Mrs. Engels (2 page)

II. On the Threshold

And there's no doubting this carriage is high class. The wood and the brass and the velvet and the trimmings: I see it in bright perspective, and though we've been sat here since early morning, my mind has been so far away, up in the clouds gathering wool, it's like I'm noticing it now for the first time: a sudden letting in of daylight. I reach out to stroke the plush of the drapes. Tickle the fringe of the lace doilies. Rub the polished rail. I twist my boot into the thick meat of the carpet. I crane my neck to look at the other passengers, so hushed and nice-minded and well got up. None of this is imagination. It is real. It has passed into my hands and I can put a price on it all.

Across the table, on the sofa he shares with his books and papers, Frederick cuts his usual figure: face and fingernails scrubbed to a shine, hair parted in a manly fashion, an upright pose, feet planted and knees wide, snake pushed down one leg of his breeches; a right gorger. He fidgets round and tries to throw off my gander.

“All fine with you, Lizzie?” he says.

“Oh, grand,” I says, though I'm slow to take my eyes away. I can't see the crime in it, a lady taking a moment to admire.

“Lizzie,
bitte,
” he says, rustling his newspaper, and slapping it out, and lifting it up to hide himself, “I'm trying to read.”

I click my tongue off the roof of my mouth—for him, naught in the world has worth unless it's written down—and turn to look out the window. Outside, the country is speeding by, wind and steam, yet not fast enough for my liking. The farther we get away, and the farther again, the better.

I forbade anyone from coming to the station to see us off, for I didn't want any scenes, but of course Lydia, the rag-arse, disobeyed me.

“Don't let it change you,” she said, gripping my hand and casting anxious glances up at the train as if it were a beast about to swallow me. “Find a friend as'll listen to you and don't be on your own. It's no fine thing to be alone.”

We embraced and she cried. I squeezed her arm and fixed the hair under her bonnet and told her she was a good friend, the best.

“Find your people, Lizzie,” she said then through her tears. “I'm told St. Giles is where they be. St. Giles, do you hear?”

I sat backways in the carriage so I could leave the place looking at it. To go from a familiar thing, however rough-cut, is a matter for nerves, and I suppose that's why so many people don't move. Manchester: leastwise they know the run of it.

At Euston, Frederick stands on the platform, waist-deep in smoke and soot, and takes it all in: heaves it up his nose and sucks it through his teeth and swallows it down as if all these years in Manchester have weakened his bellows and London is the only cure. Around him, around us, a mampus of folk, mixed as to their kind. Men and men and men and men, and here more men hung off by ladies dressed to death and ladies in near dishabbilly and ladies in everything between. By the pillar, an officer in boots. Over there under the hoarding, a line of shoe-blacks. A pair of news vendors. An Italian grinding tunes from a barrel organ. And passing by now—charging through with sticks and big airs—a tribe of moneymen in toppers and showy chains, chased at heel by beggar boys so begrimed it's impossible to tell if they're Christians or coons or what.

I stop one of the railway porters and ask him to tell me what time it says on the station wall.

“Ma'am?” he says, unsure whether I'm playing a rig, for the clock is large and plain for all except the stone-blind to read. “That there says a quarter past two o'clock.”

I nod him my thanks. He bides for the penny. I wave him away; a tone won't win any favors from me.

“On time,” I call to Frederick. And then again to be heard over the music and the patter and the tramp of boots on the pavement: “
I says we're right on time.
”

Frederick takes his watch from his fob and holds it up to the clock, makes sure the one isn't fibbing to the other. “So it seems,” he says.

I push through to stand in front of him, my arms folded against him. “Now don't go being slippery, Frederick, and remember what you said. You said if there were no delays we'd be able to go and see the house today. If we got here before three, you said, we wouldn't have to put it off till tomorrow.”

He drops his watch back in and wrestles his hands into his gloves. “We'll see.”

We wait in the waiting room for our bags to be loaded onto the cab, then we wait in the weather for them to be removed to a second cab, on account of the lame nag that's preventing the first from moving off. These added minutes spent in the strangeness of this strange place—a smell of drains just like Manchester, only with a special whack to it—has given me a sick headache and has me wanting, more than ever, to get to the new house. To close the doors and be safe behind my own walls. I become impatient. I huff and stamp my foot. And by the time we climb up and are on our way, my tongue is aflame with speeches, even though I've promised not to bring them out again.

“Frederick,” I says. The bump and jolt of the wheels makes my voice tremble. “
Frederick?
”

He sighs. “What is it?”

“My love, forgive me if my insistence bores you, but still I don't understand why we must stop with the Marxes. If our house is ready, why don't we go there direct and move ourselves in? Then we could see Jenny and Karl at our leisure, when we're right and settled.”

He lets loose another sigh. Crosses his leg over and lands a sharp elbow on the windowsill. “Really, Lizzie, I cannot discuss this with you again.”

“I just don't see the need, that's all. Causing trouble for Jenny, when our house is there, biding to be walked into.”

“For blazing sake, Lizzie, you know well it was Jenny's idea to have us for these few days. She desires us there so we can make the final arrangements together. Besides, it's too late to change the plans. We've been kindly invited, we've accepted the kind invitation, and that, if you'll be so kind, is the end of it.”

And though it feels to me like the depths of unkindness, I know this must indeed be the end. When a man's mind is set, there's rot-all you can say to change its direction.

I turn to watch out the window. Soon the giant station hotels give way to workshops and warehouses; now to rows of brick and stone; now to terraces and park. Like Manchester, the whole of human history is here, only more of it. I make to point something out to Frederick—the door of a house on a better kind of street—but he's not looking. He's quiet in his seat. Like a statue he sits stock-still, his gaze on his lap, his mouth pulled down.

“A penny for your thoughts,” I says.

“What's that?” he says, blinking at me like a dazed child.

“You looked a hundred miles away. Were you thinking anything?”

“
Nein, nein.
” He brings a fist to his mouth and clears his throat. “I wasn't thinking anything. Nothing at all.”

He says this, and of course I ought to credit it, but his face and manner go for so much; I can tell he's lying. He's thinking about
her,
and it makes me sad and envious to know it. Spoken or unspoken, she hangs there between us; an atmosphere.

I arrange the cuffs on my wrists till I'm able to look at him again. When I do, I can tell he has noticed a hurt in me, though I'm sure he doesn't know what's caused it. He brightens, his mood freshens, and he speaks in the tone of a man who wants to make up for he doesn't know what.

“I have always thought it interesting,” he says, bringing his face close to the glass and squinting through it, “I've always thought it interesting that the English divide their buildings perpendicularly into houses, whereas we Germans divide them horizontally into apartments.”

I shrug to tell him I've never thought to think about it.

“In England,” he goes on, “every man is master of his hall and stairs and chambers, whereas back home we are obliged to use the hall and stairs in common. I believe it is just as Karl says: the possession of an entire house is desired in this country because it draws a circle round the family and hearth.
This is mine. This is where I keep my joys and my sorrows, and you shan't touch it.
Which is a natural feeling, I suppose. I daresay universal. But it is stronger here, much stronger, than it is in the Fatherland.”

I make a face—“Is that so?”—and pull the window down to let the breeze in.

Don't I deserve to have some days that aren't about her?

The cab stops outside a detached house of fair style: three up and one down, a good-sized area, a flower garden and a porch. That they live bigger than their means—that they live at the rate of knots and don't use their allowance wise—isn't a surprise to me. Even so, I feel called on to speak.

“It won't be long now before they have us cleaned out.”

I take the cabby's hand and kick my skirts out so I can land my foot without stepping on my hem. I've bare touched down before the door of the house flies open and two dogs come surging out with Tussy close on their tails: “
There
you are!”

The larger of the dogs runs to Frederick and puts its paws up on his good waistcoat. Frederick bends and allows himself to be licked on the cheek and the ear. For a man so neat he has a queer love for what roots and roves. The other dog, the ratty-looking one, comes to make circles around me. I stand frozen while it sniffs at my privy parts.

“Don't be frightened.” Frederick laughs. “He's harmless.”

I give him a look that says I'll scream and make an episode if it's the only way.

Snorting, he takes the animal by the collar and shoos it off. “Come on, Whiskey, come away from that mean woman.”

Tussy kisses Frederick on the lips and tells him he's late getting to London, twenty years late. He laughs and says something in the German, and she tosses her head and speaks back to him in the same, and between them now they release a mighty flow of language, one so foreign that, if you were to judge from their faces and features only, you wouldn't know what they were feeling.

When their business is done, Tussy comes and wraps herself round me, making me feel the child, for she's taller than me now and has a bust bigger. “At last you're here, Aunt Lizzie, at last.”

“Tussy, my sweet darling, let me see you.” I hold her out and look her up and down. She has her hair in braids and a jewel at the neck and a dress that shows a new slightness of waist. Only a year since her last visit to Manchester—what a prime and drunken affair that was!—and yet, from the look of her, it'd be easy to believe thrice that time has hurtled away. Fifteen and out of her age, never to be a child again; it'd break your heart.

“You've grown all out of knowledge,” I says.

“Have I?” she says, and does a twirl, and curtsies. She sticks out her tongue and winks as she rises from the dip.

I swat her on the arm with my glove. “You're getting more and more like your father.”

“You mean, more like a Jewess?”

I laugh. She hasn't lost her mouth. “Mind your father doesn't hear you saying such things.”

Frederick instructs the cabby to take our belongings inside, suitcases first, boxes and gifts last. Tussy takes my arm and walks me up the path to the porch.

“I have missed you so, Aunt Lizzie.”

“And I've missed you, child.”

“And now, finally, we get to be neighbors.”

“Aye, it's been a long time coming.”

“You know, it's only twenty-two minutes away. Your new house, from here. I've been there often and have counted the distance. Door to door, twenty-two minutes on foot.”

“Is that all? A mere hop and a skip.”

“We shall do all sorts together, shan't we, Aunt Lizzie?”

“There'll be time for it all. We'll not lack for things to do, nor time to do them in.”

The rest of them are stood in the hall passage: the family display. Mother, father, and eldest daughter, biding to bask in the honor they know we must feel to be connected with them. Frederick walks in and is greeted by more of the German, and more again, till the air is full of it. I leave them to have their minute. Lingering on the matting, I marvel at the tree they have in a tub on the porch.

“A tree,” I says, “in a tub.” I tug on Tussy's sleeve. “I wouldn't let that grow any farther or it'll burst out.”

Giving vent to a howl of laughter, Tussy pulls me up the step and presents me as the ringmaster presents his lioness: hip cocked back, arms stretched out, fingers twinkling, a giant grin. Young Janey comes forward first and she's a winsome sight to see. It's a beauty that might need a little bringing about, true, but it's a beauty all the same, and I wouldn't take it from her. Next comes Karl, his whiskers like bramble on my face, his lips like dried-out sausage.

“
Willkommen,
Lizzie,” he says.

And final now, Jenny herself. The changes in her face speak to how long it's been. Five or six years, by my count, though she looks to have been drawn out by a decade and more. Well settled she is now, into the autumn of her time.

“Welcome to our home, Lizzie,” she says with a bit too much energy. “Welcome to London.”

I offer a grateful smile and now blush at the falseness of it. We're not used to playing this visiting game with each other. For some reason or another, I always decided to stay at home when Frederick took his trips to the capital; likewise Jenny never joined Karl or Tussy on their visits to Manchester, and no one ever seemed to wonder at it, no excuses were given for us, our absences were taken to be the normal and wanted way, which I suppose they were.

“And Laura?” I says, in case I forget to mention her later and am judged thoughtless for it. “Are there tidings from Laura?”