Sure enough, the syrupy pears are pushed aside, the check is autographed, and the pale, balding man disappears from the dining room. Gustine determines to walk to the end of the block and back and see if he is wailing on the front step when she returns. If not, she’ll move on to the Red Lion Inn, where the men are poorer but their appetites more dependable. For every step Gustine takes, the Eye on the other side of the street takes one, toofar enough behind her not to be immediately noticed, but close enough to set Gustine’s teeth on edge. They turn at the dark intersection of Sunderland Street and Charles, a crossroads Gustine has never much liked, for it seems to contain all the contradictions of the town. Turn west onto Charles and the road broadens, coursing straight into tidy, well-lit Bishopwearmouth; turn east on Charles and it almost immediately dead-ends into forgotten courtyards and impossibly dark lanes leading nowhere. Old Quakers fester in the Friends Burial Ground and Methodists moulder on Number’s Garth, where John Wesley opened his first church in Sunderland a century ago. Gustine pivots and walks back toward the beckoning Bridge Inn. Please be there, she thinks. It’s cold and I would like to sit by a nice warm fire.
He is there. She sees him standing in a long black fur-lapellcd redingote looking the wrong way up High Street for her. His bald head is covered with a tall Neopolitan top hat, just a bit too tight from the way it’s perched, and he holds a feckless batonlike walking stick. Gustine smoothes her blue skirt, sets her head atilt after the fashion of the young ladies inside, and steps around the corner.
“Good evening,” she says pleasantly, stopping in front of the Bridge Inn’s marble steps.
The man jumps at the sound of her voice behind him. She catches a glimpse of bony eczematous hands before they thrust themselves into a pair of white gloves. Oh no, thinks Gustine.
“Hallo,” says the man, with a faint Midland accent.
“Are you a stranger in town?” she asks, dipping her chin slightly to make her curls bob.
He nods and glances nervously over his shoulder.
“It’s difficult on a man to be away from home.” Gustine smiles sympathetically, feeling the chill wind stir her skirts and probe for her chapped naked legs. “But Sunderland is a very friendly town.”
“That it is,n says the man, rooted to the Bridge Inn steps.
Is he ever going to invite me up? she wonders wearily. It’s too cold to stand here all night. The man above her on the steps wrings his hands nervously, flicking the walking baton dangerously close to her eye.
“If you’d like,” she says, backing up a step, “I could come upstairs and tell you about some of our more interesting sights.”
“Oh no!” he yelps. “I just came out. I couldn’t go back in.”
Gustine sighs. One of those. If business weren’t so bad, she would just walk away and abandon the man to his own flaky right hand for the night. But with the Quarantine, and no soldiers about to help out, she can’t be too choosy. She takes a deep breath and gives it one last try.
“We might walk about, then,” she offers. “I’ve got an hour before I’ve got to be home.”
That option seems to spur the gentleman. He gives a curt nod and jerks down the steps, falling into place beside her. As she starts up well-lit High Street, he plunges down ill-lit Sunderland, and Gustine has to jog a few steps to catch up.
For a block they walk in silence. The man in the redingote takes long loping steps and Gustine trots alongside him. He has a long-jawed, skeletal face, with two reddened eczema ridges under his eyes like war paint. He also has a spoiled-milk nervous smell about him which Gustine recognizes as desire. When they get to the intersection of Charles, Gustine once more tries to lead them west, toward populated Bishopwearmouth, but the gentleman turns east, taking them deeper into darkness. Over her shoulder, Gustine sees that the Eye is turning the corner behind them. She makes another stab at conversation.
“What line of business are you in?” she asks, slipping her hand under his arm. She does not do it to be coy, but to protect her naked skin from the icy wind blowing up from the river. It really does look like snow.
“Plumbing,” he says, and turns down Garden Street, toward the dark heart of the Quaker cemetery. The reflective white sky above provides the only light, and by it she can make out the evenly spaced iron pikes of the cemetery wall straight ahead. The putrid smell of old bones rushes out to meet them and Gustine instinctively pulls back.
“Here’s fine,” the man says, pushing her into a sagging doorway. She has time only to see the Eye over his left shoulder, stern as one of the Dissenter ghosts rising up from the grave, before his heavy black redingote is thrown over her face. The coat smells of tobacco and sweat and greasy animal fur. Her own trapped breath condenses inside the wool and drips down upon her cheek.
Well, it’s not a roaring fire at the Bridge Inn, thinks Gustine while the man thrusts a flaky finger up her and digs about as if fishing a ring from a sink pipe. But at least it’s warm.
Girl and shadow. Dress and Eye. They walk south on ViUiers Street and east on Coronation; they walk north on Sans (past the cheap theatre where the first boys are lining up for tickets to Les Chats Savants, held over by popular demand), then east on High. Some nights, Gustine feels like she’s caught the hem of her dress on a nail and that as she walks her skirt is slowly unraveling behind her, leaving a thin blue trail along the ground to mark where she’s been. Sometimes when she lets her mind wander, she feels the thread drag along the gutters, snagging dead rats and bottles, chicken feathers and broken furniture. She feels the tangled thread grow heavier and heavier, tugging her back, making her strain to drag it, until at last she spins and sees that its very weight has become the Eye, a shadow called into being out of cumulate garbage much as the first woman was fashioned by God out of clay. There is no escape, Gustine thinks on nights like these. We will walk the streets forever, the Eye and I.
Girl and shadow, Dress and Eye. She’s been walking for hours and has had no luck. And it is so cold tonight. She remembers last winter when her dress was newer and brighter, then almost nightly she was invited up to well-appointed hotel rooms where dinner was spread out in front of cheery coal fires. Her precious baby was conceived in one of those rooms, she is convinced, on a night when her stomach was full and her back was warm and she’d taken a sip of the champagne these men constantly force on her, as if getting her tipsy will make her somehow more willing than she already is. But this winter promises to be something else altogether. The hotels are half-full and the barracks are locked; the middle classes are afraid of contagion and the poor men are broke. What hope does she have now for an hour in a hotel? She must count herself fortunate to be half-suffocated beneath a plumber’s redingote.
Gustine wraps her arms around her body and wedges her hands in her armpits. She walks briskly down George Street past the wide front window of a crowded public house full of overheated men stripping off their coats to drink in their shirtsleeves. Their hair is sweaty from laugh and drink, their broad red faces shine with blessed perspiration. Gustine pauses, trying to absorb through the cold pane of glass the heat generated by corduroy pants rubbing past each other to get to the bar. Five minutes, she thinks. Five minutes inside just to restore the feeling in the tip of my nose and thaw out my stiff, blue fingers. Gustine has her hand on the door when the shadow falls, icy and pickax upon it. She is a like-charged magnet, this taskmistress
Eye, and by her very proximity repels Gustine away from the pub, down the street, back to work.
Down George Street, east on Coronation, up Spring Garden Lane. They pass a young mother muffled in shawls, cradling a hairy cow’s hoof in one arm and a baby in the other. They pass a stoop upon which sit a girl and a dog and a pig, huddled together for warmth, while from inside their house come the syncopated screams of a woman in labour. Number 6 2, Gustine notes. If the woman does not survive the birth, she might be a fine candidate for Dr. Chiver. She is not even five houses away when she forgets the number. It’s too much to think on nights like this, when the chill slows a person’s brain to dull incomprehension. It’s hard enough to walk when the soles of your feet have gone numb through your boots and you can barely feel the joints of your knees.
“May I help you?” Out of nowhere, a young man runs over, and Gustine realizes she’s on the ground. How did that happen? She looks up at him pleasant in an unconventional way, with cooked-sausage-coloured hair and back-raked eyebrows. His suit is wrinkled but obviously expensive, speaking more to his lack of a good butler than to a lack of income. Over it, he wears an unbuttoned wool coat.
“You must be freezing!” he cries.
Gustine is so numb with cold, she can barely stand up. She can tell he is unsure about her by the way he formally presents his flat-palmed, gloved hand. He keeps his body stiff and bent at the waist and his eyes respectfully averted from her face. Perhaps it’s the shoes that give her away. It’s always the shoes when someone looks close enough. When he spots them, she sees his body instantly relax and his impassive face lighten. He takes a step in toward her, allowing his hip to crush the fabric of her skirt, and without asking tucks her arm snugly in his.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me for a drink?” he asks, gripping her arm so securely she couldn’t slip away if she tried. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I don’t drink much,” Gustine replies, having trouble getting the words through her numb lips. The young man laughs delightedly.
“Oh, sure you don’t! This is rich!”
He leads her back the way she came, past the dog and pig and little girl still outside, though the screams have stoppedand around the back way to Playhouse Lane. He stops on the corner of the street in front of a brightly painted red door, behind which Gustine can hear a brass band playing and women laughing. She hesitates, even though she knows it will be steamily warm inside.
“You know this place?” the young man yells over the noise. “I come here all the time for my research.”
He pushes through into a low room made closer by the blue ceiling of pipe smoke and pungent fumes of opium. At first glance, the clientele looks similar to that of the Labour in Vain, but as her eyes adjust to the smoke and one by one faces stand out, Gustine sees it is a very different sort of place. The men are heavy-lidded and unsteady on their feet, too free by far in the handling of their companions’ bodies. As for the women, a meaty hand on a breast or a lingering finger upon an inner thigh they allow to pass unnoticed. Most are laughing and drinking gin; some slouch with their legs thrown apart and their stockings showing; others lie on the floor as if to fall asleep there. A brass band plays frenetically on a dais that looks to Lave once housed a pulpit, while couples haphazardly lurch about the floor in front of them.
“Used to be the old Methodist meeting house before they turned it into a dance hall,” says the young man, pulling her inside. “Isn’t that wicked?”
Gustine looks around in dismay. There is no shame in making money the way she does. Half the girls in Sunderland have sold their bodies at some point to put food on the table or to keep their families from the workhouse. It’s almost a daughter’s duty when her Da is between jobs to put on her bonnet, slip out onto the street, and a few hours later come back with a shilling or two. But these women are professional whores. They hang about the docks all day distracting honest men from their jobs, then join up with their pimps at places like this, half-clothed, half-drunk, and thoroughly bad. A woman Gustine recognizes from Sailor’s Alley, a dolly she’s seen on her knees performing like a Frenchwoman on men who like that sort of thing, waves familiarly. Gustine blushes for shame.
The young man finds them a small table away from the brass band and sits without offering her a chair. He reaches into his coat pocket and tugs out a small writing tablet and pencil.
“Don’t look,” he says, making a note on his pad. “But I think we’re being followed.”
Gustine glances over to the entrance, where the Eye has just stepped in. She stands like a rock in a river of smoke, the current eddying about her broad shoulders before flowing past her out the door. Gustine turns back without comment.
“You know that person?” asks the man, suddenly perking up. “Are you in some sort of trouble?”
“Yes, I know her.” Even though they are away from the band, Gustine still has to shout over high-pitched spikes of laughter. “And no I’m not in trouble.”
“Barmaid!” The man grabs at a harried servant girl’s skirt as she whizzes by. “Whiskey for me. Gin with sugar for my companion. And one for Cyclops at the door!”
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she says. “I don’t drink.” He twists in his chair and, taking up his pencil, makes a quick sketch of Eye that looks nothing like her. As if she weren’ t bad enough, he gives her a hunched back and crazy pubic-headed flyaway hair. Gustine feels a swift pang of sympathy for her enemy.
“So, tell me about yourself,” he commands, pushing the pad aside and leaning in with his chin in his hand. He is one of those, she sees, who shuts out the entire world when he looks at you. She is immediately on her guard.
“Are you with the newspapers?” she asks.
“Why? Because of this?” He holds up the pad and Gustine nods. “Ha! No. I am what you call a student of life. I am writing a brutally honest, unsentimentalized portrait of the British working classes. Their loves and prejudices, their labours and triumphs. I come here to speak honestly with the thieves and whoresto tell their stories and show the middle classes what their capitalist practices sow, their back alleys reap!”
A hank of cooked-sausage hair falls across his eyes and he licks his hand to smooth it back.
“See that poor creature over there?” He points to a rouged young woman, sitting with her arm thrown over her lover’s shoulder. “She used to be a ladies’ maid. Highly regarded, too. Son of the family caught her in the stairway one day when no one else was home. Ruined for life.”