“Well, we know that, Pop,” said Dorothy. “We’ve all been to the Tuck-Inn and we’ve all stood in a queue and we all know that when we did get a table there wasn’t anything hot left, because you’ve been talking about it ever since.”
“Well, there wasn’t anything hot, was there?” He turned his slow aggrieved eyes on her. “I had to have Spam and had a thirst all night in consequence that got me out of bed three times to drink out of the jug on the washstand. I can’t see the harm in stating a fact that happens to be true, and there was nothing hot, and I don’t care who asks me, if it was the Prime Minister himself, I should tell him : we stood in a queue for half an hour at Tuck-inn and there was nothing hot left.” He popped a small square of bread into his mouth and chewed as if it were a mouthful.
“Oh, all right, all right, all right!” said Dorothy. “Nobody minds your saying that—it’s just that you keep on and on and on about a thing, till a person could scream.” She opened her eyes very wide and half opened her mouth, but as no scream was forthcoming, she shut it again and went on eating. Dorothy was normally the most placid girl—almost cowlike she had been two years ago, when she planted her unbudging devotion and admiration at the feet of Don Derris, who could not be bothered to avoid marrying her. As a maiden, she had been peaceable in the home and never noticed her father was there. Now that she had come back to it after a year of emancipation with Don and in a condition which her mother described as “So”, her irritability increased with her size.
“Dorothy, dear,” said Mrs. Munroe, and wagged her forefinger.
“Leave him alone, Dorothy,” said Connie, “or he’ll never finish. Ted, your fish is in the oven if you want it, though I don’t know what it’s like by now.”
“Well, my boy,” said Mr. Munroe, as Edward was going out of the door, “how’s the factory?” Edward had once tried to tell them about his new job and the responsibility of it and how he was getting hold of it and working up quite a position for himself in the Inspection Shop, but the wireless had been on at the time and they hadn’t really listened. They’d be surprised, he thought, if they could see him at work, passing judgment on complicated bits of mechanism, like a Solomon. He had never been particularly enthusiastic about his job in the Fitting Shop, and if they thought he still felt like that, never mind. They probably could not understand that you could enjoy your job. Although he knew that if he passed anything faulty, it would go through a lot of hands before it got into the air, there was always the chance that all those hands might miss it, even the A.I.D., whom he was discovering now to be not so omnipotent as he had thought when he was new and callow. But he was not going to embark on an explanation to his family-in-law of the exhilaration involved in telling yourself that on your word alone, perhaps, depended whether an engine might pack up at five thousand feet over the North Sea or bring its fighter pilot safely home time after time.
Chapter 8
*
Living in sin might be preferable to marriage, as David, who had tried both, always said, but it was much more complicated. Not that Sheila felt in the least sinful or guilty, but although she was learning many things from David, she had not yet quite achieved his indifference to the rest of the world. After that first Saturday night, when he had come to the flat for dinner and still been there at breakfast time, nothing could have been more natural than that he should move his typewriter and much-labelled bags from his uncomfortable lodgings in Earl’s Court to Sheila’s sixth-floor flat near the British Museum. They had hardly even discussed it. Sheila was in a state of delirious acquiescence to anything, and if he said it was all right, it was all right.
She had gone down to Earl’s Court one evening to fetch his things, as he was busy. His idea of packing had been to throw in a few books and shoes and then lose interest and go off to the office. Sheila didn” he said. “Itms the factory?”’t mind ; she asked nothing better than to exercise her right to fiddle around among his things. Even his shirt collars gave her a thrill, and intimate things like his tooth-brush and the razor blade he had used that morning affected her strongly. His landlady had manifested herself in the doorway, registering neither approval nor censure as her eyes followed Sheila about the room. The unfortunate nape of Sheila’s neck had begun to give her away as a novice by reddening, but she had brazened it out, she flattered herself, like an old hand.
“I said I was your sister,” she told David afterwards.
He laughed. “You needn’t have bothered, darling. She wouldn’t care. You’ve no idea of the unbridled licence of Earl’s Court. Anyway, it’s no business of hers.”
“Oh, but she believed I was your sister. She even called me Miss Fielding.”
“That pleased you, I bet. Swinley rearing its ugly head again.”
He always said that when she made little gestures of respectability. The night porter was her friend and seemed to approve, but the day porter, who had a glass eye, had taken to giving her searching looks with the other one whenever she went in or out. She was careful always to wear gloves, but Swinley had reared its ugly head and prompted her to suggest that she might have a ring from Woolworths. Nothing had come of that, but he had said, laughing at her, that she could call herself Mrs. Fielding if she liked.
But then it was so complicated with ration books and identity cards. The owners of the flats held a check-up every few months and it was silly to call herself Mrs. Fielding when her identity card said Sheila Blake, single. They might get suspicious and think she was an alien. The rations were an awful nuisance. David was registered at Earl’s Court, and she had to leave the train there on Saturdays and get his rations before going home to get her own. His landlady had registered him with all her friends, who kept rickety little shops in Warwick Road and never had anything but tinned plum jam and cheese in silver paper. She was going to be very efficient and re-register him when the next period started, if she could find out how it was done. She had enough trouble with the milkman, who was as obstructionist as a whole Government Department, and they had had to share her ration of milk for weeks while his landlady was getting all his.
These details, however, were of no importance beside the fact that she was ecstatically happy and that life was more exciting than she had ever imagined in her wildest girlhood dreams. Living with David might be tiring, but it was never dull. He hated making plans, and would suddenly ring her up in the evening as she was cooking their supper and ask her to meet him in some bar in ten minutes’ time as they were going to the theatre and dinner afterwards. With a rueful glance at the wasted kidneys, for which she had spent all her lunch hour searching, she would tear off the becoming overall in which she had arranged herself against his homecoming, fly to do things to her face and hair, wail hopelessly in the streets for a taxi and plunge underground, scattering old ladies on the escalator, and arrive breathless at the rendezvous to wait for him for half an hour.
Or, again, when they had planned to go out to dinner, he would come home tired and in a domestic mood and expect to find a full course dinner waiting in the oven. Whenever Sheila went home to Swinley, she surreptitiously rifled the larder for tins of food against these contingencies. But best of all she liked Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he had been working all the night before and slept during the Do give me thean alongday. She liked to come in and find him safely asleep. She would let herself into the flat quietly and, creeping into the bedroom, sit down on the edge of the bed for the joy of having his arms go around her neck simultaneously with his waking. There was a lot to be said for living with a man, in or out of sin.
Her mother had never taught her anything about housekeeping, and it was a great worry to Sheila at first. She wished she could confide in Grace, who was always talking about ‘Managing’, and ask her how one Managed. David would eat all his week’s butter in two days and then be surprised that there was no more, and he was frightfully extravagant with toilet paper and soap. Still, he worked so hard that you couldn’t expect him to bother with silly little de
tails ; that was the woman’s job, and Sheila was proud to do it. There was a certain fascination about being ridden by domesticity, and she was beginning to understand why some women never talked of anything else. She cultivated Grace’s company and always travelled home with her.
She would have given anything not to have had to go to work, Apart from the difficulty of sleeping with the alarm under her pillow so as not to wake him and either dressing in total darkness or in the bathroom, his work as Feature Editor of a daily newspaper entailed peculiar hours which left him free sometimes in the middle of the day and hankering for her. He was very naughty about her job, and if he woke in the morning when she was dressing would do everything possible to make her late. She was getting a lot of pink cards that said : ‘YOU are helping Hitler! Why are you late clocking in?’ Once, he had actually rung her up at the factory and she had had to take the call in Mr. Gurley’s office, with Mr. Gurley listening. David was telling her to come over faint and come home at once, because he was going to Oxford on a story and she was going with him. He had booked their room and it was going to be fun. It had been terrible having to damp his enthusiasm and confidence that she would come. It was impossible to try and explain and at the same time give Mr. Gurley the impression that she was dealing with a family crisis, because you were not supposed to be rung up. David never understood that her work at the factory was at all important, nor that in wartime you couldn’t come and go as you pleased. “Let someone else count the … nuts and bolts for a bit,” he said, and she had to jam the receiver hard against her ear so that Mr. Gurley couldn’t hear.
She felt she had let him down and was miserable for the three days while he was away. The flat seemed so wrong without him. How had she ever lived there alone before? She had not the heart to cook herself anything to eat, but lived on coffee and toast. She thought he might be angry when he came back, but that was what was so lovely about David : he never brooded. He could be furious with her one minute and shout so that Colonel Satterthwaite would knock on the wall, and the next he would seize her round the waist from behind as she sulked over the stove in the kitchen and demonstrate his affection for her so exuberantly that Colonel Satterthwaite would knock on the wall again.
He came home on Friday evening in tremendous spirits, and Sheila forgot her three days’ unhappiness in an instant. He had a bottle of gin under one arm and a whole tinned ham under the other. Sheila’s eyes nearly came out of her head.
“Ham, darling! Where on earth—? You didn’t steal it?”
“One of the Subs sold it me. He’s got a girl who smuggles him out trifles like this from her father’s eating-house. He’s an Armenian or a Greek or establish blyh something, and knows all the dodges to get stuff.”
“But that’s Black Market! D’you think we ought—?”
“You’re crazy! If somebody’s going to have it, why not us?” He threw the tin into the air and dropped it, making a dent in the bedroom door.
“Oh, David, look what you’ve done.” Sheila rubbed at it ineffectually.
“One more thing to explain to Kathleen when she comes home.”
“Oh, I know. I can’t think what she’s going to say when she sees the coffee stains on the carpet and that awful burn on the mantelpiece.”
“She won’t mind. Tell her I did it. I say——” he limped into the kitchen to get the corkscrew, “it’s going to be Hell if she ever does stop being evacuated. We’d have to find somewhere else.”
“It would be awfully difficult,” she called from the bedroom, where she was replacing her lipstick. “They say you can’t get flats for love or money.”
She had a sudden vision of herself staying out from the factory to tramp from agent to agent, viewing one impossible flat after another. She could almost feel her feet aching. Supposing she didn’t find anywhere? They couldn’t afford to go to a hotel for long, and at the thought that he might drift away from her if they were separated, the round eyes looking at her from the mirror grew rounder with fear.
“Oh, you’d find something!” he called. “I can’t get the ice out of the fridge.”
Yes, she would find something, because he expected her to. That was at once the tiring and exciting part of being in love, living up to what was expected of you.
“I can’t get the ice out! What on earth have you done to this thing? It’s like an iceberg. Come and get it out, because we’re going to celebrate!”
“I’m coming.” The face in the mirror relaxed. She smiled at herself. Really, she was not looking at all bad these days. Love seemed to make your hair do what you wanted and your make-up stay on properly.
Later that evening, she said dreamily : “I’d give anything not to be going home tomorrow night.”
He was furious. He protested that she had never told him.
“I did, darling. You’ve forgotten.”
“I never forget. I don’t see why you have to go just when I get back. What am I supposed to do all the time you’re away?”
“It’s only one night. You’ll be all right. I’ve left you lots of food. You’ll only have to get your breakfast on Sunday, which you do Anyway on other mornings. Think, you’ll be able to have all the Sunday papers. I thought you’d probably go out for lunch, and I shall be back in the evening.”
“Don’t go.”
“Darling, don’t be unfair. You don’t think I want to? I haven’t been home for ages. I simply must go, or they’ll begin to suspect something. Mummy’s already beginning to say ‘What are you up to?’ in her letters.”
“Tell her what you’re up to, then. Do her good!”
“But, David, you don’t understand : I couldn’t. They’d simply die of shame. T that leaves you to singke bhey—oh, I couldn’t !”
It was a fantastic suggestion.
It seemed even more fantastic next evening in the blue-lit train approaching Swinley. She laughed to herself at the mere idea. To start with, they would never believe it. David teased her enough about ‘The Stately Home of Swinley’, but he didn’t really understand just how remote its life was from life in Museum Court, W.C.2. It was not that it was rich or stately ; it was just a house that knew what was going to happen in it at every minute of the day. Her parents were not even the Blimps he imagined ; they were just two people who had never gone abroad because of leaving the dogs. They might know less about life than their youngest daughter did at the age of twenty-two, but they knew what one did and did not do. She could never tell them.
The train made four stops at little stations on the way to Swinley, and as each one was called out there accumulated around Sheila more and more associations to draw her back to the life from which she had escaped.
‘Cot’nam!’ That was where they always clanged milk cans about on the daytime trains. ‘Ardrey Bridge!’ They had once got out there and driven four miles in a governess cart to have tea with some people called—Rogerson, was it?—whose son was six years old and couldn’t feed himself. He had been a family joke for years afterwards.
‘Park Halt!’ Funny to hear a woman calling that. That was Mrs. Munday, who lived in the cottage by the level crossing and had dozens of tattered children swinging on the gates. The children were grown up now and gone away. Some were in the Forces, perhaps. Sheila remembered one little boy who always called ‘Yah!’ and made a rude face at the train. She had seen him once when he was older, holding open a gate when she was out hunting and looking as if he would still like to say ‘Yah!’
By the time she had passed ‘Six Elms!’ with its memories of trips there to buy a special sort of red sweet, and was reaching for her case as the train slowed down for Swinley, she was so steeped in the old atmosphere that she might have been ten years old, or any age. She half expected to see her legs stepping on to the platform in black woollen stockings, so exactly did she feel as if she were coming home from school for the holidays. The thought of David and the flat brought up her head and made her walk with conscious poise to the gate. She was different now, a vis
itor from Town. She was someone from Town looking at the country, instead of someone from the country looking at Town as a place where you went to buy clothes and see matinées and have tea at the underground Fullers below Jaegers.
She was someone to whom things had happened, who knew what she was alive for. Why, then, as she stood in the station yard, trying to see which of the lights were the lamps of the dogcart, did she feel as if she belonged here, where nothing ever happened? If I don’t look out, she thought, I’ll start feeling guilty, and I’ve managed to avoid that up till now.
The dogcart had been brought out of retirement when it became apparent that if Mr. Blake were going to drive to his office in Worcester in the car there would be no petrol to spare for anything else. There was no question about his taking the car, for apart from the roundabout train journey there was a quaint Victorian custom in the Blake family that Father had first go at everything, including the red gravy under the joint.
He was the senior partner in a firm of solicitors which had the confidence of every local family whose secrets were worth knowing, but was disappointingly stuffy impossible to believe.pa about betraying that confidence in the home. With a brother-in-law and cousin as mature junior partners, he could have retired by now, but he had nothing better to do.
So the dogcart had beer brought out of the barn, where it had rested so long on its haunches with its shafts slung up to a beam, dreaming of the days when it used to develop a rare turn of speed down Swinley Hill, especially when Nigger shied at the goats half-way down. But Nigger was gone long ago. to shy at goats from between the shafts of a jobmaster’s buggy, and gone, too, was Noakes, the town-bred groom, to whom all horses were potential criminals, controlled only by a lot of jabbing and whacking and come-hupping, you Devil.
Although they were both country people and dressed and spoke the part, Mr. and Mrs. Blake did everything wrong in the country. They engaged the wrong sort of groom, because he had the right sort of references and transfixed them with a glib line of talk. They bought the wrong sort of horses—showy chestnuts with pale slender legs which buckled at the mere sight of a road, pretty, tricky ponies with little mean eyes on whom the children sat for delightful photographs but by whom they all, except Roger, the eldest, who had no imagination, were put off riding for life.
The Fancy Page 17