by Rosie Thomas
Matthew Shaw said, ‘You couldn’t trust that man as far as you could throw him. I knew it the minute he walked through my front door.’
Nowadays Lizzie never spoke of Jack Hooper, although when she first met him she had talked of nothing else. She had breathed in Nancy’s ear, ‘God, he’s so handsome. He makes me feel like a queen and a she-devil, both at the same time.’
And then she had laughed, a strange glittering laughter that made Nancy jealous. Nancy had not then been able to imagine what passion must feel like, but now it occurred to her that she had experienced the softest premonitory whisper of it. Was it only a matter of hours ago that she had sat talking to Gil Maitland? Yesterday evening seemed to belong in another life.
Devil made room for Faith at one side of the bed and Cornelius sat opposite them. There was no space for Nancy, so at Faith’s suggestion she slipped away to make tea. The fire had gone out and the kitchen was chilly. She brought in a basket of kindling from the lean-to in the back area, lit a twisted horseshoe of newspaper and set the kettle on the hob. Her chilblains flared and she clawed absently at them. While she was waiting for the water to boil she rummaged in the drawers of the old dresser and after quite a long search found what she was looking for, a small roll of butter muslin that Mrs Frost must have used for making raspberry jelly. Devil liked jelly, although none had been made in this kitchen for several years. She laid the muslin to one side, acknowledging that it was too late now to try to protect anyone from infection. But it was the memory of sweet red jelly that prompted her to carve slices off yesterday’s loaf and toast them in front of the yellow fire. She laid a tray with butter and shop jam and carried it up to the drawing room, not even glancing out of the window at the spot where Lawrence Feather had appeared last night.
Eliza was still fitfully sleeping. Her mouth hung open and her jaw sagged. Nancy gave a cup of tea to Faith and sent Devil and Cornelius downstairs for theirs.
Nancy murmured, ‘I’ve heard that the first twenty-four hours are the worst. If she can survive the night, you know …’
Faith answered, ‘Your mother will, if anyone can. I have seen her do it before. After Cornelius was born she was more dead than alive, then a few hours later she was sitting up and trying to nurse him and insisting that he was going to live too. Matthew and I sent for the priest to baptise him, we were so certain that he wouldn’t last the day.’
‘Was she always the same?’
Faith said, ‘Yes. Always.’
Nancy almost smiled. There were no compromises in Eliza except for those forced on her by life’s reverses, and she bowed under those with little grace.
Eliza’s fits of coughing shook the house. They could only hold her arms and hope that the spasms would not crack her ribs. When the latest one subsided Faith folded a damp cloth with some drops of eau de cologne and placed it on her forehead while Nancy sponged her wrists with cold water. The pillow was sweat-soaked so they placed a fresh towel under her head.
The two women talked in low voices.
Nancy asked, ‘Carlo was the dwarf, wasn’t he? She keeps saying his name.’
‘Carlo was your father’s stage partner in the very first days of the Palmyra. Eliza and I went to see them perform an act called The Philosopher’s Illusion.’
Nancy had often heard it described. The trick turned on the dwarf’s miniature stature, which he concealed from the audience throughout by walking on stilts.
‘Carlo was in love with her, poor fellow. They all were,’ Faith added.
‘Who was Jakey? Ma talked about him too.’
Faith was distracted. ‘The boy? He was in the company back then. He could act rather well. I think he went on to another theatre and much bigger things.’
Nancy bent her head and laced her fingers with her mother’s. Eliza’s wedding ring was loose on the bone.
Devil and Cornelius came back, somewhat restored by toast and tea.
The day wore on. At the end of the afternoon Nancy walked up the road to the post office. The cold air was like a slap after the close fug of the sickroom. She telephoned Miss Dent, to let her know that she would have to be away from work for as long as her mother needed to be nursed. Miss Dent accepted her apologies with a brief word of sympathy and didn’t ask her when she expected to return to work.
At home again Nancy found Faith busy in the kitchen and hearty smells of cooking drifting up through the house. She tried to thank her, but Faith would hear none of it.
‘Who else needs me? Not Lizzie. And Matthew can look out for Tommy just as well as I can.’
Nancy put her arms around her aunt’s plump shoulders.
‘All the same, thank you,’ she said.
Soon there was a hot meal ready for Devil and Cornelius. The men ate quickly and gratefully. Cornelius brooded in silence but at least he didn’t mutter about the wounded waiting for his help, or watch the clock as if every spoonful might cost a man’s life.
Devil didn’t even contemplate going to the Palmyra for the evening performance.
‘Anthony will have to manage,’ he shrugged.
The evening slid into night. Devil dozed at the bedside with his head on his folded arms and Nancy and Faith took it in turns to lie down in Nancy’s bedroom. Cornelius padded between his own room and Eliza’s, and Nancy found his withdrawn vigilance oddly reassuring. He picked up the latest letter from Arthur and scanned it.
‘Have you sent for him? He would get compassionate leave, I think.’
Devil briefly shook his head. They all understood that he delayed because Arthur was to be shielded as far as possible.
‘Ah. Well, maybe it’s for the best. I think the crisis may be almost over.’
It seemed that Cornelius was right. The next time Eliza woke she was too weak to lift her head but she knew them all. Her eyes always came back to Devil.
Dr Vassilis was visibly surprised when he called the next day, but he pretended to have foreseen the improvement. He examined her before stepping well back to remove his muslin mask.
‘Yes, you see, it is just like I told you. It is not the strongest ones who survive. Last night I have a young man die, sick for one day and pfffff, he goes like blowing out this.’ He pointed to the candle in its holder on the night table. The family stared at him, not at all comforted, and the doctor snapped his bag shut. To Cornelius he said in a more cheerful voice, ‘How are you, my friend?’
Cornelius considered the question.
‘There has been more than enough dying, doctor. To sit and brood on it as I have been doing is not helpful. I find nursing my mother a more useful occupation.’
Vassilis looked shrewdly at him.
‘That is a fine discovery, Mr Wix.’
The doctor bowed and wished them good day. After she had seen him out Nancy gave way in private to tears of relief. To manage her feelings for Devil and Cornelius’s sake she set herself the job of laundering all the soiled bed linen and towels. In the scullery she put water on to boil and found a kind of painful oblivion in plunging her arms deep in the enamel wash tub and scrubbing with the laundry soap until her muscles ached. She tipped the scummy water down the stone sink and ran a fresh tub. She rinsed everything twice and fed the clean items through the mangle, leaning down on the heavy handle with all the weight of her body. She pegged out sheets under the tin roof that partly covered the back area and draped the towels on the wooden maiden suspended from the kitchen ceiling. Her arms were scalded crimson to the elbows.
Faith found her as she was finishing the work.
‘Nancy? Look at you. Doesn’t Eliza send out to a laundry?’
‘The boy came for it yesterday when we were all too busy. Anyway I needed to do it myself, and it’s made me feel much better. Is Ma sleeping?’
‘She is. Cornelius is with her. Your father’s exhausted so I told him to lie down in your room.’
‘That’s good.’
Faith regarded her with an odd expression.
‘Aunt Faith? Is somet
hing wrong?’
‘You are so like her, you know.’
Nancy was taken aback.
Her whole life was coloured by being unlike her mother and by wishing to resemble her more closely.
‘Not in your looks, although since you have grown up I see more of her in you every day. In your stubbornness, I mean. You won’t ever give up once you have fixed on an idea. Even when you were tiny, if you wanted to play with a toy you would have it, however hard the boys tried to take it off you. You wouldn’t yell, but you kept your eyes and your little hands fastened tight on it. Lizzie always understood the power of a bargain. She’d hand over the ball so as to get herself something better. You have your mother’s energy too.’ Faith pointed at the white ramparts of sheets, stirring in the wind. ‘She would have done that, before her strength went.’
‘Poor Ma,’ Nancy sighed.
She hadn’t been aware that she possessed Eliza’s iron will. Nancy’s own impression was of inhabiting the margins of her family. She stayed on the outskirts and kept quiet, mostly because of the Uncanny and her conviction that she had to protect it and keep it secret. Her way of camouflaging her difference was to be unobtrusive in plain sight.
She took it for granted that her father loved her, in the way that fathers always loved their only daughters, but she didn’t think he knew or understood her particularly well, any more than Eliza did. Most of her parents’ energies, after all, were applied to each other. The memory of the Queen Mab returned, and how her father’s first and strongest instinct had been to save his wife.
Nancy wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her shoulders ached from lifting and mangling wet towels, and there was a new and less manageable ache in her that she did not yet recognise. She wondered how it ever came about that you loved someone like a husband or wife, and were loved back. It seemed too complicated to happen very often and yet the suggestion of it was everywhere, except in her own life.
Faith saw her expression.
‘Nancy, dear. You’re very tired. You’ll be ill yourself if you don’t take care.’
‘It’s not that, Aunt Faith.’
‘What is it, then?’
Faith’s motherly concern touched her, and the ache faded a little. But Nancy’s instinct was always to parry a direct question so she turned aside and asked, ‘Will Ma get well?’
Faith used a folded cloth to lift a pan of scalding water. Clouds of steam billowed between them.
‘I believe she will recover from this bout, yes.’
Nancy could see that her aunt was disappointed by her reticence.
The next day Eliza was a little better. The sweating and shivering stopped, although the terrible cough persisted. The day after that Faith held her while Nancy fed her two or three spoonfuls of soup.
The household adjusted to the rhythms of nursing Eliza. Faith spent the days helping Nancy and Cornelius in Islington, but she returned to Matthew every evening because he complained so much about Lizzie’s cooking and standards of housekeeping.
After the end of her marriage Lizzie went back to her parents, although she confided to Nancy that it was difficult to live in a house that had become a shrine to Edwin and Rowland. Their boyhood possessions were preserved like relics and there were photographs of the dead sons everywhere. Nancy couldn’t say much in response to this, because Lizzie must think it unfair that Cornelius and Arthur were both still alive.
Lizzie had adopted a brisk manner that could make her seem a little hard. She had to give up her beloved job with the tea importer once she became a mother, but afterwards she had quickly yielded the daily care of Tommy to Faith, in favour of helping her father with the family greengrocery. The loss of his sons had aged Matthew Shaw, and Lizzie had energy and an undeniable talent for business. She made herself useful and then indispensable and she claimed a healthy wage for her efforts. Her short tenure as Jack Hooper’s wife had left her with a fierce desire for independence.
‘Mama shouldn’t have to run back and forth every day like this. My father could quite easily fry himself an egg,’ Lizzie said when she called one evening to see Eliza. ‘Although he doesn’t believe eggs and frying pans should be a man’s work.’
Nancy had sewn a set of muslin masks and her cousin wore one as she hovered uncertainly at the bedside. The women all agreed that little Tommy must be protected from infection, but there was also an understanding that Lizzie couldn’t be involved in caring for anyone who was ill. She was not a nurse, she would have insisted, and she had no talent for such things.
Lizzie had been unable to hide her shock at Eliza’s changed appearance. She chatted to her a little too brightly and disconnectedly through the layers of her mask, and was relieved when Nancy led her away before Eliza got overtired.
The cousins retreated downstairs. Lizzie stood by the kitchen range, tapped a cigarette on her thumbnail and expertly clicked a lighter. She had shortened her skirts and her hair and had recently started painting her lips. The dark lipstick stained the butt of the cigarette.
Exhaling sharply she exclaimed, ‘Poor Nancy. What a ghastly time you have all been through.’
Nancy accepted a cigarette and puffed inexpertly.
‘She’s getting better, that’s all that matters.’
‘She looks terrible.’
Lizzie was always blunt. To change the subject Nancy said, ‘What about you?’
Lizzie shrugged. ‘Tommy’s happy. He’ll start school in the autumn. My life’s all work, more’s the pity. I’d like a nice new boyfriend. I expect you would too, eh? You and I are both going to deserve some proper fun quite soon, darling.’
Devil had said the same thing.
‘Soon,’ Nancy said. She would have liked to believe it, and sometimes as she did the endless household chores she allowed herself a fantasy in which Gil Maitland’s cream Daimler drew up outside the house or in front of Lennox & Ringland. He knew where she lived and her place of work, but as the days passed and there was no evidence of him she told herself that of course a man like Gil was not going to materialise and sweep her off her feet. He had whiled away an hour in her company and given her a lift home because it was raining. Nothing more.
You are not Cinderella or a princess in a fairy tale. You are Nancy Wix. You can dream, but a dream is all it is.
Lizzie winked at her and began to talk about business. She quickly became animated. People needed novelty and some little luxuries, she declared. With the shipping routes open again and overseas trade growing, she was establishing a network of relationships with importers of exotic fruits. Pineapples from South America, mangoes from India, figs from the Mediterranean shores, all these could be brought in the holds of cargo ships and unloaded at the London or Liverpool docks. The dewy fruits would make their way, via the modern wholesale warehouse Lizzie had encouraged her father to acquire, to every quality greengrocer in the country. The miracle of refrigeration made all this easy, Lizzie explained, waving her hands. She still wore her wedding ring, Nancy noted.
‘Just wait and see. There will be a fresh pineapple or a peach on every table, I promise you. Not only in the great houses where the dukes and lords have their own hothouses.’
Nancy wondered if the war had been fought even partly to make a pineapple available to everyone who might desire one, but she said nothing. There had been so many unexpected outcomes of the conflict that the real impact seemed impossible to discern. Married women and those over thirty could vote and one of them had even been elected to Parliament. After all the suffragists’ meetings, and the broken windows and arson and arrests and prison sentences, it had taken the greater war to win the battle for them.
‘The how doesn’t matter,’ Jinny insisted. ‘It’s the what that counts.’
After a week at home, during which his growing distraction and restlessness reflected Eliza’s steady recovery, Devil announced that he must get back to the Palmyra.
‘Anthony Ellis does his best,’ he said, which meant that the manag
er’s best wasn’t good enough.
He confessed to Nancy that there was a crisis of loyalty to deal with because some of the artistes had not been paid for their most recent performances. They had refused to go onstage and he had been forced to cancel shows. There was an embarrassment concerning available funds, he said. Audiences had been sparse for weeks because people feared the influenza, but an almost empty theatre still cost the same to run as it did when full.
It was nothing really, he insisted, only a short-term problem. Once the bitter weather and the threat of infection receded, the seats would fill up again. He was sure he could persuade his players and creditors to be patient.
‘No need to mention this to your mother. She’ll only worry.’
‘I know, Pa. In the fever she thought she was at the theatre, but back in the old days. She often mentioned Carlo, and someone called Jakey. Who was he?’
Devil gave her a glance. ‘Jake Jones? He was a street boy. Out of the kindness of our young hearts your mother and I took him in. Sylvia Aynscoe even taught him to read. He worked his way on to the stage and before Eliza and I knew it he was off to join Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket company, if you please. He’s done well for himself, has Jakey Jones. Haven’t you heard of him?’
Nancy shook her head.
‘Dear me. I should take you out and about more. He’s in the films now, I believe. Mr Jones’s Hamlet is celebrated, and he was a very good performer in Mr Wilde’s plays if that sort of thing happens to be to your taste. I really should look him up,’ Devil added thoughtfully.
Eliza’s strength slowly returned but she was not an easy or accommodating patient. She was always asking what time Devil was expected home, even in the quiet hours when Cornelius read to her or simply held her hand as she drifted in and out of sleep. Nancy became the focus for her complaints. Her bones ached so horribly, why couldn’t Vassilis give her something stronger to stop the pain? Her food was cold, the bed was crumpled and her pillows were always flat. Why was the sunlight so bright in her eyes, or why was the room so dim that she couldn’t see a thing?