The Dress Lodger Page 10

  The Sailor jumped into the ship

  As it lay upon the strand,

  But, oh! His heart was far away

  With friends upon the land.

  He thought of those he loved the best,

  A wife and infant dear

  And feeling filled the sailor’s breast

  The sailor’s eye, a tear.

  How sad the words! How true! She knows the tragic poem by heart, painted in black beneath the spout of a pink lustre-ware pitcher. Carefully painted bands of rosy pink edge the top rim and bottom base; a shakier line hides the seam where the spout was attached to the body with a bit of slip. Into a flattened oval on the side of the pitcher, the girls will transfer a moving portrait of a weeping seaman, turned resolutely away from wife and child and toward the Union Jack. Gustine has met some of the coy young paintresses who work in the paint shop, where nothing spins but dried pigment in tiny tornadoes when they stand up too fast, and clear syrupy glaze when they stir it before each dipping. They wear smart white aprons and know how to style their hair; they gossip over horsetail brushes, taking dainty dabs at their paint pots while plunging their arms up to the elbow in lead glaze to coat the pots for their glost firing. A paintress breathes in the color over which she works until her mouth is so filled with the sweet taste of lead, she desires no other food. For a year or so, she is the most beautiful creature alive—vivacious, pale, with eyes as deep and dreamy as the purple oxide of gold swirling in her pot. When at last she shows signs of plumbism, what the other paintresses call the wrist-drop, she is let go so that she might decline alone, to be remembered as young and fatally beautiful, rather than palsied, paralytic, extinguished.

  Their second-best seller is a most discreet chamber pot, proclaiming:

  Keep me clean and use me well

  And what I see I will not tell!

  Gustine’s potter also specializes in these, coaxing two hundred wide-mouthed pots a day out of the gobbets of clay she slaps onto his wheel. The girls paint the motto on the outside, and on the inside bottom, a funny little man, his arms thrown over his head in alarm. To at least half of these, her potter adds an extra joke: a three-dimensional moulded green frog affixed just inside the lip, to make the unwary lady, with her skirts drawn up and drawers dropped down, scream like a girl. Gustine thinks they are a riot, and is sad that since the town’s infestation they’ve fallen off in popularity.

  The pots are backing up now, stacked in twos and threes; while the pressed plates, as many as a hundred high, are buckling like mushroom stalks, and the glossy figurines of spotted spaniels and fearsome lions are tucked pell-mell inside the extra shaving cups, stamped “A Remembrance from Sunderland.” There are no ships to convey these souvenirs to America and Amsterdam, to London or even to Seaham. Gustine worries for the three men absent from the slapping room. What would have been a day’s lost pay before the Quarantine may now be an excuse to let them go for good. To miss a day of work is now, more than ever, to sign your own termination papers.

  It’s certainly been ten minutes, and she cannot stand here idle all night. Gustine returns to the slip house, past the spastic steam engine, past the old warlocks stirring their slippery brew and the danse macabre of the scything blungers. She climbs the stairs to the slapping room, feeling the backs of her knees crack, opening and closing her mouth to loosen the mask on her face. She stands in the door and calls out to the slapper. Hello? When she receives no answer, Gustine creeps into the dim little room. To her dismay, the slapper sits in the corner, lit by a dying fire, his shoulders rolled forward, too tired to support even the weight of his massive forearms.

  “I think they must be dead,” he says, his heavy block hands hanging limply in his lap. “All three to be gone like this.”

  He has nothing for her—even after ten minutes, he has no worked clay to take back to the potters’ house. And it is only five o’clock, thinks Gustine. There are two long hours left in the day.

  “Mebbe the cholera morbus is finally among us,” says he, searching for an answer in the dying embers of the grate.

  What is she to do? She can’t very well return to the potters’ house empty-handed, and yet if she takes them half-slapped clay, the pots will surely explode in the oven. Gustine crosses to the mallet the slapper has left cleaving a giant’s head of clay. How heavy can this be? She lifts it high over her shoulders and lets gravity bring it down with a thud, violently splattering herself with cold slip. This is not difficult. She can help slap and together they will get enough clay to finish the day’s work. Gustine lifts the mallet again.

  “Put tha’ down,” says the slapper, looking at her for the first time. Why, she’s nothing but a girl, he sees; her moulded gown is showing off naught but skinny child’s legs and a barely rounded bottom. She’s as likely to drop the mallet on her foot as upon the clay.

  She lets it crash again, savouring the impact and the spray of slip. This could be fun, she thinks, not realizing that a full day of raising the hammer and bringing it down could make a man wonder how his life is any different from a convict’s swinging a pick in Australia. Well, it is better than doing nothing, thinks she. Better than staring into the fire like an old woman. She raises the mallet again and feels a pull like to yank her shoulders out of the socket.

  “I said put tha’ down.”

  The red-eyed slapper clenches the mallet she just held and for an instant Gustine is certain he will smite her with it. His powerful white belly heaves, his face contorts in thwarted rage, and when he opens his mouth, a warning hiss backs Gustine against the door.

  “Me mates ayr dead. Wouldja go poundin’ on their graves?”

  Gustine shakes her head no, very slowly.

  “Then get outta here,” yells the slapper and pushes her roughly out the door. Gustine runs down the stairs as fast as her crusted legs will take her, out of the slip house and back to the potters’ lodge. What is she going to tell them? She stops outside the door. What is she going to say?

  “Where have you been?” Her potter looks up furiously when Gustine walks in, more than ten minutes late and empty-handed. “Where is the clay?”

  At the cardinal points of the small room, three other teams of three, families all, stop what they are doing and look up. Young sons and daughters who would push against the handle of the wheel, wives and eldest daughters who would set perfectly sized wedges of clay on the spinning lathe, and fathers, under whose strong fingers pots would rise and fall, all sit silent and wait to hear her answer. It is so dark in the potting room, Gustine can make out only their silhouettes against the sinking fire. She hates this time of year. They come to work in the dark, they leave in the dark, the rheumy-eyed windows provide only the barest blurs of light even at noon. They have all learned to work by touch, like sightless moles.

  “There is no more clay,” she announces, not bothering to hide the frustration in her voice. “There is no one to slap it.”

  If anyone but Gustine had said this, she would have been beaten soundly for a liar. Those in the potters’ house learned long ago, however, that no one takes her work more seriously than the assistant Gustine. Her potter looks down at his naked wheel, then up sharply at his young son, who, sagging in his harness, begins to whimper. The room is absolutely still except for the bronchial rustle of potters’ rot coughs.

  “What’s wrong wi’ them?” he asks at last. “Why didn’t they send someone in their place?”

  Gustine shakes her head. “Could be the cholera,” she says, remembering the remaining slapper’s stricken expression. Perhaps he’s right—perhaps it’s begun to rain cholera after all.

  “Oh Jaisus,” wails one of the potter’s wives.

  “Don’t none of you go getting the cholera,” orders Gustine’s potter in his deeply accented pipe organ voice. “Anyone misses a day in these times, if he lives, he’ll have no job to come back to.”

  They have not long to wait before the foreman, a short vulturine man with an impacted neck and peaked shoulders,
pushes open the door to the potters’ lodge. He carries the strop that Gustine felt more than once as a girl when she would fall asleep over her wheel, though more often her potter would strike her, to spare her the fury of the foreman. The doubled belt of leather is eager to bite into an idle someone now, but overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices, quivers miserably in the foreman’s hand. Gustine has never seen the entire shop motionless like this. She has no idea what to expect.

  “Go home,” says the foreman. “There is no more work for you today.”

  He could not have caused a greater consternation if he’d announced the world had no more use for chamber pots. To be turned loose two hours early might well amount to the same thing, for though any salaried employee with blood in his veins would be thrilled to window-shop for two hours or stop in for an early pint before dinner, the workers at Garrison are terrified. They are not salaried; they are paid by the piece, and no clay means no pot; and no pot equals no food on the table. Gustine’s potter pays her out of what he makes on each surviving piece; neither she nor any of the wives and children have an entry on the factory’s payroll. They are no more than ghost employees as far as the management is concerned, and what responsibility does anyone owe a ghost?

  “But we’ve na yet raiched the quota,” says Gustine’s potter. “How’ll we be paid?”

  “You will be paid for the pots already in the kiln,” replies the foreman.

  “That’s not even half of a day’s work,” argues another potter who specializes in plaster spaniels. His moulds lay open before him like cracked eggs.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  Whose fault is that? they wonder, as the foreman lurches out to deliver the news to the rest of the factory. Slowly, the potters lift their aprons over their heads, the little boys and girls unlatch themselves from the wheels they turn. No one speaks, no one glances left or right. They must wait two days to learn how many of the pots they fashioned today made it through the first firing; then there is the glost, where still more could go wrong.

  Will there be work tomorrow? It is the unasked question each takes with him out the front gates, where the two-hours-earlier sky is strangely white and electrically perverse enough to blast away their kiln along with the last remaining pots. Perhaps they will find replacement slappers, and all will be well. Perhaps (though no one will speak it out loud) even fewer employees will struggle out of bed in the morning and the factory will grind to a halt. Will there be work? The question takes them past the grinders and paintresses who stagger confusedly out from their own buildings (the lead-sated girls home to not eat what’s set before them on the table, and the grinders making straight for the Life Boat pub) and down to the river, now whittled to a simple word—Work?—which they wear to float them neck-high into the freezing Wear. The river bottom is rugged with smashed crockery and old worn bricks, the water numbs their skin; but when a single hot rinse at the public baths costs as much as an assistant’s weekly salary, there is no other way to remove a day’s accreted clay.

  Gustine steps into the water behind her coworkers and allows the Wear to find her body beneath the statue she has become. Under the river’s skilled fingers, her cotton shift slowly unmoulds itself from her thighs, her arms lose their hard white stiffness, her lashes gently separate. She arches her neck, and her hair, moulded to her skull, unmats in long cloudy handfuls. There is a deep fatigue born of gaining and losing an inanimate self, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and she’s come to find the restoration of her human flesh almost more exhausting than the job itself. As fast as she’d like to wash, she knows that if she is not careful, the river will leave a film of potter’s clay upon her skin, she’ll harden on the walk home, and wake in the morning to a body of hairline cracks.

  What will she do if there is no work tomorrow? With winter coming on, her baby needs warmer blankets, a clean change of clothes, another diaper. There is almost no money to be had on the streets, what with the Quarantine and all the soldiers locked away like virgins in a tower. There must be work tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. How will they survive if there’s none?

  Absently, she scrubs the last rigidity from behind her knees and frees the freckles along her cheeks. She squeezes her hair clean of mud and braids it high on the top of her head, leaving two sections to frizz at her temples. Henry, she thinks. He will compensate her if she supplies him with more bodies. And by helping him is she not helping herself? There is a solution for every problem, she thinks, relieved to have a plan. If only she knew the addresses of the three missing slappers, she’d find him and take him there tonight.

  Gustine feels her way up the dark bank and jogs down Low Quay, her wet shift slapping her legs. Jesus, but it’s cold. She hugs herself for the run home, feeling her organs shrink against her spine. She passes Silver Street, once a fashionable address, now just another row of collapsing facades and bowed steps, jogs past Burleigh Street, where tenements began snuggling next to upper-class housing until even the brightly tiled roofs and glazed windows caught the contagion and wasted away. Mill Street is only four blocks farther, thank God—she can feel her hair turning to ice and her shift start to crackle as she sprints the last few yards.

  Gustine pulls up short at the entrance to her narrow lane. Just look at that—Mill Street’s been whitewashed. No one has taken the pains to clean up this passage since the gas company surveyed it five years ago and refused to run a jet.

  Inside, at least it’s warm. It is early yet for the lodgers to be home; one or two sit at the long table beneath Whilky’s framed Wearmouth Bridge; the woman who sells fish to the poor Irish and her son have come home early, Gustine sees, and there is a man who was not here last night whose feet are wrapped with rags and twine, his toes protruding obscenely. From two pegs on the wall hangs the blue dress, and below it, as usual, sits the Eye, her hands folded, her searchlight sweeping the room, taking in everything, missing nothing.

  “You’re home early,” Whilky observes, glancing up from his paper. Gustine ignores him and walks straight to the coal bin, behind which Pink sits with the baby in her lap. Its little face peeps out of the stiff gray blanket like a curious turtle from its shell. Come here, little one. Gustine reaches out and takes the child from Pink’s thin arms. She puts her ear to its chest and kisses its curled fist.

  “Were you a good baby today?” she asks.

  “Oh, yes, very good,” answers Pink.

  “And Pink took good care of you?”

  “Oh yes!” cries the girl, glancing nervously at the Eye. She won’t tell about the frog on the chest or the charity visit or the new blanket Pink has wedged beneath the cupboard for safekeeping, will she? Oh God, Pink prays, please don’t tell.

  “And you stayed far, far away from the Evil Eye, did you not, good baby?” coos Gustine, herself casting a cold look at the old woman beneath the dress.

  “Mike killed sixty-five rats in ten minutes today,” Pink offers, quickly changing the subject. It’s all her Da could talk about when he came home, first telling the fish woman’s son and then the new man possessed of raw feet. You should have seen him, he said, acting out the scene. Da down on his hands and knees, pretending to throw rats over his shoulder, left then right. Flinging rats, flying rats, and Mike getting excited by the display, tearing at her Da’s jacket sleeve. Da laughing, haw, haw, haw. Will you just look a that. Just like tha’ he did! But when Pink scampered over and sunk her teeth into the other sleeve, tearing, laughing with Mike, no more haws, just Get up, and Where’s yer brain, girl?

  Whilky sits on a stool by the door, reading by a candle melted onto the table. His newspaper is spread out on his lap, an arm’s length away so that he doesn’t have to squint too hard. Curled upon Whilky’s shoulder, with his tail nestled under his pointy chin, Mike the ferret naps. His owner’s hand unconsciously steals up and tickles the soft white fur between his ears.

  No wonder he’s so smart, thinks Pink. Mike reads the newspaper. She’s surprised she neve
r noticed before. There he sits upon her Da’s shoulder, pretending to nap, but she can see his small black eyes scanning the words before Da wets his finger and turns the page. Pink wishes she could read the newspaper. Something inside it is always delighting or infuriating her father, and if she could only learn what it was, she might make herself more useful to him. Mike’s got the idea, she thinks with a sigh. He knows what’s what in the world.

  Gustine carefully passes Pink the baby and crouches next to her behind the coal bin. It really is the only place in the entire house a person might hunker and, for a couple of seconds, not be seen. She strips off the cold sodden dress and slings it across the clothesline overhead. From above, she pulls down an old moth-eaten blanket and wraps it around her naked body like a towel. Whilky says it’s silly to be modest in her line of work, but she’ll be damned if she’ll let him sneak a peek for free.