Mr. Timothy: A Novel (3 page)

--Mrs. Sharpe? --Yes, sir.

--George sent me.

In the ten seconds she took to look me over, all my last-minute toilet seemed to be for naught. A rill of impure sweat bled down my temple, a monstrous itch spread across my scalp....

--Very well, said Mrs. Sharpe.

The door scraped shut behind me. We passed through a cramped vestibule and down a long, dimly lit hall, unfurnished but for a fist-sized looking-glass, missing a frame, and a small wine table on an empty porcelain pitcher.

--I will say I'm surprised, Mrs. Sharpe said.--You're a little younger than what George normally sends our way. But I daresay we can find someone to answer.

We came at last into a parlour. The first sounds I heard were the peaceful murmurs of a parrot, calmly yanking out one of his breast feathers--he had evidently been most industrious, for he was already half bald. A cat was stretched snakelike along the swag of a divan, and sitting on a camelback sofa were three women in flounced crinolines. One of them was darning a pair of stockings; the other two were playing a languid game of Pope Joan. Such a domestic effulgence! It spoke of maidenly comforts--trousseaus and hearthside prattle. Even the smears of red on their cheeks were like archetypes of innocence. What cruel bowman was I to disturb this palisade of nymphs?

The darning girl took one look at me and averted her eyes. As luck would have it, this was the girl Mrs. Sharpe fastened on.

--Iris?

The girl froze for a second. Then, with her mouth set in a grim line, she laid down her needles and stood. A vacant, lopsided smile slid across her face and then off again, like rainwater.

--Iris, please make our guest welcome. Your name, sir?

--Timothy.

--Mr. Timothy, she said, landing lightly on each syllable, as though it were the airiest of fictions.

As we climbed the stairs, Iris trailed her hand along the banister. Two steps shy of the first landing, she wheeled on me.

--D'ye hurt your leg?

--No.

--You was limping a bit, is all.

The room faced the back alley, and a thick sandalwood scent was pouring through the open window, but from the look of Iris's quivering nostrils, it was
my
smell she was trying to fix. --It's ever so hot, isn't it? she said.

She stifled a yawn and sat down on the edge of the chintz-covered four-poster. Her hand, working almost independently of the rest of her, wriggled through the folds of her skirt and gave a yank. A great silent commotion of rings and cords, and then, like a gathered drape, the skirt began rising...rising...revealing first a measure of magenta stocking and then the embroidered hem of a single petticoat, even more brilliantly magenta.

--Ever so hot.

A fine-looking lass, I could see that. Eyes perhaps too given to starting--as though someone had just swatted her on the back of the head. In her late twenties, very likely: no longer ripe but retaining some of her original juice. Thin in the arms and shoulders, with a compensating fullness below--the kind of plenitude a man could lose himself in. I lowered myself onto the bed next to her. I took off my hat. I fingered the top button of her bodice, and just as the button pulled clear, I felt a drop land on my knee.

And then another. And another.

I didn't understand at first where they were coming from. I had to rule out several possibilities before my hand at last flew to my face and came away wet. And just then, my chest coughed out a sob so large my throat couldn't contain it. It caught halfway up my windpipe and then exploded out again.

Iris leapt from the bed.

--Bloody hell! What's got into you?

I couldn't answer; I was too busy. So many tears, a factory's worth, and no one but me to cry them. My head dropped into my hands, my chest shook, my eyes blurred into darkness. I had never done anything quite so thoroughly.

And still I tried to speak.

--I've got the money. I can make good.

In fact, I was already reaching into my pocket, feeling the familiar press of Uncle N's change purse, but Iris was having none of it. She had already thrown open the door. Yelling, she was. Loud enough to scare rats from the walls.

--Mrs. Sharpe! We've got us a weeper in the Regency Room!

The entire house broke into alarum. A cavalry of footsteps thundered up from below, and the light from the hall dimmed and flickered around me as body after body passed into the room. I had become, in the span of thirty seconds, a blood sport. And recognising all this, I yet persisted in grief 's offices. My arms wrapped themselves around my chest, my head lolled between my knees. The sobs came vomiting from my chest.

--Lookit him.

--Third weeper this week. --Must be the lunar cycle.

Iris cried out:

--Shit, he's no gentleman! He's got crawly nits in his hair.

I heard a quick hot slap. And then Mrs. Sharpe's voice, cool as licorice:

--Miss Iris, you will kindly watch your fucking mouth.

And then a few seconds of edgy silence before Mrs. Sharpe said:

--Everyone else can clear off.

I had assumed that losing my audience would come as a relief, but this feeling was somehow worse. Like being hauled up before God's throne.

Mrs. Sharpe cupped her fingers under my chin, raised my face until it was looking into hers. She had great rings of kohl round her eyes--a parody of mourning.

--You remind me of someone, she said.

--Who?

--No one.

She went to the window, brushed a layer of dirt off the sill.

--He'd be about your age now.

Her hands made a soft
tum-tum
on the pane, and when she turned around, they were still drumming the air. She stared at them, half disenchanted.

--Do you have anywhere to go, Mr. Timothy?

I thought about that one.

--I suppose I do. I just don't want to go there.

--Money?

--I've an uncle who's been very generous. But I can't take any more from him.

She chewed on her lower lip. Another minute passed. Two, perhaps.

--Look here, she said. You know how to read, don't you?

--Yes.

--I mean different sorts of things. Newspapers and novels and racing forms.

--Of course. --And write, too?

--Yes.

--And it's not difficult, is it? It's quite easy once one gets the hang of it?

--I expect so, yes.

She nodded once, smoothed the front of her dress.

--Well, then, you may have yourself a position. If you've a mind to it.

I made my debut next day at dinner. Mrs. Sharpe had lent me a new shirt with a starched collar two sizes too big. I felt vaguely like a box turtle, emerging from a hard young shell. My eyes blinked and welled in the new air.

The girls scarcely noticed me; they were immersed in a platter of Mary Catherine's corned beef. Breakfast didn't exist here, and the evening meal came and went depending on how busy things got, and so the girls tended to be quite peckish right round the middle of the day. All the decorum that Mrs. Sharpe had drilled into them was forsaken during these moments. They leant over the table like brigands, jammed their knives into their plates, wrestled with enormous chunks of beef, swallowed with the barest minimum of chewing. Most of them hadn't washed off their cosmetics, so when they wiped their mouths, their hands came away with hard brown crusts of rouge and powder, which, in their zeal, they often mistook for food.

The man who had directed me here the night before had already finished his meal. He was leaning against the mantel, reading the
Pall Mall Gazette
. He might have been mistaken for a particularly tenacious client but for his unbuttoned collar and his rolled-up sleeves and his air of quiet entitlement. A man at home.

--Afternoon, George, said Mrs. Sharpe.

He began nodding in her direction, then he caught sight of me, and his head briefly arrested itself before finishing its motion.

Mrs. Sharpe made two quick raps on the table.

--Mary Catherine, we'll need another place setting.

At this, the girls broke off their chewing. Gazed at one another with a wild surmise, as the poet writes. Mrs. Sharpe must rather have enjoyed the effect she was creating, because she provided no explanation just yet. She helped herself to some boiled potato. Took a few sips of her claret. Dabbed her lips: once, twice. Only then did she speak.

--Girls, I wish you to know that I have hired Mr. Timothy as my bookkeeper.

Another sip, another dab.

--For the time being, he will be staying with us. I have installed him in Nell's old room, next to the dungeon of unspeakable horror.
Their heads were bowed now like schoolgirls'. Only their eyes, furtively meeting and then swerving away, betrayed any sign of independent thought.

--You are to treat him as you would any other employee. That is to say, trifle with him, and you will answer to me.

It was then that Iris, propelled by her neighbour's nudge, emitted a snort louder and bawdier than any I had ever heard. Such a snort! It described a visible, almost classical arc from her mouth and nose to the table.

--Miss Iris, am I to take this as dissent?

Mrs. Sharpe's voice was at its most fluted and grandiose. Her finger was pointed like an arrow at Iris's heart.

--Not at all, ma'am.

--And you, George?

George folded his newspaper. And then, for good measure, refolded it.

The education of Mrs. Sharpe was rough going at first. Apart from George's daily journals and some bound ledgers, the only literary works in the establishment were
Buchan's Domestic Medicine
and a copy of
Sartor Resartus
, left behind by a Kings College student who had jumped out the second-story window in the belief that a police raid was afoot. (It was just Mary Catherine banging pans in the scullery.) Mr. Carlyle proved a touch abstruse for both of us, so next morning I bought a children's primer from a bookseller in Charing Cross Road. It was titled
Beauteous Betty Butterworth
, and it played out its tale in a world of
b
s.
Betty baked biscuits.... A bee bit Betty on the bottom.... Betty bawled and bawled
.

--Now, when you see that letter, that tells you the sound will be "buh."

--Buh. Buh.

And as we passed from letter to letter, from word to word, through skeins and skeins of sentences, how could I not relive the pilgrimage I had once made with my mother? I wasn't supposed to learn as early as I did. Mother was teaching Sam at the time--he was sitting in her lap, with the book cradled between his legs--and I was quite put out that they were playing a game that excluded me. I kept wandering into the room, and it was only a matter of time, really, before Mother craned her head in my direction.

--Tim, would you care to learn, too?

And so, for me, it began as a lark and became, at some juncture, deadly earnest. For Mrs. Sharpe, it was the reverse. She took it so very seriously at the start that I wasn't sure we would ever get anywhere. The sounds lodged in the base of her throat; releasing them was like breaking an unpickable lock. We spent a full week on
gh
words alone because she couldn't see why the same combination of letters should produce such radically different sounds, and I myself could not explain the wisdom behind these divergences. --It's just...it's how it is. It's how people say it.

But the more sounds she absorbed into her repertoire, the more animated Mrs. Sharpe grew, until our sessions together became simply a vehicle for her joy. These strange hieroglyphics, no longer mysterious, no longer terrible, cannonading from her chest, ricocheting up her throat, exploding in the air around us. Marvelous sounds!
Fowl. Powder. Parcel. Handle. Axe. Gudgeon. Turf. Barley
. They spilled from her mouth like fruit pulp, masticated but with a trace of their original sweetness.
Ladder. Stalk. Rum. Beeswax. Providence
.

Weeks' and weeks' worth of sound and sense had to go by before Mrs. Sharpe began to rise above the individual words, to feel the shape of a sentence and the deeper pull of a paragraph. At times, she has even surprised me by stepping outside the written word altogether and offering her own supra-textual commentary.

--Oh, he should never have let the one savage go, Tim. Mark my words, he'll regret it.

Or else:

--Isn't it amazing when you think on it? Hasn't poked a woman in twenty years! I shouldn't wonder if he buggers Friday before long.

In the face of such a discriminating intelligence, there is less and less for a tutor to do. Mrs. Sharpe's brain works largely independently now. The letters whir in and out, the cogs grind them exceeding fine. Her writing has come along nicely, too: she now produces a handsome, if tentative, cursive. And so my interventions are now confined to correcting the occasional pronunciation or defining the overly latinised adjective. Dr. Johnson, I tell her, might serve her purpose just as well as I, but she won't hear of it. Insists I have a calming influence on her.

I suppose a bit of calm might be a fair exchange for room and board. Although it does occur to me that, as Mrs. Sharpe's official bookkeeper, I might try to bring some order to her finances. The very idea is abhorrent to her.

--Christ, that's why I keep George around! You don't want to deny a man his employment, do you?

George is, in fact, the only one who knows the true nature of our arrangement. Which is not to say he approves. Whenever he sees us passing into Mrs. Sharpe's back room, he twitches away from us, as though we were the despair of England's future. At other times, he is more vocal. During one of our sessions, he opened the door on us, as if by mistake. Stood there in a transparent attitude of surprise, the candlelight flickering in the open chasm of his mouth.

--Oh, my, look at us. Will it be Shakespeare next?

He dropped his head to one side.

--A fine Romeo and Juliet you'd be. Brings tears to my eyes, just imagining it.

At which point, Mrs. Sharpe, reverting to the child she must once have been, squealed: