“Liver sausage, and cheese,” said Miss Bell, putting them on the table as she spoke, rubbing at an imaginary spot with her finger, inspecting her finger and wiping it on the handkerchief tucked through her belt.
“It’s very kind of you,” said Edward, who was still standing, with some of his papers clutched to him and others falling on the floor, “you really shouldn’t trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” said Miss Bell. Her voice was pitched on a permanent note of surprise and her face never altered in expression. She had small features, neat, and somehow unphysical. You could never imagine her nose running or her eyes watering, or saliva forming in her mouth at the smell of bacon cooking. Her little flat ears would always be clean even if she never washed them and the short bair waved behind them would never straggle in the rain. She may have worn a little powder and colourless lipsalve, but no one of either sex had ever witnessed the secrets of her toilet. She had no close friends and seemed to need none ; she had never betrayed nor given a confidence. She was as self-contained as a modern flat and about as inhuman.
She stood there, waiting to see if anyone had anything further to say to her, listened politely and without comment to Edward’s résumé of the day’s weath for Best Rabbit in Show p alonger and Dick Bennett’s groping beginning of a sentence that collapsed without ever coming to anything.
Mr. Bell had already leaned over the back of the settee and helped himself to a couple of sandwiches together before passing them round. With his mouth full, he blew a kiss into the air indicative of appreciation.
“Well, I’ll say good night,” said his sister. “Don’t forget to turn out all the lights and put the chain on the door, Edgar, before you come to bed.”
When she had gone, Edward, who didn’t want to return to the subject of the Show, turned up the pile of letters which were the week’s queries from members. Some of these Edward could answer himself, others were forwarded to the proper sources of information, in spite of E. Dexter Bell, who saw himself as the Dorothy Dix of the rabbit world and never lacked an answer. When the query was “What would you recommend as a suitable mate for such-and-such a doe?” or “What buck would give me such-and-such characteristic?” the answer was always simple : “One of the Bell bucks.” How could any fancier be in doubt?
The subject of the Show did not come up again until their next meeting, which was at Dick’s flat. Mr. Bell’s snuggery was being spring-cleaned and Edward did not like to impose too often on Connie, although she had been surprisingly complaisant of late.
The Bennett’s flat was the converted upper part of an old damp house, in which none of the doors and windows fitted. The floors didn’t seem to fit either. Domestic noises and rumbling voices rose from the ground-floor flat to mingle with the noise of Dick’s family about its daily life. As the three of them sat round the table, where Mrs. Bennett had given them a hearty and delicious meal, roars came from the baby in the front bedroom, hammering from the schoolboy’s room, shrieks and giggles from the room where sixteen-year-old Peggy was dressmaking with a girl friend, and an alarming noise from the kitchen where Mrs. Bennett was washing-up.
“Touching this question of the Show,” began Mr. Bell, raising his voice and his eyebrows as an unexploded landmine appeared to fall in the schoolboy’s room, “I’ve had a great idea.”
“I’ve been in touch with the lessors of St. Mark’s Hall,” began Edward doggedly, but Mr. Bell waved this aside and continued : “My point is this : ‘Let’s have a show,’ you say. ‘Let’s have a so-and-so class, and a so-and-so. Let’s have a this and a that.’ Certainly ; nothing finer. ‘Let’s advertise,’ you say. ‘Let’s get a lot of exhibitors to come and—’”
“No,” said Edward, “that’s just it. We don’t want a lot of outside exhibitors this first time. I want the members to get the prizes.”
“My dear Edward, I thought the idea was to rope in a lot of new members.”
“Oh yes, of course. Everyone’s welcome, provided they join, but look here, Bell——” He had been repeatedly urged to call the man Edgar, but had never been able to bring himself to it.
“Well then. Where was I? Oh yes, well now, having done all that and laid all your plans, even booked your hall, apparently, though it’ll never do—having done all that ”—he leaned his arm on the table and waggled his finger at Edward— “there’s just one, just one little infinitesimal detail that you’ve overlooked. Infinitesimal, I say that leaves you to singwdr, but I might describe it as the most important item in the whole schedule.” He leaned towards Edward, thick lips slightly open, spectacles gleaming with triumph.
“Why, I don’t know—I don’t think I——”
“The judges, man! The judges!” roared Mr. Bell, and the baby echoed him, crescendo.
“Oh,” said Edward. “Yes, of course, the judges. Well, I hadn’t really thought——”
“Ah!” Mr. Bell leaned back, nodding contentedly and taking off his spectacles. “I thought so. Now here’s where Yours Truly is going to make his humble suggestion. I think it’s a winner,” he added diffidently, and taking out a silk handkerchief, began to polish his spectacles slowly to create suspense.
“Fire ahead,” breathed Dick, his great face agog.
“Well, I was turning over this little question in the watches of the night, when I says to meself, says I——” He paused again and eyed his audience. “Why not ask my old friend, says I, my very good friend——”
Edward leant forward. “Allan Colley? “he said excitedly.
“Edward, old lad, you’re a mind reader. None other than my old friend, Allan Colley.”
“But he never would, surely,” said Edward. “A little unknown affair like ours. I mean, he judges at the big County Shows and all that. Oh, I don’t think he would. But how marvellous if he did.”
“He might,” said Mr. Bell casually, “if I asked him as a favour. Do anything for me, the old collie dog would.”
“I say, it would be marvellous,” said Edward in the tones of the schoolboy whose hammering had just been stopped by a yell from the kitchen of “Arthur! I’ll pay you if you don’t stop that and get to bed. Go and say good night to your Dad!”
“Wouldn’t it be grand, Dick?” said Edward. Dick’s face was flushed with pleasure, as he nodded, but before he could speak, a dirty object in shorts and a green jersey had hurled itself into the room, butted into its father’s stomach with close-cropped head so as not to have to look at the visitors and hurled itself out again with a great clatter of boots.
“My eldest son,” said Dick, gazing after him with his face collapsed in sentiment, the Show and Allan Colley forgotten.
Edward heard no more about it until they met at his house one evening when Connie had been given a chicken by her uncle from Barnet. Edward had thought that she would want to have it on Thursday when her family came, but when he mentioned that Dick and Mr. Bell might be looking in one day after supper, she had surprisingly said : “Well, what’s the matter with my cooking? Isn’t roast chicken good enough for your precious Mr. Bell?”
It was quite a party. Mr. Bell arrived with half a bottle of sherry in the deep pocket of his overcoat “to drink the health of my friend, Allan Colley, who’s promised to come and judge our show.”
“No!” said Edward.
“Aha, yes!” said Mr. Bell, knocking his arms against the walls as he struggled out of his coat in the hall.
“You mean he’s really promised to come and judge for us?”
“Well, I told you took a step nearer to her mother,W b he would, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but I never thought—I mean, such a small affair—it couldn’t possibly interest him.”
“Who said it was going to be a small affair?” Mr. Bell sagged at the knees to look in the mirror and quiff up his side hair with the flat of his hand. “With a draw like Colley, we’ll get the all big breeders in the neighbourhood, and some from outside, too, unless I’m mistaken. I say, can I go and wash, boy? I stink of
the city’s dirt.” He ran upstairs. He was quite at home in the house by now, and Edward followed him up and hovered on the landing while Mr. Bell sluiced water lavishly over himself and the floor. He was a large man, and though not outsize, he had the knack of making things look small. Edward’s house seemed to shrink as soon as he got inside it, and now, using the bathroom basin, he gave the impression that he was washing his hands in a pie-dish.
“Yes, sir,” he was saying. “We’ll certainly have to put up a good show for the old collie dog. I know for some reason or other you were set on a little show, Ted, but this puts a different face on things, doesn’t it?”
Edward was silent, He had never dreamed that Allan Colley would accept, and he was still adjusting himself to the impossible fact that he had. He had to adjust himself too to the defeat of his plans for a cosy, encouraging little show. Mr. Bell had undoubtedly scored a point.
“Now my idea is this,” he began, saturating as if it were a pocket handkerchief the towel which Edward handed him. “To start with, I thought the Victory Hall——” He elaborated his plans and Edward had no choice but to agree. After all, Allan Colley was coming, that was the main thing, and it was up to them to give him something worth coming for. They went down to the living-room, where Dick was reading the paper, Connie took off her apron and came in from the kitchen and they all had sherry out of the set of glasses that had hardly been used since their wedding day. They drank : “To the Show!” and then filled up and drank : “To the Collis Park Rabbit Club!” which even Connie drank quite willingly. She liked sherry. Then Dick cleared his throat and said : “Here’s to you. All you’ve done—Edgar,” which made Edward look at him sharply, it sounded so odd.
As the evening wore on, he found he was minding less and less that he had lost his battle about the show. After all—Allan Colley. And if the humbler members of the Club were eclipsed, well—do ‘em good, perhaps—give ‘em a bit more ambition.
The evening was a success. The roast chicken was perfect, Mr. Bell said that the potatoes excelled even his sister’s, and the gravy was rich and brown. Mr. Bell kept mopping his up with bread, “à la Continental”, he said and smacked his lips. Connie told him about Wenduyne and Edward was surprised that she remembered it so well. They had not talked about it for a long time. He kept looking at her and thinking how young she looked and how pretty in that pink blouse thing. Dick, of course, had to go and make her frown by asking : “Heard any more about the Call-up, Mrs. L.?” It had been mentioned when he was last there.
“Oh,” said Mr. Bell, passing his plate for more treacle tart. “They won’t take you. Don’t worry about that.”
“I’m sure I don’t mind if they do,” she said. “I should be only too pleased, if I thought that they would really make good use of me.”
“Aha he blew a kiss into the airI s.,” he said, “there, with a woman’s perfect intuition, you’ve hit the nail on the head. If they’d make good use of you—but the point is, would they? The wastage of labour that’s going on is a scandal. I tell you what you ought to do, if you really want a job, though it seems to me, you’ve got a full time job being a housewife —and a darned good one too.” He held up the last piece of tart on his fork, nodded at it and engulfed it. Connie bridled.
“What ought she to do?” asked Edward.
“That was a treacle tart,” said Mr. Bell, putting down his fork and pushing back his chair to stretch out his legs. “What ought she to do? Why, pick her own job, something that won’t waste her capabilities. If you really think they’re going to call you up, though I can assure you they won’t yet——”—he had his finger on the pulse of every Ministry—“you want to cheat them by getting yourself fixed up first. I tell you what, you know, you ought to come and work for me. I’d give you a job in the office any day. We’re rushed off our feet with work—could do with any amount of help.” Connie got up to go and make the tea, giving no indication of whether she liked the idea or not.
“But surely that wouldn’t exempt her?” said Edward. “An Estate Office—that’s not reserved?”
“Not reserved? My dear old boy,” Mr. Bell laughed tolerantly. “Of course it’s reserved. One of the most important things in the War, housing people.” He really made you believe it too, sitting back with his spectacles in his hand, his tongue excavating the remains of Connie’s excellent meal from inside his flat, wide mouth.
While he was undressing that night in their room, Edward said : “Would you like to have a job, Connie? Would you like to work in Bell’s office? I think he meant it, you know.”
She was doing her hair at the dressing table, fixing each little sausage in a loop of wire. She laughed with a curler in her mouth. “Oh, it was only a joke. I wouldn’t care to particularly, anyway. I’m all right.”
“I’ve sometimes wondered, you know, dear,” Edward stood looking at her with his braces hanging down while he took out his cuff-links, “whether you wouldn’t be happier with a job. I mean, it’s lonely for you. alone all day——”
“I’m all right,” she repeated. “I’m sure I’ve plenty to do.”
“Yes, I know, but—I tell you what, Con,” he said quickly, “I wish we’d had a child. You’d like it, wouldn’t you?”
“We couldn’t afford it,” she said without looking at him.
“Oh, I know we said that at first, and then that business of your illness came, and what the doctor said. But we could afford it now, you know.” He was scrutinising himself in his little mirror on the chest of drawers with the same studied detachment as she was in hers. “I mean, do you think you ought to go and see the doctor again?”
She dealt very carefully with a curl at the back of her head, turning it up so that the bristles showed where the underneath hair had been cut.
“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with me” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.” He sighed. He couldn’t get her to say“Don’t be silly, Don. He daren’t speak to one girl, let alone ten.”. b one way or the other whether she wanted a child.
She put on her hair net, stood up and took off her dressing-gown, was revealed for a moment in the V-necked Celanese nightgown that gave her a bit of a tummy, and then kicking off her slippers was into bed.
“Hurry up, Ted,” she said, hunching the clothes over to her side, “I never knew a man take so long to get to bed.”
“And how many have you known, pray?” he asked, but she was not in a mood for joking. The cheerfulness in which she had spent the evening seemed to be passing off.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “And do hurry up. I want to get some sleep.”
“Just got my teeth to do.” While he was in the bathroom, sedulously doing his forty strokes on each side, up and down, not across, he turned things over in his mind. He had put out of his head so many years ago the dream of having a child, that he hardly dared to bring it back. He had always known that she never wanted one, although she had made the excuse, first of money, then of the doctor. But just recently, since she had been being “Nice to him,” as he put it to himself, he often wondered : did she consider the possibility and not mind it, or had the doctor perhaps told her she was safe?
When he came back the room was in darkness. He went to the window, drew the blackout, opened the window at the bottom and stood for a minute or two doing his exercises and breathing deeply through his nose. The exercises ought really to be done in the morning, but there was never time. This was better than nothing. When he had done his twenty arms bend, arms stretch and had touched his toes with difficulty five times, he shut the bottom window, opened it a foot and a half at the top, felt his way round the end of the bed and slid under what was left of the clothes. He didn’t think she was asleep ; she was not clicking.
“Connie,” he said into the darkness, “suppose we did have a baby, would you mind? I know you were never keen on it, but now that you—now that we—you know—I wondered perhaps if it meant that you wanted one after all.”
“What do you mean?
” she asked in a strangely defensive tone. “What are you driving at?”
“Nothing,” he said surprised. “I only wondered. Nothing to get huffy about.”
“I’m not huffy,” she said crossly, “but it’s enough to drive a person mad the way you keep on question, question and cross-examine.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and put out a hand. “Con——”
“Oh, don’t keep on,” she said, kicking him with her feet as she turned farther away from him.
When she had no shopping to do, Wendy Holt usually lunched in the canteen. Although the shilling dinner cost more than her usual cheese roll and tea at the milk bar or one of the local cafés, it was more economical in the end. Having had a good hot lunch, she and her mother could manage on bread and cheese and cocoa in the evening. Her father could always have soup, or a little bit of fish or an egg perhaps. Wendy and Mrs. Holt usually gave up their egg ration to him ; they didn’t much care for eggs anyway.
In the torrent of people that was released from the Shops by the twelve o’clock whistle, those who were going to the canteen ran as fast as anybody. There were usually two meat courses : a joint and some made-up dish, so unless you had a passion for rissoles or savoury pie, it was as well to get there early. The canteen was at the far end of the track, but the men from the Machine Shop who had the shortest distance to run, managed to be queueing up at the counter almost before the whistle had died away.
There was hardly ever any joint left when Wendy arrived. The canteen was already full when she came in, breathless, to join the queue for tickets at the cash desk. Conversation that had been pent-up all morning, rabid knives and forks and a roystering lunch hour programme from the loudspeaker vied with each other in the thick savoury air. The counter was arranged like a Totalisator. Files of people approached it empty-handed and countermarched back on the other side of little railings with a heaped plate in one hand and a knife and fork in the other.
“Any fish?” asked Wendy hopefully. There was fish and chips sometimes.
“Only rissoles now, dear,” said the steamy woman who was pushing plates steadily through the hatch as if she were feeding a machine. Wendy took her plate and a knife and fork from the box and walked down between the tables looking for a place. It was a mystery to her how people managed to get there so early. Some were halfway through their plateful and some even, with eyes bolting out of their heads as the last mouthful bolted in, were half on their feet to make a dash for the pudding hatches. Wendy found a place at one of the farther tables, opposite a man who was eating absent-mindedly with a fork, absorbed in a folded paper propped against the vinegar bottle in front of him. She had sat down before she saw that it was Edward. He looked up and smiled, offered her the cruet and went on reading.
The Fancy Page 21