The Town House (21 page)

When she stopped it was like waking from a dream in which you are warm and full-fed, to find yourself cold and hungry again. We all three let out our breath in a great sigh.

She went and stood by the wall, breathing quickly and lightly. Then I could move my eyes. And just for once I saw Martin’s stern thin face and Pert Tom’s fat stupid one wearing the same look of naked lust.

The girl spoke first.

‘You like?’ She lowered the hand which held the tambourine and it gave a little tinkle, like the echo of the question. She dropped against the wall, hunching her shoulders.

‘By my mother I dance like a pig. When my mother danced, when she ceased, men wept with the pain of it.’

Pert Tom got up and blundered out of the house, leaving the door open; the cool air, faintly scented with hay, flowed in.

All very well for him, I thought; he can go and find his red-haired baggage; Martin has his empty room, with tally sticks for company.

But Martin stood up and said,

‘You know, you’ve never told us your name.’

‘Is Magda.’

‘Magda.’ He repeated the name which was as strange as everything else about her, as though it pleased him. He said, ‘We could do with a breath of air, too.’ He went towards the door and it seemed to me that he moved more lightly, more freely, leaning less to his limp than usual. She followed him, I thought unwillingly.

That evening they weren’t out an hour, all told. I was just in bed when they came in quietly, said good night and went to their separate beds. I thought to myself – Well, that’s over; he’s had his will of her and proved to himself that he can so far forget Kate as to go with another woman and now if she’ll just take herself off, everything will be all right.

In the morning, quite early she did go off, with her tambourine; but she was back, just before supper.

‘So you’ve come back,’ I said.

‘You think I will not?’ She squinted her eyes at me. ‘Martin, he is the master here, is it not? he says I am welcome. Tonight I shall dance again.’

‘Dancing! That’s all you think about.’

‘Yes and yes and yes. I have danced today. Look,’ she held out her long hand and showed me some coins in its palm. ‘I am not needing it, no supper to pay for. You can have it.’ She walked up to me and tried to put the money in my hand. I backed as though she had offered me something red-hot.

‘I don’t want your money. Save it and buy yourself a shift!’

She surprised me by giving one of the deepest, heaviest sighs I ever heard a human being give though I’d heard the like from donkeys, already overladen when something else was added to their load.

‘A shift, a petticoat and shoes. And every night the certain supper and the bed. It is much.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Things to
have
. Me, I have wanted only to
be.
’

‘Be what?’

‘Such good dancer as my mother.’

I said, almost against my will, ‘I fail to see how she could have been better than you were last night. I’ve seen a lot of dancers in my time but I never saw anybody dance like you.’

Something lit up in her face; she flung herself at me and would have hugged me, but again I backed away, this time almost into the fire.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

‘You are not liking to be touched. Me too, but with men only.’

‘Then you go the wrong way about,’ I said. ‘Any man watching you dance is bound to want to get his hands on you.’

‘But I am not dancing for men to desire me. I am not dancing to be paid. Enough for supper and new ribbons for my tambourine sometimes. And now a new comb.’

‘Then why do you do it?’

‘Because…’ she paused, smiled, shook her head. ‘There is no because. To dance I am born, so I dance.’

‘To me that sounds daft.’

‘Must everything be because? There is a poppy, very red, beside the road for just one day. Because? Is a red poppy. No good for eating. You pluck him, he falls to pieces. Is enough for a poppy just to
be
a red poppy. And so with me.’

I couldn’t find an answer except – Poppies aren’t people and people aren’t poppies – and that, because it sounded quite as daft as anything she had said, I wouldn’t say.

That evening I didn’t stay to see her dance. I went and had a little gossip with Peg-Leg. We spoke of this and that, and of the girl who’d come into the house and I mentioned what Pert Tom had said about Martin being likely to marry her.

‘He might at that,’ Peg-Leg said. ‘Once I sailed with a man that had a monkey; he was more set on that monkey than most men are on their wives. Then it died and his heart broke. A month or two after we sailed into Tangier where there was plenty of monkeys, cheap. I said to him, “Why’n’t you get yourself a new monkey?” He turned white as a sheet and he said, “I’ll never have another monkey as long as I live.” But …’ Peg-Leg paused and wagged a finger at me. ‘We went into Naples and there on the quay was a cat, terrible looking, bones sticking out and mangy all over. He took to that and within a week was as fond of it as he had been of his monkey. See? We did no good with Jenny and Kitty, they was decent, homekeeping little bodies, they just called Kate to mind. This, by all accounts is quite another pair of shoes.’

‘What do you know of her, barring what I’ve told you?’

‘I seen her,’ he said simply. ‘And I was told she was dancing and prancing and shaking a tambourine in the Market Place today. Can you see Kate doing that?’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said,‘if I thought she’d make him happy.’

‘I don’t reckon’, Peg-Leg said slowly, ‘that men look to women to make them
happy.
Martin had Kate and they got on better than most, but when they wouldn’t have him in the Guild, and then, later on, you remember when he broke his leg and Webster sacked him – you couldn’t say he was
happy,
could you? Holy Mother, he was miserable as sin.’ He broke off and rapped his wooden leg with his knuckles. ‘Meaning no offence, Agnes, you having been a woman once, women set theirselves a
bit too high. Could somebody come along to me and ask which would I rather, the Queen of Sheba in my bed, or my leg back and be at sea again, I know which I’d say.’

‘Ah, that is because you’re old.’

‘Old! God’s blood, how old do you think I am? I’m forty. I’d just turned twenty-four when I was beached.’

I’d always thought of him as being an old man.

‘Don’t you go fretting yourself over Martin,’ he said,‘He’s got his business. All he needs now is a boy to bring up in the trade, and he can as easy get that out of a slut as out of a mim little wench that couldn’t say boo to a goose.’

That at least was true, and I felt my heart lighten a bit.

‘Maybe I’d better start fretting about myself for a change,’ I said. ‘Peg-Leg, if Martin should marry her, I couldn’t stay in the house. The other night she brought in a hedgehog and I said she wasn’t cooking it in
my
pots. They’ll be
her
pots. Everything will be hers, to use and handle. I couldn’t bear it. Could I come and turn in with you for a bit?’

‘I reckon so.’ He looked round the snug little hut. ‘Since I took up work again I’ve let my mending go.’ Like all sailors he’d been handy with a needle. ‘You could stitch me up. And it’d be nice to find the fire going when I got home. You’d have to bring your own bed.’

So I found myself a hole to run to if the moment of need should come.

It came, three or four days later, when Martin said to me, in his abrupt way,

‘I’m going to marry Magda.’

‘I hope you’ll be happy,’ I said; and I meant it. ‘There’s one thing you should know, Martin – or maybe she told you. …’

‘What?’

‘They say she’s a witch and was being swum that day you found her.’

‘I knew that. As soon as I’d choked the water out of her I cut the cord. I’d seen one swum before.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

‘I don’t care what she is. She’s the only woman … Who told you it was being said?’

‘Pert Tom.’

‘You can tell him to keep his mouth shut.’

‘Oh, she did that, threatened to make his tongue drop out of something.’

Martin laughed. I thought to myself, Peg-Leg can say what he likes, a woman can make a man happy or miserable, already Martin is a different man.

‘There’s one other thing. I told you some time back this was all getting too much for me. You remember? I think now would be the time for me to go. When’s the wedding to be?’

‘This day three weeks.’

‘Well now, there’s Dummy’s Mary. She’s crooked, but she’s as strong as a donkey for all that, and she often hangs around watching me work and helping a bit. If I got her in and showed her how things should be. Then there’d be a new mistress and a new maid and that is the best way.’

‘Maybe. Where’d you go?’

‘I should go and look after Peg-Leg.’

‘I always meant you to end your days by my fire, with your feet under my table, Agnes. But then I never thought …’

‘But for you Peg-Leg wouldn’t have a roof or a fire, so it come to much the same thing.’

‘In a way, I suppose. And we’d send your food across.’

Stuff she’d have clawed over.

‘I’d sooner manage on my own.’

‘Please yourself. You can have what money you want.’

‘That’s kind. And any day I feel up to it, I’ll go in the shed and pick wool for a spell to help earn.…’

He gave me a very black look and said,

‘If you think that’s easy!’ He swung on his heel and limped away. I thought for a moment that he had seen through my excuse for leaving and was annoyed, yet he hadn’t been earlier when I said I was going. It took me a moment or two to realize that Kate had picked wool at Webster’s, and this was no moment to remind him of her.

Pert Tom had his excuse for getting out all ready to his hand. All these years he’d held on to his bear and been fairly regular about feeding it and putting it through its tricks. Once, when he was grumbling about what the animal cost to keep I asked him why he didn’t sell it.

‘Easy come, easy go,’ he said, ‘and maybe one of these days Martin’ll bite off more than he can chew. First he hev a forge, then he hev a row of stables, then he hev a wool business. Grant he’ve been lucky, but build a thing too high and it’ll topple over. If it do, then out on the road we go, Owd Muscovy and me, and no worse off than we was.’

‘Except that you’d have lost your savings.’ We’d been given to understand that it was Pert Tom’s money that had started the business in the first place.

Pert Tom laughed. ‘Ah yes, them savings! Well, they wasn’t all that much, and I’ve had years of soft living. And shall do, till Martin overreach hisself.’

‘If you think he’s overreaching himself you should warn him. You’re supposed to be his partner.’

‘I hate wasting me breath,’ he said. But he had held on to the bear; and when he heard about the marriage being so near he said to Martin,

‘I allus promised meself one more summer on the road and if I don’t go soon I shall be too owd. And you’ll like the place to yourselves to start off with.’

To me he said,‘I give it a month, but a month alongside her is more’n I can manage. Half the time I’m frit of her and the other half I’m itching arter her and I don’t know which is worst.’

‘What’ll you do if it lasts more than a month?’

‘It can’t. I towd you, they can’t stay in one place more’n a month without sickening. I shall be back in five-six weeks, according to the weather, and you’ll see, she’ll be gone.’

‘Daft talk,’ I said. ‘In five-six weeks she may be three weeks gone in another fashion. I surely hope so.’

He didn’t even stay for the wedding, so he missed the feast Martin gave to everybody on the place. He had an ox roasted in the yard and there was all the ale we could drink and plenty over. Even Martin who’d never, in all the time I’d known him, taken a drop too much, was tipsy as soon as anyone.

Magda, for the wedding had a dress, very costly, of crimson silk so dark it was almost black, she had shoes on her feet and her hair knotted up and fastened with a pair of silver pins. That way, she looked ordinary and decent, her skin very sallow between the dark of the dress and the dark of her hair; and she had none of a bride’s happiness. She looked so downcast that I wondered if the shoes were causing her pain.

We put them to bed in proper style and I myself put the salt and the handful of barley at the four corners, to make sure that they would be fruitful.

Peg-Leg was easy-going and I was comfortable enough with him, but for me everything seemed out of joint. I missed seeing Martin and seeing to him, feeling as mothers do when their sons marry and move away. I got into the habit of waiting about the yard just to catch a glimpse of him, judging from the way he looked and the way he walked, whether things were going well. One morning, not long after they were married he came out of the house and went towards the stables whistling, and I could have cried with joy. Immediately after I could have cried with rage at myself for
letting such a daft fancy put me out of the house and out of his life. One day there’d be a baby there, his baby, and I should have no part in it. I was like a woman who, hungry as she may be, can’t go to her own bread crock because a spider is sitting beside it.

Dummy’s Mary was so grateful to me for getting her the job and training her to it, that she was like a dog; she often used to come round to have a bit of a gossip and ask my advice on this and that. She told me that the mistress did nothing in the house at all, still ate only once a day and spent hours in Tom’s empty room, playing the tambourine and dancing, all by herself. Martin had put his foot down about her dancing in the town and threatened, if she disobeyed him, to take away her tambourine.

‘He should stop her dancing altogether,’ I said, when Mary told me this,‘rattling her insides about that fashion, how can she hope to breed?’

Another time, a little later, Mary reported that the mistress had a cough, which she said was because she was indoors so much.

‘She’s not hobbled or chained,’ I said. ‘She could do a bit in the garden. The lavender isn’t even cut this year yet, and the pea haulms yellowing where they stand. And couldn’t she walk into market, like any other housewife?’