Eden Falls

by Sanderson, Jane

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, that they’re being charged a guinea a smile,’ Eve said, watching them. She turned to Daniel. ‘It sounds like a proper upheaval, though. All that knocking down and building up again. Can’t you manage with what you ’ave?’

  He gave her a reproving look. ‘That’s rich coming from you, with your ever-expanding pork pie empire.’

  ‘Can I ’ave a pork pie?’ Angus asked.

  ‘Not right now, Gussy,’ said Eve. ‘I don’t carry them under my ’at.’

  The child’s face fell. Now he knew there were no pies, he felt hungry.

  ‘C’mon,’ Daniel said, holding out a hand. ‘Come and see my fruit wall. Peach now, pie later.’

  The Harrogate branch of Eve’s Puddings & Pies was the fourth in the chain: the fourth and probably the finest, housed in an elegant Regency building near the Pump Rooms. Like the other branches – in Netherwood, Barnsley and Sheffield – it had a café for the leisured shopper and a counter for the hurried and the harried, and the bill of fare was the same too: pork pies, meat pies, steak puddings, fruit pies and a small, surprising range of Russian specialities, the legacy of Anna’s involvement in Eve’s life back when it all began. Six years ago, now. Six years and three months since Arthur Williams was killed at New Mill Colliery and Eve had had to find a way to keep herself and the children from the workhouse. It seemed like another life, another time. Anna – Russian, widowed, homeless – had pitched up at the little house in Beaumont Lane and had placed herself like a lucky charm at the centre of Eve’s existence. She had been Eve’s prop then: stronger and indefatigably optimistic. They had made an unconventional family group – Anna and Maya, Eve and her three – but those days, which began dark with sorrow, were also golden in Eve’s memory. Eve Williams and Anna Rabinovich, a force to be reckoned with, a winning team. Now, amid the trappings of their respective success, despite everything each of them had gained, Eve still sometimes felt a jolt of loss. On her dressing table she had a small inlaid jewellery box, the tiny key of which had long ago been mislaid. She didn’t need the key because the box was always open, but still, she felt the lack of it. That was how she felt about Anna.

  Certainly she would have been an asset in Harrogate. Not just as company, though the solitary train journey had been long and dull, but for her unassailable confidence. Anna was a stranger to inferiority; she had an air of Russian imperialism about her, Daniel always said: a touch of the tsarina. In Harrogate, Eve could have wished herself similarly equipped; the town’s mineral springs and noble connections had given it a very high opinion of itself. There she had been, representing meat pies and suet puddings in a town blessed by the patronage of princes and dukes. Of course, Eve had once cooked for the king; she told herself this as she stood by the railway station, feeling humble. But the driver of the hansom cab that took her to Crown Place had evidently held himself in high esteem, looking down his nose at Eve even as he took her business. She had over-tipped him to make a point, and then had immediately felt like a fool.

  The day had improved, though, and her shop had looked very fine. She had been before, of course: chosen it, supervised its renovation, appointed the staff. But this was her first visit for some weeks, and she’d forgotten what an imposing building it was: double-fronted, with an elegant iron porch at the entrance and a tiled floor pristine in black and white. Eve had stood a little distance away and watched as an arresting pyramid of produce in the windows and the irresistible aroma of hot pastry had lured customers through the door. It was early days, but the signs were promising. She had been thinking of this and smiling to herself on the train home when the ticket collector had accused her of looking happy.

  ‘Pies,’ Eve had said. ‘I was thinking of pies, and how far they’ve brought me.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He had taken her ticket, stamped it, handed it back. ‘Change at Leeds,’ he said.

  Lilly Pickering, a former neighbour and a miner’s widow, had known Eve since the days when a tin bath and a brick-built privy had seemed like a step up. Lilly held the fort at Ravenscliffe every day, to one extent or another. She was there when Eve and Angus arrived at their house on the common.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I expected you sooner.’

  It was Lilly’s habit to scold. She didn’t always mean anything by it.

  ‘Ah well, ’ere I am now,’ Eve said. She took off her coat and hat and hung it on the stand in the front hall, and by the time she’d accomplished this Angus had gone: straight through the house and out of the back door to the hutch in the garden, from where his new rabbit Timothy gazed balefully at the world. Angus was trying hard, but failing, to love Timothy. The creature’s pink eyes were unsettling, and he shrank from human contact. Angus squatted in front of the hutch for a while and stared at his pet. Timothy, unblinking, stared back. In a box by the hutch were some carrots, and Angus considered them now, trying to decide if his rabbit deserved the treat. No, he decided. He shook his head firmly at Timothy and stood, then took two carrots anyway and went looking, instead, for pit ponies. They grazed on the common after retirement and they were so accustomed to human contact that Angus had once persuaded one to follow him into the kitchen. By the time it was discovered he was feeding the pony Cox’s Orange Pippins from the fruit bowl. Lilly had hit the roof, Angus had cried and the pony had bolted, smashing two tureens and a milk jug on its way out. Now he understood that ponies were strictly an outdoor diversion, but he knew their haunts and they knew his.

  ‘Don’t go too far, Gussy.’ This was Eve, who had followed him through the back door and now watched him opening the gate to go onto the common. ‘Tea time soon.’ He smiled at her and waved a carrot, and Eve went back into the kitchen.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ She could tell from the quiet that her daughters weren’t in the house.

  ‘Eliza’s at that Evangeline’s again,’ Lilly said. ‘She’ll end up with rickets at this rate.’

  ‘I doubt it, Lilly,’ said Eve. ‘It’s not caused by ballet dancing.’

  ‘Mary Sylvester ’as bow legs from rickets.’

  Eve looked at her. ‘From rickets, yes, not from ballet. And it’s because she’s half-starved, not because she likes dancing.’

  ‘Aye, well.’

  Lilly snapped out the tea towel she’d been using and it cracked like a pistol. She folded it twice and hung it on the brass rail in front of the range. ‘That’s me done then.’

  ‘Is Ellen in?’ Eve said.

  ‘Outside wi’ mine. Doubtless black bright by now, though that pinafore was clean on this morning.’

  ‘It’ll wash.’ Eve walked to the back door and looked out. Four children squatted in a circle at the back of the garden where the grass met the hawthorn hedge. Ellen, true to her reputation, had mud on her frock and a headdress of leaves and fern. Her face was flushed with the effects of recent exertion and fresh air. She was talking: issuing instructions, no doubt. She had a long stick in one hand, and she stood suddenly, wielding it like a spear and making a fearsome, ululating war cry, which her gang immediately, obediently, imitated. Eve called her name, shouting over the racket, and Ellen, sensing rather than hearing her, scowled.

  ‘Mam! We’re busy.’ She looked like Seth had at the same age: plain as a pikestaff, with her dad’s ears jutting out like the handles on a sugar bowl and a pugnacious little face to match her hard-boiled personality. She kept her hair as short as she was allowed, and if she could have worn shorts in place of her pinafore, she would have done.

  ‘Come on, Sitting Bull. Time for tea.’

  Lilly materialised beside Eve on the back doorstep. ‘Cheerio then,’ she said. She’d hung her housecoat on a peg in Eve’s kitchen and was shrugging herself into a lumpy green cardigan, which at least had the advantage of making her look plumper. She was skin and bone, always had been. Even now, when she had her own weekly pay packet from Eve and two of her boys had jobs at Long Martley Colliery, she still looked as if she lived on potato water. She stepped out o
nto the path and without raising her voice said, ‘Right,’ and her children, responding at once to the higher authority, stood up and cut shamefaced looks of apology at Ellen.

  ‘That parkin’s all gone,’ Lilly said to Eve. ‘And you’ve no milk.’

  She walked off, her dishevelled posse trailing behind her. Ellen flung her spear over the hedge and onto the common. She had a good arm and a good eye; in a skirmish or a siege she would have been an asset.

  ‘Are you going to say ’ello, then?’ Eve said.

  Ellen crossed the garden and gave her mother a stiff-armed hug, but Eve caught her and held on, kissing the top of her head, then, with one arm still around the child’s shoulders, she tried to pick out the dried leaves from her tousled brown hair. Ellen submitted to the attention, but only briefly. She pulled away and bared her teeth dramatically, to show Eve a new gap in the top row.

  ‘Another one gone?’

  Ellen nodded. ‘Feels nasty,’ she said, poking her tongue into the space. ‘What’s for tea?’

  ‘Eggs and bacon, I expect. But run on to t’Co-op for me first, fetch some milk.’

  ‘Can I get some sherbet?’ She held out her hand for money. Just seven years old, but she’d been driving a bargain since she learned how to talk.

  ‘No. Oh, go on then. And find Angus on your way back; bring ’im ’ome with you.’

  The child turned and ran. Ellen Williams never walked unless there was absolutely no avoiding it. She went through life at full tilt.

  ‘Be careful,’ Eve said, thinking of glass bottles and milk, but she spoke to an empty garden.

  Chapter 7

  The letter on the hall table hadn’t been from Eve, though Norah had been right about the Barnsley postmark.

  ‘Alderman Simpson,’ Anna said to Amos, handing him the folded writing paper. ‘He wonders whether I might stand for Ardington town council.’

  They were sitting on the Victoria Embankment, a short stroll from Westminster Bridge. The bench was one that they had used so often they considered it their own. Amos had been sitting there when Anna arrived, and had already sent away three other perfectly entitled citizens, begging their pardon but making it plain that the bench could not be shared. It amused Anna that her husband always managed to get away with this: it was the element of surprise, Amos told her. No one expected to be moved on from a public bench, and therefore they always obliged.

  From the wicker basket on her lap from which she had produced the letter, Anna now brought out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. This, too, she handed to her husband.

  ‘Bread and dripping?’ he asked, and she laughed.

  ‘Bad luck. Cheese and tomato.’

  He placed the package on his knee and opened the letter, scanning its contents and smirking at Greville Simpson’s copperplate handwriting. ‘You’d never know ’e were dragged up in a Grangely slum,’ he said.

  Anna, who liked the alderman, tutted. ‘Nothing wrong with an elegant hand,’ she said. ‘And we can all improve our lot.’

  This was true, and Amos conceded the point with a nod of his head. But Alderman Simpson’s cursive was the least of his affectations, in Amos’s view. There was a rumour that since being elected to the council, he had spent a few bob on elocution lessons and, certainly, when he addressed committee meetings in the town hall his aitches were these days very much in evidence, though not always in the right place. Halderman Simpson, Enoch Wadsworth called him, pillar hof the community. Enoch was Amos’s agent, friend, adviser and confidant: Enoch was the reason Amos was an MP. And if he couldn’t laugh at Greville Simpson with Anna, whose Russian ear, Amos was convinced, prevented her from hearing the comedy in the alderman’s voice, he knew he would be able to laugh with Enoch later.

  ‘Will you stand, then?’ he asked Anna now, because that, after all, was the purpose of the letter and the reason she had shown him. ‘They could use you on that education committee.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She took the letter back, suddenly irritated. How did he imagine she had time to run for the council? As it was, she barely had time to play the MP’s wife in Amos’s Yorkshire constituency.

  ‘What?’ Amos said.

  She looked at him. ‘How do you think I can be councillor, when so much of my life is in London? I’d have to be always in Ardington.’

  ‘Well, would that be so terrible? There’s plenty to be done up there.’

  She laughed, astonished. ‘But I have commissions until the end of summer, and new enquiries almost every day.’

  He was looking straight ahead, at the grey-brown Thames. It moved sluggishly, as if it were made of something thicker than water, as if it were weary of its journey. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘In that case I suppose it’s out of t’question.’

  Anna heard his words, but was certain his true meaning lay beneath their surface. For a while, she considered his profile; he was a handsome man, but there was a stubborn set to his expression that did him no favours. And she knew exactly what was on his mind.

  ‘You think I should run for Ardington Council, don’t you?’

  He turned to look at her again. ‘I think you’d be a cracking councillor. I think with you on t’Labour benches, they’d ’ave a much better chance of getting summat done.’

  ‘And Anna Sykes Interiors? We just close door and say, sorry, all finished?’

  He looked away again. ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that there are more worthwhile ways for you to spend your days than painting murals for pampered aristocrats.’

  It wasn’t, by any means, the first time Amos had said this, but it was the first time in a while. Anna’s spirits plummeted. It was such a familiar refrain; He can never mention aristocrats without calling them pampered, she thought now.

  ‘I love what I do,’ she said. She kept her voice quiet and steady, because they were just a stone’s throw from the House of Commons and who knew who might overhear if she truly gave vent to her feelings?

  ‘I don’t,’ he said, as if she didn’t already know this. ‘I don’t love what you do.’

  This was what happened, from time to time. The catalyst would arrive by stealth and suddenly everything would be spoiled. And now, Anna thought, I should point out how my income supports his unpaid position as Labour MP for Ardington. She didn’t, though.

  ‘I’m your wife and Maya’s mother, and those things will always be so,’ she said instead. ‘But also, I’m an artist.’

  ‘Artist to the privileged few. Artist to them as ’as a bare ballroom wall they want painting, or a billiard room that wants cheering up.’

  ‘You make me sound so trivial.’

  ‘You’re not. The people you work for are.’

  ‘But if it makes me happy?’

  His face was set: grim and unrelenting. On his lap, the waxed-paper parcel lay untouched. Too cross to eat a sandwich, she thought: how like Maya he could be. She knew from experience that, short of pledging right now to shun every illustrious name in her order book, there was nothing she could do to unravel this tangle of resentment. Time, and a little distance, would free them, as it had done before.

  ‘I’m going to Slade,’ she said, standing. ‘I need to see Clara and William; ask them to come with me on Friday to Marcia de Lisle’s place in Sussex.’

  He didn’t answer, and she hadn’t really expected him to. But she was damned if she would pander to his prejudices. Anna was all for equality: not least her own, with him.

  He was sorry, when she walked away, that he hadn’t said goodbye. He felt mean-minded and petulant and then, when he stood, the forgotten, wrapped sandwich fell to the ground and he felt even worse. By the time he reached the Socialist Club he was mired in a profound gloom, made all the deeper by the knowledge that it was of his own making. Enoch, early as usual, had already stood him a drink; he and the pint waited at a carefully selected corner table, from where the members’ bar was in full view and the red plush curtains at an adjacent window would help muffle their voices; he was nothing if
not cautious.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘You’ve a right face on.’

  Amos sat down.

  ‘Nowt new,’ he said. ‘Bit of a barney with Anna.’

  Enoch grimaced and pushed his round, wire-framed spectacles back up his nose. ‘Not this again? For God’s sake man, will you let ’er be?’

  Amos, struck dumb by his friend’s vehemence, stared at him.

  ‘She’s making a living, and a good one at that,’ Enoch said, more calmly. ‘Let ’er get on wi’ it. You can’t use sheer force o’ will on a woman like Anna.’

  Amos raised an eyebrow and Enoch immediately took his meaning; could hardly miss it. Unmarried, scholarly, dedicated to the party, Enoch was meant to confine his expertise to politics. What did he know about the fairer sex? Bugger all, said Amos’s expression.

  ‘Aye,’ Enoch said. ‘Well, ’appen I’m no authority on women in general. But any fool can see Anna’s ’er own woman. You knew that three years ago, when you wed.’

  She was a grand lass too, he thought: bonny and clever, and younger than Amos by nearly twenty years. He should think himself lucky. If he, Enoch, had been given a chance – even half of one – with a woman like Anna, he wouldn’t have spent any time grousing about her. He stared into his pint for a moment, thinking about loneliness, and the lot of the political agitator. He was younger than Amos by a couple of years, but he looked older. His lungs were bad after twenty years in the pits, and the frequent struggles for breath gave him a strained, stooped appearance and a sickly pallor. He no longer thought of romance, though he’d once exchanged letters with a fellow Fabian from Lytham; for a time, he had imagined himself attached. But then she had written with news of an engagement, which, she said, ‘made further correspondence impossible’ and he had turned back to his books and pamphlets with something resembling relief. The episode, while it had lasted, had made him feel vulnerable: waiting for her next letter, worrying that he’d replied too promptly to her last. These anxieties had distracted him from his true path, he had told himself; a solitary life suited him best, and was necessary to his particular brand of political commitment. That was fifteen years ago and, for the most part, he believed it. He knew, though, that if fate had delivered him an Anna Rabinovich, he would have felt himself blessed.