England's Lane

by Joseph Connolly

  And sexual relations with him, with Jim, all those many years ago … I can barely even remember. I tolerated his charmless invasion of me simply because I yearned for a child. As soon as it was made clear to me that he was quite incapable even of that, I stopped the whole business. Well of course I did—what on earth would be the point of continuing? To endure such a mauling with no end in sight. I don’t think he minds, or anything. Never said anything about it, anyway. One way or the other. The matter simply ceased to arise. I think that Jim, he’s maybe not as other men are—though having said this, I am not at all sure precisely what I am meaning by it. It is possible that actually I’m quite wrong about it all: it could be that he minds very much. Well there—if he minds, he minds. I don’t—that’s all I know. Because with Jonathan, you see … each time is always something of an occasion. I love to know of the pretty underwear he trembles upon the verge of discovering: it excites me to wear it every Thursday, beneath so ordinary a skirt and cardigan. Just as I am now—marching the length of Eton Avenue, looking for all the world exactly like any other housewife in her coat, hat and scarf, her sensible shoes, a shopping list, compact and a packet of Polo neatly tucked into her handbag. But what other woman, I wonder … in Westminster Bank, where now I am headed, and then a bit later on in John Barnes department store … what other woman will be secretly hugged by satin, tugged by lace, and all in a very fetching shade of cerise? Last week it was turquoise. I also have black, of course, which always seems to me to be the very most wicked of all. I really am awful, aren’t I …? I sometimes truly astonish myself. I honestly never did think that I had it in me. Do you know, I’ve even taken to wearing Cutex nail varnish, though only in a color they call Damask Rose: even I am hardly ready for the bright and shiny red talons you see on all the film stars. Also now I am a regular user of a depilatory by the name of Veet-Odourless, which I had seen advertised in Woman. I bought it in Boots—and do you know, it really is quite as easy to apply as the little leaflet inside it suggests, and upon more than one occasion I have been pleased for Jonathan to feel and be enthralled by what I love to hear him term the “sweet and so soft silkiness” of my ankle, calf and thigh.

  But as to my undies, of course I don’t buy all these lovely and frothy things in Marion’s in the Lane, where I am used to getting everything else: you know, all the usual bits and pieces—the slips, the nighties, the corselettes. John Barnes, I get a good deal of it—partly why I’m going there now, as a matter of fact. Occasionally, I’ll take the 13 bus down to Selfridge’s—and there, the range, it’s truly outstanding. The money I am spending—not just on this but also by way of the endless and blossoming debt to the tallyman … it is becoming rather alarming, I have to acknowledge that. My savings, such as they were … well, practically gone, of course. And yes he has, Jonathan, of course he has—he has on many occasions offered to buy me things, all sorts of things, but I don’t really somehow quite care for the idea. And anyway—he pays for the wine and Benedictine. What I did accept from him just the other week, though, was an exquisite little crystal flacon of Chanel N°5: he said it was the only scent that was worthy of me. I dabbed it on immediately, and he truffled around in the nape of my neck: “Ravishing!” he cried out. Ravishing, yes … that is what he thought me. Paul … that evening, little Paul, he piped up “Have you got a new perfume on, Auntie Milly? It’s lovely—I really really like it.” Jim looked up from his pools coupon, sniffed the air like a character in a pantomime who might with suspicion be smelling the blood of an Englishman. And then he said to me “I thought there were some bloody funny pong going on in here.”

  I do quite like it in the bank. The sheen of the marble floor—black-and-white checkerboard pattern, with the odd oily swirling of an iridescent green—that air of weighty silence, dust suspended in the sunlight, and a general impression of timelessness and certainty. It’s all obviously very far from accidental, of course I do know that, the atmosphere they’ve created here—because people want to, they have to feel safe, don’t they really? When depositing all of their hard-earned money. The gravitas, of course, also serves to terrify, should you be applying for a personal loan, as once, just briefly, Jim and I were forced to: like waiting to be summoned by a Victorian disciplinarian. But at other times, the dark deep paneling burnished by beeswax, the pendulum clock with its comfortable and sullen thump of each second’s passing—all so terribly calming. And of course the tellers, they’re always so very nicely turned out and endlessly polite to you—even if you’ve come in just to break a note because you’re needing some shillings for the meter, or something. I do Jim’s accounts for him, such as they are. Well of course I do—if I didn’t take care of all that side of things there’d be no books to show to the Inland Revenue at the end of the financial year, and then where would we be? And no—I won’t tell you what Jim has to say on the subject of income tax—I don’t really think I need to, do I? All of his business is conducted in cash—it’s almost unheard of for anyone to write a check: maybe for a heater or something, but it’s terribly rare. Sometimes I’m quite surprised by the weekly figures in the lodgement book, once I’ve totted them up—it’s only a small shop, after all, and really so very shamingly shabby that I’m often amazed that anyone would be moved to go in there at all. But it’s the convenience, isn’t it really? There’s nowhere else around here that sells all that sort of thing. Even in John Barnes, you’ll get your plastic buckets and dustpans and the rest of the kitchen side of things, but they wouldn’t touch anything at all in the way of, oh I don’t know—paraffin, say … or such very grisly and horrible things as mousetraps and flypapers. So at least we’re fulfilling a local demand. And it’s just as well really that Jim puts all God’s hours into the place, having no outside interests whatever to his credit. Because my housekeeping, well that’s modest enough, heaven knows, and the domestic bills—utilities, rates and so on—they’re not really too significant. But it’s Paul, of course, who’s the main expense. Every other term that school of his will send you a letter saying they regret that the fees must rise yet again in line with, well—with something or other, some sort of waffle, but never in line with ordinary people’s earnings, that’s for sure. Jim says “If they bloody regret it so bloody much, then why do they bloody well do it? Ay? Ay …?!” And I have to say I’m at one with him on that score. The cost is terrible. Worth it in the long run, of course—I mean, I’d never skimp, not where Paul is concerned … but still, it has to be said: the cost is just terrible. And it’s not only the fees, of course: there’s the uniform—from Harrods, if you please. And no, they won’t accept any cheaper substitutes, I thought of that, tried that: wouldn’t have it, would they? Very sniffy indeed, they were, at the very suggestion. And then all the little extras that you just don’t really think about, but golly do they soon mount up: a class trip to the theater, all those books, Cash’s Woven Name Tapes, sports things … although Paul, bless him, he’s always so apologetic if ever he grows out of something. It was his cricket whites last time. “It’s all right, Auntie Milly,” he was going. “We can just fold down the turn-ups!” So sweet. Not his fault he’s a growing lad, is it? He’s shooting up. My, what a masher he’ll be one day. Do they still say that? Masher? Probably not. But how many young girls’ hearts are destined to be broken? Or will he maybe stay with Amanda …? Silly to say that, of course—they’re both no more than children. But it would be rather nice. And you never know, do you? What the future holds. One day, who knows, it might be just the four of us—Paul and Amanda, Jonathan and myself. Fanciful—well yes, I suppose. But who’s to say, actually?

  Always on a Wednesday evening I count out all the notes and then the coins, which I shovel into these differently colored stiff little paper bags that they give you at the bank: they won’t accept them, otherwise—quite strict. Five pounds in silver, a pound’sworth of coppers. Takes a good while, and even after giving your hands a jolly good scrub there still is always a dingy residue, a filmy sensation of soilin
g. Could be my imagination: I always feel that coins en masse—and particularly pennies—there’s just something too earthy about them: can’t explain. Weigh an absolute ton—and gosh, the way I was swinging about my basket earlier, I felt I had nearly dislocated my shoulder: but there—I just was so gay, feeling so carefree. Anyway—got rid of them all now and I’ve had the lodgement book stamped by that nice Mr. Curtis—I always go to his booth if he’s free, such a gentleman: he said to me “Thank you again for your custom, Madam, and I do trust that you will pass a most pleasant afternoon, Madam” (Jim—and I think this every time—he could learn one or two lessons from that nice Mr. Curtis). And now I’ve just crossed the road at the zebra and here I am in my beloved John Barnes—but we all adore it, of course: everyone in the Lane. Well it’s we women I’m talking about, quite naturally: men, I don’t know … they just seem quite willfully blind to the joys of all this sort of thing. Never seem to go into a shop from one year’s end to the other. Except their own, of course, the duskier recesses of which they inhabit like voles in a warren—if a warren, indeed, is the thing that is inhabited by voles. Not Jonathan. Of course not Jonathan: he is always the glorious exception to any given rule. He constantly is buying quite beautiful things in all sorts of lovely places, a lot of them I’m sure in the rather classier parts of the West End (I would put him out of my mind, you know—try rather harder to concentrate on the matters in hand, but I really don’t want to). But we laugh about it, we girls, our infatuation with John Barnes—Edie in the Dairies, Gwendoline at Amy’s, every one of us. Edie, I remember, she once was looking for a certain little something for her sister’s birthday, and she said to us she’d searched and searched high and low but couldn’t find one anywhere—which, as we all knew full well, meant simply that they hadn’t got it in John Barnes. I wish I could remember what exactly it was she was wanting, actually—because it’s really so very strange that they didn’t have it, whatever thing it was: usually, and rather bewilderingly in so comparatively small a space, they appear to stock just absolutely everything. Anyway, enough of all that … let’s get up the escalator to the lingerie department. I do think, you know, that it must really be the slowest escalator in the whole of the world. You are overtaken by people in no sort of a hurry walking up the adjacent staircase. If I’m honest, it had actually been my intention to take care of buying all the rather boring things first—darning needles, hankies for Paul, a few everyday serviettes, and some Basildon Bond notepaper and envelopes; I tried to get them in Moore’s in the Lane, but they didn’t have azure. But all that seems too dull, and I just can’t help myself—I’m going straight upstairs: I need now to freely indulge myself.

  I don’t, though, actually think I’m going to find the main thing I came in for: much too racy, I should have said, for good old John Barnes. But you see Jonathan, just last Thursday, he had mentioned in passing—well I say in passing, but with men you’re never quite sure, are you? Maybe his seemingly casual comments had actually been rather more considered—but what he said was that one of the spectacles he does enjoy, should ever he catch a sight of it on the television, is a performance of the cancan. You know—that terribly raucous French sort of dancing where there’s this row of highly made-up young ladies in wigs and all manner of petticoats and so on, and they’ll kick up their legs and all the rest of it before ultimately, by way of doing the splits while howling like Red Indians—all very faint-making—show off these very frilly and virginally white camiknickers of theirs. I once did actually see some of this—I think it might have been on Sunday Night At The London Palladium—and the knickers themselves, I actually remember thinking them quite chaste, if that isn’t just too perverse of me. But voluminous, is what I mean. And thoroughly unrevealing. It’s the frills themselves, I suppose, that are wholly the thing. Well so you do see what I mean—not quite the thing for John Barnes, are they really? Even Selfridge’s might not run to them—but still I thought I owed it to the two of us, to Jonathan and myself, to at least try to look for them: both his reaction and the sensation of actually wearing the things, after all, could only be entertaining. I quickly passed by the children’s shoe department (always on a Saturday there are queues of excitedly giggling kiddies repeatedly X-raying their feet in the Start-Rite machine they’ve got there up a little flight of steps—the sight of the thing rather uncomfortably reminding me that Paul was in sore need of not just wellingtons but more to the point those horribly expensive hard-soled indoor shoes that his school just absolutely insists upon … and here is his Auntie Milly on the hunt for a pair of Parisian camiknickers … oh dear me). And I had only just reached the department—had yet even to riffle through the racks—and goodness, heavens above, I was simply stopped dead in my tracks: I could barely believe my eyes. For there, no more than just yards in front of me, was Stan Miller, of all people on God’s mellow earth, and holding out at arm’s-length distance from him what looked like a sort of a very filmy gown affair, a sheerish thing that a lady of leisure might slip on over a nightdress, and in a pretty shade of coral with contrasting little satinet bows at the shoulder: he seemed quite lost in earnest contemplation—devoting to the thing a very thorough appraisal. Well my brain, I have to tell you, was urging me to turn around then and there and just walk away as rapidly as possible: my brain, it was quite insistent that I should instantly be gone, to quickly retrace my steps to the escalator before Stan could have the chance to look up and just register my utterly astonished presence, gaping now full at him. And although I can vouch for the fact that this brain of mine remained very stubbornly set upon so decisive a course of action, I can also tell you this: my body, well—that apparently was having no part of it. I just continued to stand there, as if both my feet were cemented into the flooring. And then of course he did, didn’t he? Well of course he did, Stan—idly glanced over, and then he saw me. And blinked. I don’t think that yet he had focused, quite established the connection—because it can be like that sometimes, as I know to my own cost, should you ever encounter somebody somewhere so bemusingly out of context. Then a smile, a kindly smile of recognition did begin slowly to play at the corners of his mouth—before suddenly, it froze there: his eyes now were those of a hunted creature, spotlit and exposed, the concern and simply quite boiling embarrassment dancing rather alarmingly all over his reddened and perspiring face as roughly he rammed back the gown on to the rack and started up babbling to me in a pitch rather higher than his usual one some or other gobble degook, not a single word of which was remotely comprehensible. Though finally, a sort of sense began to filter through:

  “ … tea, really. Just on my way there—cafeteria, you know. It’s just down the, um … well I expect you know where it, uh … Nice cup of tea, thought that would be nice. This thing, this nightgown thing, I just saw it hanging there, and er …”

  “Hello, Stan. How lovely to see you. Not often we can escape from the Lane, is it? Only on the blessed and sacred half-day closing. Except for Jim, of course. He never closes. He’d stay open all through the night if he thought there’d be any customers. How are you?”

  “Keeping nicely, I thank you Milly. Kind of you to inquire. And yourself? Seem to be blooming, as ever. Saw it just hanging there, you know—and then I thought that Jane, Janey—you know, Janey, my wife, you remember—always was partial to that particular color. Wore it on our wedding day, matter of fact. Just struck me out of the blue, sort of style.”

  “It seemed very elegant, from what little I could see of it. Are you going to buy it for her, then? How terribly sweet.”

  He looked at her like a culprit in an orchard whose jersey was bulging with freshly scrumped pippins.

  “Buy it …? Well—hadn’t really, um … I’m not really, um … versed, you know. Not very good at … all this sort of gubbins.”

  Milly was smiling encouragingly, though closing her eyes and silently sighing: what is it about men, actually? Why always must they be so very actively hopeless? With, of course, the one great glori
ous exception (and just thinking this, she was pleased to feel that keenest little surge of excitement rippling right into her).

  “Maybe I might be able to advise …? Perfectly happy to, Stan—if you think I could be of any … I mean to say, we all of us need a little bit of help, don’t we? Time to time. If something is beyond our ken. Now are you aware of her size? That’s the prime thing. Listen—speaking as a member of the fairer sex, I’ll let you into a little secret, shall I Stan?”

  He gazed at her half-expectantly.

  “Secret …?”

  “Mm. I just can’t tell you how terribly important it is in such delicate matters as these to make sure that the sizing’s bang on. Too large, and a woman will be quite convinced that you see her as being fat. Too small, and she’ll believe that she must be fatter than ideally you would like her to be. And nothing you can say, I’m afraid, will persuade her otherwise. Awful, isn’t it? Neuroses, you see. It affects every single one of us, silly ninnies that we are. It really is rather a minefield. You poor things. I do quite sympathize.”

  “Twenty-six, I think … Can’t be sure.”

  Milly regarded him.

  “Twenty-six what, Stan? I mean to say—although I haven’t actually seen Jane for quite a long while, I hardly think she can be a size 26—that would put her on a par with Tessie O’Shea and Bessie Bunter. Both of them bundled up together.”