The animal had recently returned from Africa, where puff-adders were quite common. They hadn’t any teeth but if they bit you their tongues imparted a poison that could turn your blood to treacle.
Presently, the gentleman climbed back on to his horse and trotted away, after which the Punch and Judy man bundled his dismembered box into the van and shut up shop for the day. He was still swearing, though not so loudly as before.
*
It began to rain before I reached the Washington Hotel. I hadn’t my shawl, but a spot of damp was nothing to me. In winter, when the wind howled up from the river, I huddled in the doorway of the Star Theatre. Once, an actor came by and said I was pretty and why didn’t I come inside to get warm by the Green Room fire. I didn’t go because the rouge on his cheeks made him look more angry than kindly. Besides, I knew he was buttering me, the line of my mouth being too determined for prettiness and my eyes too deeply set, which lends me a melancholy look. Another time, in December, my feet turned quite blue and Mrs O’Gorman had to rub them with goose-fat to restore the circulation. What did I care! I’d freeze stiff for Master Georgie.
In summer, my favourite place was on the granite steps of the entrance to the railway station in Lime Street. From there I could see down the slope to where the hotel stood within its square of garden, the red roses bobbing tall in the wind. On clear days, beneath high blue heavens, the humps of the Welsh hills rode the horizon. Now, the grey river met the grey sky, and a low white sun, sliced by the masts of ships, sailed through a splash of scarlet petals.
Mr Hardy had an oil painting of the same view hung on his study wall. The masts were there, and the row of cottages sloping down towards the tobacco warehouse, but the Washington was missing because it hadn’t been built. It was a very old painting and had belonged to Mr Hardy’s father, yet the colours were as fresh as new, unlike Master Geor-gie’s photographic pictures which turned black after a week.
I had been sitting for an hour or more, watching the people bustling back and forth, the smoke from the steam engines spurting into the lowering skies, when I witnessed a Christian act. A woman who had been standing at the bottom of the steps, a child in her arms and a wicker basket at her feet, was approached by another woman, better dressed than she and holding her skirts up from the wet. A live duck sat squashed in the basket, its neck tied to the handle, its beak bound with string. The woman pulled back her shawl so as to show off the baby nestling at her breast. Just then a boy sneaked through the crowd and snatching up the basket ran off with it. Unaware, the woman went on cooing. Seconds later, another boy appeared at her elbow and deposited the basket back at her feet. He didn’t utter a word. Straightening up, he caught me watching him. He was three or four years older than myself, dark of complexion, either from dirt or nature, and his mouth was disfigured by what I took to be an epithelioma of the upper lip. I noticed such things because Master Georgie let me read his medical books, though, as yet, I didn’t understand them perfectly.
At that instant William Rimmer came out of the hotel. I waited until I saw Master Georgie emerge, then sped down the steps, across the square and into the doorway of the Union Warehouse. Master Georgie got irritated if I hung about too closely. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from the agitated manner in which William Rimmer walked off a few paces, then returned, I gathered they were arguing rather than talking. Mostly, they discussed cadavers and blood vessels and the like, so I reckoned it was a medical rift. All the same, Master Georgie looked hang- dog, which was out of character, and I felt a sudden flutter of distress. Gauging they were too locked to notice, I stole nearer and hid behind the roses. It was still raining and water sprayed from Master Georgie’s hat.
William Rimmer said, ‘I won’t listen to your excuses.’
Master Georgie said, ‘I have nothing to excuse.’ He spoke calmly, which was his way. He held that if a man wanted his judgement to be accepted, it should be expressed coolly and without passion.
‘You can’t deny it was underhand,’ said William Rimmer. ‘Damn it, George, you knew my feelings.’
‘In the circumstances, I don’t see I was at fault. You heard what Mrs Prescott said...What was I to do?...Was I supposed to refuse so that you could step in?’
‘In your place I would have done - ‘
‘Would you indeed? And risk appearing boorish?’
‘It wasn’t the action of a friend,’ William Rimmer stormed, and with that he walked off again, only this time he kept straight on and didn’t look back.
Master Georgie hesitated and then made as if to follow. After no more than a few yards he changed his mind and almost ran across the square. He didn’t turn to see if I was at his heels.
I couldn’t think what the quarrel was about. Mrs Prescott was a wealthy woman who lived in grand style beyond Strawberry Fields. She had three daughters, two of whom were rumoured to be plain and the third handsome. I’d heard Mr Hardy remark on her looks, and he was a great man for knowing what constituted a good- looking woman. Mrs Prescott had given a dance the week before to which Master Georgie had been invited. By the sound of it, so had William Rimmer. Beyond that, it was a mystery what Mrs Prescott had said and what Master Georgie had done that William Rimmer considered underhand.
My mind wouldn’t let the matter rest, the argumentative words tumbling over and over in my head as I trailed Master Georgie the length of Bold Street. It was monstrous of William Rimmer to upbraid him. Why, when he’d caught an infection of the finger from slicing livers in the dissecting room, and lain at death’s door for two days, groaning under the fever, Master Georgie had spent a whole night sitting up with him. On his return, recounting to Mrs Hardy the torment his friend was enduring, tears swelled up in his eyes. It hurt my heart to have his devotion so easily forgotten.
Master Georgie should have turned left when we reached St John’s Church; instead he swerved right, up the cobbled rise towards St James’ Mount. I reckon he was lost in thought, either that or putting time between himself and home. It had stopped raining and a watery sun floated above the chimney stacks. Mrs O’Gorman didn’t like setting foot in this part of the town. Poverty, she confided, sent her skittering, due to her having nudged too close to it on account of Ireland and the potatoes.
Years past, when Mr Hardy’s father was alive, merchants lived in the streets nearest to their manufacturing businesses beside the river. It was expansion, Master Georgie said, and the inrush of humanity, that sent them scuttling upwards to build their mansions in the hills. The once pampered houses now stood in mouldering disarray, balconies rusted, windows stuffed with rags. Sometimes the crowded cellars flooded and infants drowned along with the rats. Such disasters afforded Mrs Hardy solace, for on her good days she attended committees for the relief of the poor, which took her out of herself.
Miss Beatrice, in a spiteful mood, had implied that I too might have crawled in from the bogs of Ireland. She crowed that when found I had a scrap of green ribbon rotting in my hair. Mrs O’Gorman said it wasn’t true. She’d been the one to cut my hair off to be rid of the lice, so she should know. I didn’t mind one way or the other. It was of no interest to me where I came from, only where I was going.
All the same, I quickened my pace as Master Georgie climbed the pavement of Mount Street. Poor people appear predatory owing to their bones showing, and bones were in abundance among the gaggle of ragged boys on the corner, the wild children squabbling in the gutter, the stupefied men slouched against the railings. They didn’t molest me for they saw I had nothing to give. A woman accosted Master Georgie but he waved her aside, not from lack of charity, simply from his being abstracted. Of average height, stout of build, he walked with feet turned out and back straight as a ramrod. I watched the way he swung his arms. How strange it is that even a mode of walking can inspire love.
Suddenly he shouted over his shoulder, ‘Don’t lag behind, Myrtle. Keep up with me.’ For perhaps thirty seconds, until that scuffed front door opened, framing a screaming woman clad in a torn chemise, I was happy, for his flung injunction signified he knew I was there and didn’t want me lost.
The face of the woman in the doorway was distorted with fright. She had few teeth and her mouth resembled a dark hole. Master Georgie was about to pass by when she screamed again, shrill and menacing as a swooping gull. The sound stopped him momentarily in his tracks. He looked about him to see who would come to her aid - but what did a scream amount to in such a wretched place? Mounting the cracked steps he followed her into the house.
I scampered after, not wishing to miss the excitement. As the woman toiled ahead up the stairs I could see black hairs bristling on her plump white calves; breath needed for the ascent, she’d ceased uttering those ghastly bird cries. Someone climbed the stairs behind me and when I looked over my shoulder I was astonished to see the boy who earlier had rescued the duck. I half stumbled; the banister rail on the turn of the landing was broken and a splinter of wood pierced my palm as I propelled myself upwards.
We came at last to an open door on the third floor. Master Georgie and the woman entered the room while I remained on the threshold. I could see a fire burning in the grate, its reflection flickering upon the rails of a brass bed. Close by stood a little round table bearing a bottle, a glass and a pocket watch. On the bed, face down, arms stretched above the head, both hands clenched in a fist about the bars, lay a figure clad in nothing but a shirt, naked buttocks exposed. It was a curious position to sleep in, for he appeared to hang rather than lie, back arched as though gathering momentum like the man on the flying trapeze. I knew it was a man because his breeches hung from the knob of the bed.
Another harsh cry rang through the room, and it was worse than anything the woman had managed, for this time it came from Master Georgie. Startled, I was about to edge closer when the duck-boy pushed me aside and demanded, ‘What’s wrong, Margaret? Trouble, is it?’
‘He died on me,’ the woman wailed. ‘It weren’t nothing to do with me.’
Master Georgie fell to his knees beside the bed. He made no attempt to turn the body over or feel a pulse; poking a finger out he traced the fold of the shirt where it rucked at the neck. It had gone very quiet and a feeling of dread began to steal over me, as though something horrible was about to happen in that darkening room with the watch ticking and glinting on the table.
At last Master Georgie looked up and the dread became palpable, for his face was drained of colour and his eyes as bewildered as my own. I ran to him then and put my hand on his shoulder, and though I don’t believe he knew who it was, for a fleeting moment he inclined his head and rested his cheek against my wrist. Then he shrugged away and stood up.
‘We must move him,’ he said, addressing the boy. ‘You must help me move him.’ He was pleading rather than asking.
‘Is it to the Infirmary?’ the boy wanted to know, at which Master Georgie shouted out, ‘God damn you, no.’ After which outburst, visibly struggling to gain control of himself, he added more reasonably, ‘I know this gentleman. It will be kinder to his family if I take him to his house.’
Seeing me standing there he ordered the woman to put me into another room. ‘I ain’t got no other room,’ she said. All the same, she hustled me on to the landing and endeavoured to shut the door in my face, only I fought her and she gave up. She had no power in her arms and her breath stank of drink.
It took strength to unclasp the hands from the bed rail and turn the body over. Quick as a flash Georgie pulled down its shirt, for decency’s sake. And now it was my turn to cry out, for it was Mr Hardy who lay there, grey hair lank as seaweed, lips purple as the plums in his orchard.
The woman came to me then and whispered, ‘Who is he, dearie?’ but I stayed mute. She tugged at my hair to make me tell, and I never even whimpered. She could have pulled out every hair on my head and still I wouldn’t have told, for that would have been a betrayal.
1 need a conveyance to take him home,’ Master Georgie said.
The boy nodded in the direction of the window. ‘There’s a van out in the alleyway and a horse in the stables. I’ll need money.’
‘I have money,’ said Master Georgie, digging into his pockets.
The woman had sidled closer to the bed, her eyes concentrating on the watch on the table. I guessed what she was about and darting forward snatched it up and held it fiercely to my chest. She struck at me, catching me a blow on the ear which sent me tumbling backwards on to the bed. My leg touched Mr Hardy’s ankle and its fading warmth sent such a shock through me that I jerked upright as though galvanised by lightning.
I gave the watch to Master Georgie. He was standing at the window looking on to the alleyway below. He took it without acknowledgement, flopping it over and over in his cupped hands. So as to be less noticeable I sat on the floor with my back to the stained wallpaper.
Presently, the duck-boy returned. He said the horse was being put into harness and we should go out the back way, through the scullery and into the yard. Master Georgie said, ‘Good, good,’ and stared down at the bed. Plucking the trousers from off the brass rail he began to steer Mr Hardy’s feet into the funnels of cloth; there were corns round as beads embossed on his white toes.
The woman, her assistance required, flapped her hands and shrank away. I stood up, prepared to help, but the boy got there before me. When they humped the breeches over Mr Hardy’s backside, his shirt rolled up and I was taken by surprise at the limpness of his private parts. I’d seen them before, one Easter when he’d felt compelled to show them me, only that time a thing rigid as a carrot had stuck out between his fingers.
Master Georgie and the boy carried him down between them. He was a well-built man and his weight sank him in the middle. The woman, who had been given money to open up the yard, defaulted and scuttled back into the room, whining she had palpitations. I was clutching Mr Hardy’s boots, and when his hat tipped off on the bend in the stairs I harvested that too. His eyes were closed but his mouth sagged open, from his being jogged.