The Hours Before Dawn

by Celia Fremlin

  ‘How do you know?’ she said heavily. ‘Have you actually seen her teaching there? Or gone there to enquire if it really is her name?’

  ‘Well – no,’ said Louise, rather taken aback. ‘Actually, I haven’t. But, I mean, it would be such an easy thing to check up on – she’d never dare tell lies about it.’

  ‘But that’s probably just what she’s counting on!’ exclaimed Mrs Palmer. ‘Just because it is so easy, that’s the very reason why nobody will bother to check up. They’ll all think just the way you do.’

  ‘I can’t help feeling that’s a bit far-fetched,’ observed Louise. ‘Besides – I told you. She writes books. Homeric archaeology. That sort of thing. Terribly learned.’

  ‘Have you read them?’ persisted Mrs Palmer inexorably. ‘Have you ever even set eyes on them?’ And when Louise did not answer, she concluded, not without a certain complacency: ‘You’ve only got her word for it that she’s ever studied the classics at all. Hers – and your husband’s.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Louise stepped out into the tranquil bustle of a suburban spring evening. Threading her way through the hurrying husbands and the tricycling children, the setting sun blindingly in her eyes, she made her way back to the bus stop.

  But which bus stop? Which bus? There was still that other address, not more than a quarter of an hour’s journey away. It was after six already; by the time she got home it would already be too late to cook a proper supper, and the children would be whining, Mark aggrieved. Things would be bad enough; but would they be any worse if she stayed out another half hour? She tried to think how she could explain her absence. After last night, she couldn’t possibly confess that her errand was in any way connected with Vera Brandon. Already Mark – not to mention his mother and the Baxters – suspected that Louise was jealous. Looked at from their angle, this expedition would seem like suspicion and jealousy run mad, and no amount of explanation could be expected to alter this impression very much. That was the trouble about jealousy; once the word had been spoken between you, then everything you did or said was liable to be interpreted in that hackneyed but hideous light. Well, don’t say anything then, except that you’ve been having tea with a friend….

  The trolley-bus which could have taken Louise homewards drew up by the stop. She stepped forward. Two youths pushed in front of her. She stepped back.

  ‘Hurry along, lady, cantcher make up your mind?’ yelled the conductor; and the two youths, discerning – or feeling that they ought to discern – some sort of feeble innuendo in the remark, began to guffaw half-heartedly.

  Louise drew back. Even when wearing her best things, she was never quite sure whether such guffaws were meant in compliment or in mockery; today, in this four-year-old cotton blouse and winter skirt, she felt that there was no doubt at all.

  Well, that settled it. There wouldn’t be another trolley-bus for twenty minutes, so it would be almost as quick to go to Mortlake Terrace as not. Besides, if she didn’t go now, she would only go some other time, and have to explain things to Mark all over again. Why have two rows when one would do? she thought philosophically, and moved across the road to the other bus stop.

  The façade of the great block of flats was grey and forbidding. Lines of washing filled every balcony, and the now sunless courtyard was full of screaming children. Dirtier children than those in Elsworthy Crescent, but just as many of them, were mounted on tricycles, and Louise rubbed her shins ruefully, and dodged as quickly as she could into the stairway that led to No. 10.

  Four flights of surprisingly hygienic-smelling stairs led her to the door she sought, and at her second knock a heavy, adenoidal child of about seven appeared, and stared up at her with a blankness only faintly tinged with suspicion.

  ‘Is your Mummy – your Mum – in?’ asked Louise.

  The suspicion in the face seemed to fade a little, but the blankness increased. Two more heads appeared round the door – no, three, for the skinny little ten-year-old was peering out from behind a large and doughy baby who looked much too heavy for her.

  ‘’Ts a lady,’ she diagnosed at last, shrilling the words into the dark passage behind her; and then, when there was no response: ‘G’ahn, Em. Tell Mum there’s a lady to see her.’

  ‘A lady,’ screamed the adenoidal child obediently, without taking her eyes off Louise’s face; and a voice in the darkness behind took up the cry: ‘A lady!’ ‘A lady!’ echoed again from behind some closed door in the recesses of the dwelling; and at last, with a flurry of slippered footsteps and shrill admonitions, Mum herself appeared, patting her faded, gingery hair with a damp, steaming hand.

  Miss Brandon? No, she didn’t think she’d heard of no Miss Brandon. Not to remember it, like.

  Some time ago, perhaps? Louise prompted, remembering that Mrs Palmer’s adventure had taken place last autumn. Six months ago, or thereabouts?

  Six months ago. Mum considered this. That would be just about the time she’d come out the hospital, and there’d been no end of ladies round then, naturally. There’d been the lady from the Welfare; and the lady about the milk vouchers; and the lady about Em’s special boots on account of her toes turned in, and of course being in hospital she hadn’t been able to get her along to the clinic, not that month. Then there was the lady about the Registrations, and the lady from the School Attendance, because of course she’d had to keep Lil at home from school to help, being that she was only just out of hospital. Ever so kind, that lady had been, ever so sympathetic, and she’d written off for a form what’d put it all right, and the form hadn’t come, but it was all right, because they hadn’t heard nothing more about it, not a word, had they, Lil?

  Louise could not help wondering what tiny fraction of all these ladies’ salaries would have solved Mum’s problems for good without any more bother to anybody; but aloud she only asked if Mum could remember any other lady? Had there, she hazarded, been one wearing a brown costume?

  Well, yes, to tell the truth, Mum thought that there had. In fact, now she came to think of it, most of the ladies were wearing brown costumes. Quite smart, too, some of them. Quiet, you know, but smart. But then, most of the girls were smart nowadays, there’d been a big change since the war, didn’t Louise think so?

  It was Louise who wilted first. Of course, it was she who was confronted with the five unblinking pairs of eyes ranged alongside Mum, and under their gaze she found it difficult to pursue the enquiry intelligently. Besides, among this multitude of brown-costumed ladies there seemed little chance of identifying Vera Brandon by her appearance; and as to her conversation or activities, these would have had to be very odd indeed for Mum not to have thought resignedly that they came legitimately under some Schedule or other.

  ‘Well – thank you very much, Mrs – Um – Er—’ began Louise, and was a little disappointed that Mum should accept this title so contentedly – she had hoped that she might learn the woman’s name without having to ask for it point blank. Not that it mattered: it was hard to imagine that this woman could have any important connection with Vera Brandon’s affairs.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said again; ‘it’s been very kind of you – I must have mistaken the address.’ She backed to the stairs, awkwardly, and it was not until she reached the third flight that she felt herself really free of those twelve eyes.

  The last streaks of sunset were fading as Louise hurried up the road towards her house, guessing uneasily at the time. Would Edna still be there, and would she have done anything about the children’s supper? Or would Mark be coping with everything—?

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Henderson. I’d like to speak to you, if you don’t mind. It’s not that I wish to complain, you understand, but—’

  What, Louise wondered, would happen if she simply said to Mrs Philips: ‘No, of course you don’t’ and walked on up the path? Was that what the Keepers of Themselves to Themselves would do? She thought enviously of these technicians of suburban living who figured so large in Mrs Morgan’s ane
cdotes – those heroines who succeeded in keeping Themselves to Themselves in the face of murder, suicide or rape. Had it taken them years of study and practice to perfect their arid skill? Or had it been born with them? Were they simply endowed by nature with the chill genius needed to pass Mrs Philips without a word – to move unscathed through their front gardens like Daniel through the lions?

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Philips,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’ve been out, you see. I was – er – called away in a hurry, and I had to leave the children. I’m terribly sorry if they’ve been disturbing you.’

  Mrs Philips regarded her woodenly.

  ‘I didn’t say they’d been disturbing me, Mrs Henderson,’ she observed. ‘They’ve been bouncing their balls again, of course, those two older ones, but then that’s only to be expected, brought up wild the way they’ve been, no consideration for anybody. I’m not expecting consideration, Mrs Henderson. I’ve given up looking for consideration. But all the same, I feel I ought to tell you, there are limits. There are limits beyond which flesh and blood can’t endure, and the time has come, Mrs Henderson, when I must speak to you about your baby.’

  It seemed to Louise that this momentous pronouncement would have carried more weight if Mrs Philips hadn’t been speaking to her about her baby roughly three times a week ever since he was born. However, she hastened to apologise:

  ‘I’m terribly sorry if he’s been crying this afternoon. I left instructions about his bottle, but perhaps …’

  Mrs Philips interrupted.

  ‘No, Mrs Henderson; it’s not that. I’m not complaining about this afternoon. As a matter of fact, your baby has been very quiet while you’ve been out – I haven’t heard him at all. I suppose he’s been properly looked after for once. No, Mrs Henderson, it’s the night-time I’m talking about. Last night I didn’t get a wink of sleep, not one wink, with all that crying through the wall, right by my head. Never stopped all night long, it just about drove me crazy—’

  ‘But that’s impossible—’ Louise was beginning; and was about to add that Michael had been out in his pram most of the night, far away from the house. Then she thought better of it. There was no point in stirring up yet more gossip about her outing last night; and it wasn’t as if Mrs Philips was ever mollified by explanations, or even listened to them. For, after all, Mrs Philips was in the right, and the person who is right doesn’t need to listen very much.

  ‘If it goes on,’ Mrs Philips was continuing, ‘if it goes on, Mrs Henderson, I’m warning you, I’ll have to go to my doctor about it. Really I will. He knows that my nerves won’t stand that sort of thing. I’ve been under the doctor for my nerves for twenty years, ever since my poor husband died. He’ll tell you that I need my night’s sleep, don’t have any doubt about that, Mrs Henderson. He’ll tell you that I can’t stand this sort of thing.’

  Louise recognised this threat as a trump card. For minor annoyances, you threatened your neighbours with the police; for major ones, you brought in the doctor. Not, Louise fancied, because the doctor was the more alarming bogeyman of the two, but because he was the more powerful. From the doctor’s surgery emerged potent little scraps of paper which could subdue the milkman into giving you milk at half price; which could get you off work for weeks on end; which could conjure out of thin air liniments, spectacles and artificial legs. Surely from this shrine a piece of paper could also be summoned which would stop Louise’s baby crying at times when Mrs Philips wanted to go to sleep?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Louise for the third time; but before she could say any more (if, indeed, there was anything more to be said) she was interrupted by an explosion of sound from the house. The front door burst open, and Margery and Harriet were down the steps and flinging themselves upon Louise in imbecile rapture, as if she had been away for months, for years.

  ‘Mummy!’ they shrieked. ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Their welcome was as warm and noisy and senseless as that of two puppies. And if only they had been two puppies, Louise reflected, how different the conversation with Mrs Philips would have been. How her face would have softened; how she would have beamed, and admired, and sympathised; how patiently she would have put up with the shrill yapping….

  ‘Funny time for children to be out of bed, I must say,’ Mrs Philips observed bleakly, and as loudly as was becoming in one whose nerves couldn’t stand noise; and then, louder still, to be heard above the commotion: ‘Of course, it’s all what you’re brought up to…. Some neighbourhoods…. Playing and screaming in the streets till ten o’clock at night….’

  ‘Where’ve you been, Mummy?’ Harriet was squealing. ‘We haven’t had any supper, and—’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ contradicted Margery. ‘Oh, Mummy, why—?’

  ‘No, we haven’t, Mummy. And—’

  ‘Hush, darlings, hush! One at a time! Listen: Isn’t Daddy in?’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet; and ‘Yes’ simultaneously said Margery.

  Louise tried again. ‘Well, where’s Edna, then? Is she still here? And is Baby all right?’

  Fatal, of course, to ask two questions in the same breath. ‘No’ shrilled into one ear while ‘Yes’ pierced the other; and Louise tried to manoeuvre her clamorous escort up the path and into the house. A little sense began to emerge from the babel of contradictions. Yes, Daddy had come in, Margery explained, and had given them supper (No, not supper, only baked beans, Harriet contributed aggrievedly) and had then gone up to the Rubbish Room.

  ‘To have supper with the Spy Lady,’ elaborated Harriet, in tones likely to edify two-thirds of the street. ‘And she’s cooked him a much nicer supper than us. I can smell bacon, and cheese, and kippers, and—’

  ‘Not kippers,’ corrected Margery. ‘I know it isn’t kippers, because—’

  ‘It is,’ snapped Harriet.

  ‘It isn’t!’

  Louise could see that both children were overtired, and no wonder. She interrupted hastily: ‘Is Daddy still up there with Miss Brandon?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet resentfully. ‘And I think he’s going to be there for ever! He didn’t put us to bed, or anything. He went up there hours and hours and hours ago!’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said Margery. ‘It was only—’

  ‘Yes he did.’

  ‘Didn’t.’

  ‘Did!’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Louise hastened first to Michael’s room. Yes, he was all right. Edna must have fed him and put him to bed most efficiently, for he was rosily asleep with a well-fed, well-bathed air that was unmistakable. Louise was surprised. She had left Edna with only the sketchiest of instructions about giving him a bottle, and none about putting him to bed; and Edna was not a girl who was given to using much common-sense or initiative – particularly where common-sense and initiative would involve getting off a sofa and walking upstairs. Edna must be changing – waking up. Well, seventeen was the age for changes. Any day now she might stop knitting. And stop baby-sitting, too, thought Louise ruefully; the two no doubt went together. That was the whole difficulty about baby-sitting. The very qualities that made people willing to do it were just those qualities which also made them no good at it.

  Outside on the landing she paused. She had expected Mark to call down to her when he heard her come in; to hurry down and ask her where she’d been, what had made her so late. But he must be too much engrossed with Vera Brandon up there. She could hear their voices, faintly. A short laugh. The scrape of a chair. Voices again. The flavour of Miss Brandon’s cooking still lingered faintly on the air, and Louise considered that Harriet was most decidedly wrong about the kippers, and probably about the cheese and bacon too. The smell was a far more subtle one, far more exotic. Mushrooms, perhaps, and little cubes of veal fried in butter, with the faintest dash of garlic….

  ‘Mummy!’

  ‘What, darling?’ Resignedly Louise gave up her speculations and turned into the girls’ room. ‘What’s the matter, Harriet?’

  ‘Mummy, I can’t go to sleep.’ The words
were spoken with a smug, trump-that-if-you-can sort of air that was both irritating and endearing. Louise sat down on the bed and waited for more.

  ‘Mummy, I’m too hot, and I can’t have my blanket off because if I do a big hen might come and peck me while I’m all bare.’

  If only Harriet and Socrates could have met, thought Louise wistfully. It would have done them both good, particularly Socrates. He who had argued so many learned philosophers out of their cherished convictions, would he have been able to convince Harriet that there wasn’t – there couldn’t be – a hen in the room? Or would he, too, after half an hour’s fruitless struggle on behalf of reason and sanity, have resorted to the non-Socratic method of promising to take her to the fair tomorrow if she was a good girl?

  Harriet’s transports of gratitude at this offer made Louise feel quite ashamed – as if she had bought her victory in this idiotic argument with counterfeit coin. Because, of course, she had been going to take them to the fair anyway, some time during the weekend. She always did on Bank Holidays. Indeed, how could she ever hope to do otherwise, when it was only such a short journey to Hampstead Heath; and when the children saved their pocket money with such touching and infuriating fervour for weeks beforehand; and when all the other children go, Mummy, every single one, and Milly and Patsy White go three times, on the Friday, and the Saturday, and the Monday.

  Downstairs, the kitchen was silent, and full of crumbs. The remains of the baked bean supper still littered the table, and the corner of a piece of burnt toast jutted out from under the grill. A blob of tomato sauce had joined the streak of jam under Harriet’s chair, and Louise glanced at the clock. Would there be time to give the floor its long-overdue scrubbing tonight? If Michael stayed asleep till half past ten – and if Mark continued absorbed upstairs—?

  The ringing of the telephone put an end to these speculations; and when she heard Beatrice’s voice she knew at once that the kitchen floor would wait another day. What with Kathleen’s mother having her face lifted; and Muriel’s not being able to hold down a job because of Bristol being so provincial and narrow-minded; and Laura’s going to a psychoanalyst at last, in spite of what she’d always said about them – and what her husband had always said about them – and what, come to that, Beatrice herself had always said about them – well, by that time it was after ten, and Beatrice had honestly only got a moment left to tell Louise what she was really ringing up about.