The Fancy

by Dickens, Monica

  He looked in the spare room, shrouded once more now that Dorothy and little Donny had gone back to the Buildings ; he even looked in the bathroom cupboard where his own and Connie’s toothbrush shared a beaker in somehow indecent intimacy. The beaker was scummed with dried toothpaste and he rinsed it under the tap and also cleaned out the basin before going downstairs. Connie had never taken a pride in her house, but she was more cursory than ever now that she had the excuse of being busy all day. Other women managed, he knew ; he had heard them at the factory talking about their evenings’ housework and how they were going to turn out the bedroom on Sunday, but when Connie was not out with Miss Bell, she usually spent her evenings reading a book from the library which she had recently joined. He had long ago given up asking her why she never read anything except magazines and a picture daily, and now that she had at last taken to it of her own accord, she seemed to be more conscious of the process of self improvement than of pleasure in the book. She read with eyebrows slightly raised, lips moving, sitting very upright with a book on a level with her eyes, moistening her finger to t at the other end of the table. aafurn the pages and clearing her throat decisively at the end of each chapter. When he looked up from his own reading or writing to ask companionably : “Good book, Con?” she would say : “Very interesting. You wouldn’t enjoy it though ; it’s not a detective story,” as if he never read anything but that.

  He was pleased that she had taken to reading, but he could not help wishing that it were not at the expense of the house. After all, why be married if you had to clean out the bath every time before you used it? It had been better when Dorothy was with them ; at least, there had always been food in the house, but now, when he knew Connie was going out with Miss Bell, he always called in at the Lipmanns’ grocery on the way home. He had been told too often that they were so busy at the office that she had barely had time to pop out for lunch, let alone go hunting round for fish. She collected the rations all right on Saturday afternoons, but she was very good at running out of bread. People ate too much bread, she said. It wasn’t good for you. Far better to eat the rye crispbread which she now placed on the table in a toast rack and nibbled at during the meal. Edward missed the fat Coburg loaves from which they used to hack doughy crusts all the way round, leaving the middle for breadcrumbs for treacle tart. They never had treacle tart nowadays. Connie hadn’t time to make pastry.

  It was not exactly that she was sloppy ; indeed, she was more particular than ever about certain things. Milk now came to the table in a jug instead of its own bottle, and sardines never appeared in their tin. You must not help yourself to butter or cheese with your own knife, and since she had found that the Bells used mats on a polished table instead of a cloth, Connie had put away her tablecloths and got out the embroidered set that had been a wedding present, Edward might no longer come to the table in shirt sleeves and slippers, because it would look so funny if anybody called ; nor might he put his feet up on the fire place when he sat in his armchair. She had varnished over the scratches on the paint that he had made over a span of years. Doyleys and antimacassars broke out like a pox all over the place, and a little painted lacquer tray stood on the table in the hall for letters and circulars.

  Their laundry bills were bigger now, but although she had no time to do any washing for Edward, she was for ever rinsing out and ironing collars and cuffs and little bows to wear at the office. She bought herself a pair of rubber gloves for washing up, but neglected to clean out the oven for so long that Edward had to do it himself one Sunday. She would dust with a feather duster and polish up the letter box and knocker on the front door, but she never scrubbed floors now or beat carpets. When Edward suggested mildly that she might give a little attention to the fundamentals of housework instead of only its trimmings, he had got the same reply as when he said that if she did not darn some of his socks soon he would have to go bare-legged : “You know I’m at business all day. I can’t be a slave to the house as I used. Goodness knows you were on at me often enough to take a job, and now that I have, you’re still not satisfied, it seems.”

  Of course he understood, but it seemed wrong to him that she did not care. Other women cared. Wendy had told him only the other day how she had spent the whole week-end doing what she called “Autumn cleaning”. Spring cleaning was such fun, she said, that she didn’t see why it should only be enjoyed once a year. But when he spoke to Connie about the dust under the bed, she said : “Well, if you’re so particular, I’ll have to get a woman in to do the rough. Goodness, knows we can afford it, and everybody else does.” But most women in at the other end of the table. aaf Connie’s position didn’t. They were not as well off as all that. And most women would have stayed up all night sooner than let another woman rob them of the work that was theirs by right of being married.

  And now there was no ink. This must certainly be the worst run house in Collis Park. What was the good of having a vase of artificial flowers on the sideboard when a man could not even fill his pen in his own house? thought Edward, angrily sharpening a pencil on the blunt bread-knife. He pulled out one of the paper carnations and threw it maliciously into the fire.

  “Coccidiosis,” he wrote, sitting down slightly relieved, “is the bugbear of every fancier, be he amateur or professional.” He looked sideways at the open page of the Encyclopaedia of Rabbit Breeding.

  “It takes two forms,” he went on, adding “as everyone knows,” in accordance with his policy of keeping himself on a level with his readers so as not to be didactic in his information. “The bloated or dropsical cases, where the germ has attacked the bowel “—he crossed out “bowel” and substituted “colon“—“are always fatal. Hard though it may be, it is best to kill the rabbit as soon as you detect trouble, knowing that you are cruel only to be kind.”

  At the factory today, a man from the cylinder block fitting section had come in with a query about exhaust manifold nuts. The old man had obviously told him about Edward and the valves, for a half smile played about his lips as he watched Edward tackle Reenie, who was responsible for nuts and bolts. It was a silly query, for Edward knew that they pooled the manifold nuts in her Fitting Shop, so it was no tragedy if an engine did go through short, but the man pretended he could not read Reenie’s handwriting. Although this was understandable, Edward thought it a trumped-up excuse to come and look at the curio—the charge-hand who did not know a dud valve from a good one. He treated the fitter with dignity and hoped he had not heard Reenie say : “Oh, don’t nark me, Ted. You’d better count the nuts yourself if you think I can’t add.” He did not want everybody to know that his girls had no respect for him, even if it were true.

  Finding that he was staring at the brown velvet curtains, with pencil poised, thinking about Canning Kyles instead of Coccidiosis, Edward shook himself and wrote : “I was in my rabbitry with a friend the other day, talking shop as fanciers will the world over when they get together, and watching a litter of youngsters in a run, when one young doe left her succulent wild greens, walked a few paces, staggered and fell on her side. She got up, staggered again, and fell again, then got up and continued her repast.

  “I don’t like that,” said my friend. “Speaking as a poultry man, I’ve seen many a young fowl behave just like that when the Coccidiosis germ, which has been dormant in the gut, suddenly becomes active and strikes its victim.”

  “I hope you’re wrong, old man,” I said, but I isolated the doe as a precaution, and sure enough she sank so rapidly that I was obliged in a few days to put an end to her suffering.

  This was not true, but it was always best to illustrate a point from personal experience, to get the human touch.

  “Don’t blame me for not trying treatment ; it would have been useless.” E. Dexter Bell always swore that he could cure intestinal Coccidiosis by a draught of his own invention comprising Permanganate of Potash, but Edward, trying it once as a last resort, had found iover his shoulder blyht useless.

  “Ah, you haven’t t
he knack,” said Mr. Bell, seeing himself as a kind of Bernadette of Lourdes. “Don’t ask me why, but it never fails with me. Never lost a rabbit yet.”

  To get his own back, Edward wrote : “Some people maintain that with strange alchemies of their own they can arrest this fell disease, but, personally, I don’t believe a word of it.”

  Feeling better, he wrote on rapidly. “Now the second form, where the germ only attacks the liver, is quite a different pair of shoes. The rabbit loses flesh and becomes generally unthrifty, but does not necessarily lose his appetite. Tackle him right and he may yet turn out a good rabbit—nay, a prize-winner even. This is what I do.” He looked up again at the brown velvet curtains, seeking to make his treatment pithy. The editor was short of space this week.

  Could he be bothered to get up and pull the curtains closer together in case the wardens came? It must be getting on for black-out time. He looked at his watch. Connie had said she would he back for supper, but if she didn’t come soon he was going to get himself something to eat and be hanged with waiting. He was tired of coming home hungry and having to wait so long that he had lost his appetite by the time they did sit down. It had happened last week when Mr. Bell had been coming to supper to talk over plans for the auction sale. Connie had come home all right in time to cook—oh yes, she could cook for company, if not for her husband, reflected Edward bitterly —but Mr. Bell had arrived more than an hour late sublimely unaware that he had kept them waiting. He had helped himself to the cottage pie with the same sublime unawareness that other people existed besides himself, so it was just as well that Edward was no longer hungry.

  His mind wandered still farther away from Coccidiosis and brooded on their conversation after supper. It was a farce to call it discussing plans, when it consisted in Mr. Bell laying down the law and over-coming any opposition by the simple expedient of raising his voice. He was going to give the sale great publicity ; he was full of plans which seemed to Edward cheap and vulgar. The thing was taking on the nature of a stunt instead of a sincere enterprise to promote rabbit breeding and raise money for the Red Cross.

  “I’ll have to see that we get a good write-up in the papers,” Mr. Bell had said, drawing patterns on the tablecloth.

  “I’ll give it a good bit of space in Backyard Breeding, of course,” said Edward, feeling that here at least was something in which he had the advantage of Mr. Bell.

  “Do that by all means, my dear chap, but I was thinking of the real thing, papers that people read.”

  “But they do read Backyard Breeding” said Edward. “It’s got a circulation of——”

  “Oh yes, yes, a certain class of people do, I don’t doubt, but we’re aiming at the great general public, not at the poor little sheep who would trot anywhere after somebody that said ‘rabbits’. You’ve got to learn to broaden your outlook, Ted. I was saying to Connie only today : ‘Ted’s getting narrow-minded, I said. He wants to go about more and see what’s going on in the great world.’ Didn’t I, Connie?” Connie nodded and bit off a thread. Edward had taken the opportunity of asking her to turn a pair of cuffs for him, knowing that she could not refuse with any graciousness in Mr. Bell’s presence.

  When the broad figure took a step nearer to her mother,’ blyh had gone paddling off into the night, after standing long on the doorstep and letting a lot of cold air into the house, Edward had said to Connie : “That chap certainly knows what he wants—and sees that he gets it. I only wish I could think that he were on the right tack.”

  “You get on my nerves with all your moping and worrying, really you do,” said Connie, rolling up the shirt with only one cuff done, “Why don’t you leave the arrangements to him without trying to interfere? He knows much more about it than you do. You may know something about aeroplane engines, but that doesn’t mean to say you know everything. Just because you’re a charge-hand at Kyles, you can’t expect to take charge everywhere.” She had gone up to bed, pleased with her pun, and there was Edward’s see-saw, tipping him from one of his worries to the other again.

  He had not mentioned his trouble at work to Connie. What was the use? She was no more interested in the factory than in rabbits, and even if she did listen, she would not try to understand or take his part. The habit of criticising everything he did was too strong in her. She always knew he was wrong. If he told her it was quicker to go to Harrow by train, she would take a bus without further enquiry. If he said that he thought the Germans could not make another blitz on London, she would begin to agitate about the condition of their street shelter.

  Sitting musing at the table, when he should have been writing his article, he allowed himself to wonder what it would be like to be married to a woman in whom you could confide. How different everything would be now if he could come home and indulge in self-pity and be told how unfair it was, and that of course he was in the right and that the Management ought to be shown up. He remembered how Tom Presser’s wife had once come raging up to the factory like a tigress when Tom was being kept on night duty against the doctor’s advice.

  That was the sort of a wife to have. For a long time now, Connie had not even been a wife to him in “that way” That bewildering but gratifying period when she had suddenly started being nice to him had not lasted very long. She was back on her own extreme edge of the bed, and it would take a thicker-skinned man than Edward to invite her into the middle

  Things might have been different if they had only had a child. They never would now. The last time he had suggested that Connie might pay another visit to the doctor, she had rounded on him with : “If you ask me, it’s you who ought to see a doctor, not me!” He had not mentioned the subject again.

  Because he was feeling particularly low tonight, he allowed himself the forbidden fancy of what his life might have been if he had married someone different. The disturbing part of thinking like this was that picture her as he might, the woman always insisted on looking like Wendy. If he went on imagining what life might have been like if he had married someone like Wendy, it made him feel embarrassed when he saw her next day.

  He recollected himself and, looking at his watch again, saw that he bad not written a word for fifteen minutes. Here, this would never do. “Snap out of it, Cheviot Freemantle” he said, and got up briskly to pull the curtains across the window.

  Sitting down again, he concentrated on his treatment of biliary Coccidiosis. “I give no medicine,” he wrote. “No bread, no bran or oats. I give milk only and any choice tit-bits of green food that the ailing animal will fancy. Just as human invalids must be coaxed to eat, so with the invalid rabbit. Time spent on persuading it to partake of, if you like.”. b nourishment will not be wasted, believe me.”

  He was well into his stride, when he heard Connie’s key in the latch and then the thud of her umbrella dropping into the stand. She opened the door, breaking the thread of his thoughts, and he closed the book and stood up. He would finish the article later when she had gone to bed.

  “Ah, there you are, Con. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”

  She came into the room taking off her gloves, and then unwound her scarf and began to fold it carefully on the table, smoothing out the creases. She looked subtly different tonight, flushed, as if she were excited about something or had been running. When she spoke, she did not meet his eyes. She went over to the mantelpiece and began to fiddle with the things on it, winding up the green glass clock, emptying a clean ashtray into the grate. She seemed to have something on her mind.

  “Well,” said Edward, rubbing his hands. “What’s on the menu for tonight? Tell me what you want to have, and I’ll get supper, Con, if you’re tired.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you, Edward,” she said, turning round to face him, as if she had not heard him.

  “Fire away,” he said. “If it’s about that shaving mirror you broke, don’t worry, because I’ve already seen it.”

  “How silly you are.” She frowned at him.
“Can’t you ever be serious except when you’ve got some worry about your Rabbit Club? You’re glum enough then, goodness knows. In fact, that’s why I haven’t told you this before, although I’ve had it in my head for quite a time. You seemed so wrapped in yourself that I didn’t think you’d trouble about discussing anything else.”

  “Well, let’s discuss it now,” said Edward, “whatever it is, and get it over. I want my supper.”

  She came forward and stood her large patent leather handbag on the table, resting her hands on it. “There’s nothing really to discuss now,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.” She went on rapidly, but speaking in that careful new voice of hers which she used not only with the Bells but when she spoke of them. “You know how interested I am in my work at the estate agency. I can’t think what I should do without it now. Well, it happens that Edgar—Mr. Bell has to go to Birmingham for a while to take charge of the branch of the agency there. They’ve got into difficulties through being understaffed, and he has to go and straighten things out. Mr. Lorrimer will take charge of the London branch ; he’s a very capable man.”