Jane Borodale - The Knot

‘I had no choice but to marry, I have four surviving daughters to consider. Four, dammit! They cannot run free in the mud like dottrill or little urchins. They need a woman’s hand to oversee their maturation, to bring them up in a civilized way until they are of age and can enter the world as wives and then mothers. They need to know French, totting-up, how to stitch, how to make sweet malt, bind a man’s wound, how to be in charge of the kitchen. Not everything can be taught by a nurserymaid.’ He indicates out of the window at the rainy scene. The grass is sodden and deserted, though to the far left a cow is being driven into the yard from Inner Close for milking.

‘Look at it out there,’ he demands, to the empty room, ‘what civilizing influences will be had by them if I do not seek it?’

He regrets that there has been no time for grieving – practical matters to attend to when a family member dies seemed on this occasion to take all his vigour for months afterwards, he has felt blank and sucked dry of any melancholy or other emotion. He does not mean he didn’t suffer pain but that he felt it like a physical blow to the body, so that he sat by the hearth alone at night aching as though he’d been in a fight. Yes, it was just that he’d been in a fist-fight with death on behalf of his wife and had lost. It is all perfectly normal. Doesn’t everyone suffer deaths within their close family circle?

In the year that his own mother Edith died, coffins went up the road to the church almost every week. There had been fair warning that death was to be afoot that year – in March around Lady Day there had come a great comet, reddish like Mars, half the size of the moon in diameter, with a flaming, agitated tail that stretched itself across the night sky and scorched a rightful terror into the hearts of those who looked upon it. There were many who said it was a clear token from God that the end of Catholic rule was near, and that Queen Mary’s tumour may have begun with its manifestation. A comet is a sure sign of change, or death. He hopes never to see another body like it in the sky. His mother had died in exceptional pain, drenched in sweat and gasping for air in what had been the hottest summer for eleven years, as she clung to his hand for those last dreadful days. Sometimes across his knuckles he feels the grip of her bones still, has to flex all his fingers to free himself of it. And sometimes when his eye catches at the horizon just after sunset, the first bright sight of Venus makes his blood pound momentarily, mistakenly. It is surely unthinkable that another comet of that stature could appear twice in a man’s lifetime.

His father, remarried himself after Edith’s passing within two years, has no right to listen to any bad claims against his character. It’s just the usual way of things, to marry again.

‘Everybody does it,’ Henry goes on aloud to no-one. ‘Hadn’t I waited a decent length of time since Anys was taken from us by the will of God? By God’s will alone. It had been nearly a year.’ With this last thought, a draught blows under the door, and for a second he almost thinks he can catch the scent of her brushing against him like a substance.

Anys smelt of leather polish and warm skin and oats. She smelt of hard work and prayerbooks and children and bread. He is sure he has remembered that right. He is sure she knew how well she was esteemed by him. He swallows. The whole business is unavoidable. He leaves the study hastily, goes to the last of his new wife’s boxes stacked in the hall, and carries them up.

He had lost two servants soon after the funeral, but they’d each had good reasons, as they explained, for their change of situation. Lisbet is the new maidservant, she replaced Sarah who was a diligent worker. He had let her go with regret, Anys had thought so well of her. Lisbet is tolerably good, but he did wish he couldn’t hear her feet slopping down the corridor all the time when he is trying to concentrate. Why does she never pick them up when she walks? It occurs briefly to Henry Lyte that her shoes might not fit properly. She has a pleasant enough face. There is even something quite appealing about the crooked tooth that juts out a little over her lip, though it is the kind of countenance that will not age well, and of course he knew her mother. He prefers to hire local girls like her, they stay for longer, ask fewer questions, and he doesn’t think she can have heard anything of what happened. The misunderstanding will all simmer down and be forgotten. He hopes that Frances herself will never hear what people have said of him. It is just a matter of time. People forget so easily; memories are flimsy, friable things that get buried and mulch down into the past like vegetation. A few will stick, of course, inevitably. His memory of what happened is already concentrated to a few sparse images that he cannot shake off. One can be forgiven for forgetting a detail here or there – even though details, the little unimportant daily things amassed together over time, are what makes up most of living. What does his own life add up to, he suddenly wonders. In forty years, a hundred years, three hundred, what will be left of him?

He recalls a distinct, disturbing sensation he had once in his early days as a student a long time ago, in one of Oxford’s many bathing houses. It was not the sort of place that he was to frequent very often, but he was a young man missing home, missing his mother, and had gone for comfort, a little bit of human warmth that could be bought straightforwardly with sixpence.

A pretty doxy by the name of Martha was rubbing at his back with oil, plying her knuckles to his spine, to the very bones inside his muscles, and smoothing backwards and forwards across his shoulders in a shape like a figure of eight, her breathing ragged with exertion. There was a good savour of flowers or resin all around. Afterwards she was friendly to him, and didn’t seem to mind that he had fallen asleep.

‘How was that?’ she’d asked, prodding him gently and pouring a drink from the jug. He’d thought carefully, yawned and sat up. He examined the back of his hands, turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.

‘It was like … being rubbed out,’ he’d said eventually. It was the only way to put it.

‘Out?’ she’d queried, her brow wrinkling up as if she hadn’t heard this one before, and pouring herself a measure too, just to take the edge off. She had a busy night lined up.

‘Like being erased,’ he’d said, ‘quite worn away into nothing. No trace of me left at all, not a bump or ridge to show I’d existed.’ As if it were his history that was being smoothly abolished with her accumulating, efficient strokes, in just half an hour. He had an image of himself face down in the earth, being slowly flattened and absorbed into its clayish mass, and it had felt inevitable, nothing out of the ordinary, as though this was what happened to everyone. Which it does in the end, of course, for who gets remembered? Almost all of us go back to the earth to be worn away into nothing again.

She hadn’t laughed, he recalls, but pursed her lips as though it was not at all the answer that she’d wanted. She stood pinning up her curls and ducking in front of the polished plate that served as a glass to catch her reflection. ‘You should go to church more if you want that kind of talk.’

‘I don’t mean my soul,’ he protested, confused that she was so offended. ‘I mean my presence on this earth as we know it.’ But she had a customer waiting, he could hear his shoes scraping outside on the boards, and she’d gone to the door and held it ajar for him to depart.

Chapter IV.

Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.