Daughter of the House

‘That’s good.’

Faith regarded her with an odd expression.

‘Aunt Faith? Is something wrong?’

‘You are so like her, you know.’

Nancy was taken aback.

Her whole life was coloured by being unlike her mother and by wishing to resemble her more closely.

‘Not in your looks, although since you have grown up I see more of her in you every day. In your stubbornness, I mean. You won’t ever give up once you have fixed on an idea. Even when you were tiny, if you wanted to play with a toy you would have it, however hard the boys tried to take it off you. You wouldn’t yell, but you kept your eyes and your little hands fastened tight on it. Lizzie always understood the power of a bargain. She’d hand over the ball so as to get herself something better. You have your mother’s energy too.’ Faith pointed at the white ramparts of sheets, stirring in the wind. ‘She would have done that, before her strength went.’

‘Poor Ma,’ Nancy sighed.

She hadn’t been aware that she possessed Eliza’s iron will. Nancy’s own impression was of inhabiting the margins of her family. She stayed on the outskirts and kept quiet, mostly because of the Uncanny and her conviction that she had to protect it and keep it secret. Her way of camouflaging her difference was to be unobtrusive in plain sight.

She took it for granted that her father loved her, in the way that fathers always loved their only daughters, but she didn’t think he knew or understood her particularly well, any more than Eliza did. Most of her parents’ energies, after all, were applied to each other. The memory of the Queen Mab returned, and how her father’s first and strongest instinct had been to save his wife.

Nancy wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her shoulders ached from lifting and mangling wet towels, and there was a new and less manageable ache in her that she did not yet recognise. She wondered how it ever came about that you loved someone like a husband or wife, and were loved back. It seemed too complicated to happen very often and yet the suggestion of it was everywhere, except in her own life.

Faith saw her expression.

‘Nancy, dear. You’re very tired. You’ll be ill yourself if you don’t take care.’

‘It’s not that, Aunt Faith.’

‘What is it, then?’

Faith’s motherly concern touched her, and the ache faded a little. But Nancy’s instinct was always to parry a direct question so she turned aside and asked, ‘Will Ma get well?’

Faith used a folded cloth to lift a pan of scalding water. Clouds of steam billowed between them.

‘I believe she will recover from this bout, yes.’

Nancy could see that her aunt was disappointed by her reticence.

The next day Eliza was a little better. The sweating and shivering stopped, although the terrible cough persisted. The day after that Faith held her while Nancy fed her two or three spoonfuls of soup.

The household adjusted to the rhythms of nursing Eliza. Faith spent the days helping Nancy and Cornelius in Islington, but she returned to Matthew every evening because he complained so much about Lizzie’s cooking and standards of housekeeping.

After the end of her marriage Lizzie went back to her parents, although she confided to Nancy that it was difficult to live in a house that had become a shrine to Edwin and Rowland. Their boyhood possessions were preserved like relics and there were photographs of the dead sons everywhere. Nancy couldn’t say much in response to this, because Lizzie must think it unfair that Cornelius and Arthur were both still alive.

Lizzie had adopted a brisk manner that could make her seem a little hard. She had to give up her beloved job with the tea importer once she became a mother, but afterwards she had quickly yielded the daily care of Tommy to Faith, in favour of helping her father with the family greengrocery. The loss of his sons had aged Matthew Shaw, and Lizzie had energy and an undeniable talent for business. She made herself useful and then indispensable and she claimed a healthy wage for her efforts. Her short tenure as Jack Hooper’s wife had left her with a fierce desire for independence.

‘Mama shouldn’t have to run back and forth every day like this. My father could quite easily fry himself an egg,’ Lizzie said when she called one evening to see Eliza. ‘Although he doesn’t believe eggs and frying pans should be a man’s work.’

Nancy had sewn a set of muslin masks and her cousin wore one as she hovered uncertainly at the bedside. The women all agreed that little Tommy must be protected from infection, but there was also an understanding that Lizzie couldn’t be involved in caring for anyone who was ill. She was not a nurse, she would have insisted, and she had no talent for such things.

Lizzie had been unable to hide her shock at Eliza’s changed appearance. She chatted to her a little too brightly and disconnectedly through the layers of her mask, and was relieved when Nancy led her away before Eliza got overtired.

The cousins retreated downstairs. Lizzie stood by the kitchen range, tapped a cigarette on her thumbnail and expertly clicked a lighter. She had shortened her skirts and her hair and had recently started painting her lips. The dark lipstick stained the butt of the cigarette.

Exhaling sharply she exclaimed, ‘Poor Nancy. What a ghastly time you have all been through.’

Nancy accepted a cigarette and puffed inexpertly.

‘She’s getting better, that’s all that matters.’

‘She looks terrible.’

Lizzie was always blunt. To change the subject Nancy said, ‘What about you?’

Lizzie shrugged. ‘Tommy’s happy. He’ll start school in the autumn. My life’s all work, more’s the pity. I’d like a nice new boyfriend. I expect you would too, eh? You and I are both going to deserve some proper fun quite soon, darling.’

Devil had said the same thing.

‘Soon,’ Nancy said. She would have liked to believe it, and sometimes as she did the endless household chores she allowed herself a fantasy in which Gil Maitland’s cream Daimler drew up outside the house or in front of Lennox & Ringland. He knew where she lived and her place of work, but as the days passed and there was no evidence of him she told herself that of course a man like Gil was not going to materialise and sweep her off her feet. He had whiled away an hour in her company and given her a lift home because it was raining. Nothing more.

You are not Cinderella or a princess in a fairy tale. You are Nancy Wix. You can dream, but a dream is all it is.

Lizzie winked at her and began to talk about business. She quickly became animated. People needed novelty and some little luxuries, she declared. With the shipping routes open again and overseas trade growing, she was establishing a network of relationships with importers of exotic fruits. Pineapples from South America, mangoes from India, figs from the Mediterranean shores, all these could be brought in the holds of cargo ships and unloaded at the London or Liverpool docks. The dewy fruits would make their way, via the modern wholesale warehouse Lizzie had encouraged her father to acquire, to every quality greengrocer in the country. The miracle of refrigeration made all this easy, Lizzie explained, waving her hands. She still wore her wedding ring, Nancy noted.

‘Just wait and see. There will be a fresh pineapple or a peach on every table, I promise you. Not only in the great houses where the dukes and lords have their own hothouses.’

Nancy wondered if the war had been fought even partly to make a pineapple available to everyone who might desire one, but she said nothing. There had been so many unexpected outcomes of the conflict that the real impact seemed impossible to discern. Married women and those over thirty could vote and one of them had even been elected to Parliament. After all the suffragists’ meetings, and the broken windows and arson and arrests and prison sentences, it had taken the greater war to win the battle for them.

‘The how doesn’t matter,’ Jinny insisted. ‘It’s the what that counts.’

After a week at home, during which his growing distraction and restlessness reflected Eliza’s steady recovery, Devil announced that he must get back to the Palmyra.

‘Anthony Ellis does his best,’ he said, which meant that the manager’s best wasn’t good enough.

He confessed to Nancy that there was a crisis of loyalty to deal with because some of the artistes had not been paid for their most recent performances. They had refused to go onstage and he had been forced to cancel shows. There was an embarrassment concerning available funds, he said. Audiences had been sparse for weeks because people feared the influenza, but an almost empty theatre still cost the same to run as it did when full.