The Pharmacist's Wife

by Vanessa Tait

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Rebecca, dismayed. ‘So you said.’ Her friend was drifting, drifting away. ‘But why,’ she said loudly, to wake her again, ‘must you be clear of it? Haven’t you always said the medicine is a friend to us? If every woman knew, I remember you saying that, what we knew, no one need be unhappy again.’

  Eva sat up and scratched fiercely at her nose. ‘But can you not see? It is drying me up, from the inside out! I cannot laugh, not truly laugh, nor cry neither. It is a kind of half-life that I live. Do you not feel it too?’

  Rebecca hesitated. ‘Yes, I do feel it – but – it is better this way, for me, I think. My husband – my life – are more tolerable.’

  ‘But not for me! I am sorry, dearest Rebecca. Only – I want to give up! It makes no difference to you, does it?’

  ‘You must do as you want, of course. It does not matter about me.’ The medicine was her only source of comfort, her rock in the middle of a stormy loch. And Eva had been her friend in it. P’raps she could try this new way, not to stop, but to dream again, as Eva was dreaming now. Eva’s lips were murmuring and her hand was fluttering, she was talking to someone – someone else – behind her eyelids. She would try it. She would wake Eva and have her fill the syringe once more. But another look at the clock told her it was late; Alexander would be home within the hour. She must wake Eva in any case, but to tell her to go. She dare not risk it, not today. But tomorrow, early, she may ask.

  CHAPTER 17

  But the next day the streets were treacherous with leaves. Every time the wind blew, a new bustle fell down; sweepers could not keep up with them and great piles gathered untouched under trees. Rebecca was going out, on her way to Evangeline’s, when she slipped and almost fell on the edge of such a pile that had turned to slime. To right herself she put out her hand to the pavement and twisted her head back and thought she saw – but it could not be – thought she saw Gabriel.

  Rebecca rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. She was not dreaming! Her gloves were filthy, she would not dream that. Her nose itched. She would not dream that either, would she?

  All the youthful vigour had gone from his face and she hardly recognized him. He looked, what? Forty years old, when he was not yet thirty! His hair, once so golden red, was now run through by streaks of grey and grease. Pallid skin, the colour of porridge. His moustache had been joined by a short beard that was dirty too. Deep lines ran from his nose to his mouth.

  He had started to walk on, leisurely enough, but because of his height his strides were long and he was already almost at the corner. Rebecca turned away from Eva’s house. She would follow him to see if he was an apparition.

  And because she could not be certain she was not dreaming, she followed him at a distance, quite calmly, her heart cool and her hands swinging at her sides. Though she could have been at his elbow and still been unseen, for he turned neither left nor right, neither stopped to inspect anything nor chatted with anyone.

  Up Leith Walk they went, the two of them, keeping to the pavement, for the tramlines were getting ready to be laid in the street. Everybody else was on the pavement too and there was a crush; it was easy for Rebecca to follow along behind, unseen.

  After a while the houses gave way to weeds and she saw up in front of her a ragged boy with a pail in each hand. Gabe overtook him, still striding on, but Rebecca paused when she reached him. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Can you not tell?’ the boy said, pointing his nose up. There was a stench in the air. His buckets were filled with dog leavings.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I see. Thank you. I’ve not been round here before.’

  ‘No one who does not work here comes. You are lost. Go back the way you came and turn left. That is the way to town.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rebecca, reaching into her purse for a coin, ‘but I am on the right path.’

  ‘I don’t need that,’ he said, ‘for a bit of conversation.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Rebecca. And it was true, the boys like him who collected pure were well paid.

  What was Gabriel doing in the tannery district? She went on, following the boy, and the stink hit the back of her throat and made her eyes water. Perhaps it was only now that she realized she was not dreaming. The trees and bushes all drooped as if the smell had a weight to it. Someone had lined the way with mint and Rebecca snatched up a few leaves and crushed it beneath her nostrils, but it did not help.

  At the end of the lane was the tannery itself, housed in an assortment of dank sheds. Rebecca turned into the first one she came to. Several of the windows had broken panes and cold air feathered in through it, setting the light from the lamp glancing over the uneven rafters and wooden pillars that supported them. The plash of the wheel turning in the water, the trembling yellow light and the smell of fermenting faeces made bile rise in Rebecca’s throat once again and she leaned against a pillar, pressing her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Where was he? The wheel concealed another man, a giant, his sleeves rolled up past his elbow in spite of the chill to reveal a forearm as big as another man’s thigh.

  ‘Have you …?’ Rebecca began. ‘Do you know of a man here called Gabe? Gabriel, I mean?’

  The man inclined his head. ‘In the lime yard.’

  Gabriel did work here in this awful place, the boy had been right. For how long? And why had he not come to see her? Outside were more puddles, her toes were soaked through and stinging with lime. She went towards a rasping sound, wrinkling her nose against the smell. It took her a moment to realize, in the stench of it all, that the rasping sound came from a skin with the fat being scraped off it, and that the man with the knife stretched between his two hands was Gabriel.

  ‘Gabriel – oh!’ she cried out before she realized what she was saying.

  He looked up. Stared at her. Looked away, frowning, then stared at her again. The yellow of his skin turned first white and then red. He looked back down at his work as if he did not know where else to look and made as if to carry on, but one end of the knife slipped from his grasp and he dropped the other wooden end of it onto his toe. He picked up his leg and hopped. ‘Is it you?’

  His voice had not changed, not really.

  ‘Of course it is me!’

  ‘You are so different.’

  ‘You are different, I hardly recognized you! I followed you all this way, not knowing.’

  Outside the boy whistled and clattered his pails.

  ‘You should not be here,’ Gabe said.

  ‘I thought it was you, only I could not be sure. Nowadays I – well, never mind. Where have you been?’

  ‘I have written you a letter,’ he said, with a helpless gesture.

  ‘When? I never got it.’

  ‘I don’t … I haven’t … sent it. I was planning to—’

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘When I had got it right.’ Gabe looked down at the bony gleam of his hide.

  Rebecca coughed without bothering to reach for her handkerchief. ‘If you knew how I waited for those letters! If you—’ She coughed again. ‘What happened?’

  Gabe looked down. ‘I have ruined it. It was the shock of seeing you—’

  ‘Not the hide! Though I don’t,’ she swallowed, ‘I don’t know what you are doing here, of all places. Of all the places to find you!’ She closed her eyes, shook her head. ‘What happened to you, I mean, in Egypt?’

  ‘To me?’ Not taking his eyes from Rebecca’s face Gabe let the knife clatter down on the stone, making them both jump. ‘Me? I wanted to write to you, to explain it. I don’t think I can tell you here,’ he let his eyes go round the room, ‘in all this. Because I want you to know, I wanted to tell you, to make you understand, that I never stopped thinking of you in all that time. To make sense of it! Oh Rebe, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do not know what you mean. Not this time. I have spent more than two years waiting for a letter! And now I find you here, and you have not visited me … even still … even though yo
u are in Edinburgh.’ Her eyes stung and tears fell from them before she could blink them away. ‘Why did you not write to me? You could have been dead!’

  He kept his eyes on her face. ‘I am sorry. It is not enough, just to say that. I know it. But … I am sorry. I lost … hope. I lost you.’ He is crying too, she sees.

  ‘I am married, you know.’

  ‘I know.’ Gabe let his hands hang at his sides. His fingers clenched and unclenched. ‘That is why I have held off coming to see you. Though I have followed you once, twice … ’Twas stupid, I know, but I wanted to see you. I hope you are happy.’ Next to his lip there was a scar she had not seen before, the length of her fingernail.

  ‘Happy?’ Rebecca gave a disbelieving laugh. Gabe must have seen something in her face because at last he crossed the space between them and made as if to touch her, to embrace her, but at the last moment he stopped his hand so that it only grazed her sleeve. ‘You are not happy! I knew it. Rebe, what has happened? I know I have no right to ask. Are you ill?’

  Rebecca wanted to step back and forward both, to sag against him. She did neither, only took in the strangeness of his face. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do not cry. Oh Rebe, do not cry! What can I do?’ He worked his lips and tried at last to smooth away a tear but she jerked away.

  ‘Do not do that! Who are you?’

  ‘I am no one, no one. How right you are to ask it! But I care for you …’ He shook his head and almost seemed to smile. ‘I love you still. That is who I am.’

  ‘You cannot say that to me!’

  ‘I say it with no claim at all, I ask for nothing back. But if I can help you, only tell me!’

  ‘It is too late. Years too late!’ She turned her shoulder to him. ‘I have things in my life that you know nothing about, and never shall.’ She is almost glad, almost proud, at last, to say it, though God knows it is madness to be either. ‘And I don’t think anything can help me now, especially not you.’

  She has waited for him, feeling as if she were nothing, feeling as if she did not exist. She had made him everything, she had made him as big as the giant in the next shed. Now he was in front of her, he was just a man, and a strange-looking man at that.

  Perhaps she had grown used to the regular features of her husband after all.

  ‘Just – please – I must know – are you dying?’ he said.

  ‘What? I don’t – do not be stupid! I haven’t consumption, or anything like that.’ She scrubbed her hand across her face again.

  ‘I have made you unhappy, broken your heart perhaps, and I cannot forgive myself for that.’

  ‘You did, I admit it. But I have fixed it again! I am very well. You do not need to worry.’ She needs, suddenly, to breathe.

  ‘Send for me – any time of the day or night! Only send a boy and I will be there. Promise me, Rebe.’

  ‘You are too late,’ she tells him again. Then she is outside, taking great gulps of foul air.

  CHAPTER 18

  Tomorrow she would ask Alexander for another dose of her salts. An evening dose, for by this time her morning dose had worn off entirely. The want of them made her restless. The restlessness started in her joints, in her elbows and knees, and travelled upwards to her heart, to her mind, until she could not bear to sit still.

  She could not read, could not write, could not play solitaire. Could not sew her tapestry, nor darn her stocking, could not, in short, do anything.

  Rebecca went again to the window and drew the curtains apart with a lurch. A brougham clattered past, its own windows impenetrable. Then the street fell silent again. Not the weather for walkers, and too late. Except, who was that? A boy, who came round the corner at a run. A ragged boy, his shirt showing through the holes in his jacket, his trousers several inches too short. What was he doing out so late? He ran up the length of the street, appearing and disappearing under the flood of the street lamps, his head turned to the houses on her side, looking at the numbers.

  Rebecca pressed her forehead onto the pane. It was cold and made her neck shiver, but she wanted to see him run. Closer he came, until Rebecca could see the dirt on his face.

  He disappeared under her house and she waited for him to turn up on the other side. But instead the doorbell rang out noisily into the silence, so loud it seemed everyone on the street must hear.

  He must be carrying a message. For her! Rebecca’s first thought was Alexander – there had been an explosion in the pharmacy! She ran swiftly downstairs on bare feet, pulled open the door.

  The boy’s breath clouded the darkness. He snatched his cap off and reached into his pocket. The notepaper was creased by the heat of his hands. ‘I’ve to give this to, Mrs Palmer. That’s you, in’t it?’

  Rebecca nodded.

  ‘I’m to wait for a reply.’

  She stepped back into the house a little, leaving the door open, in case the contents of the note made her cry out. But the writing on the front of the envelope was not Alexander’s, or even Gabe’s. The neat hand held a trace of the governess: Evangeline’s, then. What news had she, so late in the evening?

  Rebecca tore open the envelope, in her haste cutting a thin line of blood into the side of her finger. She sucked on it as she read.

  Dearest R,

  You asked when you first came to visit me to be shown the owner of the shoe. Come then, tonight.

  You think you know what is in store, but I must warn you, in the strongest terms, prepare yourself! I have grown accustomed to men’s predilections – but p’raps you have not.

  Tell the boy you will come and I will see you in an half an hour on South Bridge, just past Mr Carraway’s, the tea dealer. Look for a brass plate advertising a cordwainer and wait outside it. We will go in together.

  Your loving friend,

  E

  Rebecca folded up the note and pushed it into her pocket. ‘Tell Evangeline – the woman who sent you to me – I am coming.’ Then she flung on her cloak and snatched up her keys. As soon as she got onto the street she realized she had caught up two sets of keys in her haste, they clanked together in her reticule, but there was no time to return them. If Alexander should notice … But he would not; no matter.

  She had also forgotten to clip on her pocket watch, but she arrived at South Bridge certainly less than half an hour after she’d got Eva’s note. There was Mr Carraway’s, with its boxes of tea, and there was the cordwainer’s, its sign shining out from its dingy brick surround, the thumbs of a hundred men had rubbed it to a shine.

  No sign of Eva, not yet.

  Rebecca must walk or else explode. Someone had up-tipped a cart of sprouts. Someone else had been selling bloaters. At the turn in the road a woman screamed – and now there would be crying. Rebecca turned back towards the cordwainer’s – she could not bear to hear it. But there was not crying, only a man’s voice, low and pleading. Rebecca put her hand on her chest and tried to breathe; she longed again for her medicine. Not having it made her start to sweat, although the night was chilly.

  She did not hear Eva come up; her voice at her shoulder made her jump. ‘Rebecca? Are you ready?’

  She turned. Eva’s face was the colour of distemper, her eyes were ringed with dark circles. Her lips were dry, cracked; she chewed on them.

  Rebecca tried to smile. ‘Ready? I don’t know! This is not how I expected to spend my evening!’ She had meant it lightly, as a kind of joke, to ease the strangeness of it all, but Eva grimaced.

  ‘Let us go in.’ Eva grasped the knocker, which Rebecca now saw was too heavy and ornate for a usual shoemaker’s; it was some kind of snouted animal with wide-open eyes. Eva brought the nose of it down on the plate twice, then twice again.

  One minute passed. Two. Then came the sound of footsteps shuffling towards the door. Slowly, slowly … the maid must be very ancient.

  Rebecca had lived and died before the door, at last, creaked open.

  But she was not ancient, this girl, she was young. She wore a man’s black cap and a
high black collar, and a man’s britches, but her mouth gleamed with gold, like a pirate’s, and her hand rested on the silver bulb of a walking cane. Rebecca had heard such women whispered about, but she’d never seen one for herself. Did she go about as a boy in the daylight too? Rebecca must have seen them without knowing, walking in the street, say, looking as if they were young men yet to shave.

  How Alexander would hate them if he knew!

  The boy – the girl dressed as a boy – gave them a nod and a gleam of her teeth. The corridor was very close and very dark as they went in; Rebecca stumbled and put her arm out. Eva gave her a shove. ‘What is it? Do you want to turn around?’

  Rebecca shook her head, both to clear the fog from it and to say no to Eva.

  They went on until the corridor opened out onto a large room with high ceilings – an aristocrat’s old home, like all those in the Old Town. A row of pillars extended down the centre of the saloon, ornamented with black wax candles, guttering in a breeze that only they could feel. The girl pointed to an old silk divan, grubby at the front. ‘Sit there a moment, we are not ready for you yet.’ Her voice was high, she made no attempt to lower it.

  ‘Your fob watch!’ Rebecca said, as she was turning away.

  She smiled then and, for an instant, looked more like a girl. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It is very fine – I have looked for one just the same.’

  She gave her a bow and a wink. ‘Pure silver,’ she said, and banged her cane down smartly.

  Eva elbowed Rebecca in the ribs. ‘You must not talk to him – to her!’

  ‘Why not? I have never seen such a person before and she is so handsome. Do you think she goes about as a boy always?’

  ‘I don’t know! Or, yes, I think she does, that one. She prefers it. But there are rules here. Just … be quiet.’

  Rebecca sat still then, as still as she could, for her heart was jumping around in her chest. Now she began to see about her more clearly. The place was filled with furniture and tapestries: Spanish mahogany tables polished to an ebony sheen, blood-red carpets with Persian patterns. On the wall: murals, painted in reds and blacks, except for the white orbs that the hissing gasoliers gradually brought to life – breasts or buttocks or cheeks. She became aware that there were others in the great room, hidden away on couches, chairs, even sitting on cushions. Men, of course, of every kind. She saw yokels with dirty clothes; they must have come up from the countryside. How would they hear of such a place? Rebecca supposed that news of it must travel, from mouth to ear. A drunken confidence. And more urban types: swells with silk kerchiefs in their top pockets, inky-fingered clerks still in their work clothes, swankeys with their polished boots. Rebecca had always thought that pleasures of this kind were taken by men who were tipsy, ribald, yelling encouragement to each other. But these ones sat, looking quite cast down and dishevelled. The only sound was the hiss of the gasoliers and the slow step of the Tom as she opened and shut the door. Or – Rebecca’s eyes were used to the sombre light now – they were not quite cast down. Wasn’t there something theatrical in the angle of their heads, in the nature of their sighs? They were all watching the several doors and the staircase that led off from the room, with – Rebecca realized it now – a hunched kind of excitement.