by Jane Gardam
Upstairs there was a kitchen that housed one chipped enamel-topped table and a chair. Under the table were old copies of the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph so densely packed that the table legs were rising from the floor. A rusty geyser hung crooked over a Belfast stone sink. Cupboard doors hung open against a wall. On the table, green fish-paste stood in an open glass jar and a teacup from some unspecified time. It had a mahogany-coloured tidemark inside it.
Edward smiled about him. “I have a cleaner but it doesn’t look as if she’s been in. I’ve never actually met her. I leave the money by the sink and it disappears—yes, it’s gone, so I suppose she’s been. I hope the bed’s made up. I’m not good at all this. I’m hardly ever here. There’s a laundry round the corner and an ABC for bread.”
“You live here! All the time? Alone? But Eddie, it’s so unlike you.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never been fussy.”
There was a Victorian clothes airer attached to the ceiling on a pulley with ropes that brought it up and down. Sitting on one of the rails of the airer was a rat.
Over the years this homecoming became one of Elisabeth’s famous stories, as she sat in Hong Kong at her rosewood dining table with its orchids and silver and transparent china bowls of soup. Contemporaries discussing post-war London. Elisabeth became glib, inspiring like memories among guests who were all of a certain age. They joked proudly of the drabness of that fifties—even sixties—London; the insanity of the National Health Service (“free elastoplast!”), the puritanical government. Elisabeth, always pleasant, never joined in about politics. She revered the British Health Service, and turned the conversation to the London she came to as a bride, to Edward’s unworldliness in seedy Pimlico, his hard work, his long hours in Chambers. But when she told the homecoming story, which became more colourful with the years, she could not decide why she somehow could never include the rat.
She had screamed, run from the kitchen, down the stairs and out into the fog, and stood shaking on the pavement, Edward following her and shouting, “Betty—for God’s sake, there were rats on Malta. Plague rats. And Hong Kong. And what about Bhutan and the snakes coming up the bath pipes?”
“We never saw one.”
“What about the Camp in Shanghai?”
“That was different. And we kept the place clean. We’ve got to leave, Eddie. Now.”
“You don’t know how hard it is to find anywhere. Even one room. Everywhere is flattened. And Ebury Street is SW1. It’s a good address on writing paper.”
“That rat wasn’t there to write letters!”
Forty or so years on, in Dorset in her Lavendo-polished house and weedless garden, driving her car weekly to the car wash, refusing to keep a dog because of mud on its paws, a blast of memory sometimes overcame her. There sat the rat on the airer. It was her falling point. It was the rat eternal. It had been the sign that she must now take charge.
“Isn’t there a hotel? Isn’t the Grosvenor around here? At Victoria Station? We’ll get the luggage back on the pavement and go there in a cab.”
“We’d never get another taxi in this fog,” he said, and at once a taxi swam out of the night, its headlamps as comforting as Florence Nightingale.
“I’m not sure if I’ve any English money left,” he said.
“I have,” she said. “I bought some at the airport. Slam the front door behind you.”
She climbed in, and after a moment he followed.
And at Grosvenor Place they were out, they were in the foyer and the cabman paid off while Edward still stood frowning on the pavement in his linen suit. “This hotel smells. It smells of beer and tobacco and fry. It’s probably full up.” But she secured a room.
In bed he said, “I always rather liked rats.”
That night in the Grosvenor in an unheated bedroom, shunting steam trains clamouring below, yellow fingers of fog painting the window and a mat from the floor on top of the skimpy eiderdown, Edward began to laugh. “I am the rat,” he said, grabbing her. “I came with you in the taxi.”
Scene in HK. Rosewood dining table. In middle age.
Fin de Siècle.
Edward (to guests): End of my freedom, you know. Minute we reached London, she took me over. She and the clerk and, of course, Albert Ross. Needn’t have existed outside work.
All: Well, you did work, Filth! How you worked!
Edward: Yes. Work at last began to come in. Remember, Betty?
Elisabeth: I do.
Edward: Don’t know what you did with yourself in the evenings, poor child. You looked about sixteen. All alone.
Elisabeth: Not exactly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By the morning the fog had lifted and Edward was off to Chambers with his laundry and papers by nine o’clock. Across the table of the gloomy breakfast room at the Grosvenor Hotel, he handed Elisabeth the keys of the maisonette.
As soon as he’d gone she picked up the keys, asked for the luggage to be brought down and taken round to the station left-luggage office. She paid the bill and set off on foot, bravely, to Edward’s horrible domain.
As she reached the corner of Ebury Street the fog rolled away and she saw that Edward’s side of the street was beautiful in morning light. The façade was faded and gentle and seemed like paper, an unfinished film set, almost bending in the wind. The eighteenth-century windows that had withstood the bomb blasts all around were unwashed, yet clear, set in narrow panes. Little shops on to the pavement ran all along, and doors to the houses above had rounded fanlights. Each house had three storeys. There were two tall first-floor windows side by side with pretty iron balconies. The shop at street level beside Edward’s front door seemed to be a greengrocer’s with boxes and sacks spread about the pavement and a very fat short man in a buff overall was standing, hands in pockets, on the step. “Morning,” he said, blowing air out of his cheeks and looking at the sky.
“Are you open yet? Have you—anything?”
“Anything? I’d not say anything. We have potatoes. Carrots. Celery, if required.”
“Have you—apples?”
He looked at her intently and said, “We might have an orange or two.”
“Oh! Could I have two pounds?”
“Where you been then, miss? I’ll sell you one orange.”
She followed him inside the shop where a doom-laden woman was perched high on a stool behind a desk.
“Look at my ankles,” she said, sticking one out. It bulged purple over the rim of a man’s carpet slipper, unstockinged. “D’you want a guess at the size of it?”
“It looks horribly swollen,” said Elisabeth.
“It’s sixteen inches round. Sixteen! And all water. That’s your National Health Service for you.”
“But you must go to the doctor at once.”
“And who does the accounts here? You reached home, then?”
“Home?”
“Next door. “Mr. Feathers is home,” they said, the electrician’s across the road. Mozart Electrics.”
“We’re—we’re just passing through. I’m Mrs. Feathers.”
“Well!” She rolled her eyes at her impassive husband, who was again on the step cornering the market. “Married!”
“You can have two,” he called over his shoulder. “But don’t ask for lemons.”
“Sack that cleaner,” said his wife. “She stays ten minutes. You’ll have to get scrubbing.”
“Oh, well. I don’t think we’re staying. We want to get something nearer the City.”
“You’ll be lucky,” said the woman. “But you are lucky, I can see that. There’d be a thousand after next door the minute you handed in the keys.”
“I saw a rat. Last night. We left.”
“Oh, rats. They’re all over the place, rats. Mr. Feathers used to complain sometimes, though he’s a perfect gentleman. ‘Have you by any chance got a dog, Mrs.—er?’ (He calls everyone Mrs.—er.) ‘Does your dog like rats?’ We said we didn’t know but we took it round and it sta
nds there looking at this rat”—a huge wheezing and shaking soon taken up by the greengrocer on the step, the rolls of fat beneath the buff vibrating—“and it turns and walks out. The dog walks out. It was a big rat.”
“Well, I can’t live here,” said Elisabeth.
“I’ll get you the Corporation,” said the wife. “You’ll be clean and sweet there soon, you’ll see. D’you want some kippers?”
Elisabeth turned the key in Edward’s lock and then stood back for a while on the pavement, watching the electrical shop across the road opening up. A very arthritic old person stood watching her.
“Go on in,” he called. “You’ll be all right. ’Ere, I’ll come in with you,” and like one risen painfully from the dead he slowly crossed the road, cars stopping for him. “Takes me over an hour now to get up in the morning,” he said. “Now watch that bike. The stairs is steep but if I take it slow . . . I’se easing. Now then . . .”
In the kitchen the airer was unoccupied and through a beautiful window, its glazing bars as fine as spars, lay a long, green, tangled garden full of flowers. Upstairs and upstairs again were bedrooms with tipping floors and simple marble fireplaces. Edward’s narrow bed stood like a monk’s pallet in the middle of one room, on a mat. One fine old wardrobe. One upright chair. A decent bathroom led off, and now the higher view showed a row of other gardens on either side. On the other side from the green grass was a small lawn and forest trees blocking out Victoria Station’s engine sheds.
“Don’t you get too far in with her next door that side,” said the electrician. “I don’t mean Florrie with the ankles. I mean t’other side. You all a’right now?”
“Yes. Well. I shan’t be staying. We saw—well—rats.”
“From the river,” he said. “They have to go somewhere. There’s worse than rats. Now, this is a good house and so it should be. We hear it’s two pound a week rent. Mind, it’s all coming down for development soon. Miracle is that not a bomb touched it. All the big stuff came down—Eaton Square and so on—not a window broken here. Artisans’ dwellings, we are. But panelling original pine. I’ll leave you for the moment.”
“Thank you,” she called down after him. “Very much. Could you tell me why you’re called Mozart Electrics?”
“Well, he was here as a boy,” said the arthritic, amazed that the whole world did not know. “One day there’ll be a statue.”
She found her way to the garden and there were fruit bushes and a cucumber frame, and over the fence to the right an old woman with a florid face was watching her.
“Good morning,” she said. “I am Da-lilah Dexter. You may have heard of me. I am an actress but equally concerned with gardening. And I hear that you have just married Edward.”
“How ever—?”
“News flies through eighteenth-century walls. We heard you arrive last night but then you were gone. I suppose he’s off to his Chambers?”
“Yes. We’re just back—”
“From a long honeymoon. It will be hard to adjust. I suggest you come in for hot cocoa and to meet Dexter.”
“I don’t think . . .”
“I will put on the cocoa and leave open the front door.”
“This,” Delilah said, pointing, “is Dexter.”
The house was like the green room of a small theatre, the sitting room apparently immense since the wall opposite the windows (hung with roped-back velvet like proscenium arches) was covered by a gold-framed mirror that reflected an older, softer light than was real. The mirror had a golden flambeau at either side of the frame where fat wax candles had burned to the last inch. The looking-glass reflected a collapsed man in a black suit, his legs stretched out before him on a red velvet chaise longue that lacked a leg. His face was ivory. He waved an exhausted greeting.
“Dexter,” announced his wife, “is also an actor. A fine actor, but in his later years he only plays butlers.”
“How interesting . . .”
“Butlers have been our support for years. Unfortunately the new drama is uninterested in butlers. It is all tramps and working-class women doing the ironing. But still, here and there, Dexter finds a part, or rather directors find a part for him. He’s the ultimate butler. He very much favours the Playhouse where they still tend towards the country-house comedy, and long runs. At present he is in a play where his part ends with Act Two and so he gets home for supper. They let him off the final curtain.”
“I hope always to be let off the final curtain,” said Dexter. “And as I always wear black I need spend no time in the dressing room. I can leave this house and be on stage in nine minutes.”
“But if you fell over in the street?”
Both actors looked at Elisabeth with disdain.
“We are professionals,” said Delilah. “We can dance on a broken leg. If Dexter should get late, he could borrow Edward’s bicycle. I’ll top up your cocoa with a little green chartreuse.”
When Elisabeth had opened every window in the house and propped open the front door with the bicycle, she followed Edward’s telephone wire under a cushion and phoned the Westminster Council about the rat. Then she got busy with the labour exchange and went across to Mozart Electrics about a cleaning agency. At the National Provincial Bank on the corner she opened an account and she attacked the gas showrooms to dare them not to replace the geyser. “They’ll not show up for a month,” said Delilah Dexter, but someone came round in an hour and stayed until hot water crept forth. Elisabeth found a saucepan, cleaned out spiders and ate kippers.
“They were very good,” she told the greengrocer’s wife.
“Yes, They’re from Lowestoft. These are Lowestoft kippers—we’ve gone there two weeks’ holiday for twenty-seven years, even in the war. You’ll be all right, they keep. We’ll be back there in a few months and I’ll get you some more. We don’t like change. We’re here.”
Edward, returning uneasily—and late—that evening to the Grosvenor, found no sign of his wife or his luggage. He walked back dispiritedly to Ebury Street to find every light in the house ablaze, every window open and a smell of kippers noticeable as far away as Victoria Station. His wife on his doorstep, arms akimbo in a borrowed overall, was deep in conversation with the fruit shop, and Mr. Dexter was making his way solemnly down the street dressed as a butler.
“The end of Act Two,” said Dexter, raising his bowler hat.
PART THREE
Life
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Well, yes. There is money,” Edward agreed. “Yes.” (Reluctantly.) “The fees do begin to roll in at last. But I feel we should not be rash.”
“Decorate white throughout,” said Betty. “The electric shop knows a couple of men down the mews. Then the new place, Peter Jones in Sloane Square, it’s reopened. It’s the place for all carpets and curtains. And furniture. Do you think it’s time we had a car?”
“Good God, no!”
“It could stand in the road.”
“It would need lights at night.”
“We could have a wire through the sitting-room window. On a battery. They all do.”
“It’s against the law. It’s carrying a cable across the public highway. One day the whole street will catch fire.”
“The fruit shop van stands outside all the time. By the way, he says he’ll deliver free.”
“Since he’s only next door . . .”
“And Delilah Dexter’s going to help me with the interior decoration.”
“Which one is Delilah Dexter?”
“Married to the singing butler. They know you. Leave it all to me, but I need a bank account of my own. And something to put in it.”
“That,” said Filth, “is, I imagine, usual now.”
Delilah was very decisive when the bank account was in place. The whole house was to be the very purest white, like Lady Diana Cooper’s used to be in the Thirties, though she wasn’t, Delilah found, the purest white herself. Nor was England. “And we’ll have one sitting-room wall in simulated black marble, surround
ing the white marble chimney piece. And crimson and silver brocade striped curtains. The sofa and chairs are good—Edward says they came from Lancashire but can’t remember how. They can be loose-covered in pale citron linen. And the carpet should be white. Fitted to the walls. And thick and fluffy.”
“I’m not sure that Edward . . .”
“Oh, and silver candlesticks with black candles on the chimney piece with a tall looking-glass behind them. It happens that I have some silver candlesticks somewhere. We used them in the Scottish Play. Now, let me go ahead.”
“The Chambers want to give us a wedding present,” said Filth three weeks later, standing outside the sitting-room door and wondering whether to remove his shoes. “This white carpet. It’s where we eat?”
“Oh, we’ll eat in the kitchen now. It’s beginning to be considered O.K..”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t eat in a kitchen.”
“It’s not like it used to be. It will be clean.”
“The Chambers,” he said, in his bony stockinged feet, “want to give us an armchair. I told them we have one coming from the East.”
“Dear love,” she said. “We’ll not see that again.”
Filth looked sad.
“What’s wrong?”
“I remember your face when I bought it. Ecstasy.”
“Oh, I was being childish. Look, tell them we want a black chair from Woollands of Knightsbridge. I’ve seen it in the window. It has cut-out holes in it like Picasso. It sprawls about. It will add a revolutionary touch.”
When the chair arrived it still had the price tag attached. Twenty-two pounds!
“Crikey,” said Betty. “Your Chambers must like you. We’d better give a party.”
“I never give parties,” said Filth. “They know me.”
“They don’t know me,” she said. “Come on. I’ll make a list. I’ve done coq-au-vin for dinner, all red gravy. It’s in the kitchen.”