The Dress Lodger Read online

  Eye has heated a pan of water in the fireplace, and with careful sponging is making Gustine’s dress fit for tonight. She looks up from her work as the lodgers tramp down; the bottle workers first, for they have the longest to walk, then the keelmen. A bleary-eyed mother leads her two boys off to the quay to buy fish for their baskets. They’ll hawk it to the poor Irish down along Woodbine Street who haven’t the gumption to walk the half a mile themselves. With each guest’s descent, Whilky, not stirring from his stool by the fire, holds out a broad palm for the week’s rent, payable in advance. Woe betide the keelman or glass blower who blew his salary on Saturday night. Whilky shows no mercy. He makes them march upstairs, gather their meager possessions (the trip is usually unnecessary, as they wear upon their backs all that they own), and quit the house immediately. The others have left by the time Gustine makes her way down the rickety stairs, her face buried in a small woolen bundle. She always waits for her coffee, out of principle, even if it means she has to run the whole way to the pottery.

  What a difference a Monday morning makes in the appearance of our bold Gustine. Her hair, no longer apolloed and ringletted, loiters atop her head in a loose bun. Her daytime outfit, a fawn-colored shift threadbare almost to transparency from too much scrubbing, hangs loosely from her shoulders. She looks her age in these clothes, without ribbons and lace to take focus from her sharp little face. She looks like a sleepy young girl in desperate need of some coffee.

  “Pink,” says she. “How much longer?”

  “Eeek. Eeek,” replies Pink.

  “In English please.”

  Pink hangs her head and shuffles over to the table.

  “Five minutes more, perhaps.”

  “I’ll have mine with sugar then.”

  Pink pulls back the blanket Gustine carried downstairs and sniffs the tiny creature inside. That’s her baby, her res-pon-sib-ility for which Gustine pays Da an extra two shillings a week on top of her three shillings rent. Da says Gustine spoils that baby mercilessly, that she should save her money for it won’t be alive much longer to appreciate the thought. Gustine says shut up and Pink, you know to hold this baby very, very carefully. Pink knows Don’t carry it with your teeth.

  Gustine rains kisses on the baby’s forehead and it smiles up at her toothlessly. Baby, baby, baby, says Gustine. Baby, baby. She pulls from her pocket a bit of plum cake she bought yesterday and shoves it crumb by crumb into the baby’s mouth. First thing every morning, even before Gustine’s eyes are open, she puts her ear to the baby’s chest. Still beating. First thing when she comes home from the pottery but before she puts on the dress, she lays her ear on the baby’s chest. Still beating. Whilky says why bother—it’s only a matter of time. But Gustine says I’m taking care of that, and Pink, where’s my coffee?

  Pink retrieves the coffeepot from the fire with a set of arm-length tongs and staggers with it back to the table. She pours a cup for all three grownups, one for herself, and one for Mike.

  “Brother John mentioned you’ve been hanging about the Labour in Vain recently,” says Whilky blandly. “And yet not upstairs.”

  “What of it?” answers Gustine, sipping her scalding coffee.

  “M’not paying you to socialize.”

  “You’re barely paying me at all.”

  Mike the ferret leaps from Whilky’s shoulder to lap the cup of coffee Pink has placed on the floor for him. She puts hers down beside his and laps away as well.

  “How d’you expect to afford all those extras for the babby?” asks Whilky. “Woolen blankets and such like? Booties and wee jumpers? You were barely earning enough at the pottery to keep yourself together.”

  “I give you money, don’t I?” asks Gustine, turning the baby over to burp it. She doesn’t lay it over her shoulder like most mothers, but holds it away from her body and pats its back gently.

  “I’d like to know how yer gettin’ it. And if yer holding out.”

  “I am not holding out,” says Gustine pointedly. From the corner, gray old Eye looks up. She is elbow-deep in the blue dress, sponging off the mud from where Gustine fell down the Wear embankment. I dare you to say something, thinks Gustine at the old woman. Gustine is to give Eye whatever she makes and Eye punctiliously reckons up with Whilky. Out of the money she earns, Whilky takes her expenses and those of the baby’s, then of the eight she usually brings home a night, pays her four shillings over a week. Until now, Gustine has never been bold enough to cheat the Eye.

  “Let’s see that you don’t waste time. We don’t want our dress lodger evicted from her digs? Eh, Eyeball?” Whilky wheezes. The old woman narrows her single eye at the landlord, then goes back to work.

  Next to Mike’s unrivaled record, nothing swells Whilky’s chest more than the knowledge that he alone was responsible for the importation of dress lodging into Sunderland. Obvious in its simplicity, yet strangely unknown outside of London, dress lodging works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress to pass as a higher class of prostitute. The higher the class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientele; the higher the station, the higher the price. In return, the girl is given a roof over her head and a few hours of make-believe. Everyone is happy.

  Like any pioneer, Whilky had his share of unforeseen setbacks. His first girl got greedy and made off with her dress, though whether she sold it for drink or pawned it to maintain a preferred childlessness, he never discovered. Her shadow was a washed-out old bawd who lay facedown in a bar the night First Girl absconded with the dress. He went through another set, with the same result. Not until two years ago, with diligent Gustine and incorruptible Eye, did he hit upon the perfect remunerative combination. The last thing he wants is for Gustine to ruin it.

  “Pink!” Gustine drains her coffee and stands up to leave. “Come take the baby.”

  Pink jumps up from her cup and scampers to the table. It’s time for her to be a Good Girl.

  “You remember how to hold it?” Gustine asks the same question every day, laying the baby carefully in the little girl’s thin arms. Support the head, cradle the bum. Whatever you do, don’t ever—never, never ever—put the baby down on its chest. Or set anything, even a folded blanket, there. Or kiss it too hard in that spot. Or jokingly poke it. Are you a good girl?

  “Yes,” answers Pink.

  “And you will remember these things?”

  “Yes,” answers Pink, thinking, Don’t carry it with your teeth.

  “And don’t let her touch it,” says Gustine, casting a dark look at the Eye. It is daytime now and she owes the relentless shadow nothing. “Don’t let her near this precious baby.”

  “Right,” says Pink.

  Gustine gives the smiling infant one last kiss and draws her shawl off the clothesline. She won’t be home from the pottery before seven o’clock and then Eye will have the dress waiting the moment she steps in the door. She has such a short time to love and protect this poor child. But she will see it survives. No matter what it takes.

  Gustine pauses in the doorway to make sure Pink and the baby are as far away from Eye as the tight room allows. She doesn’t know why she is so superstitious about the shadow and her baby, but she swears, if she ever catches the old woman laying a finger on her child, she’ll gut her like a fish.

  “And someone should check on Fos,” Gustine calls over her shoulder, referring to one of her fellow lodgers, our friend the matchstick painter. “She didn’t get out of bed this morning.”

  “Whoops,” says Pink and the baby starts screaming. She picked up only the corner of its blanket with her teeth, but wriggly baby, it slipped right out.

  It is noon and the blue sky has accommodated itself to the yellow sulfur clouds, providing a lovely green day for charity visiting. The temperature last night dropped precipitously and there is a crispness behind the smog that, had we only the conveyance to get twenty miles out of town, we might very much enjoy. The men and women of charity go on about their work, drawing their shawls more tightly abo
ut them or stuffing their hands into pockets. No one is concerned about the weather, except maybe the apothecaries. Their leeches, about two hours ago, started creeping up the sides of jars, a sure sign an electrical storm is brewing.

  Since the cholera scare, the dogs of charity have been unleashed upon Sunderland’s East End. The Methodist Ladies are distributing tickets for soup at the value of one penny “equal in quality as what is given to the military.” The Friends of the Sunderland Dispensary are passing out tincture of chamomile along with their own printed tickets returning thanks to the Almighty God which must be redeemed by the grateful poor at church the following Sunday. The Indigent Sick Society has its blankets and stockings, the Board of Health its wagonloads of free lime for whitewash. They are rolling up Mill Street when Whilky Robinson steps out of his house to buy the newspaper. They are coming with their curled white papers and buckets of flour paste, slapping their lies over honest posters for Barklay’s Asthmatic Candy and Sunderland Reform meetings, making Whilky so mad he could spit. The whole East End has been gummed and slathered, calci-mined and blanchified with these damn white papers, a new one every other day. They figure if they scream it loud enough, we’ll begin to believe, thinks he. It’s just another facet of the Grand Plot.

  BY ORDER OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH

  All kinds of Putrid matter, decayed Vegetables,

  Filth of every Description should be

  REMOVED.

  Walls of Houses and Passages should be

  Washed with

  hot LIME

  and all Persons Bathed daily.

  Dirty Hands and dirty Faces breed

  THE CHOLERA MORBUS

  The git who smacks this bill over Whilky’s boarded-up, tax-free window gets a sharp rap on the head for his pains. Away with you, toady! And with your wheelbarrowload of lime dumped in front of my door! Whilky kicks the white mound left by the minions of the Board of Health. Whitewash the damn streets if you like but you’ll not invade the house of a free man.

  Mike peeks his narrow head out of Whilky’s breast pocket at the disturbance. Look at ’em, Mike. Pious men and do-goody women marching up and down our back lanes. Hawking their moth-eaten blankets and donated stockings, darned six times at the toe until a man feels like he is eternally treading upon a pebble. But we’re not fooled, are we, Mike? They’d rather see every one of us dead than give us the Right to Vote. Funny, isn’t it, how this cholera morbus business only came up after the Reform Riots in October? Funny, too, how all the Reform meetings had to be canceled for fear of the contagion. And while you and I have tenants to spare, Mike, them that lodged in the workingman’s pockets and the workingman’s belly; by which I mean the staples of cash and food, Mike, have all up and fled in the face of this contrived Quarantine. A poor man is so busy contemplating those cruel desertions, so busy scheming how to lure cash and bread home again, that he has no time left to even think on Reform. Look there, Mike. Some of our weak-minded neighbors open their doors to these government patsies. But not us. Against our better judgment, we let the government inside this summer so that we might be “counted,” and look what it’s got us. Green toads and a coming plague that, conveniently enough, kills only the poor.

  Whilky hesitates at the end of the lane. Maybe he ought to go back and wait them out. Pink, moronic git that she is, might open the door, and God only knows what they’ll plant inside. But Whilky wants his newspaper and a tall glass of beer. And besides, John Robinson claimed a bricklayer came into the Labour in Vain last night with a Border collie rumoured to have killed sixty rats in ten minutes. Pink knows what he’ll do to her if she undoes that latch. She’s daft, but she’s not that dumb.

  Whilky ducks under the low arch and lumbers out onto the wide expanse of High Street, blissfully unaware that behind him, exactly nine houses in, a tidy blonde woman loaded down with charity is stepping over his uncovered midden (that overflows with decayed Vegetables and All kinds of Putrid matter) onto his privately owned stoop and is, even now, rapping sharply upon the sanctity of his door. His republican daughter Pink, resisting tyranny for the time it takes to set down the baby and scamper over, asks cheerfully through the wood, “Who’s there?”

  “Audrey Place. With the Indigent Sick Society,” comes the answer.

  “Right,” says Pink and opens the door.

  Why, we know this Audrey. She’s lived on Fawcett Street all her life. Her mother is good Dr. Clanny’s wife’s best friend, just as Henry’s mother is sister to the selfsame wife. We understand Audrey’s engagement is a much-needed distraction at the Fawcett Street household; it’s been so sombre with her father away, captain of a ship stuck in Riga, on the other side of Quarantine. Take a peek at her, there in the doorway, before she enters the gloom of Whilky’s establishment. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t her boot neat and her red-gold hair attractively but not showily dressed? There is a certain determination about her green eyes that sits uncomfortably in the softness of her face, but it is a well-formed face, somewhat too apple-cheeked and dimpled for elegance, but pleasing and kind. Though only seventeen, Miss Place for many years has extended her hands to the poor; and to her credit, she is more proud of her magnanimity than her manicure. Once, when she was but twelve, we witnessed her surrender her only umbrella so that a poor woman might not go without one. And the head cold she suffered in consequence, she wore like a badge of honor.

  It takes a moment for Audrey’s eyes to adjust to the untaxed twilight of 9 Mill Street, but slowly the room begins to take shape. Low ceiling, stiflingly hot fire, empty of furnishings save for a table, some stools, and a gigantean Wearmouth Bridge framed like a Rembrandt. She is a little shortsighted and squints down at the little girl who comes only waist-high, dressed in a grown woman’s gown of faded pink gingham. The sleeves are rolled to her elbows and a deep hem has been taken in around the knees. It is still too long and the little girl trips as she backs up to let the lady in.

  “Is your mother or father at home?” asks Audrey Place of the Indigent Sick Society.

  “Dead,” says Pink. “And Out to get a Pint.”

  Audrey looks around and catches sight of an old woman in the corner. She sits beneath an incongruous blue dress that hangs from two pegs on the wall, watching Audrey fixedly. “Is this your grandmother then?” she asks sweetly.

  “Eek!” says Pink. “That’s the Eye.”

  “The Eye?” Audrey wonders. “Then who might you be?”

  “Pink.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve always been called Pink.”

  It never fails to amaze Audrey, no matter how many times she comes down here, that the children of the East End don’t know their own names. They are all called Crank or Tough or Flotsam or Pink from the time they kick their way out of the womb. How can one expect them not to behave like animals if they are all named like dogs? Audrey sets her blankets and stockings down on the table and wanders the room. It has the standard close sweat and fried herring smell of most lodging houses, but is a good deal less filthy. True, its walls and ceiling are a bit fuliginous and like every other house in the East End, this family keeps a sloshing crock of urine in the corner. She has urged others to get rid of it, but they use it to wash their clothes; nothing gets grease out so well, they tell her. They save their ordure, too, in the reeking unemptied middens fouling the lane. Once every eight or ten weeks, farmers come up from the country and buy it for fertilizer. In the meantime it breeds typhus and scarletina and cholera. Or at least that’s what Henry says.

  “Would you like coffee?” asks Pink in her talking-to-boarders voice. This lady looks a little like Gustine except that her dress is not nearly so pretty, being gray and without any ribbons on it. She is plumper too than Gustine and her voice is lower like a dog’s where Gustine’s is higher like a ferret’s. The lady nods yes to coffee, so Pink picks up Mike’s cup and refills it from the pot on the hearth. It’s not so hot anymore, which is how she likes it. The lady says thank you. br />
  “Do you go to school. … Pink?” asks Audrey, sipping the ice-cold coffee.

  “Neeak,” says Pink, shyly.

  “Do you go to work?”

  “Neeak,” she giggles.

  “Neak? Does that mean no?”

  “Eeeak.”

  “Let me guess.” Audrey smiles into the spindly girl’s red-rimmed eyes. “Are you a mouse?”

  Oh the shame of it.

  From the woeful expression on the girl’s face, Audrey realizes immediately she’s said the wrong thing. Quickly she switches topics.

  “Pink,” she says, “I am here from the Sick Society to care for those in need. We are looking out for the cholera.”

  “Da does not believe in the cholera,” says Pink raising her chin defiantly. “He says it’s the Government’s way of murdering the poor.”

  Audrey is taken aback by the girl’s answer. How can a rational man not believe in a disease that’s killed millions?

  “I’m afraid your Da is mistaken,” she says gently. “The cholera has been coming from around the world. We’ve been reading about it for months in the newspapers.”

  “Da says other Governments are also killing their poor. It’s where our Government got the idea.”

  “Sweetheart,” Audrey says, shaking her head. “Your government doesn’t want you dead. They’ve established a Quarantine to keep you safe.”

  “Da says the Quarantine is to starve us so that their Cholera Morbus can kill us the quicker.”

  Audrey would like to wring Pink’s Da’s neck for all the lies he’s telling this poor child. Instead she tries a different tactic.

  “Well, I have some lovely blankets and stockings here I would certainly love to give away,” she says. “I would love to give a lovely blanket to you, Pink. But first I must see if anyone sick needs them. Is anyone sick in your house?”

  “Only Fos,” Pink answers, looking longingly at Audrey’s stack. “We call her Fos because she has the Fossy Jaw.”

  “May I see her?” Audrey asks, gathering up her blankets and stockings.