‘I did run away at first… I didn’t want you to see me, I was ashamed, thought you’d laugh at me. You must think it odd that I am here. The truth is, I’ve nowhere else to turn. Laugh if you will, get it out of the way, then please say you will consider what I’m about to ask you.’
I felt the dread of an unknown favour in the pit of my stomach and hoped her request would not be something to further embarrass us both. I tiptoed over to the door, opened it an inch to check Mrs Wiggs wasn’t listening, closed it again and sat down.
‘What is it? Only don’t talk too loudly, my housekeeper has very big ears,’ I said.
Without any warning, Mabel started crying and put her face in her hands. I sat stiff as a scarecrow, trapped between her quivering shoulders and the door, imagining Mrs Wiggs and her omnipresent ears pressed to the other side. I kept telling Mabel to be quiet, but she continued to cry and rambled in between breathless sobs.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I’m here. Can you even remember why we never became friends, Susannah? Because I can’t. I was always envious of how clever you were, I know that. I was right to be. I mean, look at you. You should be proud of how things turned out. I must have known, somehow, that you would get everything I wanted. I was jealous before it happened. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.’
I had always found it difficult to know how to act when people cried or displayed great emotion like that. It frightened me. I wanted to shake them or hit them. Why should such feeble creatures have the luxury of crumbling while the rest of us had to carry on?
When Mabel had finally calmed herself and wiped her nose on her sleeve, she looked at me with red eyes.
‘I got myself a dose of scarlet fever, Susannah,’ she said.
I didn’t understand at first, but when she explained that she’d met a soldier, I knew what she meant. She had been courting him in secret for months, long before I met Thomas.
‘He was an officer and we were to be married – or that was what I thought, anyway. We talked of being married, what type of house we would live in, children… I know that sounds stupid now,’ she said.
Mabel had voluntarily left her job at the hospital, not wanting to suffer the humiliation of being fired, as I had been. She was sure her soldier would marry her imminently, on account of the fact she was carrying his child.
‘But when I told Walter, he said he couldn’t marry me, because he was already bloody married. I thought I’d gone mad, that I’d imagined the whole thing, but he did talk about marrying me, I swear. He let me believe it all along. We argued, of course, and when I asked why he’d said he loved me when it was so clearly a lie, he said, “I did at the time.”’
That was the last she heard of Walter, the charmer.
‘Why don’t you go home to your father’s farm?’ I asked.
‘My father won’t have me, unmarried and with child, and nor will my sister’s husband. I have to get rid of it, then I can go home.’
‘So get rid of it,’ I said.
This sent Mabel into another crying fit. I tried not to roll my eyes as I worried about the noise.
She had started to pay nightly bed rent in various doss houses, not being able to afford a decent boarding house. Some of the doss houses had more than forty beds, all of them with soiled straw and crawling with insects. ‘It was frightening being so different to the other women in those places,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to fall asleep for fear of being robbed. All the women were thieves. Thieves and drunks. They drank beer when they had money, gin when they didn’t, and they watched for new girls like hawks, working out who they could prey on.’ She sniffed into her handkerchief again.
‘I can’t understand how I’ve found myself like this. How fast I have fallen – and I am still falling, Susannah. It feels like no more than a minute ago, a blink of an eye, that I was a nurse at the London. I felt safe. Now I don’t know how to stop it getting worse. Where will I end up? You hear about those poor women found slaughtered like pigs in the gutter. Who is to say it won’t be me one night?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mabel,’ I said. ‘Of course that won’t happen to you,’ I lied.
Obviously, it could happen to Mabel; it could happen to any one of us. Why else had I married Thomas? Why else had I stayed with him? All that talk about ending up like those poor dead women made me nervous. In nurturing my macabre obsession with them, was I inviting the same fate to befall me? With Mabel there, it was all too close; it was as if my destiny was
