Mrs. Engels (5 page)

She tugs on my arm in an effort to turn my eyes towards her. I don't give in to it. “You are a good person, Lizzie, and I appreciate most deeply your trying to save me the pain. But I must talk on it. Otherwise it shall always be there, haunting me. The only way to put a thing behind one is to put a name on it and to know it, or?”

She goes quiet, leaving just the wind in our ears, and it seems for a moment like her mind has countered itself and decided against naming or knowing anything, but the moment passes and she turns to me now, intent on my face.

“As you well know, Lizzie, anxieties and vexations are the lots of all political wives, but I can say with certainty that few are familiar with the misery and anger I have experienced over the years. With Karl I have lived a Gypsy life, forced from place to place, this country to that. I can barely remember a week when I did not have to struggle in some mean way to keep the family healthy and alive in the hovels our poverty pressed us to live in. I often went to pieces and saw Karl weep. Many times I felt I could no longer keep my strength. I became an expert at composing begging letters. I lost my looks.” She wipes a hand across her cheek as if to remove the pits that the smallpox has left there. “And through all of this, the only means, the
only means
I had of preventing a total collapse was the show of respectability I was able to maintain. It may sound silly to you now, Lizzie, but I was young and I had certain ideas, and my public face was all that kept them alive. And when Frederick took up with Mary, it threatened to take away even that.” She takes my hand from where it was warm in my skirt pockets, and she holds it. “Did Mary speak to you of me?”

“Speak, nay. She fumed. Called you all sorts. And she had some right, Jenny. It was no business of yours what she and Frederick did.”

“Yes, I know, Lizzie. And if it were only that they were not married, then it would not have been a problem. Please, I am not a fanatic. But the fact was, they were using each other. Mary was using Frederick to get ahead. And Frederick was using Mary to make a splash. Nothing was real. They were playing each other like a game, and that was all. She took his money and gifts, and lived like a fine lady of society on the back of him. And he showed her about like a prize. He said it himself, she was his
finger-up
to his family and the whole blasted bourgeoisie, and it was clear they both enjoyed it a bit too much, she and he. It was vulgar and intolerable, and it was doing no good for the Movement. People, our comrades, were asking questions. I remember hearing them wondering out loud to each other why such an intelligent man was involving himself with one of his workers. They could accept he was a capitalist and a millocrat. That was the family burden he had to carry. But did he also have to behave like one? He was taking advantage of his position. He was no better than the other rich sons of Manchester who used the young girls of the proletariat for their pleasure. Frederick, they said, was an exploiter. They thought he was exploiting the—”

She stops here. She sees my face and is clever enough to know she ought. She gives me back my hand and I put it away again. “Can you forgive me, Lizzie? Do you think we can be friends?”

I'm far from charmed. It's not in me to offer any softening words. But nor do I push her to the apology she's paining to reach. At bottom she's a good woman. Her affliction is only that she believes, still, that she has a right to be free from all that's disagreeable. “Of course,” I says, and touch her on the shoulder.

She moves around to allow an embrace, but before anything can happen—before I'm seen stood in this park in this woman's arms—I come away to help Nim with the final bit of carrying.

“Do you need a hand with that, Nim?”

“I can manage, thank you, Mrs. Burns.”

October

V. Let Us Hear

I lie under, his whiskers like a broom of twigs and stinking of liquor, till I've come to terms with the dark and my situation in it. “Angels of grace, defend us,” I says, “what bloody time is it?”

Our first p.m. in the new house and Frederick went out to the Club to celebrate. “Karl is insisting,” he said. “There are some people he wants me to meet. I'll be back before ten.” At midnight and no sign of him, I went to bed. Alone among the unfamiliar walls, I slept in a state close to waking. Now—some unholy hour—the weight of man collapses onto me. When God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers.

“My Lizzichen,” he moans, grappling for a grope through sheet and dress, “forgive me, but I'm in need.”

“You rotten scoundrel,” I says, using my elbows against him. “Get you to your own chambers.”

“Come now,
mein Liebling,
show some mercy.”

“I'll show you more than mercy, Frederick Engels, now skedaddle. Away with you. Can't I put my head down a minute?”

He kneels over me and, mocking-like, clasps his hands together as if to beg. “Have pity on a rogue,” he says. “Am I not good to you?” he says. “Is a moment of comfort too much to ask?” he says, and other such phrases that he thinks will wheedle him in.

“Mary Mother, give me patience.” I yank up the linen to stole myself. Knowing neither my own forces nor the degree of his impairment, this sends him rolling—
thump!
—onto the carpet. I sit up and hold my breath. Rain is falling outside and there's a barking of animals off and yonder. Bellows of laughter rise up from under the bed. I fall back and sigh.

Boys kept like monks by their mothers go one of two ways: they turn womanly or they turn wild. Frederick's rearing among the Calvins—kept behind curtains drawn tight and doors too thick for the world's vices to get in—has done naught for him but disease his head with what it's been deprived of, and now look at him: single-minded and seeing no ends that aren't low. He keeps pictures. He makes foreign requests. It's not always the Council he runs off to.

After some scratching about and some fumbling, there's a striking at lucifers and the lamp flares up. I cover my eyes from the sudden light. “Still in fit shape, I think you'll agree,” he says. I see, when I've come to terms with it, that he has his clothes off and is showing himself. He clasps his hands behind his neck, which makes the skin run up over his bones and the hair jump out from under his arms. He holds this pose as long as the lush in his veins allows it. Now he wobbles and, giggling like a little girl, staggers over to lean on the wall. The lamp shines hard against him.

Growing up, no one sits down and tells you what the man's bit is going to look like. Knowledge is got from the snatches you catch. The hole in your father's combinations. The neighbor man washing at the pump. The surge in the gent's breeches on the bus. The Jew Beloff pissing in the bucket. Frederick's is like none of those. In its vigors, it points up and a bit to the side. Its cover goes all the way over the bell and bunches at the end like a pastry twist. Before he does anything, he spits on his hand and peels this back. Then you know he's right and ready.

Personal, I have my limits with it. There's things I'll not be brought to do. I'll maw it: no harm in that if he doesn't shove too. And I'll let him turn me over: let go of your vanities and there's pleasure to be got there. But the hooer's trick, that's crossing the pale. What's the draw of an act so cruddy? And what's the purpose, anyhows, when the normal carriage road has been clear of courses these past twenty years? “Keep dreaming, General,” is what I says whenever he starts to rub up that way. “Not for love nor lush.”

Tonight, though, he wants the usual, and I don't quarrel with that. I bring my hands down his back and put them on his arse, his little arse that hasn't dropped with the years but has stayed upwise and firm. Where it meets the leg is like the underneath of swollen mammies, and when he pushes, its sides dip in to make dishes smooth enough for your morning milk. It turns heads, the round of it under his breeches. I've seen it with my own eyes. When it's late in the parlor and hot with bodies, and when he himself is sticky from all the hosting, he sometimes takes off his coat and turns to throw it somewhere; that's when they nab their peek.

He puts his arms under my knees and bends my pins over them. I know he'd like them hooked over his shoulders—my ankles clutching his neck, my toes taking hold of his hair so sleek, his whiskers tickling skin that usual only feels the itch of a stocking—but I'm no longer the young thing I once was, and neither is he, though he likes to think his physical senses are as hale today as when he first fetched a lass.

His eyes are open. He doesn't ever close them doing it. He likes to pin you, pierce you through. I swear with those eyes he'd stare into naught and find something. Even when he's lushed they stay clear and bright, and seem to let you into his head, though this can only be a fancy, for afterwards there remains the mystery of what he thinks when he gets on top of you, whether it's dark or light or what.

I begin to feel it, the quiver down in my cunny, but I've to conjure it up if I don't want it to fade, the last lick of oil in a lamp. I help it with my hand like he himself has taught me—a French recipe—and I let out a gasp. Reading this a sign, he comes down bricks on me.

If he says anything now, dear Jesus, I'll credit it.

There's never been anyone like him.

It's rare I sleep the whole night when he stays. I go off easy enough, but am woken early by his kicking. For some reason, I can't bear to roll over and see him there grunting and happy. There's others, I'm sure, who lie and watch for the sun to rise up out of him. He'll not get that from me. I stay with my back turned.

In actual fact I ought be up already, doing the round. The maid doesn't get here till Sunday and I've to look after everything myself. The pulling back of the blinds and curtains. The opening of the shutters. The drawing up of the kitchen fire and the polishing of the range. The checking of the boiler. The putting on of the kettle. The cleaning of the boots and the knives. Then the other fires. And the hearth rug. And the grate. Then the rubbing of the furniture. Then the washing of the mantelpiece and ledges. Then the dusting of the ornaments. Then the scattering of the tea leaves and the sweeping of them up. So many things, and for every one a thought. So many thoughts at a time, for so many things, it's hard to know the ones you ought be hearkening to. By thinking you're forever running behindhand you make things the master of you.

The worst, though, will be the answering of the door. I can already see it in their faces: “Why
her
?” The butcher boy, the shop girl, the milkmaid, the grocer, the letter carrier: “Can't see what makes her stand out.” Every day of every week, somebody, some way: “If she can do it, any old beggar can.”

I'll try to turn blind from it. I'll pass them my coins and tell them my orders and make as if I've not remarked a thing. But afterwards, I know, I'll be left with something inside, a prickling feeling like a hair in my collar or a pea in my bodice; a reminder of the fact that, when it comes to my hike to the higher caste, there's no getting away from the chance of it. Would I know what I know, would I have done what I've done, would I be here today, swelling it up, if I'd gone down different alleys, taken up with other souls?

Fortune first spins her wheel in my favor in the summer of forty-two. It's the summer the wages are cut and the mills are turned out. The summer the coalpits are shut and the boiler plugs are pulled and the workers gather and the riots flare and the soldiers march. And while all this is happening I'm at home, locked into the basement with Mary. Though I don't know it yet, though it will take me time to understand, my being here, inside away from it all—my sitting it out—will be the chancest thing I ever do.

I
want
to join in. There's rebellion enough in my heart to spark a hundred rallies. But Mary has other plans for me.

“If you go out that door,” she says, “you'll not be getting back in.”

“Well, maybe I won't want to get back in.”

“You want to be a corner girl, is that it? You want to be a loafer and a beggar till you die? Go out there now and that's what you'll be, and that's what you'll stay. If anyone from the mill sees you with that crowd, or even a girl who looks like you, you'll have no hope of a situation when the mill opens again, no hope in hell. And I'll not support you. I'm over with looking after you and being your mother.”

She touches something with that, the proud bone in me. With Mam passed over, and now Daddy at the workhouse, I've come to depend on Mary for what I can't beget on my own, and though I'm grateful for her good offices and will live to thank her for them, they come at a dear cost.

“You want me to be a knobstick, is that it? You're telling me to break the strike?”

“I'm telling you to pull your weight. When a girl gets to fifteen, she ought know how to walk for herself and not tug on other people's sleeves.”

“The neighbors will make it hard for us. They'll shut us out.”

“Let the neighbors act for themselves. They can throw stones at us, for all I'll cry, as long as we can feed ourselves.”

“Who wants to work in the mill anyhows. It's the mill is keeping us down. It's the mill that's killing us.”

“Fine sentiments, sister lady, but I hate to tell you, it's the clemming that's killing you right now, and unless you find yourself a swell and marry up quick, it's the mill or a pauper's grave for you.”

And true enough, it's the hunger that eventual brings me round. Weeks, the mills stay closed, the Ermen & Engels the same as the rest, and without Mary's wage, we're brought to winking distance of the workhouse ourselves. I feel I'd like to cry, only I don't have the forces, and I know then I'm in the last ditch and sinking, for I'd like to and I can't. And in that moment I know that when the gates of the Ermen & Engels are thrown back, I'll be there in the horde, elbowing and stepping on heads to get to the front.

An animal, that's what chance makes of me.

On my first day, the girls are already talking about the owner's son. “Soon he'll be coming,” they says to each other, for there isn't much else to amuse them in the yard. “Soon he'll be coming from Germany to learn the strings, and one day he'll be the boss man himself.” And they're excited about this idea. They can't wait to slap an eye on him, for they've heard he's quite the looker.

They haven't a good head between them. Most of them are yet young like myself, some of them well under the age, and every morning that he doesn't appear makes the next morning a thing for them to look forward to. Me, I dread the next morning as a plague, for it only promises more of the same: a job that lays you low and saps you. And I can't picture how the owner's son, however dapper, could change it.

I'm unhappy, but more than that, I'm raging. In the place bare a month and I'm already having urges. To scream and shout. To climb on top of the yard wall, and from there to get onto the roof so there'd be no one in Manchester who didn't hear me. But in actual fact, I do what I'm told. I stay quiet, just as Mary has warned me, and don't let tell of my affairs. I keep my opinions and my illnesses hidden. I put a rag over my mouth to keep from coughing. And I work hard, harder than I've ever worked at anything before, by putting my cholers into it.

“The strikes came at a good time,” we're told at assembly one morning. “The strikes came at a good time for
you.
” The mill has bought new machines, the latest crop of mules that need but a fraction of the hands to work. They were planning to let go of the people they no longer needed, given the advances. But—luck and behold—the job was done for them, the troublemakers weeded out natural. Leaving us, the new, leaner, better Ermen & Engels family to march with the banner.

Mary is thankful to be given one of the new mules. I think better of reminding her of the people her mule is replacing, people she knew and declared to care for; or of the meanness of her new wage, lower than what they were giving her before. I think better of it because she knows these things well and is choosing not to give them their proper weight, for if she did, they'd crush her.

I'm to follow her on the floor, pick up the new ways, and then take over a mule of my own. “Be fast,” she says to me. “Be fast and you'll be seen, and you'll move up,” for it's a fine spinner she wants us to be, a spinner of the Diamond Thread, which she believes to be a situation that can't be robbed by the machines or by the children. “If we don't learn the fine spinning,” she says, “we'll go the same way as the men. Out on our backs and not a situation in Manchester to be had.”