by Alix Nathan
Since the unfortunate episode when his hand brushed against her he’d kept short his meetings with Hannah. Sometimes she appeared about to speak but never did. She would answer him of course, but it was always he who spoke first.
He was surprised at himself. Of course, speaking to a woman once a week these last months was much more than usual. Talk occupied little time in Jermyn Street. Physically the woman was no longer pretty nor painted like the harlots at Clavering’s. Each Monday he’d noticed more of her appearance: the pleasing oval face with its delicate features, how her eyes startled, being sometimes grey, sometimes blue depending on the light of day. He’d overheard talk that her mother had been a beauty and perhaps some of it had come through to the daughter. The grace with which she carried herself was extraordinary for a woman of her kind.
But her continuing resistance, her suspicion challenged him. He’d tried so often to make her look at him and when at last she did, steady, critical, he suddenly felt desire.
After all these years could he really be more interested in her than his plants, trees and flowers? Surely not.
* * *
—
CATHERINE WENT TO COLLECT vegetables for Cook, for she and Annie were housemaids and kitchen maids rolled into one. Her attitude to Mrs Rentfree was ambivalent. She despised her for her utter dependency upon gin and water. Catherine’s life had been determined by drunkenness, her father’s. Each time he was too drunk to work her mother took in washing, however advanced she was in pregnancy, and Catherine had to help. The pregnancies were continuous, as were the lines of dripping linen, hung from the low ceiling of their cottage. Catherine’s image of herself as a teacher, leading an entirely different life from her mother’s, shrank into dreams. She still had such dreams. The closest she’d got to their realisation was the instruction of new housemaids in polishing grates and lighting fires.
Yet Cook was never incapable and Catherine admired a certain obstinacy in her. Though she could barely write (Catherine must help her with household accounts, notes, letters, as Powyss refused to employ a housekeeper), Cook knew when she could resist the master. While she was willing to prepare some of Mr Powyss’s newfangled fruits, she refused to handle squashes, for instance.
‘Ugly beasts, no Christian will eat them,’ she said. Expressed her feelings subversively by serving salsify, so tiresome to peel, with far too much Jamaica pepper or on the contrary, broiling cucumbers with nothing to relieve their insipidity.
Every day a basket of vegetables and fruit was left for collection outside one of the greenhouses. Catherine had seen little of Abraham Price since Christmas, when he’d fingered as much of her body as he could reach during the game of Pop. Now he was there with an earthy basket.
‘You’ve come for the dinner, is it?’
‘Yes, Mr Price. Abraham.’
He stared at her meaningfully until she looked down. Then he said:
‘I did like your spinit.’
‘I learned to play at school. Sometimes I do without the music notes. It just comes to me.’ Then she burst out: ‘I only slapped you because of Cook,’ and he, scowling, turned and stumped off.
Now she’d wrecked her chances. How stupid! How foolish! She was furious at herself for sounding so childish, as bad as Annie. Putting herself at such a disadvantage. He’d despise her now. She sighed to herself. Probably he’d acted only out of drunkenness at Christmas anyway.
Who else was there? Samuel was far too young, Jenkins too old; the one timid, the other puffed up with self-importance like a toad; and anyway both had eyes for Annie alone. There was no one in the village even had she the time to go and look, and the labourers in the garden were beneath consideration. She was herself getting old. She’d like a husband, one or two children. She didn’t want to wither. Or turn to gin and water.
* * *
—
HANNAH PUTS THE MONEY in her pocket, sets off from the house. She’s refused China tea in a cup with a curly handle. She didn’t always refuse, especially in cold weather, but she dislikes the questions they ask in the kitchen.
She’d never had to do with them before, Mrs Rentfree and Catherine. But now she must encounter them frequently and they look at her in a prying way. Have begun to ask about Mr Powyss.
‘How do you like the master, Hannah?’
‘Quite well.’
‘Has he shown you all them things in cabinets? Mr Jenkins say there be all sorts in drawers.’
‘No, he have not.’
‘You were a long time with master today, Hannah.’
‘He did talk.’
‘What did he talk of?’
‘Oh, I forget.’ Better tell them nothing.
It’s a warm summer day. She thinks to walk by the orchard to see the young fruit. Goes through the gate, past glasshouses, glimpses men weeding in the kitchen garden.
The children have stopped asking about John.
‘He’s gone away to work,’ she told them. They do as they wish without him there to use his stick or fists upon them, David, little John, George. Jack goes off. Hours at a time. Where to? She cannot stop him. Margaret is good, helps her with washing and cooking and Polly, the youngest, is growing now. They are all glad of more to eat. Shoes.
Without John it’s like when she were a girl after Father were killed. Mother let us be, she reminds herself, no man to make us cry, except when Mr Kempton visited. I did always think it best to be a widow woman like Mother. She did love all her babies though she surely didn’t love Kempton. I did like to help, feeding hens, yeanlings.
She thinks to get a few chickens now with the money; John were always too poor. The young ones can collect the eggs, George, Polly.
She imagines John living in a great big room like Mr Powyss’s library, snoring on a bed with velvet hangings. But she almost never thinks of him. At home she lets Polly and Margaret sleep in her bed, the oldest and the youngest, to keep them from the fighting, kicking boys in the other. She sleeps as she’s never slept before.
She thinks: Mr Powyss have no wife. They do say he never have a woman.
But he did not say to not come again. And I think he like me. That time. His hand did brush against me, he did blush.
Surely all masters do as they wish.
It is good with John gone. Like being a widow woman, like Mother. Except for Kempton.
Mr Powyss is a gentleman. I’m not his servant, but I takes his money and gives him nothing for it.
* * *
—
THE TONE OF FOX’S LETTER written at the end of August 1794 was sharp though ostensibly smoothed over with jokes. That was his way. He complained about Powyss’s lack of reply, putting it down to his absorption in the Investigation, together with his solitariness.
You were always a man for whom numquam minus solus quam cum solus most perfectly applied. Even when you were a boy!
London was in a frenzy of war, he wrote, with volunteers marching all over the place and accusations of treason made at the slightest suspicion. It concerned him, for his friends were mostly radicals and yet more of them had been arrested. Annual parliaments, universal suffrage, Powyss couldn’t bring himself to care about these things.
Of course events in France are hideous. They guillotined their own monster of reason Robespierre a month ago.
But our rationality is so unlike the Gallic. There is a wonderful growth of common sense among the people in the form of the London Corresponding Society whose huge gatherings in Hackney and Chalk Farm I have attended and observed closely. They have my namesake, the hirsute, grimy and brilliant Charles James to support them as well as Mr Sheridan, both excellent speakers. Yet the government is certainly afraid for they have suspended Habeas Corpus. ’Tis a government that throws crusts to the poor while paying spies great sums to listen at holes. I suppose it is something that good men, rad
icals like Hardy, Thelwall and my dear friend Horne Tooke get a trial at all.
And on and on. Powyss stuffed the letter into a drawer.
He was angry. He found himself thinking of Mrs Warlow too often. The slight figure of a woman who’d yet borne many children, her firm tread, the enquiring, still reluctant eyes he’d at last engaged. Her presence in his library had become exotic, irresistible.
But he’d heard her supposedly beautiful mother had been a feckless widow, giving birth to a stream of children sired by the despicable Kempton. (What was this, that he listened to servants’ gossip!) Probably she was no better than her mother, who also went mad, they said. And in any case she was just a poor woman! One of the poor Fox was continually writing about, one of the poor who, according to Fox, needed more bread and the vote, for he even extended the franchise to women. Well, at least she was getting more bread. But that he spoke to her at all was an accident; he’d never have noticed her if it hadn’t been for the experiment, and now he ought only to be interested in recording changes of an observable kind in her and her children for the Lateral Effects section. He turned from the window in disgust as though trying to turn away from himself.
But it was Monday and she came again.
With his notebook open and pen ready, he asked stiffly about her and her children. Wrote down little enough. What more was there to record from last week?
He gave her the money, her hands square and short-nailed. They would be rough-skinned but reliable whatever they touched. The thought aroused him.
He remembered having seen two of her girls run out of the kitchen garden, a tall one pulling the hand of a little round-faced one. He asked about this.
‘Mr Price did say they could get some sea-kale and carrots.’
‘Did he now?’ She was on her way out. They were halfway down the room, near to the beautiful globes at which she no longer stared in amazement.
‘Seeing as how you do give us things. He did say.’
She could have as much sea-kale and carrots as she wanted, he thought, and better vegetables than that. Some fruit: cantaloupe, grapes, apricots. Price’s gesture, however, he recognised as insubordination rather than generosity. He must keep an eye on him. It looked as though a pattern was emerging.
‘Did you enjoy the kale, Hannah?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Powyss. We be grateful.’
He didn’t want such an answer, he wanted something else. She used that tone because she thought she should, or perhaps to protect her children. He preferred her resistance, even her hostility. Annoyed, he was about to raise his voice, recalled, in time, that Warlow beat her, so he didn’t, but not before an image of Warlow rolling over her in bed revolted him into action.
He grasped her shoulders. ‘Hannah, there’s no need to be grateful!’ Her eyes caught him; she moved out of his hold.
‘Remember, it’s part of the experiment that I support you and your children. You know that quite well.
‘Let your two girls come into the garden. To look at the flowers. Remind me how old they are now.’ He made as if to return to his notebook.
‘Margaret be thirteen, Polly four.’
‘Would they like to do that?’
‘Oh yes. They’d be glad.’
‘Good. Remember it’s my side of the arrangement with your husband.’ This was said as much to remind himself as her. He rang the bell to curb his impulse to pull her to him.
‘I can do no less…’ he said, leaving the ellipsis hanging. Then suddenly as she turned he bent and kissed her clumsily on the cheek. Unsure, she lingered for a moment, but Jenkins came in and she left.
* * *
—
HE ALWAYS LISTENS for Annie but her’s not come back. Wonders if they’ve got rid of her. If her’s gone her’ll have no choice. No other work. He thinks of Moreham men enjoying her. Under hedges. In barns. Behind walls. Fucking in barns is best. How many threepences a day? Like Sarah Gibbs her’ll do it for a penny. He groans. Scratches himself hard. Groans.
When he’s not thinking of Annie he’s listening. Listening. He’s certain he can hear when leaves drop down the shaft. He’ll hear new frogs next year when they fall, sure to. When it’s dark you hear better. When you can’t see much. Like now.
Always dark. There’s candles of course. Candles! Sometimes he longs for the familiar smell of rancid rushes. Grease of bacon scummings fizzling. There’s oil lamp when he bothers to fill it. But nothing’s bright down here. Nothing moves either. No sudden birds. No trees cracking in a gale. No children wrigglin, fidgetin, pinchin each other.
Them as can’t see hears like dogs at night. Thinks of the blind beggar in Moreham when he was a boy. Them ran after to taunt him. He always heard when them were coming, other end of street. Them’d tiptoe and he heard. Hid in bushes and he knew them were there. People said he could hear three mile away.
So he hears when they load the waiter thing two floors up. One day he decides to open the door to it, hear more. Can just make out, right up the shaft:
‘He’ll not eat that, Cook.’
‘It’s exact same as the master’s, Mr Jenkins. That’s the rule.’
‘Oh, cut him another slice of beef. Mr Powyss’ll not know.’
He never thought of that, did he! Powyss. That he’d listen up the waiter thing. So he keeps the door open when he sends up his used plates to the kitchen.
‘Here’s his plates. Left your strawberry custard, Mrs Rentfree.’
‘Picks at his food! Don’t know what Mr Powyss was thinking of. All cause of being a heathen. It don’t say you should give away strawberry custard in the Holy Book. He don’t read his Bible, do he. All them stacks o’ books and papers, Jenkins do say. And no Holy Book.’
‘He did put a Bible with the other books for John Warlow. Besides, some heathens are good people.’
A loud drawing in of breath. ‘I’d give him a loaf a day and a piece of cheese. An onion. Stead of all these best dishes. Why should I cook for him?’
‘You cook for Mr Powyss, Mrs Rentfree. He just gets a bit of that. And he isn’t hungry. He’s not doing any work.’
‘What’s he do all day long? Whilst we toil.’
He wants to bawl up at them. No. Better not.
‘Don’t wash hisself. That we saw from his clothes, did we not, Catherine?’
‘Oh poor man!’
Annie! Surely!
‘That’s enough from you. Hussy!’
‘Perhaps we should send some warm water. He’s only got cold water to wash in.’ That’s Catherine again.
‘And every day the blessed pot! If I’d ever’ve thought there’d be pots o’ turds in my kitchen I’d never have taken the position.’
‘Samuel whisks them away as fast as he can, Mrs Rentfree.’
‘I should think so! Filthy, disgusting it is.’
He shuts the lift shaft door. Writes:
Send worm worter lik you sed
Plaes
It comes down in a bucket with a note.
Wash Yourself with Soap
You are Not Allowed to Listen.
from Mrs Rentfree, Cook, Moreham House
This annoys him. He writes back:
Mr POWIS niver did say no lisnin
But when he tries again there’s always silence when they take his tray off the waiter thing. The door up there shuts quickly. Voices are deadened. There’s just distant bangs. Scrapes. He growls, kicks over the bucket.
* * *
—
SHE SAYS TO HERSELF: he have kissed me twice. He have wanted it a long time, Mr Powyss. I am sure of that. I felt it.
John were always a rough man.
Surely it is not all he want, Mr Powyss.
* * *
—
CATHERINE COULD TOLERATE ANNIE as l
ong as she didn’t look at her. When she accidently caught that pose of pretty suffering, the pursed lips and loud sighing, she dearly wished to slap her, even throw a plate at her, not to hurt, mind, just for it to smash near her. Startle her into sense.
But she might be useful.
‘How is it with Samuel, Annie?’ she asked nudgingly, eliciting a predictable blush. They were alone in the kitchen. ‘Did his onion sprout?’ she said, laughing gaily.
Annie had tried the old trick of putting named onions to sprout in the loft to see who she’d marry. In fact the Samuel onion had not been the first to sprout. She smothered her embarrassment at Catherine’s innuendo behind her hands and so avoided answering that particular question.
‘He likes me, I do think.’
‘Of course he do! Have you kissed him yet?’
‘He’s a quiet boy. He have no family.’
‘Oh, I know that. It makes no difference. You must wake him up. You must kiss him!’