Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house “honey-bottle,” and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it, a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun. The smell was somewhat a solace when it came to her devastating shyness, a shyness that so galled her mother that when Constance retreated into sniffing her fingers in public her mother could hardly restrain herself from swatting her daughter’s hands from her nose.
Her older sisters had no such inhibitions and considered Constance a minor mortification, while she understood their high spirits to be a manic display of an unhappiness that their mother viewed as a necessary part of their social success.
She agonized through birthday parties. She refused school games. She perambulated the fringes of family gatherings, setting everyone’s teeth on edge. Her most vivid recollections of childhood seemed unconnected, like lighted rooms scattered across a city, and she had decided that the most painful felt only distantly related to her.
When she hadn’t been absent-minded she had been diffident, and when she hadn’t been diffident she had presented as vacant. It was in no way clear to her how she had evolved into a moderately confident young woman of twenty.
Most of the girls she knew had married before they discovered what they themselves were really like, a decision that seemed to have generated neither harm nor joy. She marvelled at those few other acquaintances who carried themselves as if marked by fate at birth, young women whose decisiveness called to mind Joan of Arc, or Florence Nightingale, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Unlike those worthy role models, she had not been one for overcoming insuperable difficulties, and yet she had retained her stubbornness, despite her certainty that her path would have been altogether more congenial without it.
Her mother found her daughter’s cowardice in the face of strangers a secret disgrace, but Constance also had a father who was happy with her and with their time together, and that likely had been her salvation. Only he in her first twenty years had really mitigated her loneliness, though even in his presence she remained as wary as one being stalked.
At her school, girls had been allowed to go for solitary walks without their attendant mistresses, and she had gone out on many. She had told herself stories while walking, and that spectacle had caused her classmates to call her Mad Connie.
When she had been preparing to leave home for her first term, while emptying out her drawers she came across a list she had drawn up on her tenth birthday, titled “My Best Friends.” It was a column of two names, which included her father and the jackdaw nesting in their chimney, and next to the number three she had scrawled a series of question marks.
That first term, secret notes signed with pseudonyms had been all the rage, and she had chosen Isolde in honor of the wildly romantic lithograph that hung beside her mother’s dressing table, but then had been baffled as to whom she would correspond with. She had combatted her subsequent despair with what she imagined to be a clear-eyed acceptance of the impossibility of real intimacy between individuals. She had shared that insight with her mother in one unguarded letter, and her mother had written back that she should beware of queer spells and fits. And so Constance had remained grimly convinced that she was entirely alone when it came to facing such quandaries.
Still, she had feared that, alone, she was missing what opportunities there were to educate oneself for life. She had imagined strolls in which she and a friend might discuss kingship in history, or subjects of topical interest, or gossip, but had come to believe that such things were not for her to experience. She had asked her roommate at one point during their Sunday reading hours if she liked Walter Scott, and the roommate had answered after a pause that when younger she had enjoyed any number of sentimental works. And through such buffetings Constance’s little ketch had run aground.
On her last day of school, the visiting luminary’s address had centered on the pitfalls of smoking and drinking, leaving her disappointed at having had to listen to something meaningless when she had hoped for something interesting. Her disappointment had been compounded by a despondency at still not having made a friend. She had begun occasionally walking and exchanging information with a girl named Prue, but had found it hard to dispel the notion that the girl had approached her only because she was leaving as well.
When she was seventeen, her mother had taken her to a play in which it transpired that a young woman had kissed a man to whom she was not engaged, and her mother had bent close and assured her that such things never happened in real life. Even so, in her exercise books Constance had listed details concerning the kind of boy who might monopolize her affections.
She had finished school in May, and in June had her coming out, accompanied by her mother through the tedium of formal dances, where she had been keenly aware of the number of potential partners who, once introduced, did not return—most of Gloucestershire, it felt like—so that dance after dance ended with her sitting against the wall with her mother.
Her sisters recorded every anti-Catholic remark as a measure of all they had to overcome in social terms, but she doubted that her religion was the main impediment in her case. She had no gift for flirtation, and it hadn’t helped that when she had encountered someone intriguing she had been so startled by her own attraction to that person that she had focussed on maintaining her composure. One young man who suffered through her silence had finally begged her to have some champagne, hoping that might induce her to say something. She had tried the champagne, and it hadn’t. And with every disastrous evening her mother had refrained from making any comparison between her and her sisters.
Constance resolved that she had thought enough about boys for the time being. It was like expecting figs from thistles and then blaming the thistles for the absence of fruit. The one young man who had professed to be genuinely taken with her (after just a few short conversations) also claimed to be more an antique Roman than a modern drudge, and further insisted that their country’s high-water mark had been Alfred the Great, to which Constance responded that it was 1913, not 886, and that she hoped that in the event of future encounters they might find better things to discuss. He had reminded her of a boy from the village she’d known as a child who had always surprised her with his awful impulses, like roasting sparrows over a candle.
She would be realistic enough to cut her hopes according to her cloth. She had now been a bridesmaid for three of her cousins. And she found a sort of refuge in her memory of a prayer of St. Teresa of Avila’s: God, consider that we do not understand ourselves, and that we do not know what we want, and so are infinitely far from what we desire.
Though her mother’s expectation seemed to be that she not aspire to too much and instead remain useful in some homely and simple way, Constance wished to develop in full measure what she imagined to be the three preconditions of happiness—courage, selflessness, and discipline—holding before herself a remark of Florence Nightingale’s she had once read, that women dreamed until they no longer had the strength to do so. Her aunt had been part of the suffrage movement, and her cousins lamented that the instant they complained about it she went straight off and burned a letter box and got herself thrown in jail. As a fifteen-year-old, Constance had been dazzled by the newspaper accounts of the “Votes for Women” procession at Charing Cross, with thousands of women carrying banners celebrating everyone from Madame Curie and George Eliot to Boadicea. But then this past June a suffragette had thrown herself before the King’s horse at the Derby and had suffered terrible injuries and died; her father had proclaimed the woman’s behavior appalling, and she had been ashamed of her mixed feelings when reading of the woman’s coffin being escorted through the streets of London by all those thousands wearing their purple and white.
She wanted to do something to make someone glad they knew her, to make some place the better for her having been there. Who was to say there wasn’t some vein in her that was not being worked?
And then it happened that her father’s dissatisfaction with the candidates he interviewed for the position of confidential secretary made him announce at their dinner table that he would like to try her. When she asked, after an awkward and thrilled silence, if it could really be true that she was more qualified than those other men and women, he explained that really the matter turned on the issue of trust. Her mother, after her own nettled silence, reminded him of just some of the many disadvantages of taking on a daughter in such a role, and he acknowledged each, then added that they were nonetheless dwarfed by that one advantage. He concluded that it was her position if she wanted it, and her mother gave her an oblique look and dropped the matter. And she swithered for a few days but always knew she would take it.
She had henceforth been present at all of her father’s meetings and interviews, and it had been an education. He required from her careful notes and logistics but soon also took to soliciting her impressions afterward, and she was gratified to discover that her instincts were largely his when it came to his various employees and associates. His associates’ views on the subject of her qualifications were far from hidden, but she turned out to be so rare a phenomenon in their world that most found her too exotic to disdain. Soon she had under her a clerk and a typist to assist with her clerical work, and she found that, as it became clear that shyness would be of little use in negotiating this world, during her workday she put it aside. She still at that point had formed no particular friendships, but felt satisfied that she had presented herself as friendly in a general way. She devoted herself to reading, though she gave up on the sorts of romances in which the heroine’s mournful face was always fixed in a look of self-abnegation. And she thought there had to be people somewhere among whom she could sit and carp and still be counted as a familiar.
Her father’s was a coal-trading concern a short ride from their home outside Sharpness, on the River Severn, with Wales comprising all of those hills to the west, and on Saturdays, after organizing the week’s correspondence in the office, she began taking strolls in the little park near the railway bridge. It was never very crowded. And on one Saturday so stifling the omnibus horses had been fitted with straw hats for the heat, she came across a striking young woman aslant in a little canvas chair under some elms, absorbed in a pocket edition of “Adam Bede.”
“You’re staring,” the woman noted, startling her.
“And remember, if at first you don’t succeed, the internet will let you know immediately.”
Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
“My apologies,” Constance said.
“You’re just going to stand in the sun?” the woman asked. She added that this was the sort of heat in which even ladies could not succeed in looking comfortable.
And so Constance joined her under the elms. The woman introduced herself as Minna Royden, and in the remarks they exchanged about Eliot’s early works gave evidence of a fluid intelligence. She seemed to return all looks with her head at a disconcerting angle, and when Constance finally confessed, after one of their lengthier pauses, that she must be going, the woman’s look of bemusement haunted her for days.
They exchanged greetings each Saturday after that, with Constance lingering longer and longer before moving on. It transpired that Minna was from Dursley and held the position of legal secretary, and when she first invited Constance to extend their conversation at a Saturday lunch, Constance’s courage failed her, but three weeks later, when she offered again, they found themselves, after rather a long walk, at a new little restaurant that had been a coal cellar before being glorified by paint.
Their waiter’s indolence meant a long wait even for menus, yet neither of them let drop a word of complaint. They discovered they each had two sisters, and Minna said about her older one that their father claimed she thought with her mouth, and about her younger one that she was the sort that could go on for days about her luncheon cutlet. Of her schooling Minna said that she was mostly remembered for her impertinences in the presence of eminent scholars, and that at gatherings in general her comments seemed to attract a sideways cautious glance. They shared their dislike for the coming-out dances, though Minna asked with some pleasure if Constance remembered the whispering sound the train of her first long dress made on the stairs.
They seemed to share a spirit of mutiny. Minna said she knew a number of the new dances, like the turkey trot and the chicken scramble. They got on the subject of sex, and Minna asked if it really mattered how people acted in the bedroom as long as they didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses. She called it fortunate that their waiter had been so delinquent, since they hadn’t had to chat about the food, and she seemed to be the sort of person who when it poured down rain noted that it was good for the ducks. And, by the time they parted, Constance was convinced that the fact that many of her new friend’s virtues were unconventional was an additional appeal, and that, when it came to nurturing acquaintances, it was important to work to keep hope alive.
Two years later, she snatched at that same promise of hope as she spiralled downward swallowing water until she remembered to close her mouth, and surfaced as part of a loose floating island of people and debris. In the melee of the ship’s sinking, she’d been able to find neither her father nor Minna before the deck lurched and the green water was up to her thighs with a stunning jolt of cold, and she’d just had time to unhook her skirt so its voluminousness wouldn’t hinder her when the water swamped her chest and she’d been sucked down. Beside her on the chaotic surface now was what looked like the shattered bow of a collapsible boat, and she clung to it. One of the funnels of the great liner blotted out part of the sky, and its stern was high in the air. It seemed that all she saw in the water were children, everywhere, and in their shrieking and wailing they raised a mass of waving arms. She started pulling the closest of them to her and directing their hands to the easy grip of the boat’s gunwale, and she could feel others clinging to her from behind.
A month earlier, she and Minna had teased her father mercilessly for having chosen such a small ship for the passage to New York, since the result had been ten long days made yet more dreary by enforced blackouts so complete that even smokers had not been allowed on deck after sundown. And she and Minna had then advocated, since it was a business trip and much of the cost could be justified, for travelling on something swifter on the return voyage, in order not to miss the best weeks of the year in terms of the weather back home, and so, despite the warnings that the German Embassy had issued, he had booked them two second-class cabins—one for himself and Constance, and one for Minna—on the starboard side of the great Cunard liner Lusitania.
A quarter of an hour before she’d been pitched into the water, she and Minna had been arm in arm at the open-air café at the end of the Boat Deck, a location that had become one of their favorites because of its wicker chairs and minor thicket of potted plants, and because on the second day out they had sighted from there an entire pod of porpoises that had brought a crowd to the railings above and below them. And as they leaned together over the rail on a gloriously sunny afternoon, elbows touching, Minna talked of how happy she was with their time together and Constance spied a narrow white turmoil on the surface arrowing toward them. From above, someone shouted, “Torpedo coming, starboard side!,” and they heard the scuttle of feet before the concussion lifted the ship from the water and soaked them in a column of white spray. They came to themselves to find they’d been knocked to their bellies on the deck. Constance felt as though she’d been showered with hot cinders, and there was broken glass around them, and a woman’s shoe beside her cheek.
The debris cloud billowed away to the stern, now tilted high above the ship’s Marconi wires. Other clouds of hot steam issued up from below. Some of those who had been near the café’s entrance had been thrown down the stairs.
The ship’s list was already so pronounced that the drawer of the café’s cash register was slung open, and the pair were passed by officers and stewards hurrying to their boat stations, their arms out to each side like customers negotiating the tumbling barrel of a fun house. She and Minna helped each other to their feet, and because of the list had to set one foot on the deck and the other on the bulkhead. Constance exclaimed about her father, still at lunch, and Minna cried that she would fetch the life jackets from her cabin and meet them at the lifeboat station below.
But Constance got only a short way down the stairs to find her father before being forced backward by the crush of third-class passengers sweeping up from the Main Deck, and when she instead turned to find Minna she was pummelled by those surging the other way. She persevered and got as far as the nursery on the Shelter Deck before being further impeded by the mothers unable to find their children in the tumult. And as the ship rolled further and she was pitched into the sea, she registered that Minna had gone back not only for their life jackets but for the cameo keepsake that had been Constance’s first real gift to her.
The cameo featured what they had decided was the perfect likeness of the heroine of a story that Minna had written when she was eleven. A December evening well into their friendship, Minna had shared with Constance the memory of having been scolded for telling her sisters a bedtime story titled “The Earl Fell Into the Moat,” and then had shown Constance the handwritten and illustrated “Saga of Queen Ren,” about a twelve-year-old queen sailing around the world to find the perfect kingdom for her subjects. Minna said that she had carried the thing on for quite a while until she had got tired of it and left the poor girl floating mid-ocean.
Some nine months before they travelled to America together with Constance’s father, Constance had presented the cameo, to great effect, on Minna’s birthday. The following day, they had surprised themselves with a squabble. They had undertaken a blackberrying expedition to the hedgerows along the river and Minna had asked after her work, and Constance had answered that more than the usual had recently been heaped upon her shoulders, which had been fine, though it always left her feeling behind. Minna had not responded, and Constance had found herself in a strange state of mind, drawn as she was in many different directions. Her friend’s small attentions filled her with pleasure, and yet there had been any number of instances when a few unflattering words had rankled for weeks.
Why did she herself keep silent? Overcoming the reticence at the heart of her shyness was like scaling a cliff only to discover another view of the real summit farther off.
“I dote on you too much, I sometimes fret,” she said, surprising them both.
Minna stopped in her tracks and said that she had feared that instead of fitting herself to some great task she had been drifting along daydreaming about her friend. When, after a stymied pause, Constance confessed that she liked to appear indifferent while feeling otherwise, Minna let it go, and then noted grimly a few minutes later the way that they were perhaps all strangers to their best selves.
She added, “Do you know what I have written over my desk?” And then she recited part of a poem of R. L. Stevenson’s: “Wealth I seek not, hope nor love / Nor a friend to know me; / All I seek, the heaven above / And the road below me.”
“And yet last week I rose in the middle of the night to write you that I would have given a good deal to see you at just that moment,” Minna lamented. “And that, if I could have, I would have wanted to kiss you, very specially.”
Where they were stopped, they could make out deep in the hedge a mother blackbird on her nest, tracking them with her bright black eyes. And each registered the other’s contention with the hard-hearted energy of her own physical craving.
When they finally regarded each other again, it was with increasing frankness. Constance volunteered that there had been many nights when she also had been too roused to sleep, and had tossed about for hours.
“I’m not suggesting I’m the wronged and desperate heroine,” Minna said sharply.
“I’m not sure what you are suggesting,” Constance responded, with some sharpness of her own. And they exchanged vexed glances helplessly.
And finally Minna seemed to deflate, and conceded that the whole thing reminded her of how she used to fear that nothing seemed ideal when you got too near to it.
“Which whole thing?” Constance asked.
But Minna shook her head, and took Constance’s hand. And Constance clasped hers a moment, and then let it go, noting that Minna didn’t seek her hand again, while they concluded in silence what they both later agreed was an unexpectedly troubled outing.
She had led her floating daisy chain of children far enough away from the immense ship that when it went down and all sorts of swimmers and debris were drawn into the great funnels, the horror seemed more remote. Soon after the vast curve of the stern submerged, they were jounced by the rumble of an underwater detonation, and a colossal surge of foaming ocean boiled up, with corpses and wreckage spinning up from below, and the resulting wave pushed Constance and the children even farther away.
Perhaps her father was in a boat. Perhaps Minna was as well. Or they were elsewhere on the great floating island of people and debris. She worked to master her panic about them the way she worked to master the cold.
The children’s cries were mostly whimpers and calls for their parents, and one by one they gave in and let go, and after the first few times Constance made no effort to pull them back. One little girl floated like a tether between Constance’s sleeve and an infant face down in its life jacket. Others bobbed about just beyond her reach like water lilies.
Even in the sun of the cloudless day the cold went to her marrow. She could see a few lifeboats laboring back and forth in the distance and held out the hope that one might reach them soon.
She became aware that she was weeping, and she was moaning, Minna and Father, Minna and Father, over and over, and stirred finally to discover the rest of the children gone. The great mass of which she was a part had begun to evanesce with the current. The cold gradually caused her to lose her grip, and she was registering the sunlight’s brightness from beneath the surface when the bumper of a lifeboat slid past and she raised up her hand and caught it, and was pulled into the boat.
A week or so before their squabble, soon after Constance had purchased the cameo but before she had presented it, she had stayed over at Minna’s house. The rest of the family had gone away for a short holiday. Minna had begged off, and with the house to themselves they had spent a riotous and regressive evening dancing about and shouting and sometimes going to sleep. They had shared Minna’s bed and in the morning Minna had remarked apropos of nothing on how important the body was. She said that another summer morning a few years before, when her father was away, she had come down to breakfast perfectly naked just to hear her sisters scream. She laughed that her conduct had been shocking enough, but far worse was the pleasure she took in recalling it. She added that her mother’s response had been that while usually the culprits were French novels, Minna had shown that any middle-class Englishwoman could assault her own decency. And that her mother had also recalled that even as a child Minna had particularly enjoyed books in which none of the children behaved well.
“I cherish you as my Queen of Bad Influences,” Constance observed.
“I’m not much in that regard,” Minna responded. “Though it is possible I’m too flexible for virtue and too virtuous for villainy.”
After a silence in which they hunted for each other’s hands beneath the coverlet, Constance suggested they save up and go to Rome together. She would look after all the practical matters while Minna wandered about and admired columns.
They could keep a journal of the trip, Minna said, and write of things that they had never spoken of before, in pages that were to be burned at once.
Constance agreed, with audible enthusiasm. And then they fell into a silence that felt to her equal parts contented and unmoored.
Later, at the breakfast table, Minna remarked on how long she had wished for a friend with whom she could share something beyond the ordinary aspect of things, and compared it to plucking leaves and grasses from a thicket and coming away with a handful of flowers. Constance listed all the ways in which Minna had taught her to be more forthright and thoughtful and affectionate. And Minna wondered if they would stay as close as they were now throughout their future marriages.
“Throughout your marriage, you mean,” Constance told her. “I’ll die an old maid.”
“Your father will find some young man for you,” Minna said. “Someone who can cope with your many indispositions.”
“Or at least understand my peculiarities better than most,” Constance agreed. And they sobered at the thought of such a man, and gave their attention to their toast and tomatoes.
It was all about love and respect and patience, they later agreed, while washing and drying their dishes.
“I do sometimes pinch myself at the portion we’ve been allotted,” Constance confided to her. And then, fired by her own courage, she put her cheek to her friend’s and kept it there, so that they might more fully appreciate this bounty they had been offered, or had gathered, together.
She found herself face down in a tangle of shoes and boots, and someone was working her arms to pump the water from her lungs. She was helped to a sitting position squeezed between two weeping men, one of whom was rowing. She swayed there until a fishing smack bumped alongside and took on the lifeboat’s passengers. Once seated on the smack, she noticed other lifeboats bobbing nearby, all far from full. Her boots were gone and the deck slippery with fish scales, and one of the fishermen looked aghast at her condition. Next to her, someone’s head was bandaged with someone else’s handkerchief and bled through it immediately. She was given some warm sugared tea. More people crowded onto the smack from other lifeboats. When she was strong enough, she joined others at the railings, scanning and scanning the waves. Someone said something to her, but she was so chilled she was unable to respond.
That same voice said they had sunk close to a town on the Irish coast and were headed there now. All around them passed other boats steaming the opposite way. She remembered Minna beside her, the bright sunshine, the glassy sea, and some of that animation they felt which overtook passengers when nearing port. Then she closed her eyes to the juddering of the engines beneath her.
She was helped up the gangway once the boat had docked. It was announced that the recovered had been taken to the next wharf over, and there was her father among them, his face blank with shock. She was jolted to her knees by the sight, and it was only when she got so close she was nearly staring him in the face that he seemed to recognize her.
“Then I jiggle the handle just to make sure it’s locked.”
Cartoon by Jimmy Craig
After the maelstrom of their reunion, he agreed to wait with her for the other boats coming in, and shared his blanket. Someone else gave her some men’s galoshes. Around midnight, they were put up at the Queen’s Hotel and helped into bed and given hot-water jars. Despite her fatigue, she couldn’t keep herself from keening, and throughout the night at any noise in the hall she came awake again.
They spent four days checking the hospitals and other hotels and private homes that had taken in survivors, as well as the lists at the newly constituted Cunard office, before her father finally asked if she wished to go to the post office to wire Minna’s family. Her hand shook so badly on the form that he had to steady it, and she could write only that they were still looking and that not all hope was lost.
Corpses were continually being unloaded on the wharves, so every day there were those ordeals. The quantity was staggering, and she remembered Minna’s remark that a single stroll around the Promenade Deck covered a quarter of a mile. By then, all of the retrieved lifeboats had been drawn up quayside, and seemed to be functioning as an exhibit. The shopwindows were filled with notices of the missing, to which they added their own: a young woman of twenty-six years, with dark-brown hair and brown eyes, very pretty. Constance added the cameo at the end of the description.
Until the last minute it hadn’t even been certain that Minna would accompany them to America. They had had a falling out that made their squabble on the blackberrying expedition trivial in comparison. Constance termed it a falling out when she sought to minimize it for herself even as she registered that the more apt term might be betrayal.
Minna had explained that her refusal to play to others’ follies had made her current situation at the legal offices increasingly untenable, and had suggested that she might find a new position in the consortium that Constance’s father was helping to organize, at the government’s request, to coördinate the supply of munitions from the United States. That was the main reason for the trip to America, besides her father’s efforts to locate new markets for his coal, and Constance had surprised herself with her lack of enthusiasm for Minna’s request, a lack she neither understood nor examined. The closest she came to comprehending it was to attribute it to the fierceness with which she prioritized her father’s interests, but that hardly explained her reticence, since Minna would likely be welcomed by both her father and his associates. Constance had been further irked when Minna, without having consulted her, importuned her father about the consortium during a visit to Constance at home, and he volunteered that perhaps Minna could attend the lunch he and Constance were having the following Friday with a young man who ran a sulfur-and-potassium concern. It was agreed that Minna would meet Constance at home and proceed from there. And when that Friday Constance found herself alone at the appointed hour, she declined to answer the door for a full twenty minutes until Minna went away. At the luncheon, she pleaded ignorance and then was told the following evening by her father that Minna had encountered him coming out of his office and had again put herself forward for the consortium. And she and Minna had then been out of touch until Minna intercepted her on a walk in the park near the railway bridge, waiting in the same canvas chair under the same elms.
