The Trespass (6 page)

‘Why?’

‘Well, he is the only person there.’

‘Oh, do you not
know?
’ said Asobel scornfully. ‘He is going to have lots of pets – parrots and dogs and cats and a darling little goat kid, and then he will meet Man Friday.’

‘Ah,’ said Harriet, smiling, and read on.

But in the middle of the adventures Asobel began fidgeting and moving in her chair.

‘I know it is hot but try and sit still, Asobel,’ said Harriet. ‘Ladies always sit still.’

‘Why?’

‘They just do. You read to me now.’

Asobel read slowly and carefully in her high, piping voice, every now and then asking for elucidation. Harriet could hear the birds in the trees outside and in the distance the men calling as they pulled up the marquee. Then she heard Asobel’s skirts and petticoats again, scratching and catching on the wooden chair, and the little girl pulled at her bodice again and again as she read. Her tight little boots kept banging against her chair and her reading became more and more exasperated, and interspersed with sighs.

Finally she stopped reading and said, ‘Harriet?’

‘Yes, Asobel?’

‘Harriet, can I ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘You will not be angry?’

Harriet smiled at the little round earnest face looking up at her. ‘I do not suppose I will be angry.’

‘I am not meaning to be rude, or not like a lady.’

‘What is it, Asobel?’

Asobel took a deep breath. ‘Harriet, what is the water that runs down me?’

‘What do you mean?’ Harriet looked alarmed.

‘See, you are angry. I thought you would be.’

‘No, Asobel, I am not angry.’ Harriet sat up even straighter.

‘Harriet, I am so hot. My dress scratches, and my stockings and my petticoats. And water runs down me under my arms and sometimes past my waist. What is it?’

Harriet cleared her throat very slightly. ‘Asobel, there are many things that ladies do not talk about. Not at all. Not ever. If I discuss this with you you must not discuss it elsewhere.’

‘Even with Mamma?’

‘Particularly with Mamma. She would say what I am saying: ladies do not talk about this. But what you mean is
perspiration.
’

‘Perspiration?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it dirty?’

Harriet cleared her throat slightly again. ‘No, it is not dirty. It is perfectly natural. But it is just one of the things that happens when – when a person is hot. But ladies never, ever mention it, and you must not mention it again.’

‘Do men have
persip – perspiration?
Or only ladies?’

‘Everybody has it. But nobody, ever, talks about it.’

‘I thought it meant I was sick.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is – funny.’ And Asobel wriggled slightly disconsolately in her chair in the summerhouse.

‘Read on now, Asobel.’ And Asobel sighed and then began to read again of the adventures. She had secretly decided that she was going to be a sailor when she grew up, not a lady.

Later two of the workmen passed near the summerhouse. They were hauling huge metal poles across the grass.

‘Harriet, look!’ Asobel whispered. ‘They are – they are perspirationing.’

Harriet gave her such a warning look that Asobel at once sat demurely, her hands clasped in front of her as she had been taught.

But later the younger of the workmen who had been listening to the poetry, John Bowker, ventured past the summerhouse. There was nobody there: cushions and chairs and a table sat neatly and silently in the sunshine.

*   *   *

In London in the sunshine Mary, wearing a light shawl instead of a hat, limped her way to Hyde Park, crossing where the road had been cleared a little by a sweeper, giving him a penny and a smile; her skirts nevertheless caught excrement and leaves as she walked. She loved the Park, never tired of it, the green grass and all the trees – even though the miasma around the Serpentine drifted towards Oxford Street. A band played today as it did so often, jaunty tunes wafted on the afternoon air; fashionable coaches rattled by. A woman was selling ginger beer, Mary bought a twopenny glass, sat on one of the iron seats in the sunshine. She was tired: she had walked to Harley Street, had stood outside the Ladies’ College.

She listened to the band; now they were playing a polka, the new craze, her fingers tapped in time to the music. She watched the fashionable and unfashionable passing by, and the ginger beer tingled on her lips. In a few days she would turn thirty. Half her life was perhaps over. If she did nothing now her life would stretch endlessly onwards through the other half, and nothing would change. For Harriet’s sake she must always be near; nevertheless on her thirtieth birthday a difference must be made at last. And her thoughts turned again to the Ladies’ College in Harley Street, her heart’s dream. She closed her eyes in the warm sunshine.

Her mother had known that Mary’s salvation was to be through reading books. Her eyes had sparkled with her plans for Mary’s education: ‘It will be my education too’; daily they had read and talked and planned for Mary, when she was nine, when she was ten, when she was eleven. And her mother told her of meeting an old, old lady of the most impeccable background, Lady Arabella Stockton, who had known Mary Wollstonecraft, known her trials and tribulations, but also her shocking ideas: her belief in the rights of women. She had met the old lady just before Mary was born: ‘It was my first confinement and I was very frightened; after meeting Lady Stockton I prayed every evening and every morning to God, that he would grant me a girl, and I got you, my darling. When you were born I knew that what I might not have for myself I could give to you. And I called you Mary.’ And so all that time, of the rose garden and the rustling skirts of the sisters and the echo of laughter everywhere, the mother and the daughter were conspiratorially reading and planning and questioning and laughing – you could teach! you could travel! you could write books! – and it mattered not one jot that she was a girl who would not marry, being a cripple.

Mary’s attention was caught by a balloon in the sky above Hyde Park: people rode in these nowadays, waved through the hazy sunshine to the earthbound. She looked up in amazement as she always did, and waved back even though she imagined they could not see her. An elderly man in black was slowly walking by, but staring upwards also. Mary looked at him carefully; she had seen him several times, and she recognised him: it was the old Duke of Wellington, England’s greatest hero. He lived nearby and often walked in the Park. He was all alone, still staring, as Mary had been, up into the sky at the balloon floating by and the people waving. And Mary thought that despite all his history, and all his battles, the Duke of Wellington seemed just as amazed as she.

All over London, people stared upwards, wondering what the world was corning to.

*   *   *

Next day the workman John Bowker watched, when he could, the comings and goings of the summerhouse. Suddenly Asobel was called urgently up to the house: the dressmaker had arrived.

John Bowker approached the summerhouse with his cap in his hand. He saw the young lady look up in surprise to see him there; she half-rose: he thought she looked frightened.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ he said gently. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt you, or alarm you.’

She sat down again, reassured perhaps by his voice, but said nothing and seemed ready to spring up again at any moment.

‘I wanted to ask you to help me.’ The words came out in a rush, seemed to surprise the young man as much as they surprised Harriet, but he hurried on. He tried not to notice how extraordinarily beautiful she was, close to. This was his chance, and nothing else mattered.

‘I need to send some letters. I can read quite a bit, I went to a school for a little while but I can’t write, I haven’t used a pencil since I left school and the letters have to be neat-like, it wouldn’t do if they was untidy.’ But all the time, because he saw that he had alarmed her in some way, even in his enthusiasm and his nervousness he tried to speak quietly and he did not move from the door of the summerhouse. Harriet saw that his shoes were worn and his jacket looked as if it belonged to someone else and she could definitely smell him. But there was such earnestness and enthusiasm in his face that she felt herself relaxing. She still had not spoken but now she nodded, to show he might go on.

‘I need to go away,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t understand, miss, but there is no work for us here. I used to help on farms but the farms have got machines now, to do what we was used to doing. I was the best there was with a scythe but now they’ve got them threshing machines, even down here. I came back this late summer, I’d heard there might be work at the harvest but we wasn’t needed. There’s nothing here for us and so some of us want to have a new chance and go to a new country. We could start again, maybe even – they say it is so – own some land of our own,’ she saw how his eyes lit up, ‘build things for ourselves, make our lives begin again.’ He forgot she was afraid, stepped into the summerhouse. ‘There’s new lives to be had in Canada and Australia and New Zealand, all these new places we’ve discovered, these new parts of Great Britain. We’ve heard that some of the countries are paying men like me, I mean offering to pay our fares if we work when we get there. What we’ve heard is they might pay for us to get on the boat and just sail away and start again, can you believe that? And we’ve heard that countries are giving free land, acres and acres where no-one has been. So we need to write to find out if they’ll take us, people like us. I went up to the Church and asked the Vicar if he would help me but he didn’t know me and asked me if I had family, and I said I had my mother and sisters and he said I should stay and look after them, but what use am I to them like this, without proper work? If I could go there – Canada maybe, it’s a bit nearer than them other places – I could work and work. I wouldn’t mind the work and then, when I’d made my way, they could come too.’ His eyes shone. ‘I’ve got all the addresses, me mates have already got them things, the Brochures. And one of them has got a handbill, it blew off a building in London and he brought it all the way down, walked with it, to show us.’

‘Harriet, Harriet, Harriet!’ Asobel came running down the lawn.

‘Do not run, Asobel, ladies do not run!’ Aunt Lucretia’s voice floated down to the summerhouse.

John Bowker at once moved outside the summerhouse but he kept his eyes on Harriet.

‘Bring the addresses tomorrow,’ said Harriet.

Only for a moment did the little girl stare at the strange, shabby man touching his cap, turning away. ‘Harriet, we are having peach dresses, what do you think,
peach
dresses, it’s called peach but it’s a sort of pink, well sort of like peaches.’ She tumbled into the summerhouse in excitement.

‘Sit down, Asobel,’ Harriet said in her severest voice. ‘Breathe in and out quietly until you are calm.’ Then as Asobel’s breath came slower at last, even though her cheeks were still as pink as peaches, Harriet smiled. ‘Now tell me,’ she said.

Asobel took one more deep breath and considered her words.

‘Actually I am going to be rather beautiful,’ she said.

‘I think perhaps it is time for multiplication,’ said Harriet.

*   *   *

Dear Father,

I have just received your letter and the copy of ‘The Women of England: Their Social Duties & Domestic Habits’, by Mrs Stickney Ellis, which you enclosed. I understand you to mean that young ladies do not work and that it would be quite unsuitable for me to think of working with other children.

Thank you for agreeing that Mary should come to the wedding. The family here is so much looking forward to seeing her.

Your obedient daughter

Harriet Cooper

*   *   *

‘What exactly do you want the letters to say?’

Asobel had gone, with much sighing and complaining, for her afternoon rest. The workmen had been dismissed because the marquee was ready but John Bowker had found Harriet in the summerhouse.

From his pocket he took the brochures he had spoken of, and a larger tattered notice which she guessed to be the treasured handbill: he handed it to her with immense care. She saw:

FREE PASSAGE

EMIGRATION TO CANADA

For Mechanics, Gardeners, Agricultural

Labourers, Domestic Servants

Of good character.

‘I want you to tell all of them, all the countries that Britain owns, that I’m a hard-working, all-round agricultural labouring man of twenty and that I want to go to their beautiful country and work hard and make something of my life.’ He looked uncertain. ‘I thought I should say beautiful country to each of them, and it’s not a lie, they are beautiful to me. And that I need my fare paying. And that I’ll work like a nigger and be a credit to their beautiful country.’ He had to step across to the table to hand her the brochures.

‘Are you sure you want to leave England?’ said Harriet shyly, not yet looking at the brochures. ‘It is – it is very beautiful here also, where you live.’

‘No, miss, it is beautiful where you are, not where we are. And anyway, it will still be English, Her Majesty is still the Queen after all. We own these new places.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In Canterbury. Like I said, I walked down here because I heard there was work. But there was none – bar putting up this marquee for a couple of days. I’m staying just in the town here. With a friend.’

‘I do not think you gave me your name.’

‘John Bowker, miss. Twenty years old and hard-working.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Will you? Will you write these for me, miss?’ He looked at her as if his life depended on it, was aware then that he was standing too close, that she had partly turned away,
I’ve been lifting them canvases this morning, I’m maybe none too clean,
and he moved back at once to the summerhouse door. He had taken the handbill back again. ‘Then I’ll go to London. Most of them offices are in the Strand. I’ll take it to them. I’ll go every day till they give me an answer.’