Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

  There isn’t a sound in the room, and the heat makes it all seem like a feversome dream, and Mary, I can see, is struggling to understand whether she’s being mocked, whether this foreigner is using her for his fun, and it’s all a trap, and these are the last agonies of her situation. So what she does is, she hardens against the doubt and says the only Italians she knows are the organ boys that come into the pub, and they’re only good for making a racket and slipping their dirties up your skirts, and she wouldn’t like to be put in a basket with them.

  At this, he roars. So shocked are we by its quickness and its power that at first we don’t understand it’s laughing he’s doing, and we’re relieved when we see that it is, and that it’s the good kind, not the sneering kind, and then we let ourselves do it too. For we can see he’s no longer behaving like one of them—listening from across a fast river—but has dropped his distance and waded in, like a hunter that’s lost his fear. His arm reaches farther around Mary’s waist.

  “Where would a man have to go in this town to meet a girl like you?”

  I know now that a bold manner goes well with women and impresses men. I’ve seen it work a hundred times since. But back then I think he’s gone too far, crossed over too quick. It isn’t the species of thing a mill man ought say—though it is, I know, the truth of what they do without saying—and I’m not prepared for everybody laughing, and Mr. Ermen clapping his back and calling him a sly trickster, and the girls turning to measure their disbelief against each other, and Mary giving him a soft elbow and asking him, scut-like, what type of man he is at all. Nay, I’m not prepared for any of it—the fainting and the adoration that no mortal body deserves—so when I see it, it sickens me.

  He takes to walking out with her, I believe, because she talks well and he enjoys hearkening to her. And he keeps walking out with her, he doesn’t bore of it, I believe, because he doesn’t understand her and wants desperate to understand her, for it promises so much.

  She likes to say it’s because of her ankles. They have a peculiar allure, she thinks, that he can’t get full of. She takes to flashing them at him in the yard. He’ll be up in the office looking down, and she’ll be walking with us and putting on not to notice anything but the ground in front, but then, easy as you please, not a whiff of warning, she’ll lift up and step one out from under the hem. They aren’t bad as ankles go—of the two of us she has the better—and I’m sure they don’t put a damper on proceedings, I’m sure he likes them regular enough, but what really keeps him interested, I’m also sure, is her blather.

  He’s like a young scholar trying to pull truth out of a foreign gospel. If he learns to understand her, and to speak like her, he’ll know what it’s like to be her, and by there to be poor. Of course, what he’s chasing is a shadow down a passage, for you can’t learn that species of thing. To have your vittles today and to know it doesn’t depend on you whether you’ll have them tomorrow, that’s something you’ve either lived or you haven’t.

  “What do you talk to him about?” I says to her, for I want her to be ashamed, going around at night with the owner’s son.

  “Oh, everything,” she says.

  “Everything?”

  “My life. His life.”

  “You’re telling him our affairs.”

  “Arrah, don’t be at me, Lizzie. He’s not like the others. He wants to learn about how things are for us. To help us.”

  “Help? Well, we know what that means.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Why is it different? Why would he want to help you? Hasn’t he enough to be getting on with? A mill to run.”

  “He doesn’t like what he sees here, Lizzie. In Manchester and thereabouts. He wants to understand it so he can change it.”

  “He has ideas, all right, and for that he’s no different than any other man. You’ll be ruined.”

  Listening to me, you’d think I’d become the eldest and she the youngest. The truth is, I’m scared for her. She’s gone deaf to her own advice. Isn’t it herself who says that the higher-ups only marry their own, and if they want your time it’s only to lie down with you, and then only for the thrill: it’s you who pays the final price? Hasn’t she gone back on her own words? It’s a part of Mary I’m not patient with, this habit of not heeding herself, but I don’t punish her with it either, for she punishes herself enough on the days he doesn’t call.

  No doubt he goes with other women—he’s been seen wandering alone down the District—and the thought of it makes her suffer, deep and miserable. He stays away for weeks on end. She sees him in the mill and pours all her hurt into her eyes, but he resists her willing and stays upstairs where he is. Then when it suits him, he appears again, raps his ashplant on the door, and goes to the end of the passage to wait. So strong is her wanting, she throws a shawl around her pain, and runs out.

  “What do you do when you go out with him?”

  “I show him around.”

  “Around where? What’s there to be shown?”

  “He wants to see where we live.”

  “We? We who?”

  “We the Irish. We the workers.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The Holy Name, Lizzie.”

  “Well, he’s not coming in here, he’s not welcome.”

  “He’ll want to come inside eventual. And I’ll not stop him. And you’ll not stop him neither.”

  She enjoys her new position, anybody can see that. It’s easy to picture her leading him down the passages and into the courts, choosing the meanest of the doors to knock on, pointing out all the things that are filthy and wrong, speaking to the bodies for him and getting them to show him their children, and their hips and their sores. Oh aye, all that would come to her like breathing. But what it takes a sister to see—and what I can’t keep my eyes off once I’ve seen it—is what she’s doing her best to hide: her love illness.

  For it’s ill she is. Ill and pure struck-blind. The moments when he needs her and wants her—“Precious moments,” she calls them—these moments are when she’s fullest and happy, and she wishes them to go on and on into forever, for she doesn’t want to go back to being empty of him. She wants him to be unable to do without her. And he leads her to believe this is so. Just by looking at her a certain way he leads her down that lane—she herself tells me it’s all in his eyes—and she forgets her own person there, gets lost in the maze of his possibilities.

  She falls, just as he does, for a promise.

  Then comes the night he comes inside and stays for tea. He brings pies and ale, too much for the three of us, so he orders the neighbors out from behind the curtain and divides it all up. I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking, Who in God’s name does he think he is?

  He gets the good chair, and the best cup and plate, and a knife and a fork, and everybody watches how he uses them, on a pie. No one dares talk, so he has to do the talking himself, though he leans on Mary for help, there being so much in what he says that’s hard to get. He tells us many things, gossip most of it, about the foremen in the mill and their romances, and the practical jokes he likes to play on Mr. Ermen. And a whole other heap, too, about growing up in Germany among the Calvins, and hating it because the Calvins credit that all time is God’s time and wasting a minute is a sin, and life isn’t meant for enjoying but for working only.

  As for working, he hates his situation at the mill. He hates the position it puts him in, up there on a pillar, for he’s happier down here with us lot. But he judges it good for himself also. “Because Germans of my particular caste know too little of the real world. It’s an education of sorts, and will do me good.”

  What he’s learnt so far—and he swears to learn more before he leaves for Germany again in a year’s time—is that the workers are more human in daily life, less grasping, than the philistines who employ them, and that the philistines are interested only in money and how much it can buy them. The least grasping of all, he thinks, are the Irish. And, as far as he can see, they wor
k just as good as the English.

  Says he: “It’s true that to become something skilled like a mechanic, the Irishman would have to take on English customs, and become more English, which would be a formidable task, for he’s grown up without civilization, and is close to the Negro in this regard. But for simpler work which asks for more strength than skill, the Irishman is just as good.”

  All this sort of science, he talks, and more besides, but what’s stayed with me—what my mind lingers on oftenest—is what he says about the way we talk. At this stage, we’ve all imbibed a fair amount, and most of the neighbors are already sleeping: Seamus is on the ground away from his straw, the children are in their different spots, only the wife, Nan, is still with us. It’s late, and I’m trying to signal to Mary to put an end to it. We all have work to get us up in the morning. But she’ll not break in on him, not in his stride, and what he’s saying is interesting to her, or so it seems from the way she has her chin in her hands and is staring at him, tranced.

  What he’s talking about is the old language. He says he has heard it spoken in the thickest of the slums, as if this is something to wonder at. From there, he gets to talking about the English as it sounds in the Irish gob.

  “I can read and understand twenty-five languages,” he says. “But I admit to being tested by the English spoken by you and your people.”

  Then he gets us to say a few things, and he laughs and repeats what we say, and then we laugh.

  “Grand this and grand that,” he says. “Everything is always so splendid for you! Through it all, you manage to stay so cheery and optimistic!”

  At this, Nan near on falls off her stool for the laughing. “I’ll tell you something for naught, girls,” she says. “These foreigners are shocking queer!”

  Then we all roll around, and Frederick does too, though he’s only allowing himself to be taken along, for he doesn’t really know what we’re laughing at.

  Mary takes it on herself to let him in. “For the Irish,” she says, “grand doesn’t mean more than middling.”

  Nan sees Frederick’s muddled arrangement. “We’ll need something strong to get us through this,” she says, and goes to get the bottle she keeps safe for the priest.

  Meantime, Mary goes over and sits down on his lap—right there in plain sight—and scratches his whiskers and plucks his cheek. “Listen now, Foreign Man. If a thing is grand, it’s holding together. If a situation is grand, it’s tolerable good. If a body is grand, she’s alive and likely to do. No more and no less than that.”

  Nan can barely get the spirit into the glasses for all her snorting and shaking. I’m just mortified and want the pageant to end so I can face the mill tomorrow with some of my honor intact. Frederick, for his part, takes to pondering what he’s been told, and when he’s over with that, he looks about our little room.

  “And a house?” he says, being the type who wants to know the in-and-out of things precise. “If a house is grand?”

  Mary stops smiling then, and puts down playing with his necktie, and turns to us, and takes us in—stunned-like—as if remembering us from a distant past. And then she says, “If a house is grand, my love, it comes with a rent that will leave you enough to go on.”

  Now, awake, Frederick gets up and dodders about for his clothes. He’s having another cock-stand. I watch him muffle it into his breeches. In his room he keeps a tin, lozenges meant for sustaining your piss and vinegar, though I can’t see the use of them myself, it being a fine and thirsty animal God’s made of him.

  “Are you well, Lizzie?”

  “Well enough.”

  He puts on his shirt, leaves it tucked out to hang over the stubborn article. “I’ve missed the morning. Why didn’t you wake me? I’ll have to skip my walk and work late to make up. Can you bring my meals up?” He picks up his shoes and puts his coat over his arm. “Lizzie, did you hear me?”

  I nod. I heard you.

  I put onto my side, haul the covers up. “Frederick?”

  “Ya?”

  “Jenny thinks it’s a good idea to get another maid.”

  “There’s one coming on Sunday.”

  “Another one, I mean, over and above her.”

  “Oh? Jenny thinks so? And what do you think?”

  “I think it’d be a good way to get Pumps out of Manchester.”

  “Pumps?”

  “My niece. Half-niece. Thomas’s eldest.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “Aye, him. He has her in a bad way. When she’s not locked at home looking after her nine brothers, she’s on a corner selling bloaters till all hours. It’s only a matter of time before she gets into trouble. She could come down and help me here. It’d be a chance for her.”

  “Let me think about it.” He goes for the door.

  “Oh, and, Frederick?”

  “What now?”

  “Can you open the curtain before you go?”

  He looks at me like I’ve just asked to be fanned.

  VI. Capital

  Not shy of the curtsies. Round-boned. Clean-cuffed. Plainness of a good human sort. Frederick sits her in the morning room and reads us through her character.

  “It says here that you can read and write. That will be helpful. And you can milk a cow. Interesting. And make butter. A country girl?”

  “Devon, sir.”

  “Oh, and look, how about that! You can do the scales on the piano.”

  Aye, with her feet. Blindfolded.

  “Listen here now, Miss Barton,” I says. “Do you know anything?”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

  “About keeping a house?”

  “Well, as it says there—”

  “I don’t care a whit for what it says on that bit of paper. I want you to use your voice and tell me out. Can you cook?”

  “I can.”

  “Good. Because it’s for the kitchen I want you. My niece will be joining us in a few days, and she’ll look after the hearths and the upstairs. You’re to tend to the cooking.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “I don’t know what you’re used to from your last place, but here there’ll be fish on Fridays.”

  “Course, ma’am.”

  “You’re to keep the counters and pots clean, I won’t stand for mice. And most important, you’re to look after the kitchen store. Groceries for the day, the week, and the month are to be put in the book. You must keep a check on what’s lacking and you must do the writing yourself, do you hear? I won’t do it for you. I’ll count what comes in and you’ll cross it off the list. Not a penny is to be spent that does not have my approval. Breakages must be mentioned within the day or they’ll be made good from your wages.”

  She nods a biddable nod.

  “Now come with me and I’ll introduce you to the kitchen range.”

  I lead her downstairs. “Don’t be shy now. Get familiar.”

  She makes her way around, opening into cupboards and checking for what she’ll need. Naught much to her is what I think. Improvable is what I think. She’ll do, she’ll do. But she has another think coming if she thinks I’m going to spend my days calling hoity up the stairs.

  Nim. Skim. Spin. Spiv.

  “Spiv,” I says. “We’re going to call you Spiv.”

  “What’s Spiv?”

  “It’s your name from now on.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Naught, only I like the ring of it.”

  Once I’ve taken her on the full round, I go up with his middle-p.m. cheese and beer. I come in on him pacing. He freezes and turns from where he’s stood, feet outspread in the center of the carpet. “Lizzie, I must ask you to knock.”

  “Oh, I would, Frederick, I would, only I’m holding this”—I nod down at my burden—“and I would have kicked, only I saw the door half-open.”

  “Excuse me, Lizzie, I’m a brute. Come in, come in.”

  I put the tray down on the sideboard and take up the old one.

  “Thank you, my love,�
�� he says, not moving from where he is. Then, as if a brilliant idea has just occurred to him: “Why didn’t you let the maid do it?”

  “Sure if I gave it all to her, I’d never see you.”

  He laughs. “And how is she settling in?”

  “Early yet,” I says. “We’ll see.”

  “Ya. Indeed. Good.” He claps his hands, rubs them together, now strides over to his desk, lifts the moneybox out the drawer. “Actually, I’m glad you came. I wanted to talk to you. Karl and Jenny are giving a party in our honor.”

  “Oh, aye?”

  “Tomorrow. To celebrate our arrival and to introduce us to some of the London-based comrades.” He rummages in the box and comes out with four sovereigns. “I want you to take this and buy yourself something nice to wear. We’re dandying up, making a bit of a fuss.”

  I give him a stern look.

  “Come, Lizzie,” he says. “It’s all right to spend a little to look good.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Well, to the dressmaker’s. Have something pinned that will leave their jaws hanging.”

  “What dressmaker’s would have anything ready for tomorrow?”

  “Go to Barrow’s”—he speaks like a man who knows—“they will be able to help you, I guarantee it.”

  I crinkle my brow on purpose. “Barrow’s?”

  “It’s not far, in Camden. You won’t find anything here in Primrose Hill. Get a cab. Give them my name and pay them off a few extra shillings, you’ll see. A new place recently opened opposite them and they’re begging for the business. They’d have it sewn while you waited, if that was what you wanted.”

  He comes and puts the coins on the tray by his dirty plates. Seeing them there, twinkling among the pork rind, I feel a fresh lightness in my heart. “You might be right, Frederick. I wanted to get abroad of the house anyways, and a run round the shops might be just the ticket.”

  “That’s the spirit, Lizzie.”

  “I’ll go right away.”

  “Ha!” he laughs. “No time to lose.”

  “And I might have something out.”