THE COMPANION, formally known as THE POETRY-LOVER’S COMPANION, a compendium of poetry compiled from illustrative stanzas of verse found within the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition (1875 — 1889), or “Ensyke” in common parlance. The source of all Outlander poetry not to be found adventitiously within the novels of Charles Dickens, The Companion was long taught in Dinglian high schools, although since the 1960s it has largely been supplanted by indigenous verse.
Chapter the Third. Saturday, June 14, 2003
had the fidgets. I could not have kept my feet still for any amount of gold or treasure. I had skipped breakfast and taken hardly anything for my supper the night before, and at some point would have to provender myself with something above the microscopic tea cakes and wafer-sized biscuits that sat upon a plate and were offered to my morning companions and me by the drowsy young woman who kept falling asleep at every opportunity only to be elbowed to wakefulness by her mother with a stentorian, “Revive yourself, Betty, and make the round! Our guests must have another cake! REVIVE, DEAR GIRL! You’re quite the walking dead this morning.”
There was a reply, which came in the form of a groggy mumble to which the close proximity of my eaves dropping ears gave me full access: the mother — Mrs. Malvina Potterson — had, you see, played desultory ditties upon her harmonica through half the previous night as a remedy for sleeplessness that largely benefited the afflicted instrumentalist herself and not — unfortunately — the by-standing (or, rather, bylying) listener. This, of course, left one of the two women at a bit of a deficit and dozing off and fumbling forks and plates, and there was an obvious irony at work here in that the one doing the admonishing was also the very one responsible for that which was being admonished. (At least this was my cursory evaluation of the situation.)
The hour had got itself off to a good start; the profusely brocaded Mrs. Potterson and her slow-moving (and some say slow-witted) daughter Betty had together greeted me upon the flagstone walk that led to the Potterson cottage’s front door, Malvina with open arms and Betty with arms pinned flatly to her sides in the manner of a tin soldier. The embrace of my exuberant hostess gave way to double kisses to the cheek and to the emotional declaration, “Oh, Frederick, we’d begun to think that you weren’t going to come, but bless my eyes, here you are, here you are!” Then, directed to her rigid daughter: “Betty, dear, if you will not make our guest welcome with a kiss upon his cheek, then kiss the air at least, or blow him something which approximates a labial greeting.”
Betty kissed the air and looked mortified as she did it.
Malvina Potterson continued to bubble and babble as she led me inside and into the fat armchair that her husband had occupied up to the very moment of his death and then a few inconvenient hours thereafter. Betty followed along, her head bobbing, one hand brushing aside a nettlesome fly that had entered the domicile expressly to torment all of her facial projections as it sought a potential landing place, and in the end achieved a small measure of victory in the annals of insectival annoyance by prompting the beleaguered young woman to swat herself hard upon the nose.
Now inside the dwelling to commence my hour-long captivity, I set myself to the task of maintaining a smile of that same duration and a look of rapturous engagement, which said that everything that was spoken within this circle was more interesting than anything I’d ever heard in all of my thirty-four years of conversational audit in surely the most chattering dell in all the world.
While trying futilely to contain my fidgets.
In keeping with the annual ritual, there promised to be talk of my mother’s many offices of kindness and talk of some of her more comical traits and habits such as slapping the knuckles of the butcher with a ruler after he had placed a chop on the scale so that he would not be tempted to add an ounce or two with the press of his thumb upon the tray. Or rather I thought that this should be the theme and purpose of the morning’s visit. But 2003 would prove to be the year in which I’d be most grievously mistaken, as you will shortly witness.
Here are the names of the six women who convened themselves for the purpose of deferential attendance to the memory of my mother, Euphemia Trimmers, upon this, the fifteenth anniversary of her demise: Mrs. Malvina Potterson (the hostess, as I have noted, in company with that filial child-woman appendage named Betty), Mrs. Sophronia Venus, Mrs. Lavinia Blight, Miss Georgianna Milvey, Miss Antonia Bocker, and Mrs. Rose Fagin. I had known each of these women for all the years of my life. As to their colourful names, they had kept to the long-standing custom in Dingley Dell of choosing Christian names for themselves from the lengthy list of character names given to the world by the imaginative author Charles Dickens — a list of such bountiful eccentricity and peculiarity as to allow the forming of a bond of close denominational similarity, one with another, though Rose did not go along with the queer scheme, preferring instead when it came time for her to pick a name and register it with the Bureau of Appellations to call herself simply Rose, for she had sought since she was a toddler to give herself the name of her favourite flower— beautiful in colour and pleasing in fragrance.
It was Rose who sat next to me and winked conspiratorially every now and then when something was said that was frivolous and perfectly ridiculous. And it was Rose who warned me away from the biscuit that had the curl of dog hair upon it (for the Potterson terrier had just been groomed somewhere nearby, and the animal’s fur had attached itself to everything about the room). Rose was a stately woman with a firm, raised chin and dark brown eyes that sat deeply within the recesses of her sockets and gave one the impression of sternness and sobriety though no friend of my mother’s was warmer and more genial. She agonised through each of these yearly reunions to remember my mother who was her dearest friend, yet scarcely saw her companions upon other occasions except when they paid the occasional visit to her family jewellry shop to touch every little bauble that shimmered and attracted the eye only to return each to its velveteen cushion, and plead poverty and walk out of the shop having spent not even a cent for the privilege of the fondling.
“And where is your brother Augustus on this fine-weathered Saturday morning?” sought one of the two ample-figured constituents of this gaggle, Mrs. Venus — her plumpness so evenly distributed upon her large bones that sitting within an elbow chair (let us say, for example, the one she presently occupied) was a nearly unendurable discomfort to her, and for which reason she was apt to pop up (as best as one of her portly size could “pop”) to examine close hand, as an example, the lustrous components of her companions’ mourning weeds (for each woman was required to attend the tea wearing funereal black) or to leaf through a cookery book that had been left upon a side table, perhaps in a deliberate attempt by the hostess to disprove the oft-repeated rumour that Mrs. Potterson fed herself and her daughter exclusively on bake-house veal pie and boiled potatoes.
As I thought best how to answer Mrs. Venus’s enquiry in such a way as to preserve the good name of my truant brother, Mrs. Lavinia Blight offered up a question of her own for anyone who would entertain it — a question quite remote from the prescribed topic of the morning, my mother. Mrs. Blight, who was an even larger creature, in point of fact, than Mrs. Venus— possessed of an abundance of adipose much differently distributed, her hips being of relatively normal size, whilst her legs and arms were elephantine — drew attention away from her visually-arresting appendages to her plump-lipped mouth from which issued a deeply sonorous, almost manly voice. (Indeed, the legs themselves sat like two great tree trunks upon the floor, for my mother’s husky-throated friend chose highly hemmed gowns that gave more leg than was customarily available for viewing.)