Joy and Josephine

by Monica Dickens

  Mrs Abinger was afraid they were going to be too early at the Moores’. Charlie Cummerford and Fred Oakes had arrived before she was ready to go, so she had had to put on her hat in a greater hurry than she liked, and take herself and Josephine out of the way.

  All the way up the hill, she gave last-minute instructions about manners and grammar. She was nervous, because she could not decide whether they ought to go to the front or the back door. Rounding the corner, however, she was relieved to see that the Moores were all out in the front garden, helping their father plant out some roots he had brought from the country.

  Commander Moore loved to organize his family into a team, issuing orders as if on the quarterdeck. He had them lined up now, Billy making holes with a trowel, Tess dropping in the plants, and Wilfred, with his small craftsman’s hands and absorbed face, patting down the earth. They would not last long like this. They got quickly tired of being organized, and would drift away as soon as their father’s back was turned.

  Billy, bored with digging holes, looked up to see Mrs Abinger hovering outside the gate. He had been barely six when he went away, and he did not recognize her now.

  ‘Do you want something?’ he asked socially. ‘Are you selling something? We’ll have one.’ In the country, people had always been coming to the gate with things to sell. Mummy would buy anything, because she felt sorry for anyone who had to do that for a living.

  Mrs Abinger was taken aback. ‘I – we – I’ve brought my little Jo to tea. Your Mummy very kindly invited her.’

  ‘Did she, by Jove?’ Commander Moore looked up from the box where he was sorting plants. ‘Well – come along in.’ If she said she had been invited, she probably had. It was not the first time Margery had issued an invitation and forgotten all about it.

  ‘Open the gate, Billy,’ he commanded. ‘Tess, come here and shake hands. Wilf, get up. And you’re packing that earth too tight.’

  As he opened the gate, Billy exchanged a look of despair with Tess. What had their mother let them in for? Wilfred moved on to the next plant and began to bed down.

  ‘Are you sure –?’ Mrs Abinger hesitated in the gateway, as shy as Jo, who was hiding behind her. None of the opening conversations she had rehearsed could survive the damper of not being expected. She felt flustered, and knew that her hair would come down at any minute. ‘Perhaps we’ve come on the wrong day?’ But it could not be the wrong day, because it was Mrs Loscoe’s birthday. She had met Dot this morning, and a coldness had passed between them which was going to take weeks to thaw out.

  ‘Of course not. Come in,’ boomed Commander Moore, extra loud, to carry off the situation. ‘I’ll call my wife; she’s indoors.’ He dusted earth off his hands. ‘Who shall I say it is?’

  ‘Of course, I suppose you wouldn’t know me, sir, you having been away so much. The name’s Abinger – Mrs Abinger from the Corner Stores, and this is my little girl. Come here, Jo, and don’t be so silly.’ She pulled Josephine round to the front and stood looking up at him, feeling shorter and stouter than ever beneath his lean height, which was topped by a bird-like, balding head.

  They all looked towards the house as the drawing-room window squeaked up, and Mrs Moore stepped out on to the balcony. ‘Hullo, Mrs Ab.!’ she cried. ‘And little Jo – how sweet she looks. My children have been so looking forward to seeing her.’

  ‘But Mummy, we never – ’ began Tessa, who was deadly honest and could always be relied on to say the wrong thing.

  ‘I’ll be out in a moment.’ Mrs Moore bent double to go under the window and disappeared, trying to remember whether she had asked the mother to tea as well as the child.

  ‘Well, I’ll be running along.’ Mrs Abinger backed towards the pavement, trying to stop Jo backing with her. ‘I only just came to fetch Josephine up. You’ll be all right, dear. Mum will come back after tea. Look, here’s Billy, who used to come and talk to you in your pram. Don’t you remember, Master Billy, how you used to come and steal my currants and raisins? I’ve been wondering when you were going to come down and see me. I’ve been saving some glassy cherries for you. Don’t say you’ve forgotten me?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said, puzzled. So much had happened since they lived here before. He could hardly remember anything about it. Coming back to the house had been like revisiting somewhere known in a dream. Things hazily remembered looked different now that they were solid and real. Everything seemed much smaller. He could not understand why the basement staircase and the bathroom geyser held the memory of fear. He lived so energetically in the present that he could not imagine himself here as the baby boy in the photographs he was told were of himself.

  ‘What’s her name?’ he asked, staring at Jo. ‘I don’t remember her.’

  ‘I remember you,’ lied Jo, drawing confidence from the support of her mother’s skirt.

  ‘You couldn’t possibly, dear.’ Mrs Abinger laughed at Commander Moore. ‘Aren’t kiddies funny the fancies they take?’

  ‘Rather,’ he said heartily, and glanced up at the front door, wishing his wife would come and take over so that he could get on with his gardening.

  Mrs Abinger knew that he wanted her to go, and she wanted to go, but could not quite achieve it. ‘I must be going along then,’ she repeated hopefully, as if the words could get her out of the gate. ‘Goodbye, sir, for now. Remember me to Nanny. Is she still with you, if I may ask?’

  Billy said: ‘Yes, but she’s not our Nanny now.’

  ‘She sews,’ explained Tess.

  ‘In the country sometimes she cooked, but the standing is getting too much for her,’ said Wilfred.

  ‘I see. Yes, I daresay.’ Mrs Abinger gave Jo a little push, hating to leave her now that the moment were here and fraught with unexpected awkwardness. It had never occurred to her that they might not remember her, who had thought about them on and off for five years.

  Josephine’s face crumpled. She turned and buried it in her mother’s skirt.

  ‘She needn’t stay if she doesn’t want to,’ said Tess cheerfully. ‘We don’t mind.’

  Mrs Moore came down the front door steps at last. She had knocked over a flower vase on her way into the drawing-room and knew that if she did not stop to clear it up, she would not remember.

  ‘Oh, are you going, Mrs Ab.?’ she asked relieved. One day, she would have the old dear, but not to-day, when there was so much to do. She was wearing an overall and her head was tied up in a yellow duster, which managed to look more ornamental than workaday. She bent down to Jo, who did not recognize her, and put her finger in her mouth babyishly.

  Mrs Abinger’s heart ached for Jo’s hung head and pinkening eyes. She found her way out at last, and as soon as the flowers on her hat were seen rounding the garden wall into the Portobello Road, Mrs Moore’s family turned on her.

  ‘Mummy you are!’

  ‘Who is she, Mummy? I don’t remember her.’

  ‘Really, dearest, I do think you might prepare me for these things. Damned awkward.’ Commander Moore mopped his crinkly forehead.

  ‘Aren’t I awful?’ she lamented. ‘I forgot all about it. I meant to tell you, and then, you know what it is …’

  Jo, interested in the talk, forgot her shyness and watched the family with her quick, intelligent eyes.

  ‘What shall we do with her?’ grumbled Billy.

  ‘Don’t be a bore.’ His mother flapped her hand at him. ‘Let her play the game you’re playing, whatever it is.’

  ‘It’s not a game,’ said her husband. ‘We’re gardening.’

  ‘Then let her garden.’ Mrs Moore looked doubtfully at Jo’s dress with its frills and ribbons. ‘Oh dear.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’ She expressed her thoughts in casual, labour-saving utterances.

  ‘All right crew.’ Commander Moore began to get into his stride again. ‘As you were. Billy, come here and leave that gate alone. You haven’t done nearly enough holes. Make the next one here. Tess, we’ll do the primroses now
. Come here, and I’ll show you. Wilf – oh good chap, you’ve been getting on with it. But I told you – not so tight! Here, young lady, you can help Wilf fill in the earth; he’ll show you how. Over here. Billy! Come here, you young blackguard and do as you’re told. Stop swinging on that gate!’

  Having got them safely into line again, he leaned against one of the cannon balls at the foot of the steps and lit a pipe, watching them over the match. Josephine, who had obeyed his vibrant tones more promptly than she ever obeyed her father’s nagging monotone had gone to squat beside Wilfred, who was about the same age as herself. He accepted her as philosophically as he accepted everything, good or bad, that came his way in life.

  ‘Like this,’ he said.

  ‘Not too tight, I said, Wilf,’ called his father, between the puffs of his kindling pipe.

  ‘Like this,’ repeated Wilfred, going on in his own way, which he knew was the right one.

  They had tea in the kitchen, because the maids were out, and nursery and dining-room still in disorder. Nanny was at the head of the table. Smaller than ever, she had to sit on a cushion to pour out. Josephine thought she was the Moores’ grandmother. She had never heard of anyone having a nurse before, and ‘Nanny’ was the Portobello word for ‘Granny’.

  She behaved beautifully. She ate whatever was given to her, even a half-chewed crust which Wilfred slipped on to her plate because he wanted to get on to cake.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Moore said to her husband. ‘I hope she’s enjoying herself. She’s so quiet. Are you always as quiet as this at home, Jo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mustn’t it be lovely?’ sighed Mrs Moore.

  ‘Once,’ said Jo, putting on her candid, inventing face. ‘I didn’t speak a word for a week.’

  Billy stared at her. He was fascinated by anything abnormal. ‘Were you dumb?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you a deaf mute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Golly,’ he said, respectfully. As a freak, she rose in his estimation.

  Josephine was quiet, because she was busy noticing things. She had never been in such a big house before. It was even bigger than Mrs Mortimer’s private school, which was tall and narrow like a tube, in which the smell of Mrs Mortimer fulminated, unable to find a way out.

  If it had not been for the gas stove and dresser, Jo would not have believed that this was a kitchen. She thought all kitchens were the size of the one at home, where Mum could reach anything without moving a step from the stove. She had never heard of such a thing as a scullery, like the one where they washed their caked hands before tea.

  She did not think much of the tea, which was only bread and butter and one kind of jam, and cakes which were raw in the middle. She had better teas at home, where she was allowed to choose things from the shop; jam or paste or biscuits, or the slab cake if there were any left over at the end of the week. However, everything else seemed so big that it was comforting to find something to belittle. She would scoff about it to the Goldners, but it was a pity there was nothing worth slipping into her pocket or the elastic of her knickers for them.

  After tea, the children took Josephine up to the bathroom. They laughed when she said she had never seen such a big bath before, so she did not say that she had thought the sink in the scullery downstairs was their bath.

  It had never occurred to Billy that a bath was something you could swank about, but he made up for it now. ‘I have the water right up to here.’ He put his finger on the rim and made his swaggering face, looking down his short sunburned nose and curling his lips in a braggart smile.

  Jo peered into the depths of the great old-fashioned tub, which had straight sides coffined in by sodden, blistered boards, ‘Ain’t you afraid of drowning?’ she asked.

  ‘Course not. Would you be? Can’t you swim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ They could not understand this.

  ‘Where do you have your bath then?’ Tess asked her, worried. ‘Don’t you have to wash?’

  ‘I have a bath like this.’ Jo sketched the size of her zinc hip bath. ‘Mum hots the water in a big jug and I has me bath in front of the fire.’ This sounded to them delightful, as indeed it was.

  ‘You are lucky living in the Porto,’ sighed Billy. ‘I wish we did. Tess and I went down there yesterday. The market was super fun.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to play in the market,’ said Jo warily.

  ‘Aren’t you? What a waste of living there. Your mother keeps a shop, doesn’t she?’ asked Tess. ‘Can you take what you like without paying? What do you sell?’

  ‘All sorts. Sugar, tea, biscuits, sweets, cars, horses, toffee-apples, grand planners – ’

  ‘Oh Jo,’ reproached Tess, who had a troublesome conscience, which worried for everyone else’s sins besides her own, ‘that can’t be true. It’s only a grocer’s shop. You don’t sell all that.’

  ‘We do!’ cried Jo furiously, realizing she had overdone it.

  ‘I’m going to come down to your shop,’ said Billy. ‘I’m going to come and sell.’

  ‘You ain’t never going to come and sell in our shop.’

  ‘I am. Your mother said I could.’

  ‘She never.’

  They were still bickering when they were sent into the nursery to unpack the toys from the boxes in which they had come from the country. Mrs Moore rashly told Jo she could choose something to take home with her. ‘Unless it’s something the others specially want,’ she qualified, seeing Billy’s pout.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Commander Moore, who had a tidying fit on and had come into the nursery to see what rubbish he could throw away. ‘Do ’em good to give up something for a change. They’ve got far too many toys anyway. They only break them. Look at this.’ He held up the sailless, keelless hulk of a toy yacht.

  Billy hurled himself at him. ‘Give that to me! It’s mine!’

  ‘You don’t want that wreck,’ his father said. ‘The damn thing’s not seaworthy.’

  ‘I do. It’s Round Pond worthy.’

  ‘Tell you what, old son, I’ll buy you a decent boat for your birthday. We’ll rig her properly and I’ll show you how to sail her.’

  ‘I know how to sail a boat,’ muttered Billy, as his father went out of the nursery with an armful of broken toys and torn books, which the children would retrieve later from the dustbin.

  ‘You can have a doll,’ Wilfred told Josephine. None of the dolls were his. ‘You can have that one.’ He gave her the only doll that Tess liked, a black Mammy, with a coloured turban round its battered head.

  ‘She can’t have Dinah!’ Tess snatched the doll away, and then looked strickenly at Jo. ‘You don’t want her, do you? Oh say you don’t want her, or I shall feel I’ve got to let you.’

  ‘Tess has a conscience,’ explained Billy. ‘It’s an awful nuisance.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Tess said. ‘It’s a disease, Mummy says, like measles.’

  ‘I’ve had measles,’ Jo said chattily. ‘Twenty-four times.’

  Billy sucked in his breath. ‘I say, you’re an awful liar.’

  Seeing that he was admiring her, Jo took the opportunity to say: ‘I want to have that engine.’

  ‘You can have it,’ said Wilfred sunnily. He had quietly removed all his own toys and hidden them at the back of the cubboard.

  ‘She’s can’t!’ Billy snatched at it. ‘It’s mine! Why should she come here and take all our things?’

  ‘Your Mum said I could.’ Jo hugged the engine to her. She had never had any clockwork trains; there was no room for them at the flat.

  ‘I say you can’t!’ Billy blazed at her. When he was angry, his whole body took part. His dark stiff hair stood erect, his limbs moved jerkily as if he were on wires, he bounced on the balls of his feet.

  ‘Don’t shout at me. It’s rude.’

  ‘Rewd,’ he mimicked. ‘You don’t even speak properly.’

  ‘I can speak proper.’ She stuck out h
er lip, still holding the engine, although he had got his fingers round it and was tugging.

  ‘Can speak proper, can speak proper!’ he jeered. Secretly, he admired her accent. Since he had come to London, he had lain awake in bed, listening to the street boys, luckier than he to stay up after dark, shouting and cat-calling in the Mews beyond the back-yard. Under the sheets, he whispered to himself the illicit charm of their horrid cries. It was envy as well as anger that made him taunt Jo now.

  ‘Porto child, Porto child!’ he mocked her, pulling hard at the engine. As it came free, it scratched her arm, and she let out a piercing yell, which brought Mrs Moore resignedly into the room. Why was it always the visiting child who got hurt?

  She made no attempt to understand the clamoured explanations. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘Daddy’s going to take you all out now to play cricket in the Square.’

  ‘Oh Mummy, must we?’ sulked Billy, not knowing that his father was in the doorway.

  ‘You know you love cricket,’ said Commander Moore. ‘You’d like it even better if you weren’t such a duffer at it. Margery, I want them to play every day when I’m not here. You’ll keep them up to that, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said at random, wiping Jo’s eyes, and straightening her hair ribbon. ‘Tessa, I suppose I couldn’t persuade you to wear a big bow like this instead of those pigtails? It does look so pretty.’

  ‘No, Mummy, I’m afraid not,’ said Tess quite kindly.

  ‘Someone get the stumps and bat,’ ordered the Commander.

  ‘We don’t know where they are,’ said Billy.

  ‘I do,’ said Wilfred. He always knew where everything was. He did not mind cricket, because he could be long stop and lie in the grass to study insect life.

  ‘What about her?’ Billy nodded to Jo, who had been given a sweet, and was making a great display of sucking it, because no one else had one. ‘She can’t play.’