The Journal of Dora Damage (32 page)

I thought of Din, and the way I got him to kiss me, and what a chaste little kiss it was. I was ashamed of myself. Our minds
keep secrets even from ourselves. Had it really been so obvious to those at Holywell-street? How had they found me out, when
I was still denying it to myself? But now that I lacked the pressures of survival to keep my real feelings at bay and a man
in the Windsor chair – even a sick man who needed nursing like a baby – Din’s absence came crashing in.

I had to work, I decided, just to blot out these worrying revelations bursting inside me like fireworks. I headed for the
new crate, trying not to look at the sewing-frame where he used to sit. But I could not help myself. I ran my fingers along
the wood; I picked up a needle. I tried to remember the gentle words we used to exchange right here. I craved him; now my
belly was filled, I could feel it all the more. It was a different kind of hunger.

I tore myself away from the frame, pulled out a manuscript from the crate, and scanned it to see what treatment it required.
Oh, but it was revolting, too. Revolting, yet deeply sad; poignantly paradoxical, that such literature described the most
intimate thing we could do with another person (or admittedly, people), in the least human of terms. There were no people
in these books, really; only parts. The stories weren’t about union with another at all; they were about individual fantasies,
self-serving indulgences. They weren’t generous or free-spirited or embracing; they sought to exclude, to diminish and dominate.
There was no pleasure, unless it was denied to some as much as it was enjoyed by others. And, as my existence was founded
on my complicity with the production of these texts, what hope for the satisfying emotional life I so craved? You can only
have half of what you desire, my mother would say; and if financial security was the half I was being granted, my emotional
self needed excising.

In the morning, as the parish bells rang and the roads teemed with parishioners who were better dressed than usual, I tried
on my new brown dress, even though it would be a year yet before I could go into half-mourning and wear it. I took off my
cap and cuffs, then slipped out of my smock and chemise. I would not try the corset; the dress was enough of a novelty for
one day. I pulled it on, and reached behind myself. With various configurations of arms up over my shoulder and under round
my waist, I was able to do up enough of the fastenings to see how the dress became me. I pulled the blanket off the Psyche
in the corner of the room, and although I could scarcely see my reflection through the dust on the glass, it was enough to
make me shriek with alarm.

‘What is it, Mama?’ Lucinda came running, tea-cup in one hand and Mossie in the other. ‘Oh! You look – beautiful! Mama! Here,
let me help you.’

Beautiful? Is that how I looked? My neck, shoulders and even all the way down to the rising curve of my tiny breasts were
completely exposed. Aristocratic women might have presented such splendid
décolleté
every evening, and in front of gentlemen too, but I had never felt so undressed. Beautiful? Bony and scrawny, like a sad old
chicken, more like.

‘Mama, look at the blisters on your hands,’ Lucinda said. The finery of the dress threw up my imperfections as my smock never
would. ‘Your shoulders are hunched. Ah, now you are holding them back, like a proper lady. You should wear this all the time.
You look ten feet taller!’

I seized the black-and-purple feather fan, and held it in front of the lower part of my face, with only my eyes peeping over,
and my arm crossed my body to cover my neck and breasts. But such a presentation only served to hint more at the nakedness
beneath. I tried to look only at the dress, and ignore the flesh rising above it. It was designed to be worn over a corset,
the way its curves flexed, but even without a corset I could not deny that my waist looked good in it.

I threw the blanket back over the glass, and in agitation paced over to the window, from where I could see the merry-makers
on their way to church. They were not the habitual faces of Ivy-street; people were passing this way for a festive change,
or had come up to visit family for the day. My eye was drawn to a group of men waiting for their slower companions. Some of
them were smoking; they all looked proudly awkward in their Sunday best, stiff and unfamiliar, and not-quite-gentlemanly.
One of them – a tall, handsome fellow on the edge of the group – saw me looking, and returned my gaze, which I held likewise.
I felt I could stay there for ever, until I realised that someone might stop and look where he was looking, and see me, and
judge me for a brazen hussy. I left the window sharply, and came back to Lucinda, but his eyes were still in mine.

I am no longer waiting for my life to begin, I thought, before being seized with a vast sense of abhorrence at myself. A woman
in mourning, indeed. I fiddled at the fastenings down my back, and barked at Lucinda to help me, and only felt a lightening
when the silk cascaded down to my ankles. I took my chemise and my black dress from the peg, and wriggled into them, my new
old skin. I pinned up my hair and pulled on my veil, and my old worn boots, and seized Lucinda’s hand, and headed out of the
house to join the throngs of church-goers.

I sang the hymns with gusto, as if volume would drown out the rising confusion in my breast, listened intently to the Christmas
sermon, nodded at the urgings to charity, and rested my eyes on the evergreen boughs bedecking every arch, window and ledge,
as if they might provide me with something on which I could ground my shaky sense of self. I scarcely noticed that my ‘Merry
Christmas’s to Mrs Eeles and Billy, Nora Negley and husband, Patience Bishop and her two sons and their wives and children,
and Agatha Marrow and countless relatives, were all shunned or met with frost and pursed lips. For nothing seemed regular
to me today. I had not recognised the face that stared back at me from behind the fan in the Psyche. Who was this terrible
woman, I kept thinking, who dishonoured her sex, and betrayed her deceased husband and invalid child, by abandoning her position
as the refuge, the balm, the angel in the house? I, who had once been a kept wife, was now an enterprising businesswoman,
yet my business was illegal, immoral, and disrespectful to women, and any sense of freedom I was feeling at being the breadwinner
was skilfully negated by the inescapable traps constructed by the
obsceniteurs
, which bound me inexorably to them through their knowledge of Lucinda’s condition and my ambiguous status. At least I no
longer had the challenge of finding a way to bind Din to both me and them, but it was not a finding I wished to share with
them.

Furthermore, I was not a lady, although I was being dressed like one, at the behest of the richest
roués
of London town; I felt no shame at flirting with a strange man wandering through Waterloo on Christmas morning, and was finding
myself drawn to a mysterious, and black, former slave. The Noble Savages must have been having a good laugh at my expense,
as if I were some botched Galatea. I knew full well that the rest of the upper ten thousand wouldn’t look at me for a fraction
of a second, so why should Knightley and Glidewell take such interest in me, and dress me so? I was further away from the
ladies these men sojourned with than the wilds of Africa, and far less interesting. The thought of who I became when I put
on that brown dress appalled me.

But, I thought, as I sang praises for the birth of our Saviour, I would not be vanquished by what was also feeding me. We
best seek the resurrection, not the tomb, I reminded myself, although I would not try telling that to Mrs Eeles.

I did not hurry home after the service; on this sacred day, I felt that my house was more than ever an unholy temple of vice
and vanity. Savonarola would have rampaged through it: not only the crates of books that lined every wall, but also my fine
dress, my corset, the luxuries that were strewn across every room while I wondered where to put them. Savonarola burnt everything
– not just books and art, but mirrors, cosmetics, dresses – and in the end, he was burnt too. Burn or be burnt; what we think
we are choosing comes back on us in ways we cannot imagine.

Lucinda and I warmed the goose and stuffing, roasted some potatoes, cooked some carrots and parsnips, and opened a bottle
of wine, and as we sat around the table, we managed to make merry. It was a warm place to be, and in so many ways a safer,
prouder day than last Christmas, despite our poor dear Peter. But we couldn’t help but laugh as I told Lucinda about our first
Christmas in Ivy-street, when Patience Bishop had just been bereaved, and we took her round some meat and dumplings, and Nora
Negley had drunk too much gin and wouldn’t stop singing ‘Lipey Solomons, the Honest Jew Pedlar’, and Mrs Eeles kissed Peter
under the mistletoe. Lucinda was laughing so much she got hiccoughs, so I poured the dregs of the wine into her little tea-set,
and I let her have a few sips, and we tickled each other and sleepily sang Christmas carols, until I took her to bed with
her protestations that it had been the best Christmas ever, although she hoped the ghost of her papa would not hear her say
that from down the line at Woking.

The brown dress lying on the bed mocked me. Little Miss Jackie Jump-Up, it teased, as I folded it up and laid it in the ottoman,
in the space left by my weeping-veil. Think yourself the lady, do you? And even when you are out of full mourning, when, now
that you are banned from Holywell-street and confined to the workshop and home, do you think you will possibly wear me?

Once the house was still, I was left alone with my emptiness – which I wanted to be filled only by one man – and my compulsion
to work to fill the space instead. I went to the workshop, lit a solitary candle, and worked until midnight.

Boxing Day brought the usual procession of dustmen, watermen, grocers’ boys, post-boys, coalmen, and lamplighters all begging
their Christmas boxes, and I was glad not to have to turn even one away. And after lunch on the twenty-seventh, when Pansy
and Din were busy at their work once more, I left Lucinda playing in the parlour, gathered my shawl and veil, and finally
set off to find Jack’s mother.

Without a single look at the sharp eyes glinting at me from behind windows and door-curtains, I walked north-east, towards
the river. I wondered if this was the route Din had taken when I sent him to find out what had happened to Jack the day Peter
died. I tried to think of my dear husband, but, cruelly, my thoughts kept wandering back to Din, Din here in these streets,
Din here on my cheek, until eventually I came to 13a Howley Place, as Din would have done, and saw these same squat little
houses with broken windows and paintwork that had peeled so much one could scarce tell what the original colour had been.
There were ragamuffins sitting outside these houses in the street. The door to Lizzie’s home was wide open despite the cold,
so I called inside.

Out from the shadows came a wizened and pinched woman, like a thread of grey dust that had been wafted upright by a breeze.
Her eyes were sad and sunken; everything about her was meagre.

‘I wondered when you’d come,’ she said, as I lifted my veil. Her lack of teeth was only revealed when she spoke, for she never
smiled. ‘Should’ve gone and told you meself,’ she said. ‘But it’s been busy, with the little ones, and Jack gone and lost
us his money. Cou’n’t tell the darkie, no matter what Jack said about him. Cou’n’t bring meself to.’

‘That’s all right, Lizzie. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. It’s not that I didn’t care – I’ve been worried sick – but I haven’t
had a moment, what with Peter dying so sudden and . . .’

‘I’m ever so sorry about that.’

‘Thank you. It was strange, not having Jack at the funeral. Is he in trouble?’

‘Come in. I’ll tell ya all about it.’

She led me inside, into a room that had scarcely any plaster left on the walls, and that smelt of rotting floorboards, rising
damp, and decay. A dozen bright eyes peered from the stairs from dirty little faces, most no bigger than Lucinda, although
I knew some were older. There was one chair in the room, and two little three-legged stools.

‘Sit down,’ Lizzie said to me.

‘No, you have the chair, Lizzie. You look weary.’

We both remained standing in the end. The floor was so uneven, due to sinking walls, I felt like a sailor in need of my sea-legs.
‘So tell me, Lizzie.’

‘We didn’t know it ourselves for a while. Should’ve seen the signs. Should’ve. Good thing Dan isn’t ’ere no more, ’e’d have
brained ’im, straight off. Dan would’ve killed that boy, I’m tellin’ ya. That’s summink to be grateful for, I s’pose.’

‘Why would he have killed him? What’s he done?’

‘That night, when he left yours. He was arrested, right on the door-step.’

‘On what charge?’

‘Ugh, Mrs D, that’s where it ’its ’ard.’

‘Has he gone down for it, whatever it was?’

‘Hasn’t gone to trial, yet, but ’e ain’t got a hope. Ten years, I’ve bin told. Ten years, ’e’s gonna get.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you what for?’

She sighed deeply, as if what she was about to say might kill her off finally, and slowly and heavily raised the middle finger
of her left hand, which she curled upwards, and then made a sudden jerking movement upward with it. And then I knew, without
any doubt, and years of not knowing all flooded with meaning.

Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nomi-nandum
, as I had read in a thousand texts.

‘Ten years!’

‘Ten years. Still, could’ve been worse. If it’d been a year ago ’e would’ve been ’ung!’ Her voice was rising, and her hands
lifted like shabby angels’ wings, as if for all the world she were about to ascend to reach her maker, along with her voice.

‘No, Lizzie, they wouldn’t have done, I promise you.’ I grabbed her arms and brought them down again, and held her hands to
my chest.

‘’Swot I was told by the Shiv,’ she said.

‘Who’s he?’