Bond Street Story

by Norman Collins

  Mr. Rammell passed them all across to Miss Underhill for stamping. Then he paused. Here was something. A watch, guaranteed for ten years, had stopped dead on the third day, and if that was what Rammell’s meant by a guarantee ... Mr. Rammell broke off and wrote the single word “watches.” There had been another watch complaint yesterday.

  Mr. Rammell worked quickly, spending only a few seconds on each complaint. And he never read the last paragraphs at all. They were all entirely standard, these last paragraphs. Practically interchangeable, in fact. The stricken Cheltenham resident might have collaborated with the woman who had been addressed as a common shoplifter, or the owner of the broken milk jug could have contributed the last few sentences for the lady with small feet. It was always in the last paragraph that the big rudeness, the real sting-in-the-tail venom came. It was the last paragraph that made the writer swing round from the desk, and in the glow from the shaded lamp say quietly to the family circle: “You might just care to hear what I’ve said to them ...”

  Not that Mr. Rammell minded these bits of fine writing. After all, he was in business with the object of indulging people. And if what they really fancied was a piece of virtuoso invective on the best note-paper, it didn’t worry him. Rammell’s was quite big enough and old enough to be able to ignore it. It any case, the rude bits were entirely silly and unnecessary. A simple statement of the facts would have had the same effect. Rammell’s wasn’t the sort of shop to let its customers down.

  But it was nine-thirty by now. There was no time for any more uninvestigated complaints. He pushed the tray from him, and rang for Miss Underhill.

  “Just stamp the rest,” he said. “And let me have the Board of Trade papers. The carpet file.”

  There was a tap on the door and Mr. Rammell’s other secretary, Miss Winters, stood there. She was a newcomer. A dark intense kind of girl, who seemed to have been born for the delivery of bad news. She was still on probation, and Mr. Rammell was far from sure about her. It was her eyes that troubled him. Too fixed and staring for his liking. They made him feel as though he were taking part in a verse drama, and had just heard that Troy had fallen. This morning that feeling was stronger and more overpowering than ever.

  “A phone message from the Chairman, sir,” she said, speaking right past him and out into the auditorium. “Sir Harry is on his way round now, and wonders if he can see you straight away ...”

  2

  Mr. Rammell felt the whole calm of the morning suddenly evaporating. Because it was an understood thing that his father never came into the office on Tuesdays. Thursday was his day. And then only for a couple of hours around lunchtime. After all, the old boy was nearly eighty. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He was somewhere in the teen-age of his second childhood. And spry. Spryness was Sir Harry’s chief failing.

  An aura of ghastly good health surrounded him. He emerged from his hotel suite in the morning—the house in Hill Street had been closed when Lady Rammell died—looking as pink and white as a big albino baby. He always wore a flower in his buttonhole. And his head was perpetually buzzing like a beehive with all the nonsense that he had been thinking up the night before.

  Like most old people he didn’t sleep very much. And some mornings he would have hatched up as many as a dozen different ideas, all revolutionary, all cock-eyed, and all requiring endless work, research, figures, before the Board could quietly turn them down.

  This morning, moreover, Sir Harry felt simply marvellous. Having ordered the car for nine-thirty, he sent it away again—and set out to walk from Piccadilly to Bond Street. This, however, was a mistake. Too much to see on the way. Too many distractions. He was like a schoolboy. He hung about shop windows. He lingered. And, in consequence, he kept Mr. Rammell waiting. From the moment of that first impetuous telephone call, an air of suspense had hung over the office like a gale warning. It was nearly eleven-fifteen before the storm finally broke.

  But even if Sir Harry was late he certainly got down to things as soon as he reached his room. He sent for his son straightaway. And it was obvious from the start that he was right at the top of his form. He had his little note-book open on the desk by the time Mr. Rammell arrived, and he was poring over the mass of jottings that had been so clear to him when he had made them, and were now somehow so puzzling.

  It was apparently the staff pensions fund that was exercising him most this morning. Some time during the night he had thought up a scheme for a vast new rest home somewhere on the South Coast outside Bognor Regis, and he wanted his son to hear. But why Bognor? Mr. Rammell kept asking. Why a new rest home at all? Why even mention pensions when they had all been agreed by the Staff Association only last year? There was no time, however, to go back over that now. The old man’s mind darted back and forth across the conversation like an intoxicated butterfly. It was off again on another of its zigzags. Why didn’t they sell more billiard tables? Had the game gone out of favour, or was there something wrong with the department? Was the Dramatic Society right in doing Hay Fever, or shouldn’t they stick to things like The Quaker Girl which had been their first big success? Wouldn’t escalators throughout the whole store save the cost of lift-attendants? Why were Jamaican cigars such a terrible price? Could he have by to-morrow please a list showing how much everything in the Fur Salon had gone up since 1939?

  But this was only the small stuff that had been passing through Sir Harry’s mind. He was only now getting to the real point of his visit.

  “I’ve been thinkin’,” he began.

  Mr. Rammell felt a new area of coldness developing inside his stomach.

  “When’s Tony comin’ into the firm?” Sir Harry went on. “Time the boy did somethin’. No good bein’ soft with the lad.”

  Mr. Rammell did not reply immediately. The one subject that he did not want to discuss with anyone, least of all with his father, was Tony. The young man was altogether too mysterious. Too unaccountable. Too much like his mother. He seemed to have inherited none of the real Rammell qualities at all. He was twenty-three. And he might have been born yesterday for all the sense of family responsibility that he showed. And what made it so particularly maddening that the old man should have chosen this moment to ask him about Tony was the fact that only last week he and Tony had had a real set-to about the same thing. Neither of them had properly recovered from it, in fact. Apparently there were at least two people in London—Tony Rammell as well as Irene Privett—who didn’t want to go into Bond Street on any terms.

  But already Sir Harry was off again.

  “Got to be someone to run the place,” he said. “You and I aren’t so young as we used to be.”

  Mr. Rammell raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  “You don’t look so good. Ought to give yourself a holiday,” Sir Harry continued.

  Mr. Rammell stirred uneasily.

  “I’m all right,” he answered. “Nothing wrong with me.”

  It was a particularly delicate point this, the subject of Mr. Rammell’s health. He knew how bad his digestion was. And so did his doctor. There, however, so far as he was concerned, was where Mr. Rammell felt that the matter should end. He wanted other people to make allowances for his weakness. Not refer to it.

  “Look at me” his father advised him. “I take care of myself.”

  Mr. Rammell looked. Sir Harry was sitting right on the edge of his chair snipping the end off a cigar. The cutter was a brand new one. He had, in fact, discovered it that very morning on the counter of the Wine and Tobacco Department as he sauntered through. There was something special about the patented spring cutting lever. And, as he sat fiddling with it, his resemblance to an elderly schoolboy was more marked than ever. If the cutter had been something that he had just invented and built out of Meccano he could not have been more intense or preoccupied.

  But already he was off again.

  “What’s Tony say about it?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t want to come into the firm,” Mr. Rammell told him. “Says h
e won’t, and that’s that.”

  Sir Harry gave his son a wink.

  “Leave him to me,” he said. “I know how to handle ’im.”

  “It won’t do any good ...” Mr. Rammell began. But he was interrupted by the telephone. It was the verse-drama student who was on the other end of it.

  “Mrs. Rammell to speak to you, sir,” she said, sounding as though she was on her way to bury Polynices.

  Because his father was there, Mr. Rammell spoke into the instrument carefully, diplomatically.

  “Yes, dear. Yes. What is it?”

  Mrs. Rammell’s own voice came through very loud and clear. It was naturally a little high-pitched. Urgent-sounding. And on the telephone it was always singularly penetrating.

  “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Am I interrupting? Is someone with you?”

  “No, dear. No. Go on.”

  “Then why are you using your business voice?”

  “I’m not, dear. Really, I’m not.”

  “Oh, yes you are. But it doesn’t matter. I only wanted to remind you about to-night,” Mrs. Rammell went on. “It’s not eight. It’s seven-thirty. We’ll have to eat afterwards.”

  “After what?” Mr. Rammell asked. He felt his strength ebbing away from him.

  “After the concert,” Mrs. Rammell told him. “You said you’d come. You can’t let me down as late as this.” Mrs. Rammell was fairly shrieking by now. “There’s a box reserved for us. Constance’ll be there ...”

  “All right, dear. I’ll be back in good time, dear. Good-bye, dear. Good-bye.”

  As Mr. Rammell hung up the receiver he congratulated himself. There had been nothing for his father to get his teeth into from overhearing that conversation. Not a hint that he felt that he would go stark raving mad if he were ever dragged off to another concert anywhere. Last time it had been madrigals of all things. Part-songs and bleatings, like musical and demented sheep. His wife, Mr. Rammell realized gloomily, somehow belonged among such goings-on. And he didn’t. That was the whole trouble. He didn’t even look as though he belonged. Anyone seeing the pair of them sitting up there in the box would probably assume that it was the lady patroness being kind to the man who had landed the refreshments contract.

  He looked up and caught his father’s eye.

  The old man winked again. Evidently Mrs. Rammell’s voice had been louder than he realized.

  “You singin’ to-night?” Sir Harry asked.

  Chapter Four

  1

  But Mr. Rammell wasn’t the only person connected with the firm who was having a bad day. There was also Marcia. And even though it was getting on for midday the curtains of her little flat were still not drawn back. Nothing very remarkable in that. In any large city there will always be plenty of late ones, night birds and other odd misfits who get home with the milk and try to make up for it afterwards. But for a member of Rammell’s staff to be down under the bedclothes at this time was certainly a bit of an exception. Because among the whole of the one thousand and eleven employees there was only one—Staff No. 737—from whom such behaviour would have been tolerated.

  That was because No. 737 was one of Rammell’s big assets, their ambassadress. While there were five other mannequins in Rammell’s, there was only one Marcia. Indeed, there was only one Marcia in the whole of England. Other houses had their models. Girls pretty as powder puffs. Or tall and dignified like Marchionesses. Or sun-tanned and smelling of the heather. Those girls were trained. They emerged. They walked beautifully. They were photographed. They married stockbrokers or a friend of the chief buyer. They disappeared. But Marcia remained.

  And with every year that passed her position became more firmly established. More unassailable. She was like Royalty. She went everywhere. And, when she stayed away she was missed. Ascot, Wimbledon, Roehampton, Henley, Lord’s—but only on the day of the Eton and Harrow match—the premières of big film shows, the more important first nights, the charity balls—she turned up, exquisite, delightful, smiling. Conscientiously bashing her way through an engagement diary that she dared not allow to grow empty. Her picture was in all the papers. In consequence, seven-pound-a-week typists learnt from Marcia the right way to drape themselves in two or three thousand pounds’ worth of mink, so that there was an easy, almost nonchalant informality to the whole effect. Mothers with young children, and all the ironing still to do, saw just how they should stand when they next found themselves up against the radiator of a big Rolls-Royce in front of Blenheim or of Chatsworth.

  Wherever you looked, she was there. Superb. Serene. Indisputable. The steeply arched eye-brows. The long curve of the cheek. The deep indecipherable eyes. The wide gentle mouth. The face smiled imperturbably on the public from all sides. From boxes of face powder. From the shiny pages of expensive magazines. From Mayfair pageant programmes. From the walls of Underground platforms.

  That face, and the figure that went with it, represented everything that the race was always reaching out for. It was elegance. It was poise. It was correctness. But there was more to it than that. There was also an indefinable spiritual quality to it. A placidity. Even if it were a new strapless evening-gown that she was displaying, or a Longchamps ensemble with a hat as flat and wide as a Chinese umbrella, there was still the same ethereal, faintly surprised air of a discreetly fashionable Madonna.

  But even a face and a figure must have some kind of private life. And it was the private life that wasn’t so good as the public one. Not nearly so good. A proper mess-up, in fact. To be honest, it was hardly worth living. She had known better, too. Much better. At the time of her first marriage she had lived in the country. Quite a large house as she remembered it. With lawns and paths and shubberies. And an awful lot of rain. But Marcia, against a purely agricultural background, had never made much sense. That was something that she had come to realize within the first few months of trying it. And, in the end, because her husband had refused to do the gentlemanly thing, she had allowed herself to be divorced for desertion. Had simply turned her back on the house, the stables, the kennels, the dove-cot, the goddamn awful rain, everything ...

  Then there had been the suite-in-Claridges period when she had married her American. But that, too, had proved a disappointment. He had moved out one night in a great flurry of fancy-looking suitcases, clasping his World Airways ticket-folder in his hand and begging her to wake up just once before she was really dead. That had come as a great shock to her. She never had been able to understand the American way of putting things. But he had behaved very decently. For a start, he was the sort of man who understood divorces. He had realized that a woman can’t live on old memories. And the settlement had been generous. Even lavish. But his health had been shocking. He had died suddenly in a dude-ranch somewhere outside Houston—taken his own life she learnt afterwards—just when the bottom had fallen clean out of his particular corner of the stock market. And because it had always been a hotel suite that they had lived in, there wasn’t even a house and furniture that she could sell. For all the good it had done, that marriage might simply never have occurred.

  Luckily, she had kept up her modelling. And it was round about this time that, always beautiful, she had suddenly assumed the Madonna expression. What’s more, finding that it suited her, she had stuck to it.

  She had been with Rammell’s for nearly eleven years now. That was what was so alarming. There aren’t really that number of years in a model’s life. And there certainly wouldn’t be eleven more. Or ten. Or nine. Something more like three or four, probably. And, after that, a steadily descending scale. The sunset period. Free-lancing. Trips into the provinces. Autumn collections in the seaside towns. Going to places as one of the second best-dressed women. Or, worse still, not going at all because another brand-new Marcia had turned up from somewhere.

  She had left it too late now to do any of the other things that had once been enticingly dangled before her. Films, for instance. Naturally, all the agents in turn had been after her
. They could hardly afford to have neglected anybody who was so much photographed. So eminently photographable. There had been screen tests. Conferences. Auditions. It was the auditions that had been the stumbling block. Because at auditions you have to speak. And this was Marcia’s weakest side. It was something that she had never properly got round to. She had been too busy ever since she had left school, getting married, being divorced, divorcing, standing in front of cameras, wearing clothes that didn’t belong to her. There had been no time for amateur theatricals. Or verse reading. Or anything like that. No time even for ordinary elocution lessons. And this was a pity. Because Marcia’s was by no means the kind of voice that could be allowed to speak for itself. Apart from a slight huskiness that might once have been possibilities, there wasn’t even anything to work on. It was pure Kilburn. In the pursuit of refinement she had gone over her vowels so frequently that she had trodden them quite flat. There was scarcely a breath left in one of them. When she did speak which was rarely because Marcia couldn’t usually find very much to say—it was like someone murmuring under an anaesthetic. Not that this was surprising. There was a distinctly coma-like quality to Marcia. She had been going about in an elegant daze for years.

  2

  She glanced at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. Time to be getting on with things. The first parade at Rammell’s was at lunch. And there would have to be a big change in her appearance, a complete transformation of everything, by then.

  Slowly, gracefully, in the smooth undulating way in which she always moved, she slid out of bed. Then she drew her wrap around her, and went over to the dressing-table. Because it had been late when she had got back last night and because she had been tired, things had rather a messy, flung-about appearance this morning. She had upset a powder-box when she put her bag down. The black velvet of the bag was now all smeared and grubby looking.