Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

Harry starts to hit and kick. She stands and, holding him under his arms, offers him to me. “Here, can you take him? He’s driving me mad.”

  He stops howling the moment I get touch of him. “Lord have mercy, the weight of him.” He pinches and smears and puts fistfuls of my dress into his gob.

  “Is that your good clothes?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  She has me feed him some pap, and afterwards I give him a ballad. He stares at me, tranced, through all the verses, and, when I’m finished, sinks his fingers into my cheeks and pulls them down. There’s a stroke of sadness, now, giving him back, for it’s one of those things that’s hard to leave off once you’ve taken to it.

  “You never wanted any of your own?”

  “Sure, aren’t wanting and getting worlds apart?”

  “You can say that again. I never wanted anything, and look what I got.”

  I come away. “Tell him I called, anyhows.”

  “Is there anything you want to leave for him?”

  I think a moment. I could tell her now and be done with it: Freddy’s father isn’t who you think it is. But in my mind I see that I won’t tell them anything, not ever. And I’ll never be back here again either. It’s not my place. These people don’t belong to me, and I don’t belong to them. “Just give him my love,” I says.

  She walks me to the door. Her disappointment is plain.

  I rub Harry’s cheek and brush his hair out of his eyes. “Look after him, won’t you?”

  I get a bus as far as the Park and, in spite of the drizzle and the line of waiting cabs, walk the rest of the way. I approach the house on the opposite side of the road, glance in as I pass. The windows are bright. The fires are up and the lamps lit. Naught looks lacking. I’ll be home for supper.

  There’s a fight on in one of the warehouses, so the Lansdowne is deserted.

  “How goes it with the radicals?” says Bert.

  “Don’t be at me today.”

  “The usual?”

  “Nay, give me a beer. I’ve to go easy. Heavy night last night.”

  “Anything special?”

  “An engagement.”

  “Your own?”

  “Get away with you.”

  I watch him pull it. “Mind you put a good head on.”

  I stay at the counter and he tells me the local news.

  “Do you know either of the men?” he says.

  “What men?” I says.

  “Fighting.”

  “I don’t. What are their names?”

  “Don’t know. I was wondering if you knew them.”

  “I’m not the newspaper, Bert.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I come here to take a sup and to get away.”

  “I’m sorry for asking, Mrs. Burns. Forget I said anything.”

  He takes up his cloth and goes away to clean something.

  “Sorry, Bert. Come back. Don’t take it on. The world isn’t fit for me today.”

  He comes back wearing a generous smile. “I’ve got just the thing for you.”

  He’s got his hands on a bottle of the homemade stuff. He’ll put a nip in my flask if I don’t tell anybody where I got it. I refuse him at first. It’d only keep me here and put me in the way of another hangover. But as we talk, and as our subjects become nearer, the need gets the better of me.

  “Sure, give me a taste of it now and let’s be done with it.”

  “There’s a good woman.”

  It’s hard going down, and runs fast to the head; a heavy kind of pleasure. He joins me for a second drain, and our mouths now loosened by it, we fall to talking about the thoughts that have been busying us. I tell him where I’ve just come from.

  “So you went back?” he says.

  “I did,” I says.

  I stop short of telling him the reason for my visit. But I give him everything else.

  “The world isn’t fair, Bert. There’s some that die for want of a child, and there’s others that have no real care for their own. It’s true what they say, children are wasted on their begetters.”

  “Come now, Mrs. Burns. It’s only parents themselves that can know the true pressures of it.”

  His words sting, but I allow them in exchange for another quick go. He grants it to me, and one to himself, too, which opens him to speak of his own trials, bedaughtered as he is.

  “But we can’t get down about it, can we, Mrs. Burns? We have to take our bits and ends of happiness where we can find them.”

  “Aye, Bert,” I says. “We’ve to let things alone, else we’ll never be easy.”

  He nods away to that, and I nod along in my stead, and the next I know myself, I’m opening my eyes and being looked at.

  “Child, is it yourself?”

  She’s trying to get my arm into the sleeve of my coat.

  “Come on, Aunt Liz, let’s get you home.”

  “I’ve lost track. Is the supper ready?”

  “Put this on you.”

  “Did you come on your own?”

  “Come on, take my arm.”

  “Is he fed? Did Spiv manage without me?”

  “Stop your flustering and get a hold of me. Night, Bert.”

  “Night, Pumps.”

  The air sets me aching for a spend. We go up a lane and she stands in front.

  “Stop moving,” I says, for I’ve to hold her skirts for balance.

  “Hurry up,” she says. “We ought to get you home and out of those damp things.”

  “Nay,” I says, helping myself up. “I’ll lie down as I am so I can sleep the extra minutes in the morning.”

  XXXVI. A Higher Authority

  To mark the anniversary, there was going to be a rally for five thousand. But now, at the last moment, the owner of the hall where it was to be held has refused us admission. French Communists, he said, weren’t allowed to meet in any hall in London. If he’d known who we were beforehand, he’d never have agreed.

  Frederick is livid. “Since the philistine is sure to be unwilling to lose the ten guineas rent, and since we shall sue for damages and shall get them too, it is obvious he’s being compensated by the government. I think we should chance it anyway. We shall gather a smaller group and go along quietly. If we find the door locked, which is probable but not certain, we shall put the man in the witness box and see what can be made of the affair.”

  The door, we find, is indeed locked. Not a sinner in sight. Once we’ve shook at the bolts and caused a bit of a scene, we make our way to a room on Frances Street and have the ceremony there. Speeches are given. Resolutions are adopted. Frederick decides to invite everyone in earshot to our house for a drink and a song. Cheers go up. My day falls to rubble.

  I track down Jenny and ask her would she like to share a cab back.

  “Why Lizzie,” she says, unable to hide her surprise, “I’d be delighted.”

  We sit side-by-side. She lets me take her hand. Moves in close. Fixes her skirts so that they fall over mine. She compliments Frederick on his speech. I can’t bring myself to say anything about Karl’s. I tell her the Girls are looking ever handsomer, Janey most of all, since the engagement. She thanks me in a tired way, and, to my own surprise, says no more about them. I myself have to poke at the subject to get it up.

  “Do you still worry about Lissagaray?”

  “No. I’ve grown weary of worrying. I have forbidden the relation, and I expect that to be the end of it.”

  “You’re going to lose her to someone, Jenny. I daresay she might be happy in a marriage where her husband is a sort of father and could teach her.”

  She shakes her head. “More education is not what Tussy requires. A strong man, a solid man, that is what. A provider. I couldn’t save the others from their fate, but I still have a chance with Tussy. She, at least, must be kept clear of the dangers that our political life has put in her path.”

  Her regret shows as a passing shadow on her face, and I find myself drawn into sympathy. The fate she’s
afraid of is her own: a wifehood devoted to making up for her husband’s poverty and putting away his sad mistakes. She’s right to want Tussy—at least her—saved from it.

  The doors open to the hordes, by midday the house is full to the beams. With all the craving stomachs, every bit of vittle that goes up comes down as crumbs on the plate. The order from the pastry cooks is soon exhausted, leaving us to rely on our own preparations, and Spiv is set teaving to keep up. Pumps is doing her utmost, but she can’t be counted on for a prompt return, not with all the flitting and tossing she tries to squeeze into her runs. Frederick has already been sent down the cellar stairs more often than is right for a body of his age and standing. And it’s not for the cheapest bottles he’s dispatched either, but for the dustier, dearer ones that are then sloshed about the place as if the merest ale. The better the lush, the easier it goes down, and it’s wise to be heedful and watch your measure, but it seems the French can bear a great deal of pleasure, for they don’t ever refuse what’s offered them, nor even wait to be offered in the first, and what’s left now is not a soul sober among them.

  The whole thing has put me into a coat of sweat, and into a humor too that would raise the hair on the devil himself.

  Says one of them from the crowd, “Are we to be denied some tobacco after coming so far?” And Frederick, like a dullard, dashes off for the box.

  Jenny gets up a German song. She leads into the strain, and the Girls join in, and now Karl. When they’re finished, Tussy calls on Frederick to give us a bout of “The Vicar of Bray.”

  “All right,” he says, after much coaxing, “but I cannot guarantee I shan’t mess it.” He takes a gulp from his tumbler and, holding on to the chimneypiece, makes the mime of a tipsy drunk clinging to the edge of a bar counter, and everybody laughs. When there’s some hush again, he begins, trembling at first but soon steadfast. He’s left alone for the verses; the Marxes chime in for the refrains.

  “And this is law, I will maintain, unto my dying day, sir, that whatsoever king may reign, I’ll be Vicar of Bray, sir.”

  The clapping goes on well after Frederick has bowed and sat down, and threatens to go on an embarrassing length, till Karl strikes the punch bowl with the rim of his eyeglass and a hush spreads over once more. The big man stands, teeters, and is put right by Tussy. He waves her away and plants himself well into the carpet. Takes hold of the openings of his coat, gives his throat a rough throat-clearing. He gives a speech in the French. When everybody bows their heads, I understand he’s asking for a minute to remember the Paris dead, and I bend down in my turn. Out the side of my eye, I see Jenny crying behind her fan. Lissagaray and another man tussle to be the one to pass Tussy a handkerchief. Janey has fallen sideways into Longuet’s arms. I wonder why I’m not feeling the proper feeling. I try to bring it on by thinking of Mary, but it doesn’t come. These things can’t just be called up, like a servant from below.

  The minute over, Karl takes up with his speeching once more. The crowd raises their glasses and turns to face me. It takes me a moment to realize they’re proposing me.

  “To our hostess, Lizzie Burns,” says Karl.

  “To Lizzie Burns,” says Frederick. “Proletarian, Irish rebel, and model Communist!”

  “Lizzie! Lizzie!”

  I’m lost for what to be saying or where to be saying it. “Thank you, gents. Our home is your home. Now, would you ever sit down and make it so? You’ll have me mortified standing there in your gaiters.”

  Laughter, clapping, some more cheers.

  I go down to the kitchen to come over it with a bit of dignity.

  Spiv is sat at the table, having her bit.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  I turn to the stove and don’t feel called on to explain.

  She fetches me a fresh glass from the cupboard and fills it from her bottle. “She who goes to bed sober falls with the leaves in October.”

  I take it, and it helps me on.

  Back up in the parlor, the serious business has begun.

  “Too many false prophets have polluted the field,” Karl is saying. “Now is not the time for sects and factions and discord. Now is the time for unity and for discipline. Now is the time for optimism. Now is the International’s time.”

  Frederick sweeps a fierce look round the faces, and musters an applause by it.

  “The anarchists, that plague of bourgeois rats, consider any revolutionary uprising to be justified as a step towards the total destruction of society, and so run about giving their support to spasmodic uprisings, wherever they take place. We, on the other hand, do not expect a quick revolution, nor a partial one. The failure of the Paris Commune has shown us that Communism will only be possible as the act of the proletariat all at once and simultaneously!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Well said!”

  “Murderer of freedom!” It’s the ill-dressed old gent in the upright chair who speaks: a stranger to me and to this house. “You have said it, Dr. Terror! With your own words, you have proved yourself an authoritarian, a murderer of freedom!”

  “Who is this man?” says Karl, almost laughing. “Who brought their grandfather with them?”

  “Who are you?” says Frederick. “Speak your name.”

  “Equality without freedom is a fiction!” he says. “Equality without freedom is a myth created by swindlers to mislead fools!”

  Frederick springs to his feet. “Get this anarchist worm out of here!”

  Five, ten men answer his command. Numbed by the lush, they stumble over chairs and knock down bottles and glasses to get to him. The man doesn’t struggle when they put their hold on him, nor when they pull his coat up over his head and lift him onto their shoulders like a coffin.

  “Equality without freedom means state despotism!” comes his muffled call as they carry him out to the hall.

  I put myself among the herd that follows the procession out, but instead of turning left towards the street door like the others, I steal right, down the kitchen steps. Spiv is washing plates in the scullery.

  “Didn’t it say in that character of yours that you play the piano?”

  She gives me the daggers.

  “Go on up, you’re needed to lighten the atmosphere. It’s gone dark.”

  She wrings out her rag and slaps it onto the side of the bucket.

  “Well, isn’t it better than wiping at these?”

  “I’d quicker wipe a thousand of these, and a thousand arses after them.”

  “Don’t give me that, and go on. Get it past and done. I’ll finish this for you.” I take the bottle of champagne out of the sink where it’s been steeping in cold water. “And bring this up with you as an extra excitement.”

  She takes the bottle from me and stomps up. “This is some life.”

  I bide till I hear the first notes struck, delicate as a bull at a gate, before going out the area way.

  I find Moss turned towards his door, fumbling with keys. I come up behind him and float a hand against his shoulder. I see he’s made a toilet of bear’s grease and has brushed his breeches of their stains.

  “On your way out?”

  He jumps, alarmed. Sighs and shakes his head when he lights on me. “I thought we’d seen the last of you.”

  “I’m out for a walk and this is my way.”

  “You’ve never been one to keep your word.”

  He yanks the door towards him and, with a holy curse, forces the lock to turn. “I can’t stay. I’m on my way to a meeting.”

  “Suit yourself. I only came to give you this.” Untroubled by the bright daylight and the beggars creeping around, I hold out my purse: the house surplus for four months, not an enormous sum, but tidy enough to deliver a man from anxiety.

  He flashes up and down the road. “Christ, Lizzie, put it away.”

  I laugh at his nerviness, and drop the purse back into my skirts. All business now, he takes my arm and walks me off.

  “What changed your mind?”

>   “What does it matter? Do you want the mint or not?”

  “Come with me to the meeting. You can make your donation there. It’ll be most welcome.”

  “I’m going nowhere near another meeting.”

  “I won’t take the money unless you come. You’re not giving it to me. You’re giving it to the Cause.”

  “You’re mistaken, Moss. I’m giving it to you. You’re the Cause.”

  If this touches any feelings in him, he doesn’t make a display of them, except to tighten his grip and pull me closer.

  I’m taken along by his slow walk. My mind calls out against going with him, but my body doesn’t hearken. Down the alleys and lanes, through the courts, I let myself be led. When we get to the church, I says, “Where on earth are you taking me?” but it’s too late to sound anything except false.

  We go inside and walk up the main aisle to the top. He knocks on the sacristy door. A head peeps out and looks us over before letting us in. The sacristy is as you’d expect. A small window. A table spread with white linen. A wardrobe for the gowns. A shelf for the holy things. Candles and chalices. Jugs of wine and water. Bells and books and vases.

  “Mrs. Engels!” says Killigad. “Welcome!”

  Stood around the priest, leant back against the walls and the furniture, squatted down close to the floor: an amount of men, no less than two dozen. Many of the faces I recognize from Manchester. Albert and Joseph and Kit and Dan. Here, too, are the three I hid in the house after the rescue of Kelly and Deasy. And many others that I don’t have names for.

  “This here is Lizzie Burns,” says Moss, presenting me. “She’s come to make a donation. Give her the welcome she deserves.”

  I put the purse on the table, by the pile of holy books. “I just don’t want to know how you’re going to spend it.”

  An applause erupts, and a round of cheers, and now the men get into a line to greet me. Many of them are yet young for whiskers, and most have holes in their knees and their elbows, but by the strength and soberness of their grip, they do honor to themselves, and to Manchester, and to the other country. I feel overcome. I’m not someone who sheds abundant tears, but abundant is how they now come. There’s no sadness compared to the loss of home.