A Possible Life (14 page)

The doctor in charge was able to see us for a few minutes. This was a tall man with a beard, not the one we’d seen before. He said something like, ‘The nervous system is still a mystery to us, Mr Webb, but we are making some progress. Gentlemen in Paris using the method of …’

I didn’t take it in. Nancy told me afterwards that what it boiled down to was they wouldn’t have a clue till she died. Then they’d look at her brain and they’d see a little spot or something that told them what illness she’d had.

‘What sort of medicine is that?’ I asked. ‘That waits till you’re
a
goner before it can find out what the matter is? She’s only thirty-two.’

Ma Smith said at least she’d be fed properly and there was no denying that. Also Alice was not half as bad as some of the poor wretches in there, people dribbling and shaking and thrashing their heads up and down, moaning and soiling themselves. You could tell that some of them had once been something. The nurse said there was a gentleman downstairs who’d been a doctor himself and at least two were clergymen.

Nancy and I went to see Alice every week to start with but she seemed to get worse. After a year or so there didn’t seem much point in going. She stared straight ahead of her and she dribbled. Her lovely yellow hair was going dry and grey. She couldn’t even take herself to the privy any more, the nurse told me, and they put her into bed most of the time. I don’t think she knew who me and Nancy were.

It was hard for us to go and see this person, who looked like Alice, who looked like the little girl I’d seen in the Union in her white cap, but wasn’t Alice any more. She was someone else. So we stopped going to see her so much, it was more like once a month and then every two or three months and eventually just at Christmas and once in the summer.

Back in Crow Street things were going along pretty well, you could say. That man Worthington who was the rent collector had a small line going himself and he asked if I could put some money into a house he was going to buy and then repair to let out. He’d got most of the money he needed from the bank. It was a weaver’s house in Bethnal Green which had one big room on each floor. Over the years they’d put up partitions and there was now six families in it, two on each floor and one of them still let out space to a weaver to put up his loom. It was horrible. It was infested with all sorts of vermin, not just flies and
lice
and that which everyone had, but rats too. Worthington had got a deal off the owner who was fed up with it because they could never collect the rent that was owing. The idea was to knock out the partitions, fumigate the thing and then repair it.

You need a bit of go, a bit of spark. There was nothing me and Worthington did that others couldn’t have done just as well if they hadn’t been all day in the Turk’s Head. One of the ladder men who worked for me had a nasty little terrier. I give him an extra shilling in his pay to lend me the dog and that saw off the rats. I got Arthur in with a sledgehammer and that took down the partitions. Arthur was living rent-free in Crow Street so he owed me a favour. Him and a bill-sticker with a nice steady hand did the painting. We did have to pay a proper joiner to replace the banister and do a fair bit of work about the place, but that and the roof repair was the only big expense.

I don’t know what happened to the families we kicked out but they all owed months in rent anyway. Worthington was good at finding decent families to go into the three floors and he got them all to pay ten weeks’ rent in advance. With the income we were paying back the interest and some of the loan to the bank and keeping a small profit.

It was an awful slow process. I was running the bill-sticking business and that was making enough for all of us in Crow Street so long as everyone else did their little bits. But it was stuck where it was and it was very small money really. So when Worthington come up with another house I jumped right in with him.

In five years we had four houses up and running. I put Arthur to run the bill-sticking and I became a landlord. I was the man they all hated. The costermongers, the catsmeat men, the coffee-stall owners, the prostitutes and their bullies, the dossers, the drunk old teachers and all the others. I was the enemy to them. Not that many of them could afford the rents that me and Worthington
could
ask for these houses once we’d done them up. I’ll own that we did put some of them people on the street. And the new houses that the charities were building, the tenements and that, they couldn’t afford them neither. That was the funny thing about housing for the poor – the poor could never afford it.

In all of this Nancy was my helper and my companion. She and Alice was only half-sisters. Both the fathers had disappeared at the first sign of trouble which was what had led old Ma Smith into the Union. They were different creatures. Nancy was thin and dark. People who didn’t like her said she was sly, but she wasn’t. She was the daughter of a pauper with an older half-sister, no money and brought up in a workhouse. She had nothing except her wits to live on. She learned to be quiet, we all did in that place. But she could read and write and she was quick with things – like with the doctor at the Incurables she understood better than me what he was saying. She was good at being in the right place at the right time and she was good at not being there when you didn’t want her. She had a big barking laugh on her too. You didn’t hear it that often but when something tickled her or when she’d had a drink, you’d wait to hear her and it was like the donkey on Clapham Common. ‘Penny a ride, boys,’ her mother used to say.

She looked after my girls, Liza and May, like they was her own and they loved her like their own mother, though they called her Nance. When her mother was too run-down to shift for herself, Nancy looked after her too. In the evening Nancy cooked supper for everyone who was there which might be all of us and my father and Arthur too. She didn’t have a temper like Alice. I wouldn’t say she was all sweetness, Nancy, but she never complained and she had a smile in her big brown eyes that could set the room on fire.

The first time she came into my bed I had a feeling it was wrong. Alice had been gone four years and they said she was never coming back, but even so. I looked at Nancy standing naked in the firelight.
We
knew what was going to happen. It was Saturday and I’d been drinking all evening in the Turk’s Head. There was a lovely clean smell to her hair when she put her head on my chest. She told me she’d never been with a man before but she’d waited long enough. She took my hand and put it down there and it was lovely. She held on to me all night like a monkey on a branch. I couldn’t get enough, it was awful, I felt like a savage.

A couple of years later – just when I got my fourth house with Worthington – Nancy had a baby boy and we called him Dick.

We still used to go and see Alice in the Incurables twice a year, but we never told her about Dick, not that she would have understood.

When Liza was nineteen she married a dairyman who had a cottage in Camden Town. May was sixteen and Dick was just four and they came to the wedding in the same church in Mare Street where me and Alice were married. Nancy bought a new dress and looked beautiful. Although she drank a bit on a Saturday, she had been a good and faithful wife or like a wife to me.

The days went by. It must have been five years after Liza was married I had a letter and I could see from the envelope that it was from the Incurables.

I said, ‘Prepare yourself for bad news, Nance.’

I began to read and pretty soon I found my legs wouldn’t take my weight so I sat down at the table. It was from a Dr Charwell. I got it still in front of me as I write these words.

Dear Mr Webb,

I am writing to inform of a change in the condition of your wife,
Alice Webb
(date of birth unknown, circa
1852
), who became a patient at this hospital almost fifteen years ago. About six months
ago
, as you know from your last visit, she began to attempt speech. Following exercises with the nursing staff, she has regained the powers of communication. She recently reported the return of sensation to her lower limbs. Despite atrophy of the femoral muscles, she has regained the ability to walk. A few weeks ago, her improved co-ordination and dexterity meant that she became able to feed, clean and clothe herself.

It has long been our belief that her particular symptoms were the result of a localised trauma rather than of a degenerative paralysis. Such recoveries are comparatively rare but by no means unprecedented. I have no doubt that the diligent nursing and medical treatment she has received while under our care have contributed significantly to this happy turn of events.

Following a final examination by Professor Elliot, the visiting neurological consultant, we expect to discharge
Alice Webb
from our care on September 12th. We trust you will be able to make arrangements for her journey home.

A week later, I had a letter from Alice herself.

Dear Billybones, I know the doctors have wrote you about me. It is a miracle. They have give me back my life. I can hardly wait to see you and our dear little girls again. Thank you and Nancy for coming to see me in the hospital. I have missed you all so dearly and am longing to be back in our house again. Ever your loving Alice.

‘What the devil are we going to do?’ I said.

Nancy was crying. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘After all these years. What’s she going to be like?’

I didn’t know. I thought perhaps in her own mind she didn’t know that nearly fifteen years had gone past. I thought perhaps she thought she was still a young woman and that Liza and May were little girls. She’d been as good as dead and you can’t be that poorly
and
just come out the same as what you was before. There must be some change, some damage in her head. That’s what I told Nancy.

‘And what do we say about you and me?’ she said. ‘And about Dick? We can’t hide the boy.’

I didn’t know what to say. Dick was at the Board school and was going along well enough but I thought it wouldn’t harm him to go away for a bit. So I got Worthington to give him a room in one of his houses. He was only nine but it wasn’t like I was sending him to the workhouse. There was an old lady there who’d look after him and I’d pay his keep. Then I told May that when her mother come home she wasn’t to say nothing about Dick.

What I was really thinking was that we’d wait and see what Alice was like and then we could decide.

Well, we got the house ready. We had the whole of the top floor at this time and May put flowers on the table and Nancy cleaned everything up nice while I was out at work. I didn’t write and tell Liza anything yet. She was expecting a baby herself and I thought it was best to leave her alone.

The day came and I set off in the omnibus for Putney with a heavy heart. I had to go into the office on the ground floor and talk to the Matron who made me sign some papers for her discharge. This time I could sign my name well enough.

Then I stood in the hallway on the cold stone and waited for my wife to come back to me. I looked up and saw her walk round the turn of the stone steps. She was wearing a black dress they must have given her and her hair was pinned up on top of her head. She was holding the rail as she came down and although she moved slowly she seemed able to manage fine.

When she saw me, her face lit up and she hurried the last few steps and threw herself into my arms. She clung on to me crying for a long time. When she lifted up her face to me there were tears all down it and it was swollen red.

‘Oh, Billy, I can’t believe it. I’m so happy, I can’t tell you.’

‘Come on then,’ I said. ‘We’d best be getting back.’

Alice wanted to say goodbye to the nurses and there were lots more tears before I got her out of there and on to the omnibus going down West Hill towards Wandsworth. She sat holding my hand and staring out at the streets and all the people in them. Sometimes she turned back to look at me and her face was all shining like a child’s, like she couldn’t believe her good fortune.

‘There’s been some changes at home,’ I said, as the omnibus was getting towards Battersea Bridge. ‘Liza got married. A dairyman called Roberts. They got a nice little cottage up in Camden Town. And she’s expecting.’

This knocked her back but not in the way I expected. I thought she might think Liza was still only three or four years old but she was just surprised we hadn’t told her.

‘Well, you couldn’t take it in, could you?’ I said.

‘I took in most things all right,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. But I thought of the times Nancy and me had been to see her and talked to one another in front of her and it made me feel uneasy.

When we got back to Crow Street, Alice walked in as though she’d never been away. I mean, she said how much better the house looked and how well me and Arthur had painted it and that, she said nice things about it – but then she went up to the top floor and settled down in the chair she used to sit in before.

We had a big supper that night with a shoulder of mutton and boiled potatoes and a steamed pudding and there was beer and wine to drink. We put Alice at the top of the table with her mother and her half-sister on either side of her. My father sat down with us, but he didn’t seem to know what was going on. Afterwards old Stevens came up from his ground-floor room to take a glass of wine.

I looked at all these people flushed and talking away in the light
of
the candles and the single gas jet and I wondered what I was going to do.

Alice was back like she’d never been gone. She looked much older, all grey-haired and quite frail, but she didn’t seem to think that anything was changed at all. But to me she was dead. I was looking at a ghost.

That night I showed her a little bed in the back room we’d had made up special. She looked surprised.

‘Can’t I curl up with you, Billyboy? It’s been a long time.’

‘I know. I need a bit of time to … to get used to it.’

She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Didn’t you miss me?’