The Petticoat Men (18 page)

In the end I think it was because although he had made money and strutted about like a gentleman and sat in the best seats in the theatre and hung about backstage with champagne, he wasn’t a proper gentleman, not really, and I think he felt more at home with me, it was probably as simple as that.

‘I own many houses,’ he said to me several times.

‘I’m glad for your sake, Mr Rowbottom, now please get out of my way.’

When he heard of our dire story he straightway came to me while I was trying to find someone we might stay with, and said he had two rooms empty in the Strand and we could have them now, they was furnished and ready.

‘Mr Rowbottom, go
away
, I cant pay any rent.’ I was frantic and I dismissed him like a fly.

‘Yes you can, Isabella,’ he said. And he grabbed at my arm and stared me straight in the face. ‘You can pay me. Later.’ And I stared back.

And that was that really.

Two rooms in the Strand.

Elijah Fortune who’d gone to the Parliament by now came to see Joe soon after that, knowing he was ill and we had been evicted. He knew the situation, Mr Rowbottom told everyone the situation, sort of rubbing his hands together, but never once did anyone we knew make me feel they judged me or blamed me when they came to visit Joe at the end.

Two rooms in the Strand.

Joe lived another miserable three months but at least we had a home. And we looked after him and used all our money for medicine and flowers and chicken to make soup he could still swallow and we loved him and talked to him about when he was better and loved him. When an – uninvited – churchman came and told us Joe was going to a better life and it was God’s will, Billy shouted, ‘We
had
a better life before, so God is rotten,’ and punched the churchman who threatened to sue for assault.

And after Joe died I paid Mr Rowbottom for the rooms.

In the way he expected, most nights, in the rooms in the Strand that he gave me ‘for free’ before he went home to his family. Mattie was so young still, and hardly ever saw him, fast asleep with her arms around a book before he would even arrive.

But Billy knew.

Drury Lane Theatre wanted me to return to work, but I wouldn’t go back there. I went to the Haymarket Theatre and I stayed for years. Finally Billy turned thirteen and his teacher found him the position as a messenger in the Parliament because Billy was so clever. I longed and longed to get away from Mr Rowbottom, I’d paid my debt over and over, and Billy and I found another room to rent, the three of us, in Bedford-street, and decided to keep Mattie longer at the school that she loved so much, till she was thirteen, and then I should be able to get her work sewing. I told Mr Rowbottom, thanked him for helping us when we needed it most but that we would be leaving now. Mr Rowbottom cried. He sat one night in one of the rooms in the Strand, the children asleep next door, with tears dripping down his face and off the end of his nose.

‘Stay with me, Isabella, and I’ll give you a house when I die.’

The words were almost ridiculous. No one in my family, or Joe’s family, had ever owned a house.

I thought how wonderful it would be, to be free of Mr Rowbottom. God, he might live to be a hundred years old. I might die first, we would surely manage now that Billy was working too. We could afford a room, nothing else could go wrong now.

Then I thought about how nearly we had sunk into the poverty of the city. Because nothing, ever, stays as you think it will.

‘Which house?’ I said.

He took me to 13 Wakefield-street, I saw it could be a lodging house with a bit of paint and polish.

‘Legally,’ I said. ‘To Billy and Mattie as well as me in case I die.’

He brought a lawyer to the Strand, and we both signed – but not until I’d had the contract checked over, clause by clause, with a very clever lawyer I knew from the Haymarket.

And I stayed with Mr Rowbottom. You might find me disgusting. That’s fine. It’s what many women do all the time. In their way. I think Lais the courtesan was killed mysteriously by jealous women but I’m not likely to die a mysterious death, I dont think anyone was jealous of me when Mr Rowbottom came beaming into the theatre at night to claim me and take me to the two rooms in the Strand.

Then God smiled. (I dont believe in God either, but still.) Mr Rowbottom died about a year after Billy started at the Parliament.

We got the house.

We own the house.

We are safe.

Or we were until Ernest and Freddie’s story intertwined with ours.

Billy. He’s a true, real scholar. He knows so much – of course he’s worth more than running around with messages from Honourable Members and writing down their every word – not that it isn’t a very good position mind, and so well paid, we know how lucky we are. But he could have done anything, Billy, if he’d just been born a bit upwards and known a few of the ‘right’ people that you have to know in this world.

Billy reads and reads – even poetry. Once he saw Mr Matthew Arnold at the Parliament, come to speak to Mr Gladstone, and next thing I know he’s reading all Mr Matthew Arnold’s poems too! There’s something basically ‘good’ about Billy. That’s the only way I can describe him really, Joe was like that too. Billy’s a good person, and a very, very clever person. And: there’s something – I dunno – immovable about Billy once he makes his mind up about something. Mattie said once over some small thing: ‘It’s like sitting at dinner with God, sitting eating stew with you, William Stacey!’ but as Billy has immovable thoughts on matters of religion too we all laughed then, the three of us!

Billy knows perfectly well the price of our house. He knows how near we’d been to the workhouse and he knows why we stayed with Mr Rowbottom and he understood and has made me know he understood, always.

But once – him and me alone in our downstairs kitchen, we were discussing something or other and I said, ‘You’re as stubborn as a bleeding ox, William Stacey! An ox as huge as Big Ben! You dont have to carry the whole blooming world on your shoulders!’

And my son said to me quietly: ‘I just want to carry us, Ma, that’s all,’ and I nearly wept then. I knew what he meant, dear loving responsible Billy. But I think – I think everything that happened has somehow made him a lone person. And that is a sad thing in my life.

And, Mattie. Always so bold and brave and making her famous ‘Plans’, but I know her heart inside. I’d like to kill that Ronald Duggan – nah but I was taken in by him too, he seemed a nice and reliable man who cared for her and I did make him welcome. I thought,
it will get her thoughts away from Jamey and the sad past
.

It’s Jamey she hasn’t mentioned.

She might not ever, it goes very deep with her, which is why I’ve encouraged her to walk out with others. And she had so,
so
wanted her and Jamey to have a baby, so when this happened with Ronald Duggan I was taken aback (and of course I thought he might be a fly-by-night who had taken advantage of her) but I could see that he did care for her (or so I thought) and I could see that it made her happy to think of being a mother at last, so I was happy too. You might think I should’ve kept her more carefully. But – she’d been a married woman. I could hardly treat her like an innocent young girl.

Jamey. Mattie and Jamey had known each other since they were about nine years old when me and Billy and Mattie came, at last, on our own, to live in our very own house, in Wakefield-street. It was paradise, after everything. Truly,
paradise.
My soul breathed.

There was a big, moving population in all those streets round Kings Cross but Jamey lived near and was not much older than Mattie and he and she, these two children, just took to each other and were inseparable. I think he never even noticed her leg, she was full of life, tough as a nut, and full of her reading, and Jamey loved books too, right there in Wakefield-street, these two young people and their beloved books, chatting away, scaring themselves half to death reading
Frankenstein
, writing in notebooks even, telling their own stories. One day I found them at the back of our house, digging with a huge shovel that was bigger than both of them. They had decided to plant some honeysuckle that they’d found in the old churchyard at the end of our street, so that it would grow over the old cesspit and ‘smell lovely’.

Young Jamey was a grand lad and when he was thirteen he got work with Mr Bloom, who owned a printing press down Kings Cross – so many big and little businesses started up there, that station is the worst in London, like a big public meeting all day long, yelling and travelling and buying and selling and thieving. And all the mad, dangerous bloody,
bloody
traffic, round and round the station.

Soon as he turned sixteen Jamey asked me, very formally like in one of their novels, if he could have my permission to marry Mattie because he loved her. ‘I’ll do better than help in a printing press,’ he said to me with his dear earnest face, ‘I’m going to start writing stories like Mr Charles Dickens! I’ve already started, and Mattie and I will be rich and happy!’ Mattie wasn’t even turned sixteen but it seemed right and fine and they’d been cuddling by the fire for years.

‘Course you’ll do well, Jamey!’ I said. ‘And you can marry her if she wants it too,’ and course I knew she did, like I say, we’d known him for so long and Mattie and he were so close and fond, and she looked so happy and she is so pretty when she is happy. If they wanted to be married that was fine by me. So we had a little wedding party, best china, Billy in his suit, Jamey’s mum came and his sisters and brothers and we all went into the old nearby churchyard that smelled of honeysuckle, it was a lovely sunny day and we sat on the old graves in the sun and thought the world was a fine place indeed, and Jamey’s mum and me, we even sang a few of the songs of our younger days after we’d had a few bottles of stout – there was this popular dance song, that kids sang later, and I do believe we danced in the old churchyard that day as we sang it!

Up and down the City Road

In and out the Eagle

That’s the way the money goes

POP Goes the Weasel!

And Jamey came to live at 13 Wakefield-street, and he was a good boy to have around – though a bit dozy at times, forgot things, because he was writing stories in his head, but we only laughed and he really tried to help Billy fix things in the house, they put up some new wallpaper with little roses on, and chopped wood for the fire from old logs they found in the graveyard. (But you had to watch that Jamey with an axe, he was too dreamy for an axe, he might be thinking of a story and cut his leg off, we joked.)

Mattie teased me about being a grandmother, and I said, ‘Dont be in so much of a hurry,’ and she said, ‘Why? I can still make hats as well as have a baby!’

And I expect she could have, only – although they so wanted to have this big family I used to hear them chatter about, she didn’t get in the family way.

And then, after only about six months, Jamey got knocked down by a stupid,
stupid
, STUPID, drunk cart-driver delivering things to Kings Cross. There are always accidents with bloody carts and carriages all the bloody time everywhere round the bloody station but somehow you dont think it will happen to your own loved ones do you? Jamey died, carried here bleeding and unconscious by Mr Bloom and another man, with his legs all out of shape and Mattie falling as she tried to run fast down the little steps by our front door to get to him. We thought Mattie would die herself, she got ill, she couldn’t stop crying, me and Billy were at our wits’ end, finally we got a doctor but he couldn’t do anything, he said we were spoiling her and he told Mattie she was a pretty young girl with her life ahead of her and it was God’s will and she must ‘pull herself together’. That advice cost four shillings and I was glad to see the back of him or Billy might have punched him too.

She sat at the table so pale with us that night after the doctor left, not eating anything, and pulled and pulled at her thin arms.

‘Whatever are you doing, Mattie?’

‘He said I have to pull myself together,’ she said. ‘And I am trying but what does it mean?’

Mattie pulling at her thin arms at the table that sad night is the second thing in my head I cannot bear to think about.

Luckily a lady in Mortimer-street who had had one hat from her sent a note just at this time, asking for another. I made Mattie go to see her, I mean I took her myself and the lady had very large-hat ideas, it was to meet Royalty no less because her husband had won a medal although it wasn’t the dreary old Queen they was to meet of course, no one ever met
her
, but one of the younger Princes, at a ceremony in the Palace.

That was the start of Mattie getting better but it was long and sad and I was probably at fault when I encouraged her to walk out with others but I thought it would help the healing.

I still feel so angry with Ronald Duggan the railway man, to leave her without even a word or a note. Coward.

The third thing inside my head I cannot bear to remember is that I was sound asleep as well as deaf and didn’t hear her pain until Billy came to wake me and there she was so pale and Freddie covered with blood in his yellow gown and his chignon lying on the hallway floor and it all over – without me being there to help her. Freddie and I went outside with the little bundle wrapped in his bright blue shawl. And buried it in the dark little yard next to where Jamie and Mattie had planted the honeysuckle. The honeysuckle had died long ago, there was no sun at the back.