Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“Poor Livia,” I say, no longer mocking. “Do you think you are the first girl to ask herself whether she should be happy with a nice boy or unhappy with a cad? It is perfectly natural.”

For a moment she seems ready to accept my wisdom; to sit with me atop my bed and share her heartache. Then she remembers herself and slips on that mask of meekness that has separated us ever since my husband lost his wits. She speaks calmly, her face a foot away from mine, the voice demure.

“Charlie says that Father cut you open. From the hip to the ribs. It must be quite a scar.”

And just like that our roles are inverted and heckler has become heckled. She is ready to continue, twist the knife. But I do what she found impossible to do. I start crying.

It takes her a minute before she wraps me in her arms.

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So we end up on the bed after all. Her clothes are so dirty she leaves stains on the bedding. She smells, too, of sweat and the street. I cling to her all the same, elbow hooked into elbow. It is well when emotion aligns with strategy. I wish to secure her loyalty. Her cheek rests an inch from mine. She is scrupulous about avoiding its touch.

“How is Father?” she asks, not shifting. “How is his health?”

“As ever, I hope. Thorpe is looking after him. You see, a search was made of our house. By now, the whole of England will be talking about him, poor soul. ‘Mad Baron Naylor.’ How he would have detested such gossip!” I pause, allow my emotions to sweep me from anger to nostalgia. “Do you remember, Livia? How he used to be?”

“Of course I do. He was righteous and gentle. Almost a holy man. Like that famous count in Russia, the one who walks around in peasant smock.”

“Tolstoy? What a funny thing to say! But no. I mean before all that. When you were young.”

“Before? He was — busy. Frantic, even. I remember him sitting in his study with so many papers around him they covered the floor. Always reading and scribbling. Talking over dinner. One month it was the Greeks, then a trip he was planning to the antipodes. He got so very excited, I thought he would start smoking, right in front of the servants.”

“He never made that trip. The antipodes.” It is funny that it should make me smile. “He went to the Argentines instead. Four months and one letter home. The vagabond!”

Livia is quiet at this, caught up in the past. Her head slides towards mine. She remembers herself just in time.

“Why did he go mad, Mother?”

“You know why he did.”

“The Smoke overcame him, and he got lost.”

“No. He had given up smoking. Quite successfully it must be said.”

“Why then?”

“Just that. He had given up and decided to become a saint. It put a strain on him, a terrible strain.”

I want to say more, explain it to her: how he foreswore his experiments and tried to conquer Smoke through a sheer act of will; how he changed week by week until it was too late, driven mad by the effort to be sinless; how he abandoned me and our love. But there are things too private for one’s child. Livia sees my hesitation, slides her feet off the bed and sits up.

“I don’t know when you are lying, Mother, and when you are telling the truth. That’s the whole problem.”

It’s her sadness that impresses me, the sense of loss.

“You won’t tell us what you are up to, will you?” she continues. “This grand plan of yours.”

I shake my head. “I am just like you, Livia. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

She bristles at this. “I brought you here, Mother. I found you shelter! I pulled Thomas aside when he wanted to stop you from infecting the child. I did all this because you promised me answers.”

“Yes, you did all this. But will you tell me who hid you after Julius shot at you? Where those clothes come from?”

My daughter stands silent, head bowed.

“You see, my dear, we really are much the same.”

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I don’t want to let her go. She has turned around twice now, and each time I have called her back with a question, something stupid, aimless, asked only to force another moment of her time. It is the first time in years we have attempted any sort of exchange, beyond trading hurtful nothings across the dinner table. But in this specialised skill of talking to one’s daughter I feel utterly inept.

“Tell me,” I try again, inching forward onto more treacherous conversational ground. “What do you want, out of all this?”

When she looks at me in puzzlement, I make a gesture that is meant to encompass the enterprise in which we find ourselves grudging partners, but largely seems directed at the bed. It is fitting enough: not an hour ago found me flat on my knees and fumbling underneath the bed frame, hiding my secrets like some old woman afraid of being robbed. There is not a piece of furniture in the whole room that could be locked.

“Sebastian and I are changing the world,” I add. “There must be something that you want.”

To her credit I see her struggle with it. She is about to give me something pat and worthy, a nunnish answer long-rehearsed. But I have asked her earnestly and earnestness is one thing she finds hard to resist.

“I want to be certain again,” she says at length, “of who I am and what is truth. I want to be inscrutable, immovable, safe in myself. Can you do this, Mother?”

She says it softly, because she knows the answer.

“No, I cannot.”

“What, then, will you do?”

I repeat what I told her before. “I will give the world justice.”

“Virtue?”

“Justice is virtue,” I say, quoting someone my husband was fond of, one of his Greeks.

My daughter wrinkles her nose at this, turns around and leaves.

I retrieve the brush and finish with my hair.

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I am about to extinguish the lamp when there is a knock on my door. A soft knock, one that is careful not to be heard throughout the flat. Bemused by this string of visitors, half hoping for, half dreading Livia’s return, I open the door. Mr. Grendel is in his nightshirt and flustered; he wrings his cotton sleeping cap between work-hard hands. A strange man, shy and cringing in his movements; so diffident that I have yet to see him smoke. There are not many who would have stood at the threshold of my boudoir without giving my figure a passing glance.

“Mr. Grendel. This is hardly appropriate.”

“I am sorry,” he says, abject and whispering, his head tilted to one side. “May I. .? I saw your light was on and there is something. . You see, it’s rather important.”

“Oh, out with it!” I laugh, usher him in by his elbow, and sit him down on his own rickety chair. “Go on, speak, Mr. Grendel. It is late and I am in need of my sleep.”

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We talk for a full hour. As it turns out, I was wrong about Grendel. He is not diffident nor shy but that rarest of creatures: a man touched by fate who lacks a purpose. His wife has sent him to me to provide him with one.

I do my best to oblige.

Livia sleeps late, her mother’s words refracting in her dreams. By the time she emerges from her room, Sebastian is in the house and there is a new arrangement. Grendel has been made nursemaid to the child. The smokeless man smiles when he emerges from the nursery-prison, and continues smiling when, under Sebastian’s watchful eye, he turns the key in the lock. Then he notices Livia — and starts.

“Caught in the act!” he blushes then adds, as though in apology: “Mrs. Grendel and I, we were not blessed ourselves, you see.”

Grendel flashes her a smile, habitual and fleeting, and runs to do the dishes in the kitchen.

Sebastian stays, studying Livia.

“You disapprove, Miss Naylor.”