Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea Page A

hindered from settling into it by a draft that, no matter what the weather outside, comes under the door and cuts into me like a knife.
    Over my shoulder, it does blow, and into my ear. Then, whirling in my head, it swings my weathercock round and points it backwards and northwards, and sets me to believing that because I’ve done my time spinning cotton, I ought be handy at this fancywork too. “Lord bless us and save us, Lizzie Burns,” the wind roars. “All those years at the mill and you can’t do a simple cross-stitch?”
    I know it’s only the devil trying to make me pucker a seam or prick my finger; it’s only himself trying for my soul before the Lord calls for it. So I try to pay no heed. Though it gives me an ache to have to listen to him, speeching off like one of the mill men—“What we do today, London does tomorrow!”—or whistling the sound of the mule, dandier to him than a lark, I make as if I’m taken up with the feeding of thread and the making of loops, for I don’t need to answer for myself.
    That’s just how it went in Manchester. The way it was, we were the ones who went out to earn the fire and candle, and it was the men who sat home and did the darning. That was the custom of the place, on account of our wages being the lower. I can’t be faulted for that.

    Mr. McDermot, down Parliament Passage, he even does it for the mint, like he’s a seamstress. You pass your clothes in to him in the morning—he has a basket set out under the window, so all you have to do is drop them through and shout in your name—and he sews them up grand while you’re at work and has them ready for collecting the same p.m. Mrs. McDermot is a spinner like the rest of us, but at one of the shabbier mills that doesn’t let you out till nine or ten, so when you pass by and gander in, you see her man there, pinny-tied and stool-sat, sewing panels and fixing hems and putting strings in caps, looking all alone only for the bits of clothes and children spread about him. You only ever see him getting up to stir the supper.
    They wouldn’t believe you in London if you told them.
    Nor would they understand—though it’s a simple thing to grasp—that when you’re out working all day, you don’t learn how to knit or to mend, or to have any of the home virtues other missuses might have. Indeed, if today I’ve any skills to boast of at all, it’s only thanks to the Jew, Mr. Beloff, from up Ancoats Street way.
    I run in with Beloff during my second year at the Ermen & Engels. Having served out his year at the mill, Frederick has gone back to Germany, leaving Mary with a head full of dangerous notions. She thinks he’s coming back. She believes that, one day soon, when he’s done with his business on the Continent, he’ll ride back into Manchester and carry her off to the good life, the foreign life. It’s a bad moment. When she’s not demented with high feeling, she’s sitting in the dark and letting the blue demons waste her. And on those frightening occasions when she’s neither up nor down but normal, she’s entertaining men, one after the other, in an effort to forget. I often fear she is near to downbreak. But I don’t know how to reach her. My words she screams over. My attempts at embrace she throws off and resents. “You don’t understand,” she says, “and you never will.”
    It’s not long before I feel worn away by it all, and I begin to spend my evenings from home, and my Sundays too, in the dramshops and the pubs. Soon enough I’m getting thick with a boy called Sully from Spinning Field, who takes to walking me over to where the Medlock meets the Irwell, and to kissing me, and to putting his hands inside my dress, and to telling me that Manchester is in England, and England is in London, and as soon as he’s saved a bit of money, he’ll quit the