‘And how on earth is one expected to do that?’ she asked. I selected two bowls, and started to demonstrate. And as we whisked the whites and yolks, and added the sugar, and the beer and liquor and spices, I felt we were enjoying each other’s company. She spluttered and grimaced through her first sips of the beverage, but downed it remarkably quickly, only the alcohol dampened her somewhat and soon she was sighing and fretting and torturing herself once more. Still, I was able to find some vestige of sympathy for her inside me, much as the vision of her begging Din for humiliation started to mock my brain again and antagonise my affection for him.
‘Oh, but Jossie must love me still, Dora!’ she lamented, as she played with her empty, frothy glass. ‘And I love him!’
Yes, you may love him, I wanted to say, but you love him as you loved that spear, with Din holding it, as a victim loves a villain. And he, he loves you like that too, only in reverse. He loves you as the British Empire loves its conquests, and look what happens when they react, revolt, retreat, I wanted to say. Look at the Fenians; look at the Sepoys. That’s how much he loves you.
And then I had to wonder: is that how I felt about Din?
‘What will he think? Look at me! I have been reduced to living in the – the – slums!’
‘I think you’ll find,’ I said, hoping that words would obliterate the image of the spear and her white, exposed breastbone, and my own peculiar yearnings for the man, ‘that this is the more respectable part of Lambeth.’ Peter would be turning in his grave at her words. The grave, I suddenly realised, that this woman had paid for.
‘And in such close proximity to whores!’ she shuddered.
‘There are no prostitutes in Ivy-street, Lady Knightley,’ I said pawkily.
‘Oh, hark at you, Dora,’ she snorted. ‘Jocelyn will be horrified when he hears I had to resort to coming here. Look at you in your dull gown! Have you nothing cheerier to wear? What about that black dress we gave you? You depress me.’
I thought of the brown silk dress that lay upstairs in the box-room, and my absurd charade when I first put it on, how it had made me feel such a lady. My cheeks burned with my own contempt at myself.
‘Sylvia,’ I said quietly. ‘We have had a pleasant evening. I beg you not to spoil it.’ And so she sunk into her own thoughts once more, and I into mine, but there were too many with Din’s name on inside me, so I returned to the bindery to work.
Din stayed later these days, as if he knew I needed the company, what with Jack’s absence and Sylvia’s presence. Accustomed to his banishment from the house to avoid contact with Peter, Din still never came beyond the heavy wooden door into the house, so he and Sylvia never crossed paths again, but he was my solace and escape when I slipped into the bindery to leave her behind. Our days were marked by periods of intense chatter, and stretches of silence which seemed easy enough for him, but which for me were raging arguments between my heart and my head.
He still left early on Fridays, but nowadays he would ask my leave as a matter of courtesy, and I would of course grant it. And he still turned up some mornings with fresh tar-like wounds to his face, or an eye so bruised it could not see my blushing concern, or injuries to his shins that only betrayed their presence slowly by the steady seepage of vital fluids across the already stained canvas of his trousers.
Din. Din. I love you, Din. Oh, no, I would never say it. But the words crept up from my heart and lurked in the corners of my mouth, as if daring me to swallow them whole, or spit them out, anything but say them. Din.
‘I know what you did last night, Din,’ I said instead one such morning, only very quietly. I was cleaning a brush, in order to paste the reverse of some leather, and did not look at him as I spoke. But when I received no reaction, I added, ‘I thought that was what I would find when I followed you to Whitechapel.’
‘You are even more foolish than I thought,’ Din said eventually, when the struggle to rig up the sewing-frame became too much for him. ‘You willin’ly took yourself to where you would see a bunch of men splittin’ each other’s skulls and rippin’ their skins off.’
‘Why do you do it?’ I dipped the brush into the paste, and looked at him.
He made a valiant attempt at a shrug. ‘Why not?’
‘Is it not inhuman, Din?’
He closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Does it not reduce you to the level of dogs, or bears, or cocks?’
‘Why so interested, ma’am? Do you not know enough about the inhumanity of men?’ And here he sat upright, with more determination than his injuries would allow, and directed his one good eye pointedly at me. I swallowed and positioned the leather on the bench. We had never discussed the particular speciality of Damage’s Bookbinders; I had not wanted to know that he knew.