by Gavin McCrea
“I’m sure if you explain the dangers to them, they’ll understand and will decide against such a trip.”
“Karl has already given his consent.”
“I see.”
“He’s a scoundrel. A rotten scoundrel. He spoils them to death, Lizzie. And this time, it might literally be to the death.” She covers her face and lets out a single harrowing sob.
“Oh, Jenny,” I says, rubbing her back, “don’t be like that. Calm down now. You’re only upsetting yourself. Have some tea. You’ll feel much the better for it.”
I reach for the bell-cord. She stops me by laying hold of my arm. “Please, Lizzie, don’t call for anything. I couldn’t bear to sit here drinking tea.”
“What can I get you instead? Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No, Lizzie, I don’t want to bother you any more than I already have. Really, you are too good for this world.”
She separates herself from me. Rubs her face with her handkerchief. Stands. Goes to the mirror. Peers hard at herself.
Slaps her face and stretches back the skin. “Good God, look at me.”
I take out the brush I keep in the drawer of the cabinet and go to her. “Here, let me.”
I let down her hair and start to brush it. She closes her eyes. Though her mouth is pulled down and her cheeks sagged, though her eyes are circled round by red, the remains of her beauty haven’t all fallen by. Even now, at the age when a woman’s graces are bound to unfold, she’s a damn sight comelier than I’ve ever been. The only thing I have over her is my hair.
Now her eyes flick open as if out of a bad dream.
“And that is not the end of it, Lizzie,” she says.
“What else is there, Jenny? Let it out to me now.”
And she does. She lets it out. Delivers all the particulars with no hesitatings. It’s Karl’s carbuncles. They’re back. This time ferocious bad.
“There are days when he can only stand upright or lie on his side on the sofa. When he cannot bear the pain any longer, he takes a razor to them himself. Do you credit it, Lizzie? These little operations of his, mercy be on us, they leave these big—”
She shakes her head to rid her mind of the image.
“I cannot bear the sight of it anymore. Nim is taking care of him for the most part. My spirits have been shattered by the incessant nursing. She seems to withstand it better.”
“Is he taking the arsenic?”
“Swilling it like it is his favorite lager.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Her head falls forward to meet her lifting hands, a gesture which tugs on the bit of mop I’m holding. I let go. “Thank you, Lizzie,” she says, and, rough as a sailor with his rope, twists it round and jabs the pins back in. She leans into the mirror and inspects. “And to think, I could have had anybody.”
It’s but a slip. We make them, all of us.
“What’d you like me to do?”
“Oh, Lizzie, how it humiliates me to ask you for anything, no matter how small. You and Frederick have already done so much for us. Too much. We owe you nothing less than our lives.”
“What is it, Jenny? Are you in need of money? For the doctor?”
Giving herself a last exhausted look, she moves away from her image. Takes a chair from under the writing table. Sets herself up behind it, leans down onto it. “He speaks of a salve Mary used to make for him when he would stay with Frederick in Manchester. Personally, I think he does not need a salve but to get himself to a watering place like Dr. Allen advises, but the man has his own mind, and he is unwilling to let go of the idea of this salve, which he claims will cure any class of corn or carbuncle.”
“He wants it now?”
“It is too much for you?”
“Of course not.”
“My darling Lizzie, I cannot thank you enough.”
“I’ll go and see what I can rustle up.”
“At least let me help you.”
“It’s not a bother, Jenny, honest.”
But is that all? A bit of cream, is that everything you’re after?
I send her upstairs to the Mister and take myself down to the kitchen. Spiv blinks at me over the scales; a shovel of flour suspended in the air between us. I blink back, blank. I’ve not the murkiest idea about what went into Mary’s concoction.
“Spiv, I need to make a salve.”
“A what?”
“For Dr. Marx’s carbuncles,” says Pumps from the chimney corner.
“Oh no,” says Spiv, “not likely.” Puss-faced, she goes back to her weighing.
“Drop that, Spiv. We can give you a hand with it later. First, a salve. Jenny’s biding.”
“Is she now?”
“Get out the jars, Pumps.”
“I wouldn’t know the first thing about making a salve.”
“Nor would I. But this, my child, is what you do for your neighbors. You help them.”
We scrape something together using the soda, the butter, the linseed, the rosemary, the lavender, the basilicum, and no mean dosing of the arsenic.
“That’ll put hairs on his nip,” says Spiv.
We’ve almost beat it into a paste when Jenny pokes her head in. “I am going to run.”
“What about this?” I says, nodding at the bowl that Spiv has in a vise between her gut and her forearm, arm working double at the whisk.
“I do apologize, Lizzie, but I have to be in High Holborn in half an hour. We’re voting on the women’s resolution.”
That explains the parlor dress, the posy of flowers.
I go to see her out. She whispers to me at the door. “When you go up with it, can you talk to him about the Girls? Knock some sense into him?”
“I’ll do that, Jenny. Go on, you’ll be late.”
“You’re a precious angel.”
“Enough of that now.”
“Toodle-oo!” she calls over my shoulder, and is gone.
In the hush that comes after her, we spoon the salve into a jar and put the dirty things into the basin. We listen for the kettle to boil.
“That woman’d take your liver on a plate,” says Spiv after a time.
I’m looking at her holding her cheek before I realize I’ve slapped her.
On a normal day, I’d leave the house before Moss would, my walk to work being longer than his, but on this day I feign an illness and stay till he himself has gone. Then I pack a case. The meaning of the act leaves me unmoved. It seems more important that I fold my things in a way that won’t leave them creased. But then life is like that.
I walk to Mary’s new place in Salford. Frederick has put her here, and it’s a lovely spot, the loveliest I’ve ever seen. He has not moved in himself, of course, though he says that’s only a matter of time. I put my case down on a shining floor of tiles.
“It’s gorgeous, Mary,” I says.
“Built in the villa style,” she says, and now laughs like that’s something funny to say.
She shows me round: the kitchen, the garden, her room, my room, the place in the sitting room where the doors have been taken away and the wall knocked down.
“Imagine,” I says.
She shrugs and says, “It’s a start,” in an effort to make it appear more modest than it is. “It’ll do for now,” she says, but I can see that she’s brimming over, that a high happiness has gripped her. She has the house out of town that she wanted, and now that I’ve come, she won’t be so lonely in it anymore. The world is well again. Things are back on their right course.
I wash and change in my room. Put my few bits into the wardrobe. My case now empty and tucked under the bed, I sit and look out the window—beyond the back wall it’s possible to see the line where the chimneys give way to the woods and fields—and wonder would Moss ever be able to find this place. He would if he wanted to, if he really wanted to, but I try not think about what I’d do if he did, and instead think about how unfeeling it is of Mary not to ask me any questions about how I feel in myself
—how any woman would feel if they were put in my situation—and I know that if I continue to sit here I’ll become angry because of it and might say or do something I’ll regret, so I get up and go out and try to find a job to busy myself with.
No useful task presents itself to me, however. Everything is perfect. The hearths and windows clean. The ornaments too few for grime to collect. No rugs to muster up old smells. All the little things already paid attention to. If I was to go at this place, I’d achieve nothing except knock the furniture about and make a dust. I stand in the sitting room, in the middle of the red carpet with the border of flooring all around, and I ponder the length of the coming day.
After tea, which she bare touches, she goes to her room without a word. I do the dishing up and then sit for a while in the armchair, but it’s hopeless: I must know what those noises are. I find her rummaging through her wardrobe.
“Looking for something?” I says.
“Something to wear. Something that bespeaks the occasion.”
The occasion, I’ve been Mary’s sister long enough to know, isn’t me.
“Going out?”
“Nay, they’re coming here. Frederick is bringing a friend over.”
At least now I know what has her so excited. It’s a rare thing that Frederick brings a friend to the house, and now that’s it’s happening, it can only mean that he’s bending to her wants, that he’s beginning to turn on her finger.
“Am I to make myself scarce?” I says.
“Don’t give me that, Lizzie,” she says, running a hand along the line of hangers. “This is your home now, too.”
She picks out a dress and holds it up against her. Looks down at herself. Kicks her leg out to flare the skirts. “Bleh,” she says, and stuffs it back in.
“Who is it that’s coming?” I says. “The Pope himself?”
“Who?” Her hip cocked and a finger tapping her chin, she peers in at the array, imploring the right mood to make itself known. “Didn’t I say before?”
“Nay, Mary, you didn’t. ”
“An intimate from London.”
“And does he have a name, this intimate?”
“Marx. The man Marx is down from London for the week. Staying with Frederick.”
Arms crossed, I come around and, with my hip, push the wardrobe door closed.
“Watch! You’ll have my fingers!”
“Mary, I thought you hated that man.”
“Karl? Not a bit. It’s his wife that’s not right. He’s grand, a big pet actual, when you get him out of her company. Now, if you don’t mind.”
She pushes me aside and opens the wardrobe again. Reaches in, as if for any old thing, and throws it onto the bed.
“I suppose it’ll have to be this one. Help me, can you?”
She steps out of her flannel wrapper and into the dress. Turns to give her back to me.
“I just can’t grasp it,” I says, pulling hard on her ties.
She sighs. “What is it, exact, that you can’t grasp?”
“Naught, except I can’t understand how you can entertain this man, after all his wife has said about you. It’s a mystery to me. A God-made mystery.”
I poke her to tell her it’s done, and she goes over to look at herself in the glass. Sucks herself in and rubs a hand down her front.
“Is it right to have him here? I’d be embarrassed. For you, I’d be.”
She throws her eyes up and plonks down at her toilet table. Strains towards herself. “Is there time for the curling irons, do you think?”
I come to stand behind her. Look at her through the mirror. “Well, tell me at least, will he be expecting something? A fancy deal?”
“What he’ll be expecting is less opinion from you, I’ll tell you that much.”
She’s ready hours before they arrive, but now, when the knock comes, she runs to her bedroom and slams the door behind.
“I’ll get it, then,” I says, hoping my tone will carry through to the outside, where the men are waiting.
He’s got hairy hands, I notice, when he takes mine to kiss it. And his coat is buttoned wrong. Frederick walks him in and tours him around the room like he owns it, which of course he does.
“Mary’ll be out in a minute,” I says. “She’s fallen behind in her day.”
Frederick puts Karl standing by the fire, arranges four chairs around it, and goes to get the drinks. Karl won’t sit till I’m down. “Bitte, Miss Burns,” he says, gesturing to the chair, a light moving in his dark eyes. “Please do sit down.”
Frederick carries four glasses over, two in each hand. He serves us and, releasing a satisfied moan, installs himself in his chair. He drinks from one glass and holds the other on his lap for Mary.
“So where have you lads come from?” I ask, my voice nervous in front of this new stranger.
“A charity ball,” says Karl, “at the—” He slurs something in the German.
“The German Club,” says Frederick. He tries to cross a leg over but it slips off his knee; his boot lands heavy on the floor. “A choir concert in aid of the poor immigrants.”
“By the cut of you both,” I says, drawing a circle in the air around them, “that’s not the only place you’ve been.”
Frederick laughs. “You see?” he says to Karl. “What did I tell you?”
Karl lifts his glass and burps out a chuckle.
Mary appears, drawn out by the laughter and the envy it brings up inside of her. She kisses Karl on both cheeks, Frederick on the mouth, and takes her drink from him. She raises up to Karl, and goes round to touch all of our glasses, before she sits back into her place.
Frederick does most of the talking. Speaks at length and with great force about the boredom of Manchester. The dullness of office life. The commerce and its accursed tasks that are impinging on his Communism.
“I’m bored to death,” he says. “I drink rum and water, and spend my time between twist and tedium.”
We laugh, for though his meaning is serious, he speaks so correct, and with such humor, that to laugh is to give his speech the true weight it’s due. Karl appears the happiest body amongst us: as he listens to Frederick; as he argues with him; as he cuts in to share secret things in the German, the good temper doesn’t fall from his face, and it’s clear they adore each other.
Trust Mary, in the middle of such easy goings, to call attention to what we’re ignoring. We, to be civil, are looking past it, over it, beyond it; she can’t help but point her big finger right at it.
“Are you well there, Karl?” she says.
“Me?” he says, surprised.
“You look to be having trouble with your arm,” she says. “I see you are in pain when you lift your glass to drink.”
“Thank you for your concern, Mary, but it’s nothing,” he says.
And that ought be enough for a body; enough to tell her it’s a question she has no business with. But Mary won’t leave a thing alone, not if she thinks it’s a way into a man’s affections. So she keeps at him, she presses and presses, and now Frederick joins her—“She won’t stop till you tell her, mein Freund. You might as well give it up”—till the man caves in and lets it out; till he coughs and fidgets around and, red-faced, falls to admitting that indeed there is something the matter: something carbuncular, just under his arm, which is making movement a nuisance and writing a torture.
Frederick makes light of it; it’s his way of helping Karl out of his shame. “Do you believe him, ladies? This is the excuse he’s been giving us for not having completed his Economics.”
Karl scoffs at his friend and turns to address Mary. “It’s a terrible bother, Miss Burns. The doctor has tried to drain it, but no opening or discharge could be induced. I’ve applied every remedy and compress known to medical science, all in vain.”
Mary can’t conceal her fascination. “Let’s have a look,” she says.
Karl waves a refusing hand.
“Pop your shirt off and let me see it. I might be able to help.
”
He looks at her a moment, hopeful: perhaps this Irish woman can help! But now he shakes his head and covers his eyes with his hands. “Christ, I’ve had too much to drink.”
Frederick laughs. “Come, Karl, no need for reserve. You’re not in London now.”
Mary stands in front, so that most of his bulk is hidden behind her, and helps him out of his jacket and shirt. She lays these over him to cover his naked paunch. Now she takes his hand and levers up his arm. Glistening in the firelight, mottled red and green, it’s at least the size of an egg. The sight of it turns me ill.
“Hmm,” Mary says, and puts the arm back down.
“The problem,” says Frederick, “is that he refuses to take the arsenic.”
Karl reaches an arm across his belly, to keep the jacket and shirt from slipping off. “I have my doubts about that stuff.”
Frederick clicks his tongue. “You’re impossible, Karl. Drinking arsenic doesn’t hinder you in your ordinary way of life in any manner. Twice a day for three or four months, and you’ll be rid of this business finally.”
Karl groans.
“And you need to take more exercise. It’s good of Jenny that she dutifully drags you out to go for walks. I hope she doesn’t allow herself to be scared off by your physical indolence disguised as your need to work.”
“For goodness sake, do you want the Book written or not?”
“We do. Desperately. If all else fails, I’ll make a few pounds available to get you to Karlsbad.”
“Nay.” From her standing position, her hips held firm in her hands, Mary demands our attending. “Keep your money, Frederick. And, Karl, you’re right to stay clear of the normal prescriptions. What you have isn’t a carbuncle at all but an abscess. It’s in a bad state of neglect, on account of you treating it as something that it’s not. What it needs is a good rub with something that’ll take the poison out of it. Sit tight. I have just the thing.”
With that—her expert judgment given—she swishes off to the kitchen. I follow her in. The walls are too thin to permit me a speech, so instead I fix my face in the tone of “What, sister child, are you playing at?” My look doesn’t escape her, and her response is to wink back at it—the scab-bag—and put the kettle on to boil.