She says, “Is that the old language you’d be referring to, sir?”
And he says he supposes it is.
And she says, “Well then, aye, it was.”
Then he asks does she speak the Irish-Celtic herself, and she says she does, but only the few phrases she has. And then he asks has she ever been to Ireland, and she says, “Nay, though I hope to go before it pleases God to call for me.”
There’s a tense air about the room. He’s spent more time with Mary than anybody else, and in a manner more intimate than most would judge her worth. But it’s to get worse, for instead of calling it a day and leaving it at that; instead of being happy with saving her a fine and taking his leave, he puts a hand on her back and draws her out of her place, as if to make something special out of her, a fine example. The two of them are standing apart now, Mr. Ermen several paces back, and he begins to ask her about the firesome spirit of the Irish he’s heard so much talk of, and he wonders if it’s true that we’re more related in character to the Latins—to the French and the Italians and the like—and if, like them, we’re more interested in the body—the body!—than in the mind.
There isn’t a sound in the room, and the heat makes it all seem like a feversome dream, and Mary, I can see, is struggling to understand whether she’s being mocked, whether this foreigner is using her for his fun, and it’s all a trap, and these are the last agonies of her situation. So what she does is, she hardens against the doubt and says the only Italians she knows are the organ boys that come into the pub, and they’re only good for making a racket and slipping their dirties up your skirts, and she wouldn’t like to be put in a basket with them.
At this, he roars. So shocked are we by its quickness and its power that at first we don’t understand it’s laughing he’s doing, and we’re relieved when we see that it is, and that it’s the good kind, not the sneering kind, and then we let ourselves do it too. For we can see he’s no longer behaving like one of them—listening from across a fast river—but has dropped his distance and waded in, like a hunter that’s lost his fear. His arm reaches farther around Mary’s waist.
“Where would a man have to go in this town to meet a girl like you?”
I know now that a bold manner goes well with women and impresses men. I’ve seen it work a hundred times since. But back then I think he’s gone too far, crossed over too quick. It isn’t the species of thing a mill man ought say—though it is, I know, the truth of what they do without saying—and I’m not prepared for everybody laughing, and Mr. Ermen clapping his back and calling him a sly trickster, and the girls turning to measure their disbelief against each other, and Mary giving him a soft elbow and asking him, scut-like, what type of man he is at all. Nay, I’m not prepared for any of it—the fainting and the adoration that no mortal body deserves—so when I see it, it sickens me.
He takes to walking out with her, I believe, because she talks well and he enjoys hearkening to her. And he keeps walking out with her, he doesn’t bore of it, I believe, because he doesn’t understand her and wants desperate to understand her, for it promises so much.
She likes to say it’s because of her ankles. They have a peculiar allure, she thinks, that he can’t get full of. She takes to flashing them at him in the yard. He’ll be up in the office looking down, and she’ll be walking with us and putting on not to notice anything but the ground in front, but then, easy as you please, not a whiff of warning, she’ll lift up and step one out from under the hem. They aren’t bad as ankles go—of the two of us she has the better—and I’m sure they don’t put a damper on proceedings, I’m sure he likes them regular enough, but what really keeps him interested, I’m also sure, is her blather.
He’s like a young scholar trying to pull truth out of a foreign gospel. If he learns to understand her, and to speak like her, he’ll know what it’s like to be her, and by there to be poor. Of course, what he’s chasing is a shadow down a passage, for you can’t learn that species of thing. To have your vittles today and to know it doesn’t depend on you whether you’ll have them tomorrow, that’s something you’ve either lived or you haven’t.
“What do you talk to him about?” I says to her, for I want her to be ashamed, going around at night with the owner’s son.
“Oh, everything,” she says.
“Everything?”
“My life. His life.”
“You’re telling him our affairs.”
“Arrah, don’t be at me, Lizzie. He’s not like the others. He wants to learn about how things are for us. To help us.”
“Help? Well, we know what that means.”
“It’s different.”
“Why is it different? Why would he want to help you? Hasn’t he enough to be getting on with? A mill to run.”
“He doesn’t like what he sees here, Lizzie. In Manchester and thereabouts. He wants to understand it so he can change it.”
“He has ideas, all right, and for that he’s no different than any other man. You’ll be ruined.”
Listening to me, you’d think I’d become the eldest and she the youngest. The truth is, I’m scared for her. She’s gone deaf to her own advice. Isn’t it herself who says that the higher-ups only marry their own, and if they want your time it’s only to lie down with you, and then only for the thrill: it’s you who pays the final price? Hasn’t she gone back on her own words? It’s a part of Mary I’m not patient with, this habit of not heeding herself, but I don’t punish her with it either, for she punishes herself enough on the days he doesn’t call.
No doubt he goes with other women—he’s been seen wandering alone down the District—and the thought of it makes her suffer, deep and miserable. He stays away for weeks on end. She sees him in the mill and pours all her hurt into her eyes, but he resists her willing and stays upstairs where he is. Then when it suits him, he appears again, raps his ashplant on the door, and goes to the end of the passage to wait. So strong is her wanting, she throws a shawl around her pain, and runs out.
“What do you do when you go out with him?”
“I show him around.”
“Around where? What’s there to be shown?”
“He wants to see where we live.”
“We? We who?”
“We the Irish. We the workers.”
“Jesus.”
“The Holy Name, Lizzie.”
“Well, he’s not coming in here, he’s not welcome.”
“He’ll want to come inside eventual. And I’ll not stop him. And you’ll not stop him neither.”
She enjoys her new position, anybody can see that. It’s easy to picture her leading him down the passages and into the courts, choosing the meanest of the doors to knock on, pointing out all the things that are filthy and wrong, speaking to the bodies for him and getting them to show him their children, and their hips and their sores. Oh aye, all that would come to her like breathing. But what it takes a sister to see—and what I can’t keep my eyes off once I’ve seen it—is what she’s doing her best to hide: her love illness.
For it’s ill she is. Ill and pure struck-blind. The moments when he needs her and wants her—“Precious moments,” she calls them—these moments are when she’s fullest and happy, and she wishes them to go on and on into forever, for she doesn’t want to go back to being empty of him. She wants him to be unable to do without her. And he leads her to believe this is so. Just by looking at her a certain