This stirs up such laughter in the crowd that Janey is forced to hesitate before speaking her next line. “Come, come,” she says once there’s quiet, and the two set off into their theatricals, speeching off and casting their limbs about. I don’t know if it’s the lush or the heat of the room, but I’m finding it hard to stay with the meaning of it. My head pounds. I feel all face. I look around to see if anyone has noticed the wrong with me. Nim, I see, is stood by the door. That’s where I must go.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” I says as I make my way down the line.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Burns,” Nim says when I reach her. She gestures into the room to remind me of what I’ll miss if I leave. I turn back to see Tussy striking a blow at a figure wrapped in the drapes, and now Karl spinning out from behind them and falling onto the floor.
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