Mrs. Engels (30 page)

XXIX. New Needs

The fury of my love comes late and slow. Over the course of days, it seeps up from the bottom till it rings in my temples and pumps at my neck. The effect of it, however, is to strengthen me. To make me more calm and correct. All of my thoughts, now, are fixed on a single purpose: to make another five pounds to match those I lost.

The butcher advances me a pound, but says if it's not cleared with the rest of the account by Friday, he'll put a penny interest a day on top of it. The baker refuses to give me anything. He points at a sign by the till.

“Oh, for godsake, what does
that
say?”

“
No credit given.
”

“Can't you make an exception? Mr. Engels is the most honest and reliable gent in the parish. He'll have you paid off in no time.”

He shakes his head and says that may be so, but these little sums the housewives borrow from him add up to fortunes, and it's getting him into trouble with the bank, not to mention the menfolk who come and give him earfuls about handing over cash to their women without their authority. He has stopped with it altogether, it's not worth the trouble.

“If it's extra money you need,” he says, “go and pawn a candlestick like a normal woman.”

Candlesticks, aye. And plates, too. And jugs and tobacco jars and inkwells. I get good prices for them all. By his manner, I can tell the broker believes I'm handling goods that came to me by crooked means, and it hurts my pride to be rated so, but I suffer the wound and go on, for I'm on good terms with my Almighty and am justified: if I don't do it—if I don't make back the full sum—it'd be as good as telling Moss my word has no value and my affection is not to be trusted, and that would be the death of me.

“Girls, I need you to turn out your money boxes.”

Pumps snorts. “For what?”

“The books are running short. We've all of us to pitch in to make up what's lacking.”

Snap. Snap.
Spiv is breaking beans into a bowl. “I don't have a penny spare.
Snap.
You know my earnings.
Snap.
How could I hope to save anything from them?
Snap.
”

Truth only comes through a hard process of searching: I've been to their room and have found, hidden in a box beneath the bed, a porcelain pig filled with coins.

“Don't make me go up there and get it myself,” I says.

Spiv stops her work. Grips the lip of the bowl. Heaves a sough out into the air. Wipes her hands on her pinny and leaves the kitchen. We listen to her go up. And now, our hearts athrob, we listen to her come back down.

“He wants you upstairs,” she says.

“You'll pay for this,” I says.

“Lizzie, I have just had a disturbing meeting with Camilla. She informs me you have asked her to part with her savings. Is this true?”

I'm feeling too much to answer.

“Lizzie, answer me, did you plan to appropriate the maid's savings?”

If a feeling is there, it'll come out somehow. And now, without warning, it gushes. All the cruel words a coarse woman could say, I say to him. I call him a beast and a hound, and tell him he doesn't know who I am or how I live, what I have to put up with under his roof, and I'd be beholden if he'd get on his horse and walk the rest of the road on his own. I'm off to pack my bags, I says, and go a new route; any route that won't involve him.

And the queer thing is, he listens. He doesn't answer back or dash to defend. Instead, by his mettle, and the length of his silence, he gives open passage to my vent. Each barb I throw at him, each prickle and each spine, he takes into his grip and holds it firm, just as the rural grasps the nettle so as not to be stung by it. If his point is to exhaust me, he succeeds, for after a few rounds, the spite starts to drain out of me and I get calmer by degrees. Bit by bit, my mind clears, and once again I'm able to see the lines on his face and the faint stoop in his back, the mark on his cheek of an abscess still not full healed, and am reminded that he, too, has hardships: he, too, has been knocked up by the difficulty of life.

“Don't forget,” Mary used to say whenever I came down sharp on him, “don't forget how early he rises and how late he retires to keep us all fed and dressed.”

I'm loath to give over to pity or be swerved by his virtues, so I try to ward them off with fresh thoughts of his poor conduct—his meanness as a father and his reckless generosity as a comrade—and, from these, I find fresh umbrage to take, and my wounds break out as new and my tongue itches once more. But the truth is, I'm already tired of the effort it costs me to stay cross, and am beginning to feel the pangs of remorse, for I know I can sometimes get things out of proportion and damn people for venial things I've made mortal in my thoughts.

“What is this all about, Lizzie? Tell me out straight. What has got into you?”

“I need some money, is all.”

“What do you need it for? Don't I give you enough? Are you left short in any aspect?”

“It's not for me.”

“Well, whom do you owe, then?”

I hesitate. It's rare he knows what's in my mind. Things trouble me and I don't tell him; that has always been the way. Ought I give this to him?

“Nobody,” I says. “I don't owe anyone anything.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

He rests his knuckles on the desk and leans down on them.

“I have noticed you've been going out a lot of late. Would you like to tell me where you have been spending your time?”

“Nowhere in particular. I need the air.”

“Are you gambling?”

“Frederick, please.”

He doesn't soften to my tone, but keeps his wary eyes locked on me. “Pumps tells me you have grown fond of the local drinking houses.”

“I stop to rest on my rounds. Has that been made a crime?”

He shakes his head and sighs. Sits back into his chair.

“I have decided, Lizzie”—he crosses a leg and smoothes the wrinkles of his trouser—“I have decided you must go to Ramsgate.”

“Ramsgate?”

“You leave on Friday.”

“Not a chance.”

“You are not being given a choice. This is an imperative.”

“No way, I won't go.”

“There is to be a conference here in London. A private meeting of the Association. Things have got out of hand with the French. We need to settle these blasted disputes. Tighten discipline. Establish some organization.”

“And while all this is going on, I'm to be shipped off to the seaside, is that it?”

“Karl has insisted that Jenny leave London for the duration of the conference. If she stays and becomes involved with the organizing and entertaining, there is every chance it will attack her nerves and she will become ill again. She has chosen to leave for Ramsgate, and you will accompany her.”

“This is your excuse? This is the story you've invented for sending me away?”

Transporting me. Sailing me up the water.

“It is not a story. You need a break. I fear London is overexciting you.”

“Christ, Frederick, would you listen to yourself? Ramsgate? What'll I do there? Can you tell me that?”

“You will take the cure. You will bathe. You will practice your Irish melodies.”

“I will die.”

“You will come back your old self, Lizzie. Or you won't come back at all.”

XXX. And Forty Nights

So it's to Ramsgate we're dispatched. Ramsgate, because it's more salubrious than Margate. Ramsgate, because Brighton is only London by the shore and Scarborough costs too dear on the railway. Ramsgate, because, though the lodging rates are higher, the patients are more interesting. Ramsgate, because here the motto is safety for the shipwrecked and health for the sick.

“I thought we'd take our first dip this morning,” says Jenny, looking up from her novel.

“This morning?” I says, looking out at the sea, where the buoys are touching the bottom, and the coal ship by the pier is lolling on its side, and it's taking an age for the horsemen to drag the bathing machines out all the way. “Oughtn't we wait for the tide to come in?”

“The farther out the better,” she says. “Fewer spying eyes. Besides, I have already put our names down for a machine. Eleven o'clock.”

She goes back to reading her book, and to twirling her parasol, and I wonder how she doesn't get exhausted doing the two things at once, when it's draining all my energies just to get comfortable in this damn penny chair. I lean out of it for a bit of relief and, while so bent, decide to take off my boot and pour out what's got in. Before putting it back on, I sink my foot down and lift up the sand with my toes. If it was up to me, I'd set the morning aside for this only and wouldn't care a whit about the old rogues who'd turn their eyeglasses on my legs.

When the hour comes, we go to the area with the bathing machines. A man wearing a check suit and cap ticks us off the list and directs us to the horseman, who conducts us to a green-colored machine.

“Can't we have that one there?” says Jenny, pointing to one painted bright as a Gypsy van.

“As you like,” he says.

We watch him hinge his horse to the box.

“Business seems to be going on prosperous,” I says to him.

“With respect, missus,” he says, “you ought've seen it in July. Couldn't get near the water, you couldn't, for all the machines and all the ladies wanting a dunk.”

Mortified, Jenny climbs inside and bides there. I stroke the horse's nose till the man is finished hinging and mounts.

“Ready when you are, missus,” he says.

When I get inside, I see Jenny has already changed into her bathing frock. I find it no trouble to change into mine while we're being pulled out, the sand under the wheels being so flat and hard. Smooth as it is, though, the journey to the water isn't an easy one, given the smell of feet and rotten fish that fills the little room.

Eventual the machine comes to a stop. I'm eager to open up and let some air in, but we have to be patient while the man frees his horse. We sit and listen to the sea lapping against the underside of the box. Jenny twists the strings of her frock and hums.

“Right you are, ladies,” the man calls out after a time, and thumps the side. “Fanny will look after you from here.”

Jenny bides till she's sure the man is good and gone before opening the front hatch. I look out over her shoulder. Wading waist-deep towards us from a neighboring machine is the woman Fanny, a burly pip in a flannel jacket and a straw bonnet.

“Fine day for it,” she says, and lowers the hood of our machine till it makes a tent over the water.

“September,” says Jenny, “is England's July.”

Fanny beckons Jenny in. “In your own time, ma'am,” she says. But she fast loses patience with Jenny's toe-dipping and gasping—“The longer you wait, ma'am, the harder it gets”—and now takes grip of her waist and well nigh lifts her over the steps and into the freeze. It'd make the perfect look for my locket, the shock on Jenny's face.

“Will you be going under, ma'am?” Fanny says now, putting her fat hand to rest on the top of Jenny's head. The most Jenny can do is blink back, for the cold has struck a palsy into her as prevents the liberation of anything other than a tooth-chattered sough. Fanny takes this for a blessing, and plunges her under: bonnet, baroness, and all.

“Now you,” she says, looking up at me.

“I think I'll pass,” I says, stepping back into the box.

“Come on now, you've come all this way. You'll regret it if you don't.”

I sit back onto the bench inside. Wrap my coat round. “Let that be on my own head, woman.”

“You'd leave your friend to bathe on her own?”

I look over at Jenny and her blue lips, and at her eyes shot red and her hair hanging lank to the shoulder. “I'd leave each body to do as she pleases,” I says.

At lunch, Jenny doesn't leave it alone.

“I cannot believe you didn't get in,” she says, as if I've done something to her personal. “You Irish are all talk,” she says, “all talk,” and she goes on and on, till I'm sick to the dentils of hearing it and jaded with exhaustion, and I give her to understand as much, with some unkind words about her own Germankind and their tight fists.

There's silence between us now, and it looks likely to continue for the rest of the p.m. Which suits me grand. For it leaves me to sit and to think untroubled by her patter and nonsense. I sink back into myself, and when I tire of wondering about what ought be done about everything, I find no small amount of pleasure in the sights and the sounds of the sands. When a huckster advances, Jenny doesn't break her vow of silence to send him away, so I'm able to take a good look at his corset laces; I even buy a couple. From the coster's basket, I take bloaters and shrimps, and pies and cakes, and eat them right here, for all the crowds to see, without her blather about keeping from food that thickens the waist. And pleasure atop all pleasures, I listen unbothered to the music, and tap my foot to it, and put a penny in the tin if I think it earned.

Most of the Ramsgate minstrels are fake darkies, but there's one who comes by most days before the tea bell is rung, at three o'clock or thereabouts, and he's a real one: a black; a real black man. He dresses in a suit of red stripes and, apart from the bad expressions he makes when singing, and the touch of a crook in his leg, he has lovely looks such as common bodies won't admire. Though I don't put it out for Jenny to see, I find myself getting nervous when it comes his time for coming; I feel like a sick babby when I see his figure limping up the beach towards us. He sings alone, with no instruments behind him, and I know he's noticed me, for at our stretch of the sands he'll do two songs instead of the usual one—an opera bit and now a new air from the Americas—and God's grace be on him, a smoother tenor I haven't heard since eternity. If I thought I wouldn't be put away for it, I'd go to him and give him every coin I possess—all I've saved for Moss and everything I can find on top of that—for a pinch of his lips and a stroke of his hair.

What must it feel like to the hand?

“I used to like darky music, but it is stale now,” is Jenny's usual, but today, joy of joys, she has it buttoned, and what's else, he's giving his best performance yet. What he's done is, he's rolled up his trousers and paddled himself into the low water, and by stamping and kicking his foot, he's using the sea as a drum, which catches the attention of every chair for two hundred yards. There's not a shake, not a tremble in his voice, which washes up over the rows to drown us. Before him, we're stiff and scurvy-looking, white like melted butter in a pan.

In the pause between songs, he takes a large square of card from his basket and holds it up. After showing it round, he puts it leaning against a rock so everybody passing can see it. I muster the courage to tap the shoulder of the lady sitting on my right side, not the species Jenny would talk to, but I take people as they come.

“I've gone and forgotten my eyeglasses,” I says to her. “Can you tell me what the darky's sign says?”

“Why, my dear, you ought get a chain.” Glad to be distracted from her string of beads and her snoring husband, she sits up and peers over the bodies in front. “Let's see. It looks like an advertisement for his evening show.”

“A show? Does it have a direction? Can you see?”

“Yes, there's something. But it's out of town, in Pegwell Bay. You'd have to get a cab.”

“Oh, that wouldn't be a bother. My husband has such a fondness for the darky songs, he'd drive a hundred mile to catch a night of them.”

She looks at me, unfooled. “I don't have ink to write it down.”

“That's all right. If you tell it out for me, I'll remember.”

The darky's second song is a slow keen about the hardness of life and the wanting to be rid of it, an unfortunate subject for Ramsgate, where even the healthiest are made more healthy, but the notes carry such power that we forget who and where we are, and there's more than one lady who has to reach for her handkerchief. The applause is generous enough—my own clapping near sends me to a stand—but this being England, and England being the rottenest, stingiest place on earth, few bodies come forth with the loot when he circles with the silver shell he uses as his tin. I make sure to flash my coins so he knows not to take off before he gets to our row, and while I'm dropping them in—a whole florin this time—I also make sure to give him sympathy with all of my eyes. He smiles down at me and tips his hat, and with a gentleness and a frankness that our race has lost through too much society, he says, “Thanking you kindly, ma'am. All of us at the Three Crowns tavern in Pegwell do hope to be seeing you this night.”

He leaves me burning red and struggling to swallow. The neighboring lady leans over in her chair and, under her shawl, passes me her hip flask. “Looks like you need this.”

I don't refuse it, and when I give it back, she takes a snort herself.

“If you could,” she says now, “would you prevent the marriage of a white with a colored?”

“Well—” I falter. My throat's yet burning from the spirit, and my heart thumping from having one of them so close up. “Well, I'd never try to separate those who loved.”

She settles back and takes up her fancywork. “I quite agree. Love
is
a gift given down from God that no human being should steal. But I don't think a union of black and white very likely either, for I credit the darkies are no more disposed to marry us than we to marry them.”

I look out at the gray sea. “I suppose that's one way of putting it,” I says.

Jenny makes it the whole way through dinner without opening, but back at the lodgings, the sight of me pinning up my hair and changing into my good gown fetches her voice up.

“All sorts on the beach today,” she says.

“Same as ever,” I says.

“I think I'll get dressed as well. Have a look in the paper at what is on.”

As soon as she's in her bedroom, I'm out the door and, in no time, up the crescent. Instead of going all the way to the rank on the pier, I manage to convince the gent on the corner to give me—an ailing matron—the cab he's just flagged and to hang on himself for the next. But for all that, I'm yet too slow.

“Yoo-hoo! Lizzie! Where are you going? What is your rush?”

I turn to see Jenny appearing round the corner, the streetlamps putting a yellow shine on her frippery. In my mind, I picture myself lunging into the cab and rushing off into the night, leaving her here to wave and bawl after me, but in ordinary truth, I stay stuck where I am, one foot on the cab step.

“I feel so good after that swim today,” she says, nodding a greeting to the gent who holds out his hand to help her up. “And since it was cold, it did me twice as good. I believe I'm building up a good stock of health. What damage could a naughty late night possibly do?”

The cab moves off, and I feel I can't look at her, for she speaks as if every night till now she's been in bed with the gas out before nine; as if she doesn't wake up from her p.m. nap going “I'm bored” and flying off to the offerings of any old place: concerts, lectures, balls, novelties, amusements, mediums; you announce it, she does it. Nay, I can't look at her, so I turn to stare out into the darkness.

“Where were you thinking of going?” she says.

“No place in particular,” I says.

“Well, no place is not very fun, is it?” She laughs, the sharp edge of frantic. “How about the Marine Library? Suit you? Thursdays they have the raffling tables out. We could stake a shilling, Lizzie. That would be amusing, or?”

The conference is only to last a week, and yet I've been put here for a month and more: here, where one day is so much like its neighbor that it's no easy matter to say which is which and, filling each night, the same desert sands.