‘Now his towels, can they have their hoops sewn on here?’ a lady was saying, the hard afternoon light creasing her face with all anxiety, the years pressing suddenly forward: ‘I mean, do you do them … here …?’
‘Hoops, madam?’ Mr Lightfoot quietly questioned.
‘Yes, it says here’—and the lady crumpled her school list the better to see—‘require hoops … no, loops, I’m sorry, loops.’
‘Oh loops, madam.’
‘So silly of me. Now who would think of sewing a hoop to a towel?’ the lady laughed.
‘Who would indeed?’ answered Mr Lightfoot, his eyes carefully downcast.
‘You don’t see many hoops about these days, actually,’ the woman continued. ‘I mean, do you?’
‘No,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘Now—he wants some rugger shorts, doesn’t he?’
He angled round the counter neatly to avoid crushing his pocketed pie—why not return it to its place under the counter, with what absurd hope had he pocketed it some twenty minutes past?—and measured the boy.
‘A bit long for John I think,’ he said grating into his voice a kind of joviality.
‘Too low on the knee for Eric‚’ the woman said, and repeated it, Eric.
Slipping, thought Mr Lightfoot, saying: ‘Eric, of course. Of course, young Eric. Where am I?’ But he knew where he was, his tape was at the boy’s knees, and however dissimilar that small grit-smeared knob of bone to the plump dimpled joint whose memory he could not thrust from his mind, he thought: Knees! And guiltily his mind jabbed at him wicked glimpses of the majorette he had followed, like a man in a hangdog raincoat, like a man who writes on walls, through the amusement park only last evening.
The nights were beginning to chill, though the days were still warm: and, if one could bring one’s mind, stifled as it was by the grey flannel atmosphere in the shop, to remember the fresh smells of weather, last night had a breath of winter about it, even a mist had seemed to haze whitely over the park’s still green but drying, dying leaves, making all too still, as if it were a fuzzed dark print of a park—as he had rounded a clump of painted wooden girders to see, in cold lantern light, the lovely military figure of a half-naked lady in a feathered busby.
No one could accuse Lightfoot’s mild and married eye of easy prurience: he was neither shocked nor excited by this abrupt apparition. The world of film posters and lingerie advertisements had accustomed him to the probability that half-naked ladies stood or strode round every corner, and only by chance were rarely seen, so that this lady in the cold blue light seemed to him little more than part of a usual pattern, with her tasselled boots, her high busby, her long naked legs and her frogged bust. He was only a little surprised; and then mostly by the surrounding trees and the wide grass, for these dwarfed her, and usually such ladies were so large. It was probably a simple reflex, man to woman, not consciously interested, that made him look her way twice.
But the second look caught her knees—and then he found himself trapped. Were they really blue, or was it the light? Pretending to be interested in the euphonium carried by a wizened hussar in the band slouched at rest behind her, he edged closer. He saw that her knees were braced back, noted their dark navy dimples, slunk his eye higher to see indeed goose-pimples powdering fine round thighs. Such was the intensity of the light that each small pimple was deeply shadowed, giving the thighs themselves something of the perforated appearance of well-rounded cheese-graters—you could flake off a tasty bite of cheddar there he thought, startled into irrelevance. But he pulled himself up sharp, and forced his eye away to the bandsmen who were now spitting at their instruments and shuffling into position to play. Heavens, he thought, she must be cold! Pray heavens, he wished, that they march off! Just then, from the lady’s light-blacked lips, a little jet of pure white steam escaped. No wonder those knees were braced back! He saw her thighs, the pale blue lovely cheese-grinders, suddenly shiver like the haunches of a thoroughbred horse.
Then, alone round their hidden corner in the park, the band raised instruments to lip, the lady gripped her silvered baton, she laughed for a moment round at them and suddenly heaved her bare arms across her bosom like a frozen cabby—then to spread them wide and take the first prancing step forward as twenty brass instruments and drums behind smashed instantaneously into sound, and they all swung off to the old march, that some people hum like ‘Da-da, and the same to you,’ and others something else.
Lightfoot went with them. The cold had done it. His eyes had settled on her knees, and he would never have more than briefly noticed them but for the cold. But the cold had shown him her real intimate knees beneath the simple cursory idea of knees—and it was indeed the knees that had got at him, not the thighs with their frightening pantalettes and their eye-averting intimations of intimacy, but the big fat-muscled knees with wide hollow holes in them more like the eye-sockets in a pair of chubby skulls than dimples: and he had gone forward, hurrying up past the big-drum and the heavier brass to the cornet row so that he could walk level with her, pretending a jaunty joining in the march, but glancing ever down at these fine live joints he slyly savoured so.
Round the amusement park they had marched, others joining in. Lightfoot had worked out the hairpin bends, and hurried skilfully across, so that he was there waiting with a good view as the band came swinging towards him, the knees prancing upwards first and foremost of all. He shuddered now with shame, and with secret delight, to think of it.
He had been late home for dinner. When his wife had reminded him at some length of this, he had given the excuse of a beer at the buffet. That was also a sin—but how light, how innocent against this other! Normally he would have lied about the beer, she always made such a fuss. But now last night she had capped it all by saying: ‘No need to tell me. Your breath came in the door before you, thanks very much.’
When he had not touched a drop! The injustice! Somehow doubly unjust—since the knee-following was, in all the more practical senses, innocent. Why shouldn’t he? Other men did. But dark thoughts tapped at him saying: Better not start that. Not at your age. Dangerous.
‘Now will these do him? With the wash to pull them up a bit?’ he asked these other small knees belonging to Mrs Arbuthnot’s boy before him.
The mother agreed. He touched the knees with his tape and pulled it away as if he had been stung. Upright again, he turned to her further orders. Guilt, hunger and injustice made a black circle of the soft shop around him. He concentrated on the white patch of his order book, while the air whispered carpet-softened conversations and a machine somewhere quietly clicked.
The boys wanted their teas too. Most of them, being from different schools, stood silent from each other, and silent from their mothers too, for fear of some embarrassing endearment. They stood about bored as dummies, dreamily hungry, faces showing no expression whatever, for so young the set lines of character had not yet engraved them. Yet there were two brothers whispering near Lightfoot’s ear. Licking their lips and mouthing the words voluptuously, they were discussing food:
‘A nice plate of boiled pull-overs, now, how about that?’
‘Toasted ties for me. And plenty of sauce all over.’
‘Lovely thick sock-sauce!’
Mr Lightfoot murmured: ‘Now boys!’ quite sharply, yet smiled up quickly for the mother to see all his teeth. This particular mother was more than usually trying, she had the exact printed list of what was wanted in her hand yet misread it every time: did she disdain spectacles? She certainly disdained him, Lightfoot. She wore on her head a curious nigger brown hat shaped like the hull of a racing-yacht, its prow extending far forward over one eye: perhaps this was worn to overcome her masterfully beaked nose—but that was impossible, and now the nose and this cocked-looking hat and her two cold grey eyes only managed for her the appearance of a faded but still formidable field marshal. Yet, however formidable this Mrs Arbuthnot, who knew what lurked behind in the other mothers? What fearful pleasantries, what chatty passings-of-th
e-time that were finally far more to be feared than this field marshal’s stare?
Setting his teeth, his mind whirling, he wrote and measured and smiled and wrapped. Once he glanced up and saw all the hats before him, perched at such odd angles to the faces, unrelated whorls of felt or straw that primped nevertheless a certain pompous asseverance, an I-am-ness, into the faces beneath—and these hats brought his mind again to his wife, and to injustice. His empty frame burned with indignation. What a situation! Why should his marriage have turned out like a cartoon-joke? All the old clichés prevailed—the voice carving through his morning paper, her acute suspicion of alcohol, dress bills, everything. Somehow she managed to make him feel clumsy and male, while assuming herself a masculine authority: he could not now do the simplest thing, neither take a glass of beer nor an odd hour’s walk, without explanation, examination, judgment. Conditioned to authority by school, by his father, and by the hierarchy of his work, he felt easily guilty: he felt his wife’s eye and her voice everywhere, and nowadays more often than not he hesitated before taking some simple enjoyment, then desisted—quite absurdly, and he knew it. But knowledge is no palliative—and here he was again torturing himself unnaturally about last night. It was all so mixed in his hot muddled mind, guilt and innocence clashed together, sense of sin and injustice brewed in conflict to make an ever more fevered broth boiling up and almost over in him.
His mind shouted. But outside it, in the crowded shop, everything was strangely silent. Among so many assembled, few spoke but the assistants and their immediate customers. The figures of wax boys in glass cases smiled silently at real boys bored and unsmiling. The mothers were of too refined a class easily to engage in small-talk with their fellow-queuers, and when sometimes they did, nervous assurance made the words so loud they quickly died, to be sucked swiftly away into the thick-piled carpet.
Through the window, by a chimney high in the afternoon sky, a little white cloud passed free in the free blue air. And everyone still stood, getting hotter, hungrier, breathing their patience more heavily, while the electric clock moved steadily on, its awful red minute hand racing round. Fresh-pressed flannel shorts lay in quiet grey stacks, cellophane glinted round coiled garters, pants and vests were piled under glass like a museum show of dry fluffed tripe—all was quiet. And the minute hand raced round like a magician’s thin red wand.
Lightfoot suddenly thought: Did they all wear sweat-pads? Looking up swiftly from a woollen sock caught somehow in his carbon paper, he swiftly undressed all the women nearest to him, and saw them with those strange white pads in their armpits, white straps everywhere, a contraption in which he had once surprised his wife looking as if in waterwings. All these women, then—were their well-found suits and dresses merely a smooth deception to cover such wide white balloons? His mind wandered on, aching and light. And how was his pie doing? And when, when would there be tea? A wonderful vision suddenly arose—to soak his feet in a bowl of strong, fresh tea!
‘Stewed vests, with lashings of custard,’ one of the boys mumbled, distinctly licking his lips.
‘Plimsoll custard,’ the other agreed.
‘Hot pants!’ the first boy abruptly shouted, it seemed irrelevantly.
When then suddenly Mr Lightfoot said at the top of his voice: ‘And here are your Rugger shorts, Mrs Arbuthnot. I trust they fit snug and you’ll run a mile in them!’ When this momentous pronouncement rang on the air there was a sudden silence, which previously one would not have thought possible, so quiet was the whispering shop. But now certainly a silence cut hard and heavy, one could scarcely breathe, it was as tangible as if an overflow consignment of blankets had entered the shop above all the other cloths. Even the machine stopped its quiet steady clicking, as if clogged.
‘… and Mrs Arbuthnot’s sports stockings? Many a pretty game with that leg, I’ll be bound‚’ rang out Mr Lightfoot, an awful smile fixed across his face.
Everybody stared. The other assistants along the counter stood stockstill, garments in hand, eyes obtruded with horror. Their foreman, the shopwalker, in black coat and decorated trousers, had been telephoning and now stood with mouth open not speaking into the mouthpiece, a bewildered general flank-attacked, knowing a decision must be made, not immediately knowing how. And the other assistants knew that Lightfoot must have gone mad. None knew what multiple frustrations had burst, but they knew Lightfoot, and now they watched him paralysed, as now speaking in a kind of high comedian’s falsetto, and in caricature of a shop-assistant’s ingratiating manner, he went on holding his stage, grinning his teeth out over stretched lips and spitting hard, hard irony, all poison suddenly erupted.
‘And, Mrs Arbuthnot,’ he minced, ‘would you like the school number nailed into your instep?’—he extended wide a generous arm—‘It would be a pleasure.’
Then the silence around was broken. Somebody laughed. It was no more than a titter. But it humanised the silence, it was the lonely titter in the audience that liberates laughter pent-up for a joke suspected but not quite understood, and it was a titter, not a snigger—it was affirmative. It was infectious. Other titters began, and one lady’s bell-like laugh sounded quite prettily and loud on the air, clearing it.
Mr Lightfoot had opened his mouth again, continuing: ‘… the delicate question arises, Mrs Arbuthnot,’—hearing the titter, mistaking it in his fevered liberty for a snigger, as the others had mistaken the wild light in his eyes for one of fun—‘of your pants, your little winter vests….’
… when something too dreadful occurred, the field marshal’s glare on Mrs Arbuthnot’s face began to fade, even the prow of her nigger hat seemed to recede from its pointed aggression, as between thin ever-so-nicely rouged lips a little tooth poked its way, and the lips themselves rose daintily at the corners to form a shy baby melon; far away at the back of Mrs Arbuthnot’s pale eyes a little light began to dance: rogue dimples, one each side, like the shadows of two pearled lobes, appeared from nowhere—and like a snowdrop pressing shyly through the frost, the girl inside the field marshal came into the full view of everybody.
And the whole shop relaxed. Even the floor-walker beamed—he was not quite sure yet but in any case this unusual situation, however improper, had somehow been saved: from the looks of his custom, it might even be a good thing: ‘I want this shop to be a happy ship’—he remembered his avuncular address at a salesman’s meeting.
Then Lightfoot, continuing but feeling his voice weaken, heard a woman’s whisper: ‘You’ll never get a good cockney down.’
So that was it! He looked round the merry circle of eyes, and at Mrs Arbuthnot’s coy tooth, with growing horror—they were patronising him! Patrons indeed they were, and in the full measure of their removed class they were unbending so much as to treat his great anger as a barrow-boy’s quip, a performance, a cordiality! A smile and a joke whatever the burden … how easy to sit back more comfortably if the poor laughed, all well with the world, conscience appeased … oh God in heaven, cockney wit … and desperate in the face of such laughter, he the irrepressible tried to blaze with anger, but found instead all his spirit deflating, for there he was after all circled with smiles, hemmed in by a rubbery compound of goodwill against which all would bounce back, whatever he tried; and he opened his mouth once for the swear-word that at least might do it—but the word never came, it was not his way … and instead a pepper of tears came to his eye, dry tears that would never truly appear, a burning of eye-ducts echoing the despair that racked his whole body, as he bent down again to his order book, his moment of rebellion over, drained of all further fight, and went on in a quiet voice:
‘And now Madam … the boy’s bedroom slippers?’
To the Rescue!
YOU’D best go by train‚’ said this healthy-looking lady in overalls and some kind of cap, ‘if you ask me.’
Tressiter, who had asked her, looked vaguely about him at the trees heavy with summer, at the model engine bright blue beneath, at the miniature rail disappearing in a miniatur
e curve into green thicket. He remembered the map. No railway. He looked down at high-stepped lizard shoes pointing like a porker’s feet out of the woman’s overall trousers.
‘Train?’ he said, puzzled.
She pointed down at the engine, half the height of the man oiling it. ‘There,’ she said. ‘In five minutes.’
A mixed mob of Brownies and Cubs poured in and out of the miniature carriage doors, little folk in exact proportion to the size of the carriages. At a more distant perspective they might have been a crowd of scout instructors and gym mistresses mobbing round a real train. But just behind them a real and giant scoutmaster and a huge sort of gym mistress stood, bringing a dream unreality to the scene. These two shepherding their last charges into the coach suddenly followed, their heads bowed, their giant shanks dragging after them to disappear finally, satisfactorily within.
Tressiter raised his black homburg and smiled: ‘Well if you say so, Madam,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’
He descended the stairs and put an uneasy hand on the door of an empty carriage. It felt quite solid. He doubled himself down and entered. Inside it was surprisingly capacious—he could sit up straight without bowing his head! Yet the station steps, the platforms, and of course now the carriage windows—all these were definitely undersized, half-sized? He remembered how during the war his battalion had been stationed in a school built for very small children: washbowls, lavatories and so forth were low-down and exactly half-size. It had been strange bending to such dwarf appliances, but possible. It had given one an oddly child’s-eye view of life. A curious sensation. Yet he had noticed that the opposite worked too—here were little things making you feel little, yet big things made you feel little too, he had noticed that, for instance on his Sunday afternoon walks in London, it was only when he passed a really immense house that he felt it to be like the houses of childhood, its size proportionately large to his grown eye. There must, he thought looking out at the real countryside cantering past, be other dimensions at work than those we know.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 44