Derek Beaven - Newton’s Niece

6) These lovers sport in the public eye. But in private, when there is no one to see, what is it they say and do? What feel?

7) Why will not my passion discharge? Is a woman’s body inferior to a man’s in this? Is a woman’s mind capable of discharge?

8) Why does my time hasten away, faster than my uncle’s clock, so that I am always afraid? Are these the last days?

9) Why am I so frightened of my words ….?

10) What forces have I reacted to, so that I should once have been’, and my pen hesitated, ‘of a lupine disposition?’

I shut the book. Not much for the start of a Principia , I thought. I felt I had done something shocking.

Having hidden these deliberations, I went out of my bedroom and walked to the end of the passage until I came directly in front of the steep back stairs, which continued their upward oak pathway to where the Pointers lived. This was the place from which I contacted them about household matters. We usually shouted up. I’d never yet intruded upon their flat, although nominally I had the right. They had an air of security.

I called quietly: ‘Mary! Pet!’ There was no answer. I called again, then hoisted my skirts and stepped up, hanging on to the rope and placing my little shoes sideways on the well worn, almost vertically raked flight. At the top I stared around in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There were two doors in front of me, at right angles to one another, and an extension of the little landing space that led off to my left.

I knocked on one of the doors. No reply. I opened it cautiously. Darkness. And the other – dark too.

Down the whole flight of the back stairs, I searched for a spare light in the kitchen, from which the Pointer family was equally absent. They must have gone out on some family jaunt; I didn’t know what these London people might do at night. Perhaps he’d given them some expenses to blow. I sheltered my candle up again, right up to their privacy, and looked in for the second time. It flickered on a sparse, easy domesticity. There were the embers of a fire. Here was the parents’ bed, made, normal. There were the careful wife’s shelves of knick-knacks, a chest and a press. I noticed Tony’s gardening boots and galoshes; Mary’s stays and stockings drying over a horse. A covered chamber-pot. A washing bowl. Blue blinds drawn over the little casement. Pet’s child drawings on expensive birthday paper propped over the hearth.

In the other room, their parlour, there were chairs round a little table, and the sofa that Pet must sleep on was covered and turned back ready, with a pillow at the wall end. My eyes took in baskets, a coal scuttle and irons. Knives were on the table, and unwashed plates with the pieces of a loaf on them; a newspaper; a Bible; candlesticks; a rack of plates; a collection of unglazed jugs and metal ones. A corner held a pile of mending and a wig-stand on the floor with an old wig of my uncle’s on it, presumably awaiting some sort of repair. In the air there hung the odour of the folk I lived below: food and must and smoky body smell. I sensed my own separateness from this close, human place.

I picked up one of the knives and went back to the bedroom. Putting the candle carefully down on the press, I lay on the marital bed. My mind ran on the possibility of some alternative demonstration. That I should hoick my skirts up to my waist, spread my legs, and cut my wrists open perhaps, waiting to be found. I poked the point of the knife into the candlelit flesh of my left wrist, teasing up a peak of skin.

Was that a sound? I got up, alert, grabbed the light, then tiptoed back to the entrance of the parlour. No. No one was coming. Near the door I caught my hem and hurt my toe on a heavy cobbler’s last which stood on the boards. I noticed the ends of the wig trailing on to the floor. I stole the great drapy thing and took myself back down to my own room, suddenly powerfully aware that these lacy red appointments were nothing to do with Mary; that they must spring from my uncle’s design and from nowhere else. I had the flash that they were designed for me.

One morning I walked with Pet to Etta Bellamy’s house up further towards Hyde Park, where I was invited for tea. I had my suspicions that Etta was pregnant. I wondered who else there might be at the house, in case I should not be able to ask her. To my surprise there were lots of women there, a few of whom I knew. Etta was nowhere to be seen. I left Pet on the edge of the gathering with someone else who was a maid, then made my way toward the kitchen. A middle-aged fair woman called Margery came towards me carrying a tray of cakes.

‘Where’s Etta?’ I asked. ‘Hello Margery,’ getting my addresses in the wrong order.

‘You’re going in the right direction. Hello Kitty.’

It was a few steps down at the end of the passage into the kitchen. Etta and a number of other people were in the midst of the swelter, managing the supplies for the entertainment.

‘What is it?’ I whispered, getting near her free side and blotting her forehead with my pocket handkerchief.

‘You’ll see. Don’t ask all these people, either. I’ve left you in the dark. For a surprise. Nothing ever surprises you. I’m determined to.’

‘Are you pregnant?’ I asked. It was horribly bad manners. The question just came out. Sometimes I made these social gaffes. I can’t even remember if that word was current then. Probably I asked was she breeding, but it seems in memory the natural sort of language I would have blundered with.

‘Are you mad?’ she replied.

‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say now.’

‘It’s alright. Go up and wait in my saloon with all those other gossips.’

We drank expensive China tea from expensive little dishes. Etta played the society hostess, which is what she was. We rustled and fanned. We ate the cakes. I sat daringly on the floor as did one or two other younger girls. More status-conscious older women squeezed themselves on to the various seat levels. Pet and the ladies’ maids had to stand at the sides.

‘Now,’ said Etta. She opened an interior door. Through it, after a brief pause, walked a young girl whose skin was like fine leather, whose black hair hung in huge braids, and whose clothing was stiff, like leather too, in the form of coat and trousers covered with beadwork wildlife. ‘I introduce to you – Pawnee,’ said Etta. ‘She is an Indian Queen from Virginia, or thereabouts.’

‘Good day, ladies,’ said Pawnee, in impeccable English. ‘I hope the time of year finds you all well.’

Etta aimed a whisper at me. ‘Are you surprised?’

I was surprised.

‘A gap!’ laughed Etta.

‘A gap indeed,’ I said.

At my uncle’s house I said to Pawnee and Etta: ‘Do you know how when you are grown up the weeks and years seem to pass more rapidly than they did when you were a child?’

We were sitting in the back room looking out of the double doors at the sun on the goose-pecked grass between the honeysuckles in the yard.

‘I know what that is;’ said Pawnee. “The world is speeding up.’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Etta contracted her nostrils; it exaggerated the fineness of her noble nose for a moment. ‘Why should it?’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Well I hope it’s not, for my children’s sake.’

‘There. I was right,’ I said. ‘Rude but right. Sometimes when I know things I blurt them out. I can’t help it, it seems. But admit it, my dear.’

‘You are preoccupied,’ she replied. ‘Edmund is very skilful.’

‘What’s that? What is skilful?’ The other two both laughed.

Etta choked out: ‘Edmund is, Kit.’

And Pawnee added: ‘Let’s hope the world doesn’t speed up on him, then.’