Mary’s quest to stay disguised as a boy continues to be challenged by puberty. How to deal with periods? There is one person in London who knows she is female, will not reveal it, and might be able to help.
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You Need Not Be a Child to the Parent
‘A mouse!’ says Jim, holding his side from a laughing stitch. ‘A bloody mouse!’
‘In truth,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t a mouse that startled me. I startled myself. I didn’t intend to set alight to anything. I was the most shocked of them all.’
‘Then you are the mouse,’ he says, triumphant. ‘Startling yourself. Come, Mouse! Buy me an ale.’
Night is falling and his oranges have been locked away. I have a gentleman’s message in my pocket that I will say I was made to wait for. I am gladder to see Jim Coker than ever. He has a split lip from what he calls ‘a gentleman’s disagreement’ which I gather once we are sat in the tap room with our ales was just a regular beating from his Uncle that he dressed up in words in order to feel more courageous about it.
‘Better to say I was defending my honour with some stranger,’ he says, ‘than that I was smashed up by my only family. When your own blood think you a sorry wretch worth smacking why should anyone else think otherwise?’
I think of how my mother’s palm used to sting: not only the roughness of it but the fact she would hit me at all.
‘Why do you not stand up to him?’ I ask. ‘You are almost his size now.’
‘It’s his roof,’ says Jim. ‘I figure I can take lumps under his roof or take worse in the street. The street is no place to sleep, aside from the cold. There’s people will rob your eyeballs from under your eyelids, I heard.’
‘That’s not true!’ I say, though his words force me to see such a robbing as vividly as though I had witnessed it.
‘It’s only an expression,’ he laughs. ‘Soon, I will have enough money to rent my own rooms. I have some things of value in my possession, and I am collecting more of them, and so long as my Uncle doesn’t find them they will buy me my escape before too long.’
‘Where do you collect them from?’ I ask.
‘Places,’ he says, looking down at his ale. And then brightly, ‘Not places you should go, Mouse.’
‘I’m no Mouse!’ I say. ‘I’m taller than you are.’
‘That’s why it’s funnier,’ he says. ‘I can’t very well call you Burnt Bed, can I? If I call you Mouse we shall always remember your secret. Which makes us firmer friends. You don’t object to that, do you?’
‘No,’ I say, and use that pledge of friendship to proceed to my business, saying that as we are firm friends, there is something I must ask of him. I unfold to him my plan that he might look out for my mother and, if he sees her, ask Gordon or George to watch his oranges and follow her so as to find out where she is living. The complication is that he saw her only briefly, and though he noted her gaudy dress, that is something that might be changed. He says he isn’t confident he would recognise her again, and I am at a loss to describe her apart from her being slender boned and pale skinned with brown hair.
‘No identifying marks?’ he asks, doing an impression of Mister Rathbone, the market’s infamous beadle.
I can think of none. The problem being that she is pretty enough to ply her trade in private rooms, which kind of prettiness is all about the absence of difference, perfectly even eyes and lips and skin tones, and just the right measure of prettiness not to stand out at all. Not a mole nor a scar to define her, nor in the other direction, exceptional eyes or other body parts. When I have failed to describe her in any manner that might allow Jim to identify her by sight, he has another idea. A lady-friend of his Uncle’s works in the same trade, in the part of town they call the Birdcage, and he thinks she might be able to locate my mother if furnished with a name.
‘They all have made-up names,’ he says. ‘Buttercup and Kitten and the like. But they use real names with each other. She might know your Ma.’
So I tell him our mother’s name, and he tells me I must get something for his Uncle’s lady-friend in return.
‘What would she like?’ I ask, hoping he won’t say anything that will force me to dig too deeply into my secreted crowns. They are my first line of defence should I find myself cast out.
‘Mathematics,’ he says, and for a moment I think I have tuned out for more than a few seconds, perhaps several minutes, and missed a whole by-water of the conversation that has led to this unlikely word.
‘I should give her Mathematics?’ I ask, fully expecting to be corrected and clipped round the ear for falling asleep.
‘Some Mathematical puzzles,’ he says. ‘It is her great peculiarity. She can calculate in her head with extreme rapidity and likes nothing better than to show off this skill to men who have come to her for her other talents. My Uncle has not yet given her a sum she could not do, but that is unsurprising since he stayed at petty school only three years and knows only enough mathematics to be sure when an orange is priced to make a profit.’
‘Where will I get Mathematical puzzles?’ I ask.
‘Why from your former tutor, that bespectacled beanpole who licks Latin out of the air. He gave you mathematics as well, did he not?’
‘He tried,’ I say, ‘but I am not very accomplished.’
‘Ask him for equations,’ Jim says. ‘I hear equations are delightful to her.’
‘You mean sums,’ I say?
‘Oh no, bigger than sums. Something equations. Quadrangle equations. Or was it Adriatic equations. From Greece, I think.’
I have no idea what equations he means, but imagine something to savour, like a ripe fig.
‘I will ask Mister Rotard,’ I say, and I do, the next morning, through the kindness of Mrs Fredericks, who knows where he lodges. The equations cost me one of my precious crowns because, as he put it when I surprised him in his pyjamas, his knowledge cost him dear and he should not be expected to part with it for nothing. In the afternoon I deliver into Jim’s hand a piece of paper covered with letters and numbers that make no sense to either of us. It is a peculiar thing to be swapping for my mother’s address. After that, I have nothing to do but wait. And in all the in between time, I must manage not to bleed on my new mattress (about which Demoiselle de Vaucresson was very cross in the Frenchest way you can imagine) or my clothes or indeed the floor, chairs, or any other place.
Since I do not feel I can take more of Kate’s clouts and dispose of them, for two days I am reduced to stealing rags from washing lines. There is often a message to be delivered at the end of the day, whether to someone that was seen earlier, to thank them, or someone who will be seen tomorrow, to confirm arrangements, and I make short diversions to neighbourhoods where I will not be recognised, in the part of my errand where it is just getting dark, so that I might be more hidden in the half-light, and only steal from women careless enough not to notice that night has fallen. The act of stealing makes my heart thud, but that sensation is not unpleasant.
By the end of the week, as I am running through the market with a message in my pocket, Jim whistles me over, and when he has finished serving he says his Uncle Ted’s lady friend has given him an address, and folds it into my hand. We arrange to go there together during my evening message run. In the thin hour between the end of the market and the start of supper, we lock up his barrow of oranges before leaving. The cold sky is already darkening, and stars are winking at us like sprites come to see us make mischief. Jim is excited about visiting a house of ill repute, but I am wary.
The house whose address is on the piece of paper is as shabby as the handwriting that spells it, and I am surprised at the outer state of it, which seems far worse than our old cottage in Broxholme. But when we are let in by an older, bent-nosed woman who assumes us customers, it is transformed. The walls are draped with coloured cloth, even in the hallway, perhaps to cover the mould and damp that I can smell despite the heavy scent of incense. The incense is especially strange to me because the only place I have smelt incense is in church. This is a strange kind of church, I suppose, where some men come to worship or be worshipped.
I am so bemused by the colourful walls, the churchy smell, and the very obvious wig of the woman I am following, that I am taken aback when a man and woman lurch out of a side-room like a pillar collapsing, he half-undressed, she giggling, smacking against the wall just in front of my nose. They would have pancaked me had I been an inch or two further along. The woman (a bright and broad smile on her like the kind of apples grocers put in their windows, all polished up, and nothing like the wormy things they try to sell you) untangles herself from him, and leads him like a puppy into another room further along.
‘Pay no heed,’ says the bent-nosed woman, turning only briefly over her shoulder, ‘come this way,’ and we go deeper into the house, which goes back much further than I thought.
‘We’re not customers,’ I say, running it quickly out of me like water from a pricked bladder, ‘I’m here to talk to my mother.’ The woman stops sharply, turns round like I’ve prodded her behind.
‘Who’s your mother?’ she asks.
‘Margret Read,’ says I.
And she sighs and starts shoofing me out with her hands, shoofing like we might the dim sort of animals that go where you herd them, sheep or milk cows. Yet her flapping hands command, shoof, shoof, shoof, and I find myself walking backwards, and since I don’t bump into him, Jim too.
‘I must speak to her!’ I protest, walking backwards all the time, and she carries on flapping her hands.
When finally she has backed us both onto the step she says,
‘There is no talk of mothers in this house. We are not mothers and we don’t have children here. And Margret is busy at this present time.’
I note her words have become very stiff and precise, as though accidentally over-starched.
‘However,’ she continues, ‘should you choose to wait round the back, near the two privies there, I will send her out to speak to you when she is done.’
I look to Jim, who is beaming with curiosity.
‘Round the back,’ she says, closing the door.
‘Come on then,’ says Jim, taking my arm, ‘let’s go round the back,’ but I halt like a horse that’s spooked.
‘Not you,’ I say. ‘There’ll be no privacy there. I don’t want you hearing —’
‘No privacy at the privies?’ he smiles, but he drops my arm and says, ‘Of course, you must go alone. I’ll wait here, shall I? You haven’t got a few shillings on you, have you?’
‘No,’ I say, though I do. I don’t want him spending them there. So I leave him on the step, and there he is some time later when I return to him, chewing on a piece of liquorice that came from goodness knows where.
In the between time, waiting by a necessary house for my mother seems more fitting the longer I do it, and by the time I hear footsteps I am considering it the very best place for meeting a parent who has so often caused me discomfort, thoughts of whom I have so often wished to bury. Yet when I see her I have an immediate hope that she will be glad of it That her face will light differently on mine than the last time we spoke. That she will have come belatedly to those feelings for their children that mothers are traditionally believed to feel.
‘Oh,’ she says, as she comes around the back of the privy and finds me there, ‘it’s you.’
There is enough light from the newly risen moon to bathe both our faces in their disappointment.
‘Do you have another grown child that would call you mother?’ I ask.
And I see then she held out some strange hope of it being you.
‘I did not expect you,’ she says. ‘That you would’ — she hesitates and turns her face away and back again — ‘that you would call.’
‘You thought it more likely that my missing brother would find you than that I would travel a mile across London to do so?’
She looks shamefaced.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘it is not the past that I am here to dredge. It is the present that needs dealing with. If you do not wish me to be thrown out of my position, you will need to advise me.’
I surprise myself with the tone of my voice: the grown up and business-like manner of speaking I suddenly have with her, as though I am the mother and she the child. I do not know whether it is my being treated for two years as a gentleman, and the schooling of Mister Rotard, or whether it is due to my being a liveried Footboy and she being a whore. Perhaps it is simply my contempt for her, which has grown as my body has grown. Imagining this meeting I had thought I would shrink in her presence and become the child she so easily beat and cowed. But now I find I have better words than she does, and great strength in the wrongs she has done me, that hold me calm and metalled in front of her, my whole face a kind of armour, as I explain what I need to know: how to manage my monthly bleeding without discovery.
She is the right person to ask, not only because she is invested in being rid of me, but because women of her profession have developed many useful deceits, especially when it comes to womanly bleeding, which is deemed so poisonous to male flesh that men would not be customers for one week a month if they knew of it. She is clearly grateful that it is this rather than any other thing that I am asking her. Perhaps she dreaded I would ask her to be my mother again, give me shelter, provide for me in some way. Her gratitude spills out in several bundles of practically delivered information. Clouts, she says, being bulky and troublesome, are sometimes discarded for another arrangement: sponges, which can be cut into the sizes of small fists and stuffed where necessary.
I do not immediately understand what is to be done with these pieces of sponge until she mimes what she means in so unfortunate a movement that I hope no grown child ever has to see their mother do such a thing in the rest of history. She has, in her new profession, forgotten any degree of decorum she once pretended to adopt, and she does not even register the horror on my face as she continues, telling me that it is easy enough to rinse them out, and dry them, and far less conspicuous than a line of clouts.
All the time she is not quite looking me in the eye, and is from time to time tugging down the ends of her sleeves to cover wrists that look discoloured, blotchy and dark.
When I have asked all I know how to ask and our conversation is concluded, she requests that I do not seek her out again. And though I hardly needed her reason, she feels compelled to supply one.
‘It is painful to me,’ she says.
‘On what basis?’
‘To be so estranged from you. To not know you.’
‘If that were true,’ I say, ‘then you would surely wish to see more of me, so that you might come to know me.’
She looks to the end of the alley, and back again, and then up to the sky and down to the ground, so that it’s clear she’s doing anything other than put her eyes on me.
‘You look like him,’ she says. ‘Your brother.’
For a moment, she stares into me as though I were a hole in the ground. As she turns to go I catch sight of her cheek: a pale bruise under the eye. I stand in the alleyway until her steps have reached the back door and bolted it shut.
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oh those eyeballs! and French crossness! Love it and the characters are so alive and (mostly) so likeable but what an exchange between mother and child, sad, emotional and yet a positive outcome after all - layers of emotion. So enjoying this.