People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘Scotland,’ I said. ‘They were from Fife.’

  ‘Scotland!’ she scoffed. ‘Really? I had no idea you were a Scot.’

  ‘I’m not. I was born in England, my father was… English.’ I was anxious not to be drawn further into this and have my story unravel, so I turned the conversation around. ‘What about you, Mrs Wiggs? Where do you come from?’

  Without thinking, I turned around to look up at her. She took my temples firmly in her hands and swivelled my head back to face the mirror.

  ‘Oh, here and there,’ she said, tugging at my hair again, making my eyes water.

  ‘You must have been born in a single place.’

  ‘Bristol,’ she said, and that was the end of that particular conversation. I sensed I was not the only one being intentionally vague about her origins.

  ‘Scots! I had no idea!’ she said again. ‘I should think they were Moors, going by your hair.’ She sighed. ‘It’s going to be very difficult to do anything elegant with this, Mrs Lancaster.’

  By the time she’d finished, it was up on the very top of my head, a great pile of ringlets, but flat at the sides and the back. I looked more ewe than woman. That wasn’t the worst: she then took to my wardrobe like a plague of moths. She pulled out each dress in turn, held it aloft with a furrowed brow, as if by examining it more closely it might improve, replaced it, sighed, and went on to the next one. Soon she was uttering unintelligible mutterings. When she finally settled on the dress she found the least offensive, I had to laugh, because it was green – pale pistachio green – the very colour Aisling said made me look like a consumptive on the cusp of death. The kind that rattles, like they’re sucking on an empty bottle through a straw. The ones you wish would hurry up and die.

  I agreed to wear it, purely to put an end to the whole ordeal and to please Mrs Wiggs. I hoped that Thomas would be like most men and not notice what colour did what to my complexion.

  I had a headache by the time dinner was served. When I sat down at the table, Thomas gawped at me with a horrified expression.

  ‘What on earth have you done to your hair?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off me and putting his napkin on his lap with his mouth open.

  ‘I thought I would try something different. Do you like it?’

  ‘No, Susannah, I do not. It’s far too high. I’ll look quite the circus freak standing next to you – people will think me a dwarf. And for a person who has a very slim face, it somehow makes yours appear round, as round as a pie.’

  I felt ridiculous, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Mrs Wiggs had done this on purpose. Or if she was simply clueless and I was stupid for asking.

  We carried on with dinner. I was determined to make the evening a good one, even if it had got off to a bad start.

  But then he said, ‘You look a little off-colour – greenish. Do you feel well?’

  ‘This bloody dress,’ I muttered under my breath, throwing my napkin down and sitting back.

  ‘I beg your pardon? What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, Thomas. I said nothing.’

  The greenish tinge to my skin was my cue to embark on the subject the whole evening was balanced on.

  ‘I have been feeling a little off-colour over the last few days.’

  ‘Really? What’s wrong? How fortunate that you have married a doctor. How can I be of service, Chapman?’

  I had no eloquent way of broaching the delicate subject, so I plunged in and hoped my tongue would stumble across its own plan. ‘I think I may be… I have momentarily ceased to be unwell of late,’ I said, and hoped he understood.

  His reaction was not what I expected. It sucked the air right out of his lungs, and his face dropped into a long grey tombstone. He kept blinking his eyelids as if he were a broken puppet.

  ‘Thomas?’ I prompted.

  The silence went on so long, I bent forward and tried to take his hand, but he snatched it away before I could reach it, which made me jump.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, and slammed his palm down on the table.

  He sat there with a vein throbbing in his forehead and his fists clenched and for a minute I thought he might throw something. I had never seen him like that before.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, in a voice as thin as reeds.

  ‘Nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Nothing. I need to think.’

  He stood up and exited the room, leaving me at the table wondering how a whole day of careful planning had gone so wrong. I felt such a clumsy stranger. Whatever I did or said, it seemed I was cursed to make mistakes.

  *

  Thomas didn’t say it, but I could tell he blamed me, as if I had conjured up by witchcraft a working womb by which to ruin everything. Then, a few days later, when everything returned, I was in a rush to tell him how it had been a mistake, a miscalculation, the upset to my routine brought on by the disruption of my new circumstances. I thought he would be relieved, but instead he was angry all over again. Albeit not so explosively. This time, his immediate concern was what others would think.

  ‘But I’ve told people at the hospital I’m going to be a father. Dr Treives even congratulated me when he heard the news! How embarrassing. Well… we shall have to say there was an accident, that you fell down the stairs.’

  ‘I didn’t think for a moment you would tell anyone,’ I said. I had been under the impression that I could appeal to his reason, but one of the many lessons I would learn is that marriage is often a barren landscape, devoid of logic and reason. As it was in this case, it seemed.

  ‘This is just like you, Susannah!’ he shouted. ‘You are always so dramatic. In future, you should wait until you are sure before telling me such a thing. Why bother me with these female matters anyway? You know what everyone will think—’

  I was entirely unprepared for what came next.

  ‘—that you are too old for me. People will laugh at us. Honestly, Susannah, so much fuss over nothing, all caused by your insatiable need for attention. I could really do without the… the chaos of your imagination.’

  I was upset and started crying. He told me I was hysterical. This from the man who’d been upset I might be expecting and then upset that I wasn’t. We had been married a matter of weeks and I was already confused by his behaviour. But I would forgive him. In fact I would fawn over him, eager to do anything to make peace between us.

  Dr Thomas Lancaster was six foot two and elegant, unlike so many tall men who are a mass of knees and elbows. He would glide into a room, shoulders back, as if he were about to dance with every woman in it. I was five foot nine in bare feet and had spent my entire life hunched over in an effort not to loom over other girls. He was twenty-five, five years younger than me, and I was extremely conscious of this. There had been glimpses of what you might call immaturity before our marriage, but flaws are an expensive habit and Thomas Lancaster could afford them.

  I accepted the blows about my age and my imaginary dramatics, the jibes about my deficient grooming, the criticism of my education and lack of feminine instinct in all things, because when Thomas entered a space, everything was drawn to him; even the furniture turned inches. He had this way of making you feel like an exquisite thing, a rarity on earth, that it was you and not him who was mesmerising. When he left, he dragged that sense away with him. Without his attention, I was ordinary and dull again.

  Everything was my fault, it had to be, and I would fix it. I’d had to learn how to be a nurse; I could learn how to be a wife. I had come to think of life as a ladder made of silk thread that floated on air, barely visible, and like a spider’s web only caught the light in places. I was pulling myself up rung by rung, and yet it would take just one badly placed foot and I would plummet all the way to the bottom, to the workhouse or worse. My world, when I met Thomas, had been without hope, and he had offered me an escape. That fact alone demanded some loyalty, did it not? I’d still be stuck at the hospital if he hadn’t picked me.

  *

  My mother was an unmarried girl of s
ixteen when she had me, and for the first few years of my childhood, until she died, she and I lived in Whitechapel in a single room on Dorset Street, within the fetid maze of dark alleyways and courts called the Nichol. This was one of several details about my past that I had declined to furnish Thomas with. As far as I was aware, I was the only person left alive who knew of my insalubrious start.

  It would be fair to say that Whitechapel had developed into an embarrassing boil on the backside of London, which had a habit of pulling up its trousers and pretending it wasn’t there. England’s capital was the richest and most powerful city in the world, but you’d never know it going by neighbourhoods like Whitechapel. Throngs of fortune-seekers poured into London from every corner of the country and from the far reaches of the empire beyond – the Irish in a continuous dribble that ebbed and flowed, the Jews fleeing pogroms, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, the merchants – and the undesirables among them drifted east, to Whitechapel, like the waste sent out on the tide at Crossness. My mother too. The rich tarred us native poor of England as lazy and inept, but regardless of the truth or otherwise in that, we unfortunates had nowhere else to go and so we piled up on top of each other in the East End as if driven into a wall.

  If Whitechapel was the worst of London, the thirty lanes and courts of the Nichol were the worst of Whitechapel. The parishes of these parts didn’t have shitrakers, because tenants couldn’t pay, and nor could we afford lighting, so the streets were deep in foul-smelling rubbish and swilling with blood and urine from the tanneries and abattoirs. At night it was a lawless, pitch-black wilderness. The terraced buildings were dry and brittle on the outside and dank and swollen inside. They were crammed to bursting: a single terrace would have sixty or seventy residents, with every adult paying an extortionate rent as a percentage of their pathetic earnings. Many had more than one family sharing a room, with only a hung sheet to separate them. Adults and children slept naked like fish in a bucket; babies were made and waste was excreted all in the same room. Rotten staircases and ceilings collapsed and the wallpaper rippled with vermin. Some lived in inches of filthy water in the flooded cellars, breathing in bacteria and disease. Everywhere stank, thick with the stench of sweat and shit and whatever odour came with the trade of that court’s inhabitants: phosphorus, smoked fish, meat. Windows were either black with coal dust or broken and patched up with sacking or newspaper. Not that anyone ever opened them, as the reek from outside was worse. A few years living like that and our lungs never recovered. Little wonder that reaching thirty years of age was considered an achievement.

  Strange to say, but the putrid terraces of the Nichol and the other Whitechapel slums were the most profitable in London. So many tenants, and so few improvements ever made. The better classes bemoaned our depravity and fecklessness and yet the buildings were owned by the very pontificating politicians, clergymen and lawmakers that professed to serve those they so despised. Such was the bleak existence I considered myself fortunate to have escaped. I could never be sure what was a real memory or what my imagination had created, but I knew some things, because my grandfather told me, although I didn’t dare utter a single word to a soul about my mother, not until much later. Born a bastard, I was lucky to be taken in by my grandparents.

  I have no memory of my father and not a clue what type of man he was. My grandmother said he was a gypsy, or a hawker or a navvy, whatever she felt would shame me into obedience; either way, he was not a good man. If anyone ever asked how I came to live with my grandparents, I was taught to say that my parents had died of scarlet fever. I was trained to repeat it, like a mynah bird, and no polite person ever asked more than that.

  When my grandmother died, I was left her modest house in Reading with the perennial rat problem, and a small sum of money. Her solicitor, Mr Radcliffe, did honestly by me, but the legacy was not enough to live on and I needed an income, so I became a nurse. I was after a means to support myself and a skilled profession, which was how I found myself back in Whitechapel once again, this time at the London Hospital. We nurses did not live in the slum terraces of the Nichol, but our patients did. Caring for them was not without its dangers, as I was to discover. It was common to lose nurses during an epidemic, for we spent our lives inches from infection with little protection other than our own good practices in hygiene. Also, our patients could be violent.

  I hadn’t envisaged for a second being swept up in what I was to find at the London. I met Aisling, and for a while was living a life I had no idea existed let alone dared imagine. I was happy. It is a cruel trick that God made me learn such a lesson and then had it end so quickly. I certainly hadn’t intended to find a husband, although many women came to nursing with that in mind, much to Matron’s annoyance. She tried to sift out the starry-eyed nymphs on the hunt for wounded officers, but that was not in my plan.

  Unless you come from wealth in England, you can only float above the fate of the poor, mere inches away from it yourself. You are on your own in this world; I accept that. It’s not to say there isn’t money rolling about and lots of it; it just stays in the same old families. The trick is to take some for yourself, and to do that you must be willing to play outside the rules. I have observed that life treats you more fairly if you come from a little money.

  You must play the hand you are dealt and take the opportunities that present themselves, and present himself Dr Thomas Lancaster did. Who was I to reject God’s plan?

  5

  I was engaged in teaching paying probationers at the London when I saw the man who would become my husband for the first time. My mood at that point was very low – so low that even Matron had taken note and in an act of mercy had moved me off frontline nursing and sent me to instruct the paying probationers in routine tasks. I missed Aisling. I was alone. I had come to London for freedom and a living and found much more than I had bargained on. But now that was gone. It really was better to be ignorant of something than to be painfully conscious of what I lacked. I was happier when I didn’t understand I was lonely; now I was bereft.

  I had imagined that nursing would be exciting and rewarding, but I did not feel like a pioneer: it was more hernias and bedpans than adventure. I felt trapped by an invisible straitjacket, choked by thick black fog. I could not see any choices ahead of me, and yet they had to be there. I only knew to walk through my little existence, behaving as expected, while life passed me by. I’d spent most of it being such a good girl, waiting to be rewarded, and now I had the sudden realisation I was waiting for something that would never come.

  With Aisling gone, my life felt so hollow and meaningless that ideas of ending it crept in. The thoughts came rapidly and uninvited, crawling up and whispering sweetly in my ear, a gentle oiling to an idea in the absence of any other. I wondered how much it would hurt if I jumped from Tower Bridge, late at night so no one would see me, if the water would be very cold, and how long it would take to die. One afternoon, an open window on one of the wards had sucked the curtain out. I went to pull it back and thought how easy it would be to throw myself out. I could already picture myself on the ground, smashed and broken, a bloody bag of sticks, free of the perpetual fear as to what would become of me.

  Teaching a roomful of girls the principles of bandaging and how to pad splints and prepare surgical dressings required minimal physical effort and very little emotional investment, which was perfect as far as I was concerned. Paying probationers were the moonfaced girls from middle- and upper-middle-class families who could afford to shell out for training. They tended to be plain and doughy, with thick middles and nondescript features. When all clustered together and gawping at me, it was much like giving a lecture to a heap of boiled potatoes. They were the odd sisters from affluent families, devoid of obvious charm; they couldn’t sing, made clumsy dancers, and were in the habit of excitedly correcting each other. Lonely girls who clumped together, like bristles on a hairbrush. In other times they would have been sent to the convent. They reminded me of myself, which w
as why I found it hard to be kind to them, but they were a profitable source of income for the hospital. Once qualified, they would become the private nurses of aristocrats or other moneyed patients. The normal girls, like Aisling and myself, had to remain at the hospital for at least four years after training, and I was still in my first year. The thought of another three was overwhelming. The other option, of course, would be to get myself dismissed. I wasn’t keen on that idea; the thought of being branded a failure, even voluntarily, was not something my pride could bear.

  On this particular morning, I had the potatoes gathered around an empty bed and had started to lecture them on how to give a bedridden patient a bath when I became aware of two men at the back of the group who were chattering away as I tried to give the lesson. Distracted by their low voices rumbling under my own, my temper rose. How rude and typical of doctors to disrupt something they had not been invited to. I kept throwing them stern looks, but they carried on, oblivious. I recognised one as a hospital governor, but the other, younger and taller, I didn’t recognise at all. When he burst out laughing and every one of the girls turned to look and started giggling, simply because they were in the proximity of a young man, I was furious.

  ‘Sirs,’ I said, ‘how fortunate it is that you have joined us. We were about to discuss the principles of bed washing, and as you can see, our bed is empty. Perhaps one of you kind gentlemen will volunteer?’ I patted the taut sheets.

  There were gasps and twitching shoulders and my own cheeks began to burn. I had felt braver when the words were inside my head. The governor, an older man with an ostentatious waistcoat and a round stomach, flushed a deep purple and shuffled off, but the younger man didn’t seem embarrassed at all. He laughed along with the girls, seemingly enjoying the attention, and stood with both hands in his pockets, which I thought incredibly rude. He struck me as obnoxious and arrogant, and his broad smile showed far too many teeth, like a prehistoric exhibit at the museum.