The Petticoat Men

by Barbara Ewing

  ‘Stay with me, Isabella, and I’ll give you a house when I die.’

  The words were almost ridiculous. No one in my family, or Joe’s family, had ever owned a house.

  I thought how wonderful it would be, to be free of Mr Rowbottom. God, he might live to be a hundred years old. I might die first, we would surely manage now that Billy was working too. We could afford a room, nothing else could go wrong now.

  Then I thought about how nearly we had sunk into the poverty of the city. Because nothing, ever, stays as you think it will.

  ‘Which house?’ I said.

  He took me to 13 Wakefield-street, I saw it could be a lodging house with a bit of paint and polish.

  ‘Legally,’ I said. ‘To Billy and Mattie as well as me in case I die.’

  He brought a lawyer to the Strand, and we both signed – but not until I’d had the contract checked over, clause by clause, with a very clever lawyer I knew from the Haymarket.

  And I stayed with Mr Rowbottom. You might find me disgusting. That’s fine. It’s what many women do all the time. In their way. I think Lais the courtesan was killed mysteriously by jealous women but I’m not likely to die a mysterious death, I dont think anyone was jealous of me when Mr Rowbottom came beaming into the theatre at night to claim me and take me to the two rooms in the Strand.

  Then God smiled. (I dont believe in God either, but still.) Mr Rowbottom died about a year after Billy started at the Parliament.

  We got the house.

  We own the house.

  We are safe.

  Or we were until Ernest and Freddie’s story intertwined with ours.

  Billy. He’s a true, real scholar. He knows so much – of course he’s worth more than running around with messages from Honourable Members and writing down their every word – not that it isn’t a very good position mind, and so well paid, we know how lucky we are. But he could have done anything, Billy, if he’d just been born a bit upwards and known a few of the ‘right’ people that you have to know in this world.

  Billy reads and reads – even poetry. Once he saw Mr Matthew Arnold at the Parliament, come to speak to Mr Gladstone, and next thing I know he’s reading all Mr Matthew Arnold’s poems too! There’s something basically ‘good’ about Billy. That’s the only way I can describe him really, Joe was like that too. Billy’s a good person, and a very, very clever person. And: there’s something – I dunno – immovable about Billy once he makes his mind up about something. Mattie said once over some small thing: ‘It’s like sitting at dinner with God, sitting eating stew with you, William Stacey!’ but as Billy has immovable thoughts on matters of religion too we all laughed then, the three of us!

  Billy knows perfectly well the price of our house. He knows how near we’d been to the workhouse and he knows why we stayed with Mr Rowbottom and he understood and has made me know he understood, always.

  But once – him and me alone in our downstairs kitchen, we were discussing something or other and I said, ‘You’re as stubborn as a bleeding ox, William Stacey! An ox as huge as Big Ben! You dont have to carry the whole blooming world on your shoulders!’

  And my son said to me quietly: ‘I just want to carry us, Ma, that’s all,’ and I nearly wept then. I knew what he meant, dear loving responsible Billy. But I think – I think everything that happened has somehow made him a lone person. And that is a sad thing in my life.

  And, Mattie. Always so bold and brave and making her famous ‘Plans’, but I know her heart inside. I’d like to kill that Ronald Duggan – nah but I was taken in by him too, he seemed a nice and reliable man who cared for her and I did make him welcome. I thought, it will get her thoughts away from Jamey and the sad past.

  It’s Jamey she hasn’t mentioned.

  She might not ever, it goes very deep with her, which is why I’ve encouraged her to walk out with others. And she had so, so wanted her and Jamey to have a baby, so when this happened with Ronald Duggan I was taken aback (and of course I thought he might be a fly-by-night who had taken advantage of her) but I could see that he did care for her (or so I thought) and I could see that it made her happy to think of being a mother at last, so I was happy too. You might think I should’ve kept her more carefully. But – she’d been a married woman. I could hardly treat her like an innocent young girl.

  Jamey. Mattie and Jamey had known each other since they were about nine years old when me and Billy and Mattie came, at last, on our own, to live in our very own house, in Wakefield-street. It was paradise, after everything. Truly, paradise. My soul breathed.

  There was a big, moving population in all those streets round Kings Cross but Jamey lived near and was not much older than Mattie and he and she, these two children, just took to each other and were inseparable. I think he never even noticed her leg, she was full of life, tough as a nut, and full of her reading, and Jamey loved books too, right there in Wakefield-street, these two young people and their beloved books, chatting away, scaring themselves half to death reading Frankenstein, writing in notebooks even, telling their own stories. One day I found them at the back of our house, digging with a huge shovel that was bigger than both of them. They had decided to plant some honeysuckle that they’d found in the old churchyard at the end of our street, so that it would grow over the old cesspit and ‘smell lovely’.

  Young Jamey was a grand lad and when he was thirteen he got work with Mr Bloom, who owned a printing press down Kings Cross – so many big and little businesses started up there, that station is the worst in London, like a big public meeting all day long, yelling and travelling and buying and selling and thieving. And all the mad, dangerous bloody, bloody traffic, round and round the station.

  Soon as he turned sixteen Jamey asked me, very formally like in one of their novels, if he could have my permission to marry Mattie because he loved her. ‘I’ll do better than help in a printing press,’ he said to me with his dear earnest face, ‘I’m going to start writing stories like Mr Charles Dickens! I’ve already started, and Mattie and I will be rich and happy!’ Mattie wasn’t even turned sixteen but it seemed right and fine and they’d been cuddling by the fire for years.

  ‘Course you’ll do well, Jamey!’ I said. ‘And you can marry her if she wants it too,’ and course I knew she did, like I say, we’d known him for so long and Mattie and he were so close and fond, and she looked so happy and she is so pretty when she is happy. If they wanted to be married that was fine by me. So we had a little wedding party, best china, Billy in his suit, Jamey’s mum came and his sisters and brothers and we all went into the old nearby churchyard that smelled of honeysuckle, it was a lovely sunny day and we sat on the old graves in the sun and thought the world was a fine place indeed, and Jamey’s mum and me, we even sang a few of the songs of our younger days after we’d had a few bottles of stout – there was this popular dance song, that kids sang later, and I do believe we danced in the old churchyard that day as we sang it!

  Up and down the City Road

  In and out the Eagle

  That’s the way the money goes

  POP Goes the Weasel!

  And Jamey came to live at 13 Wakefield-street, and he was a good boy to have around – though a bit dozy at times, forgot things, because he was writing stories in his head, but we only laughed and he really tried to help Billy fix things in the house, they put up some new wallpaper with little roses on, and chopped wood for the fire from old logs they found in the graveyard. (But you had to watch that Jamey with an axe, he was too dreamy for an axe, he might be thinking of a story and cut his leg off, we joked.)

  Mattie teased me about being a grandmother, and I said, ‘Dont be in so much of a hurry,’ and she said, ‘Why? I can still make hats as well as have a baby!’

  And I expect she could have, only – although they so wanted to have this big family I used to hear them chatter about, she didn’t get in the family way.

  And then, after only about six months, Jamey got knocked down by a stupid, stupid, STUPID, drunk cart-
driver delivering things to Kings Cross. There are always accidents with bloody carts and carriages all the bloody time everywhere round the bloody station but somehow you dont think it will happen to your own loved ones do you? Jamey died, carried here bleeding and unconscious by Mr Bloom and another man, with his legs all out of shape and Mattie falling as she tried to run fast down the little steps by our front door to get to him. We thought Mattie would die herself, she got ill, she couldn’t stop crying, me and Billy were at our wits’ end, finally we got a doctor but he couldn’t do anything, he said we were spoiling her and he told Mattie she was a pretty young girl with her life ahead of her and it was God’s will and she must ‘pull herself together’. That advice cost four shillings and I was glad to see the back of him or Billy might have punched him too.

  She sat at the table so pale with us that night after the doctor left, not eating anything, and pulled and pulled at her thin arms.

  ‘Whatever are you doing, Mattie?’

  ‘He said I have to pull myself together,’ she said. ‘And I am trying but what does it mean?’

  Mattie pulling at her thin arms at the table that sad night is the second thing in my head I cannot bear to think about.

  Luckily a lady in Mortimer-street who had had one hat from her sent a note just at this time, asking for another. I made Mattie go to see her, I mean I took her myself and the lady had very large-hat ideas, it was to meet Royalty no less because her husband had won a medal although it wasn’t the dreary old Queen they was to meet of course, no one ever met her, but one of the younger Princes, at a ceremony in the Palace.

  That was the start of Mattie getting better but it was long and sad and I was probably at fault when I encouraged her to walk out with others but I thought it would help the healing.

  I still feel so angry with Ronald Duggan the railway man, to leave her without even a word or a note. Coward.

  The third thing inside my head I cannot bear to remember is that I was sound asleep as well as deaf and didn’t hear her pain until Billy came to wake me and there she was so pale and Freddie covered with blood in his yellow gown and his chignon lying on the hallway floor and it all over – without me being there to help her. Freddie and I went outside with the little bundle wrapped in his bright blue shawl. And buried it in the dark little yard next to where Jamie and Mattie had planted the honeysuckle. The honeysuckle had died long ago, there was no sun at the back.

  Buried it in Freddie’s shawl. Freddie still in his gown all covered in blood and me in my nightdress, like a couple of madwomen in a stage melodrama only it was real.

  And all that story is why Mattie loves Freddie so much, because he was kind to her when she needed him, and Ronald wasn’t, and she wants to be cherished and loved again. Me and Billy we cherish and love her so much, but I see that it isn’t that that she wants, she wants to be loved and cherished by a man, more than by her family. Somehow as if that is the only loving and cherishing that really counts. And she thinks that Freddie, when he realises she will stand by him and love him, will be that man. And I dont expect he will.

  Kind, sad Freddie.

  Surely something will happen to prevent all this going further. Probably Lord Arthur Clinton’s family will intervene – and hadn’t Lord Arthur told Ernest his sister was a mistress of the Prince of Wales? Let Him intervene then! And Freddie’s father works in the courts and his grandfather was a famous judge wasn’t he? Something will happen; they cant let this go on and on. Although, of course, after the next court day something had happened already. That could never be taken back, however it might end.

  Once your bum has been in the newspapers how can things ever be the same again?

  17

  ‘I’M GOING BACK to the next hearing at the Magistrates’ Court,’ I announced.

  Ma looked at me. That way she has. ‘Well then, I’m coming too,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to go early to get in.’

  ‘I can do it you know, Ma.’

  ‘You’re not going by yourself,’ she said.

  So we all got up in the dark, Billy too, we were even too early for the omnibuses, and he walked with us all the way, before he started work at the Parliament, he and Ma took my pace, and I walked as fast as I could and Billy whistled sort of absent-mindedly in the early morning, he’s been a bit distracted these last days, Ma and I both noticed.

  ‘Do you think he’s got a sweetheart?’ I asked Ma but she didn’t answer me.

  It was hardly light but the streets as we walked were already crowded, hundreds of carts with vegetables piled up high, some orange pumpkins fell off and rolled over the dirty old cobbles and they were gone in such a flash, children appeared so quick, and an old lady with a sack.

  ‘There’ll be a lot of pumpkin soup today,’ said Ma, and she laughed, ‘the driver told them to be ready on the corner!’

  And in the streets there were animals and milk-girls and street-girls and a whole bunch of cows, what a stink, and huge wagons of Burton’s beer from the vaults at St Pancras Station, and all the costermongers with their fish and their fruit and stuff in big baskets and all the dogs slinking about, and rats in gutters. But not many coaches and carriages at that hour. We could’ve had breakfast on the way at one of the little stalls but Ma made us have bread and tea before we left. And you know what? there were lots of people crowding about the Magistrates’ Court before us, even then, even though we’d left home in the dark – that’s how much interest this case had made – and guess what? some of them were servants for the noble people, keeping their places in the queue, what a cheek. Billy waved us goodbye seeing us safely at the court, and we were early enough and when the doors opened Ma and I knew exactly where to go now of course and hurried in and we got a good place.

  And then of course I wished we hadn’t.

  At first it was almost fun; and we were sure that this time it would all be over like a bad dream. There was this very angry businessman, Mr Cox, he gave great booming evidence about kissing Ernest – thinking he was a young woman. He kept looking at Ernest, really enraged and his face all red as he told it.

  ‘I met Ernest Boulton with Lord Arthur Clinton, oh, some time ago now. Over a year I should think. They were with a solicitor, Mr W. H. Roberts, I was introduced, they didn’t say what W and H were. Mr W. H. Roberts left but I had lunch with the other two in the Guildhall Tavern. They were dressed as men, of course. Boulton said, “Oh you city birds have good fun in your office, and have champagne,” and he said it in a womanly flirtatious way so I thought he was a woman and I said, “Well you had better come and see.” And they did, both of them, Ernest Boulton and Lord Arthur Clinton, they came to my offices in Basinghall Street, my partner came in, and we opened champagne, which we laid out in the office. I treated Boulton’ – he cast a really furious glance at Ernest – ‘as a fascinating woman and I think Lord Arthur Clinton was jealous for he left the room and while he was away Boulton went on in a flirting manner with me and I kissed him – or her. Or it.’

  All the noble ladies and actresses and gentlemen in the audience laughed so much I thought the trial could not go on, and Ernest and Freddie couldn’t help but laugh too! But Mr Cox took absolutely no notice and just went on talking angrily, so everyone was quiet to hear what he might say next, and the journalists in particular were looking very interested.

  ‘Shortly after the kiss Boulton complained of being chilly and my partner whipped off the tablecloth and wrapped up Boulton’s feet in it and placed him in an armchair.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mr Flowers. ‘Could you repeat that series of events, Mr Cox? You wrapped Mr Boulton in a tablecloth, you say?’

  ‘He complained of being cold.’

  ‘So you wrapped him in a tablecloth? Is this usual?’

  Mr Cox got angrier and angrier. ‘We are gentlemen.’

  There was so much laughter now that Mr Flowers had to bang his hammer many times.

  ‘Then what happened, Mr Cox?’

  ‘Nothing. They left
. And then I heard from others that Boulton was definitely a man.’

  ‘And you had kissed him.’

  ‘I thought he was a woman! They tricked me! But after I heard that, you can imagine how angry I was to have been tricked in such a manner! I was disgusted. I went to Evans’ Restaurant in Covent Garden. There were Park, Boulton and Lord Arthur Clinton, all dressed as men. Well I pointed them out to the waiters, and spoke of their nefarious tricks but the waiters seemed not to wish to turn them out. Do you hear that? Waiters hindering a gentleman? So I spoke severely but calmly to the waiters again. “Let me pass,” I said, “I will make no disturbance but let me pass.” And they did and I went straight up to the table where they were sitting. I said, “You damned set of infernal scoundrels, you ought to be kicked out of this place.” And I remained some little while near the table. And I used this language three or four times, I knew they heard it. But they did nothing. In fact they went on speaking to each other as if I wasn’t there, the scoundrels. Soon after, I left.’

  This witness, Mr Cox, had such a red face now that I thought he might expire.

  ‘What I dont understand,’ he said, very much aggrieved, especially by the laughter, ‘is why I am having to say all this in public! I cannot bear to see these – creatures! I am a public-spirited gentleman and I saw reports of this case in the newspapers. So I took it upon myself to go with my evidence to Superintendent Thomson last night as any reputable citizen would do – and frankly it is a mystery to me why I am subpoenaed here today.’

  There was much applause and laughter from the audience even though Mr Flowers told them they must be quiet or they would not be allowed to stay, but I thought even Mr Flowers was smiling a little bit now. And Ma and I sort of relaxed and smiled at each other. And soon we were smiling even more. The next person giving evidence at first struck me as quite mad and her hair started falling down as she was talking.