The Yellow Houses

by Stella Gibbons

  His gaze wandered around the hall, absently, while he struggled to catch and examine the impression, and reached the mat immediately before the front door. A square white object lay there, and he darted forward.

  The writing on the envelope was Mary’s.

  8

  The break-out

  Julia Anstruther did not enjoy being a mother and a housewife. As for Jeremy Anstruther, she loved him and she did not get on with him.

  It was impossible, for her, to imagine herself living with any other man. She knew this, because she had tried, conscientiously, detachedly, and many times to imagine it; and found every known part of herself shrinking from the hypothetical situation. She had even, occasionally, tested herself by being forthcoming to men who seemed to admire her. She had not enjoyed her glacial flirtations.

  Jeremy on the other hand, could have lived more or less contentedly with any woman who was pretty and kind. This, in his wife’s opinion, gave him an unfair advantage.

  My marriage isn’t an easy one, she would think, when her mind should have been on lists of marks, and notes about behaviour in the Upper Third. She was ‘intense’, as the Edwardians would have said; ‘tense’ is the contemporary equivalent; Jeremy was easy-going or ‘relaxed’. Continually, they clashed.

  Their house was large, old, and beautiful. It was one of the first to have been built in Torford, a few years after the Lorrimers had built Lorrimer Park; on the outskirts of the town to the east where that sea-mist first made its chill appearance on the evenings of late autumn. Inside it was shabby. The furniture was good, mostly inherited, but it was worn and ill-kept.

  The garden at the back was neglected; it was an acre wide and nearly an acre long, and had a small copse of aspens in one corner, and there were old swings and various mouldering huts and forts built by the children; rows of smelly cabbages put in by Jeremy Anstruther when he had believed that they could grow their own vegetables and save money; and straggling climber roses with fierce purple-red thorns an inch long that no one had the time to prune; and a lawn which had never recovered from years of football.

  It had, however, a front view straight across Torford’s roofs (for it stood on a slight rise) to the one part of the surrounding hills which did not display bungalows. Its back windows gazed over the garden at a distant wood where primroses could still be found in spring.

  A week or so nearer the battered festival of Christmas, the Anstruthers were undergoing the daily exacerbation of family breakfast in the large, warm kitchen where a cooking fire had burned for more than a hundred years. Today, it was a smokeless fuel boiler.

  ‘Babette, it’s ten to eight.’ (Ridiculous, insultingly too-feminine name, insisted upon by Babette’s father.)

  ‘Everything’s under control, Mummy – where’s my muffler? Christ, where’s my MUFFLER? It really is simply extraordinary how people shove my THINGS away . . . Giles, have you been assing about with it?’

  ‘So likely. The colours are enough to make one vomit.’

  ‘Shut up, you two, I want to read. And I dislike hearing females say “Christ”,’ droned their father, behind the pages of the Guardian.

  ‘Did you put it out ready for this morning?’

  ‘I did mean to but I was reading.’

  ‘Oh well, in that case . . .’ Her mother’s look and tone were mollified, for Babette was one of those whose natural indifference to reading is proved by their always referring to the number of pages so far conquered. ‘What were you reading, darling?’

  Ash-blonde hair, flowing in the mermaid fashion (Julia was tired of seeing mermaids in the school), grey eyes, large, with curving thick lashes darker than the hair . . . Yes, she was going to be a beauty in three years, even to the pale pug-face, which was contemporarily favoured together with the brown, plump, sensual face.

  Unfortunately, if she did not learn at the crucial age of thirteen to apply herself to her books, she was also going to be a dunce, and Julia did not want a dunce for a daughter.

  Engaged in what can best be described by the cliché crumbling a piece of toast, Mrs Anstruther sat staring out of the window across the awful garden and letting two streams of thought run confusedly through her mind – one on the apparently insuperable difficulty of dealing justly with the claims of everyone, including the animals, in a family of four; while the other lingered nostalgically on mornings in her flat in Kensington, when she had been Second Mistress at Warbeck House School for Girls. Jeremy had made jokes about Second Mistresses.

  ‘Juley, you aren’t eating a Proper Breakfast,’ came his voice from behind the Guardian. ‘Get on with it now. Nice eggy-bacon.’

  He was right: he too often was. ‘Giles, get my plate out of the oven, dear, will you?’ she said.

  Giles was nearly fifteen. An awful detachment, a god-suggesting calm, ruled his views and his spoken judgements.

  ‘He weighs his words,’ his mother used sometimes to wail to her own mother. ‘And he’s so dreadfully, dreadfully clean. It isn’t natural.’

  He now got up with an air managing to suggest that, although he had been interrupted in a train of philosophic thought, he was prepared to be dutiful. He carefully fetched the plate from the oven with a clean tea towel, which he first took from the dresser drawer, and set it before his mother.

  ‘Thank you, dear.’ Julia was not proud of Giles’s being clever; she wanted Babette to be.

  She glanced at the clock. Eight minutes before she left the house; in twenty, she would be in her room at the school, dealing with matters and people that she felt herself trained and able to deal with; not . . . floundering at home.

  How sick I am of girls, Julia thought suddenly, and checked the thought in dismay. (She was in the draughty hall now, putting on her five-year-old tweed coat.)

  ‘Oh God oh God, back to the treadmill again.’ Her husband came lounging out, folding the Guardian, and, seeing her in front of the tarnished Regency looking-glass seriously arranging her sealskin cap, took her in his arms and began to kiss her.

  ‘Don’t, Jeremy, you’ll make my hair come down,’ she whispered irritably.

  ‘All the better – that’s what I like.’

  ‘Well I don’t – what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing – right as a trivet – just like kissing you.’

  ‘Well don’t do it now – so do I – I’ll be late –’

  ‘No time like the present.’

  Jeremy kept an arm about his wife’s shoulders while he took his overcoat from the peg with his other hand.

  ‘Didn’t you tell me that a girl called Davis had bolted from your Select Academy?’ he asked.

  ‘Mary Davis. Yes. What about her?’

  ‘I had her father in yesterday morning. Wants to sell his house and isn’t asking its current value. I couldn’t convince him.’

  After he had read Mary’s letter, Wilfred almost decided to telephone Mr Anstruther and tell him that he had decided to take his advice and add two thousand to the price he was asking for the house.

  Dear Dad,

  Sorry to bother you but could you possibly let me have one pound fifty every week? It would make all the difference. I have made friends kind-of with a girl living in this house. She is off her trolley but not too bad. Sorry to be a nuisance.

  Love

  Mary

  Wilfred thought resignedly that his Mary did not tell you much. Didn’t she realize that the smallest detail connected with her was interesting to him? If her mother had been alive, we’d have had the girl’s name, and whether she’s respectable or not, and where she comes from . . . but of course, if Pat had been alive, Mary would never have dared to run away.

  She isn’t afraid of me. The thought was both a stab and comforting. The money would have to be sent to the accommodation address.

  I can’t face Dill about putting on another two thousand, Wilfred thought, at last. He was sitting in the kitchen, where he liked to be because he could look across at the Yellow House. The whole t
hing might fall through if he were to turn nasty . . . but I know what I will do – and in his excitement he went over to the window and stared out at the Yellow House, which was glowing in a burst of late December sunlight – I’ll ask Anstruther to put on something more for the furniture and fittings . . . that’ll help. And I’ll sell the car.

  I’ll keep enough stuff to furnish two rooms, one for Mary, and one for me . . . His thoughts met a sudden jar. Mrs Wheeby. What’ll I do about her? Oh damn everything. If only it was over – the house sold, me in some quiet bed-sitter with another in the same house for Mary, and the old woman settled somewhere else.

  It was not much to want. But he was learning that the less you asked, the less likely you were to get it.

  He sent Mary the money by the next post, with a letter promising its future arrival every Friday morning and ending ‘I am glad you have made a friend. Take care of yourself, Bunny. Your loving Dad.’

  They had called her Bunny until she was eleven, when Pat had announced that it was rather a kid’s sort of nickname for a sensible stoutish child looking older than her years, and they had dropped it.

  Mr Anstruther sounded pleased when commenting on Wilfred’s decision.

  ‘Always provided your furniture is up-to-date––’

  ‘It’s that, all right,’ said Wilfred sourly.

  ‘You can ask three hundred and probably get it. Carpets and curtains and beds nowadays . . . let’s try, anyway,’ carolled Mr Anstruther.

  ‘It’s all the bother,’ Wilfred snapped, affronted by this legal joyousness.

  ‘Ratchet’s are responsible for that,’ cried Jeremy, with all the energy of forty-two pushing responsibility onto someone else. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll tell them to ask three, and if we have to come down to two, no harm’s done – or practically none, ha! ha!’

  When letter and postal order arrived, Mary felt a sedate exultation. But it was a Saturday, so she would be at the shop all day while Mrs Levy pursued the religious rituals of her race, so there would be no opportunity for that excursion to Oxford Street which Sylvie had suggested.

  Mary knew that she must go to work. But when, on her way to the bus, she encountered Sylvie loitering in the hall, she remarked that it seemed a shame they both had to work on Saturdays.

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Sylvie snapped, ‘so let’s go Up West like I said.’

  ‘But why aren’t you?’

  ‘’Cos one of the bloody supervisors didn’t like being called a rotten old cow, that’s why.’

  ‘Then you’re . . . did she . . .?’ Mary still felt some of the consideration for other people’s feelings instilled by home, and the word ‘sacked’ would not come out.

  ‘Shoved out on me arse. I was wondering when you’d notice.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘I been ill. Had the Chinese flu, the doctor said it was.’

  A pause. Mary felt that she just could not speed away. It was not feeling sorry for Sylvie; it was not even that the thought of the daily bus was suddenly unbearably dreary. The front door was still shut, and it was a solid, well-hung piece of wood nearly a hundred years old, yet through it beckoned the lure of a brilliant, stingingly cold, sunny morning. Shopping! Mary burned to spend some money.

  ‘I – I suppose you’re pretty skint?’ she suggested, but Sylvie snorted.

  ‘Well I’m just not, see, ’cause I got me relief. And I paid me rent, so old Orange-Face can’t push me out.’ She paused, and her eyes, which had grown dull, began to glitter again. ‘What say we go? Oh come on.’

  Mary hesitated. ‘I’ll lose my job,’ she said calmly. ‘But we’ll go.’

  She often thought, afterwards, of the instant in which she made that decision. The whole of her future life had unrolled from it, like a Japanese kakemono.

  She went quickly upstairs and threw her dressing-gown into a corner of her room. Three months of common sense and frugality and prudence went with it.

  In twenty minutes, she and Sylvie were giggling over a second breakfast in a Wimpy Bar in Kentish Town Road.

  The luckless ones who worked on Saturday mornings were jerking past in buses. The early shoppers were on the prowl; the wind bit, the cold yellow sun shone, and a jet lumbered thundering through the thin, low, winter clouds. But in the Wimpy Bar it was warm and quiet.

  ‘We’ll see the decorations. ’Ere, I’m having another coffee. What about you?’ Sylvie spoke over her shoulder as she undulated towards the counter, her hipless body moving under a black cotton skirt printed with lilac and yellow circles and reaching to her ankles.

  ‘What decorations?’ Mary asked through her beefburger.

  ‘Xmas. Up West.’ Sylvie held up her cup questioningly, and Mary nodded. It was not coffee – her mother had ground the whole beans in a little machine. But it was hot, and the sugar was free.

  ‘Now where’ll we go?’ Mary demanded as, full and warm, they came out into Kentish Town Road.

  ‘Oxford Street. There’s blokes there sells them medals, on chains they are, and beads . . . We could have a look at them and p’raps see’f there was anything what we fancied up Selfridges.’

  It was Sylvie, too, who decided that they should travel by Underground because it was warmer and, she added, ‘There’s more boys there.’

  Side by side they sat in the Underground, and Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, Mr Nixon and the Middle East droned past their understanding like the muffled thundering of the train. Pat had worked from nine in the morning, until half past four in the afternoon, five days a week, for nearly ten years, to keep Mary at Redpaths. The rate-payers of Camden had seen a high percentage of their heavy taxes go to keep Sylvie at the Beatrice Webb Secondary Modern. Mary had listened and tried; Sylvie had sat at the back painting her nails. The result was the same in both cases: their chief, their deepest, interests were clothes, beads and boys.

  Mary preferred the kind of boy who did not wear beads; but Sylvie, with a mind suggesting those Edwardian dresses whose trains swept up miscellaneous rubbish from the streets, gathered fashionable trends in much the same way and, to her, beads on a boy were all right. Groovy.

  No one looked at them as they sat there. Sylvie’s greenish hair and pseudo-Victorian skirt and dirty leather coat bordered with dirty sheepskin were conventional wear; while Mary’s clothes were equally conventional in another and older style. Too many girls looked like Sylvie to attract the stares which she would have welcomed from the long-haired, long-legged youths; and no one but her elders ever looked at Mary.

  They came out of the Underground at Tottenham Court Road, and set off at once on a slow, prowling stroll along Oxford Street.

  They paused before a young man selling earrings set with pearls, and chains at the end of which swung a silvery medallion, stamped with a crude pattern that glittered in the wintery sunlight.

  BOOK TWO

  9

  Two invitations

  How Wilfred longed to ask Mary to come home on Christmas Eve and stay for the three nights of the holiday! But what kind of a Christmas would they have in the dusty house full of staring gadgets, with Pat’s absence haunting every room?

  ‘I never ’eard of such a thing – are you ’er father or some kind of a housefly?’ demanded his father, when he dropped in to see him some days before the twenty-fifth. ‘You make ’er come. Tell ’er she’s ruddy well got to. I shan’t; I meant to tell yer, young Ginger’s arst me along. ’Er latest’ll be there, and ’e always ’as a drop too much Christmas (Easter and all the year round, come to that) and ’e might get knockin’ the kids about. ’Course, the three eldest’ll be ’ome for the day ’cept for Marlene wots in reform but I better be there. In case,’ Mr Davis swelled up a muscle under his tattered jersey and studied it with approval.

  ‘Oh well . . . please yourself, Dad.’

  ‘Now don’t take it like that, Wilf. There’s a pound for Mary,’ he nodded at the mantelpiece, ‘not that she’ll think anything of it, but she is me grandd
aughter.’

  Wilfred wished the old man a Merry Christmas, pushed a small parcel tied with red ribbon at him, and said that he must be going.

  ‘It’ll be merry, all right – thanks,’ Mr Davis said grimly, and Wilfred, having pocketed the pound note and left a fifty pence piece apiece for Samantha and Kelly, took his departure.

  ‘Thanks for the bacca,’ followed him in a shout to the corner of the little street; he turned, and saw his father on the doorstep, his old jersey and trousers looking more than usually disreputable in the clear winter light, waving the opened parcel at him.

  Never could wait till Christmas morning, bless him, Wilfred thought, smiling and waving back.

  A man of the nineteenth century, tempered by hardship and courage into what, for Wilfred, was an utterly satisfactory human being. His love took the form of the cliché They don’t make ’em like that nowadays, and as this thought passed, his next thought was that he would write and invite Mary.

  ‘Where was you on Saturday?’ snapped Mrs Levy, her eyes narrowed and her face swollen with anger as Mary came into the shop on Monday morning. ‘I phone Mrs Cadman three times. She said she don’t know. I have to phone my daughter; I phone Mr Foster across the way making him trouble. My daughter vas going with a friend to see Canterbury Tales. She can’t go because I have to come down here because you weren’t available. Now she missed it. All your fault.’

  ‘I went Up West,’ Mary said, looking steadily at Mrs Levy. Round her neck hung a long chain on which glittered a silvery medallion.

  ‘Oh. So you went Up Vest.’ Mrs Levy nodded. ‘Ver-ry good. Up Vest. I see.’ She pointed, with drama, at the medallion. ‘Vaste your money, vaste your time, let me down. I know. Sooner or later, I think, Mary do this to me. And vy? Because you all the same. 1970s girls lazy, liars, unreliable.’ She paused, glaring.

  Mary glanced out of the door where the gold light of a perfect winter’s day beckoned.