Mrs. Engels

  He is triumphant. “Follow me.”

  When we’re good and settled in the box, he slides back the grille.

  “If I was God, Mrs. Engels, what would you tell me?”

  “I’d tell you to try my life for size, see if you’d fare any different.”

  “Do you think your life has been harder than anyone else’s?”

  The knees are at me already. Nowhere to put your arse. “Nay. I’ve been lucky. Luckier than most.”

  “If God was to live your life, how would He live it differently?”

  “I suppose He wouldn’t be on His own so much.”

  “Jesus spent long periods alone, Mrs. Engels. He suffered as we suffer.”

  I look down at the shadow of my hands, cut across by light from the gap where the curtains don’t full meet. “I fear London doesn’t agree with me, Father.”

  “How so? You are lonely here?”

  “It’s worrying my mind.”

  “London is?”

  “I thought it would be a fresh start. But it’s the same, isn’t it, no matter where you go? I thought I’d be a stranger, a face in the crush. But it’s all pursuing after me.”

  “You feel London is pursuing you?”

  “Nay, Manchester is pursuing me. London is watching me.”

  “Mrs. Engels, I—”

  “Jesus, would you listen to me? I’m bare making sense.”

  “Who is following you, Mrs. Engels?”

  “Nobody, Father. Only the past.”

  The wood creaks when he shifts to bring his face close to the grille. There’s not a nook in the church the sound doesn’t reach.

  “Are you here with a message, is that it, Mrs. Engels?”

  “I’m looking for someone, Father.”

  “Yes?”

  “Moss O’Malley. He came up from Manchester some years back. A man of strong faith.”

  “O’Malley? I don’t know him myself, but I can send the word out. We have many friends in the Church. Voices carry quickly. Are you wanting a meeting? What’s your message?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve naught prepared.”

  “Should he find you?”

  “He could, I suppose, if he wanted.”

  I give him the address.

  He repeats it back and now pulls the panel half across, whispers something so low I can’t make it out.

  “What’s that, Father?”

  Slam.

  Black.

  Am I off, or are such manners political in a priest?

  My bonnet is off before I’m through the door. Seeing Frederick’s hat not yet on the hook, I allow myself a bellow.

  “Up off your arses, he’ll be back any minute!”

  I make for the kitchen, loosening ties and tugging on buttons as I go.

  “Pumps, if I find you in that bath again, you’ll know all about it!”

  I’m stopped on the second step by voices coming through the parlor wall. The door opens and Pumps appears in the hall with an arrangement on her face—eyes wide as an owl’s, brows touching the fringe of her cap—that can only mean Jenny and Karl.

  I hurry my ties back into their knots, my buttons back through their holes. Pumps reaches an arm out as if to present me, but I push past her in the tone of “I can usher myself in.”

  In the parlor the middle doors have been folded back and the good table has been set. They’re all sat round, eating.

  “Lizzie, you’re soaked through,” says Jenny. “Where on earth did you get to?”

  I don’t feel called on to make excuses in my own house. “I thought you were dining in town. In that restaurant,” I says.

  “We changed our minds, mein Liebling,” says Frederick. “You were right. It was full and uncomfortable. It makes a better celebration to eat at home, just the four of us. We thought we’d find you already here.”

  “I had some things to do,” I says.

  “Well, you’re here now,” says Karl, to prevent a scene, “that’s the main thing.”

  “Go get changed,” says Jenny, “and then come and join us, please. I’ve been overseeing things. The girl was going to do broccoli and gravy with the fowl, but I had a look at what there was and I thought some savory rice and a curried sauce would be more amusing, or?”

  Side-splitting.

  “As long as Camilla wasn’t put out.”

  “Oh, she was delighted. She says she loves a change.”

  In the hall, I put my wet back against the wallpaper, close my eyes, and breathe.

  “Better?” says Jenny when I return in my good dress.

  “Much better,” I says.

  The dinner is curious, but I’m supposing usual to its kind. I’m left to eat alone. The men have already cleaned their plates. Jenny’s is still full, but she’s only pushing its contents from one side to the other; none of it goes near her mouth.

  “Lizzie, we’ve been talking about the success of Karl’s address,” she says, “and what a nightmare it has been for us personally. Nothing short of ruinous to our private life. We have no peace day or night. The Telegraph was around again yesterday. And now there is a journalist in New York who wants to come over and do a feature. All that way, can you imagine?”

  Aye, and for what?

  “It certainly is making a devil of a noise,” says Karl. “I have the honor to be at this moment the most abused and threatened man in London. But I have to say, it really does me good after the tedious twenty-year idyll in the backwoods.”

  “Well, you’ve never looked healthier,” I says.

  They laugh.

  I miss the Girls.

  “How have things been here, Lizzie, for you?”

  “Fine. No complaints.”

  Pumps, puss-faced, appears in the doorway. She looks at me. Usual, Frederick allows her to take her supper with us, but with the Marxes here she’s not sure which foot she’s standing on.

  “You can take these away, Pumps,” I says. “And bring in the pudding.”

  “Didn’t you like it, ma’am?” she says to Jenny when she takes up her plate, still packed with food.

  “It was delicious, Pumps, thank you.”

  There’s quiet till Pumps is gone.

  “So, what now?” I says, to break it.

  “Good question,” says Frederick.

  “The refugees are the priority,” says Karl.

  “Refugees?” I says.

  “The Communards,” says Jenny. “Hundreds of them. Come to London to escape the forces of repression.”

  “Oh. More of the French.”

  Jenny blinks at me. “Didn’t you see them, Lizzie? Thronging the streets around the Club? Thin as sticks and with no clothes on their backs. Their only belonging that bewildered air which encircles them.”

  “I saw them,” I says. “I just didn’t know what they were.”

  “Proper accommodation will need to be found for them,” says Frederick.

  “And then we must get them educated,” says Karl.

  “Yes. They must be taught the significance of what they have achieved,” says Frederick.

  “And they must be made aware of their mistakes,” says Jenny.

  “Won’t they know these things already, for themselves?” I says, tired now after the food.

  “Some of them might,” says Frederick. “But we mustn’t presume a high level of self-consciousness or theory in these men.”

  Karl nods. “Our main aim now must be to make the Commune’s historic experience available, firstly, to those who were directly involved and, subsequently, more widely. We must analyze theoretically the lessons of the rebellion and thereby turn spontaneous sympathy into the conscious desire and ability of the proletarian masses to carry its cause forward to victory.”

  “Oughtn’t we be hearkening to what they themselves have to say?” I says. “They being the revolutionaries?”

  “Of course, Lizzie,” says Frederick. “No one is suggesting otherwise. But many of these men are infused with a mood of failure and di
sappointment. We must press upon them that the Commune was merely the first attempt at working-class government, and therefore destined to failure. And that this failure is part of the necessary course. For you see, Lizzie, the death of the Paris rebellion is more historical than its life. Its dying is only the beginning.”

  The beginning? How many of those must they have before they start to see they’re the end?

  XXII. The Art of Being Well

  Dr. Allen comes and orders me onto my back.

  “You’ve been called in error,” I says. “I’m not ill.”

  “Mr. Engels tells me you’ve been coughing.”

  “I’m not one to fly to the medical man every time my throat tingles.”

  “He doesn’t like to hear it. He says it won’t leave you.”

  “I’ve had a cough since I was a child, Doctor. It’s what you get for growing up in Manchester.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Aye. Since back-when I’ve had it, and till my death I’ll have it. My wind gets wheezy and it hurts, and then it doesn’t. That’s always been the way of it.”

  “He says you insist on going out in bad weather. Getting wet in the rain.”

  “Mother of Moses, I’ve never known such a talker.”

  “Exertion is the instigation of your illness, Mrs. Burns. You must be careful against agitation of all kinds and against excessive application.”

  “English, Doctor?”

  “Stop your running about. Too much exercise can imbalance a woman.”

  I throw him a look.

  “Well, at least wait for a clear day, Mrs. Burns.”

  He feels around me. “How are your knees?”

  My knees? Growing more and more watery. Bare a bend left in them. Not long till I’ll be obliged to walk with a stick. “Grand.”

  “And down here?” He presses down into me. “Do you have urgency?”

  “Urgency, Doctor?”

  “Passing water.”

  “I’ve never been able to hold it long, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Is there a sting?”

  “Nay.” Sometimes.

  “Hmm. I feel something here. A small swelling. Nothing to worry about in the immediate term. But we’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

  “We’re getting on, Doctor. We can’t expect to be well, most of us.”

  He recommends that I stay inside and revive. Makes up a prescription for something he knows I won’t get. For the fact of it is: we’re oftener killed by treatment than disease.

  July

  XXIII. The Other Half

  In search of a missing slipper, I come through the middle doors of the parlor, and there on the chair in the corner, on the wolsey bought special for the move, is a strange man, lounging.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Engels is from home, sir.”

  He sweeps his wet hair back. “I was told to wait here.”

  “You’ll have to come back.”

  “I am sorry, but that was not what I was told at the door.”

  “Sunday is what you ought’ve been told. We receive on a Sunday.”

  “That’s no good. No good at all.”

  “If you have a card, I can make sure Mr. Engels gets it.”

  “A card, a card, that’s very well, a card is something, better than nothing, but now that I’m here and have been made sit for so long, and with the water coming down outside, and being without a proper coat and liable for a soaking, maybe all these factors considering I should be allowed to see the lady of the house? A short minute from her schedule is all I ask, s’il vous plait.”

  A pause; a tiny gap into which the whole world could fit.

  “Bah, of course! You must be Mrs. Burns!” He stands and bows. “Delighted and honored. The name is Delamer”—he opens his coat and settles back into my afternoon—“Roland Delamer. Just in from Paris.”

  “Welcome to London, Mr. Delamer.”

  “Merci, merci.”

  “And if you are still here Sunday, I’m sure Mr. Engels will be happy to receive you.”

  “Still here Sunday? Mrs. Burns, with the situation at home as it is, I shan’t be leaving London until long after Sunday. Ah, the things I’ve seen.” He closes his eyes and, like an actor of the stage, shakes his head. “The weight I carry.”

  The fashion of his collar, up at middle-cheek, makes it seem like he’s peering out over a wall and not liking much what he sees: now the pictures, now the carpet, now the ornaments, now the lamps. He smoothes his hair over the other way and looks back at me.

  “You’ll have met some others, Mrs. Burns? Communards who have fled the repression?”

  “A few.”

  Torn carpets, I have, from the volume of them coming through, and I’ve noticed it’s the ones with the look of butchers, stern and strong-made, who are ashamed about bringing their filth higher than the kitchen, while it’s the ones grown delicate from bookwork who waltz about and stamp their prints deep. And even by the standards of the dainty fellas, this one here is spare and thin, a ballroom the fitter place for his shoes, time enough on the barricades to macassar his brow and whisker.

  “It’s as I thought. For everywhere I look in London, I see French faces, my brothers, my comrades, and they all have the same aspect, the same eyes filled with the same horror. It’s an abominable situation. The things I have seen. The things I have seen!”

  I don’t conceal my sigh. “I’ll order some tea, Mr. Delamer, and you’ll have a cup. But then I must ask you to—”

  “Not Dull-a-mare, Mrs. Burns. D-E-L-A-M-E-R. De-la-mer. Of the sea.”

  I pull the bell-cord, and now harder, and am glad when no one stirs to answer it and I have to go myself. “Do excuse me a moment, Mr. Delacey.”

  Burns. Of the fire. Enchanté.

  I find Spiv in the kitchen, picking the chicken.

  “Spiv?”

  “Name’s Camilla, ma’am.”

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s bird day, ma’am.”

  “And what day is bird day?”

  “Bird day’s the day I’m stuck in here as always, not a sinner to help me.”

  “It’s Wednesday, Spiv. Today is Wednesday.”

  “Aye, ma’am, bird day.”

  “And what day do we receive?”

  “Sunday, ma’am.”

  “Too hard to remember?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The only house in the country that dares, God forgive us.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Aye, ma’am, aye, ma’am, three bags burst ma’am, but what’s there a gent doing in my parlor on this, a Wednesday?”

  “Couldn’t say, ma’am.”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Bird day, ma’am. Been stuck in here, not a sinner to help me. Ain’t seen no man.”

  Even the blunt ones would cut you with argument.

  I nose out Pumps in her room, melting candles and putting her knuckles into them.

  “Put that out.”

  She laps her tips, pinches the wick.

  “Didn’t you hear the bell?”

  “The what?”

  “Is that wax going into your ears?”

  Unmade bed. Scab on the arm. Pinny a doubtful white. A day in the mill and she’d know what from what.

  “What have I told you about callers?”

  “None past the door when Uncle Angel’s not here.”

  “Mr. Engels.”

  “That’s what I said.” She scratches herself. “Oh, and as well, I’m to take their card and tell them to come back on Sunday. And if they don’t have a card, I’m to write down their name and their current residence.”

  “The rule isn’t for saying but for obeying.”

  “All right, don’t overcook, Aunt Liz.”

  “You have to be firm at the door or they’ll put on us, these frogs.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about, I didn’t let anyone in.”

  “Now look at where you’ve got us. Frederick no
t back till supper, our stores empty, and another one on our hands till Jesus knows when. The shape will be pulled out of my day entire. I just pray he doesn’t want a bed for the night.”

  “No need for a song and dance, Aunt Liz. Do you want me to go and talk to him?”

  You do what you can, and that’s all you can do. You tell them whose house they’re in, and why a stray caller isn’t a light thing, not here. You tell them to keep a special watch on the French, for the French are ignorant of what’s done and what’s not, most of them being refugees, which means on the run and penniless and with nowhere to put down their heads. You tell them it’s forgivable they decide to call on this house, and it’s forgivable that once inside they forget their manners and overstay their time telling their grievings, darkening the rooms with wild words and dead faces, and giving eye to the sofa, hoping to put themselves on it. But the truth is, we can’t help everybody who comes. We have to draw a line. It won’t do the Revolution any good if a lodging is made of our parlor and Frederick is kept from his work. You tell them all this, you go blue in the face, and still it doesn’t sink. Still they let pass any creature that can hobble. And it’s hard to pin on them any wrongdoing. So sometimes the only thing for it is a swift clip round the ear.

  Back down in a fresh dress.

  “We’ll have tea direct, Mr. Delacey. You’ll have to pardon the running about.”

  “Oh no, Mrs. Burns, I understand. I have a wife myself.”

  It takes Pumps three trips to bring all the tea things, so concerned is she with her bobs and her ribbons.

  “Thank you, Miss Burns, that’ll be enough.”

  “A sweet girl. Is she your daughter?”

  “Niece.” Half-niece. Plenty-removed.

  “Well, I knew there was some connection. There’s the same heat in your eyes.”

  The same heat that burns.

  “Weak or strong?”

  “Comme ça.”

  “Milk?”

  “Some lemon, if you have it.”

  “Of course.” I call Pumps back in, much to her thrilling. “Bring the gent some lemon.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Slices, Miss Burns, slices.”

  “I hope it’s no trouble.”

  “Not a bit of it, Mr. Delacey, after all you’ve been through.”