by Alex Reeve
‘You don’t understand. She’s … damn you, Jacob.’ How could I possibly explain to him what Maria and I meant to each other? I stopped walking, feeling a sob rise in my throat. I swallowed it down, breathing through my nose. My head was throbbing, my armpits were aching from the cilice and my bladder was bursting. I couldn’t abide the thought of losing control. ‘You can find your own way from here.’
‘Leo? What’s wrong? Where are you going?’
I didn’t answer him. I was desperate for home.
When I finally lay down on my mattress to go to sleep, my last thought was this: thirty-eight hours to go, and we will be together.
4
The entrance to the Opera Comique wasn’t near as swish as the Savoy or the Olympic, being little more than a wood-framed canopy and a propped-up hoarding of a jolly admiral holding a telescope to his eye. I had passed it two dozen times before, but had never been inside. Now, standing there half an hour early in my best trousers and shirt, with clean hair, freshly polished shoes and a box of toffees in my hand, it was more down-at-heel than I had remembered, and I wondered if it was good enough for Maria.
I was planning to invite her for a stroll down to St James’s Park afterwards. There was a bird house by the lake filled with exotic waders and brightly coloured ducks, and for a farthing we could buy a bag of grain to feed them. I hoped there would be time. I hoped it might become a regular arrangement. I couldn’t afford the theatre every week, but a walk in the park was free, and we could touch and talk and shelter under the trees when it rained, and occasionally steal a kiss when no one was watching.
I paced up and down, too excited to stay still. This was my first time. Never before had I enjoyed the simple pleasure of courting a girl.
And if I could do this, who knew what else was possible?
The crowds started to gather on the pavement. Jacob had been right; there were lots of children with their parents, but also some couples and a large group of women, chattering at high speed. One of them had seen the play before and was trilling a chorus to the others, waving her arms and acting out the different parts. I searched among the faces. I wanted to see her eyes and her smile as she arrived.
At a quarter to the hour a young flash in a waistcoat opened the door and started ushering everyone inside.
‘You coming in, mate?’
‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘Your lady’s not shown up? It happens.’
I took a dislike to the man, and decided my time would be better spent searching for Maria.
I hurried down Holywell Street. The pavement was scanty and crowded with men gazing into the windows of lewd bookshops, shaded by the overhang of buildings tilted so far forward they seemed about to spill their licentious contents on to the street below. There was no sign of Maria.
By the time I got back to the Opera Comique, the usher was about to shut the door. She might have gone in while I was searching for her, so I handed him my ticket and rushed along the passage and down the steps.
The curtain was just rising. The stage showed a merry dockside scene crammed with coiled ropes and wooden barrels, and behind them the sun in the sky and sails on the horizon. The actors came on and started singing, but I wasn’t listening. I pushed through the shrubbery of knees to my seat, ignoring the sighs and tuts, searching every face for Maria.
The song finished and the sailors started up a cheery conversation. The audience was laughing. I looked back at the door, supposing she might be about to arrive, flustered and apologetic. I would forgive her, of course.
The woman sitting on the other side of the empty seat offered me a pitying half-smile, and the space between us took on a vast scale, a flagrant cavity in the otherwise packed theatre. I slumped down and watched the play, and even started to feel sympathy for the downtrodden Ralph, willing to fight for his beloved but kept from her by petty rules and conventions. It was a feeble comparison and I despised myself for snivelling.
When the lights came on for the intermission, everyone stood up. There was no room to breathe. All these people had someone to talk to, someone to share their opinions with. But after only half the performance I was already confident that true love would prevail through some unexpected turn of events, and Ralph and whatever-her-name-was would be wedded, and there would be a lot more rip-roaring songs. I couldn’t bear it.
I escaped down the hill to the Embankment and sat on a bench staring out at the Thames, which was as black and cold as wrought iron. It was nothing like the play; gulls picking at shellfish, boat engines hacking, the stench of tar in my nostrils, crowds of people with dour faces, and everything covered with the soot and grime of London.
My times with Maria were brief glimpses into a life I could almost have, crueller for being so tantalisingly close. And I was foolish enough to hope. Not a plan or even an intention, but a hope that Maria and I might one day live together as normal people. I didn’t yearn for greatness or wealth, just the kind of homely mundanity that every other man takes for granted: socks to hang by the fire, a book to read, a dog to walk and the sound of Maria’s laughter every day of our lives. Was that too much to ask?
Perhaps I was deceiving myself. Over the years I’d learned to pass as a man, keeping my voice deep, sitting with my knees apart and my elbows out, never putting my hands on my hips. But a natural man had a cock that wasn’t attached with buckles, and a bellowing laugh. He didn’t have to flatten his chest with a cilice or pad out his shoes with newspaper.
The Thames grew even darker as the sun dipped, and mist lingered on the water. I could almost feel the weight of my clothing pulling me down between gasps, the biting cold of it, the sweep of the current tugging me. I could taste the engine oil shimmering on the surface like tarnished copper.
But these thoughts weren’t mine, not now. They were just echoes from years ago. I toyed with them, holding them up for scrutiny and then putting them back, feeling hysterical and foolish. After all, if every fellow whose girl broke a promise threw himself into the Thames, Mr Hurst would be a very busy man indeed.
While I had still been a porter, a patient in the women’s ward had been found to possess male parts despite having long hair and wearing a silk dress and a boned corset. We were all shocked, even me. I went to visit this pale and desolate boy, and he introduced himself as Eliza. I held out my hand, but he couldn’t shake it because he was tied by his wrists to the bedstead.
‘I’m not really frightened,’ he said. ‘I’m a butterfly, and we’re not meant to live for long. Better to be a butterfly for a day than a caterpillar for ever.’ It sounded like something he’d practised in his head.
It was the first time I’d met anyone with anything like my affliction, or indeed known that such a person could exist. I had the urge to tell him about myself. I wanted to know if he felt the same, if he spent all his time watching every movement, listening to every tone of his voice. I wanted to know if he sometimes grew melancholy too, exhausted by such unceasing vigilance.
But the risk was too great, and anyway I never got the chance. The police came for him and put him into a men’s prison and later into a mental asylum, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, where the doctors ran electricity through his skull and might have drilled into it as well if he hadn’t declared himself gratefully and for ever healed.
That would be my future too, if I was caught.
I was fifteen when I became the male I should have been all along. A wealthy family had recently arrived in Enfield, and everyone was talking about them. The gentleman had taken a share in the jute factory at Ponder’s End, and was apt to drop pound notes on to the collection plate with a kind of casual flourish. My father did everything he could to impress the man, delivering sermons on the value of industry and the importance of an orderly society, and my mother invited them round for tea, including the son, who was a year or two older than me. She made the two of us sit together on the sofa, and kept throwing us sidelong glances while the men discussed the shortc
omings of the Liberal government. The son was narrow-faced and ungainly, but had an amusing way of rolling his eyes when his father wasn’t looking. I quite liked him, and would gladly have spent more time with him, but the idea of kissing or marriage was abhorrent. Pure madness.
It was clear I had to start my new life as a man as soon as I could.
I’d been helping some local children with their times tables for threepence each, and when I’d saved enough, I walked down to the market and bought myself a cap, a pair of britches, a white shirt and a sturdy pair of lace-up shoes, all in good condition. I couldn’t afford a decent coat, but I found a tatty one with torn lining and two buttons missing, and haggled the price down to sixpence.
Now, all my family were out. I sat at the bathroom mirror and cut my hair with scissors, and then crept downstairs with my little bag in my hands. I’d packed five books and a silver rose brooch my mother had given me. Everything else I left behind. It would be hard, but I was sure I could do it, and there was work in London, so I’d been told, for young men of intellect and fortitude. This was the beginning of everything.
It was a freezing-cold November day and there was frost on the windows. I thought of my buttonless coat, which I wouldn’t even be able to do up. My father had bought himself a Sunday-best one a few weeks before, with big black buttons, and I considered stealing it, but he was over six feet tall and broad around the belly, and I wanted nothing of his. Nothing except those big, black, beautiful buttons.
I took the scissors and cut two of them off, leaving ragged tufts of cotton sticking out. I sewed them on to my own coat with thread from Mummy’s sewing box, and they looked very fine indeed.
There was a noise at the front door, people coming into the hall, taking off their shoes. I slipped into the kitchen, easing the back door open just as Mummy came in. At first, she didn’t recognise this slim young man with his cap in his hand. Her mouth hung open, on the brink of shouting for someone to come, until realisation descended.
She reached out to my shorn head. ‘Lottie … my darling. Who did this to you? What happened?’
I hadn’t wanted her to see me. I knew I would be tempted to stay, for her sake.
‘I cut off my hair.’
She half-smiled and examined me again, as if I was tricking her and had a ponytail tucked under my collar. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m sorry, Mummy. I have to go.’
She frowned, still lacking any comprehension. ‘Lottie, you contrary girl. Go and get changed this minute. Quickly, upstairs before your father comes home.’
She was already in motion towards the door, as if she could return everything to normal just by wishing fervently for it to be so; my hair would grow back, these clothes could be thrown away, my momentary silliness forgotten, if only I would just do as she told me.
But I couldn’t.
I put my hands in my pockets in a deliberately masculine gesture, and to hide that they were shaking. ‘This is who I am.’
‘Upstairs, quickly. He’ll be home any minute.’
‘I know. I have to leave before that.’
‘Leave? What are you talking about? Where are you going?’ Her fingers were twitching as if she might unpick my clothes right there in the kitchen before this insanity went any further.
‘Anywhere. I can’t live here.’
I was almost weeping, but not quite. If I wept, I would have to embrace her and then I wouldn’t be able to go. I had to be resolute, even though it was unspeakably cruel, leaving her here with my father, who had so little to say to her, and Jane, whose attention was already far away, planning a family of her own.
‘You can’t leave. You’re just a girl.’
Just a girl. I smiled at that, aware of how callous it must seem. She was more of a child than I was, an innocent, married to my father at seventeen, passed to him by her own father like a sickly foal that wasn’t expected to last. She’d defied expectations by surviving, and had somehow managed to remain untouched by it all, determinedly unaware of her husband’s indifference.
She implored me. She told me to stop being so selfish, and that I was upsetting her even though I knew full well how delicate she was. How could I be so unkind, and on a Saturday as well, when we should all be together as a family? And when I told her that I had always been male underneath my skin, she sat down on a chair with her hands over her face and told me that God had made us all and we couldn’t choose. Even to think about such things was lunacy, idiocy, blasphemy. Why was I hurting her this way?
I almost stayed. It would have been so easy; she could have snicked off those buttons and got to sewing while I dashed upstairs to change and find a bonnet to hide my shame. In half an hour we could have been doing a jigsaw puzzle together in the parlour.
And then what? I would never be anything other than what I was. If I didn’t leave now, I would be leaving in a week, or a month. I had no choice.
I put on my cap and picked up my bag.
Jane had come into the room, and was glaring at me with her arms folded. ‘I never thought you’d actually do it,’ she said.
Mummy was barely able to speak through her tears. ‘Tell her, Jane. She’ll listen to you. Tell her she can’t leave.’
‘I have to,’ I said, sounding more calm than I felt.
‘Wait one minute,’ said Jane.
‘What for?’
‘One damn minute.’ I’d never heard her swear in front of Mummy before.
Jane left, and Mummy and I stared at one another. When Jane came back she pressed something into my hand. ‘From the collection plate.’
‘You mustn’t,’ I said. ‘This is five pounds. He’ll be livid. And I stole his buttons for my coat.’
Instinctively, Mummy inspected my stitching.
‘You see?’ I said, taking her hand in mine. ‘I did learn something after all.’
‘Keep the money,’ said Jane. ‘If you’re truly going, then go now.’
She was furious with me. But she was still my sister.
And she was right, it was best not to meet our father. Any fear I’d ever had of him was long since scabbed over and peeled back and scabbed over again, until it was no more than scar tissue, but Mummy would never be able to withstand him. I didn’t know what he would do if she put herself between us.
At the last, I couldn’t stop myself from drawing Mummy to me, but it wasn’t the embrace we would normally have shared. It was a brief and narrow-elbowed thing.
‘You know you’ve always been …’ My favourite she had been going to say.
‘I’ll write to you as soon as I get there. I promise.’
But I never did. At first I didn’t know what to say, and then the weeks turned into months and it seemed too late, and then it really was. She died four years later, her typhoid-weakened chest finally giving way to pneumonia. Jane told me that my father had barely visited his wife in her last few weeks, preferring to spend his time doing good works in the town, and Mummy gave up asking for him. But she never stopped weeping for her little Lottie, her darling, difficult daughter, and begged them to find me, even right up to the end. But they hadn’t known where I was at the time, and maybe hadn’t tried as hard as they might.
For a while after that, I was not myself.
Ever since that day I had known that no matter how lost I became, no matter how desperate, I could always locate my North Star, my guiding light, in my absolute hatred of the Reverend Ivor Pritchard. He was living in Hampstead now. I could picture him settling down in his armchair with a Young’s Concordance and a briar pipe, facing the fireplace, a dog lying loyally at his feet. Perhaps a cold-meat supper, if one of his parishioners had been so kind.
And somehow that settled it. I wiped my eyes. Nothing was ever achieved by giving up at the first obstacle. I would persist with Maria. I would ask her again and again until she was ready to come to the theatre with me.
And one day, who knows?
We were meant to be together. I was certain of it.<
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5
On Monday morning, the clock hadn’t yet struck six when I came downstairs. Alfie was in his dressing gown adding up his takings at the counter, his flickering candle casting peek-a-boo shadows behind the packages and bottles on the shelves. Constance was awake too, polishing the floor on her hands and knees with her own invented emulsion of beeswax and turpentine, which smelled as foul as my mood.
‘Pyrogallic acid!’ she shouted as soon as she saw me.
‘Later.’
‘Later won’t help you,’ she replied in a mock-serious voice. ‘You’re doomed, Mr Stanhope.’
‘I know.’
‘And you’re not to cheat and look it up. I have dozens of remedies I can ask you.’
‘Leave the poor man alone,’ muttered Alfie with his nose in his account book. ‘I’m sorry, Leo.’
‘That’s all right. You’re up early.’
‘Seeing the bank this morning.’ He gestured glumly at the notes and coins in front of him. ‘Just when you need a bank, you can least afford to pay them back.’
Now that I looked more closely, the pile was mainly coins: pennies and halfpennies. ‘I could pay the rent early if you want. A month in advance.’
‘No, it’s all right, thanks. I’ve had an idea. It’ll change our fortunes, I’m sure of it.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’ll see.’ He went back to his counting and I thought he looked tired and somehow older, his dark beard streaked with grey like a hearth in need of a good sweep.
I set off for work, walking briskly. Mr Hurst was both punctual and punitive. He’d fired his last assistant for lateness after employing him for twelve years. He still called me Nicholson from time to time.
In the early morning, with dawn still more than an hour away and the sky glowing red along the horizon, the overnight snow had partially melted, leaving a sediment at the edge of the pavement as if the world had started to rust.
Ted Boyd, who ran the grocery next door, was setting up for the day, putting out crates of cauliflower, spinach and rhubarb. His shop was expansive and colourful, making Alfie’s pharmacy seem small and drab by comparison. He clapped me on the back.