The Dress Lodger Read online

  Gustine wraps her arms around her body and wedges her hands in her armpits. She walks briskly down George Street past the wide front window of a crowded public house full of overheated men stripping off their coats to drink in their shirtsleeves. Their hair is sweaty from laugh and drink, their broad red faces shine with blessed perspiration. Gustine pauses, trying to absorb through the cold pane of glass the heat generated by corduroy pants rubbing past each other to get to the bar. Five minutes, she thinks. Five minutes inside just to restore the feeling in the tip of my nose and thaw out my stiff, blue fingers. Gustine has her hand on the door when the shadow falls, icy and pickax upon it. She is a like-charged magnet, this taskmistress Eye, and by her very proximity repels Gustine away from the pub, down the street, back to work.

  Down George Street, east on Coronation, up Spring Garden Lane. They pass a young mother muffled in shawls, cradling a hairy cow’s hoof in one arm and a baby in the other. They pass a stoop upon which sit a girl and a dog and a pig, huddled together for warmth, while from inside their house come the syncopated screams of a woman in labour. Number 62, Gustine notes. If the woman does not survive the birth, she might be a fine candidate for Dr. Chiver. She is not even five houses away when she forgets the number. It’s too much to think on nights like this, when the chill slows a person’s brain to dull incomprehension. It’s hard enough to walk when the soles of your feet have gone numb through your boots and you can barely feel the joints of your knees.

  “May I help you?” Out of nowhere, a young man runs over, and Gustine realizes she’s on the ground. How did that happen? She looks up at him—pleasant in an unconventional way, with cooked-sausage-coloured hair and back-raked eyebrows. His suit is wrinkled but obviously expensive, speaking more to his lack of a good butler than to a lack of income. Over it, he wears an unbuttoned wool coat.

  “You must be freezing!” he cries.

  Gustine is so numb with cold, she can barely stand up. She can tell he is unsure about her by the way he formally presents his flat-palmed, gloved hand. He keeps his body stiff and bent at the waist and his eyes respectfully averted from her face. Perhaps it’s the shoes that give her away. It’s always the shoes when someone looks close enough. When he spots them, she sees his body instantly relax and his impassive face lighten. He takes a step in toward her, allowing his hip to crush the fabric of her skirt, and without asking tucks her arm snugly in his.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me for a drink?” he asks, gripping her arm so securely she couldn’t slip away if she tried. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “I don’t drink much,” Gustine replies, having trouble getting the words through her numb lips. The young man laughs delightedly.

  “Oh, sure you don’t! This is rich!”

  He leads her back the way she came, past the dog and pig and little girl—still outside, though the screams have stopped—and around the back way to Playhouse Lane. He stops on the corner of the street in front of a brightly painted red door, behind which Gustine can hear a brass band playing and women laughing. She hesitates, even though she knows it will be steamily warm inside.

  “You know this place?” the young man yells over the noise. “I come here all the time for my research.”

  He pushes through into a low room made closer by the blue ceiling of pipe smoke and pungent fumes of opium. At first glance, the clientele looks similar to that of the Labour in Vain, but as her eyes adjust to the smoke and one by one faces stand out, Gustine sees it is a very different sort of place. The men are heavy-lidded and unsteady on their feet, too free by far in the handling of their companions’ bodies. As for the women, a meaty hand on a breast or a lingering finger upon an inner thigh they allow to pass unnoticed. Most are laughing and drinking gin; some slouch with their legs thrown apart and their stockings showing; others lie on the floor as if to fall asleep there. A brass band plays frenetically on a dais that looks to have once housed a pulpit, while couples haphazardly lurch about the floor in front of them.

  “Used to be the old Methodist meeting house before they turned it into a dance hall,” says the young man, pulling her inside. “Isn’t that wicked?”

  Gustine looks around in dismay. There is no shame in making money the way she does. Half the girls in Sunderland have sold their bodies at some point to put food on the table or to keep their families from the workhouse. It’s almost a daughter’s duty when her Da is between jobs to put on her bonnet, slip out onto the street, and a few hours later come back with a shilling or two. But these women are professional whores. They hang about the docks all day distracting honest men from their jobs, then join up with their pimps at places like this, half-clothed, half-drunk, and thoroughly bad. A woman Gustine recognizes from Sailor’s Alley, a dolly she’s seen on her knees performing like a Frenchwoman on men who like that sort of thing, waves familiarly. Gustine blushes for shame.

  The young man finds them a small table away from the brass band and sits without offering her a chair. He reaches into his coat pocket and tugs out a small writing tablet and pencil.

  “Don’t look,” he says, making a note on his pad. “But I think we’re being followed.”

  Gustine glances over to the entrance, where the Eye has just stepped in. She stands like a rock in a river of smoke, the current eddying about her broad shoulders before flowing past her out the door. Gustine turns back without comment.

  “You know that person?” asks the man, suddenly perking up. “Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  “Yes, I know her.” Even though they are away from the band, Gustine still has to shout over high-pitched spikes of laughter. “And no I’m not in trouble.”

  “Barmaid!” The man grabs at a harried servant girl’s skirt as she whizzes by. “Whiskey for me. Gin with sugar for my companion. And one for Cyclops at the door!”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she says. “I don’t drink.” He twists in his chair and, taking up his pencil, makes a quick sketch of Eye that looks nothing like her. As if she weren’t bad enough, he gives her a hunched back and crazy pubic-headed flyaway hair. Gustine feels a swift pang of sympathy for her enemy.

  “So, tell me about yourself,” he commands, pushing the pad aside and leaning in with his chin in his hand. He is one of those, she sees, who shuts out the entire world when he looks at you. She is immediately on her guard.

  “Are you with the newspapers?” she asks.

  “Why? Because of this?” He holds up the pad and Gustine nods. “Ha! No. I am what you call a student of life. I am writing a brutally honest, unsentimentalized portrait of the British working classes. Their loves and prejudices, their labours and triumphs. I come here to speak honestly with the thieves and whores—to tell their stories and show the middle classes what their capitalist practices sow, their back alleys reap!”

  A hank of cooked-sausage hair falls across his eyes and he licks his hand to smooth it back.

  “See that poor creature over there?” He points to a rouged young woman, sitting with her arm thrown over her lover’s shoulder. “She used to be a ladies’ maid. Highly regarded, too. Son of the family caught her in the stairway one day when no one else was home. Ruined for life.”

  What else have these people told him? Gustine wonders. He probably believes every woman here was turned bad by Master’s son, just as every hardworking man lost his job thanks to the cunning devices of a jealous foreman.

  “Your dress is expensive,” he remarks. “Did you steal it? I won’t judge.”

  The barmaid sets a glass of gin and three sugar cubes in front of Gustine and a pint of whiskey and water before the Student of Life. Gustine bites down hard on the lump of sugar to keep from ordering him to Hell. We need the money, she tells herself. We need the money.

  “It’s my landlord’s,” she says.

  “You mean pimp?” asks he.

  By the door, the barmaid hands Eye a gin, which the old woman stares at for a second, then fists back in a gulp. It is clo
se and smoky in the room, but it feels good to Gustine to be warm. She will just ignore the Student of Life and concentrate on the hot, heavy air thawing her legs.

  “Is that woman your pimp?” asks he, when she doesn’t answer. “I saw her following you down the street and I thought, Is that not always the way? Does not old age always dog youth? Does not monstrosity forever shadow beauty?”

  His lids have too little skin for his wide-open expression and threaten to rip at the corners. God damn, thinks Gustine, can’t we just go upstairs and get this over with—must I be forced to endure conversation, too? Sitting with Henry at the Labour in Vain was so different. He was sharing with her, telling her his secrets, not trying to pry her open.

  “I think I should go,” says Gustine, rising.

  “No, wait!” He leaps out of his chair and pulls her back down. “I want you to tell me about yourself.”

  “There is nothing to tell,” says she, exasperated and growing more self-conscious by the minute. “I’m just a potter’s assistant.”

  “Potter’s assistant!” He claps his hands and jots it down. “How rich!”

  “Really,” says Gustine flatly.

  “I see. You are modest.” The Student of Life reaches across the table and grabs her hand before she can draw it away. “Let me tell you about yourself then.

  “You are young,” he starts. “What, eighteen? Nineteen? You obviously haven’t been at this long, not to know the Red Door,” he continues, gesturing to the hall. “You haven’t yet turned to drink, nor become hardened and bitter. You still hope for a better life. How did you fall? No! Wait!” He throws out his other hand. “Your story is written on your face. You gave your heart to a young man of property a year ago, two years ago; he put you up in an apartment, bought you beautiful things, promised to marry you—but when he grew tired of that pretty, sad face, he turned you out onto the street, ruined and friendless, to fend for yourself. You’ve pawned every trinket save the dress on your back. You can’t get a character to become a maid or shop girl. Your parents won’t take you back. You have no other option. Don’t be ashamed,” says the Student of Life. “You are without blame in this matter. Our society is set up to make a prostitute out of you.”

  Gustine stares at him in open disbelief. What in the name of God is he talking about?

  “Darling,” says he, “I am here to give you a voice.”

  “First of all, I am not ashamed,” says Gustine, “of anything other than sitting here listening to you. And secondly, I work for a living. I work all day in the mud and I work all night on the streets. I do not need a voice—do you understand me? I have a quim. Now, do you fucking want to see it or not?”

  The Student of Life lunges for his tablet and before Gustine knows what he’s about, has sketched a girl who looks nothing like her, a cranky jaded creature with full breasts and open, voluptuous lips.

  Gustine shoves back her chair and storms toward the door. She pushes past a barely conscious woman held upright by a pair of lover’s hands on her ass, past the Eye, still holding her empty glass of gin, and out onto the street.

  “Wait!” she hears behind her, but she does not slow down.

  Outside, the sky scatters heavy crumbs of snow. The cold, coming after so close a room, brings tears to her eyes and sets her nose to running. What does he mean by giving her a voice? She has a voice. She uses it every day to ask for clay and to soothe her baby and to placate men. She uses it to cuss out the Eye and to sing when she’s happy and to scream at the other lodgers when they wake her with their snores. She has a loud, unpretty, ferrety voice for day and a soft, throaty, helpless voice for night. Gustine stomps down the street, with the Eye on her heels in a matter of seconds. God damn it, she does this every time. The old woman breathes down Gustine’s neck until the girl can’t take it anymore. Gets up close upon her, breathing down her neck whenever Gustine walks away from money, breathing to remind her she belongs to Whilky, that she is not at liberty to pick and choose when she is inside his dress.

  “Just tell Whilky and see if I care,” Gustine wheels and shouts at the Eye. “You should have seen what he drew of you!” Gustine storms up Playhouse Lane, pushing through the last-minute stragglers running for the ticket booth to the Theatre Royale, where the curtain is about to go up on “Cholera Morbus.” She sees well-dressed men inside the lobby, tapping their watches and shaking their heads over friends who’ve yet to show, sees their wives gossiping in brightly colored clumps about what best gets frog blood out of Turkey rugs. Gustine is passing the door on the other side of the street when a hired cab careens around the corner and nearly runs her over.

  “Jesus!” she cries, snatching the skirt of her dress away from the slush thrown up by the carriage.

  Trapped between the cab and the wall, Gustine helplessly watches as a girl gets out, a young girl probably no more than seventeen, laughing at the snow that melts upon her black velvet mantle and lamé gauze turban with ostrich feather, stretching her slippered foot far over the gutter and leaping down. She looks like me, Gustine thinks, if I could ever laugh at snow. But how put together she is, how perfectly arranged. Embroidered velvet muff complements mantle and shoes; jet flowers linked with garnets in a chain about her neck match the trinity of black and red flowers in each white earlobe. To own a set of something—what would that be like? Eye steps up so close behind her, she can smell the smoked sprats the old woman gnawed for dinner. Is this my set? she wonders. Am I always to be paired with this hag as to my own death?

  A man follows the lovely young lady out of the cab, stretching his own long legs across the slush. He has on tight-fitting black pants that button underneath his boots and a night green pinch-waist coat with high collar. She barely recognizes him so dressed up. His face is easy and relaxed, not tight with despair as she has memorized it. The girl of matched jewelry holds out a tidy gloved hand for him to take and as he does so, his eyes fall on Gustine.

  “Potter’s Assistant! Come back!” Gustine cannot believe her ears. The Student of Life is sprinting up the lane, his coat unbuttoned, his hair sizzling and popping about his brow. “I was wrong! I do want to see that quim! I do! I do!”

  Audrey squeaks at the sound of the word and covers her mouth as if she’d said it. But Gustine’s eyes are fixed on Henry, whose initial look of surprised confusion turns to horror and—oh god, is it fear? She watches his hand go quickly to the center of the young woman’s back, watches him practically push her into the theatre, where they disappear into a sea of black coats and lamé turbans, matched earrings, necklaces, and drooping ostrich feathers. From inside they might all laugh at the snow, how it falls in sheets now, upon the bedraggled blue girl standing outside in it, on the one-eyed old woman breathing, breathing behind her, on the half-dressed Student, who on his knees begs her forgiveness—please God, dear lady, we don’t have to talk. And please, dear lady, won’t you please just come back to work.

  VI

  ENTERTAINMENT

  Do you know that woman?” Audrey asks as Henry pushes her into the crowded lobby and then stands in the door, blocking everyone’s way. Men shoulder past him, women politely pardon themselves, but he cannot tear his eyes from the scene being played across the street: a well-dressed young man pleading with Gustine to come away with him, Gustine furiously shaking her head no; he seizing her hands and peering up into her face like a naughty child begging forgiveness, that old woman over her shoulder (who is she to Gustine?), and the girl finally relenting, letting him slowly draw her away, out of the gaslight, around the corner, back into darkness.

  “Do you know her?” Audrey asks again, this time more plaintively. Henry turns back to find his fiancée’s shortsighted green eyes pleading with him. He forgets how young she is, almost young enough to be his daughter. What is wrong with him?

  “No, of course not,” he lies. “I thought I recognized the man.” He steers her through the crowd and over to the staircase that leads up to Uncle Clanny’s box. They are late and his uncle i
s probably waiting.

  “That was dreadful, wasn’t it?” Audrey laughs nervously, warming to the dreadfulness of it. “I haven’t heard that word since I was in school.”

  “You shouldn’t have heard it tonight,” says Henry, horrified she’s ever heard it. “I’m sorry to have exposed you to it.”

  “Silly.” Audrey taps him with her muff. “As if it were your fault.”

  But wasn’t it? Did she not follow me here? Henry takes Audrey’s mantle and hangs it on the peg in the vestibule, knocking on the door to their box and bowing to Uncle Clanny when he reaches over and lets them in. Did she not purposefully seek me out in my personal life? It could not be mere coincidence that she would be passing by at precisely the moment Audrey emerged from the carriage, so close that she might reach out and touch her.

  Audrey settles down next to Henry’s uncle and politely answers his questions on her mamma’s health (better, thank you, for the calomel tablets he prescribed), the status of her father’s ship (still quarantined in Riga, they were sad to learn), and where on earth she got that lovely dress. Her papa sent the material from Paris this summer and the trim came from London, she says with a smile, not adding that it pinches her awfully and she can’t raise her arms more than a few inches before they go numb, or that she never would have had a dress like this made if she didn’t think Henry would find it pleasing.

  Henry is listening with only half an ear, ostensibly examining the gallery while he replays the scene outside over and over in his head. Gustine pressed against the wall, staring fixedly at Audrey as if to devour her. That man running half-dressed up the street screaming profanity, practically throwing himself upon her as she watches Henry with a look of—was it triumph? Oh God, groans Henry, what could she mean by that? He is so tired from working on the cadaver Liss for the past few days—getting less than two hours of sleep a night, he cannot think straight. He wanted to work tonight, didn’t want to attend this play in the first place, but Uncle Clanny insisted and he knew Audrey was waiting for an opportunity to wear her new dress. And his day is far from over. He promised Audrey that directly after the play he would go see that poor family she discovered this afternoon. The woman who glows in the dark and the baby with the extraordinary heart.