Authors: Monica Dickens
MONICA DICKENS
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more bypath meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.
R. L. STEVENSON
The sun was shining, and a small breeze was spicing along Piccadilly when Christine came out for her lunch.
She usually came out at midday, even when it was raining, instead of going up to the store canteen. You could never get a table to yourself, and whoever sat with you always wanted to talk grumbling shop about the customers or the management.
Everyone at Goldwyn's seemed to have a grievance of some kind, although it was one of the best London stores to work for, and many of the men and women had been there for years and years â some of them long past retiring age - for the management was good to its old faithfuls and let them stay on even when they were really past it, like poor old Miss Mattee in Model Gowns, who was always trying to sell people lace dinner dresses that were much too old for them.
Christine herself had been in the book department for more than four years. She had started as a junior, knocking over piles of books and breaking the till about once a week in her efforts to serve customers briskly. Now she was head saleswoman and moved calmly about the alleys between the bright new paper jackets, knowing that book customers liked to take their time, unlike the thrusters who stampeded through the Haberdashery with never a moment to spare.
She knew every book in the place, and all about the new ones before they came out. She was said to be Mr Parker's righthand man â and heaven knows he needed one â and was sometimes asked in to take coffee when a favoured publisher's representative was in his office.
She liked her work, as much as one can like any job that imprisons one from nine until five-thirty. She liked Goldwyn's, but she was always glad to get away from it at lunch-time, even though it meant queueing for a table at any of the restaurants and teashops that fed the West End workers, who ate with one eye on their watches and a partiality for things like macaroni and suet pudding which were the most filling for the least cost.
She was wearing her grey flannel suit today. She thought it
made her waist look trim, although it made her stick out farther in front than she cared for. A generation ago she would have been admired as buxom. Now she was a little too plump, and streamlined salesgirls tutted at her in fitting-rooms when they could not close the zipper of a dress that was the right size for her height.
She was thirty-four. She had silky brown hair that would not stay set unless she pinned it up every night, and a full creamy face with a smile that seemed to have been carved on to it from birth.
She was often teased about being too plump, and because her face reposed in a smile even when she was not smiling inside, she was supposed not to mind the teasing.
Sometimes, when life seemed hardly worth going on with, as it does to women when they are tired, she saw herself as a figure of tragedy, like those pictures of veiled French widows walking behind their husbands' coffins at important funerals; but her face could never look the part, and people still thought of her as Good Old Christine. Always cheerful and good-tempered. Quite a tonic.
Christine liked the grey flannel suit because it gave her a good waist. She had been liking it for a long time, because she had accepted her aunt's advice that it was better to buy an expensive suit that would last than to keep buying trumpery-smart cheap suits that looked very dashing for the first few weeks, until they began to wrinkle at the elbows and sag at the seat. The good grey flannel had been what the tailor called a Classic, which meant that nobody would even turn round in the street to look at it, but it would stand having its skirt taken up or let down according to the swings of fashion. It was up at the moment, because the âNew Look' was already old, and women were no longer walking bell tents.
The book department, partly due to Mr Parker's
laissez-faire
administration and partly because it was cultural, which put the assistants on a closer level to the customers, was the only department in Goldwyn's where you did not have to wear black. With so many women going shopping without hats, this led to some confusion as to who was an assistant and who was a customer, but that occurs in all book shops, and accounts for the distressed look of people who have picked up a book they
want and are afraid they are going to have their elbows grasped by the store detective before they can find someone to take their money.
With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along Piccadilly they were just ordinary women, quite meek, and obeying the policeman at the St James's Street crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the Strand, had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant.
Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel
recherché.
They knew what was what. They demanded the best, and so they bought a hat which did not suit them nearly so well, were borne down one floor in the lift when they easily could have walked, and sailed out of the shop in a glory of ego, thinking that the false smile of Mrs Arnold, who was in charge of Millinery, meant: There goes a lady who knows what she wants.
So Christine had got the hat and was glad. She always felt safe when she wore this suit and hat. Unexciting, but correct. Even when she hazarded the supreme test of catching herself sideways in shop windows, she looked all right. It would not matter whom she met, as it would if she were wearing the green coat with the collar like a run-over cat, which her aunt said was quite good enough to go to work in and need not be given to the nuns until next year.
Not that she ever did meet anyone in her lunch-hour. Alice, who was her junior, was always meeting people and having small adventures at lunch-time. Even if it was only a man who had picked up her glove in the cafeteria, she made it sound exciting, like an adventure. Alice and the other junior, Helen, were always giggling in the classics section where customers did not go so much. If Christine came along they would stop giggling and pretend to be straightening books. Christine
thought this should have made her feel very old, but it didn't. She was much happier now than she had been at the giggling age. She liked her authority in the book department. Sometimes, outside, she insecurely did not know how she stood in relation to the rest of the world. At Goldwyn's she was someone.
Crossing Piccadilly and going through the narrows of Half Moon Street, sinister with bachelors' chambers and the brass plates of Indian doctors, she was nobody except a short plump girl who looked younger than her years, walking across Curzon Street and up Audley Street to have Welsh rarebit in an Oxford Street snackbar. She did not want adventure. She wanted just to walk in the sun and get the scent of hyacinths that someone had planted in the window-box of a little white house on the corner of South Street.
A young woman in a camel-hair coat passed her pushing two small children in a pram. Christine appraised them with interest to determine whether or not they were twins. She wondered, as she often did, what it would be like not to go to work, but to be married and not have to leave your house all day unless you had to take the children out or do some shopping.
When she looked into the future Christine was a little troubled about not being married, but ordinarily she did not worry very much about it. Her friends did that for her, even the ones who were not happily married themselves and secretly envied her independence. She would like to be married, but not as much as her friends thought when they introduced her to loveless bachelors.
Her aunt, who liked to have Christine at home, said that there was plenty of time and the right man would come along soon enough, but as he had waited thirty-four years to do it Christine was beginning to wonder whether he ever would. She had her dream man, of course, with whom she stood at the altar sometimes when she was in bed at night and fancied she was prettier than she was. She knew the way he looked and the things he said. She would recognize him immediately if he came along, and then her life would start to be quite different.
In Grosvenor Square the trees were hazed with curly bright young leaves. The grass was impeccable and knew no foot, and
tulips like red and white United States Dragoons were drawn up round the base of the Roosevelt statue.
People looked happier today. The women did not look as if their feet hurt, and here and there someone raised a smiling face to the sun, which had the first real warmth of the year. In the square there were girls with magazines and books and cakes in paper bags, as well as the old men who sat there hopelessly, whatever the weather. The old men did not look at the girls, but the girls sat at the far end of the benches and drew their skirts close.
There were only one or two old men colonizing in the Little America that Grosvenor Square had become since the war. Stately families had long since abandoned the tall houses that once broke the hearts and backs of servants, and nearly every door carried the plate of some Government department. Besides the flag-flaunting Embassy, there were American offices on all four sides of the square. Roosevelt was in his right place in the middle of it all. He stood alone, as he never could in life, cloaked and immortal, and English people were surprised that some of the Americans they met did not think him as great as they did. When an Englishman meets a Republican he is as surprised about Roosevelt as an American is when he meets a Socialist who criticises Churchill.
Christine walked to the north end of the square and saw that clouds were encroaching on the pale spring blue overhead. After lunch the sun might have gone in, so she decided to sit for a moment in its warmth and think about what she could possibly do with the neckline of the dress she would have to wear at the dance tonight. The green was at the cleaners and the black had torn away at the zipper last time she tried to step out of it instead of pulling it over her head. She and her aunt had been saying for days that they would mend it.
So it would have to be the spangled blue, which did something funny at the collar. It would be all right if she could wear an orchid or a rose to cover the fault, but Geoffrey did not bring you flowers â he thought it was honour enough to go out with him â and although Christine could have afforded a corsage, it would have made her feel pathetic to have to buy it for herself.
She did not feel pathetic as she sat on a bench and widened
her smile to the sun. She could not worry about the dress. It was not worth it, for although Geoffrey liked to talk as though he was a connoisseur of women, he never noticed what you wore.
Two American women in red and yellow duster coats and hats like jockey caps were photographing each other against the Roosevelt statue. Three others, fur-coated and expensive, walked down to the Dorchester for lunch. Expatriates, sated with the incomprehensible sleeping age of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, they came here to reassure themselves with the knowledge that this American garden was the cleanest square in London, and to recharge their vitality with the sight of the monstrous shining beetles parked all round, which dwarfed the few English cars among them into insufficiency.
They also liked to see the uniforms. You could not see English uniforms unless you went to the Trooping of the Colour, or were lucky enough to be in the Mall when the faceless Lifeguards jogged by with scarlet cloaks and burning helmets, their black horses catching at the jingle of their bits as if they knew that so splendid a sight must be accompanied by music. But in Grosvenor Square the American officers came out of the naval headquarters on the corner of North Audley Street all glamorous in dark blue and gold, with chestfuls of rainbow ribbons that did not necessarily mean a hero.