Starlight

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Where do you work?’ he interrupted, flashing a glance, terrifying to both sisters, on Annie, who had ventured to move from the strained position into which fear had flung her. She froze again, and Gladys said:

  ‘Kyperiou’s, it’s a caff in Archway Road, but please don’t go making trouble there, it’s my job, see, nice people they are –’

  ‘You do what I say and there won’t be trouble.’

  Gladys’s terror was beginning to lessen; because, in her nature, hope and gaiety were always ready to pipe up like two irrepressible little birds. She actually thought, You can see he’s Peggy’s father. For she had known, from his first appalling appearance, who this was … the legendary, the horrific, the dreaded rackman in person.

  ‘It’s the money,’ she said, indignation beginning to struggle out through fear, ‘I was counting on it – must ’ave it. For Christmas.’

  He took out a pocket-book bulging with red and green.

  ‘Here.’ He pulled out a note.

  But Gladys now felt actually capable of standing up to the creature; the fact that he was so like his daughter had made her feel him less of a monster.

  ‘It’s one pound ten it’ll be,’ she said quickly, ‘a pound for the two days, and then there’s the staff box.’

  ‘I shan’t want you for two days, only for today.’ He crumpled up the note and threw it at her feet. ‘Here – do what I say.’

  ‘It’s not right,’ burst out Gladys, crimsoning. ‘It – it’s not right, that’s what it is.’

  He shrugged. ‘Ah, perhaps not. A lot of things aren’t, in this world. What you have to remember is facts. It’s a fact that I own this house, and the one next door, and the row up the street. It’s a fact I could turn you out this minute. It’s a fact you owe me a month’s rent –’

  ‘I got it,’ Gladys dared to interrupt, ‘and I got Mr Fisher’s upstairs too – in case you came in unexpected. We was wondering –’

  He held out a dark hand, impatiently twitching the fingers.

  There followed some bustling and removal of dirty notes and silver from the depths of a handbag which had once been smart. Hesitatingly, her detestation and fear showing on her face, Gladys held them out.

  He forced her to advance, step by step, until she had put them on his outstretched palm; flat, insolent, not even cupped to receive them.

  He pocketed them and said again, ‘You stay here today,’ and was turning away.

  Gladys made an effort that seemed to crack something in her spirit.

  ‘You thinking of making any changes?’ she blurted: and could hardly believe that the awful question which had been throbbing within her for so many days, had actually sounded out on the air; the question sometimes hinted timidly to Peggy, that Peggy had always ignored, and now put to the rackman himself.

  He did not look round. ‘What changes?’ he said, half-way through the door.

  ‘Rents … and that …’ she faltered.

  ‘You do what Mrs Pearson wants, you always do what Mrs Pearson wants. Then there won’t be any changes.’ He moved on, not looking round.

  ‘And the old gentleman – him upstairs,’ she gabbled, daring to follow, ‘he’s ever so old, earns a bit showing off his little dolls – pays regular –’

  ‘He can stay. But tell him; always do what Mrs Pearson wants. Then there’ll be no “changes”, as you call them.’

  He was gone.

  As may be imagined, this left the sisters with conversation for the rest of the day, and had not even more interesting events begun to occur almost immediately, the topic would have lasted well into the next week.

  Gladys was divided between terror lest her job should be lost to her through this intolerable piece of interference, and overwhelming relief that she had at last asked the cruel question and received reassurance.

  Not that you could trust a rackman, of course. But for the time being … And, as she lived from minute to minute, and was acutely uncomfortable whenever facts compelled her to look a few days ahead, she felt that a load of worry had been rolled away.

  The note was still lying, crumpled up, on the floor. Her first action was to pounce on it; when you live from minute to minute and are over seventy, with an invalid sister to support, you can’t afford to leave notes lying at your feet, however insolently they may have arrived there.

  ‘Ten shillins,’ she announced to Annie, who had not uttered a sound since the appearance of their visitor, ‘I’ll go along tomorrow same as usual. Well!’ relishingly, as her spirits soared, ‘I’m glad I’ve seen him close to, they say they mostly never come near the places they buy (like murderers only the opposite), not that he’s much to look at, come to that, those black eyes. I never do trust ’em, very like Peggy, isn’t he, funny, it must be, having a rackman for your dad but I don’t expect she minds, doesn’t notice I expect, very wrapped up in herself she is, I’ve always said so, some man in her history I wouldn’t be surprised, s’pose I may as well go and do the shopping seeing it’s stopped snowing, hope I don’t slip that’s all, could you fancy a bit of boiling bacon, they had some round at Joneses for one and six, not all that fatty, you feeling all right, old dear?’

  The last question was accompanied by a dart to the bed, where Annie had suddenly fallen back despairingly among the pillows.

  ‘Oh Glad! That awful man – in our home!’

  ‘Cheer up – he didn’t do no harm. There’s always the pleece –’

  ‘The pleece! Oh Glad! In our home!’

  ‘Oh shut up do – you give me the sick!’ burst out Gladys, shaking the pillows as if they were Annie herself. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? We got ten shillins – better than nothing, and he said he ain’t going to make no changes –’

  ‘In our home! I can’t get over it – ’ow can you take his wicked money?’

  ‘Money’s money,’ pronounced Gladys with a last jerk of the bedclothes. ‘Couldn’t ’elp meself, could I? S’pose you’d of liked me to chuck it back at him?’

  ‘Coming into our home and throwing his wicked money at us – money got out of little Nicky and Alexander I shouldn’t wonder. You ’eard anywhere they might of gone?’

  The coloured family living farther up the Walk had surprised the sisters by a sudden departure.

  ‘Not a sound.’ Gladys’s tone was good-humoured again; she welcomed the change of subject. ‘I’ll ask that black what sweeps the road up Churchill Rise, he might know (if he isn’t hiding up in that arch if it starts snowing, I’ll bet that’s where he’ll be, and can you blame him, I often think, if we’re cold what about them), could you fancy a bovvil before I go off?’

  On Annie’s giving a weak nod, the subject of Nicky and Alexander’s problematical whereabouts was gone into at length, while Gladys half-filled a kettle from the tap on the landing, set it to boil on the rusty ancient cooker, and opened a new one-ounce bottle of Bovril.

  The hours were long for Annie while her sister was at work, and they had been greatly brightened by the daily visits from Nicky and Alexander on their way home from school, invited in by Gladys after many commands, of a truly awesome impressiveness, Not to Touch and Not to Lark About and to Keep Out of That Mrs Simms’s Way, while the pair silently listened; their four jetty eyes had widened and widened until they suggested dark jewels from some remote planet. Annie mourned and missed Nicky and Alexander, doubtless driven out, with their numerous relations, by the rackman.

  ‘Make it strong, Glad. I feel that weak.’

  ‘Don’t I always? I hate dish-wash.’

  ‘You don’t ’ave to tell me. It’s not me gives tea to ’alf the street if they pops in.’ Annie reclined on her rearranged pillows, sighing at intervals, while Gladys spooned out the Bovril with a lavish hand. ‘It’s the shock,’ she added.

  Annie was still sipping, and Gladys was about to go out, when her sister exclaimed, ‘Glad! You can’t go. ’E said so.’

  Gladys paused, staring, then sniffed.

  ‘Like his sauce … b
ut I s’pose … well, they’ll be open till eight …’

  She began to un-swathe. ‘If they was to come and there wasn’t no-one to let them in and they complained … but I don’t like it, no I don’t, but what can you do? … here, I’ll have a bovvil too, I could do with it.’

  The consumption of the Bovril spread over into lunch, for there was so much to talk about.

  Gladys minced up the remains of the previous day’s bestend-of-neck (New Zealand) in the clumsy forty-year-old mincer, and, with the addition of two potatoes, well salted and mashed with half a gill of milk left from their breakfast, produced a shepherd’s pie that was just not quite enough for two.

  But the Bovril had provided a passable foundation, and, with six staleish brussels sprouts added, there was in fact a lunch.

  Gladys could cook. She loved her food, and she had a most un-English talent for making something tasty out of scraps that most women would have thrown away. It is not too much to say that she and Annie would have died years ago from some illness invited by malnutrition if they had not been carefully fed.

  ‘Quite nice, these sprouts,’ commented Annie, sitting up in bed with her lunch spread out on the old papier mâché tray with its spray of Japanese flowers. ‘When did you get ’em, Glad?’

  ‘Saturday – or was it Monday? I got a half. Pull the leaves off. Make ’em small, I hate those great lumps of sprouts. These’re all right inside, even if they are old. Like me,’ and Gladys went off into a great cackle, in which Annie more primly joined.

  12

  In the midst of their meal, there came a grinding of wheels outside, followed by a great bang on Lily Cottage’s front door.

  ‘“Dab-on-the-door-said-Daniel”!’ cried Gladys, flying up with her mouth full, ‘it’s them! Lucky I never went out. Morning, I call this, not afternoon. Wonder they dare.’

  ‘Lucky I stopped you, you mean.’ Annie was sopping a piece of bread round her plate to make sure of the last drops of gravy. But her sister was already half-way down the stairs.

  The moving van and its men employed by Thomas Pearson suggested his aura of silent lawlessness.

  It was a small vehicle, dinted and unobtrusive, painted a dingy grey, and the men were dirty beyond the ordinary grime of a day’s work and were almost in rags.

  Gladys felt no surprise, after one glance at their faces, to learn from their mutters to one another that they were foreigners. This was how she expected foreigners to look.

  One of them came up the steps and reached past her and thrust at the door she had only half opened, so that it swung back and crashed into the wall behind.

  ‘Here, steady on!’ exclaimed Gladys, ‘mind our paint. And you can mind me while you’re about it. Pushing like that.’

  He did not trouble even to glance at her.

  ‘Deaf, I s’pose,’ observed Gladys to the surrounding air.

  She withdrew into the back of the hall and stood watching. They carried up, in silence and with the greatest care, the new furniture and the mirrors and plump pink cushions: object after object conspicuous for bright colour and prettiness. It was a pleasure to watch, and a highly unusual sight in Rose Walk, and Gladys began to meditate getting Annie out of bed to share the treat.

  ‘I s’pose you know where everything’s got to go?’ she said at last, as one of the three came up the front steps leading into Lily Cottage, ‘because I don’t. Open the door, he said, never a word about where to put the things.’

  Without looking at her, he held out a dirty sheet of paper, on which she could see little squares, each one filled with small circles that were numbered; then tramped on his way.

  ‘Oh … all right, so long as you know, before you come I was thinking how you might like a cup of tea but being deaf I s’pose you couldn’t hear me if I asked.’

  The remark might not have been uttered. Gladys began to feel that she was wasting her time; a sense of importance and involvement in Lily Cottage’s fortunes that had crept into her feelings, despite her fear of the rackman and her resentment, was agreeable, but it was freezing cold with the door open. She was shivering.

  ‘You nearly finished?’ she called suddenly, and even as she spoke, one of the men slammed the back doors of the van. Evidently the little armchair, puffed and padded with rosy satin, had been the last of the load.

  ‘’Ave I got to sign a paper?’ screamed Gladys, seeing unmistakable sign of imminent departure and feeling that her part in all this had been so slight that the rackman might well come down on her. ‘Oh all right, it’s all the same to me, funny thing all three of you being deaf, s’pose that’s why you all work together, birds of a feather, as they say, well if anythink’s wrong it’s not my fault and I ’ope you’ll tell him so, if you can talk, that is, dumb as well, p’haps, it’s a great misfortune …’

  The man who had given the orders and was evidently the leader turned slightly just before he climbed in beside the driver and gave her one look – coming up from such an inward furious preoccupation with God alone knew what pains and despairs that Gladys actually took a step back.

  It was far more frightening than any look from the rackman himself during their recent interview, and it gave her a dreadful hint of what his powers could do to someone even more within his grasp than Annie and herself.

  But she forgot it at once as she shut the door.

  Unable to resist temptation, she hurried from cottage to cottage, darting through the arch in the hall and back, climbing up to marvel over the bedroom, all pink, with a curly gilt mirror above the fireplace of stepped artificial brickwork that had replaced the basket grate of a hundred years ago.

  A gentle warmth, pervasive and soothing, floated night and day through Lily Cottage, the result of comings and goings by what Gladys thought of as ‘the oil officials’ some days ago. Central heating! But only in the cottage where Mrs Pearson would live.

  The kitchen and another bedroom in Rose Cottage remained chilly and not luxuriously furnished; the kitchen, indeed, was an old-fashioned affair, so Gladys thought, with – could you believe it – two old rusty irons in a corner, and a rug made of old bits of rag and an old armchair and a wooden table. But there was a new electric cooker.

  Mean, thought Gladys. All for Show, but Mean – oh my goodness, she inwardly shrieked, here’s Nurse! and I never put the water on!

  Nurse’s knock was unmistakable; a rat-a-tat which managed to carry all the gay and sunshiny side of Ireland, and Nurse herself, standing on the doorstep in her dark blue, with her neat dark-blue car parked at the kerb, had the beautiful Irish skin and the sparkling Irish eye.

  Large, solid and firm as some bonny Prize Show dahlia was Nurse, with a kind and interested manner which almost managed to conceal her daily preoccupation with the affairs of dozens and dozens of other patients.

  ‘Hullo, dear. All ready for me?’ cried Nurse, already across the hall because she knew from experience that Gladys Barnes was seldom all ready for her, and not a second must be wasted, ‘and how’s Annie today? New tenants moving in?’

  ‘Not a drop of hot water have I got!’ screamed Gladys, toiling up after the sturdy black-silk legs, ‘I clean forgot – besides it’s Tuesday, Nurse, it’s Tuesday!’

  ‘Coming today instead of Wednesday because of Christmas, I did tell you dear,’ said Nurse over her shoulder, crossing the landing in three strides, ‘never mind I’ll just take a look at her. Or perhaps there’s a drop hot next door. Very handy having that door in the hall – painted you up very smart, haven’t they? Nice people? You run down and see if there is a drop. Well how’s Annie today dear?’ Nurse was now in the bedroom and holding Annie’s wrist.

  ‘I darsent, Nurse –’ Gladys was beginning mysteriously.

  ‘Oh go on with you, no-one would grudge a jug of hot water, God love you, and Christmas three days away,’ interrupted Nurse, peeling off bedclothes.

  ‘I darsent, Nurse, and that’s a fact, the kitchen’s downstairs, parlour and bedroom next door, another bedroom and kit
chen downstairs, here.’

  ‘Where’s the bathroom, then?’ interrupted Nurse, re-tucking Annie, who was vainly trying to push in a word concerning her condition between their voices. ‘I’ll fetch it.’

  ‘Next door. Came in this morning as bold as brass and threw ten shillings at me … I wouldn’t if I was you, really I wouldn’t, Nurse. He can be ever so nasty.’

  ‘Well I’ll just leave her for to-day, she’s nice and clean like she always is,’ pronounced Nurse with an approving pat on the quilt, ‘and perhaps you could manage a wash down for her on Christmas Eve,’ glancing at her watch and giving up the search for hot water with a philosophy taught her by years in her profession. ‘How’s the old gentleman these days?’

  ‘Oh fine,’ said Gladys instantly, with a lightning glance at Annie, ‘out and about s’usual.’

  ‘Well mind you let me know if he gets bad,’ said Nurse, disappearing across the landing. ‘The minute he complains you let me know. At his age you can’t be too careful. Take care of yourselves. I’ll let myself out. Merry Christmas!’

  Her voice died away, and was followed by the slam of the front door.

  ‘Annie!’ exclaimed Gladys, clasping her hands, ‘if you could see downstairs!’

  ‘Nice, is it? I heard them carrying it all in and I did wish I could see …’

  ‘It’s fairyland!’ nodding her head. ‘That’s what it is – fairyland! I wonder – could you possibly manage to come down?’

  ‘I would love a peep. I get so dull up here all day on my own.’

  ‘You had plenty of company to-day – more than what you want, I should think,’ said her sister grimly. ‘Oh well, better not, p’raps. Just supposing he did come in to see how things were going …’

  ‘Oh don’t! Shall I ever forget seeing him come round the door! My heart’s still going from it. I did try to tell Nurse, how it’s going, but you was both jawing fit to burst yourselves –’