Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘She’s in bed.’

  ‘With her writing-board, I suppose.’

  There was nothing to worry about. Mammie was strong. She said herself that she never ailed. If she retreated to bed, it was in search of solitude. There were always so many visitors, and they never knew when to leave.

  Hannah sniffed: her nose was red, with a drop hanging from it. ‘It’s rest she needs, not writing-boards.’

  Sacrilege, coming from Hannah. Mammie’s ideas flowed most clearly at night, with one lit candle to speed her pen while Augustus slept on beside her. There was nothing more important than that those ideas of hers should be captured and set down. Hannah had always arranged our days for that purpose. Our rooms were clean, our clothes washed and our food cooked, but even so Mammie needed the night for her work. She would wake with her mind suddenly, startlingly alive. She’d sit up in bed, reach for her writing-board, prop it against her knees, and seize on her thoughts before they vanished. Who would imagine, from the clarity of her treatises, that they sprang from a warm bed?

  It was not always so warm. When I was little and money for coal was short we would stay in bed together on cold days, curled under every cloak and blanket that we owned, like porpoises under the ice. My breath smoked when I put my face up into the chill of the room, and down I dived again. But there was always Mammie beside me, working with a heavy shawl around her shoulders and fingerless gloves knitted by Hannah, which left her fingers free to write.

  She didn’t need those gloves any more. She had a fire in her room every day. Augustus and she lived frugally, but they were never short of what they needed.

  ‘But, Hannah, she’s not really ill, is she?’

  ‘She’s been better. She’d like to see you. Now don’t fly off like that, Elizabeth, she’s not as bad as that.’

  I ran upstairs for my cloak and boots, while Sarah continued to scour the pots with sand, indifferently, as if she were alone in the kitchen. She didn’t like Hannah.

  Hannah took my left arm and walked between me and the edge of the pavement, as if I were still a child. She was so tall and stiff and perpendicular that it was like being taken in charge by a sergeant of the militia.

  ‘Mind that puddle, Elizabeth.’

  She always called me by my full name, severely. She loved me; I knew that. Hannah would beat off anything that sprang at us out of the dark. Diner called her my duenna, although that was quite wrong given how firmly Hannah believed in the liberty of women. He said that her petticoats were too short: could she not afford to buy a few more yards of flannel and make herself decent? I answered that she afforded nothing for herself, if the money saved could be given to others. Hannah would have been angry to be called a Christian, but she was more charitable than most who went to church.

  The light of our lantern shivered on the wet pavement. The street where I lived was swept and clean but as we went downhill towards Mammie’s lodgings the householders cared less and would not pay the scavengers. We picked our way over the dirt and I held the hem of my cloak high. Hannah was silent.

  She opened the door with her own familiar key. My mother and her husband had four rooms upstairs with Hannah to care for everything as she had always done. Augustus was always from home, travelling from town to town into every wretched place that would hear his preaching on the rights of men. Tom Paine might be in Paris, but Augustus Gleeson was content to deliver his sermons to the mill-workers of Preston or the coal-miners of Radstock.

  Downstairs there was a family of seamstresses, mother and three daughters. They had the best of the light in their back room and rarely left the house. We climbed the stairs; Hannah produced her second key and the door opened.

  Hannah had keys to my mother’s house, and I had none. I thought of that as I stepped across the threshold, took off my things and hung my cloak to dry.

  ‘Here she is,’ announced Hannah, holding open Mammie’s door. I expected to see the lamp lit and Mammie sitting up in bed, wearing her spectacles, blinking at me as she rose from the depths of her work. I looked where she should have been, and saw nothing but a rounded heap under the bedclothes. A candle burned on the bedside table.

  She’s sleeping, I thought. But then, why waste a candle? I glanced at Hannah, thinking I should withdraw, but she gestured to me to come on. The bed took up the best part of the room and the ceiling sloped so I always had to duck my head. There was a sour smell. My mother’s hair was tangled on the pillow, hiding her face from me.

  ‘Mammie?’ I said, and she stirred. She rolled over, pushing back her hair. Her mouth was gluey with sleep. I went to the washstand and wrung out a cloth and passed it to her so that she could wipe her face. Hannah pulled out the pillows and shook them into shape; then she helped my mother sit forward while she replaced the pillows to support her.

  After Hannah had gone out, I fetched the hairbrush. ‘Shall I brush your hair, Mammie?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’ll do it in a minute, Lizzie. How are you, my darling?’

  I sat on the bed and took her hands. The skin was dry and a little rough, as always. I picked up first her right hand and then her left, and held them to my lips. They smelled of ink.

  ‘Are you ill, Mammie?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only a little tired. And how is my girl? How is John?’

  ‘He’s asked us to call him Diner, Mammie. I wish you would remember. Or you might call him John Diner, if you prefer. He doesn’t object to that.’

  ‘But isn’t it rather cumbersome, when we are by ourselves?’

  ‘Think of it as one word, and it’s shorter than Elizabeth.’

  ‘John Diner, then. And shall I call you Mrs Tredevant?’

  ‘Mammie,’ I said, kneeling beside the bed and rubbing my cheek against hers, ‘should you like me to call you Mrs Gleeson?’

  She laughed. ‘Very good, Lizzie.’ She patted the bed covers and I sat down carefully so as not to press against her. ‘Tell me, how is the building going?’

  ‘Work will go on much better now the weather has improved. He’s taking me to see the new house very soon.’

  I was glad we had left the subject of my husband’s name. I thought his first wife, Lucie, must have called him John. That was why he flinched at the sound of it. He heard another woman’s voice, not mine.

  Mammie’s writing-board was on the bed, but there was no sheet of paper attached to its clips. I could barely remember a time when she wasn’t working.

  ‘How long have you been tired?’ I asked her, and she answered me as gravely as if I’d been a doctor.

  ‘About five days.’

  ‘Five days!’ And I hadn’t known.

  ‘It will soon pass. I am giving a talk in the Meeting House next Friday.’

  ‘On what subject?’

  ‘On hereditary privilege,’ said Mammie, fumbling for her spectacles on the table without looking at them. She put them on. She was herself again, worn but eager. ‘Well, my bird,’ she said, ‘now you’re smiling. What an anxious face, when you came in.’

  ‘I thought you were ill.’ I sat down on the bed, and took her hands again. I felt as if I could never have enough of looking at her. ‘Will you let me brush your hair?’

  This time she let me. I took off her spectacles and brushed out her hair, all of it. It was still brown, although like her hands it was dry and not glossy any more. I thought she should rub a little almond oil into it, but she would never do that. I brushed and brushed until it had some shine, and then I plaited it so that it would be comfortable for her.

  ‘There now,’ I said. She smiled and then lay back with her eyes shut. I drew down the bed linen and slipped in beside her. I hugged her to me very gently, because I was afraid that she had a pain somewhere, and wasn’t telling me. She was warm and she smelled of amber, from the scent given to her by a rich lady who had read her treatise on married women’s property rights. If the gift had been lace she would never have worn it, but
she couldn’t resist any sweet-smelling thing. I put my face to the side of her neck and curled against her.

  ‘Augustus will be back tomorrow,’ she said. I made a sound against her neck. The Roman Emperor, home from making speeches about the rights of man.

  ‘You must not do his work for him. You must rest,’ I said. I thought of how Augustus would walk up and down the room, declaiming his next pamphlet, while my mother wrote it out in her swift, clear handwriting. And even then he would find fault. There were always things that needed to be changed, or rewritten.

  ‘His eyes are bad,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  Yours will be bad too, if you write for him as well as for yourself, I thought.

  ‘I’ll come to see you tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no need, Lizzie. I’m perfectly well. Hannah shouldn’t have alarmed you.’

  I felt her words through her flesh and mine, as much as I heard them. ‘I’ll come tomorrow anyway,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear how Augustus did on his travels.’ She was still, and I thought perhaps she suspected my mockery, but then she said:

  ‘I am glad you are more friendly to him now, Lizzie. He is a kind man, you know.’

  ‘I know.’ As well as all his other qualities: his ability to spew out endless pamphlets but not to write them in his own hand, his carelessness with his clothes which led to endless mending and darning, his sharing a bed with my mother in spite of his whiskery face and ginger breath, his foolishness with money which led to … But it had to be admitted, Augustus was kind.

  ‘I could not love you any more, Mammie,’ I said, ‘if you were my own pet donkey,’ and she laughed. That laugh of hers, so warm and sweet, mocking but joyous, as if she knew all the bad there was to know about the world but still loved it … Out of all the things I loved about her I think her laughter was what I loved the best. She laughed now because when I was six years old, when I’d longed and longed for a donkey to ride on, that had been my declaration of love for her.

  ‘And how is your husband?’ she asked.

  ‘He is well.’ I hid my face against her and scrubbed my skin into hers. I shut my eyes and now I could say anything. ‘Mammie, those things you told me were wrong. Now I seem to have a hard object pressing into every orifice of my body.’

  I felt her breathe. ‘Does he hurt you, Lizzie?’

  ‘No. But it is firmly done.’

  ‘Do you use the little sponge I gave you? And the vinegar?’

  My mother thought I was too young to bear a child, although I was older than she had been when I was born.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he doesn’t object.’

  ‘There is no hurry, he says. He says, “I want you to myself.”’

  ‘I suppose that is natural, Lizzie.’ Her arms have come around me now and she is rocking me. Hannah would be angry if she knew. She’d say I was tiring Mammie and draining her strength, which ought to be kept for her work. ‘But you had better not stay. He won’t like it.’

  He would not. My husband was very much against my stravaiging about the streets after dark, even though with Hannah at my side it was perfectly respectable. Nor did he like my habit of taking walks without him. What the eye didn’t see, the heart wouldn’t grieve after, I thought, and carried on as before.

  ‘He was at the house today, supervising the plasterers. They are to put our names into the ceiling.’

  ‘So, when your visitors look up, they’ll see Elizabeth Fawkes and John Diner Tredevant entwined?’ More laughter bubbled in her voice.

  ‘You are so foolish, Mammie. Of course not. Besides, I am no longer Fawkes: I have changed my name. It’s to be El and Din. Eldin. Our two names, made into one. He calls the house Eldin. He thought of carving the name into the stone above the front door, but he decided not. It is to be hidden in the ceiling, just for ourselves.’

  ‘It will be a very fine house for you both,’ said Mammie, as if I were a child describing a home for her dolls.

  I thought of our new house, the smallest in the terrace, built on the turn. If it was one of the grand houses we could never have had it. The new house has four large bedrooms, drawing and dining rooms, and attics for Sarah and Philo. Everything is new and smells of wood and wet plaster. The kitchen will be equipped with the latest conveniences. The garden is a raw tumble of earth and stone. We look out directly over the Gorge. Diner says it is the finest prospect in all England.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Mammie did not really care about houses. She was content wherever she was, because she rarely looked about her except to find her pen or her writing-board. I was content, too, when I was a child, as long as Mammie’s Indian shawl spread its rich colours over my bed and there were flowers in the blue-and-white jug. Today, there were small wild daffodils that Hannah must have picked.

  Augustus had not changed things much, because he was away so often. We had lived in Hoxton, Southwark, Devon and Bath before we came to Clifton. That was not long before I met Diner. Each time we moved the floors were sprinkled with water and swept, the Indian shawl spread out and the fire lit. Hannah found out the best places to buy coal and wood and candles. I rolled up my sleeves to bake bread or to skin and joint a rabbit. If it was cleaner work, such as making cakes or biscuits, I kept a book propped on the table in front of me and shook out the flour from between its pages as I read. And Mammie put on her spectacles and wrote, even as I swept under her feet. Nothing broke her concentration: she merely drew up her feet and held them there until I had passed on with the broom.

  The sound of her writing is so exact in my ears that I can hear it whenever I choose: the long, steady course of her quill over the paper, the tiny pauses as she dipped it in the ink, the longer ones while she thought, the noise of writing, the friction of the pen with which she made her words and sent them out into the world. Wherever we went it was the same, until even our shifting from house to house and city to city began to seem like part of that handwriting.

  I thought it would go on forever, if I thought of it at all. Those words of Mammie’s might lead to Paris, or Hackney, and we would pack up and go with them. But now it seemed that Mammie and I were both roosted, I because of my husband, and she because of me.

  ‘You had better go home now, Lizzie. Hannah will walk with you.’

  I felt a pang, as I did every time Mammie said ‘home’ and no longer meant the place where she was. I unwound my arms from her, sat up in the bed and smoothed my hair. ‘I can perfectly well go without Hannah,’ I said. ‘She has enough to do here, with you ill in bed.’

  ‘I’m not ill,’ said Mammie again, and there was Hannah opening the bedroom door for me to go.

  3

  I reached our lodgings before Diner came home. These were nothing like Mammie’s four small rooms. He had taken an entire house for us, while we waited for the new house to be completed. I thought such fine lodgings were a waste of money, and there was far too much furniture. Every room was crammed with chairs and tables until you could scarcely move without bumping into them. I complained of it on the day we moved in, and began to shift and pile the furniture out of the way.

  ‘Is that your only objection, Elizabeth?’ Diner said, and he picked me up by the waist and jumped me towards the ceiling. He was in fine spirits that day.

  It was past nine o’clock now and he was still absent. Sarah and Philo had gone to their attic, while I sat by the fire, in a good light, with my work. I was making a shirt for him. He didn’t like to see me sewing when we were together – I should send the work out, he said – but he would change his mind when he put on the shirt. The linen was fine and I had measured him exactly. There were gussets under the arms so that he could stretch and move freely, as he had to. I sewed well and quickly, and my eyes were strong. I intended to make him half a dozen shirts, with his initials embroidered into the hems. He would pay four times as much for shirts of this quality from a tailor. We ought to have saved money, and lived in rooms.

  I knew
that Diner had sunk a great deal of money into the building of the terrace. The whole of his capital, I suspected, and he had borrowed many times more. The profit, he said, would come once all the houses were sold. The two large houses at each end of the terrace would have elegant columns and fine detailing in the stonework. The architect, Mr Fellingbourne, had designed the terrace so that these end houses would be more than twice the width of ours. They would not only be splendid, but they would have all the latest conveniences. A cold plunge bath was to be installed in the basement of each of the end houses, to attract the wealthiest and most discerning purchasers. But first, there must be foundations.

  Work had gone on well last summer, but it had been a hard winter, with weeks of heavy rain and then weeks of frost. The labourers and stonemasons were laid off as the hours of daylight shortened. Now it was March and I still saw very little of Diner. He was on the site every day until dusk, supervising the inside work. The ironwork for the banister uprights in the end houses had been delivered, but there was a fault: they had not exactly followed the measurements for one section. Diner had not sent to London, but had drawn the design himself and ordered the work from a Bristol ironmonger.

  ‘It will all be put right, Lizzie,’ he’d said, and I saw that he was elated rather than dejected by what had happened. There was something in him that rose to such challenges with a smile, as if it was a pleasure to him to prove he would not be defeated. The men knew that smile, and they worked the faster for it.

  At dusk, when the men left work, he went to his office in Grace’s Buildings. There was paperwork to be done, skilled craftsmen to be hired and brought from Bath or even London, the next order of Portland limestone for the floors. He liked to tell me what he had done each day, and I was beginning to understand how a house grew from its conception. I’d never thought, before I knew him, how much work it was to build the houses I’d lived in so carelessly. From the choice of the site to the last curlicues on the balconies, every stage must be mapped and measured precisely. And there had been a great deal of work before even the foundations were dug. The site was magnificent but it was also steep and uneven. Limestone broke just beneath the turf. Diner had to pour money into levelling the ground and building a retaining wall. Even so, he paced our lodgings when he came home at last, lit up by his enthusiasm.