EDITH UNDER ICE by Jamie Allen
(COPYRIGHT 2010)
The clock above the mantel chimed the hour. It has always been ten minutes fast, so she was not yet late.
My wife was out driving or something, which is why I asked the woman to call round this afternoon. And she’d been most understanding. ‘Lady Bishop the jealous sort, is she, Sir Alfred?’
Not exactly jealous, but possessive. And one of those horribly modern millies – all cigarettes and rumble seats and slamming doors in men’s faces. Sometimes, I wonder if the war taught my wife and her lot nothing. If ever there was an illustration of the flaws of ‘feminism,’ as I believe they call it, it was the war. While my brother daily risked, then sacrificed, his life, the idea of ladies getting their petticoats muddy in the trenches is close to laughable.
Parker cleared his throat with that gentle audacity that characterises the best of a dying breed, and announced the arrival of ‘some sort of lady’. Before I could tell him to show her in, she had shown herself both into my study and into a seat. I need not waste time on description. Perhaps the words ‘teeth’ and ‘jangling beads’ will suffice.
‘You have chosen me wisely,’ she posited with all the authority, and credibility, of a Lady Bracknell. ‘I will help you fathom the deepest mysteries of the grave. Our dead friends, like you, favour me.’ She offered forth a jewelled fist which I believe I was supposed to kiss. ‘Come, Sir Alfred, let us soiree into the past.’
Soiree? Really?
Edie had died exactly ten years previously, most likely to the day. Some ways it was as if she hadn’t died at all, but I had died. It was the uncertainty. Not knowing if she drowned, or if she froze; if she slept through it, or struggled and fought and tried vainly to swim the North Atlantic.
My wife would have disapproved of all this on a number of grounds. Possessiveness, of course, and also the fact that she doesn’t hold with Ouija boards. But she was off on her birthday shenanigans, and I was convincing myself that this pantomime dame would be able to help me.
After some amateur dramatics involving rolling eyeballs, ectoplasm, which bore a shocking resemblance to olive oil, and a strange new language – like so many things, it sounded French – the woman rolled back into her chair and started to speak. What I was expecting, God only knows, and She isn’t talkative these days. I think I’d expected a queer sort of light, a manifestation of my little Edie in her radiant youth, and a relation of scenes from the past, like a film but with colour and sound.
In fact, I found myself subject to a generic monologue in time to the ticking of the mantel clock. The same malleable bunk about ‘brave Miss Edith Evans’ I had read in the papers. Occasionally, reports of a minor actress with the same name trickled into the construction. When the charade had made me suitably seasick, I stopped the woman in mid-flow – ‘Edith says she is with the Lord Jesus now. She was that sort of Christian, wasn’t she?’ – and graciously bundled her out of my house.
Once the clatter of gaudy trinkets had abated, I took out the old newspapers and ran through them. Perhaps it was time to find out what had happened. Then I could find out if she was happy, which was all I really wanted. There’d been that story of her dying to save another. It sounded as though it might even be true. The survivor, according to the papers: Caroline, Mrs Lane-Lamson-Murray-Brown of Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve said before of God that She has a strange, shrewish sort of humour. Caroline Lamson had been the first woman I’d fallen in love with; when I was twelve.
Every time the second hand moves, it shudders.
‘Tiresome.’
‘What’s that, Edie?’
Glancing briefly towards her sister, Edith Corse-Evans sniffs a little. ‘That. Tick, tick, tick. It’s tiresome.’ Her gaze is already back on her magazine. It holds little of interest: a new Sherlock Holmes story and a couple of rather splendid hats for sale. The very fine one with feathers, quite unsuitable for this time of year but nonetheless irresistible, is advertised at $12. A stretch, but what a hat!
‘Look at this, Lena. I already feel naked without it.’
Her sister bounces into a closer seat. ‘A glorified swag bag. No, no, that won’t do at all, Edie.’
She casts the offending periodical aside and together the ladies peruse the New York Times. ‘I say, look at this,’ says Edith. ‘A fire. Here, in New York. As many as one hundred might have died.’ She mutters a quick prayer before reading on.
Lena cranes over her sister’s shoulder. ‘And to think – that gypsy told you to beware of water. Still, New York seems hexed. First, this fire, next year that ship will sink, and all the time people are being attacked on the streets.’
Edith, at sea with her thoughts, folds the paper at last. ‘They were mostly Jewish. Tick, tick, tick. It’s so tiresome. Shall we find a room that isn’t such a chore, and offer Mummy and Dr Bishop a quick round of bridge before Evensong?’
‘It was ghastly, Sir Alfred,’ said Mrs Brown without expression. ‘Quite ghastly. I shall never forget it.’
It must have been the maid’s afternoon off. My hostess had already filled the kettle before I realised what she was doing.
‘I can make the tea, Mrs Brown.’
‘No, no. I like having mindless things to do. It makes me feel a little less guilty for doing nothing all day and thinking very little.’ The kettle boiled, and she made tea mechanically.
The last time I had seen Caroline Lamson, in the nineties, she had struck me as a fine figure of womanhood. But the creature before me didn’t seem to exist beyond jewels. She had grown less American, copying the styles of the Queen, but Mary’s willowy look did not flatter this lady’s proportions. Also, I had not remembered her having such a prominent neck.
‘Be careful, Sir Alfred. You’re about to hit— Oh, forgive me.’
Presumably, she had feared for the stately grandfather clock I had just brushed past; to my mind quite out of place in a pantry, but there is no accounting for American indulgences. There hadn’t been any real danger of my knocking it down. But this was an old woman before me. She looked about ninety. I later found out that she was not yet seventy.
‘Shall we go through to the drawing room?’ I made a point of carrying the tea tray.
Once we were seated, with tea, milk, sugar, and rocks that resembled tea cakes, I realised that I had no idea how to broach the past with her. Mine were personal questions, probing questions, questions she had every right to resent. I hoped that my title, which had secured me an audience, would be enough to get her talking, and just asked my first question, with almost-regrettable bluntness.
‘I understand you knew a friend of mine, a Miss Evans from New York?’
‘You don’t mean Edith Evans?’
I nodded. ‘Edie. I had very much hoped one day to marry her. She had no idea of this.’
The old woman craned her head and lifted a teacake vaguely towards her mouth. When she spoke, it was in a monotone. ‘And did Edith – Miss Evans – know anything of you?’ The emphasis she put on ‘anything’ was beyond spiteful and unique in what was otherwise a display of bleak insouciance.
‘Yes, Mrs Brown. We were good friends. Miss Evans was sailing to New York to meet me. I had bought a ring. Not an engagement ring, you understand, just a ring of affection. Edie was so fond of jewellery.’
Not like my wife. Lady Bishop believes that every pansy pinned to a ladylike tweed is a further shackle in the all-consuming gender-trap. My wife needs a good man and a clip round the ear. The pursuit of original thought is all very worthy, but too quickly we lose track of the reasons why something has lasted so well so long. I certainly think women – particularly my wife, who isn’t young – look better when you can look at their decoration rather than at them.
Mrs Brown gummed her upper lip. ‘You must have been a little put out to read what she said to me in the newspapers.’
‘I don’t know what she said, Mrs Brown. All the accounts are so different. When none of them has her a day over twenty-five, I hardly feel them worth crediting.’
‘“Save yourself, Mrs Brown! You have children, I have no-one.” Yes.’ She wheezed like a damaged accordion. ‘Those lines were the most popular, I believe. What all the accounts stated but none of them understood was that everything was so chaotic, so hectic, so completely unplanned, that nothing really made sense. I daresay it was worse than your little war, because at least you made plans for that. We all stepped onto this ship proud of its voyage, believing it safe. It was about as safe as the Tree of Knowledge. Poor Miss Evans didn’t understand that. She tried to be businesslike. She simply said, “Mrs Murray-Brown has children, she should get into the lifeboat first.” Both she and I assumed she would follow me in, I think.’
‘But she didn’t.’
‘No. What happened there, I will never know. I can just hear those cries. Over and over, like the relentless ticking of that damned grandfather clock, like the merciless rush of the rain against windows: hundreds, maybe even a thousand, men, crying for life. They were just picking us up and throwing us into the boats. When she told the man to take me instead, he took her at her word, and probably left her for dead. And she was so much younger than I was.’
‘Shall I pour?’
‘Oh.’
I poured the tea and added milk, disputing my hostess’s suggestion that ‘you Brits do that the wrong way round’. There was something odd about handling Dresden in a drawing-room that smelt of honeysuckle, a comforting ritual that continued, shunning progress, defying change. As if my brother hadn’t been shot. As if millions of people weren’t dying every day. As if demons of all descriptions were not yet rising up.
The Brown woman grabbed the tongs from me and added her own sugar. ‘You appear somewhat at sea with your thoughts, Sir Alfred. If you will excuse the phrase.’
That expression of hers was surely a neoplasm. ‘Sorry. No sugar for me, thank you.’
She dropped two lumps into her own cup. At first they sunk to the bottom, very quickly, as if that was all they’d ever meant to do, then they surfaced and slowly began to sink again. It had the sensation of making the teacup appear much more shallow than it was, and yet it made the sugar lumps appear so very small, as they drifted apart like two halves of an offering and then grew smaller still, each granule flying off in silent prayer, clutching to water and clinging to the cup’s smooth sides before evaporating.
‘Such a sweet girl, and a gay one. She, my sisters, the colonel, and I had a beautiful journey up until those shudders. Three little shudders; a car stalling is more noticeable.’
No. ‘Evaporating’ is the wrong word. Through the tea-soiled water, bitingly boiling, each grain of sugar fled its brothers in order to sink, to sink to the bottom of the cup, where it had no choice but to lie, without the dignity of structure, with all the others. Sugar from one cube was mixed with sugar from another, and I fancy that this disconcerted Caroline Brown.
‘Sir Alfred, the band didn’t play as we went down. That is a myth I hate. Lord, this has stewed. I think we overdid it a little.’ For the first time, she actually laughs. But her laughter is as blank as it is forced.
French pastries are delicious, and Dr Bishop is almost as appetising. Edith, smiling, reads from her friend’s timepiece, reaching into his waistcoat and giggling at his awkwardness.
‘I wish you were staying in here, Alfred.’
‘Edie, Edie. In just a month you’ll be with me. I have to go.’
A bronze Napoleon points to Cherbourg’s naval port. At his horse’s feet lovers have stood before, many of their farewells just as final. But how many of them knew, as Edith knows, that they will never make love?
‘Well, I wish I were going to New York with you now.’
Dr Bishop does not react for a few minutes. Then he tells her icily not to be silly. Needs must, and he is required back in the States ahead of her. Serious propaganda business. Her journey back won’t exactly be banal.
The newest, biggest, fastest, safest ship on the sea. A final victory of Man over God. And Edith is not easy. That medium’s words at Cherbourg had not been to her, but to God in her, and although she knows what the outcome has to be, it pains her to think of His sovereignty questioned like this.
Not that she is afraid. She is nothing if not brave. Knowing that au revoir will in fact be goodbye, and watching Alfred Bishop disappear is bizarre. As if somewhere in her stomach is a clock, or a metronome, and every time the hand swings it hits something inside her and bruises it. She is distraught but not afraid. Fear only God.
After everything I’ve done, my life is a small price. My sins, my betrayals, my mindless prejudices, ticking with my heartbeat.
Mrs Murray-Brown and her sisters will be there on the way to a funeral. Edith will get on well with them; she knows Caroline vaguely, in that way one knows all the best people. She must send her condolences as soon as the relative dies. For now, travel preparations have been made. Her boarding pass is ready. A-deck, cabin 29. Her will has been drawn up, signed, and witnessed. Her jewellery is ready to be sent on to the ship.
$6,000 in jewels: an offering to Him. Small recompense for the sin behind their beauty.
I will kill my wife soon, I think. That insidious character has been alive for ten years now, and has been of little use. The awful woman with the olive oil was better.
15 April, 1922. I don’t trust God to ever make it the sixteenth. This day of this month, preserved in a berg of ice forever, visible but never accessible. I want to find Edie, but how can I? How can I, when all I have of her are photographs that deceive, placating niceties from strangers – they are my friends, but they are strangers really – and the publically-screened romances?
Save yourself, Mrs Brown. You have children, I have no one!
She can’t have said that. She had God, her sister, me. She would never lose faith in all of us. But how can I ever know? I just want to reach out, to put a ring on her finger, to show her the time by my new wristwatch. To know she is resting.
But the cold reality is that everyone who set foot on that boat – under ice now or breathing and walking – is dead. And the dead never speak to me. They have no translator.
A strange woman reads you the papers from time to time. Her voice is crackly and transmission is unsophisticated. Why she stopped reading the stories about you, only she knows. Maybe they stopped being written. Maybe she understands that they can’t help. Those financial prostitutes in top hats and tails; of what use were their prayers, to them or to their God? Warped words, wangled meanings. Nothing can warm what time turns to ice.
Time and the sea.
She keeps you up to date with Alfred Bishop. He never did marry, but he’s a knight now. There was a war and that hit him hard in all but rank. Yes, he is searching for you, but even when he’s dead he’ll never know you’re jumping within your crystal fossil, rushing to him. There is a barrier thicker than ten years. Thicker than ice. Thicker than legends in print.
Some strike oil, others strike ice. Everything shuddered, in time to the second hand on the new watch shackled to your wrist. You lie in limbo, blue and brittle, sharing a bed with all your ornaments, sullied stones you can’t see. Your watch keeps perfect time.
(2, 793 words)
The clock above the mantel chimed the hour. It has always been ten minutes fast, so she was not yet late.
My wife was out driving or something, which is why I asked the woman to call round this afternoon. And she’d been most understanding. ‘Lady Bishop the jealous sort, is she, Sir Alfred?’
Not exactly jealous, but possessive. And one of those horribly modern millies – all cigarettes and rumble seats and slamming doors in men’s faces. Sometimes, I wonder if the war taught my wife and her lot nothing. If ever there was an illustration of the flaws of ‘feminism,’ as I believe they call it, it was the war. While my brother daily risked, then sacrificed, his life, the idea of ladies getting their petticoats muddy in the trenches is close to laughable.
Parker cleared his throat with that gentle audacity that characterises the best of a dying breed, and announced the arrival of ‘some sort of lady’. Before I could tell him to show her in, she had shown herself both into my study and into a seat. I need not waste time on description. Perhaps the words ‘teeth’ and ‘jangling beads’ will suffice.
‘You have chosen me wisely,’ she posited with all the authority, and credibility, of a Lady Bracknell. ‘I will help you fathom the deepest mysteries of the grave. Our dead friends, like you, favour me.’ She offered forth a jewelled fist which I believe I was supposed to kiss. ‘Come, Sir Alfred, let us soiree into the past.’
Soiree? Really?
Edie had died exactly ten years previously, most likely to the day. Some ways it was as if she hadn’t died at all, but I had died. It was the uncertainty. Not knowing if she drowned, or if she froze; if she slept through it, or struggled and fought and tried vainly to swim the North Atlantic.
My wife would have disapproved of all this on a number of grounds. Possessiveness, of course, and also the fact that she doesn’t hold with Ouija boards. But she was off on her birthday shenanigans, and I was convincing myself that this pantomime dame would be able to help me.
After some amateur dramatics involving rolling eyeballs, ectoplasm, which bore a shocking resemblance to olive oil, and a strange new language – like so many things, it sounded French – the woman rolled back into her chair and started to speak. What I was expecting, God only knows, and She isn’t talkative these days. I think I’d expected a queer sort of light, a manifestation of my little Edie in her radiant youth, and a relation of scenes from the past, like a film but with colour and sound.
In fact, I found myself subject to a generic monologue in time to the ticking of the mantel clock. The same malleable bunk about ‘brave Miss Edith Evans’ I had read in the papers. Occasionally, reports of a minor actress with the same name trickled into the construction. When the charade had made me suitably seasick, I stopped the woman in mid-flow – ‘Edith says she is with the Lord Jesus now. She was that sort of Christian, wasn’t she?’ – and graciously bundled her out of my house.
Once the clatter of gaudy trinkets had abated, I took out the old newspapers and ran through them. Perhaps it was time to find out what had happened. Then I could find out if she was happy, which was all I really wanted. There’d been that story of her dying to save another. It sounded as though it might even be true. The survivor, according to the papers: Caroline, Mrs Lane-Lamson-Murray-Brown of Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve said before of God that She has a strange, shrewish sort of humour. Caroline Lamson had been the first woman I’d fallen in love with; when I was twelve.
Every time the second hand moves, it shudders.
‘Tiresome.’
‘What’s that, Edie?’
Glancing briefly towards her sister, Edith Corse-Evans sniffs a little. ‘That. Tick, tick, tick. It’s tiresome.’ Her gaze is already back on her magazine. It holds little of interest: a new Sherlock Holmes story and a couple of rather splendid hats for sale. The very fine one with feathers, quite unsuitable for this time of year but nonetheless irresistible, is advertised at $12. A stretch, but what a hat!
‘Look at this, Lena. I already feel naked without it.’
Her sister bounces into a closer seat. ‘A glorified swag bag. No, no, that won’t do at all, Edie.’
She casts the offending periodical aside and together the ladies peruse the New York Times. ‘I say, look at this,’ says Edith. ‘A fire. Here, in New York. As many as one hundred might have died.’ She mutters a quick prayer before reading on.
Lena cranes over her sister’s shoulder. ‘And to think – that gypsy told you to beware of water. Still, New York seems hexed. First, this fire, next year that ship will sink, and all the time people are being attacked on the streets.’
Edith, at sea with her thoughts, folds the paper at last. ‘They were mostly Jewish. Tick, tick, tick. It’s so tiresome. Shall we find a room that isn’t such a chore, and offer Mummy and Dr Bishop a quick round of bridge before Evensong?’
‘It was ghastly, Sir Alfred,’ said Mrs Brown without expression. ‘Quite ghastly. I shall never forget it.’
It must have been the maid’s afternoon off. My hostess had already filled the kettle before I realised what she was doing.
‘I can make the tea, Mrs Brown.’
‘No, no. I like having mindless things to do. It makes me feel a little less guilty for doing nothing all day and thinking very little.’ The kettle boiled, and she made tea mechanically.
The last time I had seen Caroline Lamson, in the nineties, she had struck me as a fine figure of womanhood. But the creature before me didn’t seem to exist beyond jewels. She had grown less American, copying the styles of the Queen, but Mary’s willowy look did not flatter this lady’s proportions. Also, I had not remembered her having such a prominent neck.
‘Be careful, Sir Alfred. You’re about to hit— Oh, forgive me.’
Presumably, she had feared for the stately grandfather clock I had just brushed past; to my mind quite out of place in a pantry, but there is no accounting for American indulgences. There hadn’t been any real danger of my knocking it down. But this was an old woman before me. She looked about ninety. I later found out that she was not yet seventy.
‘Shall we go through to the drawing room?’ I made a point of carrying the tea tray.
Once we were seated, with tea, milk, sugar, and rocks that resembled tea cakes, I realised that I had no idea how to broach the past with her. Mine were personal questions, probing questions, questions she had every right to resent. I hoped that my title, which had secured me an audience, would be enough to get her talking, and just asked my first question, with almost-regrettable bluntness.
‘I understand you knew a friend of mine, a Miss Evans from New York?’
‘You don’t mean Edith Evans?’
I nodded. ‘Edie. I had very much hoped one day to marry her. She had no idea of this.’
The old woman craned her head and lifted a teacake vaguely towards her mouth. When she spoke, it was in a monotone. ‘And did Edith – Miss Evans – know anything of you?’ The emphasis she put on ‘anything’ was beyond spiteful and unique in what was otherwise a display of bleak insouciance.
‘Yes, Mrs Brown. We were good friends. Miss Evans was sailing to New York to meet me. I had bought a ring. Not an engagement ring, you understand, just a ring of affection. Edie was so fond of jewellery.’
Not like my wife. Lady Bishop believes that every pansy pinned to a ladylike tweed is a further shackle in the all-consuming gender-trap. My wife needs a good man and a clip round the ear. The pursuit of original thought is all very worthy, but too quickly we lose track of the reasons why something has lasted so well so long. I certainly think women – particularly my wife, who isn’t young – look better when you can look at their decoration rather than at them.
Mrs Brown gummed her upper lip. ‘You must have been a little put out to read what she said to me in the newspapers.’
‘I don’t know what she said, Mrs Brown. All the accounts are so different. When none of them has her a day over twenty-five, I hardly feel them worth crediting.’
‘“Save yourself, Mrs Brown! You have children, I have no-one.” Yes.’ She wheezed like a damaged accordion. ‘Those lines were the most popular, I believe. What all the accounts stated but none of them understood was that everything was so chaotic, so hectic, so completely unplanned, that nothing really made sense. I daresay it was worse than your little war, because at least you made plans for that. We all stepped onto this ship proud of its voyage, believing it safe. It was about as safe as the Tree of Knowledge. Poor Miss Evans didn’t understand that. She tried to be businesslike. She simply said, “Mrs Murray-Brown has children, she should get into the lifeboat first.” Both she and I assumed she would follow me in, I think.’
‘But she didn’t.’
‘No. What happened there, I will never know. I can just hear those cries. Over and over, like the relentless ticking of that damned grandfather clock, like the merciless rush of the rain against windows: hundreds, maybe even a thousand, men, crying for life. They were just picking us up and throwing us into the boats. When she told the man to take me instead, he took her at her word, and probably left her for dead. And she was so much younger than I was.’
‘Shall I pour?’
‘Oh.’
I poured the tea and added milk, disputing my hostess’s suggestion that ‘you Brits do that the wrong way round’. There was something odd about handling Dresden in a drawing-room that smelt of honeysuckle, a comforting ritual that continued, shunning progress, defying change. As if my brother hadn’t been shot. As if millions of people weren’t dying every day. As if demons of all descriptions were not yet rising up.
The Brown woman grabbed the tongs from me and added her own sugar. ‘You appear somewhat at sea with your thoughts, Sir Alfred. If you will excuse the phrase.’
That expression of hers was surely a neoplasm. ‘Sorry. No sugar for me, thank you.’
She dropped two lumps into her own cup. At first they sunk to the bottom, very quickly, as if that was all they’d ever meant to do, then they surfaced and slowly began to sink again. It had the sensation of making the teacup appear much more shallow than it was, and yet it made the sugar lumps appear so very small, as they drifted apart like two halves of an offering and then grew smaller still, each granule flying off in silent prayer, clutching to water and clinging to the cup’s smooth sides before evaporating.
‘Such a sweet girl, and a gay one. She, my sisters, the colonel, and I had a beautiful journey up until those shudders. Three little shudders; a car stalling is more noticeable.’
No. ‘Evaporating’ is the wrong word. Through the tea-soiled water, bitingly boiling, each grain of sugar fled its brothers in order to sink, to sink to the bottom of the cup, where it had no choice but to lie, without the dignity of structure, with all the others. Sugar from one cube was mixed with sugar from another, and I fancy that this disconcerted Caroline Brown.
‘Sir Alfred, the band didn’t play as we went down. That is a myth I hate. Lord, this has stewed. I think we overdid it a little.’ For the first time, she actually laughs. But her laughter is as blank as it is forced.
French pastries are delicious, and Dr Bishop is almost as appetising. Edith, smiling, reads from her friend’s timepiece, reaching into his waistcoat and giggling at his awkwardness.
‘I wish you were staying in here, Alfred.’
‘Edie, Edie. In just a month you’ll be with me. I have to go.’
A bronze Napoleon points to Cherbourg’s naval port. At his horse’s feet lovers have stood before, many of their farewells just as final. But how many of them knew, as Edith knows, that they will never make love?
‘Well, I wish I were going to New York with you now.’
Dr Bishop does not react for a few minutes. Then he tells her icily not to be silly. Needs must, and he is required back in the States ahead of her. Serious propaganda business. Her journey back won’t exactly be banal.
The newest, biggest, fastest, safest ship on the sea. A final victory of Man over God. And Edith is not easy. That medium’s words at Cherbourg had not been to her, but to God in her, and although she knows what the outcome has to be, it pains her to think of His sovereignty questioned like this.
Not that she is afraid. She is nothing if not brave. Knowing that au revoir will in fact be goodbye, and watching Alfred Bishop disappear is bizarre. As if somewhere in her stomach is a clock, or a metronome, and every time the hand swings it hits something inside her and bruises it. She is distraught but not afraid. Fear only God.
After everything I’ve done, my life is a small price. My sins, my betrayals, my mindless prejudices, ticking with my heartbeat.
Mrs Murray-Brown and her sisters will be there on the way to a funeral. Edith will get on well with them; she knows Caroline vaguely, in that way one knows all the best people. She must send her condolences as soon as the relative dies. For now, travel preparations have been made. Her boarding pass is ready. A-deck, cabin 29. Her will has been drawn up, signed, and witnessed. Her jewellery is ready to be sent on to the ship.
$6,000 in jewels: an offering to Him. Small recompense for the sin behind their beauty.
I will kill my wife soon, I think. That insidious character has been alive for ten years now, and has been of little use. The awful woman with the olive oil was better.
15 April, 1922. I don’t trust God to ever make it the sixteenth. This day of this month, preserved in a berg of ice forever, visible but never accessible. I want to find Edie, but how can I? How can I, when all I have of her are photographs that deceive, placating niceties from strangers – they are my friends, but they are strangers really – and the publically-screened romances?
Save yourself, Mrs Brown. You have children, I have no one!
She can’t have said that. She had God, her sister, me. She would never lose faith in all of us. But how can I ever know? I just want to reach out, to put a ring on her finger, to show her the time by my new wristwatch. To know she is resting.
But the cold reality is that everyone who set foot on that boat – under ice now or breathing and walking – is dead. And the dead never speak to me. They have no translator.
A strange woman reads you the papers from time to time. Her voice is crackly and transmission is unsophisticated. Why she stopped reading the stories about you, only she knows. Maybe they stopped being written. Maybe she understands that they can’t help. Those financial prostitutes in top hats and tails; of what use were their prayers, to them or to their God? Warped words, wangled meanings. Nothing can warm what time turns to ice.
Time and the sea.
She keeps you up to date with Alfred Bishop. He never did marry, but he’s a knight now. There was a war and that hit him hard in all but rank. Yes, he is searching for you, but even when he’s dead he’ll never know you’re jumping within your crystal fossil, rushing to him. There is a barrier thicker than ten years. Thicker than ice. Thicker than legends in print.
Some strike oil, others strike ice. Everything shuddered, in time to the second hand on the new watch shackled to your wrist. You lie in limbo, blue and brittle, sharing a bed with all your ornaments, sullied stones you can’t see. Your watch keeps perfect time.
(2, 793 words)
