Two-Way Mirror Fiona Sampson (best romance ebooks .txt) 📖

We have our dinners from the Trattoria at two oclock, & can dine our favorite way on thrushes & Chianti with a miraculous cheapness—& no trouble, no cook, no kitchen, .. […] which exactly suits us—It is a continental fashion, which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee & rolls of milk—made of milk, I mean: & at nine, our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chesnuts & grapes—So you see how primitive we are, & how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast.

And why not? The six months they’ll live here are an extended honeymoon. Robert ‘rises on my admiration, and is better & dearer to my affections every day & hour. […] And we have been together a whole month now, & he professes to love me “infinitely more”, instead of the dreadful “less” which was to have been expected.’

We can picture the newlyweds pottering about their emerging routines like a pair of clockwork mice. ‘How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage, & hardly needing a double bed at the inn’, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti will speculate affectionately, ten years from now. But there are three people – and a dog – on this adventure, and it’s Wilson who must interact with the world to make it all happen. From getting baggage delivered to providing ‘the coffee & milk & bread’ on which the household appears to run, she’s forced to be intrepid, learning languages with impressive rapidity: ‘Just when she had succeeded so well in French as to be able to ask for various things, [she has] to merge all the new knowledge in the Italian “which seems to her harder still”.’ Far from becoming homesick, the formerly shy northern lass is blossoming: ‘Wilson is an oracle—very useful too & very kind.’

Perhaps it helps that there’s a separation of powers. Elizabeth has no desire to be a domestic goddess. Her ideal home life is literary, ‘We are going to be busy—we are full of literary plans’, as she announces on day one, and she’s more than happy to hand over household responsibilities:

the ordering of the dinner is quite out of my hands. As for me, when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, & so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, & so considerate moreover as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection.

Meanwhile, despite or because of this spoiling, she is ‘renewed to the point of being able to throw off most of my invalid habits, & of walking quite like a woman’. Less than a month after arriving, ‘everyday I am out walking while the golden oranges look at me over the walls, .. & when I am tired R. & I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards’, she tells Julia Martin. To Miss Mitford she boasts that, ‘Mrs Jameson says, she “wont call me improved, but transformed rather.” […] .. my spirits rise: I live—I can adapt myself.’

She can indeed adapt herself. At the beginning of 1847 Wilson collapses with stomach pains that she’s been alternately ignoring and treating with quack medicines for weeks. Elizabeth sends for a doctor, puts the maid to bed for ten days, and nurses her back to health. Close up, the invalid whom Robert married is proving unexpectedly resilient. In fact, so little does she notice physical discomfort that when she falls pregnant in October she doesn’t even realise it. She suffers no morning sickness, and, even when miscarriage threatens, she remains partially in denial. But on 21 March 1847 her pregnancy becomes undeniable and she miscarries what the attending doctor identifies as a five months’ pregnancy.

The day-long labour can’t but be a huge shock. Yet Elizabeth doesn’t grieve; on the contrary. She is forty-one, and this unexpected pregnancy feels like another marvel of her new life. She reports it carefully to her unmarried sisters:

Towards evening however regular pains came on, every five minutes .. & these lasted for above four & twenty hours, much as in an ordinary confinement—Oh, not so very violent! I have had worse pain, I assure you—It did not continue long enough at once to exhaust one! and when my eyes were open to the truth, I was as little frightened or agitated as at this moment, & bore it all so well (I mean with so much bodily vigour) as to surprise Wilson .. & Dr Cook, too indeed—

She is, truth be told, rather proud of what she takes as a new achievement; even though she’s also angry with herself for not having realised what was going on. She believes she lost the child through taking morphine (probably correct) and keeping too warm (perhaps incorrect). Robert is less sanguine. He ‘was so dreadfully affected by my illness, as to be quite overset, overcome—only never too much so, to spend every moment he was allowed to spend, by my bedside .. rubbing me, talking to me, reading to me .. and all with such tenderness, such goodness!’ and afterwards, ‘In the first moment of his readmission into this room he threw himself down on the bed in a passion of tears, sobbing like a child.’

Elizabeth is touched and delighted by this too, even as she can’t help noticing ‘Wilson shaking her head behind the curtain.’ Visceral reality replaces the fine words of nearly two years of courtship, and the first great test of their marriage has brought the couple closer still. Chianti and milk rolls, sunshine and mediaeval city streets: the embodied life takes its place at the heart of their partnership.

[

Seventh Frame

]

‘It has been within the philosophical tradition, which for me includes social, political and religious thought, that I have found the resources for the exploration of this identity and lack of identity, this independence and dependence, this