Dolly (16 page)

At last, when I could no longer bear my own aimlessness, I confronted the possibility of finding work. Marigold had gone off to begin her training at St Thomas’s, and I only saw her on her odd weekend off. Her house seemed oddly silent after the departure of the great-aunts, who, according to custom, had lavished on their hosts a hospitality which they naturally assumed to be in their gift. I bought the local paper, sat down in a café in the King’s Road, and scanned the Personal Columns, looking for that oblique out of the way message that would cause me to rise from my seat and go blindly to where the message would lead me. There was no message that day; on the other hand a small office of an indeterminate nature in Holbein Place was looking for a trainee: good reading skills necessary. Holbein Place was off Sloane Square and therefore a short distance from where I was actually sitting. Moreover, whatever else I could not do I could certainly read. Rather than telephone I walked, not too unwillingly, to Holbein Place, where I mounted the stairs to the first floor of a dark brick building, and knocked on a door marked ‘ABC Enterprises’. ‘Come in,’ sang a female voice, and I went into a small office in which a rather distinguished looking woman was seated behind a desk and talking on the telephone. ‘Be with you in a moment,’ she said and went on with her conversation, which appeared to be with a son or daughter and was to do with arrangements for the coming weekend.

‘Daddy can’t be expected to assume entire responsibility,
you know,’ she said severely, tapping on the desk with a pencil. ‘I should think you could at least get yourselves to Winchester
and
do the shopping. If you don’t want to drive take the train.’

There were muted sounds of argument from the other end: a daughter, I decided.

‘There are taxis,’ said the woman. ‘I should have thought it not beyond the wit of man to have worked that out. Well, I can’t discuss it any further now; there’s someone waiting to see me. I’ll ring you tonight. Goodbye, darling. Now,’ she said, apparently refreshed by this exchange. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve come about the job,’ I said.

‘So soon? But this is marvellous, although we’ve paid for three days.’ I worked out that she meant the advertisement. ‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen,’ I said, although I was not eighteen for another six weeks.

‘Splendid. There’s not a lot of money, you see, although the work is pleasant. You know what we do, I suppose?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘How could you? We are a press cutting agency. Do you know what that is? We have a list of subscribers and a lot of newspapers and journals and we extract the pieces that refer to the names on our list and send them out. Do you think you would be able to do that?’

I said that I thought it sounded very interesting.

‘In that case,’ she said, rising from her desk and smoothing down her tight check skirt, ‘shall we agree on a trial period? I am Barbara Hemmings, by the way. This is my little concern.
I run the business, although I’m not here every day. Shall we say a fortnight on trial?’

I said, quite sincerely, that I should like that, and that if agreeable to her I could start right away.

‘In that case,’ she said, leading the way into an inner office, ‘I shall introduce you to Mrs Swarbrick and Mrs Cassidy. They will tell you what to do.’

After a few initial moments of shyness and panic I settled down at a small desk of my own with a list of names and a pile of trade papers such as the
Draper’s Record
and the
Hairdresser’s Journal
which apparently nobody else wanted, preferring to stick to something a little more newsworthy or glamorous. When I had marked up the relevant passages I asked Mrs Swarbrick or Mrs Cassidy—I did not yet distinguish between them—what I had to do next.

‘Call me Margaret,’ said the comfortable blonde woman, who might have been either but who was henceforth to be indelibly Margaret. ‘And I’m Wendy,’ said the other, no less comfortably.

‘I’m Jane,’ I said.

‘Well, Jane, we usually have a cup of tea about now. Do you think you could make us a cup? Kettle and teapot in the bathroom, stove and fridge on the landing. Not that way, dear, that’s Mrs Hemmings’s office. Out the back. You’ll find all you need there.’

The cup of tea was my rite of passage. When it was found to be sufficiently strong I was accepted. After that the morning became very convivial. I was shown how to cut out the relevant articles (Cutting out! Shades of the nursery!) and how to fix the identifying tabs. This was a job I was prepared
to do beautifully, expertly, rapidly, but this apparently was not what was required.

‘Slow down, dear,’ said Margaret. ‘Slow and steady wins the race. Mark out in the morning and cut out in the afternoon, that’s the way. You’ll find you concentrate better in the morning, and the afternoon always seems more peaceful, doesn’t it? Now, tell us something about yourself. You’ve got lovely hair, for a start.’

‘Unusual,’ agreed Wendy, who reached into a cupboard and brought out a tin of biscuits.

So I told them how my father had died and I had given up the idea of going to university, and how I lived with my mother, about whom I was rather worried. All this came tumbling out, and I realised that I had not previously spoken of such matters.

‘Well, you poor girl,’ said Margaret, and Wendy added, ‘Hard on a young person, that.’ After which I willed the tears to stay in my eyes, while Wendy got up and put her arm round me. And after that we were friends for life.

They were the dearest women, although my contemporaries would not have immediately identified them as the efficient and loyal workers they turned out to be. They were not fashionably slim, did not wear tight suits with big shoulders, did not arrive and depart with briefcases. We are talking here, rather, of the Liberty printed oilcloth shopping bag, of the viscose dress from John Lewis, and of the modest heel on the spacious court shoe, wide fitting for extra comfort. They were both in their late fifties and had long said goodbye to the illusions of youth, but as they said, they liked to look nice, and on Saturday afternoons they would go to
Oxford Street and treat themselves to something new to wear. To my eyes they looked splendid in their royal blue or dusty pink patterned dresses, with the neat bow at the neck and the self-covered belt. These dresses were invariably the same, with the smallest possible variation. ‘Well, you’ve got to look nice for work, haven’t you?’ they assured one another, and to this end sported finely groomed heads of hair, silver blonde and chestnut brown respectively, silk scarves, and inexpensive though not unpleasant scent. To these modest women going out to work was an adventure; after years at home bringing up a family a job like ours was an invitation to enter the world once more. The job was not demanding, but they did it thoroughly, as I did, and we took a pride in our work, simple though it was. The day was agreeably broken up by snacks and cups of strong tea, but the work got done, and as the afternoon wore on and the light faded the pleasant sound of scissors cutting paper replaced our normal friendly exchanges, with full complement of the news of Margaret’s husband’s back and of Wendy’s grandchild (Fiona Kylie). I can hear that sound now. At five-thirty Mrs Hemmings would fling open the door between her office and ours, and say, ‘All right, ladies? You can get off now.’ I learned that she did very little, having inherited the business from her father, and was out for most of the day, but she seemed well-disposed, and soon accepted me as the others did, completely.

My days in the office, and the constant snacks I was offered, prepared me better for a return to the flat, although not the meals which continued to await me. In time, and rather to my relief, these dwindled, first to a slice of meat
and some vegetables keeping hot between two plates on top of a saucepan of simmering water, and eventually to a rather sad assemblage of ham and salad which I ate while my mother communed with the television. As time went on she appeared less excited, less anticipatory, as if sense were returning, and with sense pain. Often I found her in a dream, while the succession of images unrolled unnoticed before her eyes. I tried to tell her about the work, about Margaret and Wendy, but she did not seem to want to know, as if these late additions could be of no interest to a life now lived mainly in the past. She was still neatly dressed, but her hair had turned quite grey. Finally she would let me lead her to bed, and we would sit for a while hand in hand. Once she said, ‘I love you, Jane,’ but I found myself too sad to reply that I loved her too, and in any case at such moments reassurance of my love for her was unnecessary.

‘Poor soul,’ commented Margaret, to whom I was something of a godsend, since her own daughters were married and far away. ‘If there’s anything we can do, you only have to say, dear. Is there anyone else in the family?’ It was then that I thought of Dolly, although only as a last resort. I dreaded her comments, but I thought she should know of my mother’s condition. Perhaps I remembered her vigour and enthusiasm, perhaps I placed some faith in her survivor’s common sense. I telephoned her from the office and she promised to come over at the weekend, ‘if I can fit it in’. I thought that cavalier of her, but was relieved that she did not appear to be taking the matter seriously.

On the Saturday I put some biscuits on a plate and cut some brown bread and butter, all of which proved to be superfluous
as the bag of slightly broken delicacies was handed over. She arrived out of the greyness of a foggy afternoon, a positive embodiment of health and durability, in one of her exquisite short-sleeved dresses, now decidedly tight. I thought I detected a change in her, although I had not seen her for some weeks. In comparison, my mother looked weak, faded, although this Dolly appeared not to notice. Dolly, by contrast, was resplendent, with an eager alert look which nevertheless seemed to see nothing. I noted that certain modifications had taken place in her appearance. Her fingernails were now red, as were her lips, and there was a flush, either of excitement or of rouge, on her cheeks. She seemed to gaze towards the window rather a lot, and once or twice went over to see if her car was still there. Apparently she had told the driver that she would not be long. ‘Never keep a man waiting, Jane.’ Once or twice she referred, rather offhandedly, to ‘a friend of mine’. When I told her that I had telephoned and got no reply, she said that Annie had gone to Ostend on a visit and that she had been out rather a lot. After which she twisted the rings on her left hand and assumed an unconvincing look of insouciance. Then I realised that what had formerly been a vague and ludic suspicion on my part had become reality. Dolly had a man friend. Quite possibly, although this seemed grotesque to me, Dolly was in love. And the object of her affections was the man in the car downstairs, although as far as I knew she still used the same car-hire firm in the Edgware Road. All became clear when she said, in response to my mother’s question as to how she had managed the journey to our flat—always a hazardous undertaking, as they both professed to believe—‘My
friend drove me over. Actually, he owns the firm. You could say he was combining business with pleasure. Harry,’ she added, with deep satisfaction. ‘Harry Dean. A dear friend.’

Dolly must have been sixty-one or sixty-two at the time of which I speak. Certainly she looked good for her age. She had the Frenchwoman’s air of defiant belief in herself, although there were certain give-away signs, such as the feet now crammed into painful-looking shoes, and the bluish rinse on her greying hair. I have to say that she had in addition the aura of romance, although I have reason to believe that this was produced largely by her own expectations. The humid eye, the wandering smile, the quick glances towards the window almost rendered us irrelevant. These were indulged without mercy, though unaffectedly. Dolly’s good fortune had made her careless of others, as love tends to do. But could it be love? I thought it must be, since there was no mention of money, her constant preoccupation. Only love could have freed Dolly from this care. Above all there was a new sense of enjoyment and a new sense of self. Her friends, if friends they were, were not mentioned; there seemed to be no visits to Nice or Brussels in the offing. Even a call on such relations as we were was undertaken lightly, since this involved the company of Harry on the journey. It was quite clear that there was to be no sharing of my problems, no solicitude for my mother’s welfare. Dolly had moved beyond us into undiscovered country—undiscovered by me, that is, and probably even by my mother—where flirtatious skills were the order of the day.

It was to her credit that these skills did not make her seem ridiculous. In fact they were native to her, but had remained
unused for a very long time. At heart she was still a girl who enjoyed the admiration of men. At least this may have been true when she was a girl, when admiration seemed of a higher order of attainment than desire. But now the vulnerable girl had become a confident woman, her wits sharpened by years of making do, of financial bluffing, of social insincerity. Her way of life may have been more restricted than we knew: her small income from my grandmother had not kept pace with inflation, and my mother and I had tended to neglect her needs in’ the light of our own recent and current misfortunes. What Dolly wanted, of course, was to marry again, for to be dependent on a man was a far more honourable course than to be dependent on a bunch of women. I saw that Dolly despised us, although she would never have admitted as much, even to herself: she thought of us with a sort of familiarity which she no doubt took for affection, but she had nothing but contempt for the poor use we made of our money, which in her eyes had reached astronomical proportions, as if it were a limitless shower of gold, whereas, as far as I knew, it was a fairly comfortable but fairly modest income quite boringly invested. Dolly even despised the fact that it was invested; if it had been hers she would have blown the lot, on clothes, on parties, on hotels, on the fantasies of her starved youth, when she sat in her mother’s workroom and dreamed of the wider world.