‘Pass on, pass on.’ Sir Charles bent his head out and upwards to shout at the driver.
But the way was completely blocked and the driver was silent, staring at the commotion. A cart was collecting dead bodies. The woman who was screaming would not let the body of what seemed to be another, older, well-dressed woman go and her arms tried to hold the body back from the cart drivers; her skirt and the skirt of the dead woman were torn, dragged in the mud and the muck of the street. Through the gathered, murmuring people several other bodies were being carried from other doorways, wrapped in threadbare blankets or old pieces of clothing and passed up to the top of the cart and somewhere a child was crying as if its heart had broken.
Suddenly one body began to slide off the top of the pile; the crowd watched fascinated as it slid slowly downwards. A hand emerged from a shirt and seemed to move and for a moment there was total, mesmerised silence. Then one of the drivers snorted angrily and swore, jumped up on to the cart with the falling body and with his feet pushed the pile of bodies down. And the woman in the mud-stained skirt, tussling with the other driver, screamed again: No, no, no! Finally the driver on the top of the cart jumped down and kicked her. She fell to the ground, across the body of the older woman.
The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper pulled back into the darkness of the cab in shock. He had recognised the dead woman.
‘Leave them, leave them,’ shrieked another woman in the crowd whose shawl covered her nose and her face. ‘They’re only tarts.’
Another woman shouted at her, ‘Could be you next, missus, whether y’re a tart or not!’
As the last of the other corpses was piled on to the cart one of the nightmen pulled at the dead woman, the other pushed her screaming companion away from the body. With an impatient, upward heave they threw this last body on to the top of the pile, and the older driver kicked the other woman again for good measure as her cries became at last discordant and broken. Then he got on to the front of the cart with his companion and whipped his horses away through the milling, suddenly parting, people.
Someone was weeping harshly, big, jagged sobs. ‘God have mercy,’ someone muttered. Other voices joined in, low and resigned, as people moved at last. ‘God have mercy on their souls.’
But out of the darkness a man’s angry voice called, ‘There ain’t no God, you fools.’
‘Pass on, pass on,’ called Sir Charles Cooper hoarsely, once more directing the driver to the safety of Bryanston Square, and he found that he was sweating with fright. He passed his white handkerchief over his forehead several times in an effort to calm himself but he felt his heart beating too fast beneath his coat. He saw again, in disbelief, the body of someone known to him being roughly thrown up on to the cart: the torn, muddy skirt, no blanket even to give the body dignity. He knew very well that this woman had a fine house of her own as well as the house she ran off St Martin’s Lane. Mrs Ballantyre had been, whatever her profession, a lady. And then he remembered where her fine house stood.
In Marylebone. Where, this week, the cholera had been found.
* * *
Actually, Sir Charles Cooper had two daughters.
In Bryanston Square his elder daughter, Mary Cooper, was reading, in bed, the new novel ‘Vanity Fair’, and laughing. She came to the end of a chapter, closed the book so she could savour the pages she had read. From somewhere she heard a clock strike, realised how late it was, turned down the lamp. She was entranced when someone described the human heart in a way that she understood, confirmed a world she knew. Part of her listened for the roll of carriage wheels as she lay smiling into the darkness. She knew their father was not home yet, and so lay between waking and sleeping: waiting. Her smile slowly disappeared as she came back to her own world: her sister would be waiting also.
Mary clasped her hands.
Dearest Lord, help me. Help me, and guide me, in thy infinite goodness and wisdom and mercy, to care for everyone in this family.
She had the odd habit, when she was alone, of praying with her eyes open: in the hope that she might one day see God, and therefore his advice would be clearer. But all she could see tonight were the cornices on the ceiling, and the shadows everywhere: the shadow of her favourite picture on the wall, an engraving of the Mona Lisa; the shadows of the water jug and the washstand and the big mahogany wardrobe. These shadows she knew.
(But in the spring something had happened, something had changed, in Bryanston Square and it lay there in the air of the house along with the smells and the sounds, unspoken but there in the air, another shadow, dark and waiting.)
Mary stared at the ceiling and spoke again to God.
Dearest Lord, who knowest all things. Please guide me.
At last she closed her eyes, and her thoughts drifted away from this house to the house she had lived in long ago. She was not sure if all women conjured up their mother when they were preparing for sleep: she was now a middle-aged woman herself, after all. But her path was precarious and her mother was the only guide she had: if she lost her memory of her mother she feared she would lose her way. When she was nine years old and particularly overcome with religion she had informed people most fervently that she was named after the Virgin. Her laughing mother had said to her, one day in the rose garden, that she would tell her a secret, which she must keep close to her heart. She had been named after a heroine, but she was a secret heroine. Her mother had named her not after the Virgin Mary, nor after any ancestors in her family with the name of Mary, but after a writer of the previous century called Mary who had thought a lot about women: Mary Wollstonecraft, whose books Mary would read when she was older.
Mary Cooper was a lot older now, almost thirty, and she had read the books, found them (out of print now) in a second-hand bookshop. Mary Wollstonecraft had defined the difficulties, certainly, but had not counselled for the unspoken.
It was harder and harder now, to see her mother in her mind. She could still hear, if she listened carefully, the rustle of the skirts and the birds that sang in the early morning in the rose garden. But Elizabeth Cooper’s face had become indistinct, merged with the roses, and the other sisters, and the croquet on the grass on the warm summer afternoons.
Sometimes still though, if she listened very carefully, Mary heard her laughter.
* * *
In the next room Harriet Cooper also lay awake in the darkness. She was seventeen years old.
She listened, alert to every sound. And the clock on the table, ticking monotonously, was always there in the background, a dull, unvarying sound measuring the days. And the nights.
It was very late now: she heard a clock chime from the direction of Oxford Street, then she heard the nightcart clattering over the cobblestones in the mews. While their Aunt Julia was staying, just after the new water closet had been installed next to the dining room and unaccustomed water had flowed downwards, the old cesspit under this house had overflowed: a catastrophe of odour and discharging drains and questionable mud that nobody in Bryanston Square, not even the ladies, could ignore, although naturally they pretended to do so. Workmen were called in, the ladies did not of course acquaint themselves with the details and took an extended trip to Brighton until the work was completed. The night-men still came to the house in the night; what they did there in the darkness Harriet did not know.
Someone passed along the Square singing rather unsteadily:
Be it ever so humble
There’s no place like home.
and then the voice faded into the distance. Harriet suddenly got up, went to the window and opened it, trying to find some breeze, some freshness in the still, warm night.
(I am there, Mary had said as she kissed her goodnight, I am always there.)
There was an oak tree in the Square. The tree was stunted, it was true, covered in specks of black soot, unable to reach properly upwards to clearer air, but an oak tree with green leaves in the middle of London nevertheless and Harriet thought of it as her own. Her room was t
he corner room; it looked out not only over the Square but also over the mews where the horses were kept and the grooms lived and the servants came and went: a bustling lane full of life and voices and the whinnying of horses and the sharp sound of their shoes on the cobblestones. The servants kept all the windows of the house fast shut almost always, to try to keep out the black dirt, and the eternal sounds, and the worst of the malodours of the city. But the black soot still found its way inside the windows, like the smells, and the sounds, of London. This was the only house Harriet remembered: she had known the sounds and the smells all her life, they were part of her. By these things she measured her days.
Early in the morning she would hear the clanking pails of the milk carriers from the farms and the calls of the costermongers on their way to Covent Garden. Then she would hear the servants going downstairs to light the fires and heat the water. (Lately, since she got back from Norfolk, it seemed there were always servants, everywhere in the dark, heavy house. She felt sometimes spied on, trapped; often now she would come across a footman, or a maid she had never seen before, just in the next bend of the staircase, just inside a door.) Then, after the servants, the horses would begin to pass by in the street, and the rumble of carriage wheels became louder, and all the morning clocks would chime and church bells would be rung. Before too long, in among the calls and the carriage wheels and the bells, a barrel organ would start up, or a violin: ‘Home, Sweet Home’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ would be heard over and over again, wafting along from the corner, breaking off sometimes in the middle of a bar and then starting up again, faster and faster, driving many inhabitants of the Square to distraction. Then somebody would send a footman down to the street to shout, or to pay the musician to go somewhere else and play his tune. (Mary sometimes said, laughing, that the street musicians made their living not from playing but from not playing the music.) The Square would remain music-free until another music-maker set up somewhere, not far away. Sometimes it was a German band with tubas and cornets, playing a mixture of polkas and hymns.
And sometimes, in the early evening, a gull would cry over, surprising the city dwellers, reminding them that their river led to the sea.
And even with the windows tightly closed no-one could be unaware of the heavy smells of the street. Cesspits and drains and horse dung and smoke. And the outside smells mixed with the inside smells: of people, of chamber pots not yet emptied, of cigars and port, and the eternal, inescapable smell of meat being cooked in the basement that clung to the chairs and the hard sofas and lay hidden in the long, heavy curtains. Always the mixture of smells wafted upwards through the big, dark house, lingered in the curtains of Harriet’s bedroom also and drifted across the pillows; it was in the coverlet as she knelt to say her prayers. Sometimes, in a kind of shame, Harriet would actually smell her own long hair, wondering if it too smelt of mutton and cigar smoke and something emanating from the drains. But her hair smelt of soap, and she would suppose that it was inside her nose that the smell lingered, that it was part of her.
Harriet Cooper stood now by her window in the night, tall and tense and thin. Tonight she had heard the new sound that everybody recognised. A bell rang as the cholera cart passed, with the dead bodies. For a moment Harriet knelt down beside her bed.
Almighty and Everlasting God, have mercy
on those who have died of the cholera.
Dear God, please have mercy on their souls
and bring them everlasting life.
Amen.
Approaching wheels could be heard in the Square: their father’s cab rolled up to the door, stopped, clattered off back to Oxford Street. And then a door banged. And then there was a silence, as if he was deciding something. And then Sir Charles Cooper came right up the stairs of the house in Bryanston Square. Harriet Cooper turned the gas lamp up as high as it would go, so that there was light in her room.
She stiffened as his steps came nearer and nearer and then hesitated outside her room: adrenaline pumped into her legs and arms and her heart beat hard against her ribcage. Outside her door there was silence. (But she knew that Mary too, just along the passage, would be waiting for the next sound. I am always there, said Mary.) Then after a moment there was a knock and the door opened into the room where the gas lamp shone.
He stood in the doorway, surprised at the light.
‘You are still awake, Harriet?’
‘Yes, Father.’
He closed the door and leant against it.
His younger daughter was not in bed, she was sitting very upright on a chair, beside an unlit fire. She was in her nightdress but had a shawl wrapped tightly about her. Her feet were bare. She was so beautiful. (He saw again the body of Mrs Ballantyre being thrown up on to the cart.) There was a long silence while he regarded her from his hooded, blank eyes. She felt her heart pounding, she felt perspiration run down inside her nightdress, but she remained quite still, unconsciously gripping the arms of the chair.
‘What have you done today?’
She could smell the cigars, and the whisky. ‘I have been reading, Father.’
‘I thought we had agreed that your reading should not take preference over your social duties which your Aunt Lydia has arranged for you. You were to press some flowers for your album, I believe, and inscribe their Latin names.’
‘Yes, Father, I finished that.’ Damn it, she would not even look at him. He wanted to shake her hard. He wanted to hold her. I must hold her again before I send her away. He moved towards her with a little, involuntary groan, whispering her name over and over, Harriet, Harriet; behind him the door opened gently.
‘Good evening, Father,’ said Mary. ‘Have you had a very busy day? Is there anything I could get for you?’
The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, stood in the middle of the room, a daughter on either side. They could hear him breathing; but if he had listened for their breath he would have heard – almost nothing.
Time stopped, although all three of them heard the old clock ticking, there in Harriet’s room.
Then he turned on his heel and left.
They heard him walk down the stairs again, to his own room on the floor below, where their brothers had rooms also. They heard him call for Peters, his man, who would bring him his very last whisky. Their ears strained, alert to every sound; at last they heard the door of their father’s bedroom close in the distance. The sisters exchanged no words; swiftly at last Mary kissed her sister and went back to her own room.
In the night, Quintus the dog barked somewhere. Chasing the rats perhaps that congregated near the overflowing cesspits under the elegant houses in Bryanston Square.
* * *
It was their father’s decree that breakfast was an early meal. They were all, of course, in the dining room next morning as always: the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP; his two sons, Richard and Walter, his older daughter Mary. And Harriet. (And Quintus the dog, who knew how to keep out of trouble.) And the twelve servants, who always assembled for prayers. Sir Charles read from a small prayerbook, all said Amen and then breakfast was served around the long, formal table and Quintus sat somewhere between Mary and Harriet, under the table, waiting for donations.
Eating kidneys and bacon chops, Sir Charles observed his youngest daughter. His handsome, dangerous face was completely blank: his face never showed his feelings. I must send her away. Very slowly, aware, or unaware, Harriet buttered her toast. She never looked at him directly, not ever now, and his heart ached; obliquely she spoke, answered, acquiesced politely in whatever was discussed. Just sometimes he saw her face light up, become animated at something she and Mary were discussing. He would intervene and the light would go from her face and she would speak quietly again, nod in agreement with whatever was said
(And all the time, something shimmered in the shadows, dark and waiting.)
Sir Charles pushed away his plate, his face still expressionless, his thoughts agitated, knowing she must go. I must send her away. And w
ho could know from which danger in the dark recesses of his mind he was sending her.
By the time Harriet was fifteen she had had several governesses, she could read aloud most pleasantly, she could play the piano delightfully, her handwriting was exquisite. However her father was perfectly well aware that she had, thanks to having a much older sister who was an unsuitable influence, read far too many books than was healthy for a young girl. He was therefore amenable that his sister Lydia, who had lived with them in London from time to time after his wife died, take charge of the fifteen-year-old’s more essential education: the education of a young lady. Harriet had therefore been required to go with her Aunt Lydia to Norfolk, and then be placed, by her, in a recommended Academy for Young Ladies. When Harriet’s letter, smuggled out of the Ladies’ Academy, had arrived in London, begging her father to take her away, I am learning nothing, Father, but lists, Sir Charles had been furious, blamed Mary for putting ridiculous and unsuitable ideas into her younger sister’s head. ‘I want her a lady fit for my drawing room, not a bluestocking!’ he had shouted at his oldest daughter and he had written sternly to Harriet, saying she must stay.
After almost two years under her aunt’s watchful eye Harriet was returned to London, not as a pretty girl, but as an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. It was a strange beauty for the times, because something about the intensity of the face took away from what was normally considered beautiful: interfered with the serenity and placidity and quietness that were considered a woman’s greatest assets. But something about the beautiful intensity was mesmerising, and unforgettable. Everybody commented on the change: her brothers were shy with her, her father inscrutable. Then Aunt Lydia insisted that she herself would stay in London to launch Harriet. Social calls were made, cards were left, all the things were done which young women of Harriet’s age did, but from which the elder daughter, Mary, had on the whole (in the circumstances) been excused. Dinners and balls were attended and arranged: Harriet seemed to shimmer and gentlemen had secret bets that they could encircle her tiny waist in their hands. Mary was expected to dress in ballgowns and not to dance. Her brothers, who had their own activities in card rooms and other parlours, were expected to be in attendance. The idea that all his sister Lydia’s activities would inevitably lead to – were for the express purpose of – marriage taunted Charles Cooper, haunted him. Every member of the family heaved, for different reasons perhaps, a sigh of relief when Aunt Lydia, her launching activities completed for the moment, returned to Norfolk in the spring. (But then, in the spring, something had happened, something unspoken.)
The Trespass: A Novel Page 2