liberation, Ada decided to go see the Iffley oak. It’s a popular destination for those on a mission of picnic. I only hope she hasn’t slipped in the water and fetched up against the milldam.” She set out with a purpose, but turned when Miss Lydia called her name.

  “Miss Armstrong,” said Lydia, smiling with a contemptuous vagueness, “you mustn’t fret. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “My secret?” said Miss Armstrong in a rush, as if she had revealed something sinister about milldams and damp ruined children. Then, remembering her admission about Everard Boyce, she blushed a rogue scarlet.

  Lydia settled back into the arms of the tree, and Shakespeare, and the lost romantics in the forests around Athens.

  CHAPTER 10

  Perhaps she dozed a little. It was that kind of an early summer day. In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment.

  No breeze stirs. Water in slow motion. The glop of a tench breasting for a dead beetle. The river, so slow and murmurous as nearly to be mute, sealing the wound. The shriek of children at play across the fields, pestering a cow, whose bell makes jaundiced comment as she hustles away. Now a breeze arises. In the subtlest of commotions, poplar leaves shift and touch one another, and subside. A frog out of sorts with its social life croaks, but only once, as if thinking the better of it.

  Dreams ride in us, frictionless, dark reflections in bright water.

  Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams.

  Other bearded potentates—­Jehovah, Cronos, all their ilk—­they sort time through their fingers. They never confuse the strands: But dreams play havoc with sequence.

  Of course, these days, the accepted sequence is under revision. Six decades and some into the century, though Browning does indeed reassure us God is still in His heaven, Darwin is taking tea in the Croft. Heaven shudders as Cambrian creatures shake mud from their gills, rewriting history. Sequence, and consequence.

  Consider this moment. Queen Victoria, newly mourning the death of Albert the Prince Consort, has cast a spell of propriety, sentiment, and moral rigor throughout England and Scotland. Consequentiality. Lydia will spend her entire life in a nexus of Victorian social understandings too near to be identified by the naked eye, like viruses, or radiation.

  At the same time, with ink staining his forefingers, and crumbs from his hard roll upon his lower lip, Karl Marx is hunched over in the Reading Room of the British Library. He frets, and lays dynamite. History has its own evolutionary strategy, toward consequentialities we cannot anticipate.

  In 186_, faith is largely put in structure. Slice apart cadavers. Dig up Attic Greece. Examine gluey plant cells under magnification. Color another corner of Africa the geographer’s salmon-pink of Empire, and install the new district commissioner in some obscure equatorial colony to the strains of a dark-­skinned military band. Everything that exists is intact. Look at it. The established church, with the Queen as its head. Righ­teous in faith! The British civil ser­vice in its first decade of rule of the Asian sub-­continent, following the demise of the East India Company. Firmly in control. And social life: As rigid as the ironwork supporting the glass canopies of the great London railway termini—­Waterloo, Charing Cross, Paddington—­the class system keeps the London poor separate from the gentry. Mostly. Though some systems can be secretly porous, especially in certain neighborhoods after midnight.

  Meanwhile, strictest of all, and affected by everything already mentioned, the rising middle class hold notions of childrearing that are hemmed round with creeds of nation, faith, and family. Children are cornered and dragooned even by those who adore them. For their own good. For the good of their characters and their immortal souls.

  But what is character? How solid? We cut our hair, we shave our beards, we lose a limb. We remain ourselves. In drea
ms, however, we swap identities licentiously. We sabotage the structures of our character without a thought.

  None of this occurs to Lydia in so many words. A little lost ladybird stumbled into great concentric spider-­webs. Yet, as she drowses, sunlight pinking her bared forearms, she nearly wonders, where in all these enterprises of thought and institution is Lydia herself? What is the character of Lydia, and where the soul of Lydia, were there still such a thing as a soul?

  And where, for that matter, is Alice?

  CHAPTER 11

  Ada hadn’t gone much farther along the strand when she came upon a door standing upon a wooden sill. The door was closed cleanly in its framing, but its jamb was unattached to any wall. Possibly a door that had been built in a shop and abandoned upright upon a beach. When is a door not a door?

  Ada found it just as handsome and finished on the far side as on the near. Indeed, it was hard to tell if there was an inside or an outside to the thing. She tried the handle, but the door was locked. Then she looked more closely at the knob. Inscribed in tiny letters across the brass bulb, words so small she could just read them:

  KEEP OUT.

  Nothing would do, then, but to check the knob on the far side of the door. It said:

  OUT KEEP.

  Well, she thought, Miss Armstrong’s favorite words for me are outlandish and outrageous. If through that door is where the out is kept, perhaps I have no business going there.

  She stumped on, disgruntled at having been denied entry to a portion of beach she could reach just as well by ignoring the door altogether.

  Still, what sort of Hades might this be, if she were barred from certain sacrosanct sections? Maybe it wasn’t actually Hell, just hellish?

  Around a soft promontory, she came upon a stand of roses prospering in the lee of a stony slope. They tossed their heads in a salt wind. Ada didn’t know much about horticulture. That would involve asking questions of Miss Armstrong and enduring her endless answers. On their daily marches, Ada could never spare the breath to gabble. She needed all her strength for walking.

  The flowers were quietly talking amongst themselves as she neared them.

  Ada had heard of the language of the flowers. Her parents had sent roses to the Croft that time. They had said that roses spoke of sympathy. But Ada hadn’t understood that floriology had an actual tongue. In fact, Ada found symbolic language vexing. When Miss Armstrong Headstrong lunged toward a window, claiming that the sun was a golden chariot drowning in a flaming Tyrrhenian Sea, Ada humped across the room after her and saw only an evening sun partly covered by dark blue and orange clouds. On the basis of her inclination to be literal, Ada had had to relinquish her copy of the Household Tales of the Grimm brothers. She would find it worryingly fantastical and unscientific, no doubt, and probably pagan, too. Best not to risk it.

  “I do so love a day served up like this. It suits my palate,” said the tallest of the rose-­trees, flexing her petals, which were a varnished, carmeline pink.

  “Days like this, Rosa Rugosa, are a penny a pound,” replied a second, a thorn-­pronged cousin nearby whose blossoms were colored an apoplectic plum. “Cheap and cheerful, if you like that sort of thing; and, if you’ll allow me to say it, common.”

  “It’s a strain, pretty days,” said a low-­limbed third rose-­tree, gloomily. “Frankly, I don’t know why we bother.”

  “Ninny. We air our blossoms to signify the passion of the world,” snapped the thorny purple. “Though what is passion but blood and sorrow?”

  Ada knew that eavesdropping was very poor form indeed. As she inched closer, she turned her face to the sea so she wouldn’t be caught staring. The horizon seemed to be nearer than it had been before.

  At the crest of a strong spine about four feet high, the pink-­blossomed creature called Rosa Rugosa bobbed. “You two would complain at being dipped in liquid gold. What’s wrong with buttery sunlight and a vivid wind? I’ve rarely enjoyed a more gratifying light.” She turned her upper leaves, as if opening her hands. “A day like this nourishes one.”

  “Well, Miss Happy Happiness! Such self-­satisfaction,” remarked the plum-­violet blossom. “Preening all day, and for what? I never would. Wait till a lovesick courtier or a grieving widow comes by and tries to pluck me. I’ll give them what-­for with my thorns. Mark my words, Rosa Rugosa, you’re becoming blowsy.”

  Rosa Rugosa took no offense, but rotated her sepal neckline the better to spread her pink petals about in the light.

  “You’re right, Rosinathorn,” said the low-­growing third to the second. “Rosa Rugosa looks like a hoyden behind a shop counter.”

  “Of course I’m right,” snapped Rosinathorn. “She’s parked right in front of me, Rosadolorosa, I can hardly see the shoreline for all her primping. I’ve a good mind to lean forward and stab her.”

  “Oh, why bother?” Rosadolorosa, the third tree, was a no-­nonsense confusion of collapsing hoops and canes. Her few petty blossoms were arrayed without conviction on a single drooping spear. The blossoms meant to be white, Ada thought, but against Rosa Rugosa’s pinks, they looked dingy and lacking in starch. “It’s my belief that our lives are stolen from us. Ornamented with pinnate leaves and colored frills, we exist only as a consolation for others. I don’t feel fulfilled. Indeed, some days I scarcely feel at all.”

  “If you begin to weep again from some nameless ontological grief, Rosadolorosa, I’ll call for a pruning,” declared dusky Rosinathorn. “Bad enough I have Little Honeysweet Sunshine to one side. To have the Flower of Death to the other side is more than stem can bear. I’m not sure which of you is worse.”

  Ada found arguing roses to be unsettling. It was so like the Bickerage. “I think you’re all lovely, each in her own way,” she said peaceably.

  “Horrors! A spy, listening in at our backstairs nattering!” said Rosa Rugosa. “Attitudes, girls!” She rearranged herself in as relaxed an odalisque’s posture as she could, given she was outfitted with woody stems. Ada knew what that felt like.

  “This is such a charade,” muttered Rosinathorn. Her stems brushed against one another, clicking thorns.

  Rosadolorosa made no attempt to compose herself, but sagged in the wind like a white shroud dropped upon the sands.

  “I never met flowers who could speak,” said Ada.

  “You have not yet met us,” said the first. “I am Rosa Rugosa.”

  “I don’t mean to be impertinent,” said Ada, “but can you tell me what you signify? I mean, in the language of flowers?”

  The roses exchanged glances. “Why do you ask?” barked Rosinathorn.

  “Some months ago my parents sent roses to the Croft. They told me the flowers conveyed a message. But I don’t know flowers. Do different colors signal different messages?”

  “Pink is for happiness,” said Rosa Rugosa promptly. “Tra la la and all that.”

  “Purple red is for passion, but in my experience that usually means pain,” snarled Rosinathorn. “Come close to my thorns and I’ll show you.”

  “White is—­but why should I signify anything to anyone?” murmured Rosadolorosa vaguely. “White is the absence of significance.”

  The Boyce family had sent the Clowds a bouquet of yellow roses. Literature, even of roses, remained a mystery. Ada dropped the matter. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Ada.”

  “Was that Ada, did you say?” Rosa Rugosa leaned upon the available breeze; it looked something like a curtsey.

  “Or Ardour?” snickered Rosinathorn, with a certain menace.

  “Or Adder?” ventured Rosadolorosa. “The worm, the worm, he comes for us all.”

  “Ada. Miss Ada Boyce, of the Vicarage of Saint Dunstan’s, Oxfordshire.”

  “A very low address,” said Rosa Rugosa, “if I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Rosa Rugosa has pretensions,” pointed out Rosadolorosa, sniggering
. “Uppity.”

  “Isn’t it rewarding to have friends of the heart?” asked Rosa Rugosa in a bright, hysterical tone. “Mine are always having fun with me.” She beckoned Ada with a spray of leaves.

  Ada came nearer, but not too near.

  “Now, tell us how you like our little patch of heaven,” said Rosa Rugosa. “Don’t you admire it? I’m sure you’ve never before seen the likes of us.”

  “I don’t mean to be contrary, but I’ve been to the Isle of Wight,” said Ada. “I’ve seen roses along the beach before.”

  “Oh,” said Rosa Rugosa. She sounded insulted, as if perhaps she had thought herself one of a kind. However, she rallied and continued in a sweet diatribe. “But have roses seen you? You can’t be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.”

  Ada didn’t know how to answer this. When she was out in public, passersby sometimes averted their faces, if not out of disgust then, as she preferred to think, out of charity. Perhaps Rosa Rugosa had a point. She turned her face from the roses so as not to give away her sense of disorientation, both at home and here. “Is it my imagination or is the sea shrinking?”

  “There is no sea,” said Rosa Rugosa. “This is only a very wide salt-­water well. May I present my ladies-­in-­waiting, Rosinathorn and Rosadolorosa?”

  “Who died and made you princess? I’m not waiting upon you,” said Rosinathorn. “I just happen to be rooted in the same neighborhood.”

  Rosadolorosa added, “I’m waiting for your pink petals to go beige, Rosa Rugosa. If you must know. Death comes to us all. You first, I hope.”

  Rosa Rugosa seemed accustomed to the insurrection of her court, if that’s what it was. They could get no nearer to her than fate had planted them; anyway, she was the largest and benefited from the best situation. Ada said to her, “Are you the queen who forbids drowning?”