In the distant steppe, the camels . . .
It is half past three. She will not stir, even to prod the coals when the fire dies. Her face is unwashed, her hair in disarray, the house dirty, the supper uncooked, Leopold’s socks unmended. When he comes in, he will find her sitting, just like this, face forward toward the hearth, hands resting, palms down and open, upon a dog-eared copy of Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak.
I went there with him, you know. I helped him to write this book. My Papa took me with him everywhere . . . to Bain Dzak . . . to Khartoum . . . to Sfax . . . to Morocco . . . to Patmos . . . to Peru . . . Why do you not take me anywhere, Leopold?
She turns upon him blue eyes puzzled, sad, reproachful. If you loved me you would take me somewhere, those eyes seem to say; or, perhaps, Why has my Papa gone away, and left me here, in this terrible place, with you?
Madame Marie-Louise Girard, confronted similarly ten or more years before, responded with indifference, and reached for another slice of bread. This Leopold cannot do. He loves Clotilde . . . loves her to distraction. In the shed in the back garden where, in the cold and dark, surrounded by boxes from Bury Place, he is building his studio, he keeps every drawing of her that he made while on board the Narcissus: Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde at the spinet, Clotilde bending over to button her boot. He still keeps, always, in his breast pocket, the piece of soft textile bearing the woven image of the fair servant girl reaching to place an emerald upon the head of the sultan’s elephant, because the girl looks so very much like Clotilde. He knew it even then, when he stole it: she is his fate. And so what can he do? He is not indifferent to her suffering.
I . . . I . . . I will t-take you e-everywhere. . . .
He promises; he means it. But he is still nervous when in her presence. He stutters. Familiarity has not diminished his fear. If anything he is more nervous, now that he has seen and touched her luminous white body, her body that seems always to recede before him, no matter how tightly he holds her. Even in the entanglement of the bedsheets she torments him—especially there.
My Papa—
In her grief for Felix Girard she seeks, it seems, something lost that Leopold cannot replace—that he never will replace, no matter how hard he tries. And he knows it.
I used to stand on my Papa’s feet, and we would walk together in the garden . . . Dash was there . . . Where is he now, I wonder? Leo, where is Dash now? Is he with my Papa, do you think?
Leo cannot answer; he hardly knew Dash; Dash, to him, is a dark figure, silent, receding into the jungles of memory.
I d-don’t know—
Her disappointed gaze settles upon him for a moment, then wanders away, searching around all the five fire-lit corners of the pentagonal room, along the walls where her father’s orchids hang dying of the cold; probes the tops of the curtains where sometimes a hummingbird hovers; circles six terra-cotta goddess heads on the mantel; then settles back into the hearth.
My Papa will come for me . . . You’ll see. He would not leave his Clotilde . . . My Papa always comes back.
It is true, Leopold thinks, that sometimes people come back. Himself, for example. He did not intend to come back to Whitby, and yet he has come back. And then, having once come back—having contradicted himself the one time—he had sworn he would not return to the Dell’oro Jet Works, and yet he has done that, too. For one entire afternoon he has stood in Henrietta Street, slightly up and around the corner from his father’s house, pressed into the alley between the millinery and the joiner’s, watching the pony carts laden with stone rumbling into his father’s cobbled courtyard, then rumbling out again, emptied (the ponies, unburdened, tossing with relief their lathered necks, slavering, their hot breaths white on the cold, damp air). He has seen, from a distance, the men with whom he’d grown up, with whom he’d sorted jet and carved it, and one more, a man he doesn’t know, a short, squat, red-faced, scowling figure, directing the carts into and out of the yard with sharp, impatient gestures of his thick hands—Matty Mohun, the man to whom, one day, in the absence of my father’s interest, the jet works shall eventually belong. He has seen Gentilessa emerge carrying a basket, a kerchief tied around her head, obscuring her face; heard Emilio, in the yard, shouting at the men. But he has not seen Anna.