What about us?

by Jacqui Henderson

  Unable to come up with a better idea, I did as I was told.

  “Tell him Winnie sent you...” she called after me, as I strode off to find Mr Bloom, pleased to have something to do that I might be able to accomplish.

  Mr Bloom was very happy to let me rent 29 Napier Street for a week and between us, Winnie and I got Grace to the house and then upstairs. Then she expertly undid the many tiny fastenings to Grace’s dress and peeled it off her. After she’d gone and just as I was helping Grace get her boots off, a small boy knocked at the door. The wonderful woman had sent one of her lads round with firewood and some coal, so that I could get a fire going.

  I’d just got Grace into bed, when she pointed and said one word with a terrible sense of urgency.

  “Bucket...!”

  I quickly tipped the coal onto the floor and handed it to her just in time.

  She was very ill and I really didn’t know what to do. Winnie came by an hour or so later and asked me what she’d eaten. When I told her, she nodded knowingly.

  “That’s probably the culprit. Them pies always have a nasty effect on my old Mum. Never touch ’em meself. She’ll be alright, just keep ’er warm. I’ll send one of the boys up with some water, the coolness will probably ’elp.”

  While she was undoubtedly right, alarm bells started sounding in my head. I wasn’t going to let that water anywhere near her until it had been boiled.

  By early the next morning, Grace had nothing more to throw up and finally she slept for around twenty four hours. It wasn’t always an easy sleep, but at least her temperature came down. Winnie was there with me as she woke up.

  “Where am I?” she asked, clearly dazed and confused.

  “In bed, where you should stay.” Winnie told her firmly.

  “Who are you?” Grace asked, locating the face of the strange voice.

  “Winnie Blunt, we’re neighbours. Or at least for as long as you’re in Napier Street we are.”

  I could see this made little sense to Grace.

  “Err, what day is it?” she asked.

  “Saturday.” Winnie said promptly.

  “Yes, but when? I mean the date. I mean...” she trailed off.

  Thankfully, our kind neighbour thought it was just a product of the fever and supplied the details quite happily.

  “22nd December and if you take my advice, you’ll postpone your crossing until the New Year. I’m sure France will be just the same in1889 as it is now.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it will be.” Grace said, before she drifted back off to sleep.

  By the time she was well enough to get up, it was almost Christmas. It was perishing cold too and neither of us fancied a sea journey just at that moment.

  “The songs always say ‘Paris in the springtime’.” she mused, as we were discussing what to do next.

  “True.” I agreed, humming a few bars of a song I appeared to know, but couldn’t name. “We could stay here for the winter, get the hang of things and go in May.”

  “We could and that way we’d learn more about how to be in this time and it won’t be so flippin’ cold.”

  She was shivering, so I wrapped the shawl around her a little tighter.

  “We’ll go shopping tomorrow. You need warmer clothes.” I told her, pulling her closer to me.

  “We need more than that; we need food and coal, lots of both and some sheets would be nice too.” she said, snuggling into my side.

  Winnie came to our rescue once again. She told us where to go to have some clothes made at a reasonable price. She also suggested to Grace that she hadn’t put on enough of the undergarments, which made us both laugh.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked.

  “I said it’d been warmer when we left home. What else could I say? She seemed to think that it wasn’t a good enough reason to be ‘half naked’, as she put it.”

  Winnie also helped Grace sort out what was needed to keep house, while I arranged a longer tenancy with a very happy Mr Bloom. Our very kind neighbour quickly came to the conclusion that Grace had had servants, which was why she didn’t know what was needed.

  “She said my hands had never done any real hard work.” Grace told me, holding her hands up.

  In my opinion she had lovely hands.

  “Funny really, at home I do everything myself.” she said, trying to see what Winnie had seen, but giving up after a while, clearly none the wiser.

  Winnie also arranged for a sullen girl called Sal Grundy to come and help Grace out. Apparently she was only fourteen, yet already a mother. I learnt from her father that the master of the house she’d worked in had got her ‘in the family way’ then turned her out with not a penny more than she was due. Her parents were understandably angry with the injustice of it all, but could do nothing. The money she earned would come in useful and Mr Grundy always passed the time of day with me when we met.

  Knowing her story went some way to explaining why the girl wouldn’t meet my eyes or stay in the room with me when Grace wasn’t there. Once bitten, twice shy it seemed. The child, Charlie, was about six months old and sickly, but under Grace’s watchful eye they both seemed to flourish, losing that bony malnourished look that too many people had.

  Despite Sal’s hard work and she did work hard, I’ll give her that, Grace was always busy. The only things she’d let me help with was the beating of the rugs and the turning of the mattress. For the rest she’d shoo me away and wouldn’t hear of my suggestions that we get someone else in to help.

  “No Jack, that money is all we have. I’m just doing my bit and it’s not all drudgery.” she’d insist. “We’re living in history. You go and get your fill, then come back and tell me what you found out.”

  So that was the pattern of our life in that winter of 1889, seeing for myself what I’d previously only been able to read about. I saw the changes as they happened, as the industrial revolution propelled mankind forward to a future it had never before considered possible. I found that I knew without any doubt that the trend to move away from the land and into the ever growing cities would continue. I also knew that over time, the land would no longer be used primarily for food production. I felt sad, knowing that this era would bring an end to patience; everything would become faster and more immediate. As we moved off the land, we would lose our ability to wait and to nurture.

  I had some kind of premonition that this would eventually push mankind to the brink of extinction. It seemed that not only did I hear voices on odd occasions; I also seemed capable of seeing the future. But I was not comforted, as I didn’t know how or why. I didn’t share these visions with Grace because they frightened me and she would know that and I didn’t want that fear to be between us.

  Sometimes after dinner and especially on bath night or if the smog was too thick to venture out, we would stay in and put what knowledge we had accumulated together so that it made sense. We started making copious notes and promised ourselves that one day it would be a book.

  “I bet you never thought you’d be an eyewitness to history as it happened.” she often joked with me.

  But a lot of what we witnessed was no joke. The price for the pace of modernity in 1889 was high and life was both hard and short for a lot of people.

  Grace settled into her life in history remarkably quickly and with seemingly little effort. She fought with the range until it complied with her will and wow, could she cook! She cooked everything: bread, pies, cakes, biscuits, she even learnt how to make butter. Her meals were a real pleasure and I looked forward to dinner every night, so much so that there was no need for us to even try any of the inns or eateries that sprang up and disappeared around the wharves with amazing regularity.

  After her brush with food poisoning, she wasn’t taking any chances with our health. I didn’t seem to suffer from anything, not even a smog induced sore throat, while she suffered from small ailments, usually weather related and thankfully nothing too serious.

  She even looked forward to her weekly ‘da
y out with the girls’ as she called the wash house and the information she brought back from these outings really helped me put life in the late nineteenth century into perspective. As it turned out, Winnie Blunt was a local force to be reckoned with. She had status in the neighbourhood and the fact that she took Grace under her wing meant that we were accepted very quickly. Through Winnie, Grace had immediate access to the people around us. I collected facts, but she made the people and their lives real in a way that I never could, even though I was there living it with her. She brought the mundane to life and gave it colour, vibrancy and pathos.

  She was horrified in a way that I wasn’t, by many of the little details of people’s day to day lives; the uncertainty, the violence and the drunkenness. She described it as carelessness and I knew she recognised too much of her own life in theirs.

  “But mine was never ordinary.” she’d say sadly. “I know I wasn’t the only one, but the difference is that in my time no one expected that kind of life, while here and now it’s not only what many people expect, it’s what’s accepted.”

  Some of the things we saw really upset her, but other things just filled her with admiration at mankind’s sheer determination to get through life.

  “Some of these poor women just have so many children, without really knowing how they are going to cope, or what will happen to the family if they die giving birth to the next one. Yet they hope. They really hope that one day, for one of their children or grandchildren it’ll be different.” she’d say, shaking her head. “I know they’re right to think that, but they don’t know the future like I do. So for them I suppose it’s just an act of faith.”

  While she made an effort to understand the people and their lives I always felt somehow outside it all, as if I were just an observer, not really taking part. Only my time with Grace made me feel anything and gave my life meaning. Never, not for a single minute do I ever regret having met and loved her.

  Being actually ‘in’ history did a lot to take my mind off the fact that in any time or place, I didn’t know who I was. The frustration of knowing things without understanding why or how became part of my normal life, as did the many sensations of déjà-vu that I experienced. I really missed my discussions with Dr Green, but I didn’t want to burden Grace with my worries or the ongoing irritation with myself and my situation. I tried not to let frustration get the better of me and whenever I had a strong sense of knowing something, we would add it to whatever else I knew, to see if we could build some kind of picture, but it was a painfully slow process.

  The workhouse frightened her as much as it frightened everyone else and was the one dark spot in our otherwise happy life.

  “We can’t let that happen to us. We can’t waste the money, it’s got to last us.” she’d often say and so the trip to Paris got delayed.

  I did visit a workhouse; twice in fact, to understand them better, but the desperate atmosphere inside haunted me for a long time and in the same way that Grace feared them I too began to spend time planning our future so that it wouldn’t happen to us.

  We agreed that we had to find a way of earning money before we spent any on a trip to Paris or on anything else that wasn’t strictly necessary. Winnie had said that it might be possible for us both to get jobs as teachers, which made Grace laugh.

  “You, yes, you could teach kids a lot, but me, I was never at school for three days on the trot!” she exclaimed.

  But she did teach Sal to read and write and I began to make enquiries about tutoring in some of the grander houses. Not having references made it quite difficult, especially as I couldn’t even say which school I’d been to. I managed to secure a couple of interviews, but it never really turned into anything useful.

  Normal life for most people was full of hard work and death was never far away; an accident, disease, childbirth of course, or even medical science itself. Even having money was no guarantee of reaching a ripe old age. Of course Grace didn’t have access to ‘the pill’ so we practiced what birth control we could under the circumstances, having decided that for the time being, life was easier if there were just the two of us to think about.

  Although I never said a word to Grace, the very thought of her being pregnant filled me with dread. Too many women didn’t survive the birthing process and much as I knew I wanted no other mother for my children, I wanted her much more than I wanted to be a father.

  Of course we often spent time speculating about how we’d got there, or discussing if there was any way we could return to our own time, but we never came up with a satisfactory answer to either question. However, we did agree that it would be foolish to try and tell anyone the truth, so we came up with a plausible story. We’d met in the Americas, had arrived in England some months ago and were making our way to France, where I had some family. It seemed to do the trick; no one really questioned us and there were so many people coming and going, even just in our little street, that it didn’t seem in any way odd. So we settled into a new life, agreeing that as long as we were together, we could cope with anything.

  During one of my wanderings I met a couple of men who like me seemed not to work and to have time on their hands. One afternoon, as we sat in a coffee house, talking and playing chess, the conversation turned to the local opium dens. I was intrigued by what they told me and wondered if by letting my mind float unfettered, as it were, these places might help me remember something about myself and my life. I knew Grace would never approve, so I didn’t tell her anything as I mulled it over. A week or so later when I met up with them again, they told me they were just heading to a new one near Butler’s Wharf and did I want to accompany them? I found to my shame that I did.

  At first I told myself that I would just watch, without actually taking part. We went down into a basement and there were curtained areas around grubby beds, covered with equally grubby cushions. The place was dirty and smelt terrible, coming partly from the men and women lying there in a stupor, who judging from their clothes, came from all ranks of society. In fact there were far fewer people from the working classes than I’d assumed there would be. The few windows I could see were all broken and the floor hadn’t been swept for a long time, if ever. I could hear the river lapping at the jetties not far away and I got cold feet and thought about leaving. Then I noticed that there were others there, who clearly had money and position in life, but the decrepitude of the place hadn’t deterred them from staying. I wavered uncertainly for a moment.

  “Try it Jack, you won’t be disappointed. It’ll only cost fourpence and it’ll last a lot longer than a dram.”

  I wasn’t completely convinced, but seemed to lack the will to leave. We sat on one of the beds and a pipe of sorts was brought to us.

  I gingerly took the thick bamboo mouthpart that was offered, did as I was instructed and sucked in hard.

  It was my lost weekend and a long weekend at that. It was probably only because I ran out of money that they threw me out. What became of my companions I have no idea. As the haze began to fade I became aware that I felt terrible, almost as though I were having a bad reaction to the drug, a reaction that I hadn’t noticed anyone else having. Somehow I convinced a cab driver to take me home and Grace must have paid him, for home is where I found myself, without any idea of how I got there or even what day it was.

  My head was full of visions; such fantastic visions of a future I was sure no one had ever dreamt possible. There was space travel and I saw the Earth from above and knew that it had died, but work was slowly being done to restore it while people waited in orbit for the time when they could go home. There were incredible gadgets that you to do so much with by the power of thought alone. It was such a strange feeling, being so far away from something that seemed natural to me; in fact, more normal than anything had in a long time.

  It was during this time that I had another experience with a voice in my head, but this one spoke directly to me. It was a man’s voice and he knew my name. He wanted me to make contact with him,
but he didn’t tell me how. Perhaps due to the opium, it wasn’t in any way as nerve-wracking as the other times it had happened and also it seemed familiar. Maybe it was a memory of my father’s voice.

  I knew so much in those hours or rather days and I knew it meant something to me. It was important, but I didn’t know why and I didn’t want to lose those ideas and thoughts. They were all I had and I felt sure that there was link between them and the me that I had once been. But as I tried to tell Grace what I’d seen, it all just slipped away from me, leaving only faint traces or echoes behind.

  She was crying by this time but I didn’t want her to cry, I wanted her to understand.

  “It was so real Grace. I know it could help me remember.”

  I grabbed her hand, hoping that perhaps she would come with me next time. I was about to ask when she told me what she was thinking.

  “Jack it’s not real. It’s a drug and like all drugs you’ll always be trying to get back to that first time; only you never will, so you’ll try harder and as you try harder you’ll find nothing else matters, only the desire to get back there, to that first feeling. Your whole life will be consumed and no one else will matter. You can’t have both Jack. It’s me or the opium. I’m not going to watch you destroy yourself, our life and us. Choose and choose now.”

  I fell back on the pillow. There was no contest; a life without Grace was unthinkable.

  “You. I choose you every time.” I said, turning to face her. “No more, I promise. I swear.”

  She looked into my eyes and nodded slowly. She trusted me and in that moment I vowed never to do anything to break that trust.

  The problem was, it wasn’t that easy to forget. Strange visions hovered at the edge of my mind, calling to me constantly, teasing me even, but they refused to fully reveal themselves and always there was that thought; just one more pipe and I’ll remember everything. Surely once more wouldn’t be breaking my promise? I struggled with that voice and that burning craving every waking hour for days.