Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

  “And I can’t give you anything. I’ve other things to look after. And, anyhows, I’ve no guarantee you wouldn’t be hurting people off the back of it.”

  I hear myself, and I wince, for I’m only being righteous, a hypocrite. I know what a rebellion is, what it looks like on a man’s body.

  “If it isn’t in your heart to give it, Lizzie, then we’d rather not have it.”

  There’s no hint of the anger about him. If he’s feeling something, it’s compassion: pity for human shortcomings. Men like Moss are easy once you know it’s in your power to leave them.

  “I don’t want to know what it is you’re up to, Moss. What actions you have planned. If you get caught, I won’t be visiting you in jail. I’ll not be a visiting woman.”

  He gives a gentle nod, as if to say, “I understand.”

  “You’re to forget about me, do you hear? I’m going to vanish out of your life. Don’t bother about me anymore.”

  “No one’s stopping you from going your own way.”

  “That’s right. So this is the last last-time I’ll be seeing you. This is the end with no fresh beginnings.”

  He reaches out a hand to show me the right road away. “Go on, then. Off with you. But do this, Lizzie Burns. When you get back to your big house, and you fall to believing whatever it is you like to believe, remember it was you came looking for me. I didn’t ask to be found. Not this time, not the last time, not ever.”

  XXXIV. A Secret Society

  Janey’s engagement dinner, and Longuet himself does the cooking. Sole in a cream and cider sauce. I’m wary, but it turns out to be better, much better, than that beef he made for us at New Year’s. This, at least, has been heated through. We’re served by the men Wroblewski and Brunel. Two lieutenants like them oughtn’t be let up; they ought be confined to their chairs and have their every need attended on, but they seem to want to do it. They’re making a game out of it. Fussing with napkins. Sniffing the wine before they pour it. Ooh-la-la-ing when they lift the lid off a salver. Pointing at our plates and explaining what’s on them, what went into the preparation, on the chance that we’d want to fix it for ourselves and not make a German muck of it.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen Nim sitting at the table for a whole supper. They’ve put her in a privileged position, at the center beside Jenny, and she seems comfortable enough there, in her gay dress and with her educated graces, her laughter always well timed; a good humor that’s hard to account for, knowing the state of the kitchen that awaits her. Toasts are made. Wedding dates are debated. Our faces turn red from the lush and the heat of the fires. Karl cries. Frederick makes jokes about Karl’s lack of any except unbidden emotions. The only spot dulling the high shine of the evening is Tussy. She raises her glass when it’s called for, and she answers with politeness the questions directed to her, but it’s clear her effort is forced, that her true feelings are out of temper with the celebrations. I’d wager she’s angry because Lissagaray hasn’t been invited; I’d bet my life that’s what’s wrong with her. She has fought with her parents about it. What we’re witnessing are the final vapors of a tantrum. No Lissagaray, no ball.

  The pudding is baked apples, which everyone agrees are delicious. Not even Jenny leaves something on her plate for manners. A round of sweet wine, and now brandy, and the party moves to the second fireplace to play games. Nim stays at the table to clear up.

  “Can’t you leave it till tomorrow?” I says.

  “I’d prefer to make a start on it now,” she says.

  “Well, let me help you, then.”

  She doesn’t object. I load plates onto a salver and carry it to the kitchen. On the way back up, at the top of the kitchen stairs, Tussy catches hold of me.

  “I need to talk to you, Aunt Lizzie.”

  “I’m helping Nim.”

  “This is important. Please.”

  It goes against my mood. Whatever she has to tell me would be better kept till we’re not so overtook with drink; I’d rather it waited till I’m clearer of mind and have more patience for it. But I oblige. Out of obligation, I oblige.

  She takes me upstairs to her room. The fire has wasted out, leaving the place gloomy and cold. She lights a lamp and puts it on the bedside. Sits on the bed and wraps herself in a rug. Makes space for me to sit beside her. I stay where I am by the door. The lush pounds behind my eyes and in the tips of my fingers.

  “What’s the matter with you, Tussy? Aren’t you happy for your sister?”

  “That’s not it, Aunt Lizzie. I rejoice for Janey.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Her eyes glimmer big and wet in the light. “I, too, am engaged to be married.”

  Sudden, the appetite for the drink I’ve already drunk leaves me, and I turn dizzy and sick. “Oh, Tussy.” I go to the chimneypiece and lean on it. “You haven’t told them.”

  “You know they disapprove of him.”

  I look into the grate, at the burnt bits and the ashes. Why can’t people learn to keep themselves dark? Why must they insist on telling themselves out? For now I must do what it isn’t my job to do: I must try to turn her away from it.

  “Aunt Lizzie? You are happy for me, I hope.”

  I turn to look at her. Her face is open, awaiting my indulgences. “Perhaps if they knew how you really feel.”

  “Oh, they know. They know.”

  “They think it an infatuation.”

  “They hate him. He is a free thinker, that’s why.”

  I come away from the chimneypiece. Take my support from the bedstead. “Tussy, I don’t understand it. Why would you want to marry a man your parents disapprove of?”

  She throws the rug off her shoulders. Clasps one hand to her breast. Points at me with the other, accusing. “Oh no. Not you as well!”

  I flap a hand in the air to dismiss her pointing finger. “Have some reason, girl. They see what you cannot because you’re under the sway of feelings. They have your best interests at heart. You must find a match that suits the family, that fits with the position that your parents desire for you.”

  She jumps to a stand. Paces forward. And now back. “Oh, God. Everyone is against me. Everyone! Even you!”

  “What were you expecting, child? You think me so different?”

  “Not anymore. Not after this!”

  “Tussy, I’ve heard enough. I’m going back downstairs.”

  “What? You’re just going to leave me. Leave me here alone?”

  I try to make the door before my temper rises. But I’m too slow. My hand hasn’t yet reached the knob when the drink in my gut spits its poison up.

  “Why can’t you keep your business to yourselves, you people? What do you want us to do with these secrets you insist on making public? Carry the load around so you don’t have to? Do you ask us, before you empty your dirt upon us? Nay, you just decide for yourselves that this is the best course, as if you had special rights to our understanding. Well, here’s a thing, Tussy Marx. We don’t want to know what’s inside you. We couldn’t care less for what you carry about in your private wraps. We struggle enough with our own cares as it is.”

  I leave her gasping and sobbing into the quilt.

  Back in the kitchen, I beg Nim for some water and quaff it down. “I think it’s time I go home.”

  She steadies me with a strong hand. “It’s early yet, Mrs. Burns. Sit there and get your head straight. They’ll be done soon.”

  I sit in the chimney corner and watch her work. When she’s close to finishing, she boils up some tea. Stirs me a mug. Now she sits with me. We talk about the rising price of things, to be saying something. The dogs are barking in the yard. Laughter and clapping waft down from upstairs. I don’t hear Tussy coming down. She must be feeling the indignity that comes when you let go of what’s hidden; let her steep in it.

  “Thanks for the tea, Helen. My strength is up, I think. I must get myself home.”

  She gives me some leftovers in a dish. “Take this with you.”
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  I accept it with a smile.

  “I was thinking, Nim. I might go back to see Freddy soon. The scandal seems to have passed, but we ought make absolute and sure there’s no danger facing him.”

  “Mrs. Burns, please don’t.”

  “It’d be a chance to bring him something, if you have anything you think he’d like to have.”

  She shakes her head in a sad way. “No, Mrs. Burns.”

  “This time, however, it might be an idea to tell Frederick. He has a right to know I’m going.”

  “Don’t. Don’t tell Mr. Engels anything. And don’t go there, to Freddy. It’s none of your concern. I was mistaken to ask you to go before. It was a misjudgment on my part.”

  “Far from it, Helen. I was glad to go. And Freddy, I’m sure, appreciated the—”

  A new seriousness takes hold of her. She takes the dish back from me and puts it on the table. “Sit down again, Mrs. Burns.”

  “I’m grand standing.”

  “Sit, please. I can see if I don’t tell you, you will cause further harm.”

  “Tell me what?”

  She leads me back to the chimney corner, but I don’t sit in it.

  “Mrs. Burns, you should know. Freddy is not Mr. Engels’s son.”

  The words knock me out of myself, leave me struggling for sense.

  “What, what are you saying?” I says, feeling sudden sober.

  “Mr. Engels gave the boy his name in order to save the father from ruin.”

  The father? The question comes, but I stop it in my throat, for I’ve neither the right nor the need to ask it. I understand—sudden—that it’s Karl she’s speaking about.

  “It was a fine and admirable thing Mr. Engels did,” she says. “I don’t see why you must suffer in ignorance for it.”

  I hear the words—these words intended to exonerate—and I feel naught, naught except the unease that comes from being told that something is fine and not being able to feel that it’s so, like being blind when people talk of the earth and the sky.

  “Is what you say true? The simple truth?”

  She nods, solemn. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand why you were never told.” She turns her face to the floor, so it’s impossible to know what she’s feeling in herself.

  I no longer feel the drink, but only the numbness that comes after a shock.

  “Thanks for your frankness. It can’t have been easy.”

  She gives a weak smile; a thanks of her own. I make to leave.

  “The leftovers?”

  “Nay. You’ve plenty of mouths to feed here.”

  On the way back up, I pause in the hall a moment, to fathom it. What is worse, I wonder: to be Mary and to believe for all your life a false thing against Frederick; or to be Jenny and to know the truth of what Karl did, and to live with it. It’s confusing to know.

  And what about Frederick himself? How ought he be judged? By putting the man Marx before everything—by being more loyal to him than to his own woman, his own name, his own life—he has made of Karl something like a wife. Those of us who really love Frederick have had to fight over what remains after Karl has had his way, and in truth, there’s rare much there to wake up to.

  Curse these infernal times! How is a body meant to think about them? The most I can say is that it’s no better here than in Manchester; no easier to get a grasp on the working of things. The wide views and the fresh air I once hoped to find have been replaced by the same dark courts and winding passages that lead nowhere.

  Back in the parlor, Janey is playing the piano and Jenny is singing, her voice restored after the attacks of pleurisy; stronger and clearer than ever before. I sit in my place, beholding, and unexpected chords stir within me: sympathy and pity and esteem. A woman must expect trials, a politics woman more than most, but to watch your maid grow big with your husband’s bastard is a calamity requiring inhuman forbearance to live down. What agonies she must have suffered. What lonely hours passed. What grit to keep from falling down. What cleverness to have Frederick deliver her from the shame. I’ve been led into a mistake about her: she’s a good wit and a survivor; in my eyes, twice the person she was.

  And Karl? Karl, there, with his god’s beard and his foot beating out the time? How often we admire the wrong thing.

  XXXV. The Administration of Things

  Frederick is distracting himself with preparations for the first anniversary of the Paris Commune. Running up and down the stairs, barking orders and firing off letters, behaving like he’s too caught up to see me sitting here with my bowl of broth, biding my moment to come at him. I’ve left the door of the morning room open, to watch his comings and goings, and to glower at him. How he can act like it’s just another day, it passes me to understand. Is it a virtue, this capacity he has to saddle the evil that others have made? To go about with his good name in tatters in order to make right another man’s error? Am I wrong to be ill-judging him? Ought I be looking up to him instead? Ought he be returned his halo, rather than stripped of it?

  When I see Spiv bringing up his lunch, I call her in and tell her to leave the tray here. “Today he’ll have his midday meal at the table, like a good husband.”

  She goes up to tell him the news. He comes down some moments later, looking cross.

  “I don’t have time for nonsense, Lizzie.”

  “You’ll have time for this, when I tell you. Sit down.”

  He sighs. “Camilla, take the food upstairs and close the door on your way out.” He puts half an arse on the chair. “What’s this about?”

  “I know, Frederick.”

  “You know what?”

  “I know Karl’s the father.”

  He throws his eyes up and rolls his head round as if seized by a mortal attack of boredom. “Are you claiming this knowledge came to you only recently?”

  “Yesterday. Nim told me.”

  “Rubbish. You’ve known for years.”

  “I was never told.”

  “I didn’t see the need. The situation was perfectly clear.”

  “It was? So you told Mary, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did?”

  “She was sick with it, so I told her. The envy took her over and I thought she was going to do herself harm, so I gave her the truth, yes.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t believe me. She went on believing the lie.”

  “Ha! And why wouldn’t she, that woman who loved you to death? You made her demented with your stories and your traveling and your affairs, you made her so she didn’t know where to put her faith. May you rot in hell for it!”

  “I refuse to believe she didn’t know, despite what she said and how she acted. And you, I think you knew too.”

  I shake my head, exasperated. “You have always had a too high opinion of our minds, Frederick Engels. We’re far more ignorant than you give us credit for. Far far more.”

  “Pah!” he says, and we shake our heads in unison.

  “What a mess,” I says now. “And for what? For Karl?”

  “For the Cause, Lizzie.”

  “The Cause. The Cause.”

  “Yes, the Cause.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “Mine.”

  “Liar. It could only have been Jenny’s.”

  “What difference does it make? Together we did what was right.”

  “Does Freddy know?”

  “Lizzie.”

  “Does he?”

  “No. He has been protected from it.”

  “He has a right to know.”

  “Go softly, Lizzie Burns. You’re wading in high waters. Don’t get out of your depth.”

  His hard arrangement gives me to understand that this is all I’ll pull from him today. I get up before he has a chance to. I want to be the one who calls an end to proceedings; I want to be the one who walks free. I put my coat and bonnet on, and leave by the street door.

  “Thought you had a hangover!” he shouts after me.

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nbsp; The thing must be done, and no one else around here will ever do it.

  Sarah answers with a big and grubbed-up Harry on her hip. She looks up the road.

  “Don’t worry,” I says. “I’ve been careful.”

  “Come in. You’ve come all this way, you might as well stay for some tea.”

  The room looks knocked about and neglected.

  “Freddy?”

  “There’s a man sick. He’s working a Sunday to cover.”

  “Will he get something extra for that?”

  She shrugs. Puts Harry on the dirty floor while she boils the water. She gives me the tea in a glass. “Sorry. The cups is all broke. Harry kicked them off the table. Lucky there were nothing poured or he’d of been scalded.”

  I close my eyes and try to fight off the image. I wish people would keep from telling me anything.

  She sits across from me. Takes Harry back up. “He won’t be home now. He’ll go out for a few, after the day. Won’t be back till we’re well took to bed.”

  I nod. Stir my tea. It puts you off, seeing through to the milk churning round.

  “Is that all right for you?”

  “Grand.”

  I reach over and put a stray butter knife out of Harry’s reach. A proper scrub is what he needs. And a scissors put to his hair. You’d mistake him for a girl, under the grease.

  “Have you come for anything particular, Mrs. Burns? Can I help you with something?”

  She’s expecting more money. She’s being careful with me, handling me soft, for she thinks she can get it out of me and not tell Freddy about it.

  “There’s been something on my mind, Sarah.”

  She narrows, mistrusting.

  “I was just wondering, has Mrs. Demuth ever come? Freddy’s mother?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to meet her? I could set it up.”

  “That’s Freddy’s business.”

  “Wouldn’t he like to see her from time to time?”

  She shrugs. “He might visit her on his days off, for all I know. I barely see him.”

  “And the fosters? Are they in touch?”

  “It’s for the better they’re not.”