Mrs. Engels (19 page)

She sighs. “What is it, exact, that you can't grasp?”

“Naught, except I can't understand how you can entertain this man, after all his wife has said about you. It's a mystery to me. A God-made mystery.”

I poke her to tell her it's done, and she goes over to look at herself in the glass. Sucks herself in and rubs a hand down her front.

“Is it right to have him here? I'd be embarrassed. For you, I'd be.”

She throws her eyes up and plonks down at her toilet table. Strains towards herself. “Is there time for the curling irons, do you think?”

I come to stand behind her. Look at her through the mirror. “Well, tell me at least, will he be expecting something? A fancy deal?”

“What he'll be expecting is less opinion from you, I'll tell you that much.”

She's ready hours before they arrive, but now, when the knock comes, she runs to her bedroom and slams the door behind.

“
I'll
get it, then,” I says, hoping my tone will carry through to the outside, where the men are waiting.

He's got hairy hands, I notice, when he takes mine to kiss it. And his coat is buttoned wrong. Frederick walks him in and tours him around the room like he owns it, which of course he does.

“Mary'll be out in a minute,” I says. “She's fallen behind in her day.”

Frederick puts Karl standing by the fire, arranges four chairs around it, and goes to get the drinks. Karl won't sit till I'm down. “
Bitte,
Miss Burns,” he says, gesturing to the chair, a light moving in his dark eyes. “Please do sit down.”

Frederick carries four glasses over, two in each hand. He serves us and, releasing a satisfied moan, installs himself in his chair. He drinks from one glass and holds the other on his lap for Mary.

“So where have you lads come from?” I ask, my voice nervous in front of this new stranger.

“A charity ball,” says Karl, “at the—” He slurs something in the German.

“The German Club,” says Frederick. He tries to cross a leg over but it slips off his knee; his boot lands heavy on the floor. “A choir concert in aid of the poor immigrants.”

“By the cut of you both,” I says, drawing a circle in the air around them, “that's not the only place you've been.”

Frederick laughs. “You see?” he says to Karl. “What did I tell you?”

Karl lifts his glass and burps out a chuckle.

Mary appears, drawn out by the laughter and the envy it brings up inside of her. She kisses Karl on both cheeks, Frederick on the mouth, and takes her drink from him. She raises up to Karl, and goes round to touch all of our glasses, before she sits back into her place.

Frederick does most of the talking. Speaks at length and with great force about the boredom of Manchester. The dullness of office life. The commerce and its accursed tasks that are impinging on his Communism.

“I'm bored to death,” he says. “I drink rum and water, and spend my time between twist and tedium.”

We laugh, for though his meaning is serious, he speaks so correct, and with such humor, that to laugh is to give his speech the true weight it's due. Karl appears the happiest body amongst us: as he listens to Frederick; as he argues with him; as he cuts in to share secret things in the German, the good temper doesn't fall from his face, and it's clear they adore each other.

Trust Mary, in the middle of such easy goings, to call attention to what we're ignoring. We, to be civil, are looking past it, over it, beyond it;
she
can't help but point her big finger right at it.

“Are you well there, Karl?” she says.

“Me?” he says, surprised.

“You look to be having trouble with your arm,” she says. “I see you are in pain when you lift your glass to drink.”

“Thank you for your concern, Mary, but it's nothing,” he says.

And that ought be enough for a body; enough to tell her it's a question she has no business with. But Mary won't leave a thing alone, not if she thinks it's a way into a man's affections. So she keeps at him, she presses and presses, and now Frederick joins her—“She won't stop till you tell her,
mein Freund.
You might as well give it up”—till the man caves in and lets it out; till he coughs and fidgets around and, red-faced, falls to admitting that indeed there is something the matter: something carbuncular, just under his arm, which is making movement a nuisance and writing a torture.

Frederick makes light of it; it's his way of helping Karl out of his shame. “Do you believe him, ladies? This is the excuse he's been giving us for not having completed his Economics.”

Karl scoffs at his friend and turns to address Mary. “It's a terrible bother, Miss Burns. The doctor has tried to drain it, but no opening or discharge could be induced. I've applied every remedy and compress known to medical science, all in vain.”

Mary can't conceal her fascination. “Let's have a look,” she says.

Karl waves a refusing hand.

“Pop your shirt off and let me see it. I might be able to help.”

He looks at her a moment, hopeful: perhaps this Irish woman
can
help! But now he shakes his head and covers his eyes with his hands. “Christ, I've had too much to drink.”

Frederick laughs. “Come, Karl, no need for reserve. You're not in London now.”

Mary stands in front, so that most of his bulk is hidden behind her, and helps him out of his jacket and shirt. She lays these over him to cover his naked paunch. Now she takes his hand and levers up his arm. Glistening in the firelight, mottled red and green, it's at least the size of an egg. The sight of it turns me ill.

“Hmm,” Mary says, and puts the arm back down.

“The problem,” says Frederick, “is that he refuses to take the arsenic.”

Karl reaches an arm across his belly, to keep the jacket and shirt from slipping off. “I have my doubts about that stuff.”

Frederick clicks his tongue. “You're impossible, Karl. Drinking arsenic doesn't hinder you in your ordinary way of life in any manner. Twice a day for three or four months, and you'll be rid of this business finally.”

Karl groans.

“And you need to take more exercise. It's good of Jenny that she dutifully drags you out to go for walks. I hope she doesn't allow herself to be scared off by your physical indolence disguised as your need to work.”

“For goodness sake, do you want the Book written or not?”

“We do. Desperately. If all else fails, I'll make a few pounds available to get you to Karlsbad.”

“Nay.” From her standing position, her hips held firm in her hands, Mary demands our attending. “Keep your money, Frederick. And, Karl, you're right to stay clear of the normal prescriptions. What you have isn't a carbuncle at all but an abscess. It's in a bad state of neglect, on account of you treating it as something that it's not. What it needs is a good rub with something that'll take the poison out of it. Sit tight. I have just the thing.”

With that—her expert judgment given—she swishes off to the kitchen. I follow her in. The walls are too thin to permit me a speech, so instead I fix my face in the tone of “What, sister child, are you playing at?” My look doesn't escape her, and her response is to wink back at it—the scab-bag—and put the kettle on to boil.

She goes back in with Lord-knows-what stirred into her bowl. She kneels in front of Karl and soaks a bit of cotton. “This'll sting now,” she says.

“What is it?” he says.

“Never you mind,” she says. “Something from where we come from.”

Karl clenches his teeth. He calls out German oaths. But then, after the third or fourth soaking, he grows calmer, soothed not by any special ingredient, of course, but by the attention, the rubbing in, which she makes a theater of doing, in her good dress, her knees on the floor, and her sleeves turned back.

Mary says it's only when Jenny is around that Karl acts shabby towards her, and though I've never got solid proof of this, for I don't go with them on their trips to the capital, I see now that Mary might be right. He enjoys her attention; by his gestures and words, he shows himself fond of her; this, it seems, is his real feeling.

“You have the nurse's touch,” he says to her, smiling and reaching out to put his hairies on her waist.

What it is, I think, is that he's a family man; a real family man like Frederick will never be. He cares for his own blood and kin above all else, and it has never occurred to him to cross his wife or put his friend's poor choices above her. Fundamental in his mind, more fundamental than his politics even, is the belief that his family should live high, that they should be protected from the hostile and vulgar world: if his wife sits in judgment of Mary, if she goes as far as being cruel and personal with her, then she must have a good reason, even if he himself doesn't share it.

Watching Mary now, as she helps him back on with his shirt, I begin to have thoughts I've never had before. I'm going to have your life, is what I think. I'm going to have your life, but without the mistakes. Without the need for all this carrying on. Without anything old to count against me.

I turn to Frederick, and by the arrangement of his face, I can tell he's only half-enjoying the scene; part of him is uneasy and doesn't trust it. I catch his eye, and his way of looking at me covers me with happy confusion. Pictures of a life with him, an honest life, come between me and the room, and for a moment I'm lost in them. By thinking that it might be, however, I arrive at the conviction that it never could be. My heart sinks and settles, and though I can't see into his body, I can only suppose his heart is in agreement: these are but thoughts in the air with no spirit.

With the bad winds and the lack of cabs, I've a parch on me by the time I get to the Marxes, but I'm not offered anything to lift it, and I know by the hardship in Nim's face not to ask.

“Are the Girls here?” I says.

“Gone to get new bonnets for France,” she says.

“So it's definite? They're going?”

She shrugs as if to say, “Don't ask me, I only clean the pots.” She takes my coat and reticule. Tries to take the jar with the salve from me. I tell her I want to present that myself, and clutch it close. She frowns and leads me towards the kitchen, but there's fluid on my knees and a pain in my lung, after all that walking against the gales, and I have to sit on the stairs to cough it out.

She slaps my back. “Here, give me that.”

“Nay, I'll bring it up to him.”

“What can it be that you're so close with it? Gold dust?”

I look at the face between the graying locks. It's sincere. She knows naught about a salve. “I want to give it to him myself, that's all.”

I take the teaspoon of sugar she brings and start up the stairs.

“Mrs. Burns, it has taken me all morning to get him onto his back. Please do not disturb him. I can give him the gift on your behalf later.”

“I won't be a second, I promise. He's gone and ordered it special.”

“What is it he has ordered?”

“A salve. Jenny says he's been crying out for it, the relief it gives him.”

“A salve? Is that what she said?”

“It is and all.”

She lets out the quiet air of a body that's making the best of things. “I'll be in the kitchen.”

I find Karl wrapped in cataplasms and lying stiff as a stave across his divan. He's reading from a book held out to one side. He strains his neck round. “Oh, Lizzie, it's you!” He closes the book and wedges it into the space between himself and the cushions. Shifts as if to hide himself. Crosses his arms across his pot. “I cannot stand for you to see me like this. If I had known—”

“Please don't move, Karl. Stay as you are. I'll only be a moment.”

Groaning, he sits up. “No, no. Be as long as you like, my dear Lizzie, it is a tonic to see a different face.” It's clear his new position pains him, and after only a moment of it, he collapses onto his side. “I would like best to hang on a tree in the air.”

I make my way through the heaps and stacks on the floor, and clear a space among the papers on his desk for the jar. Now I kneel on the carpet beside him, put a hand on his forehead.

“Touching anything is nasty for me,” he says. “But that feels wonderful.”

“I brought some of Mary's salve. Maybe that'll help you to get comfortable.”

“Ah, the old Irish salve! I'd clean forgotten about that. It used to help. Very thoughtful of you, Lizzie.”

I shake my head, as if to fend off the thanks, but really I'm thinking, How many separate stories are playing out at a single time, in a single house?

“I'd rub some into you now, only I'd be hard-pressed to find a spot between your coverings.”

He smiles. “You know, it is funny”—his face bright with fresh effort—“I was just thinking before you came, it would have been better if this affliction had been given to a good Catholic who could have turned his suffering to some account!”