Mrs. Engels (3 page)

“Safe,” Jenny says. “They have moved from Paris to Bordeaux. They will be safe there.”

I open to inquire further, but she grips my arm to say there'll be plenty of time for that, I'm not to worry, now is a moment for reunion and celebration.

Behind us, Karl and Frederick start a scuffle over who ought pay off the cabby, as if it made a piddle of difference on earth which pocket it came from: isn't it all water from the same fountain? Jenny can't help but to get involved, and I'm glad of the free moment to take off my bonnet and have a proper look. The hall, I see, is papered gay. There's a table with pottery animals and a bust. A mirror and a line of pictures, and in every wall a door. The carpet is rich and unworn and goes up to the first landing and into the beyonds. The banisters are painted three coats of white.

Once the cabby has been dealt with, Jenny sends the men into the parlor and out of the way. She smiles a moment through the silence, and now she says, “Nim?” only the once and bare over her breath, almost a sigh.

Miraculous-like the maid comes up from the kitchen. She's wearing a simple dress and a white cap and apron. I've heard so much about her, how good she's supposed to be to look at, I'm relieved to see she's plainer in true life. Fine bones, to be sure, but the work tells upon her.

“Nim, the cases, please,” says Jenny. She whispers it, as if the giving of orders hurts her and must be made soft. “Into the guestrooms. Thank you.”

Nim nods at her mistress and, as she passes, gives me another as a greeting. I step aside to give her way, but not so far that I can't measure her up.

Her nose doesn't reach my shoulder!

The sight of her knocks me out of myself, for when a figure has been made famous to you—when she's been talked about till her name sounds louder in your ears than Jehovah's—you expect her to tower over and be massive, and yet here she is now, a tiny thing. As I watch her go up the stairs, I'm left in no doubt as to the solidness of her frame, and her limberness—she manages to haul two burdens at a time and not be tripped by the dogs whirling about her—but there's no getting clear of the fact that, God bless her, she's but a pip. If you didn't keep an eye on her, you'd lose her.

“Oh, and, Nim,” says Jenny when the maid is already gone round the bend of the stairs, “when you're done with that, we'll have some refreshments in the parlor.” Jenny now turns to me and makes a gesture to indicate that it's a relief to be rid of ugly tasks. She takes the bonnet out of my hand and leaves it down on the table. “Come,” she says, and puts me on her arm and walks me off for the tour.

I count a parlor, a morning room, a conservatory, a cellar, five bedrooms, three cats, and two birds.

Says Jenny: “It is indeed a princely dwelling compared with the holes we have lived in before. In fact, to my mind it is far too large and expensive a house. I am forever telling Karl we ought to move, that we live too grandly for our circumstances. I for my part wouldn't care a damn about living in Whitechapel. But he will not hear of it. He thinks the house is the one means by which the Girls can make connections and relationships that can assure them a future.” She unfurls a finger and makes circles in the air with it. “
Surrounded
as we are by doctors and lawyers.” The shape of her mouth is supposed to tell me that such people are a necessary unpleasantness to her, like the stink of the slop pail. Pondering a moment, she lets the face fall away. “But I daresay Karl is right. A purely proletarian setup would be unsuitable now, however fine it would be if we were alone, just the two of us, or if the Girls were boys.”

We've stopped outside Karl's study. By the way she puzzles at the half-open door, I can tell she's queasy about whether to venture in or to pass over it. Shamming ignorance of her unease, I unhitch myself and go through.

“It might look like a mess,” she says, following after me, “but it has its own peculiar method.”

I make my way to a clearing on the rug, a small circle of carpet bordered by piles of books and papers.

“It may not be immediately evident, but this room is actually the brightest and airiest in the house.” She picks her way through and draws the curtain back. “The Heath right there. The air the best in London. One has only to leave the windows open a moment and that cigar smell is killed.”

I'm close enough to the chimneypiece to have a proper gander at the things littered on it: the matches, the tobacco boxes, the paperweights, the portraits of Jenny and the Girls.

“Look, here's yours,” she says, pointing at the picture of Frederick.

On the way back out, I take the liberty to push in a file that looks ready to topple from the bookcase.

“He calls them his slaves,” says Jenny, meaning the books.

Back downstairs a tray has been made ready in the parlor. Nim stands beside it, biding our wishes. Frederick and Karl have already been served liberal shorts of gin.

“Lizzie, what shall it be, tea or coffee?” says Jenny.

“Whatever you're having yourself,” I says.

“What do you say to coffee?”

“Nay, I won't have coffee, but thank you.”

“Tea, then.”

“Not much up for tea either, you're very kind.”

Karl slaps his thigh and gives out a good-humored roar. “Can't you see it's a drink the woman wants!”

The color runs up Jenny's neck. She lets out a little laugh, glances at the clock and now down at her hem. “A drink, Lizzie?”

“Aye, I'll have a nip, if it's going.” To put me into the spirits.

Nim comes to me with a half-measure. She refuses me her eyes when she hands me the glass; keeps them low on the floor.

“Thanks, Nim,” I says, loud and clear so I'm heard. “You're awful good.”

Her mouth twitches. Someone coughs. She scuttles back to the tray and sets about readying the Girls' tea. Sat in the chair closest to her is Frederick. I watch for his behavior, but in actual fact, he bare notices her. More than that, he ignores her. I'd even say rude, if I didn't know Frederick to be so particular about his graces.

From his royal spot on the settee, Karl proposes us. “To Frederick and Lizzie,” he says. “After the darkness of Manchester, may you find happiness and rest here in London.”

Tussy rummages in a drawer and comes out with two wrapped gifts. Frederick is served first: a red neckerchief. He ties it on and marches up and down and gives a blast of the “Marseillaise,” and everyone laughs and claps. Mine is a jewelry box, and inside, lying on a bed of velvet, a silver thimble and a pin with a bit of thread already fed into it. I hold up the needle between my fingers, and they all brim over.

Says Karl between his guffaws: “The revolutionary finally settles down to her fancywork!”

I make as if to pour my drink into the thimble. “It'll come in handy for measuring my poteen.” And that—easy as falling off a chair—brings the house down.

When the laughter drains, the room settles into a tired silence. The tick of the clock. The sucking at glasses.

“Uncle Frederick,” says Janey after a time, “have you finished your history of Ireland?”

This gets Tussy excited. “Oh yes, Uncle Angel, when do we get to read it?”

“Oh, oh,” says Frederick, trifling with a corner of his jacket and frowning. “Thank you for your interest, my dear children, but I'm afraid I've been distracted of late. It's all about France now.”

“Hmm,” gurgles Karl, “indeed. And speaking of that damned place, we need to take a clear position on the situation. Our initial support of Prussia is proving quite an embarrassment—”

“Karl, please,” Jenny interrupts. “Can't you leave this outside talk until you are actually outside?”

Karl puts his hands up in surrender.

Tussy giggles.

Jenny catches my eye and gestures at the tray. “Lizzie, there is some tart here,” she says. “But if you are hungry for something more filling, I could have Nim fix you up some cold cuts.”

I shake my head, perhaps a little too fierce. “Please don't go to any trouble. We ate on the train.”

Frederick, always liable for a man-faint if he doesn't have his in-betweens, looks about to contradict me, but he sees the arrangement of my face and checks himself. “I fear Lizzie is getting restless. She is anxious to see the house. I promised to bring her to see it today.” He looks at Karl, as if begging leave.

Karl waves a woman's wave. “Go on, Frederick. Show Lizzie your new home. We'll have time to catch up later.”

While I'm putting my coat and bonnet back on, Jenny tells me what she's done to the house. She calls my attention to certain arrangements and wonders if I'd like them altered.

“When I see them, I'll tell you, Jenny,” I says. “You'll be the first to know.”

The air outside runs into me, a respite. I wouldn't mind walking the twenty-two minutes. “Will we foot it?” I says, thinking Frederick is beside me, but when I turn, I see he's clean gone. “Frederick?”

Of a sudden, I feel him behind me, and then I see only black.

“This way it will be an even bigger surprise!” he says, bringing forth more laughter and clapping from the family gathered on the threshold, and though I notice I'm allowing it to happen, I do say to myself, I says, “Can't I just see the blessed thing? Must it be one of their games?”

He's gone and put his new neckerchief over my face as a blindfold.

III. A Resting Place

A donkey's age, it takes him, to get the wretched thing off. Two, four, six taps of my boot and still he's behind me, fighting with the knot.

“What's keeping you?” I says.

“Patience, Lizzie,” he says, and I know it'd be no use telling him again, at this late stage, that his time in Manchester has turned him into a northern stumpole.

I feel him wiggle his finger underneath the neckerchief; now I hear him bite into it and grind it between his ivories. The cotton presses tight against my nose, which tells me it's not really new, this rag. It's one of the old ones from the Club, still smelling of cigars and bear's grease.

With a last wet groan, he gets it free. A curved terrace of houses—dream palaces—unrolls itself in front of me.

“Primrose Hill,” he says, and turns me round to face the hill of grass that rises out of the ground where the terrace ends on the opposite side of the road.

“Are those sheep?” I says.

“And this one”—he turns me again, this time to meet a giant face of plaster and brick—“is ours.”

I have to creak my neck back to see to the top of it. The brightness of the day gleams up its windows. Three floors. Iron railings. An area. A basement.

“Well?” he says.

My heart feels faint, which can happen when you make the acquaintance of a real future to replace the what-might-be.

“Have you nothing to say? Hot and cold water all the way up!”

Dazed by light feeling, I clutch at my throat and dither about stepping over the doorsill. “Bless and save us, Frederick, I don't know. It's awful grand.”

As I make my way around—the green room already filled with flower and plant, the laundry room fit for an army, the cloakroom with hooks for a hundred, the cellar bigger than the one I myself was reared in—I can't help holding on to the walls and the tables to keep myself on end. I keep expecting a steadying hand from Frederick, but it doesn't come. Something isn't right with him. A flash temper has come over him. When I point something out, he makes sure to bid his interest the other way. When I open a door on the left, he opens one on the right. When I go to look at a wardrobe, he goes to look at a lamp.

“She's done a fine job,” I says. “A fine job.”

But he doesn't answer. It must be that he doesn't like what she's done.

And, to be honest, I can see why.

In her book, there's naught worse than a new house that looks new. She said so just now before we left. “So long as the thirst for novelty exists independently of all aesthetic considerations,” she went, “the aim of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham will be to produce objects which shall always appear new. And, Lizzie, is there anything more depressing than that luster of newness?”

And I went to myself, “Aye, the smell of decay,” and took her attitude for a London attitude, set square against sense. But what do I know? She's the baroness and knows better about the styles. (How she ended up with a cruster like Karl is anyone's wager. He must have thought that, because her family tree has as many rebels as it does nobles, she'd have the right opinions about everything, already there in her blood. And she must have thought, well, she must have thought he was intellectual and clever, the kind of man that'll win glory on earth, which only goes to show how little true wisdom there is in young hearts.)

In decorating the house, what she's tried to do, she said, is dull the pristine down and make the place appear longer stood. I said I hope this doesn't mean there'll be dirt and dust round the place, for I don't allow it. She said it isn't a question of cleanliness but of heritage, for olden things can be clean without being shiny. I said what would I be wanting with heritage? All I need is a couple of chairs that stand upright. She said it isn't hard to give the idea of it, even in recent and modest houses, by buying the necessaries at auctions, such as movables of no modern date and art that's been handled and weathered—and chipped, I see now—and by scattering it all about so that two new things don't rub against each other and make a glare.

“Ending the tyranny of novelty,” is what she called it.

“Spending other people's brass,” is what I call it, but only to myself. And it's unkind even to think it, for I wouldn't have been able to do it—the ridding, the arranging, the fixing up—without her.

She's thought of everything. She's had the right fringe put on the draping, and the right frills put on the fringe. The few bits we sent down ourselves, she's had cushioned over. She's had the stores stocked. She's had calling cards made; there they are stacked on the hall table. Everything: first to last, start to end.

“We went a finger over budget,” she said. “But I believe quality speaks for itself.”

And the rooms do indeed speak. They speak dark and solemn. For in buying the movables—and by all accounts she bid like a madbody after most of it—she thought not about what was handsome but about what was suitable to Frederick's position. And seeing them now, these hulks of bookcases and cabinets and desks and tables, I find myself wondering has she mistaken him, all along, for a priest.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Frederick?” I says, as a way of cheering him.

But there's no humor to be had from him. He's gone like a brick. Closed like a door. He shrugs and disappears upstairs. I follow him up and find him on the first landing, glowering down at his feet.

“Lizzie, I wish you to favor me by showing me which room you would like to have as your boudoir. I'd rather have these matters decided for me.”

“All right,” I says, hardening myself now. “If that's how you want it.”

Jenny has put a cabinet and a toilette table in the large room on the first floor, so she probable expects me to claim that one, on account of its size and distance from the road. As it happens, I decide to leave that one to Frederick—it's closer to his study, after all—and I choose instead the smaller one on the top floor. Here I'll have to share a landing with the maids, and it means an extra flight of steps up and down, and I know people will think I picked it out of a fear of taking too much. But the truth is, I much prefer it. They've thought to put a fireplace all the way up here. And there's a nice washstand and a hip bath, and the flowers on the wall are so brilliant and colorful they look fresh picked. And the bed: the bed has golden posts and an eiderdown quilt, and the way it's sitting in the light, it's like God shining down over it. I sit on it and know immediate that it's mine. “That's it with the moving,” it makes me think. “We'll not budge from here. This is the place that'll see me out. This is the bed that on my last day I won't get up from.”

“This is the one I want,” I says.

“Fine,” he says, and goes to look out the little window that gives over garden and the roofs of the other houses.

There's a terrible quiet. His back is a wall blocking out the lovely bit of sun, and the shiver in his limbs makes me think he's going to put his fist out through the glass. For what reason, it's beyond me to say.

“Is everything all right with you, Frederick?”

Slow, he turns round. He doesn't look at me and heeds only the wringing of his hands. “I am sorry, Lizzie”—he shakes his head in a sorrowful way—“I am sorry that you judge the house only awful grand. You were expecting something more. But this will have to do for now.”

Alarmed, I open to object. I rise to a stand and reach out an arm, but he raises to halt me.

“It is already a risk to take a house this size. A bigger one would be a push too far. Besides, I have already given my word on it. It has been signed to us for three and a half years.”

“Frederick, I—”

“Jenny and Karl are waiting for our impressions. They, and especially Jenny, have put a great deal of time and effort into finding us this house and making it fit to occupy. So what you are going to do, Lizzie, what I'm telling you to do, is to pretend that you think it more, much more, than awful grand.”

A rising laugh makes me push my face into my sleeve. As foreigners go, he's unusual fast at picking things up. His problem—the big noke—is letting go when a thing is long done and over. There's times he'll get his whole fist round a delicate article and won't drop it till he's wrung all the sense out of it, and he holds it still, even if he knows it's crushed or broke, or anyhows beyond repair.

“Lizzie, are you laughing?”

Laughter that's sealed only builds and I think I might burst. I plonk back down on the bed and lift my shirts up to hide my face.

“Ya, you are laughing! What is so funny? Stop it! I said, stop it!”

“Oh, Frederick,” I says, and it all spills out of me, a peal. “Come here and let me kiss you.”

He lumbers over, confounded, and sits beside me.

“Frederick,” I says, “the house is much more than grand. It's an effin' castle!”

He frowns and studies my face for any hidden rigs.

“I'm serious! I just adore it!”

He grins and lets out a sigh and takes tight of me and kisses me. And for a moment now, it almost doesn't matter that it's her he really wants to be holding, that it's her he'd prefer as his princess, for she isn't here and won't be coming back, and I'm the closest thing to her he can ever hope to get.

“You know something?” he says then, tears in his eyes but laughing too. “The Queen was right.”

“The Queen? About what?”

“About the Irish.”

“And what, pray tell, did the old hooer say about us?”

“That you're an abominable people, none in the world better at causing distress.”