The Dress Lodger (31 page)

No, thinks Henry, watching his student disappear down the street. No one can blame me for that.

Gustine creeps under her wedge of clay, carefully descending the dark, tabid staircase from the slappers’ room back to the potting house. Below, the steam engine, alone of all the workers still bellicose and robust, feeds fresh slip to the shirtless old men, who stir it around their low-tide troughs and worry that once the bubbles settle, barely a pot’s worth of clay will remain. She knows they are worried—she’s stood with them ten, fifteen, as much as forty minutes at a time while waiting on the replacement slappers to take twice as long to pummel half as much air out of the clay. She is adjusting to idleness, but she doesn’t like it. Having the clay balanced once more upon her head makes her feel better, almost normal again. She can wrap her arms around her second wedge as if it were a beloved child at six years old, a burden to carry, surely, but a familiar, comforting presence nonetheless.

She passes by the empty spots of fallen colleagues and notes their absence, but today her mind is on her own troubles. She slept miserably last night, kept up by broken nightmares of her child in a laboratory, trapped beneath a bell jar, his eyes big and blue, trusting in the way a puppy wearing a stone around its neck licks the hand of the boy about to toss him into the Wear. His tiny heart had grown so large it flattened against the curved side of the jar while his breath silently steamed the glass until, in tortur-ously slow dream time, he disappeared from view. At least three times during the night, she woke crying, terrified her nightmares had killed him; but each time she drew him close, she found the baby awake and smiling, wearing the expression of utter trustfulness he’d worn in her dream.

He will be wellJed, well clothed… . His life would surely be of a higher quality than anything you could provide. The surgeon’s voice follows her across the courtyard, where at four o’clock the sun is just sinking behind mountains of chert. Last night handsome Harry Hopps, an out-of-work labourer who had lived at Mill Street almost as long as Gustine, began vomiting food he’d eaten two days ago, whole and undigested. Two hours later, she could no longer recognize him. His lips were blue, his eyes retreated deep into his skull. His hands, feet, and nails turned a deep indigo, and his full sensual mouth drew back into a death’s-head grimace. Whilky, with.all the compassion his lodgers have come to expect, shook his fist in the dying man’s face, accused him of being a Government Operative, and threatened forms of sexual violation unknown even to Gustine. His rant was lost on Harry Hopps. The lodger expired with his own hail of expletives not even eleven hours after the onset of his first symptom.

Is this how my baby should live? worries Gustine, tightly hugging her clay. Would he not be better off with another, who would feed him well and keep him clean? These fantasies carry her stiffly between the monoliths of bony chert and across the broken oyster shells of the courtyard. The beautiful Indian summer weather of yesterday’s picnic has vanished as fast as it came, replaced by low chalcedony clouds, agitated and alive, quivering with fine stinging snow. Gustine is cold inside and out. Can you protect him every hour of the day? Especially when you are working two jobs?

She has only been working two jobs for his sake; has cared not whether she lives or dies except that through her work, she might perpetuate him. She has scrimped and saved to buy him food, to clothe him warmly; she has paid Whilky extra so that Pink might mind him and keep him out of Eye’s clutches. But to think, all this effort might be replaced with a few spare coins from Henry’s pocket, shillings scattered across a dressing table or slipped unnoticed beneath the sofa cushions. What is unending toil to her is a casual offer to him.

Gustine wipes slip from her lashes and continues toward the potting house. She is being ridiculous. Pink is watching her child, and she still has her job. Perhaps her baby might have more advantages should she give Dr. Chiver what he wants, but that would mean losing him forever. And Gustine is not that strong. She shifts the weight of her clay and reaches out to open the potting house door. It is better he be with me, she thinks. But, unbidden, the doctor’s words return: Can you protect him every hour of the day?

Back at Mill Street, Pink is playing the game where she asks, Miss Audrey, may I bring you a cup of coffee? and Miss Audrey, may I help you deliver those blankets? and Miss Audrey, may my friend Mike come and visit us sometimes? He’ll be no trouble, I promise.

She sits by the fireplace brushing the disgruntled weasel’s fur. Little black fleas detonated by her fingers fizz away into darkness, pop, pop. The clock says we’re in the quiet time of the day, when so much nothing happens that little girls must be extra careful not to let down their guards. Pink has forgotten that important fact; she is supposed to be watching Gustine’s baby, propped by the fire, but she is so lost in her Miss Audrey game, she’s let the creature slip perilously close to the embers.

“Miss Audrey,” Pink is saying. “May I hold your hand?” She stands the ferret up on its hind legs and makes its paw stroke her cheek. “That is so nice,” she says.

Outside, another electrical storm is brewing. The air has been so hot, then cold, lately, and lightning, rather than striking, has webbed its way across the sky in violet tangles. It shoots its silks through the cracks in Mill Street’s nailed shutters, followed seconds later by hissing thunder. How close was that? Pink wonders excitedly, scooping up Mike and running over to look outside. Throwing open the latch, she is surprised to find snow instead of rain swirling hypnotically in the doorway. The wind snaps it down the lane like a woman shaking the wrinkles out of sheets.

When she goes to live with Miss Audrey, a lap will be kept warm for nights like this. When thunder cracks, the kind young lady will pat her knees and Pink will scamper over to lay her head there. Perhaps she’ll curl herself into a tight ball like Mike does and look up at Miss Audrey with one grateful glittering eye. Pink is not sure how she’ll break the news to Mike that she is going away. She undrapes him from her arm and places him around her neck like she’s seen her father do, giggling as he stands on her shoulders and prickily stretches. They are just beginning to be friends, she and Mike, finally growing to understand each other. Now that she has someone to pet her, she does not resent the strokes he gets from her Da; in fact, she feels sorry that he’ll have to stay here while she moves on to real res-pon-sibility.

The wind in the lane changes direction again, spinning the snow back on itself. Pink’s eyes travel past the faint outline of the word
SICK
that her

Da furiously scrubbed from the door and down the darkened lane. It is fun to look for things in the snow. If she squints her eyes, like this, and lifts her chin, thus, she sees a beautiful lady dressed all in white like a bride. And if she turns her head just so, the lady lifts her veil and stretches forth her arms. Let’s go home, Pink, she says. I’ve had such a lovely wedding and the time has come. At her feet, a flurry of white ferrets caper in a powdery ring. They will dance Pink all the way to her new house and dance her up to bed, then dance her down to breakfast in the morning. Pink sighs deeply. She could stand in the door all night, looking for Miss Audrey in the whirling snow.

Useless pink rat.

The Eye scowls up from her sewing at the scatterbrain in the doorway. That dreamy little rat has let her charge slip closer to the fire. She knows nothing about concentration. Eye looks sharp, for she understands the dangers of this quiet time of day. She sits with the dress in her lap, petting the fabric like Pink pets the ferret. She has shaken off the confusion of Wednesday night when the room was full of shadows and glow rat disappeared. Her head felt so heavy then and her eye was not her own. Everything could have gone wrong that night, thinks she, but Eye protected you. Her arthritic hands stroke the length of blue silk; ach, another froth of bouffant has torn away from the hem. Careless blue rat. But Eye will sew you up, pulling a threaded silver needle from its hiding place in her neckerchief. Lost between her thick padded fingers, the needle jabs fleshily at the blue fabric.

What will it take to teach that careless rat? What did it take to teach you, old gray Eye? You were not always old. Staring down into the sky in your lap, the clean river of this new blue responsibility, you are so grateful for having been given a second chance. And yet, since Wednesday night, your head has been full of memories; you have been caught in a curious shadowy undertow pulling you down the long dark tunnel to your first responsibility, back when you were no older than the pink rat. You have spent nearly sixty years swimming away from that place, learning concentration, vowing that what happened there would never happen again. But now during the quiet time you feel yourself slipping down the long blue tunnel to where it comes out on the other side. Where you find yourself in an underground cave in the coal fields of Durham, a little girl sitting cross-legged, staring down into a deep black hole.

You sit alone for thirteen hours, in silence, in near total darkness. Two soft-glowing miners’ lamps (for your protection, the owners said; so that we might work deeper in more hellish conditions, say the miners) provide the only illumination, and they cast the strangest shadows. Sometimes the coal outcroppings overhead throw ladies in profile wearing high-crowned leghorn hats. Sometimes they look like a line of ducks waddling across the wall; sometimes your imagination fails you, and the shadows fall like dull potatoes on the ground. It is the game you play with yourself—find the thing in the shadow—thirteen hours a day, in silence, in near total darkness, for only twice a day are you called on to do anything other than watch. Twice a day, you have to pull the lever that starts the engine that lowers men into and draws them up from the bottom of the vein. You have to watch carefully, for sometimes the engine catches and then you have to shut it off quick or the cageful of miners will fall to their deaths. Sometimes, completely unanticipated, the chain jumps, meaning: there’s been an accident; turn on the engine and draw up someone hurt. It is important to watch the chain and never take your eyes off it. But it is hard to watch a chain in a hole in almost total darkness, in silence, thirteen hours a day, when you are only nine years old.

Yet, you are a good girl, and you watch diligently. It is getting late and the chain looks eager to come up, knowing the next time it reaches the top, it will stay for the night. Then the miners can go home to dinner; then, you too can go home, and fall asleep at the table with food still in your mouth. It is very hot where you sit, and sweat runs down your hair into your gray eyes. Some of the other children have had trouble with their eyes, straining in the low light until their vision becomes foreshortened and the chain and hole are no more than a fuzzy puddle on the ground. But you have perfect vision. Nothing escapes you, from the crunchy centipede that shunts up the far wall to the tiny wood spider, no bigger than an eyelash, dangling from the engine above. You take the health of the hole like a doctor reads a patient’s throat, observing how it slides naturally from red to sable to black to ink, all the way down to the mysterious gullet. You are a genius of vision, even though a little girl; all the other miners say so. Ah ‘ad a bit o’ candy in me pocket, an’ damme iftha’ girl didna spy it! What’s a man t’do but give a lass a bit? They give you candy sometimes if you are sharp enough to spot the lump in their back pockets. They give you a swig of ale at breakfast and make you feel like one of the mates.

The final hour before you pull the lever that starts the engine is the hardest of the day. You have been sitting alone for twelve hours with only the centipedes and spiders for company. You think about how you will pull that lever and the crunching sound the chain makes as it shortens up to the top. You think about the tired blue faces of the men in the cage, how they swing the door open the second it clears the hole and jump out, making it sway dangerously for the men behind them. You still have a half-hour climb up to the daylight, which will be night this time of year, and a mile walk home. You watch the chain carefully now. Any moment there will be a tug, telling you to pull the lever and draw them up. You mustn’t make them wait a second, or they will be wroth with you, but draw them up right away.

But what if? What if just after the tug has come and you’ve leaned your meagre weight upon the lever, and the engine is filling with steam and turning, groaning to pull your men up, what if at that very moment, you spy a rat out of the corner of your eye? A gray rat, with a sharp whiplash tail and big tarry eyes, creeping away with the piece of candy one of the miners gave you before he went down the hole. Between his jaws, that rat has your sugar-crusty piece of horehound, the one you have been saving all day to eat on the long walk home when you need to be cheered the most, and he is stealing away with it, skirting the soft-glowing miner’s lantern, making toward the shadows where he might blend in with the lady’s profile and the ducks and the dull potato.

What if, at that moment, your eyesight gets the best of you, for though another might have missed it, you see where he goes, around the corner, quick as a heartbeat. If you can only keep him in sight, you think, then you can catch him; and though the cage is slowly ratcheting higher, you too dart around the corner, knowing this tunnel leads only up, and that there is no place for him to go.

Miners’ lamps are set into niches up the corridor, but your eyesight is so good, you could see that rat even in the dark. There goes his slipper-shaped shadow along the right-hand side, searching out a break in the wall to duck into. There are none—you would have seen them; he has nowhere to hide. You run faster, pattering up the soft earth floor; the rat gallops ahead, but you have him in your sights and he will not get away. It is just you and the rat, under the earth, and he is panicked by the roar of the steam engine, lifting the men. You are gaining ground; in front of you, the rat darts left, then right, knowing he is trapped. When he darts across the tun-204