by Paul Binding
Mrs. Fuller bowed her head as if at last submitting to a judgment from me. I must take advantage of these charged moments, I told myself, a beneficial towel can wait, and if I get the mother-and-father of all bad colds, well, so be it! I shall suffer—but I shall survive, I’m strong enough.
“Mrs. Fuller,” I went on, “I met someone just now—in the little shelter on the Esplanade, quite by chance—and he turned out to be Bo’sun Johnston from the Norwegian ship, the very man your Mary, that excellent little vehicle, brought Hans Lyngstrand and me a message from—from the Great Pathway beyond the Gateway. The man is no more out there in the land of the dead than you or I are at this very minute. What Mary said was a lie from beginning to end, and it wasn’t for the first time she was guilty of one, was it?”
“Mary acts under the influence of the spirits who govern existence without our always realizing it,” said Mrs. Fuller, more to the floor than to myself, “and into the bargain she has remarkable, prodigious talents.”
“I’ve no doubt of it. Among her talents are the writing and reading of shorthand, I now know. I put two and two together just now, as I walked fast through the rain to this house: Mary read, on my bedroom table, those notes I’d made for my interview with Hans Lyngstrand about his experiences at sea. Not all of what he told me was suitable for the newspaper, you see. That’s how she knew the story I’d told nobody else of Bo’sun Johnston and how Hans had heard him venting his rage and distress to the elements when the ship was caught in a storm.”
Mrs. Fuller said, but her subdued, near-apologetic voice had something girl-like, indeed almost waif-like about it: “I did not know this. I did not know it was a . . . lie. How could I? I don’t read shorthand myself. I was always—am always—impressed by the things Mary says at our sessions. Shows such imagination and ability to identify with others.”
“How about the many messages from George Fuller? Another person whom the Gathering assumed was dead, but who was in fact alive and well in Italy, in the real Castelaniene, I have no doubt. As nobody knew better than you.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Fuller in the same curiously pathetic vocal register, “that she exercised her intelligence at such times just as she did in the case of—of your Norwegian’s bo’sun. Also, she’d known George personally, ever since she was little, and obviously later listened to me talking about him, and . . . and besides . . . Well, I suppose that’s yet another thing you, the ever-snooping journalist, know?”
At least she hasn’t called me a Mr. Peter Pry! I thought.
“I don’t know what you’re now referring to, Mrs. Fuller.” And then suddenly—well, of course!—I did!
“Mary is my husband’s daughter. She doesn’t know this herself, but I suspect she has guessed by now. Her mother was a woman from Farthing Lane who also used to work in the kitchens at St. Stephen’s College. An easy enough friendship to form if you’ve a roving eye for vulnerable lowerclass women like my unfortunate husband. He was always terrified that Horace would feel the same kind of attraction to Mary as the boy grew older; that was one reason he was so keen to get him out of this country, that and his own infatuation with that stupid old Italy and all its many treasures . . .” She hissed out the last words, and hadn’t she a right to her anger? Her husband had, I now knew, masterminded her son’s expulsion from school so that he could leave the country and lead an Italian life, free from any danger of being attracted sexually to his half-sister.
Readers, please believe me when I tell you that for the first time (even counting that occasion when she broke down and wept on my shoulders) I felt unmitigated sympathetic sorrow go out from my own self to Mrs. Fuller. To the woman who, to my real embarrassment, had got herself into a crouching posture on the hall-floor, a reduced personage indeed.
“Mrs. Fuller,” I said, as softly, as warmly as I could, “you don’t need to tell me everything you’ve been through. You’ve suffered, really suffered, I see that now. For some years. Far more than you should have done.” Then, “I am sorry that’s been so!”
Mrs. Fuller said, equally softly, “I do believe you are, Mr. Bridges, I’ve always suspected you of a kind heart somewhere, which you largely preferred to keep hidden . . . Yes, imagine how awful it was having your husband and son both leaving you, of their own volition, how tongues clacked spitefully and reprovingly here in Dengate, Edmund Hough’s alone excepted. It was George Fuller’s own idea that we should make out he was dead. He’s living another life under another name with another—shall I call her wife?—in Italy. And I decided once we’d come to that arrangement to take up Mary—seriously take her up—teach her a little of literature and the arts, while paying her to do work in this house”—pay her for skivvying, I added privately, for wasn’t that what it had been?—“and also encouraging her to make the most of her truly amazing gifts for improvisation by introducing her to the Gateway. Of course, that was a very good place also to ensure everyone in this community thought George had died. You do realize, I hope, that if I hadn’t helped Mary as I did, she’d have—well, gone the way of many a girl in Farthing Lane and entered the oldest profession in the world. There were definite temptations in that direction. There was one terrible old woman in Farthing Lane who was ready with contacts for Mary in Dover. I ask you!”
She didn’t altogether need to. Limehouse, I could not but remind myself here, perhaps all along Mary had induced in me thoughts of Limehouse and its activities, to my shame, to my reluctant, guilty enjoyment and my confusion.
“I suspect your opinion of me must be a very low one,” said Mrs. Fuller, from her discomfiting physical lowness of attitude, “but I want to tell you something, Mr. Bridges. That telegram I was so angry with you for seeing, and leaving about for others to read, concerned new arrangements between George and me. I am now as his full legal widow in complete command of his former British property. I shall sell Castelaniene —which has brought me misery rather than happiness—and move somewhere out of Dengate, probably abroad, and take Mary with me. She shall work in a menial capacity no more. I shall raise her to that station in life which will bring out all that is best in her.”
And as if to prove that she was robust enough to do this, she raised her own body up from the hall-floor. Somewhat incongruously she then said: “Mr. Bridges, how very terribly you got caught in the rainstorm. You must now rub yourself down, very hard, very thoroughly; it’s not too late to do this. We don’t want you catching your death of cold. I shall go and get you a large towel from the kitchen.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said, “and I’ll avail myself of your offer. But I’d best tell you that after this conversation, I’d prefer not to stay here in this house. Even for tonight. I shall go, despite the hour and the weather, ’round to my friend, Barton Cunningham. He has always said the Cunningham house is a very large one, with several bedrooms vacant, one of which I could rent from his parents. It’d be a happier arrangement for me. Though I shall miss the cats here! I’ll collect my stuff and pay you any arrears of rent tomorrow afternoon.”
And that’s what I did, though—a point in my favor, I think—I was to go ’round to see Mrs. Fuller and the three cats repeatedly and not without pleasure on all sides, until Mrs. Fuller did sell Castelaniene and move away. My first night not in her house—but in the comfortable bedroom at the Cunninghams’—I slept but little. I lay there on my new bed listening to the still continuing sounds of rain falling off roofs and guttering and dropping from walls and trees—whoosh, splash, drip-drop-drip—and to the sea rustling and shivering after so much liquid disturbance of its orderly surface, unable to decide what of all the dark histories I’d heard tonight—about Hans on board Dronning Margrete, about George and Beatrice Fuller, about Mary—was the hardest, the most painful, to accommodate in mind and morality.
That much-heralded issue of the Pall Mall Gazette for Monday, July 6, and for the three following days, exposed the scandalous extent of prostitution in our country, the netting and caging of young (
often extremely young) girls for commercial purposes in London’s ill-regulated stews. (Like the one in Limehouse.) It shocked the whole British nation, and brought further fame to W. T. Stead himself. Well, there by the grace of Mrs. Fuller went Mary the vehicle from Farthing Lane. Perhaps such matters—Hans’s bestowal of favors to his shipmates was another among them—were best left to the intrepid, the buccaneer journalists like Stead himself. I wasn’t like him, was I? I wanted life to be serene, harmonious.
But if in relating my departure from Castelaniene I have reached what seems like (and in so many important ways is) an ending to the story of my induction into Dengate, then I must affirm unequivocally that it also marks a beginning—the beginning of a new life which, as the calendar moved on, made the previous months’ experiences seem not just remote but worth jettisoning from the mind. Anyway they got crowded out by other concerns. Living with the Cunninghams made me into a Dengater. In their hospitable household I saw not only Barton’s friends but members of his parents’ large, self-confident, lively circle, with whose interests—and gossip—I became familiar. I got to know (I am sharp in such matters) who was on the rise in the town, who was in difficulties (or even trouble), who was going out with whom, who was about to come into good fortune. All this knowledge, all this identification with other people affected my engagement with The Advertiser where increasingly I felt it was my own town whose affairs I was dealing with as young editor and reporter. So involved was I indeed that the longing to be adventurously out-and-about rather left me. Hadn’t all that culminated in my ghastly meeting with Johnston in the Chinese/ Japanese shelter on the Esplanade? Whoever in his right mind would want to take the risk of such a thing again? Besides, major changes in my personal life were compelling and demanding enough for me not to seek factitious dramas (as, in my security, they now seemed) elsewhere.
I wonder if I ever would have been even tempted to write a memoir of my arrival in Dengate and what followed if, six years later, I hadn’t been jolted into confrontation of what I had both witnessed and been through. I had quite abandoned dreams of being a writer (perhaps all the time I had deep-down been in search of the mundane, the domestic?) but—after I had recovered from the shock—to confront was to feel anew the urge to write. Anyway, I now take my readers to events nearly six years later, to the afternoon of May 11, 1891.
PART Two
CHAPTER ONE
“I’m Going to be a Sculptor”
Will Postgate and I are sitting in the stalls of Terry’s Theatre, just off The Strand, with the curtain shortly to go up on the first English performance of The Lady from the Sea by Henrik Ibsen (in a translation from the Norwegian by Eleanor Marx-Aveling). Will, having now added theatre-going and play-reviewing to all his other Dep Ed activities, has invited me to come with him as his guest to the opening matinee.
“I seem to remember your being interested in Norway, and Norway’s Mr. Ibsen seems all set to be the big man of the coming decade in the English theatre. If we want him!” As it happened, I had an appointment of my own in town that morning—a discussion with a solicitor in Southampton Row about a possible infringement of the libel laws, Edmund increasingly entrusting me with such commissions—and so I accepted. I scarcely ever went to the theatre and almost never read the notices in the national papers, so I had no idea about who its big men should or should not be, though the name rang a bell—one I would prefer not to hear.
Suddenly old Will gives me a sharp nudge with his powerful elbow. “Take a look at your program, Martin,” he says.
He’s surely rebuking me for spending these anticipatory moments just looking around me. But why not? This theatre is only four years old and impressive. The outside is in the Flemish style, patterned brickwork, crow-stepped gables, and the inside, from the curtains and hangings to the enamelled iron-framed seats, is a pleasing blend of colors—perhaps Flemish too?—deep brownish-pink, apple-green and gold. The audience this afternoon is not large, in truth it’s rather sparse, but it has a sophisticated feel, some being what Will calls “true worshippers at the Ibsen shrine, ready to sing hymns of praise to their master at every touch and turn.”
Will digs me in the ribs again. “Why the devil don’t you do what I say, old chap? One of the names in the Dramatis Personae will interest you.”
Will it? I said: “I doubt it’ll mean much to me, Will, I know so little about actors.”
“‘Dramatis Personae’ doesn’t mean actors, it means the characters in the play, you juggins.” Will says this loud enough for two men behind to laugh. “So, go on—look! Well, now do you see it?”
How could I not? “Lyngstrand.” I keep my head lowered so Will can’t see my blushes—at twenty-nine I still blush as I did when readers last met me—and of course, my heart quickens its beat. Lyngstrand—well, well, well. I wonder how long it is since I have given Hans sustained thought—how could I, with pressure at work and at home too: three children now, with little Arthur born only last November, and another child on the way?
“Lyngstrand was the name of that Norwegian boy at Castelaniene, was it not?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I say, “but I know even less about Norwegian names than I do about the London stage. The surname may be a very common one.”
But now I see from the program that the action takes place in “a small fjord-town in Northern Norway.” Well, couldn’t Molde, from where Hans had written to me, be so described, the town where the appalling Johnston had (as he’d told me) betrothed himself to his woman? Hans’s words—from a letter I’d skimmed and had never replied to—came back to me with vexing clarity: If you think, as people from Christiania are apt to, that anywhere many hours northward from Bergen is “north,” then Molde is a northern town, though for many tourists it’s just the start of boat-trips going a lot further north still. But probably many a place in Norway could be similarly described.
Anyway why come to a play by Ibsen in the first place, I say to myself sternly, if I cannot take reminders of the one, the only Norwegian I have known well. Too well, but also not as well as he deserved!
Do my readers find it strange that after events of July 4, 1885, Will Postgate and I have—outwardly—returned to how we were with each other in South London when he was both mentor and pal? Readers will be the more surprised at the lack of change, I warrant, when I acquaint them more fully with what has happened in the intervening period. When I tell them that Will is the father of my eldest son, Eddie [Edmund], and is unaware of this fact, or has chosen to be. When I refer them to a certain afternoon in early September of that same year when Lucinda, with whom I was now on the best of terms, invited me to take tea at Dengate’s Blue Bird Cafe, and there, at a table overlooking bright beds of nasturtium and fuchsia, said: “Martin, I am expecting a child. And the child is your friend, Will’s.”
And then go on to relate that, without blinking, as they say, I responded with: “In that case I can find the courage to say what I never believed I’d ever be able to. Dearest Lucinda, marry me. Marry me, and tell the world the child is mine.”
I have no rancor against Will, not a drop really. Without him I should not have what happiness I do. And I can’t envy him—or only in patches. Yes, he has his precious freedom, I grant, but it is he of the two of us who is the restless, dissatisfied one, though maybe he never tastes that melancholy I am so regularly familiar with. He is now beau-ing, he has told me earlier this afternoon, a “most enchanting young creature, a wonder of nature really.” He will doubtless lose interest in her soon enough, just as he did with Beatrice Fuller (now a resident with Mary in Arcachon in France in a small villa bought from the sale of Castelaniene), just as he did with my dear Lou after only a few weeks, to his great loss and my even greater gain. That he has never spoken or written about his love-affair with her, to either of us, might irredeemably have tarnished that early respect I held him in, I suppose, but respect isn’t the only emotion behind a friendship—and I have a whole heap of warm memories of him. Despit
e everything I am fond of him.
When trying to persuade me to join him at this Ibsen performance, Will said he had something he greatly wanted to talk over with me. But when I reminded him of this over luncheon just now, over his favorite steak-and-kidney pie, he said, oh, yes, that’s right, he had indeed—but he must wait till after the play, for which he needed to be on his mettle. As a reviewer!
“Anyway I should tell you something, ignoramus that you are, about where I’m taking you to. Interesting place, Martin, Terry’s Theatre.” I found myself assuming the kind of face I used to in times gone by, when I was so anxious to absorb any information he imparted and worried that my lack of knowledge showed even as I did so. “Terry’s is run by a pretty interesting old cove, Terry Edward O’Connor, a capital comedian—though now he has one Mr. Edward Terry, a shrewd mind if ever there was one, to assist him in his management. Had a few memorable words myself with both of ’em not so long ago, and mentioned ’em in a little piece of mine. Terry’s great success came with Mr. Pinero’s Sweet Lavender, couple of years back, as you won’t need to be told.” I nodded here, but did need telling, I’m afraid. “But I bet you didn’t know it ran to 684 performances, making a profit of £20,000.” Twenty-thousand quid! Stupendous indeed! The old Will, the radical determined to lift up Peckham and Tooting from social penury, might have thought such a sum should be ploughed back straightaway into slum clearance. But if this were the present Will’s opinion, he gave no hint. A part of me longed to remind him also, that, with everything else on my hands, the commercial triumph of Sweet Lavender passed me by. “I suppose Terry’s have high hopes that this new Ibsen lark of theirs will have the same sort of ride as the Pinero. Well, we’ll see. I’m not at all sure we Britishers need the sort of goings-on you find in old Mr. Ibsen’s plays: people throwing themselves to their deaths into mill-races or shooting themselves in the privates.” Put like that it was hard to disagree, but I didn’t catch the references.