Chapter One
It’s raining, it’s raining,
There’s pepper in the box,
And all the little ladies
Are picking up their frocks.
I first realised we were in trouble when Peter vanished behind the curtain separating the workshop from the house just as Mrs Eeles came through from the street. She had visited the day before too, asking for him.
‘He was here only a minute ago,’ I said, ‘tending the blocking press, or maybe it was the plane.’ I looked to the others for confirmation, and they nodded. The ledger he had been working on for some politician or other was still lying on the bench, a naked manuscript being measured for its new clothes.
Oh, there were other signs, but I had chosen to ignore them until it was too late, until I was faced with too much proof that business was failing, that we were sinking into poverty, and would soon be destitute. It was like learning to read: one could pore over the incomprehensible scribbles of a book for years, until one sudden day the ciphers seem to rearrange themselves on the very page and yield their meaning at last. So it was with the trail left by Peter Damage, and once the truth dawned on me I could no longer ignore his swollen fingers; the empty tea-caddy on the mantel-piece; the hushed voices between Sven and Jack whenever Peter left the room; the cursing matches that took place, even in front of Lucinda and me. The most blatant sign was the one I had chosen most to overlook: that Lucinda’s fits were occurring more often, and with greater severity.
Mrs Eeles had a long, straight nose like a candle-snuffer, which was wrinkling at the smell of glue and leather. Everyone who came in here did that, although I never knew why. It was a far better smell than the outside stench of London putrefying in the rain. She looked like a black chicken in her triangular mourning cloak, which dripped over the trestles. Her red face darted from under her veil as she pecked around the frames and presses with agitation, as if she might find Peter amongst the leather parings on the floor. She used to preen and offer him her cheek to kiss, and would call him ‘Pete’, or even ‘Petey’, and tell him to call her ‘Gwin’, and he would chuckle, and wrinkle his round chin down on to his neck out of bashfulness.
She was about to explain her reason for the visit, but as it was five minutes to twelve, a train rattled by outside our window, and Mrs Eeles raised her hands to command silence.
‘ “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown . . .” ’
We bowed our heads, and while I fingered my mother’s hair-bracelet around my wrist, we waited for the rhythm of the train of death to cease rocking the foundations of the house. Five years before, in 1854, the London Necropolis &National Mausoleum Company had opened its Necropolitan Railway adjacent to Ivy-street, to shuttle corpses and their mourners twenty-five miles down the line to Woking, where they had constructed the largest cemetery in the world. I had heard Mrs Eeles had picked up the houses at the top of Ivy-street on the cheap, having unexpectedly inherited a small fortune from an uncle in the colonies. Whoever sold them to her had not understood her proclivities; a shrewder speculator would have charged her more for these houses, for they were to her as the apartments overlooking Lord’s or the Oval were to a devotee of cricket. The train took the dead to their graves, but it took Mrs Eeles straight to heaven.
‘ “. . . the first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” ’
For Mrs Eeles had an inclination towards death. I do not mean that Mrs Eeles lived in morbid sufferance. I mean that she loved death with a passion: she delectated in mortification. She loved death the way that a child loves sweets: it made her giddy, and giggly, and slightly sick.
‘Pardon me for the disturbance,’ she finally said when the moment of death had passed, ‘but there’s the small matter of the rent outstanding.’ Her eyes swept over the shabby little room, which was harshly lit by two naked gas flames, because I had taken the lamps into the house to clean again. I hoped that she would find no cause for concern in the way we were keeping her property. From the battered benches, peeling wallpaper, greasy leather aprons and clammy air, one would be hard pressed to believe that objects of great beauty were produced here.
‘The rent?’ I said, with genuine innocence. Peter paid Mrs Eeles every quarter; they had their own arrangements, and an understanding that Damage’s Bookbinders was not to lower the tone of Ivy-street. There had been a dreadful shindy only last summer, when Mrs Eeles let number six to a group of girls who claimed to be opera-dancers appearing at the Alhambra. She would never have considered that type as a rule, only that the house had a leaky roof and a draughty cellar, no matter how many workmen tried to patch it up. But when Mrs Eeles discovered they were what one might call gay, of the seediest type, she threw them into the street wearing nothing but their scarlet drawers, and hurled their fancy dresses after them. Oh, she could be a devil with her dander up, but she did see to the drains, unlike other landlords. Besides, I had heard that the late Mr Eeles, who had been a marble mason, used to throw his boots at her, so Peter always used to tell me that it was fortunate she had tenants to throw hers at. She and Peter had a special understanding, what with their obsessions with respectability and mortality: there was nothing that impressed Peter so much as the dignity enshrouding the payment of one’s debt of nature.