Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [54]
The woman Grace sleeps in my room. At night I sometimes see her sitting at the table counting money. She hols a gold piece in her hand and smiles. When she puts it all into a little canvas bag with a drawstring and hangs the bag round her neck so that it is hidden in her dress. At first she used to look at me before she did this but I always pretended to be asleep, now she does not trouble about me. She drinks from a bottle on the table then she goes to bed, or puts her arms on the table, hear head on her arms, and sleeps. But I lie watching the fire die out. When she is snoring I get up and I have tasted the drink without colour in the bottle. The first time I did this I wanted to spit it out but managed to swallow it. When I got back into bed I could remember more and think again. I was not so cold.
There is one window high up – you cannot see out of it. My bed had doors but they have been taken away. There is no much else in the room. Her bed, a black press, the table in the middle and two black chairs carved with fruit and flowers. They have high backs and no arms. The dressing-room is very small, the room next to this one is hung with tapestry. Looking at the tapestry one day I recognized my mother dressed in an evening gown but with bare feet. She looked away from me, over my head just as she used to do. I wouldn’t tell Grace this. Her name oughtn’t to be Grace. Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.
There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us – hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?
The door of the tapestry room is kept locked. It leads, I now, into a passage. That is where Grace stands and talks to another woman whom I have never seen. Her name is Leah. I listen but I cannot understand what they say.
So there is still the sound of whispering that I have heard all my life, but these are different voices.
When night comes, and she has had several drinks and sleeps, it is easy to take the keys. I know now where she keeps them. Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don’t remember, but we lost it. Was it that evening in the cabin when he found me talking to the young man who brought me my food? I put my arms round his neck and asked him to help me. He said, ‘I didn’t know what to do, sir.’ I smashed the glasses and plates against the porthole. I hoped it would break and the sea come in. A woman came and then and older man who cleared up the broken thing on the floor. He did not look at me while he was doing it. The third man said drink this and you will sleep. I drank it and I said, ‘It isn’t like it seems to be.’ – ‘I know. It never is,’ he said. And then I slept. When I woke it was a different sea. Colder. It was that night, I think, that we changed course and lost our way to England. This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England.
One morning when I woke I ached all over. Not the cold, another sort of ache. I saw that my wrist were red and swollen. Grace said, ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that you don’t remember anything about last night.’
‘When was last night?’ I said
‘Yesterday.’
‘I don’t remember yesterday.’
‘Last night a gentleman came to see you,’ she said.