The Specimen Page 7

  “Furthermore, you will not accept gratuities from any of my clients nor from anyone else, for any such undertakings. As you have so far surmised, we lead ordinary lives here, and there is nothing so remarkable about us bar that which is already known and appreciated by my clients.”

  Fergus Harris said, “No, ma’am. But is this you telling me to pack up and go?” Euphemia set her jaw and drew out the document she had prepared. “This is a new contract of employment, which you may read now and choose to sign. If you sign your name there, you will abide, absolutely, by everything which is set out, in plain English on that paper.”

  Fergus took the contract from where she had placed it on an occasional table beside her. She watched his eyes run over her tidy script. Here and there in his concentration he raised an eyebrow. When he came to the end he said that he would sign. Euphemia stood up and asked him to follow her through into the library where the ink and blotter were ready at the desk. Fergus Harris signed his name with the same flourish he had used to sign his letter to Isobel Scales. He rocked the blotter over his wet ink and handed the paper back to Euphemia.

  “Thank you, Mr Harris. You are a most valued addition. Remember where your loyalties now rest and we shall all enjoy a peaceful, harmonious existence in this house. And, I almost forgot, your pastries are indeed quite excellent. That will be all for now, Mr Harris.”

  Married. Of course, he was married. His hand was practised; his touch was sure. Bella. The exceptionally quiet one. She could not credit the woman with such an extravagant habit. But there it was. She turned her attention to the pile of letters brought in from the table in the hall. The usual drift of thank-you notes and exclamations of gratitude. Among them a letter to Gwen in a hand she did not recognise. She put it to the side, and attended to things in an orderly fashion. Every now and then, between replying to her own letters, Euphemia’s hand went out to touch the envelope addressed to Gwen. She picked it up, and turned it over and put it back down again just as her sister came into the room. She jammed the door wide open with a wedge. She brought the outside into the room with her.

  “Effie, Susan tells me there is a letter for me this morning.” Her whole self smelled of the hot weather. Of dust and pollen. And wine. Gwen came over to the desk. “Have you got it? Yes, there it is.”

  “A commission?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You were expecting it.” Euphemia smelled the gritty earth on Gwen’s hem as she swept around the back of Euphemia’s chair.

  “Hope for everything, and expect nothing, Effie. Isn’t that the best way?”

  “You have been taking our wine into the garden.”

  Gwen had been about to leave but she turned back again. “Honestly, Effie. It is such a glorious day, please don’t try to spoil it for me.”

  “I hope the commission is a good one.” Euphemia thought, I despise this buoyancy of yours. Please leave.

  “If that is what it is, then so do I. It’s very stuffy in here, Effie. You should go outside once in a while. More often than when nature calls. You go to bed too late and get up too late. You miss half the day. In fact, you have missed the entire summer. We may not have many more days like these.”

  “I miss nothing I do not wish to miss, much less than you might imagine.”

  Gwen went into the dining room to find the carafe, picking it up and then replacing it before going to the cellar instead. On the way down the path past the top lawn, she wiped the dust from the bottle on her skirt, holding the letter from Edward in her teeth. Edward, not Susan, had told her that there would be a letter waiting for her that morning. He had begged her not to rush off and fetch it but to read it after his visit. Seeing Euphemia with that pile of dull letters from her clients and her own placed there beside them had made Gwen suddenly sick. What if Edward one day forgot to put her full name on the envelope as he addressed it in a hurry. Miss G. Carrick. In a hurry, a “G” could be scrawled badly by Edward to look like an “E”. The eleven o’clock sun was fierce out of the shade, and Gwen hurried back along the paths, under the wall of the kitchen garden and under the beech trees where she continued along one of the higher paths, past a wasps’ nest and on to the boundary of the Carrick estate where she could look out over the fields if she chose, or out over the water where tall ships cut across the horizon of the glinting sea. Gwen opened the bottle; bending over, holding it between her feet. The noise of the cork coming out of the neck was satisfying in her solitude. She twisted the cork slowly from the screw with the letter laid across her skirts.

  Dearest Gwen,

  I am so happy with you. Does it seem like a monstrously obvious thing to say? To lie with my head in your lap and listen to you talk so seriously—these things matter enormously to me. You have no idea what a refreshing blast of goodness you have done to my soul. I have often wondered how any man could be content to loll in acres of petty small talk and twiddle flowers between thumb and finger when there is a universe of feeling to be communicated on all things—and you do so in such a fine and generous manner that it makes my whole self weak in admiration for you. Can you bear to read my inadequate missive? Perhaps you may think my words empty or second-hand when I have told you that I am inspired by you. It might seem too much to say, and yet I cannot say it enough—you must believe me when I say that there is no other person in this world near to you in your capacity for the extraordinary.

  Do you see that full stop? I had to put down my pen and take a walk into town to prevent myself from spilling a torrent of cliché onto the paper. This is because there is no arrangement of words in any language which may adequately express the depth of my feeling—it gives me a sorry pain to try to make my brain and pen work in harmony. You are an inspiration and yet inspiration renders me speechless. Perhaps it is a mark of the truth of my feelings for you that they cannot be expressed in words. Would that I could kiss your mind, taste the light on your furrowed brow, swallow your every thought . . .

  Gwen took a swig of the wine and wiped a drip from her chin with the back of her hand. She looked at the letter again and laughed. Edward, she said to herself, you are utterly incorrigible. He had engineered the manner of their meeting that morning so that when Gwen read his letter the two would match exactly. He had steered the conversation. Gwen had been talking about ordinary things: Murray and his arthritis, and how she didn’t want to have anyone else, but knew that he was finding the work too much. Edward had teased her mind away from that, by talking about Eden. It was not a subject she could remain quiet about, and he had known it. So, while she had talked about her ideas on the impossibility of a species derived from a limited source, he had lain his head down in her lap and relished her impassioned speech. But the letter did not mention how after a while with his head in her lap, he had blown hot air through the fabric of her skirt, his mouth firm against the layers of cloth at her crotch, his hands gripping her at the hips so that she could not move. Yes, thought Gwen, there were some things which could not be written down.

  Chapter XII

  Autumn, 1859.

  He had been to the summerhouse only twice since the spring of that year. Between those visits Euphemia had waited there for him every night. Each of those times he had come, she had failed to accost him with her findings. Frost underfoot. Rime touched the edges of every leaf on the ground. As she left her mark on them, treading clumsily in the old boots she had slipped her bare feet into at the back door, she thought of the wasted hours she had spent waiting for him to arrive when she could have been sleeping. It was all made worse by the fact that what Gwen had said was true. She had been sleeping away the best of the day, every day, because of this man. No more humiliation on his account, then, she told herself. His wife may come to her meetings again, if she chose. Euphemia would not approach each evening with dread, hoping that the woman would not arrive to taunt her. She could give the woman what she wanted with a clear head. Mr Scales could scuttle off to wherever he had come from.

  “If he is not here
tonight,” she said, “you will never come back to this summerhouse after dark. You will keep better hours and no one will have cause to scorn you. You will stop punishing your health over this man.” And yet she still could not prevent her mind from skipping back to the details of those visits.

  The first time she had met him in there she had been practising Gwen’s voice. Euphemia had made the most of her awkward situation; it had been dark enough not to have been recognised. At first she assumed it must have been Murray, and after the surprise of finding him there, she managed to talk with him as carelessly as if she might have done in broad daylight. She knew that on the days he came, the gardener spent a great deal of time in the summerhouse. It had seemed entirely logical to Euphemia that the man should still have been there at midnight because he spent so many hours in the old chair sucking on his pipe. Murray didn’t like her, she knew that. He suspected her of being a fraud. But he liked Gwen because she spent so much time out of doors scratching away in her sketchbooks and collecting murky water from the ponds.

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Murray,” Euphemia had said. “But you are aware that it is midnight?” She had been delighted at the way Gwen’s voice was coming on and she smiled in the dark.

  “I am the one who should apologise; I don’t know who your Mr Murray is. I fell asleep in here, I hope you don’t mind—there was no one here before. I must introduce myself; I am Edward Scales. You won’t have heard of me, I shouldn’t have thought.”

  And so the confusion had been eliminated. But Euphemia had enjoyed masquerading as Gwen and prolonged his stay. Letting Mr Scales believe she was someone else extinguished her sense of propriety altogether. It was just the way it was in the dark with the ladies and the spirits. She could do and say anything that came into her head. Mr Scales had advanced towards her as he introduced himself. He had obviously wanted to take her hand, politely, but they were standing closer to each other than he had judged. His hand touched her breast through the thin fabric of her nightdress where the overcoat was not buttoned down. Euphemia had remained absolutely still for a moment because, on touching her breast, Mr Scales did not take away his hand but kept it there. In the dark, in those slight seconds, Euphemia felt the pulse from his heart beating down his arm and joining itself to her own body.

  Euphemia had thought that she had begun to see how her talents could be employed beyond the confines of her drawing room; that she would take her ability out into an altogether different sphere of experience. Some of the words he had spoken into her ear as he’d touched her on those other visits were not to be found in any dictionary. He had opened her eyes to the true meaning of delirium. But, in her craving, she had found that she was in control of nothing, and now, finally in his company again, Euphemia was determined to straighten everything which had become crooked. She had been feeling cold, but now she found herself at a perfect temperature.

  “Who’s there?” Edward’s voice was uncertain, but his tone was proprietorial, indignant.

  “What audacity, sir. This is my property, and you are the trespasser.”

  “Miss Carrick? My apologies, to you and your companion. I meant to startle no one.”

  “There is nobody here but me.”

  “Then, I—Gwen, are you quite well?”

  Euphemia paused at the sound of her sister’s name on his tongue. Images of the summer cantered before her eyes like the flicker of a daedalum. The memory of what he had done with her there suddenly sickened her. The slotted drum of illusion spun around in her mind. She heard her own heavy breath as if it did not belong to her. And it did not. What on earth had she wished for? If she met this man in daylight, she would not even know him until he spoke.

  “This charade cannot go on, Mr Scales. Whatever would your wife have to say about your behaviour, should she know the truth of it?”

  “I cannot say that I have not expected the event of this conversation.”

  “There is no conversation.” Euphemia began to walk away from him and heard him take a few steps out of the summerhouse to follow her along the path.

  “Gwen, please stay and listen to me. I must explain.”

  “There is nothing to explain, and nothing I wish to hear from you. I am glad I will never have to look into your eyes and see the arrogance there. Shame on you.”

  She left him standing in the dark and walked quickly, the cold in her lungs a relief. Physical exertion and pain were a liberation. To get away from him, to leave him there. She would go straight to bed and in the morning she would rise before her sister and this would end.

  Chapter XIII

  Carrick House. Christmas, 1859.

  Whilst Euphemia’s meetings went on in the drawing room almost every night, Gwen vanished to parts of the house where she could not hear her sister communicating with the departed on the ‘other side’ in various odd voices. She went, despite herself, with a plateful of sweet almond pastry and pored over Darwin’s text, getting sugar between the pages, finger marks on the green cloth covers. Some of it she did not understand, and she read again until she thought that she had it. Not that she believed any of it at first, she was merely trying to comprehend the argument. She believed that to believe in anything she had to be true to what she saw as her duty of doubt. To try to comprehend evidence from every angle. This was difficult because the evidence had been collected by this man Darwin, not by herself. And the arguments he put to her were from his head. She always came up against this problem, of having to assimilate the ideas of others, always other men without ever having the opportunity to question the man who spoke to her from the page. She did not want to be lectured to; she wanted to have a conversation. But in between trying to grasp whatever Darwin was talking about and hiding from her sister’s clients, she agitated over Edward. He came and went as he pleased. Over the summer and into the autumn her life had been turned inside out, and yet on the surface nothing had altered. She made her studies and kept herself to herself. Once, on a November morning, he had surprised her with an outburst of anguish, and it had taken some hours to persuade him that nightmares were only nightmares and that they meant nothing, and that whatever he had dreamed in his sleep could not possibly have been real. Here they were, she had said to him. Were they not happy together? Of course, they were. But still she felt that she might have been consoling him against her better judgement. The pain of being apart from him was real. He had seemed to read her thoughts, but then his absences were more protracted than ever. I will find you something extraordinary, he had told her. He brought her books, including the Darwin, as though it was enough. As though it would sustain her through the uncertainty of his long absences. She chided herself for being pleased when he did come, yet, she was pleased, she really was. The pleasure of finally seeing him standing under the big magnolia, after weeks and weeks, almost choked her. Knowing that it was childish to say that it wasn’t fair didn’t make it any less so. Freddie had almost given up trying to persuade her to quit her quiet habits and become the lively, sociable creature he wanted her to be. His invitations had become much less frequent. Sometimes, Gwen had wanted to go away, spend a week in London with her cousin, but the thought that she might miss one of Edward’s visits while she was out riding with Freddie, or going to the opera, kept her to the confines of her own garden.

  This, she thought to herself, is what women do. We wait, seemingly endlessly, without complaint, and without adequate solace, for men whose lives are too busy, too full, for them to stop and consider what degrees of frustration they heap thoughtlessly upon us.

  Chapter XIV

  Carrick House. March, 1860.

  “Oh, please, not this again.”

  “I didn’t tell her ‘yes’ outright, I only hinted.”

  “I’m not doing any more blasted portraits of that overfed lapdog.”

  “I think Miss Lotts has her nephew in mind.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “It will look bad if you don’t at least come down and say hello.” />
  Gwen narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Five minutes and not a second more. But, please, do not bother to introduce me to any of your clients. I will only be tempted to snub them and that will make you feel worse than me.”

  Gwen was becoming increasingly agitated by Edward’s absences, which left her feeling hollow and without purpose. The thought of being forced to mingle with her sister’s clients for the evening, while Euphemia proceeded to tie her to promises to paint pug dogs or nephews on cushions was too infuriating to handle with decorum. She felt sure that she would offend someone in the next thirty minutes.

  They were mostly middle-aged women that evening, and Euphemia, for once, did not try to introduce Gwen to any more of them. Some of them clucked around one of the newest hopefuls, down from London, mid-season too; and the petites bouchées, a particular speciality of Fergus, were gobbled up appreciatively before the proceedings began. The sour-faced lady, in her late twenties, perhaps, seemed to take an especial interest in the tiny pastries but was the only one of the clients who did not sample them.

  Gwen made polite conversation with the dreaded Miss Lotts, trying to undo the promise Effie had made on her behalf.

  “I must apologise, Miss Lotts,” she said. The woman took her arm and began to walk a few steps over to the large oval table where there was a gathering hush.

  “Oh, call me Fanny. I am Fanny this evening, my dear.”

  “My diary is already very full, Miss Lotts. I have a very busy few months ahead of me. Now, if you will excuse me I—”

  The lamp had already been turned to its lowest flame, and sputtering feebly, it went out. Gwen peeled Miss Lott’s fingers from her arm in the sudden dark, thinking, I don’t care if I offend the old bat.

  Someone said, “Oh, that’s a pity.”

  Euphemia cleared her throat. When the shuffling of expensive cloth let up, Euphemia began to go into her trance. The lamp going out was a great disappointment as the clients liked to see her eyes roll whilst the spirits took possession of her body.