Teaching children was rewarding, she had said, but was perhaps not for everyone. There was honesty in her manner and a likeable straightforwardness. She wished to make a change in her life. In addition, she had been the only one of the three aspirants to have given any thought at all to the position, suggesting that the classes might be expanded to take in such matters as hygiene and household budgeting, which would be of interest to the wives of our members.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘let us afford her this chance. Such an outcome would be beneficial to all.’
Well, the silence that descended, Bee! It was like being on the moon. They smoked and thought and considered and smoked and looked at their thumbs and smoked. If knighthoods were awarded for the ability to smoke and say nothing, the queen would have been busy that Tuesday.
Finally, Mr Madison roused himself to utterance. ‘A governess, you know, is not always quite the thing, Mrs Stoker.’
I asked if he would care to expand.
‘There is sometimes a reason a woman is not married,’ he said gravely.
Looking at him, I could think of several.
‘Every governess has a story,’ he added. ‘That is the plain fact. Often there has been scandal or hushed-up unpleasantness in a governess’s past. We have our membership to consider. Many of them are young men.’
‘I concur,’ announced Mr Mowbray, a large brute with no neck. ‘Governesses are not wanted at the Mechanics’ Institute. We have difficulties aplenty as we are.’
‘And you, Mr Masterson?’ I said, more in hope than expectation. ‘Will you ride to my rescue, good knight?’
Mr Masterson is a Yorkshireman of the blunt-speaking sort and on this occasion he conformed to type.
‘Governesses be oars,’ he said.
‘You mean the implement one rows a boat with?’ I asked.
‘Governesses, Mrs Stoker, be damaged goods. Ah speak as Ah find. There tha art. An Ah’ll tell ’ee good an’ plain why she don’t ’ave an ’usband. She don’t need ’un, that’s why. Why ’ud she bother? The woman next door’s got ’un that’ll do just as well.’
I actually laughed aloud, which was rather embarrassing. They looked at me like a triumvirate of troglodytes.
‘And I don’t care for the idea of hygiene,’ said Mr Mowbray with a shudder. Which anyone ever standing downwind of him would have gathered.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Mr Madison, shaking his head. ‘We don’t want that kind of thing starting up, not on our watch. We couldn’t be sure where it would end.’
They then went in to bat for the drunken comrade, who was proclaimed a mightily fine fellow and a man of the world ‘like ourselves’. He was asserted to have addressed the four of us on the committee with good humour and fellowship.
‘He thought there were eight of us,’ I said.
On we wended another hour, his alleged qualities being trumpeted, his almost incapacitating incoherence put down to the anxiety of being conversed with by a group, an experience that most teachers do have to face, I pointed out, since classrooms rarely comprise one student.
Puffing like grampuses, they smoked and evaded. Finally I reached the buffers.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I have fifty pounds a year from my dowry, as you know, which for some years I have donated to the Institute. I will write to the bank tomorrow morning and cancel the arrangement if you continue in your refusal to see sense. And I will write to every newspaper in London and to every one of your members, explaining the reason for my decision. They may agree with you. They may not. I am willing to take the chance. Gentlemen, good afternoon, I wish you well.’
‘Look here, Madam,’ said Mr Mowbray, which was fuel on the fire.
‘I am not a Madam,’ I said, as I gathered my coat and handbag. ‘And Mr Mowbray, you are not a mechanic.’ This is the worst thing one can say to anyone at the Institute. It’s like calling a Frenchman a Belgian.
Happy to say, the governess was offered and has accepted the position. But dearest Bee, it was like a play, a ridiculous comedy. Perhaps you will write it one day.
Well, Nolly is calling me now and wants feeding like an ogre.
Thank you for the books you sent from Chicago. If you have time, could you see if you can find me a collected Louisa May Alcott over there? But don’t go to trouble, it’s only if you find yourself in a bookshop. I mean a fine edition, it would be lovely to have on our shelves if so.
I miss you and love you madly and am sorry we quarrelled so horridly in the weeks before you left. Come home safe, my dear husband. Let us start out again. I have a feeling our better days are at hand.
Your Flo
— XII —
In which a mummy of Dublin’s St Michan’s church is encountered and an odd manliness about the purchaser of a book is noted
Hurrying the north quays of the Liffey, the lanes behind the Four Courts, Mary’s Abbey and the alleyways near the slaughterhouse and the markets, dawn-lit gutters, mouldering cauliflowers, cows’ skulls. On Coppinger Row he pauses, is suddenly a snuffling worm, corkscrewing with savage force through the entrails of the earth, poddles and nooks, declivities and culverts, sewer pipes, silver-seams, secretly buried children, crushed granite and schist, banks of clay and Vikings’ teeth, through the cobbles of St Michan’s crypt.
Above him is evensong. Tantum Ergo, Amen. Down here the reek of chalk and rotted coffin. A ghoul the height of the capstone clambers wearily from his box, hair floor-long, raven’s nest in his ribcage, patches of ragged chainmail dangling from his femur as he dons the shield he was wearing at the siege of Jerusalem and bawls for the other mercenaries to fall in.
Stoker awakens in his cabin. The Atlantic roils hard.
Around him, the creaks and groans of the ship, beyond the porthole the shrieking night.
The Crusader is still here or in the land behind eyes, axe through his helmet but flailing on at the sands. But the crash of a breaker shudders him back to the nothingness. Stoker listens to the drumbeats but soon they fade, too.
The sour heavy taste of ship’s wine.
In red candlelight he sees with irritation that his fob watch has stopped.
Pulling on his dressing robe, he makes his way hand-by-hand along the guy-roped galley, through its eye-watering odour of vomit and spilled beer, up the steps and in through the glass doors of the Maindeck Saloon. The lanterns are burning, some of the actors at a baize table are noisily playing poker with the props-lads. At the bar, he orders a double port-and-brandy.
Harker in a corner is sketching the scene. He approaches. She looks up at him smiling.
‘Bad night, sir,’ she says. ‘Captain says it’s calming.’
‘Hope he’s right, my good Harks.’
‘You quite well, sir?’
‘Just a nightmare. Rich dinner. Had you a chance to finish counting the takings from Boston?’
‘Seven thousand two hundred and thirty-three dollars, sir. The lot’s in the strongbox down in the purser’s office. He’s arranged for an armed guard like you said.’
‘Thanks for helping me with that, Harks, I was butchered and bushed.’
‘How much’d we take in all, sir? Thirty-two?’
‘I reckon it thirty-three thousand dollars over the whole tour, after costs. San Francisco was nine thousand, but they can’t all be so good.’
‘Not a bad season’s poaching, sir. Care for another swizzle? Put lead in your pencil.’
‘Thank you, Harks, no. Chief about anywhere?’
‘Ain’t seen him this three hours or so. I believe he offed to bed, a bit shickery.’
‘What time is it, do you know?’
‘Coming on for five of the morning, sir, Greenwich time. We’re approaching your homeland, as it happens.’
On deck, he walks for a while in the not unpleasant lonesomeness of the sea-traveller. Cold, but the roiling ocean has its consolations to impart. In a dawn where you are nothing, not even a drop, all things will be washed away.
He watches t
he islands off Kerry loom slowly into view as, behind him, the sun gilds the sky’s edges. Wisps of smoke can be seen from the distant chimneys of cottages, coracles are setting out from the coves trailing nets. By some odd trick of the water, a chapel bell is heard tolling, but he can’t see the church no matter how hard he stares, and now he realises it’s the bell on the upper deck.
In the coracles, men with lanterns, hefting long harpoons. What can their lives be like, the people who live in such a nowhere? To exist one tide from death. Why don’t they emigrate?
Avaunt, the Crusader whispers. Jerusalem is lost.
The skullish starkness of Skellig Michael jutting up from the breakers like a mountain fallen from the sky. Monks and penitents lived there once. All men. Who could endure it? What was their conception of God, that their loneliness would appease Him?
At the time of an ancient plague, one of the hermits came to believe he was the last alive in all the world, carved his farewell into that wilderness basilica of granite, thinking none but the avenging angels would ever read it. A thousand years before Chaucer, before English. Mother told me the story, one evening by the fire. The callipers so heavy, my legs weak as water. But Father said none of it was true.
Stoker pictures his mother. Seven years since he’s seen Dublin. Never seems to be time any more.
Six months away on tour, a fortnight since his wife and their son left for their holiday in Dublin. What shall it be like, to live with them again?
Out of the hiss of churning sea and the cry of the gulls arises an after-presence of their arrival in New Orleans. The sultry heat, the hauteur and strange beauty of the people, their stories of the ‘zonbi’, the vudú, the living corpse, Barón Samedi, in his stovepipe hat. Some Louisianans were former slaves, others wore diamonds and silks. All, to Stoker, had a dignity, a calm; they held themselves like aristocrats come into an inheritance. The women were mockingly handsome.
The tomb of Marie Laveau, said by some to have been a witch. Why were those thousands of nails hammered into her wooden grave-marker? It was how you cursed an enemy, the custodian explained. Other ways were the black-cat bone and the mojo hand, the dark power of the crucifix and the sanctified Host. Tales of vicious retribution, bubbling like a gumbo in which a fingerpinch of gunpowder had been dropped.
The spices. The perfumes. The flash of eyes from a doorway. The smell of okra, the Spanish moss in the trees. A morning when he and some of the actors went out to see the bayous. Alligator hunters, Cajuns, in their ‘junkanoos’ and culottes. Lake Ponchartrain. The knightly courtesy of everyday speech. The roar of the Mississippi entering the bay. He had never felt further from Dublin.
Then, 72 cities in 25 weeks. 122 shows. The exhaustion, the trains. The Niagara Falls of paperwork. The receipts and lost passports, the cancelled hotels, the actors suffering diarrhoea and toothache and fevers, needing doctors in the middle of the night, losing their wages at cards, falling in love with attractive Midwesterners and not wanting to move on to the next city, getting rolled by finaglers, robbed by ladies of the street, being arrested, arraigned, jailed, bailed, bitten by mosquitoes, stung by hornets or roasting slowly on the flames of American success, everyone wanting to touch them and asking them to talk ‘in that accent’, the impresarios arguing out every clause of the contract, bargaining, hectoring, in several cities weeping, not wanting to pay, pleading bankruptcy or a dying relative, scenery going missing, an actress absconding with a cowboy, the stagehands wanting more money, five broken limbs, three impregnations, one surgical procedure (‘extraction of bullet from actor’s thigh following misunderstanding at barn dance, $80’), the theatre destroyed by a tornado in Detroit.
The closing night in New York. Stagehands sweating, shirtless, down in the pit, to pump the gas along the half-mile of tubing from 8th Street and Astor Square, up through the theatre’s trapdoors. The billowed gush of flames, the screams of the audience, the skreek-skreek of the orchestra’s strings.
A hundred slum children from Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, hired as demons, were wailing and clawing the air in their black sacking hoods, as the ten-foot-high wooden skull was lowered from the flies, Irving as Mephistopheles in the hole of its left eye, red and silver cape and the horns of a stag, come to drag wretched Faust down to Hell.
Stilt-shoes had been cobbled for him, with yard-high heels. He towered above the gibbering house, squeezed blood from the air, beckoned, cackled, quivered in a frenzy, pointed at the wife of the corrupt mayor in the front row, and at the climactic scene, thanks to a mouthful of gasoline oil and a match, spat fire half the length of the parterre.
The police had been summoned, the whole company threatened with arrest if such an irresponsible stunt were undertaken again. Mark Twain came backstage to offer congratulations, the Chief genuflected before him, kissed his hands. At the end of the night the theatre manager begged Irving to extend, cancel the trip home to England. A crowd of ten thousand had gathered in Astor Place, chanting his name, fighting the police for the chance to see him, touch him. Touts were already selling forged tickets for a newly added run, every printer south of 14th Street was cranking out fake handbills. The Chief said no. ‘Leave them wanting more.’ The complaints of blasphemy would help next time.
Past Cape Clear, the fjords of Kerry, the inlets of West Cork, Sherkin, Ballyferriter, Skibbereen. Near Kinsale the ship stops and there comes the heavy splash of the anchor dropping. Weariness enfolds him as he watches the little supply boats breasting out from the town, laden to the gunwales with food and fresh water. The lighthouse glimmers bravely, spreading its yellow beam over the surf. He becomes aware that he is not alone.
‘Good morning, Bram.’
‘Chief.’
‘The old country, what? I was watching the seals just now. Remarkable faces. Like humans, don’t you think?’
‘Some say so.’
‘Get the receipts done all right?’
‘Harks gave me a lot of help.’
‘Thirty-two thou?’
‘Thirty-three.’
They stand together at the rail watching lights come on in the distant town, the tug-men roping packages and boxes up the lines to the waiting stewards. The sky behind Kinsale is a rich red and gold.
‘Odd,’ Irving says. ‘All this time since little Harks let us in on her secret, one still can’t quite think of her as a girl. Or quite forgive the lie.’
Stoker accepts an American cigarette from the offered silver case. ‘She was afraid. One can’t blame her. Women found it impossible to find her sort of employment. Her lie was an innocent one and we gained by it.’
‘Couldn’t concur more. All the same, bit odd. Dressing up as a chap and going about so-attired. Still does, as you know, rather dandyish too. I said to her the other week in Seattle, ‘Jenny, my dear, you are the Beau Brummell of the company. Do you know what she said?’
‘‘‘Second only to yourself, sir.’’’
‘Ha. She told you?’
‘And everyone.’
‘Sweet girl. Many gifts. Rather mashed on her, in truth. Chap in the picture, do you know?’
‘My understanding – not that we’ve discussed it much – is that our Miss Harker does not see herself as the marriageable sort.’
‘Ah. Quite. Well, that’s all right too, you know.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Never met anyone who really was the marriageable sort, if I’m honest.’
‘Never?’
‘Perhaps a couple of Catholic priests.’
‘Shall you go up to London from Southampton as soon as we dock?’
‘Better do, to get the gelt banked? You’ll follow with the company?’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh, thanks for your help, old Bram. Should have said it before. Thrilled the old tour came off quite so well in the close. Wouldn’t have done without you.’
‘A pleasure.’
‘You’ll find in your cabin a polished wooden box about so high. Little gift for you
inside. Got it in Philadelphia.’
‘There was no need.’
‘And triple everyone’s wages, would you. And run up a letter of gratitude from me, the usual wording, heartfelt, so on? I’m a little tired now, off to doze.’
PHONOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPT
This is Stoker speaking.
Today is what. The first of September, 1888.
I am sorry to say that it has happened again. I was not in through the door fifteen minutes from Southampton, had barely unbuttoned my coat and embraced Nolly and Flo and given them their gifts, when an old enemy came in and ruined what might have been a happy homecoming. It was Florence that introduced him.
Copyright.
‘I have made an appointment with a notary,’ she said, ‘for tomorrow at eleven. He shall take us to the War Office. That is where patents are registered.’
I explained that I was busy.
She said that she would change it.
I said, ‘I am always busy.’
‘Why so curt?’
I said it had not been intended as curtness, that I was probably a little tired after the voyage.
‘Do you know what I hate, Bram? How you make me the scolding wife. The shrew. The termagant. The pantomime harridan. Your obstinacy writes the lines I have no choice but to say.’
‘There is always a choice.’
‘Silent acquiescence, do you mean?’
‘Wifely supportiveness might be a better way of terming it.’
‘In whatever her husband wishes, great or small or indifferent.’
‘I seem to remember you taking vows not a million miles from those.’
‘Do you dare to lecture me, Bram, on the vows I entered into? After six months away from us, you might take one minuscule instant to reflect upon your own.’
‘I stand corrected.’
‘You bloody do, sir. That’s right.’
‘Have you finished?’
‘I will not tolerate your condescension, Bram. You will not cut me down to size. Do not say to me things you wish to say elsewhere. Wifely supportiveness is something you are quite capable of giving. Just not to your wife, it would seem.’
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