I. Lindenhurst
I was twenty-six years old when I took the post at Lindenhurst, and I took it for money, which is to say that I took it for love, though I did not yet understand that the two had been braided together in me since childhood.
My mother lay in a ward of the Hull Royal Infirmary with a heart that was failing by inches, and the physicians had said, in the soft, apologetic voice they kept for the poor, that there was a procedure in London, and a surgeon, and a figure that began with a three and ended in three noughts. I was a staff nurse at that same infirmary, earning four pounds a week, and I had calculated upon the back of an envelope that I should need nine years to save it, and that my mother had perhaps one.
The advertisement appeared in the Nursing Times in the first week of October, 1962. I have kept it still, a small square of yellowed newsprint in the lid of my sewing box:
WANTED: Night nurse, single, of good character and steady nerve, for one patient at private residence on the North Yorkshire moors. Wages of twelve pounds weekly. Board provided. Discretion essential.
Twelve pounds a week. I read it standing in the sluice-room, with a bedpan in one hand, and I thought that someone had made a printer’s error, and then I thought that it did not matter, and I wrote that same evening.
I was met at the station at Danby by a gaunt, silent man in a mackintosh who drove me for an hour in a black Humber over a road that climbed and climbed through a landscape of heather the colour of dried blood, until the world seemed to consist of nothing but sky and wind and the headlamps’ narrow tunnel. At the end of that road, behind a belt of black beeches, stood Lindenhurst.
It was a Georgian house of pale stone, tall and symmetrical and perfectly proportioned, with a fanlight above the door and a gravel sweep before it, and I remember thinking that it had the look of a beautiful face from which something has been quietly removed. All its windows were lit. There was no other light for miles.
The matron received me in the hall. She was a woman of perhaps sixty-five, small and straight and dry as a pressed flower, in a grey uniform of old-fashioned cut, with a watch pinned to her bosom and a pair of hands so white and fine-boned that they seemed to belong to a younger person. Her name was Mrs. Voss. Her eyes, which were the pale blue of skimmed milk, went over me once, from my cap to my shoes, with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman reading a ledger.
“Miss Whitlock,” she said. “You are punctual. That is well. You will find the work light, and the patient courteous. You will sit with him from eight in the evening until six in the morning. You will give him his draught at midnight and again at three. You will not be required to do anything else.”
“What is the patient’s complaint, Matron?”
“A wasting of the lungs. Advanced.” She turned and began to climb the stair, and I followed. “He is not in pain. He has been dying for some time.”
I remember that I noticed the phrase and did not examine it. One does not, at the beginning of a great fear, hear the first note.
II. The Portraits
The house had a long upper corridor, panelled in dark oak and lit by electric sconces shaped like candle-flames, and along its western wall, between the doors, hung a row of small oval portraits.
I saw them first by lamplight, following Mrs. Voss toward the room that would be mine, and I stopped, because I could not help it. They were miniatures, watercolour on ivory, set in plain black frames the size of a woman’s palm. There were eleven. Each depicted a young woman in the cap and collar of a nurse. They were not alike in feature: one was dark, one fair, one freckled, one with the long grave brow of a Madonna; but there was a likeness between them nonetheless, in the set of the mouth, in a certain look of clear, uncomplaining steadiness, as though each had been chosen by the same eye for the same quality.
Under each, upon a small brass plate, was engraved a name and two years:
N. Prentice, 1911–1913.
A. Courtney, 1913–1916.
M. Hollis, 1916–1919.
I read down the row as one reads the names upon a war memorial. The last of them said, E. Marsden, 1955–1958. Beside it hung a twelfth frame, black and plain, with nothing in it but a blank oval of cream silk. The brass plate beneath had been polished but not yet engraved.
“My predecessors?” I asked.
“The nurses who have served here.” Mrs. Voss did not turn. “Lindenhurst has had the same patient a great many years, and he has been fortunate in the devotion of those who have attended him. It is a custom of the house to remember them.”
“They are all so young,” I said. “The dates… they served for three years apiece, and then…”
“Then they were no longer required.”
There was something in the way she said it that made the skin lift upon my arms. She opened the door of a small whitewashed room with an iron bed, a washstand, and a window that looked out upon the black beeches, and said, “You will want to rest. I shall come for you at a quarter to eight.”
She went away down the corridor, and I stood looking at the twelfth frame, the empty one, and I remember that my own breath, in that warm electric light, seemed suddenly very loud.
I told myself that I was tired. I told myself that a private nursing-home of this sort, in so remote a place, would naturally have its eccentricities, its mementos, its harmless sentimentalities of the long-serving. I told myself, with the dreadful sensible cheerfulness that has been the undoing of so many women, that twelve pounds a week was twelve pounds a week.
At a quarter to eight Mrs. Voss came for me, and led me down the corridor to the last door on the left.
III. Mr. Ashgrove
I had expected an old man.
I do not know why. The matron’s words, dying for some time, and the dim hush of the house, and the ranked portraits of the dead had arranged my fancy into a particular shape: a withered grandee, a fretful invalid, a skull upon a pillow. What I found, when the door opened upon a large, warm, firelit room hung with faded green silk, was a man of perhaps thirty-five years, propped upon three pillows in a vast carved bed, reading by the lamp.
He looked up as I came in. And I understood, in that instant, that I had been mistaken in a still more fundamental way: that nothing I had been told had prepared me for the fact that he was beautiful.
It was not a robust beauty. He was far too thin, and the pallor of his skin had that translucent quality which one sees in the consumptive, as though the light shone through the flesh from within. His hair was dark, and rather long, and fell across a high, narrow forehead. His hands, lying upon the counterpane with the book between them, were long and almost transparent. But his eyes, which were grey, and very tired, and very kind, rested upon me with such a quality of attention that I forgot for a moment to breathe. It was the look of a man who had spent a long time alone and was intensely glad of a face.
“Miss Whitlock,” he said. His voice was low and unhurried, with the faint huskiness of the chest. “I am afraid they have not told you my name. It is Edmund Ashgrove. I beg you will not trouble to stand on ceremony. I have not stood on anything for a very long time.”
The joke was so slight, and so sad, and so unexpectedly warm, that I laughed, and was ashamed, and he smiled, and that was the beginning.
I will not pretend that I remember clearly the first weeks. They have the blurred, golden quality that belongs to the early days of any love, when the world is arranged round a single lighted room. I came on duty at eight each evening. I made up the fire, I trimmed the lamp, I took his temperature and pulse and entered them in the book that Mrs. Voss kept upon the bureau. At midnight I gave him a draught of bitter brown fluid from a stoppered bottle; at three, another. And between these small offices we talked.
He was the best company I have known. He had read everything. He had been, he told me, a schoolmaster once, in a life that seemed to him now as remote as a story read in childhood; he spoke of it with an ironic tenderness, a fondness for his own lost youth, as though it had belonged to a gifted younger brother. He asked me about my own life with a frank, unfeigned curiosity that no one had ever shown, and he listened to my answers as though they were rare. I told him of my mother. I told him of the envelope and the nine years. I told him things I had not told my own heart.
One night, toward the end of October, he asked me to read to him.
There was a battered little volume of Tennyson upon the bedside table, its spine cracked, its pages soft as cloth with handling. I opened it at random and found a place marked with a faded ribbon, and read:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
I stopped. He was looking not at me but at the fire, and a single tear ran down the side of his face and was lost in the pillow.
“Forgive me,” he said. “It has been a long time since anyone read it aloud.”
I did not know what I did. I put down the book and laid my hand over his, and it was cold, very cold, and the stillness of it startled me. And he turned his hand beneath mine, slowly, and held it, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. The fire settled. Somewhere far below, in the great dark body of the house, a clock struck one.
Then he withdrew his hand and said, in a voice that was suddenly quite different, quiet and rapid and urgent, “Miss Whitlock. Clara. Please. You must not.”
“Must not what?”
“Do that. Care for me. Not in that way.” He closed his eyes. “I am sorry. I have no right. I ought to have said it sooner. It is a kindness I was too weak to forgo.”
“Mr. Ashgrove, I am your nurse. I cannot see…”
“Be my nurse,” he said. “Give me the draught. Take my pulse. Be as cold as a marble saint, if you can bear it. But do not love me. I beg you.”
I stared at him. I was twenty-six and I had never been so insulted, nor so moved.
“And if I cannot help it?” I said.
He looked at me then, and I saw such grief in his face that I could not breathe. “Then God forgive us both,” said Edmund Ashgrove. “For it will cost you everything, and I cannot prevent it.”
IV. The Weariness
It began as a tiredness.
I should not have noticed it, perhaps, but for the contrast. By the middle of November Mr. Ashgrove had improved. That was the word the matron used, with a brief, dry, unreadable satisfaction. The patient is improved. His colour was better. The terrible cough that had racked him on my first nights had subsided to a rare, light catch in the throat. He ate a little. He sat up in the chair beside the fire, wrapped in a plaid, and on two occasions he walked the length of the room on my arm, laughing at himself like a child learning to skate.
And I, who had never in my life been ill, who had worked double shifts in the infirmary with a freight of cheerful stamina, began to feel as though I were walking through water.
There is a kind of fatigue that sleep does not touch. It lives in the bones. I would wake at four in the afternoon, in my whitewashed room, after eight hours in bed, and lie there unable to lift my arm. My hands had begun to ache in the mornings. My knees complained upon the stair. I put it down to the night duty, to the hard work, to the cold and the moor-wind and the silence, and I said nothing to anyone.
Then, one evening toward the end of November, I looked in the glass above the washstand.
I had taken down my hair to brush it. It is long, and was at that time a plain brown, nothing in the least remarkable. And over my left temple, running back from the brow, there lay a streak of white, as broad as two fingers, as clean and as cold as frost.
I stood quite still with the brush in my hand.
Then I looked at my face. It was my face. But it was thinner, in a way I had not marked; the skin had a faint papery fineness about the eyes, and there were lines at the corners of the mouth that I did not remember. I lifted my hand and turned it over, and the back of it, in the electric light, was veined and soft and old.
I am not, I hope, a hysterical woman. I did what a nurse does. I sat on the edge of the iron bed and took my own pulse, and counted, and went on counting, long after the number had told me what it had to tell. And then I put on my cap and went downstairs to the night-room, because there was nothing else to do.
He was awake. He was sitting up in bed, as he had not sat for years, I think, with the firelight on his face, and when he looked at me I saw that he had known. That he had known all along, and had been waiting, with a dreadful, helpless patience, for me to come to him.
“You have seen,” said Edmund.
“What is it?” My voice came out cracked. “What have you done to me?”
“Nothing,” he said. “That is the horror of it. I have done nothing. I have only been loved.”
He told me then. It took the rest of that night, and he told it quietly, looking at his hands, in the plain, exact language of a man who has rehearsed a confession for fifty years and never had a listener.
He had been a schoolmaster at a grammar school in Whitby, in the summer of 1911. He had been twenty-nine years old, and dying of consumption. The doctors had given him a winter. He had been taken in by a private nursing-home upon the moors, a plain Victorian establishment that has since burnt, and there, nursed through the nights by a girl of twenty-three called Nora Prentice, he had discovered that he was not going to die.
“Not because I recovered,” he said. “I did not recover. The disease went on, as it still goes on, a slow ruin in the lungs. But I did not die. I lingered. The winter came and went, and I was alive in the spring, and Nora was very happy. And then, in the autumn, I noticed that her hair was turning grey.”
A coal broke in the grate.
“She loved me,” said Edmund. “That was the whole of it. I do not know how; I do not know why; I have had fifty years to ask, and I have found no answer. But when someone loves me, wholly, as she did, as you do, Clara, whether you will own it or not, there is a thing that passes from them to me. A tithe. A little of the time they have. Days, at first, and then months. It is given freely. That is the cruelty of it. I have never once taken a year that was not offered.”
“Nurse Prentice,” I said. “The first portrait.”
“She died in 1913, at the age of twenty-five, of nothing at all. She had the body of a woman of seventy.” His voice shook. “I wished to die. I begged to. I fasted. I tried to take my own life, with Nora’s own scissors, in the spring of 1913; and I could not. The wound closed before the blood had dried. And then the matron of that time, a woman whose name I will not say, came to me and said that I was a gift; that I had a use; that the house might yet be of service to those who wished to remain near what they loved.”
He lifted his head. And in his grey, exhausted, beautiful eyes I saw a fathomless shame.
“There have been eleven of you,” said Edmund Ashgrove. “And I have loved every one.”
V. The Matron’s Ledger
I went to Mrs. Voss at six o’clock in the morning, with my cap in my hand and the white streak in my hair, and I found her in the housekeeper’s room at the foot of the back stairs, seated at a table with a cup of tea and the great black ledger open before her.
She did not look surprised. She looked up, and her skimmed-milk eyes passed over my hair, and she closed the ledger gently, as one closes the eyes of the dead.
“So he told you,” she said.
“Is it true?”
“All of it.” She poured a second cup and pushed it across the table. “Sit down, Miss Whitlock. You look ill. You will look worse before the end of the winter.”
I did not sit. My knees were shaking with a fury I had not known was in me. “You knew,” I said. “Eleven women. You hung their portraits in a corridor, like trophies, and you brought me here with a smile and a salary, and you knew what it would do.”
“I did.”
“How can you bear it?”
She regarded me for some time with an expression I could not read. Then she said, in a dry and level voice, “My name is not Voss. It was Prentice. Dorothy Prentice. In the autumn of nineteen-thirteen I was nine years old, and I used to sit upon the stairs of the old Lindenhurst and watch my sister Nora carry up the evening tray. She was twenty-five. She was the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen. And I watched her grow old in a year, as a candle burns down in a draught. At the end she could not lift the spoon. She said to me, Dolly, it is worth it. He is worth it. Promise me you will look after him.”
Her hands lay folded upon the ledger. They were the hands I had admired on the first night, white and fine, the hands of a young woman. I understood, with a slow cold lurch of the stomach, why they looked so.
“I was nine,” said Mrs. Voss. “I promised.”
“And you have kept that promise by feeding him girls,” I said. “For fifty years.”
“I have kept it by keeping him alive.” For the first time her voice cracked, very slightly, like thin ice. “Do you not see? If he dies, it was for nothing. Nora’s years, and Alice Courtney’s, and Margaret Hollis’s, and all the rest, they are in him, Miss Whitlock. They are in him now. They are the only place they are. If he dies, they are scattered like chaff and my sister has been dead for forty-nine years for no reason at all.”
I said nothing. There was nothing I could say that she had not said to herself ten thousand times, in the dark, in the long cold corridors of that fair, empty house.
“There is another thing,” said Mrs. Voss, more gently. She opened the ledger and turned it to face me. “Your mother.”
The page was ruled in a clerk’s hand. Beneath my name were the words:
Mother, Mrs. Ada Whitlock, Hull Royal Infirmary, cardiac failure. Surgery, London (Mr. Hargreaves). Estimated cost, £3,000. To be met in full by the House upon completion of term.
“The House has always provided for its nurses’ families,” said Mrs. Voss. “It is a point of honour. Eleven mothers and fathers and brothers have been seen to, Miss Whitlock. A farm was bought for the Hollis family. A cottage for the Marsdens. Your mother shall have her surgeon. She shall live to be eighty. You have only to serve the term.”
“Three years.”
“Not more.” She closed the ledger. “He will be gentle with you. He is the gentlest creature that ever lived. And he will love you, to the very end, which is more than most women are granted.”
I left the room without answering. I walked the whole length of the house, through the hall with its fanlight and its pale stone floors, and out onto the gravel in the grey, ice-edged dawn, and I stood there beneath the black beeches while the wind came off the moor, and I understood that I wanted to say yes.
That was the true horror of Lindenhurst. It was not the house, nor the ledger, nor the white hair at my temple. It was that everything which was offered to me was good. Everything. My mother’s life. A man who looked at me as though I were the only lit window in a darkening world. A task, a use, a place in the order of things, and a pair of tired grey eyes that said stay.
If evil had come to me with a cloven hoof I should have known it. It came with a tea-tray, and a tenderness, and a promise to my mother.
VI. The Letter from Hull
The letter came on the first of December.
It was written in pencil upon the lined paper that the ward sister kept for patients who could not hold a pen, and my mother had dictated it, I think, for the hand was a stranger’s:
My dear Clara,
I am keeping well. They have moved my bed by the window, so that I can see the lorries. I am not in pain. You are not to worry or to come, for the matron here says that you have a very good position, and I am proud of you.
I will say one thing, and then I shall say no more. You have always carried me. Since your father died you have carried me, ever so cheerfully, as if I were nothing. I would like you to know that I have never once supposed it was nothing. I would not have you carry me one step further than you wish. I have had a good long life, my dear, and a better daughter than I deserved, and if I go, I go with my hand in yours, wherever you are.
I read it in my whitewashed room, with the wind moaning in the eaves. I read it twice. Then I folded it and went down the corridor to the portraits, and stood before the twelfth frame, the blank one, with its silk oval waiting like an open mouth.
I thought of my mother, who had never in her life asked for anything. I thought of Dorothy Prentice upon the stair. I thought of eleven women who had each looked at the same grey eyes and said yes, and gone on saying it, with a sort of radiant, willing, disastrous generosity, until there was nothing left to say it with.
And I thought: none of them was a fool.
That was what I could not forgive them, and could not forgive myself. They were not deceived. They were not weak. They were simply women who had been given, for once, a thing worth the whole of their lives, and who had paid, gladly, in the only coin they had.
That night I went to Edmund and sat down at the foot of his bed.
“There is a way, isn’t there?” I said. “You have thought about it. You have had fifty years.”
He had been reading. He laid the book aside, and I saw that it was the Tennyson, and that his hands were trembling.
“There is,” he said. “I have never dared to tell any of them. I was afraid that if I said it, they would try.” He drew a long breath. “The years are lent, Clara. They are not taken. That is the whole nature of the thing. They pass from the one who loves to the one who is loved, and as long as the love holds, they stay with me. But the love is the lock and the love is the key. If it were ever surrendered, truly, wholly, without any thought for oneself, if one who loves me were to say, go, I release you, I would rather lose you than keep you, and to mean it, to the root, then the lock would open.”
“And then?”
“Then I should die. All at once. Fifty years in an hour.” He smiled faintly. “I am an old man, Clara. I am eighty-one.”
“And the years?”
“They would go home. Not to the dead, I think; they have no use for them. To the living, to whoever is held most dearly by the one who lets me go.” He looked at me with an expression that was almost unbearable. “Where love is strongest. There is a kind of justice in it. I have never been sure of it, but I believe it.”
The fire popped.
“None of the others could,” I said slowly.
“None of them was told. And Dorothy…” He closed his eyes. “Dorothy has always been so careful. She never let one of them come within a hundred yards of the truth. She was nine years old, Clara. She has been nine years old all her life.”
“Edmund,” I said. My throat hurt. “Do you want to die?”
“More than I have ever wanted anything,” said Edmund Ashgrove. “Except you.”
VII. The Twelfth Frame
It would be easy to say that I decided at once. I did not.
I spent eleven nights in that room, reading to him, and I did not decide. I would sit by the fire with the Tennyson on my knee, and watch him sleep, with his dark hair upon the pillow and his long hand open on the counterpane, and I would think: give me three years. Only three. I would think of my mother’s ward, and her pencilled letter, and the surgeon. I would think of his face when I came through the door each evening, the way his whole being lit, like a house in which someone has just trimmed the lamp. I would think: who is harmed, if I am happy, and he is happy, and my mother lives?
And then I would look at the twelfth frame in my mind, the empty oval of cream silk, and see my own face in it, old, ruined, smiling, content.
On the twelfth night, the twenty-second of December, a telegram came from Hull:
MOTHER SINKING STOP COME IF YOU CAN STOP SISTER BARLOW.
I read it by the hall lamp, and in the shadow behind me Mrs. Voss said, very quietly, “The car will take you to Danby. You may go, of course. You shall have a week. I will not keep you from your mother.”
I turned and looked at her. She stood in the light of the sconce, small and straight, in her grey uniform, with her nine-year-old’s white, young hands clasped at her waist, and in her pale eyes I saw the whole desperate faith of her life, held out to me like a cup.
“And when I return?” I said.
“You will return,” said Mrs. Voss. “They all do.”
I did not go to Hull.
I went upstairs, and put on my cap, and walked into the green-hung room, where the fire was burning low and he was sitting up in bed, waiting, as though he had known. I closed the door. I took the Tennyson from the table and sat in the chair beside him. For a while we said nothing at all.
“My mother is dying,” I said.
“I know.”
“I will tell you what I think, Edmund, and you must tell me if I am wrong.” My voice was quite steady. I was amazed at it. “I think that love is not a thing one keeps. I think that it is a thing one gives, and that if one does not know how to open one’s hands, it turns into something else. Something that has to be fed. My mother wrote me that she would not have me carry her one step farther than I wished. It was the most loving thing that anyone has ever said to me. And I have been carrying you since the first night, and I think you have known it, and I think it has been breaking your heart.”
He made a small sound.
“I do not know if I am wise,” I said. “I do not know if I am brave. I know that I love you. I think I shall love you until I die, which I now hope will not be soon. And I know that you have been dying in this room for fifty years, in the arms of every woman who ever loved you, because not one of us could bring herself to say the only word that would help.”
I took his hand. It was very cold. I held it between both of mine.
“Edmund Ashgrove,” I said. “Go. I do not hold you. I never had the right. Go home. I release you, with all my heart, and I will carry what I carry gladly, and I will not be sorry.”
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a tremor ran through the house. It began far below, in the foundations, and rose through the floors and the walls, like the shudder of a great animal in its sleep. The lamp swung. On the landing, I heard a sound like a dozen small clear bells, and knew it for the glass of eleven picture-frames cracking, one after another, from corner to corner.
Edmund opened his eyes.
I shall remember what I saw for the rest of my life, and I shall not tell it plainly, for it was not horrible. It was the most natural thing in the world. Years went out of the room like light going out of a window at evening. His hair, which had been black, lightened to iron and then to silver. The fine lines upon his forehead deepened and softened, and the face beneath them, still beautiful, still entirely himself, grew old: unhurried, unfrightened, serene, as an old tree grows. His hand in mine thinned and warmed. And all the while his eyes remained fixed upon me with a look I can only describe as homecoming.
“Thank you,” said Edmund.
He said it very quietly, in an old man’s voice, as one who has laid down a long burden.
The door burst open behind me. I heard Mrs. Voss cry out, not in anger but in a high, thin, childish voice, like a creature in a trap, “Nora! Nora, no, no, it was for nothing, it was all for…”
“Dolly,” said Edmund.
He turned his head upon the pillow. He looked at her across the whole width of that room, across fifty years, with a face full of grief and tenderness and a great, tired, gentle authority.
“It was not for nothing,” he said. “Every day she gave me, I lived. I read, and I wrote, and I loved. I was seen. Do you not understand? She did not die so that I might be kept. She died so that I might be loved, and that was what she wanted. It is all she ever wanted. Let her go, Dolly. Let me go. Let us all go home.”
Mrs. Voss stood quite still in the doorway. And then I saw her face change, and I understood that she was, at long last, grieving, with the pure, bitter, bewildered grief of a child of nine, for a sister who had been dead for forty-nine years. She sank down upon the threshold, and put her white young hands over her face, and wept.
He died at a quarter to six, as the first light came through the green silk curtains, with my hand in his. It was very quiet.
VIII. Those Who Remain
I was not as old as I had feared.
The years went where he had said they would go. I felt them leave me, in the hour after he died, like a tide going out of a harbour, and I sat by the bed in the grey dawn and felt my knees ease, and the ache go out of my wrists, and strength come back into my arms. I did not look in the glass. I did not need to. When at last I did, a week later, in my mother’s ward at Hull, the lines at my eyes had softened, and my skin was my own; but over my left temple there remained the white streak, as broad as two fingers, cold and clean as frost.
I have never dyed it. I would not have it otherwise.
My mother was sitting up in bed when I arrived, with a bright spot of colour on either cheek, arguing with the ward sister about the tea. The registrar, a baffled young man with a stethoscope round his neck, said that it was most unusual; that the heart had, so to speak, taken a turn; that there was no longer any question of surgery. She lived eleven years more. She saw me married. She held my daughter in her arms, in the sunny front room of a house in Beverley, and said, with her old quiet laugh, “Well, now, there’s a thing,” and I do not think I have ever been so happy, or so afraid of that happiness, in the whole of my life.
I never returned to Lindenhurst. It was shut up in the spring of 1963. The solicitors wrote to say that Mrs. Voss had left the district; that the house was to be sold; that the furnishings had been dispersed. A year later a small parcel came to me from a convent in Whitby, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Inside lay a battered little volume of Tennyson, its spine cracked, its pages soft as cloth, and a black picture-frame the size of a woman’s palm.
The frame was empty. Its oval of cream silk had never been painted. Beneath it, upon the small brass plate, someone had engraved, in neat, careful, schoolgirl letters:
C. Whitlock, 1962–
There was no second date. The space after the dash had been left bare.
In the Tennyson, in the margins, were eleven sets of pencil marks, eleven different hands, all of which had underlined, in the same poem, the same line. And on the flyleaf, in an old man’s writing, thin and exquisite and slightly forward-leaning, I found a message that I read and re-read until the paper wore:
For the twelfth, who opened her hands.
I keep the frame in my hall, upon the wall beside the front door, where the afternoon sun falls on it. My daughter, who is eleven, asked me once what it was. I said that it was a memento of a house I once worked in, and of a man I once knew, and that she must never worry about the empty place on the plate. The second date, I told her, I leave to God.
And she nodded, the way children do, and went away to her play.
But sometimes, in the winter, on the longest nights, I wake at three in the morning to the taste of bitter brown fluid upon my tongue, and the faint, far, unmistakable sound of a clock striking in a house many miles away, and I lie in the dark beside my sleeping husband, and I am not afraid.
I think only: he is well.
And I turn upon the pillow, and the clock goes quiet, and the white streak in my hair lies cold and bright upon the dark, like a single window, left lit.
