Madame Sasso could not have been more shocked. The announcement brought to mind a suicide in Number 17, from which it had taken her reputation several months to recover.
‘You are sure, madame? You are not excited?’
Less involved, Mrs Corbould was fascinated by the openwork in the yoke of the nightdress this rather angular, flat-chested young woman had been wearing when her emotions carried her into their presence without additional covering.
‘Do not distract yourself, madame. We will see,’ Madame Sasso advised, herself trembling.
‘But I know!’ Madame Vatatzes insisted.
Madame Sasso also insisted, pushing past the young wife to reach the maid’s room which the couple were at present occupying. From being English and discreet, Mrs Corbould did not follow, but poured herself another glass, and sat awaiting developments.
Madame Sasso was quick to see. ‘Oui, madame, il est bien malade.’
‘Send for a doctor then — can’t you?’
‘Marguerite est partie. I dare not ask the cook. I have no other person.’ Madame Sasso parried necessity like an expert, then appeared to remember.
She marched out, her black forms falling into place behind the padded buttons. ‘Rouse Mr Genge,’ she commanded Mrs Corbould.
Those who knew about such things were aware that Mr Genge, a pensionnaire of some years’ standing, was in the habit of warming his blue shanks round Madame Sasso’s steamy thighs on cold nights when the propriétaire was either forgetful or charitable.
Abandoning her poire William, Mrs Corbould rose to the occasion.
Madame Sasso returned to the sickroom.
Monsieur Vatatzes was lying, chin raised, his nightshirt open on a wisp of scruffy hair which his wife was stroking with one hand while holding with the other a bundle of yellow bones, not unlike, Madame Sasso observed, the claw of an elderly black cock, the kind which can be served as several courses after careful stewing.
‘He is coming, darling,’ Madame Vatatzes assured her husband with a tenderness Madame Sasso had not experienced before.
‘Who is coming?’ he asked. ‘Who?’
‘The doctor.’
‘Oh,’ he groaned. ‘Only the doctor.’
To do something, Madame Sasso was pouring a glass of tepid water out of a carafe, when she definitely heard, ‘I have had from you, dear boy, the only happiness I’ve ever known.’
Madame Vatatzes turned at once to the landlady. ‘Leave us, please. I think it is over.’
Madame Sasso obeyed.
When she had returned to her confidante she could not prevent herself laughing. ‘Poor man, he is out of his wits! Last words can often be amusing, as you, madame, will no doubt have found.’
Mrs Corbould found the last words of Monsieur Vatatzes, if not amusing, provocative.
Madame Sasso was pouring yet another glass of poire William when the young woman appeared again.
‘He is dead,’ she said, in what sounded not only a broken, but at the same time, an awakening voice.
Still barefoot, she was wearing a long black cloak over the nightdress with the openwork yoke.
Before the two women could go to her, to initiate her into the formal grief it is usual for widows to indulge in, Madame Vatatzes escaped from them into the night, her gait as long, loping, ungainly, as provocative as Mrs Corbould had found the openwork in a flat nightdress and the elderly Greek’s last words.
As soon as she returned from that grotesque encounter with the woman of the suppurating bandage, she slipped off the smocked travelling garment she had been wearing over her nightdress, and after rummaging for a sheet of her best monogrammed letter parchment such as she had used weeks before in starting what became the aborted letter to Eadie Twyborn, sat down to write while her emotions, her dashed hopes, her suspicions and doubts were still seething in her. Yet hesitated before beginning, her glance directed beyond the upheaval of bosom, the delicately manicured finger-nails, the plump ineffectual hands, the rings arrayed against the grain of this expensive letter-paper. (Were the rings perhaps vulgar when compared with those of Lady Tewkes — and Eudoxia Vatatzes, despite the fact that one had caught sight of congealed egg lurking in the corner of an agate eye?)
So she held back.
Before writing,
My dear Eadie,
more sober than on a former occasion, as was the comma more humbly inscribed than that other incised, flaunting one.)
She continued sitting awhile to gather courage for the plunge; then:
… What I am driven to write you will probably find preposterous, unbalanced, mad, but there comes a point in life where one has to face up to the aspirations, aberrations — failures. I’m sorry if I appear to be diverting to myself matters which concern you before anyone — well, Edward also, to some extent — but men, even fathers, are less concerned with what troubles the sensibility of wives, mistresses, children (of whatever sex). Men are complete to an extent we can never hope to be, as self-contained as those leather armchairs on which they leave their imprint …
Here Mrs Golson again hesitated for fear of what she might dredge up from depths she had never yet explored.
… Men are kinder than women, if also more clumsily brutal. I have never been whipped by a man as women know how to cut, dispensing pain often of an exquisite kind.
There is this Madame Vatatzes we recently met — and her elderly husband, a Greek if you please! I cannot blame Madame Vatatzes for any of the pain she inflicted on me, in fact I believe both she and I might not have accepted this infliction as pain.
She is in any case a radiant creature such as you before anyone, darling, would appreciate. On meeting ‘Eudoxia’ I could have eloped with her, as you too, Eadie, would have wanted, had you been here. We might have made an à trois, as they say! I would have been jealous. I would not really have wanted to share our bed of squalor with anyone else, after escaping from husbands, prudence, the past, into some northern town of damp sheets, iron bedsteads, bug-riddled walls. To lie with this divine creature, breast to breast, mouth to mouth, on the common coverlet, listening to the activity of the street below, flowing by gaslight over the wet cobbles.
There was a moment when I would have made this mistake had I been given half an opportunity. I would have allowed myself to be destroyed not only by a love such as I had never hoped to experience, but by a war which we are told is impending, both in the newspapers, and by what is perhaps the most reliable source in this horrid town, a lady of some authority at the English Tea-room and Library …
Mrs Golson paused breathless above her slashed parchment. I am mad, she thought, to pour out as never before on Eadie Twyborn. (Or not mad, perhaps literary without ever suspecting.) Then she continued,
… You if anyone, darling, will understand my predicament. shall always remember how the palms trembled in the winter garden as we toasted our own daring — the amazed faces at that dance as we forced our way amongst the bankers, graziers, barristers, doctors — their wives … You gave me my first glimpse of the other life and the poetry of rebellion. None of what I hoped for ever began to be fulfilled until a few weeks ago when I met this Eudoxia Vatatzes …
Joanie paused again, the perspiration, the downright sweat plumping on the third sheet of parchment.
… You will understand — and my misery in finding she has disappeared, with her all hopes of definite evidence for solving a mystery which concerns you more than anyone else. I have nothing to prove anything, except those extraordinary eyes reflecting the fears of a small child, seen by night light, years ago.