Charles Palliser (38 page)

“It would be painful because I made a promise about it,” she said hesitantly. “A solemn promise. To my father. Just before he died. But I think he would want me to part with it now that we have nothing.”

I begged her to explain more but she would not. I argued that it would be better to sell the locket but since she adamantly refused, we at last agreed not to part with either of these things.

“Mamma,” I said. “I have an idea. Do you remember Mrs Digweed and her little boy who came to our house the Christmas before last?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea to find them?”

“Why, whatever for?”

“We are now as badly off as they. And they at least know how to be poor, which you and I must quickly learn.”

“But how could we find them?”

“I remember that they lodged in Cox’s-square, Spitalfields, and I believe that is not very far from here. So why don’t we go there and look for them?”

“Well, why not? After all, what does anything matter any more? What does it matter what becomes of us? We are lost now.”

“Don’t be like that,” I said angrily.

At this her pretence of equanimity collapsed and she started sobbing. It was some time before I had undone the damage and she had recovered her composure. While she was making ready to leave, I acted on an idea I had had and wrote a brief letter to Miss Quilliam reminding her of the occasion we had met, indicating that my mother and I were now in London without friends or means of subsistence, and asking her to leave an address at which

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we might reach her. I gave the letter to Nancy who undertook to put it into her hands when she returned and to retain for us any reply.

We left the house and enquired the way to Cox’s-square. As we approached it the streets grew poorer and poorer and our spirits fell. The heavy sweet stench of a nearby brewery hung over the area, there was a public-house at every corner, and half-naked children swarming in the gutters called out to us for money when they saw how we were dressed — for in that district even our dowdy garments stood out. It wasn’t merely the shabbiness of the clothes of the people we passed in the street that struck me, but their faces — pale, sallow, the skin often hideously pitted — and the eyes of many seemed empty as if they were in a stupor. I saw numerous swollen noses and black eyes, and many of those we passed were pigeon-breasted and had drooping shoulders and bandied legs.

The houses grew increasingly delapidated: the doors peeling and cracked, the stonework discoloured by a rotten green slime where the guttering had given way, and many of the windows broken and stuffed with rags. We passed many narrow slits in the walls through which people were disappearing or from which they emerged.

When at last we reached “Petticut-lane”, to which we had been directed, we found that we ourselves had to pass into such a narrow alley-way in order to reach our goal.

finding ourselves in a dark court with a heap of refuse in the centre, we looked at each other in amazement.

“It was No. 6 wasn’t it?” my mother asked.

I nodded for the stench was so terrible I did not want to open my mouth. The doors had no numbers.

“Which is No. 6?” I asked a little girl.

She pointed towards one of the entrances whose steps were broken and whose battered door was half-open. We climbed the steps and knocked.

A boy called out: “Keep on knockin’, the footman can’t ’ave ’eard you.”

“Bless you,” said a woman passing by. “You just go straight in and find the room you want.”

We passed into the dark hall, unsure of what to expect. There was a door on our left which was ajar and we went up to it and my mother called out: “Mrs Digweed?”

A woman’s voice responded: “Come in.”

This was most encouraging and we pushed open the door and advanced into the room. However, the face that greeted us as we passed round the door, though cheerful and friendly, was not that of Mrs Digweed. The woman was about forty-five, neatly dressed, and with an open, pleasant countenance. Over her shoulder I could see that the chamber, which seemed bright and clean though it was not large, was full of people. A man lay sleeping in a makeshift bed in the corner, a young woman and two little girls were preparing food at the fire, and two younger children were playing with some pieces of coal on the cracked stone floor before the hearth. They looked up curiously at our entrance but then went on with what they were doing.

“You’re not the family called Digweed?” I asked since my mother seemed overwhelmed by what she saw.

“Never heerd on ’em,” she said. “Our name’s Sackbutt.”

I was aware of my mother turning sharply to me and not wanting to see her disappointment I ignored her and asked: “So they’re not in this house?”

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THE MOMPESSONS

“I can’t say so much,” she said, looking at us with interest. “But come in and sit down.

You look fair done up. Meg, clear them things off of that settle.”

As she turned away my mother looked at me with her nose wrinkled to indicate her distaste but I nodded at her that we should accept the invitation. So we seated ourselves, I on a very precarious chair and my mother on the single decent piece of furniture, a battered and patched settle.

“Let me see,” said Mrs Sackbutt, counting off on her fingers; “there’s the Sneezums and the Glatts and the M’Tongues down here. But I don’t know about all the rest of the house. There’s …”

My mother interrupted: “Do you mean that each family has one room?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Sackbutt with unmistakable pride. “There ain’t no sharin’ down here, though as I says, I can’t answer for the rest of the house.”

My mother turned a ghastly face towards me.

Oblivious of this, Mrs Sackbutt continued: “There’s the Clinkenbeards in the first-pair front, and the Meatyards in the back, so they’ve got two rooms apiece, though in course they pays more than what we do.”

“Do you mean that you pay for this?” my mother cried.

“In course,” said Mrs Sackbutt in surprise. “Why, you are simple. Are you Irish?”

“No, we’ve just come from the country,” I explained.

“Four shillin’ a week. Why, you pays everywhere except p’r’aps a few places like the Holy Land or the Devil’s Acre or the Rookery at Mitre-court in Hatton-garding and such, and I wouldn’t go there, not if I was able to crawl nowheres else.”

The man muttered in his sleep and turned over.

Mrs Sackbutt went on: “But as for here, why, the landlord’s deputy, Mr Ashburner, comes round regular every week and if you can’t pay, why, out you go.”

I saw my mother shudder. Did she know the name? That was an absurd thought.

How could she?

“He takes most of the rents for here and Bell-lane,” Mrs Sackbutt went on.

“Bell-lane!” my mother exclaimed. “Is that near?”

“Why the next street to this,” the good woman answered.

My mother blenched. What
did
she know of this place?

“Are you all right?” Mrs Sackbutt said. “You look poorly. Will you take something? A little gin?”

Rather to my regret, she accepted.

“We should be going, Mamma,” I said. “Thank you for your help, Mrs Sackbutt. We’ll enquire of the rest of the house.”

“Why don’t your mother wait here while you go?” she asked. “She looks fair done in.”

“Yes, Johnnie, I am very tired,” my mother said.

I agreed and Mrs Sackbutt placed two glasses on a sideboard and pulled open one of its drawers. There was a cry and there — to our amazement — was a small baby lying in an old egg-chest in the drawer that was lined with straw. It was sucking a teat made of a bag of plums.

“Why,” my mother exclaimed. “That can’t be good for the child!”

Mrs Sackbutt smiled cheerfully: “Bless you, that’s only a nuss-child. And it does her no harm.”

While my mother took the baby out and began to nurse her upon her lap and UNDERSTANDINGS

177

Mrs Sackbutt poured out two tumblers from a stone jug, I left the chamber and climbed the battered staircase to knock at each door. My search was without profit for nobody had heard the name of Digweed, and as I went from one room to the next I realized that this was because the occupiers came and went too quickly for the house to have a common memory. I wondered where they came from and went to, for this, I reflected, must be the very bottom of the pit of degradation, and I could not conceive that there could be anywhere more debased than this.

The signs of poverty increased as I ascended, for above the floor on which the Sackbutts lived I commonly found two families inhabiting a single chamber. (They were large for the houses in the square had long ago been built as fine merchants’ dwellings.) In the first I was assailed by a strong stench which came from the paste the whole family were using for making cigar-boxes. A broken flower-pot propped open the window-frame but smoke from the chimneys outside was billowing in and adding to the foetid atmosphere. In the next room there was nobody but a small boy holding a baby that looked like a limp bundle of rags. There was a bucket full of soaking rags on a rickety deal table, the grate was oozing cinders, and a cracked tea-cup stood on the floor.

Most of the rooms had little furniture — perhaps a single turn-up bedstead with a bag of straw and a dirty and scanty coverlet — and the windows had in many cases lost their glass whose place was supplied by sheets of cloth covered in tallow to let a little light through. Yet in many of them an attempt had been made at decoration and there were flower-pots containing flowers or in some cases mere dried sticks where the plants had long ago died.

When I had tried every door, I decided to try all the other houses in the square in case we had mistaken the number, or in the hope that even if the Digweeds had gone, someone might remember them and know where they were now. The first chamber I tried on the ground-floor of the next house was the dwelling of a sweep and although the front room was fairly clean, I saw over his wife’s shoulder a back chamber containing nothing but a huge pile of soot and beside it an empty bird-cage. I opened another door when there was no response and found an old woman holding a plucked chicken that was visibly putrid, who screamed abuse at me so that I hastily closed it again. The next room was deserted and bare except for a pile of rags, a broken table, and a small girl of about five and a baby — both sitting on the floor.

I need not go on. Many of the occupants of these houses were stunned by hunger or incapacitated by drink or spoke no language that I recognised, but of those who could reply in English, none of them — at least of those who would answer me — could help me, and in despair I almost decided to abandon the search.

Then I knocked at the door of a garret-room at the top of No. 10 and although the woman who opened it (holding it only a little ajar) said: “I nivver heerd tell on ’em, young master,” an old man’s feeble voice from the room behind her called out:

“Digweed? Aye, I rec’lleck a fambly of that name.”

“No you don’t,” the woman said without turning round and beginning to close the door.

“Why, I do,” the querulous voice insisted. “They lived four houses along, I b’lieve.”

The woman still held the door, looking at me discouragingly.

“No. 6?” I said. “Yes, that is so.”

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THE MOMPESSONS

With a warning shake of her head, the woman opened the door, allowing me to see that she was holding a baby to her breast, and I entered.

The chamber was small but clean and tidy and the walls, though they came down from the low ceiling at a sharp angle, were freshly whitewashed. A clean old man with a grizzled white chin sat before the fire looking at us.

“Here, sit down, young ’un,” he said, and with a smile showed me his complete range of teeth: two shiny yellow stumps.

I sat in the ancient chair opposite him that he indicated.

“Digweed, you say?” he began. “For sure, I mind ’em well for the master gived me baccy and the mistress brung me poultices for the rheumatiz and the little lad runned messages for me. They moved away, though. Now when was that? Let me think. They had the fever that time it was so bad here.”

“Yes,” I said with mounting excitement. “That’s them.”

“Why, I rec’lleck now. ’Twas the winter I broke my leg. That was four or five year agone.”

I was disappointed for it had sounded like them and yet if this was so it could not be.

But the woman broke in impatiently: “Why, father, that was only a year or two back.”

“Aye,” he agreed. “Mebbe it was. Two on the children died. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the letter we had received and the news that we had been unable to interpret. “But where did they go to when they left here?”

He frowned: “I can’t call it to mind. In fact, I don’t believe I ever knowed it.”

I slumped down, and after all I had endured I found myself fighting back tears. “Do you know of anyone who might know?”

“Hold hard,” he said, “I believe I might. How I knowed ’em at all was on account of Barney. I believe he was the master’s brother, or mayhap the wife’s. Anyways, this Barney (I never heerd no other name), he worked mates with some coves what I done some work with. This is going back more nor ten year now. Jerry Isbister and Pulvertaft, they was.” Here he paused as if remembering something, and then he suddenly looked at me strangely: “Would you know anything about the lay they was on?”

I shook my head.

“Well, howsomever, they worked mates together for many a year. And with others, too, in course. (There was Blueskin for one. Nobody couldn’t forget him.) I helped ’em once or twice but I hadn’t the stomach for it, but that’s how I come to know Barney.”

Though I wanted to ask questions for I was intrigued by these words, I was afraid to interrupt him because he might lose the tenuous thread.

“Well, arter I gived up I heerd they had a turn-up. Barney and Pulvertaft agin Isbister.

Then him and Pulvertaft went over the water.”

I glanced at the daughter in surprise and she mouthed: “Down the Borough.”

“But I believe Jerry knows of Barney still,” the old man went on. “I rec’lleck he said summut about him not three month back when I met him one day coming down field-lane with his hoss and cart.”