by Gavin McCrea
Turning from her, I pitch a pleading eye to Frederick. “All we need is a few pounds to set ourselves up. Then I’d be out of your hair for good.” I already owe him—God knows I owe him, and not a little—but if I’ve gained any sense of the man, he’s above keeping personal accounts. “It would be a loan, Frederick. We’d pay you back a bit at a time.”
Behind me, Mary foams over. Frederick silences her with a finger. Comes to the edge of his seat. Signals towards the armchair. “Bitte, Lizzie, sit down. You too, Mary.”
We obey. The furniture creaks. He studies me a minute. Then he says, “Is this truly what you desire, Lizzie, or do you feel pressured, by him or by us? If it is the former, I would be glad to help. But if it is the latter, then we should talk and try to come up with a different solution.”
His question puts a knot in my innards. Am I starting out of my own mind, or am I being forced against the grain? If I’m honest, I know the answer. My accidental life was bound to put me swimming upstream eventual. But I can’t say it aloud.
Mary sees me shally. “What Frederick’s asking you is, are you going with him to get away from us, you ungrateful ax, or do you love him plain and true?”
Love?
Love?
The way I’ve heard Mary speak of it over the years makes me doubt I’ve feelings in my body at all. But I’ve seen enough of this world to know that most of us have to accept men we don’t feel for, and I’m not sure it’s for the worst in the end. A marriage of emotions can’t be lasting. It wouldn’t be healthful if it was. You only have to look at Mary, gone thin and nervous, to know it doesn’t do a woman good, and she’ll waste away entire if she doesn’t soon understand it.
“I have to be practical,” I says.
“How is making house with Moss O’Malley practical? God, it’s like you’ve not heard a word I’ve ever said to you, about anything.”
“I’m prepared to give him the benefit of a doubt.” It’s a stranger he is, but a man too, and most men lean to the good.
“You’re a fool, Lizzie, to cast your life on such a die.”
“I’m not with him for what he’ll win me. I’m with him for his character. His morals.”
And just like that, it’s said. The whole “morals” bit. Said and heard, and certain to come back and scorch me.
We find a room in Hulme, Moss and me, a fair walk from our situations but where the Irish are few and nobody bothers with our private affairs. The place costs more than we can afford, but we’ll manage, for Frederick has put me in charge of the Diamond Thread and added three and sixpence to my wage, and with his loan I’ve paid an advance on the first three months. For that’s what I’m giving it: three months.
“Three months?” says Moss.
“Aye. After that, I’ll decide.”
“You mean you haven’t yet decided?”
“Nay.”
“Oughtn’t we do it straight off? Isn’t that the normal way?”
“Three months. A trial run. A chance to prove yourself.”
“Prove myself?”
“You can start with your drinking. I’ll not be ballyragged by a soaker for the rest of my days.”
“Is that what you think of me?”
“It’s what I’ve heard of you. It’s what they’re saying. You’re lucky I’m not one to put faith in the voices. I’m giving you three months to make liars out of them.”
“And what about our living together? What’ll we tell them about that?”
“Why must we tell them anything?”
“Passing as man and wife, isn’t that a sin? Doesn’t God look down on it?”
“He might, but He also knows my reasons and will forgive me for them.”
“They’ll be expecting a wedding. Everybody’ll be.”
“Well, they’ll have to bide.”
“Bide? Begorrah, woman, don’t you have any Church in you at all?”
When not at the mill I keep close to home and watch him, and what I see is a man raised on naught to be naught, thankful for any crumb he has and not particular as long as he gets the needful. I tend to the meals, but I give out the stitching and steer wide of the baking, and I make sure not to take him anything to the bed, for then he’d expect it every day. He does what he’s required about the place, fixing it up and making it a bit of a home, and he makes an effort to be cheerful, striving against the sorrows of the past that sometimes sore beset him. Though we’re not yet joined in God’s eyes, in my own he’s within his rights, and I give myself over to the fetch whenever he wants it, to keep him manly and also to relieve him. And though he’s inclined to be quiet, I press him to speak and to tell his stories, and the odd time we bring the chairs out to sit, the neighbors stand in their doorways and hearken, for I understand that in his soul he holds a deep well of feelings, and that, without a means to draw down, it could boil into a storm and burst out of its own willing. On Saturday nights he goes out with the lads, which keeps him in bed most of Sunday morning, and he often comes home from work with the whiff, but he never gets in too late or without his legs full under him, and what he spends doesn’t make us poorer, so I make it my business not to complain. And for some weeks we live like doves together, never having disputes.
Some time in the second month, Frederick summons me to the office.
“How are you getting on?” he says, closing the blinds against the clerks at their desks outside, then changing his mind and opening them again.
“At the Diamond Thread? Pretty tidy, Mr. Engels,” I says. “The girls are good workers.”
“Good, good.” He comes away from the windows to fiddle with some papers on his desk. Takes a file out, puts it back. When he looks at me again it’s with a sly twinkle. When he speaks it’s in a whisper. “What I mean is, how are you plural getting on? We have not seen you since you left.”
“Oh, we’re getting on grand.”
“You have not come to visit.”
“We’ll come when we’re proper settled.”
“Mary misses you. We both do.”
“Nice of you to say.”
I brush some flyings off my sleeve. I don’t intend to give it easy, whatever it is he wants.
“We would like to see where you live.”
“I’ll do you a dinner when the place looks halfway decent.”
He comes round the desk and takes a box from the cabinet. “Do you need any—?”
“Nay, not a bit of it. And we’ll start paying you back as soon as the wedding is over and paid for.”
“Ah!”—he shakes the coins in the box—“there is to be a wedding!”
On the other side of the glass, the men look up from their business. I pinch myself through my pocket. “No date yet, but I suppose it will have to happen sooner or later.”
“Well, this calls for a celebration.”
“Nay, Frederick, please.”
He puts the box down and goes to pour two drinks from a bottle on the sideboard. I try to hide behind a hand. “I oughtn’t, Frederick. They’re watching.”
“Do not pay attention to them. I shall tell them you have had a faint.”
“I want my head clear going back to work.”
“Oh, pish-posh,” he says, handing one to me and touching his own against it.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
My throat is dry from the mill air. The lush burns it farther and I cough. One of clerks lowers his papers to peer at me. I take another sup and catch his eye over the rim. He turns away.
“It is good to hear you are so happy, Lizzie,” Frederick says now, sitting down and leaning back in his big chair. “You deserve it, more than anyone I can think of.”
“Well now, Mr. Engels, happy is a stretch.” My time under Frederick’s protection made the hobble of life foreign to me, and I’ve been alarmed by the difficulty of returning to it. But it’s also true that I’ve been enjoying the simple-and-straightness of it. It’s what it is, and it’s a struggle, and it doesn’t put on to
be anything else.
“Well, you certainly look happy, Lizzie.”
“I do?”
“I only wish Mary were the same.”
So we’re there already.
He sits there looking at me, biding for a word—advice and such—but I don’t give it. I put the glass on the desk and my hands on my lap. I cross my feet in front of me and look straight back at him. He doesn’t need me to say what he already knows. She’ll never be happy. She’ll always be like a child, ever wanting what she doesn’t have.
“Please come and visit,” he says when the silence gets too heavy for him to carry.
“I will. Maybe when the babby’s here.”
He flinches at the mention. Grimaces like he’s been jabbed. And that’s how I get to know the babby’s gone. Come out before its time. I put on not to understand.
“Mr. Engels, I’ll get behindhand if I sit here any longer.”
“Ya, of course. Be on your way.”
“Thanks anyhows for the drink.”
I leave him pale and scrambling to look busy.
“What was that about?” says Lydia when I get back to the workroom.
“What do you think?”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s made her bed, now she may lie in it.”
When I get home that evening I find Moss sitting outside, making speeches to some of the local children.
“Don’t be giving them nightmares,” I says, going in.
When the supper is on, I decide to go out and join them, but something stops me on this side of the door. I put my ear against it, but it’s only the usual racket I hear: the Liberator O’Connell and the landlords and the Great Hunger, things any Irishman with a head would know, though to hear him you’d think he was a prophet of the news.
“You’ll get those children into trouble,” I says to him later, when we’re eating.
“Not a bit,” he says.
“They’ll get some hiding if they go home spouting about the suffering sister island.”
“Well, it’ll be good for them if they do. They’ll learn what their folks are really like. The history they carry.”
“Just be careful,” I says, and leave it there.
But it’ll not be left. There’s something I heard him say to the children that stays with me like a tick, burrowing down and making a wound. And a few days after, while I’m scrubbing his back in the bath, I find myself saying, “Moss, I need to ask you something. Do you mind if I ask you?”
“Jesus, not so hard, Lizzie!”
“The other day when you were talking to the neighbors’ children.”
“When?”
“A few days back.”
“I don’t recall, but what about it, anyhows?”
“I heard you say something and I didn’t like it.”
He looks over his shoulder at me. Big worried drops fall from his lashes. “What didn’t you like?”
“It’s probable naught.”
“What was it?”
“You said that if you weren’t born in the Catholic provinces of Connaught, Leinster, or Munster, you weren’t Irish at all.”
He laughs. “Is that what has you so nerved up these past days? Stomping around and clattering the pots?”
“If it’s anything particular, aye, it’s that.”
“Christ, it’s well for some, having so little to worry them.”
I slap him on the arm with the brush. “What did you mean by it?”
“Ah, for feck sake, Lizzie, it’s only a way of talking.” He rubs his arm. Lifts some water out and pours it over the spot. “A way of talking is all it was.”
“Well, I don’t want any more talk like it.”
“Well, you know what, Lizzie Burns—”
Of a sudden he’s up standing and the water’s rushing off him onto the flags and he’s grabbing the towel from my shoulder. “I’m getting sick of your rules. Sick to the teeth.”
“If you don’t like my rules, what’s keeping you here?”
“I’m beginning to ask myself the same.”
He leaps out of the tub and strides across the room, leaving his wet on the only bit of carpet we have, and has to last us.
“You’re dreeping every place,” I says. “Can’t you wait till you’re dry?”
He tears at the fresh clothes I’ve put out on the bed. His breeches stick to the damp and he has to hop round to get into them. “A better man would have raised his hand to you long ago.” He slaps his cap on and makes for the door.
“Where’re you going?”
“Out.”
“Off with you, then.” I follow him onto the road. “Off with you back to Tipperary, if that’s where you’re from at all.”
He reels back, comes to giant over me, though what I see is only a boy in his tantrums. “What did you just say to me, woman?”
“You heard me. How can we know for sure where you’re from? We only know what you tell us, and any amount of that could be tarradiddle. There’s voices saying you were born in Cheetham and your accent is only what you kept from your kin.”
He slams his fist into the brick behind me. Draws his hand back slow. Puts it under his arm. Bares his teeth. Growls through them. “And what are you, Lizzie Burns, only an effin’ Brit-licker?”
Four whole days he’s gone. Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, till the Thursday when his money is spent and he shambles in looking like he’s been pulled through the bush.
“Did you go to work at least?” I says.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he heaves himself by the limbs to the bed, falls down on it full-clothed. I leave him there and finish my tasks. At supper, I put out a plate for him, but he doesn’t get up for it. What’ll not keep till tomorrow I eat myself.
“I’ll not having you running off every time you don’t like the sound of something,” I says when it’s time to get in beside him.
He says naught, but I can tell by his breathing he’s not asleep.
“Do you hear me, Moss? Do you hear me?” and I keep at him till he groans and pulls the sheets over his head, for he needs to understand the health of a thing is told by how fast it recovers, and four days is too long by any measure.
I blow out the candle and in the dark allow a hand to rest on him. It’s late, after all, and he’s learnt.
After so many days with only broken rest, sleep comes quick, but I’m hauled from it young by the sound of the springs grating. “I’ll not be made a mocking stock anymore.”
I blink up at his shadow. “What’s the matter with you?”
“We’re to marry. This week, we’re to do it.”
“I told you three months.”
“And I’m telling you, Lizzie Burns, I’m finished with your tricks and your tests. We’re getting married or we’re calling it off.”
“All right,” I says, “all right,” for his whimpers are those of a man who’ll not be any further pushed, and they’d frighten the insides out of you.
He caves onto me, more out of relief than longing, but he’s soon going at it full peck, and what touches me is not the sopped words he leaves on my neck but the effort it costs me to show him proper feeling in return. My heart’s hard against him, and the more he gives way, the harder it grows.
“It’s the proper thing,” he says afterwards. “I couldn’t live on like this, it goes contrary to my morals.”
I tell him he’s right, all along he’s been right, I was only being silly and afraid, and that sends him off into his snores. Leaving me to stare into the thought that there’ll never be light for me locked into this Irish lie.
XIV. The Franco-Prussian War
Jenny has grapes, real grapes, in her hair. She’s drawn me over to the sideboard and is poking furious at a display of green boughs.
“I don’t know what to expect,” she says.
“I’m sure they’ll be charming,” I says.
“They are French, most of them. Escapees from the siege in Pa
ris. It worries me.”
“What does?”
“Them. I do not know how they will be. We are Prussians, after all.”
At a loss—why are we whispering?—I look back into the room. Karl is treading the length and breadth, glancing at the clock and grumbling. He’s had his beard brushed out and locks curled up special, and is making great efforts not to touch them and put them out of place. Frederick is fidgeting by the chimneypiece. Bare through the door and he’s already on his second vodka. Christmas Day in Jenny’s parlor, and I don’t think Joseph himself was as fretful as this, waiting for the virgin birth.
She tugs on my elbow and I turn back.
“You must think I am being silly, Lizzie.”
“Nay, not a bit of it.” I give her my best face.
“If they are coming here to dine with us, it must mean they have embraced Communism and are free from that blasting curse of national prejudice, which at the end of the day is nothing but wholesale selfishness.”
What has them so nerved up? As far as I’m concerned, you’ve dealt with one frog, you’ve dealt with the whole pond.
Outside, the sound of wheels. Karl moves to the window and checks up and down the road.
“This must be them.”
He sends Nim down to pay off the cab. I go to the mirror to make some last revisions. In the glass now I see Nim coming in, looking wan. No one appears behind her. She speaks something in German. Exclamations fly. There’s a rush for the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, forgive us, Lizzie,” Jenny says. “We have to go straight down to the dining room. One of the men has an injury and cannot get up the stairs. How could we be so thoughtless?”
“Not thoughtless,” I says, shaking my head, “not a bit of thoughtless,” and a part of me feels sorry she’ll not have her pageant processing down, two-by-two, the biggest animals first. She looks forward to such affairs and it will damper her mood to have it passed over.
Nine men stand in the hall. In any other house they’d be crushed, but here they’ve room to stand in a line crossways and to bow. I’m not the only one shocked as to their number. Nim’s pallor has gone to green, and Jenny has a croak in her voice when she says, “Gentlemen, the season’s greetings to you all.”
