The room stared back at her, displaying its comfort so vividly that it was almost as though someone were holding out the items and crying their value to her. The velvet curtains and upholstered furniture. The richly decorated and lavishly polished chairs and tables. The fireplace with its winking brass fire irons and elegant pink tiled surround; it was all so rich and good and desirable and she sighed softly and looked again at Maud and Wilfred.
‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘I would be a fool if I did not. And now that he is dead this house could indeed be a happy and comfortable place for me and Poppy –’
‘Poppy,’ Maud said and it was not a question. It was more a wondering sort of statement, as though she had quite forgotten her.
Mildred looked at her sharply. ‘You are prepared to have another child in the house? After all, she is only five. Still very young, though a well-behaved child. I credit myself that she has been carefully reared and knows her manners.’
‘Of course,’ Maud said heartily. Too heartily. ‘Wherever your home is, there must be the home of your child. But we must make some sort of arrangement that –’
‘How do you mean?’ Mildred was sitting very upright now and staring at her stepmother with her eyes very bright and dark. ‘What sort of arrangement?’
‘My dear!’ Maud spread her hands wide. ‘If you return here as Miss Amberly, how are we to explain a little one? Our neighbours are very superior people, you know, and –’
‘Let us be quite clear on this, Mama,’ Mildred said strongly. ‘If I return here, it is as Miss Amberly. And my daughter, who is Poppy Amberly, returns with me. I shall not tell lies about myself nor about her.’
‘Why not?’ Maud said and looked at her with her red eyes wide and enquiring. ‘Would you have every servant know she was a – a –’
‘Bastard, Mama,’ Wilfred said helpfully and grinned at Mildred. ‘That is what you are saying, is it not, Mildred?’
She ignored him. ‘I care nothing for servants’ gossip,’ she said with all the hauteur she could muster.
‘You will when they talk to other servants who will talk to their employers who will then shun us,’ Maud said and she drooped, her head down. ‘I had such hopes of us all being happy and content again, and you having your own money and living here and being comfortable. I should make you a handsome allowance too. You could –’ She looked up then, brightening. ‘You could send Poppy away to school! Now, that would suit well enough, would it not? Let her go to school to be educated and give her her father’s name and –’
‘She carries my name,’ Mildred said. ‘And she will indeed go to school. If we come here, there’s an excellent school, or always used to be, in Bayswater Road, near Orme Lane. I saw many children there when I walked in the park in – in the old days. If we come here, Poppy goes to that school –’
‘And has a dreadful time at the hands of the other children as soon as they discover she is Miss Amberly, the daughter of Miss Amberly,’ Wilfred said and grinned that wicked little grin of his. ‘Do be sensible, Mildred! Come back, make this house fit for civilized people to live in again, and take care of the Mater. She needs someone to watch over her and her brandy – oh, Ma, don’t make such faces –’ for Maud was flapping her hands about and grimacing furiously at him ‘– you know it is true. It is why you want her here. To run the house while you settle down to serious toping. Well, I want you here, Mildred, to make sure she does not kill herself with drink, and to take decent care of us all. And it will be better for you, for you will have the full running of the place and no more misery, with the old devil dead, and good riddance to him – oh, Mama, do hush! – and your little Poppy, who looks like a jolly enough little sprig, will be better off as well. It can’t be right rearing her in that gutter place you’re in now. When she talks you can hear it, you know. Got the accent of the kitchen, undoubtedly. Certainly not the drawing room. But you cannot label her with a bastard’s ticket as well, just to please your own stubbornness.’
There was a long silence and then, as people began to come to the sofa to bid the grieving – if now somewhat preoccupied – widow farewell, Mildred could sit and think.
It was difficult to think clearly with so much going on around her. She needed more time, she told herself desperately, more time and quiet in which to plan it all right. My business – and her heart sank as she thought of that. For how much longer could she go on as she had been this past five years, putting in those long hard days and short exhausted nights of constant bone-grinding effort? And she seemed to see those five years as a procession of pies and cakes and puddings and tarts, marching across her with leaden feet, and wearing her out. And suppose I should die of it all – what then? Suppose I were not alive to care for Poppy, who would look after her? She closed her eyes as she imagined the sort of person she would grow up to be if Jessie – the obvious person – took care of her. An over-dressed, over-noisy, over-painted East Ender; and she opened her eyes quickly to banish the vision of such a Poppy. Her Poppy was to be a new woman, a brave, upright and well-spoken, well-educated, well-reared woman. Not a guttersnipe. Yet that was what she would become if she remained where she was –
‘Come on, Mildred, there can’t be a choice to make!’ Wilfred was saying and slapping her on the back. ‘Here we are, a vast family for you to take care of, and you greatly in need of some new clothes and a little fun for yourself. Come here, banish the old devil’s ghost for good and all, and we’ll all be happy again. Including your little one. Just tack her father’s name on, whatever it is, and she can go to school with her head up, the dear child of a sad widow.’
He lifted his chin then and laughed. ‘It’ll be quite suitable really! This will be the house of a brace of widows – mother and daughter. All very apt. Well, whatever you decide, I must go. Mama, I shall be back late tonight, I want no dinner – invited to the Stanhopes, don’t you know. All very jolly – their younger son just invalided back and I intend to get all the gossip – goodbye, Mildred. Hope to see you here soon!’ And he was gone, following the last of the visiting mourners out of the house and leaving his mother sitting staring imploringly at her stepdaughter, who stared back, her head in a whirl.
* * *
Upstairs in the nursery, Poppy sat in the corner, trying not to cry. They had teased her dreadfully, all three of them, and not only Harold. Samuel and Thomas, big as they were – and they had told her loftily that they were eleven and thirteen – had been just as nasty and tugged her hair because it was curly and laughed at the way she spoke, mimicking her very words, and jeered when she had to whisper to the housemaid because she wanted to go to the lavvy and she didn’t know where it was. Altogether, she had had a very miserable time of it and was aching to go home. All she wanted in the whole world was the safety and joy and beauty of the kitchen at home with its lovely black range and glowing fire inside the big oven, and the table full of cooling apple pies, while outside in Leather Lane the market stall men shouted their wares. ‘Please, Mama,’ she whispered inside her head. ‘Please, Mama, come soon and take me home. I never want to be in this house ever again.’
37
The train moved slowly and majestically into Victoria Station, sending great gouts of steam up into the vaulted roof and even before it had stopped, he had the leather strap of the window down and the door open and was half hanging out in his eagerness to set foot on London stones again. To be back in the Smoke, at last; all through these past months of misery, of pain and fever and loneliness, it had been his homesickness that had been the hardest to bear. And now he was home, at last, and he teetered awkwardly on the step, waiting for the right moment to jump down, still doubtful about his balance and afraid of falling. It was going to take a long time to get used to the way his weight was distributed now, for clearly he’d lost more than his career as a boxer – but that was not to be thought of and as usual he pushed down all his fears and doubts about the future and thought of only one thing. He was home.
A p
orter, seeing him awkwardly manhandling his battered old Gladstone bag out of the carriage came running to help, but he almost snarled at him; he wanted no help, for help implied pity and that was an insult and the porter backed away, startled. He had been impelled only by an eagerness to talk to someone who was obviously an exsoldier home from South Africa, going by the sunburn on his face, and a heroic one to boot, going by the empty sleeve pinned across his chest, but if the bugger wanted to be a bad tempered bugger, so be it, and he went off in a huff to look for more cheerful passengers who would be generous with tuppences.
And Lizah, hating himself for being so surly – for it wasn’t in his nature to be anything but cheerful and full of bonhomie – picked up his bag and, leaning heavily to his left to balance himself, began the long walk down the platform to the crowded booking hall and the way out to the London air he had been craving for so long.
It was just dark; the day had been a dull cold one for the time of year, and there had even been white caps in Southampton Water as the ship had come slowly home at last, and he had shivered a good deal as he waited on deck to disembark. The long weeks of fever and the hot sun of a South African summer and autumn had thinned his blood, making fifty degrees above zero fahrenheit feel as cold as fifty below, but that hadn’t dispirited him. Nor was he dispirited now as he came out of the Chatham line exit and stood breathing deeply, with his head up, taking it all in.
And thank God, it was still all there. The stink of smoke from a myriad coal fires still being burned in this, the coldest May there had been for some time, the oil and horses and human sweat and an indefinable something else that was unmistakeably London, a sort of essence of the place, and his eyes filled with the ready tears of the recently ill as he stood there looking at cabs and the buses and the drays and the lights, and knew he was home.
‘Where to, Guv?’ A hansom cab pulled over to the side of the kerb where he was standing and the driver leaned over, touching his hat with his whip at the same time. ‘My ride, it’ll be, an’ my pleasure to serve a soldier of the Queen the way ’e’s served us.’
Lizah stared up at him in the dim light and for a moment he wanted to treat him to the same peremptory dismissal he had given the porter, but bit his tongue. He’d have to get used to this, clearly; in the hospital at Durban and afterwards in the barracks where they’d sent him to convalesce there’d been plenty more like him and no one had paid them much attention. But, inevitably, now he was home, people were going to notice and respond to what they noticed. And he was more obviously a wounded soldier than most of the other people he had been with as he recovered. For every man in the hospital because of a Boer inflicted injury there had been four others there because of sickness. Cholera, typhoid, dysenteries of various kinds had gone through the army like scythes through ripe corn and sent thousands of men scattering to uselessness in hospital beds where they lay burning with fever and scouring their guts day after day as they got thinner and thinner. He had come home on the ship with some of them, and most of them had improved in their weeks at sea, with plenty of good food and nothing to do but sun themselves but he, he would always be recognizable and he lifted his chin so that he would not have to see the evidence of his crippledom pinned across him and said gruffly, ‘Not sure, mate. Just thought I’d mooch around the town, you know, see what’s changed since I was last home –’
‘In you get, Guv!’ the cab driver said heartily and bent forwards to flip open the hansom’s front with his whip. ‘Hoick your bag up here an’ I’ll stow it and you settle in. I’ll take you all over the place. I was on my way home anyway, an’ a half-hour spent with a hero is a real pleasure!’
Perhaps, Lizah thought, as he obeyed and settled himself against the dusty leather squabs of the cab and fastened the fronts over his legs, perhaps being a hero won’t be that bad, at that. Free cabs have got to be good, and Gawd knows I’ve little enough cash to spend on them. Or on anything else for that matter. And for a moment he was thrown back into the gloom that was always hanging over him, waiting to pounce.
But not for long, for the cabbie took him at a spanking pace through the traffic along Victoria Street and then across Parliament Square to Bridge Street before wheeling left into Victoria Embankment. There he slowed down a little and Lizah sat swaying and staring out at the river and the buildings of Southwark and Lambeth over on the South Bank, winking their early evening lights at him, and was grateful to the cabbie for being so aware of where to bring him.
Although he had grown up in the wilderness of streets around Spitalfields and had made the East End his stamping ground, he was a true Londoner and that meant the river; the stretches he knew best were further along, at Tower Bridge, both on the North and on the Bermondsey sides, where as a child he had mudlarked along the edges and found treasures he could flog in the markets, and had on hot days swum and splashed, caring nothing for the foulness of the water. Here it was all much cleaner and brighter – though the river was still foul. He could feel it sour and thick in his nostrils, for it was still London’s river and the recipient of much of her ordure and as he thought of that tears of nostalgia did fill his eyes and would not so easily be staunched.
‘Fancy goin’ West now, Guv?’ the cabbie called down. ‘I could get up rahnd the back doubles to the Strand and then go back up West if that’s what yer fancies –’
‘No. No, I think I’d as soon head for home after all,’ Lizah called back. ‘It’s been a long time – but go down the Strand anyway. Only go east to Aldgate Pump –’
‘Thought as much,’ the cabbie said, highly satisfied. ‘Reckon I can place a London voice to a few streets, I can. Not from over the water like me, I thought – me, I’m a Lambeth man – and not from the City neither. Got to be the East End. So, bin a long time away, ’ave you?’
‘Yes,’ Lizah said. ‘Long time.’ And caught his breath. ‘Six bloody months, that’s all –’
‘Blimey,’ the cabbie said. ‘That is a long time without the missus. She’ll be main glad to see you, I’ll be bound.’
‘There isn’t a missus,’ Lizah said shortly.
‘Ah, just as well,’ the cabbie said adroitly. ‘An’ you with such a nasty injury an’ all. Women make a big fuss over things like that, don’t they? Where’d it happen, Guv?’
‘Spion Kop –’ Lizah was beginning to relax. Being deferred to, treated as someone special like this was what he was used to, after all. In the good old days in the gym and in the restaurants as well as at the old Britannia they’d all hung on his words. He was entitled to it –
The cabbie whistled. ‘Heard about that. Nasty do, that was. The way them Boers run you off the hill after you took it. A lot killed, I’m told –’
‘A lot. Including my own officer.’ Lizah leaned even further back and flexed his back muscles to ease the pain that was coming into his left shoulder again. ‘I did what I could. Carried him out of the fire to the foot of the Kop and thought I’d got him through, but the bastards fired on us again, and him a wounded man, and this time they killed him and hit me into the bargain.’ And with his right hand he reached across and began to massage his aching shoulder. ‘So here I am. Me, a boxer! I ask you –’
The cabbie was clearly enchanted and leaned forwards, allowing his horse to slow to little more than a walk as he plied Lizah with eager questions about all he’d seen and done and heard and being lavish with his praise and admiration and, slowly, Lizah began to thaw. He had been frightened to come home, that was the thing of it; eager, indeed desperate, to get here, but deeply frightened too. How would it be? How would people treat him? What was the good of a boxer with only one arm? But here he was, not set foot in the Smoke above a minute and already getting the attention he needed. And with it, the beginnings of an idea about how he would deal in the future. Perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad after all –
The Strand was busy as the cab went easily along it, but not as busy as it would be later; the theatres were all in and the restaurants were sparsely
populated, waiting for the rush that would come when the curtains finally fell at the Strand Theatre and the Gaiety, the Lyceum and the Tivoli. Lizah stopped talking for a while to lean out eagerly to see what was on where. Always an avid theatre-goer, he had prided himself on knowing what plays were running where and now he needed to pick up information again so that he could feel he was really at home; at the Strand an original farce in three acts, Facing the Music; at the Gaiety another of their musical comedies, The Messenger Boy; at the Tivoli Music Hall, George Robey, and Vesta Tilley, Bransby Williams, Minnie Palmer and the great Dan Leno – he’d certainly have to see that bill if he could – and at the Lyceum, Signora Eleanora Duse in repertory with Magda, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Madame Georges, Gioconda and Fedora. A busy season, but he’d give that one a miss. He liked a bit of fun and laughing and real feeling, not that fancy West End stuff – and he sank back, contented. Oh, but it’s good to be home, he thought, as the cabbie again started to question him about his adventures. Good to be home.
The cab began to thread its way through the tangle of streets where houses and shops and banks were being demolished to make way for the new road that was to link the Strand with Holborn and Lizah stared out, amazed at how much had changed since he had last been here. Wych Street and Newcastle Street were almost gone, now being little more than piles of rubble, and it was a dispiriting sight. He was indeed glad when at last the horses went clopping past the Law Courts, on their way to Temple Bar and Fleet Street and thence the City and Aldgate Pump. And home – and he closed his eyes, trying to imagine how his mother would behave when she saw him. And couldn’t, for this was not like coming home with a few cut lips and black eyes after a tough fight in the ring –
Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles) Page 40