The Flight of Sarah Battle (23 page)

She sees her replacement behind the bar, unsmiling face on a grumpy body that stiffens whenever it's approached. Despite this hostility the place is as full as ever it was, occupations entirely the same. And then a man who's taken his coffee and newspapers at Battle's for untold years catches sight of a new woman on the premises, looks again and alerts his companions to her presence. At which the entire table stands and raises its glasses and coffee bowls:

‘The prodigal daughter returns! Miss Battle, we are delighted to see you. Hurrah!' The room rises and all join in the huzza until a hush falls and curious looks are directed to where, from a curtained snug, Sam Battle emerges. His face reddens, blackens. He walks out, disappears into the depths of the house.

*

Speech was never Sam Battle's
forte
.

‘You've come back.'

‘I have.'

‘Shall you run off again?'

‘Dick has taken my box to my old room, Father.'

‘Oh. Well.'

He doesn't ask the reason for her return. The very name America, that treacherous, barbarous colony, is one he will not utter. And as to why she went in the first place, that is not to be thought of either.

Nor is mention made of James Wintrige. Sam ever disliked the man, a sponger who spouted revolution. He's not been seen for years. On Sam's principle Sarah should certainly go back to her husband. But Dick has heaved her box upstairs and Sam's well aware of the pleasure his old customers are expressing at her reappearance. Before the day is out he's sacked the bad-tempered woman from behind the bar.

Sarah's duty always was to replace her mother when she, against his wishes, damned stupid woman, went out and got herself killed. The girl tried to wriggle out of this duty through marriage, but her worthless husband knew which side his bread was buttered. Then she ran away, the hussy! Now she's back he'll make sure she stays.

In her childhood room Sarah goes straight to the window to scan the scene she knows so well. Gables, chimneys, tiles and broken lead guttering. Winter smoke aping snow clouds obscures the distance. Sparrows, whose freedom she once envied, furtive in the cold, hop into discarded nests of summer martins.

She unpacks her box: places clothes in drawers, arranges a packet of carefully wrapped papers and a dozen or so books on the chest. From her skirt she takes a red neckerchief. The pocket full of thrums went years ago.

She presses the neckerchief to her face with both hands and sobs in anguish.

*

Sam cannot refuse her an afternoon to collect her clothes from Winkworth Buildings. He's certain there's no danger she'll remain there.

It's getting late and no one answers her knock. She stands outside, envisaging the gloomy interior, leans up against the door as though to hear her youthful, uncomprehending self sink into the silence of her marriage. She and Tom had
run
down the stairs when they fled!

She brings a note for James, having anticipated, indeed hoped that he might not be at home:

James,

I am in England now and wish to collect my belongings.

I shall not return to live with you although we are still married, knowing, as I do, for whom you work. I read the letter that you wrote to R. Ford. You will say that it was not my property to read, to which I say that I had a right to know to whom I was married.

I now use my own name. I daresay you will not want me back in any case.

Please send to the coffee house to tell me when I may collect my trunk and clothes. If you prefer to pack and give them to the carrier to take I shall pay him when he arrives.

Sarah Battle

She walks back slowly, the familiar route, though then it was always dawn's ash light or late-night darkness, accompanied by Dick. There's no change in the streets except where houses have collapsed from age or been pulled down by mobs. She's heard something of recent times, of the disastrous last year of the old century: how in the spring great falls of snow buried mail coaches all round the country and mailmen rode or walked the post to London. How famished crows fell out of the sky, how lambs froze dropping from the womb. Preachers and madwomen threatened crowds with destruction of the world. Thousands left London. And while neither earthquakes nor pestilence appeared and the prophets were locked in the madhouse, in the summer rivers burst their banks, the ground flooded, harvests failed. Only the numbers of starving grew.

Men in their cups tell her this, pleased to find a woman who will listen. Once she disdained their attention. Now she hears them out, responds politely and escapes to her own thoughts. This they don't notice, content to talk at the pleasant woman, older, perhaps a little sober, but still comely.

Among themselves they fight over peace with France, whether to sign a petition insisting on negotiations. Most agree with the mayor, alderman and liverymen of the City who have already sent their own petition to the Commons.

Hovering before the fire, tamping tobacco in pipe bowls, they expend more spleen on the question of exactly when the new century began.

‘We speak of it, but has it begun at all?' says a man looking up from his newspaper, shiny with the assurance of authority.

‘Oh Lyons, how absurd!'

Lyons taps his source, blushes, smiles nervously.

‘It says here that just because we've begun to count eighteen it doesn't follow that the century must be changed.'

‘
Who
says, man? Whose nonsense is this?'

‘Lalande. Lalande the astronomer says it.'

‘But he's a
French
man, Lyons!'

‘Rothersay, move away from the heat. Let Lyons tell us what he knows. Read it out, Lyons.'

‘Lalande has published a pamphlet.'

‘
Tell
us, then!'

‘He says whatever calculation is to be made, we commence by one and finish by one hundred. Nobody has ever thought of commencing at nought and finishing at ninety-nine.'

‘
Well
?'

‘It follows that the present year, 1800, incontestably belongs to the eighteenth century.'

An explosion of guffaws compels Lyons to shrink back to his place on the settle.

Sarah, untouched, attends to the warming of punch. There are those who try to catch her eye, flirt with her, self-conscious now they're freed from wigs. Her position is ambiguous of course. She was married, but where's the husband? She ran off with a lover so she's a woman of the world. Are there babies somewhere? Are her opinions radical like the printer's with whom she eloped? Did she become bored with the man or was it homesickness that brought the handsome woman back all that way?

They don't ask, are all the more intrigued. But in any case her tasks are too many to allow much conversation. Without discussion, without even a spoken request she resumes the role she played before she fled. Every part of it: checking, ordering, supervising. The days caked with coffee grounds and alcohol, broiling meat and fish. Waiters, maids, Mrs Trunkett, Dick all look to her commands just as before.

Sam speaks only when he must. One day she's astonished to overhear him say with glee: ‘My daughter has returned, you know!'

My daughter. My wife. Like her mother she has no existence of her own separate from Sam's, from Battle's. At night she hears her father's snores from his room below, his groans as he reaches down for the pot and hauls himself out of bed.

It is as though no time at all has passed. As though three years' sojourn in the New World has taken place entirely in her mind. Three years quickened by discovery, delight.

Those martins in whose nests the sparrows squat, do they remember their winter over the sea? They will return soon, come April, she realises with a momentary lightening of the heart. They will be here under the eaves, before the swifts come screaming in the dusk.

She remembers her twelve-year-old self; how no one spoke of her mother's death or Newton's. How strange that now she should repeat the pattern of her girlhood. Mourning at night with all the zeal of unextinguished love.

*

A handsome pump is erected in front of the Royal Exchange over a well, unearthed in Cornhill not long ago.

‘Sam Battle, you must come with us to see the pump in its obelisk case,' says Bullock. ‘Did you not contribute something towards it?'

Sam grunts. They don't know he didn't.

‘It is your
duty
to see this fine monument so close to home. And think how useful it is were there to be a fire. Good God, this very house was rebuilt after a fire, was it not?'

‘In ‘48.'

‘Your father's day. Well, they'll put it out more quickly next time with this pump so close by.'

Sam cannot remember when he last left the coffee house. His wife's funeral? He has no need to go out. All arrangements with tradesmen were established years ago. There's Dick for errands. Mrs Trunkett at a pinch. Dick limps, but gets there.

For once Bullock and Thynne agree.

‘You
must
come. The Exchange provides most of your custom, Sam. The monument and pump have been paid for by many of those who frequent Battle's. Besides it is an elegant thing.'

‘
El
egant,' he growls.

‘You need leave your house for twenty minutes only.'

‘Damn, damn!' he mutters.

They edge him out, a group who've drunk at Battle's for years, who enjoy Sam's crabbedness. They remind the old snudge, as if he doesn't know it, of Sarah's capable hands. Shuffle him along Change Alley to the painted iron obelisk decorated with emblematic figures and an image of the house of correction that stood on the spot in 1282.

Sam gazes blankly, uneasy in the outer air. Smoke and fumes are his natural medium.

Thynne reads:
‘This Well was discovered, much enlarged, and this Pump erected in the year 1799 by the contributions of the Bank of England, the East India Company, the neighbouring Fire Offices, together with the Bankers and Traders of the Ward of Cornhill
. There now! 1799. It's been standing since last century!'

‘No, no. Lyons would have us believe we are still
in
that century.' They wag their fingers at each other and laugh.

Sam is agitated. What is happening in the house while he's not there? In his mind's eye the waiters lounge in the kitchen, pick bits out of pans, swig the residue from glasses. Mrs Trunkett sleeps in the corner. A maid drops the red-hot fruggin as she stirs the fuel in the oven. Dick is entertaining his cronies in the yard. Men call for their drinks to deaf ears; someone's dog shits all over the floor; a brawl erupts; someone else knocks out a plug of burning tobacco on a table. His heart begins to race, his skin goes cold.

The table smoulders, smokes, a flame darts to the settle, leaps to the ceiling beams; snow falls, the yard ices over; gales howl round the chimneys, the sound of mobs smashing all the windows fills his ear, there's heavy hammering on the door.
Sarah is running away again
!

He pitches forward, strikes his head on the iron, slumps.

Later they learn from the surgeon that the obelisk is not to blame. It caused a mighty contusion on Sam's forehead but it was his heart that failed. An opinion is expressed that had he known, he would have regretted not dying on his own premises. This is countered by the argument that there's far greater fame in death at the feet of a fine new monument than fizzling out, hugger-mugger at home.

*

Sarah has no time to mourn her father, even if she wanted to. Condoling takes place over coffee dishes, maudlin memories over punch bowls, funerary toasts to the clink of bumpers. She nods to all comments, assures older customers of continuation, gradually warms to a sense of freedom, not as great as when she ran away with Tom, but good all the same, definitely good.

A complex freedom, for she is now quite sure that she is expecting a child and may yet not miscarry. That she didn't bleed for months after Tom's death she'd put down to the shock of losing him and the timelessness that ensued. All days thereafter were the same, meaningless, without form, blurred by grief. The world was empty. Her body mourned him by drying up.

Now she begins to hope. Is relieved she will not need to explain to her father, but as yet tells no one. As her body changes shape, they'll just decide she's getting fat, she thinks.

There is more than ever to do in the coffee house. Sam kept the accounts, paid the waiters, Dick, Mrs Trunkett and the kitchen maid, looked out for holes in the waiters' striped stockings, stains on their waistcoats, admonished impertinence, ordered newspapers, tobacco, replenished drawers of pipes. Sarah absorbs these tasks, hires a girl to take her place behind the bar and feels the prick of reform. The newspapers can stay, she thinks, but she always wanted books in the coffee house, wanted the presence of intellectual matter beyond mere deals, politics and scurrility. She buys volumes for lending out, even hopes they might effect change to some of the more loathsome views she overhears. Tom certainly would have planted pamphlets and books. Oh Tom!