Marnie (10 page)

‘Such as?’ I said quickly.

‘Never mind. You say you went to a High School, and your accent’s right, but sometimes you seem to let it out that your childhood has been very tough. You’re never lacking in
initiative so far as your work is concerned, but you seem to be in your play. I’ve never heard of you saying a catty thing about anyone, but you’re awfully tough about something inside
and ready to fight the world. What’s the secret, Mary? Tell me.’

I said: ‘What are those simple bits of etiquette?’

Over dinner I thought it looked as if it might be getting serious. He didn’t paw like his cousin, but the light was on. Oh, Lord, I thought, and to keep his mind off it I
asked him about himself.

His mother was still living, and had a flat in Hans Place.

‘Why did you leave the Navy?’

‘You might say, why did I
go
in the Navy. When I was thirteen my brother, who was to have come into the business, had already been killed, but by then my father had made up his mind
that I was going to be saved the unpleasantness of working in a family firm, so I was sent off to Dartmouth. And from there, of course, it was straight on.’

‘The unpleasantness?’ I said gently.

‘Yes. My father and Christopher Holbrook never hit it off. Christopher’s one ambition has always been to squeeze out the other members of the family in favour of his own son, and
when Tim was killed it looked as if he was going to succeed. Then when my father died I wrecked everything by leaving the Navy and coming in in his place.’

‘Did you mind leaving the Navy?’

‘No, I wanted to get out. In my opinion it’s a dead end now – sadly enough. In peace it has a sort of skeleton usefulness, but in war, which after all is what it is designed
for, it will become about as serviceable as mounted cavalry. I couldn’t see it as a proposition at all, so I was glad to go.’

‘So you came to fight at Rutland’s?’

‘I’m not all that combative. I haven’t looked for trouble. But I think the worst is over now.’

For a moment I thought of two letters marked PERSONAL lying on Christopher Holbrook’s desk.

‘I’ve wondered sometimes,’ he said, ‘if my cousin Terry Holbrook has ever made things difficult for you.’

‘Difficult? How?’

‘I thought that might have been clear. I’m glad if it isn’t.’

‘Oh . . . well. There hasn’t been anything serious.’

‘Sometimes I wonder . . .’

‘Wonder what?’

‘As you know, Terry’s wife let him down. I sometimes wonder if he gets all that much fun out of his present philandering or whether half the time he isn’t trying to prove
something to himself.’

I said: ‘Perhaps your father was right, and it was a mistake to come back. You should have become an archaeologist.’

It was always a surprise when his smile came. It softened up all the rather off-key determination in his face. ‘You’re dead right, I should. But I’ve done quite a bit of
digging up of old bones at Rutland’s.’

He drove me home about eleven-thirty. The street where I had my rooms was a cul-de-sac and there was no one about, only five or six parked cars and a street lamp and a stray cat sitting near by
licking its back foot.

‘Thank you awfully,’ I said, trying to talk even more the way his sort of girls talked. ‘It’s been a gorgeous day. I have enjoyed it all.’

‘We must do it again,’ he said. ‘Let’s see, next Saturday, I don’t think there’s anything near enough.’

‘I can’t next Saturday,’ I said too quickly.

‘Another engagement?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘There’s something the Saturday after at Newbury. What about it?’

‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’ By Saturday the 24th I should be out of his reach.

I put my hand on the door of the car to open it.

‘Mary.’

‘Yes?’

He put a hand on my shoulder and drew me to him and kissed me. There was nothing particularly passionate about it, but you certainly couldn’t say he was inefficient. His hand moved over my
head.

‘You’ve such lovely hair.’

‘D’you think so?’

‘It’s so strong and yet so soft . . . are you cold?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you shivered.’

‘No!’

‘It’s been good today – for you?’

‘Yes, Mark, it has.’

‘So far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘to say it’s been good is quite an understatement.’

‘I must go. Thank you again. Thank you, Mark. I’ll see you on Monday. Good night.’

That night I woke up in the middle of the night dreaming I was crying, but it wasn’t feeling sentimental about Mark Rutland. It was a dream I sometimes had, although
often I didn’t get it for twelve or eighteen months. In fact it wasn’t so much a dream as a sort of dream memory.

I sat up in bed and looked at my watch and cursed; it was only half past three.

Lovely hair he’d said I’d got. Maybe that was what had started it off, him saying that. I wondered if he would have thought the same ten years ago.

It didn’t really start with the hair; it started when Shirley Jameson said something insulting in the playground about my mother. I can’t even remember what it was she said but I
know at thirteen years old it seemed frightful and I flew at her with waving fists and there was a fight there on the paved yard. In the end I was dragged off and there was a row and we were both
kept in, and then we had to go and say sorry to each other in front of the headmistress.

At this time I was sleeping with old Lucy, and old Lucy wasn’t clean, especially her hair, and I got lice in mine. Mother used to comb my hair out over a newspaper with a small-tooth comb
and you could hear the little tat-tat as the lice fell on the paper. Then she would empty the newspaper into the fire and the lice would slide off and
crick-crack
as they went in. After that
she would rub in ointment, but I don’t think she ever told me that it might be helpful to use soap and water. Anyway, one day soon after that first row, I was coming home from school when
Shirley Jameson and two other girls she was friendly with caught me up, and Shirley Jameson said she’d seen something crawling in my hair that afternoon in school. If it had only been her I
should have told her to go jump in the sea, but with the other two there I couldn’t do that, so I just told her she was a bloody liar. Then she said if she was a liar I could prove it by
letting her look through my hair then. We were in an entry, and there didn’t seem any way out, so I had to let her. All the time she was doing it I was grinding my teeth and praying to God
she wouldn’t find anything. At first I thought I was going to be lucky, and then suddenly she squealed with delight and came away with a thing between her thumb and forefinger.

I lost my head then because I screamed at her that she’d never found it in my hair at all and that she had taken it out of her own hair and had it in her fingers all the time. I was going
to lay into her but the other two girls grabbed my arms and twisted them behind me and Shirley said, take that back or I’ll slap your face. So I said I wouldn’t take it back, because it
was God’s truth, so she gave me a good swinging slap that I think surprised her as much as it surprised me because she stopped and stared at me. Then she said, will you take it back now, so I
said no, and then a queer look came into her eyes as she suddenly realized she was going to enjoy this.

So she gave me a slap on the other side of my face that made my head ring, and one of the other girls said, go on Shirley, go on and make her cry. So Shirley went on, first one side and then the
other. But of course I wasn’t nice to hold, and eventually I kicked myself free and butted her in the stomach and knocked her against the wall and ran up the alley. And they came baying after
me. I ran like mad all the way and they never let up till I got to my street.

When I got there I didn’t dare go in because I knew I’d get half-murdered coming in like that. My nose was bleeding and I’d lost my school bag and they’d pulled all the
buttons off my blouse and torn the strap of my vest.

In the dream I was always crying at this point, and I always woke myself up, because if I didn’t it would begin all over again. But when I really woke I never was crying, my eyes were
always hard and dry. I’ve never cried, except for effect, since I was twelve.

In fact – though I never dreamt this part – things went on quite differently that day from what I expected. After I’d sat on the back step for a bit I went in with a story that
I had been coming round the corner of Prayer Street and had gone to cross the road and had been knocked down by a bicycle. But when I got in my Uncle Stephen was there, he’d come in on his
ship that day and they were making him supper. I told my story, and Mother and Lucy swallowed it hook, line, etc., especially as they were busy all the while with their guest and hadn’t much
time for me.

But I noticed while I told it
his
eyes were on me in a rather queer way, and that made me uncomfortable because I always admired him and thought him the person I should have wanted to be
like if I had been a man. He was a good bit younger than Mother and tall and good looking but he had gone grey early, because at the time of this visit he would only have been forty, and he was
certainly grey then.

I remember, besides looking at me in that rather sceptical way, he also looked me up and down with a certain amount of surprise because by now I was just on my fourteenth birthday and I was
growing up. I remember holding my torn blouse up at my neck when he looked at me because although I knew Uncle Stephen could have nothing but decent thoughts about me, yet I knew he was seeing me
as other men would see me and was thinking I was nearly a woman.

After supper he said he would walk with me to the place where I had been knocked down and perhaps we should find the lost school bag, so I could hardly say no. So we went, and on the way he
talked about South America, where he had just come from, and I asked him about the horses there. Then I found the corner where I was knocked down and we cast about for the school bag and I casually
went down the entry and found it lying under the shadow of the brick wall, so we were able to take it home. But half-way home he said, ‘What really happened, Marnie?’

I was so angry at being disbelieved, and by him of all people, that I went into the whole story again, describing the bicycle and the boy on it and the woman who picked me up and what she was
wearing and what I said and what they said; because by now I almost believed it myself.

So in the end he said: ‘All right, my dear, I only wondered.’ But I could tell from the tone of his voice he still didn’t believe me and that made me madder still, because I
cared what he thought.

We went the rest of the way home, with me in a sulky silence, until at the door he said: ‘Have you thought about what you want to do when you leave school? What would you like to
do?’

So I said: ‘I’d like to do something with animals, chiefly with horses.’

‘A lot of girls do. If you couldn’t do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you good at at school?’

‘Not much, really.’

‘Isn’t that over-modest? Your mother says you’ve a head for figures.’

‘I can add up.’

‘Only that? Well, Marnie, in another year we’ll see. I’d like to be able to help in some way, to send you perhaps to a secretarial college, to give you a chance of getting out
in the world. There’s more to life than this, Marnie. I’d like to get you away.’

On Thursday the 15th I did all the pay packets myself. They offered me Jennifer Smith from the progress department but I said I wouldn’t have her, so they didn’t
press. At two o’clock on the Thursday I made out a cheque for £1,150 payable to Cash and took it to Mr Holbrook to sign. I then gave it to Howard, the caretaker, who went across to the
bank with it, accompanied by Stetson, the foreman. They came back with the money in two blue bags and left it with me. To the £1,150 I added £250 takings from the retail side and began
to make out the pay packets. I was left undisturbed and I worked, never stopping. By five o’clock I’d done more than three-quarters of the job, and when Mr Ward came in to lock the
money and the pay packets away he asked sarcastically if I was trying to do Miss Clabon out of a job.

So another week went past. I got a postcard from Susan, whom I’d softened up quite a lot by this time. ‘Glorious weather. Went Shanklin yesterday. Have just bathed. See you soon. S.
C.’ Like Hell she would.

During the previous weeks I had loitered through the works several times and fingered some of the papers that were stacked in the storeroom and about the works. On the Tuesday I went up to one
of the young men, called Oswald, who was on a cutting machine and said to him: ‘D’you think you could do me a terrific favour? I’m organizing a Church social on Saturday afternoon
and we’re going to play games. I want a lot of small pieces of paper for them to write on. Do you think you could possibly cut me some?’

‘Of course. Just let me know the size. What sort of paper do you want?’

‘Well any plain paper – no lines – so long as it isn’t too thick. And I want the pieces about postcard size or a little longer, about an inch longer. I wonder, could I go
and choose from those stacks over there?’

‘Sure. Go right ahead.’

So I went and chose my paper and he cut it up into the required size just like I asked.

Thursday the 22nd was a windy day, and the dust and leaves blew along the street outside the works. Autumn was coming early, and I felt sorry for types who were going to take their holidays by
the sea, skulking behind walls and walking up draughty dismal piers. But it would be all right for riding. It would be just right for riding. In my handbag today I brought 1,200 slips of paper
ready cut to size and rubber-banded in packages of fifty. Oswald had done them for me.

Mark made things easier by leaving straight after lunch. One of the girls told me he was going to a sale at Sotheby’s. I wondered if there was going to be another Greek stirrup cup in
Little Gaddesden.

The amount taken on the retail side during the week was about £350, but Mr Holbrook wasn’t to know this. I made out the cheque for £1,190 and he didn’t query it.
Afterwards I wished I’d risked more. I took the cheque to Howard, and he and Stetson got the money. They were back by two-thirty and I began work at once with Adcock, J. A., No. 5, whose
basic wage as a journeyman printer was £10. 15s. 3d.