“This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.
What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.”
Mary Szybist, “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary,” Incarnadine
Irma walks up the gangway onto the ocean liner and doesn’t look back. By the time the moan of the horn announces the ship’s departure, she’s ensconced in her stateroom (this ship’s excuse for first class; it isn’t up to her standards, but she hadn’t been willing to wait for a finer ship. Even Melbourne was too close to Woodend), shades pulled down over the portholes. She doesn’t let the steward open the shades again until she knows they’re too far out to sea to see even a glimpse of the brown smudge of coast that is Australia.
In the dining room the first evening, she’s seated at a table with a retired admiral. Very correct Oxbridge English, but his wife is the daughter of the richest cattle station owner in Australia. When Irma hears the the woman’s accent, she rises, skirts sweeping gracefully around her ankles, and goes back to her stateroom, where she orders a meal from the steward. A brief word with the purser and a scan of the passenger list allows her to choose dining companions with whom she’ll be more comfortable. She’s a Rothschild, after all.
--
Papa bid her come home, but first she goes to Paris. The House of Worth first, of course, and she finds to her horror that even though she was in Australia for barely a year, fashion has moved on. A whole new wardrobe (no white) on Papa’s account makes her feel more like herself. (Not that she’ll ever feel like the Irma she was before Appleyard College again. Not that she could ever be that Irma, not with the empty spaces in her mind: nine days that never were, Marion, Miranda.)
She spends whole days in the the Jardin du Luxembourg, eating ices and drinking in the order and structure, the cool breezes of early spring, the smell of a civilized place. If the French reminds her of Mademoiselle de Poitiers’s classes and Miranda’s atrocious accent, if the sight of school girls in white dresses makes her flinch, if the smell of the rose bushes thick with spring blooms brings tears to her eyes, no one needs to know.
(Walking down Champs-Élysées one evening, she passes a couple having an argument. She sniffs, turning her back, but the sudden slap of the word salope leaves her nearly running back to her hotel. She has the concierge buy her a ticket to Calais.)
--
Back in England, she makes friends with girls her age, debutants on the marriage market and fully committed to the conventions of the Season. None of them have Marion’s fierce intelligence or Miranda’s bone-deep surety, but she doesn’t want that anyway. She likes glittery girls, ones who talk of parties and betrothals and fashion, who she will feel no guilt for dropping or betraying because they would do the same to her.
She says something careless one day and Lavinia storms off, furious. At dinner, she’s surprised that Lavinia still won’t talk to her. Irma said thoughtless things all the time that hurt Marion, but Marion always forgave her within moments because she understood that Irma hadn’t meant to hurt her.
Well, she never liked Lavinia anyway. Easy enough to find someone else. One girl is very like another.
(The little asides about her Jewish blood must be like the sidelong looks and whispers about Marion’s color. Irma was too young, too insulated by Father’s money to notice them before. Now they stick like burrs in her skin, and if she could, she would ask Marion’s forgiveness.)
--
She kisses Anne in a conservatory at a house party. Anne looks pleased, flushed, rises on her toes for another kiss (and maybe Irma picked her because she’s round and short and titian and everything Miranda wasn’t). But Irma storms off in frustration, fleeing the scent of eucalyptus and memories.
After that, she kisses boys instead. (It isn’t any better, but at least it doesn’t make her want to scream.)
--
She sets herself to the business of choosing a proper husband. Station, title, wealth, appearance, manners, prospects, connections. She ticks names off of mental lists, flirts just enough to see what kind of man she’s talking to, drinks in every word of gossip. This is what she was raised for, what Appleyard with all its pretensions couldn’t possibly teach. She knows the steps as surely as she knows the waltz, and she never puts a foot wrong. (No more kisses in conservatories. She knows what she wants, what she was raised to attain, and only a man can give it to her.)
But she has another requirement, too, something to elevate him in her mind. There has to be a story she can see herself in, like there was with Mike (she’s beginning to admit to herself that the pain with Mike came from the blow to her pride, the shattering of a future she was constructing in her mind, not because of a broken heart. He could never have broken her heart even if it hadn’t already been broken). He had rescued her, of course he would fall in love with her, and wasn’t it all so romantic? The narratives here aren’t as theatrical, but then nothing in England is as dramatic as Australia was. The land is too domesticated, too familiar, to provide anything like the extremes she’d discovered in her time at school.
The story she settles on is uncomplicated: a childhood friend, one she’d played hide-and-seek with in each other’s homes, then lost touch with when he was sent away to Harrow. They’ve discovered one another again and seen each other with new eyes. It’s simple, but classic.
(Maybe if she’d picked a more thrilling story, she could have believed in it longer.)
--
Peter is entirely suitable in every way. Impeccable breeding, even better manners, and a fortune of his own. (Later, she’ll regret that last. He’d have been less trouble in the long run if he’d been dependant upon her. But he never said one word about her being a Hebrew, and that counts for something.) Handsome, but not so handsome that he outshines her. Even Mama can’t think of one single criticism. Peter’s pawing, as tiresome as it is, is worth it to see the sour milk look on Mama’s face.
(Her stepfather slithers an arm around her waist when she passes him in a hallway, tries to kiss her again. This time she does what Miranda taught her, brings her knee up sharp to the place he’s most vulnerable. “Touch me again,” she hisses, “and I’ll kill you.”
She has a pearl-handled handgun in her valise. She could use it. Miranda taught her that too.)
--
She wears white, of course--it’s been the fashion since the late queen’s wedding, and fashion is one of the few things Irma is sure of. Flowers in her hair, and a veil: she looks beautiful and delicate as a doll. But when she’s leaving for the church, she sees her reflection in the hall mirror out of the corner of her eye, and she could swear she’s wearing a flat-topped straw hat with a blue bow.
--
The old joke instructs a young lady lie back and think of England. Irma lies back and tries, very hard, not to think of Australia.
(Marion. Miranda.)
--
“I loathe picnics,” she snaps and slams the door, leaving Peter standing confused with his stuffed basket and the ruins of his romantic surprise.
--
Reading makes her think of Marion, riding makes her think of Miranda. Throngs of girls make her think of Appleyard College. This woman has hair just like Miss McCraw’s, that girl’s laugh reminds her of Blanche’s. This girl’s graceless gait could be Edith’s and that young miss plays piano as badly as Miss Lumley. The memories make her restless, but thankfully, Peter loves to travel.
--
The Alps are more beautiful by far than some volcanic pile of rock, not to mention higher. She stands on the ledge, sharp rock around her, and looks down at the people strolling in the gardens of their chalets. From this distance, they look like ants. (As flies to wanton boys…)
The air smells fresh and clean, piney and cool, not hot and still and dirt-clogged like the last time she’d climbed so high. Still, the agony surges up inside her and she finds herself screaming into the uncaring blue of the sky.
“Why? Why did you send me back? Wasn’t I good enough?”
There isn’t any answer, and the words rip themselves out of her throat.
“You left me! You sent me back and then you left me here alone! I hate you!”
(She doesn’t know if she’s speaking to Miranda or Marion or herself.)
“Was that you shouting?” Peter asks when she reaches him. “I heard someone, but the wind snatched the words away.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” she says, slipping her arm through his. “Can you imagine me shouting?”
He laughs, and she tells herself that the sound isn’t grating already.
(Romantic stories, she finds, wear thin quickly. The satisfaction lasts only till the memory of Mama’s face loses its novelty
--
In Budapest, there’s a little girl selling flowers who has eyes just like Sara’s. Irma buys a bouquet, then walks away, tries to forget her.
Two weeks later, briefly back in London, she summons her man of business, giving him instructions to find a little flower girl in Budapest.
He blinks. “Am I given to understand that you want to adopt this child?”
“God, no. I never want to see her again. Just...make sure she’s fed and clothed and educated.” She writes up a list of qualities a proper school for girls must have (or must not have), and he hides his dismay at its length.
--
She tells Peter it’s just a trip to Marienbad with her friends, but she knows when she packs her bags (when she instructs her maid on how to pack her bags because really the girl can’t be trusted with anything no matter how sterling her references were) that they’ll never live together as man and wife again.
She stares at herself in the mirror and sees her mother looking back. “I’m not like her. I’m not.”
(She had said that before, looking into another mirror in a dark, old-fashioned room on the other side of the globe. But then she had Miranda to slip her scarred hand into hers, Marion to say, “Of course you aren’t, Irmlette.” Now there’s only silence and her hands are empty.)
--
She runs into Anne again when staying in the villa of some friends in Florence. Anne has a husband now, too, a big, puppyish fellow who doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself when Anne isn’t around. But Anne’s still willing, her dark eyes flirting over her wine glass, and Irma barely has to crook her finger.
This time, Irma doesn’t think of Miranda, and she definitely doesn’t think of Peter. With pleasure comes a fleeting moment of bliss that wipes her mind clean. Only a moment (not nine days), but it’s more than she’s had before.
--
Peter’s writing her letters again. She doesn’t have to open them to know that they’re desperate, pleading.
She had always wondered if her mother felt guilty, leaving her husband, abandoning her child. Now she knows.
She feels nothing.
--
There are others after Anne, some she even likes, some she laughs with. Some of them make the days sweet and careless and she remembers that she’s still young. Once or twice she considers the word love, but ends up rejecting it. Nothing she feels is deep enough for that word. She remembers feeling deeply once, emotions so intense they threatened to choke her. But that was long ago. She left that behind in Australia.
And even the stupid ones, or the ones who last only a night or two, give her those moments of oblivion wrapped in pleasure, and that’s the closest she gets to the things she can’t remember.
--
The dream takes her by surprise. She often dreams of white dresses against a backdrop of alien trees, pillars of stone rising around her to the sky. Pain and betrayal, bitterness and yearning. She can never fall asleep again after waking from one of those dreams.
This one is different. She’s walking down the hall at Appleyard College, down the carpeted stairs, past those ridiculous statues with their even more ridiculous placards. Miranda and Marion are waiting for her in the rose garden. She’s happy.
Outside the light has that quality that she’s never found outside of Australia. It’s hot and the grass is so green it hurts her eyes and beyond the wall and the manicured grounds, there’s a continent of bush and wilderness she will never understand (any more than she ever understood Miranda, who belonged to it).
The mass of rose bushes rises out emerald grass, big as a mountain. Big as Hanging Rock. Shaped like Hanging Rock. She has to climb, hand over hand, pulling herself up, blood ripped from her palms, agony rippling up her arms. She knows what she’ll find when she reaches the top. Two girls in white, waiting for her. She climbs on, bloody hands slipping against leaves, then snagging on thorns. The petals that had been white and yellow and pink are now red. She climbs on.
When she wakes, she goes.
--
Every few hours, she wants to hunt down the captain, order him to turn the ship around. She lies in bed sleepless and fantasizes about buying the ship and instructing it to Kathmandu, Lake Lugano. But the heavy steam engines eat up the miles of ocean and then she’s there. The place she’d vowed she’d never see again.
(She’s made and broken enough vows by now not to fret over one more.)
--
It’s a long dusty train journey, a long dusty ride in the rented carriage. After the sun beating down, the shade of the bush around the base of Hanging Rock is delicious, green and cool, echoing with the strange birdsong she’s never heard anywhere else. There’s no one here, no schoolgirls on a picnic, no pompous colonel and his wife and nephew, no strange riders. Just Irma.
The climb is harder this time. She’s older, past the first blush of youth, a few pounds heavier, her boots made for European city streets and not Victoria dust. She thinks of Mrs. Appleyard’s admonitions against perspiration, but it isn’t long before her dress and shift are plastered to her back and her limbs ache with every move. She climbs on.
(Around one corner, she looks up and up and sees four girls in white dresses pass a gap in the rocks. If she bothered to look at it, she’d see that her diamond watch on its chain has frozen at 12:00.)
She’d worn her very plainest dress in preparation, buttons down the side instead of lining her spine. The corset is a battle, but the way her lungs expand like a bird’s wings when it finally releases feels like redemption. She even removes her own shoes and stockings this time, scattering everything around her as she would in her Paris hotel room when she knows the maid will be along to tidy up.
In white, free, she stands on the top of Hanging Rock. The air is thick with heat and dust and in the stillness she can hear the wind in the trees far below and the echo of girls laughing. Her palms throb with the remembered pain of being sliced by rose thorns and then the pain fades away as it had when Miranda and Marion had slipped their hands in her own. They were waiting for her all along.
“I’m here,” she says. “This time I’m ready.” This time, she knows, she won’t be sent back.
The sky turns to red above her and she takes a step.