Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

Imogen takes the bottle of medicine from her coat pocket and throws it over the rail, watching it flip end over end until it is lost in the gray.

It seems hours before the ship reaches Folkestone. Imogen boards the connecting train and at dusk the conductor enters her compartment to draw the air-raid blinds. The electric light is too murky to read by and she does not know they are in London until the conductor opens the compartment door.

— Madam, it’s the terminus. Charing Cross Station.

She takes a taxi to Cavendish Square and enters the house, creeping up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom. She throws her dress on the floor and pulls off the silk combination she has been wearing for three days. She had left her spare in Laviéville. Her bed seems alien with its Turkish counterpane and soft bolster. She is nearly asleep when she hears her door open in the darkness. Imogen turns her back to the door, pulling the covers tight around her shoulders. The door closes again.

In the morning they are waiting for her in the parlor: her father leaning beside the mantel clock with the smoldering stub of a cigar in hand; her mother looking pallid on the divan, her hands in her lap; Eleanor perched on the piano bench, her legs crossed tightly at the knee. Her father clears his throat.

— Imogen. It’s time we spoke.

Imogen glances at her sister, but Eleanor turns her face to the window. Imogen looks at her father.

— I was at Beatrice’s in Surrey, didn’t Ellie tell you? I meant to come back yesterday, but the trains got muddled by the zeppelin—

Her father taps his cigar on an ashtray on the mantel.

— She told us, her father says. And we’ve more pressing matters to discuss.

He comes quickly to the point. He impresses upon Imogen that the decision is not simply hers to make, that the ignominy of the existence she intends would not only be hers but scrupulously allotted to all four of them, even to the more distant relatives of the Andersson or Soames families.

— You imagine you’re simply deciding for yourself. But what you do affects all of us.

Imogen crumples into a chair. She has not bathed since her return and her hair and skin smell of salt water. Her father continues his discourse, outlining the consequences of an illegitimate child, the hardship it would incur on Imogen and the child and the family at large. To this speech Imogen’s mother adds meager words of agreement. Her father begins to question her.

— You say this fellow won’t marry you?

Imogen puts her hands to her face. She can feel the nausea coming back.

— I don’t want to marry.

— But what are his intentions?

— It doesn’t matter what he intends. It’s my life—

— Imogen, will he or will he not?

Imogen looks at her father. Her voice is hard.

— He will not.

— Can he pay anything?

She glares at him, too angry to speak, her fingers clutching the bracelet on her wrist. Her father is unperturbed.

— You don’t care for money now. But you will in time.

— He can pay, Eleanor whispers. He gets thousands and thousands per year, so Charles heard. They say his uncle was frightfully rich and left him nearly everything.

Imogen’s head turns with a start. She has never heard of Ashley’s money before and she is on the point of questioning Eleanor when her mother begins talking in an oddly calm voice, her words evidently well rehearsed.

— Darling, what I say may sound cruel to you at first. But Papa and I have put a great deal of thought into this, and I promise you it’s the best thing for everyone. Most of all for you—

Imogen has trouble listening, but she absorbs the dim outline of their plan. Eleanor will announce she is expecting a child; Imogen will write to Ashley to say she has miscarried; the two sisters will go to Sweden, ostensibly to escape a winter of rationing and bombing raids for the comforts of a neutral country; the sisters will live in the seclusion of a rural home, the secret of Imogen’s pregnancy closely guarded; Imogen will deliver the child with the assistance of a hired live-in nurse; Eleanor will return to England with the child and raise it as her own. The plan would neatly solve every problem, for Imogen and the family would emerge with their reputations unscathed, the child would grow up without stigma, and Eleanor would gain the child Charles and she had so far failed to produce.

Imogen is horrified. She stands and curses them all, most of all her sister.

— Mind your own bloody lives! This is my life and my child—

— Darling, calm down—

Eleanor stands up and touches Imogen on the shoulder, but Imogen pulls away.

— I can’t believe you told them. Why did you tell them? Why?

— You can’t do this on your own.

— I am doing this on my own.

Her father stubs out his cigar.

— And how do you intend to finance yourself? Or the child for that matter? Filling shells at Woolwich twelve hours a day, one day off every fortnight? Imogen, you’re nineteen years old and you haven’t the faintest notion what it means to pull your own weight in this world. You’ve never done it and pray God you never shall.

No one speaks. Eleanor sits down and looks out the window. Imogen’s mother comes to Imogen and takes her hand, practically kneeling before her daughter.

— You must think of us, Imogen. Think of what they would say. Think of Papa’s position, you’ll see he’s only trying to protect us. For heaven’s sake, think of your child. Don’t you wish it to be happy, to have every chance in life as you’ve had?

Imogen shakes her head. — Does every girl in England have a family that makes decisions for her? And takes her own child from her?

Her father scoffs. He takes another cigar from a box on the mantel, but he is too agitated to light it.

— You’re the child, he retorts, otherwise we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Imogen, we’re not here to beg for your consent. I won’t see this family’s reputation compromised on account of your girlish fancies. If you won’t entertain your mother’s ideas you shall have to entertain mine, and I daresay they’ll please you even less. When I think of the thoroughly decent fellows you’ve ignored only to turn to this scoundrel, it makes my blood boil—

— What do you know of him?

— I know what he did to you.

— And you think I’m naïve. What makes you imagine I didn’t do it to him?

They stare at her in frank amazement, Imogen staring back, looking at her family as if she had never seen them before in her life. Her father, his forehead slightly flushed, muttering to himself as he cuts the end of the cigar with a pair of silver clippers and strikes a match; her mother, grasping Imogen’s hand and talking softly about dire consequences Imogen is too young to understand — her father’s delicate position, the blockade and U-boats, no coal in Sweden save for what the Germans give, now the Russian problem too — not to mention the scandal of the last envoy’s niece in Paris, which had not been half so delicate, and not in wartime; and Eleanor, worst of all Eleanor whom Imogen now hates as she has never hated anyone, Eleanor who still will not look her sister in the eye, her face turned to the window as she smoothes the folds of her skirt.

— It follows you all your life, Imogen’s mother whispers. You’re too young to know what that means, but I’ve known women who twenty years later can’t enter a room without imagining they’re being spoken of—

Imogen is not listening. She swallows and says some stupid, hateful thing to all of them, hardly aware of her words, then dashes into the hallway, grabbing her handbag and pulling her umbrella so violently from the basket that it topples, spilling the umbrellas and walking sticks and Grandfather’s silver-headed cane. She leaves them all on the ground and runs out, slamming the door behind her and crossing the square before anyone can follow.