‘For the able apprentice Master Jack Tapster’, was a bottle of single-estate whisky.
‘For the maid of all work, Pansy Smith’, was a new bonnet, with blue ribbons.
For Din, there was nothing, but that was of no surprise.
And for me, was a sumptuous, brown silk dress, the colour of caramel, and of my boots. It had cream petticoats, and a central black rose at the bust-line, with pleated sleeves and cream lace edging.
Unlabelled, but I presumed for me too, was a small cardboard box, containing something I would not have been able to recognise even six months ago. Due to my rapid education in such matters, I was able to work out (within only a few minutes, at least) that they had a contraceptive function (the words ‘Ballons baudruches’ on the side of the box would have given it away to a Frenchman, who would have needed less help than I in their recognition anyway). I had never seen them before, given that they cost over a pound each, and were only available to those with connections. I could not help but be shocked. Sexual relations whilst in mourning was as bad as, if not worse than, actual adultery. I would not be unfaithful to Peter’s memory. Noble Savages indeed.
And finally, there was a book, bound in full aquamarine morocco by Zaehnsdorf himself, with marbled endpapers, entitled A History of British Birds, Indigenous and Migratory, by William MacGillivray. It bore an inscription on the ivory endpaper:
To Mrs Dora Damage,
a fine and rare species,
with respect at Christmas time,
Valentine G.
I ran to get Lucinda and Pansy, to show them the sight; it was as if Christmas in some fine town-house had come to pass on the workshop floor.
‘For the love of – !’ Pansy said, as I gave her the bonnet.
‘And this is for you, Lou,’ I said, giving her the parcel.
‘For me? Who’s it from?’
But I could not answer her as she pulled the paper off, to reveal a pretty doll’s tea-set, with a tea-pot, coffee-pot, milk-jug, sugar-bowl, and four cups and saucers, all painted with violets and forget-me-nots.
‘Mossie’s got to have some!’ she said, breathless with delight, and raced off to find her doll. When she returned, she blithely invited Mossie to tea, and together they poured and drank, and made polite talk that was as one-sided as my tea with Lady Knightley.
Pansy was at the looking-glass trying on her bonnet while I busied myself with the other crate. It was full, as I had both hoped and feared, of unbound manuscripts. I wished that Jack could have been with me, to investigate their contents first. I took out the top one, and opened it. It was reasonably benign, as were the subsequent ones. Also included were three Bibles, and a letter from Bennett Pizzy requesting more pretty albums and fancy journals: ‘your superfluous nonsenses have proved irresistible to ladies and their menfolk’, he wrote.
So it seemed that Damage’s was back in business, and back to normal, if normal is what one could call it. I wondered again at this absurd world I had found myself in; a world in which my patrons bought me mourning finery, and yet knew I would have to continue working as if I were not in mourning; a world in which my neighbours expected me to behave like a widow, but knew I would behave like a widower. It was, as always, about a woman’s visibility. I would walk the streets in my mourning attire as a woman, but at home, behind closed doors, I would work like a man.
Wedged down the side of the crate, I found a large manila envelope. I prised apart the seal, and reached inside, where I found papers, a great many of them, all identical, longer than my hand, black ink on white paper. The words ‘Bank of England’ in an elaborate typeface, were printed across the centre of the notes, and the portrait of Britannia was in the top left corner. It promised to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds. I had never seen paper money before; it seemed as unreal as the photographs had become to me, or as real. Eighty fivers. Four hundred pounds.
I pulled out the accounts book and totted up what I was owed. It was all there, for all the work I had ever done for Diprose, and for the contents of this new crate at least. It would pay off my debts with Skinner and Blades completely. It was a fortune.
First I went to Mrs Eeles, and handed her over three of the precious fivers with a ‘Merry Christmas’ and a smile as sweet as sherbet, and did not look back to see her face as I hurried out of Ivy-street. Then I went to the pawn-shop and redeemed my wedding ring, and enquired as to where I might find Messrs Skinner and Blades. A further couple of hours was spent traipsing from gin-shop to petty sessional court, bottle-shop to auction-house, knocking on all manner of seedy doors and asking of a great many harassed and worn folk until I found Skinner, who offered to relieve me of the money there and then, only I insisted so on a solicitor, and although it were Christmas Eve we finally found one of good note, and the matter was settled for ever with a counting out of my precious papers and a flourish of his pen.
It was fair to say my feet were sore but my spirits somewhat lighter when Din came by that evening to find out how I was faring, and when I would be opening the bindery again for business. I took him to the drinking-house on the corner that evening. It was Christmas Eve, after all, when otherwise respectable people could drink here without a stain on their character, even a woman in mourning, and we stood amongst the husbands with their wives, the legal clerks and the tradesmen, amidst the cries for porter and juniper, ale and stout, and the exhortations to ‘sluice your gobs, for it’s Christmas after all’; and we drank awhile and I pondered my peculiar fortune.
‘Come and dine with Lucinda and me tomorrow, Din,’ I asked him as he escorted me back home. The festivities were passing me by – the strolling carollers with their black lanterns, the brass bands bedecked with holly, fir and laurel, the cries of ‘mistletoe’ from the little girl-sellers, the crowds still pouring into the poulterer’s, the butcher’s, the grocer’s, the itinerant vendors with scrawny little ducks and geese still alive, albeit barely, pecking at the meagre grains in the mud – and I felt the need to spend the day itself with people about whom I cared. I bought a ha’pennyworth of mistletoe, then I stopped at one of the penny-toy men, and bought a handful of tin soldiers, several pairs of brightly coloured knitted gloves, and a mouth-organ. At another one, I bought a box of paints and a paintbrush, and a monkey whose arms and legs leapt in the air when one put one’s thumb into the base. But Din shook his head, and said that he had other plans; but beyond spending the day with those I had seen in the basement of the pub in Whitechapel, eating roast beef at the Christian alms-house, I could not imagine what they could be. So I sent him home with a side of goose, some ham and cheese, a bottle of wine, and fruit. Then I handed him the gloves and the mouth-organ I’d bought from the pedlar. ‘And this,’ I said, as I put an envelope in his top pocket, ‘is your Christmas bonus.’
‘Thank you ma’am,’ he said, and turned to leave me.
‘Ain’t you going to give me a kiss under the mistletoe, then?’ I said in my best Cockney. A little sprig was drooping meekly from my hand.
He took it from me, raised it over my head, and gave me a little peck on the cheek. ‘Have a fine Christmas now, won’t you?’
‘And give your friends my thoughts for the season,’ I called to his departing back, and watched as he lifted his hand from his parcels, and waved his farewell.
We are bound to be happy at Christmas, whether we feel it or not. People exhort it of us several times a minute, and being a good girl, and one always to do what I am told, I felt it insolent to defy them. Yet neither was I relinquished from the need for cheer by dint of my widowhood: too much pity galls, like too much rain.
Din left me to a warm house at least, filled with unexpected fineries. Pansy had tucked Lucinda up in bed, clutching Mossie to her breast. I pressed the soldiers and some more gloves into Pansy’s hands, and sent her home in her new bonnet with another envelope of money and some more victuals from the crates. Then I drifted around the parlour, alone. I thought several times of going into the workshop an
d starting on the newly arrived manuscripts, out of force of habit, and something to do.
This loneliness is only to be expected, I tried to console myself, what with my husband so recently passed away. Only I knew I was not missing Peter at all. This was a different kind of vacancy. I was richer than I had ever dared dream, and yet I felt bereft and alone to my core, and it was not an obvious bereavement.
I thought of Din, and the way I got him to kiss me, and what a chaste little kiss it was. I was ashamed of myself. Our minds keep secrets even from ourselves. Had it really been so obvious to those at Holywell-street? How had they found me out, when I was still denying it to myself? But now that I lacked the pressures of survival to keep my real feelings at bay and a man in the Windsor chair – even a sick man who needed nursing like a baby – Din’s absence came crashing in.
I had to work, I decided, just to blot out these worrying revelations bursting inside me like fireworks. I headed for the new crate, trying not to look at the sewing-frame where he used to sit. But I could not help myself. I ran my fingers along the wood; I picked up a needle. I tried to remember the gentle words we used to exchange right here. I craved him; now my belly was filled, I could feel it all the more. It was a different kind of hunger.
I tore myself away from the frame, pulled out a manuscript from the crate, and scanned it to see what treatment it required. Oh, but it was revolting, too. Revolting, yet deeply sad; poignantly paradoxical, that such literature described the most intimate thing we could do with another person (or admittedly, people), in the least human of terms. There were no people in these books, really; only parts. The stories weren’t about union with another at all; they were about individual fantasies, self-serving indulgences. They weren’t generous or free-spirited or embracing; they sought to exclude, to diminish and dominate. There was no pleasure, unless it was denied to some as much as it was enjoyed by others. And, as my existence was founded on my complicity with the production of these texts, what hope for the satisfying emotional life I so craved? You can only have half of what you desire, my mother would say; and if financial security was the half I was being granted, my emotional self needed excising.
In the morning, as the parish bells rang and the roads teemed with parishioners who were better dressed than usual, I tried on my new brown dress, even though it would be a year yet before I could go into half-mourning and wear it. I took off my cap and cuffs, then slipped out of my smock and chemise. I would not try the corset; the dress was enough of a novelty for one day. I pulled it on, and reached behind myself. With various configurations of arms up over my shoulder and under round my waist, I was able to do up enough of the fastenings to see how the dress became me. I pulled the blanket off the Psyche in the corner of the room, and although I could scarcely see my reflection through the dust on the glass, it was enough to make me shriek with alarm.
‘What is it, Mama?’ Lucinda came running, tea-cup in one hand and Mossie in the other. ‘Oh! You look – beautiful! Mama! Here, let me help you.’
Beautiful? Is that how I looked? My neck, shoulders and even all the way down to the rising curve of my tiny breasts were completely exposed. Aristocratic women might have presented such splendid décolleté every evening, and in front of gentlemen too, but I had never felt so undressed. Beautiful? Bony and scrawny, like a sad old chicken, more like.
‘Mama, look at the blisters on your hands,’ Lucinda said. The finery of the dress threw up my imperfections as my smock never would. ‘Your shoulders are hunched. Ah, now you are holding them back, like a proper lady. You should wear this all the time. You look ten feet taller!’
I seized the black-and-purple feather fan, and held it in front of the lower part of my face, with only my eyes peeping over, and my arm crossed my body to cover my neck and breasts. But such a presentation only served to hint more at the nakedness beneath. I tried to look only at the dress, and ignore the flesh rising above it. It was designed to be worn over a corset, the way its curves flexed, but even without a corset I could not deny that my waist looked good in it.
I threw the blanket back over the glass, and in agitation paced over to the window, from where I could see the merry-makers on their way to church. They were not the habitual faces of Ivy-street; people were passing this way for a festive change, or had come up to visit family for the day. My eye was drawn to a group of men waiting for their slower companions. Some of them were smoking; they all looked proudly awkward in their Sunday best, stiff and unfamiliar, and not-quite-gentlemanly. One of them – a tall, handsome fellow on the edge of the group – saw me looking, and returned my gaze, which I held likewise. I felt I could stay there for ever, until I realised that someone might stop and look where he was looking, and see me, and judge me for a brazen hussy. I left the window sharply, and came back to Lucinda, but his eyes were still in mine.
I am no longer waiting for my life to begin, I thought, before being seized with a vast sense of abhorrence at myself. A woman in mourning, indeed. I fiddled at the fastenings down my back, and barked at Lucinda to help me, and only felt a lightening when the silk cascaded down to my ankles. I took my chemise and my black dress from the peg, and wriggled into them, my new old skin. I pinned up my hair and pulled on my veil, and my old worn boots, and seized Lucinda’s hand, and headed out of the house to join the throngs of church-goers.
I sang the hymns with gusto, as if volume would drown out the rising confusion in my breast, listened intently to the Christmas sermon, nodded at the urgings to charity, and rested my eyes on the evergreen boughs bedecking every arch, window and ledge, as if they might provide me with something on which I could ground my shaky sense of self. I scarcely noticed that my ‘Merry Christmas’s to Mrs Eeles and Billy, Nora Negley and husband, Patience Bishop and her two sons and their wives and children, and Agatha Marrow and countless relatives, were all shunned or met with frost and pursed lips. For nothing seemed regular to me today. I had not recognised the face that stared back at me from behind the fan in the Psyche. Who was this terrible woman, I kept thinking, who dishonoured her sex, and betrayed her deceased husband and invalid child, by abandoning her position as the refuge, the balm, the angel in the house? I, who had once been a kept wife, was now an enterprising businesswoman, yet my business was illegal, immoral, and disrespectful to women, and any sense of freedom I was feeling at being the breadwinner was skilfully negated by the inescapable traps constructed by the obsceniteurs, which bound me inexorably to them through their knowledge of Lucinda’s condition and my ambiguous status. At least I no longer had the challenge of finding a way to bind Din to both me and them, but it was not a finding I wished to share with them.
Furthermore, I was not a lady, although I was being dressed like one, at the behest of the richest roués of London town; I felt no shame at flirting with a strange man wandering through Waterloo on Christmas morning, and was finding myself drawn to a mysterious, and black, former slave. The Noble Savages must have been having a good laugh at my expense, as if I were some botched Galatea. I knew full well that the rest of the upper ten thousand wouldn’t look at me for a fraction of a second, so why should Knightley and Glidewell take such interest in me, and dress me so? I was further away from the ladies these men sojourned with than the wilds of Africa, and far less interesting. The thought of who I became when I put on that brown dress appalled me.
But, I thought, as I sang praises for the birth of our Saviour, I would not be vanquished by what was also feeding me. We best seek the resurrection, not the tomb, I reminded myself, although I would not try telling that to Mrs Eeles.
I did not hurry home after the service; on this sacred day, I felt that my house was more than ever an unholy temple of vice and vanity. Savonarola would have rampaged through it: not only the crates of books that lined every wall, but also my fine dress, my corset, the luxuries that were strewn across every room while I wondered where to put them. Savonarola burnt everything – not just books and art, but mirrors, cosmetics, dresses – and
in the end, he was burnt too. Burn or be burnt; what we think we are choosing comes back on us in ways we cannot imagine.
Lucinda and I warmed the goose and stuffing, roasted some potatoes, cooked some carrots and parsnips, and opened a bottle of wine, and as we sat around the table, we managed to make merry. It was a warm place to be, and in so many ways a safer, prouder day than last Christmas, despite our poor dear Peter. But we couldn’t help but laugh as I told Lucinda about our first Christmas in Ivy-street, when Patience Bishop had just been bereaved, and we took her round some meat and dumplings, and Nora Negley had drunk too much gin and wouldn’t stop singing ‘Lipey Solomons, the Honest Jew Pedlar’, and Mrs Eeles kissed Peter under the mistletoe. Lucinda was laughing so much she got hiccoughs, so I poured the dregs of the wine into her little tea-set, and I let her have a few sips, and we tickled each other and sleepily sang Christmas carols, until I took her to bed with her protestations that it had been the best Christmas ever, although she hoped the ghost of her papa would not hear her say that from down the line at Woking.
The brown dress lying on the bed mocked me. Little Miss Jackie Jump-Up, it teased, as I folded it up and laid it in the ottoman, in the space left by my weeping-veil. Think yourself the lady, do you? And even when you are out of full mourning, when, now that you are banned from Holywell-street and confined to the workshop and home, do you think you will possibly wear me?
Once the house was still, I was left alone with my emptiness – which I wanted to be filled only by one man – and my compulsion to work to fill the space instead. I went to the workshop, lit a solitary candle, and worked until midnight.
Boxing Day brought the usual procession of dustmen, watermen, grocers’ boys, post-boys, coalmen, and lamplighters all begging their Christmas boxes, and I was glad not to have to turn even one away. And after lunch on the twenty-seventh, when Pansy and Din were busy at their work once more, I left Lucinda playing in the parlour, gathered my shawl and veil, and finally set off to find Jack’s mother.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 30
