by Clare Clark
Jessica walked with Eleanor to the end of Elgin Avenue. Mrs Leonard’s street was no more than a short walk away. Perhaps in time Mrs Leonard would allow Eleanor to sit more frequently. It would be an advantage to be close by, just in case. In London too Eleanor could continue her acquaintance with Sir Oliver Lodge and his wife, perhaps with other like-minded people. When Eleanor demurred, Jessica urged her to think of the meetings she could attend, the lectures on spiritualism put on by the Society for Psychical Research. Jessica had done her own research and she did not mean to give up. The flat cost one hundred pounds a year, with an additional forty pounds for a maid. Jessica’s salary as assistant to the editor of Woman’s Friend was twenty-five shillings a week.
Twenty-five shillings turned out to be a quite extraordinarily small amount of money. Even a room in a ghastly hostel like Phyllis’s cost the best part of twenty shillings a week once breakfast and dinner were included, and heaven only knew what they would be like. Baths were threepence extra. By the time she had paid for lunches and bus fares all the money would be gone, and that was before she had bought stockings or soap or lipstick or had her laundry done. There was her dress allowance on top, of course, but it was still not nearly enough.
Her first thought had been to plead with Gerald for an increase in salary. Five pounds a week might just do it, she thought. Since that first time at the Savoy they had had lunch together on two more occasions. She told her mother she was attending job interviews, which she almost was, she supposed. When he told her about the job he presented her with a box, beautifully wrapped in ribbon. Inside was a gold wristwatch. He said that the editor at Woman’s Friend was a stickler for timekeeping. Afterwards they walked together down to the river and in the deserted Embankment gardens she had let him kiss her. Close up his face was loose on the bone, the thin skin punctured with thousands of tiny black dots where he had shaved, and beneath the expensive spice of his cologne she could smell, very faintly, the stale mouse-nest whiff of old people. She was glad it was expected that you closed your eyes. Desire slackened a man’s features, caused his eyes to hood, his mouth to soften. When it was Rudolph Valentino in the flickers, it gave you the goose bumps. Gerald just looked drunk.
She kissed him back. It was polite, like writing thank-you letters. She did not mention her pay. As things stood, it was Gerald who petitioned, who sought her favour. She did not ask for the outlandishly expensive lunches, the champagne, the presents in their beribboned boxes. If he chose to give them she owed him nothing in return, or nothing more than a kiss or two. There was something a good deal more businesslike about the negotiation of a salary. Payment in exchange for services. He would expect more than a kiss for five pounds a week.
Jessica could not live in London alone. The flat had many advantages, Eleanor conceded, but Jessica was only nineteen, too young to live without the care of an adult. She required a chaperone, and Eleanor herself would not be there often enough to provide such care. Jessica pleaded with her but her mother was implacable. A maid-cook was in no way an adequate substitute.
Jessica stormed out of the house in a fury of rage and selfpity. She stamped down the drive and out onto the lane. She walked for a long time, her rage cooling to despondency. All her carefully laid plans had come to naught. She was stuck in Hampshire for ever. She would grow old and ugly and so desperate that she would be forced to marry the unspeakable Mervyn who would write her excruciating limericks and kiss her with his dead-fish lips. Or worse, the unspeakable Mervyn would marry one of the ghastly girls who giggled every time he went near them at parties, and Father would die, and she would be forced to become Cousin Lettice’s companion or governess to the Yorkshire Melville boys, like Jane Eyre only without Mr Rochester. She thought wildly of writing to Guy Cockayne, of begging him to rescue her for Theo’s sake. She had not heard from him for months, not since the end of the War, but she supposed his regiment would have a forwarding address.
She was going mad. Her parents were sending her mad. Father would die and she would not be Jane Eyre at all but Bertha, the crazy cousin however many times removed, raging in the attic as around her the rain came through the roof, drip-drip-drip into the tin buckets like a ticking clock. At the turning to the village she passed Mrs Briggs from the bakery, walking briskly in the other direction. Jessica hardly recognised her without her apron on. She wore a coat with something dead on the collar and a bonnet that would not have looked out of place in one of Grandfather Melville’s photographs.
‘Off to see your old Nanny, are you?’ Mrs Briggs said cheerfully. ‘She will be glad to see you.’
Jessica stared at Mrs Briggs. Nanny. She could not think why she had not thought of it before.
‘Nanny,’ she said delightedly. ‘That’s it. I’m going to see Nanny.’
Nanny hated London. She hated flats. She said that there was a reason that the better class of servant refused to work in them, that flats harboured infectious diseases, that they were a French invention and no one should have to live like the French. It was Nanny’s firm belief that the French were dirty, that they never bathed but only dabbed at themselves with the corner of a wet towel. She said that only the French would imagine it respectable to have bedrooms on the same floor as the drawing room. But when Jessica cried and threw her arms around Nanny and said that it was all that she wanted in the whole wide world and that it would not be for long, only a year perhaps, and what would Nanny do with none of them at home anyway and no one to visit her, and that if she would only agree to come it would make Jessica the happiest girl in the whole wide world, and besides Jessica would come home to Ellinghurst every weekend and Nanny could come too or she could visit her niece, she had a niece in Essex, didn’t she, or was it Middlesex, the one with the husband who owned a draper’s shop, because if she agreed to come to London Father would pay her and there would be money for travelling and everything, she knew that Nanny would do what she had always done. She would put her arms around Jessica and shake her jowls and tut, and Jessica would breathe in her familiar smell of talcum powder and boiled milk and know that everything was going to be all right.
Three weeks later Pritchard drove Nanny and Jessica to the station. They had very little luggage. Their boxes and trunks had gone ahead. When the porter had brought up their suitcases Jessica helped Nanny unpack. She stroked the new dresses she had purchased in Bond Street, the suit with its nipped-in jacket and narrow skirt. Jessica had winced when she saw the price tags and had the breathy saleslady send the account to her father. A miserly salary was no reason for the assistant to the editor of a London magazine not to look the part. Besides, you never knew who might turn up while you were busying yourself in your office and insist on taking you out to lunch. When they had eaten the supper the maid had left for them Nanny went to bed.
Jessica stood alone in the middle of her drawing room, her newly cut door keys in her hand, and she danced. It was a gleeful goblin kind of dance, a Rumpelstiltskin dance, except that unlike Rumpelstiltskin Jessica had got what she wanted most in the world and she had no intention of losing it. Somehow, she thought, leaping and twirling in delight, she had spun straw into something remarkably like gold.
It was all rather jolly at first, having a job, waking to the jangle of an alarm clock and gulping a cup of tea standing up while pinning one’s hair and applying a hurried dash of lipstick. Even the trolleybus, crowded with bleary-eyed passengers, moved with a jolting purposefulness that filled Jessica with anticipation. The spring mornings were sunny, the sky a freshly washed blue, and the broad streets of Maida Vale were crowded with people hurrying, their heads down, all of them with somewhere urgent to get to. In her elegant new clothes, her hair swept up in a loose chignon beneath a dashing little hat, Jessica felt like a butterfly, suddenly free of the chrysalis of childhood. She smiled at the other girls on the trolleybus. They did not smile back. They ducked their heads, suddenly intent on tickets or gloves or the handle of a handbag. Their shabby coats were the colour of moths.<
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The offices of Woman’s Friend were located at the top of a tall building in Bloomsbury. The building had seen better days. The paint in the stairwell was peeling, the carpet damp and malodorous. There was no lift. On Jessica’s first day she opened the door, expecting a reception area, and instead almost fell over a desk wedged in what appeared to be a corridor. Behind the desk a girl was banging at a typewriter. There were no windows in the corridor, which turned sharply behind her, and her desk lamp cast a reluctant circle of light. It might have been the middle of the night.
The cramped conditions were a result of budget cuts which required the magazine to share the premises with two of their sister publications, Sewing Circle and Nursing Digest. Desks were pushed into every corner, often so close to one another that there was barely room to squeeze between them. Jessica’s at least had a slice of window, a three-inch-wide vertical offcut of smeared wire-glass tucked into the seam of a plasterboard partition. It was plain from overheard snatches of conversation that the other girls bitterly resented the new girl bagging such a prize, but no one said anything to her. They smiled at her carefully and said that if there was anything she needed she only had to ask. They offered her toffees when they handed round a bag. But there was a wariness in their manner, a formality that was not there between the rest of them. Gerald had told Miss Cooke, the magazine’s editor, that Jessica was the daughter of a friend of his. There was no reason for them to disbelieve him. But she saw the way the other girls looked at her, noticing her dresses, her good handbag and expensive shoes. However much anyone pretended, she was not one of them.
On her first day they asked her if she wanted to come with them for lunch. The Busy Bee was a dingy-looking teashop tucked into a corner of Gower Street with grimy windows and curtains bleached into stripes by the sun. It smelled strongly of dust and sugar and stale fat. The girls sat at a greasy table in the corner and discussed whether they could possibly run to tinned peach melba or if it would have to be the usual sardines on toast. The table was too low. Jessica kept knocking her knees against it. Peggy said it was because the proprietress ground the table legs to make soup. Jessica poked at a poached egg that glared up at her like a watery eye and tried not to breathe through her nose.
‘It’s not exactly the Ritz,’ Joan said, ‘but there’s nothing better for ninepence. I should know. I’ve tried them all.’
Jessica did not go to the Busy Bee again. There was a little French restaurant close to the British Museum with white-aproned waiters and a deliciously lemony sole meunière. She did not tell the other girls. They watched every penny and were always talking about money, about cheap cobblers and when museums were free and how to mend laddered stockings so they could do another turn. When Jessica had first seen a copy of the magazine she had told Gerald it was dowdy. Shop girls might not have much money, she said, but everyone wanted glamour. She talked about film stars and fashion plates and gossipy pieces about society weddings and parties on the French Riviera, but Gerald only laughed and said that the readers of Woman’s Friend would not know the Riviera from a hole in the ground. By the time she had been at the magazine for a week Jessica was quite sure that the same was true for the girls that wrote it. It was not just the Riviera. They wore the same dreary clothes day after day and they never seemed to launder them, or even bathe. On warm days the smell of unwashed bodies was almost overpowering.
Miss Cooke did not bother to glance through Jessica’s envelope of cuttings. She pushed it to one side, and opened a copy of Woman’s Friend.
‘You’ll be doing this,’ she said, turning the magazine round for Jessica to see.
Fireside Chat occupied a double-page spread towards the back of the magazine. The girls at the magazine called it the agony column. Readers wrote in to the magazine’s agony aunt, Mrs Sweeting, seeking her advice on all manner of problems, and the magazine published her replies. A widow with a kind heart, Mrs Sweeting had considerable experience of life’s vicissitudes. A portrait of her in pen and ink smiled cosily above a curlicued banner that declared her the Voice of Understanding. So affectionately was she regarded that from time to time she even received letters from gentlemen enquiring, in the most respectful of terms, whether Mrs Sweeting might consider entering into a correspondence of a rather more personal nature.
Such letters were returned to their senders with a polite note asking them not to write again. The rest were divided into two approximate categories: practical questions about how to wash corsets or renovate a bathtub, which got the left-hand page, and cris de coeurs, which got the right. The letters themselves were not published, only the replies, but Mrs Sweeting often quoted sympathetically from the distressed appeals of A LONELY GIRL or TIRED OF LIFE before offering advice. This, Miss Cooke informed Jessica, was the secret of Mrs Sweeting’s success. Readers appreciated her counsel; some doubtless even took it. But there was comfort of a much deeper kind in the assurance that, however wretched their lot, there were other readers out there whose sufferings were much greater than their own.
‘You wish me to assist Mrs Sweeting?’ Jessica asked.
‘Assist her? You’re to be her.’
‘I don’t understand. Is she ill?’
The editor snorted. Then she looked at Jessica. ‘You’re serious.’
It shocked Jessica more than she cared to admit to learn that Mrs Sweeting did not exist and never had done. The portrait had been the publisher’s idea. He said that people liked to put a face to a name, especially when they were lonely. Until recently the agony column had been shared out among the girls who had dashed off replies when they could snatch a moment, but since the War the postbag had more than doubled. The publisher was talking of more pages.
‘Which would be fine if they weren’t all exactly the same,’ Miss Cooke said briskly. ‘Too much work, not enough money, dashed dreams of home and hearth. Do this job for six months and you’ll be reciting them in your sleep. Magazine goes to press last thing on Tuesdays. I’ll need your pages by Monday afternoon. Ask Joan if you need any help.’
Jessica spent the rest of the afternoon reading past issues of the magazine and trying not to be terrified. What on earth did she know about nourishing meals for one or how to get lipstick marks out of a blouse? It was Mrs Sweeting’s romantic counsel, though, that made Jessica want to give her a good smack. The agony aunt’s answer to everything consisted of sympathetic mumblings of the ‘Bear up, dear sister’ variety twinned with a frankly preposterous belief in the beneficence of destiny. It was nothing short of wicked, Jessica thought, to peddle the fictions that most men really preferred plain girls to pretty ones and that good things came to those who wait. As for the blatantly fallacious assertion that Cupid’s bow and arrow waited for everyone and it was much too soon for a thirty-two-year-old woman to give up on finding happiness in love, it made Jessica want to laugh out loud.
That evening when she left the office she went to a bookshop on Tottenham Court Road and bought, on the recommendation of the sales assistant, a book by Agnes M. Miall entitled The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Everything—or The Girl on Her Own. There were surely no practical problems, she reasoned, that could not be solved between Miss Miall and Nanny. As for the romantic side of things, it was simply a matter of using some common sense. The readers of Woman’s Friend needed help, not half-witted humbug.
20
The restaurant at the King Club was small and dark and eye-wateringly expensive. Jessica adored it. The best tables were the booths, half-circular scoops set into the wall, their curved red banquettes like luscious red mouths. When the band started up at midnight, the banquettes were crowded with laughing revellers, drinking champagne and perching on one another’s knees. Dancing never started till midnight anywhere. It was lucky that Nanny slept like a walrus. She never woke when Jessica tiptoed in in the small hours.
‘I have a guilty secret,’ Jessica confided. ‘Shall I tell you?’
‘Guiltier than never having seen Iolanthe?’
Jessica rolled her eyes. She had told Nanny that she had been invited to the operetta by the parents of a friend from work. It was only with difficulty that she had dissuaded Gerald from telephoning, pretending to be the girl’s father. It irked her slightly, the entertainment he derived from her deceptions.
‘I’m going to murder Mrs Sweeting,’ she said. ‘Death by drowning in a mixture of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda.’
‘A taste of her own medicine?’
‘An act of mercy. In the name of all the wretched factory hands and shop girls across the land. Plus when it’s all over she’ll be absolutely spotless.’
‘She won’t take it lying down.’
‘Oh, but she will. She takes everything lying down.’
‘My type of widow.’
Jessica laughed. She wished it did not shock her when Gerald said things like that. It was so provincial to be a prude. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you but Mrs Sweeting is pure as the driven snow, and a hundred times more bothersome. There, there, dear, bear up. Work is a tonic and patience is a virtue and platitudes are two a penny, and three on Saturdays.’
‘Do I gather that Miss Cooke won the day?’
‘She says if she publishes my answers people will think Mrs Sweeting has had a stroke.’
Gerald laughed.
‘It’s just such utter nonsense,’ Jessica protested. ‘How can anyone say that Mr Right comes to those who wait when the only thing Mr Right really wants is a gay girl in a pretty dress who laughs at his jokes and likes dancing?’
‘Isn’t that what Mr Wrong wants too?’
Jessica smiled, despite herself. The waiter brought wild strawberries, the first of the year. They were tiny and dazzlingly red. A single berry, she thought, would probably pay for a week of lunches at the Busy Bee.