The Trespass (2 page)

‘Prime Minister. There must be, no matter what the cost there has to be, one central body to arrange proper sanitary arrangements, the abolition of cesspools, the construction of drains, the construction of new sewers…’

The Prime Minister stood up. ‘
Gentlemen!
I agreed to see you because I thought there might be something new. You know very well that last year we passed a Public Health Act yet nothing we are doing seems to make any difference. It is not yet clear what is causing the return of the cholera. The water belongs to the Water Boards and good men run those boards, many of the honourable members of the government of this country are directors of the Water Boards. And what is more I am not entirely convinced that it is the job of the state to cure all the ills of the country. I am sorry, Her Majesty is waiting…’ And Edwin Chadwick, and his companion, found themselves being ushered from the large and elegant room.

It was the second man who spoke back into the room as they left, again low and violent, just loud enough for the Prime Minister to hear every word: ‘Sir. Your family has I believe done many things for this country. It is said you have met Napoleon, and I have heard that you have written a five-act play, as yet unperformed. These are interesting matters perhaps. But, I promise you, you will go down in history as Prime Minister of a country where people were forced, and required by businessmen to
pay for the privilege,
to drink their own shit.’

*   *   *

The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, left the restaurant in the Strand, listened for the particular sound of a cab-horse’s hooves that heralded a closed hansom cab rather than an open gig, and hailed one out of the darkness. He directed the driver to Bryanston Square and his tall, brooding figure disappeared at once inside the cab. He wished he could direct it to an even better address, Berkeley Square, or Park Lane. But Bryanston Square (although not to be compared with Berkeley Square) was better than Clapham. He lit a cigar, held a handkerchief over his nose as the cab edged its way through the crowds. It was so unseasonably warm for the time of year, the smells were worse – surely by the very end of August a little respite could be expected. He had been dining with the men who wanted to build an underground railway. Charles Cooper was not convinced that there was enough money in it. His main loyalties at the moment were towards the Water Boards where he had much money invested: an underground railway could interfere with Water Board property. There were enough problems underneath the city, as he well knew. He had listened and barked with the businessmen as expected. But as the wine had flowed and the men’s voices had risen, his thoughts were elsewhere. He went over again the Prime Minister’s words about the epidemic.

Sir Charles Cooper had a daughter also. Bryanston Square was a stone’s throw from Marylebone.

He would send her to Kent, to his brother’s farm, until the danger from cholera had subsided. He could not bear it. But it must be done.

He pulled his watch from his waistcoat; in the darkness of the cab he could just make out that it was well after midnight, too late to arrange things tonight, no need to hurry home, although he could of course, even at this hour, talk to his daughter if he so desired. (But no, perhaps – not tonight.) He shifted uneasily inside the cab as a hundred visions kaleidoscoped across his mind: suddenly he abruptly knocked on the roof and told the driver to turn off and head for St Martin’s Lane. Mrs Ballantyre’s house, in a narrow street nearby, was free of cholera germs, he was sure of that, she had had the place cleaned and disinfected twice a day since the epidemic began; she had told him how she soaked her curtains in chloride of lime and her sanitary arrangements were better than many a finer house.

A whisky, and a girl, before bed. He stretched his legs in a kind of dull, automatic, physical anticipation. Mrs Ballantyre’s girls were young. They knew the kind of thing that pleased him.

But as the horse trotted up along one side of the new Trafalgar Square and turned past the church it had to stop. A crowd had gathered from a narrow street nearby, halting the traffic. Above all the other noises of the city night he could hear a woman screaming over and over but there was nothing unusual in that, in this area.

‘Pass on, pass on.’ Sir Charles bent his head out and upwards to shout at the driver.

But the way was completely blocked and the driver was silent, staring at the commotion. A cart was collecting dead bodies. The woman who was screaming would not let the body of what seemed to be another, older, well-dressed woman go and her arms tried to hold the body back from the cart drivers; her skirt and the skirt of the dead woman were torn, dragged in the mud and the muck of the street. Through the gathered, murmuring people several other bodies were being carried from other doorways, wrapped in threadbare blankets or old pieces of clothing and passed up to the top of the cart and somewhere a child was crying as if its heart had broken.

Suddenly one body began to slide off the top of the pile; the crowd watched fascinated as it slid slowly downwards. A hand emerged from a shirt and seemed to move and for a moment there was total, mesmerised silence. Then one of the drivers snorted angrily and swore, jumped up on to the cart with the falling body and with his feet pushed the pile of bodies down. And the woman in the mud-stained skirt, tussling with the other driver, screamed again:
No, no, no!
Finally the driver on the top of the cart jumped down and kicked her. She fell to the ground, across the body of the older woman.

The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper pulled back into the darkness of the cab in shock. He had recognised the dead woman.

‘Leave them, leave them,’ shrieked another woman in the crowd whose shawl covered her nose and her face. ‘They’re only tarts.’

Another woman shouted at her, ‘Could be you next, missus, whether y’re a tart or not!’

As the last of the other corpses was piled on to the cart one of the nightmen pulled at the dead woman, the other pushed her screaming companion away from the body. With an impatient, upward heave they threw this last body on to the top of the pile, and the older driver kicked the other woman again for good measure as her cries became at last discordant and broken. Then he got on to the front of the cart with his companion and whipped his horses away through the milling, suddenly parting, people.

Someone was weeping harshly, big, jagged sobs. ‘God have mercy,’ someone muttered. Other voices joined in, low and resigned, as people moved at last. ‘God have mercy on their souls.’

But out of the darkness a man’s angry voice called, ‘There ain’t no God, you fools.’

‘Pass on, pass on,’ called Sir Charles Cooper hoarsely, once more directing the driver to the safety of Bryanston Square, and he found that he was sweating with fright. He passed his white handkerchief over his forehead several times in an effort to calm himself but he felt his heart beating too fast beneath his coat. He saw again, in disbelief, the body
of someone known to him
being roughly thrown up on to the cart: the torn, muddy skirt, no blanket even to give the body dignity. He knew very well that this woman had a fine house of her own as well as the house she ran off St Martin’s Lane. Mrs Ballantyre had been, whatever her profession, a lady. And then he remembered where her fine house stood.

In Marylebone. Where, this week, the cholera had been found.

*   *   *

Actually, Sir Charles Cooper had two daughters.

In Bryanston Square his elder daughter, Mary Cooper, was reading, in bed, the new novel ‘Vanity Fair’, and laughing. She came to the end of a chapter, closed the book so she could savour the pages she had read. From somewhere she heard a clock strike, realised how late it was, turned down the lamp. She was entranced when someone described the human heart in a way that she understood, confirmed a world she knew. Part of her listened for the roll of carriage wheels as she lay smiling into the darkness. She knew their father was not home yet, and so lay between waking and sleeping: waiting. Her smile slowly disappeared as she came back to her own world: her sister would be waiting also.

Mary clasped her hands.

Dearest Lord, help me. Help me, and guide me, in thy infinite goodness and wisdom and mercy, to care for everyone in this family.

She had the odd habit, when she was alone, of praying with her eyes open: in the hope that she might one day see God, and therefore his advice would be clearer. But all she could see tonight were the cornices on the ceiling, and the shadows everywhere: the shadow of her favourite picture on the wall, an engraving of the Mona Lisa; the shadows of the water jug and the washstand and the big mahogany wardrobe. These shadows she knew.

(
But in the spring something had happened, something had changed, in Bryanston Square and it lay there in the air of the house along with the smells and the sounds, unspoken but there in the air, another shadow, dark and waiting.
)

Mary stared at the ceiling and spoke again to God.

Dearest Lord, who knowest all things. Please guide me.

At last she closed her eyes, and her thoughts drifted away from this house to the house she had lived in long ago. She was not sure if all women conjured up their mother when they were preparing for sleep: she was now a middle-aged woman herself, after all. But her path was precarious and her mother was the only guide she had: if she lost her memory of her mother she feared she would lose her way. When she was nine years old and particularly overcome with religion she had informed people most fervently that she was named after the Virgin. Her laughing mother had said to her, one day in the rose garden, that she would tell her a secret, which she must keep close to her heart. She had been named after a heroine, but she was a secret heroine. Her mother had named her not after the Virgin Mary, nor after any ancestors in her family with the name of Mary, but after a writer of the previous century called Mary who had thought a lot about women: Mary Wollstonecraft, whose books Mary would read when she was older.

Mary Cooper was a lot older now, almost thirty, and she had read the books, found them (out of print now) in a second-hand bookshop. Mary Wollstonecraft had defined the difficulties, certainly, but had not counselled for the unspoken.

It was harder and harder now, to see her mother in her mind. She could still hear, if she listened carefully, the rustle of the skirts and the birds that sang in the early morning in the rose garden. But Elizabeth Cooper’s face had become indistinct, merged with the roses, and the other sisters, and the croquet on the grass on the warm summer afternoons.

Sometimes still though, if she listened very carefully, Mary heard her laughter.

*   *   *

In the next room Harriet Cooper also lay awake in the darkness. She was seventeen years old.

She listened, alert to every sound. And the clock on the table, ticking monotonously, was always there in the background, a dull, unvarying sound measuring the days. And the nights.

It was very late now: she heard a clock chime from the direction of Oxford Street, then she heard the nightcart clattering over the cobblestones in the mews. While their Aunt Julia was staying, just after the new water closet had been installed next to the dining room and unaccustomed water had flowed downwards, the old cesspit under this house had overflowed: a catastrophe of odour and discharging drains and questionable mud that nobody in Bryanston Square, not even the ladies, could ignore, although naturally they pretended to do so. Workmen were called in, the ladies did not of course acquaint themselves with the details and took an extended trip to Brighton until the work was completed. The night-men still came to the house in the night; what they did there in the darkness Harriet did not know.

Someone passed along the Square singing rather unsteadily:

Be it ever so humble

There’s no place like home.

and then the voice faded into the distance. Harriet suddenly got up, went to the window and opened it, trying to find some breeze, some freshness in the still, warm night.

(
I am there,
Mary had said as she kissed her goodnight,
I am always there.
)

There was an oak tree in the Square. The tree was stunted, it was true, covered in specks of black soot, unable to reach properly upwards to clearer air, but an oak tree with green leaves in the middle of London nevertheless and Harriet thought of it as her own. Her room was the corner room; it looked out not only over the Square but also over the mews where the horses were kept and the grooms lived and the servants came and went: a bustling lane full of life and voices and the whinnying of horses and the sharp sound of their shoes on the cobblestones. The servants kept all the windows of the house fast shut almost always, to try to keep out the black dirt, and the eternal sounds, and the worst of the malodours of the city. But the black soot still found its way inside the windows, like the smells, and the sounds, of London. This was the only house Harriet remembered: she had known the sounds and the smells all her life, they were part of her. By these things she measured her days.

Early in the morning she would hear the clanking pails of the milk carriers from the farms and the calls of the costermongers on their way to Covent Garden. Then she would hear the servants going downstairs to light the fires and heat the water. (Lately, since she got back from Norfolk, it seemed there were always servants, everywhere in the dark, heavy house. She felt sometimes spied on, trapped; often now she would come across a footman, or a maid she had never seen before, just in the next bend of the staircase, just inside a door.) Then, after the servants, the horses would begin to pass by in the street, and the rumble of carriage wheels became louder, and all the morning clocks would chime and church bells would be rung. Before too long, in among the calls and the carriage wheels and the bells, a barrel organ would start up, or a violin: ‘Home, Sweet Home’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ would be heard over and over again, wafting along from the corner, breaking off sometimes in the middle of a bar and then starting up again, faster and faster, driving many inhabitants of the Square to distraction. Then somebody would send a footman down to the street to shout, or to pay the musician to go somewhere else and play his tune. (Mary sometimes said, laughing, that the street musicians made their living not from playing but from
not
playing the music.) The Square would remain music-free until another music-maker set up somewhere, not far away. Sometimes it was a German band with tubas and cornets, playing a mixture of polkas and hymns.