‘Do you think I could live here in this place?’ she said pointing at a jumble of words on the leaflet. ‘With Sam and the baby?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It is not like that.’ I grabbed the leaflet back from her, worried that I had given her some kind of hope for a life that would be impossible.
‘Oh,’ she said glumly. ‘Well, it probably won’t come to that anyway. I would not let my father take me to those nurses, so he has found other ways to sort the problem, ways to make sure that things don’t get that far.’
‘As far as Brighton?’ I said.
She stared into the mirror, our eyes connecting for a moment in the glass.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I knew I had said something stupid but I did not know exactly what.
I feared that she might cry but when she spoke her voice was steady. ‘We are looking to find somewhere we can be together,’ she said. ‘We have made plans.’
‘You and Sam?’ I said. ‘But Sam is—’
‘I know what you are going to say,’ she said, raising her hand to silence me. ‘You will tell me that Sam is irresponsible and just a simple boy with little money.’
It was what I was going to say but it was not all of it, for there was so much more that I felt I could not say. I could not tell her how I had sat on the little bench outside the tack room, listening to her laughter as I watched the tremble of a cobweb through my tears. I could not tell her about the way Sam had touched me on that same mattress and of how I had once dreamed of our marriage. I could not talk about the way her plans tore me up inside because they included Sam and not me. I could not tell her about how I had always thought that it was Sam I had wanted until an embrace had shown me that it was not.
‘He will come and take me from here, Nell,’ she said, nodding her head slowly. ‘You must not tell a soul, but we will elope.’
Elope – it was a word that I had only ever seen in romantic novels, the type of fantastical thing that would happen in the stories of Mrs Corelli or in the daring adventures of the Strand magazine. They were the type of literature that Iris had claimed not to read but the little table I had seen in the library had been piled high with such books and Iris must have spent her days in this lonely house reading them all from cover to cover. I might have been a vicar’s daughter, but just then I realised that I had always known more about life than her – for she had no view of the real world, a world where romance does not exist.
‘I promise I won’t tell,’ I said quietly, for I did not want her to hate me.
‘We will be leaving on Wednesday morning,’ she said.
‘So soon!’ I cried. ‘Surely you need more time to plan and to—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I have it all planned. Sam will come here and we will leave together in the omnibus. Once a week it makes an early stop at the crossroads past the village green.’ She pulled a little timetable from the drawer of her dressing table and smoothed it on the desk so that I could see the time of the omnibus ringed in black ink. ‘I cannot wait another week or my father…’ Her voice tailed off.
‘Or your father what?’ I asked.
But she did not answer; she just looked at the bottle of pills on the dressing table again. ‘He is losing patience,’ she said.
I looked at the timetable. ‘Wednesday is May Day!’ I said. ‘You are the May Queen, you won’t be able to slip away unnoticed!’
‘We will catch the first departure,’ she said, pointing to the black ring on the timetable. ‘It is so early in the morning that we will be gone by the time most people are risen.’
‘You can’t!’ I cried. ‘What about your dress that my mother has worked so hard on, and the willow crown and the maypole?’ But I only had to look at her to realise that these little things that had meant so much to her just six weeks ago, no longer mattered. I no longer saw a girl sat in front of the mirror but a lady, even if she was one who had been forced into her womanhood.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Will you give this timetable to Sam? I must let him know of the omnibus. He must know when to come for me. You must tell him that I will be looking out from my bedroom window, waiting for him.’
‘I don’t know, Iris,’ I said. ‘I don’t know that I will be able.’ It was a weak excuse, but I could not tell her that I did not want to face Sam again, not after all that had happened.
‘Please,’ she urged. She took a small Bible from the drawer of her dressing table and folded the timetable between the pages. ‘Nobody will know, and the Bible is a gift from me to him.’
I took the small book from her. It was not much bigger than the palm of my hand.
‘Look inside,’ she said.
I opened the front cover, the inky swirl of ornate handwriting at the top of the page:
To my love, one day we will be together
‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘I am sure he will like it.’ But the swirls of ink were already starting to blur through my tears.
‘I know you understand,’ she said. ‘You have to get it to him.’
‘I will try,’ I said, blinking the tears away, ‘but I can’t promise anything. Like I said, I don’t know if I will be able.’ I wondered if she heard the hollowness in my voice, for I did not know if I would see Sam again. I did not know if I would even try to.
I closed the book and put it in my pocket. I did it to please her more than anything, as I was still unsure of what I would do.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You know this is my only chance.’ Then she locked her eyes on me, her voice steady. ‘My mother died giving birth to me.’
I glanced at the photograph on the dressing table. The one in which her mother lay dead, looking quietly on the world through eyes that no longer saw. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I am sorry. I know how upset you must be.’
She stood up and I hoped for a moment that she might embrace me again, but instead she took my hand in hers and led me over to the bed where she lay down next to her crumpled nightgown.
‘Here,’ she said, pulling me down so that I knelt next to the bed. ‘Put your hand on me.’
I tried to pull free from her but she gripped my fingers hard and pressed my hand between the folds of her housecoat and on to where the thin fabric of her dress was stretched tight across her middle.
‘I can’t feel anything yet,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about these things. I would not know if there was a baby.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that.’ She put her hand on top of mine and moved it downwards so my wrist rested on the jut of her hip bone.
‘What do you feel?’ she said.
I thought of when our nightgowns had been set out on the bed the previous week, and of how I had panicked when I imagined the cuff of her nightgown to be touching mine, where my hip would have been. ‘No, Iris,’ I said, trying to pull my hand away. ‘Don’t do this!’
But she held my hand firmly. ‘What do you feel?’ she said again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I could not mention the softness of the material, nor the warmth of her body that rose through it, nor the shame she made me feel from such an intimate touch. I feared that she was taunting me again.