The Ripper's Wife(25)
I’d end up spending the best part of the day shopping, so I’d have to rush to get home in time to welcome Jim. When I unpacked all my parcels my bedroom was awash with so much tissue paper and boxes you could hardly see the carpet.
Deep in my heart, it worried me. Shopping was becoming like a drug I reached for at the least little twinge of boredom or loneliness. I was as dependent on it as Jim was on his arsenic. It filled and gave me something to show for all the empty hours. The smiling faces of the salesclerks were such a welcome change from all the disapproving frowns of the people who filled my life now. I often sat, chin in hands, on the side of my bed, staring down at my purchases spread out on the floor before me. Sometimes I’d feel so disgusted with myself I’d vow that tomorrow I would take them all back and never do this again. I had my books, and my embroidery, to occupy me, and I might even take up china painting again, or maybe I could find some sort of ladies charitable society that would truly welcome my help. But somehow, no matter how good my intentions were, my resolve always crumpled and I managed to talk myself out of it. I always found a reason to keep everything I bought; I never returned a single thing.
Every month the bills got higher and I’d find myself a nervous wreck, prostrate with worry, sick headaches, and a sour stomach, worrying what Jim would say, but he never said a word about any of it except to comment on how pretty I looked in my new finery or how thoughtful a gift I’d chosen. He even said the elephant foot umbrella stand I’d given Michael was “charmingly exotic as well as utilitarian” and the stuffed aardvark was “the perfect conversation piece every parlor requires” and that he was the luckiest man in the world, to have such a beautiful wife who always chose such nice things for him, his family, and friends.
I loved him so, and every day I kept vowing I would do better, that I would make myself into a wife worthy of him. I kept promising “tomorrow” and every day when that tomorrow actually came I said “tomorrow” again and went on just the same, wallowing in bed until half past noon and spending money like it was water and gallivanting around to dime museums, freak and magic shows, and melodramas with the irresponsible, irresistibly charming Edwin. My metamorphosis into that perfect wife was as much a failure as one of my brother-in-law’s magic tricks.
6
Bobo was just taking his first steps when I found myself pregnant again. One moment I was standing there with my arms outstretched, my son toddling toward me in a rose satin gown trimmed with blue rosettes. The next I was flat on my back, staring dizzily up at the spinning ceiling, trying to see it through a starry haze.
Jim was adamant. I’d dallied too long and we simply must engage a nanny. Now that I was expecting again I couldn’t possibly take care of myself and Bobo too.
The sickness that had dogged me in the early days of my first pregnancy, usually passing by mid-afternoon, this time was unrelenting. I couldn’t keep a thing down and began to lose flesh. Dr. Hopper ordered me to bed, and I rarely left it, rising only sometimes, for a few hours, in the late afternoon or evening.
Once again, Mrs. Briggs reigned supreme at Battlecrease House. Jim entrusted her with finding us the perfect nanny. Mrs. Briggs was to handle the whole thing; I wasn’t even permitted to sit in when she was interviewing the applicants. She was to have first and final say about the woman who would take care of my children! No matter how much I wept and raged about it, Jim stubbornly refused to see it my way. “Children need discipline, Florie, not sugarplums ten times a day,” he said.
The nanny Mrs. Briggs chose for us was Alice Yapp, an innkeeper’s horsey-faced spinster daughter from the aptly named Nag’s Head. She still figures in my nightmares, staring at me with big fishy eyes swimming behind the thick lenses of her steel-rimmed spectacles, hair the color of horse chestnuts scraped back in a severe bun to fully reveal a face as friendly as a hatchet. I wouldn’t have been surprised to awaken in the night and find her standing over my bed with an ax. We hated each other at first sight. I begged Jim to dismiss her, to find someone sweet to look after our children, but he and Mrs. Briggs were in complete accord that “children need structure and discipline, and that’s what nannies are for.” The moment Nanny Yapp took Bobo in her arms, I started to lose him. She contradicted me at every turn, pouring her always politely worded grievances into Mrs. Briggs’s all too willing ear and worming her way into the good graces of the whole household staff; she was after all one of them and I was the outsider. We were like chess players trying to outmaneuver each other, and the children—my children—were the poor little pawns.
Why does the miracle of birth have to be so horrid? I felt so ugly and ungainly as I tottered around, swollen, half-sick, fearing I’d spew all the time, embarrassed by the blemishes erupting on my face, feeling like the pimple on my nose was drawing stares like a big pink and red bull’s-eye, and hating the way my clothes chafed but feeling slatternly whenever I dared flout propriety and venture out of my room in my robe. Even though the spring weather was quite mild, I felt stiflingly hot. I was sweating like a field hand, even though I’d done absolutely nothing. I’d lie in bed in my chemise, sucking on hard ginger candies to quell the nausea and plying a palmetto fan, feeling unable to breathe with fear whenever I thought about the ordeal that awaited me. I was terrified of the pain to come, afraid that this time I might not survive it.