by Louis Bayard
—Who?
—No one.
She went to the window, brushed a layer of dirt off the sill.
—He’d be about your age now.
Her hands made a soft tum-tum on the pane, and when she turned around, they were still drumming the air. She stared at them, half disenchanted.
—Do you have anywhere to go, Mr. Timothy?
I thought about that one.
—I suppose I do. I just don’t want to go there.
—Money?
—I’ve an uncle who’s been very generous. But I can’t take any more from him.
She chewed on her lower lip. Another minute passed. Two, perhaps.
—Look here, she said. You know how to read, don’t you?
—Yes.
—I mean different sorts of things. Newspapers and novels and racing forms.
—Of course.
—And write, too?
—Yes.
—And it’s not difficult, is it? It’s quite easy once one gets the hang of it?
—I expect so, yes.
She nodded once, smoothed the front of her dress.
—Well, then, you may have yourself a position. If you’ve a mind to it.
I made my debut next day at dinner. Mrs. Sharpe had lent me a new shirt with a starched collar two sizes too big. I felt vaguely like a box turtle, emerging from a hard young shell. My eyes blinked and welled in the new air.
The girls scarcely noticed me; they were immersed in a platter of Mary Catherine’s corned beef. Breakfast didn’t exist here, and the evening meal came and went depending on how busy things got, and so the girls tended to be quite peckish right round the middle of the day. All the decorum that Mrs. Sharpe had drilled into them was forsaken during these moments. They leant over the table like brigands, jammed their knives into their plates, wrestled with enormous chunks of beef, swallowed with the barest minimum of chewing. Most of them hadn’t washed off their cosmetics, so when they wiped their mouths, their hands came away with hard brown crusts of rouge and powder, which, in their zeal, they often mistook for food.
The man who had directed me here the night before had already finished his meal. He was leaning against the mantel, reading the Pall Mall Gazette. He might have been mistaken for a particularly tenacious client but for his unbuttoned collar and his rolled-up sleeves and his air of quiet entitlement. A man at home.
—Afternoon, George, said Mrs. Sharpe.
He began nodding in her direction, then he caught sight of me, and his head briefly arrested itself before finishing its motion.
Mrs. Sharpe made two quick raps on the table.
—Mary Catherine, we’ll need another place setting.
At this, the girls broke off their chewing. Gazed at one another with a wild surmise, as the poet writes. Mrs. Sharpe must rather have enjoyed the effect she was creating, because she provided no explanation just yet. She helped herself to some boiled potato. Took a few sips of her claret. Dabbed her lips: once, twice. Only then did she speak.
—Girls, I wish you to know that I have hired Mr. Timothy as my bookkeeper.
Another sip, another dab.
—For the time being, he will be staying with us. I have installed him in Nell’s old room, next to the dungeon of unspeakable horror.
Their heads were bowed now like schoolgirls’. Only their eyes, furtively meeting and then swerving away, betrayed any sign of independent thought.
—You are to treat him as you would any other employee. That is to say, trifle with him, and you will answer to me.
It was then that Iris, propelled by her neighbour’s nudge, emitted a snort louder and bawdier than any I had ever heard. Such a snort! It described a visible, almost classical arc from her mouth and nose to the table.
—Miss Iris, am I to take this as dissent?
Mrs. Sharpe’s voice was at its most fluted and grandiose. Her finger was pointed like an arrow at Iris’s heart.
—Not at all, ma’am.
—And you, George?
George folded his newspaper. And then, for good measure, refolded it.
The education of Mrs. Sharpe was rough going at first. Apart from George’s daily journals and some bound ledgers, the only literary works in the establishment were Buchan’s Domestic Medicine and a copy of Sartor Resartus, left behind by a Kings College student who had jumped out the second-story window in the belief that a police raid was afoot. (It was just Mary Catherine banging pans in the scullery.) Mr. Carlyle proved a touch abstruse for both of us, so next morning I bought a children’s primer from a bookseller in Charing Cross Road. It was titled Beauteous Betty Butterworth, and it played out its tale in a world of bs. Betty baked biscuits…. A bee bit Betty on the bottom…. Betty bawled and bawled.
—Now, when you see that letter, that tells you the sound will be “buh.”
—Buh. Buh.
And as we passed from letter to letter, from word to word, through skeins and skeins of sentences, how could I not relive the pilgrimage I had once made with my mother? I wasn’t supposed to learn as early as I did. Mother was teaching Sam at the time—he was sitting in her lap, with the book cradled between his legs—and I was quite put out that they were playing a game that excluded me. I kept wandering into the room, and it was only a matter of time, really, before Mother craned her head in my direction.
—Tim, would you care to learn, too?
And so, for me, it began as a lark and became, at some juncture, deadly earnest. For Mrs. Sharpe, it was the reverse. She took it so very seriously at the start that I wasn’t sure we would ever get anywhere. The sounds lodged in the base of her throat; releasing them was like breaking an unpickable lock. We spent a full week on gh words alone because she couldn’t see why the same combination of letters should produce such radically different sounds, and I myself could not explain the wisdom behind these divergences.
—It’s just…it’s how it is. It’s how people say it.
But the more sounds she absorbed into her repertoire, the more animated Mrs. Sharpe grew, until our sessions together became simply a vehicle for her joy. These strange hieroglyphics, no longer mysterious, no longer terrible, cannonading from her chest, ricocheting up her throat, exploding in the air around us. Marvelous sounds! Fowl. Powder. Parcel. Handle. Axe. Gudgeon. Turf. Barley. They spilled from her mouth like fruit pulp, masticated but with a trace of their original sweetness. Ladder. Stalk. Rum. Beeswax. Providence.
Weeks’ and weeks’ worth of sound and sense had to go by before Mrs. Sharpe began to rise above the individual words, to feel the shape of a sentence and the deeper pull of a paragraph. At times, she has even surprised me by stepping outside the written word altogether and offering her own supra-textual commentary.
—Oh, he should never have let the one savage go, Tim. Mark my words, he’ll regret it.
Or else:
—Isn’t it amazing when you think on it? Hasn’t poked a woman in twenty years! I shouldn’t wonder if he buggers Friday before long.
In the face of such a discriminating intelligence, there is less and less for a tutor to do. Mrs. Sharpe’s brain works largely independently now. The letters whir in and out, the cogs grind them exceeding fine. Her writing has come along nicely, too: she now produces a handsome, if tentative, cursive. And so my interventions are now confined to correcting the occasional pronunciation or defining the overly latinised adjective. Dr. Johnson, I tell her, might serve her purpose just as well as I, but she won’t hear of it. Insists I have a calming influence on her.
I suppose a bit of calm might be a fair exchange for room and board. Although it does occur to me that, as Mrs. Sharpe’s official bookkeeper, I might try to bring some order to her finances. The very idea is abhorrent to her.
—Christ, that’s why I keep George around! You don’t want to deny a man his employment, do you?
George is, in fact, the only one who knows the true nature of our arrangement. Which is not to say he approves. Whenever he sees us passing into
Mrs. Sharpe’s back room, he twitches away from us, as though we were the despair of England’s future. At other times, he is more vocal. During one of our sessions, he opened the door on us, as if by mistake. Stood there in a transparent attitude of surprise, the candlelight flickering in the open chasm of his mouth.
—Oh, my, look at us. Will it be Shakespeare next?
He dropped his head to one side.
—A fine Romeo and Juliet you’d be. Brings tears to my eyes, just imagining it.
At which point, Mrs. Sharpe, reverting to the child she must once have been, squealed:
—George, d’you know Shakespeare had an e at the end of his name? Just like moi!
This, I believe, is the mark of a true scholar: to be unfazed by the world’s skepticism. The one thing she can’t abide is the thought of her girls finding out. She fears it will cost her some of the sovereignty she has built up over the years. Of course, she’s perfectly capable of enforcing that sovereignty when the need arises. I once saw her box the ears of an employee who had refused to lick a vice admiral’s scrotum. And when she learned that one of her girls was privately blackmailing a married barrister, Mrs. Sharpe sent the girl packing before another half hour had passed:
—If there’s any extortin’ to be done, it’s I as will do it!
And yet she can be very good to her girls. She will not allow them, for instance, to be punished for anyone else’s pleasure (although they may freely inflict punishment when called upon to do so); whenever a customer indicates such a preference, she refers him to Mrs. Lee’s on Margaret Place. I am told that one gentleman was so very persistent on the subject that Mrs. Sharpe herself agreed to be spanked with a pillow—but only while clothed, and only while standing. As soon as the gentleman had taken five passes at her, she snatched the pillow from his hands and informed him that he owed her five pounds.
Thus, between Mrs. Sharpe’s general good nature and her occasional royal edicts, none of her girls would ever dare cross her. Or even speculate openly about what she and I do during our daily sessions. They assume, probably, that I am Mrs. Sharpe’s concubine. At least, I have seen them wink at one another as they ask me leading questions. Iris is the boldest in this regard. She will open her eyes wide and inquire:
—Have you seen the madam’s cherries about?
Iris has never truly forgiven me for that first night—I can see I was a pique to her professional pride. She wastes few opportunities to get her own back.
—Mr. Timothy, wasn’t Lord Byron quite the swordsman?
On this occasion, I was lulled, I confess, by the sound of a poet’s name emerging from Iris’s mouth.
—Yes, I suppose he was.
—And is it true he had a club foot?
—I think so, yes.
—Then there’s hope for you, isn’t there?
No one else generally rises to the bait, and in fact, most of the girls are quite lovely to me. Pamela, for instance—the former governess—always has a kind word. And Sadie, too, sweet little thing, tiny of bosom, tiny of voice. Mrs. Sharpe tried to fatten her up in the beginning, then headed full steam in the other direction, with the result that Sadie is now known to patrons as Wee Lucy, a twelve-year-old milkmaid with extravagant ringlets and flimsy peasant bodices that rip very neatly down the middle.
And then there’s Minnie, a plump Christmas goose of a girl, with stately carriage and a heavenly coral complexion and two toffee drops for eyes. Quite the catch, is our Minnie. It’s rumoured that the second son of the Bishop of Exeter has larger designs on her: he sees her three nights a week and has lately broached the possibility of introducing her to his mother. Minnie knows better than to believe a boy’s promises, but everyone agrees that if ever a girl was marked for rapid social promotion, it is she.
And lest I forget, there is Mary Catherine, boiler of beef and maid-of-all-work. Nurses a dream of someday becoming a top-of-the-bill attraction herself, although it must be acknowledged that her chances in this regard are slight. Tenterhook hands, pachyderm elbows, turnip nose, and potato chin…she is not built for love’s work. She is, rather, one of those people who spread love as they go. Even the act of cleaning water closets becomes, through her good graces, a ritual of devotion. On her hands and knees, scrubbing deep veins of grime from the front staircase, she is yet able to lift her head and toss you a smile as you step over her.
Yes, all things considered, they’re a fine mess of humanity, my fellow employees. I can’t say I fancy any of them in particular—excessive proximity has a way of ruining that—but I do hold them in the highest regard. I have seen them go out of their way to drop coins in a beggarwoman’s apron. I have seen them squeeze spare shillings from a tightfisted customer to help a friend pay his rent. I have seen them comfort men in every degree of affliction. I have been one of those men.
Sometimes just coming home to them is a comfort. I walk up the stairs of a December evening, and the sounds of Mrs. Sharpe’s boardinghouse come floating up to me. The phantasmal whispers and elongated moans. The creaking of a floorboard, the thumping of bedpost against wall. A shriek, brief and genderless. I feel strangely welcomed in these moments. Embraced.
And this feeling follows me all the way to my room. I give my face a quick scrub from the basin. I blow out the candle by my bed. I throw off my clothes and pull Father’s comforter over me. I rub my bare limbs to get them warm.
Some evenings, I even receive a parting benison. Tonight, for instance: the litany of Squidgy and Pamela, resounding from the adjoining room.
—What is thy duty towards God?
—My duty towards God is to…to believe in him…to fear him and…and…
Thwack!
—Love him! Oww, love him with all my heart!
And then I remember: it’s ten days till Christmas.
Chapter 3
I SCARCELY NOTICE IT AT FIRST. The courtyard behind Mrs. Sharpe’s boasts so many other late-night attractions, each making its own claim upon the eye. At this very moment, I can see, from the vantage of my bedroom window, a torn-off playbill from the St. James Theatre, a troop of rats gnawing on soup bones, crates and bins, an abandoned spittoon, and a long trail of cracked gin bottles ending in the crumpled heap of an old sot, sleeping off many yesterdays.
Amidst such a rich tableau, why pay any special mind to a tarpaulin, bunched and creased and billowed, its corners tucked in? Flung, probably, from some neighbouring window. I wouldn’t even look at it twice were I not so struck by its whiteness—the absence of any paint or glue. A purely spotless tarpaulin, left for rubbish.
Even stranger: it begins to move.
Almost imperceptibly at first, by the barest of degrees. And then either my eye becomes attuned to its motion, or its motion accelerates, for it begins to pulse with a restless intelligence. It wafts down the alley, the most graceful of ectoplasms, with no definite point of attachment, no obvious axis, just a clear line of intent. And even when it jars against a refuse bin, retracts its border and adjusts its alignment, its movement is so deliberate that it seems somehow to have accounted for the bin in advance, and incorporated it.
A pantomime spirit. That’s my best explanation. A children’s pantomime, rehearsing well past midnight, and now one of its lead goblins has wandered offstage, stumbled out the side door, and headed down the wrong alley. The other cast members must even now be giving chase: “Have you seen our little goblin? Yea high? Moving rather slowly?”
And so I’m not surprised, not truly surprised, to see the tarpaulin drop away to reveal a child’s uncovered head. And yet the effect of this head against the white of the cloth and the near-extinguishing black of the alley is so intense, so cauterizing, it stops the breath in my throat. I step back from the window, and my hand jiggles the candle on the sill. The barest flicker of light, that’s all, and yet it might as well be the infusion of a thousand torches, because the child’s head jerks towards my window, and in the ensuing second, her face—for the child is a girl—stands strangely
segregated from the rest of her accoutrement. And in the next second, she has taken flight.
No longer a slow parabolic line but a clean, straight trajectory, accorded a special geometric purity by its sheer haste. She wants very much to be gone. Very soon she is.
Next morning I find the tarpaulin, snagged on the corner of an ash bin, three houses down. Cast off like the skin of an enchanted snake.
That night she colonises my dreams. We pick up almost exactly where we left off. The girl is running—running hard. Her tarpaulin streams behind her in a long, resplendent wake. Jermyn Street has disappeared, and the buildings have pulled back, and there’s nothing now but a long track of pavement, wide enough to hold all of London’s carriages. The girl is running, a blur of light and steam, and above her, a shadow gathers. A shuddering blue shadow that expands until it covers the entire track. I hear the beating of wings and a high, strangled call—a sound from the furthest aeries of Asia. The shadow parts, and through the vent, a head emerges, eyes hard and unblinking, beak pointed like a butcher’s hook at the running girl.
The girl never looks up; she knows what’s there. Her hands, flying before her, assume the guise of talons. An act of desperate cunning, I can see that: she wants the predator to think she’s one of its own. But the creature is under no such illusion. It contracts itself into a bundle, a bale of infinite density, and, with one last burst of terrible power, flings itself towards earth…
—There! cries Mrs. Sharpe.—What think you?
From across the breakfast table, she slides a torn piece of green paper towards me. It’s the backside of an empty ledger sheet.
Your Presents Is Most Humbly, Awflly Beseeched
By Mrs Ophelia Sharpe
For an Our of Yuletied Cheere
—The lettering is very fine, I say.
—Oh, do you think? I’m feeling very glum about my f’s; they keep curling back on themselves. I think they must secretly want to be g’s.
—Everything looks very nice. Shall I correct the spelling?
—Please.
I work in silence for a few moments, waiting for Mrs. Sharpe’s voice to fill the void round us. It soon does.
