The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  Twenty-three inches, said Hetty. This was awful news: for the tissue pattern of the gore, or long triangular piece, twelve of which were to be sewn together to make the Freedom Skirt, was for a waist of twenty-five inches. The problem, or disaster, presented two alternatives: one, to cut the material to the pattern, and allow wider margins when sewing together; the other, to reduce the paper pattern by the difference, two inches, in proportion.

  “Of course, after I’ve had my tea … but I don’t always get blown out…. No! We must cut for what I am, twenty-three inches!”

  “If only Nina were here! She is better at mathematics than I am. Two inches off all round, divided by twelve. That’s one-sixth of an inch. Doris! Doris! Bring your ruler, please! Quick! No time to be lost!”

  Doris came in from the kitchen, where she was doing her homework. Her opinion was asked for; and immediately afterwards she was asked if Mavis’ opinion was correct. Before Doris could adjust herself to this, Mavis said, “No! It would be fatal to take off one-sixth of an inch all down each gore! Don’t you see, one-sixth of an inch at my waist would be the equivalent of ever so much more at the hem, for the hem is wide! The waist is narrow! So how can it be the same? Mother, stop laughing! Oh, you are silly! Now you’ve upset all my thoughts, and I’ll have to start again!

  “I am so very sorry, Mavis,” laughed Hetty. “I know it’s ridiculous, but I saw a perfectly straight skirt, twenty-three inches all down, so that you had to hobble, like Marie Cox did when she wore her hobble skirt through Randiswell!”

  “I know, and ragged boys followed her to the High Street, and jeered at poor old Marie! Little beasts! I was going to the High School then, before I went to Thildonck. How awful she must have felt!”

  Nina arrived at this point, flushed and out of breath, full of apologies that her train had been missed. All was well. Hetty went to make a pot of tea, the kettle already simmering on the gas—or wasting away, as Richard (and Phillip) would have said—but thank goodness both were out of the house. Raisin scones with butter, put on in thick pats, were nourishing, and would keep the girls happy until supper, which they were to have next door, with Papa and Aunt Marian. Ever optimistic in her clear moments, Hetty took the tray into what was originally her drawing-room, and still was; for Dickie, she reflected, seldom if ever went into it. To the children, of course, it was the front room, a place of withdrawal.

  Three girls were working out sums on paper, with pencils: how to reduce the pattern by 2/25ths. Doris worked it out to three places of decimals, and on being scorned by her sister for this, promptly left the room, saying “Do it yourself,” and returned to her interrupted Latin “construe”, taking her ruler and two buttered scones with her.

  Two minutes later Hetty joined her, laughing silently, all her suggestions and attempts to solve Mavis’ problem having been scouted. Her laughter turned to tears as she set about washing up in the scullery: why, she told herself, she did not know. The sudden revelation had been smothered: an opening upon the evaded reality of her life: that nobody wanted her for herself, only for her usefulness.

  Apparently Mavis and Nina solved the problem, for when her smiling, cheerful face looked round the door again, the Crow Blue material, with its dark sheens, was in strips, cut to a diminished pattern.

  “I think,” said Nina, in her sedate voice, which seemed at times to have been pushed back into her stocky Saxon figure, “we’ll easily be able to finish it all by next Saturday. Mavis will look wonderful in it, her figure is just right for it, don’t you think so, Mrs. Maddison?”

  “Don’t waste time,” said Mavis. “We’ve got to make the jacket yet, don’t forget!”

  “Don’t worry, Mavis, we’ll get it finished all right.”

  *

  Saturday was always a time of enjoyment for Hetty, for in the morning her dear friend and charwoman, Mrs. Feeney, came to work with brush, pan, polish, emery paper, hearth-stone, swab, and pail, practically all of her time on her knees, but for a break at eleven o’clock, when with bread-and-cheese, and bottle of porter, she sat at the kitchen table and talked to the mis’ess sipping a cup of tea. Doris was home, too, and the April sun was shining, the hawthorns in the gulley were a pale gentle green, and little children playing happily on the grass beyond the spiked railings of the park in front of the house; and her son, still her little son, was twenty-one! How the time had flown since they had come to the house, nineteen years ago, one Saturday afternoon, to find it all new and bare, the floors so clean, and the new bathroom, and the picnic tea which they had had together, and while she had nursed her brown-eyed baby by the fire, Dickie and his little boy, who so loved him that he imitated him in nearly everything he did, played hide-and-seek in the bare rooms upstairs, and Phillip was so happy because Dickie had saved a spider which had fallen into the lavatory pan, and put it on the window sill to dry, to her little boy’s delight, “’at poor spider will find ’is mummy now, won’t ’e, Dads?”

  “Now ma’am,” said Mrs. Feeney, cheerfully, “I must get on with my steps. Master Phillip must see them properly hearth-stoned for his birthday.” She understood the tears in the mis’ess’ eyes, God bless ’er.

  *

  Richard refrained from looking closely at the ring and the case when Phillip showed them to him on his arrival home in the afternoon. He could not help saying, “I am afraid I have no present for you; it was taken out of my hands, that is all I can say.” Then he put on his allotment boots. Wheeling away barrow and tools, kept under a tarpaulin in the front garden (well into the privet hedge against theft) he felt grievous and unwanted; but walking in the sun along Charlotte Road his heart lightened at the vision of bringing fertility back to his few rods of soil which for so long had lain acid under the smoke of London, and now were in his tenancy, at a peppercorn rent of one shilling a year.

  *

  While Richard was trundling his one-wheeled wooden vehicle of gardening tools past the open gates of the cemetery, another manifestation of vernal hope was showing itself in the front room of the house in Hillside Road, where Mavis and the faithful Nina were busy completing the Freedom Skirt, in the sunlit air coming in through the open windows of the front room, and slightly stirring the leaves of the aspidistra on its tall stand.

  Doubts, anguished and devastating, tightened within Mavis when first, in company with Hetty and Nina and Doris, she saw herself in the long looking glass in her mother’s bedroom. The skirt was a complete failure. It hung on her like a punctured balloon. And the pleats! They looked shapeless, some thin and others puffy. The skirt did not swing when she turned round, it did not swish, the pleats followed sluggishly. It was the pattern which was wrong. She had known it all along. If only Mother had not laughed, just when Nina was calculating the amount to be cut off the pattern. Now there wasn’t enough material round the hem to let the skirt down a couple of inches. It was a disaster!

  “Nina, why didn’t you tell me I was cutting the skirt too close to the pattern? O, now I look a sight!”

  Mavis was near to tears. While Nina humbly said she was very sorry, Doris proclaimed stoutly that it looked very nice. Hetty agreed. Mavis sighed, and wondered. Doris said, “I vote it looks jolly fine, Mavis.” Nina ceased to apologise and added her assurances.

  “Are you sure? I wish I could see it from behind.”

  Mavis twisted and peered, while her woeful face in the glass stared back at her. Her mother made a suggestion which in reverse settled the matter.

  “Why not keep it, dear, a little while, and see if others are wearing it first?”

  “What? And let them say I am a copy-cat? Not likely!” exclaimed Mavis, the plaintive, almost helpless tones of her voice giving way to a rougher, slightly guttural note, as she summoned up resolution. “No, I shan’t care what people say! What do I care what anyone says about me? I like it, and I’m the one to be considered!”

  “Of course, dear, naturally.”

  “Why not let Gramps and Aunt Marian see it,” suggested Doris, �
��if you can’t believe all of us?”

  “Pouff, what will they know about clothes?”

  “At least, Mavis, Gran’pa is interested in his granddaughter. And if he approves, you will know it is all right to wear it.”

  *

  The old man was sitting by the fire in his yew-wood chair, reviewing scenes of his living long past, in the kinema of his mind. Tibby, the household steer cat, lay stretched along the length of its master’s right thigh. Its tail hung down by his groin; its paws, with claws half-sheathed, rested on the shiny, rounded blue serge trouser covering the cocked-up knee.

  For more than a dozen years, ever since he had given up his country villa at Cross Au ton in Surrey to be near his daughter in the Benighted Swamp, as he called the foggy environs of the south bank of London River, Thomas Turney had worn only one kind of suit during the day; a ready-made blue serge, one or another of a score hanging in the mahogany cupboard in his bedroom. He was a short man, with a round bullet-shaped head, now almost bald. His body was not fat—his weight was constant at what he called, in his older way of speech, “Ten stun twelve pun”. Since his days of discretion, he was wont to say, he ate for nourishment only, he-he-he—the little wheezy laugh, emphasised by a chronic inflammation of the bronchial tube, was due to having smoked too many Havana cigars in the past.

  His eyes closed; the kinema of his mind, its life, was dulling out; he was on the edge of sleep; only the ticking of the ormolu clock set in dark marble on the shelf above the fireplace was audible in the room. He had not yet begun to snore.

  In a plush-covered armchair, with its back nearly upright, sat his eldest sister. Her eyes were open, her arms folded, her thoughts were composed; she believed implicitly in the Christian faith. At eighty-three years of age Miss Marian Turney was still active and alert. She had a mass of white hair, and a strong, resolute face, which was offset in conversation by the controlled quickness of her manner. She wore a striped flannel blouse with a stiff starched linen collar like a man’s, a thin black bow hanging from it. Whenever she spoke, it was in a decisive, firm manner. She listened to whoever was speaking with marked attention, as though what was said was important to her. Now she was resting between tea and supper.

  At the click of the gate she looked up, and light came into her eyes. She rose to open the door to her niece and the two girls.

  “Do come in! Tom will be so pleased to see you! Mavis, how nice you do look, dear! What is it, le dernier cri? To be sure, it is! And Nina, too, what a pleasant surprise!”

  She always made people who called feel welcome; so did her brother Tom. Their nerves were strong; centuries of work on the land had bred a generation which was uncomplicated by the constraints of urban living.

  The dernier cri was examined, every exterior part of it: the material, the cut, the jacket with the roll collar, the new large hat, the parasol, the new Norvic glacé kid button boots, with patent leather toe-cap and cuban heel. O, the doubt and hope that had flowed away from Mavis, and Nina, in choosing those boots! First it had been a cloth-topped patent golosh; then a velvetta calf with mother-of-pearl buttons, until, with almost a fracture of the mind, Mavis realised that cockney pearly men and women wore such things when they drove out, with feather hats and great vulgar boas, from their awful homes on Bank Holidays, usually singing and the worse for liquor. So the unexceptionable first pair she had tried on were finally chosen … at the very stiff price of 19s. 6d. And she had promised to pay for them on the Monday, having spent two weeks’ salary on the materials for the ensemble.

  While she was showing herself off, Phillip arrived. He would, she thought. If he were sarcastic, she would die!

  “Good afternoon, Aunt Marian! How are you, Mother? Hullo, Nina! How do you do, sir?” Facing his grandfather, he said, “I have come to thank you for the very handsome presents you have procured for me for my birthday. Also I must ask to be taken into consideration my lapse in not having replied to your letter of six months ago, but I still keep it in my pocket case. Now do introduce me to this charming young lady, won’t you? Why, it’s you, Mavis! And wearing a Crow Blue ensemble. My lady friends in Debenham and Freebody’s would be envious if they saw you now. Oh yes, I know two lovely girls who are mannequins there. I was very nearly engaged to one, but that was some time ago.”

  Taking solemnly his grandfather by the hand, he said in voice of the dead Hugh Turney, “I shall carry the Le Tournet crest, sir, in the Field—and faithfully maintain its traditions in the face of the enemy.” He displayed the 18-carat gold ring on a little finger. “Seriously, Gran’pa, thank you very much indeed! How’s old Tibbles? Still torturing birds in the Field—I refer to the Backfield, of course, this time.” He rubbed the cat’s ear with his finger.

  Thomas Turney, not quite knowing how to take the varying moods of his grandson, said, “Well, your mother tells me that you’ve changed your Corps, once more, Phillip.”

  “Yes sir, kicked out once again, this time arriving on the back of a horse. Eheu fugaces, fugaces—as Uncle Hugh used to say. I thought that it referred to the cigar smoke he used to puff out of his mouth. Phew—fumes, fumes, for the word fumes was connected in my mind with smoke, from hearing him speak of a chimney on fire, in Charlotte Road. Then of course he told me that it meant the old days gone forever. It’s a habit they have, unfortunately.”

  Hetty feared that her son had been drinking: his mocking manner, too, was startlingly like that of her dead brother, Hughie. She glanced at her aunt, that tower of affection and strength.

  “Let me make you a cup of tea, Phillip,” said Marian, getting up from her chair.

  “Thank you, Great-Aunt, but I would not dream of putting you to any bother on my behalf.”

  “No bother at all, Phillip!” said the old lady, on her way to the kitchen.

  “Well, Phillip, we expected you for lunch, you know. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Yes thank you, Mother. As a matter of fact, I had lunch with some friends for whom I referee’d a hockey match this morning.”

  “I bet!” scoffed Mavis. “Who were they?” she challenged.

  “Some girls at the High School, if you must ask questions.”

  “Ha ha, those flappers you and Desmond meet in the Gild Hall! Fancy running after flappers, at your age!”

  “Mavis, how dare you,” said Hetty.

  “Well, the referee must run occasionally, you know,” said Phillip.

  “Will ye stay to supper?” asked Thomas Turney. “Escallops will do you good. You must not neglect the inner man, you know.”

  “Well, thank you, Grandfather, but I promised to dine with some friends in London tonight.”

  “Then come tomorrow night, why not?”

  “Yes do, Phillip,” said Hetty, “we are so looking forward to it.”

  “Thank you very much. Well, I must be off now.”

  “To Freddy’s, I bet,” said Mavis.

  He looked at his wristlet watch. “I must rush! Desmond and I are meeting Gene at Charing Cross in less than half an hour. Goodbye, everybody.”

  Home again, Hetty said, “I think you are most unfair, Mavis, to say things like that, especially before other people. Why you do it, I can never understand.”

  “There you go, always defending Phillip, and never seeing what he really is! I have told you, I am ashamed of having a brother like him! Everyone says at Head Office that he is a coward, or words to that effect, and was sent home last time, because he was no good. And everyone there has to work extra hard, to pay the salaries of the men away at the war, and what is Phillip doing with the money? Spending it on drink, and then wasting it away down the drain! And worse than that, he goes with loose women down in the High Street, and was seen the other night standing with one for a long time, outside St. Mary’s Church, a woman called Lily Cornford, who gets drunk in the Bull and Freddy’s, and picks up with anyone in uniform that comes along.”

  “Mavis, what are you saying? How dare you?”

  “Well, it’
s the truth, Mother! I’m not imagining it! Desmond knows her, too, he takes her to the Hippodrome. And she goes to see that awful boozy old Dash wood, too—quite shameless!”

  “How do you know all this, Mavis?”

  “I heard it from someone who knows Phillip very well, and has done for years.”

  “Who is it? Tell me, Mavis.”

  “Do you swear you’ll never tell a soul, Mother?”

  “Very well, if you insist.”

  “Well, it is Mr. Jenkins, who hears it from the detective-sergeant at Randiswell Police Station.”

  “I did not know that you have been seeing Mr. Jenkins, Mavis!”

  “I often come across him, when I go to see Nina. He goes on duty near her home.”

  “Oh, I see. All the same, I wish you hadn’t told me, I wish you hadn’t,” said Hetty, feeling one of her headaches coming on.

  Mavis put her arms round her mother. “Don’t you worry, darling Mummy, I love you very very much, you know. But how can I help feeling like I do, about Phillip I mean, when he upsets everybody in the house, including Father. He always did, from the very first. When he was quite tiny, he was always taking Father’s things, and causing trouble. Then when he was bigger, look how he used to get Peter Wallace to fight for him, and pick on innocent, weaker boys! Such as Albert Hawkins, who was killed at Loos with the Blackheath battalion, and I liked him very much, do you know that? Yes, he was the only boy who has ever loved me! And I loved him, too, as much as he loved me! And I can’t forget his face, all over blood, as he cried and hung for support to that little tree growing on the bank below the garden fence, where the marn pond used to be, when Peter Wallace had punched him!”

  It was now the mother’s turn to hold the daughter, shaking with sobs.

  *

  London, April 1916. A fine night over Piccadilly, hub of the machine-turning globe, its golden spokes covering one-fifth of the world, the British Empire, whose energy was now roused in unity for—its own destruction.