by Tanya Moir
Instead 32 Fournier Street falls, in due course, to Joshua. In fact, he receives his house in 1786, a few months before he turns twenty-one, when his father succumbs to a short but inconvenient illness. It is necessary, given the arrangement of their attics, that Number 30 should follow, just as soon as Granny Beth is ready to leave it. She does so twelve years later, on 2 January, in a box.
It’s good timing on her part. Just a few months later, hard questions begin to be asked. They revolve around the fate of one Jack Gilet — a boy who, to Tobias’ chagrin, turns out to have been only temporarily friendless.
When little Jack’s uncle arrives at St Bart’s to reclaim his long-lost nephew, Tobias is unable to satisfy him. Mr Gilet is understandably upset, and calls on the good folk of Spitalfields to help him in his search for the missing boy. The following day, when eight-year-old Jack is found throttled to death in Moorfields Mortuary, alarm turns to anger. Fingers are pointed. A constable is called in. He interviews Tobias, and the boys.
William defends his brother, successfully, against the resulting manslaughter charge. During the trial, however, certain allegations emerge. According to the prosecution, Tobias has been in the habit of ordering a boy or two to be sent to his room late at night, where they remain for some hours, receiving his private instruction. It doesn’t help when his wife, Josephine, testifies that she ‘cannot say’ what Tobias gets up to in Silk Street at night, having moved to a house in Shoreditch, unable to stand ‘what goes on in that awful place’.
It is all hearsay, argues William. The lies of wicked children and disgruntled former employees. Still, the details of these alleged divertissements — constricting fingers, bruising hands, unnatural connections — cannot be unsaid. The public gallery is full, and Spitalfields’ memory long.
When the case is over, it is thought best — by and for all — that Tobias make a fresh start, somewhere else, a long way away. And so it is that my great-uncle takes ship for America, hoping to bury the corpse of his reputation in foreign soil. He settles on the Chesapeake Coast, where he will come in handy.
In London, meanwhile, William’s appetite for the law is whetted. He devotes more and more time to his practice, which, since Tobias’ not guilty verdict, has been blessed with a lengthy list of clients. He takes a house near the Inns of Court, leaving Joshua to run the Princelet Street home as well as St Bart’s in Silk Street.
And what of Marguerite, you may ask? A timely question: that flutter of ribbons is just about to take her place in our story. Tiring of needlework in her mother’s house, Marguerite has married a Mr Percival Grant, the eldest son of the family that will one day be known as the Shipping Grants, but right now operates two leaky barques out of Rotherhithe on the London–New England run.
One night, after a good dinner at the Hardynges’ mahogany table, in front of a merry fire, Percy Grant proffers a box of Virginian snuff and complains, rather too bitterly for courtesy, about its current price. Uncle Joshua takes a generous pinch, and no offence. When he can speak again, he agrees that the high price of American commodities continues to stultify that country’s growth, and declares her little loss to the empire.
The Americans’ problem, Percy opines, placing his snuffbox safely back in his pocket, is shortage of labour. ‘Tobacco or cotton,’ he says, ‘it’s all the same.’ He pauses to dab his eyes. ‘The Lord has ordered it very ill. He’s given their side nothing but work, and ours all the idle hands.’
‘Cotton, you say?’ observes Joshua, as the footman pours the port.
Above their heads, Marguerite is visiting her old room. In its centre, Great-aunt Nora agitates a cradle but, despite her mother’s attentions, Baby Barbara remains asleep. Marguerite is not listening to her sister-in-law’s cooing — has moved to the window, in fact, to be free of it, where she plucks aside the edge of the curtain and surveys the familiar shapes of the Spitalfields night.
A cold draught stirs the room, and causes Marguerite’s bare skin a pleasant little shudder. Surely, if Nora would only be quiet, she would hear the pitter-pat of unshod feet upon the ceiling? She closes her eyes and presses her hand to her breast. The wet-nurse rises quietly from her chair to add more coals to the fire.
Marguerite turns away from the window to watch the coal dust flash and flame. She imagines the friendless boys overhead, under glass and stars, huddled up to the warmth of the chimney. As a child, she always made sure that the servants kept an extravagant fire in her room on cold evenings. If she woke in the night — as she often did, from the noise of drunks and the night cart, from improvident cats and the silent will of orphans — Marguerite would rise and mend the grate herself. There’s nothing as cheering to the heart as a good blaze.
In the cradle, Baby Babs reddens and squawks. There’s a groan up above. Then the midnight bells of the Strangers’ Church begin to ring, and a lost snatch of carol makes its way across the frigid air from the back of the Weaver’s Arms.
Aunt Nora kisses her wakening child. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she says. She takes Marguerite by the arm, and they nod to the nurse as they shut the door.
The joint venture’s first shipment — thirty-six boys — leaves for Virginia in the spring. Joshua has prepared them well. The more handsome ones have been trained in service, just in case; all have been taught to tell anyone who should ask, between Spitalfields and Chesapeake Bay, that they are past their sixteenth year. They’re not, of course, for who in their right mind wants a boy of sixteen? A bothersome, truculent age, at which they possess the strength and appetite of a man, but are yet to develop his instinct for self-preservation. But at ten or twelve, they are nimble-fingered and quick, and easily governed.
Tobias is waiting to greet them. They walk through the strange streets to the house he has purchased. The Hardings (as they’ve taken to spelling it since the trial) are officially transatlantic.
Luckily for them, the boys don’t stay long with Uncle Toby. The cotton mill owners snap most of them up, though a farmer from Jamestown buys the biggest one, and a snuff baron takes a matched pair for his carriage. The indenture business is brisk: Tobias sends word by Percy Grant’s returning ship that he could have placed twice as many.
Delighted, Joshua wastes no time. Late night trawls of Spitalfields alleys yield a further sixty boys, who depart in September. They arrive in time to clear the first snow from the door of the Western Home for Friendless Boys.
The following year, my great-uncles diversify, Tobias having spied a gap in the market. While there is little demand for teenage boys, the same is not true of their sisters. Accordingly, Joshua takes a lease on a house in Peckham with Percy Grant. They put Marguerite in charge.
The first few hundred young girls come and go through St Beth’s with no more fuss than could be expected. They are taught how to cook; how to clean themselves, the silver and the house; how to lace a lady’s gown and get gravy stains out of a waistcoat. Those with the prettiest smiles even get to dress Marguerite’s hair and dust — very carefully, so as not to dirty the precious silks — her doll collection.
If very many girls spend their first night at St Beth’s in tears, there are not a few who also cry to leave it — and not just from fear of the voyage to come, or what awaits on the other side. The real servants whisper that their mistress is too soft, and that no good shall come of spoiling the little slatterns.
It’s not until 1804 that trouble occurs, on a bitter January night, the worst in that especially cruel winter. Percy is from home. Up in the dormitory, the girls — all ninety-four of them — are asleep. Or at least, let’s hope so. (Yes. I believe they are. The sobs of the recently arrived and soon to depart are quiet now, just a mist on the attic glass.)
It is entirely possible that the events of this night are not planned (so Maggie explains, and I for one believe her). It might be that it begins as an accident. The coals of Marguerite’s overstuffed grate simply tumble out, bouncing over the fender to alight in the pile of old Monthly Mirrors that my careless au
nt has left beside the fire.
Marguerite wakes to lovely orange light, the smell of hot beeswax and the gentle flickering of Percy’s mother’s Sheraton chair. Her sin is just one of omission — in the next precious seconds, as the oil paint on the deal panelling melts and the timber beneath begins to flame, Marguerite neglects to scream and run and warn the house, but merely laughs and claps her hands. The chintz curtains flare suddenly, and make a delightful blaze.
Aunt Marguerite may be mad, but she isn’t stupid. When the flames make a bid for the bedclothes, she beats a retreat to the door. But on the landing, she hesitates, pulls her shawl up over her nose and mouth, braves the heat to seize a little hand. Then, leaving the door open, she exits in an orderly fashion via the central stair.
When the servants, finally roused from the lower ground floor by crashing timber and bursting glass, tumble outside, they find the upper windows of St Beth’s spouting fire and their mistress on the pavement in nightgown and cap, a lightly singed wooden doll in her arms and a rapt expression on her face.
Are there screams? Doomed faces pressed to the attic glass? Marguerite will recall no such smuts in her pure flames. She is blinded, of course, by madness — not to mention the white-hot glare.
But it may well be that the carbon monoxide finds its way through the floorboards first, and the sleeping girls die gently, warm at last in their beds. As Maggie says, we must all meet an end, and who’s to know which is best?
Marguerite, perhaps, arrives at some opinion before she meets her own. There’s not much else in her asylum cell to think about, and twenty-eight years is a long time. Can she hold them in her shivering mind, that incandescent heat, those all-consuming colours?
Above her head is the shuffle and clank of friendless feet. She hears it, year after year, winter after winter. But for the rest of her life, my aunt will never again see a fire.
THREE
Maggie has chosen a much better time to be mad in. Three or four years earlier, and they might have slid an ice-pick under her eyelid and rammed it up into her brain. But by 1981, lobotomies are going out of fashion, and my mother is spared the clear white slice, along with the cuppings, the hosings, the hot and cold water cures — though it’s just as well I don’t know about the latter yet, or there are days when I might be tempted to try it.
Instead, for an hour every Tuesday after school, I watch Dr Chen stick needles into my mother’s head. Both assure me it doesn’t hurt. The needles just feel a bit funny, voodoo-Maggie says, while we wait for Dr Chen to sweep the curtain back and twiddle them some more. Watching him twist the one in her upper lip, I feel a bit funny myself.
I quite like the waiting room at Dr Chen’s, which is often empty, and yet to harbour anyone I know. It’s dark, with a lot of black vinyl and silk screens of dragons and fish. There’s a red-and-white china cat on the reception desk, and a cassette deck that plays the sound of running water.
I even quite like Dr Chen, in spite of the needles. He’s much better than Dr. F. Rasmussen, MB ChB, FRANZCP, who is just a name on a board at a frigid clinic where I’m not allowed past the door. Besides, Dr Chen must be doing something right, since they haven’t yet come to take either my mother or me away to any kind of institution. I still hunch down in my seat every time we drive down Liffey Street, past the borstal, just in case.
‘Sit up straight, Janine,’ Maggie snaps one night. ‘For heaven’s sake, you’re not a sack of potatoes.’
I begin to think she’s making progress.
It’s taken some time, but I’ve made a new friend. Her name is Annabel Miller. She’s had to change schools because her father ran off with a hairdresser, and now her mother is getting a Divorce. I’ve just spent my first weekend at her house, which is almost brand-new, with a lot of cedar and glass and stone, and piles of thick-covered magazines you don’t see in waiting rooms. The house looks like it belongs in one of the magazines itself, but when I say this to Mrs Miller, she just looks sad. Annabel says to admire it while I can, because they’re not going to be in it for long.
I’m pleased my parents didn’t get a Divorce. For once, I feel superior. After all, my father is respectably dead, not shacked up with a tart in Gore. I come home from Annabel’s in quite a good mood, to find our furniture out on the lawn, and the neighbours looking nervous.
‘Hurry up and give me a hand,’ Maggie says. ‘They’re going to be here in a minute.’
Over the fence, I can see Mrs Cousins watering her dahlias and pretending not to listen. We’re all a little relieved, I think, when the furniture van pulls up.
My mother has been shopping. She’s traded George the Second’s dining table for a shiny new suite in glass and steel. Given the lectures I’ve had on its care and worth, I’m surprised to see my promised inheritance disappearing down Bradbury Street, and I hate to think what we’re going to tell Nanny Biggs. But Maggie seems pleased with herself, and it’s nice to see her happy.
She rips off the plastic and sits in a chair. ‘Brand-new,’ she says. ‘We’re the first ones to sit here. Isn’t that nice? No one’s ever used them before.’
The new vinyl does smell good. ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘It’s lovely.’
(Many years later, I think I see our old table in the window of an antiques shop in Parnell Rise. Beside me, Andy sucks in his breath. ‘Wow. Wouldn’t that be just perfect for the island?’
I stare at the familiar mass. The neat, close-knuckled paws — which aren’t really leonine at all, but come to think of it now, look a lot like Ella’s — between which Harry’s feet once fidgeted, May the murderous slept and baby Maggie crawled. The mahogany Beth failed to wax as she dreamed, and Babs impressed with the bones of Anthony Boucher’s head.
‘I don’t know,’ I tell Andy. ‘I don’t think it’s me. Come on, let’s get a coffee.’)
When I look around Bradbury Street, I see that my grandparents’ hall-stand is gone as well, and the Spode plates that used to hang on the wall, and the clock, and the silver cruet set that was a wedding present from Nanny Biggs, and the pair of pistols above the fireplace that I was never allowed to play with. The house looks a bit like it’s been burgled — and scrubbed at the same time.
‘She got rid of my really old wooden doll,’ I tell Annabel in maths the next day, ‘without even asking.’
‘Maybe she’ll get you a new one.’
‘I don’t want a new one.’ I’m nearly twelve, after all. ‘I only liked it because it was old. It was supposed to have been my great-great-great-grandmother’s, or something.’
‘Mum got rid of my dad’s stuff,’ Annabel confides. ‘He rang and said could she send it up, so she put it all in bin-bags out on the street and told him to come and get it.’
‘Did he?’
‘He didn’t get chance. It was rubbish day.’
(People got divorced with so much more spirit back then.)
When I get home from school, Maggie’s on the phone to her editor. She sounds chirpy, and a few days later, she gets a glossy book of knitting patterns to review.
By September, there’s an empty lithium bottle in the rubbish bin, and Maggie’s back at work. In fact, she’s the new ‘Dear Dinah’, giving hints and answering readers’ questions. She goes in Tuesdays and Fridays, and at first there’s a lot of alarm in the morning over toast and who should go first in the bathroom. But it isn’t long before she has us back in something like our old routine.
The year ambles on in a harmless, aimless sort of way. We see Dr Rasmussen once a month, and Dr Chen once a fortnight. Maggie begins crocheting a jaunty pair of bed-socks. Annabel moves to a tidy brick-and-tile on the edge of Grasmere and gets a horse. Against the odds, I’m still at large, and nearly finished form one.
Maggie and I don’t say much. We watch a lot of TV.
I remember a night when I look over, out of the colour and noise, to see the crochet hook and Maggie are still. My mother’s not seeing any of it. I think of her drowning, all those years ago, her journey down
into black water. She should struggle more. Not just wait for somebody else to jump in and get her. For a minute or two I watch the water widen.
The ad break ends. Back in Dallas, there’s a body in the swimming pool. It might have been Pam, but Bobby is calm. He’s the Man from Atlantis, after all. Maybe nothing worries you when you know you can breathe under the water.
Jake’s nail-gun has started up again. I’m getting used to it now, this ruthless day-long execution of wood and silence. I wonder if my neighbours across the water feel the same.
You can’t see the new jetty from the mainland. It’s on the opposite side of the island, where the reef ends and the mud drops away to a deeper channel. They must wonder, over there in the backyards and industrial estate carparks, what all the noise is. These whumps rolling towards them like silenced shotgun fire, like shocks to a distant heart. I imagine a sudden salvo might make the unwary jump, backing nervously out of an angle park behind Countdown.
Or maybe not. There’s a lot going on over there, no doubt, and silence is rarely valued other than in retrospect, if and when it’s broken. An acquired taste, I think — I only came to it myself when I was in my twenties. Growing up, I used to resent those days and nights when my mother said nothing at all. They frightened me, I suppose. I used to think they were punishment. Now, thirty years later, I’m tempted to see them as love — though, of course, the two are never mutually exclusive.
No parent is indifferent to their children. Mothers give according to their means. It’s like Christmas — some kids get ponies, and some kids get socks. There are reasons for this. The best of us smile and say thank you.