Whispers in the Dark (3 page)

“The poor horse,” he shouted, “he’s beating the poor horse. And when I tried to stop him he only laughed.”

I remember the bewilderment in my mother’s face. She looked at Arthur, then at me, then Hannah. We did our best to explain, but Arthur was losing patience. There was no time to be wasted. He rushed off suddenly, out of the room, heading for the front door, which was still open, and out into the street, where we found him shouting abuse at the carter.

I cannot remember now quite how that incident ended, for my memory of it is so focused on Arthur and the fury he displayed. Years later my father would still ask my mother to relate the scene, so disappointed was he to have missed the fun.

And there was so much fun. No matter that Arthur was a boy and I a girl in a time when boys and girls grew up in different worlds. We were never separate for more than an hour or so at a time. We slept in separate rooms, but not many nights passed when Arthur would not sneak down to my room for a story or a game. We were caught and spanked for it often enough, but we kept it up with a determination that surprises me now.

Arthur, dear Arthur, exquisite and fearful Arthur, you hate all this, don’t you? My reminiscences, my praise. You always hated fluff, didn’t you? I can still see you, after tea with the Misses Singleton, screwing up your face and shouting “What a load of fluff and twaddle.” Your favorite words. Are you there now, mouthing those old rebukes at me, “fluff and nonsense,” “fluff and stuff?

I can see him so clearly, Doctor, God forgive me if seeing the dead is a sin: his eyes, his hands, his fingernails. Lying in bed, that lime he was ill with jaundice, and it was my job to see he stayed there; setting fire to cook’s hat, and taking a beating for it, and coming to me afterward, not in tears, but in delight at what he had done, for it had been such a particularly monstrous hat, and he had so hated it, as he must hate all this; sucking sweets in church, and all the while a rapt, angelic look on his face; running like a hare at the seaside, a strand of seaweed in one hand, streaming behind him; rolling colored eggs down the hill on the town moor at Easter, one after another, so they would crack at the bottom.

The best times were at Christmas, a time of year that Arthur loved above all others. It snowed at Christmas every year, or so my memory tells me. We were great believers, Arthur and I, like all children of our creed and class in those days, and everything was jumbled up in a glorious mental confusion: the baby Jesus, the Wise Men bearing gifts, Santa Claus, angelic voices, Donner and Blitzen, the fairy on top of our tree.

The magic has gone now, and not merely because I am so much older. They have taken the heart out of Christmas, i try as best I can to fill all this emptiness with memories, but I don’t suppose anyone notices. My great-grandchildren are greedy for loud games and television, they want rooms full of toys, they think Father Christmas is a bit of a joke. I remember sitting in the window of my father’s study, overlooking the garden, with Arthur beside me, watching the sky grow radiant with snow and with that strange pearllike light it brought. There was a fire in every room, burning with resinous logs, and candles, and holly we had picked ourselves, and ribbons we had tied, and a tree heavy with lights that flickered in the darkness. All gone now, all vanished, all packed away in the trunks and boxes of memory.

I’ve never lied to you, Doctor, I’m incapable of it, I could never tell a deliberate untruth. I do admit there are things I have never told you, things I’ve thought best to hold back; but I’m telling you now, aren't I? When I say we were happy and at peace, I do mean exactly that. There were worries, I know that very well, my parents had more than their share. But I was unaware of them, and I am glad of it. I had a childhood, I had the best brother in the world, nothing can ever take that from me, nothing. Not even the thing I fear most.

I don’t mean death, Doctor, pray do not misunderstand me. You think I fear dissolution, but you’re wrong. You think I dread the coming of darkness, but it isn’t so. I’ve known a greater darkness than that. I know there are worse things to fear. You’ll see, Doctor, I’ll show you, I’ll tell you everything, you know I will.

What did you mean yesterday when you said I must “set down the bare facts”? Did you think I was pulling your leg, spinning a tale of happy families, covering up some physical or sexual abuse? You’ve never liked the fact that I can talk back, have you, Doctor? That I’m not like your other old ladies, perfectly happy to be sent home to suck on pills or slip on rubber drawers for incontinence. It unsettles you that I have a degree, that I had a profession, that I can speak up for myself, doesn’t it? Well, doesn’t it?

You’re all the same, you doctors, you think God made you out of different clay. The least show of independence on the part of your patients, and you think you’re about to lose control, may have lost it already. Well, in this case, I have no intention of reassuring you. You have lost it. I’ll tell my story as I want to tell it, and no more interference from you. If you’re carping at this stage, God knows what you’ll be like once I get to the bits that matter. So from now on I’m keeping this record to myself. You’ll only see it when it’s finished, and I’ll only talk with you about it then.

But, believe me, I’m telling the truth. About everything. My childhood was happy, and that’s all there is to it. If that seems abnormal to you, so much the worse for you and the profession that made you think that way. But if it makes you happy, I’ll mention the one cloud that hung over us. A thin, wispy thing it seemed at the time.

It didn’t quite make itself clear to me at first, mainly, I think, on account of my mother’s lack of family. By the time I was seven or eight, I knew all about that, what had happened to my grandparents. And then, when I was eight, Aunt Harriet died. She had never really got over her sister’s death, all their deaths, never got the water out of her dreams. She had a stroke, but I think she drowned in her sleep, beneath seas of her own making.

I remember a great sense of isolation after that, for my father had no family either, or at least very little. I think it may have been what drew him to my mother in the beginning, a sense of affinity. There had been no tragedy in his life to match hers, no tidal change of that angularity or speed, but something had happened and we knew it, even as children. His parents had died sometime before, his mother first of tuberculosis, his father two years after that of a heart attack, a rare enough thing in those days. He had been an only child, and on his father’s death already established in business and free to live his own life.

There was talk—we overheard it sometimes, when they thought we weren’t listening—about an aunt, cousins, distant relations of whom we had never heard. By the time I was ten, I knew there had been some sort of breach, a rift that went back well before my father’s time to that of my grandfather and, for all I knew, even further still. He never talked of it openly, this break, this estrangement, whatever it was. Of his own parents, he spoke freely and often enough, trying to make us love them a little through his stories and the photographs in his album. Or, if not love them exactly, at least know them, form images of them as though seen through his eyes. He had loved them deeply, felt their loss immeasurably.

But one day—I must have been about nine—I asked a foolish question. I had been at a birthday party that day, I remember, a dreary enough affair, all frilly dresses and pink bows and merciless games that ended in tears. Louisa, the little girl in whose honor the party had been held, had introduced me to no fewer than six "cousins,” and I had experienced one of my first real pangs of jealousy.

“Do I have any cousins, Papa?”

I remember the question, thinking it and asking it, as though it were moments ago. The stillness that followed, then my father’s outburst, quite incomprehensible to me. It was one of the very few times I can remember him losing his temper. He came to me later, when I was in bed, and apologized. I’ve already told you, he was not a typical Victorian father.

He said he had not been angry with me, but with circumstance. Yes, he told me, there were indeed cousins, but he had never met them. There had been a split in his family a long time ago—he did not say precisely when—and contact between the two sides had never been resumed. It was not his fault, not his cousins’ fault either, for that matter; but neither side seemed to have the will or the need to bridge the gap. In another generation, he thought, even the original quarrel would have been forgotten. By then, the very memory of a relationship would have faded, and it would all become a matter of genealogical interest. It was my first long word, “genealogical,” and I never forgot it.

I asked him about the original quarrel to which he had referred, but he merely smiled and said it was a grown-up matter, he would tell me later, if I still wanted to know, when I was a young lady and able to understand such things. He never did, of course. But I found out myself in time.

And that. Doctor, is all I can tell you. Very few arguments, other than those built around childhood tantrums. No mysteries, other than that pale question mark concerning my half-cousins. We were a very happy family until . . .

Until my father died. I was eleven and Arthur nine and a half. I still remember. . . I still remember the door of the nursery opening, and Mother sending Hannah away, closing the door after her, her eyes so full she could not have been able to see. And the horrible knowing of something wrong before she ever spoke, and the knowing everything must change from that moment.

Arthur was very quiet afterward, and all that night. We spent the night together in my bed, with a light lit against the darkness, and we scarcely slept. I had cried myself dry. I had listened to my mother weeping, alone in her room. He had died of a heart attack, prematurely, just like his own father. They had brought him home from the factory, when we were out of the way, and men in black had come to lay him out. He was down there now, I knew, laid out in his coffin, wearing his best clothes, to all appearances sleeping.

I must have fallen asleep, as you will even at the worst of times. I remember waking, a little groggy from unpleasant dreams. The light was still on. But Arthur had disappeared. He was nowhere in the room, nowhere in the passage. I thought he might have gone to be with our mother, but she was asleep at last, and he was not there.

I found him finally in the parlor, where Father’s coffin lay across two dark trestles. He was standing, just standing by the open coffin, as though waiting for something, as though expecting Father to open his eyes and get up. I was terrified, I had never been near a dead body before, but I went in and took Arthur by the shoulders and led him out.

He never spoke of it afterward. It had been a private leave-taking, one in which none of the rest of us had a part. At the funeral he never shed so much as a single tear, and I overheard one old woman remark most unkindly how unnatural it was. But I had seen the look on his face that night as I took him from the room where Father lay and led him back to bed. Of all of us, I think it was Arthur who suffered most during those terrible days.

When the funeral was over, our real troubles started. Even before my father’s death, things had been growing difficult for us. The United Alkali Company had been set up in 1890, and before long all the other firms had been amalgamated with it. Tennant’s and Allhusen’s stayed independent for a year or two, but my father’s business was soon shut down and dismantled.

He opened a new company manufacturing electric lights, but was never able to compete with his heroes, Edison and Swan; when they moved to Kent soon afterward, so did most of his own orders. I think it was the strain of that time that killed him.

But it was only after his death that we learned the full truth. My father had made a series of incautious investments over the years and had lost a lot of money in speculations abroad. In his will, he had left everything to my mother, Arthur, and me. But after it was read, his solicitor told us not a penny could be paid. Quite the contrary. There were enormous debts. It seemed that father had borrowed heavily against his expectation of an inheritance from an aunt, a wealthy woman then living in Morpeth. Now that he was dead, the anticipated inheritance would never be paid, and his creditors were already demanding full repayment of both capital and interest. My mother’s inheritance had already been spent in a last-minute attempt to save the electric light company. What was left of it was tied to my father’s estate through some legal misjudgment. Unless someone came to our rescue, we were ruined.

My mother traveled at once to Morpeth, where my father’s aunt, the widowed Mrs. Ayrton, refused her admittance. I remember her returning that evening, distraught and soaking. It had been raining heavily, and there had not been money for a covered trap. There were cousins who lived at Barras Hall, a large house in the wilds of Northumberland, near Elsdon. They were a brother and sister, the children of the Ayrtons. My mother wrote to them, but they did not answer, not even a single line, not even a word of consolation on my father’s death.

In growing desperation, she applied to other relatives, and then to friends. Most did not bother to reply. Those that did prefaced their letters with the obligatory phrase “I regret.” Our house and furniture were sold, but any profit occasioned by the sale was quickly eaten up by debts and legal expenses. Over a period of months, we moved from humbler to yet humbler quarters. My mother’s health, already delicate, suffered exceedingly. I watched her turn gray; not only her hair, but her skin.

In November of 1899, we presented ourselves at the gate of the workhouse, in my mother’s former parish of Chester-le-Street. There was a bell above the porter’s lodge. I can still remember the sound of it, jangling in the cold air. We stood outside for a long time, shivering, before the porter opened the narrow gate and let us in. The coldest of welcomes. And the harshest of separations. They took Arthur away from us, to the men’s wing. They had rules, rules to which they made no exception, though my mother cried fit to burst her heart.