The Fancy

by Dickens, Monica

  … .

  David always seemed to have some excuse for not sleeping at Thatcher Street. He was tired, he was working late, he had promised Toddy to go back and meet some chaps in his room. On the nights when he was not there, the cistern was mute and the street outside as quiet as a country lane, but when he was there, all the devils in hell seemed to be let loose in the plumbing, cats mated at the tops of their voices and local revellers behaved as if it were New Year’s Eve. Sheila would lie awake, listening to him tossing and cursing, willing him to sleep, and dreading to hear him, when she got up in the morning, wide awake, as he had never been at the flat, say : “Don’t expect me tonight, darling. I’ve got a late job on. I’ll sleep at home.” Home, he called Toddy’s, when this was supposed to be his home. She was beginning to hate these rooms as much as he did. At the flat, she had managed to feel married, but here she felt like a prostitute, waiting night after night, going to bed without cream on her face in case he should change his mind and come back.

  “What about dinner, then?” she would say.

  “Better not fix anything. I may not be able to get off and I don’t want to keep you hanging around. You go out and enjoy yourself.” Enjoy yourself! Who with?

  One night, when she was happy, when everything had gone right and he had come back to dinner and they had had fun, just as they used to, she came down to the kitchen at about eleven o’clock to make coffee. Ellen and her young man, who had been to the cinema, had come in with the same idea. She was standing over the stove, her behind prominent in a flowered silk dress, cut on the cross, and her young man, who was rude and untidy, was sitting at the kitchen table picking his teeth with one of his fingernails, which were never clean.

  “Oh hullo, Ellen,” said Sheila. “I just came down to make some coffee, d’you mind?”

  “Of course not, dear,” said Ellen, who, given the chance, would have been bosom friends with Sheila. “You can have some of this if you like ; I’ve made pints. How many’s it for—the two of you? Got your husband up by the time he got home p along there?” She jerked her head towards the ceiling. David was always called Sheila’s husband, although she thought they all knew that he wasn’t.

  “Yes, two of us,” she said, putting down her tray on the table. “Good evening, Mr. Birkett.”

  He made a vague salute. “Just call me Dan,” he said without getting up. Ellen took a long time over the coffee, insisting on letting it brew before she would strain it. Sheila wished she would hurry ; she wanted to get back to David. When she was with him up there she felt that she could make him forget how beastly these rooms were. She didn’t like to leave him in them too long alone, knowing from experience what powers of depression they held. It didn’t matter what you did—whether you moved the furniture about, or stood vases of flowers everywhere or stuck up magazine pictures or silly dolls—the rooms lowered at you. The black marble mantelpiece in the sitting-room was a scowling brow, the half-open, convex drawer of the sideboard a sullen underlip.

  David did not like being up there alone any more than she liked leaving him. Presently she heard his whistling and his feet clattering down the stairs.

  “Darling,” he called from the first floor landing. “What on earth are you doing down there? Get a move on.” Dan Birkett raised his head in surprise and as David limped down the last flight and appeared in the kitchen doorway, he said with his dirty sideways smile : “Hello, fancy meeting you!” Sheila was watching David’s face, which was taken aback and trying to register unconcern.

  “Oh, do you boys know each other?” said Ellen comfortably. “That’s nice.”

  “Sure,” said Dan. “We work on the same paper. That is, if you can talk about a common reporter and a feature writer in the same breath.” He did not seem to like David. “I didn’t know you hung out here though, Fielding. I thought your wife lived up north.”

  “Well, she does—I mean, she did, you see, we—Oh, hell, what business is it of yours, anyway?” David, who could so easily have explained the situation away had chosen instead to turn and stamp angrily away upstairs.

  “My, my,” said Dan, and he and Ellen looked at each other. “What about your coffee?” said Ellen as Sheila picked up her tray and started off after David.

  “Oh never mind,” she said. “Leave it. I—I’ll come down for it later.”

  She found David in the sitting-room, leaning on the mantelpiece and kicking the fender with his good foot.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” he said. “This’ll be all over the office by tomorrow.”

  “But, darling, it’s all right. He doesn’t know we’re not married. If only you hadn’t dashed off like that—I mean, there’s nothing funny about two people living over the Acropolis Dining Rooms.”

  “The Acropolis Dining Rooms!” His laugh was a snort. “I was a fool not to think of it. I knew his girl’s father was a Greek who kept some low café—he was the one who used to get us those tongues and things, remember?”

  “Yes, but I don’t see that it matters. Even if he doesn’t think we’re married—and I’m sure he does—why should you mind? You’ve laughed at me often enough for being conventional; by the time he got home p along it seems to me you’re a damn sight more conventional yourself.” She sat down at the round table and twisted the fringe of the green woollen tablecloth, wanting to cry. “I don’t mind what your beastly friends think, so why should you?”

  “Oh you fool, it’s not that. I don’t give a damn for that. It’s just the—oh, I don’t know—being caught in this awful sordid hole. It’s all so shabby, and sort of degrading. I shall be laughed to death over this.”

  They were not really having a row. Sheila often thought afterwards how much better it would have been if they had, but David never quarrelled ; he couldn’t be bothered. If they had been having a row, it would have been quite natural for Sheila to challenge him with : “What did he mean, he thought your wife lived up north? Doesn’t he know you’re divorced?” But as David, once he had got over his first annoyance about Dan Birkett, didn’t seem to notice that there was anything wrong between them, or that Sheila couldn’t see what her fingers were doing to the tablecloth because of the mist of tears that hovered on the brink of her eyes, it sounded stupid and captious when she blurted it out. She could hear how self-conscious it was as she said it : “What did he mean, he thought your wife lived up north? Doesn’t he know you’re divorced?”

  “What?” He took his foot off the fender and looked at her in surprise. “Well, I’m not actually. We’re separated, but there’s never been anything legal. You know that.”

  She didn’t know it. Although they had hardly ever spoken about his wife, she had taken it for granted that he was divorced, but she would have died now sooner than let him see that.

  “Oh yes, of course,” she said. She had torn a tassel off the cloth and was pulling it to pieces, thread by thread, without noticing what she was doing.

  “Well,” said David, “if we’re not going to have coffee, I think I’ll clear out before Birky comes up to ask the happy married pair down for a nightcap. Where’s my coat?”

  The Thatcher Street rooms were a terrible place to cry in alone. Once started, you could never stop, and you realised then, that that was the effect they had had on you all along. They had made you want to cry, and now that they had achieved their object, they stood off, more comfortless than ever, and watched darkly the tears which had been accumulating for so long reducing you to a rag.

  After that, David came less and less to the rooms. He had the additional excuse now of not wanting to meet Dan Birkett. At first Sheila went on buying food, in case he should want to have dinner there, but presently she gave it up. He did suggest it one night when he was tired and they had not much money between them, but as she had got nothing to cook for him, they had to go to a restaurant just the same.

  Theequently for dinner, but afterwards, whereas it had at least been a question of was he or wasn’t he coming back with her, it was now hardly
ever even that. It gradually became the accepted thing for them to part at the Tube, or at a street corner, and gradually, Sheila could not quite say when, it was not : “See you tomorrow,” or “Ring me at lunch-time” or even “Keep Monday.” It began to be : “See you some time” or Sheila would say diffidently : “When’ll I see you?” and he would say : “I don’t know. I’m going to be pretty busy. Tell you what, I’ll give you a ring.”

  But youngsters blyh it was usually she who rang him in the end. The terrible part of it was that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening. He behaved quite naturally, while all the time, Sheila could feel him slipping out of her hands like the crumbling earth of a cliff edge.

  They began to see each other less and less frequently. Once, when they met, she heard him being polite to her, as if he had forgotten for a moment that she was not just some woman for whom he was switching on his charm. Nothing was ever said between them. Perhaps she could have saved it even then if she could have brought things to a head, but how could she bring to a head something of which he did not even seem aware?

  Presently he was going to Bristol, to take over the job of the branch editor who was on holiday. “When I come back,” David said, “we’ll have a party. It’s ages since we had a good party. We might round up some of the folks and have a real do.”

  “Yes, that’d be fun,” she smiled, clamouring inside herself : “I shan’t come! I shan’t come! If you’re bored with me, why don’t you say so, instead of sitting there looking just the same as you always did? How am I supposed to stop loving you when you go on looking just the same?”

  He went to Bristol on the night train and he made her have dinner with him and see him off at the station. There was another woman seeing a soldier off, and after the train had gone, Sheila saw that the woman was crying as if she thought she would never see the soldier again. Sheila had an awful feeling that she would never see David again either, but she had not even the right to cry about it. There was nothing heroic about her tears as there was about this other woman’s, who walked away, looking like a symbol of the tragedy of war.

  Sheila was not a symbol of anything except an unattached girl who bad missed the last train home and would have to walk.

  Dinah knew about David. She had heard about him ad nauseam when Sheila was in the first flush of living in sin. In those days to say : “How’s the boy-friend?” never failed to unloose a torrent of tedious detail, so Dinah hardly ever said it unless she were feeling so sunny that she could stand anything. But nowadays, since Sheila had become more reticent, it was safe to ask after David.

  “How’s the boy-friend?”

  “Oh all right, thanks. He’s gone away, as a matter of fact.”

  “Has he? Where to?” Dinah thought it would be nice to take a polite interest, as Sheila looked subdued this morning and had not bothered to do her hair properly.

  “Bristol.”

  “Oh, Bristol. Gone off on a job, has he?” There had been no need to draw Sheila out like this in the old days.

  “He’s working at the branch office of his paper there.”

  “Pity you couldn’t have had your holiday now and gone with him,” said Dinah.

  “Yes, wasn’t it?” said Sheila. They were washing their hands before lunch and she scrubbed absorbedly at her nails as if it were the only thing in the world that counted.

  “You probably could have, if you’d pestered old Gurley,” went on Dinah. Sheila didn’t answer.

  “Did you try?” persisted Dinah. She knew she was being nosey, but she wanted to find out if anything was wrong. There must be something wrong to have took a step nearer to her mother,llaf turned Sheila recently from a babbler into a clam.

  “Oh yes,” said Sheila. “It wasn’t any good though. Damn my hands : I don’t believe I’ll ever be clean again.”

  “Bill’s away tonight and tomorrow,” said Dinah as they were drying their hands under the hot-air blower. “We might have some food and go to the flicks or something. We grass widows ought to get together. Perhaps I could sleep at your place if we’re going to a cinema up West. I’ve never seen your new flat.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tonight, Dinah,” said Sheila. “I—I’ve got to go out with an aunt.”

  “I’ll come another time then. I’d love to see it.”

  “Yes, you must come some day. We’d better be going back hadn’t we, or the bell will be ringing.” She had no intention of letting Dinah come to Thatcher Street. Apart from being ashamed of the rooms, she didn’t want Dinah to see that there were no masculine traces—nothing of David there.

  She could not give up the rooms, because she had nowhere else to go. Impossible to go back to Kathleen after having been so firm about living separately. Kathleen would take her in, of course, but she would gloat. She would have her bath ready and bring her things on trays and say : “I knew you wouldn’t like living on your own. You were a goose!” It was difficult enough to live with Kathleen when you were happy ; unbearable now that you were miserable.

  She had paid the second month’s rent in advance to the Greek, so she could not afford to live anywhere else, even if she could find something. She was very hard up. Dining out so often with David had been expensive, because he was hard up too. When they lived at Kathleen’s flat, she had always paid the rent ; this was natural, because she had been paying for it long before she met him, but they had been going to share the rent of Thatcher Street. She supposed it was natural too that he had never paid his half for the first month. After all, he had hardly been there.

  So there she was, stuck in those two hateful rooms, with the use of a bath, which, when the geyser was not out of order, was always occupied. She lived bleakly on snacks, to avoid going down to the kitchen more than necessary. She was sure everybody knew about David, because they were so inquisitive. Mr. Petrocochino was always, asking when the “Beautiful Husban’” would return, and Ellen was always saying : “My goodness, don’t you get lonely up there? I should think he’d be afraid to go away for so long and leave you on the loose.” Even Victor, the French refugee who waited in the dining-rooms, would question her as she went through on her way to the stairs.

  “All alone again, dearie?” he would say in his Gallic cockney. “’E don’t know ’is luck. Englishmen! I tell you——” He spat into the recess behind the counter, where he kept the bowl for washing up glasses. “Why don’t you come and eat down here tonight? I fix you something special—just for you.” His manner was increasingly familiar now that she was without David. Sometimes he would come round from behind the counter and make for her as she was walking between the tables, so that she had to run through the swing door into the kitchen.

  Mrs. Urry was almost the worst. She had become clingingly maternal. She would watch out for Sheila coming home and pop out from the scullery to catch her as she hurried through the kitchen, intent on getting upstairs aw, that’s what it is.”. bay from them all.

  “Just in time,” she would say. “We’ll ’ave a cup of tea quick before that Greek comes back. The kettle’s on the boil.”

  “No thanks. Mrs. Urry, really.”

  “Come on love. Just a nice cup of. Do you good, a nice cup of will. Look, I’ve made it now, you can’t say no.”

  “Oh well.” It was simpler to do what people wanted, to stop them pestering you. Then Mrs. Urry would get all chummy over the cup of tea and come and stand very close, the top of her head on a level with Sheila’s shoulder.

  “Come on now, out with it,” she would say. “Something’s up, ain’t it? Mum knows. Tell Mum.” She had usually just been out for a quick one or two before the evening washing-up session, and having temporarily dispelled her own troubles, was anxious to dispel everyone else’s as well.

  Sometimes, to get away from the place, Sheila went round to Kathleen for supper. She always came away wishing she had not gone, but it passed the evening.

  After one particularly depressing evening when Kathleen had given her dried-up risot
to and made her listen to a radio play in blank verse about Sir Philip Sidney, the night porter strolled out of his cubbyhole as Sheila was leaving the flats.

  “Hullo, stranger,” he said. “We don’t see much of you these days, do we?” She stopped and talked to him. She had always liked him and thought him a sympathetic person to talk to.

  “Remember the days I used to come up to your flat and jaw over coffee?” he said. “Seems a long time ago. We were pals then, weren’t we?”

  “Well, we still are.” She didn’t want him to think she had forgotten how nice he had been to her when she was alone at the flat. They had been quite intimate. She had confided in him when she first met David and he had been agreeably interested in the progress of her romance. He seemed to approve of David coming to live with her. With the day porter, Sheila had kept up a feeble pretence of being married, but with the night porter, it didn’t matter. He understood, and she thought he felt benevolent towards them, having been in on the start of the affair.

  “Yes, rare old times we used to have,” he mused, leaning against the wall in his familiar attitude, with his chin on the loosened knot of his tie. “And then Love walked in and I walked out, eh? How is Love by the way? Still going strong? You might give him my regards and tell him he owes me eightpence on some empties that went astray.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” said Sheila, opening her bag. “I’ll give it you now.”

  He waved it away. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “So everything in the garden’s still rosy, eh?”

  “Yes——” she said from habit and then paused. She was tempted to tell him. He had always been so understanding, and the strain of having nobody to confide in was wearing her down. He was the only person she could possibly tell. She didn’t think he would laugh at her or despise her or tell her she had been a fool. Almost she told him. She was turning over in her mind possible ways to start, when he went on :

  “Well, it’s nice to see you—and looking so lush too.” She always dressed smartly when she came to see Kathleen.