‘For Christ’s sake, not that stinking thing in here,’ I said (which would have given me away good and proper to Dora in the morning). Yet, to continue to appear obliging I fetched him a cheroot from the box on my mantelpiece at four in the morning. It all began to recall the old routine of dancing attendance on princely Jim. It brought back that old world of hurry, scurry, bangs on the door in the middle of the night, of being in the street as dawn came up and still asleep at midday, and always some alarm, catastrophe, and danger round the corner. It’s a life that can’t be described. Only those who’ve lived it can know. Looking from my window after he’d left, waiting for the dawn, I resolved to round off our trip to the music-hall, seals, Cockney Nightingale, patriotic songs and all, with that popular finale, the disappearing trick.
So early that morning I wired Brown at Knare Park and received a reply at lunchtime: ‘So glad you are coming. Best train is at 3.30 from Victoria’ – and I took it.
As I watched trees, fields, orchards streaming past the window, drawing further away from London, that Babylonian city, a thought slowly came to me, or rather, a question. How could it be that Mary Jane was still eluding me? I’d advertised, sped everywhere, leaving messages and promises of a reward for information. All evidence pointed toward her being around and about in the East End, yet apparently no message had got through to her. My first advertisement had after all brought Mary Claire all the way from Liverpool. Of course, Mary Jane might be abroad, or in this very countryside picking hops. She might be in prison, or ill. Yet somehow I was not satisfied with any of these explanations. But if she was about and had heard I was looking for her, why was she unwilling to meet me? Perhaps she was ashamed. God knew what the last eight years had made of Mary Jane.
Mary Claire, I thought, hadn’t wanted anything to do with me, but at least I knew why. She had her small house in a long street with the brick chapel at the end where on Sundays she took her well-scrubbed family. She had her regular daily round, and probably it was the continual round of washing, starching, scrubbing and dusting which provided her with a sense of comfort and security. So long as she could keep up with her tasks, gaining the grudging approval of her husband, a strict mother-in-law and her censorious neighbours, she could believe nothing would go wrong in her little world. Well, I had to confess my own responsibility in all this, with father dead, then mother, my own sudden evaporation, leaving no message behind, must all have been a bad knock for her. So she had found for herself a life ruled by a stern God and plenty of yellow soap. Who could blame her?
But Mary Jane, a whore like myself, had no respectability to protect. She could afford to remember her parents, sisters, what had happened and where we came from. Why didn’t she come? I puzzled over this as smoke streamed past the windows, revealing and concealing by turns the reapers in the fields yellow with corn, hedged around them, the little stands of trees here and there, swelling hills, orchards of trees hung with ripe red apples. It was like a picture from a children’s story book, so pretty, so safe and so tranquil, so unlike the towering mountains, great lakes, unexplored forests and measureless plains of waving grass moving as the winds moved, oceans of grass – all that landscape I had left less than a month before. In Canada most places were unchanged, unvisited by man, or disturbed only by the light footfalls of the Indians. Here, every inch of ground had been ridden over, trodden, ploughed, reaped countless times. Countless hands had shaped the land, planting trees and hedges, making ditches, diverting streams, to make it what they wanted. Here were no bears or wolves or snakes, savage snows or dusty broiling summers. It was peace. We went past hopfields, the full-grown hops clinging to their poles and strings. In one a big gang of gypsies was stripping them. Their painted caravans were parked in the next field. In another some twenty or thirty pickers from London, mothers, fathers, children, were doing the same. Two men heaved the filled sacks on to a cart. A woman was boiling a cauldron of water over a fire by the side of the field. The sun was still hot; the pickers moved slowly. A woman slapped a child and I heard his sharp cry as we passed. Through the open window of the train came sweet gusts of country air; then, as we turned a corner, the acrid smell of engine smoke.
Just short of Faversham I, the only passenger to descend, got out at a little station, where roses grew in beds behind the platform. There, a short, respectable-looking man in a bowler hat approached me. Lifting his hat he asked, ‘Mrs Frazer? Sir Marcus desired me to meet you and drive you to Knare Park. He sends apologies for not coming to meet you himself. A matter of family business. Shall we go to the gig?’ So we gave up our tickets and walked from the station across the yard to where a little brown-painted gig, with a good-looking chestnut horse in front, stood waiting. A porter stowed the small trunk I had with me at the back, among some parcels the bowler-hat man had evidently collected in Faversham before meeting me. The bowler hat made sure to tip the porter for me. All this intimidated me more than somewhat, so did the fact that Mr Brown had a handle to his name. He must have been a baronet all the time (he was too young to have been knighted) and I hadn’t been aware of the fact.
So off we clopped, soon off the big road, and going down small ones. There were well-kept hedges and copses on either side, cows mooned over fences, watching us pass. I began to wonder how much of all this belonged to Marcus Brown and felt nervous about the whole affair. For all I knew the Queen would be there when we arrived and I wasn’t sure I was up to the job at all. Bowler hat volunteered, ‘My name is William Edwards, madam. I manage the household for Sir Marcus – as I did for his uncle before his death.’ Not much regret for the late lamented Brown, I noted, observing also that Edwards appeared a decent, capable fellow, well up to managing anything. I wished for a moment I had him at Esmeralda’s, wondered if he was open to offers, decided no, he was not a man who would take easily to life in a brothel. ‘I also act as butler,’ he mentioned, ‘my wife being cook-housekeeper. It’s a small establishment. Sir Marcus’s uncle lived very quietly. I think you’ll find the house a very pretty one.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Two and a half miles, and we have a lovely day for the drive.’
He told me a good deal as we went along, though judiciously. Sir Marcus’s uncle had started off as a soldier, but soldiering did not suit him and after the Crimean War he had given up his commission and bought the estate, thereafter living quietly for thirty years, farming, putting his tenant farms in order and modernizing the house. ‘When I came to the house as a boy,’ Edwards told me, ‘there was only one tap in the kitchen and a pump in the yard. Every drop of hot water required for the household had to be heated over the kitchen fire.’ Edwards himself had begun as a kitchen and garden boy at sixpence a week. His son, he said, was at a polytechnic in London studying science, while his daughter was an apprentice seamstress who lived in Faversham with the family for whom she worked. On hearing that I had just returned from Canada he remarked solidly that his son, once qualified, planned to emigrate.
The sun was almost down when we turned off the road and along the drive. At a certain point it curved, revealing a gem of a house, all red brick and old windows, quiet and glowing in late sunshine. It seemed huge to me, though I suppose by the standards of houses of that kind it was not. At the back of the house a garden ran, on a slight incline, down to the farm fields, one golden with corn stubble, one green, where sheep grazed. A small river ran through. At the end of another field I saw a boy with a stick urging a group of cows through a gate. Behind that were more fields. Further back still, there was a church spire just visible amid some trees, four or five miles off. To one side of the house – I could not see it then – lay a sunken garden.
We drew up in front of the house, where roses grew in beds. Marcus came out to meet me, with his mother. I suppose the warmth of Marcus’s greeting was enough to make Mrs Brown dislike me from the word go, though I dare say even without that she would not have warmed to me much. She and Marcus resembled each other, but in his case that a
ppearance had worked out as a brown complexion, with a ruddy tinge, big, rather merry eyes and a generous mouth, whereas with his mother the same face was sallow, the same eye was wary, warning and disappointed, the same mouth pinched with heavy, but concealed obstinacy.
I was taken to my pretty room, where vases of roses had been placed. Having washed and changed into a grey dinner dress suitable for a widow and nothing to frighten the horses in the street, I came down into the drawing-room to meet the others. Cecil Curtis was there. He greeted me very civilly, but I was wise to the situation now and realized my host had revealed an interest in me, and Curtis had backed off, as an old friend ought. Then there was Roger Crooke, a big, bluff man, an old friend of the family and Member of Parliament for the area, and his pale daughter Guinevere, a young widow of about my own age. She, I quickly saw, was Mrs Brown’s candidate for the post of daughter-in-law. Apart from them there were only two girls, still in short skirts, with their hair down. They were Alice, Marcus’s seventeen-year-old sister, and her friend Veronica.
Mrs Brown, in black silk, with a lot of jet sewn on and some diamonds, being the hostess, started straight away to make me feel uncomfortable. It took me some time to realize that it wasn’t quite in order for Marcus to invite a complete stranger, and a young woman at that, into a family party at his house so soon after his uncle had died. I was longer still in realizing that an unmarried son of thirty, who has just inherited his uncle’s money, land and title, could do what he liked – go into the Church, or the law, seduce all the village maidens, take off for the North Pole, whatever he pleased – but that what Mrs Brown desired was to settle him down and keep him at home by means of a marriage to a woman of a good family, with some money, who agreed with her about everything. Now, the Crookes were a very big family in the country, Guinevere Coleman had been left rich by her husband, and therefore she was the choice.
As the days passed Mrs Brown came to like me less and less. I did not come from a world she knew, my tale of who I was did not convince her; she rightly suspected me, and all the more since she, who knew her own son best, understood better than I did at the time that he was deeply attracted to me. What I thought was a fancy, such as men get, went deeper than that. Meanwhile I was all at sea. I’d been reared in East London, completed my education on the streets of Whitechapel and spent the last eight years on the Canadian frontier. I couldn’t understand half what these people were saying, for the topics they spoke of and the assumptions underlying their lightest remarks were completely foreign to me. I knew no one they knew, I couldn’t play any of their games, from piquet to croquet: advertising that I was a dab hand at billiards and poker would only have marked me down as a low female. Even my clothes were all wrong, being foreign and fitting in the right places instead of the wrong ones. During the day the ladies wore cotton dresses and straw bonnets and so did I, but theirs were English, mine French. So I kept quiet, appeared stupid, and in spite of the pretty countryside and charming house, began to wish I was elsewhere.
Although I had only arrived on Tuesday, it seemed to me the easiest way out of this dilemma was simply to pack and disappear. Therefore, I scribbled a wire to my solicitor, Mr Ratcliffe, asking him to send me a telegram recalling me to the bedside of my imaginary sick friend. I got it sent on Friday morning during a stroll round the village, complete with forelock-tugging yokels, condolences on the death of the uncle, congratulations to the young heir, etc., etc. from ruddy-cheeked local tradesmen. No doubt but that the Browns were a big noise in this peaceful spot, but what they took for affection, as the women bobbed curtsies and the men touched their hats, I saw as nothing but fear of a blow or hope of a bone, as with dogs.
We, that is, Marcus, Mr Curtis, Mrs Coleman and the two girls, took a pint of ale outside the local inn, sitting under a big chestnut tree. The men, that is, took the ale; we ladies had lemonade. Guinevere Coleman buttered up the gents; the girls attempted to suppress the boredom and bottled-up energy so plain on their faces. Marcus’s sister had a little sly look as she gazed at me, as if she suspected I had different information to impart than the kind she had been given so far, and wanted it badly. Girls are quick in that way. Cecil Curtis and Marcus, in their white suits and panamas, sat with their legs stuck out, enjoying the sensation of being outnumbered by pretty women and monarchs of all they surveyed. I concluded they could afford this satisfaction, for they could go elsewhere when they felt like it, in the direction of fast horses and fast women if they wanted, whereas poor widowed Guinevere, and Alice and Veronica, all needing husbands, had no such freedom.
Then it was back for lunch, the heavy table in the rather gloomy dining-room presided over by Mrs Brown, who enquired as to my maiden name. I told her blandly, ‘Kelly,’ knowing that it would prevent the usual genealogical enquiries, for there are few Kellys in the ranks of the notable English families, and it would be a foolish person who would try to track a Kelly back through their connections to the Plantagenets.
‘You are descended from the old kings of Ireland, then?’ she remarked, somewhat sarcastically.
‘Bog-Irish, rather,’ I claimed, sick of the woman and all her works. This caused a silence until Crooke burst out laughing.
‘So – what do you think of Mr Gladstone’s efforts?’ he enquired. Crooke was a Conservative MP and therefore an opponent of the Prime Minister.
‘I know very little of politics,’ I said. ‘But I doubt if we’ll solve the Irish question. The Irish will solve it themselves, I suppose, by emigrating and emigrating, until there’s no one left in Ireland, but the rest of the world is full of us.’
He smiled at this. ‘A good solution – a solution without bloodshed.’
‘Then who will live in Ireland?’ asked the girl Veronica, looking up in wonderment from her blackberry and apple pie.
‘We’ll leave it all to the donkeys,’ supplied Cecil.
‘Oh, you’re joking,’ she concluded.
‘What do the women do in the wilderness, Mrs Frazer?’ asked keen Alice. ‘Do they round up cattle and fight Indians, too?’
‘Alice, how absurd,’ said her mother. ‘I expect they keep house, as women do everywhere.’
I nodded in assent, for it was no lie that I kept a house, though not the kind of house Mrs Brown could imagine.
In the afternoon we went to an abandoned castle in the neighbourhood by carriage, and had a picnic tea in the grounds. Mrs Brown accompanied us, to keep an eye on Marcus, but after tea Cecil Curtis suggested a stroll and, on Marcus’s instructions, I believe, tried to make sure he and Guinevere and the girls lost us in a wood, which I prevented. There was nothing obvious about Marcus’s behaviour, he was not trying to corner me in dark places, squeeze my breasts or pull up my skirts, but for me that made the whole matter more confusing, not less.
It was late afternoon when Marcus caught me alone in the sunken garden. Knowing that next day Mr Ratcliffe’s telegram summoning me back to London would arrive I felt quite detached, almost as if I had already left, as I sat on my old stone bench, a low yew hedge behind, hearing the click of croquet balls on the lawn further off. The laughter and exclamations of those playing reached me. ‘Beast! Beast!’ I heard Alice exclaim, in jesting rage. It was odd to think that when I was no older than those two big girls in their white dresses and black stockings I’d been approaching men in the street, laying my hand on their shoulder and asking them if they were lonely tonight, all for a couple of shillings. Alice and Veronica, they were lucky, I thought, to be playing croquet on the lawn while the cook in the kitchen got tea ready. I sat there in calm contemplation, book in hand, gazing at the small dry fountain, with the greenish bronze model of a nymph on it, and at the roses behind, mostly gone. I could hear the little cheep of a starling on a bough behind me. And then who should come through the hedge behind me but Marcus.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘You’re in search of tranquillity.’ He sat down beside me. ‘Do you like my house?’ he asked. ‘Or are you dreaming of Canada?’
To tell the truth, over the quiet days I had found my mind returning to the vastness of that country. Here at Knare Park I felt as suffocated as I did in Whitechapel, though in entirely different ways. It was not of course dirt or foul air, or teeming streets filled with hungry animals all trying to push to the top of the heap in order to survive, which seemed to choke me. Here in Kent I felt stifled in another way. Here was a small world of unyielding order. Those who lived in it believed in their own absolute rightness, that this little corner of the universe had been created to measure and judge the rest. Comfort and complacency reigned. The surroundings had charm, the residents not.
That morning I had woken early, risen, gone to the window and breathed the fresh morning air. I looked over the lawn where starlings and blackbirds hopped and pecked in the dew, stared upwards at the blue sky, heard from downstairs the faint clatterings and bangings of the house being arranged, breakfast cooked, the clop of the breadman’s horse arriving at the back door. Gazing over that still landscape of small, hedged fields, the length of willows by the river, a wagon, far off, moving down a distant lane like a toy, I was seized with delight at its prettiness. Then I remembered the place I had left, where the air in winter was like a knife and wolves in the forest howled under snow-laden trees, the snow billowed over the prairie, mile on mile. I thought of hot summers, thousands of half-wild longhorn cattle being driven helter-skelter down the main street through the clouds of dust thrown up by their hooves, to the rail head. I recalled huge brazen skies, lightning flickering over the huge plains, rain battering flat a thousand acres of grass. Where, I wondered, did I belong? Perhaps, stuck half-way between being a woman and no-woman, half Irish and half French, I was doomed to be an individual with no country, no place I felt to be my own.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 15
