What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  I added that the ‘Washerwoman should be dispensed with for smaller items’, and Mrs Staynes nodded and said she was afraid so. There was a sagging on her face and beneath her eyes that suggested some of these changing circumstances had cost her sleep.

  Cissy said ‘Oh…’ It was clear to all that such washing of smaller items would now fall to the littlest, youngest maid.

  ‘Supplies of non-perishables for the house and kitchen, in the meantime, to be bought in some bulk’. It was agreed very readily, though Mrs Staynes said she would have to consider where these things might be stored. She closed her eyes a long moment. I pressed a blotter to the ink and said that Mrs Staynes should do her considering and would be free, when she was ready, to purchase what she thought best.

  ‘Material for clothing to be bought in bulk, to cover both mourning and general needs into the future, and bedsheets and cloths’ was an addition in general thought most practical, and Cissy suggested ‘A machine for sewing?’ I could not for the moment decide whether this was a practical or an outrageous suggestion, and placed a question mark next to it.

  Then there was a pause. Our womanly faces turned first toward, reluctantly, then from the two men, Albert and Mr Brent. I wrestled with what I fancied must be their mortification. This was, it occurred to me, like the embarrassment felt by the fortunate at and for the unfortunate. The men sat awkward together, almost forgotten on the smaller settee, like two looming wanderers mistakenly in this place, teacups scraping against their saucers and incongruous in their big hands. Mr Brent sat square, stolid, his face inanimate as dumpling so that his thoughts could only be surmised, as was ever the case, even while his attention was apparently concentrated upon each of the women as she spoke. I felt a rising anxiety: Is he angry with us? Is he merely stoical? What are his expectations?

  Albert’s legs, meanwhile, were drawn up close. He was a collection of angles, and bound, clearly, not to look at any of the women at all; not, perhaps, to acknowledge any authority in this woman’s room. He gazed upward by turns at cornices, curtain rod and chandelier. He is galled, clearly, and yet this also so clearly concerns him. He knows his employment will cease with his master’s demise. I saw where he looked and felt, in contrariness perhaps, as if I gathered all these oddments to me, claimed them even as he rejected them for their womanliness. Yes, of all the rooms of this house, it is true, this one is most mine.

  I dipped my nib into the inkwell. We women all agreed (in clumsy bursts, for it was as if the men were eavesdropping, would overhear something that might pain them) that at Mr Hadley’s passing the horses and landau should be sold, if possible, and the money could be set aside for general uses; in unanimous chorus, we agreed that Mr Brent should be given most positive letters of recommendation. The chorus added how much we would miss him. And, too, with much nodding, though there was a sense still of afterthought, that Albert should receive letters of recommendation to aid in his seeking new employment upon Mr Hadley’s eventual demise.

  In any case, there was the tax on male servants to be considered. Mr Gordon’s advice whispered and rasped in my head; and I had once heard Mr Hadley berating Albert with this information, when Albert had forgot some duty or other, that he must not only be paid but must also attract additional taxation. And so, I assumed, a first saving would be best made. The thought brought with it an exquisite twist of guilt and I was of a sudden angry with Mr Gordon. Silly, silly. Not his fault.

  Though I wish I could blame him. Oh, silly.

  There was a creak from Mr Brent as he shifted in his seat.

  Is he mollified? Have we made this easier for him?

  A message was dispatched to Mr Gordon, stating (in general at least) what I intended to purchase immediately. He would not, of course, deem this to be unreasonable, surely, and would, naturally—and as he had undertaken, I insisted to myself, as he had stated, absolutely, would be done for me—underwrite. I mentioned, too, household changes, and further household purchases, that I felt must be made in due course. This message was written and rewritten three times, for I could not at first achieve the correct tone. I wished not to appear imperious (I thought of Gwendolyn); I wished neither to patronise as one might the servants, nor to cringe, as it were, upon the page. And then, of course, I sat for some time wondering if I had forgotten anything that must be mentioned to him.

  ‘How we must plan like field marshals for the least thing!’ I said to Sobriety.

  Mr Brent, having committed my letter to the post, was visiting relatives, a cousin and his wife who lived nearby. The horses would by now be mouthing inside their nosebags while waiting for him outside the cousin’s dwelling.

  Sobriety and I adjusted our attention in the vast emporium lit with windows and lamps hissing in their brackets. Wordless for a stretch of some minutes, we stood and gazed from one end of the space to the other. There were notices and displays and young men and their older supervisors; and women with baskets, fingering lengths of dress material and sturdier material for upholstery and velvet ribbons and satin ribbons and bobbins and cord. There was lace and fabric flowers and trimming frill and naked bonnets awaiting decoration; and netting for the hair, hairpins and hatpins; and buttons and hooks and frogs. We saw lengths for bed sheets and for curtains—plush and brocade as well as plain or flowered prints. Murmurings from customers and assistants, calls and traffic clatter from the street, were all muffled in here, as if bolts of that material had been wound about the head and ears. I had visited here for my marriage, the dress and trousseau, and many items for the decoration of furnishings, but since then had chosen from catalogues, or from samples carried to me by the seamstress.

  It was a vaster and busier place than I recalled, in any case. There was so much movement, so much displayed, so many little scenes of transaction, that I forgot entirely what it had been decided, in my meeting with the household, to buy. Sobriety, too, swung her attention this way and that, eyes too wide for her to be of help.

  At last, there came to us a young man and his supervisor, smiles fixed and hands gloved; employees of this bewildering establishment. I fetched my list once again from my pocket.

  There was indeed on display a machine for sewing, and we had it placed with our parcels, the account to be sent to Mr Gordon (and every argument gathered and detailed, should it be required). Dear God, what am I doing? It was the purchase of this machine, perhaps, that set my fingers to trembling. Ten pounds! My pulse skipped.

  ‘There will be a man come to show us how to use it,’ Sobriety turned to me. ‘After all.’

  ‘That is true.’

  There was a pause, while we gazed at each other. ‘Lord, ma’am,’ Sobriety’s breath was a plosive. ‘We must never spend like that again, surely!’

  ‘Well, Mrs Staynes might, when she buys for the house.’ We each put a hand over our face, and rocked with choked laughter for some minutes, our heads turned away from the other customers.

  I have not laughed in this way since Susan Ford, I thought. I put a gloved finger to my eye, and fanned my face a little with my hand, and took a breath to help the laughter subside.

  The young man came back from the gathering together of our goods for wrapping and delivery, winding his way with self-conscious grace between the aisles. Sobriety gave the separate addresses for delivery of the purchases and the account—the first to the house and the second to Mr Gordon. I stared, unfocussed, at a display of laces. Thoughts of fleeting friendships had left me pensive, for the moment, I realised.

  ‘Luncheon, I think. Where shall we go?’ I said, returning to the present, and Sobriety followed in my billowing wake to the door.

  ‘Mr Brent, it’s early yet. I would like to visit Mr Bazelgette’s works.’ There. It was said.

  I had thought of it at luncheon, fork poised over the cake much boasted of in that small, elegant establishment. We will be much, much too early away home. There is such a bustle here; there
’s no sign of rain. At home there were Mr Hadley’s sagging cheeks, his fustiness, the phlegm clicking in his throat with every shallow breath. The silence there filled the spaces between the creaking of floorboards. We should— I searched in my mind for the means to extend this outing—visit Mr Bazelgette’s works. So many do. I recalled that Mr Hadley himself had been garrulous on the subject, particularly when the Illustrated London News announced in evident relief that ‘spade, shovel, and the pick’ should at last take ‘the place of pens, ink, and debate.’ It was a momentous thing, a huge undertaking; it was change brought about by change, by a city bursting with itself.

  Mr Brent and Sobriety both looked at me, Mr Brent twisted almost all of the way around in his seat as if he would say something. Though, of course, he did not.

  The pause continued until Sobriety said, ‘Really?’

  Later, I considered that my maid had seemed pale, had been so at luncheon, with a dark smudge at each eye as of weariness and its accompanying despondency. But, I confess it, I was not intent on how Sobriety seemed. Indeed, feeling myself the centre of their combined attentions, the combined bewilderment, the combined disapproval, perhaps, of my own servants, I felt a hot surge over my own face and reached back to bring my veil to the front.

  Behind it, I said, ‘These are very important works for the City of London. Many, many women will have come to view them with their husbands.’ I sat up straight. ‘I will view them with you. Hampstead Heath, I think, Mr Brent.’

  ‘Right you are, ma’am,’ Mr Brent said. I glanced at the back of his hat. What is that tone of voice? He turned to the horses and said, ‘Hup!’

  Sobriety brought her own veil forward, and the two of us spent ten minutes in silence, heads turned toward the street, while the horses made their contrapuntal clatter through crowds, smells and stenches, catchcries and chatter.

  ‘We see so little of what the world is doing.’ I still had my

  shadowed eyes toward the street.

  ‘True,’ Sobriety said, and I put back my veil to turn my head from side to side to view the world, while Sobriety sat back a little, as if to rest her head, though there was no support for it there.

  Chapter Ten

  The disappointment was vexing. It is not beautiful, I thought. Gentlemen tend to describe engineering works as things of beauty, and I leaned forward to see where this might be so. I assumed that the site was up ahead, where there was such concentrated digging. There was a line of men, rising and falling with their picks, tiny in the distance and very rhythmic, a human machine. Their labours had despoiled everything about them, and created great mounds of earth.

  We had trotted the horses a very long time up the Haverstock Road to Roslyn Street—to where it became Hampstead’s High Street. The town, like a village in its setting of trees and fields, lay northward along the road. We turned, eventually—after consultation with a man in a dray—along Downshire Hill Road until we passed a tavern and the heath came in sight. Up above, ragged clouds scampered across the sky and left streamers behind them.

  The works took up a wide swathe of the heath. Beyond the digging, all was green, and treed, the scummed ponds to the southeast a home to weeds, reeds, and hardy fowl. Ahead there were the greys and browns of earthworks, the bluish-red of bricks in serried stacks next to a raw, plainly practical rail line which, it was evident, was the way by which the bricks had come. The landau had, however, to stop at some distance from the works, where a track finally gave way to rutted, undefined space inhabited by two other carriages and horses tugging at grass at its edge.

  The clanking of machinery sounded at a distance. I was aware that Mr Brent and Sobriety were waiting; I looked toward the activity and spied a group of frock-coated men, tall hats nodding in conversation. No ladies. And now we—Mr Brent, Sobriety, and I—were here, lurking, too shy to see the works of which all the journals had spoken.

  ‘We should walk over there, to where those gentlemen are,’ I said, since something must be said. We all looked toward the gentlemen, but remained where we were. Absurd. I must move. My cheeks were hot. What a cowardly baby I am.

  It was Sobriety who broke the silence, of course. ‘Mr Brent, would you help us descend?’

  The landau lurched with Mr Brent’s hop to the ground; the carriage door was opened, the steps let down, and we were out, before more thinking could prevent it. Mr Brent led the horses to where they could pass the time feeding on green tufts of their own and drinking from a trough set up for equine visitors. Sobriety said, ‘This ground will not be kind to our skirts,’ and we two slipped gloved hands into slits at our waists and tugged on our porte-jupe strings to hoist our hems away from mud.

  ‘Mr Brent,’ I called, ‘if the horses can do without you, might you like to attend us to view the works?’ And Mr Brent smiled and said, ‘Yes, ma’am, thank you.’ Is he mocking me? I wondered, and then was cross with myself, once again, for my concern at his opinion of me. We—Sobriety and I—made our way over uneven ground, picking through gravel and around puddles in footwear never meant, heaven knows, for fields or worksites. Mr Brent, hands clasped behind his back, stepped and stopped, stepped and stopped, so as to keep a little behind the ladies. But I glanced back—his gaze was concentrated on the workmen and wisps of steam ahead, and so my cheeks cooled in the breeze. Poor man. He does not mock me. He would rather goggle at the foundations without us. I was uncertain if I felt relieved at this, and avoided a small rut. Men are so taken with concrete.

  One of the frock-coated gentlemen we had spied, on our circuitous route over pocks and gravel and muddied patches, was, evidently, some manner of host to visitors. There was much nodding of his top-hatted head, conversational movements of the shoulder, discursive waving of his hand—there, toward the bricks, and there, following the line of the digging works westward. The other hats nodded more slowly and in unison, and followed the gestures of the hand.

  I kicked a small stone away from where it pressed into the ball of my foot even through the sole of my boot. Out here in the open, at this high point on the heath, the breeze had picked up into a light wind, with a cool bite not evident in the city. Our veils streamed behind us; our skirts bobbled and swayed. We each let their arms drop to help weigh down the skirts lest they flip up. There, is this a natural-seeming stance? I had not considered such a wind! We, and Mr Brent, stood a few paces from the main group of men, who now raised hands to anchor their hats.

  The engineer-host, at last, spied his new visitors, bowed his excuses to the knot of gentlemen and came up to us. He was a short man, his waistcoat stretched across his rounded belly. He bent, causing stress upon the buttons of his waistcoat, and offered his hand to shake mine.

  ‘Madam, welcome. Allow me to introduce myself—Selwyn St George, in charge as overseer of these works at Hampstead under Mr Furness, contracted by Mr Bazalgette of the Metropolitian Board of Works, under direction of Parliament.’

  The thought sprang to mind: He has a longer designation than the average baron. I introduced myself, along with Sobriety and Mr Brent.

  ‘Please join these gentlemen, Mrs Hadley, to whom I was just explaining…’

  Mr St George made summary of his explanations so far, how these works were the beginning of a great network, this section running to Old Ford in Stratford; the tunnels would harness local streams, with cleansing effect; would be dug to a depth of around twenty feet and fall four more per mile; used especially-created bricks (he waved to the piles) called Staffordshire Blues; the cement (Portland cement, also especially produced) was being manufactured at temporary works and brought here (he pointed) by temporary railway line.

  After some minutes, Mr St George interrupted himself with a little bow. ‘This is no doubt very dry for ladies. Great works are not always graceful.’ He gave a waggle of his head and one or two of his male audience tucked in their chins and chuckled down at me.

  ‘Not at all.’ I dippe
d my own head. ‘Do go on.’ I have no doubt, I thought, he was less circumspect with his descriptions before I arrived. He might even have mentioned the word ‘sewer’.

  One of the gentlemen asked a question about depth, and Mr St George returned to his recitation. How he drones. My head tipped a little to the side and I looked at Sobriety, whose eyes seemed preternaturally dark with tiredness. Disappointed with the dreariness of this aspect of concrete and bricks and maleness, yet reluctant, still, to end this day’s outing, I thought that twenty more minutes would suffice before we made the return journey home. That would be fair. It would answer all needs, I thought, and sighed a little. The breeze, which was overly cool, tilted the cage beneath my skirt and circled my legs. Perhaps ten minutes. For the moment, as it blew this way, the breeze also brought with it thumpings and unpretty sounds of work, and a whiff of smoke. Mr St George borrowed a cane from another rounded gentleman, whose whiskers now lifted gently to and fro with the movements of the air. The engineer drew a complicated set of lines in the dirt to illustrate, he said, the conjunction of the various parts of the northern drainage. ‘And here…’ he said. Everybody bent forward to watch, except me.

  What—no, who is that?

  I frowned, the better to see. For up ahead, near where the railway embankment was complete over the construction of tunnels, there was a figure, quite alone, making its way in the flapping wind. She—this was a she, with a scarlet skirt dancing in the erratic weather; and a poor person, without bonnet or fashionable shape—was carrying something, clutched close against herself and wrapped tight in blue.

  No, no, not quite blue . . . it is that new colour. Purplish, yet . . .

  Mr St George was scratching still at the ground, with the gentlemen looking on, and Mr Brent behind them, all bent over in concentration. Sobriety stood a little behind Mr Brent, stretching her head to one side to see past shoulders and elbows. I tapped at her arm and spoke in an undertone into her ear.