Bond Street Story

by Norman Collins

  It was to avoid that kind of thing that, she kept telling herself, she should have had a lady’s maid. It was having had one once that had spoiled her. Because since she had lost her, she had never really taken proper care of anything—unless, of course, it was something of Rammell’s that she had on loan. It was because she never remembered to put things away that she had to spend such an awful lot on herself. It wasn’t that she was particularly extravagant. Or indulgent. Or even changeable in her tastes. It was simply that she couldn’t manage. And all the time at the back of her mind there was that horrid shadow. The knowledge that the time would come when it wouldn’t be so easy to go on like this. A voice from nowhere kept reminding her to be careful.

  She sat for some time in front of her mirror, turning her head this way and that like a canary in a cage. Not preening. Merely looking at herself. Sideways. Full-face. Sideways again. On the whole, the effect wasn’t so bad as it might have been. Not nearly so ghastly as she had feared. The new mud massage that the Rammell Beauty Parlour was providing had freshened her skin quite remarkably. It might have been the skin of a girl of twenty. The only thing that worried her was the fact that the full course was only six treatments. And she had taken five of them already. Apparently if anyone took more than six in a row it was the skin as well as the mud that came away afterwards as soon as the scraping began. And she couldn’t afford to go back to the old flat complexion with which she had been getting along for the last six months. It had been one of the fashionably sallow periods then. All pretty women had been looking slightly Asiatic. But that was over and done with now. The blood was being worn much closer to the skin this season.

  Then her hair. It was the fineness of it that was the difficulty. Other girls—the phrase “other women” would have seemed all wrong to Marcia: she wouldn’t have realized that she was included in the conversation at all—had hair like wire. The hairdresser’s scissors could scarcely get through it. But her own was as soft as floss. That was why it had to be soaked in oil so often. Otherwise it would get ruined every time a wave was put into it. It was dark hair. And she was wearing it at the moment a little shorter. Ever since February, the lobes of the ear had been left showing.

  Dressing was always rather a slow business with Marcia. She examined everything carefully before she put it on. Compared with her manner at night-time, it might have been a different person who was handling her clothes in the morning. She held out each garment at arm’s length and went over it seam by seam, practically stitch by stitch like a wardrobe mistress. But this was only to be expected. It was the public Marcia, the one who was going out, who was preparing herself.

  And once in the street, she felt better already. It was only in that pokey little flat that she felt so awful. So suicidal. Out here, life was going on all round her. And she was part of it. Contributing to it. Before she had reached Knightsbridge she had felt herself being looked at. Recognized. Desired. Thought about. She became reconciled to life again. Happily conscious of being permanently twenty-three.

  Then at the corner of Sloane Street she stopped suddenly. The Madonna expression faded. And a frown that belonged to a different kind of face altogether appeared beneath the veil. She felt for her handbag.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Mum’s postal order. I’ve forgotten all about it ...”

  Mum was another of Marcia’s troubles. They hadn’t lived under the same roof for years. Not since Marcia was sixteen. Practically never saw each other nowadays. Didn’t correspond very much, either. And never telephoned, because Marcia’s mum wasn’t on the phone. So it couldn’t be said that Mum was a nuisance. Or even difficult. Just a drag.

  And in a dim vague sort of way Marcia was still fond of her. Needed her at times. Would have liked to visit her. Take her out somewhere. But that was impossible. Their lives had grown too far apart. Old Mrs. Tutty in her back bed-sitter in Kilburn and Marcia in her flat off Cadogan Gardens didn’t belong in the same world any longer. Simply couldn’t be seen about out together.

  That’s where the tragedy lay. It was harder on Marcia than on most girls who have a poor widowed mum tucked away somewhere. Because other girls could always slip in during the week or pop across on Sundays. And Marcia couldn’t. She hadn’t got the right kind of clothes to wear. The last time she had made the attempt and had gone toiling up the Edgware Road by bus all the way to Pitter Street, it had been disastrous. It was a simple mink stole that she had on. And in those parts, mink stoles, real or artificial, meant only one thing. People who passed her kept thinking terrible thoughts. In short, the gulf was too wide. It was unbridgeable.

  In consequence, she had been reduced to show her love, her devotion, by sending little gifts. But even that was difficult. Because she didn’t like giving Mum’s address at Rammell’s. Or at Fortnum’s. And Marcia wasn’t the kind of girl who could buy the things and make them up in a parcel afterwards. Never had been any good with brown paper. And knots. And all that kind of thing. Cheques were no use either. Mum had never had a private banking account. So postal orders were really all that was left. And now Marcia had forgotten even that. All the week she had been reminding herself to send a couple of pounds. One for luck. And one because she had completely overlooked Mum’s last birthday ...

  Not that there was anything that she could do about it. She had just got time to get along to Rammell’s for the luncheon salon. It was lucky that the only food she ever allowed herself at midday was cinnamon toast and a cup of black coffee. Otherwise she would have been late even for the dress show.

  Chapter Five

  1

  Sunday had come round at last. The weekly miracle had occurred. And London had died in the night. The City, from St. Paul’s to Liverpool Street, was simply for archaeologists. Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill might have been a deserted mountain pass. Bond Street itself was a smooth, unencumbered stream—practically a lagoon—meandering past curtained windows. With only the cats and the caretakers peering out.

  Like one vast flock of homing pigeons some two or three million Londoners, all simultaneously released and all urged forward by a common impulse had popped out of their week-day imprisonment and made a bolt for their ancestral dove-cots.

  Some of them, moreover, were doing quite nicely in their new surroundings. Mr. Preece, for example. Wearing a pair of smartly-pressed grey flannels and a sports coat obviously cut only for the mildest kinds of sport, he was sauntering round the garden in his idlers, feeling simple. Primitive. Bucolic. One of the Carshalton peasantry. In his left hand he carried his sécateurs, and in his right a tin of patent ejector insecticide with which he gave each rose bush a little friendly death blast as he passed by. He was in fact an entirely happy man. His new denture was bedding down at last exactly as the dentist had said it would. His eldest son had just won the school economics prize for an essay on Trade Balances. He kept remembering a strangely poignant and beautiful dream of cycling with an attractive but unknown girl through Portugal, a country which he had never visited. Mrs. Preece’s new Swiss girl seemed positively to like washing-up. His petunias, after rather an anxious and uncertain start, were now safely established. He had done his exercises. And he had not thought about Rammell’s once since breakfast when he had jotted down two little entries, one about gloves and the other about travel vouchers, in the small leather note-book which he carried even in his sports coat. All in all, life seemed very nearly perfect.

  2

  Not so with Mr. Rammell. At this moment he was standing in the bathroom bending forward over the basin and peering into the mirror to inspect his tongue. It was horrible. A pale, white-flannel tongue. And bundled up in his scarlet silk dressing-gown, with his hair still sticking up like feathers, the whole appearance that he presented to himself was obnoxious. This, the regular morning disillusionment, saddened him. And he stood gloomily reflecting. For a start, he had not slept well. At one-thirty he had got up and mixed himself a dose of Bisodol. Then, once awake, he had not been able to go to sleep again.
He had lain there in his tall bedroom in Eaton Square thinking unquiet thoughts.

  He kept remembering that last visit his father had paid him. Nearly two hours completely written off. Destroyed. Wasted. It was a severe nervous strain even having the old man in the office at all. So far as Sir Harry was concerned, life was one long conspiracy nowadays. Keeping things from him. Concealing future plans. Innocently deceiving him. If only he would finally agree to throw in the sponge and retire gracefully ... But it wasn’t only his father who had kept sleep away from him. It was Mrs. Rammell as well. She was the prime cause of his dyspepsia. Not intentionally, of course. There was nothing deliberately malign about her slow-murder treatment. It was simply that she couldn’t relax. Couldn’t for one single moment ease up like other women. Simply had to go on and on tormenting him. Last night, for example, she had invited two Hungarians to dinner. And, as though she were actually proud of it, she had explained that one of them was a sculptor who did flower pieces in stainless steel and the other a film director engaged exclusively on abstracts. Mr. Rammell recalled, these two unheard-of émigrés from old Buda, all bortsch and botched accents, lapping up his claret and flattering the one woman in London fool enough to have been taken in by them. And in his 2 a.m. mood would have been ready to commit homicide, cracking the abstract film director over the head with one of his fellow-conspirator’s cast-iron daffodils.

  And in the stillness of the night, with the startling clarity of all-night thoughts, he realized suddenly how like his mother Tony really was. Artistic. Musical. Restless. The boy was completely indifferent to everything that went to make up responsible adult life. And more than indifferent. Openly hostile. He lived, hermetically sealed off from the world. A chrysalis inside a cocoon of pure selfishness.

  Mr. Rammell felt better when he had breakfasted. The coffee had been particularly good. And the toast was excellent. Of exactly the right thickness, and a clear chrysanthemum bronze in colour.

  As he left the table with the Sunday Times neatly tucked under his arm he felt that life was re-opening. Blandness enfolded him. And peace. He was, he realized, in exactly the right frame of mind for pondering on the future of his son. Not immediately, that is. But during the morning. In the meantime, he wanted to be alone. To finish reading the Sunday papers. To smoke a cigar. Even to doze possibly. He was still thinking about Tony and the way he would have a fresh shot at putting things to him, even more quietly, more reasonably than last time, when he reached the library.

  That was why it was so unfortunate that he should have found Tony himself already installed there. And the boy certainly looked comfortable. His legs were dangling over the arm of Mr. Rammell’s own chair, and a portable radio, like a pale cream cosmetics set, stood on the carpet beside him. Mr. Rammell knew that radio set well. And he hated it. Ever since it had come into the house, his son hadn’t been alone with himself once. Wherever he went, he was followed by voices. Low, crooning voices. Husky, suggestive voices. Voices whispering in American accents of love and women’s lips, and the moon.

  To Mr. Rammell’s relief, Tony turned off the set as soon as his father came into the room. But the relief was purely temporary. Compared with what Tony had to say, Mr. Rammell would have preferred the B.B.C.

  “I say, Dad,” he began brightly. “I’ve just had a brainwave. I’ve thought what to do with this bloody awful room.”

  Mr. Rammell started. The cigar, his first of the day, remained unlit between his fingers. This room, the library, with its quiet dark panelling and its deep red carpet and its heavy tapestry curtains had come to be his one retreat. His refuge. With the mahogany door closed behind him, he was safe alike from Mr. Preece and from Mrs. Rammell. Even his indigestion seemed to vanish as he entered.

  But young Tony was still speaking.

  “If we got rid of all that phoney woodwork,” he was saying, with the same kind of dreamy insistence that Mr. Rammell knew in his wife’s voice when she was planning a concert, “we could scrap the curtains altogether and begin getting down to things.”

  Mr. Rammell tried hard to feel amused.

  “What sort of things?” he asked indulgently.

  “I should junk the books for a start,” Tony continued. “It isn’t as if you ever read them.”

  “And then?”

  “Why not offer the furniture to the V and A?” Tony asked him. “Pity to disperse it. ‘Hotel Lounge. English style, c. 1900’—that kind of thing. They’d rather like it.”

  “And if I did, what the hell should I sit on?”

  “Plastic mostly,” Tony told him. “Plastic. And moulded ply.”

  Mr. Rammell gave a little involuntary shudder.

  “Any upholstery?” he asked.

  Obviously there was nothing to be done but to humour the boy. And, up to the present, Mr. Rammell had been congratulating himself on the way he was keeping things going just as though it were a normal conversation between two sane, healthy people. But Tony’s absorption in the project was already beginning to alarm him.

  “Foam latex,” he replied. “Sprayed on. Choose your own colour.”

  “That the lot?” he asked.

  Tony paused.

  “I’ve been wondering about the ceiling,” he said. “With the chandelier down, it would make a rather nice expanse. Could be plain silver. Then you could throw the light up at it.”

  “And the walls? Don’t forget you’ve stripped the panelling.”

  “Why not pink?” Tony asked. “Pink for the two sides. And apple-green for the ends. Then it wouldn’t look so much like a bloody undertaker’s. You’d find yourself breathing again.”

  Mr. Rammell took up a position on the carpet in front of the fireplace. He was still calm. That was the great thing. Hadn’t lost his temper yet. But he knew from long experience of talks with Tony that it was liable to go at any moment. And he particularly wanted to avoid any kind of upset this morning.

  “I think I’ll just keep things as they are for the time being,” he said quietly. “If you want to go mucking about with the furniture why don’t you start on your own room.”

  He smiled a little as he said it. If only his wife could have heard him she would have realized how patient—God only knew how patient—he really was with the boy.

  But already Tony was speaking.

  “I have,” he said.

  Mr. Rammell uttered a long, deep sigh.

  “Does your mother know?” he asked.

  Tony looked surprised.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “She likes it. It was her idea about this study. That’s why I came down here.”

  That was all that Mr. Rammell needed to hear. He could feel his temper, his carefully suppressed temper, suddenly boiling over inside him like a milk saucepan!

  “Why the devil can’t your mother leave things alone?” he demanded. “And you, too. It isn’t like a reasonable home. It’s just one long bloody madhouse. When it isn’t music, it’s ballet. And when it isn’t ballet it’s some goddamn-awful sculpture.” He paused for a moment. “Just you listen to me, young man,” he went on. “When I was your age I’d done nearly three years in the business. I knew enough to earn my own living. I could ...”

  But Tony was no longer listening. He had got up from the chair and was bending down to pick up the portable radio. Then he walked slowly across the room without even looking at his father. When he reached the door, however, he turned.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “No wonder Mother gets sick of it.”

  3

  For Mr. Bloot it was being a very different kind of Sunday. A unique, exciting sort of day. Easily one of the most intriguing and stimulating Sundays he had ever known.

  He had shaved once already. But being dissatisfied with a small scrubby patch that he had just discovered beneath his chin, he was now hard at it again. Hot water. Soap. Shaving brush. Everything. In matters of shaving, Mr. Bloot was strictly orthodox. Never used anything but a cut-throat. It was like the beginning of a sabre charge every time h
e really got down to it. And, by the time he was through he usually had one or two honourable gashes.

  This morning, when he came to put his collar back on, he noticed that his cravat was unworthy of him. Not exactly messy. And certainly not stained. Nevertheless, it was still too creased and rubbed in places to be suitable. And this itself was significant. Because in the ordinary way he usually let up a bit on Sundays. For years now he hadn’t worn anything better than his second-best when off-duty.

  This morning, too, he spent nearly ten minutes in bringing his shoes up to real Guardsman standard. He stood there beneath the budgerigar cages sawing away with the Nugget brush. The toe-caps now glistened like gun-metal. And to avoid soiling them, he placed the shoes carefully side by side under the sink, with a sheet of newspaper on top in case of drips.

  On a shelf above the sink stood a small white vase. And standing up in the vase was a tea-rose. It was saffron-yellow in colour. And ingeniously wired by the florist so that it would die of sheer old age before it could open up beyond the bud state. Mr. Bloot had chosen it carefully for his button-hole. And he made a special point of trying out the holder to see that it was still water-tight. This was important. Because, although there was a patent rubber ring near the top of the holder to prevent spilling, it was not always reliable. Very much the reverse, in fact. Once when he had leant forward in the shop to pick up something the water had come squirting out as though it were some sort of carnival novelty that he was wearing.

  Mr. Bloot glanced at his watch, and compared it with the kitchen clock. Eleven-fifteen. Everything ready. And no matter how slowly he walked, or how long he was kept waiting for a bus, it couldn’t take him more than thirty minutes to get to Finsbury Park.