The Butterfly Cabinet (19 page)

“Get help!” I shouted. “Bring something! A quilt or—anything!”

He came back with two of the stable boys and the winter
cover for the carriage. Together they dragged away the dining table, stretched out the canvas between them and positioned themselves under the chandelier. All of us stood, mesmerized, watching as the great flower of crystal slowly came to a stop and hung glittering in the room above all our heads. The carpets and floorboards in the room above had to be lifted in order to tighten the great bolts back into place, the work of the stables and yard halted for half a day over the act of two thoughtless little boys.

It must have been that day Maddie was describing when she told the court how she had witnessed me drag Gabriel up the stairs by his heels. I looked across at her in the courtroom, at her white face and her shaking hands: she looked like she was the one under sentence; she would not meet my eye. It turns out I was right to suspect her: she told Morell it was she who had written to the Cruelty Society and brought that nasty little man to the door. I do not remember the incident with Gabriel all that clearly. I know that when the chandelier finally completed its terrifying arc, I commanded the two boys out of the room. I know I lifted my riding crop out of the umbrella stand. I know I put Morris in the library and told him not to move until I returned. I know I got Gabriel up the stairs somehow, that he resisted because he knew what was to come, that I threatened him with the crop and put him in the wardrobe room, from which I could hear him crying, “I am sorry, Mama,” over and over again. I know that I went away and left him then and that I had no energy for Morris, so I had Feeley take him outside and tie him to the horse chestnut (not securely, as it turned out), so that everyone who passed would know of his misbehavior. Why did he run away? What did he hope to gain from that? I almost think he wishes to provoke my anger. He allows me to catch him at misbehavior he knows will attract punishment. Why does he bait me so? I caught his look as I left him in the library to drag Gabriel up the stairs and it was not a look of repentance or even of fear at what was to come. He
appeared upset at being abandoned, envious of the attention that I was about to bestow on his brother.

How are they ever to learn the effects of their thoughtlessness, if not by punishment? They value nothing—not their clothes or their toys or their warm beds or their freedom. They are robbers of time, demanding and unthankful. They must be taught to appreciate what they have. God only knows if any of this will have any beneficial effect. It is just as likely that they will go from being careless children to being careless adults, imprudent with their time and with that of those around them.

I wonder if Edward has stopped loving me. There are aspects of the management of the children over which we do not agree, but since he does not wish to be troubled with domestic matters, he acquiesces, for the most part, to leave them to me. After Morris freed himself, however, was lost and then found again, Edward came in to me in the morning room, where I was bent over the sateen lining of my riding jacket, trying to mend a tear in the seam where I had raised my arm too high. It was not something I could leave to the servants: their work was acceptable when it came to joining the sheets or mending a hole in the linen, but this was from Redfern’s, mohair trimmed, and a clumsy hand could have made the injury worse. Edward sat down opposite, picked up a copy of the
Contemporary Review
. The low winter sun stretched a finger in through the window, killing the fire in the grate.

“I have been speaking with Morris,” he said from behind his magazine.

“Then you know what he was doing to the chandelier,” I answered, without lifting my head from my sewing.

“You had him tied to a tree?”

“Indeed. I could have done more but by the time I had finished with Gabriel I had no energy left.”

“Do not you think you have been a little harsh, Harriet? I know they can be trying, but it is high spirits for the most part; it is
not done to torment you. When they are absorbed in a game it is as if they are in another world; they do not see the consequences.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “They do not think. They never think. They show no appreciation for the time and trouble of other people. They have no respect for what others hold dear to them. They are pests and nuisances, every one.”

I heard the paper rustle as he lowered it. “Don’t you remember what it was like to be a child, Harriet? To lose yourself in an imaginary world? A princess fleeing from a dragon, a—”

“No, Edward,” I said. “I never forgot for a moment who I was, what my duties were, where my responsibilities lay. And that is the difficulty with them. You fill their heads full of nonsense about battles and wars and monsters until they believe the entire world is a circus, that the adults around them are characters in the drama and that every object they come across has been placed there to be used by them as a plaything. They must learn that life is not a playground.” I looked up at him. “It is our duty to raise them with sense, not to produce savages.”

He was quiet, looking straight at me with a strange expression on his face. Not affection, certainly, and not interest, but I think, possibly, pity.

“I did not raise my hand to either of them,” I said. He got up, closed the magazine, dropped it on the console and walked out of the room without another word. I do not think things were ever the same between us again.

It is a kindness to teach them as soon as is possible that they cannot always do as they would, without regard for others. It is for their own safety and their own self-preservation. There is too much talk these days of leniency and compassion. Had I not learned as a child to armor myself against the world, I would never have found the strength to endure this place, now. I do not know what my parents saw in me to distrust. I used to think it was a hardness that repelled them, but now I think that
what they felt toward me was fear. I was not the child they had expected; Julia must have been that for them. She was perfectly happy to be preened and paraded in ribbons and bows, to sit for hours learning a piece at the piano, to sketch hills and fields and cottages, to while away hours in an imaginary world with her dolls. I could not be held by such activities; I preferred the world at firsthand. I wanted always to be out, galloping over the hedges, rolling down dunes. I craved air, always. But that was unseemly, more so as I grew older. It was impressed upon me that I must learn to behave as a young lady.

I remember clearly being fitted for my first corset. Elsa, the maid, stood behind me, my mother in front. Elsa slipped the straps over my shoulders, wrapped the boned casing round my middle and drew the stays tight according to Mother’s instructions. I was seven years old. I knew it was an important moment. The stays were uncomfortable; my breathing grew more shallow as Elsa pulled them tighter. I found it hard to believe that I was expected to wear this garment every day from that day forward. After we were married, and I grew large with Harry, I left the instrument of torture aside and never wore one again.

Raising children demands a certain kind of mental energy. Not the energy that is needed to cross a field at a gallop or scale a hedge. I would far rather break a yearling than go head-to-head with Morris or Gabriel when either one of them throws back his head. One needs to be on top of everything: brush your teeth; wash your hands; say your prayers; do your lessons; comb your hair; button your shirt. I am sick at the sound of my own voice repeating the same instruction over and over. “A gentle tap about the hocks is usually sufficient,” Lord Ormond would say, “that will help them toward the correct way of going.” If only it were that simple.

I have been dutiful, I believe, taken most of my meals with the children, not left them to the care of servants. In this respect,
I am unusual among my peers, but I have wanted, always, to be available to the children and to do what was correct. I brought them into the world; they are my responsibility. If their behavior is not what it should be, I have no one else to blame. There were days, though, when the burden of what that entailed weighed on me like a blanket, and I felt like I would never get through. I will never, I thought, have them all bathed and dressed and down to breakfast by eight, and in the schoolroom by nine; I will never see that they have had their walk by luncheon; I will never manage to round them up again for tea at four; I will never have them ready for bed and their prayers said by six. I was always underneath, looking up, straining under the weight of it. My days were gated and barred, like the shadows the stair railings make on the wall when the sunlight pushes its way through the glass at the front entrance. Through it all I must make it look easy, as if no effort were required, and speak to Peig about what can be salvaged from dinner for luncheon and see that the housemaids have seen to the fires and the beds and not bother Edward with trifles. Then it takes only one interruption to upset the most fragile routine: the butcher has not come, or the milk has turned, or Morris has a cough, or fleas have been discovered, and there is no way to recover from any setback because no contingency has been allowed. I watched with relief as Harry and then Thomas and James were sent off to school, regretted only that the others were too young to go.

They have never been required to tend to me. I have asked nothing of them. The balance has been exactly as it should have been. Julia is free to be the indulgent aunt if she so wishes—except in the matter of discipline, in which she has no business to interfere. She doted on Charlotte, of course, invested wholesale in the frills and curls, insisted on quilling a lace bonnet for her herself, bought her that ridiculous dolls’ house. I have never understood this fashion for the miniature—why must a thing be
declared “delightful” by virtue of its having been made smaller? A ewer, a chair, a tablecloth, ordinarily they attract little interest, but produce one that has been shrunken, and it will have ladies and maids alike in salons and kitchens throughout the country swooning over its detailed execution. I see no point in it. A doll cannot mount a horse, pour tea, arrange flowers—why pretend otherwise? Why bother to surround it in tiny pieces of china, equipment for grooming “so like the real thing,” when it is all for show and no function at all?

I expressed my sentiments on the matter to Julia. “Your failure, Harriet, is a failure of the imagination,” she said to me. “You see only what is before your eyes and not what is behind the eyes of others.” I take it she meant it as an insult, but no offense was taken on my part. She reminded me of Maddie, that day on the beach when Charlotte refused to enter the water. “You want to see what she can see,” she said. As if I could not. What is it that makes them believe that their vision is superior to mine?

Julia’s nonsensical pursuits include tile painting, sewing unusable pincushions for every new birth that is announced and, surely most inane, flower pot drapery that she contributes to charity bazaars. She is always engaged in a project. For a while, the summer after Charlotte was born she and her friends took to sketching. I could often see them from the castle, perched on Harbor Hill among the whins, taking in the long curve of the Parade, the Drontheims in the harbor below them; the laundry drying on the rocks; St. John the Baptist’s church spire at the other end; the tram toiling along, past the cast-iron railings and balconies of the shops and houses and the hotel in between. She would come back with an armful of oxeye daisies and wander the house, thrusting them behind pictures and over doorjambs, where they would fill the rooms with flies and then wilt and droop until eventually the servants yanked them out. She salvaged the neglected wardian case from the hall, emptied it of its sad-looking
ferns and orchestrated a dyed seaweed display. If that is evidence of the imagination being employed then I will do well without one. Although it had the advantage of keeping her out from under my feet.

She and Charlotte would spend hours with their heads together, drawing and decorating. Julia taught her how to draw around her hand, in and out around her small fingers, and then to decorate the sketch with sennaed and sequined tattoos: robins and hearts and roses. They plundered the sewing box for bright scraps of fabric and colored thread, discarded ribbons, lace collars, buttons and bows. They are everywhere in the nursery, those elaborate appliquéd drawings, rings on every finger, jeweled bracelets dangling from disembodied wrists, the imprint of Charlotte’s small hand.

After the day of the chandelier, I perfected a kind of self-willed absence: a distracted attendance that allows me to be both present and unavailable at the same time. The children, with their sixth sense, have come to recognize it quickly, have walked straight past me to ask Elise for a book or a slate that was right by my hand. Soon, I think, they will be able to walk through me. I will not exist for any of them. I will be the ghost of their mother, recognizable in outline but not in substance, the insubstantial remnant of something that once was.

I will not see Charlotte grown. What kind of woman would she have made, I wonder.

29 NOVEMBER 1968

Did you pass the fishermen at the harbor, Anna? Did you come that way? I love a bit of fish on a Friday. I can see them from here, the boats pulled in, jostling against each other and the seagulls wheeling about above their heads, swooping for anything they can get, and the stalls all laid out with the catch. The master was particular about his salmon: he didn’t like to wait until the cart came, when the whole catch, he said, had been picked over. He used to send Peig down as soon as the boats came in to get the pick of them.

This particular day, when Peig had gone down to the harbor, the mistress sent down word that she wanted a seawater bath. The copper cans were kept just inside the cellar door, off a dark passageway to the other side of the lamp room. They weren’t heavy when they were empty, but they were awkward to maneuver in that tight space and it took two people to carry them out, one at either handle. I was in the scullery, scrubbing the earth off the spuds, when Alphie came in.