Arcadia (11 page)

Once he’d belched he would have stayed most happily, his head laid back upon Em’s chest, his hands encased in hers, a dozing spectator. But there was money to be earned. His
mother’s breasts were Victor’s lathe, his workbench, the family spinning wheel. Em put her small son to her breasts. She put his mouth onto her nipple and she held him there, whispering
and pigeoning into his ear to make him calm. It was a hopeless task. A growing child will not stay calm and supine all day long. A child is put upon this earth to raise its head and stretch its
legs and grab. Em sang him lullabies. She told him country tales. She reminisced about her husband, Victor’s dad. But Victor did not care. The docile, suckling infant grew less tractable. His
stomach became distended and would not clear with belches. His testicles and inner thighs became encrusted with a bitter rash, its scaling plaques and lesions made angrier by the baby’s water
and his stools. He cried when he was wrapped inside his swaddle clothes. He thrashed his legs and pushed his fists into himself.

Em knew what should be done. A nappy rash is not the plague. It only takes a little air, some white of egg, and patience for the rash to clear. She begged an egg and broke it into the half-skin
of a discarded orange. She put tiny poultices of orange pith, glistening with albumen, onto her son’s sore thighs and testicles. She stretched his legs and let him lie, naked from the waist
down, across her lap. The sun and breeze were free to sink and curl between his legs. Young Victor – his flaming gonads patched in orange pith – looked as if the madders and the ochres
of a peeling fresco had settled in his lap. So much for Eve and Motherhood. This sculpture was not good for trade. Em’s outstretched hand was hardly troubled by the weight of coins now.
Nobody caught her eye. The squeamish men no longer paid to stare at Victor on Em’s breast.

The remedy was simpler than eggs. The problem was that Em was eating too much fruit. Her diet was the oranges, the grapes, the grapefruit, the tomatoes, and the apples that the more familiar
shoppers and traders tossed to her as they passed by. She dined on that. Then for supper she fed herself on what she gleaned amongst the cobbles, the fruit discarded, bruised, mislaid in the Soap
Market. She fed herself on citrus, pectins, fructose. Her waters were as tart and acid as peat dew. Her milk was too. It passed through Victor acrimoniously. It turned his gut. It chafed and
scalded his most tender skin. Feeding made him restless on his mother’s breast. He tugged her nipples in his gums. He tried to bite. And then Em had a problem of her own. Her son had made one
nipple sore. The nipple cracked, and was not helped to heal by all the acid in her milk. She would not let her child feed on that side. She only let him suck milk from the right. But he was bigger
now and wanted more. One breast was not enough. He’d passed six months. His mouth and stomach were prepared for solid food – some mashed banana mixed with milk, some peas, potatoes,
stewed apple, grain. But Em was frightened of the day when Victor would renounce the breast. She liked the way he clung to her to feed. She simply pushed her child onto her one good breast and
hoped his rash, her crack, would heal before the cash dried up.

Em’s fruity undernourishment and her fatigue at coping with the child alone reduced her flow of milk still more. Again the baby lost all interest in the outside world. He sucked all day,
but still he was not satisfied. He was tired and fretful now, at night. He would not sleep for long. He whimpered and he dozed. His mother’s breasts were irritants to him. She would not let
him suck the one; the other one was nearly dry. Em was in pain. Her cracked nipple had become infected through neglect. She was feverish. A nut-sized abscess had formed amongst the milk ducts of
her breast. It blushed and throbbed. The pain was memorable.

‘I’m out of oil,’ she told herself, picking at the peeling fossil slates which were her nails.

Together Em and Victor rocked away the nights and days. Em’s careful presentation of her baby and herself was neglected. The radish face turned yellow-white. The good health of the
countryside did not survive the hardness of the town. She had no plan to make a fresh escape. She sank into the shade beneath the parasol and called out above the fretful cries of Victor,
‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying.’ She wept. She tried to seize the trouser legs, the skirts of passers-by. She mimed an empty stomach. She put her hand onto her heart.
She tried abuse. She called out words she had not known before she came to town.

It did not work. The rich were blind to noisy poverty. The people hurried by. The crazy woman with the parasol would win no hearts like that. She had trembled at the gate. Now the gate was
closing on them both. The city was about to lock them in a cell of hunger, sickness and despair. And then their fortunes changed. Em’s sister, Victor’s aunt, was sent by chance to
rescue them.

S
HE WAS NO
rich man’s maid. She was a beggar, just like Em. And worse. The aunt had lost the kitchen job for which she’d come to town three
years before. She’d not excelled at the skivvying which – when her widowed father died – the Village Bench had hoped would ‘quieten’ her. High hopes indeed for such a
squally girl. Her face, and tongue, had not found favour with her employer’s cook, who had taken her teenage dreaminess, her wilful tawny hair, her lack of tact, her pockmarked forehead and
cheeks, as insolence.

The hope had been that Aunt could – quickly, cheaply – be transformed from hayseed into scullion. But she was not the curtsy-kowtow kind and had no kitchen skills. ‘She
couldn’t boil up water for a barber,’ cook had said. ‘That girl’s as much use in this kitchen as a cat.’ Instead, she was the sort who saw the city as a place for play
not work. Unlike the country working day the city day was ruled by clocks. It had its shifts for work and meals and sleep. And there were shifts when Aunt was free to play. What did she care if
cook found single, errant, tawny hairs entwined in dough or curling like a filamentary eel in ‘madam’s’ soup? Why all the fuss? Nobody had died from swallowing one hair. And what
if there were egg bogeys between the tines of breakfast forks? Or if the skillet smelled of pork? So much the better if the skillet smelled of pork! Anyone with sense or appetite would take a fold
of bread and ‘wipe the pig’s behind’. She and her older, married sister, Em, fought for such a treat when they were young.

Aunt simply could not understand the odd proprieties, the niceties, of bourgeois city life where more was wasted than consumed, where laughter, yawns, and stomach wind shared equal status,
swallowed, hidden, stifled by a hand. She did not like ‘indoors’. But she adored the bustle and the badinage of streets, the intimacy of crowds, the hats, the clothes, the trams, the
liberty. She had it to herself once in a while – when she was sent by cook to purchase extra eggs or vegetables, when every second Saturday she had a half-day off, when – once, at night
– she climbed the backyard wall and walked till dawn in those parts of the city where lamps – and spirits – were rarely dimmed. On that occasion Aunt was met by her
employer’s dogs when she returned. They took her for a thief and, though they knew her well enough from all the times she’d favoured them with kitchen slops, they were too dumb or
mischievous to let her clamber back into the kitchen yard. Their barking called the Master and the police. For cook this was the final straw. She did not find it likely that the girl had just been
‘walking’ as she claimed.

‘You country girls are all the same,’ she said. ‘“Bumpkins do not good burghers make.”’ She did not say what she had told her employers, that Aunt was mad,
‘a leaking pot’. She paid Aunt off with the exact train fare – oneway – to the village of her birth, only fifteen months after she had fled it for the prospects of the town.
Aunt spent the train fare on a hat.

She skipped around the bars and restaurants quite happily. She wore her hat – a high-crowned, deep-brimmed cloche in straw with dog-rose sprigs in felt. It was the fashion for that year
amongst young women of a cheerful disposition. It masked the pockmarks on her forehead and made her seem more winsome than she was. She doffed her hat at groups of men who sat on the patios of bars
or on the terraces of restaurants. They seemed so bored and so keen to be amused. She only had to smile or comic-curtsy or spin her hat around upon her open hand, to earn a little cash. It was so
easy to take money or a meal off men and still stay good.

There were a dozen country girls like her who worked the same neighbourhood of the city and who shared a two-room attic in a tenement near the Soap Market, in the Woodgate district. The
Princesses they were called, sardonically, by the poor families and the labourers who inhabited the lower floors. They’d all lost jobs as maids or kitchen girls and had finished on the
streets. Some stole. Some sold themselves to men. Some earned a little from the sale of matches or doing fetch-and-carry for the posh, frail ladies who took strong waters in the smart salons. Aunt
stuck to begging. She was good at it. And soon she had enough each day to pay the pittance rent for a small corner in the Princesses’ attic rooms. There was no proper light or water there, or
any stove for cooking. But there was camaraderie and candles. We know that poverty’s not fun, but if you are young and poor in company then shame, and lack of hope, and loneliness do not
increase the burdens on your back. Sharing nothing or not much is easier than sharing wealth.

So Aunt was happy with her life. There was no washing up. No slops. No punctilious, grumpy cook. No silver breakfast forks. They shared – like only women will – their daily gains,
their city spoils, their swag. The only privacy they had – if, say, they wished to sit unnoticed on the pot – was to hide behind the lines of washing, strung across the rooms, or to
wait for darkness. But why hide away to pee, when peeing in full view of all your friends can cause such mirth and raucous joviality? ‘Hats off,’ they used to say to Aunt, whose cloche
would rarely leave her head. ‘It’s impolite to pee like that in the presence of Princesses.’ They’d wait until they heard the spurt of urine in the bowl and then
they’d say, ‘Hats off. Stand up … and take a bow!’ Or ‘Sing, sing! And show your ring.’ The communal laughter of these Princesses was laughter with no victim
and no spite.

Aunt learnt the tricks of begging from their attic talk at night, as each described the day they’d had; how men’s brains were unfastened with their braces; how careless waiters were
with tips; which restaurant chefs would give a back-step meal to any girl who’d volunteer to mop the floor. You’d eat the meal – then run; what places were the worst and best for
palming cash from strangers. She learnt how just a dab of zinc and vinegar could make a girl look feverish. It didn’t work with men, but women – older ones – would pay to make you
go away. She learnt a gallery of beggars’ faces, how to slide her tongue between her teeth and lips to look the simpleton, how to fake the single floating eye of the insane, how picking noses
is just as good as picking pockets for getting cash if it is done on restaurant terraces and in a childish, not a vulgar way.

So she did well on city streets. She begged and importuned enough to count herself – by country standards – well set up. She was much plumper than the girl who’d skivvied in
the kitchen. She had her hat as talisman and her Princesses for family. She did not think about the coming day – or much about the day just passed. She liked to place her hat upon her head
and wander streets as if they were country lanes and she was simply searching for free fruit. She never tired of putting out her hand or challenging – this was her favourite trick – the
drinking men in bars to toss and land a coin in the canyon brim of her straw hat.

Despite the drama of the hat, she was an ill-built, scruffy girl. The pits and craters on her face were blessings in disguise. They kept the men at bay. She did not have her sister’s
looks. But what she had was something better, rarer in those days than mere good looks. She had a sense of unembarrassed self-esteem. She liked the way she was. So when she heard her sister calling
from beneath her green and yellow parasol, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying,’ Aunt was not the least put out. She’d heard a hundred stories of the saddest kind of
why and how her Princesses had fallen on hard times. Tough tales that made her wonder how animals, as frail as adolescents are, could surface with such buoyancy from depths so cold and bitter. She
guessed that there was death in Em’s own tale or illness or the loss of work. She was not shockable. It seemed to fit, not flout, the patterns of the world that Em, like her, should end up in
this place. Fate – the fate of being born a country woman in those days – was not Coincidence, nor was it Chance. The poor take trams. They travel on fixed lines. It’s only the
rich that go at will in carriages.

Aunt stooped below the parasol and matched her sister with the voice she’d heard. They were the same, except that Em was poorer, thinner than a head of corn that had been stripped of ears.
Aunt knew – from just one glance – that her sister was forlorn and ill and underfed. She heard the whimpers of the child. Her niece or nephew, she presumed. She felt content to have a
sister once again, to be an aunt. She knew that she could help.

So Em became the oldest of the Princesses – and Victor was their little Prince. Most of the girls were glad to have a child at first. They passed him to and fro and petted him as if he
were a cat. They teased him with their little fingers in his mouth and marvelled at the power of his gums and lips. They loved to belch him on their knees, his fingers wrapped so bonelessly round
theirs, or to press their noses to his head and smell the honey-must of cradle cap. They kissed the baby dimples on his arms, his back, his chin, and called him ‘Little rogue’ and sang
‘Dimple in chin, Devil within’. They made noises like you hear in zoos from those determined that the parakeets should talk. But Victor was in no mood for games. You see, already he was
malcontent, and not because of his acid rash alone. He wanted food. Warm lips and murmurs do not serve supper. He tried to push his hand between the buttons of their dresses. He wet and creased the
fabric of their blouses with his mouth.