Marianna (15 page)

‘Quite perfect as it is, my dear young lady. Or perhaps we will just draw out one or two more of these wayward tresses. There ... how utterly captivating! You see your husband signifying his approbation?’

Mr Carstairs continued to chatter away while his fingers were busy at work arranging the pose with precision, and it came to Marianna that perhaps his flowery outpourings were designed to put her at her ease. Finally he stood back a little, making a frame to gauge the result. She was sitting now with her head slightly bowed, gazing pensively at the dewy rosebud he had placed between her two hands, which in turn rested in her lap. Her feet he had demurely crossed at the ankles.

‘Parfait, parfait!
Perhaps just the weeniest tilt of your chin to the left, so ... so! Now you must remain entirely still... you must not even breathe, when I give the word. But not for very long, my dear young lady, such are the wonders of modern science. An exposure time of a mere two seconds is all I shall ask of you, and everything is so convenient now with these new gelatin plates I use.’ Out of the corner of her eye Marianna saw him duck his head beneath the black cloth that hooded the camera, and his voice was muffled. ‘Now, all is ready. You must be as still as a statue, if you please.’

Marianna held her breath with deep concentration, and she was greatly relieved to hear him say, ‘All over! And quite painless,
n’est-ce pas?
’ With a clacking sound he changed the photographic plate, then approached her again.

For the next pose he required both her feet lifted up on to the stone seat, with her hands clasped around her knees and her skirt draped softly about her calves.

‘But the shoes ... no, no, we shall dispense with shoes and stockings to reveal your pretty toes. Remove them, if you will be so good! There is a screen over there.’

Once more Marianna glanced at her husband, doubtful if this could be what he wished of her. But William nodded and smiled encouragingly, so she retired behind the Japanese screen and did as she was bid.

The new pose was acclaimed a great success, calling forth a rapturous ‘Bravo!’ from William. This led to another arrangement in which she sat on the rim of the cherub fountain, dangling her fingers in the little pool.

Next, though, the demand was for something in a more classical vein. Much against her will, Marianna was persuaded to retire behind the screen a second time, where William helped her to remove every garment she had on and swathe herself in a long length of filmy white muslin which the photographer produced from a cupboard. When she emerged, Mr Carstairs sat her facing a truncated Doric column with her arms raised above her head and palms pressed to the cold stone in supplication; while her eyes were turned heavenwards and her hair fell softly about her shoulders. He spent several minutes tweaking and tugging the drapery into folds that satisfied him. Then he tripped off to his camera, chattering away the entire time.

When he returned to Marianna once more, he pulled aside the muslin to leave her left shoulder completely bare.

‘No’ she protested, jerking the stuff back into place.

‘We must allow Mr Carstairs to be the best judge, my love,’ William intervened. ‘So do as he wishes. He is the artist, and I am sure it will look very beautiful.’

‘It will look divine,’ the little man concurred, unbaring her shoulder once more. ‘A nymph in a sylvan glade.’

Feeling very unhappy, Marianna allowed herself to be manipulated. But she could not withhold another protest when he attempted to draw the flimsy fabric even further aside to reveal most of her breast.

Mr Carstairs clucked his tongue reprovingly. ‘If you do not co-operate, my dear young lady, how can we achieve the result so desired by your husband?’

‘But ... but I cannot. Glancing round, she appealed to William. ‘Please...you do not truly wish this?’

He came over in three swift strides, while the photographer withdrew to fiddle with his camera.

‘Kindly allow Mr Carstairs to do as he wants, Marianna.’

‘But it is so ... so improper.’

‘How can it be improper, when I am here?

‘But... I don’t like the way Mr Carstairs looks at me,’ she whispered. ‘He even touches my bare skin. It’s so hateful.’

William sighed his impatience. ‘Can you not get it into your head, you foolish child, that Mr Carstairs is a professional man, almost as a physician would be? To him, these photographs he is taking of you are merely another commission. He aims to capture your tender young beauty and record it on a photographic plate just as if his subject were a landscape view or even a bowl of fruit.’ Her husband’s frown loosened and he smiled at her coaxingly. ‘Just place yourself in his hands, my love, and allow him to arrange the further poses in whatever way he decides.’ She started to make a further objection, but William silenced her with two fingers pressed against her lips. ‘It is my express wish, and I require your obedience. Do you understand?’

Marianna nodded wretchedly. William was her husband; she had no option but to submit.

His voice was deep with reproach. ‘Oh, what a
doleful
little smile she gives me. You can do better than that, my angel. Right, Mr Carstairs, my wife is quite ready to continue now.’

Somehow Marianna overcame her revulsion and strengthened herself to go through the motions of obedience, permitting the photographer to draw away more and more of her gossamer covering until, in the final pose, she was completely undraped apart from the tiniest wisp across her thighs. Whenever
a
fresh wave of shame caused her to resist, a warning cough from William would remind her where her duty lay. In desperation, she tried not to think about what was happening, not to notice the indignities to which she was being subjected.

And at last, at long long last, the ordeal was over. As the photographer advanced towards her this time he proffered a large enveloping shawl, which Marianna gratefully accepted.

‘There, my dear young lady, you are free now to retire and redon your clothing. You’ve been a most excellent subject for me, I do assure you, and I have not the slightest doubt that your husband will find the results entirely to his satisfaction. More than that, he will be overjoyed with them.’

Hastily redressing behind the screen, fumbling with the fastenings, Marianna could hear the murmur of the men’s voices. At one point the photographer said, ‘But of course, my dear sir, your wishes will be observed to the letter. The prints will be made without delay and delivered tomorrow to your residence in a sealed package marked for your personal attention,’

William came to assist her with the hooks and eyes she could not reach. He hardly spoke and appeared as eager to be gone now as Marianna did herself. Under his prompting, she managed to stammer some sort of leave-taking to Mr Carstairs. A cab had been summoned for them and was waiting outside. At Trafalgar Square, she saw from the clock of St Martin-in-the-Fields that they had spent well over two hours at the photographer’s. The most wretched two hours, Marianna thought with a shudder, of her entire life.

William seemed distracted on the journey home, making not the smallest attempt to coax her from her despondent mood — which only added to Marianna’s resentment. Presently though, after their glances chanced to meet once or twice and her husband looked quickly away, she began to wonder whether her own attitude might be at fault; whether perhaps she was making a mountain out of an unimportant molehill. She fervently wished that she knew how other wives would have reacted to the afternoon’s experience.

The moment they reached Cadogan Place, William shut himself away in his study. He was unusually silent at the dinner table, only addressing her when the servants were waiting upon them; and later, when he rejoined her in the drawing room after sitting over his port, he brought
The Times
with him. He did not speak one single word to her as he took a chair, but put on his gold-rimmed spectacles and settled to read. Presently, in an effort to catch the warmth of his attention, Marianna went to the piano. After a glance through the sheet music, she started to play some of the catchy tunes by Sir Arthur Sullivan to which, she had discovered, her husband was especially partial. But William did not so much as look up from his newspaper.

‘Do you wish me to continue playing?’ she asked eventually.

‘I think it is high time you retired to bed.’

‘Oh dear! Is my performance so very bad?’ she countered with a nervous little laugh,

‘You are tired. You’ve had an exhausting day.’

She took a deep breath for courage. ‘William, are you ... cross with me?’

‘Why should you suppose that?’

‘Because you’re being most unlike your usual self. So withdrawn, so silent.’

He rose from his armchair and strode to the fireplace, where the coal fire burned brightly. Consulting his watch, he opened the glass of the mantel clock and made a small adjustment. When he turned back to her his face looked tired and

‘Run along to bed, child!’

But Marianna could not leave it there. She felt deeply unhappy, and contrite too, because clearly she was responsible for her husband’s displeasure. Rising from the piano stool, she went to stand before him.

If I have annoyed you in some way, I am sorry for it, William. Perhaps, at the photographer’s this afternoon, I behaved a little foolishly. I ... I was not prepared.’ She braced herself, and added, ‘It would have been better, I think, if you had warned me in advance what you expected of me...’

Her husband cut her short. ‘Enough of that! The matter is over and done with.’

‘But William, I cannot bear you to be angry with me.’

‘Go to bed! How many more times must I tell you?’

Marianna was overcome by a sense of desperation. Always her husband treated her as a mere child. But would she ever earn his respect as a woman if she never behaved like a woman? Somehow contriving to force her face into a smile—the inviting smile, she hoped, of a mature wife expressing her devotion for her husband — she laid a hand upon his arm and said in a soft voice, ‘You order me to bed, William, but am I to go alone?’

For the space of a few seconds he seemed puzzled by her sudden change of manner. Then, to Marianna’s startled dismay, he took her face between his two hands and gave her a kiss of such bruising force that when he thrust her back from him a moment later, there was the taste of blood on her lip.

‘I told you once before,’ he said thickly, ‘don’t play the coquette with me, child!’

Marianna’s heart was numb with shock and she felt sobs gathering in her throat. Turning, she fled from him and did not stop running until she had reached the sanctuary of her room on the floor above.

Hilda was turning down the bedcovers. She glanced at her mistress curiously.

‘I am very tired,’ Marianna said, ‘and I want to go straight to bed.’

Her maid, though, was bursting to talk of all the exciting things she had been hearing about London from the other servants. One of them, an under-footman by the name of Albert, had promised to take her for a ride on the underground railway when the family moved to London for the winter; also to see the conjuring at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Marianna, guiltily aware that she ought to break it to the girl at once that this fond hope would never now be realized, was brusquer than she might have wished.

‘For goodness’ sake, stop chattering and get me unhooked.’

In bed, with Hilda dismissed and the gas brackets extinguished, she lay tensely listening for the sound of her husband in his dressing room next door. But the whole house seemed utterly silent, with only the occasional rumble of a. passing carriage penetrating the heavy fabric of the window curtains. Would William come to her bed tonight and hold her tenderly in his arms? Or did what had happened today presage a change in his feelings for her? The thought was terrifying — for without William’s love, where would she be?

Marianna must have drifted into a doze. Her eyes snapped open as she heard the click of a closing door. Her husband was moving across the room, stealthily as was his habit, so as not to disturb her. She gave up a prayer of thankfulness, knowing that she would find infinite comfort in his embrace, his whispered endearments.

But tonight something was different. This Marianna sensed in those final seconds as he paused at her bedside. It was his breathing that gave her the clue, heavy and somehow laboured, as if his throat were constricted.

‘William, what is wrong?’ she whispered.

It was as though the sound of her voice acted as a trigger. The bedcovers were wrenched aside and her husband fell upon her, crashing down onto her slender body so that she was knocked breathless. Sheer instinct made Marianna struggle, though she was helpless under his crushing weight. Then suddenly she realized with a flood of shock and horror what it was that her husband was about. At one time she had been so ready in her mind, but now she was totally unprepared. Or had she ever truly been prepared, for
this?

‘William, please,’ she gasped out. ‘You’re hurting me. Please be more gentle.’

But he made no response; there was only the sound of those laboured breaths rasping in his throat. Marianna’s frail resistance ceased and she lay utterly motionless. He was rough, brutish, totally uncaring when she cried out with the sudden searing pain that shafted through her. She submitted to him in an agony of disillusion and humiliation, praying for the end of this bruising assault upon her body. For how long must she endure it she had no idea, only that the torment seemed to be lasting an interminable time. It was not until her husband flung his sweating body aside that her tears began to flow. She longed desperately for a kind word from him now, a whispered loving word to reassure her, a gentle kiss on the brow that would help to erase the misery of what had just occurred.

Marianna tried to speak his name, but could utter no sound. Her silent tears flowed on, brimming over and rolling down to dampen the lace-edged pillow. When she felt her husband thrust himself up from the mattress, she shrank away in expectation of another horrifying onslaught. But he was leaving her bed, departing without having uttered a single word. In the darkness she heard him lurch across the room, then for a moment she saw him outlined against the light from his dressing room, until he drew the door shut behind him.