Birdcage Walk (5 page)

George’s walk home from Highbury formed no impression on his memory. It passed in a daze, people jostling him as they overtook him, looking back with impatience at his meandering progress. When he reached home, he nodded absently at Cissy and then went and lay on his bed.

“Are you alright, George?” Cissy asked, having followed him. “Are you coming down with something?” She placed her hand on his forehead but found it cool. George didn’t reply, but instead lay motionless, hands behind his head, his gaze directed at the portion of sky visible from the window. Cissy followed his eyes.

“Thank goodness it looks as though some rain is on its way,” she said, though it elicited no response from the figure on the bed. “You did deliver the cage alright, didn’t you?” she said. “There weren’t any trouble, were there? You look funny, George.”

After a pause he looked at her properly and, much to her surprise, smiled. “I got it there fine, Cissy, and got half a crown off the gentleman.” He handed her the money and she closed her hand over it in relief, her face clearing.

“He’s a character, that Mr.Booth,” said George, resuming his gaze out of the window.

“Yes, he was that,” said Cissy. “Kind, too—he’s given you extra. Did you see his goddaughter with the funny name?”

“I saw Miss Clemency. She seemed a very nice young lady,” George replied seriously, causing Cissy to stifle a giggle behind her hand.

“What did she look like though?” she asked when she had recovered.

George thought for a moment and realised that while he could picture her pale figure at the door, her face had already blurred in his memory, like a photograph whose subject has moved before they should. There was nothing left of her but a singsong voice, an impression of pink cheeks, and a dress of gauzy white tied with a rose-coloured ribbon.

“I can’t really remember,” he said truthfully. “She was all pink and white.”

“Well, that’s a fat lot of good, that is!’ cried Cissy. “What do you mean, pink and white? Was she pretty?”

George shrugged. “I suppose she might have been, but I couldn’t say now. She seemed young though, younger than you. She was telling me about her father’s books, that I do remember. She said I could come back and look at them sometime, copy some of the plates into my book. She said he never looks at them and it would be alright.”

“How are you going to manage that, then?” Cissy’s anxious expression, never long from her face, had returned. “You can’t just go calling on a family like that, it wouldn’t be right. What would her father say if he knew she’d been inviting strangers to look at his books. She must be as green as grass.” George shot her a look.

“It’s not like that,” he said. “She meant nothing by it which wasn’t proper. It’s like another world up there altogether, I can’t tell you how different. She only wanted someone to make use of the books, that was all.” He turned over on the bed to face the damp plaster that rose in tiny hillocks, and pushed a finger into the centre of one, feeling a momentary give before it cracked inwards.

“Oh, don’t do that, George, it looks bad enough round here,” Cissy exclaimed. “Listen, I’ve got to go out now, so keep an eye on dad, will you? And George, I would forget about them books if I were you.”

George remained sullenly silent until she left and then fished underneath the mattress to pull out a small book bound in red leather. From the windowsill he retrieved a short nub of pencil and began sketching on a fresh page. As he drew the rough outline of a large house, he couldn’t help remembering how the volume—his most precious possession—had come to be his.

It was perhaps six months before his mother had died, before Charlotte had moved into Avebury Street, and when the old century was in its last throes. He had got back from the print early one afternoon because too many men had turned up for the shift. He would miss the money, but felt jubilant as he walked home, the unanticipated holiday all the sweeter for it.

The Woolfes hadn’t long moved from their rooms on Eagle Wharf Road to the more down-at-heel lodgings on Wiltshire Row. None of them had spoken of it aloud, but his mother had decided to give up her regular shifts at Freeman’s cigar factory a couple of months earlier and his father’s trade was too slow to keep them in better accommodation any longer.

Privately, George had thought his father should have made more of a fuss about it—as far as George could see there was nothing much wrong his mother, other than the pains in her stomach that she always complained of. Since they had been on Wiltshire Row, cooped up together in two meagre rooms that never got any light, she had also given up most of the housework, saying the pains stopped her bending or lifting any weight. Gradually the space, hardly spick-and-span to start with, had grown dingier, each corner harbouring fine-spun nests of dust and hair, the window glass veiled by a miasma of soot.

When he got back, he took the bare flight of stairs two at a time. At the top, still unused to the stiff catch on the door to the relatively new rooms, George had been about to knock when he heard a muffled cry from within. His mother would be alone inside—she’d been taken bad the day before and had said she would remain in bed while Cissy and their father took work to sell at the market. Now, putting his shoulder against the warped old door, George shoved hard and only just caught himself from falling as it swung open as if it had been newly greased.

There, looking up at him with a mixture of shock and defiance in her eyes, was his half-naked mother. Her thighs, which she hurriedly covered, looked very pink against the dull white of the soiled sheet. So horribly transfixed by the image was George that he barely registered the man who pushed past him and clattered down the stairs in boots that weren’t laced up.

“What are you doing back here so early?” she’d eventually said as she rose, her composure only slipping as she stumbled to retrieve her discarded skirts. The air of the room smelt both sweet and acrid; a nauseating blend of brandy and sweat. Turning to look at George, who still hadn’t moved from the open doorway, she pinned her hair where it had come loose from its bun with hands that weren’t quite steady. Unable to meet his eye any longer, she then began ineffectually smoothing the bed sheets.

It was some time before he trusted himself to speak without fear of his voice breaking. “You know I must tell my father about this,” he said in a low tone. “I won’t keep quiet for you.”

The idea sickened him, but his mind was already hurrying through the practicalities: where he might break the news, how he could keep it from Cissy, and how he could find the man who had invaded his father’s bed. His mother’s voice punctured his thoughts then; she had turned once again to face him, a pillow leaking feathers clutched to her breast.

“Oh, lovey. You think he don’t know?” She tried to smile, but her mouth twisted into a grimace. “Your father turns a blind eye to everything I do, good or bad, but don’t think he don’t know exactly what goes on when his back’s turned. I might be a mother and a wife, George, but that don’t mean I don’t have needs. Not everyone can disappear inside themselves like he does. He won’t give me anything of himself, he’d rather be catching his birds or selling those cages for pennies, so I’ve learned I had better find some pleasure in life by myself. I ain’t going to be around forever, you know, and we’re all a long time dead.”

George hadn’t answered. Instead, he’d turned and slowly descended the stairs and walked unseeing until he arrived at a pub where he wouldn’t know anyone. There he had got into a fight that he could not remember the precise details of the next morning, when he woke fully clothed and miraculously transported back to his own bed. Only his pounding skull, the jawbone bruised and stiff, and a trickle of blood that had browned and crusted around one nostril were proof it had happened at all. He wished the man he had fought was the one he had seen with his mother, but he was certain it was a stranger that he had deliberately cheeked; needing to lash out and be hurt back.

The next week, his bruises gradually turning a jaundiced yellow, he had been so curt and unresponsive to Cissy’s questions that she had eventually fallen silent. The respite was short-lived, however, and her furtive glances over at him with large, anxious eyes told him that she was beside herself with worry. One night, to escape her scrutiny, as well as his mother’s company, he had taken himself early to bed, drawing the curtain across for privacy.

As he laid his head down in the relative gloom, his pillow had felt strangely lumpy. He put his hand underneath it and brought out a small red leather-bound book. Holding it up to the pale moonlight at the window, he opened it to the first virgin white leaf. On it, his mother had written a message in her childish hand. ‘
For your drawings, my dear George, from your weak but loving mother
’. He had rubbed out her pencil marks so hard that the paper had almost worn through, but he’d kept the book, using it as she’d intended.

Now, his mother dead and the sheet she’d lain on with the stranger boil-washed many times since, he turned back to that first page and held the book up to the candle light, tracing a finger along the still-visible indentations of her message. Then he turned back to the outline of the house he’d seen for the first time that day and took up his pencil once again.

During the following weeks, as the mercury plummeted and the wind turned bitter enough to make the roots of his teeth jangle and ache, George struggled to concentrate at the press. Despite his best efforts, his mind kept wandering a mile or two to the north. As the days passed, he found it increasingly hard to believe that the white house really existed, along with its otherworldly occupants and the imagined bounty of its library.

Instead of avoiding his father’s silences by taking refuge in the pub with Charlotte, he found relief in the peace and quiet of home during the evenings. With more zeal than he’d shown in years, George drew long into the night, copying from memory botanical illustrations more complex than he’d attempted before. Cissy, who found any break in routine a cause for quiet alarm, was also baffled. On the nights when George worked well past the hour that she retired to the truckle bed near his, she took to pointedly sighing and fidgeting in order to register the disapproval that masked her concern.

Just after his visit to Highbury, he’d tried hard to draw the house from memory but, just as he’d struggled to describe Miss Clemency’s appearance to his sister, his powers of recall proved more vague than he would have liked. In his mind’s eye the house had been reduced to an impression of white stucco, as pristine as the girl’s dress, and the startling green of the lawn, brilliant as an emerald in spite of the arid summer it had endured.

Two Fridays after he’d been there, George was helping Cissy to stuff rags in the window frames to stop a bitter easterly wind finding its way inside. He had told a sulky-mouthed Charlotte he would see her in the pub that night but, once the draughty windows had stopped rattling, it felt quite snug at home and he felt again the lure of his sketchbook. Abandoning the trail of wisteria he’d been working on for the last few days, he began a new sketch, starting with the outline of a face and then moving onto a pair of wide eyes. Where his mouth had failed him when Cissy had asked, his hand now seemed to remember who and what he had seen.

By the time he’d finished, the candle on the rickety side table had burned low in its holder, the flimsy tin saucer that held it deformed by the dirty globules of wax that had dripped and hardened on it. Cissy was finally asleep across from him, lost in dreams with her mouth slightly open and her eyes flitting rapidly under their lids. Even in sleep, her face looked afraid, an expression that irritated George when she was awake but now, her thin hands clasped over her chest, her body barely making a hump under the blankets, he felt an ache in his chest for her. He could already see how she would look when she was older; a slighter version of his mother, with the same chapped knuckle joints and congested voice from an endless stream of colds.

It was late enough for the moon to have risen high, but it didn’t matter now that he wasn’t expected at the print tomorrow. After the tedium of work that day, when even his daydreams hadn’t hastened the hours on, he’d asked to swap his shift the next day and the foreman had nodded his permission, much to George’s astonishment. The surprise gift of time stretched out in front of him now, becoming such a vast tomorrow that he felt reluctant to snuff out the candle and sleep, diminishing it all the sooner. That was when he decided, just like that. Tomorrow he would return to the house that had taken root in his mind. He could pretend he was off to the factory for his usual Saturday morning shift and escape the close atmosphere of Wiltshire Row early enough to stop Cissy asking any questions. The matter decided, he felt calmer and more resolute than he had for weeks. Turning his limp pillow over to its cooler, cleaner side, he smoothed out the rough cotton and lay his head down.

Reaching out a hand towards Cissy, he gently stroked her fine hair, a gesture of affection he knew there was no risk of her knowing about. Then, pinching the sputtering flame out of its misery, he got into his usual position, face turned up to the bare window. Beyond it, a breeze stirred the towpath weeds just as the wind high above had already swept the sky clean of any cloud cover. George’s mind also clear, he gazed out, glad to know that there was truly nothing between him and the great dome of navy-coloured sky.

When George awoke soon after dawn, the new day’s sun had flung a square of light over his knees under the thin blanket. Keen to be up making the most of the crystalline morning, he sat up and stuck his head out the window. Last night’s breeze had sharpened into a cool wind and looking across the canal’s inky sludge towards the north, he could see clouds mustering at the horizon. Undaunted, he wondered if his moth-eaten umbrella was fit to be seen in public.

“You’re going to be late,” Cissy muttered sleepily as he pulled at the creases in his better shirt. “And why are you worrying about that now, when you always leave your shirts in a heap?”

He’d hoped to make himself some breakfast before Cissy woke and started up with her nagging but now he would have to leave quickly, before she came to properly and discerned the excitement that lightened his movements. Already her face looked sharp in the cold early light as she sat up in bed.

“You shouldn’t wear that shirt to the print anyway,” she continued. “It’s your last decent one that hasn’t gone threadbare or got ink all down it.”

“Just leave it, alright?” He frowned at her to cover the nerves that had abruptly knotted in his stomach. The benefits of his sound, dreamless sleep were already being eroded and it was only just seven. He went to swing out the door but reached back to retrieve his flat cap from its iron hook just as Cissy opened her mouth to remind him of it. He gave her a tight smile and then took the stairs two at a time, desperate to be out in the brisk air.

With the momentum of his own eagerness and the lack of traffic on the roads, it was no surprise that he had reached the gates of Aberdeen Park before the clock belonging to the church on the enclave’s small green showed half past seven. The weather was hardly mild but George had worn his thickest jacket and a scarf and thought he might sit out comfortably in it for an hour. He had no firm plans other than to better memorise the white house, but he was afraid of being noticed when so few others were abroad. He retraced his steps back to Highbury Fields, which was nearly as deserted, and went over to a wooden bench placed near the centre of the grassed area. Visible through the half naked branches of the trees, the sun was succeeding in burning off the scudding clouds and it felt warm on his face. With something regained of the previous evening’s serenity, and a timely drop in the wind, he was soon fast asleep.

By the time he awoke, the sun had moved around and the surrounding gardens were now thronged with promenading elderly couples and nurses stoically pushing enormous perambulators, black and shiny as beetles.

“What’s the time please, miss?” he called to a passing girl laden with parcels. His voice cracked with sudden apprehension as he spoke, fearful that he had wasted his precious day off.

“There’s a clock over there,” she replied curtly, nodding her head towards a draper’s shop at the far end of the Fields, where above a pair of gaily striped awnings, an ornate clock reached out over the pavement.

He got up, feeling faint from lack of food, and crossed the road to squint at the clock’s hands. It was gone ten. More than two hours could not now be recaptured but it was still not late. He thought that if he made his way a little further along the Holloway Road there might be a bakery where he could get a bun for one of the coins that had found its way between the stitching of his jacket pocket to drop into the lining. He could feel their outlines between his finger and thumb along the hem. It was just as he was attempting to extract the largest, surely a penny, his fingers casting about and making the pocket’s hole even bigger, when a pair of neat velvet slippers the colour of brandy stopped just in front of him.

“It’s Mr. Woolfe, isn’t it? George Woolfe?” asked the light, musical voice that he had cursed himself for forgetting so quickly after their meeting. She was wearing an outfit festooned with all manner of complicated ribbons and clasps. Above them, her eyes were bright and merry.

“Mama, this is the birdcage-maker’s son who delivered Uncle Charles’s present,” she said, turning to the older woman next to her. “Do you remember I told you about him and how he must come and look at father’s books? You must remember.”

Mrs. Drew was a slightly collapsed version of her daughter, and though she stood only a shade shorter, she was many inches stouter around the middle. Her hair, which looked to George like nothing so much as a clump of wire wool, was frizzed out in a puff quite different to the shiny rope that reached down Miss Clemmie’s back. It was the eyes that made for an uncanny likeness; only the slightly creped skin around the older pair distinguished them.

“Hello Miss, and Mrs. Drew,” he stammered, hoping he had remembered the name correctly.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Woolfe,” said the lady, inclining her head slightly. “My daughter loves her birdcage and has a pair of canaries to go inside it now. You must tell your father how impressed we were by his skill, I don’t think I’ve seen a finer cage. Do you live close by?”

Before George could answer, Clemmie spoke up. “No, mama, he lives in Hoxton, don’t you, George? Uncle Charles told me. He made notes on George’s street for his study.”

“Ah, Hoxton. I know of it,” said Mrs. Drew vaguely. “So, what brings you to the Holloway Road this morning, young man?”

George was suddenly at a loss for an answer he would admit to and, feeling his cheeks colouring, simply stared at his feet while he tried to extract his hand through the pocket hole as unobtrusively as possible. After a long moment, when it seemed to George that the bustle and tumult of the surrounding street had also quietened in anticipation of his excuse for being there, the girl spoke up for him again.

“I expect you have been running errands for your father again, haven’t you?” she said. “That must be it.”

He looked up and saw that she was not teasing him and this emboldened him to nod and even smile thinly in the direction of Mrs. Drew. “Yes, that’s right,” he said slowly, the new notion taking shape in his mind. “I’ve already delivered the cage I brought with me, as you can see, and so I’ll be going now, back home.”

“Well, you can walk with us part of the way, can’t you?” asked Clemmie, glancing at her mother.

Mrs. Drew nodded her permission thoughtfully. “George, if you’re not in a dreadful hurry to return home, there’s something you could do for me, just a small job,” she said. “You see, my husband Captain Drew is away on his ship, and we are all women in the house. I wanted something fetched down from the attic but it’s far too heavy for our maid to lift and I am too old for such things.”

She held out two small, pudgy hands that were studded with half a dozen gold rings. “Would you mind bringing it down for me? It would only take a healthy boy like you a few minutes.”

George was rendered speechless by the unexpected request and even Mrs. Drew looked embarrassed at this new silence. “Of course, there’ll be something small in it for you,” she said.

This jolted George into animation. “Oh no, Mrs. Drew. I wouldn’t expect anything for such a . . . for such a trifle.” He gulped that such a word should have issued from his mouth. “I’ll come right away and fetch it down. I’m not too big but I’m strong, so it’ll be no fuss at all.”

The matter resolved and all parties relieved, they set off purposefully. George found he couldn’t help looking about him, wondering what passers-by thought he was to these two ladies as they walked between the graceful ranks of Highbury Fields’ plane trees.