Quincunx

  As I looked at the shocked faces around me — except for Dick’s which wore a reflective expression — I felt a profound sense of excitement mingled with feelings of dismay, for if this was right, then everything was arbitrary and uncertain.

  “I cannot stay any longer to hear such abominable ideas,” Miss Quilliam said, rising to her feet.

  “Dear lady, I will accompany you,” Mr Silverlight said with a reproachful glance at his friend. “I have something I wish to say to you and Mrs Mellamphy.”

  When they had gone, and Mr Pentecost and I had retired to his tent, I said: “But if you believe that self-interest is the ruling principle of human affairs …”

  Then I paused, not knowing how to express my point delicately.

  “How have I done so badly for myself?” Mr Pentecost said. “Well, people don’t always manage to live by their principles, I’m afraid. I was a sad disappointment to my family in this respect. They were in trade and when they realized how unfit I was to inherit my father’s connexion, he took a very high-minded step and disinherited me — as he was quite right to do, for I would only have lost the money. I have always lost any money I ever had.”

  “Do you mean you have been unlucky like Mr Silverlight?”

  “Gracious me, have I taught you nothing? There is no such thing as luck. I brought my woes upon myself by once foolishly acting against my principles. As a consequence, I am being sought by creditors, though I have nothing to give them. Fortunately they do not know where I am.”

  He had acted against his principles. I was afraid to think what he might mean, but, needing to get away, I left him a few minutes later. I returned to our own room feeling, as always when I entered it from the Peachments, that it was much gloomier than the other which was always full of people and life.

  Now I found Mr Silverlight saying to my mother and Miss Quilliam: “Dear ladies, some friends of mine and of Pentecost — excellent people though simple, very simple — are holding a … well, an assembly or rout or what you will, a week tomorrow night. It would be a privilege to be permitted to escort you there.”

  I saw my mother blush with pleasure.

  “Thank you,” Miss Quilliam replied gravely. “We would be honoured, would we not, Mary?”

  “Yes,” my mother cried. “I haven’t been to anything like that for simply ages.” Then she frowned: “Oh, but Helen, only think: we have nothing to wear!”

  Miss Quilliam glanced at Mr Silverlight who smiled very charmingly and said: “Set your minds at rest. The elegant and unaffected apparel in which I see you now will be perfectly in order.”

  This remark did not achieve its aim, for when he had gone my mother was full of the great question of what to wear and how to appear at her best.

  “Do you think, Helen,” she said after a reflective pause, “we might meet someone there … I mean, some gentlefolks who will appreciate us for what we are and take pity on us and help us to take up our rightful position in society?”

  Seeing that Miss Quilliam was at a loss for a reply, I asked: “Am I to come, Mamma? What shall I wear?”

  “Why, Johnnie, I think you’re too young to go to a ball. And besides, you haven’t been invited, you know.”

  The great day announced by Mr Silverlight came at last and my mother and Miss Quilliam finished work early and spent a couple of hours dressing each other’s hair and helping each other with their clothes. By nine o’clock, when there was a knock at the door, they really did look very handsome and lady-like. When Mr Silverlight and his friend entered, the two ladies — both of whom were now offended with Mr Pentecost — managed to greet him with a display of goodwill. The two gentlemen, too, looked quite elegant — particularly Mr Silverlight who had clearly taken even more trouble than usual with his toilette.

  “It’s such a fine night,” that gentleman said with a smile, “that I thought we might walk, if you were agreeable.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr Pentecost, smiling at Miss Quilliam and my mother; “it’s really no distance at all.”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “Let us by all means leave the carriage at home.”

  Mr Silverlight laughed as if she had said something rather clever.

  And so, the ladies holding their dresses above the mud of the unpaved way, we set off — for I had prevailed upon my mother to permit me to come. With the aid of Mr Pentecost’s lanthorn, we went a little way along Orchard-street and turned up a dark alley into New-square. This mis-named place was no more than a court of low dwellings, work-shops and store-houses thrown up a few decades before in the back-gardens of the former fine mansions of Orchard-street. From somewhere in a corner of the dark yard in which we found ourselves, we heard the scrape of fiddles, the lilting of cornets and fifes, and the drone of pipes, all punctuated by the crash of dancing feet. We went up to one of the low door-ways and as we stood at the threshold, my mother turned to Miss Quilliam in dismay. Before us we could see a large chamber — really a kind of rotting outhouse — which was blazing with the glare of rushlights secured to the bare walls which were splashed with lime where the plaister still clung to the decaying bricks. There was a swirling mass of bodies and shadows, for people were dancing in couples or in groups on the earthen floor, while others were drinking from great pewter cans and singing.

  “But this isn’t …” said my mother and faltered.

  I could see how disappointed she was and it made me angry with her.

  “Come, dear ladies,” said Mr Silverlight, advancing into the building.

  We walked a little way in and were assailed by a strong smell of mould and rotting wood mingling with the acrid stench of the burning rushes and the odour of heated human beings crowding together, and tobacco and drink.

  “I can’t stay here!” my mother gasped. “Not with these people.”

  “My dear lady, I don’t know quite what you anticipated,” said Mr Silverlight. “Our good hosts are poor unhappy exiles of Erin — our sad sister-island — and therefore somewhat rough and ready in their ways, but perfectly respectable in their own manner, I promise you.”

  “Let us leave, Helen,” my mother whispered.

  At that moment a man came forward: “Why, bless your Worships’ honour. We’re glad to see you at the jig. And so would Thady be for he loved a ranty.”

  “Thady?” Miss Quilliam repeated. “Is this your friend who is our host, Mr Silverlight?”

  “Sure and Thady isn’t the host,” the Irishman went on. “This is for him. We are waking poor Thady.”

  “Waking him!” cried Miss Quilliam. “Why, can he be asleep in all this noise?”

  The man laughed: “Asleep, do you say? Acushla machree! But will you see him?”

  Without waiting for our response he turned and we all followed him to a corner of the shed where there was a straw palliasse with a candle in a silver-gilt candle-stick at the head and the foot. An old woman wrapped in a dark and ragged cloak was squatting on the floor at the head. As I looked at the body, I recognised Thady as a neighbour of ours.

  Saying something to the crone in their own language, the man poured some liquid from a jug into a tumbler which he then held out to her, and then did the same for my mother and Miss Quilliam.

  “It comes to this in the end,” he said. “So we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

  My mother seized the tumbler and drank it down. Then she flung it aside and plunged forward into the mass of dancers and Mr Silverlight hurried after her. I watched as they began to waltz, whirling in and out amongst the others.

  As I listened to the wild lilting of the fiddles playing reels and the moaning of the bagpipes and screeching of the fifes, all counterpointed against the stamping feet, it occurred to me that we might have been in a cabin in the far west of Ireland.

  My mother was still dancing with Mr Silverlight and as they passed me I saw her smiling at him and reflected that this was the first time for a long period that I had seen her happy — though I could not have known that it would also be the
last. Seeing her partner smile back at her as he held her I wasn’t sure that I really liked Mr Silverlight after all.

  Now Mr Pentecost held Miss Quilliam rather stiffly and they sedately picked their way through the couples and the lines of men linking arms and dancing in rings in the Hibernian fashion. As I sipped my beer by the wall I wondered if I was alone in feeling that the gaiety on display bore a desperate air, as if for everyone there the pleasure in the moment was overshadowed by fear of what lay ahead now that the winter was approaching.

  The rushlights casting long shadows on the filthy walls as the dancers swirled were beginning to assume strange forms when I heard a voice saying: “Come, it’s time you were in bed, young fellow.”

  Mr Pentecost took my arm and hurried me back to our house, almost carrying me upstairs and into our room. He gently laid me on my bed and I quickly fell asleep so that I never knew when my mother and Miss Quilliam returned. I did not ask them the next morning for they were both pale and tired and my mother complained of a head-ache.

  My fears were vindicated, for this turned out to have been the last happy moment before the long slide into disaster brought about by the imminence of winter and the consequent slackening in trade. This meant that Mr Peachment was able to give my mother and Miss Quilliam less and less work. They tried various other expedients to keep themselves profitably employed — pin-making, button-manufacture, lappel-sewing — but with little success. There were so many people prepared and able to work even longer hours than they could and for even less remuneration, that they could not compete. And so by the beginning of October our plight was desperate.

  By now the three of us were making about five shillings a week in total and even this was decreasing. The rent was three shillings and the landlord’s deputy allowed no arrears, so that the first Saturday we were unable to pay we would find ourselves homeless from the following Monday. We were only able to survive on Miss Quilliam’s slender savings which she insisted on sharing with us, and it was clear that unless trade picked up substantially, we would soon be destitute. Moreover, as the winter approached our expenses would increase considerably for we would need to burn both coal and tallow-candles in order to be able to work for longer hours. Moreover, neither my mother nor I had any winter clothes. In the light of this, it seemed to me that the time had come to sell the locket.

  So one evening in the middle of October when Miss Quilliam was next door with the Peachments and my mother was still sewing by the little light that remained, I raised the question.

  “Mamma, we cannot continue to live on Miss Quilliam’s money.”

  She looked at me in alarm: “What can we do?”

  “We must sell the locket.”

  She gasped and reached for it where it hung: “I knew you were going to say that. I don’t think I could bear to lose it.”

  “But we have no choice.”

  “It is the only thing I have left to remind me of that brief time when I was happy.”

  Tired, cold and hungry as I was after a day on the streets, I felt a surge of irritation: “But only be reasonable. How else are we going to eat and stay warm?”

  She seemed to be finding the courage to say something: “Johnnie, I’ve been thinking. Now please don’t be angry with me, but why don’t we offer to sell the codicil to Sir Perceval after all?”

  I thought of what I had learned about the law from the two gentlemen and the understanding I had begun to acquire of how my family’s claim might be valid.

  “No,” I said. “That would be very silly. I’m sure it’s worth a great deal more than they would ever give us for it.”

  “We should never have left Bethnal-green,” she sighed.

  I was suddenly angry and wanted to blurt out the horrible truth about the Isbisters.

  “Those people may not have been very charming,” she went on. “But they were good to us.”

  “Then go back there!” I cried.

  Now, in exasperation, I told her what I had seen that night I had followed the cart to the graveyard. To my annoyance she refused to believe me, telling me I was merely remembering the story of Syed Naomaun and his wife that had frightened me all those years ago. I was furious at this and we quarrelled fiercely.

  Afterwards I reproached myself and asked her pardon, and at last she forgave me and kissed me and said she was sorry for being such a goose but that the idea of losing the locket was almost more than she could bear.

  Then I said: “Well, would you agree to pawn it? We would have to keep up the interest payments or we would lose it, but if we got some money we could redeem it.”

  She reflected.

  “Yes, I believe I could resign myself to that,” she said at last. “We will ask Helen’s advice when she comes in.”

  Miss Quilliam agreed that my idea was a reasonable one. We would raise less by pawning than by selling but on the other hand, if we could redeem it in the spring when our earnings should rise, it would be a useful form of security for the future.

  So the next morning my mother and I went out into the surrounding streets to look for the sign of the three golden balls. At the first we came to, on the corner of Orchard-street and Dean-street, we followed a pointing hand that led up an alley-way to a back-door. Inside we found ourselves in a dark passage at the end of which were a number of wooden boxes. We entered one of them, bolted it on the inside, and waited at the counter while the taker dealt with someone in a neighbouring box. On the racking behind the counter were shelved the pledges: jewellery, watches, pelisses, bed-ticks, wrappers, duffles, Waterloo medals, and so on.

  After a few minutes the man attended to us.

  “What will you give me on this?” my mother asked, taking the locket from around her neck.

  The taker took it and looked at it very closely: “One pound ten shillings,” he answered.

  She hesitated but I remembered that Mrs Philliber had said we should not take less than three pounds for it, so I led her out of the office and impressed upon her that this was the very least she should accept. We walked on and the next, in Princes-street, offered us two pounds, then the next only one pound and six shillings.

  In the fourth, which was a little further up on the corner with Bennet-street, the man behind the counter looked at the locket without much interest. He had a squint and carried one shoulder higher than the other so that his chin was forced into his collar-bone at an angle.

  “One pound and five shillings,” he said.

  My mother shook her head. Then he opened the locket and it seemed to me that he was suddenly interested. He examined the initials with particular attention, then studied the two miniatures, glancing at my mother to compare her with her painted likeness.

  “I’ll give you two pound on it,” he said.

  My mother declined and turned to go.

  “Wait,” he called out. “What do you want?”

  “Three pounds.”

  “I can’t go so far, but I’ll give you two pounds fifteen shillings.”

  My mother hesitated.

  “Two pounds seventeen shillings,” he said.

  “Very well,” my mother said.

  “Don’t do it,” I whispered.

  “What a silly boy you are,” she said. “Whyever not?”

  I could say nothing, except that I had vague suspicions. So I stayed silent.

  “What name shall I write on the duplicate?” the man asked.

  My mother hesitated.

  “Halfmoon,” she said. “Mrs Halfmoon.”

  I looked at her in surprise. Why had she chosen such a strange name? We had once walked down a street whose sign bore that legend, but what had made it lodge in her memory?

  “Interest payable monthly,” the man said as he handed the duplicate over.

  She took it and the money and put them in her outside pocket, and we left the shop. When we got home we paid Miss Quilliam back some of what we had borrowed over the last few months.

  Later we exchanged our fine clothes for
cheaper but warmer garments. This was a crucial step for, as Miss Quilliam pointed out, it would henceforth be impossible for my mother to appear as a lady in the cheap and ill-fitting garments she now wore.

  That terrible winter of bitter memory was now approaching, and as the days grew darker and colder we found it more and more difficult to work. When I went down to the yard in the morning, there were often people slumbering on the stair who had taken shelter there from the cold. I had to break the ice in the leaden cistern before I could bring up the water for our tea, and by this time my mother and Miss Quilliam would be working by the light of dips so that the stench of tallow already filled the room. Although we encouraged each other with the thought of Christmas, it was not that we anticipated being able to mark it with any kind of celebration, but simply that we hoped that the Season would begin not long after that and therefore that the demand for all manner of clothes-making would increase.

  My mother’s cough grew worse and I would often lie in the cold and darkness resenting the way she was keeping me awake and yet feeling a terrible anguish for her. We all suffered from the low-fever and my mother, in particular, from night-sweats and bad dreams that brought her suddenly awake and crying out in terror.

  Yet there were times even then that I remember with some tenderness. I recall one misty afternoon late in November when I had met the two gentlemen — who had also abandoned work early because of the weather — and we had walked home together. As we had passed the Abbey it had loomed up vast and black, the mist making it seem that there was nothing behind it. In the distance the houses — save for the occasional yellow flickering of a lighted window — were indistinguishable blocks of darkness whose chimneys and gables alone were visible against the lighter shades of the sky. And higher up the blue vault became a liverish purple where the sun still shone feebly on the top of the mist.

  Mr Pentecost and Mr Silverlight had invited me to share their supper and as we were finishing it Miss Quilliam had come in saying, “There you are, Johnnie. I thought you might be here.”