Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Page A

honour. Mr Ibbs took the carving-knife to the back-door step, put up his sleeves, and stooped to sharpen the blade. He leaned with his hand on the door-post, and I watched him do it with a queer sensation at the roots of my hair: for all up the post were cuts from where, each Christmas Day when I was a girl, he had laid the knife upon my head to see how high I'd grown. Now he drew the blade back and forth across the stone, until it sang; then he handed it to Mrs Sucksby and she dished out the meat. She always carved, in our house. An ear apiece, for Mr Ibbs and Gentleman; the snout for John and Dainty; and the cheeks, that were the tenderest parts, for herself and for me.
    It was all got, as I've said, in my honour. But, I don't know—perhaps it was seeing the marks on the door-post; perhaps it was thinking of the soup that Mrs Sucksby would make, when I wouldn't be there to eat it, with the bones of the roast pig's head; perhaps it was the head itself—which seemed to me to be grimacing, rather, the lashes of its eyes and the bristles of its snout gummed brown with treacly tears—but as we sat about the table, I grew sad. John and Dainty wolfed their dinner down, laughing and quarrelling, now and then firing up when Gentleman teased, and now and then sulking. Mr Ibbs went neatly to work on his plate, and Mrs Sucksby went neatly to work on hers; and I picked over my bit of pork and had no appetite.
    I gave half to Dainty. She gave it to John. He snapped his jaws and howled, like a dog.
    And then, when the plates were cleared away Mr Ibbs beat the eggs and the sugar and the rum, to make flip. He filled seven glasses, took the irons from the brazier, waved them for a second to take the sting of the heat off, then plunged them in. Heating the flip was like setting fire to the brandy on a plum pudding—everyone liked to see it done and hear the drinks go hiss. John said, 'Can I do one, Mr Ibbs?'—his face red from the supper, and shiny like paint, like the face of a boy in a picture in a toy-shop window.
    We sat, and everyone talked and laughed, saying what a fine thing it would be when Gentleman was made rich, and I came home with my cool three thousand; and still I kept rather quiet, and no-one seemed to notice. At last Mrs Sucksby patted her stomach and said,
    'Won't you give us a tune, Mr Ibbs, to put the baby to bed by?'
    Mr Ibbs could whistle like a kettle, for an hour at a go. He put his glass aside and wiped the flip from his moustache, and started up with 'The Tarpaulin Jacket'. Mrs Sucksby hummed along until her eyes grew damp, and then the hum got broken. Her husband had been a sailor, and been lost at sea.—Lost to her, I mean. He lived in the Bermudas.
    'Handsome,' she said, when the song was finished. 'But let's have a lively one next, for heaven's sake!—else I shall be drove quite maudlin. Let's see the youngsters have a bit of a dance.'
    Mr Ibbs struck up with a quick tune then, and Mrs Sucksby clapped, and John and Dainty got up and pushed the chairs back. 'Will you hold my earrings for me, Mrs Sucksby?' said Dainty. They danced the polka until the china ornaments upon the mantelpiece jumped and the dust rose inches high about their thumping feet. Gentleman stood and leaned and watched them, smoking a cigarette, calling 'Hup!' and 'Go it, Johnny!', as he might call, laughing, to a terrier in a fight he had no bet on.
    When they asked me to join them, I said I would not. The dust made me sneeze and, after all, the iron that had warmed my flip had been heated too hard, and the egg had curdled. Mrs Sucksby had put by a glass and a plate of morsels of meat for Mr Ibbs's sister, and I said I would carry them up.—'All right, dear girl,' she said, still clapping out the beat. I took the plate and the glass and a candle, and slipped upstairs.
    It was like stepping out of heaven, I always thought, to leave our kitchen on a winter's night. Even so, when I had left the food beside Mr Ibbs's sleeping sister and seen