I made my way to the back of the shop, mostly to get some space, and for the second time that day I saw someone in what I understood to be their wrong place. The scrunched-up figure had her face turned away, but the tiny waist and bouncing red ringlets could only belong to one person: beautiful, pert, little Nurse Mabel Mullens. For some reason I had the urge to rush over, tap her on the shoulder and say hello, as if, being outside the hospital, all our old gripes would be forgotten. But before I reached her, she scurried off.
She glanced over her shoulder at me, and we locked eyes for a second. I smiled at her, but she disappeared around the corner. Of course, it was obvious: we had never been friends, so why would she speak to me now? I exited the shop feeling lonely and rejected. I cursed Aisling. I wanted to blame her for everything at that moment.
I had only walked down the road for a few minutes when I felt a sharp tug on one of the wide sleeves of my dolman. When I turned around, there was Mabel, out of breath, panting on the pavement and wearing neither coat nor bonnet.
‘Su-san-nah…’ she said, as if trying out the sound of my name for the first time. ‘I can call you that now. No need for “Sister” any more, is there?’
We were blocking the pavement and the crowds tutted and brushed past us, but we didn’t move. I didn’t know what to say. Mabel was still small and pretty, maybe smaller than I remembered. She looked delicate, as if I could scoop her up in my hands. Her apple cheeks were hollow and she had a fading yellow bruise under her left eye.
‘Mabel, how are you?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ she said.
‘What am I meant to have heard?’
‘It is good to see you. You look well,’ she said.
She kept glancing behind her as if something might jump on her back, and shuffling from one foot to the other, her arms crossed over her chest against the cold.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘I can’t talk now. He watches us – the man who owns the shop. I can get away tomorrow, maybe for an hour or two. It would be good to speak properly. Shall I call on you?’
I realised what I had been too stupid to see: that Mabel was working in the milliner’s. For a girl to go from a nurse to a shop assistant was a considerable fall. I looked at her dress. It was clean but old and worn. She saw me looking and folded her arms tighter across herself.
‘I had to sell most of my clothes,’ she said, and I felt my face flush.
‘Yes, please come,’ I said, not sure I believed the words even as they left my lips. ‘If I tell you my address, will you remember it?’
Mabel laughed. ‘I only need the number,’ she said. ‘I know where you live, Susannah. All the nurses know where you live – we all gossip, you know this, we all know you married the handsome young surgeon from Chelsea.’
16
My troubled history with Mabel Mullens had much to do with Aisling’s dislike of her. There was one significant spat in particular, which happened during a lesson.
Mabel was sitting in front of me and Aisling. As usual, Aisling was leaning up on her elbows, swinging on her stool and whispering to me. She found it nigh on impossible to concentrate for long periods of time, especially in class. She was better at practical things, but when she was forced to sit, she would wriggle and distract me, which I found irritating. I helped Aisling with her theory and, later on, when our group of new nurses was unleashed on the public, she would teach me how to manage people. We were a good team.
Aisling also had a remarkable knack for never getting caught playing about. She had such an innocent-looking face that no one could believe she would ever do anything wrong. The result was that in any situation it was I who was cast as the Machiavel – such was the curse of being tall, dark but not necessarily handsome, and a girl. People forever assumed my severe frowning was because I was plotting something and not because I was actually concentrating.
Mabel hated our silly antics and would frequently shoot us spiteful looks. This time, she turned around to berate us while the doctor giving the bandaging lecture was facing the board. ‘Will you two be quiet! It’s so annoying, you whispering all the time while the rest of us are trying to think,’ she hissed.
Aisling was having none of it. ‘Oh, give it a rest, Mullens,’ she spat. ‘Like you’ve ever had a thought that someone else didn’t put there. The only reason you’re pretending to pay attention is because there’s an unmarried man in the room.’
‘What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that the natural thing?’ Mabel said, and she smirked. The nurse sitting next to her looked shocked but then started smirking and laughing too.
‘No educated man who can string a sentence together is going to be interested in you,’ Aisling said.
‘I can assure you, when I have a man’s attention, the last thing he’s thinking about is forming sentences,’ said Mullens.
Some of the other nurses started to giggle. The doctor at the front of the class sensed something was going on and looked over, so everyone settled down for a couple of minutes.
But Aisling was getting increasingly worked up.
‘You realise she’s trying to antagonise you on purpose,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s working,’ said Aisling.
‘Don’t give her the satisfaction.’
‘I can’t let her have the last word,’ said Aisling. She leaned forward and whispered at the back of Mabel’s head, ‘I’m sure the only thing you’ve learned in the last ten months is how to kneel and open your mouth. But then I expect you knew how to do that anyway.’
Mabel gave an audible gasp, picked up a roll of bandages from her table and threw it at us. Aisling and I ducked quick enough and the roll flew between us and travelled across the floor. Another nurse bent down and scooped it up, just as the doctor noticed the flurry of movement and gave us a stern look. I waited until he’d turned back to the blackboard.
‘Are you happy now?’ I whispered to Aisling.
‘Why do you let people walk all over you?’
‘Wait, are you angry with me now?’
‘I’m always the one that sticks up for the both of us.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said.
‘Shhh!’ A nurse from another table tried to quiet us.
‘You shush!’ I spat back.
Without thinking it through, I picked up another roll of bandages and threw it straight at the back of Mabel’s head. My aim was perfect – I was very proud of that. The bandages bounced off Mabel’s head in the only way a tightly wound roll could, sailed across the room and came to a stop at the feet of the doctor. He was young and nervous and clearly felt intimidated at being surrounded by such a large group of female students, with only his moustache for armour.
I still had my hand in the air from where I’d thrown the bandages, so there wasn’t even any need to winkle out a confession.
‘Chapman? Really?’ the doctor said. ‘Well, I didn’t expect that. I think you’d better go and see Matron, don’t you? I don’t know what’s the matter with everyone today. There must be something in the air.’
Matron Luckes was surprised to find me outside her office yet again. She was most disappointed, she said, to learn that I had engaged in such childish behaviour. I had to work hard to convince her that yes, this behaviour was out of character indeed. Outside, Aisling had waited for me. We walked arm in arm back to our quarters, laughing at how surprised we both were to learn I was such a good shot with a set of bandages.
17
Mrs Wiggs described the visitor as bedraggled and waited for an explanation. I enjoyed being given the opportunity to disappoint her, and told her to show the woman in, however unkempt. She turned to leave but then hesitated at the doorway, waiting for me to ask what the matter was, which I didn’t. That, of course, drove her insane. I learned that technique from my husband.
‘Is the lady collecting for charity, or a women’s refuge?’ she asked eventually.
‘Please send her in, Mrs Wiggs,’ I said.
This was the nature of our conversations at that point. In hindsight, those were the glory days. It would soon get much worse.
Once Mullens was shown into the front dining room and Mrs Wiggs was clear of the door, I found myself performing an anxious monologue of vapid small talk, adopting airs and graces I didn’t have and that didn’t suit me. I felt such an obvious fraud in my own home; it was horribly uncomfortable. We were overly congenial, as women who dislike each other tend to be when forced to spend time together, only a few badly chosen words from tearing each other’s hair out. I knew that neither of us could sustain that level of nauseating sweetness for long, and it was me who broke first.
‘I wasn’t sure you would come. Yesterday, in the milliner’s, I could have sworn you ran when you first got a glimpse of me.’
‘How much do you know?’ came the blunt reply.
‘Mabel, if there is something I’m meant to know, whatever it is, I can assure you I don’t.’ I was already tired by the mystery.
Mabel went quiet and studied her hands in her lap. When she’d first come in, she’d looked about the room, appraising every ornament and trinket, trying to assess the worth of all that shined. I’d done the very same thing when I first took up residence there. Then she progressed to taking an inventory of me. Her glowing eyes alighted on the brooch at my throat and then examined the silk of my dress. Our knees were close enough as we sat together on the settee to make the clash of fabrics brutal and humiliating. She’d arrived wearing a baggy old duster with brass buttons, and beneath it a green chintz dress with daisies. I knew it had been chosen because the pattern made the wear less obvious; you had to really look hard to see where the holes had been repaired. I used to do these things myself. She had such pretty eyes, large and childlike, that it was hard to ignore them as they kept creeping back to my engagement ring and following my hands as I waved them in theatrical loops while I talked. Again, this was not my habit. Now she was there I couldn’t wait for her to leave.
‘I did run away at first… I didn’t want you to see me, I was ashamed, thought you’d laugh at me. You must think it odd that I am here. The truth is, I’ve nowhere else to turn. Laugh if you will, get it out of the way, then please say you will consider what I’m about to ask you.’
I felt the dread of an unknown favour in the pit of my stomach and hoped her request would not be something to further embarrass us both. I tiptoed over to the door, opened it an inch to check Mrs Wiggs wasn’t listening, closed it again and sat down.
‘What is it? Only don’t talk too loudly, my housekeeper has very big ears,’ I said.
Without any warning, Mabel started crying and put her face in her hands. I sat stiff as a scarecrow, trapped between her quivering shoulders and the door, imagining Mrs Wiggs and her omnipresent ears pressed to the other side. I kept telling Mabel to be quiet, but she continued to cry and rambled in between breathless sobs.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I’m here. Can you even remember why we never became friends, Susannah? Because I can’t. I was always envious of how clever you were, I know that. I was right to be. I mean, look at you. You should be proud of how things turned out. I must have known, somehow, that you would get everything I wanted. I was jealous before it happened. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.’
I had always found it difficult to know how to act when people cried or displayed great emotion like that. It frightened me. I wanted to shake them or hit them. Why should such feeble creatures have the luxury of crumbling while the rest of us had to carry on?
When Mabel had finally calmed herself and wiped her nose on her sleeve, she looked at me with red eyes.
‘I got myself a dose of scarlet fever, Susannah,’ she said.
I didn’t understand at first, but when she explained that she’d met a soldier, I knew what she meant. She had been courting him in secret for months, long before I met Thomas.
‘He was an officer and we were to be married – or that was what I thought, anyway. We talked of being married, what type of house we would live in, children… I know that sounds stupid now,’ she said.
Mabel had voluntarily left her job at the hospital, not wanting to suffer the humiliation of being fired, as I had been. She was sure her soldier would marry her imminently, on account of the fact she was carrying his child.
‘But when I told Walter, he said he couldn’t marry me, because he was already bloody married. I thought I’d gone mad, that I’d imagined the whole thing, but he did talk about marrying me, I swear. He let me believe it all along. We argued, of course, and when I asked why he’d said he loved me when it was so clearly a lie, he said, “I did at the time.”’
That was the last she heard of Walter, the charmer.
‘Why don’t you go home to your father’s farm?’ I asked.
‘My father won’t have me, unmarried and with child, and nor will my sister’s husband. I have to get rid of it, then I can go home.’
‘So get rid of it,’ I said.
This sent Mabel into another crying fit. I tried not to roll my eyes as I worried about the noise.
She had started to pay nightly bed rent in various doss houses, not being able to afford a decent boarding house. Some of the doss houses had more than forty beds, all of them with soiled straw and crawling with insects. ‘It was frightening being so different to the other women in those places,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to fall asleep for fear of being robbed. All the women were thieves. Thieves and drunks. They drank beer when they had money, gin when they didn’t, and they watched for new girls like hawks, working out who they could prey on.’ She sniffed into her handkerchief again.
‘I can’t understand how I’ve found myself like this. How fast I have fallen – and I am still falling, Susannah. It feels like no more than a minute ago, a blink of an eye, that I was a nurse at the London. I felt safe. Now I don’t know how to stop it getting worse. Where will I end up? You hear about those poor women found slaughtered like pigs in the gutter. Who is to say it won’t be me one night?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mabel,’ I said. ‘Of course that won’t happen to you,’ I lied.
Obviously, it could happen to Mabel; it could happen to any one of us. Why else had I married Thomas? Why else had I stayed with him? All that talk about ending up like those poor dead women made me nervous. In nurturing my macabre obsession with them, was I inviting the same fate to befall me? With Mabel there, it was all too close; it was as if my destiny was circling above my head like a vulture.
‘Will it be me next who is cut and found dead?’ she wailed. ‘Really, what is to prevent it? Where do I go? What shall I do? I did not think myself a bad person, Susannah. Why has this happened? I have been foolish, yes, but not bad. I am desperate, Susannah. You must understand how desperate I am, to have come to you, the woman I was so jealous of, and to be begging you, quite without dignity. I have no one. The man who runs the shop you saw me in takes my wages to pay for my board. I can never earn enough to save any money. He and his wife, they keep us like billy goats upstairs in a bedroom cold as a barn with water running down the walls. I am always in their debt.’
She glanced up at me. ‘You haven’t asked how I came by this bruise on my face – I know you can see it.’
‘I didn’t think it polite to ask.’ I took a sip of my by now very cold tea, just to keep my hands occupied.
Mabel had refused to go to bed with the owner, who complained to his wife, who then screamed at her, called her ungrateful and told her that her husband always tried the girls first, so he would know how to price them. If Mabel did not lie with him willingly, she would be strapped to the bed by the woman herself and offered to whichever man came for the cheapest whore.
‘When I refused, she hit me, punched me with a closed fist like a man, then told me how she was in with the peelers and would have me fitted for stealing, unless I worked off my debt of £5, the debt I’d accrued for being rude.’
‘What about Dykes from the hospi
tal?’
‘Dykes? I don’t have time for squatting over pots of steam or chewing herbs that will do nothing but give me a headache! There’s nothing I haven’t tried.’
‘How much money do you think you’ll need?’
‘I was thinking, what about your husband? He’s a doctor. He must know how to flush it out. Don’t tell me to go to the quacks for this – I’ll die, I know I will. I have a feeling, the same way I had a feeling about you.’
‘Then it’s not my help you are asking for, is it?’ I spat this out. I was beginning to tire and my head throbbed. I needed my drops but hadn’t taken them that day because I’d known Mabel would be calling.
‘Please, Susannah, I am begging you. If I have this baby, I swear I will throw it in the Thames along with myself.’ She grabbed my sleeve and her fingers pinched my forearm. It was the same hopeless grasp as Emma Smith’s when she’d lain bleeding to death in the hospital. It disgusted me.
‘That’s your choice, Mabel, not mine,’ I said, and pulled my arm free.
She had inched closer to me on the settee and I could smell the mouldy scent of the unwashed. There it was again: Emma Smith, the bag of twigs on the hospital bed. Blood dripping off her and running across the uneven floor.
I told Mabel I would think on it and would get a message to her at the millinery, but I only wanted her out of the house. I gave her five shillings at the door. She went to kiss me, but I flinched away and we were stuck in that excruciating moment. Then she nodded and smiled as if she knew I would not be sending any message, thanked me, and left. Because of the gentle way she managed my indifference, I felt I deserved my marriage after all.
18
As much as I tried to convince myself it wasn’t my problem, I kept feeling Mabel’s pain, and I cursed her. The next evening, I caught Thomas alone, without the cloying Mrs Wiggs. He was in the bathroom, tending to his precious whiskers, which were becoming sparser by the day, making his face thinner and drawn.
People of Abandoned Character Page 13
