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Oriana has learned to see Kathleen plainly. She is entirely unsurprised by the hostile simplicity of the dress she wears to Markham’s dinner, black and buttoned all the way up the neck. Kathleen, in truth, is utterly unmodern. She likes old men, babies, and white rhododendrons. Her son is the little star around which her own constellation revolves. One would not know that she is a wealthy woman now from the sight of the single ribbon threaded through her dark hair. It hangs limp like a torn sail, the color of cream.
They are very much alike, but Oriana alone has discovered this. Perhaps she was able to piece it together in the end because she is accustomed to simple things and has learned to cherish them. She shuns vanity like any good vicar’s daughter, however faithless she may be now. Her resistance to charm is so great that she knew her husband as a friend and nothing more for four years before his proposal.
And yet, Oriana is not impervious to rage. It rises in her, syrupy and visceral, when she sees Kathleen maneuvering Markham’s chair at the top of the staircase, one hand placed on his brittle shoulder.
Imagine how easy it would be to let go, how natural. No one would know that he did not fall on his own.
Kathleen is so plain that she does not wear perfume, rarely ever a hat. When Oriana stoops down to speak in her ear, she is met only with the warm smell of her skin. Kathleen stiffens with dislike because she is imprudent, does not know what is good for her.
“Have you ever thought about it?” Oriana asks.
Because she thinks herself the master of appearances, Kathleen reaches out to grasp her arm in a mockery of womanly sentiment. Her hand slips beneath the frill of Oriana’s sleeve. Square fingernails dig in deep, deep enough to do damage.
When Oriana thinks of Kathleen as plain she only ever means her morals. She is rather magnificent, in a way a man could only appreciate if he was afraid.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
A spot of blood soaks into the gauze of Oriana’s sleeve. Something has been set into motion.
Or did it begin long ago?
Kathleen has never been able to get rid of her. In the chasm left behind by their husbands they have become the property of Markham, Lord Curzon, the country. War work does not keep them apart for long, and they find that they must inhabit all of the same parlors, dining rooms, and hotels once more. Cherry passes between them, forever in the wreckage. Oriana has no patience for superstition, but she supposes that this is what being haunted is like, this perpetual belonging.
The Berkeley Hotel has a tendency to make one feel very cold, with its antiseptic white walls and pea green carpets. People frequently end up in each other's rooms in search of respite from its creamy orderliness.
Kathleen is drunk that night. She claims that this is unusual for her, that she abhors drunkards with a terror. She slips off the chaise into a pile of linen on the rug and tells Oriana of the time a man on the street seized her as a child and carried her off. He stank of liquor. She had left two perfect tooth marks on his arm and thrilled at the sight of her own violence. Kathleen blinks up at her with her marvelous cat-eyes as she revels in the memory. Ted would have found this all very sordid, but he is not here.
Oriana had once seen a photograph on Hannah Scott’s mantelpiece of the captain as a boy, around the age when Markham first met him. The cadet’s uniform made him look like a child in costume. How obscene it had seemed, to let a boy that young hold a sword. Oriana tries to recall him as a man; eyes a clean cornflower blue, refusing to shoot the beautiful stag he had sighted while out in the country with Ted. She wonders if Markham saw him as something to leave bite marks on.
Predictably, Kathleen redirects her anger onto Oriana that night. She presses Oriana’s hip bones against the edge of the center table, hoping to turn them red and violet. It’s punishment for Oriana slapping her hand away when she had tried to undo the laces of her corset. What’s one more in a long succession of performances, from the bohemian to the hero’s wife to this? At least Oriana knows when she herself is playing a part. She is committed now to the role of the aggrieved girl, back of her white dress torn open in the anonymous hotel room she has been lured into. As if she could ever be anything but a careful planner.
“What I always hated about you,” says Kathleen, twisting her fingers roughly inside of her, “Is that you were always so damnably good.” Oriana can feel sweat, or spit, drip onto the small of her back. The nettlesome sting of Kathleen’s dark hair where it has come loose and licks at her exposed flesh.
The comment strikes her as odd. One can only ever do good, never become it. Some good works, though apparently perverse, are morally necessary. When Oriana peers into the deep well of herself she sees neither simple shades of light or dark, but instead action, and purpose. She likes that Kathleen is like that, too.
Especially now.
Kathleen watches her get dressed. She herself remains unclothed, draped over the chaise with a practiced, ostentatious ease. Oriana does not need to ask what pleasure Kathleen derives from witnessing this seduction in reverse because they understand each other.
“You remind me of the Parmigianino madonna,” Kathleen says, too fondly. She would almost look untouched if it weren’t for the strawberry pink flush of exertion that blooms down her throat and between her breasts.
Oriana fastens her garters to the top of her stockings without looking up. “Flattery doesn’t work on me.”
“Awful prig. I bet you were a terrible schoolmistress.”
“I was fair.” Oriana crosses over to the chaise and kisses her, not chaste but precise. She wonders, indifferently, whether her husband used to kiss her like this. Less indifferently, she wonders if Kathleen can taste herself on her tongue.
Kathleen sighs into her mouth and is instantly wounded by the ease with which she responded to the gesture. “Awful prig,” she repeats, waspishly. “Always so foolishly agreeable, as if nothing could ever hurt you. You and your husband both.”
If she was a different sort of woman, Oriana would tell her about that summer at the cottage, the moment in the garden when she saw Kathleen’s husband reach for Ted’s hand thinking that they were out of sight. He had pressed a reverent kiss to his cheek, then turned away in shame.
“I have been angry every day of my life for four years,” she says, plainly. “And I’m good at recognizing danger. I simply believe that hysterics are a waste of time. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Kathleen is an intelligent woman. “And you believe in fairness.”
“Above all else.”
Oriana can recall the exact moment that she decided it must be done. It had been the December of the previous year, too early for snowfall, but Oriana had dreaded it all the same. She had loved the cold ever since she was a girl, but snow put her in mind of death.
There had been a strange rippling something in Markham’s eye when he spoke, as if restored to youth.
“I knew that boy would grow to be a remarkable man the instant his clipper sailed ahead into first place. Poor thing! You should have seen the dumbstruck look on his face turn to pride. He knew that in that moment of his life he had done something perfectly.”
Kathleen had always believed in the invulnerability of her husband’s strength to the point of mania, but she too had seen the picture in Mrs. Scott’s parlor. At the memory of it, Oriana considered spit-heaving onto the fine Punjaubi rug.
Oriana watched Kathleen’s face become equally bloodless. Markham planted a gnarled hand on Kathleen’s arm, undoubtedly mistaking her fury for feminine tender-heartedness. She tensed.
“Your husband too,” Markham offered in Oriana’s direction. “An honorable man.”
Ted had told her that Markham had always found him weak, not just physically, but in that ineffable way that men use the word weak against each other. What irony, when Markham covets and treasures weakness. Perhaps what he really meant was that Ted was too strong.
Some time later, Oriana let herself out into the courtyard to escape the babble of Markham’s admirers. Her gown had been too thin for early winter, but she rejoiced in the prick of gooseflesh.
She heard the striking of a match.
Kathleen was huddled by the steps, lighting a cigarette. How novel the sight. There was an angry urgency to her, hands shaking as she curved around the flame like a moth. Oriana basked in the lovely chiaroscuro of her in the light before Kathleen looked up and met her eye.
When Markham had asked Oriana to play a piece by Debussy that she loathed, Kathleen was still looking with the same intent fire. Oriana’s fingers stumbled on the piano keys.
Much later, Kathleen tells her about the time she had met Aleister Crowley as a sweet faced, chemise-wearing girl fresh out of the convent. He had called her a whore and a prick tease because of the look in her eye. Another time she had been pursued by a drunken Swede who had lurked outside her bedroom window with a pistol, intent on killing the both of them. When she had run terrified to their mutual friend, a big, strong Englishman, he had seized her by the wrist and crushed it until she heard the bones creak. “What have you been doing to him?” he spat.
Oriana is insensate with anger for the rest of the afternoon. Her hands shake. She stumbles through Hyde Park, thinking of nothing but Kathleen. Love has never turned her into the girl on the balcony but rather the rough boy waving his sword in the air. Only a few hours later, she returns to the house on Buckingham Palace Road like a wretchedly faithful dog.
She does not even wait to cross the threshold of Kathleen’s doorstep. “If I was your husband I would have gladly shot them.”
Kathleen looks her over. “My husband would have never dreamt of such stuff.”
Oriana understands, then, that this is why she loved him.
She spends the evening kneeling on the carpet, head resting on Kathleen’s lap where she reclines on the sofa before the fire. Oriana lets her untie her hair, thread a gentle hand through.
“My pretty, serious girl,” Kathleen says. “Do you know that is what I told my husband the first time I met you? I couldn’t bear how serious you were. You stood beside your beautiful husband but your smile was empty. How ludicrously happy I am in this sad grim world, I thought. To everyone else it is sad and grim and to me an endless ecstasy of delight.”
“We’ll do it together?”
“Together.”
Kathleen is the one to draw the plans to Markham’s home. Her keen, artistic eye is just one of many things Oriana admires about her. The myth of the tormented visionary is one of the great lies of their wayward age; it takes a deep, natural patience to see the world as it is and make something new out of it for oneself.
“The garden is the easiest way in. Albert– one of the boys who attends to him– has a loathsome habit of leaving the rear window open.”
For a brief glorious instant, Oriana pictures Albert slipping out of that window and stepping into the crisp night air, never to be seen again.
“We could be as quiet as a pair of mice.” As they survey the drafts, Oriana wraps an arm around Kathleen’s waist, feeling the wonderful solidity of her. “And wake no one in the house.”
That alone does not constitute a brilliant plan, but the effect of Oriana’s slim fingers skirting Kathleen’s hip, the proprietary intent of it, proves enough to distract them from the matter at hand for the next few hours.
“You once called me foolish,” Oriana says from between Kathleen’s thighs. “Now look at the two of us.”
One night Kathleen rolls over in Oriana’s marital bed and presses her nude body against her, pleasantly damp.
“What happens after? In a world without him?”
There might have been a time when Oriana would have said something like one day I will find a real friend and you will be a forgotten doll at the bottom of a toy chest or one day you will marry another man who is remarkable only in his un-remarkability because you can’t help yourself and that will be your life .
Instead, she says:
“We will go someplace we never dreamt we’d see.”
“I have dreamt of going everywhere, and I have been everywhere.” Kathleen crawls over her until they are eye to eye, direct, animal. “I think you lack imagination.” She brings Oriana’s hand up to cup the swell of her chest. Oriana strokes the flesh there willingly.
“I could say the same of you. Perhaps we are unimaginative women.”
“You don’t believe that.” Kathleen aligns their lower bodies, growing slightly breathless. “You can’t possibly believe that.” Her bare skin chafes against Oriana’s stockings. Oriana prefers it that way, cannot envision herself as a Venus or Eve.
“Perhaps we should have both been men.” Kathleen supplies.
“Captain and first mate.”
“We would have been sworn enemies.”
“We would have never met.”
Kathleen pauses and settles her entire weight on Oriana, knowing that she is strong enough to hold the both of them up. “That's right. You would have gone North and I, South. We would see each other only briefly at balls and banquets and I would have wondered about you. But the world is too vast.”
The pretense is a sculpture.
Markham sits for Kathleen, who looks him in the eye as she sketches. What an idiot he is to look back, and never be afraid. All the while, she is committing to memory the little world he inhabits, the home almost resplendent in its tastelessness, frozen in time and dim in the absence of electric light.
Kathleen shows her the sketch later in the studio she rents. Oriana likes the irreverence with which she tosses her the slim leather-bound book, a thing as unpretentious as the sight of Kathleen in her canvas apron.
Oriana studies the outline of Markham’s form, drawn from the shoulders up. A marble bust, play-acting as a Roman. In one neat motion, Oriana tears the page out of the sketchbook.
“The matches, if you please.”
Wordlessly, Kathleen hands them over and watches with rapt admiration as Markham goes up in flames.
Later when they are tangled together on the paint-flecked floor, Kathleen protests.
“Do you think I would have ever let a man come here and do that to my work?” she gasps.
She lifts her hips higher and higher, seeking a closeness that isn’t physically attainable, trying to turn them into concentric circles, two women always nested away within each other.
Oriana lifts one of Kathleen’s legs onto her shoulder, molding them closer together. She rolls her thin stocking down just far enough to press her mouth against her calf, not quite a kiss.
“I’ll say what they would say, then.” She smiles deviously against her skin. “I was only trying to give you inspiration.”
Kathleen laughs that wonderful, wild laugh that always gets her in trouble.
Oriana’s brother is killed on the first day of the Somme. She pictures him snarled in wire, legs askew, like one of the many dead birds in Ted’s study.
She is called away to Berkshire to care for her father. She sits at the piano and does not touch a key.
If she hadn’t learned before, she knows it now. We meet each other once and then never again. She wonders if those who are wounded early are forever separate from all those around them, recalling Constance’s screams when their baby brother had plunged off the cliff at Beachy Head while collecting wildflowers, remembers how they had only buried their mother some weeks before it happened.
Was her husband lucky or unlucky for never grasping his own impermanence? It is very easy to waste time if you believe that you will always have more of it. Oriana no longer believes in the world to come, but even so the letter Ted left her promising a glorious reunion in heaven has left her bound to him eternally. She will never marry again. Still, the cool pillow beside Oriana in her childhood bed doesn’t remind her of her lucky, unlucky husband.
Kathleen sends her one letter.
Did you know that last night I dreamt that I was a young girl again in Colarossi’s studio and that you were the model? I still remember the first time we sculpted the women nude. My dear girl friend was so composed, so unaffected. “How could she?” I thought. I fled and hid in the lavatory, where I was sick. I thought myself a horrible, puritanical little thing. I forced myself to go back in and imitate my friend in her indifference. But the model then had been a parody of womanly beauty, not too fleshy and not too thin. In my dream, you took the throne and were much more beautiful. How did you end up where you are when you are not the kind of woman who can be easily dreamt up?
Oriana thinks of Hilda Evans’ tears for the first time in years. She remembers the room in impressionistic strokes. Poor, pretty Hilda, senseless, flung down on the settee in the hotel lobby. Her ostrich feather boa torn and snagged under the leg of the chair, woman upended like a gasping fish in the net of her own finery. Kathleen’s furious brow. She had been angrier at Oriana for her coolness than at Hilda for her violent, public unspooling.
Hilda would be dead within three years like their husbands. Maybe she was weeping for herself, and should be forgiven.
How different this moment of meeting must have been from their husbands’ first encounter. Ted at the time, as delicate and pure as wheat, with his flaxen hair and furtive smile. His injured arm hung uselessly in its sling. Kathleen’s husband had been all too eager to have a wounded animal to fuss over and cling to, reconstituting himself through the other.
Oriana decides that her own union with Kathleen is more sensible. They are like two masts of the same ship. If one was somehow felled, the other would hold. After all, it is a terrible thing to die with someone.
And yet, how unbearable the thought of seeing the other fall.
Kathleen’s despair has always been quiet. She takes pride in her refusal to weep, even though her doctor has advised her to do so. It startles Oriana when sees her for the first time upon her return to London – tea at the Lord Mayor’s residence – and finds that she smells not of herself but of smoke.
She follows her when she slips outside discreetly. Kathleen faces away and stares at nothing, another statue in the garden. Oriana places her hands on her shoulders.
“Soon,” she says steadily. “We must do it soon.”
Incendiary insanity. This would be the charge, should they be caught. Oriana tries to imagine a world in which she and her husband had never met in the slum hospitals of Battersea, had moved through this great city without each other. She pictures him as the upright doctor testifying at her trial, politely telling the jury that pyromania is a disease rather than a vice. He would offer her a pitying smile before she was taken away.
Consider this: flame not as vice, but as virtue.
They decide that a candle will be enough, untraceable. So resistant is Markham to the march of time.
If Oriana was less perceptive, she might say that Kathleen has never looked more beautiful than tonight in the moment that she hoisted her petticoats above the neat little box of begonias and slipped through the window facing Markham’s courtyard.
Oriana has seen night-blooming jasmine in New Zealand, petals unfurling secretively in the moonlight. Kathleen is more beautiful, and always has been.
When she turns in the windowsill she holds a finger to her smiling mouth, holding her other hand out to Oriana. She takes it.
Markham is not a man who is equipped to understand what is happening to him at the moment of death.
Oriana holds his legs down, as superfluous as that may be. She wants him to see her face.
When Kathleen pins him to the bed with one strong arm, like an insect in a display box, and shows him the lit match, Oriana sees neither the woman who refused to cry while standing at Markham’s side at various memorial services, nor the convent girl bruised and chastised by hungry men, nor the little girl snatched off the streets of London.
She sees only action and purpose.
“A fifteen year old boy,” says Kathleen, hurt but measured. “Only a boy.”
Oriana reflects on the things we can and cannot know when we take our last breath. So many of us live half lives. Meanwhile, death is always coming.
Kathleen lights the candle. The orange gives way to white to blue to infinite nothing.
Oriana clutches Markham’s legs through the fabric of the dusty quilt at the rapture of it. She could sink into the sight, the same way she could fall into Kathleen’s pale eye, her slim form, the place between her legs, forever.
She’s close enough to feel the heat of the flame. She imagines herself a lonesome traveler across an expanse of white, reaching a tent at last. In the tent, a stove. Feel the hot tongue of it against her cheek.
Kathleen raises the candle to Markham’s milky eye.
The glow brings the whole dim room into focus. Markham’s terrified gaze seems to land on something behind Oriana’s shoulder. He screams.
The conflagration erupts around them. Oriana swears that for a moment, she feels twin breaths on the back of her neck. She doesn’t have time to dwell on it as she pulls Kathleen into the swallowing dark of the hall.
Oriana thinks of the men who become the mulch of empires. Sever one head of the hydra and it lurches on, feeds again. Boys in the wet dirt of France. Men frozen through, a few miles from their destination, only to die and be given to the sea.
Girl shuns the beauty of the wolf, overcomes the strength of the minotaur. Emerges from the labyrinth. Cannot burn the labyrinth down but emerges from it all the same.
Myth in reverse.
Oriana dreams of a garden that could be any garden. The horizon of the Earth at dusk is the same anywhere, ecstatic indigo descending into violet.
There is a boy there that she recognizes at once, even though he is not in uniform. It’s the pristine blue of his eye that gives him away. She takes his small hand in hers and guides him between the shrubs, showing him the possibility of the world. This is a silver spurflower, this a bottlebrush, thistle, bog myrtle. In the trees, the honeyeater and the sparrow.
She wakes to the stunning heat of Port Darwin. Instinctively, Oriana reaches out in bed to find only the warm indent Kathleen has left behind. How unusual for her to be the one to rise early– but Oriana has grown accustomed to forgetting old habits. It is one of the delights of growing older. She stretches, relishes the sensation of the sheets against her bare skin.
When she musters the resolve to dress herself, she descends the stairs of the summerhouse to the sound of nothing but birdsong. Kathleen must be on the beach.
The one exceptional thing about the house is the piano. In the sitting room, she removes the cover cloth and watches motes of dust float in an arc of scorching antipodean sunlight. Ted had favored Chopin.
Oriana listens to the birds for one second more– two rock doves high in the branches– and begins to play.
When baby Peter runs into the house triumphantly, dripping with sea spray, she lifts him up into the air and squeezes him until he squeals with delight.
“Come with me,” says Oriana. “I have much to show you in the garden.”
As it turns out, the world is very small. Smaller still, if you are bound up in someone.
Oriana can feel nothing but Kathleen as she presses her back against the pleasantly hot sand, presses her hot mouth against hers, swallows the breath, and there is not enough time in this life to do this slowly, not when they have mistrusted and waited and schemed for so long, not when people are dying every day in all of the corners of the Earth, when the cup of happiness is within reach and no one is bidding them not to drink from it, when they are alone by the sea, alone in the world, two women together or one woman in double portrait with herself, both equally, resplendently rare.
They linger in the heat.