Paying Guests (27 page)

Tilly was never sure which of them started to weep first, she or Eliza. Certainly they both had wet cheeks when they left Polly murmuring over the dying baby, Georgie, there in their small attic room at the back of the house.

BUT GEORGIE STUBBORNLY refused to die. Despite all the gloomy prognostications from all around him – Mr Cumming, Eliza and, because of them, Tilly, too – he clung to life like a barnacle, silent, stubborn, but there. Polly sat with him for day after day beside the kitchen fire, tucked into the big rocker and, patiently and laboriously, dripped food into his half-open mouth from a china pap boat. At first the food dribbled out of his mouth to drip down his chin, but she would mop away the mess and try again and again, and after a while less of the pap was rejected. He did not precisely swallow but seemed almost to absorb the food through his mouth; and then one day he actually did swallow, and opened his eyes a little and then closed them fully. Polly lifted her face to Eliza who was, happily, watching them at the time and said simply, ‘You see? I told you he’d get better.’

After that first hopeful reaction, which came five days after the pair had moved into Quentin’s, he seemed to speed up his progress. He swallowed as much as a dessertspoonful of pap at a time, though it took him close on an hour to do it, and Eliza decided that no matter what the hospital had said – they had given instructions that the baby was to be fed only on bread pap, which was white bread soaked in water and squeezed out to leave a thin, cloudy liquid – that he needed ‘somethin’ a bit stronger than that’. She showed Polly how to make a richer bread and milk mixture with sugar in it and a little butter, and squeezed it through a muslin sieve to make a thicker, richer feed. And Georgie seemed to like that, for certainly he swallowed more and more of it.

It was a week later that Tilly came down on her way to breakfast to find Polly crouching by the baize door, just inside the hall, her skirts pulled close to her knees, and her chin tucked in so that she could peer out over her hands which were clasped round them, looking as though she was all eyes. Tilly stopped at the foot of the stairs when she saw her and her belly lurched. Had something happened to Georgie in the night?

‘What are you doing there?’ she cried, sounding brusque in her anxiety and for a moment Polly’s face crumpled.

‘I was waitin’ for you,’ she muttered and got awkwardly to her feet. ‘Didn’t know I weren’t supposed to be ‘ere. It’s the way wot you brought me into the ‘ouse, and I ‘as to come down the stairs an’ all and through ‘ere to get to the kitchen so I didn’t think it mattered.’

‘Of course it doesn’t!’ Tilly said, still a little sharply. ‘I was not complaining because you are in the hallway, silly girl! I was just surprised to see you there. Is there – have you trouble with Georgie?’

The slightly sullen look which had appeared on Polly’s face smoothed itself away. ‘No, Mum. It’s what I was waitin’ to tell you. ’e cried in the night.’

Tilly looked at her blankly. ‘Cried in the night? To be sure, Polly, all babies cry in the night.’

‘Not Georgie,’ Polly said. ‘’E did when ’e was first born, o’ course, when ’e was still what a baby oughta be – but since ’e was ill ’e’s ‘ardly cried at all. Not ’ad the strength for it, see? But ’e cried last night –’

At last Tilly understood. ‘Oh, my dear!’ she said and held out both hands to Polly. ‘How splendid! Of course it is a great sign of his increasing strength, and we must delight in it! Was he hungry, or was it because he was soiled?’

‘Hungry, Mum,’ Polly said. ‘I come down and got some food for ‘im an’ I ‘ope as that was all right, Mum.’

‘Of course it was all right,’ Tilly said warmly. ‘Come. We must speak to Eliza about this, and see to it you’ve a boatful of food to take up each night so that you need not come down in the dark.’

She hurried down to the kitchen where Eliza had now emerged from her own room and was busy supervising the preparation of the hot dishes for breakfast.

‘Kedgeree,’ she was instructing Rosie, ‘needs to be really hot, you hear me? It can’t be one of your half-and-half dishes, so be sure to set it in the chafing-dish with the spirit lamp. It don’t matter so much that the bacon goes in a plain one, so long as it’s covered and well warmed to start with. That’ll keep it nicely hot, whereas a chafing-dish’ll go on cooking it and turn it into a crisp and ruin it. But the kedgeree don’t hurt none if it goes on cookin’ – brings out the flavour of the curry, like. Put a bit o’ extra butter on top and stir it in before you takes it to the table, that’s all. And Rosie, don’t you start those coddled eggs till I gives you the office, you hear me? Yesterday Mr Hancock said his was downright hard and no coddled egg should ever be anything but nicely tender – Good morning, Mum! Oh, there you are, Polly! I thought you’d gone off to the privy, seeing Georgie there like that. Next time you have to leave him, tell one of us and we’ll watch him. I don’t hold with tying babies to chairs – one of my brothers nearly hanged himself because of that.’

‘I shall obtain some leading reins for him,’ Tilly said. ‘And then we can fasten him to a chair safely if Polly needs to be away from him. Eliza, he cried last night. From hunger. Is that not good news?’

Eliza looked at her and then at the baby who was sitting in the big rocker, slipped sideways a little and fast asleep. Then she peered at Polly.

‘Are you sure? Not just wishin’ it?’ she said. ‘He don’t look all that bright to me and I won’t say otherwise. Still as scrawny as a skinned rabbit.’

‘He cried,’ Polly said stubbornly. ‘Cried real loud. Woke me up! I came and got some pap for him and ’e took it all. Half the boat full.’ She snickered then. ‘Got into a right mess too, this morning. ’e ain’t shit like that since I dunno when.’

Across the kitchen beside the fire Rosie, who was busily turning sausages in the big pan, snorted in disgust and threw a sharp glance
at Polly. That the other servants did not like Polly or her baby brother was no secret, but they had done nothing worse than mutter at each other and treat Polly with silent contempt, which seemed to suit her well enough; certainly she showed no sign of minding what they did or said, and did not do so now.

‘Well,’ Tilly said as dampeningly as she could. ‘That is another good sign, no doubt, but we will not discuss it here. Now, while he seems happy enough, and Eliza is here to watch him, go and have your own breakfast.’

‘No,’ Polly said. ‘I’ll see to ‘im first,’ and went and picked up Georgie, who woke and lay there in her arms blinking up at her, and Tilly went over to him and touched his cheek. He had lost some of the thick pallor that had made him look like a waxen effigy rather than a living creature, and though he was still desperately thin, his eye sockets looked less deep, and his temples seemed less hollow.

‘You have made a superb task of caring for him, Polly,’ Tilly said, ‘has she not, Eliza? I don’t scruple to tell you, my dear, that when you came here first I was quite certain, as was everyone else, that he could not live more than a day or two. You have confounded us all.’

‘Not me,’ Polly said gruffly. ‘It’s ‘im. ‘E’ll confound all of us one day, you see if ’e don’t.’ And suddenly she lifted him to hold his cheek against hers and began to rock him, with a fierce possessiveness that made Tilly take a step back. ‘’E’ll show everyone one day, you see if ’e don’t. ‘E’ll grow up to be richer an’ cleverer an’ stronger than any of you. Just you wait and see!’ And Georgie let out a sudden wail of protest at the strength of her grip, which sounded like a kind of repetition of his sister’s outburst and across the room Rosie laughed incredulously. But it was an uneasy sound.

After that, Georgie came on apace. As the autumn days shortened and the air got crisper, he seemed to grow before their eyes. His appetite became voracious and soon he was clamouring for more food so loudly and so often that Eliza advised abandonment of the pap boat and a transfer to bowl and spoon. He wolfed as much buttered bread and milk and honey as Polly gave him and still
seemed to want more, so Eliza added eggs which were beaten into the mixture. That seemed to please him for a while and he became more active and it was no longer safe to set him in a chair, for he would roll out at the first opportunity. Tilly obtained the promised leading reins from Jem’s shop, and Georgie spent his time either sitting on the floor beside his sister, attached to her wrist by the leather straps, or perched on her scrawny hip as she moved about the house.

Then he got hungrier again and bad tempered with it, crying so much that even Eliza got irritable, and she assured Polly it would be perfectly all right to feed the child on stronger food and added mashed fish and even scraped beef to his diet. And at last Georgie stopped crying and became more like an ordinary baby. He slept a lot and ate a lot and played a lot and soiled himself a lot, and he looked well. The eyes and temples filled out as fast as his cheeks. His skin lost its sickly pallor and took on a lively rosiness. His hair, a soft brown like Polly’s, curled vigorously about his ears and he began to develop bracelets of fat around his wrists as Eliza, now quite besotted with him, added a few dollops of cream to his bread and milk and as much honey as he would take, which was considerable.

Within eight weeks of his arrival at Quentin’s, he was crawling everywhere. Tilly had not thought too much about his age and was startled now to realize that he was as old as he was; fully fifteen months, according to Polly.

‘I allus knew as ’e was born to be a bigun, like my pa,’ she said as she sat crouched on the rug beside him, her favourite position. ‘My pa’s ever so big. Or ’e was when times was better.’ She seemed to brood for a moment. ‘’E got ever so thin when ’e couldn’t work no more.’

‘Why could he not work any more, Polly?’ Tilly asked and the girl shot a sideways glance at her.

‘Done ‘is back in, di’n’t ‘e? Fell off a ladder on account it was all busted, and ’e ‘ad a big load o’ slates up and when ’e went up to the roof, the ‘ole bleedin’ thing come down and ‘im with it. Couldn’t walk at first, ’e couldn’t, but after that – well ’e could walk but ’e
dragged one leg an’ no one’d give ‘im work. So ’e did ‘is best and stole food, but ’e couldn’t run fast enough to get away so –’ She shrugged. ‘Gone to clink ’e ‘as. Won’t never come out, I reckons.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’ Tilly cried. ‘Tell me which prison he is in and perhaps I can –’

The girl looked at her almost contemptuously. ‘Which prison? ‘Ow should I know? I went to ‘ear the beak in court when they put pa up in front of ‘im to see what I could find aht, but no one’d tell me nothin’. I just got kicked aht for me pains. ’e waved to me from the Black Maria, but I never saw ‘im again nor found aht where they took ‘im.’

‘Well, I might have more success,’ Tilly said. ‘Which was the court you say you went to? The one where your father was tried?’

Polly sat very still on the kitchen hearthrug, her skirt of blue print stripes – for Eliza had made up a couple of maid’s dresses for her, and provided her with aprons and cotton caps to keep her neat – spread about her, and stared up at Tilly curiously. Georgie, sitting beside her on the rug and playing with a little pile of polished pebbles, which he was putting into and taking out of the battered tin mug which Eliza had given him and which he regarded as his own special treasure, made the sort of contented babbling sounds well fed babies do make, and then, oddly, turned and looked at her too, so that both seemed to be regarding her with an air of puzzlement.

Tilly leaned back in the rocker; they were alone in the kitchen because Eliza had gone out to Charlie Harrod’s to deliver the monthly order. Tilly had sent Eliza on this errand rather than go herself as she usually did, because she felt the need to talk to Polly about her history, and had therefore created an opportunity to speak to her alone. But now she felt oddly embarrassed, as though she had been prying into matters that were none of her concern. Yet surely, she thought a little defensively, she had a right to ask questions of her own protégée?

‘I do not ask out of any morbid curiosity, Polly,’ she said. ‘I only wish to be of help to you.’

‘That’s what I was wonderin’’ Polly said. ‘Why?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Why? I mean, why should a lady like you go to such a bother over the likes of us? I got a bit o’ time to think now, what with Georgie bein’ so much better.’ And she turned her head to look adoringly at Georgie, who blew a spit bubble at her and tried to put one of the smaller pebbles in his mouth, which she took from him, much to his annoyance, for he let out a sharp squawk of protest. ‘’E’s the way a baby ought to be now, an’ it’s all been to do with you. I mean, I never doubted, not fer a minute I didn’t, as Georgie’d be all right in the end –’ There was the now familiar fierceness in her voice again. ‘But now ’e is an’ I’m that much better too, bein’ fed proper for the first time since I can remember, an’ gettin’ right fat on it,’ – And indeed she has plumped up a little, Tilly thought, and looks much the better for it – ‘well, I took to wonderin’. Why should you bother? Is it all on account of church, like?’