A Dark Dividing (43 page)

T
ANSY HAD NO idea how long she would stay in the house in Bolt Place, but she thought it would probably be a long time. Once or twice, she wondered about leaving and earning a living somewhere on her own, but London seemed so vast and so noisy that it frightened her. Since the pig-men brought her here she had never been outside the house by herself and she did not know how to set about finding somewhere else to live or how to get work. One of the older girls said it was all very well to say bravely that you were going to leave, and that you were going to earn your own money; it was not so easy as that. Unless you wanted to sleep in the street you had to find a room, even if it was only what they called a two-pair back, and the only work you were likely to get was as a skivvy, perhaps in a tavern. But the wages for work like that were cruel and the hours even crueller.

There was street-selling—flowers or watercress or bootlaces—but you had to have a few shillings to buy your stock, and you were out in all weathers, and even if you made a penny or two there was always the rent to find. Leastways in here you were sure of your room and a bit of bread and meat or a kipper to your supper, and cheerful company. Tansy was feeling a bit glum, that was all. How about planning a treat? They could all lift a few coppers from tonight’s visitors and treat themselves to the music hall again on Sunday? They might go to Dancy’s this time; it was only just down near the River.

Dancy’s, thought Harry, his mind detaching from Floy’s story for a moment. It’s the first time he’s used any actual place names—except Bolt Place, which could be anywhere. Was Dancy’s a real place, I wonder? One of the dozens of little halls and supper-rooms that flourished in London in those days? How could I find out?

Tansy had worn a blue cloak on the outing to Dancy’s—one of the girls had given it to her—and she thought she looked nice, but she had not enjoyed the evening very much. She had liked the other music hall to which they had gone even though it had been so noisy and hot, but Dancy’s was different. There were one or two acts with people singing or dancing, but the evening seemed to be given over mostly to what were called speciality acts. ‘Freak show,’ said the girl who had advised Tansy not to run away from Bolt Place. ‘People lap it up, but
I
think it’s cruel on the poor things. I don’t think I’d have come if I’d known they were doing that tonight.’

Tansy would not have come either. She sat quietly in her seat, her eyes on the small lit stage, and tried to shut out what she was seeing. First there were midgets—small men and women—who danced and capered about, and this was not too upsetting because the midgets seemed lively and cheerful, and when the audience shouted things to them they shouted back, grinning hugely and making rude gestures with their hands. After this were two people with the man skeletally thin and the woman monstrously fat, and this was not too upsetting either. They sang the song about Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat, His Wife Could Eat No Lean. Tansy knew the song; it was one she and the other children sometimes used to sing.

But then came a man who was announced as the ‘Half Man of the World’—he had no legs and a very short torso so that he really did look as if he was only half a man. He was grotesque and pitiful, and there was a pretend-thing of sawing him in half on a table which Tansy found dreadful although most of the people around her were laughing and calling out encouragement.

Last of all were two girls who were introduced as Siamese twins—their bodies were joined together at the waist. Even from where she sat near the back of the long room, Tansy could see that they were very young, not much older than Tansy herself, and that they were very pretty, with sweet faces and bright eyes and smiling mouths. Their arms were around one another the whole time, and they sang a song about All the World’s in Love with Love, which everybody joined in and which was so lovely you wanted to dance around the room to it, and then they sang one called Three Little Maids from School Are We.

They had beautiful voices, sweet and clear; Tansy thought they sounded like birdsong in the early morning. While they were singing they might just have been two ordinary girls, but when they had finished singing they performed a dance, and Tansy had to clench her fists and bite her lip so as not to cry, because it was unbearable to see them moving so crookedly and awkwardly, with everyone watching. Until then she had thought the man who was only half a man had been the worst thing she had ever seen, but she thought these two pretty girls doing this ugly, distorted dance was the most pitiful and tragic sight in the world.

Twins, thought Harry, staring down at the page. Conjoined twins—what Floy’s time would have called Siamese twins. That’s an extraordinary coincidence to come upon.

On the way back to Bolt Place Tansy and the others had bought bags of jellied eels and winkles to eat. The other girls thought they had had a real good evening out, but Tansy had hated it.

Tansy’s creator had hated it as well. Floy, using the character of the older girl who had befriended Tansy, said that once upon a time, and not so long ago a time as all that, deformities had been accepted; such unfortunates had been part of the community, and every village had had its idiot, or its holy fool. Accepted. Tolerated. Even, occasionally, venerated. Because earlier ages had been more used to Nature’s mistakes, was that? Or simply because people had been more tolerant? Whichever it was, it was undeniable that the nineteenth century, and even the brave new world of the twentieth, was cruel and venal. It no longer accepted these flawed creatures as part of ordinary life; it put them on show, and it exploited them unforgivably.

Harry considered this premise and found it fairly sound, although not absolutely watertight, because exploitation had always existed all through history. But at least the twenty-first century, with its sleek, slick surgical technology, did not deal in freak shows. Or did it? Well, of course it does, you cretin, said his mind at once. Nature still gives the occasional vicious tweaks to the human race, and every time it happens the media fight to get pictures and make TV documentaries of them. A year or so back there had been a man in America who had sold video rights to the operation to separate his twin daughters, and then had used the money to buy drugs.

Floy had hoped the world had been changing for the better, but Harry was not sure that it had. We still sightsee nature’s mistakes, he thought. We still pry and snoop, and get a vicarious kick out of human tragedy. And I’d better stop feeling smug because I’m not much better myself, in fact if I had a dram of decent feeling I’d kick Markovitch and the
Bellman
into the gutter where they belong and refuse to have any more to do with this Anderson-Marriot story. Because there isn’t a story, not any longer. Sonia died abroad, it’s as simple as that.

But he would continue with Floy’s book, because he was intrigued by Floy, who had lived in the tall, thin Bloomsbury house—the house that Simone Marriot had been so strongly drawn to—and who had created this odd heroine-waif in his book, and written with such passion about the appalling cruelties meted out to pauper-children.

And about the exploitation of freaks in late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century music halls.

Charlotte Quinton’s diaries: 15th October 1914

Antwerp has fallen, also Zeebrugge, and we are getting casualties from the Ypres battles. Some of their wounds are
dreadful
, and some are wounded in their minds as well—do not think doctors entirely understand this. But it is starting to be clear that this war is not going to be the death or glory business the poets write about, or the heroes of literature and myth make stirring speeches over. Perhaps no war ever is, and perhaps poetry and literature will take on a different flavour when this is over. If ever it is over. Edward is still insisting that it will be over by Christmas, but even he is sounding a bit doubtful, and I suspect he does not entirely believe it any longer.

My work at the convalescent centre is something of a housekeeper’s role—partly overseeing the paying of bills and receiving of governmental funds that do not always reach us when they should—but mostly taken up with ordering supplies and ensuring that the kitchens keep proper accounts and records. It is a little daunting trying to feed so many people, but we buy huge ham bones and vegetables to make really nourishing soup, and bake our own bread (Mrs Tigg has given me several excellent recipes for this, and I have persuaded her to come to the centre every Monday to help out). We also try to get chickens to make broth for the weaker men; there are several chicken-farmers not too far out of London who will supply us.

But sometimes I go into the long room which is now the main ward, and which was once a raucous cheerful place of entertainment, and see if there are any little commissions I can undertake for the men. I write letters for them to their wives or sweethearts, and read the replies if they cannot read them for themselves. The letters—and the replies—are almost always heartbreakingly sad.

Today one of the men, who had been blinded by a shell explosion, felt fumblingly for my hand, and when he had found it, held it hard and said, ‘You have the most beautiful voice in the world, Mrs Quinton,’ and I came home and howled into my pillow for the sheer pity of it all.

18th October 1914

Today we heard that the main British force has been moved to Flanders, and that although Zeebrugge and Ostend look like falling to the German armies, the British are determined to keep hold of Calais.

Tomorrow more men are expected from Ypres. Somebody said the man escorting them home was a conscientious objector—devoutly hope not, since he will create no end of trouble among the soldiers who will jeer and hand out white feathers if they can find any. But then someone else said, no, it was one of the stretcher-bearers. Rather a mystery.

20th October 1914

It is not a mystery at all, and the man is very definitely not a conscientious objector, in fact if he had been only a few years younger, he would certainly have been in the front line, fighting the Prussian armies with every fibre of his being.

He came into the room where I usually work in the mornings, wearing an aged herringbone coat with a hem that trailed carelessly on the ground, looking as if he needed a haircut and a shave and a bath.

It was nearly fifteen years since I had seen him and although he was older, just as I was older, beneath the ragged unkemptness he had not altered so very much. He was thinner and more intense-looking, but he still had the air of a man prepared to take on the world and refuse to be defeated by it.

He stopped dead when he saw me, and the light flared in his eyes, in the way it always used to. Then a faint amusement lifted the corners of his mouth, as if he might be thinking: I should have known you’d do something like this. I stared at him, unable to speak (in fact I had to grip the sides of a table to stop myself from falling down), and after a moment he said, ‘Charlotte,’ making it a statement. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ His voice was exactly as I remembered it: smooth and soft, but with the remembered spikiness underlying it.

‘The same as you, Floy,’ I said. ‘Fighting the war.’

In two strides he was across the room and I was in his arms, and the fifteen years—the dull, struggling years of trying to be Edward’s wife, and trying to be conventional and well-behaved—melted into nothing.