Denton leaned in. ‘Worried about what?’
‘So much younger, wasn’t she? Go the same way she done, I s’pose. She said something like, “Wind up like me.” And crying.’ Lillian looked at Mrs Striker. ‘We had such a good time at the hop-picking last summer, the three of us. Now she’s gone.’Tears shone in her eyes. ‘That’s all I know.’
Mrs Striker raced along the pavement, Denton striding to keep up with her. ‘You’re a fast walker,’ he said, meaning it as a compliment.
‘I shouldn’t have brought Sticks. She’s a vicious little brute. Did she offer herself to you?’
‘More or less.’
‘I’m trying to reach girls like her. I apologize for using your shilling to do it. Anyway, it didn’t work.’ She strode on as if late for her appointment, although there was more than an hour yet. ‘You needn’t accompany me.’I
‘I want to talk to you. About what they said and — other things.’
Perhaps she misunderstood; perhaps her own life was on her mind. Whatever the reason, she was silent, seemingly angry, and then she burst out, ‘I told you I spent four and a half years in an institution. Now I shall tell you why.’ She raised a finger to point to a turning to the right as they were entering the City. ‘My mother sold me to Frank Striker. It was called a marriage, but it was a sale. I was cheap goods — no dowry, no beauty. I was my mother’s only capital. She raised me to be marriageable, tried to teach me to please men, gave me all the useless capabilities — I could pour tea but I couldn’t boil water. When I was seventeen, she put me on the market.’
‘Edith Dombey,’ he said.
‘What? Oh, I suppose. Anyway, she found Frank Striker. He got me, and she got a yearly stipend and a flat in Harrogate.’ She fell silent again; he glanced aside at her and saw her face spottily reddened, her jaw set. Then she started talking again in a hard, half-strangled voice. ‘My husband liked two women at a time. That was my wedding night — a prostitute and me. I stood it for a year and then rebelled. He came for me one night with a belt and gave me three welts on my bare back, and then I tried to push him downstairs. He had me committed. Well, it’s perfectly logical, isn’t it? Any woman who’d raise her hand to her husband must be insane.’ She slowed, looked at her watch and strode on. ‘Four and a half years later, by whining and wheedling and saying I was a good girl now, I managed to get my release. He sent a servant for me. I jumped out of the cab and went straight to a woman lawyer I’d heard about in prison, and I started suit for divorce the same day. Two of his prostitutes testified for me — they were sorry for me. The prison doctor testified about my scars. We were going to win the case, and the night before the jury returned the verdict, he took his revenge — shot himself and left every penny to his Cambridge college.’ She laughed rather horribly. ‘My mother lost her stipend and her flat and tumbled on me to care for her. I sued to break his will, but I hadn’t a penny. Have you ever tried suing one of the colleges of our great universities? The nurseries of our great men, the treasuries of our best thought, the preserver of our highest traditions?’ She hooted.
‘What did you do?’
She laughed more quietly. ‘I did what women always do. I went on the street.’
He felt her look at him; he met her eyes and saw the challenge. ‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper,” ’ he said lamely.
She laughed, this time a real laugh, almost a masculine one. ‘Wherever did that come from?’
‘My grandmother.’
‘Irish?’
‘Scotch.’
‘Scottish. Scotch is whisky.’
‘We say Scotch.’
She looked at him again, smiled, shrugged. More cheerfully then, as if it were all a kind of shared joke, she said, ‘I didn’t know a thing about going on the street. I knew only the words. So I went out on Regent Street. I didn’t know it was the French girls’ pitch. Two of them pushed me into a doorway and slapped me about and told me if I ever came on their territory again they’d cut my nose off. But it was rather pro forma; when they were done, one of them told me to try Westerley Street, where they might have a taste for a woman like me. I thought she meant prison-worn, but now I know she meant English and conventional. Anyway, that’s how I met Mrs Castle. I wasn’t much good to her as a prostitute, except for a few men who wanted to be able to say that they’d had the woman who killed Frank Striker, but she sent me on a bookkeeping course and I became her accountant and played the piano in the parlour for the gentlemen, and so I had a home and an income and a skill.’
Ahead, he saw one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea shops. ‘May I buy you a cup of tea?’ he said.
‘You mayn’t buy me anything, Mr Denton. But I’ll buy my own cup of tea and drink it with you, if you’ll be quick.’ It surprised him. He realized that she wanted to talk.
‘You’re going on to dinner?’
She hooted again. ‘I’m going to speak at a temperance meeting at a Methodist chapel.’ She looked at the watch again. ‘I’m due in Euston Road at eight.’
‘I’ll put you in a cab after we’ve had some tea.’
They were at the shop door. She looked at him with a kind of weariness. ‘You won’t put me into anything. If I take a cab, I shall take a cab.’
Inside, flanked by a teapot and cups and a plate of aerated bread and butter, they were awkward. The silence between her tirade on the street and their seating themselves had made them both diffident — strangers again. He felt intimidated, yet knew she had told her story to have this effect — and to force him to know, from a curious egoism, who she was — and yet he felt a kind of diffidence towards her because of it. What she had said, the brutality of her saying it, seemed to invite — to challenge? — a response of the same kind. His voice tentative, he said in almost a whisper into the silence between them, ‘I was married when I was young.’
She was pouring tea for herself. Sharp eyes touched his. ‘And?’
‘She killed herself.’ He could have stopped there, had meant to, but it seemed self-pitying, and suddenly he was rushing to tell her. ‘She drank lye. She took the lye bottle out into a field and drank as much as she could stand and then began to scream. I was in the barn. I heard her, but I thought she was just-I was used to hearing her scream. She lived for three days. We were thirty miles from a doctor. I took her in the wagon; it was all we had.’ She wasn’t going to pour him tea, he had seen; he had one hand on the teapot, but his eyes were staring off into the far side of the vast room ‘She’d had four babies in six years. Two stillborn. She was carrying another when she did it. She hadn’t told me.’ He was silent. ‘That one died, of course.’
Janet Striker said nothing. Her eyes were on his face.
‘It was too much for her. I was too much for her. We had-We’d done it together. As if we’d conspired to make something that would destroy her. And we called it love.’ As he said it, he saw all of a piece what was wrong with the book he had been writing, and he saw the book he should write; he saw the image of a man and a woman making a beautiful and then hideous thing together as they laughed and endured cold silences and made love and hated each other, and he saw the title: The Machine.
‘Do you blame her?’
‘She took to drink. I’ve always blamed her for that, but I guess I shouldn’t. We did it together.’ He felt his hand hot and looked at it and saw that it was still embracing the Britannia-metal teapot. ‘The saddest words of voice or pen — we meant well.’ He grasped the teapot’s handle and poured himself tea, his hand shaking. He gulped the tea, then said, ‘I’ve had a damnable day.’ He told her about Mulcahy then, and the roof, and what he’d found in the Inventorium. ‘Getting back up that roof was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’