"Well," she said, placing the fork down, "that's the last of the cutlery."
For the last of the family, a part of her mind added, and it was as though someone had taken the fork, thrust it through her stomach and mercilessly twisted and pulled.
"They're my cousins! Your nieces and nephews!"
Oh, would this never end? Every which way she turned, every time she thought, she stumbled and fell on shard upon shard of glass.
It had started in the afternoon, when Harold had started setting the table, and he had laid the plates and forks out at Eustace Clarence's seat. She had contained herself until Harold had stopped, bread knife hovering over the serviette, and let fall a single tear. (Harold didn't cry.)
"It's all right," she had said briskly- too briskly, voice burnished like twice-polished brass. "Susan can sit there."
Then as Harold had drawn her close, he had made the mistake of kissing her forehead and resting his nose in her hair.
"Victor, stop it! You'll mess it all up!"
"Mess what up?"
And she had felt his arms squeeze around her, as they had all those years ago, before he let her go. Glaring upwards into his irreverently smirking face, she had attempted to cross her arms with anger, but he had only shrugged, patted her hair once more.
"Who are you trying to impress, Bertha? Not that stodgy Harold Scrubb, surely?"
She had needed to find and iron another shirt for Harold after that almost shameful mix of tears and nasal mucus.
And then, there had been the issue of the sitting room walls. The bare beige walls (like a clinic).A gallery stripped of its works.
"We've got to fix this," Harold had said, his voice taking on a very queer tone. Tremulous, Alberta might have called it, except for the fact that Harold never spoke with a hint of a tremble."Alberta, you're the art expert in this house. Isn't there anything?"
Was there anything else in the house! Well, there were the old imitations- Guernica being the most obvious (even though it was no longer new, Alberta couldn't find it in herself to dispense with it)- but then, she couldn't hang that painting up, not now.
"All those faces. ... Life is so precious"
But even as she shook her head, she knew she was lying, that there was one (one) that had been there for years, untouched, but palpably present in its hiddenness, and she could no longer ignore it.
"There is one," she had said then, haltingly, "the one that- that Victor gave us, that wretched little thing that Helen chose."
And of course, of course it made sense. It was all wrong, she hated that painting. It showed no craftsmanship, and that florid dragonboat bopping over its merry little waves was oh so cliche. It had been the source of so many arguments between herself and Eustace Clarence (what over? Oh yes, Jill Pole. How insignificant and silly those arguments seemed now. How invalid).
Yet it was perfect, for all its wretched qualities.
Helen had chosen it. (My apology to you, the thought briefly flickered in Alberta's mind). Victor- Victor had given it to herself and Harold. Victor, she thought, and felt him sitting next to her, laughing at her, and it was so vivid that she felt she would drown in the empty space pulsing so vibrantly, so cruelly, with (life).
She had put it in the room where her niece, Lucy, had stayed during the War, when Victor had gone off to give his series of lectures on Proust and Pound across the American Ivy League universities.
"Look after them, please, Alberta," Victor had said, and although he rarely pleaded, she had instantly heard the pleading quality in his voice. "They're so young. Helen and I can't afford to take them with us, and Susan has been waiting for this American trip for so long."
At the time, she had complained (as always, a horrid little voice whispered, and she felt slightly ashamed).
"You know that our house is smaller than yours, Victor. Harold and I have only one son."
He had caught her by the elbow with that charming smile of his that she knew he only utilised when he really wanted something. How she had resented that smile; how she had always given him what he wanted when he looked so cheerful and charming.
"That means you have more unused rooms in your house, Bertha," he had replied, so smoothly, so quickly. That was the thing about Victor; so often when he spoke it was as though he had been following a script, there was hardly a beat when he could not think of something witty or useful. "And Lucy and Edmund are more than happy to share a room if need be. And even you remember how Eustace and Edmund were chums when they were younger. Wouldn't you want that for Eustace?"
"His name is Eustace Clarence," she had said, automatically, but she hadn't felt too resentful or sounded all that stiff when she informed Victor, two days later, that she and Harold had discussed the matter and would be happy to provide shelter for both Lucy and Edmund in the following weeks.
And hadn't Lucy been a polite little slip of a child? Simpering, she had thought uncharitably at the time, but time coloured and softened one's judgements. Or perhaps it was- but no, Lucy and Edmund couldn't be dead, could they? She had barely had time to know her niece and nephews. (You hadn't tried).
"Eustace Clarence was very fond of that," Harold's voice said somewhere, distantly, but his words had barely pierced the veil of memories threatening to envelop her.
"I was wondering... could I have that painting?" -then his frame swirled, the scene rippled, and he was ten years old again, sitting with his back to her.
"Eustace Clarence, what is this?" -holding a ripped book. A sinking feeling of dread, of inexplicable sadness. "Eustace Clarence, this is your diary!"
The ripped cover, the torn pages of the book she had carefully chosen for him, that he had so carefully stored and written in. She could still see his meticulous hand.
E. has gone dreadfully soft. He tried to stop me from pinning a butterfly the other day! Apparently L. cried when she saw it. Tried to explain what Alberta says, that being a girl doesn't mean one has to be sentimental, but E.-
Eustace Clarence grabbed the paper from her, glanced at it, and shredded it in eighths. then he dropped it in the wastebasket and looked at her steadily, his chin defiantly raised.
"I'm not proud of what I wrote, Alberta. I'm jolly well ashamed of how I used to think. Edmund and Lucy were right all along."
Right? About what? Alberta remembered that strange sensation of confusion, that dreadful swirl in her stomach that whispered, you do not know what your son means.
How familiar she had become with that feeling in later years; how painfully unaccustomed to it.
She remembered, even now, that bewildering cloud that had risen and scattered her mind like a hundred dandelion seeds carried on the breath of the wind.
"Eustace Clarence, what on earth has brought this on?"
"Well, I went on a journey." How his body had stilled, tensed; almost like a businessman, and he had squared his shoulders just like his father. How proud she had been of him even as she had been apprehensive. How little she had expected his next, most outrageous comments. "I fell into the painting in the spare room with Lucy and Edmund, and Aslan changed me, he- peeled it all off. And then I saw that they were right, and I was wrong. And I can't go back, Alberta, I can't go back."
(I can't go back, I can't go back).
And that, she thought ruefully, might have been why she hated that painting so much. Falling into paintings indeed! She couldn't think of a sillier story if she tried.
"But Alberta, it's real! And I haven't told you about Narnia- or Aslan, the great lion- Alberta!"
She had already begun to regret having mentioned the painting when Harold had stood, his bound a strange mix of enthusiasm with solemnity, and had walked purposefully to the spare room.
"Here it is,"he said, almost triumphantly, as he entered the sitting room, painting in tow.
As she smoothed her shirt, awaiting the chime of the bell that would indicate Susan's arrival, she studied it agian.
The first thing that struck her was the obnoxious open mouth of the dragon boat. And the obvious purple sail, so clearly meant to indicate royalty; it made Turner's paintings seem subtle! And then, of course, the simplicity of the wave. It was almost a solid blue, thick, almost amateurish strokes, lacking the understanding of nuance that even artists like Monet had so easily grasped. Yet there was still something about it- perhaps the way those green wings just opened at the sides, curving behind in an unseen sweep- that somehow-
"It's not very pretty, is it?" said Harold thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. "I wonder what Victor was thinking when he gave it to us."
"I think Helen chose it, or maybe even framed it," said Alberta, and was half surprised to hear the waspish sting had left her voice as she spoke of the woman who had once been her sister-in-law. "Victor was always dreadfully sentimental that way."
Harold laughed a strange laugh, and Alberta thought she detected a sob hidden somewhere within.
"I think a lot of us are more sentimental than we let on," he murmured, and Albert wasn't sure whether the burn she felt was one of shame or not (unless shame could ever feel pleasant). "Didn't Eustace Clarence want to give this painting to that girl of his?"
"Jill Pole," Alberta murmured.
She felt, rather than saw, Harold study her face. His eyes brushed over her and she could almost feel his touch (whisper soft), carving (or reading?) tiny lines on her blank cheeks.
"You used to dislike that girl so much," he said, presently, and Alberta felt a slight flush of shame. "But you don't sound angry anymore."
(Angry).
Now there, that was the deepest shard she had encountered yet, and it dragged its crooked edges through her (rocky soil) heart.
"No," she whispered, and closed her eyes, wishing that the action could bring some sort of relief. Intensified darkness was no relief. "No, I can't be angry."
Harold placed his hand over hers, gave it a quick gentle squeeze.
"I might have been angry, too," he said, and she looked up to see him pull an awkward, pained smile. "It's not a very good painting. Even I can see that and I don't know half of what you do about brush strokes and whatnot. But then I remember that I once thought of giving you a volume of Yeats. Would you have spoken to me again if I'd given you The Celtic Twilight as opposed to "The Waste Land"?"
In that moment, she loved Harold more than she thought she could.
"The Celtic Twilight Oh, Harold!" she said, and the absurdity of the thought that Harold had read, let alone considered, giving her a copy of Yeats' works, a genuine laugh scampered from her lips into the quiet air.
Then again, Victor had read Yeats, had written a paper on Yeats. And Harold had been fond of Victor, as Victor, for all his jokes and initial apprehension, had come to genuinely enjoy spending time with Harold. (It had made Alberta happy, to know that; superior, that Victor liked Harold, while she could see Helen's faults, but happy- so happy- that her brother and her husband should enjoy each other's company.)
Unbidden, the lines diffused themselves in her mind until she could see them, tightly printed against an empty page.
Time drops in decay
Like a candle burnt out...
Like a candle burnt out
"Time drops in decay..."
No, she had better stop that train of thought, right now.
"Bertha, looks like Eustace wants something."
Tiny hands grabbing at her skirt.
"Ahbta! Ahbta!"
Herself, bending down to look at him seriously; her little man.
"Yes, Eustace Clarence?"
A sloppy kiss, pressed against her cheek.
She raised up her hand, almost feeling the pressure against her cheek.
"Harold?" she whispered, and he gave her hand a quick sqeeze (pulse of affirmation). "Harold, I miss them."
"So do I, Alberta," he replied, voice thick, and then his arms like drapes were wrapped around her, his nose pressing into her hair. She did not complain.
A/N: OK I AM SO SORRY. I said Susan would come in this chapter and she didn't. Rest assured, the doorbell WILL ring and there WILL be a dinner. Next chapter! It's already being written.