‘Here…’ My mother put down the Bible at last and held the frilled bonnet out to me. ‘Put it on,’ she said. ‘You remember how Sir Howard liked it.’ There was a kind of desperation in her voice and I wondered if pleasing Sir Howard was just an excuse and that really she could not bear to look upon the horror of my hair, even though it could now be tied and pinned to suggest that it had some length to it.
I looked at the bonnet dangling from her fingers but she snatched it back when she heard the rattle of the door. It was not Sir Howard who entered and, as my mother rose from her seat, she let out a little gasp.
‘Dear child!’ she cried, the bonnet falling to the floor. ‘Are you quite well? You should surely be in bed!’
Iris leant on the doorframe. Her skin was pale but for a little spot of blood where she had bitten down on her lip. She wore a short chequered pinafore but her undergarments billowed underneath it as if the whole outfit had been thrown on in haste. She smiled weakly, and then made some sort of excuse for her father’s work on the motorcar, which neither my mother nor I really heard.
My mother walked a few steps towards her and took her hand, stroking it gently as if she dared not get any closer.
‘It’s alright, Mrs Ryland,’ said Iris shakily as she perched on the edge of the chaise longue. ‘I am just a little out of sorts. Maybe it is to do with the mutton I ate last night.’
‘Well, we won’t keep you,’ I said standing up and smoothing my skirts, ‘just in case it is the same bug that has been going round the Sunday school—’
But my mother looked at me sharply and I sat down again when Sir Howard entered, still in his driving gloves.
‘Oh, Sir Howard!’ said my mother. ‘We can come back another time if—’
‘No, no. I am sure that this will pass,’ he said as if commanding the illness away. ‘If Iris took the pills that have been recommended, I am sure that it would have already gone by now.’
My mother turned back to Iris but Sir Howard had not finished. ‘Agnes, if you are ready you can show me the hymn book that you found in the library.’
My mother jumped up as if she were a dog commanded by its master and followed him out of the room, with a motherly glance back at Iris.
I turned to Iris. ‘You look a fright. Do you want me to help get you presentable? I can at least run a comb through your hair.’
To my surprise, she nodded. ‘You are kind, Nell, I know you do not think it but you are.’ She rose shakily and I followed her down the corridor to her bedroom.
Iris’s dressing table was at the far side of the room in front of a long window that overlooked the little lawn and the slope up to the common. There was a large mirror in the middle, which framed her face like a portrait when she sat down on the little stool in front of it. On the mahogany surface was a silver hairbrush and another framed photograph – a copy of the one I had seen on the desk in the study, the portrait of the serene woman gazing down at a bouquet of flowers. Now I recognised it as, not of Iris, but her mother. I had thought that the artist who had painted all the portraits of Lady Caldwell must have softened his brushstrokes to flatter her, but this was a photograph that could not be altered, and her face almost filled the frame. I thought of what Francis had said about the camera only capturing the truth – Lady Caldwell really had been as beautiful as her paintings.
Iris winced when she saw her reflection in the mirror. Slowly she reached to her shoulders and undid the buttons on her pinafore, the fabric dropping to her waist, a gape of white lace revealing her delicate collarbones and the loose ribbons that fastened the material at the back.
‘You are still in your nightgown,’ I said, standing behind her, ‘although I did not notice it when we were in the study for it is grander than my own best day dress. My mother would never approve of lace on a nightgown. She would think it quite ungodly!’ I mimicked my mother’s voice as I said the last word. It was something that had cheered her up before but she did not laugh this time.
She smiled weakly. ‘It is of no use to me if there is no one to see me in it!’ I wondered if she did feel sad about Francis Elliot-Palmer, the husband who would never be.
I took the brush from the dressing table and started to pull it through her hair, the bristles catching a little in the bed-tangled strands. I drew the brush slowly through the mats, but as my strokes started to reach down the length of her back, the bristles snagged on the hard boning of a corset.
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I see that you have let Dora dress you a little – you really should not have gone to such trouble just for my mother and me. I only own one little bodice and I just wear it when my mother wants me to be smart.’
‘I had started to dress but the sickness came on quickly,’ she said. ‘In fact, it comes and goes.’ Then she added, ‘But I’m sure it is not contagious. It is just something I ate.’
‘Of course,’ I said and started to brush her hair once more. My eyes fell on the photograph again, and I remembered one of the beautiful pictures from the poetry book I had read in school – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, about a woman trapped in a castle looking into a mirror and then drifting away on a boat. I had never paid attention to such things in class, but I imagined Iris as this fine woman suffering from some sort of sensibility that only her class suffered from and I would never know the like of.
Then she held out her hand to me. ‘I can do the ends,’ she said.
‘There is no need,’ I said, ‘because your hair is so straight and fine.’
‘That is what everyone tells me,’ she said as if she had grown weary of compliments, then her eyes flicked to my reflection. ‘Your hair is already growing longer, Nell. I can see that it would usually be curly.’ She spoke the words as if she had spotted a stain on my dress or was pointing out where a bird had messed on my shoulder. It was the kind of comment I had suffered at school, when my classmates would pull my hair and ask me when it would grow past my shoulders, and I tucked the curl Iris had seen back behind my ear so that she could not taunt me any longer.
I passed the brush back to her and she bunched her hair and pulled it over her shoulder and started to rake the ends with her fingers. The movement of her arm caused the neck of her nightgown to gape wider and I could not help notice that the pale skin under her shoulder blades was rubbed raw at the edge of the corset, the reddish imprint of the wounds staining the fabric of her slip.
Corseted women were the wives of merchants and officials. They would parade in the high street with their maids and parasols or take tea in hotels, but they would never lift a bag of groceries or run to catch the omnibus. Their bodies were trussed, laced and pulled in all directions from their high arched shoes to the powder on their faces and the pins in their hair. Iris was not one of these women – she was a girl who read political journals and had calmed a rearing horse. She was a girl who had worn riding britches and jumped on to the saddle behind me. She was a girl who had squeezed her thighs around me and pressed her breasts into my back, and I knew that there had been no corset then.
‘I can fetch those pills for you, if you like,’ I said, suddenly feeling awkward at the memory of her body so close to mine. ‘Those ones that your father spoke of.’