The Fancy (15 page)

Disembodied footsteps passed, figures manifested themselves at startlingly close range, a stick went tapping by like a blind man’s and screams of feminine laughter announced that someone thought it the funniest thing that had ever happened. Distance was non-existent, but they should long ago have come to the cross-roads with the lighted island. From time to time, a train thudded by on the left, so they must be on the right road. Unless they had already passed the island, it had taken half an hour to cover a distance which normally took ten minutes. Thinking of her mother’s anxiety, she quickened her steps and a pillar box ran into her left cheek. The slap in the face brought tears smarting to her eyes, but she fought them down. Her companion might want to come round to her side of the bicycle if he thought she was hurt.

He was still occupied in reaching down branches of the Maxwell-Steed
family tree for her benefit. He seemed quite happy, although he was probably going in the wrong direction.

She knew where she was now, after the pillar box. “We have to cross the road here,” she said. “At least, I do. I only hope we find the other side. Look out.” She turned her bicycle wheel and struck off at right angles, feeling very insecure without the kerb, as if at any minute she might walk straight into a yawning abyss.

“You cannot,” said the foreigner chattily, “see your face in front of your hand,” and was suddenly lost. From one instant to the next, the fog had taken him unto its own and Kitty was alone in the middle of the road. It must be the middle, because she could hear water gurgling under a grating. She sa in the Redundant Stores.paid: “I say!” tentatively, and “Where are you?” but he was gone as completely as if the yawning abyss had been more than Kitty’s imagination. Feeling very much alone and quite missing him, she shuffled on into the eerie yellow blanket until she stubbed her toe on the edge of the pavement. She walked along it, sniffing, with her bicycle in the gutter. She must be nearly at the High Street by now, but in that case, what was that train doing far away on her right, when it ought to be close to on her left? She stood still, gripping her handlebars and looking all round her into nothing, realising in complete panic that she had not the slightest idea where she was. She tried crossing the road, but when at last she did strike the other side, she met trees. She could think of no road with trees. She waited for another train and when it came, turned so that it was on her left and began to walk forward.

As a blind man is aware of furniture in his path, she heard rather than saw the air-raid shelter, just in time to avoid another smack in the face. All the streets in which she might conceivably be had their shelters down the middle of the road. She took off her glove to get her handkerchief out of the bag in her bicycle basket, and her hand was numb before she put it on again. She went forward blindly, because it was better than standing still, snivelling to herself like a lost child. She saw herself wandering about until morning, or fainting, perhaps and lying senseless in the road until someone stumbled over her. Would they send out an ambulance on a night like this? They’d have to. How the ambulance men would curse—or perhaps they would think it an adventure. She might have broken her leg ; that would make it more worth while them coming. By the time she was lying in a high hospital bed with the sheet drawn very smooth, unable to move her head, but following with her eyes the affecting entrance of her mother into the ward, she was crying in earnest. She ached for her mother. Sometimes she thought of Len and hoped he was safe indoors and wondered whether he were at home and mad with anxiety, but it was her mother for whom she ached. If I ever get home, she thought, I’ll never be rude to her again. If I ever get home, God, I swear I’ll pray—yes, every night, and do it kneeling before
I get into bed and not lying down so that I go to sleep in the middle.

She wandered dolefully on into the freezing unknown that was like a nightmare from which you awoke sweating and lay almost panting with happiness that it was not true. But this was true and she knew now that she would never get home. She began to review her life, like a drowning man, but before she had got beyond that deliriously exciting last term at school when she had been a prefect and vice-captain of netball into the bargain, a sound of which she had despaired of ever hearing again brought her back to life.

The sound was : “Cooee! Coo-ee!” Like a child playing hide-and-seek. Kitty stood stock still and listened, her tired eyes straining. The fog played tricks with sound. It wrapped it up and moved it, so that the second faint “Cooee!” seemed to come from behind her. She swung round. Only one person said Cooee, when she meant Hullo or, Where are you? Kitty listened again so intently that she seemed to hear the fog itself pressing and humming about her ears. There was nothing else. She must have imagined the voice. It was just a memory of the days when they used to take their tea on to the Common after school. She could not possibly have heard it where she was now—wherever she was.

She was lost. Lost, and crying with the same abandonment of despair as that time on the beach at Lyme Regis, when she had suddenly looked up from shrimping to find that everyone had disappeared and a great cloud was over the sun … “C again?”an alongooee!” said the voice almost on top of her. “Cooee—Childie!”

“Mummy!” A blur of yellow light melted the fog, and in an instant, the familiar smell of her mother’s old mackintosh was all round her and Kitty was clutching on and laughing and gasping and gabbling everything that had happened to her, her legs melting with relief.

Mrs. Ferguson had been out for more than an hour, cooeeing and casting in what would seem to anyone else a hopeless way on such a night.

She brought Kitty home with the triumph of a hunter and paraded her in the sitting-room before her father and fiancé.

Leonard had groped his way round to Barnado Road immediately he left work, and finding Kitty not back had been setting out to meet her, when Mrs. Ferguson forestalled him, sweeping by him in the hall in her mackintosh and shapeless wet-weather hat and telling him to go and warm up by the fire that instant, did he think she wanted her daughter to marry a consumptive?

When the excitement of Kitty’s homecoming had died down, Mr. Ferguson, who had never stopped treading and shedding sawdust in a gentle heap on the carpet, enquired mildly what time they were going to have supper.

Kitty went and kissed him. “Poor Dad. You shouldn’t have waited for me.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, Katie, but I didn’t have any lunch.”

“You didn’t have any—!” His wife was round on him in a flash, her loose bun coming to bits as she pulled off the wet-weather hat. “I never heard of such a thing. What on earth were you doing?”

He blew sawdust off the piece of wood on his fretsaw. “Oh, I didn’t want any, and I had to get a haircut, and go down to Dobbie’s for some oil and things.”

“But if you’d only told me, I could have given you something the minute you got home. You could have had dripping toast or some cake—no, we finished that yesterday—but I would have opened you a tin of pilchards—anything! I’ll go and get supper ready this minute.” She hurried out as if she expected him to drop dead of starvation before she got back.

“Kitty!” she called from the kitchen. “Go and take off your things. Stockings too. I should put on your bedroom slippers if I were you. And when you wash your face, give your nose and ears a good clean to get the fog out of them.”

“Come up with me then, Len,” said Kitty, “and talk to me while I wash.” He followed her out and when they were in the hall, she turned to him and he kissed her. He never kissed her in front of her parents.

He was not much taller than she, and slighter, a pale, serious boy, who had been an old-looking child. Kitty with her health and bounce and tight, glowing skin made him appear even quieter and less robust by her side, though all the time he was drawing warmth from her. He was quite content to sit and watch her for long stretches at a time, basking in her vitality like a lizard in the sun.

He sat on the edge of the bath and watched her now while she tucked her hair behind her ears and plunged her face in the basin, then soaped it vigorously.

“What a night!” she said, looking at him in the glass, while she massaged soap into her cheeks. “I’m sure there’s never been one like it in history. I was frightened, were you?”

“I wanted to come out and look for you, but your mother wouldI believe youan alongn’t let me. I nearly came out anyway after she’d gone, only I hadn’t got a torch.”

“Good thing you didn’t. She found me all right—trust her, and I don’t suppose you ever would have, considering you even get lost yourself between here and Manor Park in broad daylight.”

“Darling, that was years ago,” he said seriously, “and I’ve told you dozens of times, it wasn’t my fault. If that man at the bus terminus hadn’t told me——”

“All right, all right,” Kitty laughed. “I was only teasing.” She dried her face and turning round, bent down and kissed him. She
smelt almost unbearably young and clean. Her skin was like china. He would have liked to be tremendously tall and well-built, like a Guardsman, so that he could pick her up without dropping her as he had the only time he had tried. Or even tremendously rich, perhaps, so that he could marry her straight away and give her things to make her happy, instead of hanging around always having colds when she wanted to go out, with the wedding date hovering in the nebulous future of “when Len gets his rise.”

What he had done this afternoon had seemed so right. Now he was beginning to be not so sure. Perhaps he was only taking the easy way out. Well, he would tell her and see how she took it.

He was hardly ever completely natural and at his ease with her. Although they had known each other for five years, had been going out together since they were grown up and had been engaged now for a year, there were sometimes long silences between them, when they would find themselves making conversation as if they were strangers. They were shy of each other.

He waited until she had turned round again to wash her hands and then said diffidently : “By the way, I applied for a Medical Board this afternoon—the Air Force, you know. I may have a chance of getting in as ground crew, even if I’m not fit enough to fly.”

“Len!” She turned round with black horror in her face. She had never considered this, with Len in his reserved job as a skilled engineer. “But Len, you don’t have to go ; you’re reserved. They’d have called you up if they wanted you.”

“Oh well,” he looked at his feet and rucked up the bath mat with his toe. “I wanted to join up. Somehow—I don’t know—it seemed all wrong to be earning three times as much as blokes in the Services who are working a damned sight harder. We had a pilot came round the works the other day. He’d had half his face burnt off. It made you think, you know.” He stopped embarrassed, as he had been when he had seen the pilot’s face, and had realised he was staring.

“Well, we have pilots come round too, but I don’t go and join the W.A.A.F.S.,” said Kitty pouting.

“Of course,” he went on gloomily, “it’ll mean I get a lot less money. I don’t know about our getting married … I hate having to ask you to wait.”

“Well, why should we?” said Kitty suddenly, sparkling. “Suppose they do take you, we could get married quickly before you go, so’s we could have all your Leaves together.”

“Kitty!” But he looked down again, determined to see all sides of the idea. “But you’d be awfully lonely, and we wouldn’t be able to afford much of a place. It wouldn’t be much fun for you while I was away.”

“But we wouldn’t">
. b have a place of our own, silly. There wouldn’t be any point. I’d live on here with Mum and Dad, and go on working
at Kyles. We could have the spare room as ours for when you came home. In a way it would be a nicer way of starting marriage—not such a break. Then, after the war, of course, which won’t be long, everybody says so, we can have our own place, just like we planned.” She was warming up to the idea. She pulled him up off the bath. “Come on, let’s go down and ask Mum what she thinks of it. I’m starving, anyway. Of course,” she went on, as they went down the stairs, “I might not be able to have a white wedding, but I wouldn’t mind, honestly. I could have blue, to go with your uniform. Oh, I
like
the idea. Do let’s get married!” She jumped down the last three stairs and ran into the sitting-room in front of him. Her mother was putting things on the table, fussing round with dishes and table-spoons, getting a bottle of sauce out of the dresser, standing back to see what she had forgotten and dashing at the table again with the cruet.

“Come along, come along everybody,” she said, cutting bread and butter horizontally, with the loaf on end as if it were a school treat. “Come along, Charlie, put that away. It’s not often we get a joint, so you might as well have it while it’s hot.” Mr. Ferguson could carve bookends and pipe-racks and even delicate work like penholders, but he had never carved meat since his marriage. Mrs. Ferguson was an expert carver. The little joint went round although she gave everybody more than they wanted.

“I should think we’re all ready for our supper,” she said, heaping potatoes on to Kitty’s plate.