Mrs. Engels (9 page)

Dizzying, I rush down the stairs and out the street door. I take the air and am thankful for it; it keeps what's down from coming up. A moment and Nim is outside with me.

“Here,” she says, wrapping a shawl around me.

“You don't have to worry, Helen. I'm grand.”

“Shall I fetch you a glass of water?”

“Nay, nay. Just stay a minute.”

“Well, all right. But not too long. I must get back.” She puts the door on the latch. Rubs her arms. “It's getting cold now,” she says. “It will be fully winter before we know it.”

“Aye, that it will.”

Some minutes pass. The noise from upstairs comes through the windows and out into the night. All down the road, the houses are dark.

“I shall have to leave you now,” Nim says.

“Nay, wait—”

Knowing no way to proper introduce it, I go ahead and bring out the money: the savings from the dressmaker's and a few other morsels I've managed to gather up.

“Here,” I says, “I want you to have this.”

She takes a step away.

“Take it. It's from Mr. Engels. He wants you to have it.”

“Mr. Engels? For what?”

For what. For what.
She must believe my head emptier than the Savior's tomb.

“Helen, please. I'm not just another of these silly women. I know how many beans makes five.”

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean.”

“Mr. Engels and me, we have so much. More than we can cope with.”

“I'm not going short. I'm looked after.”

“I don't doubt it. This is just an extra bit. You have full claim to it.”

She shakes her head and pushes open the door. “I have no claims to anything.”

“Your son does. Think of your—”

But she's already gone. Leaving me to hold the whole weight of my purse.

Back upstairs, I find the performance over. Port and sweets are being tendered round. Tussy pushes through to reach me.

“You missed the whole thing, Aunt Lizzie!”

“Not at all, I saw you up there. You were a star. I've never seen such—”

But she'll not be cozened, nor condoled, and she doesn't spare me any of her pouting, and I don't have the force to bring her round, so it comes a relief when, from across the room, the woman Dmitrieff calls her away with the lure of her smoke. I watch her go, the man's jacket spilling over her shoulders, and it occurs to me now which one
Hamlet
is: it's the one where she marries her husband's brother and, by there, sends it all down-falling to shite.

November

VIII. Inverted World

Pale as royals, the pair of them. Wouldn't know a day's work if it shone on them blazing. Put their backs into naught, far as I can see, except giving me gob.

Only this morning Spiv says to me, she says, “Don't mind me, ma'am,” when I find her dangling her feet while she ought be cleaning the slops. “Don't mind me, I'm only resting up on account of my courses.” Then, when I catch her putting the woolens through the mangle: “But, Mrs. Burns, this is how I did them in the last place, this is how the missuses are doing them.”

You come to London, get a nice home about you and—blight your innocence!—you think you're over with the toils and the trouble.

The other one can hear me chiding from two flights up, and comes down in her night rail. “Don't stand there, Pumps,” I says to her. And then, “For the love of Christ, Pumps, don't stand there gawping,” for she'll not hearken to something spoken only the once. “Make yourself useful and go do the grate, it's a blind disgrace and needs blackening.”

She bobs a curtsy and goes, and I'm left relieved by how easy she's toed, for on your regular day she's the worse of the two, all her energies spent trying to get one over me and prove I'm not up to the dodge. With the passing of the moments, though, my relief turns to suspicion—the lass so yielding is a forecast for bad goings-on—so when I've done with Spiv and sent her into the kitchen to think about lunch, I go to the parlor to give it the once-over.

Just as I pictured: the grate still undone, the drapes covered with paw marks, and Pumps herself in front of the mirror rubbing black onto her face. Which is to say, it's worse than I pictured, and we're back to the usual.

“Pumps, what's this?” I says.

“What's what?” she says.

“This here, on the drapes.”

“That? Was there when I got here.”

“Why didn't you get the benzene to it, then?”

“Thought you wanted it that way.”

“And on your face? Did you think I wanted you with whiskers as well?”

“Oh, this? I just thought you could use another man about the place.”

This, for the London missus, is life. Not the fancy ball you might have imagined, but this. Which only goes to show you can't foreknow the shape of things to come. For if you'd told me this day twelvemonth how it was going to be—that my hours would be spent poking in nooks and sniffing in corners, running the finger and dancing at heels; that every day would be a scrub, and every week a starch, and every year a white; that tomorrow's coals would turn to yesterday's ashes, and time would burn my wick both ends—if this day twelvemonth you'd told me the God-glaring truth of it, I'd not have credited you. I'd have thought you unkept in your mind.

Get away with you, I'd have thought. It can't be shabbier than Manchester, can it?

Yet nowadays I oftentimes think we oughtn't have flown the old kettle at all. I oftentimes think the mill wasn't so killing as this. Topsy thinking is what this is, but topsy is how it goes up here; topsy and wrongways.

Advice: if you come, leave your senses back where they were common.

IX. Island Dwellers

I like to do the step myself. Which is a lucky thing. For Spiv refuses to be seen out front. And Pumps is too afraid of a bit of exertion to take her shoes and stockings off and get down into the scrub. It's a task I ought stay away from, on account of the knees, but I've learnt it gives me more pain to watch them do it than to do it myself. They're likely to be content with less than the right white. And there's no precise measure for the clay, the blue, the size, and the whitening; you have to judge the mixture by its look.

I go hard at it—my sleeves rolled, my face lathered—and I don't let off till, out the side of my eye, I light on a crowd of four women coming up the road from the Hill side. They, in return, catch sight of me when they're a few doors away. By my own deeper wisdom, I know they're headed in my direction. I put my attending back on my cleaning, but I'm aware of myself now and don't feel inside the task.

They come to stand in a line over me. I twist my neck to look up at them.

“Might we see the lady of the house?” says the one in the high-boned collar.

I stand. Brush the hair off my brow. Flatten my pinny. “Come on, Lizzie,” I says to myself, “don't be put so easy to the blush.”

When it dawns on one, it passes through the others like electricity. “Oh!”—they clutch their chests in the spot where the air has been knocked out—“How novel!”

Sat on my sofa, gummed together in a talcumed clump, the committee members of the Primrose Hill Residents' Association tell me what they saw: a woman and a girl viewing the house, and then the same two overseeing the arrival of the furniture and making all the arrangements. They describe both figures in a detail that'd chill the devil: the size and shape of their noses and mouths, the height of their brows, the color and curl of their hair, the cut of their clothes; it's as if they've painted picture portraits of Jenny and Tussy and hung them in their heads. They expected to be received by them. They look disappointed to have got me.

“Relations of yours?” the woman named Stone asks, pulling out the end of her dress and floating it out over her boots.

“Nay,” I says. “Just intimates.”

“I've seen her before,” Leech says. “The woman, I mean. Does she live nearby?”

“Aye, not far. Near the Heath, up that way.”

“Foreign?”

“A baroness.”

“Oh, I see.”

“And her name?” says Westpot, jigging her leg in a manner that says she's unprepared to sit here, in these uncomfortable visiting clothes, and bide for the required particulars to come out of their own accord.

“Von Westphalen,” I says, giving Jenny's maiden name to avoid mention of Karl.

“Von Westphalen. Let's see. German?”

“Aye.”

Westpot ponders a moment. “Doesn't ring any bells. Does she go much into society?”

“I'm not sure, you'd have to ask her.”

“And yourself?”

“Me? Oh well, I'm not the outsy-aboutsy sort.”

I ring for tea and sandwiches and cake. Pumps bites the side of her finger and glares at the women through squinted eyes.

“Go on, girl,” I says. “Don't be dallying.”

While we're waiting, I bring the talk round to the house—that's what they're here for, isn't it?—and mention the hidden costs of living in a new area: the uncivil distances, the bad roads, construction everywhere, hoarding blocking the paths. It's a speech I've heard Jenny give on several occasions and it's always been well received. Here, now, I'm met with a row of faces longer than a day with no bread.

Pumps brings in the tray and I give out the tea.

“And you are Mrs. Burns,” says Mrs. Westpot. “Isn't that what you said?”

“That or thereabouts,” I says.

Leech looks about for signs of children. Halls sighs into the emptiness.

Sensing an edge to our nerves, Stone says I'm not to be embarrassed, there'll always be duties the householder will reserve for herself. She, for instance, makes the beds of her own choice, for the servants aren't to be depended upon to put down the same number of blankets every night. Leech looks shocked that Stone would let go of her home secrets to a stranger; she tries to turn our minds away from the blunder by lashing herself into an enthusiasm about my draping. I ought keep the windows open as much as possible, she says, so the smoke doesn't linger on them. This prods Halls to air her loath for women who insist on smoking, especial out in the public.

“It can only be taken as a kind of challenge.”

Leech tut-tuts and says she heard there were women smoking at the funeral of Mr. Miller, a man who used to live down by the Canal. Fifty people for breakfast, there were, a table covered in cakes and biscuits and oranges and nuts, and all species of wine and exotics, and though Leech herself didn't attend—she wouldn't dream of it, for it wasn't her place—she was told there were women there, attending; women with flowers in their bonnets and fags in their mouths, and it had the atmosphere of a wedding more than anything else.

“It's hard to imagine a grieving widow having to serve delights to such a rabble, but that's exactly what Mrs. Miller had to do, as it was ordered in the will. Then, after all of that, he didn't leave her enough to get by on her own.”

There's a pause to allow the shaking of heads. I pass the plate of sandwiches around. “Thank you, but no,” they each say in turn, for they don't want to ruin their appetites; they're on the route to other engagements.

Saucers under their chins, as if to catch every precious thing that might fall out, they take it upon themselves to explain the area to me. It's best, they say, to think of Primrose Hill as an island, with the railway forming the northern boundary and the Canal the southern one. The better sort of residents live this side of St. George's Road. This is because here, one escapes the murky results of the railway activities, thanks to a benevolent wind that blows the smoke and dust eastways over the Chalk Farm Road and Camden. On the opposite side of St. George's Road, running towards Gloucester Avenue, the residents are working types, three families or more to each of the houses. It is, they say, like a little northern town, dominated by the railway and with a strong bond between the bodies living here. The houses are impossible to keep clean, of course, due to the flakes of soot that float about and settle everywhere. But the people are happy and tend to their own. Nevertheless, it's best not to walk there at night, for the roads can be rough, with families of boys patroling about. And the railway bridge is to be avoided at all costs, and at all times, for it provides dry arches for the congregation and accommodation of street Arabs and gutter children.

Their speech causes me a twinge, to be sure, but if I'm honest, I don't despise them in my heart. Perhaps this is because I don't feel beneath them. I'm no great lady and I don't know the fashion of the months, but I'm aware of my new position, in the middle class of life, and I don't think I'm faring so shabby.

Once satisfied that I'm a woman with the right information, they allow their talk to move to other subjects. It comes to rest on the banks. They're thankful the crisis years have passed.

“Dreadful, was it not, ladies?” says Stone.

“Dreadful, dreadful,” the heads nod.

“When I heard that Overend and Gurney had gone under, well, I got such a shock I called my husband in and I said to him,
Gregory, take all our money out of the banks immediately, our savings would be safer under a board here at home.
”

Halls laughs. “Did he do as you commanded?”

“Are you mad? He just snickered and told me to not to worry my head over affairs which aren't mine. They can be such rotters, can't they?”

A chuckle passes round.

“Speaking of rotters,” says Leech, “have you heard about Mr. Wagner?”

At this, they all sigh together and say it's a shocking and terrible thing. Such a disappointment, they say, when a genius fails his public with immoral private doings.

It's clear they've talked about this Wagner character before. He might even be someone they regular use to take the corners off a meeting, to make it feel rounder and sister-like. I take him to be another neighbor and am glad I don't ask further about him—that instead I sigh along in my ignorant stead—for it soon becomes clear to me that it's a musician he is, not a neighbor, and by the sounds of it, a bit of a hound too. Once I know the facts, I'm resolved to tell them some true and shocking stories about musicians, stories that will go all the way to their cores: about the Manchester halls and what the singers and fiddlers got up to there, the fiddling they did in the dressing rooms, and not only with the loose women from the boxes but with the higher-ups too, who would bribe their way down the corridors and hide themselves between the costumes. But my chance doesn't come, their fast manner of talking to themselves makes it hard to break in, and when the subject passes on, it irks me that there's things I could have said on my own side, about musicians.

“You're not from London, are you, Mrs. Burns?” Westpot says, impatient to be getting on.

“Nay, from down Manchester way. But my kin, they're from across the water.”

“France?” says Leech, making Stone and Halls giggle.

“The other way.”

“Ah, of course.” She looks at the other three. They twitch their faces back at her.

“So you and your family,” Westpot says, “you are, um, shoppy people, then?” She talks to her nails, as if abashed by having to bleed this personal vein.

“We were in the cotton, if that's what you mean. But we've stopped with that. Now we're in something else entire.”

“Well, that's a relief,” says Stone.

“A relief, indeed,” says Halls.

“Shoppy people are bad enough,” says Leech, “but the Manchester ones are supposed to be a whole grade down, if that's possible.”

“Always behind the counter, even when they're not,” says Stone.

I can't gainsay what they're saying about Manchester and the rest, but I don't like how they're saying it, so I says, “If the Manchester men have a bad name, it's their own doing and they deserve it, but they're not all the same, there's good eggs between them.”

“Good eggs?” says Westpot. “Like Mr. Burns, you mean?”

“Mr. who?”

“Why, Mr. Burns, woman! Your husband!”

When you're called a missus, oftentimes you forget yourself, and it's a good idea to have a story to tell, to cover over. But I have no such story ready. “There's no Mr. Burns,” I says.

“Oh, my dear woman.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“No Mr. Burns?”

“Where is he?”

I clear my throat. Scratch an itch that takes hold of the scalp under my bun. “He's in his grave,” I says, undressing the lie by thinking of my father.

Stone allows herself a gasp. Leech takes a napkin from the tray and offers it to me. Halls gives me a Protestant “Bless you” and looks down, virtuous-like, at her clasped hands.

I nod my thanks and reach once more for the sandwiches, happy to be off the hook as light as that. But Westpot has drawn back her lips and is thirsty for the truth. For that's how they bite you: smiling.

“But I've seen a man,” she says, “I've seen a man coming in and out.”

“You have?”

“Yes, Mrs. Burns, a man.”

“Oh, aye. Now that I think of it, there's a man who lives here.”

“But he's not Mr. Burns?”

“Nay, he's not Mr. Burns.”

“Oh?”

“Oh!”

“Oh.”

“Who is he, then?”

“He's Mr. Engels.”

“Mr.
Angles
?”

“Engels. Mr. Engels.”

“Is he here now, this Mr. Engels?”

“Nay, he's away from the house on business.”

“And who is he? A lodger?”

“Nay, not a bit of a lodger.”

Westpot simpers, understanding. “You're not married, are you, Mrs. Burns?”

“He's my husband, I just haven't taken his name.”

“You can't take a man's name unless you're wedded to him.” She turns to the others. “She's not married.”

“I'm his helpmeet is what, Mrs. Westpot.”

“You're his—?”

“She said
helpmeet.
”

“Shh, ladies, let's try not to be rude.”

They suck themselves in. Leech's stays creak. Halls, so fascinated by the proceedings, forgets herself and takes up a slice of cake. Her eyes darting around for the next move, she feeds the whole thing in.

“Mrs. Burns,” says Westpot, “if you don't mind me asking—” She hesitates.

I meet her gander full force. I've naught to hide from no one. “Aye, Mrs. Westpot?”

“What I was going to ask was, what business is Mr.—?”

“Ah!” Halls lets out a splutter, and now a gullet-bursting cough, and now the contents of her gob drops out—
pat!
—onto her lap. “Pepper!” she yelps. “There's pepper on the cake!”

Pumps—I could hear her ear scratch against the door the whole time and now I know why—shimmies in, calm as a cucumber. “You all right, ma'am?” she says. “Can I help you there?” She walks around, positions herself behind Halls, and serves out four slugs to her back.

Stunned, I watch the scene, the perfect horror of it. And I'm still sat here, unable to move, while the women file out, crinolines crumpled, bunches bounced; and still now while Pumps fettles up the tea things.

“Those were some bitches,” she murmurs to herself as she makes a pile of the plates. “They got what was coming.”

Her behavior is a credit to those who brought her up. For she was raised in thoughtlessness. Reared to be someone who'd have none of the advantages. Just one more of the poor tattery children of Little Ireland. Like all of us, she would've seen much brutality within the circle. A crooked look would've caught her a larruping at the hands of her slack-spined father and rag-and-scram brothers. Her face and the bent of her back bear the marks of this ill usage. I can't blame her for feeling angry and wanting to defy the laws of the wide world. I've been her. I
am
her.