Read by Tim Larkfield (fourth story in podcast, at 52 minutes, here)
He doesn't know what to do with her spectacles. Every time he enters the room, they stare at him from the work table. Unseeing. Incomplete. The thin wire frames, the round lenses gathering dust along with her embroidery silks and scissors. They watch blindly as he spins the carousel of little bobbins, like a child with a zoetrope, watching crimson merge into scarlet merge into robin's breast orange. So many colours. She saw the world in colours for which he has no name.
Her father is trammelled in the study, cutting up her words to send to grieving admirers, bending low over the huge magnifying glass. Her small, hasty penmanship, words he is sure the elderly Reverend can no longer read, flying away via coach and train to people he has never met. Flying to console strangers who looked into her words and believed they knew her. The intimacy of eye and page beneath the warm glow of candlelight.
How dare these strangers presume to grieve? He alone knows the taste of her skin, the breath of her sigh. How she laughed and spun, arms outstretched, on the shore of the wild Atlantic, her hair whipping across her forehead, her bonnet strings a-flutter. So small, like a little bird. The wind could have lifted her from Donegal to America.
How can six feet of earth enclose her now?
The father snips away, behind the locked door. They are no longer speaking, Mr Nicholls and his father-in-law. Mr. Nicholls has killed his wife, her father says. He killed her the day they wed; the marriage never had his blessing. She was too slight, too fragile to bear a babe. Mr. Nicholls has robbed the old man of his last remaining child. Five children and a wife, he buried before this one. Could not the last have been spared?
And so, the father snips, dispersing her words like pollen, set on making children of the whole world.
In the first, raw days, Mr Nicholls thrust the father's arguments back in his face. He did not kill his wife. He brought her to life. After all the death, all the illness, the grievous parting from her siblings. Her father never saw her laughing on Ireland's West Coast, knew nothing of her secret ecstasy between linen sheets. She was looking to the future. She was stitching baby clothes.
He wipes the sudden mist from his eyes. The spectacles stare back, with her own starling's gaze. He expects a witty rebuke at any moment. But the only speech he will ever hear from her again comes from those words she scratched out so furiously. Those words now being sent out to strangers who pretend to understand her better than he did.
The gaze of the spectacles never falters.
"Try me," they seem to say, "if you are so certain you knew her well. If you are sure you never mistook her desires."
He bites his lip. Upstairs is a sheaf of papers the old man will never snip. She showed it to him, one night not months ago. The opening pages of a story. A widow, a school, a mysterious child.
"Critics may accuse you of repetition, setting another story in a school, my dear."
This was all he had said, and yet it was enough to send his wife storming upstairs, doors banging, drawers slamming. The manuscript never reappeared, nor was the name of Widow Chalfont spoken again in his presence.
Had he misunderstood? As a husband, he was merely trying to be helpful. Besides, he'd assumed her writing to be a thing of her spinsterhood, a means by which the Parsonage siblings kept body and soul together. But the siblings were gone now. And he was come to take care of her. She need work for her keep no longer. Her energies could now be devoted to wifely duties, to building a nest for their future offspring. That was what she wanted, what they both wanted.
Wasn't it?
He toys with the spectacles, pushing them here and there with one finger. How hard it is to see through another's eyes. What was she trying to say when she showed him that embryonic story? Had he killed it in the womb with his blundering comments? He had looked at his wife and imagined the son or daughter quickening within her. But each day nearer birth was a day nearer death. Less than a year on, he has neither wife nor child. Had he left her to birth stories instead, she would still be with him. With him, but not one with him. Not laughing in the Donegal foam.
He feels foolish as he picks up the spectacles to try them on. His neck prickles, as though a host of onlookers is watching. Mrs Gaskell, Mr Thackeray, the ghosts of the dead sisters and brother. Her father. His head flicks round, but the opening door is in his imagination. He is alone with his memories and his wife's spectacles. He hooks the wire over his ears, pushes the lenses up towards his eyes.
He looks.
So many colours! Colours for which he has no name. The gnawing of unrequited passion. The mad raving of a woman scorned. The desperation of starving rioters. The shrinking world of a lonely and deserted schoolteacher. Here is a bold, young heiress, reading the business news. There is a troubled old housekeeper, a spoiled schoolgirl, a man pursued by secrets. The landscape takes in a Belgian cathedral, a West Indian plantation, a London prison cell, a Calderdale mill. Toy soldiers come to life and wage complex wars, spectral nuns and demon dogs haunt gardens and byways.
There are characters he recognises – the comic curates, the exacting schoolmaster – among many more he does not. Who is this salt-white lady, entombed in a crumbling tower? Why does this child walk the cobbled street, with none for company but an old, grey cat? There are stories here he was never told, ideas that will never take further shape. She laid down her pen and their voices were stilled. And yet he sees them. He sees them.
Slowly, he pulls the spectacles down his nose, wiping his streaming eyes. The parlour blurs, suddenly drab and brown. He draws a deep breath. The visions have departed but, before they faded, he saw one last thing. A woman spinning, spinning on the wild sea shore. Her bonnet strings a-flutter. Her mouth filled with laughter. A woman fulfilled and looking to the future. A woman for whom the material and the imaginary walk side by side.
He has not killed her. She lives. In his heart and in her words.
He folds the spectacles, one wire arm and then another, and carries them upstairs. He knows what he must do. Her father was right, and yet not right. Her words should fly, as she did, but not snipped and separate, orphans without identity, widows whose names remain unspoken. He opens the drawer, searching. It seems Mr Nicholls knows something the grieving strangers do not, after all. They know only the familiar words they have read and re-read, but he has seen – ah! there it is – the novel in embryo, the precious two chapters. He may not have understood and appreciated them as he ought, but he understood and appreciated her. His wife. His Charlotte. And she understood him.
Mrs Chalfont will not hide in the shadows in her widow's weeds. She will fly. She will soar. The literary world will speak her name. Mrs Gaskell, Mr Thackeray and the rest. He will edit. He will publish. And let her critics dare to scorn! His wife did not leave this world without progeny, and he means to let the world know it.
He puts on the spectacles and sharpens his pen.
(c) Elizabeth Hopkinson, 2024
Elizabeth Hopkinson is the author of the Asexual Fairy Tales & Angelio. Her short stories have appeared in many places, including previous Liars’ Leagues. She lives in Bradford – City of Culture 2025! – with her husband & cat. She dressed as Girl Blackbeard for her 50th birthday.
Tim Larkfield lives in Margate, Kent. He recently appeared in the feature film The Mystery of Mr E, a murder-mystery musical. He's taking two solo shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year: The Signalman, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens ghost story, & James Whale: Beyond Frankenstein.
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