He loves her. He will love her until the end of always. The bone and the hair are nothing in the face of all that he’s given her. A bit of sheep’s foot that didn’t make it into the stockpot. A scrap of horsehair to make into rope. Or perhaps it was a test, to see if she would doubt him. Yes, yes, that had to be the answer. A test. And Sophia would never fail.
But in her mind she sees the spiderweb of broken glass irising out from the hole the heron smashed into her house. Each thin thread of silver slowly growing, reaching through the perfect, clear, smooth pane, until soon, there would be nothing left unbroken.
No. No.
She would have tonight and nothing would spoil it.
The footlights dim, several throats clear, Mr. Rook taps his baton on a tree stump. The pantomime begins. Sophia glances at her program.
Memories of Bliss to Come.
Could anything match her life more perfectly?
Mrs. Palfrey and Mr. Silverback enter the stage, gesturing broadly. Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Moray and Mrs. Hart and Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Flye all crowd on to meet them, embracing, dancing and singing with joy. Mr. Silverback squeezes Mrs. Palfrey tight and introduces her to each of the other actors one by one by one.
Sophia weeps again. Her whole body shakes and shivers. What’s gotten into her, weeping so much in so few days? But she cannot stop. Memories of Bliss to Come unfolds onstage as it unfolded in her own life—it is her own life. Sophia watches in bashful bewilderment as her friends perform the day Sophia and her husband came to Arcadia Gardens. The day they moved into their beautiful house, the first time the neighbors asked her to tea. Mrs. Hayre plays Mrs. Lyon with exaggerated exuberance and everyone giggles along, as the lady Lyon is as ample as the lady Hayre petite.
“Why are they doing this?” Sophia whispers to her husband. “Why me? I’m no sort of subject for a play!”
But her mate does not answer. He watches the stage without moving. Not a hair on his forearm so much as shifts in the breeze. His heavy hand grips the stone seat, knuckles bloodless and tight.
Mrs. Palfrey sits at a papier maché vanity and makes a great show of primping. She laughs and shakes her long, black, coarse hair in the limelight—a wig, of course. Mrs. Palfrey has quite a lemony colored mane.
The wig is very long, and very black, and as coarse as dead wheat stalks.
It is nothing like Sophia’s hair, even though this is Sophia’s house on the amphitheater stage, Sophia’s vanity, Sophia’s first day. Mrs. Palfrey tugs an oversized prop brush through her hair and ties it with a wide white ribbon. She holds the brush in her hand for a long moment, then tucks it into the left-hand drawer and locks it away. She glances sidelong at the audience through her lashes as she turns the key, and it seems to Sophia that the actress playing her on the happiest day of her life is looking right at her, at her and through her, past her skin and into her blood and her bones.
Sophia drags her eyes away, only to see Mrs. Lyon and Mrs. Fische and Mrs. Minke trying to flay her alive with their gazes too. And not only them. Everyone is watching her. The whole amphitheater, every eye turned up and down and sideways toward her. Their horrible eyes prodding her, testing her, trying to see to the core of her, like the heron, like the field mouse, like Mr. Semengelof. All except her husband, glaring straight ahead, hardly breathing.
Mrs. Palfrey turns to kiss Mr. Silverback dramatically as he makes his entrance into the scene and dances happily through her onstage life as though nothing unusual has occurred. At the end, she twirls away stage right in an explosion of flowers and only the dressing table remains, lonely and dark on the boards.
The crowd shifts in their seats and applauds wildly, cheering and hooting and braying and yelping and roaring.
Sophia’s husband slumps back, exhausted, the tension seeping out of him slowly.
“Are you all right, darling?” Sophia whispers.
“I’m fine. Don’t fuss over me,” he snaps abruptly.
“I don’t understand,” she says, shaking her glossy head. He’s never snapped at her. Not once. “Surely there’s a hundred better pantomimes than our moving-in day!”
“They must like you,” her husband grumbles. “They must like you a great deal.” She has never heard such a tone in his voice. It makes her quail and shrink away from him. Just an inch. Not so anyone would notice. But she pulls away, and she knows he feels it. “I’m leaving,” her husband snarls suddenly.
His expression is unreadable, faraway. He doesn’t even look at Sophia. She can’t stand it. The loss of his regard. Please look at me again, she thinks, I’ll die if you don’t, I will. But it does no good. He stands up and so does Mr. Semengelof in the front row, their sight lines connecting over the heads of the crowd bustling toward the next activity.