The color runs up Jenny’s neck. She lets out a little laugh, glances at the clock and now down at her hem. “A drink, Lizzie?”
“Aye, I’ll have a nip, if it’s going.” To put me into the spirits.
Nim comes to me with a half-measure. She refuses me her eyes when she hands me the glass; keeps them low on the floor.
“Thanks, Nim,” I says, loud and clear so I’m heard. “You’re awful good.”
Her mouth twitches. Someone coughs. She scuttles back to the tray and sets about readying the Girls’ tea. Sat in the chair closest to her is Frederick. I watch for his behavior, but in actual fact, he bare notices her. More than that, he ignores her. I’d even say rude, if I didn’t know Frederick to be so particular about his graces.
From his royal spot on the settee, Karl proposes us. “To Frederick and Lizzie,” he says. “After the darkness of Manchester, may you find happiness and rest here in London.”
Tussy rummages in a drawer and comes out with two wrapped gifts. Frederick is served first: a red neckerchief. He ties it on and marches up and down and gives a blast of the “Marseillaise,” and everyone laughs and claps. Mine is a jewelry box, and inside, lying on a bed of velvet, a silver thimble and a pin with a bit of thread already fed into it. I hold up the needle between my fingers, and they all brim over.
Says Karl between his guffaws: “The revolutionary finally settles down to her fancywork!”
I make as if to pour my drink into the thimble. “It’ll come in handy for measuring my poteen.” And that—easy as falling off a chair—brings the house down.
When the laughter drains, the room settles into a tired silence. The tick of the clock. The sucking at glasses.
“Uncle Frederick,” says Janey after a time, “have you finished your history of Ireland?”
This gets Tussy excited. “Oh yes, Uncle Angel, when do we get to read it?”
“Oh, oh,” says Frederick, trifling with a corner of his jacket and frowning. “Thank you for your interest, my dear children, but I’m afraid I’ve been distracted of late. It’s all about France now.”
“Hmm,” gurgles Karl, “indeed. And speaking of that damned place, we need to take a clear position on the situation. Our initial support of Prussia is proving quite an embarrassment—”
“Karl, please,” Jenny interrupts. “Can’t you leave this outside talk until you are actually outside?”
Karl puts his hands up in surrender.
Tussy giggles.
Jenny catches my eye and gestures at the tray. “Lizzie, there is some tart here,” she says. “But if you are hungry for something more filling, I could have Nim fix you up some cold cuts.”
I shake my head, perhaps a little too fierce. “Please don’t go to any trouble. We ate on the train.”
Frederick, always liable for a man-faint if he doesn’t have his in-betweens, looks about to contradict me, but he sees the arrangement of my face and checks himself. “I fear Lizzie is getting restless. She is anxious to see the house. I promised to bring her to see it today.” He looks at Karl, as if begging leave.
Karl waves a woman’s wave. “Go on, Frederick. Show Lizzie your new home. We’ll have time to catch up later.”
While I’m putting my coat and bonnet back on, Jenny tells me what she’s done to the house. She calls my attention to certain arrangements and wonders if I’d like them altered.
“When I see them, I’ll tell you, Jenny,” I says. “You’ll be the first to know.”
The air outside runs into me, a respite. I wouldn’t mind walking the twenty-two minutes. “Will we foot it?” I says, thinking Frederick is beside me, but when I turn, I see he’s clean gone. “Frederick?”
Of a sudden, I feel him behind me, and then I see only black.
“This way it will be an even bigger surprise!” he says, bringing forth more laughter and clapping from the family gathered on the threshold, and though I notice I’m allowing it to happen, I do say to myself, I says, “Can’t I just see the blessed thing? Must it be one of their games?”
He’s gone and put his new neckerchief over my face as a blindfold.
III. A Resting Place
A donkey’s age, it takes him, to get the wretched thing off. Two, four, six taps of my boot and still he’s behind me, fighting with the knot.
“What’s keeping you?” I says.
“Patience, Lizzie,” he says, and I know it’d be no use telling him again, at this late stage, that his time in Manchester has turned him into a northern stumpole.
I feel him wiggle his finger underneath the neckerchief; now I hear him bite into it and grind it between his ivories. The cotton presses tight against my nose, which tells me it’s not really new, this rag. It’s one of the old ones from the Club, still smelling of cigars and bear’s grease.
With a last wet groan, he gets it free. A curved terrace of houses—dream palaces—unrolls itself in front of me.
“Primrose Hill,” he says, and turns me round to face the hill of grass that rises out of the ground where the terrace ends on the opposite side of the road.
“Are those sheep?” I says.
“And this one”—he turns me again, this time to meet a giant face of plaster and brick—“is ours.”
I have to creak my neck back to see to the top of it. The brightness of the day gleams up its windows. Three floors. Iron railings. An area. A basement.
“Well?” he says.
My heart feels faint, which can happen when you make the acquaintance of a real future to replace the what-might-be.
“Have you nothing to say? Hot and cold water all the way up!”
Dazed by light feeling, I clutch at my throat and dither about stepping over the doorsill. “Bless and save us, Frederick, I don’t know. It’s awful grand.”
As I make my way around—the green room already filled with flower and plant, the laundry room fit for an army, the cloakroom with hooks for a hundred, the cellar bigger than the one I myself was reared in—I can’t help holding on to the walls and the tables to keep myself on end. I keep expecting a steadying hand from Frederick, but it doesn’t come. Something isn’t right with him. A flash temper has come over him. When I point something out, he makes sure to bid his interest the other way. When I open a door on the left, he opens one on the right. When I go to look at a wardrobe, he goes to look at a lamp.
“She’s done a fine job,” I says. “A fine job.”
But he doesn’t answer. It must be that he doesn’t like what she’s done.
And, to be honest, I can see why.
In her book, there’s naught worse than a new house that looks new. She said so just now before we left. “So long as the thirst for novelty exists independently of all aesthetic considerations,” she went, “the aim of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham will be to produce objects which shall always appear new. And, Lizzie, is there anything more depressing than that luster of newness?”
And I went to myself, “Aye, the smell of decay,” and took her attitude for a London attitude, set square against sense. But what do I know? She’s the baroness and knows better about the styles. (How she ended up with a cruster like Karl is anyone’s wager. He must have thought that, because her family tree has as many rebels as it does nobles, she’d have the right opinions about everything, already there in her blood. And she must have thought, well, she must have thought he was intellectual and clever, the kind of man that’ll win