go with the new dress, and she realized the truth of Miriam's statement that no one over fifty should ever try to buy anything in a bargain basement.
"But look what we ate!" Ellen reminded her. "And he didn't look at any of the prices on the menu, and when the bill came, he didn't add it up, like Daddy does. Why don't you marry him, Granny?"
"Don't be silly." Louise saw the reflection of her startled face, and changed it to a laugh. "People don't get married at my age."
"They do. Miss Porter in the village did. She married that old man at the smithy who'd been waiting for his wife to die so he could marry Miss Porter. His childhood sweetheart, Mrs. Match said. Marry him, Granny. I read in Mrs. Match's magazine that a woman can always get a man to propose if she wants him. I could wear that pink party dress for bridesmaid, and you could be rich and have a house of your own, and not have to live in people's spare rooms all the time."
"Here's my comb," Louise said. "Take off your hat and try to do something about your hair."
"Where are we going? Will he take us to the cinema?"
"We'll see."
Ellen was disappointed when her grandmother agreed to Mr. Disher's suggestion that they should go to the Saturday market in the Portobello Road; but when she got there she realized that it had been a good idea.
All down the narrow, shabby street that leads decaying Bayswater into the morass of North Kensington, there were stalls loaded with delightful junk. Behind the stalls, dark little shops spilled their debris out on to the pavement : f stacks of pictures, broken furniture, old phonograph records, piles of rags and buttons, a complete set of rusted armor, and enough dusty glass and china and silver to have come from the back of all the pantry cupboards in the land.
A slow-moving crowd milled along the stalls and down the middle of the road, which was littered with paper and broken
crates and trodden refuse from the vegetable stalls. A rough passage awaited any car that foolishly tried to come through, for the street belonged to the people on Saturdays, and they held their ground like a flock of sheep in a narrow lane, so that the car had to crawl at their pace, with small boys slapping at its sides and clinging like parasites behind.
Some of the people looked poor, as if they lived in the street or its dingy neighborhood, but the people who were peering and poking most intently at the stalls were quite well dressed, and there were several Americans, who talked in monosyllables in the forlorn hope of concealing their vulnerable nationality. Ellen watched one of them with an English girl. He would make her ask the price of pieces of silver, while he stood back among the crowd, with his hand over his jaw, like a spy in a film. The girl would report to him, and he would tell her out of the side of his mouth to go back and offer less.
"Ten bob!" said the man behind the stall, keeping his eye on the American. "But it's Jacobeen, dear. That's less than I gave for it."
At the antique stalls, people were trying to bargain craftily, telling each other: "It's like in the East. They don't expect you to pay what they ask at first." The stallholders handled them with cynical indulgence, pandering to the belief that they did not know the value of the things they offered, so that a customer who bought something for three or four times what it had cost should think it a triumphant bargain.
Out of nowhere sprang a stunted man in crazy clothes, who went straight into an unintelligible song, to the accompaniment of a banjo with one string missing. The crowd stopped to watch amiably, but moved away when he threw his scarecrow hat on the ground for coins. The man began a jerky dance, his face working up and down with his knees.
"Come along, Ellen," Louise said. Mr. Disher dropped three pennies into the hat, and they moved off. Ellen lingered and watched them pottering from stall to stall, an oddly matched pair, like an elephant and a sparrow. The stunted man gave a
yell, scooped up his hat and put it on his head with the pennies still in it, and disappeared as abruptly as he had come.
Biting her nails, Ellen turned to look at the pictures that were stacked against the front of a shop, in whose low doorway a woman in a stretched green sweater sat and knitted herself another loose garment on big needles.
'Take a look, my young lady. That's right/* she said, as Ellen crouched to examine the darkened, frameless oils where cattle browsed under a stormy sky, and ships sat rigidly with all sails blowing on a corrugated sea. Old brown photographs of wedding couples and fuzzy-haired women grouped outside villas were piled on a rickety table among framed postcard scenes of Wales that had let the damp in patchily through the back. Everything smelled of old, shut-up houses and forgotten people. Who would want such things, except the people to whom they had once belonged? It would have been better to burn them than to let an auctioneer consign them in a job lot to end their days in the Portobello Road, brought out without hope on Saturday mornings and taken in again without disappointment in the evening, to turn their faces to the wall in the bomb-gutted cavern of the shop. To a child, the pictures were pleasant but meaningless. Ellen's mind wandered as she turned them over, getting a faraway sensation from them, without noticing the details.
Suddenly she saw it, the picture of her heart. She took it in her hands and adored it, knowing that life would be quife different if she could have this on the wall of her room to look at every day.
It was a cleanly colored print of a horse, accoutred for battle in the first war, and lying in a tragic heap with its neck stretched in the mud, and one great knee drawn up towards its chest. In the sky, shells were bursting like fireworks, and beside the horse knelt a soldier in tattered khaki, with the ravaged face of a hero. There was a lot of realistic blood, both on the man and the horse. The text beneath the picture was: 'Goodbye, Old Friend/
A lump rose in Ellen's throat, as she knew It would rise every time she looked at the picture. She had to have it,
'That, dear?" The woman looked briefly up from her knitting. "Five bob, that one, and worth a lot mare."
"But I've only got half a crown" Ellen said, not believing that such a thing as money could come between her and her treasure.
"Sorry, duck/* said the woman laconically, losing what little interest she had shown.
Ellen put down the picture and lingered, running her finger along the splintery edge of the table. Granny never had any money to spare, and yet she always gave if she thought you needed it. Would It be unfair to ask her for the loan of half a crown?
A man in a dirty beret brought a cup of tea for the woman in the doorway.
"What she want?" He jerked his head at Ellen.
The woman told hirn, cradling the cup of tea automatically, although the day was warm.
"Oh, let her have it, Doris," the man said, "Poor kid. Thank God she likes the bloody thing/'
"YouVe got a bargain there," the woman said sternly, dropping the half crown into the baggy pocket of her sweater.
"Oh, I know!" Ellen held the picture flat against her chest. "Thank you very much. It was most kind of you." The woman jerked up her head, surprised that anyone should speak to her like that.
Ellen ran, threading her way through the crowd to find her grandmother.
"Look, Granny, look what I boughtP Ellen tugged at Louise's skirt. "It's to hang over my bed. Look, the frame isn't broken, or anything. It's even got the string on."
"It's beautiful, darling, but it's very sad/' Louise said mournfully, knowing that Ellen had chosen it for its sadness.
"Oh, it's all right, Granny. Don't be upset. It isn't the horse that's dying. It's the man/'
Louise had bought a little lustre jug for Miriam's flowers. Beneath the faded rim was a picture of a drooping, willowy woman, rather like Miriam, saying good-bye to a red-cheeked man in tight trousers, It was called The Sailor's Farewell/ and had a verse in old-fashioned script.
Sweet, oh Sweet is that Sensation, Where two hearts in union meet;
But the pain of Separation, Mingles Bitter with the Sweet.
"Do you think Mummy will like it? This is
rather sad, too, don't you think?" Louise said, but Ellen could not pretend that she thought it was. She was interested only in her picture, and wished that they could go now and catch the train, so that she could rush up to her room and shut the door and prop the picture on the chest-of-drawers and brood over it. If they did not go soon, Judy, who shared her room, would be in bed by the time they reached home, which would spoil everything.
She wished that Mr. Disher would hurry. He was buying something at a stall farther up the road, counting money carefully into the blackened palm of a sharp-faced man, who chewed rapidly on a matchstick.
"What have you bought?" Louise asked, as she and Ellen came up behind him. Mr. Disher started and turned round, his broad cheeks reddening under the shapeless grey hat.
"Oh, nothing much. Just a present for someone." He took the newspaper-wrapped parcel and hurried it into his jacket pocket, which was big and baggy, as if he had been poaching rabbits.
"Can I interest the wife in something?" the sharp-faced man said, removing the match to study its chewed end. "There's a nice Victorian pin-cushion here. Or what about that little silver mirror for your daughter? Dainty, isn't it?"
"Yes—dainty," Louise said in a fluster, not daring to look at Mr. Disher, "But not today. Not just now, thank you. We've a train to catch. Come along, Ellen. We'll have to go."
She had to look at Mr. Disher now, to tell him that it was time to leave for the station, and when she looked, she saw that he was not annoyed or embarrassed, but was smiling, and holding Ellen by the hand. Louise unscrewed her face and smiled back at him, and the three of them walked up the street together, just like a family, just as the man with the match had thought.
They were too early at the station. Louise hoped that Gordon Disher would not stay to see them off, and spoil the pleasant friendliness of their day with one of the nervous, repetitious conversations that take place on station platforms. He said that he would go to the bookstall to buy her an evening paper.
"Can I come, too?" Ellen asked, rising on her toes to look up at him. "I want to see if they've got any of your books. Lester Drage!" She chanted it with awe. 'That's a much prettier name than Gordon Disher." *
"The publisher thinks so, anyway," he said, as they went off together.
Louise hoped that if they found one of his books he would have the sense not to let Ellen open it on the staccato phrases of passion and horror that he so surprisingly was able to perpetrate. She sat down on a grimy bench next to a defeated woman with a strapped suitcase, who was whining back at her two whining children. Louise wanted to tell her not to let them wander in the path of the man who was driving the little motor with the string of trucks, but she had nearly started a street fight once by interfering with a mother whose child was hanging head downwards out of its pram.
"Hullo, Mother!" Louise turned and saw Eva, in a slick linen suit and tiny white hat, standing beside her. "Miriam called me yesterday about the Cobbs* garden party, and told me what train you were catching, so I thought I'd come and say hullo. I knew you'd be here half an hour too early."
"And I am. How nice of you, darling, and how brown you are," She had not seen Eva since she came back from Italy. She got up, because Eva did not want to sit on the bench in her
light suit, and the defeated woman ostentatiously hauled her suitcase onto the seat, as if she had been waiting for Louise to
8 °"«
"Oh, it's fading now. You should have seen me. I was mahogany, Where's Ellen? How are you, Mother? Was it hell at Anne's? Let's go and have some tea. YouVe got hours yet." She sounded for some reason a little nervous and jerky*
"You look tired/* Louise said, seeing the unusual shadows in her face.
"No, I don't. Mother, don't always " Eva bit her lip, and
then said quickly: "I'm not sleeping very well as a matter of fact. But it'll pass. You know I get spells like that. But it's not overwork this time. Things are a bit slack all round. The boys are still messing around rewriting the third act of the play. I've been trying to get into some rotten thing that's being done at Oxford, but I'll be just as pleased if I don't."
"How—how's David?'' Louise asked hesitatingly. She had to ask it.
"Oh, he's fine. Sent you his regards, as a matter of fact He likes you."
"I like him, too," Louise said, '*but "
"He's going to do a film." Eva hurried on, before Louise could say more. "He says there's a chance he might be able to get me into it, too. Don't look so nervous, Mother. Denham isn't Hollywood."
"I'm not nervous." It was difficult to talk when they had to keep stepping back and forward to avoid being struck by baggage as the hurrying crowd flowed round them. "I hope you get the part, dear," Louise lied.
When she heard that David was going to be in a film, she had been pleased, because that would keep him busy and away from Eva for long hours; but if they were going to be in it together, things would be worse than ever. They would be together all day, as well as ...
What was Eva doing? Louise did not know. Whatever it was,
she was powerless to stop It, She could only say her Hail Mary, and ask the Virgin Mother to send her daughter down some caution.
"If you are still worrying about me and David/* Eva said, "don't Things will come out all right. You 11 see. You won't have to be shocked/'
"Nothing you did could ever shock me," Louise said.
"I believe that's true/' Eva said slowly. "It could only distress you." She looked at her mother for a moment with serious affection, and then they were abruptly parted by a heavy man with a bag of golf clubs and a sharp-cornered suitcase, who thrust his way feverishly between them, pursuing the five-fifteen as if it were the Holy Grail.
When they came together again, Eva was once more bright and inconsequential. When Gordon Disher found them and was introduced, Eva said: "But of course, I know you. You're the man I was so rude to. About the tea-party." She laughed unnaturally, and began to chatter to him in a brittle, flippant way that reduced him to silence.
She is tired, Louise thought. So restless. Not really as gay as she's pretending to be. 'We'll have to hurry if we're going to have tea," she said, looking at her watch.
"Mother always panics about trains/' Eva told Mr. Disher. "Come and have a cup of tea with us. Please do. Let me make up for the tea you didn't have before." Whatever she thought about his being at the station with her mother, and Louise could not help wondering what she thought, she did not show it. Mr. Disher backed away a step from her bright charm.
"I'll have to be getting along," he said. "Thanks all the same." He raised his hat, which had left a dent round his silky grey hair. "I'll say good-bye then, Mrs. Bickford. Good-bye, Ellen. I enjoyed it so much."
With Eva watching, it was a flat, unsatisfactory good-bye that was said between them, without the real gratitude that Louise would have liked to convey. As she walked to the tea
room behind the other two, who were looking at Ellen's picture, Louise felt a touch on her arm. She turned and saw Mr. Disher, breathing heavily, as if he had run to catch her.
He took the newspaper parcel out of his pocket, and thrust It into her hand. "This is for you/' he said almost in a whisper. "I couldn't resist it. Please don't be offended."
Louise unwrapped the parcel and found a Victorian cut-glass scent bottle, with a round silver cap. On the cap, in facsimile of someone's handwriting, was engraved the name 'Louise/
Mr. Disher watched her nervously. She looked up at him in surprise. "But it's lovely,'' she said, stroking the smooth, round cap. "I can't thank you enough."
"I felt I had to get it for you. The coincidence of the name seemed too much. Do you really like it?"
"It's the nicest present I ever had," Louise said, and heard him give a little sigh of relief. She had always disliked her old-fashioned name, but now she was glad of it, because it had brought her the scent bottle, and him the pleasure of finding such a fitting gift for her in the Portobello Road.
The garden
er met Louise and Ellen at the station, mutely aggrieved because he had been all day at the horse show and wanted to go home to supper.
Miriam was in the kitchen, feeding the younger children. "Come straight in here, Ellen," she called. "Your egg's cooked."
Ellen pretended not to hear, and ran upstairs to hide her picture in a drawer. She did not want anyone to see it until it was hung in its glory on the wall. Louise also went to her room. She did not want her prize to be bandied about either, although sooner or later Miriam would have to know that they had been with Gordon Disher, because Ellen would tell her.
When Ellen came down, Judy, in dressing gown and slippers, screamed at her: "What do you think, Elly! Simon was fourth in musical chairs. He was fourth, I tell you! He would have been third, only one of those beastly pros knocked him off the chair, and so he didn't get a prize. Wasn't it a swiz?"
"I got a rosette, though," Simon said smugly, and pointed to
the door, where his bridle hung among the aprons, decorated with purple ribbon.
"Jolly good/' Ellen slid into her chair, thinking of her picture, and how she would hang it after supper before Judy went to bed. She could not feel any enthusiasm for Simon's triumph at the horse show, so remote from the delights of her day. She was irritated by Judy's boasting prattle about the show. She did not want to hear about Michael Pitt's new bay pony, which had been third at the White City, nor how they kept putting up the jumps for Mrs. Slazenger, but she never touched a thing.
"We had a super time," Judy said, her blue eyes misted with fatigue. "You wouldn't have liked it though. You miss all the best things."
"Well, listen to this then." Ellen waited for silence. "I went to the Trod"
Simon put down his knife and fork. "To the Troc! Lucky swine. Have you been with Uncle Bill?" he asked suspiciously, and glanced at his mother to see if she heard.
"Of course not. Uncle Bill's in Spain. Even a fool like you knows that. We went with Granny's friend, Mr. Disher, but his nom de plume is Lester Drage."
"Was he common?" Simon asked. There had been some talk in the family about Gordon Disher, and the children had not missed a thing.
The Winds Of Heaven Page 12