Once she came in especially, for she could not really have wanted to know the price of China tea, to say: ‘I saw your friend Mr What’s-his-name – Pennyfeather – Pinfold – down at the Bush.’
‘He’s no friend of mine,’ retorted Mrs Abinger, trying to control her feelings.
‘Of course not, Ellie dear. How stupid of me. I don’t know whatever made me say such a thing.’ She went out, delighted with herself for having said it.
Dot Loscoe would go the same way as her mother if she were not careful, thought Mrs Abinger, shutting the door quickly before the buzzer could make George shout. She was getting as bitter and dried up as the pickles and second grade prunes which were almost the only things she bought these days. Never a smile except when she thought she had touched you on the raw.
Mrs Abinger’s feelings were very raw. The shock had done her health no good either; it was going to take her a long time to feel herself again. She did not know which had upset her most: the visit from Mr Pennyfold, with his sarcastic air of enjoying himself at everyone else’s expense, or the stupefying, vociferous visit from Commander Moore, which rang in her ears yet.
As if he were the devil’s instrument of torture, Sidney had to ask: ‘Any orders for Mrs Moore?’ as if he did not know quite well that Commander Moore had made his wife change her grocer.
When he had gone out, Mrs Abinger said: ‘We shall have to get rid of that boy, George. He’s made trouble enough. Oh, he makes out to have done no wrong, I daresay, but I reckon he knew about it all along. If he’d have spoken out before, we could have stopped it.’
‘The harm was already done,’ said Mr Abinger, ‘and by you know whom, no matter at whomsoever else’s door you try to lay the blame.’ He was very fond of Grammar. He had recently joined a Debating Society, whose oratory, like a monogram, strove after intricacy rather than lucidity. He was an apt recruit. He spoke slowly enough to be able to build into his sentences a panoply of pronouns.
‘You mean,’ said his wife, ‘by those Goldners. Lucky for them they’ve been packed off to that special school. If I was to get my hands on them – ’
Mr Abinger cleared his throat. ‘I was actually thinking of someone nearer home,’ he said, and opened his mouth to sling in sultanas, as if he were having six shies a penny.
‘George, you won’t hold it against her?’ she begged. ‘You’ll forgive and forget? We must stick by each other. We can be happy rubbing along together in the way of life to which we’re called. I was wrong to try and fly above it.’
‘Don’t preach at me,’ he said, catching a sultana with a snap. ‘I never ran after the Moores. I was too busy working to provide a home for my family, which, to their cost, they were far from appreciating.’
Mrs Abinger sighed and went upstairs to put the kettle on for tea. She always regretted appealing to him for sympathy or support. It never brought him closer. Although she knew him through and through, and he knew her, she sometimes felt that they were no more intimate than fifteen years ago when he had met and wooed her in language as formal as his collars. She had been proud then of marrying someone cleverer and of better education. She was still proud, she told herself loyally. It was she who was to blame for any lack of understanding.
At the top of the stairs, she paused to get her breath. She hoped it was only the winter coming on that made her so short-winded these days. George’s respect for illness did not extend to her, who had scarcely missed a day’s work since she married him. Ellie could not possibly be ill; he would not hear of her going to a doctor. He did not hold with doctors, anyway, preferring to prescribe for himself. He had given her some heart and blood pills and would not believe they had done her no good.
Mrs Abinger was afraid to go to the doctor, for fear of what he might tell her. If the noises in her head meant anything, she did not want to know. What would become of Jo if anything happened to her?
Forgetting about the kettle, she went into her bedroom. A glimpse of herself in the mirror brought her short arms up for the familiar movements among the pins and coils of her back hair, but her mind was on her top drawer. Opening it, she took out the photograph she had cut from the evening paper, and tore Sir Rodney Cope and the Hon. Lydia Manning-Day into little pieces. He was nothing to do with her now. Throwing away the scraps of paper, she was throwing away the last hopes of Jo being an aristocrat by birth. Blood will out; instinct will never let you down. She knew that Joy Stretton would never have chosen such low company as that to which Josephine, the foundling, had migrated as if to her natural element.
Who could her parents have been? They might be anybody, anybody. Reaching to the back of the drawer, Mrs Abinger took out a little twist of paper, which was hidden under her stockings. Who had given this little cross to Jo? The initials B.C. were scratched on the back. Who was B.C.? Was it her real mother or was it herself? And if it was hers by right of birth and baptism, was she wrong to withhold it?
Mrs Abinger had nothing against Roman Catholics. She had not been brought up to think much of her own church, and since marrying George, it had meant still less to her, for no church meant anything to him. He was an atheist and proud of it, as he never tired of informing anyone who would listen. He claimed to back his own reasoning power against the superstitious nonsense of any clergyman, and as for the Roman Church – well, you did not mention that in George’s hearing, unless you could stand a buttonholing tirade.
She looked at the crucifix with its frail broken chain, lying tarnished and tiny in her clean red palm. If George got to know of it, he would hold it against Jo to the end of her days, as if it were her fault to be born a Roman Catholic. She could never give it to Jo, because Jo must not find out that she was adopted. Not yet, not until she had found her place in the world. Perhaps not ever.
‘What you got there, Mum?’ A listless figure, pathetic in the overwhelming school hat appeared in the doorway.
‘Nothing, dear.’ Mrs Abinger hastily wrapped up the cross again and thrust it to the back of the drawer. ‘Just some old trinket.’
‘Let’s see.’
‘Not now. How was school then?’ she asked brightly.
Josephine stood at a little distance, drooping, not bothering to take off her hat or undo her satchel. Mrs Abinger’s heart yearned with pity. She knew the child’s unhappiness, yet since the catastrophe she had been unapproachable, shying away from confidences or consolation. It had been impossible to punish that forlorn, remote little figure, yet Jo did not even seem to know that she had been forgiven. She seemed to be beyond emotion.
Now suddenly, as she stood by the bed, trying to twist a French knot off the counterpane, she shuddered.
‘You didn’t take cold coming home from school, did you?’ asked her mother. ‘You should have worn your woollie.’
‘Oh Mum!’ The sob that had been welling up inside Jo caught in her throat. ‘Oh Mum!’ The sob burst forth, and with it, all her pent up despair, as she rushed at her mother and clung, wailing: ‘I saw Billy Moore just now. He wouldn’t speak to me, ‘cos of what I done. Oh Mum – I wish I hadn’t have done it.’
‘So do I, precious.’ Mrs Abinger sat on the bed and pulled Jo on to her lap. ‘So do I.’ Although they both meant different things, they comforted each other, rocking on the great double feather bed, mingling their tears as they pressed their faces together.
‘Never mind, love,’ crooned Mrs Abinger. ‘Never mind the Moores. We can get on without them.’ Never mind who Jo was or was not. She was her baby. She wanted nothing else.
‘Never mind,’ she repeated, chanting like a lullaby. ‘We’ll be happy without them, you and I. And Dad,’ she amended, as a cough from the doorway made her look up.
George stood there in his long stiff apron, nodding his heavy head as he did when he was put out. Yet somehow he did not look cross. His eyes looked less prominent, softer, sadder; and his wife smiled at him and wiped her eyes, her other hand clutching Josephine’s woebegone head to her chest.
‘Well
, well,’ he said quite mildly. ‘Men must work and women must weep, they say. But if I’m to do all the work and you women are to do all the weeping, another time, Ellie, you might put the kettle on before you start, and oblige.’
4
When Josephine was twelve, Mrs Abinger’s Aunt Ethel died and left her a little money. George took it for granted that she would spend it on the shop, which badly needed redecorating.
Although they had been married by the registrar, Mr Abinger always behaved as if his wife had promised at the altar with all her worldly goods him to endow. He had long ago appropriated the curly-backed leather armchair which had been her father’s, and when she had sold her cottage piano to make room for his family sideboard, the money had been spent on a Bank Holiday week-end at Hartlepool, where there was a Provision Retailers’ Association rally. When Mrs Abinger drew a prize in the Bridge club Christmas raffle, he had calmly chosen for her, not the turkey, nor the silk stockings, nor the flask of eau de Cologne, but two bottles of whisky, which the doctor had forbidden her to drink.
Giddy fits and unbearable headaches had sent her to the doctor at last. ‘I’ve got blood pressure,’ she told George. ‘He says I’m to take things easier.’
‘You don’t want to believe all they tell you,’ he said and allowed her to do as much as ever.
‘The doctor dared me to touch alcohol,’ she had said, and soon after that George had come home from the club with a bottle of whisky under each arm.
A glass of it stood at his elbow one evening, as he studied a decorator’s estimate. Josephine was at the cinema with her cousin Violet. Mrs Abinger was washing up the supper things, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for her legs were troublesome these days. Her hands swelled too in hot water, and Josephine had bought her a mop, but she forgot to use it, and plunged about in the sink with a dishcloth in her old way.
She did most of her thinking at the sink. Washing up, or peeling potatoes and cleaning vegetables was so automatic that it left her mind free to roam beyond the cramped, inconvenient kitchen, where everything was at the wrong height, and you were in your own light standing at the stove, with wet clothes under the low ceiling brushing your hair on washing day. The gas stove had a slight leak somewhere, but the door could not be opened when the hinged chopping shelf was up, and the window was above the sink, where Mrs Abinger’s short arms could not reach to open it after George had banged it down for shaving and gargling. A prolonged cooking spell in this Black Hole of Calcutta was enough to make anyone feel giddy. She had maintained this for a long time before she admitted to giddiness in all kinds of places besides the kitchen.
Take things easier, the doctor had said, probably knowing the advice to be as useless as she did. How could she take things more easily when, even with all the work she put into it, the business was barely holding its own?
Scraping the residue of fried egg and chips off his plate, she thought of what George had said after Jo had gone out.
‘Time that girl had left school,’ he had said, ‘and began to help you in the shop. We need another pair of hands.’
Mrs Abinger had not answered. She went on clearing the table, rather grim about the mouth. No doubt he saw himself spending more and more time in the armchair up here, or out at the Club or Debating Society, as Josephine took over more and more of his work downstairs. But that was not what Mrs Abinger saw. Jo was not going to waste her youth in a grocer’s shop, weighing out biscuits for people who thought you really cared whether they had Osborne or Oval Rich Tea; struggling with sides of bacon and sacks of soda; sweeping out the shop before daylight and again after dark; shut into the back storeroom on sunny Sundays, fighting the losing battle against confusion. No matter how often you tidied the shelves, by the end of the week, you could scarcely lay your hand on a thing you wanted. George, sooner than look for a tin of custard powder, would rip open a new carton which had not even been checked, take one tin and leave the rest spilling out of the overturned box for someone else to put away.
No, she wanted something better than that for Josephine, but there was no sense in contradicting George yet. Time enough for that when Jo left Mrs Mortimer’s next year. If only she could have stayed a bit longer and learned something that would help her to a good job. But Mrs Mortimer did not keep the older girls. At thirteen, they had learned everything she and her dim whispering daughter could teach them. Jo had learned some ladylike things there, but she did not seem to have nearly as much book-learning as Violet, the pride of Denbigh Terrace, who had just passed from the Council to the senior school.
Her hands in the sink, her eyes looking above it unseeingly at the assortment of scouring agents, some for the sink, some for George’s inside, these thoughts slid about in Mrs Abinger’s brain, until, like balls of mercury, they suddenly coagulated into one of those breath-taking ideas of hers which could not be restrained.
Without stopping to dry her hands, she went straight through to the sitting-room and sat down opposite George at the round table. She had to sit down nowadays when she got excited.
‘George,’ she said, scarlet. ‘I know what I’m going to do with Aunt Ethel’s money.’
‘So do I.’ He tapped the estimate with his long, knobbly finger. ‘But not by this fellow. It’s robbery without violence.’
‘Suppose,’ said Mrs Abinger, breathing hard, ‘we didn’t have the painting done just yet, dear? We’re in a shabby way, I know, but I daresay it doesn’t notice as much as you think. Why don’t you get some paint and just touch up the letters and that, where they’ve faded?’
‘I?’ His heavy jaw dropped. His face was a mask of horror.
‘You’re so artistic,’ she said, leaning across the table. ‘You’d quite enjoy it, I’m sure.’
‘I? And have all the customers come and laugh at me perched up out there on a ladder like a monkey on a stick? Thank you very much indeed. Very good for business, I’m sure. We may not have the turnover of some whom I could mention – ’ he glanced behind him as if he could see Ellison’s lively shop taunting him through the wall – ‘but we haven’t quite come to that.’
‘Well then, dear.’ She sat back, leaning away from him like someone about to touch off a charge of dynamite. ‘We shall have to go shabby a bit longer, because I know what I’m going to do with Aunt Ethel’s money. I’m going to send Jo to the High School’
Without looking at her, George picked up the bottle and poured himself out a generous tot of Mrs Abinger’s Christmas whisky. He drank, thumped the glass down on the mossy tablecloth, swallowed with a great plunge of his Adam’s apple, and shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond.
‘Now Ellie,’ he said steadily, ‘don’t get excited. Remember what the doctor said. Much as I dislike,’ he said – and the Debating Society should have heard him now – ‘to damp your maternal enthusiasm, I must forbid this harebrained project categorically. Ca-te-gorically.’
Josephine took to High School like a duck to water; or like any only child with unsatisfied herd instincts.
Mrs Abinger marvelled at her. She herself had been terrified by the vast brick building with its uncurtained windows and acres of worn green oilcloth. There seemed to be far more than two hundred girls. Hordes of them stampeded about like wild bronchos, for the headmistress, who had been a great half-miler at Newnham, had heard that the Dartmouth cadets ran everywhere and had borrowed the idea.
The headmistress had further shaken Mrs Abinger by wearing an academic gown and by talking very fast and loud in short, sharp rushes. She appeared to be a ‘clever’ woman; all brain and no horse sense. Would she notice if a child were coming up in a rash? Would she send Jo home if her head came on bad? Did she give every girl the same chance, no matter where she came from?
Rising to dismiss Mrs Abinger, the headmistress had said: ‘I hope your girl will do well here. She’ll have to work like smoke. Absolutely. If she’s to catch up with her age group.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be very happy, than
k you,’ murmured Mrs Abinger, just preventing herself from adding Madam, for the interview had wobbled the supporting prestige of Aunt Ethel’s money. She felt as if she had been applying for a domestic post somewhat above her status.
‘Happy?’ neighed the headmistress. ‘That’s up to her. Absolutely. If she’s a good mixer. Girls of every class come here. Democracy, that’s the style. She’ll find her level, Mrs Abinger. Absolutely have to. Good day to you. Straight down the corridor. First right and down the stairs.’
Mrs Abinger had crept away, wondering what she had let Jo in for.
Josephine however, read plenty of books about girls’ schools. Primed with them, she sailed off confident in her new uniform, everything marked, her new gym shoes asserting their anaesthetic smell even through her strong new boot bag.
When she found that the books were all wrong, she swallowed her Angela Brazil slang and listened, running about with the other girls, watching and imitating. On her second morning, she appeared at breakfast with her curly chestnut hair not drawn back under a ribbon, but looped over her forehead like a proscenium curtain, caught up at the side by an unsightly great slide of imitation tortoiseshell.
‘What the dickens have you done to your hair?’ asked her father, pouring himself another cup of tea, and not replacing the cosy, because he had finished.
‘Oh,’ said Jo airily, pulling the curtain of hair still lower, ‘it’s for school. All the girls do it that way. Except Christine Bollinger She’s got ever such lovely long yellow hair, Mum, you wouldn’t believe. She used to be able to sit on it, but she cut it off because it got in her way at gym. She’s the youngest in the gym team.’ She spoke with awe.
Christine Bollinger was the first in a succession of heroines whose doings were to be recounted ad nauseam in the home. There was Mary Murphy, who had painted a picture of Cape gooseberries, which was to be framed and hung in the junior playroom.
Mr Abinger was still harping on having the shop painted.
Joy and Josephine Page 14