The Trespass Read Free Page A

in disbelief, the body of someone known to him being roughly thrown up on to the cart: the torn, muddy skirt, no blanket even to give the body dignity. He knew very well that this woman had a fine house of her own as well as the house she ran off St Martin’s Lane. Mrs Ballantyre had been, whatever her profession, a lady. And then he remembered where her fine house stood.
    In Marylebone. Where, this week, the cholera had been found.
    *   *   *
    Actually, Sir Charles Cooper had two daughters.
    In Bryanston Square his elder daughter, Mary Cooper, was reading, in bed, the new novel ‘Vanity Fair’, and laughing. She came to the end of a chapter, closed the book so she could savour the pages she had read. From somewhere she heard a clock strike, realised how late it was, turned down the lamp. She was entranced when someone described the human heart in a way that she understood, confirmed a world she knew. Part of her listened for the roll of carriage wheels as she lay smiling into the darkness. She knew their father was not home yet, and so lay between waking and sleeping: waiting. Her smile slowly disappeared as she came back to her own world: her sister would be waiting also.
    Mary clasped her hands.
    Dearest Lord, help me. Help me, and guide me, in thy infinite goodness and wisdom and mercy, to care for everyone in this family.
    She had the odd habit, when she was alone, of praying with her eyes open: in the hope that she might one day see God, and therefore his advice would be clearer. But all she could see tonight were the cornices on the ceiling, and the shadows everywhere: the shadow of her favourite picture on the wall, an engraving of the Mona Lisa; the shadows of the water jug and the washstand and the big mahogany wardrobe. These shadows she knew.
    ( But in the spring something had happened, something had changed, in Bryanston Square and it lay there in the air of the house along with the smells and the sounds, unspoken but there in the air, another shadow, dark and waiting. )
    Mary stared at the ceiling and spoke again to God.
    Dearest Lord, who knowest all things. Please guide me.
    At last she closed her eyes, and her thoughts drifted away from this house to the house she had lived in long ago. She was not sure if all women conjured up their mother when they were preparing for sleep: she was now a middle-aged woman herself, after all. But her path was precarious and her mother was the only guide she had: if she lost her memory of her mother she feared she would lose her way. When she was nine years old and particularly overcome with religion she had informed people most fervently that she was named after the Virgin. Her laughing mother had said to her, one day in the rose garden, that she would tell her a secret, which she must keep close to her heart. She had been named after a heroine, but she was a secret heroine. Her mother had named her not after the Virgin Mary, nor after any ancestors in her family with the name of Mary, but after a writer of the previous century called Mary who had thought a lot about women: Mary Wollstonecraft, whose books Mary would read when she was older.
    Mary Cooper was a lot older now, almost thirty, and she had read the books, found them (out of print now) in a second-hand bookshop. Mary Wollstonecraft had defined the difficulties, certainly, but had not counselled for the unspoken.
    It was harder and harder now, to see her mother in her mind. She could still hear, if she listened carefully, the rustle of the skirts and the birds that sang in the early morning in the rose garden. But Elizabeth Cooper’s face had become indistinct, merged with the roses, and the other sisters, and the croquet on the grass on the warm summer afternoons.
    Sometimes still though, if she listened very carefully, Mary heard her laughter.
    *   *   *
    In the next room Harriet Cooper also lay awake in the darkness. She was seventeen years old.
    She listened, alert to every sound. And the clock