The Town House

  ‘You daft owd besom,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know when you’re well off? If Martin got married his wife’d look round your greasy pans and show you the door.’

  ‘That wouldn’t matter to me, ‘I said, thinking of my legs and the way the swelling was creeping up. ‘I want to leave him with somebody before I die.’

  ‘I’m here, ain’t I?’

  ‘Fine help you are. You’d watch him work himself to death and never do a hand’s turn.’

  ‘You can’t say that. Didn’t I take Owd Muscovy and my whistle, and go round gathering the crowd and yelling my lungs out about the cheap smith work and stabling to be found at the Owd Vine?’

  ‘So you did. Three summers back. Just to get him more work than three men should’ve tackled!’

  There was no love lost between Pert Tom and me. For one thing, after that first night I never believed that he burnt himself trying to save Martin’s wife and children. I noticed next morning that the bear was burnt too; and it certainly hadn’t tried to save anybody. Tom said it to boast and be admired, and it had paid him well. It seems that he’d saved a bit of money, not a lot, but enough to start a business with, and he wanted somebody to start up with that was capable of earning him a comfortable living for the rest of his life. Martin was just the man. It amused me, though, to see that despite it being Pert Tom’s money, Martin all along had stayed top-dog, mainly on account of those black looks of his. Even while Martin was working from dawn to dusk in the Forge and Tom was just idling about, Tom was never master. And later, when Martin went into the wool trade and had smiths working for him in the Forge, and began to call himself with two names, Martin Reed, and was being called Master, the bear man stayed plain Pert Tom.

  Well, all I could do, having tried my hand at match-making and being acquainted with no other respectable young women, was to pray; and since by that time I couldn’t get to church, the best I could do was to steal into Pert Tom’s room now and again and painfully go down on my knees before the Virgin that he had there, calling her St. Ursula. I knew better; her cloak was true Mary blue, and she had the face of the Holy Mother. The bear was just there to show that even a savage beast could be tame in Her presence. At least, that is how I thought and believed while I was doing my praying that somehow or other Martin should find him a good steady wife and that he could be fond of. Later on, when I saw what we got I changed my mind, and I reckon Tom was right, that was St. Ursula and I’d annoyed her by calling her out of her name.

  We got to June again and Martin was riding about, buying up fleeces. He’d been away two days and nights and was coming home for supper. I’d got fowl on the spit, peas in the pot, fresh baked bread, and a dish of little strawberries I’d bought, from a hawker. Pert Tom was fidgeting about, wanting to begin, saying Martin had changed his mind and wouldn’t be back that night; and I said I wouldn’t cut the fowl and let the good juice run, just for him. It was well on into dusk and I’d lighted the candles when we heard the horse come in at the back and trot to the stable. Then we heard Martin, walking slowly.

  ‘He’s met with a mishap, or he’s ill,’ I said; and I shuffled over to the door and opened it just as he got there. He’d got his arm round what I thought was a child and was helping her along. They were both smeared with mud and dripping with water.

  ‘Oh, what is it? What happened?’ I asked, the foolish way you do when surprised.

  ‘Let’s get in,’ he said. I pushed a stool close to the fire and he set her down. Her long black hair reached to the edge of the stool and water, dripped from it to the hearthstone.

  ‘I’ll see to her,’ I said. ‘You go and put on some dry things. Tom, brighten the fire and mull some ale.’ It wasn’t a cold night, fortunately, but the girl’s teeth were chattering and Martin was all goose-pimples.

  I threw a blanket from my bed over the girl and stripped her, no hard task, she had on only a bodice and a skirt, such stuff and colours as no decent woman would wear. The bodice was made of red silk, frayed and worn web-thin in places; the skirt was all striped with different colours and had holes in it you could put your hand through. My work as mid-wife and layer-out made me knowledgeable about bodies, but I never, in all my time, saw a woman quite like this one. She was so thin, but not wasted thin, sinewy rather, square in the shoulder and narrow in the flank, more like a boy, and yet very dainty. And her legs, in proportion to her body were the longest I ever saw.

  I had a queer fancy, when I’d got her stripped and was rubbing her down, that this was the kind of body angels had perhaps, under the long robes, a body not tied down to any one sex.

  At the same time I had a great dislike for touching her. I couldn’t think why – for except for the river mud she was clean, cleaner than most folk I’ve had to handle. But she had the effect on me that mice have on some people, or cats, or harmless frogs. In the first instant, faced with a drenched woman I’d snatched the blanket from my bed, but once it had been over her, touching her here and there I knew I couldn’t sleep with it again until it had been washed and hung in the air several times. I put my second shift on her – I was so well provided for these days I had three, just like a bride, and my best dress I gave her, too, knowing that I should never like them again. Shoes I couldn’t lend her, mine were too big, and there was no need. I doubt if she’d ever worn shoes in her life; her feet were as hard as horn and so high arched she could have stood on a good-sized pullet’s egg without crushing it.

  Martin came back into the kitchen, dressed dry and with his hair standing on end where he had rubbed it.

  ‘All right now?’

  ‘I am – thanks to you – very well.’

  Her voice wasn’t like a woman’s, either; it was deep, like a low note on a fiddle, and she certainly wasn’t from our part of the country.

  Pert Tom poured out the hot, spicy-smelling ale and the girl took her cup without saying ‘Thank you,’ and sat hugging it to her chest and staring into the fire. Martin took his and sat at his own place at the table.

  ‘Well, what happened?’ Tom asked. ‘Why was you both so wet?’

  They seemed each to wait to let the other answer, and both spoke together when they did speak.

  ‘I fell…’ the girl began, just as Martin said,

  ‘I fished…’ He stopped and allowed her to finish.

  She lifted one long thin hand and laid it to her flat wet hair.

  ‘I am doing my hair, making the water my looking glass, and I fall in.’

  ‘And you fished her out?’ Tom said to Martin.

  ‘That’s so. Is supper ready?’

  ‘And waiting,’ I said. ‘Pull that stool in.’

  ‘You are inviting me?’

  ‘You’re welcome to your supper and a bed,’ Martin said.

  ‘Is very kind.’

  ‘Where did you fall in the water?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Some place,’ the girl said.

  ‘Flaxham St. Giles, by the mill,’ Martin put in.

  ‘Where’s your home?’

  She hunched her small square shoulders, ‘Anywhere. Everywhere. I am on the roads and I make my living… Oh!’ She dropped her knife and turned to Martin and said in the most heart-broken way, ‘My tambourine. I have lost my tambourine.’

  ‘Don’t fret about that. We’ll see about it in the morning. And if the worst comes to the worst we’ll get you a new one.’

  ‘Is very kind.’

  Pert Tom, who had travelled the roads himself, began to ask her questions about this person and that – a stilt-walker, a tumbler called Boneless, a man who swallowed knives. Sometimes she would say,

  ‘Yes, I know him,’ or ‘He was at York last summer,’ but when he pressed for details her answers were vague and unsatisfactory.

  ‘Mostly I am alone. It is better so,’ she said.

  ‘And if you’d just escaped drowning by a hair’s breadth, Tom, probably some things would slip your memory,’ Martin said.

  ‘Now somebody once towd me that when you drown
ed you see your whole life spread out like a picture. I allust wondered if that was true. Is it?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I do not know. I saw only a hawthorn tree. So pretty, green and white in the sun. I think to myself – Is Heaven, after all. Then here I am, being slapped in the face, very wet and cold. Sir,’ she turned to Martin, ‘I do not wish you to think me ungrateful, but I was … Oh well, it is over now.’

  When she said that Martin looked at her with a sudden, sharp interest, such a look as I’d never seen him turn on anyone, not even his Kate. You’d look that way, maybe, if you were in foreign parts across the sea and suddenly heard somebody speak in your own tongue.

  He stopped eating and seemed as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t; the habit of easy talk had gone from him in these last years.

  I thought over the words again, and couldn’t find anything in them. This was June, the hawthorns would be in flower, and most likely the last thing she saw when she fell in the water was just such a green and white tree. And if it wasn’t the words she said, it must have been her looks that suddenly made him come to life that way. So then I took another look at her.

  I know that men and women see things differently, and I know that I was already against her, but even so, she had no beauty, no prettiness. Her face was too thin, all mouth and eyes, and the eyes not set in right. Or at least it looked so. It looked as though her cheeks had been pushed up, leaving hollows where flesh should have been and a heap of flesh up under the eyes, shoving them out of shape. Her skin was all over alike, the colour of porridge. Her mouth, I grant, was as red as a berry. I looked at this face and I remembered what I’d seen of the almost breast-less, un-female body, and I shuddered as I sat there.

  Pert Tom, as soon as he had supped got up and went off for what he called his ‘last breath of air’. That meant Dummy’s daughter, not the crooked one, the younger, with the red hair, a very forward little wench, bound for a bad end.

  Martin sat on at the table, and again looked as though he was going to say something, and finally did.

  ‘Agnes will look after you. Good night,’ was what he got out. Then he went to his room and we two were left.

  I didn’t want her to help me clear the table. I knew that if she lifted the loaf and put it in the crock I should not want to eat another slice of it. I didn’t want her to touch anything; and that puzzled me, life had long ago knocked any fancifulness out of me. But there it was. I said,

  ‘The bed’s up there,’ and I pointed. ‘And the privy is outside, sharp to the left.’

  She went out and came in again and climbed the little ladder. I noticed that her toes curled round the staves, like fingers, and that seemed so unnatural that it gave me a shuddering grue once more. Her wet clothes lay on the floor, she’d never thought to hang them out to dry. I did that, because I didn’t want her to have the excuse for waiting for them in the morning. For a little while they smelt of wet stuff drying, and then they smelt of wild thyme. The scent reminded me of the sheep run at Horringer where I had lived as a girl.

  In the morning she came down and picked up her clothes and in a minute was down again, wearing them.

  ‘A comb,’ she said. ‘Could you lend me? That I lost too.’

  I had a comb, a good one, not a snaggy toothed wooden one, a fine bone comb that Martin had bought for me one day when a pedlar came to the door. I handed it to her unwillingly, thinking, Another thing spoilt, I shall never really like it again. She ran it through her hair which had dried out, black and glossy as a blackbird’s wing, but almost as flat as when it was wet. She didn’t plait it or knot it, just left it hanging and that, for some reason, annoyed me, as well as seeing her with my comb, so I said,

  ‘That skirt of yours isn’t decent. Why don’t you mend it?’

  ‘I cannot sew.’

  ‘Rubbish. Any woman with hands and eyes can sew. What can you do?’

  ‘I can play my tambourine. And I can cook a hedgehog.’

  ‘A hedgehog! That’s no meat for Christians.’

  She made no answer, but went and stood by the door, looking out at the morning. I stirred the porridge, set out the bread and drew the breakfast ale. Martin came in from the yard and stood by her in the doorway.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh yes. Is so long since I sleep in a bed.’

  He came in and stood by the board and I put the porridge bowl before him. He always took his breakfast standing. She stayed by the door. After a spoonful or two he said,

  ‘Have you had your breakfast?’

  She turned around and leaning against the door post laughed.

  ‘Once a day is for eating – with people like me.’ She smacked her flat stomach with her hand. ‘Get into bad habits and expect to be fed all the time. No!’

  Martin, whose very smile had grown into something painful, actually laughed.

  ‘One indulgence couldn’t hurt. Still, please yourself. Now, where do I look for this tambourine? Where exactly did you… fall into the water?’

  She squinted up her eyes so that they looked more misshapen than ever.

  ‘The name of the place? I do not know. There is a bridge.’

  ‘Stone or wood?’

  ‘Stone. Two arches.’

  ‘Up river from Flaxham. That’d be Marly?’

  ‘Perhaps. After the bridge is a place for dipping water and there is my tambourine.’

  I knew that on this day Martin had planned to go to Hedingham, and that was nowhere near Flaxham or Marly way. Wasting his time, I thought.

  ‘Most like it has been picked up by now,’ I said.

  ‘I do not think anybody will do that,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go and have a look. And if I can’t find it you shall have a new one.’

  ‘It belonged to my mother and I have just bought it new ribbons.’

  When he had gone I said to her,

  ‘Would it have hurt you to say “Thank you”? Here’s a busy man going out of his way, promising you new if he can’t find your old – and that is most unlikely. And you can’t even thank him!’

  The bulges under her eyes lifted, squeezing her eyes as she smiled.

  ‘You should know. You are a woman. If you thank a man he thinks you are in debt to him and so he looks for payment.’

  ‘Not him,’ I said. ‘He’s the kindest and best-hearted… This whole place is built up on his good heart, lame folks and daft ones and people in trouble or disgrace, people nobody else wanted.’ I thought of Dummy and Peg-Leg and Peter Priest, and a dozen more. Me too.

  She said, ‘People nobody else will want, they are very cheap.’

  Something in my head went ‘Snap’ like an over-blown bladder. The shocking part of it was that just for a second I thought – That is true! Just as he made that tidy little hut in Squatters Row, out of nothing, out of stuff other people would chuck away or overlook, so he’s made all this out of human rubbish. Even Pert Tom’s savings had been used, and Pert Tom so handled that he daren’t bring his baggage into the house.

  But that only lasted a second; it was like some of the things you see when you’re very drunk; they seem very real and you’re scared. Then they’re gone. And that was gone.

  I said, ‘I suppose you will have to wait to see if he finds your tambourine; and if you want to eat mid-day there’ll be food here, but I’d thank you to get out of my kitchen.’

  She went off and I began on my day’s work, which was preserving gooseberries. Our young bushes were in full fruit that year and some of Dummy’s children had gathered them and picked off the tops and tails. I scalded the jars and packed them in close, got the cloths soaking in the mutton fat for the covers, and more mutton fat melted to pour over. Then Pert Tom, who was a slug abed in the mornings, came ambling in for his breakfast.

  ‘Where’s Martin’s drowned cat?’ he asked.

  ‘Out. I’m busy. I didn’t want her hanging round me.’

  ‘I reckon you’d better get used to it. I?
??ve missed my mark if he don’t take up and marry her.’

  ‘Marry her. Rubbish!’ But another over-blown bladder had gone ‘Snap’ in my head.

  ‘You ask yerself. Take the way he looked at her, promised her a new tambourine if hers was lost – and him so mean he didn’t even hev a pair of gloves till you give him a pair for Christmas. You couldn’t’ve missed that. If you ask me, she’s cut to his measure, all skin and bone and grief, somebody to feel sorry for, just like his other one.’

  I dished him out the heated-up porridge.

  ‘You knew Kate, then?’

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘His wife.’

  ‘This porridge is burnt, tastes awful. Kate, was that her name? I saw her, yes. I saw her go into the hut – like I say, all skin and bone and grief. And now he’ve got hisself just such another, after waiting so long.’ He laughed and pushed his porringer away. ‘Still, maybe she can cook.

  ‘She can,’ I said tartly. ‘She can cook a hedgehog.’

  ‘A hedgehog? That ain’t Christian food,’ he said, exactly as I had done. ‘Thass real Romany.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Oh, foreign. Out of Pharaoh’s Egypt some say. There’s one or two on the roads, but decent people don’t hev nowt to do with them. They’re heathen. They don’t even lay together like other people, they do it cutting their thumbs and letting the blood mix.’

  ‘The tales you tell!’

  ‘I only pass on what I hear tell myself. And of course if she is Romany I shall miss my mark ‘cause she couldn’t marry him. They ain’t allowed to stay in one place more’n a moon month; if they do they die.’

  He finished his breakfast and went off, it being Wednesday, to idle away his time looking round the market and sitting in one ale-house after another, listening to and spreading gossip. He didn’t come in for dinner, nor did the girl, so I fed those men who were on wages-and-dinner terms, finished my gooseberries and sat down to rest myself before starting supper. I’d hardly set down before Pert Tom came in, full of ale and something else, I could see before he opened his mouth that he had a fine tit-bit to tell me.

  He looked round the kitchen and up in the loft.