The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [233]
Years later, in a chapter of their courtship, I know that Constance—during a walk they had stretched over hours, city to park to café to park—confessed to her suitor that she was an orphan. She felt this admission would likely be the end of their brief time in each other’s company, and that her fantasies of his love for her (furtively enjoyed even in solitude) faced certain doom. Still she spoke, as if offering a hanging judge the extenuations of her stained character. She told Joseph of her siblings, and in her description of death after death she said, “They slept too deeply. My mother used to tell me that.” He did not banish her, only asked if she would accompany him to his home; he wished to show her something. It should have been out of the question—but it was an insult she recognized but did not feel, for she would by then have sunk to any depth for his approval. She gladly entered his grand home and was led into his study, this very room where her daughter now slept by candlelight. “These are your enemies,” he said and bid her look inside the black cylinder of his microscope at loops and threads. “These are the beasts that steal lives. Your brothers and sister did not sleep too deeply. On the contrary, they likely prayed for it. Sleepless, brows damp with anguish, sickness most violent and unremitting, torment for patient and parent alike.” Quite a lecture to a young woman he was courting. The biology lesson had ended with his taking her hand. They had very nearly come to an understanding right then, surrounded by laboratory apparatus and restored memories of her family’s destruction, the handsome scientist explaining the cruelties of Nature, while she felt no sorrow, only a prickly warmth in her fingers and cheeks, and a desire for his hand to stay wrapped around hers.
She knew Joseph’s descriptions were accurate, but she could not recall events as he painted them. Her most certain recollections (though certainly false) glowed as incontrovertible as holy relics or newspaper reports: wishing her healthy, strong elder brother Alfred good night, then sitting at his bedside, watching him fall asleep, deeper, deeper, until he simply all at once turned white and cold, and a last visible puff of steam escaped from between his cracked and blackened lips. By the light of Joseph’s slow instructive conversation, she could prove that this fantastic memory was impossible: she had been younger by far than Alfred, would never have put him to bed or watched him fall asleep, and, of course, that was simply not how human souls were called to their reward. She must have seen his body at burial, ashen and cold. Perhaps that was one of the fragments from which she had created this figment: her own breath in the November cold steaming on his behalf, her own lips cracked in the dry air.
She had been younger than Angelica was now when Alfred died, and he was the first to go. Alfred, George, Jane, Father, Mother. Invisible string-beasts steal into the blood and devour us. Joseph laughed when she asked, “How ever are doctors expected to catch such tiny devils as these?” She recalled that at the time she thought his laughter kindly. “They cannot be caught. One can only deny them the conditions that favor their growth,” he said lightly.
What could a mother expect to do in a world where enemies such as these assaulted children? What could she prevent, if not the illnesses that had caused her own mother such suffering,