Martha sized up the situation at a glance. It was obviously the lodger just ejected by Ma Battleaxe, the high-and-mighty Mr Phillips, seeking fresh accommodation—and she could have spared him his pains. There were never any vacancies at Number 6, whose celebrated Regulars actually kept their rooms on while holidaying, so clean and comfortable the beds, so excellent the Yorkshire cooking. Mr Phillips, returning down the path, showed a familiar face of disappointment as the door behind him closed on a familiar face of pride.
“I could have told you that,” said Martha smugly.
“Told me what?” asked the frustrated lodger, angrily seizing his bags.
“That it’s always full. She makes ginger puddings.”
“Can you tell me anywhere that isn’t?” demanded Mr Phillips.
The question was actually a rhetorical one, but Martha took it literally, and it jerked her out of her own preoccupations. Until that moment she had in no way considered Ma Battleaxe’s as a source of supply, indeed she had completely forgotten, among the battered landladies at Number 11, that Dolores was attempting the same dangerous trade. Now she considered Mr Phillips with interest. She was pretty certain who he was, and regretted that she hadn’t listened longer at the kitchen-door to hear the worst. At sight, Martha judged him elderly but not likely to die on one (always an important point), and quite clean: and since he had his baggage with him, a High-and-Mighty, not a Bilking Tom.
“Did Ma throw you out, or did you give notice?” checked Martha in business-like tones.
“I gave notice. I don’t remember seeing you about,” said Mr Phillips.
“I don’t live there any more,” explained Martha. “I just heard. Haven’t you anywhere else to go?”
Mr Phillips looked injured.
“I gave a week’s notice this morning, allowing myself time to glance around, and she throws me out as I set foot in to-night! I’m not sure it isn’t illegal.”
Martha nodded intelligently. The phrase stirred memories again. (Richard Hogg, that exemplary public servant, would have been surprised to know what experience his infant daughter was accumulating. He alone, Number 11’s solitary Regular, had never seen Ma in form.)
“It’s her way,” quoted Martha, “never to stand under notice. It’s why she’s so looked up to. And no one ever does have the law on her.—All right,” said Martha decisively, “we’ll take you. There’s a bus at the end of the road.”
“Here, steady on!” said Mr Phillips—in not unnatural surprise.
It was however about six o’clock, and he was in a predicament. He was ready to catch at a straw. He also observed of Martha, as she had of him, that she was clean.
“You’re certain there’s a bed for me?” he asked warily.
“With clean sheets,” promised Martha. “Both. But if you’re only coming for just one night, perhaps it isn’t worth the laundry.”
“I’d stay a week anyway,” offered Mr Phillips—thus unexpectedly put on the defensive, “if comfortable. What’s the weekly rate?”
“I don’t know. I’m only a child,” pointed out Martha severely. “Are you coming or aren’t you?”
Mr Phillips deliberated no longer—his predicament was serious—but with a bag in each hand, and a parcel under his arm (which Martha didn’t offer to carry), accepted her guidance to the bus-stop and on to the right bus. Only as he paid their fares did he realise how remote lay their destination; but he worked in central London, in an office almost equidistant from Brixton and Paddington, and did not now draw back.
“Is it your mother who lets rooms?” he asked, near Kennington.
Martha hesitated. “Aunt” was tabu, and some instinct bade her reject “Dolores”.
“It’s Miss Diver,” she said repressively. “I’m an orphan.”
Every now and again, during their long ride, Mr Phillips glanced at her curiously. At least she seemed a silent sort of child. Mr Phillips was a great one for peace and quiet—it was another reason why he’d been so uncomfortable in Hasty Street—and if there’d been too much chattering he’d still, he told himself, have cried off. In fact, after that single question and answer, there was dead silence. In fact, Mr Phillips wanted to put several questions more. The fact was, Martha didn’t encourage him.
3
The little house in Alcock Road surprised Mr Phillips by its classy exterior; but for the card in the window he’d never have guessed lodgers taken there at all. As until that moment, of course, they hadn’t been: Dolores, hurrying out to question Martha, found herself a landlady unawares.
“I’ve brought a lodger,” said Martha casually. “I got him from Ma Battleaxe’s.”
“The name is Phillips,” Mr Phillips said.
“I thought it was,” agreed Martha. “He gave notice himself,” she added to Dolores. “Shall I get my supper?”—and without waiting for a reply stumped through to the kitchen and there as a reward for her exertions opened the last three tins in the larder—a tin of salmon, a tin of pineapple, and a tin of baked beans. It was so long since she’d felt a little sick after a meal, the sensation was rather agreeable; and she easily settled herself down with a few plain biscuits.
Evidently the negotiations between Mr Phillips and Dolores came to a satisfactory issue, for he slept that night in the spare room.
CHAPTER NINE
1
Had Miss Diver’s luck turned at last?
“Good morning, Mr Phillips,” said Miss Diver, every morning.
“Good morning, Miss Diver,” replied Mr Phillips; and raising his trilby hat (which he always put on in the hall), went off to work.
“Good evening, Mr Phillips,” said Miss Diver, every evening.
“Good evening, Miss Diver,” replied Mr Phillips, wiping his feet on the mat. Then he went upstairs to his room, and half-an-hour later Martha carried up his supper-tray (as she’d carried up his breakfast-tray in the morning), and that was the last seen of Mr Phillips.
As a member of the desperate race of lodgers he was indeed a shining exception. Tidy, quiet, and punctual in payment, he neither robbed the gas-meter, nor cooked in his room, nor brought in women. Nothing could have been more reassuring than his profession, which was that of clerk in an Insurance Company. Nor was he as old as Martha had thought, being about forty-five—and thus good, in landlady-calculations, for another fifteen years at least. The only point on which he gave the slightest anxiety was the cardinal one of whether he would stay.
It was difficult to put a finger on. Mr Phillips gave no overt sign of discontent. The week bargained for by Martha elapsed, and he entered on a second. Yet his manner, during the brief conversational exchanges reported above, became more, not less, reserved. They were so very brief, there was hardly room, so to speak, for much manner at all; but Dolores was already acquiring a professional sensitivity, and the first overtone a landlady learns to recognise is that of the concealed grievance.
“Good evening, Mr Phillips,” said Miss Diver. “I hope you’re quite comfortable?”
“A.1,” replied Mr Phillips—and Dolores was left with the impression that he might give notice at any moment.
Fortunately this nerve-racking period did not last long. In fact it lasted just about the same length of time as the uneasy period three years earlier following the introduction of Martha. Again, Miss Diver managed to avert calamity.
2
“I suppose he hasn’t said anything to you?” Miss Diver asked Martha.
“I never talk to him at all,” said Martha.
There was something in the tone of this that caught Dolores’ attention; disturbingly. Could it be Martha who was upsetting Mr Phillips? Yet how? To ask, Do you tease Mr Phillips, in the face of that flat statement, was obviously silly; moreover if there was one thing Martha wasn’t, it was a tease. There was still something in her tone Dolores liked so little, she felt herself on a possible scent.
“Good morning, Mr Phillips,” said Miss Diver.
“Good morning, Miss Diver,” repl
ied Mr Phillips.
“I hope Martha brings you your breakfast nicely?”
“Very punctual indeed, thank you,” said Mr Phillips.
Dolores didn’t like the tone of this either. Also Mr Phillips, instead of going straight on out, for once paused.
“I hope she hasn’t ever been … discourteous to you?”
It was now plain that Mr Phillips had something to say. His hat was half-way to his head; he lowered it and looked steadily into the lining, while Dolores waited with increasing apprehension. His next words took her by surprise.
“I’m always fully dressed,” stated Mr Phillips. “I make a point of it.”
“I’m sure it’s very thoughtful of you,” said Dolores—still at a loss. She had made a point of it herself: carrying up Mr Phillips’ breakfast-tray was a service Martha could most usefully perform, especially since Miss Diver no longer felt able to afford chiropody; but the latter had made careful and immediate enquiry as to the state of Mr Phillips’ attire. A dressing-gown she would have tolerated, even pyjamas (both halves); impeccable Mr Phillips!—Martha reported him complete to shoes and tie …
“So there’s no reason why she shouldn’t look at me,” continued Mr Phillips, still with restraint. “I only mention it. I mean, she isn’t exactly feeding a dog.”
After that Martha not only carried in Mr Phillips’ breakfast-tray, but looked him in the eye, and said “Good morning, Mr Phillips” every morning. As she tried to explain when Dolores scolded her, she hadn’t looked at him before simply because he didn’t look like anything. “He looks like your bread-and-butter,” said Dolores sharply. “Remember that!”
Had she reflected, she might have wondered whether Martha’s steady dispassionate gaze, first thing in the morning, was really going to make Mr Phillips any happier. Yet he seemed satisfied.
3
Thus at last Dolores’ luck turned. Mr Phillips stayed—the perfect Regular. Even his undiminished reserve, now that it no longer hinted at concealed grievances, became a virtue: an extrovert who cracked jokes or grew familiar Dolores would have found intolerable, for though finally translated into a landlady she was still, she assured herself, no ordinary one, of the type that hob-nobs with the lodger. Mr Phillips, by keeping his distance, she felt acknowledged this. She felt his reserve a tribute to her unusualness. It didn’t displease her to fancy that she seemed a little mysterious to him. There was no personal element involved; had Dolores’ skein of thought been unravelled, the clue-thread would have proved not any regard for her day-by-day self, but regard for an image existing only in her own mind. (And in the mind of Harry Gibson.) It was to the image of King Hal’s Spanish rose that Dolores required tribute; as it was the fragrance of that rose, she hoped, shed mystery …
As an individual her lodger didn’t exist for her. Even in rebuke to Martha, Dolores found nothing more to say for Mr Phillips’ appearance than that he looked like their bread-and-butter; and after a month could hardly have described him much more accurately. He was of average height, and neither fat nor thin. He wore some sort of a moustache, and his overall coloration was greyish. This peculiar nebulousness in the impression Mr Phillips left on Dolores was indeed chiefly due to her preoccupation with another masculine image altogether—bluff, florid and stalwart; but the fact remained that any description was difficult, of a man so peculiarly featureless.
He didn’t so much live in the house as haunt it. He was like a ghost that appears at a regular time and place—in Mr Phillips’ case, twice a day on the stairs. Otherwise he was invisible. Neither Miss Diver nor Martha ever saw him enter, for example, the bathroom; it was as though he materialised, when necessary, inside. What he did with himself at the week-end, on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays, might have been a mystery to Dolores in turn, had she ever speculated on it (as an ordinary landlady would have done). Was he a great reader, a student of commercial Spanish, a follower of racing-form? (A caster of horoscopes, a composer of minor poetry? Was he in the house at all?) Miss Diver didn’t even speculate. Whatever Mr Phillips’ week-end occupations, they kept him typically and satisfactorily unobtrusive. His unobtrusiveness was in fact one of his greatest virtues. Apart from the mechanical provision of his lodgerly requirements, Miss Diver could ignore him.
4
“Good morning, Martha,” said Mr Phillips, every morning.
“Good morning, Mr Phillips,” replied Martha; and by deliberately unfocusing her eyes reduced him to a shapeless blur.
It was a trick she had known ever since she could remember, and which she now regularly employed to his, and Dolores’ deception. She still had to say “Good morning,” and though always more jealous of her eyes than of her tongue, disliked saying it because she was made to.
CHAPTER TEN
1
As though they were two buckets over a well, as soon as Dolores’ fortunes rose a little, so Mr Gibson’s sank.
Miranda Joyce, naturally interested in all that concerned her betrothed, found her way into the shop.
How could Mr Gibson keep her out? “You must remember it’s going to be my bread-and-butter too!” cried Miranda gaily. “If I see you working very very hard, I shall make Dadda raise your salary!” Of course Mr Gibson couldn’t keep her out. Soon she was popping in every day, to gossip with the girls in the show-room, and then to run up for a word with her Harry. To the latter’s annoyance, the show-room made her welcome. “If you see what I mean, Mr Gibson, she does dress the place a bit,” said Miss Harris practically. “Many ladies don’t like to find a shop quite empty.” “And she’s ever so friendly,” added Miss Molyneux. “Really you’d scream, Mr Gibson, to hear some of her jokes about our old stock!” It was unreasonable of Mr Gibson to be annoyed: besides dressing the show-room and keeping Miss Molyneux in stitches, Miranda more usefully still brought in some of her own friends, one or two of whom actually made purchases. They naturally got special terms; but in their wake, as though this little trickle of business acted as a sort of pump-priming, appeared one or two genuine new clients to be impressed by the new Joyce of Bond Street labels. In Mr Gibson’s opinion, these labels were the best of their money’s worth. In Mr Gibson’s private opinion, Joyces were unloading their old stock on Kensington. Apart from the promised skunk for Miss Molyneux to display, there was nothing, in Mr Gibson’s opinion, so very much out of the ordinary. “I could make a joke or two myself,” thought Harry Gibson.
All the same, it was unreasonable of him to object to Miranda’s activities in the show-room. Possibly he mightn’t have done, if they hadn’t involved the running-upstairs afterwards. But his whole scheme of existence, at this time, was designed to avoid being alone with her—he was assiduous at Knightsbridge, he dined willingly in Knightsbridge most evenings of the week, because there would be Mr Joyce and Auntie Bee, also the mater, and he could always ask Miranda to play the piano, or if the women’s manœuvres looked like being too much for him, demand to talk business with old man Joyce. The tête-à-têtes in his office filled him with dismay.
He kissed Miranda twice a day as it was. (Upon arriving at the Knightsbridge flat, and upon leaving it.) It was still like kissing a sea-horse, but he had trained himself not to flinch. She expected also to be kissed in the office—with less formality. If he didn’t take care, she was on his knee. The first time Miranda so impetuously showed her affection, Mr Gibson had no other resource than to seize the E to K telephone directory and look up the Hudson Bay Company. The act dislodged without discouraging her. Upon hearing the engaged signal (in one way not unwelcome, Mr Gibson telephoned simply because he’d looked up the number, he had nothing to say to Hudson Bay), Miranda was back on his knee in two shakes.
She wasn’t any bonier than Dolores. Her good face-cloth jacket was better padding than a Spanish shawl. But Mr Gibson felt no fragile rose upon his bosom: he felt a skeleton.
Her ungloved forearms were no leaner than Dolores’—in fact a slight duvet of black hair by comparison softened them: Mr Gibson, whose
dislike for dogs had often troubled him as being un-British, felt a greyhound’s paws about his neck.
In a way it was as much for Miss Joyce’s sake as for his own—the die being cast, the inescapable accepted—that he issued a doubly roundabout ultimatum.
“Will you please explain to your chum Beatrice,” Harry Gibson instructed his mother, “that a man would rather run his business by himself? Also that if he comes up to scratch every single damned night of the week, his days at least should be his own?”
Old Mrs Gibson giggled. If Miranda was at this time behaving like a girl of seventeen, Mrs Gibson was behaving like a frivolous sixty. All she lacked was a knee to sit on herself.
“So Miranda comes to the shop too often? Then throw her out, boy!” advised old Mrs Gibson. “Show yourself masterful!”
Of course the women had got together. Harry’s masterful wooing was now a family legend.
“Throw her downstairs!” cried old Mrs Gibson. “There is nothing dear Miranda would like better!”
This was in fact precisely what Harry Gibson feared might happen. When he remembered the parabola described by a bunch of pink carnations, he felt he could hardly trust himself with Miranda at the top of the steep office flight. Whether or not something of this showed in his face, Mrs Gibson sobered.
“All joking apart, of course you are quite right,” she agreed. “The whole pleasure of marriage is that a man should have a wife to come home to; even in the pleasure of being engaged, the girl should not over-do things.”
For a rare moment, she looked at her son anxiously. They were sitting at breakfast together: for all her new pleasures and excitements it was still the best hour of the day to her. Mrs Gibson had deceived herself with wonderful success: the fundamental satisfaction, the knowledge that her son wasn’t marrying a wife who would take him away from her, was buried so deep that when she exclaimed how much Harry admired Miranda’s piano-playing, how completely he relied on her taste, how well the two children suited each other, for ninety-nine per cent of the time Mrs Gibson believed every word. Now, in a hundredth moment, she looked at him anxiously.
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