“Dare say.”
“One good turn deserves another, I say. I used to do Ginger a good turn, ’e used to do me one.”
“Dare say he did.”
“I’d look after you well if you did.”
“I can look after meself.”
Blakers hesitated. He was a man who weighed the odds carefully before making enemies. He put down another half-sovereign. Dido pocketed it and turned away in silence. Blakers said, “You wanna go easy.”
Dido paused and looked round interrogatively. Blakers said, “Pride goes before a fall, you know. You’re not the only chap in these parts as can ’andle ’imself. I’m tellin’ you.” He saw the compression of Dido’s lips and he added, “As a friend, mind you. Only as a friend.”
There had been a good deal of speculation in the street about Dido’s young lady but the departure of the whole family in a carriage one Monday afternoon, all in their best clothes, settled the matter. The knots of chattering women on the pavements all agreed that it could only be a wedding.
The carriage vanished from the street and Rabbit Marsh for the time being knew no more, for the chapel was a far-off and unknown place.
Fifteen people sat down to tea, strictly temperance, in the chapel hall after the wedding ceremony. The minister and his wife were there. Ada and her family had come by train. Mrs Dowll, the teashop manageress, had taken the afternoon off to bring an electroplate cakestand that the girls had collected for. The hostel girls had also subscribed, for a pair of hand-painted vases. The gift was brought by the hostel matron, who always liked to see her girls off.
Mrs Peach had given the young couple her treasured best tablecloth and two sets of bed-linen. Shonny and Chas had bought a clock with Westminster chimes. Ada had demonstrated her goodwill and her prosperity with a canteen of cutlery.
The minister made a short speech and the rest of the meal passed in a muted, uncomfortable chatter. In spite of her gift Ada looked on the hasty marriage as a disgrace to the family and the girl as its cause. Mrs Peach sat looking at her lap and wondering if the child was really Dido’s. Such girls were capable of anything.
Soon after four, Dido and Grace set off in a cab for London Bridge Station. They were going to spend two days at Brighton. Grace, to Dido’s astonishment, had awakened from her sleepwalking passivity a week before the wedding to demand this. She had done so because she had boasted of a honeymoon to the girls and because she could not bear to go straight to that awful slum house.
Dido was glad to give way. He wanted to please her; and he, too, wanted to defer the ordeal of coming home with her to Rabbit Marsh.
Before they got into the cab, Mrs Peach kissed her son and then did her duty by quickly pecking the bride’s cheek.
The landlady had lit a fire. Their room was small. They had taken lodgings in a cottage near Brighton Station. Between the bed and the fireplace there was not much room, and they had to exercise great care in moving from place to place while they prepared for bed, so as not to bump into each other or look at each other. In fact anyone seeing them making their moves, waiting for the right moment, frowning to themselves as if each of them was deep in private thoughts, might have thought they were playing some comic game of chess with their bodies as pieces.
Dido held himself close to the fire, warming his front, hands outstretched. He always slept in his underclothes and he was dressed from neck to ankle in two tight, thick woollen garments. Behind him, he heard her get into bed. Now he could do the same.
She was sitting up. She wore a flannelette nightdress with long sleeves, some embroidery on it, and frills standing up at the neck and wrists. She had let her hair down and Dido was surprised how long it was. He turned down the gas. She looked pretty in the firelight. He felt for the first time a stir of tenderness for her, and a faint pride of possession.
If at this moment she had only smiled at him, the whole nature of the man might have been changed like magic; or some part of his nature hitherto denied and buried might have begun to free itself. But she went on braiding her hair, gazing placidly in front of her, at nothing. She was no frightened, shrinking bride. She was a practical girl and she knew what to expect from marriage. She waited as she might wait for a bus.
She lay back and lifted the honeycomb quilt for him. He climbed into bed. He stayed sitting up, frowning down at her. She lay and looked up at him with empty, tranquil eyes.
Seconds passed. Dido felt the time crawling on his skin and the perplexity growing in his head.
She had only to part her lips in the faintest smile, or even to reach up and lay a hand on his shoulder, and he might have grinned in response, leaned down to touch her hair back from her forehead, or said a friendly word; and it would all have turned out differently.
But all she saw was a man looking down at her with a sombre frown which puzzled her. She wondered what was bothering him and, afraid to do the wrong thing even by a gleam of expression, she waited impassively.
And as he felt the seconds taunting him he nerved himself for the only answer he knew to a taunt. He flung back the covers and with a suddenness that knocked the breath out of her was upon her.
She had been ready for him; but not for this attack. Her wits were scattered. In reflex, a scared animal, she arched herself hard in resistance. The flexed resistance of a body, thrusting back against him in the room’s heat, touched off all the sensuality in Dido that had been disciplined since boyhood and disappointed by that brief rape on a freezing night. A heat indistinguishable from anger possessed him. The more closely he felt the softness and hard springiness of a pliant female body wrestling his own, the more he was mastered by the will to take what was his.
The nightgown was long and clinging, and demented by his clumsy failure to pull it up he seized the neck and tugged with both hands until it ripped. For the first time in the firelight he saw a woman naked and he fell upon her insensate, pulling and writhing at his own garments until he had thrown them away and he, too, was naked. The heat and soft slither of skin upon skin was a torment and a pleasure beyond all his imagining. He was mindless and his emotions were without name so that even now one whisper or bodily flicker of response might have slowed him to tenderness, changed him, changed her, altered their future.
After all, she had not come averse to the notion of pleasure. She had heard from different women accounts both delightful and awful. She had been prepared to discover that there was “something in it”. It was the remoteness of this body fighting upon her, the anger in the clenched face, his impersonality, not his roughness that daunted her. She could feel only that she was something used, and she responded no more than something used.
He rested and in a neutral voice he told her that he had ordered hot water for eight in the morning. As neutrally she said that it was the right time for her, too. Then he was at her again; and later, again, till he had used up his strength.
In between they held their quiet, calm conversations, like an old married couple. She was not the sort to weep, broken, on her pillow. The roughness inside her was expected and easily borne. Rather as if she had to endure the buffetings of an energetic child, she lay in his grasp busy with thoughts that were far away from him.
She thought about her mother-in-law. She had visited the house twice in the fortnight before the marriage. She and Mrs Peach had kept up a brisk, pleasant chatter, but each was aware of secret thoughts behind the other’s placid face.
She thought about the house. She had no idea whether he was a rag merchant in a large way or a small; and she understood about living where the business was. But surely he could afford something better than what she had seen, those bare wooden stairs all rotten in places, not a sink in the house, only a tap outside in the smelly yard. One nasty outside lavatory, and worst of all, that dreadful Irish family upstairs to share it with.
She was bewildered, between two moods. Whenever she thought of the house she felt a slump of wretchedness. She was with child and she was trapped in this place.
Yet whenever she saw the room that Dido was preparing, the nice paper and lino, the fresh paint, the beautiful shining pieces of furniture as they were brought in, she felt a real lady. She felt such a lady when she went round the shops buying the new clothes Dido had given her and watching him pay out in gold sovereigns. He had the money all right. He must be in a substantial way and this thought made her feel that for the first time in her life she, too, was someone of substance. It was only natural for a bachelor not to care how he lived. A frumpy old mother wouldn’t know any different either. It needed a wife to teach him how to live according to his station.
And then again, the pleasant mood died and she felt sick at the stomach remembering that time she had gone up to their room and on the landing outside had seen a horrible bucket, which the Irish people used so as not to have to go all the way downstairs to the lavatory. Again and again the smell of stale urine rose in her memory to revolt her, and she remembered how she had gone into the bedroom and there alone as she listened to the Irish couple trampling and shouting in the next room she had cried. It was the only time she had cried since all this business started and she had soon dried her eyes.
Afterwards she had plucked up courage to say very casually to Dido that it would be nice if they found a place of their own. He peered at her incredulously. He said, “Don’t be silly. Can’t leave the business. Can’t leave mother. Isn’t the room nice enough? You say so, I’ll chuck everything out, start again.”
She said, “No, it’s lovely,” and then she managed to tell him about the bucket.
He said, “Oh, I’ll stop that. Promise you that.”
There was something hard and intense about him that made her believe him. But the smell of the bucket would not leave her memory. She would still have to live in that house next to that drunken couple. And with that mother-in-law.
Thank goodness, he was asleep at last, turned on his side away from her. What couldn’t be cured had to be endured and made the best of. At least she was married, and to not a bad fellow. That was something a girl should be thankful for. Her nightgown was ruined. Heaven only knew where it had got to. Marriage was all very well but who ever heard of people in bed without a stitch of clothes on? The fireplace was black and dead and the room was getting cold. She pulled the covers up to her chin and drifted towards sleep, wondering meanwhile how much a yard of flannelette cost down here and whether she could pick up any other bargains for the house.
Chapter Fourteen
They came home on Wednesday evening. Dido treated Grace to a cab from the station, a last luxury before the hard truth of daily life was broken to her.
It was dusk, the lamps already glimmering, when they came down the street, and it was not till the cabbie slowed his horse that Grace saw the man outside Number 34.
He was huge. In a shapeless jacket and baggy, concertinaed trousers of grey, he appeared in the twilight like a two-legged elephant on the pavement. He was banging continuously at the knocker, and he paused only to sway back, stare upward and shout.
Dido knocked on the ceiling and the cab stopped some yards from the house. Grace peered out of the window and, looking up, saw a curtain in a first-floor window lifted slightly, and Mrs Peach’s face, with Chas visible behind her.
Dido put a hand on her arm and said, “You stay here.”
He opened the door and stepped down. She could hear the big man shouting now. “Fuckin’ Peach! Fuckin’ Dido Peach! Come out an’ fight, Dido Peach! I’ll fuckin’ kill yer!” He was swaying all the time. The crumpled trousers made his legs seem as if they were giving way under the weight of his massive body. His uplifted face was twisted and red with rage. His heavy square head wore a mat of cropped grey hair.
Dido said something quietly. The man turned and saw him. He came lumbering towards Dido. His weight thumped down on one step after another, as if each was an effort. Grace had come home in a mood of slumbrous calm. Suddenly the sight of the man had awakened her to a cold fright. Now he seemed all the more frightening, like a figure in a dream, some giant raised from the dead to lurch and sway along by a magic that might let him fall at any second. His arms were out wide like those of a baby trying to balance and as he came closer to Dido, shouting obscenities in words that became more and more slurred, he raised a great bunched fist in threat. By the sound of his voice and the way he swayed, he must be very drunk.
She sat in the cab frozen. A lump choked in her throat. Dido stood there silent, hands down at his sides. The giant took step after step towards him; then paused; stood there rumbling in fury, the words now a bass gabble that ran together unintelligibly; and suddenly pitched forward. He fell all in a length, like a tree, and the awful thump was another sickening blow in Grace’s stomach.
She hardly knew what happened after that. There was a crowd, all chattering. There was Dido helping her down, and Chas taking the bags, and Mrs Peach helping her into the kitchen. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, her teeth chattering as she tried to sip hot tea. Dido was saying, “It’s all right. All right. Only some ol’ boozer.”
But later when she came down from her bedroom she paused outside the kitchen door and caught snatches of their talk. She heard Chas say, “Ginger —” and, in Dido’s deeper voice, the word, “dying —” All her acceptant calm had vanished. She was terrified by her homecoming. She had a chill dread that things were being kept from her. She suppressed her fright and went in to join the family for supper, but she had no stomach to eat.
Ginger Murchison had sat at home for six months, just able to dress himself, waddle about the courtyard of Jaggs Place and sometimes appear for a little while in the street. He had lived in an intermittent fog of forgetfulness. His family did not keep him from the drink, and he was little trouble to them.
But always the name of Dido Peach throbbed in his injured brain. He sat for hours muttering vengeance to himself, seized sometimes by fits of rage that empurpled him and brought on fearful headaches. The vague muddle of his thoughts was sometimes interrupted by a sharp reminder from Harry that he was no longer the guv’nor; more lately from Keogh; or he was made aware of his own downfall by the jeering of children. He brooded on the time when he was held in awe. His anger against those who taunted him fused into anger against Dido. He slumped in his chair drinking, deep in fantasies of strength and power regained, and the starting-point of all these dreams was a triumphant public annihilation of Dido.
For some reason he did not understand Harry shut him up every time he mumbled threats against Dido. Harry ould not even let him totter towards the corner of Rabbit Marsh. Now Harry was in jail. Keogh was the guv’nor but he let the old man roam about without check. One evening Ginger heaved himself out of his kitchen chair, managed to walk the few hundred yards to the house of his enemy; and there, in the grip of a climactic anger, suffered a brain haemorrhage. He lay for two weeks in a death coma.
Grace had been brought up as one of the genteel poor who lived in frugal neatness and to whom the slums were what hell had been to their ancestors: a pit of horror all the more feared because anyone might fall into it. Now she lived in a slum.
On her first night she heard the Irishman’s family in the next room; children crying, a man cursing, breaking of wind. For one night that dreadful bucket was on the landing. After that Dido spoke to the Irishman and Grace did not see the bucket any more. But she heard them using it in their room at nights, and Dido did not seem to think anything of it.
She had to wash in her bedroom and carry the dirty water down to the yard. She had to go outside in all weathers if she wanted to use the lavatory. It was dark. It had a massive box seat built from wall to wall. Dido kept scrubbing it white but after the Irish had been there it was filthy with muck round the edges or there were puddles on the floor, and the smell was awful. Dido was ready enough when she asked him to go out and see if it was clean but his rag business seemed to keep him away from home a lot, and what was she to do when he was out?
She did not like to go out.
The street was always crowded and noisy. Dido told her that she was not to lower herself by talking to any of the people and she was only too glad to obey. There were drunks at all hours outside the pubs. It would have been nice to go, even on her own, for a bus ride to look at the smart shops in the West End or the flower beds in a park; but she was not prepared to run the gauntlet of these dirty, frightening streets. For the time being she was content to stay indoors.
She was quickly relieved to find that her mother-in-law gave no trouble. They did not fall into each other’s arms; but there was no bad feeling. Grace just could not think of much to say and she could see that the same was true of Mrs Peach.
When she came down the first morning she wanted to help in the kitchen, but Mrs Peach said, quite nicely, “You rest your feet, my dear. There’s no room for two in one kitchen.” And since Dido did not want Grace to go out in the locality, Mrs Peach did all the shopping.
After the teashop Grace was only too happy to rest her feet. It was lovely to be idle like a lady. It was easiest to let her mother-in-law get on with it if she was so keen on it, and keep out of the way. She would not talk to Dido again about moving, not for a while. She had decided that in married life one needed tact. It was best to learn to get on with him and show appreciation of all he did for her. Later, when they were more man and wife, would be the time to open his eyes to things.
Meanwhile she fell into the habit of passing her days in her bedroom. She was no sloven. She made the bed and saw that the room was spotless. It was a pleasure to stay in it then, with lovely furniture around her, lying on the pretty blue quilt and admiring the curtains she had chosen. At least she had something to get on with. She bought dozens of twopenny romances and read them all day long. A pleasant fire crackled in the grate and she could have imagined herself a lady in her boudoir if it had not been for the noise of trains going past every few minutes, goods trains that rattled slowly on and on as if for ever, and the noise of great horse-drawn carts, the carters’ shouts and the crack of whips, the shrieking of children, the voices of women yelling from window to window; and the air full of smuts that made all her nice room dirty. But Grace got used to it.
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