If the gulls cried, she said something was hurting them.
Yes, I answered, the gulls are downright sodden as up they arc but not near as high as they might if their day was sunlit, you’re right, Miss D.
The sunbeams have departed the gulls, she said. The sunbeams have abandoned the grass. The sunbeams have left the water.
But she’d never say, the light has left me. She didn’t need to say it.
I knew that one and the same thing to her were gull and grass and lake and path and her own self.
seven
and i mean in that way, in the way of being part of nature and loving and revering it, Rotha was a new kind of woman, to me, so very different from the likes of my mam, who was a lot more ordinary and I hate to say it but who I might even have felt a bit…I mean, was I? Ashamed of my mam? I mean she wasn’t ordinary as such. My mam was very intelligent. Only she ruined her intelligence or time and place ruined it for her.
Ye would think, looking at Mam with her body gone to wasteful ruin, all grey and swollen like, fed on buns and tea and gin and tobacco—paff-paff, paff-paff, always the tobacco with my mam, fumes of it, or fumes of gin…ye would think she hadn’t a sensible brain in her body, but she did. My mam could read very well, and she could certainly put two and two together, especially any time it had to do with money. She sniffed out the aims of people and she had disdain for their scheming. Everybody scheming, she used to say, yet she herself was the head schemer. Aye, if anyone went on and on about the advantages that might be gained by our family once I got in with the Wordsworths, it was my mam. Ye would think I had come across dead gentry on the highway, festooned with medallions and their pockets crammed with gold, and all I had to do in the quiet wind and the wild loneliness was lift the gold off them and be on my merry way.
But let me stick up for my mam here a bit! Don’t judge her that fast.
Ye have to look at it as regards things she believed. And she didn’t drink as much as lots did. She drank herself out of pain which is what many do, though I don’t do it myself. And was it when she drank that my mam dreamed of a different life? Or did she dream of a different life before her drop of gin, and was the gin only to help make the dream move closer…
And it did. Once, I…her dream came closer and closer whenever I went to see Mam, after I got in with the Wordsworths. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I praised the situation up too much. At any rate Mam believed I had found her own dream come true. She believed the Wordsworths were like royalty and in fact as far as we were concerned, our family, they might as well have been.
What Mam and Penny thought my new life was like—ha, it wasn’t like that at all. But could I convince them? I didn’t even try.
Because my mam had a fantasy. She had never been inside the Wordsworths’ home like I had. She saw it—it’s funny, this—she saw it a bit like the Wordsworths saw it, themselves. A tall house hidden behind trees and gardens, separate from that other world where Mam skivvied for coppers and ate only buns with no raisins, and drank tea that got weaker and weaker as time went on, until it was nowt but a cup of hot water, because she steeped it over and over again until it had no trace of comfort. Not like the Wordsworths’ house where tea is plentiful every day and strong enough, aye. Gallons of it!
That was one thing, the tea.
But it wasn’t tea, or roast pork shoulder, or even the use of a horse that Mam thought about when she kept on with her Wordsworth dream. Her dream of what I had amounted to by coming to this place.
No.
Mam’s fantasy, and Penny’s also, since Mam passed on to Penny her notions about my job. Penny had not seen me in my new element. I wanted Penny to come! But Penny had only Mam’s version. Cream in a bowl, honey from ye lot, with the comb afloat in it to lift out and gnaw like a king. Berries as well—all that on one bowl of porridge!
And quietness.
And flowers.
And books.
Mam said to me son, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot. Roast pork for you on a Sunday! Aye what would I not give for a nice pork shoulder like that. She said like that, as if she had with her own eyes watched me in the Wordsworths’ kitchen seated at their table spearing a slice of pork with a silver fork and putting it in my mouth. Slick pork grease on my lips. My mother saw this in her mind’s eye. She had a bright imagination, perhaps as strong as the imaginations of the Wordsworths themselves. And in her mind she had seen the roast, and the silverware all polished, and a fine tablecloth. These things had not really happened but Mam saw them clear as day. She and Penny fancied jonquils on the table, a real la-de-da situation with me as a kind of honorary Wordsworth enjoying the spectacular fruits of that life. You couldn’t talk them out of it.
And if I am honest with ye, my mam’s imaginary Wordsworth family and my own imaginings were not very different at first. This is why I can’t bear feeling ashamed of Mam. I was not forced to stay in her world. If my life here is not what Mam thought it was, or even what I hoped it might be, it is still a world far grander than ours. Mine and Mam’s and Penny’s.
But I found out I had a capacity to appreciate things William said or wrote, and things his sister said and did…I soaked up their world and I knew what it was made of. Mam did also. Even Penny. It didn’t belong to us but we recognized it. We were wishful. We were waiting. But we would never claim it. What can I call the Wordsworth atmosphere?
Loveliness? Shelter? How is it ye regard your hive? Full of sweetness and shade and protection? Fragile and filled with gold treasure the whole world wants but hardly anyone can have?
When I started here I thought of myself as coming in from outside. Coming into shelter, into paradise. But very soon I saw that William and Rotha were doing the same thing! They were coming in from outside. Coming into shelter, into paradise. And paradise was pretend. Even for them. It was a moving painting or it was that lantern show I told ye I went to see in Manchester with Mam’s cousin. It was no more real for William or Rotha than it was for me or my mam or for our Penny.
Was it?
Sometimes I cannot make out the real difference between the Wordsworth family and mine, as far as our ideas go about shelter from bad things in the world—things causing blight the way foul weather or fungus can come to ye and to your glory realm and to your hives and even your very bodies, if you are not careful and if you are not blessed.
How does paradise touch some people like a lantern beam? While other people, like Mam and Penny, fumble in the gloom?
It doesn’t take long for copper to tarnish and it did not take long for my shining sister Penny to lose her youth and her health. I wanted to help her, even if that only meant bringing her here to the Wordsworths’ made-up paradise. For the Wordsworths have not lived in the real world!
Did Mam start the notion of my getting Penny a job with the Wordsworths? Or did I? Did Mam say she wished Penny worked beside me instead of at the factory in Pendleton? And did I chew on that wish until it was mine?
Because it did become my thought.
All my first year here at Rydal and maybe my second, I could not make out how to bring that thought up with William or his sister. I mentioned Penny whenever I could, reminding them that I had a sister and that she was a very hard worker.
I spoke this as if I was talking to myself but I made sure William overheard. After all, I am my sly mother’s son, thought I. But William did not bite the bait. I was doing it all wrong. Or I was not the son of my mother, who’d have spilled the information naturally, completely innocent like. And because I was so woeful at it, it soon became all I could think of. Mention Penny as a good worker and hope someone would take me up on the idea. But my attempts fell on deaf ears until one day Rotha was reading the paper and there was an article in it about Manchester and she flung the paper in the fireplace. I watched the word Manchester flame up then shrink to grey with a gold edge and then collapse. It was one of her la
st fires of spring. I remember because I was measuring the fireplace to fit a new summer board over the hole. I know it wasn’t my first spring there because that first year we had no summer. So it was my second or third.
Rotha shuddered and she said, James, I am most glad I do not have to look very often at a street in that town!
And of course I was all ears since Pendleton, where my sister worked, was on the edge of Manchester.
So I said, Manchester, Miss? I made out as if I was very carefully double-checking my measurements for the fireplace. My sister works there, Miss, I said, although I had told Rotha this before.
But in truth at that moment my sister was out of a job. Something had gone badly downhill with her shoulder. My mam had her at the house and was trying painful exercises to get it to rise back up evenly with the other shoulder. Because Penny had been working at the same spot on the floor in the same position from the age of eleven and was now nearly sixteen. She had become a piece of the machine. Her shoulder had ground itself down low like a worn-out machine part and my mam had it strapped up with bandages night and day, but I wasn’t confident of the result. Or I was pretty sure what the result would be and did not want to admit it to myself. Here was I, very comfortable, while Penny…
An awful place, Rotha said. A sister, you say? I had thought you mentioned a brother.
No, Miss, a sister.
A sister?
Yes, Miss. I kept my surprise to myself, that she did not remember all that I had told her about Penny. As a matter of fact, I said, Penny is off work on a little break at the moment, and I have been wondering…
Is she? How nice for her. I myself am very glad that our own tranquil paradise means I hardly ever have to look at a filthy industrial city such as Manchester. I do hope your sister has a chance to come back to the Lakes.
Yes, Miss. I was going to ask you…I mean if you and your brother didn’t mind…if it would be all right for Penny to come and see me for…a short visit.
Heavens, James, you don’t have to ask me that. It is up to your family, surely, whether your sister comes to visit them, is it not? And we can certainly spare you the few hours you would need to go and see her, yourself.
Rotha had misunderstood me. Or I had not said it properly, the thing I wanted to ask, which was whether it would be possible for Penny to come here, to Rydal Mount, to recover in the fresh air and the peace here, as the Wordsworths themselves repaired their own health whenever the world beyond our little paradise affected them too much…but I had not managed to say it. And now if I said it, the thing would come out all wrong. It would be presumptuous. I could not figure out how to ask. I envisioned Penny curled up in my hut where I had a spare blanket and straw to make an extra bed. She would be no trouble at all to the Wordsworths! But I could not for the life of me find a way to paint this picture in Rotha’s mind without it sounding preposterous.
Thank you, Miss, was all I could think of to say. Her working hours at the mill have been long, I said, and my sister does need a rest.
Yes, Rotha said. I have just now read that the government has sent inspectors to the Douglas mill and to other mills to assess whether the floors are really as bad as they all say. Inspectors! But, James, anyone could tell them the answer to that. I could tell them, myself!
Miss?
I was not sure what she meant as I could not picture Rotha having gone inside a mill and seen the workers.
Anyone could, she said, who has visited the streets of Manchester and seen the youths maimed like people who have come home from a war.
Miss, I said, that is true, for our Penny’s workmate Rhona got caught by a strap on the machine and flung against a wall and broke every bone in both arms and both legs and has to…
Stop! Rotha said, and she shot both arms toward me with her hands splayed as if I had thrown my yardstick at her face.
I realized I should never have spoken. What had come over me?
I did not continue about how Penny herself would never stand straight again. I did not say how her shoulder skewed her spine. Nor did I mention Penny was thin as a nail since thread and dust clogged the air and landed in the porridge you ate as you worked, more thread than oats—you ate the thread you milled and breathed pieces of it until your lungs were full but your stomach empty and you were let go as soon as they caught you spitting blood.
I did not say any of that, because the look on Rotha’s face meant if I said another word she couldn’t take it and Penny might not be the only young Dixon out on the street. I had a glimpse into Rotha’s hard-heartedness that minute. It was something I took in. If she heard or saw even a glimpse of something that didn’t go with her vision of paradise in that closed-off, shaded world of theirs, Rotha Wordsworth wanted it gone.
What made the mill send Penny home at last wasn’t her shoulder or her lungs. They sent my sister packing with a note. Mam told me they kicked her awake in the drying-room at one o’clock in the morning. Penny hid there instead of being driven into the cold in wet clothes after her shift. They all hid. In the wool. Under the baskets. But when the overlooker kicked Penny she jolted up and went through the motions of her work though her machine had stopped for the night. Like I told ye she had turned into a machine herself, or a wrecked or manic part of the machine going on and on after the controls were off. The note called her unfit due to laziness. But is it lazy if you keep working while you are asleep? I don’t think lazy is the word and what the word might be I do not know.
But all I said to Rotha was, Sorry, Miss. I understand. It’s just that my sister, Penny, has been having a little trouble with her health, and…
Are her feet all right? Rotha asked.
Her feet, Miss?
Yes. As long as one’s feet are all right, then everything is not lost.
She looked down at her own feet and I realized she was worrying about them, about being able to cover the miles on foot that she wanted to cover. She was not thinking about Penny, but about her own freedom. Wild miles on the hoof. Would the miles always meet her? She suspected something faltering in herself and this was when I caught wind of it. That moment when she asked me about Penny’s feet.
and after that i started noticing Rotha talked often about feet.
Mostly the feet of women older than herself. She kept a running commentary. Poor Molly, for instance, the Wordsworths’ old servant who had died before my time. Rotha described to me how Molly shoved her poor ankles into her boots deformed like. Her legs didn’t come out of the boots straight. Her shins overflowed like puddings from a pan and her legs were ready to topple like a couple of waterlogged larches!
And William rubbed his sister’s feet. That was one thing he did do. He only asked me to do that whenever he was away from the Lakes.
Once when I did rub her feet I saw they had the start of a bunion and I said Miss, do you wish me to make you a splint to straighten it up? Because I knew how to make one out of willow. The bark fits around a toe and besides that there’s medicine in willow that stops any ache.
But she said no, thank you, James, it’s not bunions I worry about. Bunions are insignificant. Nor am I the least concerned by blisters or corns. Calluses, however, quite interest me.
They interest you, Miss?
Yes, in fact, I welcome calluses since in the right places they can increase the working lifespan of a person’s feet.
Ah, I says, like an extra bit of leather?
Exactly, she says. I have a few calluses and I don’t mind them at all. It’s not those small inconveniences I worry about, but larger, systemic things that start elsewhere in the body but end up affecting one’s feet so that the feet cannot do what they were designed to do. That is what frightens me.
I wanted to ask her what she meant by systemic things that start elsewhere, but I kept quiet. Like I have said, it behooved me to learn when to keep my mouth shut with the Wordsworths, and wh
en to speak, in order to gain and keep their trust and to learn all the things I needed to learn.
So yes I kept quiet about her fears until out of thin air she would begin ruminating on them.
I was giving her feet a rub and she says to me, James, she says, you, now, you’re a lad of no more than twenty-two. You’ll have nothing the matter at all with your feet, will you? Not a thing. Your feet must be like the feet of Mercury, adorned with wings! And she looked at mine more than a bit jealous like. In fact she looked at them as if she’d like to chop them off me and have them for herself.
As a matter of fact my littlest toenails had both cracked right down the middle but I didn’t tell her that. The nails cracked because my boots were tight. They had got soaked and dried out enough times that the leather had shrunk. And in the toenail cracks I stuffed globs of your bee wax to keep dirt out and to try and repair the nails. But they were a sight. Any gardener that doesn’t have filthy feet is no gardener at all is he? And filth had ground into my feet. The dirt was ingrained. I knew if Rotha ever saw my bare feet what a fright she’d get, although hers were not as white or spotless as other women’s feet. Her feet were brown as a child’s that has been playing outside all summer. But they were nothing like mine.
But I says no, Miss D, I have no problem with bunions or blisters or anything like that.
And, she said, I can see for myself your ankles are not swollen.
No, Miss, my ankles are all right.
But she says mind you watch that lopsided sole on the heel of your left boot. It means your gait’s uneven. And James, I warn you, your second twenty-two years will whizz past twice as fast as the first! By then that foot won’t know what hit it—look at William’s poor toe!
Yes, Miss.
Gradually is how it happens, says she.
That was when I noticed she was forever remarking on the state of everyone’s feet and shoes.
And aye, she mentioned wings. Because those feet of hers were like your wings are to ye. Your wings get you pretty far over these fells and lakes, and her feet were wings in her mind. Everyone’s feet were wings in her mind. And you have to give it to her, the shape of feet with their toes is a bit like fans or wings with the feathers sticking off. Hands and fingers an’ all. Wings and feathers on our bodies. If only we could fly! Ye lot are the lucky ones.
Undersong Page 8