The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  – Good lord, she said, look at the state of you. What’s happened, love? Shall we have a cup of tea? Or maybe you’d prefer a drop of something stronger?

  Oh Gustl would indeed prefer a drop of something stronger.

  – So would I, said Joan, for despite the ambivalence she felt towards this shabby refugee of Julius’, she was a woman and she did arouse Joan’s compassion and, too, her admiration, when she thought of what Gustl had survived, what little she knew about it. Gricey had always made it clear he hadn’t much time for Auntie Gustl, and uttered dark sneers as to what Julius was doing with a Jewish refugee in his house. Given what Vera was now saying about there being a woman in the garden, and perfume in the bedroom, she didn’t know quite what to think. But she was a shrewd woman, Joan, and didn’t really believe this blowsy woman was a home wrecker. If it’s the only home you’ve got, why wreck it? Even if it is the home of a swine like Julius Glass? Poor Gustl, what must she put up with in that house. And for a few seconds Joan felt her old lion self rising once more. Her fingers trembled, pouring gin into a couple of tumblers and being not parsimonious about it. I had a good man once, she thought, and Julius Glass destroyed him.

  – Drink up, dear, she said, and we’ll have another, and you’ll tell me all about it.

  But Gustl was not the woman to come swiftly to the point. She sat there in her cardigan, shifting about on the chair, frowning. She stopped and started, approached the fence then balked. She sipped her gin. Her English was at times not good, and it seemed to Joan that she was absorbed as much in finding the words as in framing the thought. She tried again. Julius was not a bad man, she said at last – er ist kein schlechter Mensch – not like people thought. It was true she was not his Schwester, but she was not his Schickse. No, no.

  – Schwester?

  – Sister.

  – Oh, sister. You’re not his sister, and you’re not his Schickse, so what are you?

  Gustl spoke now with the emphatic aplomb of a woman embarked on telling the truth, chin up and hands flat on the table. What emerged was a declaration that Julius had saved her from the fascists in Paris, and now – and this was new – now they were fighting fascists in London.

  – But what about the perfume?

  – Was ist mit dem Perfum?

  – In his bedroom. Your perfume, the Jicky, Vera smelled it.

  Gustl swelled with indignation.

  – Ich gehe in sein Schlafzimmer, aber ich gehe nicht mit ihm ins Bett!

  – English, dearie! Speak English!

  Gustl admitted she went into his room but not his bed.

  – Well, I daresay you don’t get into his bed but what do you do?

  – We talk.

  – What do you talk about?

  – I cannot tell you this. We are fighting the fascists. Es ist ein wenig gefährlich, Liebste. Not safe.

  She reached across the table as though to hold Joan’s hand but Joan wasn’t having it. Fighting the fascists, are you, she thought. They were both smoking now. Joan then thought about her daughter, an untidy girl, eating pork pies with her fingers and drinking beer from the bottle at this very table the night before. She’d had a script in front of her but no other sign of what it was she did for a living, or how very good at it she was. She told Gustl it was Vera she was worried about, not fascists.

  – I said to her he’s a good man, cried Gustl. Dass er ein guter Mensch sei!

  – What did she say?

  – She said, I am not a fool.

  – Why did you pretend to be his sister?

  Gustl snorted and said it was her own stupid idea but now she thinks, what was wrong to tell the truth? She was ashamed of herself.

  – And at my husband’s funeral?

  A long silence here. The snow pattered against the kitchen window. A large alarm clock ticked the time, seeming suddenly terribly loud.

  – I’m sorry. Es tut mir leid.

  Joan had not the heart to go on. They sat for some moments in silence. Gustl was staring at the table. Then up came those china-blue eyes, swimming a little in tears and gin, her mascara smudged and running with those she’d already shed.

  – Your husband—

  It burst out of her. Then she extended a soft white hand, paint-stained, and on the pinkie a thin silvery band with a tiny gem in it, groping for Joan’s hand and not finding it.

  – Yes?

  – I think he was no good.

  A silence. Joan stared at Gustl like a basilisk, unblinking.

  – Go on, she said quietly, but with steel in her voice.

  – You know everything. Alles.

  – No, I don’t. I know nothing.

  She stood up and fetched the bottle down again. Oh bloody hell. What on earth was the woman on about?

  – I know nothing, and whatever it is you think you know, Auntie, I don’t want to hear it.

  But Gustl had not the words anyway. Or if she had the words, they were all in German. She was confused, she opened her mouth, she closed it again, she closed her eyes, she brought her hands up to her face. There came a low groan. Joan wasn’t angry now, although she’d felt a sharp flare of rage a moment before. Exasperated, rather, but familiar with Gustl’s odd ways.

  – All right, Auntie, she said. Now drink up, love, and off you go. Better take a cab, it’s still snowing hard out there.

  Gustl gazed at her. Oh, she knew Joan knew.

  – Ah no! Aber ich habe kein Geld. Nichts.

  – Nichts geld? No money?

  – No money.

  Gustl wasn’t so bad, thought Joan. She wasn’t a slut, as Gricey and Vera both seemed to think. She was disorganised, of course. But she’d spent two years on the run from the Nazis and Julius had saved her life. You had to make allowances. But to let her go out without a penny—! She was a little shocked. Not a thing Gricey would have done, she thought.

  – Finish your drink, dear, she said, then I’ll give you what I’ve got in my purse and you’ll have enough to get home at least. The pub on the corner, they’ll get you one.

  Gustl was weeping again. She didn’t think she’d be shown kindness, after telling Joan her husband was no good. But that was what she had come to tell her, in part. She realised she had failed. She found the English incomprehensible.

  – Drink up, dear, time I was in bed.

  Five minutes later, exit Gustl in her damp flannel coat, two large gins inside her, in some disarray. She makes her unsteady way to the pub on the corner. Her soul is tarnished but there is nothing to be done about that now. Water under the bridge, she thinks. It’s a phrase she’s recently learned, and she finds it useful. To survive is what matters. All else is water under the bridge. Wasser unter den Damm.

  She is parked on a stool in the small saloon bar with a gin-and-lemon in front of her. She becomes aware of a man trying to catch her eye from the other end of the counter. And oh yes, here he comes, he’s making his move. The master race is on the move. He gets himself comfortable on the stool next to her.

  – Buy you a drink, love?

  – I don’t mind if I do.

  This phrase too has been recently acquired.

  – And what’s your name?

  Gustl has assumed a rumbling baritone for this encounter, and with it a heavy Berliner accent.

  – Auntie Fensterputzer.

  Vera was still out and Joan took the opportunity to go into Gricey’s wardrobe. She was disturbed by her conversation with Gustl. She tried to shake it off, dismiss it as the maundering of a sad woman in drink. She wanted to have a look at her husband’s overcoats. The black coat in which he’d died was hers now, of course. Oh, Joan. The impulse was a generous one, she told herself, her intention simply to give a poor man something warm to wear in this interminable winter. But what she could not have predicted – although we could, oh yes, we saw it coming – was that the frail structure she had for so long maintained to compensate for the loss she’d suffered, its collapse was imminent. And, all unknowing, Auntie Gustl had b
rought it to the very point of disintegration.

  She kept the key in the bedroom, in a drawer of the small chest under the window. The key to the chest was on a ring in her handbag. She turned off the light in the kitchen and, closing the door behind her so as not to let the heat out and pushing the rug up against it, she went along the passage and into Gricey’s room. It was bitterly cold in there and the curtains were closed.

  Against the wall stood the immense fastness of the great peeling wardrobe, crowned with its broken pediment. Joan approached with caution. It was silent but its power was undiminished. His garments hung ranked along the rail inside. Eagerly Joan inhaled odours of heather and mothball. How many times now had she pulled clothes off their hangers, then laid herself upon them on the bed like a lover?

  Tonight was different. She murmured aloud to him, saying why begrudge a poor actor the use of a coat? She had to ask his permission for he still lived, in a way, in her mind, in this wardrobe, and of course he coexisted with Frank Stone, the two at times discrete entities but often enough a twinned presence, stepping forward and back in ghostly tandem, in a kind of existential minuet. Or so at least it felt to Joan.

  But still it was far from easy to stand in front of Gricey’s clothes and not be affected. Courage, dear, she whispered. There was a particular overcoat she had in mind. She touched first a tailored jacket, a cotton-linen blend he’d worn last summer. Last summer – she stepped away and sank down on the bed, bringing her hands to her face—

  She lifted her streaming eyes to the ceiling. To think of all she’d had to look forward to, last summer. Now lost. Just nothing. Meaningless. Just empty days, and little worth waking up for in the morning but memories and old clothes. And thinking this, she told herself, as she had a thousand times before, now pull yourself together, dear, you stupid bloody woman, you have a task in life. But at times she couldn’t remember what it was.

  With what then seemed the most arduous effort of will she stood up from the bed and, wiping her face, stepped forward to find the overcoat that would get that poor bugger through this dreadful winter.

  Again she stood before it. Again she pushed the hangers down the rail. Then she had her hand on the shoulder of the coat Gricey had sometimes worn when he made his wartime rounds in a tin helmet and armband. There was something else, something odd about this coat, and she’d known about it for some time and never confronted it. Until now. And as she lifted it off the rail she felt again a small flat hard thing behind the lapel. What’s this? she said aloud, as though she had an audience, and turned it face out.

  She stood between the wardrobe doors, holding the lapel in her fingers, the coat itself spilling from her hands onto the floor. She stared at it, disbelieving and believing at the same time. Then she unpinned it, the tin badge she’d found on the underside of the lapel. Again she stared at it as it lay in the palm of her hand. Then she heard a key turning in the front door. She slipped the badge into the pocket of her cardigan. The bedroom door flew open.

  – I saw the light from the street and I thought I’d turned it off but maybe I didn’t and that’s practically treason!

  – I was just getting something from your father’s wardrobe—

  – Oh Mum, such a night we had!

  – Go into the kitchen, love, while I put these things away.

  – A cup of tea, then I want to sleep for a thousand years.

  Joan was left alone with the open wardrobe, the overcoat in her hands now and in her pocket that badge. She took it out and regarded it once more. She closed her fingers on it. She turned towards the door and found her reflection in the long mirror, and she was ashen. We knew what it meant all right, that flash of white lightning on blue, didn’t we, ladies? Oh yes, and so did Joan.

  10

  THE NEXT DAY, cycling home in the dusk, she made a detour and stopped into a cinema. She wanted to see the newsreels. She’d thought she could never see them, she hadn’t the stomach for it. But she’d changed her mind. She sat in a dark auditorium staring at images of corpses and bulldozers and lime pits. Emaciated people in filthy pyjamas stood behind fences. ‘Refugees.’ ‘Displaced persons.’ ‘Victims of the Nazis.’ They were Jews, of course. Why was this not made clear? She emerged from the cinema feeling ill. That night she sat alone in her kitchen staring at the stove. It didn’t occur to her to get the gin down off the shelf tonight. It was after nine when she bestirred herself to make a sandwich, and then she couldn’t eat it.

  Gricey. The name carried no warmth or softness in Joan’s heart that night, and in the days that followed she could think of nothing else. Gricey – the hypocrite. Gricey the deceiver. The betrayer. The charlatan, the traitor. Oh, he was a character all right, he’d come home to her with his stories and she’d sit and listen, sewing or darning, a glass to hand, or a cup of tea, and he never mentioned the badge he wore on the inside of his lapel. Nor how he felt being married to a Jew, either. Or being the father of a Jew, poor Vera’s blood tainted by her mother’s. Subhuman, were we, thought Joan. Then she thought: Vera must never know, break her heart, it would. No, leave the girl a few illusions about her father. She could only imagine those Saturday afternoons when he didn’t have a matinee, and off he’d go to the football, or so he said. Then those nights he didn’t come home after the show, not until the early hours. Was he out with a bucket of whitewash? Painting swastikas on walls? He should have painted one on our wall, she thought. Or the neighbours’ walls: the Bergs, the Silvers. Maybe he had. She’d certainly helped them scrub the fucking things off.

  She tried not to think about it but it was all flooding up now. Oh, and was he out marching with the rest of them, in the street, yes, three abreast, proud in their hatred, shouting for the extermination of the men and women she spoke to every day of her life in the shops and caffs and pubs of Mile End, and Dalston, and Hackney and Limehouse and Whitechapel and Bow, was he out there shouting for the burning of the synagogues? At least he couldn’t burn her synagogue, she didn’t have one. Never observant, saw no point. But so what? He’d still have exterminated her. Why had nobody told her? They must have known. She could hear them in her head, wittering on.

  – Ooh, didn’t you know, love? Yes, he hated your people. Ooh, proper Blackshirt, your Gricey.

  And the work he’d done in the war, a special constable, walking the streets of the West End in his tin hat all through the Blitz. Had he looked up at the night sky, the bombers droning through the clouds, and did he say to himself, go on, friend, drop the fucking lot, right on top of us? All the sorrow he’d caused her, dying as he did then trying to come through again as though he couldn’t bear to leave her, and after what he’d done—

  She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Now she felt she didn’t know the first thing about him. He was a stranger to her. And did he fight when the meetings turned ugly, when it got out of hand, chaos and violence in the streets, men screaming in pain and the coppers charging in with their truncheons out, always on the side of the fascists? And some men covered in blood with their teeth smashed in and their fingers broken, there was one man even lost an eye? And her Gricey was in all that, was he, on the wrong side? And Cable Street? Autumn of ’36, when Mosley tried to bring three thousand fascists into the East End, and encountered barricades, and behind them twenty thousand Londoners, maybe more, Jews, Irish, communists, all sorts, who wanted no part of them whatsoever, and fought them to a standstill with sticks and chair legs and rocks, and unloaded on top of them from bedroom windows all the rotten vegetables and kitchen rubbish they could lay their hands on, and the contents of their chamber pots? Mosley had to take those fascists back where they’d come from. Wonderful thing, heart-warming it was, to see them turned back, as usual with no help from the coppers, the reverse – they supported him. Such pride we felt then, and some of us even thought, well, that’s the end of that. Ha. But was he there, Gricey, in the fascist ranks?

  Well, no. He didn’t go in for the actual street fighting. He was more for entertainin
g the troops, as it were. Stiffening morale.

  We saw her in the pub around this time. We thought we should take her out, cheer her up. There were a few of us she knew, old friends, Hattie of course, Delphie Dix, in her wheelchair, poor old thing. Mabel Hatch, two or three others. Oh, but she just sat there gazing into space while the talk ebbed and flowed around her. Have another drink, dear, before you freeze to bloody death, said Delphie – and Joan gazing into space with her mind a thousand miles away. We knew what she was thinking about, it was Gricey, of course, who all that time had had a secret, and herself practically the only one who didn’t know it because nobody wanted to be the one to tell her. Well, why would we? She’d have told him.

  – Who said that? he’d shout.

  And Joan would have to say who it was.

  – I’ll have that cunt!

  11

  LATE ONE SUNDAY morning Frank Stone rang Joan’s doorbell. Vera was out, a small mercy. Joan went down and opened the front door. An arctic wind swept into the building and flattened their clothes against their limbs and went howling up the stairs like an Irish ghost. He gazed at her for several moments and once again the curious effect of time apart had occurred, for she was bathed in light now. He stood on the windswept pavement apparently unable to move.

  – Mr Stone, are you coming in or not?

  He stepped across the threshold and pushed the door closed behind him. The howling continued in the street; inside all was still. Joan turned and started up the stairs. He was conscious of her body always, and felt able with impunity to observe the lift of her heels, the taut calves in sheer seamed silk – and where did she get silk stockings, we should like to know, in 1947? – oh, and the sway of her hips and her bum in the trim skirt, and he loved too her long slim wrists with the white fingers trailing on the banister as she ascended. She could feel his eyes upon her and halfway up she stopped, and turned, and on the narrow staircase, with its thin carpet runner and the dim light from the hallway above, she regarded him where he’d halted three steps below.