Finer Things

by David Wharton

  She considered choking back a sob, but that would be too much. It was enough to let a pause imply her restraint. The emotion could speak for itself.

  ‘We were both here at the time, weren’t we, Miss Chalmers?’ the saleswoman said. ‘I’m sure your daughter’s learned her lesson.’

  ‘Thank you both,’ Delia said, glancing accusingly at the shopwalker. ‘Those so-called friends of hers all got off scot-free. It was only our Maureen got locked up. She wasn’t suited for it, Ma’am. All those young criminals. You can see from her face how she suffered in there.’

  ‘Oh, the poor thing!’ said Miss Chalmers.

  Affecting a struggle to reassert her dignity, Delia kept an eye on the shopwalker. Obviously he didn’t believe any of this, but he was puzzled enough by her game to let it continue.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘But we didn’t come here today to make excuses. We came to make amends. Me and her dad’ve thought and thought about this, and we’ve decided there’s only one thing we can do.’ She took her purse from her handbag. ‘That’s the same hat my daughter tried to steal last year, I believe? We’d like to purchase it.’

  As she had anticipated, both saleswomen were horrified to see this unfortunate woman reach deeply into her life’s savings to buy an item for which she’d have no use whatsoever.

  ‘There’s really no need, Madam,’ said the senior assistant.

  ‘I insist,’ Delia replied, opening her purse. She’d chosen the smallest one she owned and overstuffed it with far more money than it had been designed to contain. ‘Sixty pounds, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sixty guineas, actually,’ said Miss Chalmers.

  ‘Oh.’ In a perfect moment, Delia actually felt her face flush with shame, as if she had not known, had not constructed this misunderstanding on purpose. ‘I see. Well, that would mean another three pounds, wouldn’t it? I’m sure I must have that much. Would you mind if I—?’ She went over to the counter, opened the change pocket of her purse and tipped its contents carefully onto the surface. There were eight silver shillings in there, a sixpence and a scattering of copper coins. Delia set about counting the money meticulously back into her purse, as if she hoped some impossible mathematics might reveal the three extra pounds she needed to pay for the hat. She made this awful process last as long as she dared, paralysing the two saleswomen into an agony of embarrassment. Once she had finally collected all the coins, she kept her eyes down and said, ‘I’m afraid I’m a little short. I’ll have to go the bank and come back later, if that’s all right.’ She turned to the junior assistant. ‘Would you mind taking it off display for me, Miss? I’d hate to find someone else had bought it.’

  This prompted the senior saleswoman with the idea she needed. Her voice was almost joyous, ‘Ah. I was about to explain about that, Madam. I’m afraid another customer has already purchased this item. A gentleman bought it only this morning. For his wife’s birthday. We were just about to wrap it up for him.’

  This woman was an appallingly poor liar, Delia thought, and May was an odd time to give anyone a fur hat. But the script had unrolled according to plan, so she remained mute.

  ‘He’ll be back to collect it this afternoon,’ Miss Chalmers added helpfully.

  Maureen took Delia’s hand in hers. ‘Let’s go, Mum.’

  But Delia was not quite ready yet to finish. Fixing the senior assistant with a look of desperation, she said, ‘You’ll be ordering more of these, surely?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Madam. This one has been in stock for some time, and the furrier only makes them in winter.’

  Delia looked around herself, as if in a daze of bafflement. ‘I just thought I should— that I had to—’

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ Maureen said, tugging gently at her hand. ‘I don’t like it here.’ She glanced in the direction of the two assistants. ‘No offence.’

  The fat shopwalker decided it was time for him to take charge. ‘Tell you what, ladies,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I walk you both out of the store? This isn’t a place either of you wants to be, is it?’

  The kindliness was a pose, of course. Still, Delia let Maureen lead her to the down escalators with the shopwalker at their side. He rode behind them, one step above, during their descent, and when they all stood on solid ground, he was his sneering self again.

  ‘Whatever you pair of slags are up to, it isn’t going to work,’ he said. ‘You might have fooled those two up there, but you can’t fool me.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Delia said.

  Discreetly, out of anyone’s sight, unless they’d been watching closely, he gripped her wrist, held it just tightly enough to hurt a little.

  ‘I’m thinking perhaps we might all go into my office for a little search,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Maureen said. ‘You going to make me strip down to my underwear again, are you?’ And she whispered, ‘We’re not scared of you, you dirty sod.’

  With his free hand, he took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘Maybe you ought to be scared, Maureen. Because you’ve got a record, been locked up for this sort of thing already. I’ll bet I can find evidence on you two. Stuff you’ve got hidden in your knickers.’

  ‘Whether anything’s there or not, I’ll bet,’ Delia said.

  His mouth compressed into a narrow smile. ‘See, Maureen. Your mum understands.’

  He shut up as a young couple went past. The husband fussed over his heavily pregnant wife, annoying her. The woman’s tight black jersey emphasised her gravid belly.

  ‘Just let me be, Alec,’ she snapped.

  ‘Well, sorry for trying to take care of you and our baby,’ the husband said crossly. He pushed on a little ahead of her, but then stopped to let her catch up and began apologising for real.

  Delia watched this little drama play itself out all the way to the exit, where the young woman finally planted a kiss of forgiveness on her husband’s cheek. The shopwalker’s paw was still around her wrist. She felt it growing slippery with sweat.

  ‘Some of the girls who come pinching stuff here,’ she told him, ‘have employers. Businessmen.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Why should I care about that?’

  ‘Because these particular businessmen have ways of dealing with things that get in the way of their business. For example, if some shopwalker turned out to be a problem to them, he’d probably wake up one morning with his fat fucking belly sliced open and his guts all over the bedroom floor.’

  She’d been mimicking the sort of thing Stella might say. It seemed to work. At the very least it had surprised him. His mouth flapped open and shut several times. He let go of her wrist.

  ‘That’s a lot of rubbish,’ he said eventually, but he stepped back from them. ‘Piss off, the pair of you. And don’t let me catch either of you in this store again.’

  ‘Bye then, porky,’ Maureen said. ‘See you soon.’

  They strolled unhurriedly away. About halfway to the exit, Delia stopped and looked back. The shopwalker had not moved. She picked up a cashmere scarf, held it up to the light and then wrapped it around Maureen’s neck. The shopwalker stayed where he was, watching them as they continued on their way. Just before the revolving doors Maureen stopped, took off the scarf and draped it over the shoulders of a female dummy in swimwear. Then they left.

  ‘You scared the life out of him,’ Maureen said once they were out on the street. ‘He won’t sleep for days, probably.’

  But Delia wasn’t thinking of the shopwalker any more. She was looking at the window displays. There were dummies in the new season’s fashions; piles of tableware; a kind of gigantic fan made of different curtain materials. The Doris Day scenes had all gone.

  Some silences are easy and comfortable, some are not. As they walked together along Kensington High Street, Delia found the one that had fallen between her and Maureen was of the latter sort. She had thought she felt a kind of mother’s love, had imagined herself bound by it, but now she no longer owed the girl anything, all she wanted wa
s to escape.

  After fifteen minutes they reached the Albert Memorial. A young couple were messing about on the street. It was the same pair who had pushed past them in Barkers. The pregnant wife leant against the memorial’s gates, watching her husband perform a kind of unschooled tap dance on the street.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Delia said to the wife.

  ‘Entertaining me, apparently,’ she replied. ‘He’s still all excited.’

  Jimmy stopped dancing. ‘I’ve never done anything like that before. It was terrifying.’ He didn’t look terrified. He was gleeful.

  ‘Can I see it?’ Maureen asked.

  Delia nodded and Tess reached up into the bottom of her jumper. She wriggled a little, undid some buttons under there, and pulled out a domed cloth pouch. She looked down at her now-flat belly, thinking perhaps of the real bump that would be there in a few months, of the real child in there, invisible for now, growing.

  ‘It was so easy,’ she said, handing the pouch to Delia. ‘After you went down the escalator, those two assistants were gabbing about what had just happened and paying no attention to the store. They were just like you said they’d be. But then it got better. The older one went off to tell her friend in Cookware all about it, and she left the younger one on her own.’

  ‘I distracted her while Tess did the business,’ Jimmy said. A look of uncertainty crossed his face. ‘We got the right thing, didn’t we?’

  The pouch had been made by a clever seamstress. It would retain its domed shape and look like a pregnant midriff, no matter what had been stuffed inside. Delia opened it up, pulled out the Russian hat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is the right one.’

  And they heard the boots of the Red Army marching towards them. Not metaphorically. Really. The boots of the Red Army. Because there needed to be a sign now. The Imps wanted Delia to know she’d finally got it right. They were satisfied at last.

  A month previously, Tess had brought one of her paintings to Delia’s bedsit. She’d unrolled it and laid it on Delia’s bed so they could both step back and take a look. In the picture, two half-defined figures, a man and a woman, floated out of a vibrant, dream-coloured world and into each other’s bodies, so the viewer could not separate person from person from landscape. It was, Tess explained, an attempt to render an idea into an image.

  ‘It’s Bill Shearsby and you. I wondered whether you were attracted to him because he reminded you of when you were evacuated to Somerset.’

  She didn’t buy that idea at all; nevertheless, the painting moved her, seemed very beautiful to her. But Delia knew that would not be enough for Tess, because nothing ever was. The girl had disappointment in her blood. It was aggravating, how she could never settle for what she had.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about when we went to see Tommy the Shovel rob that butcher’s shop,’ Tess said as she rolled the picture up again.

  ‘Tommy the Spade.’

  ‘There’s this American artist, Allan Kaprow. He says a work of art doesn’t have to be a painting or a sculpture, or anything permanent. It can be an event – something weird or shocking. He calls them happenings.’

  Delia laughed. ‘You ain’t saying Tommy’s an artist, are you?’

  ‘I am, in a way. I mean, not quite. It needs to be intended as art. Like nature can be beautiful, but it’s not art until someone does something with it.’

  ‘So if Tommy called himself an artist, rather than a criminal, he’d be making happenings, would he?’ Delia said. ‘That might be a way to keep himself out of the nick.’

  Tess was working her way towards something. She said, ‘I think artists and criminals are similar in a lot of ways. Especially successful ones, like you.’

  ‘I’m not a criminal anymore.’

  ‘No. But you were a success at it, weren’t you?’

  ‘Right up until when I wasn’t.’

  ‘No, but I’m saying I think what you did was very like Art.’

  ‘Do you want to try for yourself?’ Delia said. She had heard the capital ‘A’.

  ‘Why not?’ Tess’s quick, unthinking reply confirmed Delia’s suspicion. Her choice. Still, there was a duty to warn her.

  ‘You could get caught. You know what happened to Maureen.’

  ‘I’m not like Maureen.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Could Jimmy help?’

  ‘If he wants to.’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  ‘You’ve asked him already, haven’t you?’

  Delia agreed in principle. She liked the idea of a last-ever hoisting trip; liked the idea of taking Tess along to turn it into Art, but she hadn’t any particular plan yet. One would come to her, though, she was sure – and two days later one did, straight after she’d spotted Teddy in the crowd at the Enterprise. It would involve Maureen, require a return to Barkers, and if it went well, it would fix everything.

  19

  There was a sound of marching boots in the distance.

  Maureen put the hat on. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Jimmy said. ‘Perfect on you.’

  Tess caught Jimmy’s eye. He had said beautiful when he really meant ridiculous. But wonderfully, right now these two words could be synonyms.

  ‘Do you want to keep it, Tess?’ Delia said. ‘You were the one who stole it.’

  ‘We all stole it together,’ Tess said. ‘But you started this, Maureen. You should keep it.’

  Maureen grinned, and pulled the hat down a little more firmly onto her head. At last they saw where the sound of boots had been coming from. A long single file of uniformed men marched towards them from the east of the city. They were not British Army, these invaders in crisp, dark jodhpurs, in peaked caps and high-legged boots. They might have been threatening, except there was something not precisely military about them. As they neared, Tess saw the unevenness in their physical fitness. Some were almost scrawny, some verged on the portly. Some of them smiled as they marched, with a swing that seemed a little like dancing. Theirs was the discipline not of soldiers, but of a chorus line. If she had known the word camp, back then, she would have seen that this was its apotheosis.

  ‘Oh, that’s perfect! Look—’ Jimmy said, and he pointed across the road to the posters on display outside the Albert Hall.

  ALEXANDROV ENSEMBLE they said. RED ARMY CHOIR WITH TRADITIONAL DANCERS.

  ‘Russians!’ Maureen cried out. ‘Like my hat!’

  The four criminals cheered the Choir of the Red Army as it marched from Knightsbridge to Kensington.

  JULY 1963

  20

  Just over a month later, on the afternoon of the first-year show, Delia stood across the road from Moncourt and watched the trickle of guests pass through the college entrance. The old man on the door barely seemed to acknowledge them; it appeared the invitation card she had kept so carefully in her handbag would be unnecessary.

  She lit a cigarette to give herself some sort of purpose and tried to decide whether she would go into the exhibition or not. The Imps kept quiet about it: their job was to look after shoplifters, not barmaids, and they didn’t bother much with Delia these days. If she had to guess, she’d say they were in two minds.

  Here came a different kind of omen: a coat of startling pink, Harvey Nichols, most likely, making its way towards her. The young woman wearing it walked in short, rapid steps, constrained by a tight pencil skirt. Her eyes were invisible behind dark glasses, her red hair piled into a monumental beehive. It was Penelope, Tess’s housemate.

  ‘I take it you’re here for the exhibition too,’ she said. However her appearance might change, the voice remained unmistakable. She inclined her head towards the young man by her side. ‘You remember William Shearsby’s son, Marius? You met him at the Gaudi.’

  ‘Of course,’ Delia said. ‘You two are engaged now, aren’t you? Tess mentioned that. Congratulations.’

  Marius seemed balder and stockier than when she had last seen him; duller too,
if that were possible. There was an unfriendly look about him. Perhaps he was bothered by Penelope mentioning the shameful evening at the Gaudi, or perhaps he knew something about Delia’s short-lived romance with his father. More likely he was just surly about being dragged to this arty nonsense.

  ‘Shall we get on with it?’ he said. He had his hands firmly in his jacket pockets, a recalcitrant schoolboy.

  Delia held up her cigarette. ‘I’ll be a few minutes. Just finishing this.’

  ‘Come along then, fiancé,’ Penelope said, taking off her sunglasses.

  Delia watched them cross the road and enter the building. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall behind her and began to count, as she had once asked Maureen to count, slowly, taking a breath between each number and the next to mark the seconds. When she got to three hundred, she stopped counting, but she stayed where she was.

  Tess waved to Jimmy, over on the far side of the studio. (‘Let’s not have Mr and Mrs Nichols snuggling together,’ nasty Roger Dunbar had said yesterday, while deciding who should be stationed where.) Jimmy waved back and stifled a yawn. All the first years had been here long after midnight yesterday, whitewashing the studio and preparing it for the private view.

  Her peers were standing sentry next to their own artworks. With her pregnancy now an acknowledged fact, Tess alone had been allowed a chair. During the quietness of the first hour, she had caught herself almost falling asleep on it several times. Now everyone’s family members had turned up, and the room felt, if not quite busy, at least occupied.

  Her own parents stood in front of a vast inverted crucifixion. They listened politely to its cadaverous young painter just as they had listened politely to eight other artists already that afternoon, including both Tess and Jimmy.