Most of her neighbours turned their steps that way, to the Mecca of Whiteleys and Arthur’s Stores, but Mrs Moore liked the shops in the Portobello Road. They were cheaper and more entertaining, and you never knew what you might find in the market.
She always bought her groceries from the Abingers’ shop which was on the third corner down the hill, where the Portobello Road began to get really animated. Mrs Abinger valued her custom, and sent her errand-boy up each morning to take the order. He did not always arrive, because he preferred bicycling downhill to uphill, so Nanny and the children would take their walk that way, not straight down the Portobello Road, but by the healthier detour of Ladbroke Grove. Wilfred’s pram had to be manoeuvred into the shop, for Nanny knew her Portobello, and while she was doing this, Tess and Billy would stump straight through to the back storeroom to prospect in the sacks and bins. Sometimes Mr Abinger was in there, muttering about in his long white apron that made him look like something out of Happy Families, diving the little brass shovel into the Demerara sack, or taking the bones out of a side of bacon. The children would back out then, for he did not like them taking anything, although he was always picking at things himself. They had even seen him eat suet and shreds of raw bacon.
But most of the time he was in the front shop, taking as long to serve one customer as his wife did over six, because he talked so much. Mrs Abinger did most of the work in the Corner stores. Mr Abinger did most of the talking, and thought he did most of the work.
After she had heard about the baby, Mrs Moore took the grocery list down to the Corner Stores herself. She dawdled down the road, looking into shops, asking the price of things on stalls, buying two jelly mice for Billy and Tess, which she must give them when Nanny was not looking.
Margery Moore dawdled everywhere these days, while she was waiting for the war to be over and her husband to come home from sea. She had nothing much to do. She had a nurse and two maids, and she was discouraged from working more than twice a week at the station canteen, because she muddled the other helpers. Tall and lazy and languid, she was made for reclining in a deck chair on a rose-scented lawn, or dispensing tea and raspberries and cream under a cedar tree; but no one had tea parties these days, and you could not sit out in the back-yard of Chepstow Villas, because it smelled of cats.
The glass door of the Abingers’ shop stood crosswise on the corner. It said ‘M ZAW TEE TEA’ in white enamel letters, and buzzed when you opened it. The buzzer did not stop until the door was shut again, and Mr Abinger would shout from behind the counter: ‘Shut that pestilential door!’ A hundred times a day, he regretted having been persuaded into the buzzer by Mrs Abinger’s desire for progress. He had been meaning for months to take it off, but had not yet got round to it.
He was leaning on the counter eating dates and talking to a friend, when Mrs Moore wandered in, leaving the door open and the buzzer clamouring.
‘Shut that door!’ he called, without looking up. When he saw who it was, he condescended a sarcastic Thank you, but no Madam. He did not Madam anybody, even good customers like Mrs Moore. They need not give themselves airs just because they had a poundsworth of groceries a week and ran up a bill instead of paying cash. There was nothing of the hand-rubbing, what-can-I-do-for-you-to-day family grocer about Mr Abinger. There did not need to be, for most of his customers were penny-wise locals, who no amount of hand-rubbing would have flattered into buying a thing more than they wanted.
‘Good morning, Mrs Moore!’ Mrs Abinger, warm and busy in a tight blue overall, beamed across the shop. ‘Do take a seat. I won’t keep you a moment.’
Mrs Moore drifted along the shelves, touching and looking and taking things down to inspect the labels. She loved grocery shops; they made her want to buy all kinds of things she did not need.
‘What’s isinglass for?’ She reached for the packet and knocked down a bag of semolina, which burst, spilling on to the floor.
‘Please don’t handle the goods, Mrs Moore.’ Mr Abinger’s friend had gone now and he was titivating his show piece of cereals at the back of the window. ‘I shan’t be able to sell that bag now.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Moore, who was so used to being a nuisance in shops that she did not realize she was. ‘I’ll buy it.’
‘Now there’s no need to do that, Madam,’ said Mrs Abinger, flicking biscuits into a bag as if she were playing ducks-and-drakes. ‘I can always use it up myself, if need be.’
‘But I want it,’ said Mrs Moore plaintively. ‘It’s one of the things on my list. I want that gelatine too, up there. Shall I take it?’
She could not reach the top shelf, so she stood on a lower one among the firewood, and stretching for the gelatine, lost her balance and staggered to the floor, with bundles of firewood tumbling round her feet.
‘Now I ask you.’ Mr Abinger lifted the flap at the end of the counter and came through to stack up the firewood with exaggerated nicety. ‘Now I ask you,’ he muttered. ‘Some people.’
Mrs Moore wasted one of her charming smiles on him. ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry,’ she said. ‘So stupid. Do let me help.’ As he did not answer, she wandered off into the back-room to see if she could find Mrs Abinger’s baby.
‘When you’ve finished, George,’ said one of the women at the counter, who was getting tired of waiting, ‘you might just get me half a pound of Cheddar, and a sweet pickle, if you have one.’
‘Ellie will serve you in a moment,’ he said, dusting off his hands. ‘I’ve got my window dressing. Can’t do everything, you know, though there’s some as would expect it. It’s an art, window dressing is; you’ve got to give your mind to it, same as any other brain work. That window pays for dressing, too. It’s as nice a little display now, as any you’ll see in the street. Shut that infernal door!’
Bob, the lanky errand boy, picked up a case of groceries waiting to be delivered, and scuttled out, hooking the door shut with his foot.
‘Yes,’ went on Mr Abinger, when the buzzer ceased. ‘I’ll never forget the time Ellie got loose in that window that Christmas I was laid up with my chest. Talk about everything but the kitchen stove! My word, you never saw such a conjumble.’
Mrs Abinger laughed good-humouredly. She had learned long ago that it did not pay to show you minded anything he said, lest he should nag on at it, like toothache.
‘Not that I’m saying it was her fault, mind,’ he said generously, ‘but you’ve got to be born with a gift for these things, same as any other art.’ He was leaning back against the counter now, his starched apron bib standing squarely away from his waistcoat, his eyes glazing with the inward look of the unstoppable bore.
‘Well, you might as well serve me, as stand there and talk,’ said the customer, who knew him well.
‘I don’t know what trade is coming to these days,’ he sighed, ‘when a man can’t do as he likes in his own shop. It’s get this, get that, all day long, till I sometimes feel like chucking up the whole business. It’s a mug’s game, I can tell you.’ He pushed himself upright and went back to the window, helping himself to a ginger biscuit from one of the glass-topped tins along the front of the counter.
Mrs Abinger laughed again. ‘Did you ever hear such a man?’ You could never be quite sure whether George were joking or not, so she always tried to make it a joke, in case he really meant to be rude.
‘He’ll lose you your goodwill one of these days, Ellie,’ said the woman who wanted the cheese and pickles. ‘As it is, I always say, if it wasn’t for you, there wouldn’t be nothing at all sold in this shop.’
‘Get along,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘I only do the donkey work. George is the brains of this establishment, that’s where it is. He’s got a real head for commerce. You want to see him doing the accounts. Speed? Ready reckoner isn’t in it. I’ll get your cheese, dear.’
In the back-room, she found Mrs Moore mooning over Josephine’s pram, tickling the baby’s face with the tails of the martens which hung round her long white neck.
/> ‘Ah, so you’ve found my Jo,’ she said, and rocked the pram, as she did every time she came in here. She could not keep her hands off it.
‘That’s why I came down,’ said Mrs Moore. ‘Nanny and the children told me. You are a dark horse, Mrs Ab.’ She had a habit of lazily curtailing people’s names. ‘Where did you have her?’
‘In the hospital.’ Mrs Abinger bent over the cliff of cheese to hide her reddening face. However many lies it meant, she was determined that people should not know the baby was adopted.
‘I wish you’d have told me. I could have brought you some flowers or something.’
‘There’s no call to make a song and dance about lying-in.’ Mrs Abinger bore down on the cheese wire and put the cut triangle on the scales as a formality, for she could guess to a fraction of an ounce after all these years.
‘She’s a lovely baby,’ sighed Mrs Moore. ‘Much prettier than any of mine. How on earth did you and Mr Ab. manage it? I mean – ’ Realizing she had said the wrong thing again, she changed the subject, raising her head to sniff the spicy, ham-charged air of the store room. ‘Bit stuffy for her in here, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid of not hearing her if she were to cry upstairs,’ explained Mrs Abinger, who really brought Josephine down because she could not bear to be a yard away from her. Each time she came out here for anything, a warm glow welled inside her, just as if she really were the baby’s mother. It made a treat out of those tiresome trips backwards and forwards between the shop and the store.
‘Oh I see,’ said Margery Moore vaguely. She often forgot to listen to the answer to a question. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better get my things. I wonder where I put my list?’ She picked a mouthful of cheese off the lump, bent to kiss the baby, and went through to the shop, saying: ‘When she’s older, you must bring her up to play with mine.’
Mrs Abinger pounced on the suggestion with disconcerting eagerness. ‘I’ll certainly do that, Madam,’ she said. ‘That will be ever so nice. Just as soon as she can toddle.’ She handed down May Brewer’s pickles triumphantly, pleased that May should have heard the invitation.
That was just the kind of thing she wanted for Jo, who was going to rise far above the Portobello Road. Steps up, one grander than the other, until in no time at all, she was going anywhere and everywhere, and people like the Moores proud to know her. For although Mrs Moore was a very nice lady, with a good address, she kept no style at all. The children sometimes looked ragamuffins, and Nanny had said that Mrs Moore was not above sitting down to a poached egg for supper in the kitchen, which in a Naval officer’s wife, did not seem quite the thing.
When the shop was empty, Mrs Abinger went upstairs to make sure her suet pudding had not boiled dry. She had got so used to popping up and down between the flat and the shop, that she never thought of herself as hardworked, although the end of the day sometimes found her very short of breath. Now that she had Josephine to look after as well, she sometimes did not get a chance to read the paper until she was in bed at night, leaning lopsidedly over towards the candle. They had electricity in the flat as well as the shop, but George could not go to sleep with the light on.
Bob had not yet finished his rounds, so Mrs Abinger put more water into the saucepan under the pudding. They could not have their dinner until Bob was back, because he had to look after the shop while they were upstairs.
They might have taken it in turns to eat, but Mr Abinger liked to be waited on, and a good sit down midday meal together was one of the solidarities of life which Mrs Abinger would not have dreamed of discarding. So they always had their hot dinner, with the table nicely laid, and cups of tea afterwards on early closing days when there was no need to hurry down to see what Bob was up to.
Bob’s idea of looking after the shop was to sit on a stool with the midday racing sheet, his long back curved like a banana, his feet on the top rung and his knees jack-knifed under his chin. If a customer came in, he would unfold himself with such a weary creaking of his joints, and listen to their order with such despair that they quite wished they had not given it. Having dragged himself out to the back store, he sometimes remained there so long that the customer would come to the doorway to see whether he had died serving her.
Going downstairs again, Mrs Abinger rocked Josephine and clucked at her on her way through to the shop, where she found Bob, peg-topped in bicycling clips, straddling to lift a cardboard box of groceries. Mr Abinger, with a pencil behind his ear, was serving a customer with unhurried dignity.
‘Well, you’re being a time and a half this morning, Bob,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘Here’s Mr Abinger and me waiting to have our dinner.’
‘It’s that hill,’ complained the youth, exaggerating the weight of the cardboard box. ‘I can’t somehow seem to tackle it on an empty stomach. If only I could have me dinner before I do all these orders.’ It was his eternal grievance that he could never have his own dinner until two o’clock, when the soup at Uncle Ben’s Café was off the boil and all the meat gone from the stew.
‘Folks don’t want their groceries delivered after lunch,’ Mrs Abinger told him. ‘What’s got to be done has got to be done.’ She always spoke kindly to him, for he had no mother. That was why she had employed him in the first place, in the hope of mothering him a little; but he was unresponsive material.
‘It’s that bike.’ He paused on his way to the door, clasping the box, with his stomach stuck out. ‘The front wheel’s too little.’
‘It’s got to be little,’ put in Mr Abinger, shaping a half-pound pat of butter with a flourish, ‘or where would the basket go?’
‘If only I could have one of them box-tricycles like Ellison’s boys have got.’ This was another of Bob’s grievances.
‘Don’t talk to me of Ellison’s if you don’t want a thick ear,’ rumbled Mr Abinger, criss-crossing the wooden patter on the butter. ‘It’s Ellison’s and their like will be the ruin of this trade. Isn’t that so, Mrs Lupin?’
‘Oh, I daresay,’ said his customer, hoping he had never seen her going into Ellison’s for things like candles and soap and barley that were cheaper there than at the Corner Stores.
Ellison’s was the cut price grocery across the road. It employed a manager and three well-paid assistants besides the errand-boys. It was open to the street with all the goods on show, lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling, stacked on the counter so that the assistants had to play peep-be among the tins and bottles.
An outcrop of cheap crockery and enamelware cluttered the pavement on either side, graded in height like a herbaceous border, blossoming with price labels. Lures were chalked on blackboards in the curly letters which were the manager’s speciality: ‘Oh, look, ladies! What a Bargain.’ ‘Stop! Look! Buy!’ ‘Our prices are so keen we cut ourselves!’
Ellison’s was a permanent eyesore to Mr Abinger. He would never walk on that side of the street, and was engaged at the movement in a campaign to bar the senior assistant from membership of the Avondale Park Bowls Club.
‘Ellison’s,’ he grunted at Bob. ‘I’ll give you Ellison’s.’
‘No offence,’ said Bob. ‘I was only talking. And I say – Ellison’s boys get their dinner at twelve.’ He escaped, leaving the door open and the buzzer going, as Mr Abinger came prowling under the counter flap at him like a gorilla.
3
The war had been over for nearly six years. Ellison’s had expanded, buying the next-door shop on each side and opening a hardware department and a forest of cheap overalls and dungarees. The Corner Stores had not expanded, but it had not contracted either, because it was as small as possible already. It was one of Mrs Abinger’s great worries that they were always running out of this and that, because there was no room to store enough stock.
They had run out of sultanas when Miss Loscoe came round from the basement flat in Cornwall Road where she lived with her mother. She called it a garden flat and did not speak to the families on the stories above.
‘It’s a funny thing,
Ellie,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘but whatever I want most particularly has always just run out that day. But then, I always say I’m an unlucky person. I wanted to make a fruit cake for mother’s birthday on Sunday. She quite enjoys my Dundees, and gracious knows there’s not much the poor soul can fancy these days. I was thinking you might like to bring little Josephine up to tea, seeing you won’t be in the shop.’
‘Ellie usually does the stock-room Sunday afternoons,’ put in George, from the bacon machine.
‘That’s right, I do,’ said his wife who knew that Jo would not want to go to the basement flat where Mrs Loscoe brooded like a half-crazed spider.
‘You managed to find time last Sunday,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘to take the child to the fair, but I suppose I mustn’t expect my poor little tea-party to compete with that’ She inspected a jar of pickled cucumbers disapprovingly.
‘Don’t take me up so, Dot,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘It’s very kind of you, but I was thinking it might be too much for your mother. She gets tired, I know.’
‘Mother doesn’t see enough people,’ said Miss Loscoe. ‘She wants taking out of herself a bit more. “A proper old hermit crab you’re getting,” I said to her the other day. I try and jolly her up, you know; she gets so sorry for herself.’
‘I only hope my Jo will be as good to me when I’m old and feeble,’ said Mrs Abinger, who could never keep off the subject for long. ‘Did you want the cucumbers, then? They’re one and ninepence.’
‘I don’t trust that brand,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘ever since that chutney you sold me last year.’ She pushed the jar away, wrinkling her nose at it.
‘I’ve got a bit of news for you,’ she went on. ‘That Mrs Moore of yours is coming home. I passed their house on my way from the tube at Notting Hill Gate. I saw the vans. I must say, I wouldn’t like my furniture to stand on the pavement for all to see if it wasn’t in better condition.’
Joy and Josephine Page 6