London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Then, to Connie’s and Mrs Josser’s amazement, they saw the vase openly displayed on Mrs Vizzard’s mantelpiece. Mrs Josser said nothing even to herself. She was too badly staggered. But Connie recovered more rapidly. ‘My God,’ she thought reverently. ‘It was the old girl after all. She swiped it.’

  The fact that the vase was there at all had been the outcome of a long struggle on Mrs Vizzard’s part. At first, she had felt insulted, actually insulted, by Mrs Boon’s suggestion. The whole letter had been couched in a humility more wounding than wrath. For a moment, she had even thought of telling the unfortunate woman to go her own way and keep her debt and her wedding present. Then the folly of that plan revealed itself to her, and she became anxious for her rent again. But, if she took the rent without the wedding present, it would seem as though at heart she really were cold and inhuman. And so, in the end, she chose something large, flamboyant, practically valueless. It stood in its new home, against the mirror of the overmantel as much a token as a gift. And, because of its presence there, Mrs Vizzard was able to write back a letter that entirely cleared her conscience.

  ‘Dear Mrs Boon,’ she replied. ‘It came as such a relief to get your letter and know that you were all right. We were most disturbed by your departure. Please don’t mention what I did for you. It was only what any Christian’ – Mrs Vizzard prided herself on the use of that word: it added dignity – ‘would have done. Thank you for inviting me to choose a wedding present. I have decided on the beautiful blue vase that used to stand in the centre of your sideboard. I’m sure that it will be much nicer for both of you if you’re near Percy. Trusting that you are in better health, Yours sincerely,

  Elizabeth Vizzard.’

  Mrs Vizzard took the opportunity of showing the letter to Mrs Josser before posting it. They had scarcely spoken since the incident and Mrs Josser recognised the gesture for what it was. An armistice at least. Even peace, possibly.

  Also, the bit about the wedding present had come as a relief. Like Mrs Vizzard, Mr and Mrs Josser had at first been reluctant to accept anything. But from a different motive. ‘She’ll need every penny she can lay her hands on,’ Mrs Josser said firmly. ‘If we choose anything we’ve got to pay her a fair price for it.’ And with this in mind, they had gone round the flat inspecting. Somewhat to their disappointment, they found that the only things that they really wanted were the sideboard and a cushion with a red silk cover. But the sideboard, of course, was too big – even if they paid her for it, it would look as though they were trying to pick up a bargain at her expense – and the cushion wasn’t permanent enough. So in the end, they compromised on a Birmingham‐Benares brass tray with a criss‐cross design on it and a deckled edge. It was large, and kept falling over, with the noise of stage thunder, as soon as they had got it downstairs.

  But the person who was most relieved by the openness with which things were being picked up was Connie. Not for any reason other than that it had seemed a shame to see the whole home broken up among strangers, she had paid one or two little visits herself already. She had got a pair of nail‐scissors, a little china elf, and a bed‐table stand on which to hang a watch – only without the watch, of course. The things weren’t of any value. But because other people might not understand, she had kept them shut away in the bottom of her drawer. Now they could come out and be worshipped openly.

  As it happened, however, Connie had picked up her little trifles before the letter had been delivered. And so, in a way, the letter itself was of the manner of an anti‐climax. All the same, it had regularised things. And it made Connie think.

  She thought quite a lot, in fact. And, after a while, she got the letter out and re‐read it. ‘…So if there is any little thing you fancy before the sale please take it for a keepsake…’ Any little thing: Connie turned the words over in her mind. What she had taken already was hardly worth mentioning: they certainly wouldn’t have justified a letter. So she decided that she would return them and start again.

  This time, she chose the gramophone and the box of records. And half an hour later she went back for the knick‐knacks.

  Chapter LXXIII

  1

  It was just as well when the time came that Connie was in charge of the sale. Because Mr Josser turned out to be no good at bargaining. He had already let six of the likeliest sort of buyers go off without getting any offer over twelve pounds ten, when Connie turned up with her own find. He was a soiled decrepit sort of man with sharp steel spectacles, and he jabbed at everything with the stump of a pencil before estimating it.

  ‘Fifteen pounds the lot,’ he said finally.

  Mr Josser seemed pleased. But there was only a low whistle from Connie.

  ‘Why not just steal ’em?’ she asked. ‘It’s quicker.’

  ‘That’s my price,’ the auctioneer answered.

  ‘Sorry you’ve been troubled,’ Connie told him.

  The auctioneer did not move.

  ‘We’ve been offered twenty‐five pounds already,’ Connie observed, looking hard at Mr Josser. ‘Haven’t we, Uncle?’

  It was awkward for Mr Josser. But the auctioneer spoke for him. ‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘You take it.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Connie answered. ‘We turned it down.’

  ‘Fifteen pounds is my price,’ the auctioneer repeated.

  ‘Twenty,’ Connie told him.

  ‘Seventeen ten.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Nineteen ten.’

  ‘Eighteen. That’s my last word.’

  As he spoke he produced a bundle of creased, dirty notes. It seemed as though in his world even the money was second‐hand, too.

  ‘O.K.,’ said Connie. ‘Have it your own way. You’ll be wanting my gramophone next.’

  She hadn’t actually meant to say anything about the gramophone. It just slipped out. Not that it mattered. She’d just got Mrs Boon three pounds more than Mr Josser could have got for her. And she was glad. Her conscience had been troubling her about those knick‐knacks.

  2

  The decrepit auctioneer moved the stuff out on the following day. And Mrs Vizzard set about re‐furnishing the rooms straightaway. She had wanted the whole suite re‐decorated first. For its bridal purpose she would have preferred something brighter than the chocolate brown of the paint and the sea‐weedy blue‐green of the wall paper. Even something in off‐white, possibly. But she was too terrified to spend the money. The permanent loss of rent that Mrs Boon’s departure represented, the uncertainty of the war and the chronic unemployment of Mr Squales all combined to dissuade her from spending anything.

  ‘If I once start eating into capital…’ she told herself – but the thought was so frightening that she was unable to pursue it.

  It was on a Sunday morning when the first of the furniture was moved upstairs and, before they were through with the dressing table, the whole of No. 10 was helping. Mr Josser himself was in the thick of it right from the start. Mrs Vizzard had approached Mrs Josser – the breach between them had tacitly been sealed – and asked if Mr Josser could lend a hand. Nothing heavy, she had explained; just helping Mr Squales with one or two of the rather awkward pieces. On those terms, and on those terms only, Mr Josser was allowed to help. But shifting large old‐fashioned bits of furniture up five flights of stairs is an unpredictable affair. And when it became apparent that Mr Josser was positively and securely trapped behind the dressing table in the right angle bend by the first landing, there was nothing for Mrs Vizzard to do but to go for assistance. She went upstairs and asked Mr Puddy if he would mind helping – only for a moment, she said.

  When she came back down, there were four of them there all told – only Mr Josser didn’t show because he was concealed by the dressing table. The other two had arrived in her absence. Mrs Josser was there because she had sensed that something was wrong. And Connie was there simply because she was Connie.

  As Mrs Vizzard and Mr Puddy got there, they heard a v
oice from behind the dressing table saying that it was slipping. The information alarmed Mrs Josser. She assumed that her husband was being crushed beneath it. But it was Mr Squales who answered the voice. He told it to push. Push hard, and keep on pushing, he said. He had been doing all he could, he explained, by pulling. And evidently Mr Squales must have been exerting himself quite considerably. Because as soon as Mr Puddy appeared he let go altogether. He stood there wiping his forehead with a fancy bordered handkerchief, and sighing.

  Urged on by Mrs Josser and Mrs Vizzard, Mr Puddy threw his weight in. This was considerable. And, in the result, it overcame everything. With a sharp rending noise, the dressing table suddenly rushed forward. Mr Josser was released.

  ‘I’b afraid id bay be dabaged,’ said Mr Puddy. ‘But I dud it.’

  He seemed rather pleased with himself because, without further asking, he insisted on remaining in charge of the dressing table until it was actually in place. And he might have been ready for more – even though moving heavy things wasn’t at all in his line really – if Mrs Josser had not abruptly removed Mr Josser altogether. She told Mrs Vizzard – the breech between them was widening visibly again – that if she wanted any other removals done, she would have to make her own arrangements. Mr Josser wasn’t equal to it, she said.

  This set‐back was serious because the overcrowded rooms in the basement were like a ripe seed‐pod ready to burst open. Mrs Vizzard had done a lot of preparing. She had emptied all the drawers and, for protection, she had even tied a rug over the long mirror in the wardrobe so that it shouldn’t be splintered on the way upstairs. And now it seemed that everything was to be at a standstill until Monday. Unless she unloaded the bed of its boxes and encumbrances she would have literally nowhere to sleep that night.

  But Mrs Vizzard was not a woman to take defeat easily. Even if the furniture itself were immovable, there were still the oddments, the bits and pieces. Carrying these, she made fifteen journeys in all. Fifteen journeys up and down twenty‐seven stairs.

  The odd thing was that Mr Squales himself was so useless. Still with the bloom of his three days in the country on his cheeks, he seemed nevertheless to be fatigued at the slightest exertion. In consequence, he chose none but the lightest objects. And, even so, his betrothed did two or three journeys to his one. To a casual observer – or to Mrs Vizzard for that matter – it was as though he weren’t really trying. Not trying, and not caring very much, either. It was as though his own wedding preparations didn’t really mean a thing to him.

  Unlike a casual observer, however, Mrs Vizzard knew the reason for it. Or suspected that she did. It was because of a long and painful conversation that she had had with him the night before. Ever since his return, her fiancé had been more moody and preoccupied than usual. And in the end Mrs Vizzard had been able to stand the nervous strain, the perplexity, no longer. She had asked him outright whether he was regretting it, whether he didn’t really want to marry her at all.

  The effect of the question had been remarkable. Never in her most foolishly romantic moments had Mrs Vizzard expected to receive such assurances. She was, he told her, his life, his very life, his one hope, his star. It was so entirely unqualified a declaration, in fact, that she was able to lead up to the second ultimatum. She explained what Mrs Boon’s departure meant to her, referred to the Jossers’ back room – the room the detective had occupied – which was still vacant, and showed him a cutting about the way London was emptying and how for the first time since the war, the Great War, there were more rooms than tenants. Laid all her cards on the table, in short, and told him that he would have to find himself a job.

  It was all just as Mrs Vizzard had feared. The move had been postponed. She had re‐packed the drawers – so that she could have somewhere to sleep – and had taken the rug off the front of the wardrobe. The room was in disorder, but habitable.

  Because the attempt had been abandoned, Mr Squales was a free man again. Or, at least, if not exactly free, he wasn’t wanted at the moment. In consequence, he was lying on his back in bed, resting. He allowed his eyes to rove round the room for a moment, taking in everything – the cross‐legged bamboo table with the red fringed clock on it, the bamboo and marble wash‐stand, the wicker and bamboo easy chair – and then stared again at the blank expanse of ceiling because it was less distasteful.

  He was remembering those three days at Mrs Jan Byl’s.

  ‘Blast Boanerges,’ he said half aloud. ‘He might as well have stayed away altogether for all the help he was. She didn’t give a damn for his advice. And it was pretty straightforward. If I’d put it any more bluntly she’d only have suspected me.’

  Chapter LXXIV

  1

  The end of the episode – the deliberate and calculated sundering of all Mrs Boon’s connections with Dulcimer Street – left Mrs Josser depressed and unsettled. Throughout the arrest, the trial, the appeal, she had remained self‐possessed and purposeful. Had managed to keep on top of things. But there was no doubt about it: the sale of the furniture had been the climax. Everything else was now anti‐climax. She was living in the trough of things at the moment.

  And it wasn’t about her own feelings that she was worrying. It was about Mr Josser. The events of the past three months hadn’t done him any good, either. He was ageing visibly. And rapidly. Having looked the same for as long as she could remember – at times it almost seemed that it had been a small grey‐haired man whom she had married – he was suddenly changing before her eyes. His hair was wispier now and thinner. And he was growing absent‐minded: twice, lately, he had gone through to the kitchen to put a kettle on and then come back without having done it. He seemed, too, to be missing Doris. Missing Doris more even than he missed Ted. He spoke about her longingly as though she were part of a remote, delightful past. He was content to sit for hours – whole evenings, in fact – just smoking and remembering. It was a vague, shaky sort of existence, not like real life at all. And in Mrs Josser’s present state it was getting on her nerves.

  It was lucky in a way that there was the matter of Uncle Henry’s will to distract her. And it was lucky, too, that she had placed the whole matter into Mr Barks’ hands because he seemed to be so very efficient about everything connected with the law. It was only a bit strange – and a bit ironic, when you came to think of it – that it was Mrs Boon herself who had recommended Mr Barks.

  In her present reduced condition even remembering Uncle Henry, however, upset Mrs Josser. She still had occasional qualms of conscience that she hadn’t loved him more and been nicer to him. But finally she had to admit to herself that really Uncle Henry was far easier to love in retrospect than he had been in reality. As a family figure there had always been something uncompromisingly prickly about him.

  All the same, she had found tears coming into her eyes more than once as she had sat in Mr Barks’ office going over the details. It was the side of life that Uncle Henry himself would have despised most. And at times she had an uneasy feeling that Uncle Henry with his Socialist views must somewhere at this very moment be feeling that, will or no will, she hadn’t got any real right to the flourishing business that he had left her. His greengrocery and coal connection should have reverted to the State or something.

  It came, therefore, as a shock, a positively breath‐taking shock, to learn what Uncle Henry had been worth. Somehow she had always thought of him as one of themselves. Not poor exactly, but certainly not of the moneyed classes. And she had been wrong. Astonishingly wrong. Uncle Henry, with the sports shirt and his cranky views and his green bicycle, had fairly been rolling in it. By the time the whole estate had been wound up there would be something, Mr Barks said, between eleven and twelve hundred pounds.

  The effect of the news when he told her was to leave her first staggered. Then excited. Then sick. If it had been a decent moderate sum like two hundred and fifty, or even three hundred, she could have borne it. But the immensity of eleven hundred pounds alarmed her. And in a strange way
she felt ashamed. Ashamed, because Mr Josser after having worked hard for nearly forty years had managed to scrape together only just enough to think of buying himself a cheap cottage. Whereas she, by just sitting back and not doing anything, had suddenly become a rich woman.

  A rich woman! She turned the words over in her mind all the way back from Mr Barks’. A rich woman! It put her at once into the Mrs Vizzard class. Instead of merely renting three rooms in No. 10, the Jossers could buy the whole place outright if they felt inclined. They could expand. It was only a passing thought, however. Because Mrs Josser knew perfectly well that they didn’t want to expand. And the idea became modified to refurnishing the three rooms that they already had. Then that, too, was seen to be the foolish notion that it was, because the three rooms didn’t need refurnishing. And the spectacle of Connie frittering away her little nest‐egg rose up before her eyes. At all costs she must avoid that. And she recognised that it was just as easy to squander eleven hundred as it had been to squander sixty‐five: it was only that it took longer. And with actually spending the money out of the question, Mrs Josser, to her surprise, found herself wondering what she should do with it. It seemed that, after all, she didn’t really need it.