‘Well, you don’t see many of those fuckers round here, do you?’
Uproar from the actors. Much imitation of the punchline – the face and the words – by the third-rate actors.
‘Scuse me,’ Delia said, getting to her feet. ‘I just need a word with Finlay over there.’
Shearsby’s rueful smile acknowledged she’d beaten him to it. A look of surprised disappointment crossed the face of the so-far silent Tess.
‘Oh—I—’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Nothing. I was going to ask you something. It doesn’t matter, though.’ There was a pleasing music in Tess’s northern accent. Delia found herself wanting to be kind to her.
‘You sure?’
‘Honestly. Some other time,’ the girl said.
Once the woman, Delia, had left them, Tess knew it was just a matter of when Shearsby would feel he had done enough of his duty and could break off the encounter too.
Jimmy said, ‘She doesn’t really work in a shop, does she?’
Shearsby ignored the question and turned to Tess – his back closing off further discussion of Delia, or any other topic, with Jimmy.
To smooth over this rudeness, Penny said something uncomplimentary about the jazz trio – a springboard from which the other two leapt gratefully into a conversation about music, leaving Tess to deal with Shearsby.
‘What sort of an artist are you?’ he asked her.
‘Not one at all, yet,’ she said. ‘I hope I’ll be good enough to be a painter one day.’
‘Not like your friend, then?’
He meant Penny’s idea of becoming a schoolteacher at a boarding school. That ought to have come as a surprise to Tess, since Penny had never mentioned it before. But it was a lazy, pragmatic decision, and there was nothing unexpected about it.
‘No. When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?’
‘Never did. Still don’t. It’s not a calling. It’s – I don’t know – unavoidable, don’t you think? I mean, what would you do if you couldn’t paint or draw?’
She had no answer. Despite all her recent uncertainty this was not a question she had ever considered.
‘Well,’ Shearsby said. ‘That’s my point.’ He kept glancing away from her towards the bar, where Delia was now talking to the club boss and his pretty companion. A look of hostility briefly crossed his face.
‘What’s your view on things in South Africa?’ he said.
‘South Africa?’ What did he mean? A moment ago he’d been talking about art. Being an artist. What did South Africa have to do with that? Marius must have been listening out for this turn in their conversation. He dropped the exchange he was having with Penny and Jimmy.
‘Dad,’ he said. ‘We’re just out to have some fun. There’s no need—’
‘—to talk about anything that actually matters?’ Shearsby interrupted. ‘Aren’t your friends serious people, at least?’
Marius looked down at his drink. Tess flinched at the idea this unforgiving man might think her as frivolous as his son.
‘I’m a serious person,’ Jimmy said, quietly.
Shearsby seemed not to hear him. ‘It’s terrible, how things are over there, and hardly anyone in this country knows about it. There’s a march in a couple of weeks’ time, if you’re interested.’ He put some kind of leaflet on the table, then addressed his son. ‘I’m sorry I was sharp, Marius.’ When Marius did not look up or speak, he said, ‘Well, I’d better be going. I’ve writing to do. I’ll just say goodbye to Delia.’
Jimmy picked up the leaflet. ‘I’d like to find out more about all this.’
Seeing Shearsby about to ignore him a third time, and Marius preparing to say something unpleasant, Tess added, ‘Me too.’
‘Well then,’ Shearsby said with something approaching a smile. ‘Maybe I’ll see you both at the march.’
Up close, Delia could see Maggie wasn’t right. Despair lay immediately beneath the make-up. Her eyes kept trying to focus and then letting go. Mother’s little helpers, most likely, prescribed by the crooked doctor her new boyfriend paid to look after his girls. More than once, Delia had heard Finlay refer to this man as ‘the vet’.
‘Who’s that lot with Shearsby?’ Finlay asked her, as if he was only making conversation.
She told him, ‘The one in the middle’s his son. The other three are his son’s friends.’
‘Yeah, Lenny told me.’
Why bother asking, then? Delia thought. ‘They’re all students,’ she said.
Finlay pretended not to be very interested in the answers to the questions he kept asking. ‘What were they talking about?’
‘Nothing. Themselves.’
‘Oh yeah? Like what?’
‘That girl on Shearsby’s left, the taller one. She’s going to be a teacher in a private school. The son, Marius, is doing some sort of business certificate. The other two are just art students.’
For the moment he seemed to have all the information he wanted. He fell silent and watched what was happening over on Shearsby’s table.
Maggie said, ‘You seen my kids recently, Dee?’
‘Few days back, I did, yeah. Jemima was walking them to school. Making sure they didn’t get lost on the way in.’
Maggie laughed. ‘When Albie was looking after them, the truant officer used to be round our house all the time. Jem won’t have none of that. How’d they look?’
‘Healthy.’ Delia wasn’t sure how much to say, how Maggie would feel about her children not needing her. It might be a relief, she supposed, but it might hurt her too. ‘They were happy, far as I could tell.’
Still with an eye on Shearsby’s table, Finlay said, ‘Not too sorry about their old man, then?’
‘Kids are tough,’ Delia replied.
Without looking at Maggie, Finlay laid his hand on her arm. It might have looked like a sympathetic gesture. Maybe that was how it was meant. But Delia doubted it. She remembered one time when she was a kid, evacuated to Somerset. A farmer had brought his dog to heel with a tiny click of his tongue, barely audible, and then winked at the child. Men like Finlay were that way with their women, always showing off their control, never guessing what they were really demonstrating was their weakness.
Maggie finished her drink and called to the barman for another. Finlay signalled his permission with an exasperated sweep of his hand, like he was batting away a moth. He probably didn’t want Maggie drinking so much, but he had other things to worry about. He returned his attention to Delia.
‘What about before?’ he asked her.
‘Before?’
‘When you were talking to Shearsby on your own. What’d he have to say for himself?’
‘Oh—’ she’d already started forgetting that conversation. ‘His plays. Things he writes for the telly.’
‘He writes for the telly?’ Maggie said.
‘Yeah. Dixon of Dock Green, apparently. And he did a play about a young woman who runs away from home.’
‘Ooh. Girl on the Run?’ Maggie said.
‘That’s the one, I think.’
‘I saw that. It was ever so good. He wrote it?’ Full of admiration, she gazed across at Shearsby, who was talking animatedly to the girl called Tess.
‘That all?’ Finlay said. ‘No politics?’
Delia decided to improvise. Give the man something he might want to hear. ‘He’s writing a thing for the telly about the blacks,’ she said.
‘Oh yes? Which blacks is that?’ Finlay was always keen to hear about any talk to do with the blacks.
‘The usual ones. Them that go on all the marches in the States.’
At that he lost interest again, for real this time. Wrong sort of blacks, obviously.
‘You don’t think about someone writing it,’ Maggie said. ‘When you’re watching a story, you just imagine it’s real people.’
Shearsby was standing up now, saying goodbye to Marius and his friends. He came over to the bar.
‘I’m
off home,’ he said to Delia. ‘Writing to do.’
Finlay ground out his cigar. ‘We’re going too, Bill. Whereabouts do you live?’
‘Clapham.’
‘That’s well out of our way. But still, we ain’t got nothing better to do. Why don’t we give you a lift?’
‘You’re all right, Finlay. I’ll take the night bus. Public transport’s good for writers. Sitting in expensive cars, you lose touch. But thanks anyway.’
Finlay caught Delia’s eye and inclined his head slightly towards the table Shearsby had just vacated, where the four students were still sitting. She gave him a tiny nod of understanding.
‘All right,’ he said to Bill Shearsby. ‘We’ll walk downstairs with you, anyway. C’mon Mags.’
‘See you Dee,’ Maggie said. She stood and put on a fur coat, which looked very like that fox jacket from the day in Barkers when Maureen had got herself caught. Quite possibly it was the same one. Delia pushed aside an echo of sadness, of guilt, and made her heart small and cold.
Some kind of disagreement had broken out between the art students. The two boys had stood up and were facing each other off. Neither of them looked much like a fighter, but if she had to guess, her money would be on the queer rather than the bore. Anyway, nothing would happen. Lenny the doorman was on his way over to deal with it.
‘Typical,’ Marius said, right after his father had left them. ‘He can’t bear to be around me for more than quarter of an hour.’ He was drunk, Tess saw. Drunker than the rest of them. Otherwise he’d have kept that thought to himself.
‘Maybe he’s—’ Jimmy began, then decided not to finish the thought.
‘What?’ Marius asked. ‘Maybe he’s what?’
‘Sorry, it’s none of my business, is it?’
‘Go on,’ Marius insisted.
Jimmy smiled artlessly. ‘Really. Let’s talk about something else.’
He won’t leave it alone, Tess thought. This conflict was in motion now, and if Jimmy was forced into a fight, he’d do anything necessary to win it. Marius imagined he had the upper hand, was too drunk to understand that he really ought to stop. Leaning in, he fixed his eyes on Jimmy’s. ‘You obviously understand my father better than I do. So let’s hear it, Mr “I’ll come on your march, Mr Shearsby, Sir”.’
‘Listen,’ Jimmy said, his voice level, meticulous. ‘I’m not the one who abandoned you when you were a kid, and I’m not the one who doesn’t like you now.’ He stopped speaking, as if he was finished, but Tess knew he was waiting deliberately for Marius to open his mouth. She was right: as soon as he did so, Jimmy interrupted him. ‘Well, no, that’s not true exactly. I don’t like you, but that’s neither here nor there, is it? We’re nothing to each other. Why not show some guts? Go and take it out on your dad, rather than me.’
Marius slumped in his chair. ‘I’d like you to leave,’ he said.
Before she could think about it, Tess found herself saying, ‘Oh, don’t be so absurd!’
Furiously, he turned on her. ‘You can get out too, you little slut. I saw what you were up to. Flirting with a man twice your age. It’s disgusting.’
Was that really how it had looked? It was a horrible, insulting lie. Tess wanted very much to punish Marius for it, but Penny did the job for her.
‘Speaking of your father, we’re all his guests, aren’t we, rather than yours? He’s on his way out now with that owner chap. I’ll nip over and ask him if we can stay, shall I?’
Marius was suddenly all supplication. ‘I didn’t say you were to leave, Penny. Just these two.’
‘Well, of course I can’t stay if you throw out my friends,’ she said.
Tess felt grateful for this defence, though she knew it was mostly an excuse for Penny to exercise power over Marius. She looked over to the bar, where she saw William Shearsby glance back across at his son’s table, realise what was going on, and turn to leave the club. Marius saw it too. And he saw her see it. He rose to his feet, accidentally knocking his glass over in the process. Spilled beer crawled across the table towards the flyer Shearsby had left there.
Jimmy grabbed the piece of paper. ‘Careful chum.’
Marius narrowed his eyes. ‘Fuck off, you fucking degenerate!’
Jimmy stood too, a smooth, controlled motion. ‘Do you want me to punch you, Marius? You could try and hit me back then. Would that make you feel better, do you think?’
Then there was a third person standing by their table. The scar-faced little doorman, with a bar towel in his hand. ‘Everything all right here?’ he said.
‘S’fine,’ Marius replied. There was, Tess thought, relief in his voice.
‘You’ve had a little accident, I see.’ The doorman righted the glass and spread the towel on the table. Then he took hold of Marius’s upper arm. ‘All right, Sir. I’ll help you find your way out, shall I?’
‘I know the way,’ Marius murmured, allowing himself to be led to the door.
‘You might catch up with your old man, if you’re quick,’ Jimmy said. Marius affected not to hear. Before he sat back down, Jimmy folded the soaked bar towel into four and dumped it on Marius’s empty chair. ‘Well that was awful,’ he said.
Penny chuckled unkindly. ‘You terrified the poor thing! What would you have done if that bouncer hadn’t arrived?’
‘Oh, there was never any danger of that. I’d seen him heading for us before I stood up.’
‘Still, if it had turned into a proper fight, would you have won, do you think?’
‘No idea.’
Tess said, ‘Anyway, I’m glad he’s gone. I can’t believe he accused me of flirting with his father.’
‘Well, of course you weren’t,’ Penny said, and for some reason that unthinking dismissal annoyed Tess more than the original accusation had.
Jimmy opened the leaflet. It was a single sheet of white paper, covered on both sides with heavy black type.
He turned it over and read the other side. ‘It says the United Nations have called for a weapons boycott, but Macmillan’s refusing to honour it.’
‘Commie rot,’ Penny said. ‘These people want to hand Africa over to a lot of savages. My uncle and aunt had to move out of Kenya during all that Mau Mau business. Even in Rhodesia, where she is now, you can’t trust the servants not to murder you in your sleep.’
Hearing them talk like that, Tess felt shamed by her ignorance. Apartheid, Mau Mau, Rhodesia, United Nations – she knew these were the kind of things on which she ought to have a view. Everyone else – Jimmy and Penny and Bill Shearsby – seemed to understand all about them, while she herself had only the vaguest idea. Macmillan was Prime Minister, of course, leader of the Conservative Party; and there had been other names on the leaflet – people scheduled to speak at the rally – whom she half recognised as politicians of some sort. Barbara Castle and Harold Wilson. They were from the Labour Party, she was pretty sure.
In a year’s time, she’d be twenty-one, old enough to vote, and it was likely there would be a general election soon after. She was going to have to make an informed decision. Her parents had always voted Conservative in a ward that invariably returned a Labour MP. What was the point of that? Or any of it? One person’s political argument always sounded as convincing to her as another’s, and whenever such matters came up, she struggled to prevent her thoughts from drifting away. Realising they had done so now, she refocused her attention, and found that for some reason Jimmy was talking about George Orwell having shot an elephant. She wondered if he’d noticed her not listening.
‘Mind if I join you again?’ said a voice behind Tess. It was that woman from before. Bill Shearsby’s friend.
‘Certainly,’ Penny said. ‘Did you perhaps notice the recent display of manly ferocity?’
‘I saw your friend got a bit upset. What was that all about?’
‘Nothing much,’ Jimmy said. ‘Marius thinks I’ve got designs on his sister. He was trying to defend her honour.’
Delia took a seat between Penny an
d Jimmy. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s understandable.’ Tess didn’t think she sounded convinced.
‘I came over,’ continued Delia, ‘because I was wondering what it was you wanted to ask me before?’
‘Oh, that,’ Tess said. With everything that had happened since, the thought had quite gone out of her head. Now Delia had reminded her, it seemed an even more essential idea. ‘It’s just – would you let me paint your picture?’
Delia raised her eyebrows. Smiled. Tess had the feeling the request had surprised her, that she was trying to look as if it hadn’t, was taking a moment to formulate an answer. ‘I’d have to come to your studio, I suppose?’
‘I don’t have a studio of my own. Anyway, I’d rather come to your place, if that’s all right – for the sketches anyway. I’ll do the painting itself back at college.’ The switch from conditional to definite was deliberate. Tess hoped it would somehow confirm the idea in Delia’s mind, give her the impression she had already agreed to something.
‘How long would these sketches of yours take?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of hours perhaps.’
‘I got work to go to in the day. It’d have to be a weekend.’
‘How about Sunday? And you can have some of the sketches to keep, once I’m done. If you like them.’
Jimmy said, ‘Might be worth a bit, those, if she gets to be a famous artist one day.’
Delia gave him an appraising look. ‘Everything isn’t about money, young man.’
He looked ashamed, but Delia agreed to the offer, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad move after all. She drew a little map for Tess, directions on foot from Fenfield Underground Station to her flat on Doddington Road, under which, in the graceful, schooled handwriting of a previous generation, she added instructions, turn-by-turn.
‘Sunday afternoon, then. After church,’ Delia said and Tess couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
Later, Penny told her, ‘You probably shouldn’t go there. It’s not safe.’ When Tess said she was going, safe or not, Jimmy offered to accompany her. She refused.
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