Amelia Read online

  ‘No,’ said Mary Ann. ‘She’s not dead yet. We got her into a home for incurables. That was her wish. She didn’t want to infect the young ones.’

  Incurables. It had a nasty, defeated sound to it.

  ‘But, Mary Ann, do you ever get to see her?’ asked Amelia, shocked.

  ‘No,’ said Mary Ann, speaking carefully, as if she were working hard at not crying. ‘No. I only have this afternoon off. I can go to her, or I can go to the children. She wants me to go to the children.’

  Amelia thought of her own mama and how much she missed her. But her mother would be home soon, and they would all be together then. How could she have been so sorry for herself, when here was her best friend in the world with so much to worry about?

  Amelia reached out to Mary Ann and squeezed her wrist. Mary Ann gave her a watery smile.

  Amelia and Mary Ann parted on Sackville Street, where they had met. Amelia wanted to make an arrangement to meet again, in a fortnight. But Mary Ann said better not.

  ‘I like you very much, Amelia,’ she said. ‘And I would like to be your friend. But you see, I have no time for friendship, at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, Mary Ann!’ wailed Amelia. ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Amelia, but there’s no point in meeting every other Sunday. You would get weary of my family, and I wouldn’t have time to talk to you properly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get weary of it, I promise!’ said Amelia hotly, but she knew deep down that Mary Ann was right.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to be your friend, you know. It’s just that it can’t work. Not just at the moment anyway.’

  ‘Yes, Mary Ann,’ Amelia whispered, looking at her boots.

  ‘If you need me badly, you know where to find me, Amelia.’

  ‘Yes, Mary Ann,’ said Amelia again. ‘Will you at least write to me?’

  ‘Of course I will. Giv’us your address.’

  Amelia didn’t have any paper, so she repeated her address to Mary Ann.

  ‘Rightio. I’ve got that now,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Now, be a big, brave girl, and kiss me goodbye.’ She sounded just like a grown-up – a kind aunt, perhaps.

  And Amelia Pim, who two months ago thought that she could never be proper friends with a serving girl, put her arms around Mary Ann’s thin frame and hugged her hard.

  As they drew apart, Mary Ann said: ‘Now, Amelia, I want you to give your ma my love, tell her I’m happy in my new situation, and tell her I’m ever so sorry to hear about her bit of trouble. Will you do that?’

  Amelia nodded. She would have liked to be able to send her love to Mary Ann’s mother, but she didn’t know her, and besides, she knew Mary Ann wouldn’t be able to get to see her.

  ‘Goodbye, Mary Ann,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  ‘Goodbye, pet,’ said Mary Ann.

  And Amelia stood for a long time, watching the thin little figure tip-tapping smartly up Sackville Street, the empty basket swinging on her arm.

  At the Sign of the Golden Balls

  Amelia’s birthday dress lay on her bed. She had taken possession of her own bed again, now that Edmund was better, and he had moved back to his room to sleep. During the daytime, he was up and dressed. Every time she looked at Edmund, playing happily with his wooden train or making gingerbread men at the kitchen table and ‘helping’ with the housework, Amelia congratulated herself and looked forward to Mama’s homecoming, which was to be in a few days.

  But Amelia didn’t want Mama coming home to a big unpaid doctor’s bill. Dr Mitchell hadn’t actually submitted his bill for attending Edmund, and he wouldn’t, because he knew they couldn’t possibly pay him for all he had done – coming out late at night, daily visits for nine days, and then more infrequent visits as Edmund made a slow but steady recovery – but Amelia knew that even though the bill hadn’t been submitted that didn’t mean the money wasn’t owed. Amelia wanted that bill paid, before Mama came home.

  And so she sat on her bed, fingering her lovely emerald dress and wondering who might want to buy it. Several of the girls at school had admired it immensely on the day of the party, but she couldn’t imagine any of them buying a second-hand dress, no matter how pretty it was. Maybe she could put an advertisement in the newspaper, in the Articles for Sale column, but then she’d have prospective customers trailing to the front door, and she definitely couldn’t have that. Papa would be so ashamed.

  No. She would probably have to settle for whatever a pawnbroker would give her for it, though she knew that was not the way to get full value for it. She suspected it would not be enough to pay Dr Mitchell, but at least it would be a start, and the dress was the only thing of value that she had. She knew she had a bank account, but Papa always made the transactions on her behalf, and she couldn’t ask him about it. He wouldn’t allow her to use her savings to pay the family bills. Whatever she could get for the dress would simply have to do.

  She longed to slip it over her head once again, to hear its friendly chatter as it slid past her ears, as if it were glad to be worn, to feel the skirts billowing and floating under her hands again. It couldn’t do any harm, just once, could it? Guiltily, though she didn’t know why she should feel guilty about putting on her own dress in her own room, Amelia unbuttoned her everyday pinafore and put on the silk gown. It rustled and whispered, just as she had remembered, and it fell into place about her limbs and body with a sigh of pleasure.

  Bristling with anticipation, Amelia turned to look at her reflection. She would look like a princess in her green dress, she knew. Just for a few minutes, she would pretend to be the old Amelia, the rich Amelia who had chosen the stuff for this dress and gone to the dressmaker’s in high excitement with her mama for fittings and had glided down the elegant staircase in Kenilworth Square in this very dress, on the day of her thirteenth birthday.

  But when she looked, she saw a half-grown, gawky girl whose ears stuck out, her hair streaked with grease from housework, her hands red and lumpy from incessant soakings. Amelia’s throat ached as she looked at herself. It wasn’t just that her hair needed washing and her hands needed pampering. The old Amelia had simply disappeared: no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t see her. But she still felt like the old Amelia. She still had the same dreams and longings.

  Or had she? The old Amelia had thought friends were for inviting to parties and showing off to. The old Amelia had never smelt the stench of poverty. The old Amelia had never nursed a sick child, let alone given the slightest thought to the idea of becoming a doctor. The old Amelia had never felt hurt and angry because boys were considered more important than girls. The old Amelia would have been ashamed, not proud, of Mama.

  With a sigh, Amelia changed back into her old dress, and folded up the emerald silk again, laying tissue paper between the folds, and packed it back in its box. The fabric sighed too as she shook it out and folded it away, rustling protestingly, as if it knew her horrid plan. But Amelia didn’t listen to it. Firmly, she fitted the lid over the box and marched purposefully downstairs.

  It was mid-afternoon. Papa was at the office, Edmund was having his afternoon nap, as the doctor had prescribed until he was completely well, and Grandmama was sewing by the light of the parlour window, working away before the evening started to draw in. Quickly Amelia left the house, and scurried off to Clanbrassil Street, where she knew there were pawnbrokers’ shops, or ‘money offices’ as they genteelly called themselves. She knew you could tell a pawnbroker’s by the three golden balls that hung outside, like a promise of new and better worlds within, but she had never been inside one.

  She didn’t stop to think. That might be fatal. She put her hand on the worn brass handle, smoothed by generations of the hands of the poor, and entered the shop, as the shop-bell clanked. Amelia heard footsteps coming out from the back in response to the bell, and then she heard a voice saying ‘Yes?’, but she couldn’t see anyone.

  Where the counter would have been in a normal shop was a huge glas
s showcase, much taller than Amelia, filled with pocket watches and gold necklets, and lockets containing miniature portraits and little faded locks of hair, and silver teaspoons and snuff-boxes and pill-boxes and tiny gold-threaded evening purses and cufflinks and little gold collar studs and even a silver salt cellar, with a blue glass inset and a tiny salt-spoon, and a shoe-horn with a silver handle. Hanging up all over the shop were men’s suits in all shapes and sizes, some complete with shirts and collars, and women’s dresses, drooping sadly on hangers, and on shelves all around a raggle-taggle collection of clocks ticked and tocked and chimed and argued, for none of them seemed to tell the same time, and there were teapots, jugs and household items of all descriptions. The shop smelt of mothballs and stale humanity.

  Amelia stood on tiptoe, but she still couldn’t see the pawnbroker, so she said very loudly, ‘I have a silk gown to pledge.’ She had no idea where she got the word ‘pledge’ from, but it seemed to be the right word, because the invisible voice said: ‘Well, let’s see it.’

  Amelia opened the box, and her green dress smiled up at her. At last the pawnbroker came into view. He sidled around the side of the glass case, threw a quick look over Amelia first, in her once-smart coat, and then he eyed the dress disparagingly.

  ‘Five bob,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Amelia, whose throat was dry. She wasn’t going to let the dress go that cheaply. ‘I want twelve-and-six for it.’ She hadn’t a clue if that was a reasonable price, but she had quickly doubled the amount he had mentioned and added a bit.

  The pawnbroker looked more closely at the dress and felt the stuff.

  ‘Ten shillings is my final offer. Take it or leave it.’

  Amelia was just about to say, ‘I’ll take it,’ triumphantly, when she got a sudden rush of courage – after all, there were other pawnbrokers – and instead she said: ‘No. I said twelve-and-six and I meant twelve-and-six.’

  The pawnbroker fingered his wispy little beard and shook his head. Amelia was just about to put the lid back on the dress, but quite unexpectedly the pawnbroker put out his hand in a gesture that said she shouldn’t close the box, and he said ‘All right,’ and handed her a ticket. Immediately Amelia wished she had said fifteen shillings. For a moment she thought maybe she would chance it. But then she realised this wasn’t how you did business in these places. She patted the dress sadly, as if to say goodbye to it, and took the proffered ticket and coins. Then she raced to the door and clanged it behind her, without another word to the pawnbroker. She didn’t want to see his thick fingers fumbling at her gorgeous frock.

  She headed straight for the little subpost-office around the corner and bought a postal order for twelve shillings and a stamp. Then she went home and wrote a letter to the doctor in her best handwriting:

  Dear Dr. Mitchell

  Enclosed please find a P.O. in the amount of 12/-, and accept it as a payment on account in respect of your professional services to my brother in his recent illness. If you would be so kind as to furnish an invoice in respect of the outstanding balance of the above-mentioned account, I will give it my best attention at my earliest convenience.

  I remain, my dear Dr. Mitchell,

  Yours faithfully,

  Amelia Pim

  P.S.: Edmund is much better now. Thank you ever so much for everything. I think you are a first-rate doctor, but you are wrong about lady doctors and I shall be one some day, you wait and see.

  She had no idea how she was going to give the outstanding balance her best attention at her earliest convenience, but she thought she’d better put that bit in, so the doctor wouldn’t think she was trying to get away with just paying a bit of the bill. Then she tucked the pawn ticket under the kitchen clock, and went out to the pillar-box and dropped the letter into it.

  And that was the end of her lovely party frock. It was sad, of course, but after all, Amelia wasn’t likely to have many opportunities to wear it now that the family lived so much more modestly, and it was better to have no emerald silk dress than to have no Edmund. At that thought, Amelia gave a little shiver, and she pulled her coat around her more tightly as she faced home, even though the air was mild and the trees heavy now with their new foliage. She still had a little change left over, after buying the postal order and the stamp, so she stopped off at a sweetshop and bought a bag of cough lozenges for Edmund – because he liked them rather than because he needed them – and a bag of comforting peppermint humbugs for herself. She popped one into her mouth as she trudged home, and it made a sweet minty lump in her cheek as she went, and altogether the world seemed a better place than it had this time a fortnight ago.

  The Homecoming

  Mama was due home on a Sunday afternoon. On the Saturday night Amelia filled up all the pots and kettles that were in the house and set them to boil. She stood the tin bath before the kitchen range and she filled it up with hot water, mixing cold into it until the temperature was just right. Then she bathed Edmund quickly, so that he wouldn’t catch cold, using a smooth, translucent bar of Pears soap she used to keep in a china dish on her dressing table in Kenilworth Square. She quickly washed his hair, putting vinegar in the rinsing water to make it gleam, and then she pulled his glistening little body out of the bath, stood him on a towel, wrapped him in another towel, and rubbed his hair with a third towel to get as much of the water out of it as she could. When he was quite dry, even between his toes, she dressed him in a clean nightshirt and then she carefully brushed his hair until it dried in the warm kitchen air and sat like a little gold cap about his pale forehead.

  Amelia bundled Edmund off to bed with a hot-water jar and a perfunctory story, and then she had a quick bath herself in the firelight. She washed her own hair too, but it took much longer to dry, and she sat contentedly in the glow of the range, looking at her pink toes, and endlessly brushing her shining mane.

  Next day, they all went to early Meeting. It was Edmund’s first outing since his illness, and Amelia made sure he had a good nourishing breakfast first, and she buttoned up his coat over the little sailor suit he wore on Sundays. She noticed that the cuffs didn’t come down as far as his wrists. He evidently hadn’t stopped growing during his spell in bed.

  When they were all dressed and ready to go, Papa whisked a surprised Edmund onto his shoulders, saying: ‘You may have a ride, at least part of the way, son, but don’t jig about or the horse will buck. Come along, Mama!’ This last was to Grandmama, who was fussing with her parasol, a remarkably plain parasol, Amelia noticed.

  ‘Duck, boy,’ shouted Papa, and Edmund ducked his head just in time not to be smacked in the nose by the door lintel, and with that the Pim family set off at a brisk pace. It was a fine day and the streets looked fresh and bright in the light of morning. It wasn’t much above a mile, down Camden Street and South Great George’s Street and across Dame Street to Eustace Street, but Papa’s shoulders must have ached by the time they got there.

  ‘Why is the Meeting House on such a poky little side-street, Papa?’ asked Amelia as they approached it, thinking of Christ Church standing proudly on its little knoll and St Patrick’s Cathedral with its spire overlooking the humble buildings around it.

  ‘Penal Laws, Amelia,’ said Papa.

  ‘What sort of laws are they Papa?’

  ‘They aren’t laws now, Amelia, but they were once upon a time. Only the steeple-houses of the Established Church, which was the Church of Ireland, were allowed to be on the main streets. Papists, Quakers, and Dissenters of all sorts had to skulk in side-streets. Even the Pro-Cathedral, the main Roman Catholic church in Dublin, is on a side-street. There’s a Non-Subscribing Presbyterian church on Eustace Street also, whatever a Non-Subscribing Presbyterian might be when he’s at home.’

  ‘Are we Dissenters, Papa?’

  ‘Yes, my girl, we most certainly are. We dissented from the Established Church, but that is only the start of it. We dissent from such a great many things, that I couldn’t begin to list them.’

  ‘You
make us sound querulous, Charles,’ said Grandmama, not looking too pleased.

  ‘That’s right, Mama,’ said Papa with a grin, looking and sounding quite like the old Papa as he strode along in the sunshine with Edmund on his shoulders. ‘God’s Quarrellers, that’s us.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Papa,’ said Amelia, suddenly serious. ‘We are not a quarrelsome people at all. In fact, above all the things we believe in, not quarrelling and fighting is probably one of the biggest things.’

  ‘No, you’re right, Amelia,’ said Papa, grave too all of a sudden. ‘But we are an opinionated people.’ Then he grinned again and said: ‘But then our opinions are right!’

  ‘Charles!’ said Grandmama, but Amelia noticed that she took out her handkerchief and blew her nose with what seemed like unnecessary force, almost as if she were hiding a little snort of laughter.

  Amelia couldn’t remember when they had all last marched along together like this, poking harmless fun at each other. It must be the thought of Mama coming home that made them all so light-hearted.

  Even when they entered the Meeting Room, with its grave brown furniture, looking for all the world like a courtroom, their spirits remained high, and they nodded and smiled to their friends and relations as they took their places and bowed their heads. People leant over and patted Edmund encouragingly on the head, and one or two whispered ‘Well done!’ to Amelia. They must all have heard how she had worked to save Edmund, and they were congratulating her now. Amelia sat and looked at the pattern which the sunlight coming in at the high-placed windows made on the floor and she felt thankful for Edmund’s life, for Mama’s homecoming, and for the sunshine. She felt regretful, too, for their old way of life, but her regrets were starting to fade, and already she was finding new things to be glad about in their new life, small things, but still, they were there. Her only major regret was the loss of Mary Ann’s companionship. She knew she hadn’t lost Mary Ann’s friendship, but she missed her presence and her quirky jokes.