The Ingenious Edgar Jones by Elizabeth Garner

Author:Elizabeth Garner [Garner, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45973-2
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

BY THE TIME ELEANOR REPEATED THE TALE TO MRS. SIMM, IT had become a thing to be laughed at. William, all fumble fingered and flustered, pitching himself onto the floor in a flurry of bed-sheets and protest.

Mrs. Simm laughed until tears came. “Oh, my poor dear,” she said, “I do believe that your husband is afraid of his own flesh.”

“And mine, it seems.”

Mrs. Simm pushed the nightdress back into her bag. “Then for all his wise words and his bookish ways, your husband is nothing more than a fool, Mrs. Jones.”

The afternoon of tangled sheets and lost opportunity was never mentioned again. But when Eleanor retired that evening she found a bank of pillows set down the center of the bed. In the nighttime Eleanor slept with the barricade pressed against her back. In the daytime, William curled his body up to the divide and embraced it as if it was flesh.

The parlor table became a place of utter silence. Edgar kept his thoughts of iron to himself. William repositioned the wall of the newspaper between himself and his family. If Eleanor felt the weight of the wedding ring around her finger to be heavier than before, then she did not speak of it to anyone. Instead, she retreated into her world of silks and stitches. She turned seams and hems, and as the dresses re-formed themselves, low cut, full skirted, Eleanor held them up against herself. Peacock blue. Bright scarlet. Verdant green. She imagined the kind of lives these dresses might have. They would dance beneath sparkling chandeliers in the richest houses of Oxford. They were the dresses of love and adventure. They were slender, small-waisted things. It would take three of them stitched together even to begin to hold the shape of Mrs. Simm.

On one such night, Eleanor was interrupted from the push and pull of the needle by a knock upon her door. There, standing upon the step, was Mrs. Simm, her arms around the shoulders of a tall woman, dressed in a cloak, with a dark veil shrouding her face. “Mrs. Jones,” she said with a smile, “let me introduce you to my friend Lady Arabella.”

Eleanor hovered at the doorway. It was one thing to let Mrs. Simm into her haphazard home, quite another to allow a smartly dressed stranger across the threshold. Eleanor held out her hand. “How do you do?”

The woman did not move an inch.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” said Mrs. Simm. “She’s a quiet one, but she is a lady of substance.” Mrs. Simm chuckled and pulled aside Arabella’s cloak to reveal a burlap body, with a sturdy iron foot fixed below on wheels. A mannequin. “Now, let’s get her inside before she catches her death.”

Eleanor grabbed the thing by the neck, Mrs. Simm hoisted it around the waist, and together they went careering over the doorstep, across the parlor, and into the workroom. Arabella was placed by the door. Her cloak and veil were removed and there she stood: faceless, armless. Eleanor passed her hands over the curve of her shoulder, the tapering of the waist.

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