much to do. A drink at the club? Would Denton consider an expedition for salmon in February? Denton’s thought had been that the one thing he needed, money, and the one thing Hench-Rose had, money, was the one thing he couldn’t ask Hench-Rose for, although he suspected that Hector would have started flinging notes on the desk if he had asked for them. But Denton couldn’t ask.
Chapter Sixteen
The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children was in Hackney Wick, the Lea running almost at its back, although Denton wasn’t to realize that the river was there until almost the end of his visit. It was a wet, raw day, a fine drizzle boring down like somebody’s bad intentions, drenching and chill. It smudged distance as if a fog, and as Denton and Mrs Striker jogged through unfamiliar streets in a mouldy cab, he thought that this might be one idea of hell, going on endlessly towards a dimly glimpsed nowhere in the damp discomfort of the grave.
‘I’d like a hot drink,’ he said, when neither of them had spoken for several minutes.
‘A lap robe would do.’
He grunted. They were crawling through mean streets where nothing else seemed to move. It was as if the entire city had died. He shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat. ‘Poor people around here,’ he said. ‘Not enough money to buy a louse a wrestling jacket.’
‘Your grandmother? Definitely Irish.’
‘Scotch and proud of it. Worshipped John Knox, believed a blow was healthy for a child, saw the world as good or bad, white or black, all choices made on principle.’
‘Hard to live with?’
He hesitated. He had been talking for the sake of talking; now he had to think about what to say next. ‘It sounds peculiar, but she wasn’t. Sure, she whacked us now and then, but she was protective.’
‘Against the world?’
‘Against my father.’ It came out slowly, an intimate admission, painful. ‘She used her hands; he used a piece of firewood.’
‘On you?’
‘Until I was as big as he was. Then he tried it and-’ He shrugged himself into the coat again, shivered. ‘We fought.’ His shoulders were trembling with cold, perhaps with memory. He wondered what she would do if he moved closer to her for warmth. ‘I joined the army when I was fifteen.’
‘I wouldn’t think they’d take you so young.’
‘I lied. I was big for my age. My grandmother signed the paper.’ He smiled. ‘She could read and write. That’s Scotch, not Irish.’
‘Was that her way of protecting you?’
He looked out at the wet house fronts, an ironmonger’s shop, a scene of water and soot and lifelessness. He had never told anybody this story. ‘It was for my sister.’ He felt the fine drizzle on his cheek, realized his trousers were getting damp. ‘She was fourteen. She didn’t have a dowry. I got a hundred dollars for enlisting.’
‘For her?’
‘There was somebody would marry her if she could bring some money. My grandmother told me to do it.’
Janet Striker was silent, staring, too, at the bleak, blackened bricks. Then she said, ‘Because of your father?’
The question surprised him, an insight straight to his secret self. He had his hands in his overcoat pockets, his long legs stretched out; he moved, a kind of squirming, acutely uncomfortable. ‘My mother died,’ he said uncertainly, almost stammering, ‘when we were kids. Fever. Josie never had a proper mother. My grandmother-’ The memory was acutely painful.
‘Did you understand what was going on?’
‘I don’t think anything was really-’ He trailed off. He couldn’t picture his sister as she was at that time; had he erased her? But he had ‘understood’ something about her — and about his father. He mumbled, so low he was never sure she heard him, ‘My father said things to Josie — he started touching her-’ He trailed off. ‘My grandmother said it was best for Josie to get married.’
She looked at him. ‘You could have been killed in the war.’ As if she distrusted the effect of her eyes, she turned her head towards the street and leaned back. ‘Did it work out for her?’
‘She had four kids of her own and raised my two, after-When I couldn’t. She seems content enough.’
‘And you? The army suited you?’
It made him laugh, part of it relief at the changed subject. ‘The army doesn’t give you a chance to say if it
‘Were you ever wounded?’
‘Twice. A musket ball and a bayonet. Neither fatal. Obviously.’
They rode along. The horse’s hooves rang on the wet street, now wider, opening out into the newer, less impoverished neighbourhoods beyond Victoria Park. A few living beings appeared — a dog, a shopkeeper in a doorway, two women with a child. Janet Striker said, ‘And your father?’
‘He married again. He left the farm to his widow.’ Ahead, he saw a grey building, stone, neoclassical by suggestion but essentially ugly; he guessed it was the Humphrey Institution. ‘I never went back,’ he said.
‘And your grandmother?’
‘I hated my father. But after I’d knocked around a while-’ He stared at the ugly buildings along the cab’s slow progress. ‘Poverty drove him mad. He worked and worked-’ He made a gesture of futility. ‘My grandmother died while I was away. There was nothing for me to go back to.’ But there had been his sister — why hadn’t he gone back to her?
The cab pulled up opposite the building’s entrance, a set of double doors up two stone steps from the street. The doors looked as if they had been closed and locked when the building had gone up, closing in a prison for lifers. They got out and he paid the driver, a hopeless-looking man who neither smiled nor thanked him but wiped his wet nose on his sleeve and passed his whip over the horse’s back as if too tired to lift it higher, and the cab passed away into the drizzle like a phantom. Denton and Mrs Striker were left standing on the narrow pavement, the only living things to be seen in a square of which the Humphrey took up an entire side; inside an iron fence, five leafless trees reached up like blackened hands. There was a smell, familiar but unpleasant, that Denton couldn’t place.
‘Hell,’ he said.
‘Its entrance, anyway.’ She went up the steps and yanked a bell-pull. After several seconds, she said, ‘Somebody’s coming.’ She looked down at him, seeming to gauge him, to estimate just what he might be. ‘I think you’re a far better man than I first took you for,’ she said. The door opened.
The smell was laundry. Wet laundry, soap, steam. The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children operated a sizeable commercial laundry that took up the entire rear of the stone building and two sheds behind, as well; it was in the laundry that the wayward ones earned their keep.
‘Work is their salvation,’ the woman who met them said. ‘They scrub clean their souls.’ The words seemed to be quotations that she had by rote. Mrs Opdyke was a big woman in a black dress a few years out of fashion, the cut emphasizing her bigness, her chest and abdomen, as if she were some male figure of power whose belly was called a ‘corporation’, but within this was a less certain woman. She was tall, made taller by grey hair piled on her head in lustreless clumps like dirty wool, and she stooped as if her tallness was a burden. Keys jingled at her waist, suggested a saintly emblem — the keeper of the keys — that was belied by her wary eyes. Denton wondered if she was afraid for her job. ‘We would do them a disservice to indulge them.’ She meant the women.
‘How many live here?’ Mrs Striker said.
