Mrs. Engels (22 page)

XX. The Horrors

Morning queer won't kill you. It's only the lush that stands inside you pickling. But if you stay lolling in it—dreaming miserable half-dreams about what you said and did—it can make your spirit bitter. The trick is “up and out”: rouse yourself up and fetch it out. Clean of the old, you'll then be fit and primed for the new. Claret is the best cure. I order a glass with a rasher of bacon.

“How are you feeling?” says Spiv, bringing the gridiron over to the table and tilting it so the meat falls—
flop!
—onto my plate.

“Fine, Spiv, thank you. Has Mr. Engels had his breakfast?”

“Ages ago.”

“What did he have?”

“The usual.”

Toast with butter and jam, porridge with salt. Eggs once a week. Kidneys if the energies are down. Cold ham or tongue if there's guests. And the papers for company; always them.

“Get the cheese from the stores,” I says, for eating has given me an appetite. “And the jam. And if there's no fresh bread to spread it on, bring me the plum duff instead. I'm dying for something sweet.”

Tussy and Janey call while I'm still halfway hungry. They come right into the kitchen and take stools to join me at the table.

“We've come to say goodbye,” says Tussy.

“So you're going after all?”

“Of course! There was never any question of canceling. We just had to find the right moment.”

“And you decided on this one?”

“We can't delay any longer. The baby is ill and Laura is alone with it. Paul has gone to Paris.”

“Won't it be dangerous?”

“Well, if the barricades tempt him to go in for fighting—”

“Nay, I mean dangerous for
you
. Traveling over there at such a time. What if someone finds out who you are? They'll think you're working for the Commune and you'll be shot.”

“Oh, Aunt Lizzie, we appreciate your concern, but there's no need to worry. We intend to travel under assumed names. And by all accounts, Bordeaux is a tedious place. Laura says she's bored. She wishes to be back in Paris. I think she would have gone with Paul if she had found someone to whom she could have trusted the child.”

I offer them food, they refuse, and I'm glad, for the truth is, I'm tired to death and not at all well, and as much as I love them and want to be good to them, right now I'm craving my own company. Oblivious, they stay on and tell me their travel plans, how the railway line has been cut off so they have to catch the steamer, and other such details that on an average day I'd enjoy but today I can't even keep track of. My chin slips from my hand and my head falls to my chest.

“Aunt Lizzie?”

“I'm sorry, Girls.”

“You are tired. We should leave you.”

“Excuse my manners. It's just I'm not feeling the best.”

I stand to see them out, but they wave me down.

“Stay where you are, Aunt Lizzie. We know the way to the door.”

I don't argue.

Tussy touches my shoulder on her way out. “Look after yourself, please, Aunt Lizzie. Why don't you call on Dr. Allen?”

I go back to bed and have a cry. I'm sad to see the Girls go, and am worried for them, but what upsets me more is my behavior just now, the mistakes I made in front of them. And last night, too, going about in the world, letting loose Moss's name in the society of strangers. And Frederick. He must take some of the blame. For leaving me idle when there's a revolution going on and plenty that could be done. And for not taking me with him anywhere, never showing me anyplace. And Mary, well, isn't she the first source of it all—

Sleep doesn't come. I weary of thinking, and yet thinking keeps me up. Old troubles come back. I'm crushed with shame. I can't bear to be inside my skin. The horrors have hit me full-strong.

Frederick announces himself with a rap of his stick, and I put the flame under his supper to warm it. I'll not move from here, nor will Mary from her dressing table upstairs, till we hear him come through and the door locked behind him.

“I'm home.”

I look out. “Sit down. This'll be ready now.”

“Too kind, Lizzie,” he says, though he stays stood and keeps his coat on till Mary comes down, for he knows she likes to help it off.

“You look tired,” she says.

“It will be the death of me, that place.”

“It won't be forever, Frederick. You weren't meant for there forever.”

We sit at the table and watch him with his food. We can't last till this hour to have our own, which to the foreign mind must be a failing, though it doesn't seem to trouble him. He knows we're ruled by a different tide, and he seems to enjoy being under our scrutiny.

“Here, have another spoon.”

“I cannot refuse, Lizzie, it is so delicious.”

Between mouthfuls he talks about the mill, the little bits of business he thinks we might understand, but there is only so much of this talk that Mary will stand, the mill being somewhere else now, somewhere she no longer is, and if she cannot be there herself, in the midst of it, knowing everything, then she'd rather not know anything at all.

“Something happened to me today,” she interrupts him to say.

“A thing good or a thing bad?” he says.

“Good, I think.”

We look at her. She appears surprised to have got our attention so easy.

“Or bad, maybe. I can't be certain.” She looks into her cup. “It was in the park.”

“You were in the park today?” I says, knowing she has not left the house.

“Nay, not today. Yesterday, it was. Yesterday.”

I give her a stern look. I'd have reason to remember if she'd gone to the park yesterday, such an event would it have been. Fact is, she's only speaking to speak, to be heard to be saying something. For in the silence Freddy lurks.

“Come on, then,” Frederick says. “What happened?”

“God, now that I mention it, I doubt myself. It could've been a dream. Aye, what it was was a dream. One of these nights, I had a dream.”

He's grown huge, the bastard boy, in the dark. Her promise not to name him, not to conjure him up in any aspect, has done naught but store him in her every thought. She tells us some made-up dream about finding a babby in a basket in the park and searching the paths for its mother and being unable to find her and having to nurse the thing herself, and it's impossible not to see Freddy everywhere in it.

“Does it have any sense, do you think?” she says.

“Not a bit,” says Frederick with a click of his tongue. “You are bored, that's what's going on. These fantasies are the outcome of separation only, and the lack of things to do. You need some recreation. We should go to the theater this Saturday. I will check what is playing.”

“The theater?” She covers her eyes against it. “I couldn't bear it. All those false feelings.”

Frederick sighs and folds his arms across.

“Don't decide now, Mary,” I says, taking her hand away from her face. “See how you feel on the day.” She gives me a smile, weak but there. I squeeze her hand. “It might help you to think on other things.”

I take Frederick's empty plate to the kitchen, and put some time into preparing his pudding. He'll be off soon, back to his own place, so it's right that they have a moment alone. I can hear them whispering. If I stopped humming and strained an ear, I'd get the tone of what's going between them. But, in all sincerity, I don't care to know. I've found pleasure in things as they are, and see I can be happy.

It's Mary, as it happens, who has gone blind to what's good.

“Which is it?” she says when he's left. “Is he living with us, or isn't he?”

And in truth it's hard to tell. Every day he leaves money on the table, and in the evening comes back to eat what the money has bought. Then, when we retire, he goes out again and leaves more money on the table for the next day. Sometimes he visits Mary's room. Sometimes he stays away for days. Sometimes he wants that we're talking and laughing. Sometimes he wants that we're quiet and out of the way. Always he expects that we do only what it pleases us to do. Never does he invite us to join him on his social rounds. For a time, so, he is provider and we are family, and for a time, for me at least, that's everything and fine.

“What matter where he lives, Mary, aren't we getting on grand?”

I don't miss the mill. Like a fish to the bowl, I've taken to the kept life. Its close bounds. The safety and the ease of it. The empty hours and the eating for something to do. Each morning I'm woken by the first bells, the faraway sound of them, and am set tossing by the picture of Lydia and the other girls rushing through the gates and to their places. But once they've died down—the bells and the pictures—I roll over and sleep till they strike again at noontime.

Twice I've been woken by Moss come to call my name outside the house. Only twice. The second time I almost get up and go to the window, but then I think, Next time. Let him sweat it a bit. Of course, so painful is it to him to sweat long at anything, there's no next time.

No matter what time I rise, Mary is rare up before me. She bides till she hears me put the kettle on downstairs and then she calls me to her room, where it's fetch me this and do me that, for I'm the scab, the hanger-on, and she believes I must moil like a slave on account of it. I know to oblige. To refuse would be to prove what she already credits about the world—that one of its halves is against her and the other taking advantage—and who'd suffer the brunt of that rage, only myself? Though she's my flesh and kin, I can't claim to know her limits. There's naught to say she wouldn't pin the guilt on me for a trifle and throw me to the street as a justice. This much, I'm long enough to be wise to.

With just the three of us to think about, the house is easy to keep without her help, and the message rounds don't tire me more than they keep my spirits up and my lungs clear of carpet dust. At first the local shopkeepers are wary of me, and some are regular rude, having heard uncommon rumors about my position, but I don't take on to notice. Instead, I hold their eye at the counters and don't flinch with my orders and make sure to get into some easy talk about the stresses of doing business with the cost of the rents and the up-and-downs of the prices, and with some lighthearted grumbles, too, about the peculiar duties a woman has to face when her sister goes bedridden, and like this I soon have them on my side and eating out of my palm. It helps that Frederick is generous with his allowances, for it lets me go for the better cuts, the choicer brands. At the same time, though, I'm careful to keep a shilling over for my own private ends: a cold glass at the alehouse, a shampooing at the haircutter's, a bottle of Rimmel's toilet vinegar, a penny for the savings jar.

For the whole of the p.m., meantime, she lies on her linen and doesn't move except to drink my preparations and follow me with her eyes gone dull. To the same measure as I've surrendered to gratefulness, she's surrendered to dejection. It'd be easy to blame
him,
but she can't pretend to have been ignorant of his history when they first upped shack. The truer truth has to be that she's doing it to herself, that it's a malady of her own making, and that most of it is for my benefit: a touch of the plague she'll riddle us both with if she doesn't grow with child, and quick.

“Mary,” I says to her one day, “you might well be lying here in front of me, but I'll be effed if I know where you are.”

It's like she doesn't hear me, she's gone so far in on herself. She rolls her eyes over me and moans like her voice is coming from another room, and it's plain the company she's now keeping closest are the thoughts put in her head by the devil, thoughts that give her to believe that having a babby will bring vengeance on the Marx maid and snare Frederick once and forever: a single stone to kill the two crows preying on her happiness.

I don't tell her what I think, for what I think is, It'll never happen. In all the weeks I've been here, I've not seen any red on the sheets, not even a fleck from the normal courses, so it can't be like before when her belly wouldn't hold the babbies in, but must be that she's gone the same way as myself: dry as a bone from too much gained and lost.

“Keep up your heart, Mary. Ward off the woe-filling thoughts. Bear patient what He sends and for what He doesn't.”

But she doesn't listen. She stays in bed listening only to herself. Hoping and praying for the impossible. Wallowing in the bitterness and the spite that sinks her ever further backwards and in, in, in, in till seven o'clock draws near and she sits up and calls for hot water, and I sponge her and dress her and put cucumber on her eyes and pour her out a nip, and she goes to wait in the armchair for his return. He comes in spent after his day of dealings, but he usual finds the forces to sit with her and give her his attention while I heat the dinner. Alone with him, she comes over happy. I can hear her spouting it from the kitchen. But then at the table, if she earns less than his every regard, her jealousies and her disappointments seep up, and she starts to cark: she is tired, she is bored, she is lonely.