Jim Crace - Arcadia

‘I’m out of oil,’ she told herself, picking at the peeling fossil slates which were her nails.

Together Em and Victor rocked away the nights and days. Em’s careful presentation of her baby and herself was neglected. The radish face turned yellow-white. The good health of the countryside did not survive the hardness of the town. She had no plan to make a fresh escape. She sank into the shade beneath the parasol and called out above the fretful cries of Victor, ‘Please help. Please help. My baby’s dying.’ She wept. She tried to seize the trouser legs, the skirts of passers-by. She mimed an empty stomach. She put her hand onto her heart. She tried abuse. She called out words she had not known before she came to town.

It did not work. The rich were blind to noisy poverty. The people hurried by. The crazy woman with the parasol would win no hearts like that. She had trembled at the gate. Now the gate was closing on them both. The city was about to lock them in a cell of hunger, sickness and despair. And then their fortunes changed. Em’s sister, Victor’s aunt, was sent by chance to rescue them.

SHE WAS NO rich man’s maid. She was a beggar, just like Em. And worse. The aunt had lost the kitchen job for which she’d come to town three years before. She’d not excelled at the skivvying which — when her widowed father died — the Village Bench had hoped would ‘quieten’ her. High hopes indeed for such a squally girl. Her face, and tongue, had not found favour with her employer’s cook, who had taken her teenage dreaminess, her wilful tawny hair, her lack of tact, her pockmarked forehead and cheeks, as insolence.

The hope had been that Aunt could — quickly, cheaply — be transformed from hayseed into scullion. But she was not the curtsy-kowtow kind and had no kitchen skills. ‘She couldn’t boil up water for a barber,’ cook had said. ‘That girl’s as much use in this kitchen as a cat.’ Instead, she was the sort who saw the city as a place for play not work. Unlike the country working day the city day was ruled by clocks. It had its shifts for work and meals and sleep. And there were shifts when Aunt was free to play. What did she care if cook found single, errant, tawny hairs entwined in dough or curling like a filamentary eel in ‘madam’s’ soup? Why all the fuss? Nobody had died from swallowing one hair. And what if there were egg bogeys between the tines of breakfast forks? Or if the skillet smelled of pork? So much the better if the skillet smelled of pork! Anyone with sense or appetite would take a fold of bread and ‘wipe the pig’s behind’. She and her older, married sister, Em, fought for such a treat when they were young.

Aunt simply could not understand the odd proprieties, the niceties, of bourgeois city life where more was wasted than consumed, where laughter, yawns, and stomach wind shared equal status, swallowed, hidden, stifled by a hand. She did not like ‘indoors’. But she adored the bustle and the badinage of streets, the intimacy of crowds, the hats, the clothes, the trams, the liberty. She had it to herself once in a while — when she was sent by cook to purchase extra eggs or vegetables, when every second Saturday she had a half-day off, when — once, at night — she climbed the backyard wall and walked till dawn in those parts of the city where lamps — and spirits — were rarely dimmed. On that occasion Aunt was met by her employer’s dogs when she returned. They took her for a thief and, though they knew her well enough from all the times she’d favoured them with kitchen slops, they were too dumb or mischievous to let her clamber back into the kitchen yard. Their barking called the Master and the police. For cook this was the final straw. She did not find it likely that the girl had just been ‘walking’ as she claimed.

‘You country girls are all the same,’ she said. ‘“Bumpkins do not good burghers make.”’ She did not say what she had told her employers, that Aunt was mad, ‘a leaking pot’. She paid Aunt off with the exact train fare — oneway — to the village of her birth, only fifteen months after she had fled it for the prospects of the town. Aunt spent the train fare on a hat.

She skipped around the bars and restaurants quite happily. She wore her hat — a high-crowned, deep-brimmed cloche in straw with dog-rose sprigs in felt. It was the fashion for that year amongst young women of a cheerful disposition. It masked the pockmarks on her forehead and made her seem more winsome than she was. She doffed her hat at groups of men who sat on the patios of bars or on the terraces of restaurants. They seemed so bored and so keen to be amused. She only had to smile or comic-curtsy or spin her hat around upon her open hand, to earn a little cash. It was so easy to take money or a meal off men and still stay good.

There were a dozen country girls like her who worked the same neighbourhood of the city and who shared a two-room attic in a tenement near the Soap Market, in the Woodgate district. The Princesses they were called, sardonically, by the poor families and the labourers who inhabited the lower floors. They’d all lost jobs as maids or kitchen girls and had finished on the streets. Some stole. Some sold themselves to men. Some earned a little from the sale of matches or doing fetch-and-carry for the posh, frail ladies who took strong waters in the smart salons. Aunt stuck to begging. She was good at it. And soon she had enough each day to pay the pittance rent for a small corner in the Princesses’ attic rooms. There was no proper light or water there, or any stove for cooking. But there was camaraderie and candles. We know that poverty’s not fun, but if you are young and poor in company then shame, and lack of hope, and loneliness do not increase the burdens on your back. Sharing nothing or not much is easier than sharing wealth.

So Aunt was happy with her life. There was no washing up. No slops. No punctilious, grumpy cook. No silver breakfast forks. They shared — like only women will — their daily gains, their city spoils, their swag. The only privacy they had — if, say, they wished to sit unnoticed on the pot — was to hide behind the lines of washing, strung across the rooms, or to wait for darkness. But why hide away to pee, when peeing in full view of all your friends can cause such mirth and raucous joviality? ‘Hats off,’ they used to say to Aunt, whose cloche would rarely leave her head. ‘It’s impolite to pee like that in the presence of Princesses.’ They’d wait until they heard the spurt of urine in the bowl and then they’d say, ‘Hats off. Stand up … and take a bow!’ Or ‘Sing, sing! And show your ring.’ The communal laughter of these Princesses was laughter with no victim and no spite.

Aunt learnt the tricks of begging from their attic talk at night, as each described the day they’d had; how men’s brains were unfastened with their braces; how careless waiters were with tips; which restaurant chefs would give a back-step meal to any girl who’d volunteer to mop the floor. You’d eat the meal — then run; what places were the worst and best for palming cash from strangers. She learnt how just a dab of zinc and vinegar could make a girl look feverish. It didn’t work with men, but women — older ones — would pay to make you go away. She learnt a gallery of beggars’ faces, how to slide her tongue between her teeth and lips to look the simpleton, how to fake the single floating eye of the insane, how picking noses is just as good as picking pockets for getting cash if it is done on restaurant terraces and in a childish, not a vulgar way.

So she did well on city streets. She begged and importuned enough to count herself — by country standards — well set up. She was much plumper than the girl who’d skivvied in the kitchen. She had her hat as talisman and her Princesses for family. She did not think about the coming day — or much about the day just passed. She liked to place her hat upon her head and wander streets as if they were country lanes and she was simply searching for free fruit. She never tired of putting out her hand or challenging — this was her favourite trick — the drinking men in bars to toss and land a coin in the canyon brim of her straw hat.