by Maggie Ford
‘Myself,’ she muttered into the darkness at the back of the shop, rectifying the error fruitlessly. ‘Help myself …’ Help …’
Beside her Lucy stirred in her sleep, murmuring, ‘What?’
Letty kept very still until she settled again, trying to obliterate her bruised pride in sleep, but David Baron kept getting in the way. Thanking Mum and Dad for their hospitality, turning to her: ‘Delighted to have made your acquaintance, Miss Bancroft,’ so formal she could have screamed. She had shrugged as if it hadn’t mattered a jot to her. But it had mattered. It hurt that he hadn’t asked to see her again. It was no compensation that his last glance had been for her; she interpreted it as one of reproach for the way she had shown herself up.
Furious with herself, she turned over. Facing away from Lucy, she stared into the darkness of the shop, its faint mustiness enveloping her. How could Lucy call him handsome? The boys around here were much better looking and far more robust. They spoke roughly but you knew how you stood with them. But David’s maturity had given him a certain attractiveness … Oh, well, too late now. She closed her eyes before the morning light became too strong to let her sleep.
‘I should have been nicer to ’im,’ said Letty, desultorily flicking a feather duster over the vases on the piano. The last of their guests had gone home, leaving the flat with a forsaken air, having been so full of people the night before.
Lucy had her mind more on Jack and when he’d get around to talking to Dad about their engagement. ‘Nothing you can do about it now,’ she murmured, disinterested, her arm working like a piston rod to bring up the dining table’s mahogany shine.
Letty gave the feather duster another listless flick. ‘He might be coming with your Jack this afternoon?’ she suggested hopefully.
Jack called every Sunday. He and Lucy usually took a tram to Victoria Park, the only bit of decent open space in the East End and a wonderful place for courting couples and family picnics. It had deer, a lake with a Chinese pagoda on an island in the centre, a huge ornate Victorian drinking fountain, lots of shrubberies and secluded walks, football fields, tennis courts. It extended all the way to Hackney Downs, almost like being in the country.
Lucy would return after kissing Jack goodbye, eyes sparkling, face glowing – and not all from the fresh air. Mum would give her a quick glance, then look away, and Dad’s face would bear an anxious expression.
Letty wished someone was taking her to Victoria Park so she could be looked at like that. ‘Don’t suppose I’ll see him again, anyway,’ she muttered.
‘Don’t suppose you will.’ Lucy’s tone was offhand. ‘You made it plain you didn’t want nothing to do with him.’
‘I didn’t make it that plain. I just didn’t want him thinkin’ I was chucking meself at him.’
She gave the vases a last flick and transferred her attention to the gilt frames of two large pictures hanging side by side on the wall by the door. They’d come out of Dad’s shop years ago, had been on the wall for as long as she could remember, hadn’t been moved for years, the wallpaper behind them still light while the rest had darkened.
One of them depicted a young woman with the classical softly round face and figure and fair abundant tresses beloved by the Victorians. She was clad in flowing diaphanous amber material. Her back to a low, seawashed obelisk, she was bound loosely by golden chains, wrists crossed upon her breast, a dramatic love-lorn gaze cast heavenwards. A green and angry sea foamed about her thighs and dark storm clouds rolled above her, split by the occasional patch of palest blue.
The other showed the same maiden, unchained and embracing the stone while the sea receded though her gaze was still cast heavenwards at the clouds and still wore the same forsaken expression. Letty had often wondered what story the pictures told, but no one could ever tell her.
Lucy had slid the chenille cover back in place and was starting on the piano.
‘All I can say,’ she went on, removing the vases one by one before polishing, ‘is that after my Jack put ’imself out to bring him, you could have been more civil to him. Anyway, it’s your lookout, not mine. Me and Jack’s got more serious things to talk about today.’
What she meant was, she was going to have to push him again to talk to Dad, though it was hard to see why Jack was so scared. Her father was a quiet man, a bit stubborn but never the argumentative sort, and he already looked on Jack as a very worthy young man, very suitable.
Jack always came about two o’clock, after Sunday dinner. Washing up done, Mum having her usual Sunday afternoon lie down with a glass of Guinness – to do her blood good, as she always said – Dad down in his shop, Lucy sat by the window in her Sunday best. Her bridesmaid’s dress still to be modified, she was in her dark blue suit and a high-necked cream blouse, her cream straw hat pinned to her hair. She looked a picture, her back stiff with anticipation as she waited for Jack.
Letty sat at the table, her weekly copy of Peg’s Paper under her elbows, her chin in her hands. She too was in her Sunday best, though she wasn’t going anywhere. But just in case.
It was another lovely sunny day. The sash window pushed up as far as it would go for some fresh air, was also admitting a musty taint of bird droppings from the cages stacked against the shop front next door. The voices of the dealers loading them on to barrows to cart away, the market having closed, seemed to be almost in the room.
‘I wish we didn’t have to live here.’ Lucy, her speech grown very cultured in preparation for Jack’s arrival, wrinkled her nose delicately. ‘It does stink sometimes. And I can smell the brewery.’
Her remark suddenly awoke Letty’s senses to odours that normally passed unnoticed, acclimatised as she was, having lived with them all her life: a compound of rotten cabbage leaves, sewage, horse manure, and the sour reek of Trueman’s Black Eagle Brewery in Brick Lane that hung in the air day and night, worse some days than others, especially when they cleaned out their vats. Today it wasn’t so bad, being Sunday, but Letty found herself suddenly embarrassed by the combination of odours.
If David Baron did appear with Lucy’s Jack, what on earth would he think, his nostrils assaulted by this stink of the East End, having to pass by the market traders, their language somewhat more than ripe at times? The market being closed yesterday, the street had been quiet. But today… For the first time in her life Letty too found herself wishing she lived in some more wholesome area.
‘Vinny’s lucky, moving out to Hackney,’ Lucy muttered petulantly, playing with her gloves and gazing out of the window.
‘Well, when you marry Jack, you’ll be leaving too,’ Letty said, but Lucy gave her a petulant look.
‘When he gets down to talking to Dad! You’d think he was an ogre or something. Jack don’t seem to have any courage sometimes.’
When he did arrive, he’d obviously found some degree of it. He didn’t come upstairs immediately as he usually did. To Lucy that meant only one thing, and her hopes were rising.
‘He’s talking to Dad about us.’
Unable to sit any longer, she began roaming the room, peeping out of the door, straining her ears. Hearing her prowling outside her bedroom, Mum got up, and came into the parlour, her rest having imparted a high colour to her parchment cheeks, giving her a deceptively healthy look.
‘Jack’s talking to Dad,’ Lucy told her, her own cheeks aglow with premature delight. ‘It must be about us!’
‘Now don’t get excited, luv.’ Mabel smiled tolerantly, but there was no holding Lucy who continued to pace the floor.
When Jack came upstairs he was with Dad. Arthur had opened a couple of bottles of brown ale, which was enough for Lucy. Her face radiant, she threw herself at Jack, all but upsetting his glass in the impact.
‘Jack! You did it! You did it!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, you did it!’
She and Jack went up West to buy her engagement ring, a band of three diamonds and two deep red rubies few boys around here could have afforded and which she flourished whenever anyone came ne
ar. She drove everyone half round the bend talking about her wedding.
‘We have planned the wedding for next April,’ she said, her speech almost on par with Vinny’s these days. ‘I shall be a spring bride.’
And: ‘Jack’s grandparents are buying us a house near where they live, in Chingford,’ she made a big thing of telling her elder sister. ‘It’s got a long garden and a proper bathroom and you pump hot water into the bath through pipes from a boiler in the kitchen. They’re ever so well off, Jack’s grandparents.’
The look on Vinny’s face was enough to pull shades down on, Letty thought; Vinny, who’d become so stuck up since marrying Albert, having her nose put out of joint!
Jack began coming for Sunday dinner, part of the family now, and Lucy’s cheeks glowed even brighter than usual when she and Jack came back from Victoria Park, enough to make Dad remark, ‘All I ’ope is they’re be’aving themselves. If she gets in trouble before she’s wed, I won’t be giving ’er away, yer can bet your last farthin’.’
Letty had given up wondering if Jack would ever bring his friend along with him. He wouldn’t now. It was obvious David Baron had found her tiresome company, had merely been polite in saying he’d been delighted to meet her. Well, he hadn’t been her type, anyway.
‘Don’t know as I’d fancy all that bother tryin’ to be someone I ain’t,’ she confessed to Mum. ‘I suppose I’ll end up with someone like Billy Beans or Bert Wilkins.’ She’d given up the effort to improve her speech, since as she said, she’d probably settle down with a local boy. ‘But it don’t seem fair, do it? Vinny movin’ away to a different area now she’s all toffee-nosed. And Lucy’ll get just like her when she goes to live in ’er posh Chingford. Never mind, Mum, I won’t leave you and Dad on your own. Billy Beans does like me. If I was ter marry him eventually, you’ll always ’ave me near you.’
‘You could do worse, luv,’ her mother said philosophically, but her face was that of one who feared she might never see another marriage take place. ‘Both of them lads is nice-looking and presentable. And that young Wilkins boy from Ebor Street ain’t exactly hard up, him working at Watney’s Brewery in Whitechapel Road where his dad’s foreman, he’ll soon get promotion. And Billy Beans’ people are trade like us. You wouldn’t ever ’ave ter scrimp and scrape. You ain’t been brought up to that. And young Billy’s always bin keen on you, luv.’
Billy with his bright shoe-button eyes, his broad smile on broad features, blond hair always neatly brilliantined down from a centre parting, was a better choice than sallow-faced Bert Wilkins, though Letty would never let on to Billy, mostly because it sort of spoiled the romance, imagining herself as Letty Beans. Letitia Baron would have sounded much nicer, but she shrugged off that speculation as an airy-fairy dream. Men from outside the East End didn’t marry girls from inside it. It had happened with Vinny, of course, and again with Lucy, but three times in a row was just too much to ask.
‘That’s Jack, I expect.’ Lucy’s voice was off-hand as the doorbell jangled. She didn’t even look up from the Rational Dress Gazette she bought every week from the newspaper shop next door to Beans Grocers. She was usually up and halfway down the stairs before the bell had stopped swinging on its single coiled spring.
Letty heard Dad open the door, then call up, his voice sounding a little perplexed: ‘Your Jack’s down ’ere, Lucilla.’
‘Ain’t you going down?’ Letty prompted from the sofa. Lucy was all dressed and ready to go out. Letty herself hadn’t bothered putting on her Sunday frock. She might later, if one of her friends called, when the girls would sit and scan through back copies of old magazines.
Lucy’s mouth was set into a sulky pout. ‘He’s got legs – let him come up.’
‘You ain’t had a row with him, ’ave yer?’ Something inside Letty perked up to find that all didn’t always go well with true love – compensating in some way for that nagging sense of defeat still lingering inside her even after all these weeks.
‘No, I haven’t had a row with him,’ Lucy said sharply, then bit at a lower lip that had begun to work. ‘Well, who does he think he is – telling me them suffragettes are getting too big for their boots and he’d soon put a stop to me if I behaved like that? Just because I said women should have more rights. He said a woman should know her place. Well then, let him do the running and come up here instead!’
Dad’s voice came down again. ‘He’s coming up. And tell Letitia there’s someone down ’ere for ’er too, if she cares ter come down.’
Letty looked enquiringly at her sister, but Lucy was already on her feet, doing a lot of hurried hair patting and frill pinking, in a fine old two-and-eight for one vowing a second ago to keep her fiancé dangling.
As Letty passed Jack at the top of the stairs, she smiled at his worried expression, stifling an impulse to say, ‘Don’t worry – she’s not planning to be a suffragette!’
Mum’s weary voice followed her down the stairs. ‘Whoever it is, you can’t go out until after dinner. I’ve only just got the ’taters on, and the meat’s only ’alf done.’
‘Orright, Mum,’ she called back, prepared to relay the fact to her friend Ethel who was always calling before dinner. Her mum never got dinner until she came back from the Carpenters Arms in Hare Street, her chosen local rather than the Knave of Clubs on the corner. Her meal was often as late as four or five o’clock and Mum’s heart had too often melted at her pinched longing expression at the aroma of cooking and put a bit on a plate for her. Ethel would gollop it down, saying, ‘Yer won’t tell me mum will yer? She’ll get ever so annoyed. She don’t like everyone feedin’ me.’ Mrs Bock liked her pint or two at the Carpenters Arms, could hardly afford to feed her brood, but had her pride. And someone else feeding her kids did it no good at all.
It wasn’t Ethel Bock standing by the door as the shop came into view at the bottom of the stairs, but a tall figure, his hat in his hands – a pale grey homburg that matched an immaculate suit cut in the latest fashion Letty only ever saw in the West End when she and Ethel went to gape at the toffs.
She stopped abruptly on the last stair as her caller’s resonant voice met her.
‘Good morning, Letitia.’
Her first thought was her dress – the old blue dress, worn for much of the week. What sort of awful picture must she present to this well-dressed man? She shot a desperate glance towards her father, beaming his approval at her caller for having spoken her full name to his satisfaction.
Her voice, when she found it, sounded high and squeaky. ‘Mr Baron … I … didn’t expect to see you.’
She was put in an even greater fluster by Dad quietly passing by her, prudently going upstairs to leave the two of them alone, his face split in that silly grin of approval.
As David Baron came slowly towards her, Letty found her shoulders hunching forward, her hands fluttering about the front of the faded dress in some attempt to hide its appearance. She wanted to say something but her lips felt stiff. It was David Baron who spoke, completely in charge of himself when she was standing there like a chastised child, almost trembling embarrassment.
‘I’ve wanted to call on you since your sister’s wedding,’ she heard him saying through her confusion. ‘My work kept me away. You must have thought I’d forgotten you. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh,’ Letty said awkwardly. Outside she could hear the shouts of the street traders. People passing were glancing casually through the dusty window at the bits of bric-a-brac lying there. ‘What do yer … What do you do then, your work?’ she amended hurriedly, her vowels still flat to her ear for all she was watching the ts and aitches, though he didn’t seem to notice.
‘My father has a draper’s shop in Highgate. Not far from where we live,’ he said evenly.
Letty’s tension relaxed instantly. His people were trade, same as hers. For all his posh talk he helped his father in a shop, just as she did. And here she had been, putting on airs and graces, or trying to, and all the time he was just a tradesman’s son
! Even the ten years’ difference in their ages seemed to diminish. Yes, he was good-looking she decided, his face lean and strong, though that longish narrow nose still spoiled the balance a little.
‘You never said your dad had a shop,’ she burst out. He had quite a gentle smile, not at all superior or patronising.
‘You were so enjoying yourself at your sister’s wedding reception, I thought you wouldn’t be interested in such dull conversation.’
‘Oh, I would have been,’ she blurted. ‘I am. Ever so.’ She caught herself hastily, slowing what could have become a gabble. ‘I didn’t think you were very interested in me, so I … Well, I …’
Words faltered, died away awkwardly. She couldn’t tell him how she had felt about him, could she?
It didn’t seem to matter. He was looking at her as if she was something really special; she might have been wearing a ballgown and tiara the way his eyes took her in.
‘Your dad, do … does he ’ave … a big shop?’ She was stammering in her haste to sound right. ‘It ain’t … isn’t a departmental stores, is it?’
‘Just a shop,’ he said, his eyes holding hers. ‘It does quite well and it needs to be larger. That isn’t possible, so we’ve had to find bigger premises nearby, and it’s taken up a lot of time getting things into shape. That’s why I couldn’t come to call on you.’
Oh, help! her mind exploded. There were shop people and shop people. Her father was one of the lesser ones against his. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said lamely. ‘I just thought …’
It didn’t matter what she thought, being polite and good-mannered, David Baron had merely called to apologise for any oversight on his part, no more than that. Disappointment dragged through her and she looked down at herself again.
‘Well, thanks fer calling anyway. It was nice.’
‘Letitia.’ He had come closer. She glanced up to see him gazing at her. ‘I’ve called to ask …’
He broke off, the shop bell jangling. Customers, a middle-aged couple, quite well dressed. Excusing herself hastily, Letty hurried over to stand by as they picked up a small flower-encrusted vase.