Mrs. Engels (11 page)

He gives me many lessons. About the earth and the sun, and which goes around which. And about how to speak, like you don't says “worser” but “worse,” and unless you say it a hundred times a day till it comes out natural you'll be put down as an unread and no notice will ever be taken of you. And about England and how it's a place where the people spend too much time inside, thinking, and this gives them notions about themselves and sets them to believing they're masters and can rule over other people who live in other places. And about the difference between the English and the Irish, how one are Protestants and have to choose between High and Broad and Low, and the other are Catholics, plain and simple, and slaves to the English, and will keep on being slaves until the Catholics from other places, Spain and that neighborhood, come to free them.

A lot of what he says is thick-spread like this and hard to swallow, and I oftentimes feel like telling him that a Jew has no right to be talking about things that don't concern him, and he'd better shut his trap in case anybody hears and slaps it shut for him. The only thing that stops me is a feeling I have, strong and deep down, that liars don't talk like him.

My last ever lesson with Beloff I remember like I had it yesterday.

“Stick clear of the religions, Lizzie. There'll come a time in your world employment when they'll want to save your soul by making you read passages and live by rules written down. There'll be little you can do to avoid it, you being the pauper and them being of the conviction that you're such because you lack faith. You won't have a say except to listen, but you shouldn't let it in. Mouth the words they ask you to speak, but don't put your believing in them, do you understand me? Learn the words, but don't credit their meanings.”

It's the sad hour of a Saturday evening. When I finish putting this last bit of polish on the candlesticks, I'll have to cook his tea, then it'll be time to go back. I rub as slow as I can to stretch out the minutes.

“But I already have a religion,” I says. “I even go to Mass for it.”

He's over by the fire, wrapped in the bed things. “What matters your religion if it's the wrong one? They'll want to change it, and you should be ready for them.”

“Sounds like you've quarrels with the Protestants, Mr. Beloff.”

“Yes, and with your kind too. And my own kind most of all, make no mistake about it. Each as bad as the next, thinking they know the secret to living and dying, and fighting each other over it all the while.”

“But you obey the rules. You don't work on a Saturday.”

“Ignoramus girl. You mistake something born of blind conviction and something done out of mere habit.”

“You don't believe at all?”

“It's not a question of believing. It's about suspecting the ideas they're putting into your head. Always look at who is telling you something as much as what he's telling you.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Beloff? I oughtn't hearken to someone if I don't like the look of him?”

“No, you should listen
more
. That's how you'll learn to be the good judge.”

I put the sticks I've shone back where he likes them—one on the windowsill, two on the table, the rest on the dresser by the pictures of his family—and put the water on for the potatoes, but low. If he keeps on like this, it'll go past the hour for my leavetaking and that'll be grand by me, every minute away from Mary being a minute from the scourges saved. I peel with the blunt knife. Instead of bringing the fork and plate to the table together on the salver, I make trips back and forth.

“You can stay, young Lizzie, if it'll take the stones out of your shoes.”

“Mr. Beloff?”

He takes the bite off his pipe, spits into the fire. “If it's such a vexation for you to go back, you can remain.”

“Where'd I sleep?”

He whirls round, looking horrored. “I said nothing about sleeping!”

“Oh.”

He makes a gesture to say his heart is pierced by my look. “All right, all right, I suppose we could find something for you to lie on.”

I smile and put the bacon in to fry and, over the sizzle, try to comprehend my feelings.

I'm put on a mat in front of the fire with a rolled-up rug under my head and a coat thrown over.

“How's that?” he says.

“Warm enough,” I says.

All night I keep my eyes closed, but am kept alert by the expectation of a snore or a fart or any sign to show Beloff's gone off into his slumbers so that I can go off myself without fretting about keeping him up with my own noises. But naught comes, bare even a breath. When I open my eye a slit and look through the dark, I can make him out on his back on the mattress, stiff and ironed out like a corpse.

It's the first time in my life I don't say my prayers.

As soon as there's light, I get up and make a new fire. I take out the ash and the night soils. Seeing the volume that comes out of the bucket, I realize I must have slept after all, for I didn't hear Beloff getting up. I spend in the lane myself so as to leave the bucket empty. While I'm haunched over, I watch the flapping of the oilskin in the window of the house opposite, which satisfies me and gives me no short measure of peace, it being early and there being no bodies yet risen to distract me.

Back inside, I'm surprised to find Beloff up and waiting for his breakfast.

“Am I getting something for the extra day?” I says.

He grumbles something about asking no questions till he's had his coffee.

“Where do you go to the Mass?” he says, once served. “I want you to take me.”

“To Mass?”

“That's right.”

“Do the Jews not have their own churches?”

“They do, but I want to go to yours. That's the humor I've woken up to.”

On the road there, he must realize I'm not bringing him to my regular place, for I lead us out of the way, far from the passages and over past the lots. But he doesn't let on or allow his good mood to change. He whistles through his lips and skips through the puddles, jumps over the lushed-out bodies sleeping on the road. When a scrawn of a cat comes out of a sprung door, he lifts it up and presents it to me for petting.

I'm having trouble finding the church I'm thinking about, for I've never stepped inside it but only wandered by. The third or fourth time we circle past the same court, Beloff stops and leans on the pigpen that takes up most of it. From a window a bit of something is thrown and the animals snort and climb over each other to get it.

“You know, Lizzie, most of the Jews who don't eat pork don't know why it shouldn't be eaten, only it's wrong to eat it. Do you see the lunacy of that?”

“The only lunacy I see, Mr. Beloff, is yours for the bacon.”

He laughs. “I'm no bigot, Lizzie. I don't care where I get my meat, so long as I can get it. I often go and buy it without looking at what it is or how they've killed it, whether it has a seal or not. And why?”

I shrug.

“Idiot girl. Because I don't think it's wrong. The Chinaman eats cats and doesn't think
that
wrong. He'd be shocked and appalled if you told him it was. Does that make him bad and evil?”

When eventual I find the church, I'm appalled to see that, despite it being first Mass, it's squeezed to bursting. Have we come on a feast day without my knowing? I go to stand at the back with the men who, hungover and coughing, have been pulled out of the beds by their women. Beloff is having none of that. He bends his arm out, puts my hand on the inside of his elbow, and marches me up to the top as if giving me away. I don't think my heart has ever beaten so fast or my face taken in so much blood.

He genuflects. He kneels. He stands. He bows. The old beggar even clasps his hands and speaks out the prayers, word for effin' word, and all I can think is, Will this ever be over? Then, just as I begin to see a light shine at the end, he joins the file of bodies going up, and my worst fears come to be.

“You oughtn't of taken the host,” I find the boldness to say on the walk back home.

“Why on earth not?” he says, putting on to be surprised by my displeasure.

“You're not a bit of a Catholic and you oughtn't of.”

“Oh, but, Lizzie”—he's enjoying this, the hooer's donkey—“I was hungry.”

“You were making a mockery.”

“And do you see me burning up for it? Has the lightning come to strike me?”

“You're going to hell.”

“Which hell is that?”

“Whichever one'll have you.”

He shakes his head and chortles. “Oh, child of the Irish benighted—”

“Lizzie's my name. Lizzie Burns.”

“Well, Lizzie, it's time you grew up and climbed out of your swamp.”

Mary is waiting outside his door. She has a shawl dragged over her head and pulled across her nose against the cold. I'm almost glad to see her.

“How long have you been out here?” I says.

“Long enough,” she says, muffled through the cloth. “Where were you? I was worried sick.”

“It's Sunday, young Mary,” Beloff breaks in. “Where else would we be but at the Mass?”

Mary's hand comes out from under her coverings to bestow on me an almighty whack. The pain of it rings as far as my toes. Before this violence, I was resolved to leave Beloff, to skivvy no more for him, for he's a man with no respect to show for anything, but now I find myself conflicted.

“And you, sir,” Mary says, pointing a finger at him, “you ought be ashamed of yourself.”

Beloff doesn't look the slightest bit fussed. “Sister child, why don't you come in and we'll boil up some tea, get the cold out of those limbs?”

“Tea? Here's your tea, you dirty Jewish.”

She frees her mouth of its veil and spits on the ground by his feet. Turns on her heel and storms away.

When I leave I know I'll never be coming back, so I stay a while drinking tea and looking into the fire, and another while frying up the midday dinner.

Says he: “Don't look so hard at it or it'll turn.”

When it begins to darken, he tells me he has a card party to go to and it's time I faced what I had coming. I hate him then and wish him dead. How dare he send me away when it's his own hide that ought be tanned? All the same, I know that when Mary comes at me, it will be pleading his honor I'll be doing.

XI. With Radical Chains

“Here! Spiv! Pumps!”

Five in the p.m. of another day and I'm feeling compunctions about being over-hard. Five in the p.m. and, again, I decide it's time for a fresh start. Five in the p.m. and I call them to the morning room.

Pumps arrives, her hand in her mouth as usual, finger rubbing tooth. “Are we expecting?” she says, making sheep's eyes at the tea things I've put out, the cake I've cut.

“Nay,” I says, “I thought we'd have a sneaky tuck-in, the three of us.” I smile—muster all I can—and spread butter onto the slices and put them onto the plates. “With all the running round we do, it's rare we take the time to sit down and have a chat like us girls ought do together.”

Spiv appears in the doorway. Folds her arms across. “I made that cake for Sunday.”

“You did?” I take the prize slice with the cherry for myself. “Well, no harm, can't you make another?” She opens to give out, but I'm faster: “And aren't there always the shops? The world wouldn't stop without you.”

I pour. Spiv perches, ready to jump up and gainsay any involvement if it all turns out to be a rig. The more effort she spends keeping the saucer from falling off her knee, the more fidgeted she gets and the more tea that spills over. Pumps, on the other side, slouches like it was onto cushions she was born. A parish pip warming her hands, she makes, the way she's holding her cup underneath.

“Now, girls,” I says, “I've been thinking. It's nigh time we looked at your half day.”

Pumps takes her bit of cake up and bites into it. “The half day's fine as it is,” she says, wet crumbs flying. “Why fix something that isn't broke?”

“For goodness sake, child,” I says, “if from time to time you hearkened before you spoke, you might actual learn something. You've neither of you to worry. I don't want to take any of your time away. It's
more
time I want to give you. An extra hour seems fair to me for all the work you've been doing, helping us settle in and the rest. Believe it or not, it's already two months since we came to live under this roof, and that makes—how long?— a whole quarter of a year, and it's not always been roses, I know. There have been high emotions and some bad scenes. I own I've not been the easiest, this being a new arrangement for me. But now I want to wash the plate clean. I want us to be friends.”

Glad of myself, I push my cake in and wash it down, press my thumb onto my plate to collect what's fallen. We all of us ought remember that, though it's no small task to be large and humble, the pleasures got from it make it worth the trouble.

Spiv clatters her cup down and narrows across at me. “Pumps is right, the half day ought stay put as it is.”

“But—” My tea goes down the wrong way. “But Spiv,
cough cough,
don't you understand,
cough,
I'm trying to
give
you something? A reward for your services?”

She curls at me. “The name's Camilla, ma'am.”

Lord have mercy, not this old bone.

“Your name's what I call it, Spiv”—how swift a rising ire can gulf the finer feelings—“and it'd do you no harm to remember there's girls who get only an afternoon a month, if they're given pause at all.”

As if to remind me of the times, she throws her eyes up. “Adding an hour'd be no help, ma'am. With the lunch, I can't get out before two, and if I come back after seven, there'd be everything still to do for the morning. It'd make Thursdays unpossible.”

Camilla Barton, Camilla Barton, it's higher than your hole you're fartin'.

“All I want,” I says, putting the rage into the stirring of a fresh cup, “all I want is for us to be a bit closer. I'm not asking us to be bosom familiars or any such thing. I understand you must live according to your age and have your own secrets. I don't expect you to have older heads than you do, nor give out all their contents. But wouldn't it be right to share ourselves out a touch, to take our spare time together now and then, to do things more like a family? I'm sure Frederick would like to see it that way. You know how he hates ill feeling in the house.”

“Listen, Aunt Liz—” Pumps puts on that voice she's learnt from listening to the Men in the parlor, that
reasonable
voice they like to use. If I wasn't busy with my handkerchief getting a splash of milk off my sleeve, I'd flatten my hand and silence it that way. “Aunt Liz, it's very nice of you to offer, and we love Frederick right well and want him happy in every feature, but I'm telling you, you wouldn't like what we do. We run about and get up to young tricks, it wouldn't fit you right. You're a bit past it, if you don't mind me saying.”

This brings a new rush of gall to my embittered mood. Lucky she'd be, at my age, to have hair half as black, not a gray strand on show, and no lady do-naught in London has it so shiny and thick. “Mind yourself, Mary Ellen Burns,” I says. “If you're let out at all, it's because I license it. And if you're
here
instead of freezing your derriere on a Manchester street corner, it's also because I license it,” and she knows it good and she knows it well, which is why the colors come up her face and she withers back into her cap.

By now our little Burns dramas must be as familiar to Spiv as any she can recall from her own childhood, but I don't think it's in her natural nature to be generous in her comparisons, or to own that her bad feelings towards us might actual be the flutterings of envy, on account of being so far from her own kind and having so little opportunity to quarrel with them. So she sits through it silent and judgeful, and when it's over and Pumps has begged her pardons, she stands up with a sigh and starts to clear.

“Mrs. Burns, if I may,” she says, licking a blot of icing that gets on her finger while scraping.

“What is it, Spiv?”

“Mrs. Burns—” She doesn't look at me but between her fingers, in those warm spaces where the mites sometimes gather, for any icing she might have missed. “Mrs. Burns, can't you go out with Mrs. Marx and her intimates? Isn't she forever inviting you? And wouldn't you enjoy that much the better?”

“Put those plates down, Spiv.”

She gives me a wary look.

“I said put them down. I'll do them.”

Once free of her burden, she bobs a curtsy.

“Now get out of my sight. You too, Pumps.”

Heads bowed, they hare for the door.

“You both ought be married by now,” I call after them. “You ought be married and not here bothering me.”

I'm left feeling too much to move. A cruddy humor has come and teased away my goodwill, the hopes I had of refreshing the heavy airs in this wretched house. Of course, the proper thing now would be to turn my affliction to good, to rise and come over it with busyness and tasks.
Trial and emotion strengthen the constitution and ought be cheerful borne
is how the saying goes. But to
look
at the half-eaten cake and the pool of tea in Spiv's saucer—just to look at them—tires me right out, weighs me to the carpet.

Jenny says that the Revolution will better our fare. That it will pay us for our home tasks and make us self-supporters. And I'm ready to put my doubts in a drawer and believe it isn't a swindle; I'm ready to follow the wind. But what she's not saying—what I've to keep to my own sorry self—is that at the pace the Revolution's going, with the comrades divided on themselves and squabbling over trifles, we'll not live to enjoy it.

I stay in my chair like this till I hear Frederick's step coming down the stairs. Of a sudden I'm charged with a desire to squeal on them. I must let it out, I think. I must reveal to him how they really are before it burns me away. A fire lights in my chest and roars in my ears. “We could do without them,” I'll say. “We could live alone, just you and me, and get by regular well.”

I hear his feet hitting the tiles in the hall. I stand and take up a stack of plates and hold them in front so that, if he comes in on me, I'll be seen to be doing something. He shuffles about outside the door. Picking things up and knocking things over. Giving out German curses.

“
Scheisse,
” he's saying, “
Scheisse, schei—
”

A moment and he bursts in, the skirts of his coat flying. “Ah, here you are,” he says. “Have you seen a letter lying around?” He spies over the tables and sideboards, turns over the clock on the chimneypiece, peers under the mats and the doilies. I can't work out if it's me who's looking slow or him who's moving train-speed. “I put it on the hall table to take to Karl, but someone seems to have moved it.”

By his tone I know he's holding down a temper. I decide now to be the wrong minute to come at him with the house doings. “I've not seen any letter, my love,” I says, putting down the plates to help in the search. “What did it look like?”

He turns to look hard at me, the conch shell in one hand and the ballerina figurine in the other. “It looked like a letter, Lizzie.”

Folding open the doors to the parlor, he has to fix his elbow to his side to keep the papers under his arm from falling. I go to help him. “Here, give me those.”

“
Nein—
” He puts them down on the writing desk. “Leave them there, do not touch them.” He pulls the doors open the rest of the way and goes through, begins tearing at every blessed thing: the plants, the vases, the albums, the pressing books, the sewing box.

I sigh and follow him in. Lift the newspaper off the seat of the armchair. “Is this it?”

“Which?
Ya,
thank the devil.” He whips it up. “I wish people would keep their hands off things.” He puts it under his arm, where he had the other papers before. “Right, Lizzichen, I'm off”—hand brushing light on my arm, whiskers tickling my cheek—“I'm with Karl for dinner tonight.”

“But I've ordered fowl. Spiv is going to roast it.”

“Have it yourselves. Or I can send Jenny down to help you.”

“Nay, nay. I'm sure the girls will be happy with an extra helping.”

“Superb.”

“Don't forget these.” I give him the papers from the writing desk.

“Ah,
ya,
thank you.
Bis bald
.”

I wait till he's halfways out the door. “Oh, but, Frederick—?”

He twists and looks at me over his collar.

I point to his shoes, all scuffed and muddied. “You're not going out with those looking like that, are you?”

He looks down and curls his toes up. “I don't have a clean pair left. These will have to do.”

Being so peculiar about his appearance—his lines he likes straight and his colors in tune—I thought he'd be pleased to have his eye drawn to the lapse, but I see now I've only nettled him further. A flush comes to his cheeks, and his response is mottled by it, and it makes me feel down-low and contrite, for I remember now that I promised to polish them yesterday, and it's only on account of his high manners he's not mentioning it. There's people, I know, that write down their tasks in a ledger, and the hours for doing them, but I count on my own brains, and I'm not a machine, time and times there's things that slip through.

“Come on, then,” I says. “Take them off and I'll do them this minute. I won't have Jenny saying I send you out on your business looking like a rural.”

“I have a cab waiting. They are fine as they are.”

“Sit down there now. Flick of a lamb's tail and they'll be done.”

I draw him over to the chair by the occasional table and put him into it. He moans. Throws his papers down. Takes out his watch and studies it. But he stays sat all the same.

I'm about to ring the bell for Pumps to bring the polishing box when the earwigger herself comes running in with it. “Here we go, Uncle Angel,” she says, and kneels in front of him. “Give me your foot here and we'll get those spick and span for you.”

The bell-cord still tight in my grip, I glower down at her. “I'll do that, Pumps, thank you. I'm sure you're busy at other things.”

“Not at all,” she says. “I can't think of any task that would better merit my attending.” She smiles up at Frederick and takes his foot onto her pinny. He meets her mooning face and—begad the weakness of men!—his arrangement softens.

“Pumps,” I says, coming to stand over her, “this is something I've promised Mr. Engels to do and I'd like to do it.”

“For godsake, Lizzie,” he says, chucking an arm at me, “let the girl do it.”

I'm still holding the newspaper I took from the armchair. I slap it now against my skirts and take the chair on the other side of the table. All right, let her do it, but she'll need watching over.

While Pumps works, he fans himself with a magazine, sending the smell of spices across. “What would I do without you, Pumps?” he says. “You're a good girl, you're learning well.”

She looks up at him, and they beam at each other, and it's enough to make the juices rise from your stomach.

He lets her work for as long as he has the patience. “I'm going to be late,” he says when it's final exhausted. “Are we nearly there?”

“Nigh on, Uncle Angel,” says Pumps. A few more lashes of the brush and she lifts his foot down to the carpet. “There we are. Good as new.”

“Thank you,
mein Liebling,
” he says. “Good enough to eat from.” He leans over and kisses her on the cheek.

She reddens and bows down, hides her face under the fringe of her bonnet. “You're some fine charmer, Uncle Angel,” she says, putting the tubs and the brushes back in the box.

He tips his head and grins. Gets up and stretches. Puts his papers under his arm. “Don't wait up!”

He's gone—
slam!
—and I'm left with the task of bursting the little grubber's head, though I find now I don't have the energy for it. She mutters something about clemming for a smoke, and I let her go.