Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

  “Of course,” he says, and searches his pocket for an extra guinea. “Good idea.”

  I leave as I am, only a light shawl and a reticule as excitements, and I leave the house as it is too, shambled with unfinished tasks, the new girl with the dinner yet to prepare, and I can’t say I’m bothered about it.

  I cross the road to the lamppost at the bottom of the Hill and flag a cab from there. On the journey, I watch out the window and put the roads to memory so I can walk back and save the fare.

  The bell in Barrow’s brings two girls beetling out from the back room. They’re got up in identical silk dresses with short sleeves and lace caps, but to look at, they couldn’t be further apart: one tidy and pinched, the other large and dusky-skinned and curled about the face.

  “I need a dress,” I says.

  “Um, certainly,” says Pinch, leading me over to a counter so polished you can see yourself in the black. “Is it for a special occasion, or do you require something useful?”

  “I suppose you could call it special.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case might I recommend our antique moiré, which we have on special offer at the moment, nearly half price?” She throws a length of rippled silk over the counter; gold so gold it glows. “We have this in a range of shades. Unfortunately, one cannot see its full effect here. It’s most becoming at candlelight.”

  “Half price you say?”

  “Half price, madam.”

  “So how much would a dress of this cost, at half price?”

  “Four pounds, eighteen shillings, and sixpence.”

  I splutter. “You must be barking. I won’t be spending more than a pound.”

  She purses. Beside her, Curly laughs an appeasing laugh and whips the gold silk away, replaces it with another, this one a high-shining blue. “Am I right to say that madam is of the more sensible sort? Less interested in the novelties of fashion than in value for her spend?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be wrong anyhows.”

  “In that case, we have this plain glacé silk in over thirty shades of color, commencing at only two pounds, fifteen shillings, and sixpence for the extra full dress.”

  I give an impatient cluck. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear—”

  She shakes her curls. “Madam, you made yourself perfectly clear.” She rolls away the blue silk and puts out a green muslin. I touch it. Stiff as a board. “This is French organdy, one of last year’s designs, which we are giving away at the very reduced price of one pound, six shillings, and sixpence for the extra full dress.”

  I put my hand under my chin and tap my lip with a finger, as if considering. “Do me one without the frills and I’ll give you a pound for it.”

  “Without the frills, madam?”

  “None of those ridiculous trimmings you have in the window there. All that unnecessary bib and tucker.”

  “We have other models we can—”

  “I want it plain, plain as can be.”

  “You don’t want to see—?”

  “Do you understand the word plain, young lass?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that’s what I want. And I want it for a pound.”

  “I shall have to speak to—”

  “Speak to whomsoever you like. Mrs. Engels is the name. One-two-two Regent’s Park Road. I’ll be here.”

  Curly curtsies and goes into the back room. Pinch forces a smile into her cramped little face and goes to busy herself with the show dummies. I turn my gander to the carpet to keep from catching myself in the looking glasses that leer from every side.

  “All right, Mrs. Engels,” says Curly when she comes back, “that should be fine. If you would like to come this way, we shall get you measured up.”

  “That won’t be needed, I can tell you straight off what I am.”

  “I do not doubt it, Mrs. Engels, but at Barrow’s we like to measure all our customers to ensure the best style and fit.”

  “Listen, chicken, do you have a book to write in?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, put this down.”

  Flushing, she picks up her feather. Dips it.

  “Bust thirty-four, hips thirty-six, length-to-foot just as you see me.” I step back to give her a full view. She frowns at me and scribbles down. “I’ll be back at five tomorrow to pick it up.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Madam, I’m sorry, but we usually need at least three working days. We could have it ready by close of business Monday.”

  I pick a sovereign out of my reticule and put it down on the page of the book.

  She waves her hands over it as if to magic it away. “No, madam, please, you can pay when you come to collect it.”

  “Take it now and be done with it. And I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

  I find a cookshop a little up the road and order a chop and a pint of Bass’s ale, and now a slice of plum pudding and a cup of ready-made coffee with cream and sugar. I take the table in the window, for I like to look out.

  Passing by, streams of people with bags and boxes: gone out for a ribbon and coming home with the stock of an entire silk mercer’s. These places, they do it on the cheap and make their capital out of pressure and high prices. It takes cleverness and steel for a woman to get her fair portion.

  Exhausted, I look into my cup and try not to feel like the only one fighting.

  VII. The Party

  When it comes to the dangers of a bit of food, the Germans can be as afraid as the English, so I eat before we leave. Spiv heats me up a kidney pudding, and I have a glass of milk with it to line the gut, and after that some cold saveloy and penny loaf.

  As it happens, I needn’t have ruined my stomach, for there’s vittles enough to feed a battalion: tables of meat and fowl and fish and cheese, salvers of delicates and dumplings carried by livery servants in silk hose, all sorts of strong-tasting aliments smelling up in our noses. Who’s died? I think as I marvel the fare.

  Tussy appears beside me. “I’ve been looking all over, Aunt Lizzie.”

  Embarrassed to be the only one grazing, I drop my pastry roll onto the damask. “Tussy, my sweet darling.”

  “Come on, I want to present you.”

  She takes a glass of red from a tray, puts it in my hand, and pulls me with her into the crush. “I don’t think I have ever been in a room with so many interesting people at once,” she says.

  The men have changed the usual shab-and-drab for frilled shirts. The women are in clothes above the ordinary but not showy. I feel in tune, glad to have put my foot down at the dressmaker’s. Tussy introduces me to everybody, even to those I’ve met and know.

  “This is Mr. Engels’s wife, Mrs. Burns. An Irishwoman and a true proletarian.”

  The strangers bow. The familiars wink and smile along. There’s more women than I expected to see. One sitting beside Karl on the couch. A pair by the window, looking foreign and bored. And by the chimneypiece, in a circle around Jenny and Janey, several gathered. Frederick—no surprise—has dug out the one with the lowest neckline.

  “I’m not going to remember all these new names,” I whisper to Tussy, mortifying of the fuss.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “What’s important is that they remember yours.”

  From where he’s sat, Karl makes a big act of twisting his monocle in to show he has it tied on a new ribbon. Janey’s wearing the Celtic cross I sent her. Jenny has made more of an effort than anyone else to draw attention onto herself: a feather in the hair, yards of a color not found in the wild.

  “Oh, ladies, please,” she’s saying to her audience, the lush sending her voice up a pitch. “Before the illness, I had no gray hair and my teeth and figure were good. People used to class me among well-preserved women! But that’s all a thing of the past.”

  Loud protests.

  “Come now, ladies, I am not looking for your reassurance. I speak from a place of solemn awareness. I can see the reality. When I look in the g
lass now I seem to myself a kind of cross between a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus whose place is in Regent’s Park Zoo rather than among members of the Caucasian race!”

  Reddening for her, I busy myself with the only bow on my bodice.

  “Now, Lizzie,” she says when the required objections die down, “I’d like you to meet some extraordinary women. Mrs. Marie Goegg, chairman of the International Women’s Association. Mrs. Anna Jaclard, writer and Communist. Mrs. Yelisaveta Tomanowski, thorn in the side of every Bakuninist, real or suspected. And Mrs. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Karl’s own private reporter in Paris. Elisabeth is just here for a few days before going back into the mêlée. And what exactly are you going back to do, Elisabeth?”

  “Well, I certainly won’t be sewing sandbag sacks, that is for sure!”

  They cackle and clap and swat the air with their gloves and fans. I drink and look around. Nim is by the door ordering one of the hired men down to the kitchen. Her hair is looped and she’s put earrings in, but apart from that, she’s the selfsame: sensible petticoat, two pleats in her dress. It’s said she’s had many suitors and could have made a good match more than once, even with the shame of Frederick’s bastard hanging over her, but here she has stayed, devoted and constant, both when the wages have come and when they haven’t. She sees me looking and comes over.

  “Your glass is empty, Mrs. Burns,” she says, taking it from me and replacing it with a full one from a passing salver.

  “Thanks, Helen,” I says, for that’s her real name; I know it to be so.

  “Lizzie!”—Jenny is calling—“I was just about to give the ladies a tour of the upstairs. Do join us.”

  “Well, thanks, Jenny, that sounds nice, only—”

  Laughing, Tussy takes my arm. “Don’t be such a bore, Mohme. Lizzie is going to stay here with me. The band is going to start soon, and the men aren’t nearly drunk enough to dance, so I’m relying on Lizzie to be my partner.”

  Tussy leads me to the bay window where the band has set up. “Music, please!” she cries, and they start up. She spins me from one side of the empty floor to the other till, three songs later, I start hacking and I’ve to sit down.

  After a time—no sooner do I finish one drink than another is pressured on me—the women come back from upstairs. “Finally!” says a voice, and the men approach with outstretched hands. I refuse the two who ask me up.

  “Maybe the next one,” I says. “I need the rest.”

  But the truer truth is, I’ve become interested in what’s happening by the second fireplace; to get up now would be to miss it. It appears the woman Dmitrieff is telling something of her life. Sat on an easy chair like it’s a throne, enough space between her legs to fit a violin-cello, she has the place rapt. Frederick, Karl, and some others have made a ring round her and are fighting with each other to laugh loudest at her utterings. I strain my ear to catch a scrap.

  “So I said, I only married you to get a passport, and he said, Well, I only married you for your—”

  She widens her eyes in mock horror and peers down at her bust, as if noticing for the first time how smooth and well-looking it is.

  Now there’s a body to contend with.

  Refusing another round of dancing, I rise and make for the empty chair beside her. But Jenny, who must have been watching too, is faster. She slips through the band of men and takes Dmitrieff’s hand.

  “If none of these men are brave enough to ask you up, then you shall have to make do with me.”

  Dmitrieff laughs. “Oh, Mrs. Marx, I thought you would never ask!”

  The two skip to the floor, and the men look after them, murmuring and scratching and wondering why all women aren’t like them.

  Stranded now on a bit of empty carpet, I hasten to the nearest free seat. I watch the array over the lip of my glass: Jenny and Dmitrieff, Karl and Goegg, Frederick and Janey, Tussy and Dalby, Tomanowski and Lessner, Jaclard and Eccarius, Dr. Allen and his wife, the Lormiers, and maybe ten others, swaying and reeling. The number dawns on me: thirty or more altogether. A good way to clear off those who are due a visit, but the expense must be—well, it must be effin’ mighty.

  Of course, it’s easy to spend when you haven’t done a tap to have it. Three hundred and fifty pounds a year, in three installments, straight from Frederick’s accounts, that’s what they get. I’m sure they think it’s a secret; I’m sure they think I’m oblivious because I’m unable to make out what Frederick writes in the books. But in our house, having keen ears is just as good as having snooping eyes of your own, for half of the time he’s forgetting to speak in the German; half of the time he’s shouting through the walls instead of keeping his talk to a whisper; and the other half of the time he’s at the street door barking orders to messengers and letter carriers; it was never going to be long before I caught wind. Three hundred and fifty pounds is the digit, and that’s before the gifts and the sneaky envelopes; that’s before he sweeps in to level the bills and promises-to-pay that they leave to pile up on their desks and dressers and drawers (and not, where they ought be, on their memory and their morals).

  Careless charity is what the world would call it, if it knew. Helping those who beg and not those who really need the help. And who needs the help more—can someone please tell me?—than Nim’s son? Lord knows what condition of roof that boy is living under, and yet I don’t see a single tormented penny leaving the house in his direction. Would Frederick even know where to send it? One day justice will have to be done the poor lad; one day he’ll have to be cut his sliver.

  “You know, there’s a story told about them,” I says, turning to the man sat beside me.

  “About whom, madam?” he says, his breath wafting through his moustache.

  “The Marxes.”

  “Ah, yes. Such a remarkable family. Stories are bound to be told about them.”

  By the fireplace, Karl has taken up the fire blower and is making smutty jokes with it. Watching him brings a smile—like a secret understanding—to the man’s face.

  “You one of the Party?” I says.

  His smile drops. “The Party?”

  “You know, the International.”

  “Madam, the International is not a party. It is an association. A free association of workingmen.”

  I make a face to say I stand humble and corrected. He accepts it with a nod. Brings his glass under the hair of his lip to suck from it.

  “Well, sir, the story I’m thinking about—”

  “Is almost certainly just that, a story. Tittle-tattle from the bread queue.”

  “You haven’t heard it yet.”

  “I don’t need to hear it to know that it’s false.”

  “If it’s false I tell it, it’s false I got it.”

  “Precisely.”

  I take a sup and ponder this a moment. “Only I don’t believe this one is false. And if you only listened a minute, I’m sure you’d find you agree.”

  He shakes his head and groans.

  “The way it goes is, her mother, I mean Jenny’s mother, gave them some money for their honeymoon, and they took it with them in a chest.”

  “Please, madam, must we do this?”

  “And what they did was, they left the chest open on the table in the different hotel rooms they stayed in, so that any old body who visited them could take as much as he pleased from it. As you can imagine, empty the chest soon was!”

  The man stares at me. He joins his brows together and frowns. “That’s it?” he says. “That’s your story?”

  I push a finger into the soft bit of his arm and whisper into the black of his ear: “But don’t you see, this is the root of it! One generous thing done a lifetime ago and they think the world is in debt to them since. There’s no fairness in it. In the first place, I don’t think you can call giving your parents’ good money away generous. If you can call it anything, it’s—”

  The blood now comes beating to his face. An angry flush overspreads his features. He shifts his chair so he can f
ace away from me. I take my hand back and sigh. These foreigners have no notion of the banter. The Irish, there’s not much I can say in their favor, but at least they allow for a woman’s words when she’s lushed; they know it’s only the drop talking.

  The music stops and the remaining dancers bow and clap, and now make their way back to the chairs and sofas. A woman rushes in from the hall, as if summoned by the new quiet.

  “Where’ve you been?” rasps her redheaded friend, just two paces from me. “All this time, I’ve not seen you.”

  “I was in the kitchen playing cards with the hired men. What a lark! I won this.” She opens her palm to show a threepenny bit.

  Jenny walks into the center of the room and calls for a final applause for the musicians, then orders us up the stairs to the parlor for the performance.

  “The moment we’ve been waiting for!” someone shouts.

  Frederick comes to take me up. “Are you safe?” he says when my foot squeaks on the carpet of the stairs and I have a little wobble.

  “Go to blazes, Frederick,” I says.

  In the parlor we get seats, but the men have to stay on their feet. Jenny comes to stand in front of a counterpane held up as a curtain by two menservants. She gives a little speech about the effort she and Karl have made towards the Girls’ education, and how unfortunate it is they couldn’t do so much for them in music as they’d have hoped. “In any case,” she says, “their real strength is drama and elocution. And tonight my youngest daughter, Eleanor, whom many of you know as Tussy, shall be playing Hamlet. This is apt, for her father used to always say she was more like a boy than a girl.”

  A chuckle goes round.

  “Good old Tussy!” someone calls out.

  “My eldest daughter, Janey, shall be playing Gertrude, and although she knows not yet the joys and pain of motherhood for herself, I think you shall find she does the role full justice.”

  Cheers and claps.

  “The Girls would like to dedicate their performance to their sister Laura and her husband Paul, who are now safe in Bordeaux, thank heavens, and expecting a child.”

  Applause.

  Jenny bows and the servants let drop the curtain. One of the men has given Tussy a military jacket. Jenny has put Janey in one of her ball gowns.