‘I’m going to get a flannel from the press,’ I told him slowly, but his protests mounted, and he continued repeating the word ‘sponge’ so I stayed by him, and tried to fathom his request. Eventually he sighed heavily and let his head drop to his chest, and so it went, and nothing was revealed, so I settled him into the Windsor chair and went into the kitchen. I let the draught into the range to draw up the heat, then went back to the parlour to lay the fire in the grate, before running upstairs to get a flannel, and returning to the kitchen to boil some water.
Then I cleaned his face as best I could as he winced and groaned, and I applied some salve.
‘Here, love, drink some tea. You can tell me all later.’ I poured him a cup and placed it into his beleaguered hands, then left for Agatha Marrow’s house.
Lucinda was already asleep on a chaise amongst the piles of laundry and I picked her up and started to carry her home. Agatha said not a word, nor even smiled at me, but she laid a paper bundle on Lucinda’s sleeping stomach, and held the door open for us to leave. Back home, I nestled Lucinda into her bed and felt a warm patch on her dress where the parcel had been. Inside the paper were four steaming cheese-and-parsley scones; it was as much as I could do to stop myself crying out and devouring them all there and then, but I scuttled down the stairs and presented them to Peter, who was still struggling to lift the cup to his lips. I broke a scone into pieces, and placed them into his dry mouth, trying not to let the errant crumbs straying from the corners down his shirt trouble me in their profligacy. I restrained my hunger until he had finished, and then I fell upon my own scone, and when it was gone I ran a licked finger around the paper to collect every last crumb, and thought about starting on those lingering on Peter’s chest. I folded the other two up in a towel and put them in the dresser for Lucinda in the morning. It felt strange to be a recipient of such alms, but I was glad all the way down to my frozen feet.
‘I was rooled,’ Peter murmured finally, his mouth clagged with scone. ‘Rooled up. In the sponging-house. Blades and Old Skinner had me done. Skinner skinned me. Got himself an arrest warrant for a shilling, threw me in the sponging-house. Blades too.’
Lucinda was turning in her bed upstairs.
‘I only pledged twenty-five pounds. But the paper says fifty. It’s got my signature on. And we agreed five per cent. Not – not –’
‘How much?’ I dared ask.
‘Thirty per cent,’ he lied.
‘They charge what they please, don’t they, those folk,’ I said, numbly. Sixty, I wanted to scream. I saw it, Peter. Sixty!
But he proffered nothing further. There was nothing left in his voice, nothing left in him. He had become a veritable Dombey.
‘How long have we got?’ I eventually said.
‘A week.’
‘Will the bailiffs come?’
‘If Mrs Eeles doesn’t distrain it all first. We must – should we – can we bolt the moon?’ For the respectable Peter Damage even to suggest this was a sorry sign of how far he had sunk.
I shook my head. ‘No need, Peter. I’ve taken care of her. The rent’s been paid for two months, love. Don’t you worry there.’
‘How?’ He looked up at me in shock.
‘I’ll tell you another time.’
In bed that night I could not rest, despite my wearying day. I was hungry and faint, and sick for more food; my limbs were restless, and my sleep enervated. My dreams were haunted with spectres of my daughter, my husband and my father hovering around my mother’s death-bed, but who was dead and who alive I could not tell, for all were grey with terror and privation, and all cried at me to save them.
My mother, Georgina Brice, died on 14 September 1854, twelve days after she went down with the cholera. She weakened quickly; her liveliness poured out of her with every filling of the chamber-pot. Everything about her was dry: her skin flaked under my touch, her mouth cracked not only at the corners but inside, at the roof, under the tongue. No matter how much clean water she drank, nothing would quench her. Soon she stopped passing water: she could not even cry tears, although she knew she was dying, and her face sometimes creased and heaved up and down, as if she were weeping dry. The doctors said to give her salt, and more salt, to keep the water in her tissues, but it was too late, and I might as well have been embalming her for all the salt I shovelled into her. The fishy smell of cholera pervaded the house and the streets around the contaminated water pump in Broad-street. Even now, when I walk past the fishmongers’ stalls, I am reminded of those dreadful days of death in our little tenement north of the river. Would that we had never left Hastings in search of the heart of the book trade.
She would ask me to sponge her face with water, then leave the sponge on her lips so she could suck it. But she was too weak, and the water just pooled in her mouth and dribbled down her chin. I was nineteen, and about to become a mother myself, but I was not ready to lose her, even though there are millions of wretches out there who lose their mothers as they draw their very first breaths, or in their tenderest years. I wiped her chin and neck, and I could see from her pallor that she was leaving, and that she did not know me any more. She opened her eyes wide one last time and stared at me, and she did not cry. She could not, the doctor told me, even if she had wanted to. She died like that, with her eyes open; her eyeballs had so dried out that it took me twenty minutes to close the lids, using my own tears as lubrication. Her body was not cold as marble, as the saying goes; rather, it was like petrified wood, so ravaged was her desiccated skin. As I washed her all over before dressing her, my tears dripped onto her and mingled with the water, and so great were the out -pourings of my grief it was as if I needed not have brought the pail up. But tears are futile, and could do nothing for her dry old body, and so ashamed was I of my excess that I have not cried a single tear since.
Early the next morning, stiff-limbed, I picked the fire over for cinders to stoke up the range, and drew water into the kettle. As I set the breakfast things I ran my hands over the table, the chair backs, the piano. The knock at the door would surely come soon, and we would stand by stoically, relinquishing everything to the bailiffs, or the brokers, and be left standing in a bare little house. Where would Lucinda sleep, and how would Peter eat breakfast?
Yet it was a rare moment, for I felt a peculiar sense of freedom at the thought, as if furniture was merely tiresome and its removal a blessing, and I knew then what I had to do. Perhaps the answer had been inside me all along, but it took the prospect of release from my trappings for me to notice it.
So in and out my toes went again that morning, only this time the hem under which they went was edged with a slightly worn but still fine green ribbon, which contrasted with the pale floral cambric. I married Peter in this dress; it was the only decent dress I had kept from Huggitty, as if I knew I would need to look proper again one day, and it had a matching bonnet that caught the worst of the drizzle. I had left a note, assuring Peter I would not be gone long, but I did not state my destination. With luck Lucinda might not even wake before I returned.
I paid my ha’penny and scurried over Waterloo Bridge once more. It was still dark. I did not look over at Lambeth Marshes, but kept my eyes on my worn leather boots lined with The Illustrated London News, going in and out beneath my green hem. How hopeful the colour seemed, how fresh and spring-like. I was such the innocent.
Occasionally I would glimpse the steamboats puffing underneath me, crowded with clerks on their way to Essex Street Pier, or Blackfriars Bridge Pier, or St Paul’s Wharf, or Old Shades Pier by London Bridge, where they would disgorge their sombre-suited cargo. The air was oily on my skin: the breath of London.
The lamplighters were doing their rounds with their ladders, turning off the stopcocks at each lamp-post, and the pavements were already full of tradesmen, footmen, clerks, all wrapped up in thick cloaks. A few women were amongst them: maidservants in couples, wives tottering next to their tradesman husbands, the odd gentlewomen mantled and veiled to obscurity, wi
th maids in tow. All were in pairs; I felt conspicuous on my own. I was stared at with impunity, especially by the men. Women are experts at the cross-gaze; why do men have to look directly? Was I overdressed in my finest, or not smart enough? Did I look like a lady’s maid who had done away with her lady, or a prostitute, even? For, unaccompanied, I became a public woman, a term I used to reserve for those whose coquettish walks, kiss-me-quick ringlets, and slightly-too-trim trimmings sought to be noticed, and paid for. Oh, for an escort on to whose arm I could cling, to allay my fellow street-goers’ curiosity and render me invisible.
Straight up Wellington-street I went, with studied nonchalance and directness of purpose, past Somerset House on my right and Duchy Wharf down to my left, and all the way up to the top where the road was bisected by the Strand. Then I turned right, trembling but determined, and increasingly immune to the gaze of men. I was crossing paths with journalists and hacks from The Illustrated London News, which had its headquarters hereabouts, and doctors from King’s College, which I was just now passing. Through the shoppers I went, the gentlemen on fast business, the trolleys, crinolines, crossing-sweepers, hawkers, urchins, wheel-barrows, all weaving in and out of the irate, tedious crawl of carriages, cabs and buses. The noise was deafening: the iron-shod wooden wheels of the carriages rattling over the cobbles, the drivers of the omnibuses shouting their destinations, the thwarted haste of the red newspaper express, and at last I was anonymous, irrelevant, obliterated in the thickness of the crowds.
Soon I reached the church of St Mary-le-Strand, which marked the junction with Holywell-street. The traffic was at a complete standstill here, for the Strand branched into two strandlets, one of which was the narrow, dark Elizabethan lane of Holywell-street and its tortuous mesh of alley-ways, where I was headed. I could not see above the suited backs of the crowds ahead of me, so I raised my eyes heavenwards, to the overhanging tenements, the lofty gables and deep bay windows, under which hung wooden shop signs and figures, including a large carved half-moon which betrayed the mercery past of the street. The old lath-and-plaster houses huddled and skulked just like the people below, deprived of light and air but rich in dirt and disease.
At one junction with a fetid alley-way leading off into an unwelcoming labyrinth, I had to wait at a lamp-post to let people past. A notice was glued to it announcing the imminent demolition of Holywell-street and a blessed proposal of a new, straight thoroughfare to blast through the meandering pestilence and decay of this metropolitan anachronism, and bring order and circulation to the unregulated, crumbling relics of a bygone age. A gap appeared in the crowd, but before I started to move on again, I noted the sign was dated ‘July ’52’. It was the first sign I had of quite how tenacious Holywell-street was, how long it would hold out against the city-planners’ drive for light, air and hygiene for all, how it determinedly clung to its own filth.
At another pause in my journey, I spotted a small grey plaque marking the site of a holy well, which once provided succour for pilgrims bound for Canterbury, its curative water giving them a taste of the holy wonders to await them at their destination and in the next world. As I inhaled the stale air I thought ruefully of my mother’s death, and I fingered her hair-bracelet.
The signs intrigued me: ‘Shampooing – Hats Ironed – Shaving – Books’; ‘Boot Depot – Books – Sole Entrance’; ‘Hawkers – Suppliers to the Trade’, ‘Removed Opposite’, ‘Punch – Almanacks – School Books’, ‘St Clements Stores Merchant – Books’; ‘French American Spanish LETTERS’; ‘Bears’ grease, freshly killed’, and I shrieked as I came face to face with a very subdued bear – a real, live, breathing, hairy bear with a dry tongue – chained miserably to the railings outside the barber’s, as if he knew he would be next.
Soon the crowds started to thin, and eventually I no longer needed to look up, but could scan across, into the windows. But straightways I wished I hadn’t, for the first shop window stopped me directly in my tracks. Despite myself and my own feminine cross-glance, I looked directly through the small panes of glass of the narrow shop window, where the cobwebs were lit by gas-light, and the shop beyond lay gloomy and nefarious. Waiting for my perusal were lithographs, mezzotints, daguerreotypes, call them what you will, but their subject matter was plain: a girl greeted the morning sun in nothing more than her crinoline and chemise; another young lady laughed while gaily ironing an indeterminate item of clothing which she no doubt would presently put on; another made lemonade in such a manner that it was necessary to display her ankles; another shucked oysters with bare arms; ballerinas stretched their limbs along with their morals. I pulled away from the window, flushed, and saw a gentleman with yellow whiskers smiling at me, at my betrayal of interest, my forthright and shameless looking. My mother would have wept.
I stumbled on, averting my gaze and checking the card in my hand with purpose. I had taken it from the workshop this morning, and it read:
Mr Charles Diprose, 128 Holywell-st, London.
Purveyor to the Professions –
Importer of French and Dutch Specialities –
Books Bought.
Fortunately the subsequent windows between that print shop and Mr Diprose’s establishment were less compelling: stacks of old and new books, prints of city streets and rural idylls, medical and scientific pamphlets, periodicals and broadsheets, second-hand clothes, old furniture. Many of these, like the print shop, I could not avoid, but now for more physical reasons: the shops tumbled forth their wares on to the pavement, and I had to step around crates of old books and dodge the swaying lines of old clothes.
I finally spotted the sign ‘Diprose & Co.’ swinging on its hinges underneath a small carved wooden figure of a negro sucking on a long pipe, wearing a wavy grass skirt and matching wavy gold crown, a gaslight directly beside it. I was at a loss to tell what it represented, but was relieved to see in the windows no arresting engravings. It was a smart but small shopfront, with a bright brass bell, on which I rang. It was quickly answered by a young man who enquired after my business.
‘I should like to talk to Mr Charles Diprose, please,’ I said sweetly.
‘On what matter?’ he asked, with a wobble of his head and a swagger not unlike mirth in his voice. Like Jack, he was a red-head, but his was that insipid washed-out orange colour one finds at the tips of a newly picked carrot, not the rich woody-coppery tones on Jack’s bony skull, and his curled lips and the freckles stippling his skin were of the same pallid hue as his hair.
I was not prepared for interrogation at this stage. I had steeled myself for the actual encounter with Mr Diprose, and had not expected to fall before even offering my hand. I stuttered and stammered the words Damages – bookbinders – husband – business – Mr Diprose – at which the grinning assistant pulled back the bolts, delighting in my discomfort.
‘He is out, but he will return presently. You may wait.’ He ushered me in to the stuffy room, where two men were being served. I hesitated at the sight of them, but the assistant gestured to a chair in the corner on which I seated myself. The men raised their hats to me, exchanged a glance with each other, then returned to the books on the counter.
‘But these are . . .’ the man paused to look back at me, as he chose his words carefully, ‘artistic anatomy books.’ I squinted and was able to make out the gold-tooling on the spines: John Rubens Smith’s A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure, and Pieter Camper’s Works on the Connexion Between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, and Statuary. We had previously bound copies of both in the workshop when money was tight and expediency temporarily superior to principles, though of course Peter had never let me peruse them; I knew they were unseemly.
‘The Camper is a fine edition,’ the shop-keeper argued. ‘A reprint of the 1794 English translation from the Dutch.’
‘But I require medical anatomy.’
‘Ah, medical anatomy, of course. I have several copies of Quain’s, and a splendid edition of the Gray’s, quite the m
odern thing. Or if Aristotle and his chef-d’oeuvre would be more to your liking . . .’
‘Young man . . . Have you no sense of . . . I have never . . . ! Good day!’
And thus the two men turned to leave, raising their hats to me again, as another gentleman appeared hurriedly from within the shop behind the brown curtain. He was a paunchy, round-shouldered man with a purple face and black beard. Both his skin and hair were shiny, and his silk hat greasy; even his sombre black frock coat seemed damp. I would have said he was trying to be a gentleman, and knew enough of them to have influence on him.
‘Who were they, and why did they leave?’ he said, in clipped, hushed tones as he removed his hat.
‘Proper ones,’ mouthed the assistant.
Just then, the purple and black man caught sight of me. He half-turned to the assistant, while continuing to look at me, as if trying to ascertain my station and purpose there, and what response of his would be appropriate.
‘This is Mrs – Mrs – ah . . . Damson? Damsel?’ said the assistant.
‘Mrs Damage,’ I said.
‘Mrs Damage?’ the gentleman repeated, more warmly, but still with reservation. ‘Mrs Peter Damage?’ I nodded. ‘Mrs Damage,’ he said again. ‘Charles Diprose.’ He took my hand, and kissed it. If I had been a lady, and wearing gloves, I would still have been able to feel through the kid that his hands were clammy. The kiss left a trail on my skin like a snail. He gestured to his assistant to bolt the door.
‘I have not had the pleasure of meeting your husband, but I know of his work, and his contribution to the unions. Il se porte bien?’
He must have assumed my delay in replying was due to my not understanding French, rather than my uncertainty as to how to answer, so he asked, ‘Is he in good health?’
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 6
