by Adam Roberts
‘He is almost a gentleman,’ said Mamma, wistfully. They were trotting now, bumpily but with a pleasant sensation of swiftness, along Oxford Street. There was a great blueness in the sky, and a congregation of bright white clouds. The very air felt blue and clean passing into Eleanor’s lungs. Sunlight winked at them through a grid of streetside poplars. They were going, as they did most weeks, to watch the soldiers parade and practise in Hyde Park, the carriage joining a select audience formed of two dozen other carriages (most of which were much grander than their own) parked on the green.
These little excursions represented a high point of Mamma’s week, and although Eleanor always found them tedious she endured them for her Mamma’s sake. But lately, since the engagement to Burton had been formalized, Eleanor had been finding them less tolerable than before. Her Mamma seemed to have no understanding of the ironies of the circumstance. There was, in her limited imagination, no conflict between her own gawping at these handsome men and her daughter’s prospects of life with the soggy-faced, flabby-bodied old factory owner. Eleanor looked away from the park as the men filed past. Her heart complained within her. There would be no slim, handsome husband waiting for her by the altar; no hero of the Continental wars; no officer with twenty thousand a year. Her mother’s eyes positively latched on to each of the young men as they passed. Was not such behaviour indecorous? Surely it verged on the improper. Of course, if Mamma were to be challenged (and of course Eleanor would not force her mother to so humiliating a circumstance) she would talk about the trips as her tribute to the army, or somesuch expression - as relating to her national pride at this time of war, or admiring the precision with which the men drilled, the glamour of their uniforms and the honour they embodied. But Eleanor, though young, was not so foolish as to miss the truth of it. Her mother admired the young men for their good looks, for the slimness of their figures, the straightness of their limbs. The carriages lined along the park were full of wealthy women casting the same admiring looks for the same reason, and many of them were not widows - many were actually married. Being joined to their husbands did not stop those women. Eleanor’s disapprobation was a puny force against such consolidated appetite.
From time to time, an officer would pull his horse up alongside one or other carriage and exchange a few words with the people within. On occasion such a figure pulled alongside even their humble carriage. Good morning to you, fair ladies, some young lieutenant would beam. A glorious morning, ain’t it? At this Mamma would giggle like a girl, and Eleanor’s heart would shrink. The embarrassment! Once a Captain leant, practically, inside their carriage, still in the saddle, and said Why I do declare there are two sisters herein, they’ve come out unchaperoned! And Mamma had laughed, and the Captain had laughed, and Eleanor had simpered and wished that he would go away and leave them be. After he had trotted off, Mamma had been virtually bursting with excitement at the encounter. ‘Did you hear that?’ she had gabbled. ‘He thought me your sister - and in such a strong light, too. It was worth spending the money on my paint’ - her face-paint, she meant - ‘if it can work such effects.’ ‘I’m sure, Mamma,’ Eleanor drawled in reply, ‘that he was being only polite.’ ‘Bah,’ dismissed her mamma with a wave of her gloved hand. ‘You said eighteen shillings and six was too much for a pot of the stuff, did you not? What do you say now, my girl?’ Such a little pot, Eleanor remembered. And so oddly coloured on the skin. And now, sitting next to her in the open-topped carriage, with the morning sunlight shining hard on her face, Eleanor could only think uncharitably how old her mother looked, how many twiggish lines had spread over her face, how her hair-dye smudged onto her scalp at the roots. But she said: ‘You’re quite correct, Mamma.’
The problem, Eleanor decided afterwards, was the way her mother’s manner was so different when it came to her daughter’s impending marriage with Burton. With the handsome young officers she was silly and self-deluding as a girl; with Burton as hard-nosed and practical as a moneylender. Did she not see that they were two examples of the same general case? Only that the former applied to Mamma’s cloud-hearted dreams, and the latter to pounds and shillings and pennies. Could she not at least be consistent? Eleanor felt like a commodity to be traded, and felt that her Mamma - now home, her face now free of beauty-paint - was merely her agent of sale. It was a common enough situation, Eleanor knew. But she told herself that she could have borne it better if Mamma had only shown some honesty about it.
Of course, in one respect at least Mamma was perfectly correct. They could not live without money. Eleanor did not know how they had lived as long as they had. And Burton - though disgusting, physically, with a nose shaped like cheese squashed in a muslin bag, and with the habit of sucking his teeth smackingly - Burton, it could not be denied, was wealthy.
Mother and daughter lived together with a maid of all work in three rooms on Poland Street; one room at the front, which received a pleasant portion of sunlight during the day, and two at the back, which did not. It was a first-floor apartment. Mamma had taken the front room, and by having a curtain hung from the ceiling so as to partition off a corner contrived to double the room into bed- and sitting room. Eleanor’s own room looked over the yard at the back of the house, a cobbled irregular pentagon shape, in which the clarence was kept underneath a tarpaulin (its horse was owned and stabled in a yard on Euston Road, and brought down by the boy when it was needed). Next to her was what Mamma called ‘the morning room’, although it was actually the maid’s room, the larder and kitchen, and served other functions too. Sally was under instruction to clear away her pallet-bed and the canvas bag containing her belongings immediately upon rising and store them in one of the room’s large cupboards. The maid received a salary of fifty shillings and two dresses each year; but Mamma had not had enough money to supply the dresses for eighteen months now. Sally-a meek, complaisant little thing most of the time - bickered about this neglect from time to time, the more so when she was stitching a repair to her own threadbare clothes. Eleanor, indeed, considered it demeaning to cheat a servant of her wages, but the few occasions when daughter spoke to mother on the subject led only to tears and a bad atmosphere between them.
‘There must be some way we can buy poor Sally a new dress,’ she would say.
‘You know nothing of it,’ her mother would snap at her. ‘The finances are a constant worry and burden to me.’
‘Yet we suffer the expense of maintaining the clarence.’
‘Don’t be foolish, girl!’ replied her mamma.
‘But don’t you think,’ Eleanor essayed next day, thinking the stratagem more likely to succeed, ‘it reflects but poorly on us if our servants are so ill-clothed? Do you not agree, Mamma?’
‘Agree?’ replied her mother, and then hallooed: ‘Ha! You’d have an army of servants all dressed in our own livery, I suppose? Dressed,’ she repeated (she often repeated her own comments if she thought them particularly witty or telling, as she often did), ‘in our own livery, I suppose?’
‘Now,’ placated Eleanor. ‘Mamma, please don’t misunderstand.’
But her mother was crying now. ‘As if I haven’t shouldered the burden of raising a family since your poor papa left us, sole and solitary. As if it hasn’t put lines into my face and shrunken my figure, shrunken my figure, with care and fretting. As if I don’t wrestle with the tiresome figures and sums and all that accounting like Jacob with the angel every day I breathe. Like biblical Jacob and the angel.’
Eleanor embraced her mother.
‘Mamma, Mamma, I did not speak to vex you.’
‘I don’t believe any woman of quality in the whole of London has suffered as I have,’ whimpered Mamma. ‘Since your papa left us.’ She never spoke of Eleanor’s father dying, always spoke of him leaving. It was a more blaming locution.
‘But I only wish to help,’ Eleanor insisted, smoothing down her hair with the flat of her hand as her head pressed against her shoulders. Smears of her mother’s hair-dye streaked her palm. ‘I o
nly wish to alleviate some of this worry. Perhaps if we moved to less expensive accommodation . . .’
Mamma jerked up, accusation in her eyes. ‘This again?’
‘If, Mamma, only if . . .’
‘You’d have us leave this fashionable address, and move to Somers Town?’
‘I only mentioned Somers Town that time before because Mr Froude at the soirée had the good sense to suggest . . .’
‘That beast!’ hissed Mamma. ‘I’ll not have his name mentioned. Somers Town is seedy and repulsive to my sensibilities.’
‘But it is less than a mile from here, Mamma, and so much cheaper . . .’
‘You know nothing of the expense of renting decent accommodation, ’ said Mamma. ‘Besides, I have an understanding with Mr Newsome.’ Then her anger, momentarily solid enough to sit her up straight, collapsed away in a tumble of tears. ‘Oh my darling girl,’ she sobbed, her head sinking against her daughter’s breast. ‘My darling girl!’
Newsome was their landlord, a doleful little man, but an individual - or so Eleanor assumed - sympathetic to the vagaries of finance that supported, or barely supported, his two female tenants. At any rate, he had not evicted them yet. The more Eleanor thought about it, the more remarkable this became to her. Father had left them no money. They had no other relatives to support them. They did no wage-earning work. Eleanor absolutely could not fathom from where her mother got her money. Not that they ever had much money, of course, but Eleanor could not guess where even that little came from. Mamma could not, presumably, conjure gold and silver from thin air; yet there was always silver, and sometimes even gold, in her purse. The silver was only thruppences and sixpences and shillings, it was true, and the dull gold of a half-sovereign was a rare visitor, but all these coins must have come from somewhere.
In many ways Eleanor knew herself innocent of the world. Appropriate to her caste, she had been raised to take a degree of quiet pride in this very ignorance. And from what little she saw of the world outside her bubble she had no great desire for closer acquaintance. It was a grim place, she saw, and dangerous - animals battling with animals and humanity little better, dirty and grimy and every last farthing fought over. Eleanor preferred the sterile beauties of Science - mathematics and engineering in particular, but any book of natural philosophy, or of technics, that she could borrow or buy. But the one field applied to the other. After a day of reading algebraic notation and arithmetical shorthands it was hard not to meditate, half consciously, on the banal arithmetic that governed their precarious gentility in Poland Street, the sums that her mother insisted, with faint absurdity, were too mean for her daughter to be acquainted with. The rooms must cost a pound a week; probably more. Call it £60 per annum. Add in a pound a month for hire of the clarence, and a crown or more each time mother wanted to take it out down Oxford Street to admire the soldiers marching in Hyde Park. Probably two crowns, now Eleanor thought of it: a crown for the horse, and another for the driver. Dresses, coffee, food, surely added up to another pound a week, or perhaps more. Membership of the Portland Street library was a guinea a year, with each volume borrowed for a week costing a shilling: three shillings for a three-volume ‘fashionable’ novel of the sort that Mamma enjoyed, another three for Eleanor’s various books of science and mathematics. Membership of the Fitzroy Society was four guineas for the two of them, although Mamma would surely insist that that was a necessary expense, for the quest to find Eleanor a wealthy husband could not be maintained in a social vacuum. Tot it all up, pennies, shillings, pounds, and the complete amount could hardly be less than £150 a year. Not a princely sum, but money nonetheless.
Where did it come from?
But as Eleanor thought about the subject she found herself wondering where any money came from. She had read Ricardo, had read Mill’s Lectures Upon Political Economy, had read Martineau’s Essay, and had grasped many of the points in these books, for she was a fast-witted girl. But this new science of ‘political economy’ seemed concerned with the distribution and effect of wealth, not with its origin. For Ricardo wealth was simply a solidified form of work. The worker labours for ten hours to make the hat, and when the hat is sold for ten shillings those chiming silver coins are just icons of the time put in by the labourer. Frozen clock-faces. Mutations of time into metal. Without the time and the labour they would be meaningless. Martineau agreed with this assessment, describing money as ‘the concretisation of social relations, the sixpence distilling (as it were) your desire for a loaf of bread and the baker’s desire to sell one to you’. Of course, it had been several years since a loaf cost sixpence. The war pushed prices up. But the general point was clear enough.
But there seemed something, somehow, wrong about this to Eleanor. It seemed to conjugate coinage in too passive a manner. When she took out her small purse and tipped its contents into her palm, the copper and the silver weighed down her hand with a more than material tug. Coins possess a magical quality, surely - an active rather than a passive power, as if each of them were alive in some way, as if the King’s head on the obverse were filled with real silver-thread or gold-cell brains. These coins, though tiny enough to hold in the hand, could assemble into great armies, could call forth mighty buildings to rise from the soil, could conjure machines to plough the oceans or thunder over the ground, or even to fly though the air. Was there anything money could not do? Eleanor could even half-believe that there was something divine about currency: something ideal in the sense Plato had meant the word. As if God had scattered coins down one day like hail, rattling on the rooftops of dumb humanity for them to take up and use and make the world a better place. Each penny, she thought, holding the coin between thumb and forefinger, held a portion of this grace. Might it not be so?
Of course she had no reason to consider money in so benign a light. To her and to her mother money was a tyrant, not a redeemer. The king stamped in Grecian profile on the coin ruled their lives with a Babylonian severity. Money dictated what they could do, and forbade them from doing a great deal more - it was money that commanded that she marry the repulsive Burton. She held the shilling at arm’s length, till it was small as the moon, and contemplated it. So small a thing, to exercise such power over them all. The sovereign is sovereign over all of us, she thought to herself. Then, pleased with her pun, worked through further examples. The crown sits on a tyrant’s head, not our own. The penny pens us in like animals in a cage. But she could not think of any further examples.
That night she played cards with her mother. Sally brought in supper from a chophouse round the corner, potatoes hot under a tin lid. The gravy was a little too salt, and the meat was overcooked, almost biscuit in texture. But Eleanor did not complain.
Afterwards there was a little Madeira wine for mother and daughter whilst Sally took the plates back to the shop. They played another hand of cards, and Mamma took a second glass of the sweet wine.
‘You know, dear Eleanor,’ she observed, ‘that Mister Burton will call on us tomorrow afternoon?’
‘I recall, Mamma.’
There was a silent moment between them. The wind brushed against the window outside, and rattled the panes with a noise like a slow shuffle of cards. Eleanor tidied things away. Mother poured herself another Madeira, and drank it in one gulp. ‘He will treat you well, my love,’ she said. ‘That can’t be said of all men a woman might marry. But he has a kind heart, I think.’
‘I know, Mamma.’
‘Perhaps he will not be the most . . . the most dashing of husbands . . .’
‘It is all right, Mamma.’
Another silence. The stub of the old candle chuckled to itself. It pulsed its light in flickers against the walls. Eleanor almost called for Sally to bring a new candle, before remembering that she had gone out to take the plates back to the chophouse. She had been gone a long while. What could be keeping her so long away? Better, anyway, to save the expense of the candle.
‘I shall retire, Mamma,’ Eleanor said.
‘Sleep well, my darling,’ said Mamma, a clucking little catch in her voice that threatened tears, the Madeira promoting the flow of sentiment through her foolish heart. ‘My darling, darling girl!’
Eleanor embraced her mother. ‘Don’t upset yourself Mamma,’ she said, softly.
‘You are so darling,’ the older woman moaned, her eyes wet. The candle stuttered again, and the light danced crazily. ‘My darling girl.’
‘Don’t upset yourself Mamma,’ Eleanor repeated. She helped her over to her divan, and pulled the curtain to. ‘Goodnight, Mamma.’
‘Darling guilt,’ murmured her mother. ‘My darling, darling guilt.’
This jarred. ‘What was that, Mamma?’
The older woman seemed to jolt more awake. ‘What?’
‘Did you say?’ But Eleanor thought better of pressing the point. ‘Nothing, Mamma, nothing. Goodnight.’ She fetched the snuffer from the cold mantelpiece and put the dying candle out of its misery. Mamma’s breathing had steadied to the rumble of sleep by the time she was at the door.
Eleanor made her way through the dark into her own room, and lit her own candle. She heard the front door, and came through to the little hallway to confront the serving girl. The candle stroked weird trembly ellipses and intersecting arcs of light against the walls. Sally’s face looked flushed. ‘Where have you been, Sally?’