London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  ‘We’ll have to do something about this,’ he said, examining himself in the mirror. ‘Can’t turn up at the church looking like the Snow Queen.’

  The cut gave him more trouble than he had expected. By the time he had finished dressing, he had spoilt the pale silk necktie which he had bought specially for the wedding, and ruined his two good collars. In the end, there was nothing for it but to trim up one of his old ones by going round the edge with a pair of nail scissors, and wear the tie that he had come down in. He didn’t like doing so because it made him feel rather a cad. That tie had been one of the first presents that Mrs Vizzard had given him.

  The unwelcome memory of Mrs Vizzard at such a moment unnerved him, and he shuddered. Between his past fiancée and his present bride there was such a gap – such a vast, unbridgeable gap. It was really quite extraordinary to think that they were both women. Not that he felt unequal to his new station in life – the station of a country gentleman. He was quite sure of himself there. Before the month was out, he would have cured the butler of breathing down his nose every time he looked at him. No: it wasn’t that. It was simply Mrs Jan Byl’s size that was worrying him.

  When he was actually with her he didn’t notice it so much: it was all of a piece somehow – large house, large car, large woman. But, looked at in prospect, she was enormous. Simply enormous. Marrying her seemed to take on a new significance. It was like uniting himself for life with the Taj Mahal or the Leaning Tower.

  It was a bit late, however, for any misgivings. Mr Squales recognised that. Already it was nearly nine o’clock, and he went downstairs to breakfast. Usually he ate a good breakfast – porridge, kidneys, toast and marmalade – everything. But this morning his mind was too full to concentrate on his food. Too full to concentrate on anything. Sitting with the untasted wheat‐flakes in front of him, he found himself drifting off into one of those dangerous psychic states of his. It seemed that Mrs Vizzard was very near to him again. Right up beside his elbow, and trying to say something. It was as though he could feel that her lips were moving, yet not hear a syllable that she said. He roused himself finally with a groan which startled the waitress, and went outside to walk in the garden. It was only a small garden and he went round and round it several times.

  ‘Poor woman,’ he kept repeating to himself as he walked. ‘I can understand just how she feels. It must be terrible for her. Especially at her time of life. I must make it my business to see her sometime if only to console her.’

  Mr Squales peered in at the clock in the dining‐room as he passed – Mrs Jan Byl was giving him a watch for a wedding‐present – and saw that it was nine‐thirty. The car was coming for him as usual at ten. And it was his business to be ready for it. Leaving the placidity of the garden behind him – ‘They could easily bung on another quid or two a week if they had an orchestra or a loud‐speaker and served meals out here under little umbrellas,’ he told himself – he went back upstairs to his bedroom.

  Mr Vizzard’s Gladstone bag, limp and rather sinister‐looking, stood on the rack at the end of the bed, and Mr Squales bundled his things into it. Then he caught sight of the tuft of cotton wool adhering to his chin. It had slipped down a little and now rode there like a small goatee, giving him the air of a swarthy Federal general. He whipped it off in irritation. And, in consequence, he was still mopping at his chin when the car came for him. What was worse was that he’d used his last clean handkerchief.

  The fact of this upset him – it seemed so absurd not to have a clean handkerchief on his own wedding‐day. What upset him more, however, was that it was the Morris, practically a market‐wagon, driven by the gardener, that came to collect him: the Rolls‐Royce driven by the chauffeur was standing by to carry Mrs Jan Byl. And his best man – he had arrived in the Morris with the gardener – was enough to upset any one.

  To begin with, he was practically a stranger. When Mr Squales had told Mrs Jan Byl that he was literally friendless in England because he had spent so much of his time abroad – and compared to Withydean, Brighton was, so to speak, abroad – he had not imagined that, in addition to everything else, she would go to the length of giving him a friend. But that is what had happened. She had rounded up someone simply to be Mr Squales’ companion on the day. So far as Mr Squales could make out, all that was expected of the newcomer was that he should stand at the altar‐rail and pass the ring over at the right minute. But even that seemed something of a tax on his powers.

  He was a small, sallow‐complexioned colonial servant who had been invalided home. And the reason for this premature retirement was obvious to Mr Squales at a glance. There was something slightly wrong with the poor fellow’s brain. He didn’t speak very often. He just sat looking on, and smiling. His only hobby, so far as Mr Squales could discover, was playing bridge. And when Mr Squales, trying to be friendly, said that he was thinking of taking up the game himself and asked for a few tips, the ex‐colonial servant only smiled again.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr Squales hated him. Had hated him from the first. And he hated him still more this morning when he saw that he was wearing tails. Tails was the one thing in which Mr Squales’ armoury was incomplete.

  ‘Do I look all right in a lounge‐suit?’ he asked, just as they were setting out. ‘My morning dress is in town. I forgot to send up for it.’

  But the invalided wallah did nothing to reassure him. He only smiled. And such a broad smile too. It was almost as if he were not smiling at all, but laughing.

  3

  The wedding was pretty as only country weddings can be. The little church had been decorated throughout with Mrs Jan Byl’s favourite flowers – dark red roses – and, as Mr Squales noted appreciatively out of the corner of his eye, there was hardly room for another bloom anywhere. They were in vases on the windowsills, hanging down in baskets in the chancel, crawling in spirals round the pillars. The whole church resembled a mock ecclesiastical side‐chapel in a high‐class West End florists.

  But it was not at the flowers alone that Mr Squales was looking. After the first flattered glance, his eyes fastened themselves on the assembled congregation. So far every man there was dressed in shapely black tails with a vivid white rim of collar showing. Mr Squales, radiant in his pearl grey, turned his head away and took up his place inconspicuously behind a screen in the side aisle. He was still thinking bitterly about the array of tails.

  ‘I’ll bet they all hired, the whole damn’ lot of ’em,’ he told himself in an attempt at consolation.

  As there was nothing to do for the next few minutes Mr Squales, whistling almost silently between his teeth, took further stock of the interior. Judging from the music spread out along the choir‐stalls, the service was going to be fully choral. Evidently Mrs Jan Byl had seen to that. He was still feeling grateful to her for all the trouble she had taken to make the whole thing a success, when an enormous peal from the organ – he was practically leaning up against the side of it – made him jump backwards. It had the alarming note of doom, that organ‐peal. Mr Squales wasn’t prepared for it, and his nerves were all on edge, anyway.

  While the organ was playing, more and more cars kept drawing up outside, and more and more men in tail‐coats accompanied by women with remarkable hats, came trooping in. Mr Squales was still the only man present in a lounge‐suit.

  It was while he was standing there that a little incident occurred that, despite his polish, he found difficult to pass off smoothly and gracefully. It had to do with the seating. Up to now, only the pews on one side had been occupied. And these were getting unhealthily congested. As soon as any one fresh arrived the others had to move up one. When things had clearly become impossible, the verger came creeping up the side‐aisle and plucked the best‐man by the sleeve.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he whispered loudly, ‘but there isn’t any more sitting room on the bride’s side. Are any friends of the bridegroom’s coming?’

  Where he was standing Mr Squales couldn’t help hearing
every word that the verger had said. And he couldn’t help hearing the best‐man’s reply.

  ‘Better ask the bridegroom,’ was what the friend whom Mrs Jan Byl had picked for him replied. And that inane smile broke out on his face again.

  Ask the bridegroom! Mr Squales half closed his eyes and put on his wonderful two‐piece smile, first the cheeks wrinkling and then the lips opening slowly.

  ‘Put the guests wherever you please,’ he said magnanimously. ‘Any friend of Mrs Jan Byl’s is a friend of mine.’

  But the humiliation of the episode remained. There seemed to be something so ridiculously naked in not having even a single friend in the whole company. It was like being an orphan. Any one would have been better than no one. For two pins he would have asked Connie.

  Connie? Mr Squales’ stomach went icy inside him. In the third pew on the bride’s side was a fairy‐sized figure in bright georgette trimmed with tufts of white rabbit wool. On its head was a school‐girlish straw hat supporting a bobbing bunch of red cherries. And beneath the hat showed a fringe of frizzed magenta hair. Mr Squales, his jaw dropped, stood there staring at the vision. And, to his horror, he realised that the vision was beaming back at him. Before he was able to step back behind the cover of one of the pillars the vision had even managed to blow a rather saucy kiss in his direction.

  ‘My God,’ Mr Squales reflected wildly. ‘I know what this means: this is blackmail. She’s been shadowing me.’

  There was no time for further thought, however. With a whirr from the electric bellows, the organ started up again. Ti‐tum, ti‐tum, ti‐tum, ti‐tum, it went. Eight scrubbed and polished urchins from the village opened their lungs. The best man gave Mr Squales a nudge – rather an unnecessarily hard nudge, Mr Squales thought it. And Mrs Jan Byl, in white satin, followed by two tiny morsels also dressed in white satin and with dark red rose‐buds in their hair, forged up the aisle.

  In white satin, Mrs Jan Byl looked absolutely prodigious.

  4

  The reception was held at Withydean afterwards. The French doors of the morning‐room had been thrown back making one large salon. And through the gay throng – bowler‐hatted generals, pensioned civil servants and retired City men – Mr Squales passed, sagging, his bride upon his arm. It was a bit of a strain this, he didn’t mind admitting – meeting all these friends of his wife’s for the first time. So much depended on the kind of impression that he made. In consequence, he decided to be quiet, genial, self‐depreciating. It was difficult because really he was still thinking about Connie and wondering how much she wanted.

  ‘To the bride and bridegroom!’ suddenly said a large well‐meaning man whom Mr Squales had never seen before.

  Immediately all glasses were raised. There was a generous unanimity about the gesture. It meant that now they could all take a good long drink of the champagne instead of simply sipping it surreptitiously.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Squales,’ they said in a chorus.

  With every one standing facing him, Mr Squales recognised this for his moment. It was now or never that he would be able to convince them what a decent unassuming sort of fellow he was. He took his wife’s arm in his.

  ‘No, no,’ he said modestly. ‘Mr and Mrs Jan Byl.’

  Chapter LXXXVI

  1

  At Conservatory Cottage the Jossers were really moved in at last.

  The sideboard had been tried in three different positions and was back against the wall opposite the fireplace. Which was where they had first put it. And the curtains – both the black‐out and the ordinary ones – had been made to fit. There had been some slight unpleasantness about the curtains. Because, though it was Mrs Josser who had actually done the cutting, it was Mr Josser who had done the measuring. And between the two of them they had miscalculated. When they came to put them up, there was daylight showing along the bottom of every window. But all that had been seen to by now. Mrs Josser had found a roll of old braid which she sewed along the hem. And the local warden on his nightly patrol passed the cottage scarcely knowing that it was there.

  The other sign that they were moved in was that Mr Josser had got to work on the garden. He had shifted a small white‐painted tub round from the back door to the front. And planted nasturtiums in it. Also, he had made himself a new rustic‐seat at the other end of the lawn so that he could have somewhere to sit quietly and smoke a pipe and survey his property. As seats went, it was not a very good one. He hadn’t, he told himself, got the uprights in deep enough. And he couldn’t get them in any deeper until he had bought a spade. There was a kind of see‐saw, rocking‐horse motion to the thing unless you sat back in the dead centre.

  But it wasn’t only the workmanship of the seat that made it so difficult to sit still in these early summer days. There was too much happening. The whole business of being alive was now split up into chunks, waiting for the B.B.C. at eight o’clock, at one o’clock, at six o’clock and at nine o’clock again. And what you heard meant that you were all jumpy and on edge until the next bulletin came round. You couldn’t get down to anything properly in between.

  It was at night, when there wasn’t any news, that it was worst. Like to‐night, just lying there, listening to aeroplanes flying overhead. And wondering. Wondering about a lot of things. Whether Ted was all right. Why the dent had ever been allowed to become a bulge, and why the bulge hadn’t been squeezed back before it had burst open into a gap. How Doris and Cynthia were getting on in London. What Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley18 had done to get themselves arrested. Whether Bill was in a base hospital or up at the front. When the French were going to start fighting in earnest. What Sir Stafford Cripps was up to in Moscow. Whether Mrs Josser would get the knack of oil‐cooking after she’d been doing it a bit longer. Whether Winston knew more than he was saying and when he was going to say something again. Whether it was true that the B.E.F. was surrounded and trying desperately to fight its way to the coast, or if that was only German propaganda. Whether the L.D.V. would be of any use if the Germans really did come, and whether the fact that he wore glasses meant that they were going to turn him down.

  Without telling Mrs Josser, he’d been along to the L.D.V. headquarters in the village. And he was still waiting for their answer. He was bound to admit that they hadn’t seemed awfully keen about him. From his reception it was obvious that they thought him too old. Well‐meaning, but too old. And this rankled. It was a fine state of affairs just being expected to sit back and take it easy while his country was being defeated. It practically made a traitor of him. He had already more than half decided that if they wouldn’t have him in the L.D.V. he’d offer himself for a special constable. Or a warden. In either case, he reckoned, there ought to be plenty of minor duties, like seeing school children across the road at breaking‐up time, or blowing a whistle when incendiaries were falling, that could still be faithfully performed at sixty‐four, by a burning patriot a bit on the short‐sighted side and a trifle dicky in one lung.

  ‘They don’t know me. That’s what’s wrong down here,’ Mr Josser told himself. ‘Now if I was still in Dulcimer Street…’

  The real trouble was that he was feeling out of it. Right up on the shelf again. It was like reliving the blankness of that first awful morning after he had retired from Battlebury’s. There was just the same air of uselessness hanging over him, the vague sensation of being a ghost that still required three square meals a day. Mrs Josser’s original instinct had been right after all. They ought never to have left London. Least of all at a time like this. London was where their home was. At this very moment he ought to have been up there by the Thames alongside Winston and Mr Puddy and Connie and Mrs Vizzard and the rest of them. Standing by in case they were needed. Not playing about with tubs of nasturtiums in the country.

  There was a movement in the bed beside him.

  ‘You awake, Mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I’m awake,’ Mrs Josser answered. ‘I haven’t closed my eyes yet. What time is it
?’

  Mr Josser struck a match.

  ‘Nearly one o’clock,’ he told her. ‘Just after five to.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I didn’t like what it said on the wireless to‐night,’ Mrs Josser remarked. ‘Ted’ll be all right, won’t he?’

  ‘Be all right?’ Mr Josser repeated. ‘Of course he’ll be all right. Trust our Ted. As a matter of fact I thought things sounded a little better. You can generally tell from the tone of voice they use.’

  With that there was silence. Even the aeroplanes had stopped now. There was the deep heavy silence of the countryside. Mr Josser reached out in the darkness and found Mrs Josser’s hand and squeezed it. Then they lay there, awake. But not speaking. Simply sharing the same thoughts.

  The single arrowhead of Mr Josser’s presentation clock striking the hour pierced through the floor‐boards from the dining‐room beneath. Mr Josser got up on one elbow.

  ‘It’s no use, Mother,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take one of my indigestion tablets.’

  It was the thirtieth of May by now. One a.m. on the thirtieth of May, 1940. Quite a famous date on which to be lying awake and staring at the ceiling. Already in the creeks and tidal estuaries of England the pleasure‐boats and paddle‐steamers were casting their moorings for the day trip to Dunkirk.

  And, over on the other side, Ted stood as good a chance as anybody else.

  2

  Mr Josser wasn’t the only person, awake and away from home, whose night thoughts included Dulcimer Street. A little further out into the country, and just as home‐sick, was Mrs Boon. She had actually been crying – which wasn’t usual with her. Crying, with the corner of the pillow stuffed into her mouth so that the doctor’s wife shouldn’t hear her.