The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 8

  Dorothy poured two measures of gin for a man with a palsied hand and wiped her palms on the underside of her apron. “Of course, you know she is to leave us as soon as her letter arrives.”

  Her words were ostensibly addressed to the other girl, but I was in no doubt they were intended for me.

  “What letter?” I asked.

  “From her gentleman, who else?” She made a play of stopping herself. “Oh, dear,” she said then, “had you been hoping . . . ?” My face must have told its own story. “Oh, dear, Louisa, I think he had and all.”

  Louisa covered her mouth with her hand again. “Dorothy,” she said into it, thrilled and appalled in equal measure. I turned on my heel. As I reached the door I heard Dorothy call to me. “Don’t look so miserable, she is too old for you anyhow: four and twenty, if she’s a day. You want a good Belfast girl like Louisa here.” The men around the fire laughed, whether at me or at some joke that had passed between them I neither knew nor cared to discover. And then I was outside, breathing heavily, purging myself of the very air I had swallowed in there.

  I had stomped, in my rage, some distance down the road before I realised that I had forgotten my lantern, but nothing – not the ditches, not the potholes, not the stillborn or the suicides – would induce me to go back for it.

  In fact I might never have gone back again had I not, quite by chance, spotted Maria several mornings later on Hanover Quay, on the opposite side of the Town Dock from the Ballast Office. At least, I thought that it was Maria. I was standing with Sir Clueless, who was talking to the skipper of a Maryport coal freighter lately docked, negotiating with him the length of his stay. (Till the last shovelful was sold out of the hold, was what the skippers usually angled for, should that mean their vessels being tied up from one year’s end to the next.) It was her proximity to the water’s edge that attracted my attention – another step and she would have been treading air – before the turn of the head that afforded me a glimpse of her face, framed today by a lace-trimmed bonnet.

  The emigration season was just getting going in good and earnest; a ship bound for Montreal lay at anchor further down the Lough, and my first thought (if that twist in the gut counted as thought) was that she meant to join it. Her costume, however, I told myself in the next second, was not that of a lady about to embark on a sea journey of any length, even the length of Belfast Lough, its greatest protection from the elements being the lace pelerine covering the shoulders that her dress otherwise left bare. And I am ashamed to say it crossed my mind then that her business there was the same as that of the other girls who waited on the quays for a boat – any boat – to come in, until I noticed, beneath the hitched hem of her skirts, that she was wearing wooden pattens on her feet, although we had not had rain for several days past. Unlike those other girls, she dared not, for whatever reason, have her shoes or her dress soiled.

  No sooner had I remarked them than the pattens turned about, towards the town, and the face was lost to me in the multitude.

  Sir Clueless was asking me the date of the third Tuesday after next.

  “Third Tuesday after next? The seventeenth of May,” I said, and he repeated it to the coal boat’s skipper. I picked up Maria’s bonnet again as it weaved in and out of the carters and the bagmen and the families waiting with their trunks and bundles for the gabbards that would carry them on the first leg of their journey to a new world. At the bottom of Princes Street the bonnet came to rest again briefly. I had the impression of a man’s head nodding in close proximity to it, or perhaps shaking – I could not be sure, only that the movement was vigorous.

  Beside me, Sir Clueless had finished with business and moved on to pleasantries: who had died, who fallen sick, and who had lost his fortune since the last time the skipper put in at Belfast.

  “If you have no further need of me at present . . .” I said.

  Sir Clueless cast a sidelong look at me and stroked his lapels with his thumbs, a tic of which he alone in the Ballast Office appeared wholly unaware.

  “Keen boy, this,” said the skipper. His smile had more of gold in it than all the Meeting Houses of Belfast put together. “Eager to get on with his work.”

  “Yes,” said Sir Clueless.

  “So what of Batt?” the skipper asked, voice rising in anticipation.

  “Which Batt?” The stroking stopped.

  “Thomas, or Samuel: he had invested in a steamer, the last I heard.”

  “That Batt,” said Sir Clueless, and to me, “You may go.”

  As soon as he turned his back again I slipped away in the opposite direction. At the High Street end of the dock I saw coming towards me Roddy McCluskey, a satchel draped right to left across his body, and recognised him as the man with whom Maria had been in conversation. Roddy had been deprived by nature of both his arms, but in all of the town there was no better messenger, or guide. He was a living, breathing gazetteer.

  “Roddy!” I hailed him. “That lady you were talking to just now . . .”

  “Prussian,” he said, as though he had been debating it with himself, and I did not correct him, nor have to ask then if he had met her before. I understood now too the vigorous movements of his head.

  “Was she looking for directions somewhere?” I asked.

  “A pawnshop. I told her she was on the wrong side of town, she would have a better choice in Smithfield, or Hill Street, even Academy Street.” Roddy tipped his chin, inclined his head to the right then jabbed it backwards, doing the work of ten fingers. “But if she must take her chances here then she could have her pick of Philips or Johnston in Princes Street.”

  I clapped his shoulders. “Thank you.”

  When I arrived at Princes Street, however, the place was in uproar. A horse drawing a cart of manure had caught its hoof in an abandoned lobster pot and stumbled, tipping its load across the roadway. The manure steamed. It stank. The horse neighed and thrashed on the cobbles, trying to drag itself up. Its owner was too preoccupied to help, jabbing his finger into the chest of the man who had left the lobster pot lying, asking him had he dropped another pot somewhere with his brains in it. Seconds had already volunteered themselves, thirds and fourths, even. Over their heads and along the street I could see the twinned clusters of golden balls, for the pawnshops Roddy had recommended were exact neighbours. The obstacles between them and me, however, were suddenly too daunting.

  The horse, summoning who knows what reserves, righted itself and reared up at the same moment as the fisherman clouted the cart owner with another lobster pot. Everyone else scattered, me included. I overtook Roddy as I hurried back along the quays to the Ballast Office.

  “Will you tell me if you see her again?” I called, and he nodded, eloquently.

  I did succeed in reaching both Philips and Johnston later that day (the manure had been swept into heaps at the sides of the street; of the horse, the cart, the lobster pot there was no sign), but neither Miss P nor Mr J nor a single one of their assistants claimed any memory of a lady answering Maria’s description, or indeed speaking in her uncommon voice. “It is not impossible that she was here,” was as near to an affirmative as I could get, this from Johnston. “But only the docket can prove it for certain.”

  A police bill to the right of his head warned brokers of the theft of a load of plate from a house in Hannahstown on the night of the 5th inst. A reward was offered, a pen picture painted of an individual of low character observed in the neighbourhood earlier the same day, “missing the top portion of the left ear”.

  “Can you check?” I asked.

  “Not my docket, hers.”

  Several dozen clocks ticked against the tock of several dozen more.

  “That is most helpful,” I said.

  The pawnbroker leaned his weight on fingertips spread on the glass counter between us: a hothouse for silk handkerchiefs and scarves of every imaginable hue. “I am sure”, he said, with a smile as second-hand-looking as anything in the shop, “you would want me to be as helpful were
someone to enquire after you. And now,” behind me an assistant had already opened the door, “good day.”

  The thought of how close I had come to meeting Maria again continued to tantalise me. If only I had slipped away from Sir Clueless sooner; if only I had not stopped to talk to Roddy McCluskey; if only I had got to Princes Street a fraction of a second before the horse met with the lobster pot . . .

  So it was in a state more of distraction than desire that I found myself once again, on the second-last evening of April, back on the road to the Mill. It had been a fine day, the spring dressed in its richest colours, which were deepening now as the sun slid slowly towards Black Mountain. A platoon of infantry added their scarlet as they marched along Great George’s Street towards the North Queen Street barracks. Filthy-faced children of the kind Belfast seemed to specialise in fell into step beside them, their chests and stomachs puffed out, their chins pulled in against their necks. The drummer boy found the mimicry particularly hard to bear, being not more than a year or two older than the biggest of his tormentors. His face flared to a shade just short of his tunic. The sticks in his hands beat like fury.

  Further along the shoreline, beyond the pigs let loose nightly upon the wrack (they were practically cured before they were slaughtered, the pigs of Belfast), oystercatchers provided the spectacle, returned in their thousands to carry out manoeuvres on the mudflats where they had built their nests of stones and eggshells. The emigrant ship had already sailed from the Pool of Garmoyle, across the estuary; a three-master was anchored there in its stead, waiting for the morning tide to carry it up to the town. Around it the gabbards and rowboats clustered, the former taking on urgent cargo, the latter passengers whose affairs or emotions, or indeed ailments (I saw one man being handed down behind his bath chair) would not permit them another night aboard ship. “A sixpence to take you up the Lough . . .” And around all of these the customs vessels prowled, making sure that whatever freight left the ship reached the shore at the place decreed by the Revenue.

  Forcade, the Superintendent of Quarantine, would be in among them, too. At the beginning of the year the Board, as though in answer to Ferris’s desire for drama, had circulated to all who worked in the Ballast Office a memorandum on an outbreak of the cholera, which, it was feared, from its first stirrings in Bengal, was making its way inexorably across the continent of Europe to our shores. Ships wanting to dock in the town were obliged under threat of the severest penalties to make known all unexplained illnesses among passengers and crew, and could if necessary be quarantined at Garmoyle or even returned to their port of origin. We, on land, were likewise to be vigilant. A description of the symptoms of the disease was appended, from the increased heart rate to the fishy odour of the flux it brought on. (Ferris whispered to me that whoever did not hold his nose, as a matter of course, on entering a privy deserved all the fishy odours he got.) Bulletins were issued at intervals throughout the remainder of the winter and into spring: the cholera was in Sebastopol, St Petersburg, Vienna, Prague; a ship from Cadiz bound for Liverpool had put in at San Sebastián with all on board dead or dying . . . We marked each new location with a pin on a map, next to the cabinet where the Harbour Constable’s pistols were kept. It was the pin that broke the established patterns for which we were to be most on the alert.

  Some of the older clerks remembered the previous panic, a dozen years before, and how that had passed without a single case being reported in the whole of the island, which did not prevent one or two of them carrying little muslin pouches of lavender to keep at bay any noxious airs – that is, any more noxious than usual airs – that might be carried through our door. And still the bulletins continued to come in, of outbreaks in Leipzig and Hamburg to the north, in Sicily and Sardinia to the south. The newspapers were now beginning to take an interest in this “Hindoostanee menace”. The day they verified a fishy flux west of Calais there would not be lavender enough in all of Ireland.

  The shore road was more congested than I had yet seen it on my evening excursions. The good weather had brought the people out to walk off an early tea, or work up an appetite for a later one, or simply to clear their heads of the noise of the day. Not a few of them, I realised, the closer I drew to it, were intent like me on the Mill. Men and women both sat on benches on either side of the entrance, gentlefolk and working folk, enjoying the warmth of the sun, watching their children play at marbles and hopscotch in the dusty forecourt, and lending the scene the air of a tableau vivant of a country that had never had to concern itself with Terry Alts or the threat of cholera.

  For all that it was busy inside, I had no difficulty on this occasion locating Maria, in the main room of the inn, and Maria, it pleased me to observe, had no difficulty recognising me, nor, to judge by her look of confusion the moment after, the import of my returning there a third time. For I did not doubt that Dorothy had made known to her my last visit, in her own very particular way.

  We were unable to exchange much more than glances, because this was the room presided over by the innkeeper herself: “Peggy”, as I heard the older patrons call her, although to the less seasoned she was “Mrs Barclay”, when they could summon the courage to address her at all.

  I had seen it before, this power of landlords and ladies (utter despots some of them), although not perhaps in one so advanced in years – the “sixty or so” I had first allowed was undoubtedly conservative – or so quiet and genial in manner. Even Maria was “galvanised” in her presence.

  I was obliged to wait until the very end of the evening for the chance to speak, when the lamps had been let burn low and Mrs Barclay had retired upstairs, leaving only the determined few, and the half asleep, hugging their tankards and tumblers. I had hugged my own tumbler since I arrived to keep myself from drinking more again in my agitated state than I was accustomed to holding.

  Maria stopped before my table. Her hair had been tied back earlier, but was now working itself loose at the sides. There was a warmth came off her, a smell like fresh-baked biscuits.

  “You came again,” she said simply, although I thought I detected in the tone admiration for my perseverance.

  “The air agrees with me,” I said, and she smiled – a smile like something being let go within: the air at that moment was yellow with pipe smoke, too befuddled to disperse. Maria took herself off down the room and picked up a bowl piled high with oyster shells, which she still carried when she returned.

  “I know what Dorothy told you,” she said.

  “I thought that you would,” I said.

  “It is true.” A shell slipped from the summit‚ unsettling the pile. She steadied it with the heel of her hand.

  “I thought that it was.”

  “And?”

  She was being obliged to bend a little towards me, which meant – I had not been aware until then that I had done it – I must at some point in our exchange have cast my eyes down. I lifted them now.

  “And I wish only to offer you my friendship, and protection if you should ever need it.”

  The thought evidently amused her. “Protection?”

  “When you are in town,” I said. “I saw you there the other day.”

  Her demeanour changed. She looked down angrily at the oyster shells and I thought for a moment she meant to tip them over my head, but a burst of singing then from another part of the inn seemed to give her pause. “You were spying on me?”

  “No, not spying. The Ballast Office where I work is on the quays. It was pure chance that our paths crossed. Nearly crossed.”

  Her knuckles were white. I explained to her that the streets around the docks were not the safest for a young woman on her own. Even on High Street ladies going to church on a Sunday evening often walked in pairs. She was, perhaps, not familiar with our town.

  “I am familiar with other towns, thank you,” she said, “towns bigger than this.” She began to say something more, but evidently thought better of it. Instead she took the bowl of oyster shells to the counter and
stood for half a minute with her back to me, shoulders rising and falling, rising and falling. The singing had started up again, outside now. Never mind the words (and forget about the tune entirely), it was hard to make out whether the singer was a woman or a man, old or young. He – she – was drunk, that was all. Maria’s shoulders rose a final time, fell again.

  “All right,” she said when she had returned. “You will be my Irish Protector.”

  She held out her hand. I went to give her mine.

  “Your glass,” she said.

  *

  A couple of days after this I heard that Millar was back in town, or more specifically, back in Rosemary Street, where, it seemed, all had not been proceeding to his satisfaction. Indeed, so appalled was he by the discovery of what Duff and Jackson had “done” to the Third Presbyterian Church in his absence that he had quite literally not been able to quit the building site. It was there that I eventually found him, in his shirtsleeves, at the top of the broad granite steps leading up from the street, talking to a stonemason and his apprentice. He looked, when he turned at the sound of his name, what he was, a man who had not slept, or even shaved, in more than forty-eight hours.

  “I suppose,” I said, wanting to lighten the mood, “you wouldn’t have time for a game of handball?”

  “Gilbert,” he said, and straight away took hold of my arm and pulled me further inside. “Look at this . . . and this . . . and this . . .”

  I did not know how to tell my friend that I had looked at his church several times a week since the first stone was laid and had noticed nothing untoward, any more, in truth, than I did when I was standing in the middle of the skeleton with him, despite his gesticulations and an accompanying catalogue of errors and omissions that finally left him at a loss for words.

  “If I had got here even a day later the damage would have been too great to repair,” he managed at length. “Hopper drummed it into us daily that as architects our duty was to be prejudiced in favour of no style, but to understand them all. This Duff has evidently forgotten the second part, and Jackson, if Duff was his teacher, can never have known it.”