‘You haf one,’ Mrs Levy said crossly. ‘Every afternoon you come here und look after the shop while I go see my grandson. I pay you vun pound per day.’
‘Good!’ Mary exclaimed, and a pink shift from the other side of the door blew out and hid her face for the second time. ‘But where am I to sleep tonight? I must –’ she brushed it aside and caught the strap of her wristwatch in it. ‘You see –’
‘Not here. Certainly not here,’ interrupted Mrs Levy. ‘Be careful, for Gott’s sake don’t tear it. That’s right. It is forbidden by the law and nothing upstairs but my stock und holes in the floor.’
She glanced upwards, as though her eyes could penetrate the blackish ceiling of the two-storey ancient little house perched on a corner near Broad Street and Liverpool Street stations.
‘I tell you vot,’ Mrs Levy went on, sitting down again. ‘You go across the road to Broad Street station and take a train to Gospel Oak. Is nice, respectable neighbourhood, Parliament Hill. You find a room there. Und you come here tomorrow, one o’clock. Sharp.’ She looked down at her sheet of figures, shaking her head. ‘I don’t suppose I see you again . . . vot’s your name?’
‘Mary Davis.’
‘Ha! Vy not Jones?’ demanded Mrs Levy, obviously suspecting an alias, but Mary said, ‘Good morning, then. Tomorrow at one, and thank you,’ and went out between the floating dresses and across the road and up some steps leading (so she was informed, on enquiring, by her prospective mentor in the tobacco shop) to Broad Street.
Mary possessed a sense of smell too acute for her comfort. She did not like the smell of London. But she kept her head turned towards the open window of the train, and, after they had passed a more than usually broken, ruinous and confused stretch of wasteland, there was a change.
Her nose reported a new freshness and coolness, almost a sweetness, though it was unlike the biting sweetness of the air at Torford. And suddenly – a high green hill, with green meadows sloping up to it, was gliding past.
The train stopped, and the name of the station was Gospel Oak.
Mary did not like the look of it.
It had an old-fashioned, Torfordish air; and she was convinced that Oxford Street, and the even more glamorous King’s Road, Chelsea, were a long way away. She had had quite enough, during the last seventeen years, of peaceful roads with trees, and, across the fields, she could see the same kind of place.
She went down some steps and turned to the left, under a railway bridge that spanned the road then past some old, whitish houses. There was a good deal of traffic. Oh bother, thought Mary, rather confused, and she turned off impatiently down a side track leading onto the meadows she had seen from the train. Her case felt heavier, her spirits were definitely falling. Nearly twelve. Of course! I’m hungry.
Seeing some shops in the distance near a bus stop, she marched towards them, following a path under trees. Passing the playground of a boys’ school, and finding a café near a sub-post office, she went in, and ate an eggy, sausagy lunch.
Full, she sauntered out again. The fading trees shone gold in the golden sunlight. This Parliament Hill must be quite a big park. I may as well have a bit of a breather, thought Mary. I suppose I don’t want to start looking. Let’s face it. She weighed her case, thoughtfully, then turned into the sub-post office.
‘We’re just closing,’ warned the sub-postmistress, observing Mary taking out her purse.
‘If I gave you five new pence, would you kindly mind my case while I go for a walk?’
‘I don’t want your five new pence . . . I’ll mind your case for you,’ said the sub-postmistress, taking the case and settling it, in reassuring privacy, under the counter. ‘Half past two, we open again. Now you mind how you go, there’s vandals about.’
Mary sauntered on.
The green fields climbed undramatically until they reached a summit where there were seats, and boys were flying a big white and scarlet kite shaped like a butterfly.
Far below, all old London; spreading away, away, filling the vast valley from east to west; a flittering, smoking, golden-grey mass from which towered up stark white cubes. Mary’s eyes smiled with pleasure, as she thought: Oh I’m glad I came! I’ve got a job, and forty-three pounds in the Post Office, and I’m glad I came.
She turned, and looked north. All green there, and the horizon hidden by a long rolling line of golden woods. After glancing at her watch, she set out towards them; across more meadows and down through a wet valley full of beech saplings and patches of boggy turf.
Once in the trees’ shade, she paced more slowly; along paths darkened by rhododendrons and smelling of autumn. It was not solitary. She passed young families strolling, tourists consulting maps; elderly women, well-dressed and ceaselessly taking. If the setting of golden stillness was too pensive for her taste, at least there was plenty of company.
She sat down on a seat under a beech tree laden with yellow leaves. A squirrel ran out onto the path and she watched it, a little bored.
A youth of about twenty came tramping round the rhododendrons; he had a white face pinched into a shape suggesting a snout, a thin moustache and flowing hair.
She had hardly time even to think how unattractive she found his appearance, before he was coming down upon her – nearer – nearer. She stared, unable to believe what was happening – and then he flung himself onto the seat, almost on top of her, with a force that jarred the wood. He pressed his body close against her side; she caught a faint, bad smell.
‘Come on . . .’ he said, out of the side of his mouth without looking at her, ‘over the fence and into the bushes.’
Mary was too astounded to feel frightened. Indeed, his voice was so low and thick that she was not certain what he had said. She got up instantly, and moved without hurry towards two people who came at that moment round the bushes at the other end of the path.
‘Excuse me –’ she said, stopping in front of the pair, ‘but may I walk on with you? That boy on the seat is annoying me.’
‘I’ll do the lot of you,’ shouted the boy, not moving, his head thrust forward on his breast.
‘Oh dear,’ sighed the woman. ‘Is there no peace anywhere? You had better walk between us.’
The man muttered some words that appeared to confirm both his complaint and her permission, and the three went on together.
‘Oh dear!’ exclaimed the little woman again, as a distant shout from the boy reached them. ‘It makes you feel quite bad.’
‘After this morning,’ said the man.
‘Yes . . . we’ve come out for a breather,’ the woman said to Mary. ‘We had a most unpleasant experience this morning with a tenant who was leaving. Our windows broken – and such language as I never hope to hear again!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary, now wishing to be rid of these apparent saviours who had too rapidly turned out to be themselves in need of comfort. ‘I shall be all right now, thanks very much.’
They had followed a path leading out of the rhododendrons and were walking beside a lake covered in lily pads and bordered by beds of brown reeds.
Mary was turning aside, intent on leaving them, when the man said: ‘I don’t think we ought to let her go alone, Florrie. We should never forgive ourselves.’
‘No . . . I suppose we shouldn’t. – What’s your name, dear? I’m Mrs Cadman and this is my friend Mr Grant.’
‘Hi,’ said Mr Grant, and made a vague gesture intended to bridge the generation gap.
‘Hi,’ said Mary, smiling. ‘I’m Mary Davis.’
‘I could just do with a cup of tea, Harry . . . Is that café place open? In the Old Stables? . . . That’s shaken me up all over again, that boy’s shocking language has,’ Mrs Cadman said, appropriating to herself the tremors that should have been Mary’s. ‘Such a dreadful-looking creature! The homes they must come from!’
‘He smelt horrible, too,’ said Mary.
‘Soap’s cheap,’ said Mr Grant deeply.
Mrs Cadman’s little face was
, Mary now observed, carefully tinted with make-up. Her lipstick was pinkish-orange, and thirty years ago she must have been deliciously pretty. Her expression, in spite of her doleful words, was cheerful. I made the best of it, one could hear her saying.
Mary’s thoughts had been straying back to the scene on the seat. Had Mrs Anstruther ever confided to this pupil her theories about the enriching of the female temperament by untrammelled experience, it is just possible that Mary might have regretted an opportunity for enrichment, lost for ever between the beech tree and the rhododendron clump. As it was, her good sense had not been dented, and while they all walked up yet another hill to a gate that led out of this big park onto Hampstead Heath (that was the name of these rolling meadows and coppices and big old trees, Mr Grant said,) she told her rescuers a carefully prepared recital, omitting her flight from home.
‘And now I’ve got to find a room,’ she concluded.
There was silence. Mary was again preparing to take off, but something in the two friends’ manner, an expression on both elderly faces, kept her lingering.
‘What do you think, Harry?’ asked Mrs Cadman, turning to him.
‘Suppose we say a week’s trial, Florrie?’ was Mr Grant’s reply.
‘Mr Grant and I were thinking,’ announced Mrs Cadman, ‘that you seem a respectable girl, and, as it happens, we do have an empty room at the moment. An attic. I suppose you require furnished?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mary, with inward amusement at a picture of herself roaming Gospel Oak followed by a van full of furniture. ‘And what were you thinking of asking, Mrs Cadman?’
She knew instinctively that the coarse words ‘How much?’ must not be uttered.
‘Two pounds a week, seeing you’re so young,’ smiled Mrs Cadman, and Mr Grant smiled too. ‘And that includes the use of gas ring and light.’
Then Mary realized just how sensible she had been to find out from Sandra’s friend Linda all those facts about the cost of renting a bed-sitter in London, for she could murmur, with strong feelings of satisfaction as well as honesty: ‘But that’s wonderfully reasonable!’
‘Ah well,’ Mrs Cadman sighed. ‘All Mr Grant and me ask is a little peace, on the downward slope of the hill.’
‘Here, here,’ Mr Grant protested, ‘steady on. We’ve got a good many years before us yet.’
‘. . . And after our recent experience we’re prepared to let it go a little more reasonably than we would normally. But I will be frank with you,’ concluded Mrs Cadman with emphasis, looking full at Mary, ‘it would have been three guineas to anyone else, and whether it remains at two pounds will depend on whether you suit.’
‘Then that’s settled,’ Mr Grant said. ‘She’d better come back with us now, hadn’t she, Florrie, and see the room.’ They were drawing near to the bus stop and the sub-post office.
‘I must just pick up my case . . . The lady in the post office is taking care of it for me,’ said Mary.
‘Oh . . . Miss Drewer . . . Yes,’ and Mrs Cadman gave a slight shake of her head, and this dismayed Mary, reminding her of Torford, where people often made a face or shook their heads when other people’s names were mentioned. She had taken it for granted that in glamorous London there was none of this.
‘You do that, dear. Mr Grant and I will go on home and make us all a cup of tea, and you can see the attic. It’s nice, isn’t it, Harry?’
‘Best attic in Parliament Hill Fields – and we have a high standard in attics in this neck of the woods,’ said Mr Grant.
‘It’s Twenty Rowena Road. You have to cross over,’ called Mrs Cadman, as Mary hurried away.
Two hours later, Mary was on her way to Oxford Street.
En route to the bus stop she had pushed a postcard into the letter-box: ‘Have got a job and a room. In a nice neighbourhood so don’t worry. Will write once a week. Love, M.’
She got back at eleven, and was in time to see Mr Grant marching up the stairs behind Mrs Cadman, who was carrying two hot-water bottles. She wore a fluffy blue shortie dressing-gown.
‘Goodnight,’ called Mrs Cadman, looking round at the head of the stairs and smiling down at Mary. Then she and Mr Grant went into a room and shut the door.
Well, thought Mary. Suits me.
5
Egg-putters
Mary’s postcard gave Wilfred a comfort out of proportion to its scanty message. If she wrote that a neighbourhood was respectable, then respectable it was. If she wrote that she had a job, then she had one. His first impulse was to bound upstairs and show the card to Mrs Wheeby, but then he remembered having told her that Mary had gone to a job with her aunt. So he put the postcard in his pocket and stood staring, with a lift to the corners of his mouth that was not quite a smile, around the white and cherry-coloured (no, it was not a true crimson) hall.
Who was it who had loved crimson and white as the height of beauty in furnishings and dress? Ah – poor Charlotte Brontë, in the person of tiny, fiery, fascinating Jane Eyre. Wilfred went absently along to the kitchen, where he had just switched on the heating for the winter and the air was pleasantly warm, thinking about Mr Rochester, and hoping that when Mary found a husband, he would not resemble that gentleman. Nor Heathcliff either, thought Wilfred, opening the refrigerator to get himself a can of beer, nor Heathcliff either . . . Too much of a good thing, both of them, if you ask me.
On this earth there are egg-putters, people who, because of their nature, are obliged to fit their allowance of eggs snugly into just the one basket. No one had ever warned Wilfred, a born egg-putter, against this habit. And it had not occurred to Pat that egg-putters existed, much less that her dozy old Wilf was one.
He felt so thankful and so much happier that he decided to walk that afternoon through Lorrimer Park, past the seat where he had encountered Mr Taverner, taking with him the washed and ironed handkerchief nicely folded in its clean envelope. He would doze for an hour in the big armchair in the lounge, then set out.
But he couldn’t doze, because this was one of Dicky’s singing hours, and the trilling, shaking, silvery sounds were dropping down through the silent house. He went over to the window, pulled back the curtain, and peered aimlessly out.
It was a grey afternoon, threatening rain, and every colour glowed soft and clear: the bluish slates of the old roofs, the sooty grass on the far side of the railway cutting. Even the ashy material between the railway lines was rich steely-black, and the great sunflowers were a sulky gold. In this sort of light, Wilfred thought vaguely, you don’t want bright colours.
His eye moved to a painting, which was of the view from this very window. It hung on the opposite wall, and was one of Pat’s. She had had enough energy left, when housework, her job, and the refuelling and supervising of Wilfred and Mary were achieved, to attend evening classes in painting. Dear old Pat, how she had loved bright colours. His widower’s eye turned from the picture, with the guilty thought that he would rather look at the real scene.
In the gentle crescent of the houses across the railway, a colour suddenly caught his eye: one line of bright white gold. A really nice colour, thought Wilfred. The sun shows it up. Now that is a colour – delicate but strong too. Funny, because – he glanced up at the leaden sky – there isn’t any sun. He stared, interested and fascinated.
What was that yellow line?
No, it wasn’t sunlight from some distant break in the clouds. Just a thin golden line, in the curve of the grey crescent.
I’ll get my glasses.
His field glasses had been a present from Pat, bought from a war stores surplus shop after she had decided that he must have bird-watching as a hobby to match her painting. In his retirement, he had dutifully used them, summoned many a time from a book or mooning fit by the robust shout – ‘Wilf! Quick! There’s a jay on the fence!’
He secretly resented birds (with the exception of his garden robin, which he looked on as a member of his family) because they ate the buds of his primulas in May, pecking out the unfolding cu
ps of blue or crimson before he had had time to perform his usual laborious protective operation with black cotton and sticks.
But looking at distant roofs, or windows giving on mysterious dim rooms, going with his eyes into toppling ziggurats of red evening cloud – that was enjoyment. He had never told Pat of his private studying of old brick walls and grimily curtained windows, because she would have said that it was a kinky thing to do, and people would be surprised if they caught him ‘at it’.
The glasses were good ones. They brought roofs and trees and windows so near and so large that a simple and unsuspected beauty was revealed; Wilfred had sometimes thought that it wasn’t possible to realize how beautiful an ordinary sight, such as an expanse of wet slate, could be until he had seen it through his field-glasses.
His sight was bad; a wound sustained during the Second World War had affected it. Now he took off his spectacles and settled the glasses against his eyes.
Ah, the familiar curve of the beech hedge below the sunflowers. Something – he knew nothing about the laws of optics and cared less – in the structure of these two thick rounds of glass made any nearby tree or bush studied through them take on a convex curve . . . After a satisfying stare at the yellowing leaves growing along the graceful bending line that he knew was, in reality, straight as a hedge can be, he tilted the glasses and focused on the line of white-gold gleaming among the old houses.
Somebody had painted a house. The rest of the houses were all the same colour, neither white nor grey nor cream. That had been their last coat of paint – in 1939, before the bombs came. But one house shone out in the colour that had lifted Wilfred’s heart.
Dicky’s song stopped, as if turned off by a tap. It must be three o’clock.
Best be off, Wilfred thought, putting on coat and muffler in the hall; it’s nearly dark by four, and I don’t want to hang about. Of course, he may not be there.
But when he turned the corner by the rhododendrons, there was Mr Taverner, sitting on the seat where they had first met, and again wearing his white raincoat. He glanced up as Wilfred approached, and smiled.
The Yellow Houses Page 5