December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  One of them opens the door, her hair standing on end, like she’s just shaken it from a sack. There’s a baby suckling at her breast.

  ‘I’m the new girl,’ I say and she backs away from the door and starts back up the stairs, leaving me standing there, clutching my case, looking around at the cold, musty interior.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she says, half waving her hand and she’s gone, the door to her room slamming, making me jump.

  There’s a smell of burnt fat as I climb the creaky stairs. Three steps have boards almost fully missing and the rest look like they could go at any second. All the doors are shut upstairs except for one tiny room. It has a single bed with a thin, stripy mattress, a big saggy hole in the middle, old piss stains circling out from it. There’s no pillow.

  I put my case on the bed where the pillow should be and I lie on the dirty mattress. After a while I close my eyes and with my coat still on, I drift into a cloudy sleep, the first proper rest I’ve had since I left Ireland. I don’t wake till near lunch time, when the girl with the scraggly hair is back standing in the doorway, the baby still in her arm, this time sleeping.

  ‘You’ve to go to work now,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’ I ask and she looks annoyed with me, as if she doesn’t have time to be dealing with me at all.

  ‘Madame Camille won’t see you today, but you can go in and meet the house madam. She’ll tell you what to do.’

  She gives me the address of the kip-house and before I leave she tells me her name is Elizabeth, but I can call her Lizzie. ‘There’s a spare pillow and blankets in my room that you can have until Madame Camille buys you your own,’ she says. ‘And if you run away and take the sheets with you, I’ll hunt you down and gouge your eyes out.’

  She looks fierce, her pupils dilating as she speaks.

  I think I’m going to like her.

  The working house is bigger than our terraced boarding house. It has a large bay window facing the street, fancy brickwork and a small garden with a path up to the front door. The difference inside is stark. There are candles everywhere, and glasses, abandoned, half filled with drink. There’s shimmery satin hanging down from the ceiling, making private nooks and crannies. Everywhere I look there’s some sort of place to lie or sit or lean.

  The house madam is made up in powder and rouge, but it’s heavier than Madame Camille’s, like she doesn’t know how to put it on right. She puts me to sweeping and washing the floor straightaway and tells me the door and windows need doing too.

  ‘We run a tight ship here,’ she says, trying to sound exactly like Madame Camille. ‘You’ll do as I tell you. I’ll not have Madame Camille dropping by here and having my guts for garters.’

  I think it’s a funny phrase, because just as she says it a girl appears in a chemise and stockings, garters wrapped around her thin thighs.

  The curtains on every window are closed; thick velvet blocking out the light, making it feel like night time every minute of the day.

  For the rest of the afternoon I work, wiping down the linoleum floors, washing and polishing the front door, cleaning the windows, fetching hot buckets of water and doing my best to keep out of the way of the customers that come through the door.

  If any look at me, I turn away, squeezing the mop, and rubbing even harder at the surface I’m washing. I’m embarrassed to be seen here, that they think I’m like them, a fallen woman, filled right up with shame.

  In the day, the customers are city gents and merchants, business men with grand suits and long, bushy moustaches. I hear them pawing at the women and slapping them round a bit. One of the girls tell me that the men are all married and have houses in the country, some have big townhouses in Kensington and Mayfair.

  I think about their wives with their fancy furs and their airs and graces and I realise that things are always more complicated then they appear. Me and Nora always thought the ladies had the grand life. But what’s grand about your husband going and pawing up a working girl and bringing himself home to you?

  As the evening wears on, the factory workers come in, stacked with drink from the pub and feeling brave. They’re usually quick, the girls tell me; tired and hungry after a long day, they don’t stick around afterwards.

  The girls dress their own beds, but in between customers I help with whatever they need, hauling down laundry for the cart and fetching new linens if they need them. I realise that I’m trying to learn, for when it’s my time.

  What I am learning is that whiskey helps. If the customer is too stingy to buy it for you, you can buy it for yourself and the house madam writes it down in a big ledger and it’s taken out of your wages.

  No one likes the house madam because she’s Madame Camille’s eyes and ears - she reports everything to her. I see one girl claim that whiskey has been added to her tab, drinks she never had, but as I watch them, I think all the girls are drunk; they’ve lost count of the whiskeys they’ve had and it’s nothing to do with the house madam’s accounting skills at all.

  Then there’s a lull. A bit of quiet, and some of the girls go out on to the street and this is the time where I give everything another good wipe down, the floors, the low coffee tables, the stands where the lamps and pot plants are, the trays with all the glasses. Slowly the girls trickle back in, their customers enticed and the house madam starts teaching me how to host and how to offer and serve drinks. She tells me I’m a natural - I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing but it’s nice to get a compliment all the same.

  Just before midnight, she tells me I can go and I feel relieved to get out of the kip house, away from its atmosphere of drink and lust, of cigarette smoke and musk. The streets are quiet as I walk, my boots clip clapping on the stones.

  I watch everyone as they pass, servant girls and their beaus, men on their bicycles, shop workers finished their shifts. I think about the families they’re going home to, their warm dinners and fireside naps, an evening of reading, their dignity and ethics all to themselves.

  And here am I, walking home to my first night in a house of prostitutes, their poor children whimpering in raggedy beds, not knowing yet about the ways of the world around them. I feel very sorry for myself indeed. But I don’t cry.

  Because, it seems, I have no tears left.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HENRY

  Half way between Oxford and Liverpool, while Henry and Arthur were playing cards at their table on the train, looking out at the rushing greenery, waiting each other’s turn, their father Seymour, had a stroke. As one blood vessel after another burst, he fell to the ground and died on the carpet beside his bed, his mouth open, his hands clenched at his head, his last words unheard in the gloom of his room.

  Mrs Johansson found him that evening, a coldness already swept through his body, his pallor pale.

  When Henry and Arthur climbed off the steamer at Drogheda they knew immediately that their father was dead by the small cortege that had come to meet them. Mrs Johansson, dressed in black, holding a white rose; the footman; and Seymour’s elder brother, Edward, old now, his skin so sagged he could hide marbles in it.

  Shaking her head, Mrs Johansson clutched the boys and Henry was shocked at how Arthur broke down, giant sobs retching from his throat, openly crying and unable to contain himself.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Mrs Johansson.

  ‘We didn’t get to say goodbye,’ said Arthur.

  They were silent in the carriage, only Mrs Johansson’s plans for the funeral puncturing the quiet. They were expecting huge numbers and they would have to be catered for. Everyone thought it was a tragedy that the boys were travelling and no one able to tell them.

  ‘But it was a blessing that you had already decided to come home. Otherwise we would be waiting longer. Just a pity it was too late,’ said Mrs Johansson, sniffing.

  Henry wondered if he had sensed that something would happen to their father. Was that why he had made the decision to come home, even though Mrs Johansson had only written of t
heir father having a bad cold?

  The carriage shook from side to side, laden down with its passengers, the two horses straining to pull it up the incline at Townley Hall. As they turned into the gates at Brabazon House, his Uncle Edward leaned forward, his blue eyes glowing in the light and whispered, ‘It’s your time now. Good luck, Henry.’

  With the shock of the news, it had not yet occurred to Henry what his father’s death really meant. Everything was now his; all decisions from here on in were his and his alone to make. The funeral, the burial, the send-off. The estate. The farms. The tenants. He was in charge, and there would be no going back to London. That was clear.

  A single white rose hung from the pier at Brabazon Estate, identical to the one Mrs Johansson clasped in her gloved hands.

  ‘The first rose was taken from the gate,’ she said, pursing her lips together. ‘I mean what class of tenant would do that, steal a funeral rose, for God’s sake?’

  Henry looked at the house as they drove up to the winding driveway. The sky was a watery December blue, wisps of white clouds high over Brabazon’s roof.

  Horses and carriages, with footmen at their heads, were lined up outside the house. The front doors were wide open, a trail of people coming in and out. There were faces he recognised and faces he didn’t.

  Arthur stepped out of the carriage and ran through the doors. He raced up the stairs to his father’s bedroom, where Seymour was laid out, looking as though he were asleep. Stepping aside, the handful of mourners who were in the room looked sorry, as Arthur broke down sobbing and threw his body across the coffin.

  Henry stood at the door before entering the room quietly. He wished his brother would try to hold it together.

  His father looked a bit thinner laid out, but he looked like himself all the same - there was that to be grateful for. He thought of the last time he had seen him, hunched over his desk, barely looking up as Henry bid his farewell. Would it have been such a burden for him to shake hands, to embrace him, to give his son a send-off?

  Arthur’s tears were getting worse. Henry placed a hand on his back and gently pulled him back from the coffin.

  ‘Arthur,’ said Henry, turning him to look at his face. But what could he say? No words could comfort him or bring their father back. He gripped his brother in a hug as the mourners left the room and closed the bedroom door quietly behind them.

  Henry felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Guilt that he didn’t feel the same upset as Arthur. Guilt that he felt angry about the weight that was now on his shoulders. Arthur would go back to university, finish his degree and do whatever the bloody hell he wanted. It was Henry who would be left at Brabazon, carrying on the work of his father and his father before him.

  He felt angry about that. He felt angry and sad and frustrated that the day he had always known would come was here so soon.

  Damn Seymour. Damn him to hell anyway.

  * * *

  The funeral week passed in a blur. When Henry laid his head to rest at night, faces flashed before him. He was exhausted from the journey home and from the shock of his father’s death. He was tired of holding everything together, making decisions, and answering all the questions that people were asking him. Particularly Mrs Johansson; she had gone from being a matronly mother figure to a woman he dreaded seeing approach. She would do nothing without his permission. It was tiresome.

  Arthur had gone from long outbursts of crying to sitting, white faced among the mourners, a glass of whiskey in his hand. Henry knew he was numbing his feelings with alcohol, but at least it was occupying him. He couldn’t cope with his dramatics any longer, it was adding more stress to the whole blasted thing.

  Amelia Aherne had appeared in the great room among the crowds, holding out her arms and taking his cheek to kiss it, her perfume wafting up his nose and drawing him right back to another time. Her smell was a comfort and he wished that he could take her away and lay with her on a bed and just hold her in the quiet.

  On the day of the funeral, cold showery clouds threw sleet down in angles, black umbrellas floating like lily pads on the sea of bowed heads.

  Arthur had howled before they closed the coffin, draping his body across his father’s, his shoulders shaking, his grief echoing through the house. Henry comforted him, before pulling him away so that they could get to the business of burying their father. He wondered if he should ask the doctor for something to give to Arthur, a tranquilliser, to help him.

  They followed the funeral hearse on foot, walking down the avenue which led to the church, the same church they had walked to when their mother was buried. Then, he had clutched his father’s hand and felt sad, looking around at the rows and rows of black trousers walking behind them. Now, he had no one to hold and felt nothing of the sadness he had felt then. He was empty, nothing.

  After the service, they stood around the grave and watched as his father was lowered into the ground, the ropes inching precariously till they reached the clawed-out earth. Henry thought not of his father, but of his mother, that this was the nearest he had come to her since. He wondered what was left of her, if he dropped down and dug through the earth with his fingers, could he touch her, smell her, feel her dust?

  He stayed at the grave after everyone had gone, asking to be left alone for just a time. He told Arthur and his uncle Edward to go ahead, to send the carriage back for him. He needed a break from the sandwiches, from the handshaking, the mourning.

  When the graveyard had cleared he bent and picked up some of the clay from the mound at the grave. He put it in his pocket, feeling the earth filter through his fingers. He was glad that it was raining. Laying his father to rest in the sunshine would not have felt right.

  He stood, letting down the umbrella so that he could feel the sleet on his face. It fell past his head, down his neck, reaching the back of his shoulders, tiny, icy daggers on his skin. He felt like he should suffer, that he should, in some way, feel physical pain. .

  When there were no more thoughts in his head, he turned and walked slowly from the grave, picturing his father, still sleeping in the box, now scattered with earth. He was leaving him behind, all on his own, not a thing he could do for him any longer.

  As he came to the front of the graveyard, the woods in front of him, he saw a man approach out of the corner of his eye. He was small and elderly with a flat cap on his head.

  ‘Grand day,’ said the man, stopping to talk.

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry, not wishing to engage.

  ‘It’s not what he deserved,’ said the man, peering at Henry through white bushy eyebrows.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Henry, unsure of what the man meant.

  ‘To go like that, peacefully.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Henry again.

  ‘He should have got what Montgomery got.’ The man looked at Henry and drew his forefinger across his wrinkled throat, dragging it slowly and deliberately and smiling. He cackled out his gubby mouth and shuffled past Henry, his right leg dragging a little, forcing him into a short hop each step he took.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Henry shouted after him, the man’s gesture now dawning on him for the insult it was.

  ‘Oh, surely I do,’ said the man, not looking back. ‘And I hope you’re not as big a bastard as your father.’

  Quelling the urge to run after the man and choke him from behind, Henry crossed the road and took off walking into the woods. The tenantry could insult him all they wanted. But he would prove in his own way, that he was not his father.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MOLLY

  I was getting bigger. My stomach was hard and round and I could feel him squirming, moving up under my ribs. I had to let out my dress to allow for my big front. Things that I’d never given a second thought to before, like bending down to sweep or reaching to pull my stockings on, became difficult.

  Soon the dress I had would be no good. Elizabeth said she had a smock dress that would do me, it belonged to one of the girls when they had come in. Now i
f they got in the family way, they were seen to quickly. Very sore and tender afterwards she said, but it got the job done.

  I had started to get used to the kip house. The shock at the start with the noises coming from the rooms and the girls all spilling out of their chemises, white flesh everywhere, didn’t bother me so much now. I just got on with what I had to do, cleaning and hosting, topping up the drinks, going out to get cigarettes or to the chemist or the confectionery.

  I got into a routine, the same as when I was in the big townhouse. I was useful and strong and I tried not to let my belly get in the way.

  There were things I was seeing that I didn’t like though. Things that I thought, if that happened to me, I’m not sure what I’d do. I was learning that Madame Camille made out that she was the best in the business, that her girls were safe and well looked after, but in a kip house, things happened and there was nothing Madame Camille and her powdered face could do about it.

  Some of the men were rough, too rough and you’d hear the girl call out for you and you’d have to come running because he might have her in a chokehold or have given her such a box in the eye that would mean she wouldn’t be good for a week. There were some nasty men who liked horrible things and they hurt the girls. They were hard to spot, because they looked normal, but they weren’t, not in the head.

  One Tuesday morning, one of the girls called me into the room. She told me she was in a bad way and asked me would I go to the pharmacist for her, to old Joe, who knew the girls and made up poultices and powders and ointments for them, to help. She showed me her most intimate herself, just a glance and I recoiled when I saw what was there.

  ‘Angela,’ I said. It wasn’t her real name either, but she had blonde hair and when she was young everyone said she looked like an angel. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ she said. ‘It won’t heal. I have to get on with it. Ask Joe for the best he’s got, the strongest stuff. Here’s the money.’