Mrs Wiggs described the visitor as bedraggled and waited for an explanation. I enjoyed being given the opportunity to disappoint her, and told her to show the woman in, however unkempt. She turned to leave but then hesitated at the doorway, waiting for me to ask what the matter was, which I didn’t. That, of course, drove her insane. I learned that technique from my husband.
‘Is the lady collecting for charity, or a women’s refuge?’ she asked eventually.
‘Please send her in, Mrs Wiggs,’ I said.
This was the nature of our conversations at that point. In hindsight, those were the glory days. It would soon get much worse.
Once Mullens was shown into the front dining room and Mrs Wiggs was clear of the door, I found myself performing an anxious monologue of vapid small talk, adopting airs and graces I didn’t have and that didn’t suit me. I felt such an obvious fraud in my own home; it was horribly uncomfortable. We were overly congenial, as women who dislike each other tend to be when forced to spend time together, only a few badly chosen words from tearing each other’s hair out. I knew that neither of us could sustain that level of nauseating sweetness for long, and it was me who broke first.
‘I wasn’t sure you would come. Yesterday, in the milliner’s, I could have sworn you ran when you first got a glimpse of me.’
‘How much do you know?’ came the blunt reply.
‘Mabel, if there is something I’m meant to know, whatever it is, I can assure you I don’t.’ I was already tired by the mystery.
Mabel went quiet and studied her hands in her lap. When she’d first come in, she’d looked about the room, appraising every ornament and trinket, trying to assess the worth of all that shined. I’d done the very same thing when I first took up residence there. Then she progressed to taking an inventory of me. Her glowing eyes alighted on the brooch at my throat and then examined the silk of my dress. Our knees were close enough as we sat together on the settee to make the clash of fabrics brutal and humiliating. She’d arrived wearing a baggy old duster with brass buttons, and beneath it a green chintz dress with daisies. I knew it had been chosen because the pattern made the wear less obvious; you had to really look hard to see where the holes had been repaired. I used to do these things myself. She had such pretty eyes, large and childlike, that it was hard to ignore them as they kept creeping back to my engagement ring and following my hands as I waved them in theatrical loops while I talked. Again, this was not my habit. Now she was there I couldn’t wait for her to leave.
‘I did run away at first… I didn’t want you to see me, I was ashamed, thought you’d laugh at me. You must think it odd that I am here. The truth is, I’ve nowhere else to turn. Laugh if you will, get it out of the way, then please say you will consider what I’m about to ask you.’
I felt the dread of an unknown favour in the pit of my stomach and hoped her request would not be something to further embarrass us both. I tiptoed over to the door, opened it an inch to check Mrs Wiggs wasn’t listening, closed it again and sat down.
‘What is it? Only don’t talk too loudly, my housekeeper has very big ears,’ I said.
Without any warning, Mabel started crying and put her face in her hands. I sat stiff as a scarecrow, trapped between her quivering shoulders and the door, imagining Mrs Wiggs and her omnipresent ears pressed to the other side. I kept telling Mabel to be quiet, but she continued to cry and rambled in between breathless sobs.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I’m here. Can you even remember why we never became friends, Susannah? Because I can’t. I was always envious of how clever you were, I know that. I was right to be. I mean, look at you. You should be proud of how things turned out. I must have known, somehow, that you would get everything I wanted. I was jealous before it happened. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.’
I had always found it difficult to know how to act when people cried or displayed great emotion like that. It frightened me. I wanted to shake them or hit them. Why should such feeble creatures have the luxury of crumbling while the rest of us had to carry on?
When Mabel had finally calmed herself and wiped her nose on her sleeve, she looked at me with red eyes.
‘I got myself a dose of scarlet fever, Susannah,’ she said.
I didn’t understand at first, but when she explained that she’d met a soldier, I knew what she meant. She had been courting him in secret for months, long before I met Thomas.
‘He was an officer and we were to be married – or that was what I thought, anyway. We talked of being married, what type of house we would live in, children… I know that sounds stupid now,’ she said.
Mabel had voluntarily left her job at the hospital, not wanting to suffer the humiliation of being fired, as I had been. She was sure her soldier would marry her imminently, on account of the fact she was carrying his child.
‘But when I told Walter, he said he couldn’t marry me, because he was already bloody married. I thought I’d gone mad, that I’d imagined the whole thing, but he did talk about marrying me, I swear. He let me believe it all along. We argued, of course, and when I asked why he’d said he loved me when it was so clearly a lie, he said, “I did at the time.”’
That was the last she heard of Walter, the charmer.
‘Why don’t you go home to your father’s farm?’ I asked.
‘My father won’t have me, unmarried and with child, and nor will my sister’s husband. I have to get rid of it, then I can go home.’
‘So get rid of it,’ I said.
This sent Mabel into another crying fit. I tried not to roll my eyes as I worried about the noise.
She had started to pay nightly bed rent in various doss houses, not being able to afford a decent boarding house. Some of the doss houses had more than forty beds, all of them with soiled straw and crawling with insects. ‘It was frightening being so different to the other women in those places,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to fall asleep for fear of being robbed. All the women were thieves. Thieves and drunks. They drank beer when they had money, gin when they didn’t, and they watched for new girls like hawks, working out who they could prey on.’ She sniffed into her handkerchief again.
‘I can’t understand how I’ve found myself like this. How fast I have fallen – and I am still falling, Susannah. It feels like no more than a minute ago, a blink of an eye, that I was a nurse at the London. I felt safe. Now I don’t know how to stop it getting worse. Where will I end up? You hear about those poor women found slaughtered like pigs in the gutter. Who is to say it won’t be me one night?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mabel,’ I said. ‘Of course that won’t happen to you,’ I lied.
Obviously, it could happen to Mabel; it could happen to any one of us. Why else had I married Thomas? Why else had I stayed with him? All that talk about ending up like those poor dead women made me nervous. In nurturing my macabre obsession with them, was I inviting the same fate to befall me? With Mabel there, it was all too close; it was as if my destiny was circling above my head like a vulture.
‘Will it be me next who is cut and found dead?’ she wailed. ‘Really, what is to prevent it? Where do I go? What shall I do? I did not think myself a bad person, Susannah. Why has this happened? I have been foolish, yes, but not bad. I am desperate, Susannah. You must understand how desperate I am, to have come to you, the woman I was so jealous of, and to be begging you, quite without dignity. I have no one. The man who runs the shop you saw me in takes my wages to pay for my board. I can never earn enough to save any money. He and his wife, they keep us like billy goats upstairs in a bedroom cold as a barn with water running down the walls. I am always in their debt.’
She glanced up at me. ‘You haven’t asked how I came by this bruise on my face – I know you can see it.’
‘I didn’t think it polite to ask.’ I took a sip of my by now very cold tea, just to keep my hands occupied.
Mabel had refused to go to bed with the owner, who complained to his wife, who then screamed at her, called her ungrateful and told her that her husband always tried the girls first, so he would know how to price them. If Mabel did not lie with him willingly, she would be strapped to the bed by the woman herself and offered to whichever man came for the cheapest whore.
‘When I refused, she hit me, punched me with a closed fist like a man, then told me how she was in with the peelers and would have me fitted for stealing, unless I worked off my debt of £5, the debt I’d accrued for being rude.’
‘What about Dykes from the hospital?’
‘Dykes? I don’t have time for squatting over pots of steam or chewing herbs that will do nothing but give me a headache! There’s nothing I haven’t tried.’
‘How much money do you think you’ll need?’
‘I was thinking, what about your husband? He’s a doctor. He must know how to flush it out. Don’t tell me to go to the quacks for this – I’ll die, I know I will. I have a feeling, the same way I had a feeling about you.’
‘Then it’s not my help you are asking for, is it?’ I spat this out. I was beginning to tire and my head throbbed. I needed my drops but hadn’t taken them that day because I’d known Mabel would be calling.
‘Please, Susannah, I am begging you. If I have this baby, I swear I will throw it in the Thames along with myself.’ She grabbed my sleeve and her fingers pinched my forearm. It was the same hopeless grasp as Emma Smith’s when she’d lain bleeding to death in the hospital. It disgusted me.
‘That’s your choice, Mabel, not mine,’ I said, and pulled my arm free.
She had inched closer to me on the settee and I could smell the mouldy scent of the unwashed. There it was again: Emma Smith, the bag of twigs on the hospital bed. Blood dripping off her and running across the uneven floor.
I told Mabel I would think on it and would get a message to her at the millinery, but I only wanted her out of the house. I gave her five shillings at the door. She went to kiss me, but I flinched away and we were stuck in that excruciating moment. Then she nodded and smiled as if she knew I would not be sending any message, thanked me, and left. Because of the gentle way she managed my indifference, I felt I deserved my marriage after all.