Complete Short Stories (VMC) (79 page)

But of course her decision was right, she told herself firmly. To go to London had been just what she and her sister had so badly wanted to do – and had not been allowed.

She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling exhausted. She had done her best. She had brought them up, almost from babyhood, the poor little orphans; and
she
had done so, who was quite out of her depth in such a situation, with such responsibilities. Now she could be proud of them – of their goodness and charm.

But there was one more thing to be settled – surely? At the back of her mind, a certain question shifted about. Matters were getting worse; now
that she could not even remember what the question was. She leant forward out of the window.

‘Darlings, I forget … did I …?’

‘Yes, Aunt, you did,’ they said together.

‘“Darling Aunt,

The hostel was so frightful, that I have moved to a room at Miss Bassage’s, next to Willie’s. I know that you will think this the best thing to do; for you could not have borne it yourself where I was. I was so homesick; it was a thousand times worse than school. Those awful girls drink hot chocolate all the time, and I got spots on my face, trying to join in. They wash one another’s hair, and talk about sex until I was sick at heart.”’

‘That’s good,’ Willie said, interrupting Vron’s reading of the letter. ‘We know our aunt.’

She had never married; but she rather resented sex than feared it. It was what had stolen her sister from her.

‘Very good about the chocolate, too,’ Willie added. Neither he nor Vron had ever had spots. For their transparent and unblemished skin, they were, Aunt said, indebted to their mother. Their father, it seemed, had been rubicund.

‘It was true, all that,’ Vron said rapidly, then read on. ‘“Simply, it wasn’t what I have been brought up to. Don’t for a moment blame yourself, Aunt dear. No one could have guessed, unless there, what went on behind the façade.” I shall leave about leaving the other place until next week,’ she said, looking across at Willie.

The other place was the secretarial school where – so soon, Aunt would learn – the girls did not only
talk
about sex.

‘Give it a fair chance,’ Willie said slyly, agreeing.

None of their schools had been good enough for these angels, as Aunt had so very often said, when trouble after trouble had mounted up.
She
knew what they were like, and who could know better? She was misunderstood herself. They formed a little misunderstood family, and had been almost entirely happy.

Willie, applauding his sister’s way of cutting loose from her tedious commitments, could find, for the present, no way of severing himself from his own. Daily – almost daily – he went on the Underground to work in a land agent’s office in Knightsbridge. One of the partners of the firm was related to Aunt. Willie was vague as to the exact relationship; had not listened when it was explained to him. He hoped it was not too close as to cause unpleasantness when at last, as he must, he found he could bear no more.

‘He’s like an old bull,’ he told Vron. ‘His face the colour of this.’ They were drinking
cappuccinos
in a coffee-bar, and he stared into his cup with disgust, as if at Mr Waterhouse’s creased old face. ‘Straggly moustache; hunched-up shoulders,’ he went on.

Luckily, Mr Waterhouse did not come often to the office. It was the only thing in his favour.

On the day of this conversation, Willie had been so tempted by the prospect of the sort of day Vron was going to have – doing hardly anything, that is, and nothing she did not want to do – that he could not bring himself to set out for the office. He felt snuffles coming in his head. It was not that he ever found it necessary to lie to himself; but he had been interested to discover that, by a steady concentration, almost self-hypnotism, he could produce symptoms, could make himself sneeze, even raise his temperature, certainly increase his pulse.

Miss Bassage – to whom he first rehearsed – had said it would be folly to go out at all on such a drizzly morning; but at twelve o’clock he and Vron set forth.

London enchanted them – even on such a dreary day as this, with the windows of the Scherzo coffee-bar steamed over, and umbrellas going by in the street. They sat at a corner table, backed by a blown-up print of the Grand Canal at Venice. The ceiling was hung with strings of onions, Chianti bottles, and bunches of plastic grapes. Every now and then, the coffee-machine gave out a dreadful gasp, like a giant’s death-rattle.

Although rather impeded by financial worries, Vron and Willie were very happy this noon-day. Aunt’s money was harder to come by at their new distance from it. No letters from them to her had yet been answered. Their allowances arrived – the sum judged suitable by Aunt’s old solicitor – but the past, of having what they wanted, had not fitted them for cheeseparing, or putting sums aside. In London, surrounded by so many new needs that they had hardly before pictured (such as coffee-bars, cinemas, record-shops), their condition could have been vexatious but for their sunny dispositions.

‘This is the life,’ said Willie, and put his lips to the creamy froth of his coffee.

Beautiful, glossy Danish buns were put on the next table, and he turned his head away quickly from the sight. He could too well imagine biting into the flaky, soft texture of them, tasting the thin sugary icing, smelling the spice. His imagination was like some extra, unfair pain he had to bear – one of the few things that separated him from Vron, who seemed free of it. ‘Very nice,’ she had said, as they had stood looking into a shop window earlier that morning. When she turned away, he had turned away, too; but reluctantly, and with pictures still in his head – they would remain – of
what he would look like in the striped
matelot
’s sweater – bands of dark blue and white – cut high and straight across at the neck. It would make a different person of him for two pounds ten.

Used only to school tuck-shops and the village post office, London was too much for them. Some sort of saliva of the spirit flowed continually, excruciatingly. At every turn was something saying mutely, Behold! There were beckoning fingers, luring suggestions, and no Aunt, any longer, to provide.

Vron, more philosophical, less sensitive, was able to watch – though with detestation – the woman at the next table helping herself to another bun, biting daintily at it, dabbing her lips with her paper napkin, into which she then screwed her sticky fingers.

‘I might go and work there,’ Vron said presently. While Willie’s eyes had been fixed on the
matelot
sweater, hers had strayed to the notice in the corner of the window, advertising for what was termed a ‘saleslady’.

There was something from her childhood which gave glamour to the idea of serving in a shop. She remembered the satisfaction of turning a garden seat into a counter and standing behind it to count acorns and put them in a paper bag, to hand them across the seat to Willie, taking leaves from him, and giving back smaller ones for change. The shopkeeper had a more positive role than the customer. To work in a big store must be the game on an exotic scale.

Willie had not noticed the advertisement and, as soon as she told him, his heart eased. Pounds, several pounds, perhaps many pounds (he really had no idea), would be added to their pittance.

‘Let’s go straight away,’ he said. He pushed aside his empty cup, edged round the table and went to the cash desk. Vron tilted her head back, sucking the last of the froth from her cup, and wiping her hand across her mouth, followed him out into the street.

‘I simply took it. It was perfectly easy,’ said Vron. ‘It was there.
You
wanted it. I took it.’ Impatience, posing as patience, gave precision to her words.

‘But it was hanging up in the window.’

‘It was
displayed
in the window,’ she corrected him. ‘Not this one, though. Inside there were dozens. Different colours, too. But I thought you would prefer the blue.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said quickly, blinking his eyes at the thought of anything but this colour. ‘I only like the blue.’ Having said this, he had accepted the situation, accepted the sweater. He began to tear off his shirt excitedly.

They were in his room, where the gas-ring was, and Vron emptied a tin of baked beans into a saucepan and began to heat them.

The two rooms they had on the second floor were at the end of a dark
passage. (Also use of bathroom, one flight down; and, by special arrangement, kitchen on ground floor.) They had never made any especial arrangements, preferring to keep out of Miss Bassage’s way. (‘Pack’, they had nicknamed her, between themselves.) They saw her only by chance, as they went through the hall, on their way in or out. They kept their own rooms tidy – or otherwise, according to their whim – and ate in hamburger bars, or else, as on this evening, opened a tin of something at home.

Once upon a time they had been more ambitious about food, and Miss Bassage, meeting them as they came home from the market – Vron with an armful of leeks to make soup – had cried out in horror, ‘
Do
my eyes deceive me? You surely aren’t going to
cook
those? You’ll smell the whole house out.’

They had watched with fascination the bead of mucus wavering on the end of her nose, trembling more and more, as her indignation rose.

‘Isn’t she scrawny?’ Willie said, as they reached their own landing. He had to hold his stomach for a while, so pained was he by kept-back laughter.

It was true that they had certainly stunk the house out with the leeks, which boiled and boiled in the only saucepan, but never turned themselves into soup.

Thinking of this failure, Vron stirred the safe and easy beans, her smooth hair hanging down round her pale face. She yawned, as she crouched there by the gas-ring, so tired, most awfully tired. All day long, she was at everybody’s beck and call, running errands, taking messages. Not once had she been allowed to sell anything and, as soon as one o’clock on Saturday came, she was going to take her wages, and a pair of doe-skin gloves she had her eye on for a present to Aunt, and then Price & Trounsell would never see her again.

‘It’s so quiet,’ Willie complained, pacing about the room as she heated the beans. It was indeed quiet in this faded cul-de-sac, much quieter than the country. There were no animal noises, for a start. This was a respectable district. Aunt’s solicitor’s friend’s nephew had once lodged here as a student of something or other, and Miss Bassage had been like a guardian angel to him, had even taken him to the Chapel social, and to an amateur performance of
The Pirates of Penzance
.

Willie looked out of the window at all the railings and steps, the high, narrow houses, some with old, dusty ivy on the walls, and all of yellowish-grey bricks. It was not the kind of London in whose glittering swirl they were elsewhere caught up.

‘We ought to have one of those little transistor-sets,’ he said, turning to Vron. She looked up from the saucepan, shaking her hair away from her
face. Their eyes rested on one another’s for a moment; but not a word was said.

Aunt was delighted with the doe-skin gloves – in fact, so gladdened that she wept. Although they were several sizes too small, she carried them to the pub and showed them to people; and continued to, one evening after another, always forgetting she had done so before. She passed them round to be admired. Sometimes, she left them behind, and had them back next day. Although winks were exchanged, her gloves were treated with reverence, with murmurs tinged with simulated envy. And they grew soiled from constant handling.

‘Such an unerring instinct,’ Aunt would say. ‘That comes from
our
side. We have always had this feeling for quality. Their mother was just like the Princess with a pea in her bed.’

Her cronies had never known her to be coarse before, and they always waited for this pronouncement with an especial, wicked glee.

Aunt’s life was now a contented one. She believed that she had faced her duties fairly and squarely, and at last was justly freed from them. She had reared her sister’s paragons, and brought them to perfection. She took credit for their grace, their good manners, their clear complexions. (Hadn’t there been something quite lately about Vron drinking hot chocolate – so ruinous to the skin? But she, her aunt, had very properly put a stop to it.)

Puzzling letters had recently come about Vron, from the hostel and the secretarial school, written on a note of uncalled-for tartness, and almost as if in reply to letters from herself to them.

But the catspaw they occasioned soon was smoothed. The young ones’ footwork had been put in. That remedy they had made habitual Aunt turned to as a matter of course. She had thrown the letters on the fire and made for the sideboard. Standing there, she poured out brandy into a large glass and drank quickly, her hand still on the uncorked bottle, and very soon it seemed that the letters were a long-ago matter, which she had dealt with and settled satisfactorily.

It was like an illumination to Vron – the idea that having left Price & Trounsell’s did not cut her off entirely from the pleasures of shop-lifting. Obviously, there were other shops. She realised that all of London lay at hand, glittering with treasures. Her grace and deftness, her small alert body, her way of weaving herself unerringly through a crowd, made the pursuit seem almost pre-ordained. She had a vocation for it, she felt; and it was not long before Willie heard his own call.

At first, they took only what seemed to them necessities – a tin of baked
beans from the back of the display, because they were hungry; or the little transistor-set (under the folded raincoat on Willie’s arm), because number seven Enniskillen Grove was too quiet for their liking. But soon, these children of the Princess who had the pea under the mattresses developed an exquisite taste in shop-lifting. They chose the softest cashmere sweaters in beautiful shades of slate blue and apricot; silk shirts; little pots of Beluga caviare. They had not eaten caviare before, but a nice instinct led Vron’s hand to the Beluga. ‘It opens up a new kingdom,’ said Willie, spooning it from the jar.