For the rest of the day she could not shake away the image of herself. She wished with all her heart that she could have kept the mirror, or that a photographer might take a picture and she could keep the straightened image in a frame.
Ivy was still in the beer tent. ‘Agnes and Charlie are at the carousel,’ she slurred. ‘They’re having free rides, do you want one?’ But Jane shook her head. She would walk around the stalls, have a glass of sarsaparilla, and before they left for home, she would take one last look into the mirror, before the real Jane Stretch had to vanish.
‘Agnes is busy,’ Jane told the priest the next Monday. ‘But she sends her best regards.’
Father Boyd looked long and hard over Jane’s shoulder, as if Agnes might be hiding in the bushes.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said.
Because the priest had looked so disappointed, Jane decided she would make a special effort with her learning. She would be extra polite and most enthusiastic.
‘I particularly liked Russia,’ she said, pressing her hand on top of the book.
‘Oh?’ Father Boyd looked distracted.
‘Oh, yes,’ Jane enthused, ‘it’s such a big place you see, with the snow and ice, and those wide open plains where there’s nothing.’
‘What’s Agnes actually doing?’ he asked.
‘She’s helping a blind woman with her sewing,’ she said, with her fingers crossed.
‘That’s very charitable of her.’
‘Oh, Agnes has always been that.’
The priest pulled a book from the shelf and absentmindedly opened it. It was a difficult book about parliament. ‘Make a list of words,’ he told her.
‘How many words?’
‘Twenty.’
Between writing Whig and Candidate, Jane watched Father Boyd strolling through the garden. He hadn’t offered her a drink. There was no sign of Mrs Reed. She saw him with his head bowed. She thought he might be praying.
When he came inside, he smelled of cigarettes. He glanced at the words, but said nothing about them. When Jane was leaving, she told him she would be back next week, and was certain that Agnes would be with her.
‘Can I ask you something?’ said Jane, as he opened the door. ‘Can I ask you your name?’
‘My name? It’s Father Boyd, of course.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Your other one.’
He looked puzzled for a second, as if he’d forgotten who he was. ‘Oh, I see now,’ he said. ‘It’s Sean.’
Jane had followed them. Agnes and Charlie were kicking up dust by the river. Agnes was laughing. Charlie had an arm around her shoulders. He was tickling her. Jane waited behind a broken wall, positioning her eyes where a brick should have been. Agnes tousled Charlie’s hair. Her head was on his shoulder. What did a boy’s shoulder smell like, Jane wondered. Tar? Tobacco? Engine oil? Charlie’s fingers were wrapped around her waist. If Jane tried hard enough, she could feel the weight of his fingertips, the closeness, even from this great distance, even with her eyes closed.
A week later, Jane walked with a heavy heart to the rectory. Agnes had refused to go with her. Mrs Reed answered the door.
‘You?’ she said. ‘What is it you’re wanting?’
‘Father Boyd, ma’am.’
She folded her arms. ‘You’re too late,’ she said. ‘The young priest has gone.’
‘For good?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘According to his letter, most definitely for good.’
At home Agnes was buttering toast. ‘How is he?’ she asked, licking the tips of her fingers. ‘Did you tell him I was sorry?’
‘Father Boyd has gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone? Gone where?’
‘Back to where he came from, I suppose.’
‘To Ireland? Well, honestly,’ said Agnes, licking the end of the butter knife. ‘You’d think he would have mentioned it.’
Seven
Small Dark Eyes &
Little Hands
SUMMER, AND AT the Victoria Embankment accordionists played amongst signs declaring: MOST SPECTACULAR FIREWORK DISPLAY & INSTRUMENTAL CONCERT. Ned was busy selling paper flags, having persuaded the flag man that two could work the crowd, now spilling onto the pier, and he would only take a meagre cut, enough, say, for a bag of hot peanuts and a small glass of beer.
Jane walked with Edie and Alice. There were plenty of curiosities to keep them amused. A group of wild African savages in strange grass costumes were eating sticks of fire. A man balanced chairs on his forehead. On a flat stretch of grass, couples started dancing, shyly at first, to the Spanish gypsy musicians, while Jeremiah Beam, his hat on his knees, sat chewing a fatty pork rib, tapping his feet to the music.
‘I once got lost at a funfair,’ said Edie. ‘I was a tiny thing, a sprat my brother called me, and when I couldn’t see our ma anymore, I sat wailing by a carousel, until the man pulled me onto a horse, thinking that’s what I was crying for. It was terrible. The music was playing, the ride started up, and then I spotted her. But I was stuck inside the saddle. It was hopeless.’
‘She found you in the end?’ asked Jane.
‘Oh, she found me all right, and Pa beat me black and blue for the trouble of it.’
As they walked down a soft slope of grass, Jane could see Ned handing a flag to a girl who whispered something into his ear, and Jane looked away towards the river. Alice was eager to buy a cup of iced chocolate milk, saying it was her favourite thing in the world, especially if there was a good tot of rum in it. They queued behind girls in fringed cotton shawls, cooing over the boy who held the monkeys dressed in waistcoats, available for petting and for photographs.
‘We should have another picture,’ one of them said. ‘We should ask for the boy instead of the monkey.’
‘Oh, I hated my monkey,’ said another. ‘He nipped me good and proper, he smelled very bad, and I’m sure he was jumping with fleas.’
Taking their cups of chocolate, Jane and her companions sat on a bench by the pier. They watched a woman dragging her friend to where a man was offering boat rides. ‘That boat’s a filthy tub,’ the friend squealed. ‘I’m not getting into it, not for a minute I’m not!’ But of course she was persuaded, taking the man’s hand, blushing as she stepped over the side, tilting the boat and laughing.
‘It’s a shame Mrs Swift couldn’t come,’ said Jane.
‘What?’ Alice nearly spat out her milk. ‘Why would you want to come here with the missus?’
‘She’s like a blancmange,’ Edie smirked. ‘Like a great blubbery whale. One day she’s going to sit in that armchair of hers, and she’ll be stuck, and we’ll have to chop the blessed frame into pieces.’
‘She used to be slim,’ Alice told them. ‘Slim and very pretty.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Edie.
‘I was moving some furniture in the bedroom, the missus wanted a table shifting, it wasn’t heavy, but I took the drawer out just the same. It was full of old photographs and one of Mrs Swift looking very trim. She was dressed in a fancy lace frock and holding out her hands as if to say, “Look at me!”’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Edie. ‘What happened?’
‘She got peckish,’ said Alice.
‘Or frightened,’ said Jane.
‘Frightened?’ Edie laughed. ‘What do you mean, frightened? Frightened of her own wide reflection when it wouldn’t fit inside the mirror frame?’ And though Jane laughed with them, she could see Mrs Swift lying in her bed, closing her eyes, or staring at the marks on the wallpaper. Jane had seen her standing at the window, knotting her hands, stepping behind the curtain when a road-mender clattered by, or the ragman, or the lady selling books for local good causes. ‘If she comes to the door,’ Mrs Swift had whispered. ‘Tell her that I’m out.’
It was July, and at ten o’clock it was still too light for fireworks, but they lit them anyway. People stood gasping at the sparks and silver flowers. On the river, boats moved slowly, their lanterns pale in the rippling
water.
‘Come on,’ said Edie. ‘Let’s go and ride the swing boats.’
The freckly boy pushing these painted galleons was familiar to them, having once sold pies near the market, and when his boss wasn’t looking he let them ride for nothing, pushing the boats higher as the girls screamed and the sky collapsed around them. In the blur of faces, Jane could see Ned. He was waving a white paper flag.
‘Higher!’ Edie shouted. ‘Higher!’
It was getting late. People were starting to leave. Yawning, Alice said she ought to make her way back home, and Edie agreed, though Jane said she would stay for another ten minutes.
Moving closer to the river, the air smelled of burning oil and sulphur. She stood for a moment. She watched the boy leading his monkeys into a cage. Then a Romany appeared, all tousle-haired, a gold ring glinting from his earlobe, barring Jane’s way.
‘Lucky charm?’ he said.
Jane shook her head.
‘For you,’ he told her, with a serious shake of his head. ‘No charge.’ He pressed it into her hand and as the air spat out a few forgotten fireworks, Jane wanted to shout, to say she did not need his lucky charm, or his Romany superstitions, but the man was already moving off through the crowd, disappearing into the thick of it.
The little tin charm felt warm. Leaning over the railing, Jane looked at the river before throwing the gypsy’s trinket into the slapping brown water. Suddenly she could see the cardboard boot box; the baby was floating, eyes wide open and fingers outstretched, grasping, as if they were trying to reach her.
That night, her dreams were so vivid with small dark eyes and little hands, Jane threw a sheet over her head, despite the turgid summer heat. She pulled her knees inside as if it were a tent. Within these flimsy cotton walls, Jane felt safe, and when a shadow passed across in the moonlight, like a wave of bony fingers, she told herself it was just the shape of a bird flying over the window, or the magnified wings of a house moth.
Night after night, the dreams continued. She saw girls skipping rope with their mouths missing. Birds with amber eyes riding on the top of moving black perambulators. She found small wooden hands in bags of flour. Her boots were made from fingernails.
One humid night, Jane woke to the smell of sour milk. The smell was so cloying she braved abandoning the bed-sheet to go looking for a matchbox and a candle. Gritting her teeth, she examined every corner of the room. She stuck her head outside the window. Wearing the sheet like a cloak, she even braved the landing.
Inside the bedroom, the smell of the milk had changed. It was sweeter, almost artificial. It was a familiar scent, but Jane couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Arrowroot? Vanilla? Porridge? It was only when she was back under her sheet that it came to her. The smell was exactly like Doctor Ridge’s Food for Infants. It was a food one of their former landladies had fed her baby, a small sickly child she had named Isabella. ‘Who does that woman think she is?’ Ivy had muttered. ‘Why can’t she feed the wretched child plain milk gruel and pap?’ But the landlady had believed in Doctor Ridge, the papers saying his food had ‘saved lives when all other diets had failed’, and though in the end it had failed Isabella, the landlady still thought the food was the best on the market.
Inside her tent, Jane told herself that all the bakers and confectioners in London were busy working through the night. Rolling pastry. Piping cream. Stirring vats of custard. An hour later, when she heard something rolling backwards and forwards in the other attic room, she put it down to mice. The same mice had chewed Mrs Swift’s best slippers. They had gnawed twenty candles, a map of the Underground, and a box of Silversmiths’ Soap.
The rolling stopped when the sky began to brighten. Jane could hear the doctor coughing and spitting out phlegm. In the comfort of daylight she looked inside the other attic room. The junk was as it always was, though she could see the face of a doll peering through a broken fire screen, and its left eye was missing.
‘You look quite done in,’ Nell told her. ‘It’s like your eyes have taken a bashing.’
‘It’s the weather,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t sleep at all.’
‘And I can’t stay awake, more’s the pity, because I haven’t five blessed minutes to myself.’
The girls waiting to see the doctor, chewing the sodden ends of their handkerchiefs, reading the illustrated papers and waiting for a bed, were the girls from the touring summer companies. These homesick dull-eyed dancers had been on the road since May, stopping off in unfamiliar towns, sleeping in lodgings and looking for distractions. One poor inconvenienced girl couldn’t speak a word of English. Between them, Jane, Nell and the doctor tried to work out what she was saying. They thought she might be German, until she pointed to an old map of Cardiff and wept.
‘Miss Silverwood is leaving,’ Nell whispered, when they went onto the landing. ‘She’s moving to Bristol. She’s going to do all her business by correspondence, which means writing letters apparently.’
‘Why is she moving?’ asked Jane.
‘At first, she said she was going to stay with her sister, but then she had a couple of sherries too many, and said she was getting very jumpy, that she was too old for this game, and it had gone on long enough.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I’m all right for now,’ said Nell. ‘She told me I could stay.’
‘Does it ever change?’ asked Mrs Swift, who had taken to her bed in the heat. ‘Do the girls ever get married and live happily ever after? All that pain, to be left in the end with nothing.’
Jane tried not to yawn. The air in the bedroom was stale. Suffocating. She could see a tiny brown cockroach marching up the wall. If she had the strength, she would pull the drapes wide open. She would lift the dust-caked window and stick her head outside.
‘You must think it a very strange profession,’ said Mrs Swift.
‘A doctor, ma’am? No.’
‘My husband wasn’t always a doctor,’ Mrs Swift yawned. ‘In another life, we were something else entirely.’
‘In Brighton, ma’am?’
‘In Brighton people waved. They would stop me in the street. Perfect strangers would pass the time of day. We would take high tea in dining rooms overlooking the promenade. At the Sandpiper they served cold poached salmon and a girl called Clarinda would remove all the bones.’
Jane glanced towards the window where the sun was burning the glass. ‘It sounds wonderful, ma’am.’
‘Oh it was, but due to lack of money we had to change our mode of employment. We were taken to the darker side of life. And though to some extent it has been to our benefit, I never realised the need would be quite so great. Or that my husband would have to act the physician for such a length of time.’
‘He’s very good, ma’am,’ said Jane, and for the most part, she believed it.
‘Brighton was sparkling.’
‘London can sparkle.’
‘London can sparkle when it rains.’
‘Have you been to the waxworks?’ asked Jane. ‘I’m told they’re very realistic. Or the zoological gardens? It’s supposed to be a fascinating place, full of wild beasts and birds.’
‘It’s a long way from this house.’
‘You can get a bus on the Strand.’
‘A bus,’ she said, ‘would kill me.’
Jane suddenly felt the air turning cold. Mrs Swift hadn’t noticed the temperature change. She was fanning herself with a church magazine.
‘Can you feel that, ma’am?’ she said.
‘Feel what?’
‘The air has turned to ice,’ said Jane.
Mrs Swift laughed. ‘Ice?’ she said. ‘Really? It is like sitting in an oven.’
Pulling up a sleeve, Jane could see the goose bumps springing down her arm. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘I’m shivering.’
‘Then perhaps someone is walking on your grave?’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
Mrs Swift looked towards the mantelpiece. It was full of framed photog
raphs. ‘Ghosts are nothing but memories,’ she said. ‘Memories you can’t quite leave behind.’
Jane followed her gaze, rubbing the cold from her arms. Her nerves prickled and danced across her backbone. The photographs showed women with long faces. A man in an apron. A small boy holding a kite. ‘But the people, ma’am, these memories, can you see them?’
Mrs Swift took a minute before answering. ‘In my head I can see them, in reality they are gone.’
Jane moved a little closer to the pictures. The faces were vivid. Piercing. She wanted to say, what if they haven’t quite gone? What if you don’t want to see them?’ Instead, she turned around and said, ‘Miss Silverwood’s going to Bristol.’
‘Bristol?’ she said. ‘It isn’t far enough.’
Sitting in her tent that night, Jane told herself that Mrs Swift was right: ghosts were what you made of them. Birds riding perambulators weren’t ghosts. No! They were simply wild imaginings. Her father believed, but Arthur also believed in witches and goblins, saying, ‘If I believe, they’ll have nothing to prove, they’ll leave me well alone and go bothering those blighters who don’t.’
Her father had told her stories. How invisible hands played pianos in the night. Chairs had moved from room to room. Dogs had barked at nothing.
‘A woman in Liverpool once found her knives and forks dancing on the draining board.’
‘What did she do?’ gasped Jane.
‘According to the paper,’ he’d said, ‘the poor woman fainted, and from that day on, she only ever ate with her fingers.’
Yawning, Jane collapsed the tent, keeping the sheet tight around her, but when she put her head on the pillow she started. Something small and hard was pressing into her shoulder, and when her fingers started to grope, they found the doll’s missing eye, and its vivid green iris seemed to blink at her in the moonlight.
Dr Swift now looked so unkempt, his intake of whisky so huge that even the sweat on his clothes had a scent of it. He had gravy stains on his once pristine necktie. His cuffs were frayed. He had holes in the knees of his trousers from where he had tripped on a cobblestone. At Axford Square, Nell ushered him into the kitchen, where she attempted to sponge off the dust.
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