I nodded.
‘She will need to get far away, for gossip can travel a long way. Look,’ she said reaching over and jabbing her finger into the leaflet. ‘This one is in Brighton. You can tell her that there are as good finishing schools in Brighton as there are in Switzerland. It need not end in disgrace.’
There was a smatter of applause from inside the hall and I realised that the music had stopped.
She stood up, swinging the bag over her shoulder. ‘I wish her good luck,’ she said, ‘and you.’ She did not return to the hall but crossed the road and on to the village green, and I watched her as she strode across the grass in the direction of the cottage hospital.
I looked down at the leaflet again. On the front was a sketch of a destitute woman reaching up to a large crucifix, a skinny baby tumbling from her naked breast. Then a picture of a plump infant, playing happily in the arms of a nurse, the crucifix was there again, this time on the front of the nurse’s apron.
They were pictures that my mother would have liked because she always said God was everywhere. She would have seen God in those pictures but, as I looked at the inked outlines of the skinny baby and the destitute woman, however hard I tried to see him, I could not.
24
She had not wanted to see me that day, for she barely spoke, just stared into the mirror on her dressing table, her eyes still as if she did not see me and her only connection was with the world on the other side of the glass.
I had been summoned to Haughten Hall that morning by a message from Sir Howard and I had set out immediately, leaving my disgruntled mother to finish the willow crown on her own. It had been a week since I had seen Iris, but a week in which I could not escape her. Over those days I had thought of nothing but her – the softness of her body as she inched forward in the saddle, and the embrace we had shared in understanding and consolation.
But there were darker memories too, and I could not help but recall the sound of her laugh from the tack room, the quiver of the spider’s web, and my shock at the news that she had been carrying a secret that I was not part of. They were thoughts that seemed to battle in my head, but not one feeling would win through and they raged until my mind was numb.
The Iris who sat in front of me now was not the girl that I remembered. Her face was pale and her features drawn just like the day she had walked into the study with her pinafore over her nightgown, yet now she wore a baggy housecoat and made no excuses about rotten mutton.
Maybe if I had not met with Sadie that week, I would have thought nothing had changed, but what the nurse had told me caused me to see everything through different eyes and each little thing I noticed about Iris that day had new meaning: the vase of budding flowers on the dressing table that brought tears to her eyes; the smell of damp earth drifting through the window that she said turned her stomach; the embroidered nightgown that now lay alone on the bed, one sleeve folded so that the cuff rested in the middle as if showing where the baby would grow.
The room no longer held the feeling of the embrace we had shared, as if the morning’s cold rain had brought with it a change of air and swept the memory away. I wondered if all the meaning I had connected to that moment had died during my meeting with Sadie and the knowledge that it had brought.
‘What are you looking at?’ Iris said suddenly. The sound of her voice made me flinch a little as it was the first full sentence that she had spoken all day.
‘Nothing,’ I said. But her voice had woken me from my thoughts, and I realised that I had stopped pulling the silver brush through her hair and my eyes had drifted to the little bottle of pills that had returned to the dressing table.
I could hear the scrape of Dora’s broom on the stairs and the gentle rise and fall of Sir Howard’s gramophone music, so I put down the hairbrush and went to shut the bedroom door.
When I returned, Iris had picked up the bottle of pills and was looking at it, her eyebrows lowered.
‘It need not come to that,’ I said.
She looked up at me and then back at the bottle. ‘So,’ she said slowly, ‘you know.’
I nodded though really I did not, not for sure, but somehow she must have known beyond doubt. After all, she would know better than any doctor for, whatever she might have told a family physician about sickness and missed bleeds, she would not have told him about what she did at the stable of Waldley Court. I realised now that what I had heard happening in the tack room that day could not have been the first time that Iris and Sam had lain together. Iris had been having an affair with a stable lad that, if discovered, would bring shame upon the Caldwells.
‘Did Sam tell you?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Well, then I suppose everyone knows,’ she said wearily, putting her head in her hands. ‘Your mother must think me a harlot!’
‘I don’t think she knows,’ I said, ‘because she got you liver salts from the chemist. She must have believed you when you said it was something you ate. She does not believe you could lie because you fear that God would punish you.’ I had hoped to make her laugh, after all we had joked about my mother’s religious mania only a few weeks ago, but as I spoke, I heard a depth in my voice as if I thought her deserving of punishment.
She said nothing, just glanced at me briefly then turned her gaze back to the little glass bottle.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I did not mean for it to come out that way.’ The leaflet that the nurse had given me was in my pocket and I fingered the pages, willing the courage to tell her what I knew. ‘You know there are finishing schools in Switzerland as well as Brighton,’ I said, but the thought had come too quickly and the words tumbled out in the wrong order. It had made sense on Sadie’s lips but not mine and I felt my cheeks warm.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, turning to face me at last.
‘All I mean is that…’ But I could not bring myself to say the words. I fumbled in my pocket and held the leaflet out to her. ‘I got this from a nurse at the cottage hospital.’
‘The cottage hospital?’ she said. ‘My father says that they do unlawful things in the nurses’ house there. Things that the doctor will not, but things that could sort it out.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have heard that they do such things.’
‘You know so much about these matters, Nell,’ she said.
‘I do,’ I said nodding earnestly, although I did not admit that I had only known of such things for barely a day.
‘But it’s not what I want,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him to arrange anything with those nurses and I don’t want to take those pills.’ She looked up at me, her eyes wide as if searching my face for an answer, as if I was someone who could help.
‘This isn’t those things,’ I said, pressing the leaflet into her hand. ‘You can go to these places and be away from your father. They would make sure that you don’t starve.’
She squinted at the crumpled paper in her hand. ‘It’s just addresses,’ she said, and then, ‘oh,’ as she studied the text some more.
‘What I meant to say was that if you went away for a bit, somewhere far from here, like one of those addresses on the south coast, everyone would think you were at finishing school,’ I said. ‘You could even say you were at a school in Brighton.’