Читать книгу Mrs. Engels - Gavin McCrea - Страница 10
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V. Let Us Hear
I lie under, his whiskers like a broom of twigs and stinking of liquor, till I’ve come to terms with the dark and my situation in it. “Angels of grace, defend us,” I says, “what bloody time is it?”
Our first p.m. in the new house and Frederick went out to the Club to celebrate. “Karl is insisting,” he said. “There are some people he wants me to meet. I’ll be back before ten.” At midnight and no sign of him, I went to bed. Alone among the unfamiliar walls, I slept in a state close to waking. Now—some unholy hour—the weight of man collapses onto me. When God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers.
“My Lizzichen,” he moans, grappling for a grope through sheet and dress, “forgive me, but I’m in need.”
“You rotten scoundrel,” I says, using my elbows against him. “Get you to your own chambers.”
“Come now, mein Liebling, show some mercy.”
“I’ll show you more than mercy, Frederick Engels, now skedaddle. Away with you. Can’t I put my head down a minute?”
He kneels over me and, mocking-like, clasps his hands together as if to beg. “Have pity on a rogue,” he says. “Am I not good to you?” he says. “Is a moment of comfort too much to ask?” he says, and other such phrases that he thinks will wheedle him in.
“Mary Mother, give me patience.” I yank up the linen to stole myself. Knowing neither my own forces nor the degree of his impairment, this sends him rolling—thump!—onto the carpet. I sit up and hold my breath. Rain is falling outside and there’s a barking of animals off and yonder. Bellows of laughter rise up from under the bed. I fall back and sigh.
Boys kept like monks by their mothers go one of two ways: they turn womanly or they turn wild. Frederick’s rearing among the Calvins—kept behind curtains drawn tight and doors too thick for the world’s vices to get in—has done naught for him but disease his head with what it’s been deprived of, and now look at him: single-minded and seeing no ends that aren’t low. He keeps pictures. He makes foreign requests. It’s not always the Council he runs off to.
After some scratching about and some fumbling, there’s a striking at lucifers and the lamp flares up. I cover my eyes from the sudden light. “Still in fit shape, I think you’ll agree,” he says. I see, when I’ve come to terms with it, that he has his clothes off and is showing himself. He clasps his hands behind his neck, which makes the skin run up over his bones and the hair jump out from under his arms. He holds this pose as long as the lush in his veins allows it. Now he wobbles and, giggling like a little girl, staggers over to lean on the wall. The lamp shines hard against him.
Growing up, no one sits down and tells you what the man’s bit is going to look like. Knowledge is got from the snatches you catch. The hole in your father’s combinations. The neighbor man washing at the pump. The surge in the gent’s breeches on the bus. The Jew Beloff pissing in the bucket. Frederick’s is like none of those. In its vigors, it points up and a bit to the side. Its cover goes all the way over the bell and bunches at the end like a pastry twist. Before he does anything, he spits on his hand and peels this back. Then you know he’s right and ready.
Personal, I have my limits with it. There’s things I’ll not be brought to do. I’ll maw it: no harm in that if he doesn’t shove too. And I’ll let him turn me over: let go of your vanities and there’s pleasure to be got there. But the hooer’s trick, that’s crossing the pale. What’s the draw of an act so cruddy? And what’s the purpose, anyhows, when the normal carriage road has been clear of courses these past twenty years? “Keep dreaming, General,” is what I says whenever he starts to rub up that way. “Not for love nor lush.”
Tonight, though, he wants the usual, and I don’t quarrel with that. I bring my hands down his back and put them on his arse, his little arse that hasn’t dropped with the years but has stayed upwise and firm. Where it meets the leg is like the underneath of swollen mammies, and when he pushes, its sides dip in to make dishes smooth enough for your morning milk. It turns heads, the round of it under his breeches. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. When it’s late in the parlor and hot with bodies, and when he himself is sticky from all the hosting, he sometimes takes off his coat and turns to throw it somewhere; that’s when they nab their peek.
He puts his arms under my knees and bends my pins over them. I know he’d like them hooked over his shoulders—my ankles clutching his neck, my toes taking hold of his hair so sleek, his whiskers tickling skin that usual only feels the itch of a stocking—but I’m no longer the young thing I once was, and neither is he, though he likes to think his physical senses are as hale today as when he first fetched a lass.
His eyes are open. He doesn’t ever close them doing it. He likes to pin you, pierce you through. I swear with those eyes he’d stare into naught and find something. Even when he’s lushed they stay clear and bright, and seem to let you into his head, though this can only be a fancy, for afterwards there remains the mystery of what he thinks when he gets on top of you, whether it’s dark or light or what.
I begin to feel it, the quiver down in my cunny, but I’ve to conjure it up if I don’t want it to fade, the last lick of oil in a lamp. I help it with my hand like he himself has taught me—a French recipe—and I let out a gasp. Reading this a sign, he comes down bricks on me.
If he says anything now, dear Jesus, I’ll credit it.
There’s never been anyone like him.
It’s rare I sleep the whole night when he stays. I go off easy enough, but am woken early by his kicking. For some reason, I can’t bear to roll over and see him there grunting and happy. There’s others, I’m sure, who lie and watch for the sun to rise up out of him. He’ll not get that from me. I stay with my back turned.
In actual fact I ought be up already, doing the round. The maid doesn’t get here till Sunday and I’ve to look after everything myself. The pulling back of the blinds and curtains. The opening of the shutters. The drawing up of the kitchen fire and the polishing of the range. The checking of the boiler. The putting on of the kettle. The cleaning of the boots and the knives. Then the other fires. And the hearth rug. And the grate. Then the rubbing of the furniture. Then the washing of the mantelpiece and ledges. Then the dusting of the ornaments. Then the scattering of the tea leaves and the sweeping of them up. So many things, and for every one a thought. So many thoughts at a time, for so many things, it’s hard to know the ones you ought be hearkening to. By thinking you’re forever running behindhand you make things the master of you.
The worst, though, will be the answering of the door. I can already see it in their faces: “Why her?” The butcher boy, the shop girl, the milkmaid, the grocer, the letter carrier: “Can’t see what makes her stand out.” Every day of every week, somebody, some way: “If she can do it, any old beggar can.”
I’ll try to turn blind from it. I’ll pass them my coins and tell them my orders and make as if I’ve not remarked a thing. But afterwards, I know, I’ll be left with something inside, a prickling feeling like a hair in my collar or a pea in my bodice; a reminder of the fact that, when it comes to my hike to the higher caste, there’s no getting away from the chance of it. Would I know what I know, would I have done what I’ve done, would I be here today, swelling it up, if I’d gone down different alleys, taken up with other souls?
Fortune first spins her wheel in my favor in the summer of forty-two. It’s the summer the wages are cut and the mills are turned out. The summer the coalpits are shut and the boiler plugs are pulled and the workers gather and the riots flare and the soldiers march. And while all this is happening I’m at home, locked into the basement with Mary. Though I don’t know it yet, though it will take me time to understand, my being here, inside away from it all—my sitting it out—will be the chancest thing I ever do.
I want to join in. There’s rebellion enough in my heart to spark a hundred rallies. But Mary has other plans for me.
“If you go out that door,” she says, “you’ll not be getting back in.”
“Well, maybe I won’t want to get back in.”
“You want to be a corner girl, is that it? You want to be a loafer and a beggar till you die? Go out there now and that’s what you’ll be, and that’s what you’ll stay. If anyone from the mill sees you with that crowd, or even a girl who looks like you, you’ll have no hope of a situation when the mill opens again, no hope in hell. And I’ll not support you. I’m over with looking after you and being your mother.”
She touches something with that, the proud bone in me. With Mam passed over, and now Daddy at the workhouse, I’ve come to depend on Mary for what I can’t beget on my own, and though I’m grateful for her good offices and will live to thank her for them, they come at a dear cost.
“You want me to be a knobstick, is that it? You’re telling me to break the strike?”
“I’m telling you to pull your weight. When a girl gets to fifteen, she ought know how to walk for herself and not tug on other people’s sleeves.”
“The neighbors will make it hard for us. They’ll shut us out.”
“Let the neighbors act for themselves. They can throw stones at us, for all I’ll cry, as long as we can feed ourselves.”
“Who wants to work in the mill anyhows. It’s the mill is keeping us down. It’s the mill that’s killing us.”
“Fine sentiments, sister lady, but I hate to tell you, it’s the clemming that’s killing you right now, and unless you find yourself a swell and marry up quick, it’s the mill or a pauper’s grave for you.”
And true enough, it’s the hunger that eventual brings me round. Weeks, the mills stay closed, the Ermen & Engels the same as the rest, and without Mary’s wage, we’re brought to winking distance of the workhouse ourselves. I feel I’d like to cry, only I don’t have the forces, and I know then I’m in the last ditch and sinking, for I’d like to and I can’t. And in that moment I know that when the gates of the Ermen & Engels are thrown back, I’ll be there in the horde, elbowing and stepping on heads to get to the front.
An animal, that’s what chance makes of me.
On my first day, the girls are already talking about the owner’s son. “Soon he’ll be coming,” they says to each other, for there isn’t much else to amuse them in the yard. “Soon he’ll be coming from Germany to learn the strings, and one day he’ll be the boss man himself.” And they’re excited about this idea. They can’t wait to slap an eye on him, for they’ve heard he’s quite the looker.
They haven’t a good head between them. Most of them are yet young like myself, some of them well under the age, and every morning that he doesn’t appear makes the next morning a thing for them to look forward to. Me, I dread the next morning as a plague, for it only promises more of the same: a job that lays you low and saps you. And I can’t picture how the owner’s son, however dapper, could change it.
I’m unhappy, but more than that, I’m raging. In the place bare a month and I’m already having urges. To scream and shout. To climb on top of the yard wall, and from there to get onto the roof so there’d be no one in Manchester who didn’t hear me. But in actual fact, I do what I’m told. I stay quiet, just as Mary has warned me, and don’t let tell of my affairs. I keep my opinions and my illnesses hidden. I put a rag over my mouth to keep from coughing. And I work hard, harder than I’ve ever worked at anything before, by putting my cholers into it.
“The strikes came at a good time,” we’re told at assembly one morning. “The strikes came at a good time for you.” The mill has bought new machines, the latest crop of mules that need but a fraction of the hands to work. They were planning to let go of the people they no longer needed, given the advances. But—luck and behold—the job was done for them, the troublemakers weeded out natural. Leaving us, the new, leaner, better Ermen & Engels family to march with the banner.
Mary is thankful to be given one of the new mules. I think better of reminding her of the people her mule is replacing, people she knew and declared to care for; or of the meanness of her new wage, lower than what they were giving her before. I think better of it because she knows these things well and is choosing not to give them their proper weight, for if she did, they’d crush her.
I’m to follow her on the floor, pick up the new ways, and then take over a mule of my own. “Be fast,” she says to me. “Be fast and you’ll be seen, and you’ll move up,” for it’s a fine spinner she wants us to be, a spinner of the Diamond Thread, which she believes to be a situation that can’t be robbed by the machines or by the children. “If we don’t learn the fine spinning,” she says, “we’ll go the same way as the men. Out on our backs and not a situation in Manchester to be had.”
Though it makes me bitter to do it, I give in and learn, and what I do well I try to do better and faster, for that’s the way to beat the weariness and to sleep at night. I come early and leave late. I join in the talk in the yard. I spend my Sundays with the girls in the halls and the fairs. And when the time comes, in spite of myself, I have to own that he’s handsome.
He holds himself slim and erect, and has a good forehead, and—still so young—all the color is yet in his hair. At assembly he talks quick and short, ashamed, it seems, about the foreign in his patter. He’s going to make a tour, he says, and he promises to get to know each and every one of us, which makes everybody giddy. Except Mary. It makes her regular cross. “When he comes,” she says, “keep at it and put on you don’t even see him. The last thing he wants is a mill full of girls losing the run of themselves.”
Of course, it’s herself, then, who goes and loses herself entire.
His laughter comes into the room before he does, and it’s catching. “Lethal as the consumption,” Mary will say later.
“My lucky day!” he belts from the doorway, stretching out his arms to get the full lung into it. He looks around. Even from a distance I can see his eyes take in the world and see to the bottom of things, and though he keeps his face, I know he’s disappointed by us. Fine lookers between us, there aren’t many. There’s only Adele in the carding room, but she’s got very thin and looks to be down with something serious. And Maggie two rows up, I suppose, if that’s your dish of tea.
As he moves around, he waves his hand in front of his face to keep off the dust, and I’d like to tell him it’s a useless exercise, all that waving, for it only wafts the flyings in, but of course I keep my trap shut. He’s nowhere near me yet anyhows, and I don’t know if he’ll even get close, for time’s ticking on and work hasn’t been takenup proper, and he’s stopping at every girl and asking them questions—about themselves and where they’re from and their work and how they’re finding it—and he doesn’t seem to be putting on, he appears sincere enough and waits for their answers, though the bulk of them can only stretch to a blush and a curtsy.
Soon Mr. Ermen loses patience and hurries him on—something about having to finish the tour before Christmas—and then all he can spare is a flash of his whites as he passes. He doesn’t even stretch that far with me, but strolls by without so much as a glance. I see his cheek out of the side of my eye: skin like the back of a babby. He goes past Lydia, too, without a look, I’m glad to see. And Mary. And soon all there’s left of him is his little arse, swaggering away out of our lives.
Only what happens then is, he nigh on catches his side against a wheel. Mary rushes over to steady him, for she’s the closest. She takes tight of his arm and pulls him away from the danger, and while he’s still reeling in his boots, heedless to what’s happening to him, she says to his face a curse in the Irish, something our mother used to say when we were being hazards to ourselves.
The room catches its breath. Speaking out of turn costs you sixpence of your wage, and that’s on an ordinary day. Mr. Ermen makes for Mary and looks ready to handle her, but Frederick, now recovered, waves him away and tells him not to be so jumpy. Can’t he see this woman has saved him from an injury? Then, God bless him, he asks her to repeat what she said, for he loves a joke.
“Let us hear it,” he says.
She wipes her brow and looks about at all the faces, and in that moment I wish her looks were doing her better justice, for she’s recent taken on a touch of jaundice and isn’t as flush as God wants her.
“Come on, do share,” he says, and folds his arms across like someone biding to be impressed.
Mary coughs. “It’s only something Mammy used to say when we were little.”
There’s a shuffle of feet as we prepare for the worst.
“Go on,” he says, not annoyed but eager-like, fain to be on the inside of things.
“She used to say it when she’d see us knocking over things,” she says, and bites her lip and looks down.
He waits for her to look up again before addressing her. “Your accent, young lady,” he says, “is most unusual,” and he asks her where it’s from. She says it’s from Manchester, like herself, but the Irish part. Then he asks was it the Irish-Celtic her mother spoke when she scolded her.
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 way he leads her down that lane—she herself tells me it’s all in his eyes—and she forgets her own person there, gets lost in the maze of his possibilities.
She falls, just as he does, for a promise.
Then comes the night he comes inside and stays for tea. He brings pies and ale, too much for the three of us, so he orders the neighbors out from behind the curtain and divides it all up. I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking, Who in God’s name does he think he is?
He gets the good chair, and the best cup and plate, and a knife and a fork, and everybody watches how he uses them, on a pie. No one dares talk, so he has to do the talking himself, though he leans on Mary for help, there being so much in what he says that’s hard to get. He tells us many things, gossip most of it, about the foremen in the mill and their romances, and the practical jokes he likes to play on Mr. Ermen. And a whole other heap, too, about growing up in Germany among the Calvins, and hating it because the Calvins credit that all time is God’s time and wasting a minute is a sin, and life isn’t meant for enjoying but for working only.
As for working, he hates his situation at the mill. He hates the position it puts him in, up there on a pillar, for he’s happier down here with us lot. But he judges it good for himself also. “Because Germans of my particular caste know too little of the real world. It’s an education of sorts, and will do me good.”
What he’s learnt so far—and he swears to learn more before he leaves for Germany again in a year’s time—is that the workers are more human in daily life, less grasping, than the philistines who employ them, and that the philistines are interested only in money and how much it can buy them. The least grasping of all, he thinks, are the Irish. And, as far as he can see, they work just as good as the English.
Says he: “It’s true that to become something skilled like a mechanic, the Irishman would have to take on English customs, and become more English, which would be a formidable task, for he’s grown up without civilization, and is close to the Negro in this regard. But for simpler work which asks for more strength than skill, the Irishman is just as good.”
All this sort of science, he talks, and more besides, but what’s stayed with me—what my mind lingers on oftenest—is what he says about the way we talk. At this stage, we’ve all imbibed a fair amount, and most of the neighbors are already sleeping: Seamus is on the ground away from his straw, the children are in their different spots, only the wife, Nan, is still with us. It’s late, and I’m trying to signal to Mary to put an end to it. We all have work to get us up in the morning. But she’ll not break in on him, not in his stride, and what he’s saying is interesting to her, or so it seems from the way she has her chin in her hands and is staring at him, tranced.
What he’s talking about is the old language. He says he has heard it spoken in the thickest of the slums, as if this is something to wonder at. From there, he gets to talking about the English as it sounds in the Irish gob.
“I can read and understand twenty-five languages,” he says. “But I admit to being tested by the English spoken by you and your people.”
Then he gets us to say a few things, and he laughs and repeats what we say, and then we laugh.
“Grand this and grand that,” he says. “Everything is always so splendid for you! Through it all, you manage to stay so cheery and optimistic!”
At this, Nan near on falls off her stool for the laughing. “I’ll tell you something for naught, girls,” she says. “These foreigners are shocking queer!”
Then we all roll around, and Frederick does too, though he’s only allowing himself to be taken along, for he doesn’t really know what we’re laughing at.
Mary takes it on herself to let him in. “For the Irish,” she says, “grand doesn’t mean more than middling.”
Nan sees Frederick’s muddled arrangement. “We’ll need something strong to get us through this,” she says, and goes to get the bottle she keeps safe for the priest.
Meantime, Mary goes over and sits down on his lap—right there in plain sight—and scratches his whiskers and plucks his cheek. “Listen now, Foreign Man. If a thing is grand, it’s holding together. If a situation is grand, it’s tolerable good. If a body is grand, she’s alive and likely to do. No more and no less than that.”
Nan can barely get the spirit into the glasses for all her snorting and shaking. I’m just mortified and want the pageant to end so I can face the mill tomorrow with some of my honor intact. Frederick, for his part, takes to pondering what he’s been told, and when he’s over with that, he looks about our little room.
“And a house?” he says, being the type who wants to know the in-and-out of things precise. “If a house is grand?”
Mary stops smiling then, and puts down playing with his necktie, and turns to us, and takes us in—stunned-like—as if remembering us from a distant past. And then she says, “If a house is grand, my love, it comes with a rent that will leave you enough to go on.”
Now, awake, Frederick gets up and dodders about for his clothes. He’s having another cock-stand. I watch him muffle it into his breeches. In his room he keeps a tin, lozenges meant for sustaining your piss and vinegar, though I can’t see the use of them myself, it being a fine and thirsty animal God’s made of him.
“Are you well, Lizzie?”
“Well enough.”
He puts on his shirt, leaves it tucked out to hang over the stubborn article. “I’ve missed the morning. Why didn’t you wake me? I’ll have to skip my walk and work late to make up. Can you bring my meals up?” He picks up his shoes and puts his coat over his arm. “Lizzie, did you hear me?”
I nod. I heard you.
I put onto my side, haul the covers up. “Frederick?”
“Ya?”
“Jenny thinks it’s a good idea to get another maid.”
“There’s one coming on Sunday.”
“Another one, I mean, over and above her.”
“Oh? Jenny thinks so? And what do you think?”
“I think it’d be a good way to get Pumps out of Manchester.”
“Pumps?”
“My niece. Half-niece. Thomas’s eldest.”
“Oh, him.”
“Aye, him. He has her in a bad way. When she’s not locked at home looking after her nine brothers, she’s on a corner selling bloaters till all hours. It’s only a matter of time before she gets into trouble. She could come down and help me here. It’d be a chance for her.”
“Let me think about it.” He goes for the door.
“Oh, and, Frederick?”
“What now?”
“Can you open the curtain before you go?”
He looks at me like I’ve just asked to be fanned.