Mrs. Engels (21 page)

Nim looks startled when I first take tight of her wrist, but now her face settles into an arrangement that says she's been waiting for this moment a long time. The animals have stopped struggling. The water is still. Our hands are still sunk in it. I'm not certain what I want to do with this thin little bone of hers, whether I want to use it to pull her to me or push her away; it feels ready to do whatever I will it.

“Helen,” I says.

She blinks.

“Helen, listen to me. It's not your fault. I don't hold it against you.”

She sighs and shakes her head. “Mrs. Burns, please”—there's pity, frigid pity in her voice—“do not do this.”

“I'd like to help. I feel sorry for the boy. His treatment has been wrong. I feel a duty to make up for Frederick.”

“No, Mrs. Burns. You must not say these things. You must stay out of business that is not yours.”

“I'm sorry.” Seared by her tone, I let go. I look at my hand under the water, old-looking and raw. “Forgive me.”

“
Bitte,
Mrs. Burns, let's just get this done.”

We lift the sack out, heavier now that they're dead and sodden, and carry it to the storeroom, lock it away from the mice.

“If I bury them, the dog will dig them up.”

“The rag-and-bone man will take them in the morning. Sure, he'll be thrilled with them.”

She looks at me.

“For his hogwash,” I says.

Disgusted, she turns back into the kitchen.

We wipe our hands and arms dry, roll down our sleeves.

She sees me out. Opens the dining-room door on the way. Points down.

“New carpet?”

“Tell her you saw it.”

March

XVIII. A Fantastic Standing Apart

News comes of a rebellion in France. The workers have seized power from the new government, and a Commune has been declared. Frederick is somber when he tells me; humorless and unsmiling.

“Doesn't it excite you?” I says. “Isn't this what we've been waiting for?”

“It is an accident of the war, nothing more. It has no chance of success.”

“Nay?”

He shakes his head. “Won't last.”

“Well, even so, aren't you happy that
something
is coming about?”

He looks up from his newspaper. Folds it over and drops it down. Pushes his cup to the center of the table to make room for his elbows. “Lizzie, you must understand, we have been campaigning to
prevent
this kind of doomed outbreak. Upsetting the government, so soon after the Prussian crisis, is a desperate folly. The onus on the French workmen is to perform their duties as citizens, to calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of republican liberty, for the purpose of class organization. Without organization and planning, without international association, the emancipation of labor is impossible.”

“I just thought you'd be happy, is all.”

“I'm not unhappy, Lizzie. Not unhappy at all. I just understand the reality of these things. The inevitable demise of premature actions.”

I brush into my hand some crumbs from the damask, rub them off onto my plate. “So, what are you going to do?”

“Observe. See how it develops.”

“That's it?”

“What more do you suggest?”

“I don't know. You could lecture the working men about what's happening. Try to get a spark going here.”

“Hmm.” He yawns, stretches out his limbs. “The problem is, we don't know yet
what
is happening. When we have an idea, we shall make our opinions public. We cannot jump on every bandwagon that passes.” He leans back on his chair, joins his hands behind his head. “Besides, Karl is still unwell. On top of everything else, he has bronchitis now, and he complains of his liver. Under the circumstances, I do not see another course than to sit tight and wait our time.”

“There is nothing I can do, then?”

“No,
mein Liebling.
Not for now. You are off the hook, as they say.”

I sigh. Look out the window at the whirling of the trees and the clouds moving fast above them. The room brightens and darkens,brightens and darkens. “Well, at least the Girls won't go to France. Not after this.”

He shrugs. “I can't see why they wouldn't.”

“I can see plenty of reasons, their well-being being the first.”

“They will be fine.”

“Karl just doesn't have the steel to stop them.”

“Karl is giving his daughters the largest gift a father can give: their own free choice.”

Nay, he's just soft. And you're weak. But men
are
.

April

XIX. Sacred Land

The rebellion in France has turned to civil war. The forces of government have surrounded Paris and the workers' Commune is under siege. But here, on the other side, there's only the flat routine of the weeks. The dull of waking and sleeping. The boredom of tea and shopping. The bitterness of thoughts.

I sit on my bed and look at another day drawing out in front of me and, in a shot, am back downstairs with my bonnet on.

“Pumps, I've to run a message.”

“In this weather?”

“I'm not asking your permission.”

“Uncle Fred says you've to watch for your lung.”

“Mr. Engels.”

“Mr. Engels says you've to—”

It's not my health she's worried about, the scut, but the aspersions cast on me by those who aren't free to come and go as they list.

“A bit of rain won't kill me.”

“But look.” She holds up the bunch of drawers. “There's still all this to do.”

“Do it yourself, can't you?” I turn to leave. Change my mind and come back. “Second thoughts, go help Spiv in the kitchen.”

“Do I have to?”

“Go on, and none of your cod.”

“What'll I tell him?”

“Tell him I'll be home to serve the supper.”

Hate to say it, the child is right. Bad in the head, you'd have to be, to go out in this. Pulling my collars up and wrapping my coat around, I turn onto Rothwell Street, go down St. George's Road as far as Fitzroy, and now up to the railway cottages on Gloucester Road. Black smoke rises up over the roofs from the engine shed behind Dumpton Place. On the corner: a pub I've often seen and know to be in Irish hands.

I skip the ladies' saloon and go straight into the main bar, empty but for a couple of daytime stragglers.

“So this is where it all happens,” I says, taking a seat at the counter.

The barman stops his wiping to plant a look on me.

“You can serve me here, man. There's no law against it.”

He turns out, after much goading, to be a Bert.

“So, Bert, what's the name of this place, anyhows?”

“Didn't you read the sign outside?”

“I didn't.”

“The Lansdowne.”

“That's all I'm asking. I'll remember it from now on.”

I hold my glass out and shake it till he refills it.

“I've heard about you,” he says.

“All good, I'm sure,” I says.

“Wouldn't say that,” he says.

He's a tough nut, there's granite in him, but after a time—after I flatter him with compliments about the cut of his bar and after I shout him a short
out
of my own pocket—he falls to speaking about his affairs: the wife upstairs and the children. He's sure to look gloomy on them, and to make as if to envy me, with my none, for he's a man raised never to speak high of himself, it only opens you up to charges, and is a waste of time, anyhows, for you can't judge a fella by the idea he has of himself.

There's a thirst on me that won't be quenched. I have another, and soon we're talking like intimates and have much in common. Like myself, he's of the species of Irish not born there—it was his grandparents who came over—and he holds no love for the newcomers.

“Grecians,” he calls them. “The cut of these Grecians coming over here to take the bread from our mouths.”

I like him because he appears to take my meaning from few words, and in spite of my caution, a caution that comes from the fact that I've not heard an undecent word from him, nor an oath, and I wouldn't want him to think me the type either.

“You're right about that, Bert,” I says. “What we're getting now is the lowest description of Irish.”

“A discredit to their origins,” he says. “The Famine was a thing, but it's long over now and there's no excuse for them.”

He goes to take an empty glass from a table. Puts it into his bucket and washes it around. Wipes it clean with his rag. Puts it back on the shelf.

“Can I tell you, Mrs. Burns?”

“You can.”

“I'm wondering about your being here.”

“You are?”

“I mean, it's a man's nature to be seen in a pub. He needs no business to be here, it's just one of his natural homes. A woman alone in a tavern, but, that's another story. There's always a reason for it. Are you looking for someone?”

“Not anyone you'd find in this part of town.”

“Where'd you find him, so, if you went looking?”

“I'm told he's in St. Giles, around there.”

“The Rookery? You don't want to go there, Mrs. Burns.”

“I might have to, Bert.”

“Full of thieves and whores and cadgers' lodgings at fourpence a night.”

“I've heard.”

He narrows his eyes to try and get inside of me. “Well, it's the only reason anyone from the outside would go to St. Giles. To find someone.”

“Is that right?”

“And you'll never find him, whoever it is you're looking for. Any priest will tell you who's ever opened a mission there: it swallows them up. Whole families. Whole people. They mix with darkies and offcomers, and don't care a whit about it. More chance of finding a brown button in a boghole.”

“You might be right, Bert. But sometimes in life we don't get a vote. We have to do what's in our hearts to do.”

He's uneasy in the mind about my intentions, but he can hear from my tone that my mind is made, so he gives me the directions, and without my even having to ask for them. I put them to my memory. Across the Canal and past the Barracks. Right to the Park and down by the railings as far as the Crescent. If I have the money, there's a cab rank there, but if I'm short and have the breath to spare, I can go the rest of the way on foot: down and left onto the wide road, Oxford Street, and then, after another twenty minutes of walking, right into the Rookery. He thinks I must be going out of religion, to convert a man or to save him from ruin.

“Your pilgrimage to the sacred land,” he says.

“Not a bit of it, man,” I says. “Do you see me barefoot?”

His laugh is cut short by a voice coming down from upstairs. He goes into the back room and shouts up to answer it. I use the chance to take my leave.

In St. Giles it's as if God has released His revelations and is calling closing time on the world. On the short skip from the cab to the first alley, I have to step over two bodies lying in the gutter, and get past four or five beggars, each more staggered than the next. I feel the drink rise to my head and buy an orange from a coster, lean back against a bit of empty wall to refresh myself.

“Wouldn't mind a bit of that,” says the man sat on paving stones on the corner, eating an onion. “Wouldn't mind a bit of that round
this,
” he says, clutching the front of his breeches.

In places like this, naught can be full enjoyed.

I give what's left of the orange to a ragged child and push on, closing my nose against the slops that are flung down and the pools that stand reeking, pulling in my skirts against the squeeze of the passing bodies: the Ireland-born and the England-bred, the dirty sons and daughters of the Hunger, come to grabble out their fortunes in the holy gutter.

I ask around for a drinking place. I'm pointed in every direction. I find my own way to a shebeen at the end of a passage. I have to dance round a dust heap that's been dumped in front of the door: the grime-glass, worm-ate, creaky-cracky door that doesn't invite opening and ought be changed along with the crowd.

The wind gushes as I open, bringing the stink inside with me. It's full. Yet hours to go before the work bells ring and it's bursting, the glut of them Irish. The man, Paudy, is glad when I ask his name, but grumbles when I hand him back my cup, as if a little top-up will make him bankrupt. I move to the snuggery, which comes free when a pair of neckers take their display outside. The snuggery panels are bits of old doors and cupboards. Inside, the smoke is caught and the seats are rubbed raw of their cushion. I stay where I am, despite. The gap gives me a good view of the bar, and keeps my looks hidden.

A stranger man comes in on me after a time.

“It's yourself,” he says, “and in your fineries too.”

“Would that be me you're addressing?” I says.

“You and no one else, though I know the mistake in it.”

“Your mistakes are your own, man, I didn't ask you to interfere.”

Pure rotted by the lush, he moans and staggers in his clogs. Fumbles for something in his pocket. I swear you can tell a man's whole story by his comb and the number of teeth left on it. He rakes the few strands he has left across his pate.

“What is it you want off me?” I says. “Do I owe you anything?”

“Wouldn't take your mint, even if you did,” he says.

“Well, off with you, then. I don't want to be spoken to.”

The lush can give you a confidence that's terrible. I've always thought it, though I take a sup myself. The worst, it can blind you to the difference between what's thought and what's said.

Says he: “I only came to you to ask how you are and would you share a drop with me.”

“Don't mind my health and leave me to myself where I'm happy.”

“Have I seen you before?”

“You haven't.”

“Are you looking for someone?”

Knowing I'll not be rid of him, I get up and push past him to the bar. On my way through I hear some things that aren't compliments and some hard words, too. I sometimes think that because my shoulders are wide and my waist doesn't go in, that because my speaking holds its share of Irish, I'm taken for solid, when it's tender I really am in broad light and with sober senses.

Still, I'll not be beaten by it. I stay dogged and drink on my feet. I drop Moss's name to Paudy and some other drinkers whose faces I trust, but they can't help me.

“Never heard of him,” they says.

And it's just as well, for it's all got too much in here, with the patterer bawling out the top lines from a ragged-looking
Irishman
, and now the last-dying speeches of the martyrs Larkin and O'Brien, and all the howling that goes along with it, so I come away.

Down the road, things are quieter. I sit at a table by the only window.

“What're you having?” the man calls out. “I'll bring it over to you.”

“You're very good,” I says, when he sets the glass down in front of me.

“Are you all right, missus?” he says.

“All right?”

“You had your head in your hands. Have you a pain there?”

I tell him I'm grand, only I don't know why I bothered with the other place, mouthfuls of dirt with your drink, the species of hole that people fall into no matter how hard they train themselves to walk around. He laughs and says he hopes I'm not saying the same about his place somewhere else, and I laugh in my turn and says I hope that crowd and all belonging to them are swept back to where they came from, and he says it's a pity strong speeches come into the mind when it's too late to say them.

He's a Noonan, and has a gentle air, dependable, so I come straight out with my business.

“Moss O'Malley?”

“Aye. Came down from Manchester. Four years or so ago.”

“No. Doesn't ring a bell. He's not one of the ones that comes in here, anyway. Do you know what he does for his money?”

I shake my head.

“You might try down the Docks. That's where a lot of them end up.”

I pay a boy to take me out of the Rookery to the main road.

“How much would it be to the Docks?” I says to the cabby.

“From here it'd cost you six bob, ma'am.”

The spin in my head prevents me from seeing into my purse, so I have to reach in and count with my fingers. “I'm short,” I says. “Take me home.”

“Where's home?”

And for a moment I can't think of the address.