The Swans at Roxleigh

by Callie Bates
Lawrence University

Winning story of the 2007 Nick Adams Short Story Contest

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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited.

The new maid arrived at Roxleigh determined not to be intimidated. Fair-haired, with a serious mouth and eyes already warmed by crinkles in the corners, she followed Mrs. Pimm from room to room, the heels of her black shoes clacking on the floorboards. She asked questions about her allowance and her days off. She did not inquire about the nature of the former master or the absence of the new one.

The new maid's name was Helen Sands. She had arrived on the train northbound from St. Hugh's College in Oxford, having sent her application and a letter of recommendation from her supervising nurse on ahead of her. She had seen the position for a maid at Roxleigh House advertised in The Times, but never expected Mrs. Pimm to approve her as its recipient. She supposed that, after the war, it was difficult to find workers. Everyone had gone to London, no one to Cumbria. The rugged hills near the Scottish border would never transform into mountains of money.

But Helen did not like money. It made people unpleasant.

So she thrust everything she owned into a cardboard suitcase, and marched down to the station to find the train, gleaming black as a stallion in its stall. Casting herself into a seat, she spread her hands out to either side of her and closed her eyes and then opened them wide in the delicious moment as the train jerked into life. Through glass smeared with the sticky fingerprints of a child, she watched as the station doors blinked past, and the gray fog of Oxford rushed out to meet them. Beneath her feet the thrum of the train said speed speed speed!

An elderly woman, one arm stretched out in fear of falling, dropped into the seat across from her. Helen scooted her bottom back against the seat, put her hands in her lap, and looked at the stone buildings sliding by, one after another. In the distance, the towers and spires of the University cut angles into the sky. The elderly woman rustled through a handbag. She produced a box of stationary and a pen. Helen watched, silent and envious, the movement of her hand up and down, up and down as she wrote.

After a while she fetched down her case and heaved out a book which thudded onto the empty seat beside her. Bits of paper stuck up from its middle, and the wavering edge of the pages showed yellow. The elderly woman asked what it was. Helen said, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

The muscles of the woman's brow pinched in thought. "Is it theology?" she asked at length.

"No," said Helen, hiding a smile; it was rather the opposite. "It's by T.E. Lawrence. It tells about the Arab Revolt."

"Oh, Lawrence of Arabia," said the woman. "I remember reading about his funeral in the papers. Ten years ago now, it must have been. Before the war even! He was very young when he died. What's a young lady like yourself reading a book like that for?"

"I like it. It makes me feel there are possibilities."

But the woman did not pay attention; she tapped her pen against her lips. "Didn't he kill some bicyclists?"

"No," Helen said quietly. "He swerved to avoid them, and killed himself." She slapped the book open to Chapter LV. T.E. declared that, In the blank light of victory we could scarcely identify ourselves. Whatever that meant; it sounded good. The Arabs had taken Akaba. In the seat across from Helen, the woman fell silent, except for the scratch and bustle of her pen.

She disembarked at Nottingham. No one else took her place. Helen sighed, and spread her legs over the seat next to her, the book heavy in her lap.

So she arrived in Cumbria, in lake country, in a blur of English pastures in whose green grass she imagined hungry men pacing along the glittering sand outside Akaba. Jolting off the train, she blinked in surprise at the sloping roofs of Keswick, the green points of the evergreens converging about the town square. A faint but sticky snow had seized the fringes of the trees and dulled the black shingles of the houses. The clouds hovered, black and gray, around the crowns of the Cumbrian Mountains. One white cloud drifted in front of the black ones, ruffling its edges like wings.

Helen hefted her suitcase, twisting her arm so that the weight thudded against her back. The smallness of Keswick made her feel more distinct, as though she had climbed off the train into the eye of a needle. In Oxford, she had never worried about eyes.

The people wore wool of a rough, dim color, as though they wanted to blend in with the clouds. But their faces, ruddy and weathered, seemed friendly enough; their chapped lips would part for smiles the way clouds would for the sun.

She glanced about. Mrs. Pimm had said that she should ring Roxleigh House, and the groundskeeper, Telson, would pick her up. But Helen decided that she would walk to Roxleigh. She asked a stoop-shouldered man with a cane where to go, and he pointed her up the right lane and onto the next.

Keswick simply ended. The white walls of houses abutted the brooding green of the forest. She paused on the boundary, contemplating the dampness that rose from between the trees and softened the hang of her skirt.

She tramped up into the hills. The handle of the suitcase bit into her palm. To her left, visible in slivers between the leaves of the trees, breathed the lake of Derwentwater, gray as moonlight. She thought of the Arabs trampling the sand by Akaba. She imagined her cotton skirt a white robe that caught the glare of the sun, a curved dagger jammed through her belt.

Roxleigh House lay beyond the next two hills, a broad face of bricks blooming from the slope above the water's edge. Around the house the grass created a flat carpet, its greenery weathered due to the winter; from a distance, the trees looked stuck on, like knobs. The house itself rose in gray slab walls, stringing together three roofs, their notched dormers wandering in jigsaw patterns above the eaves trough. The windows reflected the dull glare off the lake. A woman stood on the front stoop, shaking out a carpet. Mrs. Pimm.

Helen squeezed the handle of her suitcase. She was no maid. What business did she have pretending to be one?

But Mrs. Pimm decided to like her. And Mrs. Pimm, like any good housekeeper, was never wrong. Not in her own domain.

She had rolled up the rug and thrown it back in the house by the time Helen arrived. "Telson would have brought the buggy to fetch you," she said.

"It was a short walk," said Helen. Mrs. Pimm lifted her head back. It seemed to indicate approval, thought Helen, though of the not-yet-sure kind. She took in Mrs. Pimm.

Mrs. Pimm had great dark eyes, and silver-spangled dark hair, and a chin which might have hidden any secret beneath its various craggy recesses. She wore a dress of fustian, its color a durable brown. She looked like the sort of person who ought to carry a great wreath of keys on her belt, always clanking and shifting against each other, but she did not. A silver cross, with the Christ ensconced, peeped out between the two top buttons on her cardigan.

"You're from Oxford, then," she said.

"No," said Helen, "in fact. I'm from Dorset."

Mrs. Pimm's brows pinched together.

"We're famous for little -- although Lawrence of Arabia lived near my house." Still this elicited little reaction. Helen said, "But I did go to Oxford."

They were back on Mrs. Pimm's ground. She said, "I've never had a girl with an education working for me."

Helen flushed, but she said, "I didn't finish at St. Hugh's. Became a nurse instead, for the war effort. So you see, I'm only tolerably educated."

Mrs. Pimm digested this. Her mouth became small. "And you studied to be a nurse?"

Oh dear, thought Helen. She expected Mrs. Pimm would not condone archaeology; it made one's knees dirty. Her fingers fiddled on the suitcase handle. "Yes," she lied.

But Mrs. Pimm nodded. Little tucks of satisfaction appeared around her nose. "You'll do," she said.

***

Mrs. Pimm showed Helen the house. The upstairs rooms, overwhelmed by white sheets, as though the ghosts of furniture had taken residence. The downstairs rooms, strained by simplicity, all the pots and the silver arranged in rows, like strips of garden given too much care. Mrs. Pimm did not show her the china closet. Helen realized that she must have given some of the plates away in the war.

They used oil lamps to light the place, and outside the yellow orbs of light spread a moving darkness, blanketing the house. In the plain corridor, on her way to her little room, Helen turned out her lamp. In the darkness she heard her own breathing, felt the thumping of her heart, and imagined these things belonged to the house as well: that the house breathed, sighed, rolled over in its sleep.

She made her way, through the dark, to her room. If she did not see where she went, she reasoned, she might be anywhere. She dreamed of a sandy place by the sea. As she strolled across it, shrubs gushed upwards in green bursts from the sand. She was running along the beach at her home in Dorset, and the English Channel sloshed cold waves in from France. She was calling out to someone, but he was not coming back.

***

Like so many people (thought Helen), the master of Roxleigh died during the war, though due rather to his liver than to the Nazis. Being childless, he left Roxleigh House to a nephew, who presently served as a corporal of some kind in the East. Mrs. Pimm felt sure he had not died during the war, because she and Telson still received their pay.

The former master, of the liver, had retired to Roxleigh before the war. Once the house had been his country retreat; but in the end he died there. He left behind a dressing gown embroidered with silver fish, a wooden comb with one tooth broken off, and a box of talc powder. Helen, sweeping under his bed, discovered a round brass button with white thread still looped through the hole. She also discovered a collection of cut-glass bottles on the escritoire, several still bright with rum and cognac. The single heavy-bottomed tumbler showed a thin, unappetizing skim of dust.

She took it downstairs to wash and clean it, and put it in the cupboard. She was certain that Mrs. Pimm noticed, because she checked when she saw it, but she said nothing.

Mrs. Pimm did not go into the master's bedroom. In fact, she did not seem to like being above-stairs at all. Helen could not see why: though the décor was tasteless (specializing mainly in cherubs and pastoral scenes), the wide windows let out a lovely view down to Derwentwater. Helen asked if she might wash the windows. The soapy water, scented with lemon, gave her the warm, aesthetic feeling she had been craving. No mangled limbs here, no blood; no crippling or death on the horizon. Just the view, waiting to be seen.

But there was no one to distract her, either. Her thoughts spun on without purpose; no one would trouble to drag her from them and make her laugh. She existed now for the sake of existing. Nothing else.

She found it strange that her days never blurred into each other. Perhaps the sight over the lake, one day benighted with clouds, the next brilliant beneath blue skies, made each day a separate time of its own. In Oxford, she had lived in a swivel from patient to bandages to water and back again. At night she would fall down, dizzy, into sleep. But in Cumbria, each day she and Mrs. Pimm set themselves new tasks, or completed old ones which took them to new places in the house. When they sat in the parlor during the evenings, Helen read books while Mrs. Pimm did her sewing. She found that here Seven Pillars of Wisdom did not fit; Yeats did, or even Tennyson. Once, remembering how the long light shakes across the lakes and the wild cataract leaps in glory, she glanced to Derwentwater and saw that it did.

The swans returned to Derwentwater on a dim morning in March. Helen had marched out to the front stoop, broom collected under her elbow like a rifle, to do battle with the cobwebs above the door. She raised the broom to attack, and a hoarse voice cried out behind her. She saw what appeared at first to be glorious clouds, skimming their wings upon the gray sky. But then the leader called again, low and disgruntled. She dropped the broom with a clank and cried, "Swans!"

They landed in a ribbon of white feathers upon Derwentwater, and the water shuddered beneath their impact.

"They are lovely, aren't they?" said Helen to Mrs. Pimm, over tea and dry scones.

Mrs. Pimm blew on her tea to cool it. "Old Master used to hunt them, before he started drinking more cognac than what was good for him."

"But they're too beautiful to hunt!" Helen exclaimed. "And just think. Don't they put you in mind of the old stories - the ones where the swans are enchanted princes, and somewhere nearby their sister is weaving them shirts of nettles, so they may turn back into men?"

Mrs. Pimm looked down her nose. "I don't know where you get these notions! And with your education. Enchanted princes. Phh."

"Maybe the former master was one," Helen said teasingly, lightening her voice to show she meant only fun.

But Mrs. Pimm set her spoon on her saucer and rose to cart the dishes off. Helen sighed. Her remaining tea looked lucently up at her from the bottom of her cup, like an eye. Let it allow her to see clearly! She drank it off.

It did not seem to help. Later, reflecting as she undressed for bed, she found she had the same answer as ever to the problem of Mrs. Pimm and the former master: a horribly typical answer, which she did not like. She shook out her nightgown with a snap, and dismissed the matter from her mind.

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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited.

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