An Impossible Marriage

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Thus this business of the letters of credit became my major preoccupation of a depressing nature; my major preoccupation of a pleasing one was food, and this I shared with Miss Rosoman. Naturally her three pounds a week went further than my two; but then she, being bigger framed and markedly viscerotonic by temperament, needed more to eat than I did. Out of my salary I had to find six shillings a week for fares and ten shillings a week to help Aunt Emilie and my father at home; I spent five shillings on cigarettes (ten a day, for I was a precocious smoker with a genuine craving that was to become worse with time); the remaining nineteen shillings had to cover my insurance stamps, my clothes, my weekly visit to the cinema, my trifling cosmetics and my food.

  So the daily lunch (at the ABC four days in the week and at Slater’s on pay-day) became a matter for much mouthwatering thought and planning. It was the focus of a dull morning, the background music of a busy one. My favourite meal was scrambled egg on toast (eightpence), a a small, canary-coloured sponge pudding with blackcurrant sauce (fourpence) and a cup of coffee (twopence)—one and twopence in all; and if I had a one-and-sixpenny meal on Friday this brought my expenditure on food to seven shillings and twopence a week, the extra shilling representing tips. Miss Rosoman, concerned for her weight, chose her food more ascetically—a salad, Rye-Vita biscuits, a glass of orangeade; but the quantity she needed to sustain her energy was so much greater than I needed myself that her food bill fell into proportion with her salary.

  One aspect of life at the agency was peculiarly trying. Until the end of September we were so busy that a moment of idleness was something disconcerting, something we hardly knew how to employ, something, in fact, vaguely embarrassing. From the first of October to the first of March there was almost no work at all—on some days literally none. Yet Miss Rosoman and I, in the outer office, could not be seen in the act of obvious relaxation because of the faint chance that some official from the Other Side should arrive unexpectedly and decide that Mr. Fawcett’s organisation was not pulling its weight. We could relax until ten-thirty, the official opening hour for customers, and from half-past nine until that hour (having written and despatched such few letters as there might be, filed a few cards relating to new customers) we could look through Time and the New Yorker, make a start on The Times crossword puzzle, or even (in Miss Rosoman’s case) knit. For the rest we had to pretend to be busy.

  This was often no difficult matter for me, as my fury of creative energy was growing. I was now managing to sell a poem or two fairly regularly; and I was trying my hand at a fanciful, undocumented biography of Christopher Marlowe. So I could sit and scribble industriously hour by hour upon pink ‘second copy’ paper, while Miss Rosoman tapped away at her private correspondence and Mr. Baynard, at his desk at the far end of the room, very slowly read ‘Sapper’ under cover of the Barclays Bank Annual Report and occasionally rose to perform the disquieting action of drying out his sodden handkerchief before the electric fire, for he was much given to streaming colds.

  If Miss Rosoman (privileged) raised her brows in protest he would whip round on her. ‘All right, I know what you’re thinking! But it’s perfectly healthy because all the germs go up in the steam.’

  ‘Filthy devil,’ she would whisper to me. ‘He makes me entirely sick.’

  But as his colds grew steadily worse towards the winter equinox, so his temper grew more uncertain, and with it his tendency to be purely spiteful.

  It was a chilly, saffron-coloured morning in early November. I had been to Brown’s (Hatton was running messages in the City) to take a client who was still perching there like some forgotten swallow her steamship tickets for next week. Miss Rosoman and Miss Cleek were away with influenza, Mr. Fawcett more than normally anxious and withdrawn because his younger son had just been sent down from Oxford for pathological laziness. I returned, nipped and despondent, to find Mr. Baynard prowling about in a kind of obscure, triumphant rage and almost the entire contents of our filing cabinet strewn about the floor.

  ‘What happened?’ I demanded, aghast. The files were my affair.

  ‘We’ve got to look busy even if we’re not. I’m fed up with you girls knitting and scribbling. You can just amuse yourselves putting all these back again.’

  ‘Putting them back?’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘You’d better have your ears seen to. I’ve noticed before that you’re a bit deaf. It may be wax,’ he added, with something like a touch of nervous conciliation. He recovered himself from the impulse to retreat. Rage was as thick in him as his cold; it was a catarrh of meaningless rage. ‘Better be seen doing the filing than doing nothing. Any of the big pots may look in—they never warn us. How do we know?’

  ‘But,’ I protested, almost in tears, I’d taken so much trouble with those files. I’d got a better system.’ Horror weakened me. ‘I was so proud of them,’ I said abjectly.

  I realised he had planned for me labour as futile and degrading as the labour of the treadmill. I could not bear it. ‘It isn’t fair!’ I broke out.

  ‘Will you remember,’ said Mr. Baynard, ‘that you’re the Junior, and the Junior does what she’s told.’

  My spirit withered. Almost in tears, shaken by fury, I stooped to my absurd task.

  At twelve he went out to lunch. ‘You can hold the fort,’ he said airily. I’ll be back at one. And Hatton’s due any minute.’

  But Hatton was kept by the City manager, and Mr. Fawcett emerged at a run to tell me he had an appointment with a Mrs. Schuyler Loring at the Berkeley. For the first time I was entirely alone, with my files and my savage grief.

  I had not been alone ten minutes when I heard the whine and clatter of the lift, and into the office walked a tall, pallid young man in English tweeds and a bowler hat. He gave me his card; I sent him to the rest-room while I looked him up, and found he was my first millionaire, worthy of an A.

  We had our own private designations for the clients on these cards, and it was based strictly upon our previous record of their tourism. We knew them as A, B and Query, and Miss Rosoman and I were adept at assigning our clients when they turned up without warning, to hotels consonant with these grades. I saw at once that James R. Dewey III was an A man, a Claridge’s man, and that he was not merely a dollar but a sterling millionaire, his father a steel magnate. This was a client not for Mr. Baynard but for Mr. Fawcett himself. Should I telephone the Berkeley? Would Mr. Fawcett be annoyed to be disturbed in his communion with Mrs. Loring, also an A, and, though less wealthy than Mr. Dewey, a regular client appearing regularly every year with the celandine and departing with the first aster? I stood irresolute amid Mr. Baynard’s brutal litter.

  At last I went to the rest-room and told the young man that Mr. Fawcett was out on business. Would he like me to try and find him, or was there anything I could do for him temporarily?

  He had risen at once with a graceful and rather startling movement, like smoke rising from an unsuspected spark on a still day. He looked down at me with the conscious pleasure of the man who enjoys his own height. ‘I can think of nothing you couldn’t, I guess.’ He examined me frankly. ‘Could you accommodate me by cashing a small cheque?’

  I told him I should have to work it out.

  ‘You must get pretty deft at all this,’ he said, following me into the outer office. I shut him on to his own side of the counter, took the traveller’s cheque and went with false confidence to the calculating machine. The sum was an easy one, and I think I should have done the exchange easily enough if I had not first been upset by Mr. Baynard and was not being upset now by Mr. Dewey’s gentle, interested scrutiny. He watched me while I scribbled meaninglessly on paper, and then as I set up the metal figures and turned the handle. The result stood there, as usual, literally pointless: and at the idea of having to think where that point should go my nerve snapped. ‘Can you work it?’ I cried.

  He laughed right out then. ‘You ha
ve got a queer set-up here!’

  ‘No, we haven’t. It’s just that everyone’s out. I don’t do this usually.’

  ‘You poor little thing!’ Mr. Dewey exclaimed. ‘It’s a shame. You turn that gadget round and I’ll fix it.’

  He looked at the result I had already achieved. ‘I guess you’re a mathematical genius, Miss—’

  ‘Jackson,’ I told him. ‘Why am I?’

  ‘No one else could have got it to do a thing like this.’

  ‘It’s the decimals,’ I said, at his mercy.

  ‘But even the figures are screwy. Look, shall I give you a lesson?’

  He smelled of some kind of toilet-water, or shaving-cream, and also of very clean flesh. His linen was stiff and white as new cartridge-paper.

  ‘Someone may come back.’

  ‘O.K.’ He operated the machine himself. ‘You owe me sixteen pounds four shillings and threepence. Will you take my word for it? Here, don’t you write it down on anything? You’ll have to account for what you take from the till. Do you keep the money up here?’

  A wild idea came to me that he might be a bank robber. He saw it in my eyes.

  ‘I’m not Jesse James,’ he said reassuringly.

  ‘The bank sends it up every day in the pneumatic tube and then we send it down again.’ I counted out notes for him and he took them with a stately bow.

  ‘Where should I get some lunch?’ he asked me.

  This was an easy question. Classing him as A, I suggested three or four smart restaurants frequented by Americans of his own grade.

  ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘Oh, anywhere,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes—but couldn’t I go, too?’

  Now this was my first millionaire, and he was asking me to lunch. I was stimulated by excitement to the entirely new sensation of greed. If I were going to lunch with a millionaire, then I would have the best of it. I would not go where I usually went; I would go where he did.

  ‘You wouldn’t care for any of my places.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Why not?’

  ‘They’re just places for business girls.’

  ‘Called—?’

  I did not understand.

  ‘What are they called?’ he repeated.

  ‘You wouldn’t care for them,’ I said stubbornly. I was watching the door. At any moment Mr. Fawcett might return, or Hatton.

  ‘Would you have lunch with me?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I’m harmless. Would you?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to—’

  ‘Then where do we go?’

  ‘There’s the Monseigneur in Jermyn Street,’ I said, my heart beating.

  ‘The Monseigneur it is. When are you free?’

  ‘Not till one.’

  ‘Shall I call for you?’

  No, I said; it would be far better for me to meet him.

  It was not that Mr. Fawcett would have refused me permission; anything, within reason, must be done to satisfy the whims of A clients. But he would have sent Hatton to follow me like a shadow, loom just beyond the outer edge of my sight (a mere edge of darkness at the extreme corner of my eye) and then follow me back to the agency again. And I wanted this joy, this Arabian Nights adventure, all to myself.

  Mr. Dewey could not have understood all of this, as he did not know our habits; but he understood me sufficiently. ‘I’ll meet you at Monseigneur, then, a little after one.’

  At that moment Hatton came back, the braided cap set well forward on his bright red hair, his lips pursed in a silent whistle. Mr. Dewey departed quickly.

  Hatton threw down a packet of ten Goldflake and held out his hand. This meant that he had won them at darts, in the Coventry Street Arcade; that his victory had cost threepence, and that for fivepence he would hand me the prize. I was saving several pence a week through this arrangement, as he was the champion of Leytonstone, where he lived.

  ‘’Oo’s ’e?’

  I told him.

  ‘Cash a cheque for ’im? Get it right?’

  ‘It was quite simple,’ I replied with dignity.

  ‘Coming on, aren’t you?’ He looked at the floor. ‘’Oo made that bloody mook-oop?’

  I told him bitterly about Mr. Baynard’s scheme for employing my leisure.

  ‘‘E’s a young—’ Hatton never articulated any word more violent than ‘bloody’ in my presence; but he would form the others with his lips, leaving me in no doubt as to his thought. ‘’Coom on, pick your feet up and I’ll ’elp you.’

  Hatton and I were friends. He was a clever man, his mind quick and neat. He knew the workings of the business as well as Mr. Baynard, operated the calculating machine (which he was not supposed to touch) more quickly than anyone, and had a gift as instinctive as Miss Rosoman’s or my own for assigning the right person to the right hotel. Coming through the gate into the outer office, he gave the files a swift glance, glanced as swiftly into the few Mr. Baynard had inadvertently left in their places. In ten minutes he had them all back again in beautiful orderliness, A, B, C, down to Z, green ones for customers of long standing, pink for newcomers, blue for customers heralded by letter but not encountered as yet. ‘And if ’e does a mooky trick like that again I’ll let ’im ’ave the sole of my boot,’ Hatton flung at me, as he marched off to his own headquarters. He would, of course, do no such thing; but it comforted his pride to think he might. I heard him, in the back room with the brooms and the vacuum-cleaner, humming his favourite song:

  ‘ Exercise, Exercise,

  In the morning when you rise.’

  Chapter Eleven

  By one o’clock I was repenting my audacity in suggesting that Mr. Dewey should take me to the Monseigneur.

  To begin with, I was a little frightened. Suppose he was the wrong kind of man? He might make suggestions to me. Never having received a suggestion before, I did not know how I should acquit myself. I was a little too mature to imagine that he might drug my drink (which was a common practice of wicked men, in the opinion of Aunt Emilie) in so public and reputable a place; but I did wonder whether I might not be weak enough to agree to ‘go to his room’ later, should he ask me to do such a thing, and then, through sheer punctilio, be forced to implement the promise.

  More serious than these vague and drifting fears, however, was the fear of being ashamed in his eyes before the waiters. For weeks I had put off mending the lining of my coat, which was now ripped from armpit to hem. Could I insist upon keeping that coat on, no matter how warm the restaurant was? I could tell him that I felt the cold to an abnormal extent. He would find this either interesting or ridiculous, according to the heat of the restaurant. But I should have to risk his findings. I shivered, in my imagination, as I saw the long tear exposed to public view, lying like a ragged snake over the back of a gilded chair. I saw the waiters grinning behind their smooth, exotic hands. I saw Mr. Dewey repressing a contemptuous smile. Whatever happened, I must keep my coat on.

  By ten to one I was so apprehensive that my legs were quivering. As if that were not enough, Mr. Baynard did not reappear—and then, with only the barest of apologies —till ten past one, when I had, through a fever of impatience, to give him an account of my stewardship. I had only time to rub some powder on my face, slide anyhow into my hat and the disastrous coat, and run at full tilt up Lower Regent Street to the Monseigneur.

  He was waiting for me there (I had even been praying that he had given me up and gone away), as calm, as cheerful as if we had been old friends and I had been punctual to the minute.

  He cut short my excuses.

  ‘You’re here now,’ he said comfortably, ‘that’s the thing.’

  I had not realised that the grill-room was in the basement. When he took me into the little lift, trellised with gold and with gilded flowers,
I felt I was being abducted into hell. I could find nothing to say. The tremor persisted in the calves of my legs.

  ‘What’s your name besides Jackson?’ he asked, as I walked by his side through a hot and golden nightmare, between little tables garnished with rose, carnation, lily. I told him.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ he said; ‘so pretty I shan’t need to call you Andy, as I would have done if your name had been Miss Jackson, Euphemia.’

  I was too dulled with fright even to understand simple jokes. I knew he had made a joke, and my misery was refreshed by the fear that, since I had laughed only feebly, he would think I had no sense of humour.

  I saw a narrow Byzantine face, two lean and prayerful hands. They were sharp upon the general haze. They appeared to want something. ‘May I take your coat, madam?’ the face murmured.

  I said clearly, to Mr. Dewey, ‘I won’t leave my coat; I feel the cold quite abnormally.’

  There seemed to be quite a long silence, during which I realised that the temperature of the room could not be unlike that of the steam-room of a Turkish bath.

  ‘Quite sure?’ Mr. Dewey asked in a tone of pure astonishment.

  ‘I’ve always been like that,’ I said. ‘Even at home I often keep my coat on.’

  ‘Oh, you do,’ he replied.

  He ordered the meal; I could not assist him. I could not read so many words on so large a card. He gave me a dry martini, a drink I had never tasted before, and immediately it made me feel much better and much worse. I could talk now, and I did; but I was feeling the heat so intensely that I knew it could be only a moment before it betrayed me by manifesting itself in a sweat all over my face.

  ‘Are you quite sure you’re not feeling it too warm?’ he asked me concernedly.

  ‘I’m barely comfortable now,’ I replied. ‘I feel just nice.’

  I took a mouthful of the second drink, which he had bought without consulting me, and all at once I knew myself to be silvered all over, my cheeks blazing under the glaze of perspiration, runnels of moisture appearing under the brim of my hat.