“Look here, Don.” Edward was cold, and it was difficult enough to talk in the deepening twilight across the barbed wire which made you feel you were visiting someone in prison, without Don putting on one of his nonsense acts. Sometimes he’d go on like this for hours—stuff he’d read in magazines—maddening if you were trying to discuss anything sensibly with him.
“My dear old soul,” said Don, irritably, “I’m telling you that the powers that be have ordained that women—W.A.A.F.S.—tarts—whatever you like to call ’em, are to release men as balloon crews. Corporal Donald Derris, No. 23894, R.A.F., starts his embarkation leave a fortnight Saturday. I’m on duty at the moment or I’d come out and have a beer with you on the strength of it.”
There was not much to say. Edward commiserated and they both agreed gloomily that it was tough luck on Dorothy, and Edward said well anyway, now he had a better chance of having a crack at Jerry, which seemed to leave Don cold.
“Well, no sense hanging about, I suppose,” said Edward. “I’ll be shoving off home to break the news to Connie. Cheer up, Don. Not dead yet, you know!”
Don mumbled something to the effect that he soon would be, said “Ta-ta” and turned to go back to the hut. Edward watched his uniform merge into the dusk, saw the door open and heard a voice from inside before it banged shut and the settlement was once more abandoned to noises of the wind torturing the balloon, more eerie than silence. Edward felt sorry for the W.A.A.F.S. He doubted whether they would feel like keeping to kiss her goodnight, ouaf rabbits.
He walked up Church Avenue in the dark and had to fumble outside his front door before he could get the key in. He would have taken his torch if he had known he was going to be late. Connie would tick him off, but at any rate he had a bit of news that would pin her ears back.
“Connie!” he called, switching on the hall light as he shut the front door. From the sitting-room came the sound of noisy crying, and as he stepped quickly forward to investigate, his mother-in-law came out of the room with a face like the sole of a boot. As far as she was concerned, Don was already dead.
“It’s Dorothy,” she said in answer to Edward’s enquiring glance. “I’m afraid she’s had very upsetting news. We came straight round to tell Connie. We’ve just heard that——”
“I know,” said Edward. “I’ve just been up to the Common to see Don and he told me he’s being sent abroad, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, so you know then.” Mrs. Munroe’s face fell another foot. She had been waiting about to be able to break the bad news to Edward. He smiled encouragingly.
“I don’t see what there is to smile about,” she said, “with that poor child in there nearly out of her mind with worry.”
“Oh come on, Mother, it’s not a tragedy.” Edward wondered whether he could bring himself to pat her drooping shoulders. “Lots of people go abroad. It’s the least you can expect. Don’s been very lucky up till now to be so near home, though for his sake I should think he’d be glad to get a bit nearer the fighting.”
“Well, you’re a nice one to talk, I must say,” said Mrs. Munroe, who although she knew that Edward had sought and been refused his release from the factory, always held it against him that he was not in uniform. “That poor Don, so nervous and sensitive as he’s always been. You mark my words, he’ll come back a changed man—if he comes back at all.” Connie came out of the sitting-room looking cross.
“Do go in to her, Mother,” she said. “I can’t do anything with her and she’s getting hysterical. It’s ridiculous to carry on like this just because he’s going abroad. Anyone would think— Oh, there you are, Ted. Where on earth have you been? I never knew anyone so inconsiderate. I might have been worrying about you for all you knew.”
“I went up to see Don. It’s bad luck, but I agree with you, there’s no sense in Dorothy carrying on fit to make herself ill.”
“What do you mean? I never said that.” She took a step nearer to her mother, and they both regarded him balefully. “You can’t expect a man to understand, I suppose,” said Connie. “Come in and have your tea, Mother.” The two women went into the sitting-room together, leaving Edward alone in the hall. He took his torch off the shelf under the hanging mirror and went out to see the rabbits.
It was all very well waking up with a hangover ; it was at least a memory of last night’s gin. But Mrs. Urry felt cheap these mornings even when she hadn’t been near the Prince Albert. That nagging pain, which she used to accept as part of the price you paid for gin, came now after nothing more than a cup of tea. In fact gin seemed to be the only thing that would lay it.
Laying the pain took nearly all Mrs. Urry’s earnings from the Acropolis Dining Rooms. Ma all the same. Ian alongtches were not doing so well these days, unless Urry was up to some trickery with the takings. The demand was there all right, but not the stock to meet it. He could have sold his supply twenty times over, but the little Jew wholesaler was cutting down his allowance every week. Time and again, Mrs. Urry had urged him to strike out in flints or bootlaces or even cachous, but Mr. Urry was adamant, doubtless because the sooner he sold out, the sooner he could leave his pitch for some warmer retreat, returning to Holborn Circus before his wife came to collect him.
“One day,” she said, “I’m going to stick to beer for a week. Beer! I could put another name to that coloured water if I wasn’t such a lady—and have a real good meal. I owe it to my system, Urry, though I must say I’ve no appetite for it.”
“You don’t need it at your age,” grunted Mr. Urry. He was sitting on the lower bunk, lacing his boots. He kept them on at night, but would not dream of going to bed without unlacing them.
“All very well for you,” said his wife. “I know you gets your bit of fish dinner from that soft Mrs. Ewins. I don’t know what her old man would say if he knew. You can’t run a fish and chip shop on charity and so I’ll tell her if ever I meet her, which God forbid I do, because her face makes me stomach turn over and look the other way. ’Urry up, Urry, it must be getting on. ’Ere’s young innocent coming down already with everything on ’er face but the kitchen stove. ’Ullo, dear,” she grinned at Sheila with her gums. “Just in time. The chauffeur is bringing the car round now.” She cocked her head to the approaching rumble of a train. Sheila made herself smile and say something friendly. Mrs. Urry’s appearance was getting more fear-some every day. Her face, which was like the uneatable kernel of an old walnut, seemed to be shrinking, the yellow hands rolling up the blankets were like roots and her body looked as though it would crumble into dust at a touch.
“Well,” she hitched up the bundle and prepared to follow her husband towards the Exit. “I must go on my way rejoicing. Ta-ta, love.”
“Good-bye.” Sheila stepped into her usual carriage, third from the end. She was glad the train windows were covered with anti-shatter net. The boy with the limp might think her queer if he saw her talking to the Urrys.
The Urrys made for the Cosy Café— “COME AND GET IT. Prop: Samuel Snagge,” who allowed them to leave their bedding there during the day.
The Cosy was a small wooden shack in a street off Theobald’s Road. It stood in what had once been the entrance to the yard of a warehouse, long since dwindled out of existence with the death of its proprietor. Nobody had wanted the yard enough to face clearing it of its unsavoury junk, so the Cosy Café stood propped between two tall shops, its chicken-house roof askew, a curtain over the doorway and above the curtain a board saying : “Teas, Light Luncheons and Minerals” which Sam had picked up cheap at the sale of effects from a teashop foundered through over-gentility. If the Cosy ever foundered, it would not be for that reason.
Inside were four linoleum-covered tables with benches, and the counter behind them, cutting Sam off at the waist and bearing crockery, two urns and a case of stale cakes and pies. The floor was the original cobbles of the yart occasionally, dislodging interesting relics of food between the cracks.
When the Urrys pushed past the curtain,
there were already a few regulars browww.bloomsbury.com/MonicaDickens. boding over their tea. Two men who worked on the roads, a man employed by the Borough Council to clean out telephone boxes, but had never yet been seen doing it, the night watchman from the excavations, a rosy old man with split shoes and a bright line in pornographic magazines—the usual crowd.
“Morning all,” said Mrs. Urry perkily. She carried her bundle behind the counter and through a low door into the shed that leant on the leaning café and held two gas rings, a cold tap and a tin bath for washing up.
She rejoined Mr. Urry at the table. Sam reached down two cups from the shelf behind him. He was a long, stooping man with a face that always looked as if he were about to cry. When he laughed, his face puckered up, his eyes watered and his mouth turned down instead of up. His appearance bore no trace of the inward joy that had been his ever since the death of his wife enabled him to sell the goodwill of his vegetable barrow and erect the Cosy. His face would torture itself into a laugh even now when he thought of that murderous trek to Covent Garden before dawn and the windiest corner in Holborn which had been his wife’s idea of a good beat.
“The usual?” he asked, dipping milk into the two cups from the bowl of tinned milk on the bread board.
“That’s right, dear. Two nice cups of, and four slices.” They drank their tea and ate the bread and butter in silence. The warm, stale air made Mrs. Urry feel sleepy. “Tell you what,” she called to Sam, “I’ll have to speak to them about running that first train a bit later. Me nights is too short.” Sam stared for a moment like a child after a fall, weighing the advantages of tears or bravery, then his face puckered up and he doubled over the counter, enjoying the joke. “Oh, that’s good—that’s good!” he gasped, wiping his eyes and holding his middle. He never made a joke himself and was in agonies of delight at anyone else’s humour. Mrs. Urry sat back, basking in his amusement, and when he looked like recovering, set him off again with an allusion to her footman. She loved to be thought a wit.
A van driver shouldered his way past the curtain and sat down heavily at her table. “Morning, Wally,” she said. He grunted at her, passing his hand over his face. “Cup of, Sam, two rashers on and two slices,” he said over his shoulder.
“Coming up!” Sam doubled up to get through the low door to his gas rings.
Seeing Wally eat his bacon and potato reminded Mrs. Urry of her intention to have a good meal. She would try and get out one dinner time and see what Urry was up to at Mrs. Ewins’ fish shop. But there was not much chance of the Greek letting her out dinner time. He was short of plates and they had to be washed as soon as they came off one table and rushed back on to the next one.
The Acropolis didn’t do breakfasts, but Mrs. Urry had to be there at half-past seven to do the cleaning, wash up whatever had accumulated after her departure the night before, peel the vegetables that the Greek was going to cook for lunch and as often as not do a bit of mincing, if it was rissole day.
Having parked Mr. Urry firmly in his angle between two walls, with his tray round his neck, Mrs. Urry went off up Holborn with many backward glances, as if she were training a dog. She had never yet caught him wandering away, but she had her suspicions. Someone would nab his pitch one of these days.
Entering the frosted glass doors of the Acropolis Dining Rooms, she went straight through to the kitchen without a glance at the Greek, reading the paper over coffee and rolls all the same. Ian alongat a corner table. He had already been to the market. There was a pile of vegetables and some large lumps of meat on the worn table that filled the centre of the low, smoky kitchen. Mrs. Urry investigated. Pork again! Black Market, of course. And all those raisins—it was evidently going to be steamed fruit pudding again. Well, she’d better get the fire going as the pans went on early, steaming days. She took off her cape, but kept on the beret and wound herself into an apron that had only gone once round the last washer-up, but went twice round Mrs. Urry and bunched out at the back like a bustle.
She went into the scullery. The sight of the piled dirty plates was too familiar to be disheartening. The water was still quite warm from last night, so after she had lit the kitchen range, mumbling and muttering at it and finally pouring on some paraffin that nearly blew off her few remaining eyebrows, she began on the washing up.
The Greek’s daughter, a dressy, pig-faced girl with a figure that burst out above and below the waist, came into the kitchen and began to pick over the raisins. Mrs, Urry leered at her over her shoulder through the adjoining doorway.
“’Ullo, Ellen, I saw you last night going in the pictures, when Urry and I was going to our ’otel. ’E’s all right, whoever he is. Where d’you pick that one up?”
“Oh, he’s a fellow I know,” said Ellen, popping a handful of raisins into her mouth. “He comes in here sometimes as a matter of fact. I wonder you haven’t seen him.”
“Fat chance I get to see any of the customers with your Pa around,” said Mrs. Urry, scraping at a bit of mustard, abandoning it, and slinging the plate into the rack that was too-high for her. When she was washing a pile of plates, she developed quite a rhythm as she swilled a plate, then up on her toes to reach the rack, then down to swill another, then up again to the rack ; swill and reach, swill and reach, up and down jauntily went the bustle of her apron.
“When you were away that time,” she went on, raising her voice against the running tap, “he and Victor were run off their feet, but would they let me have so much as a look inside the dining-room? No, they would not, and once, when there’d been a soup ordered, and I’d served it out and no one to fetch it, in I popped—as a favour, mind you ; don’t think I fancy being a Nippy. Well, in I popped, as I say——” she got worked up even now when she thought of it—“and there was your Pa coming at me as if I was murder and disease and sudden death all in one. Out he comes here after me and we had a real set to. I told him straight. It don’t need me to take away their appetites. You’d think this was the Ritz ‘Otel, wouldn’t you?” She turned off the tap. “Wouldn’t you?” she repeated.
“I daresay,” said Ellen, who hadn’t heard a word. “He’s quite a nice fellow,” she went on, following her thoughts. “He works on a newspaper.” Mrs. Urry turned on the tap again and began to wash forks, several together in bunches. Newspapers to her were things that you wrapped round other things.
The Greek came out and began to mix suet pastry in an enormous bowl. When Mrs. Urry made for the potatoes to take them to the scullery to peel, he threw back an imaginary lock of hair, stabbing at the dough with his fingers like an impassioned impresario. “Please, Mrs. Hurry,” he called, in his high voice, “the dining-room is not yet done, I believe?”
“You mean you want it done,” said in the Redundant StoresI s.Mrs. Urry, facing him with a butting stance, beret well forward. She didn’t believe in sideways talk. She collected her bucket and mop and the precious bits of rag she secreted at the back of the cupboard and went out to slosh over the marble-topped tables and fix the dirt to the floor by wetting it. Laying the dust, that was called.
Victor was sitting behind the counter, where stand-up snacks were served, writing out menu cards in a looping violet hand. He was a Frenchman, a vague relation of the Greek’s, who had escaped from Occupied France in a dinghy. He had wandered into the Acropolis one evening and had stayed there happily ever since, as if he had escaped from a labour camp and endured the hunted, starving journey across France for nothing else.
He spoke English badly, with a cockney accent. Strangers to the Acropolis thought when Victor took their order that it must be quite a continental place—until their order arrived.
“Bonjewer,” said Mrs. Urry proudly, swatting at a table with a damp cloth.
“Bon jour, vieille putain,” said Victor, and Mrs. Urry bridled as at the wildest compliment.
On Fridays and Tuesdays, Sheila knew that the curly-haired boy with the limp would be in the third carriage from the end. It was not as if she got into the same car
riage deliberately, because, after all, she went in it all the rest of the week ; it just happened to stop opposite to where the stairs brought her on to the platform. She got up a bit earlier on Fridays and Tuesdays, so as to have time to put on eye-black.
She got into the train this morning just like any other Friday, ostentatiously averting her head, after making sure that he was there and staring. He never pretended to be reading the paper, and peeped round it as some men did, and if she looked at him, he didn’t look away, but went on staring, so that she had to turn her head and hope that the hot feeling in her face wasn’t a blush coming.
He sat at the end of the carriage and she sat half-way down on the opposite side. She wondered a lot about him. What did he do and Why did he only do it twice a week, and what could he possibly do at Earl’s Court? That was where he always got off. Whatever it was, he looked as if he were overworking. Perhaps his limp meant that he was discharged wounded—a pilot, perhaps—and his face was tired because the wound hurt him. His clothes looked as if they had started life right. He was well-built, with a small head, a short nose and lively eyes, a curly mouth and that crisp, light brown hair that grew so absolutely the right way. All this she had gleaned from furtive glances twice a week and a more sustained scrutiny of his back view when he was getting out.
Sometimes she squirmed to peer through the diamond opening in the window netting to watch him walk up the platform, but once he had turned as he came level and looked her full in the eyes. She was not sure whether he had seen her or not.
This Friday morning was just like any other. She read her paper self-consciously, taking care not to frown, scarcely seeing a word she read. After nine months of this tedious journey, she knew all the stations by heart, so when the train stopped at Earl’s Court, she allowed a decent interval for him to get up and walk to the door and then raised her eyes to watch him get out. When she looked up this morning, he was gone. It was unusual for him to get out so quickly. He always waited until the train had completely stopped, because of his limp. She squinted through the window, and when she turned back, saw him still sitting in his seat at the end of the carriage. For the first time, he dropped his eyes, almost guiltily. What was so gu“You know blyhilty about not getting out at Earl’s Court? Perhaps he had suddenly decided not to go to work ; perhaps his leg was hurting him and he just couldn’t get up. She toyed with another idea. Perhaps he was going to travel on to see where she got out.
The Fancy Page 10