The Walworth Beauty Page 10

  Emm pushed past her. You smug, self-righteous bitch!

  The fury in his voice knocked her back. He shouldered out into pre-midnight darkness and cold. She banged shut the door, locked it.

  Standing in the morning light in the garden, she sighs. Fool.

  No, not a fool. Just a woman who misses sex. She didn’t stop to think, just rushed ahead she reached out towards Emm yes she did. Oh, Mary Magdalene. In the garden, by the tomb, the risen Jesus says to her: do not touch me. But Madeleine didn’t heed his warning, did she? Who was Emm, really? Narrow escape? From what? No idea.

  She steps deeper into the green enclosure. Barefoot, hopping across the flat stones set in the green stream of plants. A blackbird sings chink-chink, like the ringing of metal poles when scaffolding falls in the street. A thrush yammers away, hidden in the silver-white bushes behind the spread of pale yellow primroses.

  Never say die, says Nelly: plenty more fish in the sea.

  The warm, buttery smell of baking, hot sugar, entices Madeleine back indoors, to check on the cakes rising in the oven.

  FIVE

  Joseph

  Highgate cemetery lay tidy and calm in cloudy autumn light, paths weeded, fallen leaves raked into heaps. Graves in rows; beds in a green dormitory. Only the Last Trump would waken these sleepers. Did Joseph believe that? The lid of this garden whistling up and the dead flying out, restored, perfected? White shrouds fluttering and swirling in the crisp air.

  As usual, he read the inscription he had had chiselled into the stone. Nathalie Benson – beloved wife. Departed, but never forgotten. His mother’s and stepfather’s gravestones alongside simply bore their names and dates. His mother deserved a bit of poetry but he had run out of money.

  Overhead, trees tousled their branches together, the wind shaking them sounding like rushing water. Nobody was about, nobody watching him. He put down the parcel and the cactus that he carried, kneeled, leaned forwards, propping himself on his hands, and kissed Nathalie’s covering earth. He wanted it to hold the taste of her mouth. He wanted to lay his face flat against the ground and press his ear to it. To hear her singing among the worms, defying them.

  She roamed the underworld. Some kind of topsy-turvy heaven. Did he believe in heaven? He wanted to. A place where no one suffered. If Nathalie lived there now, at least she was free from the burdening flesh; his airy, cloud-skimming spirit. Try to believe that. No longer in pain. Milly, swelling and kicking, had tethered her to earth. The umbilical cord cut, Nathalie had soared away. She’d never grow old. Never get slack-bellied, wrinkled, coarse. She remained exquisite.

  From his coat pocket he took out a small trowel and fork, a pair of garden scissors. He cleared away the withered stalks and leaves of the chrysanthemums he had left last time. He tore up the green and yellow ivy that had appeared from nowhere, tugged out the white roots of the bindweed, threw them into the bushes. He wedged the cactus pot into the tin vase at the base of the headstone. He rubbed off the traces of moss that threatened to blur the grooves of the lettering.

  All around him stood figures leaning against headstones. Long-haired women clasping urns or harps, cherub-children stretching out their arms, angels perching on earth just for a moment before darting heavenwards again. Nathalie was one of those angels.

  The sun came out; flashing patterns of light and shadow that waved and blinked over him, making him part of itself, the sky transforming itself to sea, flowing over his shoulders like blue water. Splashing him. A blessing.

  Blue streams. Something blue wavered on the path a few yards away, shook him back into awareness of the green spot where he kneeled, stroking the letters spelling his wife’s name. Another mourner? Joseph reared up, not wanting anyone to observe him. In the dazzle of sun the blue fragment dissolved, re-composed itself. Blue lace-cap flowers blowing on a hydrangea bush. A woman dressed in a flowing lavender-coloured skirt, which swirled about her as she turned and looked in his direction. Her face in deep shadow. Bonnetless. No gloves. Curly fair hair twisted up on top of her head.

  He said: Nathalie?

  Could it be? He tried not to move, lest he disturb her, frighten her away. The sun went on flickering on the dancing green leaves of the bushes and the woman shimmered in the light. The brightness made his eyes water. He shut them, mopped them with his handkerchief. When he opened his eyes again the woman had disappeared.

  Of course it hadn’t been Nathalie. Impossible. Anyway, he didn’t believe in ghosts. He was a rational man with a living to earn. He shoved his gardening implements back into his coat pockets and made towards the cemetery gates. He’d tidy up his parents’ grave another time.

  He descended the hill to Camden Town, climbed aboard an omnibus heading south. Muddy, damp straw underfoot. Huddling his shoulders round to avoid touching the overcoat of the man seated next to him, who stank of stale tobacco and days-old sweat, he scanned the list of questions he’d scribbled. Too pompous and rigorous. How those girls had sniggered at him yesterday when he’d enquired about their means of earning a living.

  Better by far just to chat to these streetwalkers; see what came up. Get help where and when he needed it. Starting with Mrs Dulcimer.

  In the light of morning, Apricot Place looked almost rawly modern: clean neatly pointed brickwork; miniature evergreens in pots in the front areas. Someone had swept the pavement and steps outside Mrs Dulcimer’s house. The front door shone buttercup yellow, the brass doorknocker gleamed. A different maid let him in, a heavily pregnant, scrawny girl with mousy hair and jutting, shiny cheekbones, a wide mouth. Where was the thieving Doll? Hiding in the kitchen, perhaps. Or packed off back home. This one was an awkward little skivvy all right. So what’s your name, then? She twisted her red fists in her apron and mumbled. Betsy, sir.

  Joseph held his parcel in one hand and took off his hat with the other. Your mistress in? The girl hesitated. I don’t know. It’s early for callers, sir. He waved her aside. No need to show me up. I know the way.

  Light fell towards him in dusty shafts from the casement on the landing. On the window seat stood a pair of women’s boots in pale brown canvas, their white ankle buttons splashed with dirt and streaks of something red. He bent closer. Had Mrs Dulcimer been out to the butcher’s already, this early in the morning? Or perhaps she’d trodden on some runover creature, squashed under a carter’s wheels. These south London streets swirled with vermin: stray dogs; foxes; feral cats. Just before turning into Apricot Place he’d paused on the main road to watch two terriers fighting over a rat, its dark coat sleeked flat with grease, one gripping it by the back legs and the other by the head. They tore it apart, a mess of purple clots, then shot off in opposite directions, jaws clamping the gobbets of bloody flesh.

  He knocked at the sitting-room door. After a moment, Mrs Dulcimer’s voice bade him enter.

  The curtains parted and pulled back, the blinds up, faint yellow sunshine flowed in, sharp as lemon juice. A fire burned in the grate, Mrs Dulcimer’s chair set close to it. She was older than he had first supposed. Easily fifty, in this light. Creases around her dark eyes, fine lines on her brown throat. She hadn’t yet put up her hair: her black locks coiled in two curly braids over her shoulders. She was wearing a robe of thin blue wool, made high at the neck, the sleeves turned back over her slender wrists and the bodice tied with a twisted blue cord, and she was holding a newspaper. She glanced at him coolly, said nothing.

  Why didn’t she smile? Last night, delivering his coat, she’d acted the supplicant, reaching out to him. Now she’d withdrawn, into this powerful silence. She was the hostess: she ought to speak first. She ought to make him feel welcome, particularly as he had brought back her wretched cloak, sweating across town with it on a cold morning, plodding down from the common through half a mile of mud to reach her house.

  He searched for politeness. I’m sorry. I should have let you know I planned to call on you.

  She glanced at the tray on the little table drawn up next to her chair. A blue coffee-po
t patterned with yellow flecks, a matching cup, a dish of butter curls, a pot of yellow jam. An empty toast rack stood next to a basket of rolls. Toast crumbs scattered a plate.

  She folded her newspaper, making a fat little packet of black print. She said: your convenience does not match mine. You should have thought of that before just turning up and assuming I’d be available. When in fact, as you see, I am still at breakfast.

  He felt like a schoolboy, a grubby ten-year-old scolded for forgetting a point of grammar. A detail of manners. Stand when your teacher enters the room and don’t answer back. None of your cheek, you ignoramus!

  He said: you should train your maid better, madam. She let me come up!

  She considered this. I wouldn’t say she’s my maid, exactly.

  Fur-edged low-heeled mules, with pointed toes, clung to her slim feet. Bare brown ankles. Blue woollen folds sweeping over her knees. Her soft shape. No corset, surely. Under that blue gown was she naked?

  The scene spun before him, the radiant pattern made by a kaleidoscope. A long-stemmed silver jam spoon. Small bone-handled knife. Puddle of apricot jam, a brown fruit-pit nestling in the fringing gold flesh. The lace-edged white cloth covering the table. A vase of orange-speckled pink lilies. An open book, bound in half-calf, lying next to it, the pages weighed down with a fat dimple of green glass. Her glistening black hair, those childish pigtails tied with blue ribbon. The newspaper, which she was tossing to the floor.

  She said: now you’re here, why not pull up a chair and sit down?

  He held out the parcel containing the tweed cloak. Your property, ma’am. You forgot it last night.

  Mrs Dulcimer shrugged. She pointed to the half-moon table bearing the vase of lilies. Put it there, would you?

  The fresh smell of her coffee lingered. She’d had a light, delicious breakfast. Hard, dewy butter, obviously straight from an earthenware cooler, not melting and oily, as so often at home. Rolls smelling new-baked. Why couldn’t Milly learn to make bread instead of pestering him to allow her to attend nursing classes? Why won’t you let me? Because they don’t exist, my sweetest girl! Milly had glared at him. In France they do. Grandmère said so, in her last letter. I asked her to find out for me. The Sisters of Charity run them, at their hospital in Paris. I could go there! I could learn nursing!

  Don’t think of Milly here. He stared at the turquoise pot on the mantelpiece. The conviction rose inside his mind: Mrs Dulcimer is an artful, conspiring, corrupted wretch. No: that was what he’d imagined on his visit two days ago, watching her study the sturdy container. Its glossy surface had caught his thoughts, held them, and now gave them back to him. It was alive. A sort of idol, squatting there, round-bellied, grinning at him.

  Mrs Dulcimer plucked her napkin from her lap and leaned over the tray, folded the little square of linen on top of the bread basket. Here, then, as at home, a napkin did service for several meals. Mrs Dulcimer, for all her tinselly ornaments, was probably in need of money. Indeed, the daylight showed up the carpet’s faded red and blue, its bald patches only half-hidden by the little gilt chairs placed over them. The pink-and-blue-striped curtains had the sheen of cheap silk. Mrs Dulcimer’s blue robe looked quality enough, though not perfectly clean. As though she’d worn it for a month. It would smell of her. Perspiration mixed with the scent of lilies. The robe had fallen open a little way, as she stooped, revealing her throat, the edge of a frilled white chemise. Ah, so she wasn’t completely naked, after all.

  The turquoise pot leered at him. If his thoughts could stay behind in the room when he left it, attached to objects, to ornaments, then they no longer belonged to him. They flew about, like pet canaries released from a cage. They hid, like nightingales in a thicket. When she and Cara were growing up in Boulogne, Nathalie told him once, pacing arm in arm with him along the riverbank at Richmond, they’d linger late in the little local park on summer nights, first to hear the nightingales sing, and then to hear their mother calling them home: méchantes filles méchantes filles! The sensible, practical mother had encouraged their quest to find work in London. Plenty of rich English people travelled to Boulogne for summer holidays, hired French nursemaids for their children, took the maids home with them. The mother had blessed her daughters’ departure: good luck in the country of the rosbifs!

  Joseph said: I don’t know why, exactly, but I could fancy myself in France. Your breakfast, I suppose. Not so much as a boiled egg you get given over there, I’ve been told. They like sweet things. Brioches and that.

  On Sundays, Nathalie had served French breakfasts, bread and butter and coffee, using the coffee-service he’d bought her as a wedding-present, knocked down cheap because it lacked a sugar-basin. She’d dip her bread into her cup and hold it to his mouth, so that he gulped hot buttered aromatics.

  Mrs Dulcimer folded her hands. Still a good-looking woman. Those egg-shaped cheeks. Those deep-set eyes, those black eyelashes. She said: I spent some of my youth in France. They have their own customs. No better or worse than here, but different, certainly.

  He said: you have travelled abroad?

  He and Cara had once got as far as the coast, when his parents had rented rooms in Herne Bay one July; before his stepfather died. They took Milly, and Alfred, the toddling baby, Cara’s firstborn, down with them, to stay with the old people for a few days, feast on oysters. He and Cara collected wild flowers on cliff rambles, shells and dead starfish along the beach, netted butterflies on walks inland. Milly organised paddling, the building of sandcastles. Back in London she helped Cara lift the dead blooms from the press and stick them into the album, wire the sea treasures onto a shallow wooden tray, pin the butterflies to a board.

  Mrs Dulcimer said: I worked in Paris for a while, after I met my husband. We ran a little hotel. Much liked by English travellers, because we spoke their language.

  Nathalie and Cara were the first Frenchwomen Joseph had ever met. Not at all the painted houris of popular repute. Just two nursemaids, nicely turned out in indigo frocks, plain straw bonnets, taking their charges for an airing in Hyde Park. They had paused to buy milk from the old woman who milked the cow tethered by one of the main paths. She glowered as he drifted up, drawn by the charming picture of the children holding out their pale-blue china mugs produced from Nathalie’s basket. My cups not good enough for you, young madam, I suppose? Nathalie lifted her brows: we don’t like to drink from tin, and they don’t look so clean. The milk-seller rattled them back into the bowl of washing-up water underneath the stand, settled herself on her stool, bucket at her feet, drew on the cow’s teats. The children gazed, round-eyed, at the foaming pail. In Nathalie’s clear, direct glance Joseph was reborn. A small, delicately made woman. Glossy brown hair twining under her bonnet-brim. Slim waist and tiny feet.

  He saw immediately he’d have to take on her older sister too, in order to spend time with the young one she guarded and obviously adored. So from the start he included Cara in his conversation, paid her compliments, invited her to accompany him and Nathalie on their brief, illicit walks. From time to time he and Nathalie escaped Cara’s vigilance. Boating on the river, that afternoon at Richmond, mooring under a willow tree, kissing under the tickling green fronds.

  Mrs Dulcimer said: I liked France, but I missed London. So when my husband died, I decided to return to England and try something similar here. A boarding-house, I mean.

  Joseph said: you have no family of your own to help you? No one at all?

  She confirmed: no one.

  She turned her head aside. She sighed out the words. That last cholera epidemic. Here, on this side of the river, it was especially bad.

  Joseph said: yes! The papers were full of it. A terrible time.

  Daily, he knew, he courted danger, wandering through the south London slums. All too easy to pick up an infection, bring it home. All Londoners had to endure living in bad air, but some districts were worse than others. Joseph took the family up to Hampstead as often as possible, made the children run about in the
fresh, sweet breezes of the Vale of Health, open their lungs and draw in deep breaths of cleanliness. Hoped that would see them through the week. Then they plunged back down into the odours and overflowing drains of Lamb’s Conduit Street.

  What had Mrs Dulcimer’s husband been like? A black man? Black or white, you had tender skin, which shivered or warmed, which felt the touch of another’s hands, yearned for it, or flinched away. He’d not yet touched Mrs Dulcimer. He’d shake hands on leaving. Clasp those black fingers in his own. Surely they’d feel just like any other woman’s. But she wasn’t like any other woman. She seemed in no hurry whatsoever to get on with her domestic duties, for a start.

  Mrs Dulcimer said: returning here, I studied the situation. I saw that many young working women had no families to return to at night, for whatever reason, and stood in considerable moral danger as a result. Particularly when in between jobs as domestic servants. Great numbers of young women in that situation are homeless, Mr Benson, did you know? Often their poverty leaves them little choice but to sell themselves and so earn the money to pay for a bed for the night. I decided to take a small house and run it as lodgings, in which my female tenants could feel safe and secure.

  Translating her hints into facts, Joseph grew hot. How could he have so misunderstood the situation? He looked down, to avoid her eyes, and surveyed his trouser knees, green with the grass and moss he’d kneeled on earlier. He covered them with his palms. He said: you mean you’re rescuing fallen women?

  Black women were not benefactresses, surely. They received charity, rather than dishing it out.

  Mrs Dulcimer sat up straight, began to turn down her sleeves, unrolling them to cover the backs of her hands. She pulled them over her fingertips, as though she felt chilly. Black folks disliked the cold particularly, he supposed. Even when they were born in Deptford? He didn’t know.

  Her voice became brisk, less carefully genteel. I am not rescuing anybody. I do not go about scooping up foundlings, or stray dogs, or strayed girls. My tenants are all either in work or about to be so. You misunderstood the nature of my establishment on your first visit, didn’t you? You obviously still do.