Josephine struggled free, patting her hair. She hated getting messed up, unless it was her own doing. ‘You don’t half fuss, Mum,’ she grumbled.
‘Not “don’t half” dear,’ corrected Mrs Abinger automatically. ‘And no wonder I fuss, with you skylarking round the market with goodness knows who. If you’ve been with those bad Goldner boys, Mum’s going to be very cross.’
Josephine said glibly, without a glance at the dustbins: ‘I ain’t been with them. I never do. They’ve gone away. They’re dead. I never seen ‘em.’
‘Haven’t seen. What are you doing down here then in all this dirt?’
‘Playing.’
‘I’ll give you playing. A nice way to carry on after all the trouble I take to bring you up a lady.’ She caught Jo’s hand, angry now that relief had displaced anxiety, and began to pull her back towards the crowds of the market. Jo dragged her feet and began to whine. Looking back, she glimpsed two grey shapes disappearing with a rodent scamper among the shadows under the railway arch.
‘’Tisn’t fair,’ she grizzled, buckling her legs, a limp weight on her mother’s arm. ‘I never get no fun.’
‘You’re a bad, ungrateful little girl. You get a better time than any of the kiddies round here and well you know it. I spoil you, that’s what it is. Well, it’s going to stop.’ Mrs Abinger said this unconvincingly, every time Jo was naughty.
‘I don’t,’ said Jo. ‘I have to go to that soppy school, and Mrs Mortimer smells. She does then! I have to go to Vi’s and I hate her. I do then! She threw a knife at me at tea when Auntie Phyll wasn’t there. It missed me. I threw it back and it hit her.’
‘Now, Jo.’ Mrs Abinger, breathless, and constantly interrupted by the jostling crowd, could not miss the opportunity for one of her little homilies. ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, you know. What did I tell you about the Quakers and turning the other cheek?’
‘I told Dad that, and he said the Quakers are cissies.’
‘He likes his joke. Oh – I do beg your pardon, I’m sure.’ She and Jo went one on each side of a frail woman, who nearly crumpled up, as their tugging arms caught her in the back.
Mrs Abinger had to let go, and Josephine immediately migrated to a sweet shop which sold ice-cream. Dragged away, she set up a bawl, which excited no notice, for many other children were bawling in the crowd.
‘I’ll give you such a smack!’ threatened Mrs Abinger, who never laid a finger on her, although when Jo was wayward and roving like to-day, she thought of her not as Joy Stretton but as the baby abandoned in the church porch, whose shameful, unthinkable mother would have smacked her twenty times a day as soon as look at her.
At a corner, they were nearly run down by an invalid chair, propelled by Miss Loscoe. From a bundle of rugs and shawls a pair of malevolent eyes menaced the world.
‘Well, fancy meeting you!’ Miss Loscoe stopped the chair, and her mother slewed round to thump her hand and croak: ‘Go on, Dorothy. Go on!’
‘In a jiffy, Mother. Look – here’s Mrs Abinger and dear little Josephine. We want to stop and pass the time of the day with them, don’t we?’
Mrs Loscoe and dear little Josephine glowered at one another. The shock of meeting the wheel chair had dried up the child’s tears and driven the blood from her angry cheeks. Mrs Loscoe made one of her mad, crooked faces, and Josephine hid behind her mother’s skirts.
‘So you found the truant then, I see. What a mischee-vious youngster.’ Miss Loscoe bent down to clack her teeth at Jo. ‘About time too, Ellie. I had to pop back into the shop for baking powder which I’d forgotten in my upset at not getting the sultanas, and I found Mr Abinger creating quite alarmingly. What state he’ll be in now doesn’t bear thinking about,’ she said, enjoying the thought.
‘Push on, Dorothy!’
‘In a moment, dear,’ said Miss Loscoe, who was not going to miss this opportunity. ‘I must say, Ellie, Mr Abinger is getting quite funny tempered. He’ll be keeping people out of the shop if you aren’t careful.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘It’s only his joking way. People round here know him. Why, he’s quite a public figure with all his clubs and societies – secretary of this, president of that. Oh, George gives no offence, I assure you.’
‘Public figure he may be,’ said Miss Loscoe, giving the chair a vicious little rock, as if her mother were a fractious baby, ‘but he was very offhand to me about my raising powder. I tell you plainly, Ellie, if I weren’t such a good friend to you, I’m afraid I should have walked out of the shop without it.’
‘Well, he hadn’t had his tea,’ defended Mrs Abinger. ‘You’d be offhand if you’d been called away from your tea, I don’t doubt.’
‘You know I hardly ever trouble about tea.’
‘It was wrong of me to go off and leave him with a shop full, enough to fluster anybody on a Friday. If it hadn’t been for this young monkey – ’ She fished about for Jo, who was still hidden behind her skirts. ‘Don’t pull at my legs like that, Jo. Did you ever know such a child?’
‘Nor want to!’ barked Mrs Loscoe suddenly. ‘Why must we have them to tea on Sunday, Dorothy?’
‘Ha, ha, Mother, you really are a card!’ Miss Loscoe leaned forward to tuck in a rug and hid her mother’s face until it should have sweetened a little. ‘You know you’re looking forward to your birthday party. Quite a little gathering we shall be, shan’t we? Won’t it be fun, Jo? I’m going to make such a scrumptious cake – ’
‘Jo.’ Mrs Abinger shook her. ‘Auntie Dot’s talking to you.’
Josephine kicked at the chair wheel and jumped back in fright as the old lady suddenly lunged at her with a cackle of abuse.
‘Now, Mother, don’t get excited. I’d better go on,’ Miss Loscoe mouthed behind her mother’s back. ‘She get’s nervy if we hang about. We’re taking our constitutional as far as the cemetery and back, aren’t we, Mother?’
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ cried Mrs Loscoe testily, slumping back with a jerk that rocked the chair. ‘Push on, push on. No need to loiter jabbering here, if we’ve got to jabber to them all over again on Sunday. Push on!’ She rapped twice on the arm of the chair, like a bus conductor signalling to the driver.
‘No peace for the wicked!’ cried Miss Loscoe, and pushed the chair off the pavement with a jolt that caused her mother to turn round and chatter at her like a monkey.
‘Oh Mum,’ said Josephine, as they turned away, ‘need we go?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Abinger decidedly. ‘We need go. I might have let you off if you hadn’t been naughty to-day, but you’re having too much of your own way.’
‘Oh, Mu-um!’
“If you don’t mend your ways, young lady, I’ll tell Mrs Loscoe what a bad little girl you are. Then you’ll catch it.’ Mrs Abinger used Mrs Loscoe as a bogeyman, as mothers once used Boney.
Josephine began to cry again. Sometimes in bed in her little cupboard of a room, she knew Mrs Loscoe was behind the corner curtain where her clothes hung, trying to get out.
It was not quite six o’clock, but Mr Arbinger had reversed the ‘Early Closing Thursdays’ notice so that it said ‘Closed’, and gone up to his tea. When his wife came in with the grizzling child, he put his hands over his ears and went on reading the paper. He did not speak to them.
Mrs Abinger gave his back an experienced look. ‘Come straight through and don’t bother Dad,’ she said. ‘Quickly to bed; that’s the place for you.’
‘What about my supper?’ Jo lingered by the table, and stopped crying when she saw the fruit cake. ‘Can I have a piece of cake, Mum?’ She moved her hand towards it watching her father. She did not trust him when he did not talk. His lengthy scoldings ran off her like water from a duck’s back; his rare silences made her feel uneasy.
‘Cut us a piece, Dad,’ she wheedled. She laid a finger on the cake, and he suddenly lowered the paper with a crackle that made her jump.
‘Take your hands off the food, child! Can’t a man sit down to
his tea in peace after a day like I’ve had without women and children buzzing round him like bluebottles? I tell you, Ellie, I’ve had just about enough of it, what with you haring off like a maniac after that kid, who’s so spoiled she deserves to be sent back where she came from.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Josephine, reassured by the familiar grumble of his voice. ‘I wouldn’t mind going back to heaven.’
‘Heaven be damned. Who’s been stuffing you up with such rubbish? You see, Ellie, what you bring about with your grand ideas. Nothing would satisfy you but that she go to that footling dame school, and look what comes of it. She wouldn’t have picked up this superstitious nonsense at the Council. Come here, Jo, I’ll tell you where you came from if you want to know – ’
‘George, please.’ Mrs Abinger put her substantial body between them. He had agreed years ago to treat Josephine like his own, and never tell her that she was adopted. He had promised, but he still wielded the unspoken threat of breaking his promise.
‘Run along, Jo,’ she said, ‘and if you undress quickly, Mum will bring you a slice of cake to eat in bed.’
‘She’ll have to get out and brush her teeth afterwards,’ said George, who was faddy about things like that, and monopolized the sink night and morning with his gargles and his health salts and his nasal douches.
Mrs Abinger, the healthy daughter of healthy country people, had not been brought up to unnecessary hygiene. She and the child looked at each other, sharing the secret of sweets under the pillow and buttered crusts smuggled in late at night if Josephine could not sleep.
‘And pick your feet up,’ added Mr Abinger, as Jo dawdled to the door, bored with the idea of bed, suddenly remembering Arthur and Norman and the fun they were having digging a sewer to get their father out of prison.
‘Don’t shout at her, dear,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘She was a bit upset just now by Mrs Loscoe. We’ve got to go to tea there Sunday.’
‘Sooner you than me,’ he said. ‘The daughter’s enough to give anyone the Willies, watching the scales like a lynx, let alone the old girl.’
Josephine was listening from the doorway. ‘Well, she’s got to go,’ her mother said. ‘I’m not letting her off after being disobedient to-day.’
‘Where was she, by the way?’ he asked, without interest.
‘In that dreadful little alley down by the railway. Can you credit it? I was quite surprised at her – ’
‘I wouldn’t be.’ He folded the paper back at the sports page. ‘It’s what I’m always telling you. Water will find its own level.’
‘There ain’t no water down there,’ said Josephine. ‘I wasn’t by the canal. And I ain’t going to tea with Mrs Loscoe, so there.’
‘Isn’t any water,’ said her mother patiently. ‘Am not. But you are going. Mum’s said so.’
‘Certainly she’s going,’ said George, helping himself to the piece of cake his wife had cut for Jo. ‘And so are you. I shall be wanting this room for a committee meeting Sunday afternoon, so the Loscoes are welcome to the pair of you.’
But Josephine did not have to go to Mrs Loscoe’s birthday party after all. She was in the shop on Saturday when Mrs Moore came drifting in among the crowd of week-end customers.
The Moores had been away for five years. After the war, they had let the Chepstow Villas house and gone to live in the Meon valley near Portsmouth, where Commander Moore had a shore appointment.
This had been a great blow to Mrs Abinger. She had foreseen Josephine going up often to play with the Moores, making friends with the children, copying their accent, learning to feel as much at home in a big house like that as in the cramped flat over the shop, whose four rooms together were not much larger than Mrs Moore’s drawing-room.
For five years she had been looking forward to impressing Mrs Moore with Josephine. Now the moment was here and merciful Providence had caused the child to be wearing her tussore dress with the smocking. Jo was whispering with Sidney in a corner where they were supposed to be making up pound bags of bread-crumbs. She answered her mother’s call at once and pranced up to Mrs Moore, smirking a little as she sensed that she was being shown off. Sidney took advantage of the diversion to slink into the back store, where he kept his comics in a drawer of the spice cabinet marked ‘nutmeg’ which was never opened, because the nutmegs were kept in an old biscuit tin.
Mrs Abinger was glad there were people in the shop to hear Mrs Moore’s admiration. ‘I never had children like this,’ she complained. ‘You are lucky, Mrs Ab., to have such a pretty daughter. You ought to see what the country has done to Tess. She’s covered in freckles and her legs are like young trees, and she insists on going about in boy’s shorts. I shall never get her off.’
‘My Jo’s quite the other way. Almost too vain, you might say, a real little madam.’ Mrs Abinger pretended to deprecate.
Mrs Moore looked happily round the shop. ‘I didn’t like coming back to London,’ she said, ‘but it’s nice to come down here and see everything just the same. Except Jo. I expected her to be still in long clothes, I think. Isn’t it silly how when you go away you expect everything you leave behind to be static until you get back?’
‘And very nice it is, I’m sure, to have you back, Madam,’ said Mrs Abinger, slightly muddled, but nodding and beaming like an old family lodge-keeper. The country had not made Mrs Moore any brisker or browner. Her skin was still like a veined white rose and she still had that way of leaning against everything, as if her spine could not support her height. She had had her hair cropped and shingled, so that her head looked smaller and her neck longer than ever.
She felt warm towards Mrs Abinger for being trusty and solidly old-fashioned. Still making up spices in deft little twists of paper; still weighing out Marie biscuits with as much nicety as if it were the first, instead of the thousandth time in her life.
‘You must let Jo come and play with my family,’ she said.
‘Well, wouldn’t that be lovely!’ cried Mrs Abinger, with as much delighted surprise as if she had not been hoping for this ever since she had heard that the Moores were, coming home. ‘What do you say, Jo? Lost your tongue, have you?’
Jo was thinking out a cunning scheme. ‘Could I come Sunday?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I’d like to come to tea to-morrow, ever so much.’
‘Why not?’ said Mrs Moore. ‘We’re in an awful muddle still, but she could help the children unpack their toys. There might be something she’d like. They’ve got far too many.’
‘The child has plenty of toys of her own,’ put in Mr Abinger, moving down the counter, scenting charity. ‘And I thought you were going to tea with Mrs Loscoe,’ he told his wife. He did not want any patronage, thank you, from such as the Moores, nor did he want Jo going up there to get big ideas and fancy herself too good for the Portobello Road. There was too much of that already.
‘Miss Loscoe won’t mind.’ said Mrs Abinger, winning the struggle against her conscience. ‘Jo would love to come, Madam. I’m sure it’s very kind of you.’ Dot would be furious. She had made the cake and had even talked about buying crackers, but if Jo did not go to Chepstow Villas this time, Mrs Moore might forget to ask her again.
When she had washed up after Sunday dinner, Mrs Abinger dressed Josephine in a muslin confection that was far grander than anything Tessa Moore had ever been made to wear, and sat her tidily down in a pinafore with a book.
If it had not been for missing Mrs Loscoe’s birthday tea, Jo would not have wanted to go to the Moores. Since yesterday, she had heard so much about how lucky she was to be asked, and how politely she must behave, and not snatch at tea nor say ‘ain’t’, nor presume with toys, that she was bored now with the whole idea. Her mother was in the bedroom repinning her hair, which was always more trouble in hot weather. If Jo could escape, she might find Arthur and Norman down the Lane, and persuade them to let her go digging.
‘Can I go out for a bit, Dad?’ Mr Abinger was fussing round the table, setting chairs and laying out sheets o
f paper and thinking up what he was going to say about the presentation fund for old Bob Stewart’s widow.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘You heard your mother.’
‘But, Dad – ’
‘Don’t blame me.’ He held up a hortatory hand, as if the committee meeting had already started. ‘It’s your own fault, if you will go chasing after your fancy friends.’
Josephine sighed, and looked round the low, stuffy sitting-room as if it were a prison. The round table with the bobbled green cloth and the drawers shaped like wedges of cheese took up most of the space. With chairs round, you had to go sideways to get between it and the monumental sideboard which Mr Abinger had insisted on inheriting when his mother died. The room was further cramped and darkened by bosky wallpaper, sunless photographs in overpowering frames, and by the potbellied curtains looped on either side of the window.
Mrs Abinger liked fresh air; Mr Abinger feared it. Coming up from the shop one winter day to get his cough lozenges, and finding the window opened after he had closed it, he had banged it shut so furiously that now it would not slide down more than a few inches. He was always talking about fixing it, but he had not done it yet, and on a June afternoon like this, the sun beat through, turning the room into a conservatory of the smell of roast meat and vegetables and Mr Abinger’s pipe.
Most husbands in the Portobello Road went collarless and coatless on hot summer Sundays. Mr Abinger was fully dressed in a suit, waistcoat and watchchain, stiff collar, and bow tie. Heat did not crimson his long, colourless face, but it was already glistening waxily. By the end of the afternoon, with four men in here smoking and talking his collar would be limp, and he would demand a clean one before going to bowls at Avondale Park this evening. Mrs Abinger spent more money on his laundry than on her own and Josephine’s, which she mostly did herself; but Mr Abinger insisted on even his white grocery aprons going out to the wash. He liked a professional finish to his linen. She admired that in him; it showed his breeding.
Joy and Josephine Page 8