People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘You do yourself an injustice. You talk as if you are as old as Matron.’

  ‘I’m older than you.’

  ‘Only by a little.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I’m twenty-five.’

  ‘You look twelve. Besides, what about your family? They’ll never allow it. I’m sure your mother would be overjoyed to hear that her son has asked a lower-class nurse five years his senior to be his wife. I grew up in the Salvation Army, Dr Lancaster, crashing cymbals and having vegetables thrown at my head by drunks, so forgive me for being dubious as to why a surgeon would consider me his belle.’

  I got up from his bed in a temper and walked to the mirror to smooth my hair and clothes from where his rummaging had disturbed them.

  ‘I am too old and bitter,’ I told him. ‘Better to spend your pretty words on a younger girl. You won’t have to work so hard.’

  ‘I like to work hard, Chapman.’

  I reminded him that I had no family and that there would be no wealthy aunts or uncles leaving an inheritance. He said dead family members were his favourite kind, that it would make Christmas more bearable. I told him there was no money, certainly not a dowry. He said he would have his own income once his practice was established and would inherit Abbingdale Hall one day, along with all that came with it. But what of his mother? Wouldn’t she need to consider a match for him; wouldn’t she have done this already?

  ‘There are things you need to understand about me also, Chapman. There is my beloved twin Helen, who is small and, like many small creatures, is inclined to think of herself as much bigger than she is. Picture an extremely ferocious Jack Russell. When you meet her, you’ll see what I mean. Helen very much prefers me being far away in London so she can play queen of the castle, and for the time being I’m happy to let this continue. My moment will come, and meanwhile she is occupied with the drudgery of running the household and admonishing the staff. Then there’s my mother, a fragile old coot who quivers and shakes but still paints her face as if she is a debutante of seventeen, despite the fact that it droops on one side and she can’t speak without dribbling. I can do what I like. My father was the one to be wary of, but he’s long gone, dropped dead when I was fourteen; his heart stopped, like a watch. You and I are similar in that we are both free birds, Chapman. They won’t make a fuss if we marry, and even if they do disapprove, they won’t risk the embarrassment of making a scene.’

  Thomas had this indestructible belief that life would reward him. Only money brings that kind of confidence. Wealth in England is guarded by a closed conspiracy: you have to be invited in. Someone like me may as well have been a vampire, but Thomas was already on the inside, begging me to join him. What could it be like to sit in a grand house with twenty servants and know you would never fall to the bottom of the ladder? Thomas was impulsive, spoiled, over loud and an attention-seeker. Like his father, he enjoyed collecting things and he loved shopping and spending money – he bought me a shrunken head from South America just to watch me open it and scream. A small part of me worried that I was just another thing he was attempting to collect, but even if that were true, would it matter? I would be living in a house in Chelsea.

  The second time he proposed, he told me I had to marry him because he was colour-blind and in danger of leaving the house in badly put-together clothes, so it was my duty to save him from this fate. We both laughed. It was true, he confused green with red and sometimes brown. I stopped laughing when in the next breath he got down on one knee and presented me with a huge diamond solitaire on platinum. I had to put my eyes back in my head. I kept waiting for him to snatch the ring away, but he didn’t. I accepted. I couldn’t know what I was stepping into: it was more of a mirage that disappeared if you stared at it too long; a concept. Concepts are so easy to fall in love with, and I could only imagine it would be a vast improvement on the life I had come from, with its very troubled start.

  6

  My grandparents used to take great pleasure in retelling the story of the day they brought me home from the Nichol for the first time. How I burst into tears upon sight of my grandfather, horrified that a person could be so tall. He was as high as Big Ben to me. I burrowed into my grandmother’s skirts to get away from him, and no matter how much he tried to coax me out, cajoling me with flowers he picked from the train station and sweets he bought in the village, I refused to look at him even once on our journey to Reading. I stayed stuck to my grandmother’s side like a puppy, and, like a puppy, I thought if I couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t see me. The pair of them loved to relive that day, taking turns to tell each part, finishing each other’s sentences, even though I’d heard it a thousand times and could tell it back to them myself. It was a moment of true joy for them, when they found me: a little girl to replace the one that had been lost to them.

  I was intrigued by my grandmother at first. Her dark hair and small features made me think of my mother. But where my mother was soft, my grandmother had girders of steel. I don’t remember that in my mother. My memories, as fragile and distorted as they are after twenty-five years, are that she was gentle and quiet. I used to think her weak, but given that she left her home at sixteen to be with the man she loved, and then, when abandoned, survived for five years in Whitechapel with a child, she must have had some of that steel. My mother may have been foolish, but she was braver than I have ever been. Yet for many years I judged her, arrogantly wondering how a girl could be so foolish as to risk her life for something as silly as love. I didn’t understand at the time.

  When my grandfather returned home from work each day, I would hide behind the drapes and refuse to come out. My grandmother took this as disobedience, a lack of respect for my grandfather, and dragged me out.

  ‘Don’t do that, Alma,’ he would say. ‘Leave her.’

  ‘We will have to be firm with this one,’ came her reply. ‘She’s half feral. Do you know, she refuses to wear shoes! Throws them off, she does, runs around the green in her bare feet, comes back with them black as coal. Whatever will people think!’

  ‘Let the poor thing alone,’ he’d say. ‘She’ll come out when she wants to.’

  How I hated wearing shoes, and being tied up in ribbons and trussed up in fussy dresses and having my hair pulled about. But I loved the bed I had all to myself, and the warmth, and the house with rooms you could go in and out of, and the food. There were so many rules I didn’t understand, and no one explained them. It was like being in a game where no one told you its name or any of its rules, you had to learn for yourself by losing, over and over. My grandmother said I drove her mad, because the only thing I would say when she tried to have me do something was, ‘But why?’

  It continued like this for some time. I kicked off my shoes, tore the ribbons from my hair, chased the ducks around the green and tormented the nicely turned-out little girls from the village with my wild games, then hid behind the curtain when the big tall man came home because I was petrified.

  His footsteps made the earth shake, or at least the floorboards beneath my bottom. When he sat down in his chair, I could hear it groan. The scale of him made me think of a monster, and I’d met monsters before. He started to read books aloud from his chair while I hid behind the drapes. He would find the good stories from the Bible and share them in his booming voice; when he got to the most theatrical parts, the loose glass on the old cabinet would rattle and the fire would spit and I would peer out from behind the curtain to look at him.

  ‘You look daft reading aloud to an empty room,’ my grandmother told him.

  ‘It’s not empty – you’re in it,’ he said, flashing me a wink as I crouched on the floor, having emerged from the other side of the drapes.

  ‘Whatever will people think!’ said my grandmother.

  ‘No one will think anything, Alma. It’s an empty room, remember – you said so yourself.’

  I began to sit cross-legged at his feet so as to listen to his operatic flourishes. Soon I was running to meet
him when he came home, then crawling up onto his lap so I could see the words on the page. I still didn’t say much, and I was mute with all strangers and continued to hide my face in my grandmother’s skirts.

  We were sat this way one afternoon when there was a tap at the window that startled us both. We looked, but there was nothing there. It sounded like something had been thrown at it, so my grandfather told me to stay inside while he went out to investigate. When he came back, he was carrying a tiny bird in his hands.

  ‘It’s a little dunnock, Susannah. He must have got himself confused, or scared, chased by a sparrowhawk maybe, and flown into the glass. He’s only stunned himself. We’ll find him a box and keep him warm, see if he comes to.’

  The bird looked dead to me, but my grandfather lined an old box with straw, placed the tiny bird inside and closed the lid.

  ‘We need to remove him from all the terrors of the world for a while, let his little body recover. You know, it’s a very good thing for an animal to hide if he’s injured or in danger. All the clever animals do it. He crawls into the tiniest space he can find and makes his world very small. It’s a natural thing, when you’re very scared, to make your world very small indeed. The trick is to understand when the danger is gone, to be very brave and let the world be big again, or else there may as well be no world at all.’

  The next morning, when I came downstairs, my grandfather was peeking inside the box. He ushered me over.

  ‘He’s alive, but he’s hungry. Susannah, go outside and dig for worms. We’ll cut them up and feed him.’

  I ran outside in a frenzy and dug for earthworms by the rosebushes with my bare hands. I felt like a hero – we had saved something! I found at least three squirming worms and came running back indoors with them wriggling in my hands.

  My grandmother screamed on sight. ‘What are you doing with those!’

  ‘Shhh, woman! We’re feeding the dunnock,’ said my grandfather. ‘Well done, Susannah! We’ll give him the breakfast of a king and let him have his freedom – off to his new world.’

  ‘Good grief, Andrew! Susannah outside on her hands and knees like a dog, digging through the earth. Whatever will people think!’

  ‘I doubt very much that people will think anything at all.’

  Grandmother had a very different view: she was adamant my world should remain small. Which was strange, considering how preoccupied she was with the notion that everyone was watching us. Who even were these people? My initial closeness to my grandmother didn’t last. I sensed her disappointment in me and responded with sullen insolence. When she brushed my hair, she’d complain that it was too thick and coarse – quite impossible. I guess I had his hair. I swear she would start the brush at my eyebrows on purpose and scrape my forehead with the bristles. The more I complained, the harder she hit me with it. My grandfather turned a blind eye for a peaceful life most of the time.

  When I put a foot wrong, which was often – like when I was caught squirrelling bread underneath my bed, an old habit from being hungry, or the time I went missing in the village for hours because I’d found a litter of kittens – she would blame the otherness in me.

  ‘There’s too much of him in her. I see a lot going on behind those black eyes,’ she’d say.

  ‘Nonsense! They’re eyes – what colour would you have them be? Pink?’ my grandfather would say.

  Or she’d make innumerable comments on how I needed to be something other than what I was. ‘Look how tall she is already! Who will dance with her if she keeps growing like this? Name one boy in the village who looks likely to outgrow her at this pace. Oh, it’s a worry.’

  ‘I’ll have to dance with her then,’ my grandfather countered. ‘She gets her height from me. We’ll look far and wide to find you a husband – Sweden, Norway, the land of the Vikings. We’ll send for a nobleman, Susannah. Someone tall enough and good enough.’

  ‘Stop it, Andrew, you’ll give her ideas.’

  ‘How can that be a bad thing?’

  ‘A girl should be humble and modest.’

  ‘This girl should know her worth, at least to me.’

  ‘You’ll turn her into a boastful creature, and no one will want her then.’

  ‘Good. Then she’ll have to stay with her old granddad for ever. Won’t you, Susannah?’

  One day I committed the great crime of being the only girl among a group of boys playing blind man’s buff, and she had found me falling on top of a boy in my efforts to grab hold of him. We were only playing, but she dragged me home and beat me until the handle of her wooden paddle snapped. Even the old charwoman burst into tears and begged her to stop. When my grandfather came home, he told her she was never to beat me again. She told him that was the day he gave me permission to defy her.

  I didn’t hate my grandmother; I found her fussy, particular and a slave to silly rules and regulations that had no purpose. She was obsessed with pretence and impressions, even though no one was watching. My grandfather and I were more alike. I don’t think my grandmother ever recovered from her second heartbreak: that the child she had rescued and brought home was no replacement for the first. I had turned out very different to her fey little Christabel, my mother. I was tall and clumsy, had an opinion on everything, and was half whatever my father had been, which could only be terrible. This badness, she told me, ran through me like black tar, thickening with age.

  I thought my grandfather immortal. I never knew him to be sick or complain of being tired or aching. He was six foot four and always wore a topper. He refused to apologise for his height, but he didn’t use it to intimidate. He insisted I go with him on his work for the Salvation Army, so I could bear witness to what happened to women who made bad decisions. On account of being in the Salvation Army, he was opposed to the concept of the workhouse and its method of misery and public shame as a form of social control. He subscribed to the belief that, merely by being unfortunate enough to find themselves poor, people deserved charity and compassion. Several times a month we would stand outside Reading Union workhouse with other Salvationists, playing drums, clashing cymbals and singing. We were only allowed as far as the iron gates, and as the bent frames and sloped shoulders of the inmates dragged past us on their way through, some of the older women among us would cry out as they beat on a drum.

  ‘Are you saved, brother?’

  They would shout back, ‘God would have saved me long ago if he could be arsed.’ Or, ‘If I was saved, I wouldn’t be here, would I, silly cow.’

  My grandfather had his immovable beliefs, and many disagreed with him. Most, even among the poor themselves, considered those beneath them to be wretched and thought that charity bred the wrong behaviour. Nonetheless, he was well loved and influential, whether he was breaking up fights, settling scores between rival shopkeepers, convincing an errant husband to return to his wife or helping a deserted woman avoid the workhouse and thereby keep her children.

  ‘You won’t marry an idiot man such as that, will you, Susannah? You wouldn’t break my heart, I hope? You’ll marry a scholar, a thinker, an educated man, will you not?’

  I laughed. The idea of marrying seemed ridiculous and far away. From what I had seen, it didn’t look much fun.

  I was eighteen and he was sixty-four when he cut his foot on broken glass. He was dead two weeks later from blood poisoning. How was it possible? I thought Almighty God a wicked fool for taking him. Taking him but leaving so many terrible men behind. Men that would set the world on fire from their deathbeds without a second thought. I was told by the vicar that the Lord took the best ones first; I think he meant to give me comfort. If God had asked me, I would have swapped my grandmother for him in a heartbeat. That might be wicked, but it was true.

  I spent the next nine years alone with my grandmother. Her spirit faded faster than her body. She would become confused, forget things, and I would find her wandering around the house, lost and aimless. In her attempt to deny this, she tried to make our world so impossibly small that eve
n we couldn’t fit inside it. If I was on an errand outside the house, she would sit in my grandfather’s chair and count until I came home. If I took too long, she would accuse me of running with boys from the village, and often she would call me Christabel. She became convinced the villagers were conspiring against her, even started an argument with another woman over a plant pot she accused her of stealing. I had walked past that plant pot in the poor woman’s garden for as many years as I could remember. People were sympathetic but kept their distance. It’s a cruel curse to have, even crueller to watch.

  When I took too long to come back after one errand, she struck me about the face with the back of her hand and cut my lip, making it bleed. In the next breath she asked what I had done to make her strike me. A few days before the end, I found her foraging in the garden in the dead of night in her nightgown, the back door wide open and her skin like ice. As I walked her inside, she asked, ‘Whatever happened to that little bird you both found, Susannah?’

  ‘He flew away, Nanny, he flew away.’

  ‘Aw, I’m glad. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  She died in the January of 1885 when I was twenty-seven. To say I was relieved would be an understatement.

  7

  Things improved between Thomas and me for a while, towards the end of July. Then, as we entered the first week of August, the absences started again, for at least three nights running. I no longer strained to stay awake to hear what time he did come in, so it was a surprise when he emerged for breakfast one morning.

  I was pretending to read the newspaper, trying to embody righteous indignation, but I kept glancing up at him, waiting for him to look back at me, and it was then that I saw the scratches on his neck: two red lines, fresh, as if from a woman’s sharp nails. My stomach lurched. He sat there pushing his breakfast around as they taunted me. I blinked several times and waited for them to disappear, but they insisted on being real. Two months! We had been married for two bloody months!