“I shall have to speak to—”
“Speak to whomsoever you like. Mrs. Engels is the name. One-two-two Regent’s Park Road. I’ll be here.”
Curly curtsies and goes into the back room. Pinch forces a smile into her cramped little face and goes to busy herself with the show dummies. I turn my gander to the carpet to keep from catching myself in the looking glasses that leer from every side.
“All right, Mrs. Engels,” says Curly when she comes back, “that should be fine. If you would like to come this way, we shall get you measured up.”
“That won’t be needed, I can tell you straight off what I am.”
“I do not doubt it, Mrs. Engels, but at Barrow’s we like to measure all our customers to ensure the best style and fit.”
“Listen, chicken, do you have a book to write in?”
“Of course.”
“Well, put this down.”
Flushing, she picks up her feather. Dips it.
“Bust thirty-four, hips thirty-six, length-to-foot just as you see me.” I step back to give her a full view. She frowns at me and scribbles down. “I’ll be back at five tomorrow to pick it up.”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s right.”
“Madam, I’m sorry, but we usually need at least three working days. We could have it ready by close of business Monday.”
I pick a sovereign out of my reticule and put it down on the page of the book.
She waves her hands over it as if to magic it away. “No, madam, please, you can pay when you come to collect it.”
“Take it now and be done with it. And I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”
I find a cookshop a little up the road and order a chop and a pint of Bass’s ale, and now a slice of plum pudding and a cup of ready-made coffee with cream and sugar. I take the table in the window, for I like to look out.
Passing by, streams of people with bags and boxes: gone out for a ribbon and coming home with the stock of an entire silk mercer’s. These places, they do it on the cheap and make their capital out of pressure and high prices. It takes cleverness and steel for a woman to get her fair portion.
Exhausted, I look into my cup and try not to feel like the only one fighting.
VII. The Party
When it comes to the dangers of a bit of food, the Germans can be as afraid as the English, so I eat before we leave. Spiv heats me up a kidney pudding, and I have a glass of milk with it to line the gut, and after that some cold saveloy and penny loaf.
As it happens, I needn’t have ruined my stomach, for there’s vittles enough to feed a battalion: tables of meat and fowl and fish and cheese, salvers of delicates and dumplings carried by livery servants in silk hose, all sorts of strong-tasting aliments smelling up in our noses. Who’s died? I think as I marvel the fare.
Tussy appears beside me. “I’ve been looking all over, Aunt Lizzie.”
Embarrassed to be the only one grazing, I drop my pastry roll onto the damask. “Tussy, my sweet darling.”
“Come on, I want to present you.”
She takes a glass of red from a tray, puts it in my hand, and pulls me with her into the crush. “I don’t think I have ever been in a room with so many interesting people at once,” she says.
The men have changed the usual shab-and-drab for frilled shirts. The women are in clothes above the ordinary but not showy. I feel in tune, glad to have put my foot down at the dressmaker’s. Tussy introduces me to everybody, even to those I’ve met and know.
“This is Mr. Engels’s wife, Mrs. Burns. An Irishwoman and a true proletarian.”
The strangers bow. The familiars wink and smile along. There’s more women than I expected to see. One sitting beside Karl on the couch. A pair by the window, looking foreign and bored. And by the chimneypiece, in a circle around Jenny and Janey, several gathered. Frederick—no surprise—has dug out the one with the lowest neckline.
“I’m not going to remember all these new names,” I whisper to Tussy, mortifying of the fuss.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “What’s important is that they remember yours.”
From where he’s sat, Karl makes a big act of twisting his monocle in to show he has it tied on a new ribbon. Janey’s wearing the Celtic cross I sent her. Jenny has made more of an effort than anyone else to draw attention onto herself: a feather in the hair, yards of a color not found in the wild.
“Oh, ladies, please,” she’s saying to her audience, the lush sending her voice up a pitch. “Before the illness, I had no gray hair and my teeth and figure were good. People used to class me among well-preserved women! But that’s all a thing of the past.”
Loud protests.
“Come now, ladies, I am not looking for your reassurance. I speak from a place of solemn awareness. I can see the reality. When I look in the glass now I seem to myself a kind of cross between a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus whose place is in Regent’s Park Zoo rather than among members of the Caucasian race!”
Reddening for her, I busy myself with the only bow on my bodice.
“Now, Lizzie,” she says when the required objections die down, “I’d like you to meet some extraordinary women. Mrs. Marie Goegg, chairman of the International Women’s Association. Mrs. Anna Jaclard, writer and Communist. Mrs. Yelisaveta Tomanowski, thorn in the side of every Bakuninist, real or suspected. And Mrs. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Karl’s own private reporter in Paris. Elisabeth is just here for a few days before going back into the mêlée. And what exactly are you going back to do, Elisabeth?”
“Well, I certainly won’t be sewing sandbag sacks, that is for sure!”
They cackle and clap and swat the air with their gloves and fans. I drink and look around. Nim is by the door ordering one of the hired men down to the kitchen. Her hair is looped and she’s put earrings in, but apart from that, she’s the selfsame: sensible petticoat, two pleats in her dress. It’s said she’s had many suitors and could have made a good match more than once, even with the shame of Frederick’s bastard hanging over her, but here she has stayed, devoted and constant, both when the wages have come and when they haven’t. She sees me looking and comes over.
“Your glass is empty, Mrs. Burns,” she says, taking it from me and replacing it with a full one from a passing salver.
“Thanks, Helen,” I says, for that’s her real name; I know it to be so.
“Lizzie!”—Jenny is calling—“I was just about to give the ladies a tour of the upstairs. Do join us.”
“Well, thanks, Jenny, that sounds nice, only—”
Laughing, Tussy takes my arm. “Don’t be such a bore, Mohme. Lizzie is going to stay here with me. The band is going to start soon, and the men aren’t nearly drunk enough to dance, so I’m relying on Lizzie to be my partner.”
Tussy leads me to the bay window where the band has set up. “Music, please!” she cries, and they start up. She spins me from one side of the empty floor to the other till, three songs later, I start hacking and I’ve to sit down.
After a time—no sooner do I finish one drink than another is pressured on me—the women come back from upstairs. “Finally!” says a voice, and the men approach with outstretched hands. I refuse the two who ask me up.
“Maybe the next one,” I says. “I need the rest.”
But the truer truth is, I’ve become interested in what’s happening by the second fireplace;