by Paul Gallico
From then on it became evident to the neighbourhood that the Gussets, who anyway had a kind of Jukes-family reputation, were taking it out on the child. Little ’Enry had become a matter of deep concern to the two widows who lived on either side of the Gussets, but in particular to Mrs Harris, who found that the unhappy little orphan-by-law touched her heart, and his plight invaded her dreams of the day and of the night-time.
If the Gussets had been more brutally cruel to little Henry, Mrs Harris could have done something immediate and drastic in cooperation with the police. But Mr and Mrs Gusset were too smart for that. No one knew exactly what it was Mr Gusset did to eke out a living for his family, but it took place in Soho, sometimes during the night, and the general opinion held that it was something shady.
Whatever it may have been it was known that the Gussets were particularly anxious to avoid the attentions of the police, and therefore as far as little Henry was concerned, remained strictly within the law. They were well aware that the police were not able to take action with reference to a child except in cases of extreme and visible cruelty. No one could say exactly that the boy was starving or suffering from injuries. But Mrs Harris knew his life was made a constant hell of short rations, cuffs, slaps, pinches, and curses, as the Gussets revenged themselves upon him for the stoppage of the funds.
He was the drudge and the butt of the slatternly family, and any of their two girls and four boys ranging from the ages of three to twelve could tweak, kick, and abuse him with impunity. But worst of all was the fact of the child growing up without love or affection of any kind. On the contrary, he was hated, and this both Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield found the most painful of all.
Mrs Harris had had her share of hard knocks herself; in her world these were expected and accepted, but she had a warm and embracing nature, had successfully brought up a child of her own, and what she saw of the little boy next door and the treatment meted out to him began to assume the nature of a constant pain and worry, and something which was never too far or entirely out of her thoughts. Often when she was, as dictated by her nature, blithe, gay, light-hearted, and irrepressible about her work, her clients, and her friends, would come the sudden sobering thought of the plight of little ’Enry. Then Mrs Harris would indulge in one of her day-dreams, the kind that a year or so ago had sent her off to the great adventure of her life in Paris.
The new day-dream took on the quality of the romantic fiction of which Mrs Harris was a great devotee via magazines many of her clients sloughed off upon her when they were finished with them.
In Mrs Harris’s opinion, and transferred to the dream, Pansy Cott, or whatever her new name now happened to be, was the villainess of the story, the missing airman Brown the hero, and little ’Enry the victim. For one thing, Mrs Harris was convinced that the father was continuing the support of his child, and that Pansy was simply pocketing the money. It was all Pansy’s doing - Pansy who had refused to accompany her husband to America, as was her wifely duty; Pansy who had withheld the child from him; Pansy who, in order to satisfy a lover, had farmed out the little boy to this beastly family; and finally, Pansy who had vanished with the loot, leaving the boy to his awful fate.
George Brown, on the other hand, was one of nature’s noblemen; in the intervening years in all likelihood he would have made his fortune, as Americans did. Perhaps be had remarried, perhaps not, but whatever and wherever, he would be pining for his lost ’Enry.
This estimate of George Brown was based upon her experience with American GIs in England, whom she had invariably found friendly, warm-hearted, generous, and particularly loving and kind to children. She remembered how during the war they had unfailingly shared their rations of sweets with the youngsters surrounding their bases. They were inclined to be loud, noisy, boastful, and spendthrift, but when one got to know them, underneath they were the salt of the earth.
They were, of course, the richest people in the world, and Mrs Harris reared a kind of fantasy palace where George Brown would now be living, and where little ’Enry too could be enjoying his birthright if only his Dad knew of his plight. She had no doubt but that if somehow Mr Brown could be found and told of the situation, he would appear upon the scene, wafted on the wings of a faster-than-sound jet, to claim his child and remove him from the tyranny and thraldom of the nasty Gussets. It wanted only a fairy godmother to give the knobs of Fate a twist and set the machinery going in the right direction. It was not long before, so affected was she by the plight of little ’Enry, Mrs Harris began to see herself as that fairy godmother.
Somehow in the dream she was transplanted to the great United States of America, where by a combination of shrewdness and luck she turned up the missing George Brown almost at once. As she narrated the story of little ’Enry to him tears began to flow from his eyes, and when she had finished he was weeping unashamedly. ‘My good woman,’ he said, ‘all my riches can never repay you for what you have done for me. Come, let us go at once to the aeroplane and set out to fetch my little boy home where he belongs.’ It was a very satisfactory dream.
But, as has been noted before, Mrs Harris was not wholly given to spinning webs of fantasy. She was hard-headed, practical, and realistic about the situation of little Henry, the Gussets, and the knowledge that no one had been able to locate the father, coupled with the fact that no one had really attempted to do so. Underneath the dreams was a growing conviction that if only given an opportunity she could manage to find him, a conviction not at all diminished by the fact that all she knew of him was that his name had been George Brown, and he had been in the American Air Force.
DEEP in her heart, Mrs Harris was well aware that for her a trip to America was as remote as a trip to the moon. True, she had managed to cross the English Channel, and the aeroplane had made the Atlantic Ocean just another body of water over which to zoom, but the practical considerations of expense and living, etc., put such a journey well out of reach. Mrs Harris had achieved her Paris visit and heart’s desire through two years of scrimping and saving, but this had been a kind of lifetime effort. It had taken a good deal out of her. She was older now and aware that she was no longer capable of making the attempt to amass the necessary number of pounds to finance such an expedition.
True, l’affaire Dior had been sparked by the winning of a hundred pounds in a football pool, without which Mrs Harris might never have undertaken the task of amassing another three hundred and fifty. She continued to play the pools, but without the blazing conviction which sometimes leads the face of fortune to smile. She knew very well that that kind of lightning never struck twice in the same place.
Yet, at the very moment that little Henry, under the cover of the abysmal gargling of Kentucky Claiborne, was being cuffed about in the kitchen of Number 7 Willis Gardens, and sent to bed yet another night insufficiently nourished, Fate was already laying the groundwork for an incredible change in the life not only of himself, but likewise of Ada Harris and Mrs Butterfield.
There was no miracle involved, nothing more supernatural than two sets of men facing one another either side of the directors’ table in the board and conference room of a gigantic Hollywood film and television studio six thousand miles away, glaring at one another with all the venom that can be mustered by greedy men engaged in a battle for power.
Seven hours, one hundred and three cups of coffee, and forty-two Havana Perfectos later, the malevolence of the glares had not diminished, but the battle was over. A cable-gram was dispatched which had consequences both direct and indirect in the lives of a strange assortment of people, some of whom had never even heard of North American Pictures and Television Company Inc.
Among the clients for whom Mrs Harris ‘did’ not only with regularity but enthusiasm, since she had her favourites, were Mr and Mrs Joel Schreiber, who had a six-roomed flat on the top floor of one of the reconditioned houses in Eaton Square. Joel and Henrietta Schreiber were a middle-aged, childless American couple who had made their home in London for th
e last three years, where Mr Schreiber had acted as European representative and distribution manager for North American Pictures and Television Company.
It was through the kindness of Henrietta Schreiber originally that Mrs Harris had been able to change her hard-earned pounds for the necessarily exportable dollars which had enabled her to pay for her Dior dress in Paris. Neither of them had had any inkling that they were breaking the law in doing this. As Mrs Schreiber saw it, the pound notes were remaining with her in England, and not leaving the country, which was what the British wanted, wasn’t it? But then Mrs Schreiber was one of those muddled people who never quite catch on to the way things operate, or are supposed to operate.
With the daily help and advice of Mrs Harris she had been able to accustom herself to keeping house in London, shopping in Elizabeth Street, and doing her own cooking, while Mrs Harris’s energetic appearance for two hours a day kept her flat immaculate. Any sudden changes or problems turning up were likely to send Mrs Schreiber into a flutter. As one who before coming to England had been compelled to cope with the type of servants available in Hollywood and New York, Henrietta was a fervent admirer of Mrs Harris’s speed, efficiency, skill at making the dust fly, and above all her ability to cope with almost any situation which arose.
Joel Schreiber, like Napoleon’s every-man soldier who carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, possessed an imaginary president’s corporation seal in his briefcase. A hard-headed businessman who had worked his way up in North American Pictures from office boy to his present position, but always on the business side, he also had nourished dreams of arts and letters, and what he would do if he were president of North American, a contingency so remote that he never even so much as discussed it with his Henrietta. The kind of job Mr Schreiber had did not lead to presidencies, formations of policy, and conferences with the great and near-great stars of the film and television world.
Yet when the already-mentioned conference in Hollywood was over and the cablegram dispatched, it was to none other than Joel Schreiber, with instructions to move his offices as well as his domicile to New York for the tenure of a five-year contract as President of North American Pictures and Television Company Inc. Two power combines battling for control of North American, neither strong enough to win, and facing exhaustion, had finally agreed upon Schreiber, a dark–horse outsider, as a compromise candidate and eventual President of North American.
Following upon the cablegram which reached Schreiber at his office that afternoon were long-distance telephone calls, miraculous ‘conference’ conversations spanning oceans and continents, in which five people - one in London, two in California, two in New York - sat at separate telephones and talked as though they were all in one room, and by the time Mr Schreiber, a stocky little man with clever eyes, returned home that early evening, he was simply bursting with excitement and news.
There was no holding it in, he spilled it all in one load upon the threshold as he entered his flat. ‘Henrietta, I’m IT! I got news for you. Only it’s real news. I’m President of North American Pictures, in charge of everything! They’re moving the offices to New York. We’ve got to leave in two weeks. We’re going to live there in a big apartment on Park Avenue. The Company found one for me already. It’s a double penthouse. I’m the big squeeze now, Henrietta. What do you think of it?’
They were a loving and affectionate couple, and so they hugged one another first, and then Mr Schreiber danced Henrietta around the apartment a little, until she was breathless and her comfortable, matronly figure was heaving.
She said, ‘You deserve it, Joel. They should have done it long ago.’ Then, to calm herself and collect her thoughts, she went to the window and looked out on to the quiet, leafy shade of Eaton Square, with its traffic artery running down the middle, and with a pang thought how used she had become to this placid way of life, how much she had loved it, and how she dreaded being plunged back into the hurly-burly and manic tempo of New York.
Schreiber was pacing up and down the flat with excitement, unable to sit down, as dozens of new thoughts, thrills, and ideas connected with his newly exalted position shot through his round head, and once he stopped and said, ‘If we’d had a kid, Henrietta, wouldn’t he have been proud of his old man at this minute?’
The sentence went straight to Henrietta’s heart, where it struck and quivered like a dart thrown into a board. She knew that it was not meant as a reproach to her, since her husband was not that kind of man - it had welled simply from the need he had felt so long to be a father as well as a husband. And now that overnight he had become Somebody, she understood how the need had become intensified. When she turned away from the window there were tears brimming from the corners of her eyes and she could only say, ‘Oh Joel, I’m so proud of you.’
He saw at once that he had hurt her, and going to her he put his arm around her shoulder and said, ‘There, Henrietta, I didn’t mean it like it sounded. You don’t need to cry. We’re a very lucky couple. We’re important now. Think of the wonderful times we’re going to have in New York, and the dinner parties you’re going to give for all them famous people. You’re really going to be the hostess with the mostes’, like in the song.’
‘Oh Joel,’ Henrietta cried, ‘it’s been so long since we’ve lived in America, or New York - I’m frightened.’
‘Psha,’ comforted Mr Schreiber. ‘What you got to be frightened of ? It’ll be a breeze for you. You’ll do wonderful. We’re rich now, and you can have all the servants you want.’
But that was just what Mrs Schreiber was worrying about, and which continued to worry her the following morning long after Mr Schreiber had floated away to his office on a pink cloud.
Her confused and excited imagination ranged over the whole monstrous gamut of international slatterns, bums, laggards, and good-for-nothings who sold their services as ‘trained help’. Through her harassed mind marched the parade of Slovak, Lithuanian, Bosnian-Herzegovinian butlers or male servants with dirty fingernails, yellow, cigarette-stained fingers, who had worked for her at one time or another, trailing the ashes of their interminable cigarettes all over the rugs behind them. She had dealt with ox-like Swedes, equally bovine Finns, impudent Prussians, lazy Irish, lazier Italians, and inscrutable Orientals.
Fed up with foreigners, she had engaged American help, both coloured and white, live-in servants who drank her liquor and used her perfume, or daily women who came in the morning and departed at night usually with some article of her clothing or lingerie hidden upon their persons. They didn’t know how to dust, polish, sweep, rinse out a glass, or clean a piece of silver, they left pedestal marks on the floor where, immobile like statues, they had leaned for hours on their brooms doing nothing. None of them had any pride of house or beautiful things. They smashed her good dishes, china, lamps, and bric-à-brac, ruined her slipcovers and linen, burnt cigarette holes in her carpets, and wrecked her property and peace of mind.
To this appalling crew she now added a long line of sour-faced cooks, each of whom had made her contribution to the grey hairs that were beginning to appear on her head. Some had been able to cook, others not. All of them had been unpleasant women with foul dispositions and unholy characters, embittered tyrants who had taken over and terrorized her home for whatever the length of their stay. Most of them had been only a little batty; some of them just one step from the loony bin. None of them had ever shown any sympathy or kindliness, or so much as a single thought beyond the rules they laid down for their own comfort and satisfaction.
A key rattled in the door, it swung open and in marched Mrs Harris carrying her usual rexine bag full of goodness-only knows - what that she always brought with her on her rounds, and wearing a too-long, last year’s coat that someone had given her, with a truly ancient flowerpot hat, relic of a long-dead client, but which now by the rotation of styles had suddenly become fashionable again.
‘Good morning, ma’am,’ she said cheerily. ‘I’m a bit early this morning, but sinc
e you said you was ’aving some friends for dinner tonight, I thought I’d do a real good tidying up and ’ave the plyce lookin’ like apple pie.’
To Mrs Schreiber, her mind hardly cleared of the ghastly parade of remembered domestic slobs, Ada Harris looked like an angel, and before she knew what she was doing, she ran to the little char, threw her arms about her neck, hugged her, and cried, ‘Oh Mrs Harris, you don’t know how glad I am to see you - how very glad!’
And then unaccountably she began to cry. Perhaps it was the comfort of the return hug and pat that Mrs Harris gave her, or release from the emotional strain following the good news of her husband’s promotion, but she sobbed, ‘Oh Mrs Harris, something wonderful has happened to my husband. We’re going to New York to live, but I’m so frightened - I’m so terribly afraid.’
Mrs Harris did not know what it was all about, but there was no doubt in her mind as to the cure: she put down her carry-all, patted Mrs Schreiber on the arm and said, ‘There, there now, dear, don’t you take on so. Just you let Ada ’Arris make you a cup of tea, and then you’ll feel better.’
It was a comfort to Mrs Schreiber to let her do so, and she said, ‘If you’ll make yourself one too,’ and as the two women sat in the kitchen of the flat sipping their brew, Mrs Schreiber poured it all forth to her sympathetic sister-under-the-skin, Mrs Harris - the great good fortune that had befallen her husband and herself, the change that would take place in their lives, the monstrous, gaping, two-storeyed penthouse apartment that awaited them in America, the departure in two weeks, and above all her qualms about the servant problem. With renewed gusto she narrated for Mrs Harris’s appreciative ears all the domestic horrors and catastrophes that awaited her on the other side of the Atlantic. It relieved her to do so, and gave Mrs Harris a fine and satisfying sense of British superiority, so that she felt an even greater affection for Mrs Schreiber.