Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  The young woman’s eyes shone, and Nancy felt her own cheeks begin to burn by association.

  ‘We know that working women and poor women and women with family duties cannot afford the luxury of martyrdom or imprisonment. But of course with your first-hand experience you will know this.’

  Nancy wondered whether the woman always talked as though she was making a speech. Even so, she felt that she was with someone of like mind.

  ‘Women like yourself are the most valued in our movement, Miss…?’

  ‘Dickenson, Nancy Dickenson.’

  ‘You could be invaluable as a member. Come to our meeting, Nancy, we are in desperate need of stewards.’

  ‘All right, then. I will!’ Nancy said, thrilled at having committed herself to something that Wally would approve of. ‘All right, I’ll give it a try.’

  —

  After much negotiation with her parents, Otis squeezed an agreement out of them.

  ‘I will go thus far, Otis. I shall send Mrs Moth a note inviting her to take tea on the terrace, and we shall then see what we shall see. But I am making no promises. I doubt that Mrs Moth is over-anxious to make your acquaintance again after two of her children ended up in the sea the last time you were together.’ She glanced to try to catch out her daughter in a blush or other tell-tale discomfiture, but Otis remained sanguine.

  Otis observed her mother’s glance and wanted to protest: All that took place ages ago when we were young. But she knew the tensile strength of her mother’s affability and how far it would stretch before it snapped. So she was pleasantly quiet.

  Later that week, on receipt of a reply from Garden Cottage, Mrs Hewetson exclaimed in an undertone, ‘Goodness, Martin! Mrs Moth is seven months gone with another child.’

  Otis, who was assumed to be out of overhearing range, swivelled her eyes so as to watch her father’s reaction. ‘Good Lord! the woman must be forty if she’s a day.’

  ‘And the son is all of nineteen.’

  ‘And Esther is nearly my age,’ observed Otis, unable to contain herself at the extraordinary news about Mrs Moth.

  Her mother raised her eyebrows. She had given up saying, ‘Little rabbits have long ears’ – but it was in her expression.

  ‘You’d best do as she requests, Em, and you call upon them. And least said, soonest mended, regarding the other thing. You know?’

  Otis knew. Least said about the to-do with the children at Bognor, when Otis had, without permission, gone out in a hired dinghy with Esther and Jack Moth, and they had all been pulled out of the sea without a stitch of clothing on and a very thin explanation.

  ‘Not “them” apparently. Only Mrs Moth is there, alone with the children.’ At her father’s short tt-tt, Otis noticed that Jack – the son who a moment ago was all of nineteen – was now a child. ‘And you know, Martin, she does have some very good’ – voice lowered – ‘connections. It can do no harm to know a member of the Clermont family.’

  Otis of course knew everything of Mrs Moth’s connections, as Esther had told her in Bognor. ‘Mother’s people are the most awful bores. She was a Clermont. They are all Honourables or something. The only thing they like is killing birds and fishing. My mother is supposed to be terribly well-off, not that you’d know because Father will not allow show. I think it’s because he’s a policeman and he’s afraid people will think he married her for her money. But he didn’t, Mother threatened to run away when they weren’t going to let her marry him. We don’t feel well-off, except that when I see the way that other policemen’s families live I realize that we are better off – our house, Jack being sent to Winchester and now university…’

  Otis thought that a love-affair between a penniless policeman and an Honourable must have been terribly romantic. Especially as Inspector Moth was very big and had probably been as handsome as Jack when he was younger.

  When Esther had said with candour, ‘People can’t afford Winchester for their sons on a policeman’s income’, Otis had been quite shocked, having been taught that it was bad form to talk about money and income and affording things.

  And getting to know people with connections. Pa, being a partner in a large practice of solicitors, relied quite a lot on connections, but one did not say so. The thing that Otis had loved most about that summer in the company of Esther and Jack Moth was their openness and candour. They could discuss anything that came into their heads, and apparently were encouraged to do so by their mother at least.

  It was as a result of this attitude that they had all got into that final bit of trouble at Bognor. It had come about because Otis had mentioned her curiosity to Esther, saying that the only naked male she had seen was in an art gallery.

  Esther had said, ‘Come out with us. Jack is going to hire a boat. He likes to dive off the side. I go with him. He likes to swim in his skin, he read that that’s how pearl-divers do it – they are terribly brave, you know. Jack likes to try out things he reads about. He’s never embarrassed about things like that, I don’t think boys are; all the boy cousins swim naked at Mere, Uncle Norbert’s place. Nobody thinks much of it. I should love to, but Uncle Norbert will never let the girls.’

  ‘I couldn’t! I should be too embarrassed to look.’

  ‘Rubbish! You know you wouldn’t. I say, why don’t we try it, it would be lovely. Oh do, Otis.’

  Although she longed to keep up with the kind of tricks that the Moths were always involved in, Otis had blushed hotly at the idea, but Esther argued that if God made the human body, then there could not be anything wrong in looking at it. So Otis had asked herself what could possibly be wrong in seeing a young man’s parts in the flesh when she had seen them in marble, and what was wrong with anybody swimming naturally, and had received her own reply: there is nothing wrong.

  They had their daring swim. Clambering back in, the little boat had capsized and all their clothes had been lost. They had been picked up naked as babes by some fishermen.

  And there was quite a to-do in the Hewetson household.

  Emily Hewetson, not knowing of course where to put her face for shame, had at once packed up and they had returned to London. Martin Hewetson said that it would have been better to stay; after all they were still only children and children did some wild things. Anne Moth said that they were very foolish children to take out such an unstable boat, and next time to be sure that they told her where they were going. Nobody knew what Inspector Moth said for he was, as usual, working on a murder investigation and not holidaying with his family.

  Some good came out of it though. Otis had had wonderfully enhancing experiences. Of waves surging against her naked skin; of linking arms with Jack and Esther and treading water and bobbing about in a circle game; of seeing beneath the water their bodies looking like fluid glass in the filtered light, and of the utmost freedom of movement. She had seen the human body at its best. Buoyed up by water, youthful, healthy and graceful. She was thereafter more knowledgeable about the differences between people that are usually disguised. She began to love the changes that were taking part in her own figure when she saw the common features of femininity in Esther’s black pelt and small swellings. And the marble Hermes that had first provoked her curiosity did not seem half so much a work of art as did Jack’s warm flesh when poised to dive.

  Otis had accepted the deprivation from her punishment and had behaved in the contrite manner her bewildered mother sought, but she had never regretted the escapade – except that it had separated her from the Moths.

  * * *

  Emily Hewetson looked a picture of elegance as she set out on the ten-minute walk from The Grand to Sussex Road. She walked slowly, wonderfully aware of the way her bosom greatly protruded and her waist curved and her hips swelled with the assistance of her new straight-fronted black and blue broché corset. It had cost twenty-three shillings and sixpence but its effect upon her Japon gown with its gauged back made it worth every farthing. If a woman was not blessed with the ancestry of a Clermont, it was possib
le to compensate through one’s appearance. And at the moment, Mrs Moth was in a condition which Mrs Hewetson would have loathed. At nearly forty! The experience of Otis had been bad enough, but to be like that again when one had a son who was a man was beyond anything. Surely the woman had someone to advise her, if it was only a physician. Every woman of class must know that it was perfectly possible to protect oneself and to arrange with one’s husband to dispose of his ardour safely.

  At first, Otis was to have been left behind. But she eventually persuaded her mother that her present behaviour would be evidence of how responsible and grown-up she had become. She did not look grown-up in her cotton skirt and tammy hat.

  They almost passed by Garden Cottage, overborne as it was by a smart Thomas Ellis Owen villa. Hidden behind an iron gate in a high wall and standing at the far end of a stone walkway, the strange-looking castellated cottage could scarcely be seen from the road for the large spread of a fig tree.

  Nancy Dickenson bobbed an inch or two of curtsy and said that her mistress was in the garden and would madam and miss come through. The term ‘garden’ had brought to Mrs Hewetson’s mind her own green Lavender Hill garden and, in view of the long approach and its name, she had expected something other than what it was. Mrs Moth was seated, legs raised, on a wheeled wicker, much cushioned, cruise chair, in a tiny courtyard that literally brimmed with true geraniums, climbing roses, clematis, tall citronella lilies, furry pulsatilla, little yellow Welsh poppies and cascading lobelia. It was as though Anne Moth was seated in a bowl of flowers.

  ‘What a charming place,’ said Mrs Hewetson graciously, once they had formally greeted one another.

  ‘It is as much as we need. Esther and Jack are out of the house much of the time. George, my husband, discovered it. He has the knack for such things.’

  The ladies now being settled, and Otis having presented a bob and having given polite replies to Mrs Moth’s enquiries as to her health, Esther was given leave to show Otis the cottage and take her into the front courtyard to drink cordial made with cold well-water.

  At first meeting the girls smiled a little shyly as they each weighed up the changes and waited patiently to be free of their mothers’ observation of their manners. Now they flung their arms about one another and gave unladylike bear-hugs.

  ‘Esther! You’ve been and gorn and become a lady.’ Otis put on the funny common accent that had so amused them at Bognor.

  ‘Nar I ain’t, it’s only me cloves.’ Esther wasn’t as good at it as Otis, who had a good ear for mimicry.

  They hugged again, neither of them disappointed by finding the other too different from the memory.

  ‘Come through, there’s a nice sunny wall at the front of the house.’ Esther led the way through the ground floor of the cottage which comprised a kitchen-cum-scullery, a little dining-room, a study, a small sitting-room and a large hallway.

  ‘What an amazing place,’ Otis said. ‘From outside it looks like a fairy house, I thought it must be like the weavers’ homes we saw when Pa took us to Yorkshire.’

  ‘It’s because it’s long and narrow. Five bedrooms and the usual offices.’

  ‘Oh, don’t spoil it, Esther. I want to go on thinking of it as a magic house – tiny on the outside but large within, like something Alice would have come upon when she went through the looking-glass.’

  ‘Otis. It is so wonderful that you are here, saying your imaginative things. Nobody has said anything interesting or original to me since Bognor.’

  Otis made a face. ‘Oh, Bognor. That’s the real reason my ma is calling on your mother. She’s testing the water. She doesn’t think that we are a good influence on one another. Does yours?’

  ‘I don’t believe she thinks much at all these days about me or Jack. She just sits around holding her bump. It moves, you know.’

  ‘Moves? Her…?’

  ‘It twitches. It’s the baby wriggling about. It’s called “quickening”. If you watch closely you can see little bits of lace on Mother’s dress seeming to move of their own accord.’

  ‘I never knew they moved before they came. I thought that they were – well – like new dolls wrapped in tissue-paper in a kind of box.’

  ‘They move all the time. When they are ready to be born, they turn a somersault and go head down.’

  Otis was always amazed at Esther’s great store of facts. ‘How did you get to know? I could never find out a thing like that.’

  ‘Ma doesn’t mind talking to me. Mostly I just listen. Father never lowers his voice so that even if one is in the next room it is possible to hear quite clearly what he says.’ She put on a sober ‘father’ face. ‘“What d’you think, Annie, that little miss they fished out of the river, she’d been tupped.” All one needs then is to look up “tupped” and you find out something else.’

  ‘My pa never says anything interesting. Lawyers never do. Uncle Hewey says that there is no talk as boring as that of lawyers. And Uncle Hew’s a lawyer so he should know. Esther, what is being tupped?’

  ‘It’s what I told you about before we went out in the dinghy.’

  ‘Sexual congress you mean?’

  ‘Lord above, Otis, keep your voice down.’

  Grinning, Otis said in a whisper, ‘I think tupping is a much better word.’

  ‘Just as long as you don’t say it in front of relations or company.’

  Esther arranged cushions in a little alcove created by the old garden wall and some trellis, up which grew pink roses entwined with sweet peas and clematis. She poured the cool drink in which slices of lemon floated, and offered cat’s-tongue biscuits.

  ‘Esther! you remembered my favourites.’

  They caught each other’s glance and, holding the gaze, smiled at one another with looks that only young girls who hold one another’s secrets sacredly can give one another.

  ‘Oh Otis, I feel so happy. Nothing has changed has it? We are still the same friends we were at Bognor. Four years and yet I don’t feel even slightly strange with you. The times I have wished that you were my sister or that we lived close.’

  ‘And I. But my parents would never have let me continue the friendship. They are only doing so now because we are bound to meet one another daily in a small town such as Southsea.’

  ‘Why were they so very upset? You must have disobeyed them before, and every child tells its parents lies once in a while. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do to say that you were going to the lending library but to go out in a dinghy instead. And you wouldn’t have drowned, you know, we weren’t very far off shore.’

  ‘It wasn’t the danger. It was our bare… chests and Jack’s… you know.’ She stifled a giggle, feeling childish but unable to do anything about it.

  Esther’s mouth twitched. ‘Don’t start that, Otis, or we shall be well and truly banned. There’s nothing suggests to parents bad goings-on so much as girls giggling. I give you that gem of information for nothing. What did your mother think Jack was up to that they should whisk you away from us like that?’

  Otis put on her very straight face. ‘Tupping me I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Esther exploded and spilled lemonade.

  ‘Hush, Esther!’ Otis said, grinning herself.

  They were both suddenly sobered and hushed by the clanging open of the iron gate.

  ‘Hang me if it isn’t the notorious Otis Hewetson.’ Jack Moth whisked off his straw boater, gallantly took Otis’s hand, and placed his lips warmly upon it.

  ‘Jack?’

  Oh, he was handsome.

  ‘As ever was. Was that “Jack” a query? Don’t I look the very soul of Jack Moth?’

  He was so handsome. So tall and manly. And so… handsome. Such thick crisp curls, such a broad forehead, such large eyes, such wide manly shoulders and long, long legs. He must be fearfully impressive now, diving from a dinghy. He was looking so closely at her that she blushed to think that her thoughts might show in her face.

  ‘N… No, you don’t at all, you have
grown into a man.’

  ‘Lordy, Lordy, Miss Otis, and what pray would you have me grow into… a big geriller?’

  Otis laughed. ‘Well at least you sound like Jack.’ Suddenly she felt shy of him, of his hand still holding hers, of his inspection of her, of his genuine pleasure at seeing her again. She felt gauche and awkward. Since she had last seen him he had grown from a cheeky and slightly outrageous youth to a young man with grace and a modern manner.

  She tried to find a safe place to rest her gaze, but he was a minefield for her, particularly when she could not eradicate the vision of him as he had been, stripped to his white skin and poised to dive from the dinghy again and again. Unembarrassed, a little proud of himself, he had enjoyed flouting convention. Perhaps he boasted of such things to his friends. Perhaps it had been a dare. Unexpected thoughts tumbled through her mind and she blushed even more deeply.

  He must have noticed but he put her at once at ease. ‘I say, Esther, I’m roasting. Aren’t you, Otis? I’ll ask Nancy to dig out some of her famous water ices from the ice-box.’ Skimming his hat on to the hatstand inside, he went into the cottage.

  Otis followed him with her gaze. ‘That’s Jack? I can scarcely credit it, Esther. I thought you had become grown-up, Esther, but Jack…’

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t place too much credit on the outside, that’s how they all are at university. He’s still Jack underneath. I’ll tell you a secret about him. He’s in love.’

  Dressed as she was in her print cotton, with her hair tied back in a ribbon and a childish tammy on her head, Otis knew for sure that it was not herself with whom Jack Moth was in love. And that knowledge poured vinegar into her wounded, fragile heart.

  Suddenly she hated her mother for her vanity. People were not so stupid as to believe that Otis was still a child so that Emily Hewetson could pass for something just over thirty. Girls didn’t have breasts, didn’t have Eve’s curse, didn’t feel dizzy with love for a man.