A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

Mary dismissed the car, since James wanted it, and went into the house. She wished to think well of Florrie, but as she climbed the two flights of stairs she was assailed by a doubt as to whether Florrie could be a truthful girl. She had said that she lived with her mother in a nice little house, and here she was, apparently a lodger in a house whose stairs were the stalest Mary had ever smelt and kept by a most disagreeable looking woman.

Mary knocked at the door of the back room on the top floor, and a voice that was not Florrie's told them to come in. For a moment, when they were inside, Mary thought that they must have made a mistake, for as she turned towards the window she saw a bed in which a stout woman was sitting, a shawl over her shoulders and some work in her hands. The stout woman however seemed to expect her. "You've come for my Florrie," she said politely. "She'll be back in a minute. Won't you sit down, ma'm? Florrie was expecting you, and she's got the room straight, but she didn't think, being gentry, you'd be 'ere so soon."

Mary stared at her for a moment. She was fascinated. The woman's face was not stout, it was puffy, livid, swollen. It cost her an effort to say thank you and to find herself a chair. There were only two chairs in the room; Mary took the sound one and Miss Percival the one with a hole in its seat.

Meanwhile Mrs. Wilson continued to address them, but as she spoke bitterness overtook her and her voice reverted to its natural sharpness. "She's gone round to Moses's," she went on. "She seems to 'ave some maggit in 'er 'ead about it's not being safe. I tell 'er it's safe enough, a sight too safe, and we shall be lucky if every stick we got ain't safe the same way soon. So she goes and looks in the winder to see if it's out for sale." Mrs. Wilson's words gathered speed and her crochet-hook jerked rapidly backwards and forwards. "To lose a good place like that, ma'm, with me dependent on 'er, when she might 'a' married a gentleman too! And look at us now—where are we—with 'er character gone, and nothing put by for the rent? It isn't as if I could do anything with me 'ealth so bad, and the pain keeping me awake all night so I don't sleep a wink. And there's no market for crochet now, along of them niggers!"

Mrs. Wilson's shawl heaved, showing glimpses of pink flannelette.

Mary was puzzled. "But what is it that has happened?" she said. "I don't understand. What is Moses's and what has Florrie done? And I thought you and she had money of your own that you lived on? Money your husband left you?"

Mrs. Wilson's reply was not coherent, but Mary gathered that Wilson had never left nothing to nobody but worry and trouble. What money Mrs. Wilson had she made, a shilling or two a week it would be when the Turks allowed one to make anything. Further, Florrie had lost her place, owing to a bracelet and to a man she didn't never ought to have had nothing to do with. And Mrs. Wilson had once been second housemaid in a very good house, where she had been very differently brought up to what girls were nowadays. The end of this explanation was confused by large tears which rolled down the poor woman's distorted face and needed to be wiped away with the corner of the blanket.

Mary tried to express a reassuring interest while she turned her eyes politely from this intimate and unpleasant misery. Mrs. Wilson mustn't distress herself, Mary was only there to see what could be done. She would find some way out—there could be no doubt about it—it was only a question of taking courage for an hour or so. If Miss Percival had not been there Mary might have gone across to the creature who was sobbing so wretchedly, so grotesquely, on the bed, but her volition was paralysed by the thought of Miss Percival alert to take everything down. She looked round her, waiting uncomfortably for some lull in the snorts and groans which were shaking the opposite corner of the room, and tried in this interval of inaction, to collect her impressions and to clear her mind.

The one thing, up to this point, that admitted no doubt, was that poor little Florrie, whatever else she might be, was also a liar. She had deceived Mary, and Mary could not help feeling that she had also deceived Mrs. Black. James selected his managers with care; he would not have put Mrs. Black into the position she held unless she could be trusted to keep the firm's most important regulations. Very well then, Florrie must have obtained her own post under false pretences,—that legal phrase, slipping unbidden into Mrs. Heyham's mind, seemed to shed an even deeper gloom over the affair.

But as she examined the room where Florrie lived, while the primitive woe of Florrie's mother offended her ears, Mary's hatred of deceit became less uncompromising. It was a small room, and the stains made by damp on the walls and ceiling were freshly reinforced. The window was small, and shut, and some torn muslin was held across its lower half by a sagging tape. There was a varnished table in the middle of the floor, a cupboard at one end of it, and a packing-case by the fireplace covered with odds and ends of bedroom china. The wall-paper was yellowish brown, and on the mantelpiece there were some ancient ornaments and two scarlet paper fans. It wasn't a place, in its dreary stuffiness, where ascetic virtues would make a strong appeal. Mary began to understand why Florrie, armed for the conquest of life by a becoming cap and apron, had invented this romance of a lady mother. She felt that even she herself would have needed something to shield her from the realities of such a home. She scanned the room again for traces of the girl's presence. Florrie's best hat hung on a nail on the wall, and a petticoat hung beneath it, but Mary could see no signs of any other bed. It was some moments before she realised, with a sense of shock, that pretty Florrie slept in the bed in the corner side by side with the diseased woman who had bad nights.