‘Oh,’ Cathy said, and for the first time allowed herself the merest bitterness, ‘Daniel’s a good boy. He’ll do what his father says. They’re to send him to Derby. Their cousins own a mill.’
For a moment Mrs Albemarle was silent. Then, reaching across the table as if to take Cathy’s hand, she said, ‘Catherine, understand that, what we do here, we do for the very best. Your baby will rise from the shame of its beginnings and find a new, better life.’
The way Mrs Albemarle was smiling returned the nausea to Cathy’s stomach. She was too late to excuse herself; in Mrs Albemarle’s office, the smell would linger for days.
Her mother barely said a word as they waited for the omnibus home. Shame had compounded yet more shame (the stains on Cathy’s dress didn’t help), and perhaps she would have taken a different seat altogether if only the vehicle hadn’t been so crowded.
Back in Leigh, where the smell of seaweed cast up on the estuary sands stirred such vivid recollections, Cathy followed her mother through the door. Caught in a whirlwind of memory and scent, she took off her shoes and ventured further in. How many times had she come through that same door, laden down with shopping and heaving on her mother’s hand? How many times had she scurried in unbridled excitement along this hall, having spied her father tramping home from work? And now, there he was, eating his dinner of pork and beans, steadfastly refusing to look up as Cathy hovered at the dining-room door.
‘Upstairs,’ said Cathy’s mother. She had already closed the door, and the last thing Cathy saw was her father studying the marbling of marrow from a bone on his plate. He still hadn’t looked up.
An onlooker might have thought pregnancy was catching, that if she stayed around a second longer, Cathy’s sister – now locked in that room with their father – might suddenly issue forth some progeny of her own. Wordlessly, Cathy followed her mother upstairs. In the bedroom that she shared with Lizzy, the shelves had been denuded of her books. The toy chest and doll’s house were both gone, and the rabbit figurines that ordinarily lined up so prettily on the window ledge had been spirited away.
‘Don’t start with me, Catherine. It was your father’s decision, but I’ll brook no nonsense from you. If you’re old enough to be a mother, you’re not a little girl any more.’
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
She felt sick after she said it, but at least that complemented the nausea already bubbling in her gut. It was a pointless gesture anyway; the words did not penetrate her mother’s resolve. Instead, she began to reel off a list of instructions: Catherine was no longer to go beyond the front door – a letter would be sent to her schoolmistress instructing that she had taken work – and into the back garden only with the express permission of her mother; Catherine was to dress only in clothes that might hide her swelling stomach. ‘It’s only for three months,’ her mother concluded. ‘Then you can go where you need to go and come back to us afresh, our own little girl.’
After she had gone, Cathy took in the room. How big it looked, emptied of all the tokens of her childhood. She tried to make herself comfortable on the bed, but conversely it seemed too small; too small for two, at any rate. She was still lying there, curled up like a question mark, when the door opened again. Expecting her mother, Cathy turned against the wall, but in the corner of her eye she saw Lizzy sidling through.
Lizzy was the taller of the two. Her hair was blond where Cathy’s was dark, but they had the same grey eyes, the same high cheekbones. Common knowledge (the knowledge of the neighbours) held that Lizzy was the prettier, and she held herself that way too. Only once had she ever climbed a tree, and even then Cathy had to scramble up to help her down.
‘Cathy, it’s me. I—’
Cathy crumpled. She opened her arms and Lizzy dropped beside her on the bed, and then they were clinging to each other as they had done when they were small, waking together in the night to hear the sea making war against the coast.
For a time, neither said a thing; for Cathy, it was enough that she was here. There was a look on Lizzy’s face that might even have been excitement. Her eyes kept flitting to Cathy’s stomach, as if she might see a little face there, pressed up against the cotton of her blouse.
‘What does it … feel like? Does it feel special, Cathy?’
As a matter of fact, it did. It felt hot and righteous, like none of the scorn nor shame mattered, like nobody else on the planet had ever done it before. That was how special it felt. And yet all Cathy said was, ‘You shouldn’t be in here. Mother will explode if she knows.’
Chastened, Lizzy whispered, ‘I wanted to bring you this.’
She had produced a newspaper, a day-old copy of the local gazette their father trawled through each night. It would be something to while away the sleepless hours, Cathy supposed, that or something else to throw up into when the feeling next came. Yet, as she took it, she felt something hidden inside. She laid it on the bed and opened it up, and inside was the same dog-eared copy of Gulliver’s Travels that had sat, for so long, on the cabinet between their beds.
‘Do you remember it?’
Cathy clasped Lizzy’s hands.
‘Hide it. Take it with you when you go. Oh, we loved it so, Cathy! Maybe you’ll have a chance to read it to the little thing, before they …’
Lizzy could not bring herself to finish the sentence. Instead, she kissed Cathy full on the lips and vanished through the bedroom door.
After she was gone, Cathy picked up the book, smelled its pages; that scent was the scent of being five, six, seven years old. Funny how quickly it could transport her back there. For some time, she savoured old sentences, until finally the sweetness turned to bitterness and she buried it beneath her pillow.
She was drying her tears, the room coming back into focus, when she saw the newspaper lying on the bed. It had fallen open at the situations vacant. There she saw the calls for tinkers and joiners, for shipwrights and salesmen, all the usual fare that her father entertained and dismissed as a daily rite. She was still staring at those adverts when her eyes were drawn to a smudge of black on the opposite page. Between a notice for a removals firm and an advertisement for the bonfire celebrations to be held on the Point, another notice had been circled in ink.
~
Help Wanted
Are you lost? Are you afraid? Are you a child at heart?
So are we.
The Emporium opens with the first frost of winter.
Sales and stocktaking, no experience required. Bed and board
included.
Apply in person at London’s premier merchant of toys and
childhood paraphernalia
Papa Jack’s Emporium
Iron Duke Mews, London W1K
~
There was a different quality to the letters, something that made them appear to float an infinitesimally small level above the page. How her eyes had glanced over it before, she did not know.
Cathy ran her hand across her belly, pretending she could sense the tiny kicks that would one day come. Though she felt nothing, she could still imagine it – the he, the she, the unformed promise of days and years to come – tumbling in unrestrained delight within her. How could something so beautiful be the worst thing in all of the world?
Something drew her eyes back to the advert, refusing to let them go. Because an idea was blossoming inside her. An advert like that had to be circled for a reason. Certainly it had not been for her father. A message, then, from Lizzy to her sister, compelling her to run?
Yes, she thought, run.