Wonder by Dominique Fortier

Author:Dominique Fortier [Fortier, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4773-2
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

IN THE AUTUMN OF THE YEAR 1904, EDWARD and Garance accompanied Mrs. Love to Bath, where she had gone for several years now, where the waters, she assured them, were beneficial to her sciatica. She was usually accompanied by her elder daughter (who suffered from psoriasis and also swore by the miraculous springs in the famous spa), who unfortunately was confined to home because of exhaustion near the end of her pregnancy. And so Edward and Garance packed their bags, fearing the worst. The journey lived up to their expectations.

Every morning they followed Theresa Love to the baths where she soaked for an hour, watch in hand. Resembling an immense underground cavern, the room threw back the least murmur with an echo effect that gave the slightest sound, every word, even a whisper, a multiplied and magnified presence. The light from the narrow windows seemed rather to emanate from the healing waters and was then mirrored on the ceiling. Every day they found there, strangely devoid of bodies, the same heads bathing in the watery light and floating on the surface.

The diet the hotel imposed on its guests was Spartan. In addition to the sulphur-smelling water, legendarily rich in minerals, drawn from the Pump Room and served still tepid in long glasses wrapped in dainty white napkins, those taking the waters were presented with a boiled egg in the morning; boiled vegetables at noon; and poached fish in the evening, again accompanied by vegetables cooked in water. Garance, dreaming of roast mutton and spit-roasted chicken, came to muse whether, through a kind of osmosis, those vegetables could be the cause of the greenish tinge that she saw on all the swimmers in the pool.

In this city of old women and long diaphanous young girls, they soon noticed that everyone was walking around with a novel by Jane Austen, once the most famous of its inhabitants, as if her works were an essential guide for making one’s way through the city, although the streets were clearly identified. One morning when his mother, eyes closed, was immersed up to her neck in the lukewarm water, breathing deeply as if not to waste an atom of the precious vapour given off by the pool, an incredulous Edward observed three ladies who appeared to be unacquainted, but were sitting in neighbouring chairs along the pool, all plunged deep in Sense and Sensibility. Catching his eye, Garance whispered to him, in a voice just loud enough to travel the distance between them, nevertheless with the result that her words were immediately picked up and amplified by the echo: “You know, Jane Austen hated this place.”

He didn’t know. Nor, apparently, did the three ladies, who stopped reading for a moment and pricked up their ears in spite of themselves.

“She thought the life here was deadly, society unbearable, the gossip insufferable, and the famous water undrinkable. She’d be horrified to see how she is venerated here, in this place she loathed, and without a doubt by the descendants of those she despised.

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