‘Do you mind?’
And he shrugged again, and laughed wryly. ‘It ain’t how I choose to spend my evenings, no, but it ain’t pickin’ cotton neither.’
A thought crossed my mind. ‘Is this where you go, Din, of a Friday?’
His temper changed. ‘No, ma’am.’
‘Where do you go?’
‘I ain’t gonna be tellin’ you.’
‘That is fair, Din. If it is half as humiliating as what you do for the ladies, you should be keeping it to yourself.’ What
else did they do to the boy?
My
boy, I was already feeling.
‘And indeed I will, ma’am,’ he said, tapping his finger to the side of his nose. ‘Shall I be waxin’ the cords now, ma’am?’
I handed him the candle-stub, and we shared one last smile as he took it from me. I wandered slowly back into the booth, warm
with conspiracy, to plan the new design.
I laid out all the portraits of Douglass. He was a handsome man: his large hair was swept over neatly in a parting to one
side, and on the other it rose upwards like an irrepressible spirit. His brows were arched, and met in a deep furrow over
his strong nose, and he had a wide chin. None of the pictures – even the line-drawings – were simple enough to be transposed
on to leather, so I started to sketch my own version, with the right balance of strong and weak lines according to the tools
available to me, and my own level of skill at using them.
Yet I could not get it right. I drew face after face, with increasing agitation, and the more I drew, the more I feared Din
would come over to ask me something. For every face on every scrap of paper bore little resemblance to Frederick Douglass,
with his large hair, and straight nose, and looked every inch like our own Din Nelson, hairless, with precise, heavy brows,
a broken nose, a thick lower lip, and an uneven gleam across both cheekbones, which I could only guess betrayed the damage
he had formerly suffered. I could not get the eyes even, the nose straight, the cheeks level.
I worked on the gold-tooling throughout the following day, only vaguely aware of the hammerings, the planings, the sewings
around me. It took significant quantities of gold, for I decided that the hue of his skin would best be portrayed by solid
gold, rather than just a gold outline, and Lady Knightley was paying me well. I finished the binding around five o’clock,
and emerged from the gold-tooling booth in a state of confusion and embarrassment. For, try as I might, the face that glistened
back at me and the rest of the workshop from the cover of
My Bondage and My Freedom
was Din’s, not Douglass’s.
Was it that his Negro features dominated my perception of how a black man looked, in the way people claim to be unable to
tell one Chinaman from another? Or was it that I preferred his unbalanced features to Douglass’s more perfect ones? I had
never previously stopped in my tracks to admire a man of his colour in the way that I (I had to confess) admired Sir Jocelyn
Knightley, or even Peter, once upon a time. I found beauty in the man, beauty where I least expected to find it.
‘Let me see, Mrs D,’ Jack said, ambling over from his bench.
‘I – no – it’s not quite –’ I scanned the workshop hastily. ‘My, where’s Din?’
‘He was ’ere just a while back. Has ’e given us the slip again? I don’t believe it.’
But he had; somehow, from our very midst, while we were deep amongst the millboards and gold-leaf, he had managed to escape
us.
‘The cracksman! What yer gonna do abaht him, Mrs D? It’s not as if it’s the mornin’ after pay-day, when you’d expect a few
sore ’eads, even in Mr D’s day.’ But still, Damage’s had never been a place of unexplained leave, except in cases of severe
illness or domestic disaster. I wondered what disciplinary procedures the Society would approve of.
‘You are right Jack. It is unacceptable.’ But it was not for me today. I showed Jack the book.
‘Nice,’ he said, ‘and, by the way, forgot to tell ya, Select Skins asked me to pass on a message, that you still ain’t settled
your credit, an’ they’re gettin’ a bit crusty abaht it, to say the least.’
Even Lucinda, when she came bounding into the workshop, noticed nothing. I had expected her to stare at the book and ask why
Din’s face was on the cover. But she didn’t; she simply ran her finger over the Society’s emblem and said, ‘That’s pretty.’
It was clear, or so I was able to persuade myself, that any resemblance was a figment of my untrustworthy imagination.
And so our brief respite had ended. Douglass’s wonderful work was like Jack amongst the turd-collectors, a gem sparkling amidst
excrement. The crates kept arriving from Diprose. They were getting worse, too, or so Jack told me as he riffled through their
contents, and I shrivelled into myself as he told me what was inside. More photographic catalogues – ‘Nah, ya really mustn’t
looka’ these, Mrs D. Not for you, not for you, Mrs D’ – but also more stories, prints, and the like, the titles of which Jack
read to me.
‘Choose one for me, just so I can see for myself.’
‘All right, Mrs D,’ he said doubtfully, and flicked through a few manuscripts, most of which he hastily put back in the crate.
‘All right, here’s one, but I have warned you. Scientific nonsense, again, I think.’
It was entitled
Afric-Anus
, and subtitled,
A Scientific Foray
into the Size of the Negro Rectum in Relation to the Penis;
followed by an Essay on the Libidinosity of Women of
Colour
. I opened it to a page that depicted the prodigious posterior and pendulous labia of the Hottentot Venus.
And that was it. In an instant, I knew that I would have to find my employment elsewhere. I had other ways of feeding my family,
and of providing to Messrs Skinner and Blades, and to Mrs Eeles. I was a fully fledged bookbinder now, and I would ply my
trade elsewhere. Diprose, Knightley, and the lot of them could go hang.
How many miles to Babylon?
Three-score and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.
If your heels are nimble and light,
You may get there by candle-light.
O
n Monday morning I knocked on Agatha Marrow’s door, Lucinda at my side. She clutched the Danish tin, which still contained
a few of the pastries, and which I had topped up with some bon-bons and marshmallows, by way of thanks. I knocked again.
‘How strange. I don’t think she’s there.’
‘But I saw Biddy and Bitsy, at the window!’
‘What, this one?’
‘No, upstairs. Maybe they don’t want to play with me today.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘
And
we’ve got a present for them, and it’s still not even Christmas.’
But the door remained shut, so we walked back up Ivy-street to our house. Jack was hunting for a clean cloth in the kitchen.
‘I can stay here with Jack, Mama. Can I? Can I?’ Lucinda asked.
‘There isn’t one, Jack love, I’m afraid. You’ll have to make do with this one.’ I threw him a dirty brown rag.
Lucinda started to jump up and down. ‘Can I, can I?’
‘Yeah, she can stay ’ere wiv me, Mrs D. I’ll keep an eye on ’er.’ He was looking disdainfully at the rag; I prayed he did
not sniff it. I was ashamed; he could not use it on the books, and yet there was nothing else.
‘Are you sure, Jack?’
‘I’ll be no trouble!’
‘I know you won’t, little love.’ And I meant it too; she had become so easy, so compliant, recently. It was as if, now her
fits had gone, she had nothing to question. She slept more, she ate more, she pottered around alone more. Maybe she was just
growing up.
‘And you can keep the tin of pastries. Only don’t eat them all.’ I stood up and said in a whisper to Jack, ‘Make sure she
doesn’t eat them all.’
I put my head round into the workshop and scanned the towering crates of unbound books, the stacks of manuscripts sewn and
ready to be forwarded, and the heaps of blank bindings waiting for me in the tooling booth. It was overwhelming. And then
I saw Din, who smiled at me as usual, only one of his teeth seemed to be missing, and he looked for all the world as if he
had been in a fight. Lord, I thought to myself, I hope he’s not getting roughed up every night in the Borough. I wondered
if I should say something, but his head was bowed and he was already working away at the sewing-frame. I kissed Lucinda good-bye,
and told her I wouldn’t be long. And then I made a hasty decision: I ran back into the workshop, trimmed a rectangle of card,
and scribbled something on it.
‘I’m going to make this easier for us, Jack,’ I said over my shoulder as I left the house.
A train was rattling past, and whilst it was not that of the Necropolitan Railway, I could not help but think of it, and I
wondered what sort of world this was in which we were living, and what of one to where we were destined, where bodies take
the direct train from Waterloo to Woking, while souls are doomed to wander, lost and mapless, through the cruel streets of
the city for ever. I walked south for a while, past the gates of Remy & Rangorski, then knocked on the door of a little cottage
further up the road with a sign saying ‘Rooms Available’, and handed the proprietress a card. She looked at it, and agreed
to place it in her window. I watched from outside as it went up against the glass, and read it again to make sure it said
what I wanted it to.
Wanted. Girl skilled at sewing, folding, invalid nursing and
domestic chores, to present herself at Damage’s Bookbinders,
2 Ivy-street, Waterloo.
References required.
Then I turned, and headed north again, up to Waterloo Bridge and Holywell-street.
I had no intention of walking away from Mr Diprose entirely this morning; I simply wanted to draw a line, and give him its
exact co-ordinates on the wide-ranging map of his literary stock, so that he would no longer attempt to push me over it into
the more unseemly territories of his kingdom. By way of example, I took with me the worst of the first lot of photographic
catalogues; I was going to give it back to him, and state simply that I was not to receive any more commissions of the kind.
Apart from the knavery – the villainous way the photographs had been so constructed to convey the worst imaginings between
human beings – I was also rankled by their lack of honesty, for all their pretensions to integrity. These were not images
for anatomical study and pictorial accuracy: the printing alone would have cost more than Jack’s monthly wage, and their weighty
bindings would push their cover price far higher than anything any ‘artist of discernment’ could ever afford. Neither were
they lickerish little morsels for a spot of harmless titillation; nor were they Paphian offerings to the mighty Aphrodite.
They were far, far more dangerous, and far beyond anything I could understand.
I found my way through the back alleys to the peeled-paint door at the rear of Diprose & Co, and rapped three times. The bolt
was pulled back by the assistant, and he took my hand gently in his.
‘Mrs Damage.’
‘Good day, Mr Pizzy.’
‘At your service as ever. Call me Bennett, please. Have you brought us some wonders from Waterloo?’
‘I must disappoint you there, Mr Pizzy. I have come to speak with Mr Diprose.’ There was another man in the room with us too,
wearing a red-and-white spotted neckerchief, and a grubby checked shirt. He scarcely acknowledged me; he was too occupied
with chewing a pencil, and rivers of grey saliva coursed from the corners of his mouth. He had another two pencils stuck behind
his ears, presumably for when hunger struck later.
Mr Pizzy bolted the door behind me, and went to the front of the shop. I heard low murmurs, and the bolt being drawn closed
across the front door into Holywell-street. Mr Diprose emerged from behind the green curtain.
‘Mrs Damage.’
‘Mr Diprose.’ Oh, but there was no love lost between us.
‘Please be seated.’ He lowered himself stiffly into his chair; he really was incapable of bending in the middle. ‘I trust
you have come to furnish us with information about your inky labourer. We have been hoping for an assurance that you have
secured his loyalty.’
‘Indeed, Mr Diprose, I have managed to find a fair bit about him, and am convinced he will be of no danger to us. That is
not my purpose in coming here today, but I can assure you Mr Nelson does not concern himself with our activities.’
‘Your certainty intrigues me. Please explain how you came by it.’
‘He is not like us, Mr Diprose,’ I attempted. ‘He has suffered things we can only imagine. His past is all horrors, and his
present a mere distraction. It may be useful for him to work at Damage’s for the time being, but he is not committed. He will
move on when the time is right . . .’
‘Forgive me, Mrs Damage, but your airy sentiments are not convincing to me. If he is not committed, where is his loyalty?’
‘He is not
interested
in what we produce! It does not concern him. His thoughts are elsewhere. We – you – are
irrelevant
to him!’
‘So, you are telling me, that the only reason I should feel safe that the most unlawful literature in the land is daily surveyed
by a man of whom we know nothing, is that he considers it an irrelevance.’
‘Yes! No, I mean . . . Mr Diprose, I will be confronting him myself. He is an intelligent man. I will tell him straight out
about our shady business, and inform him that he must not speak a word of it to anyone.’
‘And you presume I will be happy with the word of the man.’
‘Won’t you?’
‘You may be a
gobe-mouches
, but I can not be so easily duped. Tell me, what
do
you know about him?’
‘He was born in Baltimore. His father was a preacher; his mother a nurse. He was abducted from them – he was taken at the
tender age of fourteen, separated from his family – and sold into slavery. They are all dead now. He has no roots, he has
no homeland. He is drifting free . . .’
‘Mrs Damage, the answer is staring us in the face. I congratulate you upon unearthing it; your ingenuity becomes you. You
are telling me that if the man ever becomes a trouble to us, we shall simply
send him back
!
Merveilleux
.’
‘Why!’
‘This is perfect. And we could probably get a pretty penny for him too.
Nous y gagnons
! Presumably you have threatened him with this?’
‘No!’
‘Then that is what you must do immediately. Mr Pizzy, would you escort Mrs Damage back to her workshop and see to it personally
that she delivers her ultimatum to her Mr Nelson?’
‘You are monstrous, Mr Diprose! You dishonour me, and discredit yourself, not that you seem to care much of that. Here. I
return these to you. I will not bind work of this nature.’ I placed the stack of photographic prints on to the table with
a hefty thud. Diprose looked down at them, without moving his head. One eyebrow rose quizzically, and he looked up at Mr Pizzy.
Even the noise of pencil-chewing ceased momentarily.
‘What is it about them to which you so object, Mrs Damage?’ my interlocutor said eventually. I could sense – I could feel
– Mr Pizzy’s smug smile broaden behind me.
‘Do you require me to spell it out to you?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ he said whimsically. ‘That would be most enjoyable.’
‘Mr Diprose, they are vicious, unwholesome, and downright horrible.’
‘They offend you.’
‘Yes. They do.’
‘And you do not like your sensibilities being offended.’
‘No, I do not.’
‘You do not approve of them.’
‘No.’
‘So Mrs Damage doesn’t approve of them,’ Diprose announced, as if to his men. ‘Do you think, my dear girl, that that matters
to us? Do we look like we care?’
‘I do not wish to bind them.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because . . .’
‘Because they offend you. Forgive me, Mrs Damage, but I do not see the connection.’ One of the men laughed. I wanted to ask
him if it had escaped his notice that there was a black man in my employ, but then, I knew that that was what he wanted me
to say.
‘And which particular ones do you find most offensive?’ He lifted the pages up from where I had left them on his table, and
started to turn them over one by one. He did not look up at me, but, of course, he lingered on the abominable pictures he
suspected caused me most distress. ‘Which ones, Mrs Damage? This one? Or this?’
But I would not rise to his goadings. It was not only the ones that contained the vengeful Negroes. They were all vile.
‘Mrs Damage, I am
un peu fatigué
of this subject. You assume I am a man of leisure, that my life is one of
dolce
far niente
. Let me put it simply: you have no choice over what you do and do not bind.’
‘Then I shall take the matter up with Sir Jocelyn Knightley.’
I had never seen Diprose laugh before, and it was not a pretty sight. His silver-rimmed glasses bounced up and down on his
purple nose with each chuckle, but he held my gaze with his eyes throughout. The mirth of Pizzy and the pencil-man was more
abandoned and hearty, even when the pencil snapped between the latter’s teeth, and he tried to rub his tongue as he continued
to laugh.
‘I fear you will not find his reaction as generous as ours.’
‘Is there not one decent fibre in the whole ungodly lot of you?’ I raised my voice, but still I did not dare shout. I felt
like a schoolmistress, enraged but powerless amongst sniggering children; and then it was that I came to the horrible realisation
that my anger was delighting them. I was one step away from Mistress Venus with her birch rods, and I suddenly realised that
her disciplinary procedures were nothing more than an artificially bestowed power, handed to her temporarily by the men who
so yearned for chastisement. Mistress Venus was just another job for just another brow-beaten woman, just another task to
fulfil, along with cleaning his slippers, filling his pipe, and being the cushion for his rage.
‘What
troubles
you so, Mrs Damage? Are we to remind
you
of where your loyalties lie? Or do I detect a certain
penchant
– some desires
contre nature
– for
les hommes de
couleur
?’
‘I think you’ve got it, Charlie,’ Pizzy sneered. ‘She’s in love.’
‘We thought we were doing you a favour. Rather like sending Pauline Bonaparte to Haiti. It is quite extraordinary, the number
of seemingly respectable women who lose all sense of decorum at the smell of black meat.’
‘Black meat?’ Pizzy said. ‘Cup of tea: hot, black and wet. Is that how you like it?’
‘You must have greatly appreciated the last book we sent you,’ added Diprose. ‘
Afric
–’
‘You blackguards! You sons of Satan!’ I finally snapped.
‘Hark! Thus speaks the lover of the son of Ham.’
‘It’s sweet,’ Pizzy said, ‘the way you talk of your dusky dandy with such tenderness.’
‘Why!’
‘Is it true, then, Mrs Damage, what they say about the nether parts of monkeys?’
And I screamed. I opened my mouth and reached down into the ancient soil, far beneath the flimsy foundations of the building,
below the sewers, below the holes opening for the Metropolitan Underground Railway, and summoned from it a scream for which
I did not know I had strength. I saw Diprose’s eyes pop from his purple head, and Pizzy’s apricot-coloured whiskers bristle
around the wet ‘oh!’ of his lips, and still I screamed. I hurled the pages on to the floor and kicked them, then stood on
them with both feet, and my legs wobbled like a new-born fawn over the hideous photographs, spreading across the floor distant
images made up of nothing more than ink on paper, black and white and grey, and I crouched over them, and sobbed without tears.
Pizzy’s hand grasped the flesh on either side of my mouth, Pizzy’s palm formed a seal around my lips. At the same time, a
child raced in from the alley-way like a dirty streak of effluvium.