Everybody's Somebody

by Beryl Kingston

  Exactly the same thing happened when they paused for dinner. He ate in silence, apart from scowling now and then, and, as soon as his plate was clean, he went back to work, and Rosie returned to her solitary contemplation of the Thames. At four o’clock he emerged again to complain that the light was going. ‘We shall have to stop,’ he said. ‘Damned light. Same time tomorrow.’

  ‘Was it all right?’ she asked.

  He didn’t seem to understand the question. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘What I been doin’. The posing.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, almost tetchily. ‘Of course. See you tomorrow.’

  As she stomped off to the nearest tram stop, glad for the warmth of her coat and hat, and her thick muffler and Jim’s nice thick gloves, she felt as tired as though she’d done a full day’s work at the club. But she took care to make light of it when she got home, and they were eating their supper and talking. Kitty was eager to know what it was like being a model.

  ‘Whatcher ’ave ter do?’ she asked.

  ‘It was boring,’ Rosie told her. ‘All I did was stand still an’ look out the window,’ and she looked at Jim and added, ‘fully clothed. I had to change into a different dress but there was a screen there so I could do it in private. It was all very proper.’ And she was pleased to see that he looked chastened, although he made no comment.

  She stood still and looked out of the window for the next four days. But as the light fell on the fourth day, Mr de Silva put down his brushes and asked her if she’d like to see how the portrait was progressing. ‘It’s not finished,’ he said. ‘Not by a long chalk. But it’s shaping.’

  She was impressed by it. The gown looked so beautiful it made her blink and she saw that he’d painted the prettiest pair of slippers to match it. But then she moved on to her face and that gave her a shock she didn’t expect because he’d made her look so fierce. She was staring at it when she became aware that he was grinning at her and looking devilish.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  She tried to be diplomatic. ‘The dress is lovely,’ she said.

  His grin broadened. ‘But?’ he teased.

  ‘I don’t really look as fierce as that do I?’

  He laughed at her. ‘You do to me. It’s one of the best things about you.’

  That was a surprise, but she didn’t want to pursue it, so she changed the subject. ‘Am I to come in tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow is Shabbat. I shall expect you at nine o’clock on Monday.’

  And that was all. The fierce face he’d given her bothered her all the way home but eventually she decided he was wrong about it. He had to be. She wasn’t like that at all. She was expecting a baby, and expectant mothers were always serene and beautiful.

  In the middle of February, when she reckoned she must be about five or six months, and she could feel her baby moving every day, she went serenely and beautifully to visit the local midwife and was booked in for the third week of May and told everything was coming along lovely and that the baby had a good strong heartbeat. By that time Jim seemed to have come round to the idea of being a father and was actually thinking up names for this baby of theirs. And Gerry was using her to model hands and feet for a couple of wealthy sisters who wanted to appear younger than they were, which meant that all she had to do was sit in a chair and stay fairly still, which suited her very well. It was peaceful and quiet and a lot easier than standing up.

  She was so easy she was nearly asleep when his voice spoke to her from behind the easel one darkening afternoon. ‘Do tell me,’ he said, ‘as a matter of interest, why did the club dispense with your services?’

  ‘Because I was “in the family way”, as the maître d’ put it,’ she said. ‘Apparently it’s not company policy to employ expectant mothers.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘Rather short-sighted of them.’

  ‘Downright stupid, if you ask me,’ she said. ‘I mean to say pregnancy ent catching. I did tell him, but he didn’t take no notice. He said it was the system.’

  ‘And what did you say to that?’

  ‘I said if that was the system, it was time it was changed.’

  He gave a great roar of laughter and put his head round the side of the easel to look at her. ‘And you say you’re not fierce,’ he said. ‘You’re a blood-red revolutionary, damn if you ain’t.’ He put down his brush and walked over to the bookshelves, trailing his left hand over the spines until he found the book he wanted. ‘Read that,’ he said, opening it. ‘The bit in italics, by my thumb. It was written in 1776 but I think you’ll agree with every word of it. Read it out loud and tell me what you think of it.’

  She took the book and did as she was told, stopping to comment whenever something struck her. ‘American Declaration of Independence July 4th, 1776,’ she read. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal — quite right — that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights — what does “un-all-inable” mean?’

  Gerry had gone back to his painting, but he answered from behind the easel, pronouncing the word correctly. ‘Unalienable. Rights that should never be taken away.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see.’ And read on. ‘…unalienable Rights that among these are Life — well of course — Liberty — yes — and the pursuit of Happiness — well that’s an extraordinary idea. But why not? The toffs think we’re just here to wait on them all the time an’ clear up after them an’ do as we’re told but why shouldn’t we have a better life an’ be happy? — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that’s what the suffragettes say — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness. He’s saying ordinary people should have a say in how they’re governed, isn’t he? And that if we don’t like what our rulers are doing, we got the right to change it. ‘Alter or abolish’ — I like the sound of that. Has anyone ever done it?’

  ‘Twice,’ he told her, gratified to see how responsive she was. ‘Once in France in 1789, when ordinary men took over the government from the king and his courtiers and chopped their heads off, and once in America in 1776, when ordinary men decided they weren’t going to put up with being ruled by us any longer and formed a citizens’ army and drove us out.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ she said. ‘All that from an idea.’

  He echoed her happily. ‘All that from an idea.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked, intrigued. ‘Was it reading all those books?’

  ‘Some of it was,’ he told her, ‘but I learnt it at school too.’

  ‘Must have been a different sort a’ school from the one I went to then,’ she said. ‘They learned us how to read an’ write an’ how to do sums but nothin’ like this.’

  ‘I can see I shall have to take your education in hand,’ he said happily. Hadn’t he always known she was different? There’d been a lot of women in his life, either as models or lovers or both, but none of them had been the slightest bit interested in revolution or literature or poetry. Or art, come to that. In fact he’d often thought that, beautiful though they were, their heads were as empty as thistledown. Whereas this one would be worth teaching. It could be an interesting experiment. ‘That’s enough work for today,’ he said. ‘Same time tomorrow.’

  From then on Rosie’s pregnancy and education continued together and apace. As her body grew steadily more cumbersome and lethargic and modelling less and less possible, her mind leapt into activity, devouring books and newspapers, struggling to make sense of poetry and politics, accepting any challenge that Gerard de Silva threw at her. ‘Try this,’ he would say, handing her one of Dicken’s formidable novels. ‘See what you make of that,’ giving he
r an article from a newspaper. He still paid her a weekly wage even though her modelling assignments were few and far between, which was very good of him and troubled her conscience whenever she stopped to think about it, but she went on deciphering books, and was reading voraciously when her pains began.

  By that time she’d given up her modelling until after the baby was born and on that particular morning she was on her own in the flat, sitting by the window in the new easy chair she’d bought for Jim with her wages, with Gerry’s copy of Oliver Twist open on her lap and the busy street below her for company. She was feeling extremely uncomfortable and kept getting a nasty little pain in her belly, but she ignored it, thinking that she must have eaten something that disagreed with her, and kept on reading because she’d reached the point when Oliver had been taken to court accused of theft and she was eager to know what happened next. It wasn’t until he was happily established in Mr Brownlow’s house that she gave her body any attention and then she realised that the pain was a lot stronger and seemed to be coming at regular intervals, which was what the midwife had told her would happen. She watched the clock and sure enough the pains were coming every quarter of an hour. So she waddled downstairs to ask Mrs Rogers if she would send her little lad to fetch the midwife.

  It was a gentle birth and very quiet. The midwife padded about in her carpet slippers, murmuring the occasional instruction, the noise of the street was a distant clatter, the pains came and went and, although they were so strong that they made her pant, they didn’t worry her. She’d watched her mother panting through her pains too often to be alarmed by them. What she wasn’t expecting was the strength of the love she would feel for her baby when she finally slipped into the world, small, damp and slightly bloodstained, with a mop of dark hair and huge dark eyes. She looked up at Rosie at once, her gaze solemn and unwavering as if they’d known one another for years.

  ‘Oh my little darling,’ Rosie said. ‘I just love you.’

  The midwife beamed approval. ‘Well nat’rally,’ she said. And when the baby began to root around, she said, ‘Well will you look at that. She wants feeding al-a-ready, the dear little mite.’ And Rosie fed her.

  The next ten days passed in a milky haze. The baby was named Grace when she was five hours old, because Jim said she was a Tuesday’s child, so it was only right an’ anyway she looked like a Grace, and Rosie was pleased to see that he and Kitty came home in a rush every day to see her. Four weeks later, Tess and Edie and Johnnie wangled a Sunday off work to travel to London to see her too, bringing a punnet full of raspberries from the garden and a pot of jam from Mrs Taylor and a nice hock of bacon from their Pa. They passed their new niece around to one another all through the visit, handling her very carefully as if she was made of bone china. And Jim had his back slapped until it made him cough and said it was ‘a bit of orl right havin’ a family’. After the clumsy way she’d broken her news to him, it was a relief to Rosie to see how much he loved this baby. And he hadn’t said anything about her lack of wages, although to be fair she had saved up quite a lot and was paying into the pot as often as she could.

  By the time Gracie was three months old, she was a lovely plump baby with the roundest, prettiest face, who smiled at everybody who came within sight. At six months she was sitting up in the highchair her now doting father had bought for her, happily eating rusks. And when Christmas came, she was the star of the feast, even though she demanded to be fed in the middle of the meal.

  ‘An’ why not?’ Kitty said, as Rosie unbuttoned her blouse ready to let her suckle. ‘We’re all feeding our faces, when all’s said an’ done. Why shouldn’t she, pretty dear?’

  ‘I s’pose I ought to go back to work soon,’ Rosie said, as the child sucked. ‘I haven’t written to Mr de Silva or anythin’ and I should’ve really.’

  ‘There’s no rush,’ Jim said. ‘We’re doin’ all right, our Rosie. Don’t worry yer head. If ’e’s all that keen to ’ave you work for ’im again, he’ll write.’ And he was secretly thinking an’ if he ain’t, good riddance.

  The letter came in the first week of February.

  Chapter 16

  It was such a nice letter. Rosie and Kitty read it one after the other and they both thought it was lovely.

  ‘That’s what I call a gentleman,’ Kitty said, handing it back to Rosie. ‘Not like all those toffee-nosed gits what treat you like dirt an’ won’t give you the vote.’ It still rankled with her that only wealthy women over thirty had been enfranchised and everyone else had been ignored.

  Rosie read the letter for a second time and it was gentlemanly, hoping she’d recovered from the birth and that the baby was thriving and asking, very delicately, when she ‘might be’ coming back to work, adding,

  ‘I have received an excellent commission from one of my patrons in the Uffizi Society for four large-scale paintings and would like you to model for all four.’

  Yes, she thought. I’d enjoy that.

  But when Jim read it, he had other ideas. He didn’t hold with her working as a model — never had, if the truth be told — all on her own with another man, dressing up in poncy clothes and getting silly ideas. He should’ve told her that long since, and he would’ve done too, if he’d thought she’d listen. Now he could speak his mind with justification. ‘Write and tell ’im you can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not with a baby. I mean ter say, you can’t go traipsing about all over London with a baby. It wouldn’t be fair to her, ’specially in this weather. We don’t want her catchin’ cold. And what would you do with her while you’re posing? You can’t leave her to cry, poor little thing. She needs lookin’ after. You write an’ tell ’im.’

  ‘Oh come on, Jim,’ Rosie said. ‘This is a good job. Four large-scale paintings. A year’s work. An’ don’t say we don’t need the money.’

  He set his jaw and argued on. ‘Money ain’t everything.’

  She was exasperated to hear him say such a stupid thing. ‘Oh yes!’ she said sarcastically. ‘That en’t what you said when we first moved in. It was all how’re we gonna manage? then, an’ we shall be skint. If you can remember.’

  He remembered every word, but he was determined not to be out-argued. Now he’d made a stand, he had to go on with it. ‘We’ll manage all right,’ he said, stubbornly. ‘You’ll see. You just write an’ tell ’im it can’t be done. I’m off ter work or I’ll be late. Don’t forget. Write an’ tell ’im.’ And he left them on very self-righteous feet.

  ‘Oh lor’!’ Kitty said, pulling a face. ‘What’ll you do now, our Rosie?’

  ‘I shall write to Mr de Silva,’ Rosie said, calmly. ‘That’s what he told me to do. You heard him. So I shall do it. I’ll tell him everything Jim’s just said, an’ see if he’s got any answers to it.’

  Which she did. And Mr de Silva’s careful and lengthy answer arrived by second post the following afternoon.

  ‘My dear Rosie,’ he wrote.

  ‘Thank you for letting me know the position. I have given it thought. Let me explain how our problems can be resolved.

  ‘Firstly, there will be no need for you to bring your Gracie out in bad weather nor for you to travel on the tram. I have a car now and I will drive over and collect you both. Secondly, I will give you a telephone as part of your wages and have it installed in your house and then I can phone you whenever I need you and we can make the necessary arrangements over the phone. Thirdly, I will hire a nursemaid to look after the baby while you are posing. Fourthly, I shall pay you by the day, weekly, if that is agreeable. Sometimes I shall need you every day, sometimes not. It will depend on how the paintings progress and how quickly I am working. And of course you can borrow books from my library whenever you would like to. That goes without saying. What did you think of Oliver Twist, by the way?

  ‘Write back and let me know if this is agreeable to you. If it is, we will start work on Monday morning.

  ‘Yours with very kind regards,

  ‘Gerry.’

  Rosie read it through twic
e just to be sure of it. It was sensible advice and she knew she would take it. The only problem was that she would have to persuade Jim to agree with her and, given the stubborn mood he was in, that wasn’t going to be easy. But she was on her own with Gracie all afternoon and she ought to be able to think of the right way to tell him by the time he got home.

  Unfortunately Gracie needed her nappy changed at just the wrong moment and Rosie was down in the bathroom attending to her when Jim came home. By the time they returned to the kitchen he was sitting in his chair with his boots unlaced, a scowl on his face and the letter on the table in front of him.

  ‘Well, what d’you think?’ she asked, speaking boldly to disguise how worried she was.

  ‘Well ’e’s got all the answers,’ he said sourly. ‘I’ll say that for ’im.’

  She was lowering Gracie into her highchair and didn’t look at him. ‘Then you won’t mind me going,’ she said.

  ‘’Course I mind you goin’,’ he told her crossly. ‘I don’t want you goin’. I’d ha’ thought I’d made that clear. It ain’t fittin’. Not now you got a baby.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but it’ll pay, and it’ll pay well. It’s a good offer, Jim, an’ I ent turnin’ it down.’ And she lifted that stubborn chin of hers and looked straight at him.

  ‘What happened to ’onour an’ obey?’ he said. ‘I seem to remember you sayin’ somethin’ of the sort in some ol’ church somewhere. Or did I get it wrong?’

  ‘Obeyin’s all very well when it’s somethin’ that makes sense,’ she told him, tying a bib round Gracie’s neck. ‘It ent when it’s somethin’ foolish.’

  His face darkened. ‘Oh, so I’m foolish now, is that it? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not sayin’ you’re foolish. It’s just you get silly ideas sometimes.’