The Fancy (45 page)

“What are you getting at?” asked Edward cheerfully. “Why all the mystery?”

For answer Bob held out his hand. One of the Canning Kyles labels lay in the palm and Edward leaned forward and read out : “Passed O.K. E.L.P. Led—but this is a label I put on Serviceable stuff last night! You surely don’t think——”

Bob shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that these valves came out of a box with this label on it.”

“There must be some mistake. Joking apart, old man, I’d never let a thing like that through in a million years. I mean, look at it!” He shook the offending valve under Bob’s nose. “Look at it—cracked to blazes at lunchtiman along, let alone burned on the seating.”

“Yes, and the whole box is almost as bad,” put in the fitter, who was a little old man with a crooked white moustache and a jumping face. “And there’s another box as well—two or three of ‘em in fact. Inspection! Whoever inspected these didn’t know B from a bull’s foot, or else they just signed ‘em off without giving ‘em so much as a glance. Inspection? It’s a scandal, that’s what it is.& registered di

*

Well might Edward remark to Wendy that troubles never came singly. He lived on a see-saw of trouble. During the day, the Canning Kyles business took precedence, but in the evenings and at week-ends the worry of the Rabbit Club came uppermost in his mind. Mr. Bell was going full steam ahead with his new idea. He had circularised professional studs soliciting membership ; he was arranging an auction sale for fanciers, ostensibly in aid of the Red Cross, but more, as far as Edward could see, as a sound commercial enterprise. Edward had put it to him tentatively that many of the Club, as Edward was going out of the doorms the factory?” members besides himself were not in favour of the sale. Mr. Marchmont had written twice to say it smelled fishy and Mrs. Ledbetter, whom Edward
had met outside the Co-operative Stores in the High Street had said that she could not bring herself to fancy the idea. But Mr. Bell laughed at Edward and went ahead, saying it would be a good thing when the Club was purged of some of these dead heads and got in a few sound men who knew what was what. Edward began to feel that he was as much a mockery of a secretary as of a charge-hand.

It was with a heavy heart that he pulled the curtains against a grizzling October evening and sat down to write his article for
Backyard Breeding.
Since everything else was going wrong, he was expecting any day to hear that the editor no longer required weekly articles from him, or even any articles at all. Meanwhile, although he was in no mood for it, “The Dread Hand of Coccidiosis” had to be ready for the post tomorrow.

He wrote his articles in a school exercise book, typing them out in the lunch hour next day on the Estimating section’s typewriter. He sat down at the table, piling beside him the text-books from which he cribbed when necessary, opened the exercise book at a clean page and hoped that inspiration would come with writing. But his fountain pen would hardly write the title. Edward shook it without result, and when he lifted the lever gingerly, the nib only bubbled at him. Tipping back his chair, he reached behind him to open the sideboard cupboard without getting up, but the ink was not in its usual corner with the laundry book. He got up and looked on the mantelpiece, on the bookshelf and on the little table in the window where Connie sometimes wrote long dull letters to her friend who was married to a clergyman in the Isle of Wight. He went into the kitchen, looked on the dresser, under the dresser, in the cupboard, on the window-sill, lifted the lids of saucepans and vegetable dishes, bent to look under the sink where the pail and floor-cloths were kept and knocked his head on the draining board as he straightened up. He was no more successful in the bedroom. Annoyed, he even looked in Connie’s dressing-table drawer, which was strictly forbidden, and banged it shut, disgusted by the mess in which she kept it. Lidless boxes of powder, grubby puffs, a hairpin sticking to a pot of vaseline, bits of cotton wool, a hair-tidy full of old hair, a hair-net entangled in a scurfy brush, a suspender and a pair of dress preservers. Once, long ago when he had been courting Connie, he had thought her the delicate mystery that he thought all women. That was before he shared a bedroom with her.

He looked in the spare room, shrouded once more now that Dorothy and little Donny had gone back to the Buildings ; he even looked in the bathroom cupboard where his own and Connie’s toothbrush shared a beaker in somehow indecent intimacy. The beaker was scummed with dried toothpaste and he rinsed it under the tap and also cleaned out the basin before going downstairs. Connie had never taken a pride in her house, but she was more cursory than ever now that she had the excuse of being busy all day. Other women managed, he
knew ; he had heard them at the factory talking about their evenings’ housework and how they were going to turn out the bedroom on Sunday, but when Connie was not out with Miss Bell, she usually spent her evenings reading a book from the library which she had recently joined. He had long ago given up asking her why she never read anything except magazines and a picture daily, and now that she had at last taken to it of her own accord, she seemed to be more conscious of the process of self improvement than of pleasure in the book. She read with eyebrows slightly raised, lips moving, sitting very upright with a book on a level with her eyes, moistening her finger to t at the other end of the table. aafurn the pages and clearing her throat decisively at the end of each chapter. When he looked up from his own reading or writing to ask companionably : “Good book, Con?” she would say : “Very interesting. You wouldn’t enjoy it though ; it’s not a detective story,” as if he never read anything but that.

He was pleased that she had taken to reading, but he could not help wishing that it were not at the expense of the house. After all, why be married if you had to clean out the bath every time before you used it? It had been better when Dorothy was with them ; at least, there had always been food in the house, but now, when he knew Connie was going out with Miss Bell, he always called in at the Lipmanns’ grocery on the way home. He had been told too often that they were so busy at the office that she had barely had time to pop out for lunch, let alone go hunting round for fish. She collected the rations all right on Saturday afternoons, but she was very good at running out of bread. People ate too much bread, she said. It wasn’t good for you. Far better to eat the rye crispbread which she now placed on the table in a toast rack and nibbled at during the meal. Edward missed the fat Coburg loaves from which they used to hack doughy crusts all the way round, leaving the middle for breadcrumbs for treacle tart. They never had treacle tart nowadays. Connie hadn’t time to make pastry.

It was not exactly that she was sloppy ; indeed, she was more particular than ever about certain things. Milk now came to the table in a jug instead of its own bottle, and sardines never appeared in their tin. You must not help yourself to butter or cheese with your own knife, and since she had found that the Bells used mats on a polished table instead of a cloth, Connie had put away her tablecloths and got out the embroidered set that had been a wedding present, Edward might no longer come to the table in shirt sleeves and slippers, because it would look so funny if anybody called ; nor might he put his feet up on the fire place when he sat in his armchair. She had varnished over the scratches on the paint that he had made over a span of years. Doyleys and antimacassars broke out like a pox all over the place, and a little painted lacquer tray stood on the table in the hall for letters and circulars.

Their laundry bills were bigger now, but although she had no time
to do any washing for Edward, she was for ever rinsing out and ironing collars and cuffs and little bows to wear at the office. She bought herself a pair of rubber gloves for washing up, but neglected to clean out the oven for so long that Edward had to do it himself one Sunday. She would dust with a feather duster and polish up the letter box and knocker on the front door, but she never scrubbed floors now or beat carpets. When Edward suggested mildly that she might give a little attention to the fundamentals of housework instead of only its trimmings, he had got the same reply as when he said that if she did not darn some of his socks soon he would have to go bare-legged : “You know I’m at business all day. I can’t be a slave to the house as I used. Goodness knows you were on at me often enough to take a job, and now that I have, you’re still not satisfied, it seems.”

Of course he understood, but it seemed wrong to him that she did not care. Other women cared. Wendy had told him only the other day how she had spent the whole week-end doing what she called “Autumn cleaning”. Spring cleaning was such fun, she said, that she didn’t see why it should only be enjoyed once a year. But when he spoke to Connie about the dust under the bed, she said : “Well, if you’re so particular, I’ll have to get a woman in to do the rough. Goodness, knows we can afford it, and everybody else does.” But most women in at the other end of the table. aaf Connie’s position didn’t. They were not as well off as all that. And most women would have stayed up all night sooner than let another woman rob them of the work that was theirs by right of being married.

And now there was no ink. This must certainly be the worst run house in Collis Park. What was the good of having a vase of artificial flowers on the sideboard when a man could not even fill his pen in his own house? thought Edward, angrily sharpening a pencil on the blunt bread-knife. He pulled out one of the paper carnations and threw it maliciously into the fire.

“Coccidiosis,” he wrote, sitting down slightly relieved, “is the bugbear of every fancier, be he amateur or professional.” He looked sideways at the open page of the
Encyclopaedia of Rabbit Breeding.

“It takes two forms,” he went on, adding “as everyone knows,” in accordance with his policy of keeping himself on a level with his readers so as not to be didactic in his information. “The bloated or dropsical cases, where the germ has attacked the bowel “—he crossed out “bowel” and substituted “colon“—“are always fatal. Hard though it may be, it is best to kill the rabbit as soon as you detect trouble, knowing that you are cruel only to be kind.”

At the factory today, a man from the cylinder block fitting section had come in with a query about exhaust manifold nuts. The old man had obviously told him about Edward and the valves, for a half smile played about his lips as he watched Edward tackle Reenie, who was responsible for nuts and bolts. It was a silly query, for Edward knew
that they pooled the manifold nuts in her Fitting Shop, so it was no tragedy if an engine did go through short, but the man pretended he could not read Reenie’s handwriting. Although this was understandable, Edward thought it a trumped-up excuse to come and look at the curio—the charge-hand who did not know a dud valve from a good one. He treated the fitter with dignity and hoped he had not heard Reenie say : “Oh, don’t
nark
me, Ted. You’d better count the nuts yourself if you think I can’t add.” He did not want everybody to know that his girls had no respect for him, even if it were true.

Finding that he was staring at the brown velvet curtains, with pencil poised, thinking about Canning Kyles instead of Coccidiosis, Edward shook himself and wrote : “I was in my rabbitry with a friend the other day, talking shop as fanciers will the world over when they get together, and watching a litter of youngsters in a run, when one young doe left her succulent wild greens, walked a few paces, staggered and fell on her side. She got up, staggered again, and fell again, then got up and continued her repast.

“I don’t like that,” said my friend. “Speaking as a poultry man, I’ve seen many a young fowl behave just like that when the Coccidiosis germ, which has been dormant in the gut, suddenly becomes active and strikes its victim.”

“I hope you’re wrong, old man,” I said, but I isolated the doe as a precaution, and sure enough she sank so rapidly that I was obliged in a few days to put an end to her suffering.

This was not true, but it was always best to illustrate a point from personal experience, to get the human touch.

“Don’t blame me for not trying treatment ; it would have been useless.” E. Dexter Bell always swore that he could cure intestinal Coccidiosis by a draught of his own invention comprising Permanganate of Potash, but Edward, trying it once as a last resort, had found iover his shoulder blyht useless.

“Ah, you haven’t the knack,” said Mr. Bell, seeing himself as a kind of Bernadette of Lourdes. “Don’t ask me why, but it never fails with me. Never lost a rabbit yet.”

To get his own back, Edward wrote : “Some people maintain that with strange alchemies of their own they can arrest this fell disease, but, personally, I don’t believe a word of it.”

Feeling better, he wrote on rapidly. “Now the second form, where the germ only attacks the liver, is quite a different pair of shoes. The rabbit loses flesh and becomes generally unthrifty, but does not necessarily lose his appetite. Tackle him right and he may yet turn out a good rabbit—nay, a prize-winner even. This is what I do.” He looked up again at the brown velvet curtains, seeking to make his treatment pithy. The editor was short of space this week.

Could he be bothered to get up and pull the curtains closer together in case the wardens came? It must be getting on for black-out time.
He looked at his watch. Connie had said she would he back for supper, but if she didn’t come soon he was going to get himself something to eat and be hanged with waiting. He was tired of coming home hungry and having to wait so long that he had lost his appetite by the time they did sit down. It had happened last week when Mr. Bell had been coming to supper to talk over plans for the auction sale. Connie had come home all right in time to cook—oh yes, she could cook for company, if not for her husband, reflected Edward bitterly —but Mr. Bell had arrived more than an hour late sublimely unaware that he had kept them waiting. He had helped himself to the cottage pie with the same sublime unawareness that other people existed besides himself, so it was just as well that Edward was no longer hungry.