‘Yeah, she can stay ’ere wiv me, Mrs D. I’ll keep an eye on ’er.’ He was looking disdainfully at the rag; I prayed he did not sniff it. I was ashamed; he could not use it on the books, and yet there was nothing else.
‘Are you sure, Jack?’
‘I’ll be no trouble!’
‘I know you won’t, little love.’ And I meant it too; she had become so easy, so compliant, recently. It was as if, now her fits had gone, she had nothing to question. She slept more, she ate more, she pottered around alone more. Maybe she was just growing up.
‘And you can keep the tin of pastries. Only don’t eat them all.’ I stood up and said in a whisper to Jack, ‘Make sure she doesn’t eat them all.’
I put my head round into the workshop and scanned the towering crates of unbound books, the stacks of manuscripts sewn and ready to be forwarded, and the heaps of blank bindings waiting for me in the tooling booth. It was overwhelming. And then I saw Din, who smiled at me as usual, only one of his teeth seemed to be missing, and he looked for all the world as if he had been in a fight. Lord, I thought to myself, I hope he’s not getting roughed up every night in the Borough. I wondered if I should say something, but his head was bowed and he was already working away at the sewing-frame. I kissed Lucinda good-bye, and told her I wouldn’t be long. And then I made a hasty decision: I ran back into the workshop, trimmed a rectangle of card, and scribbled something on it.
‘I’m going to make this easier for us, Jack,’ I said over my shoulder as I left the house.
A train was rattling past, and whilst it was not that of the Necropolitan Railway, I could not help but think of it, and I wondered what sort of world this was in which we were living, and what of one to where we were destined, where bodies take the direct train from Waterloo to Woking, while souls are doomed to wander, lost and mapless, through the cruel streets of the city for ever. I walked south for a while, past the gates of Remy & Rangorski, then knocked on the door of a little cottage further up the road with a sign saying ‘Rooms Available’, and handed the proprietress a card. She looked at it, and agreed to place it in her window. I watched from outside as it went up against the glass, and read it again to make sure it said what I wanted it to.
Wanted. Girl skilled at sewing, folding, invalid nursing and domestic chores, to present herself at Damage’s Bookbinders, 2 Ivy-street, Waterloo.
References required.
Then I turned, and headed north again, up to Waterloo Bridge and Holywell-street.
I had no intention of walking away from Mr Diprose entirely this morning; I simply wanted to draw a line, and give him its exact co-ordinates on the wide-ranging map of his literary stock, so that he would no longer attempt to push me over it into the more unseemly territories of his kingdom. By way of example, I took with me the worst of the first lot of photographic catalogues; I was going to give it back to him, and state simply that I was not to receive any more commissions of the kind.
Apart from the knavery – the villainous way the photographs had been so constructed to convey the worst imaginings between human beings – I was also rankled by their lack of honesty, for all their pretensions to integrity. These were not images for anatomical study and pictorial accuracy: the printing alone would have cost more than Jack’s monthly wage, and their weighty bindings would push their cover price far higher than anything any ‘artist of discernment’ could ever afford. Neither were they lickerish little morsels for a spot of harmless titillation; nor were they Paphian offerings to the mighty Aphrodite. They were far, far more dangerous, and far beyond anything I could understand.
I found my way through the back alleys to the peeled-paint door at the rear of Diprose & Co, and rapped three times. The bolt was pulled back by the assistant, and he took my hand gently in his.
‘Mrs Damage.’
‘Good day, Mr Pizzy.’
‘At your service as ever. Call me Bennett, please. Have you brought us some wonders from Waterloo?’
‘I must disappoint you there, Mr Pizzy. I have come to speak with Mr Diprose.’ There was another man in the room with us too, wearing a red-and-white spotted neckerchief, and a grubby checked shirt. He scarcely acknowledged me; he was too occupied with chewing a pencil, and rivers of grey saliva coursed from the corners of his mouth. He had another two pencils stuck behind his ears, presumably for when hunger struck later.
Mr Pizzy bolted the door behind me, and went to the front of the shop. I heard low murmurs, and the bolt being drawn closed across the front door into Holywell-street. Mr Diprose emerged from behind the green curtain.
‘Mrs Damage.’
‘Mr Diprose.’ Oh, but there was no love lost between us.
‘Please be seated.’ He lowered himself stiffly into his chair; he really was incapable of bending in the middle. ‘I trust you have come to furnish us with information about your inky labourer. We have been hoping for an assurance that you have secured his loyalty.’
‘Indeed, Mr Diprose, I have managed to find a fair bit about him, and am convinced he will be of no danger to us. That is not my purpose in coming here today, but I can assure you Mr Nelson does not concern himself with our activities.’
‘Your certainty intrigues me. Please explain how you came by it.’
‘He is not like us, Mr Diprose,’ I attempted. ‘He has suffered things we can only imagine. His past is all horrors, and his present a mere distraction. It may be useful for him to work at Damage’s for the time being, but he is not committed. He will move on when the time is right . . .’
‘Forgive me, Mrs Damage, but your airy sentiments are not convincing to me. If he is not committed, where is his loyalty?’
‘He is not interested in what we produce! It does not concern him. His thoughts are elsewhere. We – you – are irrelevant to him!’
‘So, you are telling me, that the only reason I should feel safe that the most unlawful literature in the land is daily surveyed by a man of whom we know nothing, is that he considers it an irrelevance.’
‘Yes! No, I mean . . . Mr Diprose, I will be confronting him myself. He is an intelligent man. I will tell him straight out about our shady business, and inform him that he must not speak a word of it to anyone.’
‘And you presume I will be happy with the word of the man.’
‘Won’t you?’
‘You may be a gobe-mouches, but I can not be so easily duped. Tell me, what do you know about him?’
‘He was born in Baltimore. His father was a preacher; his mother a nurse. He was abducted from them – he was taken at the tender age of fourteen, separated from his family – and sold into slavery. They are all dead now. He has no roots, he has no homeland. He is drifting free . . .’
‘Mrs Damage, the answer is staring us in the face. I congratulate you upon unearthing it; your ingenuity becomes you. You are telling me that if the man ever becomes a trouble to us, we shall simply send him back! Merveilleux.’
‘Why!’
‘This is perfect. And we could probably get a pretty penny for him too. Nous y gagnons! Presumably you have threatened him with this?’
‘No!’
‘Then that is what you must do immediately. Mr Pizzy, would you escort Mrs Damage back to her workshop and see to it personally that she delivers her ultimatum to her Mr Nelson?’
‘You are monstrous, Mr Diprose! You dishonour me, and discredit yourself, not that you seem to care much of that. Here. I return these to you. I will not bind work of this nature.’ I placed the stack of photographic prints on to the table with a hefty thud. Diprose looked down at them, without moving his head. One eyebrow rose quizzically, and he looked up at Mr Pizzy. Even the noise of pencil-chewing ceased momentarily.
‘What is it about them to which you so object, Mrs Damage?’ my interlocutor said eventually. I could sense – I could feel – Mr Pizzy’s smug smile broaden behind me.
‘Do you require me to spell it out to you?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ he said whimsically. ‘That w
ould be most enjoyable.’
‘Mr Diprose, they are vicious, unwholesome, and downright horrible.’
‘They offend you.’
‘Yes. They do.’
‘And you do not like your sensibilities being offended.’
‘No, I do not.’
‘You do not approve of them.’
‘No.’
‘So Mrs Damage doesn’t approve of them,’ Diprose announced, as if to his men. ‘Do you think, my dear girl, that that matters to us? Do we look like we care?’
‘I do not wish to bind them.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because . . .’
‘Because they offend you. Forgive me, Mrs Damage, but I do not see the connection.’ One of the men laughed. I wanted to ask him if it had escaped his notice that there was a black man in my employ, but then, I knew that that was what he wanted me to say.
‘And which particular ones do you find most offensive?’ He lifted the pages up from where I had left them on his table, and started to turn them over one by one. He did not look up at me, but, of course, he lingered on the abominable pictures he suspected caused me most distress. ‘Which ones, Mrs Damage? This one? Or this?’
But I would not rise to his goadings. It was not only the ones that contained the vengeful Negroes. They were all vile.
‘Mrs Damage, I am un peu fatigué of this subject. You assume I am a man of leisure, that my life is one of dolce far niente. Let me put it simply: you have no choice over what you do and do not bind.’
‘Then I shall take the matter up with Sir Jocelyn Knightley.’
I had never seen Diprose laugh before, and it was not a pretty sight. His silver-rimmed glasses bounced up and down on his purple nose with each chuckle, but he held my gaze with his eyes throughout. The mirth of Pizzy and the pencil-man was more abandoned and hearty, even when the pencil snapped between the latter’s teeth, and he tried to rub his tongue as he continued to laugh.
‘I fear you will not find his reaction as generous as ours.’
‘Is there not one decent fibre in the whole ungodly lot of you?’ I raised my voice, but still I did not dare shout. I felt like a schoolmistress, enraged but powerless amongst sniggering children; and then it was that I came to the horrible realisation that my anger was delighting them. I was one step away from Mistress Venus with her birch rods, and I suddenly realised that her disciplinary procedures were nothing more than an artificially bestowed power, handed to her temporarily by the men who so yearned for chastisement. Mistress Venus was just another job for just another brow-beaten woman, just another task to fulfil, along with cleaning his slippers, filling his pipe, and being the cushion for his rage.
‘What troubles you so, Mrs Damage? Are we to remind you of where your loyalties lie? Or do I detect a certain penchant – some desires contre nature – for les hommes de couleur?’
‘I think you’ve got it, Charlie,’ Pizzy sneered. ‘She’s in love.’
‘We thought we were doing you a favour. Rather like sending Pauline Bonaparte to Haiti. It is quite extraordinary, the number of seemingly respectable women who lose all sense of decorum at the smell of black meat.’
‘Black meat?’ Pizzy said. ‘Cup of tea: hot, black and wet. Is that how you like it?’
‘You must have greatly appreciated the last book we sent you,’ added Diprose. ‘Afric –’
‘You blackguards! You sons of Satan!’ I finally snapped.
‘Hark! Thus speaks the lover of the son of Ham.’
‘It’s sweet,’ Pizzy said, ‘the way you talk of your dusky dandy with such tenderness.’
‘Why!’
‘Is it true, then, Mrs Damage, what they say about the nether parts of monkeys?’
And I screamed. I opened my mouth and reached down into the ancient soil, far beneath the flimsy foundations of the building, below the sewers, below the holes opening for the Metropolitan Underground Railway, and summoned from it a scream for which I did not know I had strength. I saw Diprose’s eyes pop from his purple head, and Pizzy’s apricot-coloured whiskers bristle around the wet ‘oh!’ of his lips, and still I screamed. I hurled the pages on to the floor and kicked them, then stood on them with both feet, and my legs wobbled like a new-born fawn over the hideous photographs, spreading across the floor distant images made up of nothing more than ink on paper, black and white and grey, and I crouched over them, and sobbed without tears.
Pizzy’s hand grasped the flesh on either side of my mouth, Pizzy’s palm formed a seal around my lips. At the same time, a child raced in from the alley-way like a dirty streak of effluvium.
‘Rozzers!’ he cried. His two front teeth were missing. ‘It’s a bloody razzia.’
Diprose was standing up. ‘Silence,’ he hissed at me. ‘Get the girl up.’ He tugged at his waistcoat, and turned briskly towards the front of the shop.
‘Knife it!’ Pizzy whispered at me. ‘Or you will live to regret it.’ But my screams had stopped. We heard Diprose’s voice switch to controlled charm as he unbolted the front door and greeted the new arrivals in the shop.
A girl – or rather, a woman – had rushed in with the boy, all long ragged hair and faded orange dress. Pizzy handed me over to her, and she gripped my waist with one hand and the back of my head with the other, and led me to the rickety stairs. The pencil-man had already reached the first floor; Pizzy was busy handing him boxes, stacks of books, brown-paper parcels, up the staircase. The gap-toothed boy was scurrying around, quiet as a girl, gathering goods. The stairs brought us out into another dingy room, clearly the centre of Diprose’s enterprise, with its printing presses, blocks of type, and stacks of paper. Pizzy was up with us now, flitting around the room, collecting this and that, and whisking it up a second flight of stairs, which we too climbed, along with two men who had been tending the printing press, their faces pricked with grey stubble like burnt fields of corn, moving silently, jerkily.
We reached the attic, where there was an opening in the far wall, curtained with cobwebs; we climbed through it, and into a wide, dusty room in the roof-space of the adjacent building. An older woman was already in there, waiting for us.
‘All right, Bernie?’ she hissed at the woman who was leading me in.
‘All right, Mrs Trotter,’ Bernie replied.
‘Is Alec in?’
‘He’s coming.’ Alec, it turned out, was the young lad, Mrs Trotter’s son.
And then – once the room was full of the salvaged contraband, three men (two printers and the pencil-man), Alec Trotter, Mrs Trotter, Bernie, and myself – the opening was closed, and I did not stop to wonder how it looked from the other attic, or where Mr Pizzy had gone to, but I guessed that this was not the first time the room had been used in this way.
And we sat like this, in almost total silence, in the darkness and dust of the attic, for what must have been close to five hours. We heard the sounds of doors opening and closing in the houses below and around us, and footsteps, furniture being moved, cabinets opening and closing. For a while the noises were louder – closer – and I imagined the activities had reached the first floor.
We waited and waited, the unproductive hours slipping past, mocking us in our abeyance. The only movements were the shadows through the cracks in the plaster, crooked sundials marking the progress of the day outside. I tried to avoid the stares of my other cell-mates through the miserable gloom of the attic, and occupied my mind with different thoughts: of Lucinda with Jack, and whether she would notice how long I had been gone; of all the books I could be binding, the food I could be preparing. The inactivity was unfamiliar to us all in that attic. It was as if someone had told a joke that had fallen flat, and we were doomed to linger in the awkward after-moment for eternity. We were inoperative, null and void, useless, like seven phlegmatics trying to compete on idleness, or seven lie-abeds waiting on Providence, seven lotus-eaters feasting on lethargy, seven workers going rusty through lack of use. It was as if we were procrastinating, but had qu
ite forgotten what action it was that we were deferring.
And then we heard footsteps nearing us; they climbed to the attic, and spoke loudly outside our hatch, and we dared not breathe.
‘She’s not ’ere. There’s no one up ’ere.’
‘Where could she’ve got to?’
‘You sure you ’eard a woman scream?’
‘I’ll swear it.’
I prayed silently to my Maker. I had neglected Him for too long, and I promised Him anything, anything, if only He would get me out of here and safely home where I could feel Lucinda in my arms. I would go to Church more, I would sing hymns around the house, I would keep the house clean, I would not read any more illicit books before binding them, I would refuse to carry out any design that was too ‘emblematic’ . . .
‘Could’ve been out in the alley, s’pose,’ one of the men said. ‘If she’d screamed lahd enough.’
‘Must’ve been. C’mon. Better get back wiv ve uvvers. Nice pickings today.’
And then they descended, and the place became quiet.
In time the torpor started to lift. It started with the inescapable fact that our bladders were in varying degrees of fullness, and we could not help but fidget. A chamber-pot was passed round; it was shown to me, its sulphurous contents threatening to slosh on to my skirts, but I shook my head and declined its use.
‘What d’ya expect? She’s the toff’s toffer,’ Bernie said. It was the first time any of us had spoken for hours. ‘Laced and marbled good and proper.’
‘D’ya think she’s even got an arse?’ Mrs Trotter replied.
‘Oh, sure she has. But she likes it blacked.’
‘Does she now? Like a good blackleading, do ya?’
‘Got a voice on her too. If she had kept ‘er pretty mouth shut we wouldn’t be risking our skins like this,’ Bernie added. ‘Did you hear ’er holler?’
‘Shut up,’ the pencil-man said. ‘We gotta wait til Pizz-pot gets up ’ere.’
And so they lapsed into silence once more, and we waited. The shadows were fading; it was getting dark outside, and cold. We could no longer stare at each other’s shoes, or scrutinise the worm holes and cobwebs in the beams above us. We sat in the stink of each other’s urine, and waited.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 22
