In the Works
Two Novels: Sorrow Park and Pantomime
Pantomime, a novel
In summer of 1835, four days after her fifth birthday, May Paul walks behind her house and finds her father sitting against a tree stump with a hole in the side of his head. An investigation ensues, and May, whose mother cannot afford to keep her, is placed in the care of the Glencoves, managers of a Portsmouth theatrical company.
PANTOMIME, set in Portsmouth and London between 1835 and 1916, tells the life story of May Paul. The theatre -- vivid, vibrant -- is itself a character in this novel, in which an elderly May narrates the story of her unsatisfying marriage to a wealthy and flawed baronet; her unconsummated passion for her stepson's tutor; and her brief and violent interlude in Greenmoor lunatic asylum.
PANTOMIME lingers in the details of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British life, and explores what it meant to be a willful woman at a time when women's lives were relentlessly domestic.
A brief excerpt:
Prologue
Four days after my fifth birthday, in summer of 1835, I walked behind my parents' house, being careful not to tread on the yellow flowers I liked to offer in weedy bunches to my mother, and found my father sitting against a tree stump in a studious position. At first I thought he was looking for the queen ant, for his face was downcast and ants swarmed busily about his legs. Then I noticed that his hair stood up at his right temple.
"Father," I said, "you must pat your hair down or Mammy will yell." I said this because she often yelled at my wayward hair, but as we had no hairbrush it usually remained disheveled no matter how loudly she barked.
My father said nothing, only studied the ants with continued intensity of purpose.
When I lifted his head with a hand under his chin I saw the hole. There was a halo of gunpowder around it, I know that now, can see it now, only at the time I thought it was dust come out of his cap, which had flown off his head and lay two feet over to the side. I remember feeling curious, and detached, although after only a moment I realized he was dead - and then I felt sick. He must have been dead since the nighttime, because only a small trickle of blood drained out of the hole when I moved his head. I withdrew my hand spasmodically, and then I shrieked and rushed to find my mother.
My mother sent me running for a constable. I found one near the docks. He would not come with me until he had had a pot of coffee at the Sailor's Rest. I knew the owner there, and he let me stand anxiously by while the constable drank his coffee.
"Please," I cried at last, by now nearly hysterical. "My father has a hole in his head!"
"Serve 'im right," replied the constable amiably. "The populace will get unruly, when they're in their cups, and unruly will lead to unfortinate events."
I waited in agony at the counter until he had finished, and then I half led half dragged him through crowded streets to our house.
My mother was waiting for us. She was wringing her hands and crying. Her face was smeared with dirt and blood.
"May, go sit wiv 'im," she sobbed. I went reluctantly behind the house and sat down in the dirt in front of my father. I noticed that there were ants climbing the side of his face to the hole, and that a small amount of blood had dried like brown lace upon his temple. His eyes were open. I moved a few yards away, turned my back to him, and dropped my face into my hands.
I could hear the constable and my mother talking. "What's this 'ere, on yer face?"
"Just a bit o' dirt, sir."
"And that what's red?"
"It's his blood, sir! Oh, that I ever seed this day, my own husbind dead of 'is own hand!"
"If it were 'is own hand, why is there blood on your own face?"
"I did hold 'is face to mine, sir. Just for a minute. It were a wife's instinck."
"Now, 'ow do we know it were 'is own hand?" inquired the constable.
"His pistol lay next to 'im, right beside 'is right hand, sir," replied my mother.
"And 'ow do you know it is, or it isn't, 'is pistol? Have you ever shot the gun?" he asked severely.
"Oh, no, sir! Not I! But it looks very like John's pistol, it does! Only, I don't think 'e would ever do it!" And she cried bitterly.
Then their voices faded to murmurs and I could not hear any more. After five minutes the constable fetched me from my post near the body.
"You're to go to your aunt, miss. I'm takin' your ma down for questioning." He pushed me gently towards the street. "You know the way." His words seemed unkind, but there was pity in his voice.
Sobbing, I reached my hand out to my mother, and she reached back, but the constable said, "That's enough, then. Go on, little girl." And I went, weeping and shivering the whole way.
My aunt worked as a seamstress in a dress shop on the High Street, and that's where I found her. We went to her room, a small room with only a cot and table; I would have to sleep on the floor. Aunt Betty was pale and unhealthy, and had a persistent cough. She was frantic about my mother, as was I. Fortunately, after only one and a half days in gaol my mother was let go.
The constable had thought to examine the pistol that lay beside my dead father and found that it had never discharged. Thus it was determined that his death was not suicide, nor was it inflicted by my mother, who had no access to another pistol. There was a murderer afoot, and the constable swore he would find him out.
My mother could not, of course, keep me on what she earned as a washerwoman, and so I went to live with the Glencoves.
1.
The Glencoves were theatrical people, and with them most of my life as I remember it began. The Christmas before my father died he brought me to their theatre, and we sat through a pantomime, a melodrama, a comic song, and a farce, with a musical interlude in the middle. I fell asleep, little girl that I was, with my head resting on the back of the bench before us, about halfway through the melodrama. We were up in the gallery, of course, at a dizzying height; today I should be afraid of falling to my death, but then I only noticed how tired I was, and consequently fell asleep.
***
Nowadays I need no reason at all to fall asleep, it seems, except it be simply age or boredom. Still, every day at four o'clock punctually, Adelaide brings me tea. She thinks I'm deaf and tells Cook loudly that I'm constipated and must eat prune pastry with my tea. Then Cook laughs and utters choice words about her mistress's bowels, and they two imagine themselves as witty as the leading music hall comediennes. I shouldn't have referred to my bowels if I were young and beautiful, but an old woman can say what she likes. That sort of thing doesn't bother me now.
I drink my tea alone. I am almost always alone, and time weighs heavy with me. Clearing up, Adelaide spills a little cream on the sleeve of my good striped shirtwaist - a shirt for a young lady, Monsieur Le Blanc, who made it for me, said with a flattering wink - but I don't chide her, never chide, never raise my voice. She is insolent and vulgar but I let her be. I came so close myself, to walking that path. Had you not become a hactress you'd of been a washerwoman, my mother was fond of telling me until she died of female concerns in 1847, when I was seventeen years old and starting my London career. And to this day in my eighty-sixth year, I make my own bed and know the ins and outs of my own kitchen: the old stove that won't light, except with a bellows applied directly after the tinder's lit; the mice that nest in the top of the cupboard from October to May. Every year, I hire a man to set traps on top of the cupboard, and every year I stand on a chair and take them away. I cannot bear the thought of the little creatures' backs breaking, and so we live here all together, companionably, until the weather outside is hospitable and they can nest in the park.
***
I think the idea that I might work in the pantomime occurred to my father as he sat with me that night, wondering at the pantomime's spectacle and at the relative youth of its fairies and white mice. At any rate, he woke me roughly after the applause ended and took me with him backstage, where we encountered men and women in various states of undress, and Mr. and Mrs. Glencove sharing a bottle of something at a small table in the gloom of the wing.
"Might you be wantin' a small 'un for the pantomime, sir?" asked my father shyly, awed, I imagine, by the flicking gas lamps and leaping shadows, like wraiths. "She's uncommon bright, and she looks like a little lady." I must have blushed deep, because Mr. Glencove peered straight into my face and said, "She has a fine colour, and pretty blond hair. Can you dance, child?" he asked me kindly. I hung my head, ashamed of my awkwardness.
"She's at it enough, with t'other little 'uns," affirmed my father. This was untrue; I was an only child and had few friends. I did dance a little with my one doll, Barbara, but only when the street musicians visited our road, and only if my father was away, for if he were home he would bid them go in an angry way, not having an ear for music.
Mr. Glencove looked me over. "Make a curtsey, child," he said. I did not know how, and I told him so. "Mother," he said to Mrs. Glencove, "show 'er how to curtsey."
Then Mrs. Glencove, a pale wisp of a woman no more than five feet tall, stood up and curtseyed low. "This here is how you curtsey the king," she said offhandedly. I wondered if King William were her special friend. "And this here's how you curtsey in Sheridan." She made an obeisance.
"Mo-ther," said Mr. Glencove, with mock weariness, "that's a male curtsey."
"I know it, too," she retorted. "But I like making it anyway."
"Well, child?"
"Who is Sheridan?" I asked, after a pause. Then they laughed heartily and Mr. Glencove shook my father's hand. "She'll do," he said. "She starts rehearsal in a fortnight. If she boards with us she earns her bed and bread; if not, she earns three shillings a week."
My father told them that I would live at home-and I did, until he died the following summer. Then we stood outside the theatre, in the cold, black night, until a cab could be had-the omnibus was retired for the night and my little legs could hardly walk the two miles back home. He wrapped me in his great coat-the same coat that lay untouched over the back of a chair for a month after his murder, until my mother cut it up for rags-and we waited in silence. The coat smelt of him, of smoke and sea-salt, and for years afterward I remembered being wrapped in it, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. When a cab stopped he lifted me in, as if I were a baby. My father spent a week's wages on that cab fare; when I protested, and said that he could perhaps carry me on his shoulders, he said nothing; but the next day I overheard him tell my mother that it was worth every penny, because soon a heavy care would be lifted and their shoulders freed of burden once more.
That day is imprinted in my memory like a tableau vivant: Mammy bent over the grate, a coarse smock over her tattered dress to protect it from the smoke and embers; my father plucking feathers out of an old hen we'd got somehow. I sitting still, Barbara clutched to my breast, in the corner where we're hidden, I suppose, by the shadows that clung like cobwebs to that house. It seemed as if there was never any sun to brighten its dingy walls.
My father's cruel words shocked me; I had not known that I was a burden to them. They must have realized I was there directly after he uttered the words, because my father stalked out of the house and my mother wiped her eyes and poked the embers fiercely, causing little stars to arc out from under the grate and die on the threadbare blue carpet. So I was to work. I did not see the theatre, then, as a magic place, full of mystery and pleasure; I only dreaded staying up late at night and standing upon a stage in front of masses. I was too stunned to cry. Later I did cry, but at that moment I got up from my corner as if in a dream, and stooped to pick up hen feathers off the floor.
"Wot you pickin' up your pa's mess for?" cried Mammy, crossly, but then she kissed my head and knelt beside me on the floor. "It's the underfeathers makes it a rum job," she told me. "Pick 'em up with your fingernails, like I do, else they'll be floatin' up t' the curtins. I picked a mess o' underfeathers off the curtins last winter when your pa boiled Cornish hens for Christmas supper." Then we worked together in silence until the carpet was picked bare of feathers and my father had returned to boil the hen.
He plucked out the innards and fed the heart to a stringy white tomcat that frequented our street, stopping by our house some evenings for a spot of supper. It was starving and would eat the peelings of potatoes. He was so tender towards that cat; sometimes he picked it up by its front legs and spun it around in dance, but always after, as if to make amends, he sat and stroked it on his lap until they both fell asleep.
Few people attended my father's burial. My mother and I went, of course, and my aunt Betty. The constable was there, pressing his hat against his chest, and so were a cluster of men we did not know, perhaps from the docks; their forearms were covered in ink sketchings, and they smelt strongly of tobacco. The poor curate spoke a word or two (we called him the poor curate because he went willingly amongst us, and presided over paupers' burials), but he hadn't known my father very well, and consequently he seemed to be speaking of someone else altogether.
When they had removed the body from its place before the stump, the earth beneath it was dark and wet with my father's blood. I stood and stared at it when my mother was in the house, and once I squatted down and put my finger to it, to see if it felt like mud after a rain. It was sticky, and when I wiped my finger on my dress, it left a dark brown stain, like the stains on the rags I helped my mother wash every month.
After the burial I walked to the Sailor's Rest, and Mrs. Glencove bought me a cup of tea. I cried a little into my cup, remembering my father's dead eyes and the brown pattern of his dried blood, and she petted me until I was ready to try and sing her a ballad. She wanted a little girl for a new play, and of all the girls in the company she would give the part to me, just to make me happy again.
I remember my first wintry day with the Glencoves, when all the company met for rehearsal in the yard of the Sailor's Rest, near the docks, at nine sharp. (We always rehearsed in the yard of the Sailor's Rest, except in the last two weeks before opening, in spite of the fact that the theatre lay only a ten-minute walk away. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Glencove that we did it; he liked the fresh air, thought it a sort of tonic for the voice.) My father walked me there on his way to the docks, guiding me carefully through the horsetracks in the street, and our knitted scarves blew gaily in the wind. It was cold! Just a fortnight past Christmas, and snow on the walks and rooftops. I was awed by my compatriots, who seemed the most beautiful and worldly ladies in England, and the finest gentlemen. There were children everywhere: sons and daughters of the adults in the troupe; poor children sold off to the Glencoves, like me. They, however, were not so fine; as wild as street children, they were, loud and rough and most unlike the neat and pretty fairies and mice they portrayed on the stage. I shrank from them at first, but soon enough we were comrades.
The Sailor's Rest was both public house and inn; you could order spirits there as early as eight, and a great repast was always spread at dinnertime. I believe the young man who wrote our scripts, or rewrote popular novels for our personal use, partook of spirits of a morning; he had an eye that rolled back in his head when he'd drunk too much gin and water, and often I'd see him sitting off to the side of the action, script in hand and wild-eyed like a frightened horse.
We always rehearsed the melodramas first. Sometimes, after I'd been with the company six months, I had a part, and then Mrs. Glencove would wake me at seven so I'd be alert and fed and ready to work at nine. But usually it was the lot of the children, myself included, to wait an hour or two until it came time to rehearse the pantomime, if there was one on the bill; and so we loitered by the stable behind the inn, sometimes kicking a ball or devising other games. The boys, who were cheeky, often mocked the publican when he stepped out back to smoke or to feed the horses, and once he cursed the lot of us and chased us up the road with a long whip, making the girls shriek with terrified laughter every time he cracked it in the air.