Complete Short Stories (VMC) (69 page)

At once, the horrors of Oranges and Lemons sprang into Deborah’s mind. She pictured herself hysterically diving under those menacing clasped hands above her, while the owners of them chanted fiendishly – chop, chop, chop, chop. Each escape only delayed the final capture, at last they would have her, trembling and embarrassed, her hair untidy from the struggle, imprisoned, as they had intended from the start. Once, suddenly crazy with fear, she had tried to dive to freedom and had badly grazed her knee on the parquet floor.

Mrs Daubeny smoothed her gloves and graciously thanked the assistant. They set off across soft carpets, through a department all pink and white with lingerie, then one where furs were crouched. The whole room smelled of animals, Deborah thought, stepping slightly aside from an ocelot on a gilt chair. Mrs Daubeny was inclined to linger here and Deborah, forgetting, began to chew her plait again.

The lift was full and as they began to descend Deborah felt stifled, her eyes level with handbags, umbrellas, sharp-edged parcels. She knew, though, that unlike Oranges and Lemons, if she waited patiently enough she would escape from this.

Mrs Daubeny, made discontented with visions of mink and chinchilla, suffering from backache – her old trouble – and thirst, closed her eyes, but opened them at once as some disturbance took place. A large woman had suddenly struck a rather furtive-looking man across the face with her glove. He lost his balance and staggered back with his fingers to his eyes.

‘I have never been so insulted,’ the woman shouted, too angry to see the absurdity of the phrase. ‘How dare you!’ She flourished the glove again and the man raised an elbow.

‘I’ve no idea what you mean!’ he kept saying. His accent was against him and everybody thought so – he whined and overdid the aggrieved attitude.

An unpleasant man, Mrs Daubeny thought, wondering exactly what he had done, but the indignant woman would not say since there
were
gentle men present. These – there were two of them – immediately looked dependable and edged forward protectively as all the women shrank back.

‘I never did anything.’ The shameful protests went on and on. Mrs Daubeny drew Deborah to her and put her gloved hand across her eyes.

‘I must ask you to remain here,’ the lift attendant said sternly as they touched ground-floor level. Ranks were closed to prevent escape.

‘Disgusting!’ women murmured to one another. The man’s very presence in such a shop was suspect. He carried no parcel and looked impoverished. They had all heard stories of men like him who made nuisances of themselves in cinemas.

‘May I pass, please?’ Mrs Daubeny said firmly. ‘This is no place for a little girl.’

At once a way was made for them. The lift attendant, barring the way until the house detective arrived, allowed them to go through.

‘Disgusting,’ Mrs Daubeny muttered as she did so.

‘I’ll have my solicitor on you,’ the man cried piteously, his voice croaking with catarrh.

‘Solicitor!’ Mrs Daubeny thought scornfully. She took Deborah’s parcel from her and hurried out through the shop. Then, at the entrance, she stopped to buy the child a pretty handkerchief to take her mind off the unpleasantness. One takes such care, she thought angrily, such care about their friends and their surroundings and then, in a shop of this kind, they are brought face to face with a vulgar brawl. One might just as well take them into a pub on a Saturday night. She felt quite soiled by having stood so close to the squalid little man – a type she had noticed in the Charing Cross Road, furtively turning the pages of Krafft-Ebing or
Oriental Art Poses
.

The air in the street outside seemed blessedly clean and the commissionaire helped them most respectfully into a taxi. ‘There, young lady!’ he said, settling Deborah as carefully as if he were putting a soufflé into an oven.

‘Soon be home,’ Mrs Daubeny said, smiling encouragingly at the child, who looked flushed and worried. But presently, as they were driven homewards across the leaf-strewn park, Deborah, staring hard at her mother, said severely: ‘I thought that was a horrid lady.’

If she were to brood on it, lasting harm might be done and Nanny must be warned.

‘It wasn’t a very nice thing to do,’ her mother said in her most casual voice.

‘I didn’t like her when I first saw her,’ said Deborah. ‘She pushed me and squashed me. She didn’t care if I was there or not and she hurt Teddy’s bad ear.’

Sitting up primly and nursing the bear, she looked across the yellow park.

‘I pinched her bottom very hard,’ she said.

The imitation suède jacket came by the post at breakfast-time and the girl, with strength from impatience, broke the string with her hands and tore open the parcel. For a moment, she was disappointed. From the time when she had seen the advertisement in a newspaper and had sent off her money, the coat had become real leather in her mind and not this rather creased, ginger-coloured cloth.

‘Rita, will you take your granny’s tea up?’ her mother said. ‘It’s been poured out this last five minutes.’

Rita put the jacket on and buttoned it up. She went on tiptoe to get what view of herself she could in the little piece of looking-glass on the dresser. ‘Yes, it’s very nice,’ her mother said, sighing. ‘But did you hear what I said?’

The sleeves were too long, Rita thought. She took the cup of tea and went upstairs to her grandmother’s room. She hated going into it, for it was stuffed with furniture and cardboard boxes and smelt old and fusty. As a very small child, she had played there happily for hours, with her grandmother’s sentimental treasures – scrapbooks and albums and seaside souvenirs. She felt debased by the memory. By now, she had shed her family. Her grandmother had been the first to go.

‘There you are,’ she said, putting the cup of tea down and standing back, as far away as she could from the old woman in the bed.

‘What you all dressed up for?’ her grandmother asked. ‘Why can’t you carry a cup of tea without slopping it?’ She spoke in a slurred cracked voice, her lips unmanageable without her false teeth which – Rita knew, but withheld her glance – lay at the bottom of a glass of water on the other side of the bed.

‘It’s my new jacket,’ she said sulkily. The cuffs hung over the backs of her hands, but otherwise it fitted, she thought.

‘You only come up here when you want to show yourself off.’ Her grandmother began to drink the tea with an ugly sucking sound; above the rim of the cup, her eyes looked peevish, taking in the new jacket, the bouncy, red-haired girl standing away from the bed, who now said: ‘Well, I can’t stand here all day. I’ve got to go to work.’

‘How’s your father this morning?’

‘All right, as far as I know.’

‘All right!’ her grandmother repeated scornfully.

On her way out of the room, Rita managed to take a glance at herself in the mirrored panel of the wardrobe – the only big looking-glass in the house. As she slammed the door, her grandmother was beginning to say something in a sarcastic voice. She could imagine one of her usual uncouth sayings, such as ‘You’re getting a bit too big for your boots, my girl.’ She had no wish to stay to hear.

Her father was coughing weakly in the front bedroom and she put her head round the door with a false smile for him. ‘Just off,’ she said cheerily – as if there were nothing at all wrong with him. He nodded gently and rearranged his hands on the bedclothes. ‘Be seeing you,’ she added uneasily.

‘You aren’t wearing that new coat to work,’ her mother said, when Rita went into the kitchen to fetch her sandwiches, but her voice was neither questioning nor forbidding, simply a meaningless phrase – for, of course, the girl was wearing it and would wear it. She always hacked things on straightway – another phrase – to get the glory of them new.

Going out, Rita slammed the front door, forgetting her father in the room directly above, and crossed the cobbled road to the edge of the canal. The damp, misty air, the bubbles and the leaves on the slow-moving water seemed not at all melancholy to her; the scene, from the one advantage of being out of doors, uplifted her. She was away from the dark house, and the old and the sick and the dejected. Even to go to work was a relief.

The shop at the corner of the terrace was empty, boarded-up. It had once been the centre of her life, a meeting-place for all the children of the neighbourhood, who were sent there on errands and lingered to play games on the chalked pavement or to skip, chanting strange rhymes, with one end of a rope tied to a lamp-post. It was there, while bouncing a ball high up on the brick wall, that her world had broken. ‘My auntie told me,’ shouted her confidante, backing away half-fearfully from Rita’s blazing anger. ‘She knows it’s true.’ Suddenly Rita, too, knew that it was true. ‘So what’s the odds?’ she shouted back. She turned her attention to the wall, threw the ball viciously against it, caught it, threw it, her wrist twisting smartly, the colour whipped up in her cheeks. If these too-old parents were not her own, she was glad, she thought. To be a hushed-up threat of scandal, the result of misdemeanour by her ‘mother’s’ younger sister, suited her every bit as well.

When she was alone – when her backing-away, excited informant had turned the corner, she had begun to walk alongside the canal, bouncing her ball before her every three or four paces. She wandered on and leant for a long time on the parapet of a bridge, watching a string of barges going
slowly underneath it. ‘But I didn’t want to find out that way,’ she thought. The shock had been great and she had been scored off while she suffered it, had been made to look ridiculous. In such a neighbourhood, the truth must have been known by some people from the time of its occurring, and she wondered if they had smiled knowingly at one another when she had spoken of her parents with innocent possessiveness.

After that lingering walk by the canal, she returned home, inimical, her love dead and inhumed, the face of her world altered beyond all recognising; her own face altered, too. She was eleven years old and began to go through a difficult phase, her school-teachers said. She went through it alone, without a word to anyone of her discovery. It was five years ago. Her informant had gone to live in one of the large blocks of flats on the town’s outskirts. Most of the young ones had gone. The seedy and sickly and aged remained. Soon the crumbling terrace would be pulled down and only they would care. Rita knew that she would watch the demolition exultingly. She imagined the façade collapsing and the poky rooms exposed, with their faded, varnished wallpapers and their grimy ceilings, and the smell of the canal surging into the ruins.

She was always glad, on her way to work, to cross the iron bridge to the other side of the water. There, were buses and shops, children going to school, the pavements full of hurrying people – not an invalid in sight. Anyone incapable of moving at a brisk pace very sensibly stayed at home until after the rush hour.

She felt exhilarated by the bustle of the world going to work, and her new jacket made it a different morning. She looked for her reflection in shop windows. The shops were opening, but it was still too early for shoppers. They would come later, at what Rita thought of as a less vital time of day.

This less vital time of day began for her soon after she had entered the shabby hairdresser’s where she worked, when she had hung her new jacket in the dark cupboard at the back of the shop and put on her overall. As it was Friday, this was dirty.

Her first customer was an elderly woman. Shampooing the yellow-grey hair, she gazed at herself in the looking-glass and made plans with less hope than she would have had an hour earlier.

‘Your nails are too long,’ the elderly woman complained, flinching.

‘Sorry, dear,’ Rita said, winking at her friend, Diane, who raised shoulders and eyebrows, as if to say, ‘The old ones in their dotage; bear with them if you can.’

The shampooed head was knobbly and poorly off for hair. ‘Has it been coming out very much?’ Rita asked punishingly. ‘I hadn’t noticed. Do you?’ Rita, in the ascendancy now, made a towel deftly into a turban and said:
‘Well, I’m sure it might be worse.’ The words, after all, sounded as if they were meant to encourage, but if they failed to do so she was perfectly satisfied.

For the next ten minutes she stood deferentially beside her Senior, handing pins. This young woman, Miss Edmead, was popular with her customers, had soothing ways with them, but the moment Rita relaxed or let her dreamy gaze wander to the street beyond the shop door, she would click her fingers frenziedly, kept waiting one second for a pin.

The day fell into its usual pattern. The air outside thinned, the mistiness drifted away, traffic increased and passers-by walked more slowly, looking in shop windows, carrying heavy baskets, stopping to chat. In the shop, customers came and went every half-hour, and when she was not handing pins and shampooing, Rita swept up hair from the floor or ran to the baker’s shop nearby for sticky buns. The girls ate these and, later, their lunch-time sandwiches in a small store-room at the back of the shop. Today, the sky darkened early and rain spattered upon the skylight. As soon as she had eaten her sandwiches, Rita’s thoughts went forward towards the evening. The day had reached a turning-point and the rest of it was fit only for wishing away.

‘I shall get my jacket wet,’ she thought, listening to the rain coming in gusts on the skylight.

The girls, over cups of tea, discussed their customers, who were either ‘sweet’ or ‘catty’. The business was old-fashioned, its clientele those mostly elderly women, who felt that they had wasted their money if, when they left, their hair was not arranged in deep waves and confusions of tight curls. Rita often day-dreamed of laying hands on a head of thick, straight, brilliant hair, imagined the weight of it and the way in which it would fan out in the water as she washed it; young hair, with no scalp showing through.

The afternoon went slowly. Every time the shop door opened, a bell rang and she always looked up. Only the expected came. They struggled out of wet raincoats and were full of rueful remarks about the weather. Beyond them, in the street, the umbrellas went by. Rita tried not to listen to Miss Edmead’s small talk – the same soothing, automatic remarks to one customer after another – ‘It’s always the same, isn’t it?’, ‘What a day to choose!’, ‘Let’s hope it clears up for the week-end.’ … ‘T
hank you
, Rita.’ Rita started and passed a hair net. Diane, idle for a while, yawned and yawned. Women, sitting under the driers, sleepily turned the pages of magazines, the rain drummed down, the shop bell occasionally rang, and Diane went on yawning. There was a humming sound and a sense of suspension. The falling rain lulled them, and Miss Edmead, twisting up hair, thrusting in pins, talked as if she could not stop. ‘You can’t really expect anything else …’ She gave Rita a sharp look, for now she, too, was yawning. ‘That’s
what I always say …’ Rita, patting her mouth with her fist, blinking her watering eyes, thought, ‘I couldn’t stand too much of this, year in, year out.’ It would be some time before she could expect to get married and solve the problem of her employment by having none; nor had she anyone in mind for such a future. Her friend, Derek, would not do. He was too poor and too short.