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